Drop zone drop trooper b.., p.1
Drop Zone (Drop Trooper Book 10), page 1
CONTENTS
ALSO 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
Also by Rick Partlow
ALSO IN THE SERIES
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
DROP ZONE
©2022 RICK PARTLOW
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ALSO IN THE SERIES
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT FIRE
HOME FRONT
FIRE BASE
SHOCK ACTION
RELEASE POINT
KILL BOX
DROP ZONE
TANGO DOWN
1
The drop-ship touched down, the landing gear settling into their hydraulic housings before springing back. I didn’t spring back, guilt keeping me locked to the ground as I waited for the ramp to lower. Vicky’s hand slipped into mine, squeezing.
“It’s gonna be okay, Cam,” she assured me.
I smiled as much as I could manage and nodded, though we both knew it was a lie. Daylight flooded the hold as the ramp ground on labored motors. Everything was beginning to wear, to fray, the longer we stayed here. I didn’t know how much longer anything would last, myself included.
The ramp touched bottom and the crowd surged past us, Vergai running out with cries of unrestrained joy, searching for their families. The civilians were waiting for them, women and children braving the steam rising in the wake of the belly jets to rush the drop-ship. Through the white, billowing clouds they came, cloaks blowing in the autumn wind, long hair tossed back like the happy ending of some historical drama where all the good guys get to go home to their loved ones.
But this wasn’t fiction, and not everyone got to come home. She walked slowly up from the rear of the crowd—unremarkable, short, plain, even mousy—though I knew that was all camouflage for the fiery spirit within. The breeze tugged at the edges of her shawl, and as the steam cleared I could see the confusion in the face of her children. I sighed and pulled my hand away from Vicky’s, walking toward Carella with all the enthusiasm of a man marching to his execution.
She noticed me before I reached her, of course, and had no problem reading the expression on my face. The color went out of her and she dropped to her knees, only the hands of her children clasped in hers keeping her from sinking all the way to the hard-packed dirt. I knelt beside her, hunting for the words to say despite the dozens of times I’d rehearsed all this in my head on the way back.
“I’m sorry.” It was inane, stupid, worthless, but it slipped out before I could stop it. I tried to follow it up with something more meaningful. “Matis fought bravely against monsters that no one here could even imagine and he died on his feet, his weapon in his hands.”
Tears were streaming down Carella’s face, but her expression turned abruptly from devastation to fury.
“You think I care?” she demanded. “You think his children will care that their father died bravely on some other world instead of staying here to raise them beside me? You think our people will care that their leader sacrificed himself for your cause instead of our own?”
I couldn’t answer, didn’t know what to say to that. What could I say? But the worst part was, I knew that every mother and father, brother and sister, wife and husband of all those Marines who’d died under my command during the war had suffered the same way. I just hadn’t done the dirty work of coming to them in person and breaking the news. That had been done by some poor functionary who’d been hired to deliver the message. What had those people asked? And what had the messengers been able to tell them?
“We’ll do what we can for your people,” I told her. “We won’t let him have died for nothing.”
“You already did,” she accused. Then, strong as she was, Carella couldn’t hold it together anymore and she sagged backward, screaming her grief into the sky.
She wasn’t alone. We’d lost a few other Vergai, and Sgt. Motte had drawn the duty of notifying them. The others gathered around them, comforting those mourning, and about a dozen men and women crowded in around Carella. Someone tugged at my arm and a glance back told me it was Vicky, gesturing for me to leave the poor woman alone. I rose and backed away.
My eyes rose past the crowd of Vergai to the other end of the field, and I fought against a snarl. Colonel Ten-Lenon-Zan-Karan-Thint strode imperiously toward us, flanked by a Tahni guard. No local Karai… they were good enough to be his followers and acolytes but not his bodyguard. Some of the Vergai noticed the Tahni as well and seemed no happier to see them than I was. I might make a distinction between the Tahni and their more primitive cousins here on Yfingam, the Karai, but to the Vergai, there was none. And if the Resscharr had been the masters for all these years, the Karai had been their enthusiastic enforcers.
Zan-Thint pretended not to notice the stares and dirty looks, but I knew him well enough now to realize he didn’t miss anything. The Tahni officer was genius-level smart, grading on a human scale, and as ruthless as a Mongol khan, and if we had an official truce on this world, it was still an uneasy one. He made directly for me when he saw me, as well he might, given that Colonel Hachette had put me in charge of liaising with him before we’d left on our mission.
He was only ten meters away or so when he froze, his guard tensing up around them, their attention focused past me on the ramp for the drop-ship. The Resscharr survivors from Decision were coming out. Not that Resscharr were exactly rare on Yfingam—until recently, they’d been the HMFICs, as Top liked to put it, the Head Motherfuckers in Charge. But there was a qualitative difference between the petty warlords of Yfingam, scrounging for the surviving technology of their ancestors, and the Resscharr who’d lived on Decision. Their clothes, their bearing, the weapons they carried, were all tangible signs of it. They weren’t just Resscharr, they were Predecessors, Ancients in the tongue of the Tahni. They were the advanced, all-powerful beings who’d moved planets and terraformed worlds, who’d left the wormhole gate system for us to discover.
We’d brought two hundred of them with us from Decision, likely the last survivors from that world, since the Skrela had been poised to devastate the planet with overwhelming force when they’d evacuated. Most of them were on this drop-ship, though a few had been off-loaded to Colonel Hachette’s bird, and as they spread out, looking in open wonder at this new, more primitive world, I spotted Lilandreth loping into the light with her mate and children a few steps behind.
“Cameron Alvarez,” Zan-Thint said, coming far too close before he spoke. Tahni had no sense of personal space. “What are these creatures?” He pointed at the Resscharr. “And why have you brought them here?”
“It’s pretty damned obvious what they are,” I snapped, not in the mood for the self-important war criminal who we’d been forced to live beside. Every other time I’d tried to do my job and negotiate with him, Zan-Thint had always made sure it was in his territory, surrounded by Tahni Shock Troopers and Karai warriors for the sake of intimidation. “As for why they’re here, well… Colonel Hachette is in the next bird down and he wants to have a private briefing so he can fill you in on the situation.”
“And what if I don’t wish to wait for his ship to arrive?” Zan-Thint demanded, almost nose-to-nose with me. “I thought the purpose behind your journey was to faci litate your return to the Cluster, not to bring even more potential enemies to my world.”
I had a gun. I carried it everywhere, and after the last few months back on active duty its weight had become a natural part of my daily wardrobe, not something I thought about or was especially conscious of. Except now. Now, it was a lead weight dragging down my left shoulder, a reminder that I could pull it at any time and put a bullet through the Tahni’s head. It was a tempting proposition, and I might have been willing to chance the political fallout if it hadn’t been for the extreme likelihood that his bodyguard would kill Vicky and me before help arrived.
“I’m not cleared to discuss this with you,” I explained. “Orders. Colonel Hachette felt it would be better coming from someone closer to your own rank, and I’m just a captain. If you’ll excuse me.”
I didn’t wait for his leave, pretending that the scream of the belly jets from the drop-ship landing a couple hundred meters down from us had drowned out his insistent protests.
“Look over there,” Vicky said, tugging at my sleeve and pointing back at the path from the city to the landing field. Representatives of the local Resscharr had emerged from the city, drawn, I supposed, by the sound of the ships landing and were approaching Lilandreth with an attitude that might have been awe or reverence.
“Looks like they’re getting along okay,” I said, leaning closer to her to be heard over the drop-ship’s landing jets. She nodded.
“I guess that settles that question.”
That was one of the two ways I’d seen it going, the other being resentment that the other Predecessors had left them behind to dwell in primitive squalor. This was the more preferable of the two, not because the locals would have been able to do anything to the Resscharr from Decision, particularly since all their high-tech weapons had been taken away, but more because I was hoping the Resscharr would provide a balance to the power of the Tahni and the Karai.
“I remember a time when I could have said this was all above my pay grade.” Sighing, I shrugged the matter off.
Steam and dust from the drop-ship’s jets surged around us and I waved it away, covering my mouth and nose with one hand and waiting for the haze to clear. By the time it did, the ramp had touched down, and there were no civilians or militia coming out of this ship. This was full of Drop Troopers. My Drop Troopers, and didn’t that take some getting used to?
They pounded down the ramp, each footfall a drumbeat, hunched over and broad-shouldered like three-meter-tall metal gorillas. Somewhat more advanced gorillas now, thanks to the Predecessor tech upgrades from Decision, but still pretty much the same Vigilante I’d trained in during the war. Our suits were on board this shuttle as well, and we could have ridden down with them if I hadn’t been obligated to personally inform Carella about her husband’s death. I didn’t think it would have been the same delivering the news from inside an armored battlesuit, as comforting as that might have been for me.
The first rank of Vigilantes came to a halt at the end of the ramp and the chest plastron of the center suit popped open. Lt. Singh leaned out, the afternoon sun shining off his depilated scalp, giving him a robotic appearance that the ‘face jacks at his temples only amplified.
“Sir, ma’am,” he said, nodding. I tried hard not to roll my eyes. Singh could have just called them on their ‘links, but the man was eager to please the new boss. Or maybe just afraid of pissing us off. “Do you want us to stow your suits in the headquarters section?” Which was a fancy way of referring to what had been a collection of storage buildings constructed from mud and brick. Singh brightened, something approaching awe in his voice as he went on. “With the mods the Resscharr put on the suits, we can remotely fly them over there. It’s pretty fucking cool.”
I stifled a grin. Despite only being one level of rank separate from Vicky and me, Singh was much younger and it showed. Not that I disagreed with how fucking cool it was.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I told him. “We’ll be over to check them out after we report to Colonel Hachette. Get the company settled in and then set up a rotating patrol by squads.” I bared my teeth. “And don’t be shy about showing how far you can fly on the new jumpjets, and how long you can stay up. Do a Goddamned circle around the whole settlement if you like. I want the Tahni to be worried about us.”
“Copy that, sir.” Singh offered a casual salute and then slid back into the embrace of his suit, pulling the plastron shut.
I couldn’t hear his orders to the rest of the company, but I saw their effect. They didn’t bother marching back to the company headquarters, boosting up on jumpjets right off the ramp, the wash of superheated air driving Vicky and me away from the drop-ship. I shielded my eyes and watched them rise higher, thirty meters up, flying in a file formation two by two. It was an impressive sight, and I hoped Zan-Thint was paying attention.
I was sure his destroyer had been watching the Orion’s approach to orbit, but the upgrades to the ship weren’t as obvious. The Resscharr hadn’t been able to give her a gravity drive because that would have required rebuilding the thing from stem to stern and we hadn’t had the time. Instead, she’d received the same sort of reactor they used for their ships, generating power from the decay of a microscopic black hole. It put out more energy than the fusion reactor it had replaced and required no metallic hydrogen slugs to keep it running. It did still need reaction mass, and metallic hydrogen was the most efficient version, but in a pinch it could use anything up to and including sea water. Not to mention the energy shields they’d emplaced along her hull, which were ten times as effective as the deflectors with which she’d already been equipped.
All that was on the inside, just like the energy cannons that had replaced her lasers, not something the Tahni could have picked up from an external scan… and maybe that was how we wanted to keep it. The rest of the Tahni ships we could have handled even before, but that destroyer was a game changer, a capital ship. The upgraded suits might make him hesitate before trying anything heavy-handed, but if he thought we had a checkmate on his destroyer, it might make him desperate… or clever. Neither of those were desirable.
The last drop-ship was down now, and this time we stayed back far enough to avoid breathing in a lungful of dust. Landing one of the big load-lifters took turbines the size of a cargo truck, and the amount of shit they tossed into the air had to be seen to be believed. Most of my time around them had been in a suit, and being beside one in nothing but my field utilities made me feel very small.
The last of the Vigilantes came out first, already in the loop about where to deploy, and they wasted no time flying off for our makeshift military base. After them, hanging back far enough to avoid the jet blast, the Force Recon platoon ventured out, leading the last of the Resscharr refugees behind them. Campea, the Force Recon platoon leader, would take them to the Resscharr homesteads and get them settled in. Last out was the command group, led by Lt.-Colonel Marcus Hachette.
Hachette cut an impressive appearance, tall and handsome, his dark hair and mustache pushing regulation, his black Fleet Intelligence uniform spotless and perfectly fitted despite all the time they’d spent shipboard. Top was behind him, still dressed in Marine combat utilities, hands clasped behind her back. Sgt.-Major Ellen Campbell was short and unimposing, barely coming up to Hachette’s chin… but if the two of them had ever come to blows, I would have put my money on Top every day and twice on Sundays. The woman was somewhere just south of two hundred years old and had served on and off in the Marine Corps during three wars, and if there was anyone alive deadlier than her in or out of a Vigilante, I had yet to meet them.
She’d changed some on this trip though. She’d let her hair grow almost to her collar and there was something… softer about her. I had to believe it had something to do with her and Hachette. I knew they had a relationship going, which was against so many regulations it was almost unbelievable Top would ever let it happen.
