Release point drop troop.., p.1
Release Point (Drop Trooper Book 8), page 1
Contents
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Also by Rick Partlow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
RELEASE POINT
©2021 RICK PARTLOW
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WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT FIRE
HOME FRONT
FIRE BASE
SHOCK ACTION
RELEASE POINT
KILL BOX
1
I squinted my resentment at the afternoon glare. Tahn-Skyyiah was too close to its star for my taste and we were lucky enough to catch Tahn-Khandranda in mid-summer. We weren’t even off the ramp from the shuttle and I was already sweating.
“I don’t remember it being this hot the last time I was here,” I murmured as an aside to Vicky.
Vicky Sandoval looked much more at home in her Marine uniform than I felt, and she definitely seemed more likely to be wearing captain’s bars than I was. She’d even cut her hair to make the ‘face jacks in her temples more prominent. I liked her with short hair. I liked her with long hair too, of course.
“Last time you were here,” she reminded me, “you were in a battlesuit.”
“I wish I was in one now.”
“You and me both, bud,” Wade Cunningham said from over my right shoulder, and I realized I’d spoken too loudly.
If the discomfort I felt had been illustrated in a dictionary, Wade’s face would have been the picture they used. He wasn’t a handsome man at the best of times and the heat reflecting off the fusion-form pavement of the Tahn-Khandranda spaceport had turned his face beet-red.
“That’s Captain Bud,” I reminded him, smirking.
“Oh, you can shove that, sir,” he said, tugging at the collar of his fatigue top. “I’ve been working for Colonel Hachette a lot longer than you have, and just because they didn’t have time to send me to OCS doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to be fetching you your Goddamned slippers and coffee in the morning.”
“You can do that for me, then, Wade.” Vicky smacked him on the arm. “Get into character; our ride’s coming.”
I followed her gesture to the road heading up from the city. It took me a second to see the groundcar because I couldn’t look away from the buildings. Everything looked so neat and clean now. Twisting towers clawed their way to the auburn sky, obelisks that might have made their home in ancient Egypt if the Egyptians had achieved starflight. It all had a surreal haze over it, as if I’d stepped back into the past.
The last time I’d seen it, it had been on fire, in ruins, littered with dead bodies. Ours and theirs. We’d assumed the Tahni would stick their civilians in the underground shelters the way they had on others of their worlds, but not here. Here, they’d put their anti-aircraft missiles on the tops of apartment buildings full of noncombatants, sent their fighters on strafing runs through their own neighborhoods. They hadn’t given a shit. This had been it for them, the last stand.
They’d lost, and they’d probably figured that was it, that we’d wipe them out to the last male, female, and child, because that was what they would have done to us. But we hadn’t, of course. Not because we were better than them, but because you can’t make money off dead aliens, and the Corporate Council never passed up a chance to make money. I hadn’t really known during the war just how deep their hooks ran into the Commonwealth government, but I’d learned quickly after I’d taken up Wade’s offer to work for the Corporate Security Force.
That had been a cover, of course. He’d already been working for Hachette, and he’d recruited us into the CSF to bring us into the task force. I hadn’t had the chance to ask him, but I wondered if he resented the fact that Vicky and I had horned in on the whole operation.
The car grew from a black dot at the edge of my vision to something oblong, boxy, and ugly in its practicality. It had to be human, I thought. Not that the Tahni were incapable of ugliness, far from it, but with them, I always got the impression it was from the differences between us. This was intentional ugliness, something that had to be a product of a government contract. Only the military could buy a car this ugly on purpose.
It skidded to a stop in front of us and we made no move toward it. Every step meant more sweat and we’d all be sweating enough before this was done. The side door slid open, the motors grinding from the ravages of sand and disrepair, to reveal a woman in a black uniform, her hair pulled back into a severe bun that matched her features. I thought less of her presence than I did of the blast of cold air coming from the vehicle and I surged toward it instinctively.
“You Alvarez?” the Intelligence officer asked me.
“Yeah.” I nodded toward her. “You’re Geiger?”
Vicky slid into the seat beside me and Wade squeezed in past us with an impatient grunt, yanking the door closed.
“Thank God,” he hissed, sinking into the cheap, plastic chair, pulling the safety harness across his chest.
“I am,” the woman confirmed, turning back to the controls. No autonomous vehicles in the military. Supposedly because we didn’t trust AI, but mostly to give all those privates jobs.
“Don’t captains rate a driver in this posting?” I asked her, frowning as she pulled away from the shuttle.
Marine battlesuits stood at the edge of the landing field, silent sentinels, unmoved by the glaring wrath of the primary star, uncaring of the millions of potential enemies to their front. I watched them through the windshield until they slid off to the side, almost forgetting the question I’d asked Geiger.
“I was told this was compartmentalized,” Captain Geiger told me, shooting me a glance, her eyebrow cocked upward. “You want some enlisted puke talking about your visit over a few beers?”
“It is compartmentalized,” Vicky said. “Are you in the compartment, Captain?”
Geiger laughed. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, though somehow, I’d imagined it would be, given the harshness of her expression.
“It’s all need to know. And all I need to know is where I’m supposed to take you.”
“How long have you been stationed here?” I asked her.
“Since the end of the war. Every Goddamned minute of it.”
“Jesus,” Wade hissed. “Don’t they even give you leave or something?”
“I’m saving it all for terminal leave,” Geiger told him, and if I couldn’t see her smile, I could hear it. “In six months, I’m out of here and out of the Space Fleet and heading for Eden with enough credit in my account to buy a house in the mountains.”
“Are we going straight there?”
I was trying to drag the conversation, kicking and screaming if need be, back to the task at hand. Not that I was suddenly such a straight-arrow, hard-charging Marine just because I’d made captain, but there was a time pressure. Somewhere, Zan-Thint was sitting on that last Skrela seed pod, and I couldn’t think of a single good reason for him to refrain from setting that nightmare loose on the Commonwealth. Except sanity, and I was pretty sure he didn’t suffer from that particular malady.
Geiger laughed sharply.
“No, we’re not going there in this piece of shit. Not unless you want our informant to get stoned to death by his neighbors. We have to sneak in at night in the back of a cargo truck.”
I very carefully did not snap at her, not just because we were the same rank and it would have been a shitty thing to do, but mostly because we were going to need her help, and pissing her off minutes after we met her didn’t seem like a good plan.
“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” I told her. “But this is a priority assignment. I don’t want to get anybody killed, but I’m also not crazy about the idea of waiting around several hours to talk to this guy.”
“Nothing to be done about it,” she said, shrugging far too casually. “It’s too late to reschedule. Don’t worry; you guys can hang out in our offices until then.”
“Oh, wonderful.” Vicky rolled her eyes, then leaned into my shoulder. “Hachette’s going to shit a brick.”
I remembered his mission briefing and didn’t disagree.
“We need intelligence on Firbolg,” he’d said, seeming even more stern than usual, if that was possible, although looking stern in free-fall must have been one of those senior-officer things I hadn’t learned yet. “I’d love nothing more than to go tearing in there, guns blazing, and turn that Tahni bastard into incandescent gas, but we don’t have the whole Fleet behind us, just this task force, and I need to know what we’re walking into.”
“Why Tahn-Skyyiah?” I’d asked him. “Do we have any reason to believe he’s been operational there since all this started?”
Top had answered for him, and I really needed to stop calling her that, since she’d been promoted to sergeant-major, but I couldn’t break the habit.
“He hasn’t been back to the Tahni homeworld,” Sgt.-Major Ellen Campbell told us, boots attached to the deck of the Orion’s conference room by sticky plates in the soles, her hands clasped behind her back. “It would be too risky. But he has to recruit somewhere, and we’ve got chatter from sources on Tahn-Skyyiah that he had people onplanet recruiting fresh troops up until a few weeks ago. If you can locate one of them, we can find out the sort of numbers we’re facing.”
“And why us?” Vicky had asked, a lot more direct than I would have been while talking to Hachette. “No disrespect, sir, but neither of us is a spy and, given our last two outings, we’re not that great at it. You got anything you want blown up, we’re your best bet, but this sounds more like a job for someone with training with the Tahni culture.”
“Of course, it is,” Top had agreed, the corner of her mouth twisting in the closest she came to a smile. “But you’re what we’ve got and the only other choice is a bunch of Intell geeks who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger…or a couple of my Marines who’ve never done any field work.”
“Or you,” I’d suggested, half-kidding and half-hoping she’d actually come along.
“Oh, sonny,” she’d snorted, “when you get to be my age, you know what your strengths and weaknesses are. And subtlety is not one of those strengths.”
“And anyway, it’s an order,” Hachette had added, and that had been the end of that.
It sucks to lose a war. I don’t think I’d ever realized it as much as I did while driving to the Fleet Intelligence headquarters in Tahn-Khandranda that summer afternoon. And it also sucked to have occupation duty. Drop-Troopers in Vigilante suits were at every major intersection, watching like the bogey-man and being watched in return by dark, sunken eyes. I couldn’t read Tahni body language, but I knew resentment even in an alien face, and it was everywhere.
“How would you feel,” Vicky whispered next to my ear as if she were reading my mind, “if we’d lost and they were on every street corner in Trans Angeles?”
“I’d be dead,” I assured her. “And so would you. Because that’s the only way they’d get to Earth, over our dead bodies.”
The civilian traffic thinned out as we left the lines of Tahni rowhouses behind and rolled into the one section of the city that hadn’t been rebuilt in the alien image, the section of ugly, squared-off office buildings and squat, buildfoam warehouses, a canker in the heart of their city reminding them that things would never be the same again.
Roadblocks parted for our vehicle, or for the IFF transponder in it, and the only pedestrians were humans in Fleet and Marine uniforms. The duty troops walked with their heads down, as if they couldn’t keep up their focus on their purpose if they looked around them, and the ones off-duty moved with a listless shuffle like the Tahni civilians I’d seen, as if they’d been beaten into submission by the heat and the boredom and the endless, sullen hatred.
“We should’ve just fusion-bombed this place to ashes,” Wade opined, not even trying to keep his voice down.
“I tell myself that same thing every day,” Geiger agreed, pulling the van up to the curb beside a one-story, eggshell-white building decorated only by the Commonwealth flag and a small, stenciled sign advertising that this was Headquarters, 120th Space Fleet Intelligence Brigade, Third Battalion. “But the brass is smart enough to keep the launch controls out of my hands.” She hit a control and the side door slid open. “Last stop. Everybody out.”
“I hope to God there’s air-conditioning inside,” Wade said, his face already getting red from the brief exposure to the mind-numbing heat.
There was, though I was so conscious of the disdain in the looks Geiger was giving Wade that I did my best not to sigh with relief when the door shut behind us. Tahn-Khandranda in summer wasn’t quite as bad as the Fleet headquarters on Inferno, but it was a close second, made worse because I’d been spending so much of my time in more temperate climates.
There wasn’t a front desk inside the Fleet Intelligence headquarters building, probably because this wasn’t a place where people wandered in not knowing what they wanted. Offices were separated by thin partitions, most of them looking as if a stiff breeze would have blown them over, and the functionaries working inside them looked about as happy to be there as I was. Everyone wore Intelligence blacks except for the Marine guards at the front. Not Drop-Troopers, these, not indoors. Force Recon in light body armor, the visors up on their helmets for comfort, their Gauss rifles slung low across their chests.
“Captain?”
Geiger looked around at the voice and so did I. A lieutenant shuffled up to her without enthusiasm, motioning back at one of the few rooms with sturdy walls and a solid, metal door.
“What’s up, Jonesy?”
“We got another priest here complaining about the temple,” the lieutenant told her, sounding as if he’d rather endure physical torture than talk to the Tahni for one more second. “I tried to pawn him off on Civil Affairs, but they insist that he’s a security threat and we have to talk to him before they can clear him to leave.”
Geiger sighed, miming ripping out her hair, a theatrical gesture since it was too short to really get a grip on. She eyed us sidelong.
“You wanna come see why I’m retiring early, Alvarez?” she wondered.
I glanced at Vicky and she chuckled, pushing at my shoulder.
“You go ahead,” she told me. “I’m going to go to the little girls’ room while I have gravity.”
Wade didn’t even offer, apparently counting on his NCO status to keep him out of it. He didn’t announce where he was going, but if I knew him, it was to find some food.
“Sure,” I told her, shrugging. Maybe hearing about her troubles with the Tahni would make me forget my own.
The secure room was, I thought, an interrogation center. Nothing else made sense. The table and chairs were bolted to the concrete floor and if I couldn’t see the cameras and sensors, I could still feel their presence. The Tahni who sat at the heavy metal table was dressed in flowing robes of strips connected to each other in some mysterious way I’d never been able to figure out. He was somewhere in middle age for one of them, which looked pretty damned old to me, older than anyone I’d seen since Tijuana, with deep lines around his dark, sunken eyes and grey woven through his wiry hair.
