by Mel Odom
Fort York Military Spaceport
Loki 19 (Makaum)
1508 Hours Zulu Time
The dropship touched down with a jar that Sage felt in his back teeth. He waited a moment more to make certain the vessel was fully at rest, then pulled the straps free and stood. He reached into the nearby cargo compartment and hauled out his gear. He opened the duffel and took out his protective vest and helmet. He slapped the vest onto the AKTIVsuit, which powered up and adhered it in place as extra protection, then pulled on the helmet.
Once the helmet was in place, the AKTIVsuit’s power cells fired to life and the faceshield shimmered for just a second and elevated the dim light through light multiplier refraction. A second later, a green dot flared to life in the lower right quadrant tucked at the edge of his vision to let him know the helmet’s reception of photon-directed magnetic energy broadcast from the post was reaching him, swapping over from the satellite feeds.
Staying within the perimeters of Fort York would keep the helmet and armor powered. Outside the post, the armor drew energy from transport vehicles and geosynchronous satellites. Theoretically, the gear could interface from nearly anywhere on Makaum.
As Sage strapped his Birkeland coilgun to his hip, the visor interface acknowledged the link with the weapon through the biometric link grain in his palm and briefly flared a red reticle into his vision. When he picked up his Roley gauss rifle, a violet reticle flared to life. He added a Smith and Wesson .500 revolver in a shoulder holster and thick-bladed fighting knives in both boots. If he got separated from the power broadcast or his armor was damaged, he was fully prepared to go old school. He held the rifle in his right hand across his body as he got ready to debark.
For the first time in six years, Sage felt complete. He belonged on the front lines. He’d been born on a battlefield, and he never felt more alive than when he was headed into hostile territory. Makaum, so far off the beaten path, wasn’t a war zone, but the enemy was here. He was closer to the fight.
Only a few of the other soldiers had their helmets in place and their rifles in hand. Sage let out an impatient breath through his nose and curbed the urge to command them to gear up that automatically came to him. Until he was presented to the men, he wasn’t going to assume control over them. Chain of command had to be followed. If he tried to pull rank before he was acknowledged, they’d resent him.
They’d probably resent him anyway, on principle.
A few of the soldiers saw him, noted the sergeant’s chevrons, and pulled their helmets on and their rifles off their shoulders. Others saw them, looked at him, and walked by without suiting up.
Sage didn’t take offense. He’d known some of the men stationed at Makaum would be discipline problems. They lacked the cohesive nature of being in a firefight together, or being steadily drilled. He was there to take care of the latter.
“Stand clear of the exit ramp.” The pilot’s voice reached Sage through the helmet’s aud receptors.
Sage stood at the forefront of the soldiers, his rifle canted across his body. Hydraulics wheezed and the dropship shivered as the massive ramp opened outward and thumped hard against the tarmac.
Increased sunlight polarized the helmet’s faceshield before Sage could narrow his eyes. Instantly the glare of the harsh sun went away, but the heat baked into him as the cool air mixed with the native atmosphere.
“This place is a sweatbox.” A soldier with a broad face and pale skin scowled. “The racks better be cooled.”
“Or what?” Another soldier shoved the first man. “Nothing you can do about it, Donaldson. Gonna have to toughen up.”
The first man swung a lazy fist toward the second, who only laughed and quickly stepped out of the way.
Sage strode out of the dropship and swept the tarmac with his gaze. Only military personnel occupied this section of the spaceport. The corps held other sections. As he walked, sleeker dropships touched down on the other side of a long row of warehouses and the blowback from the engines threw a spray of dust and debris that peppered him. A few military aircraft flew aloft, but most of the aerial traffic came from private enterprise. Thunder cracked around them as the vessels broke the sound barrier. The port was busier than Sage had thought it would be.
Small cargo ferries flitted around the newly arrived military dropships like bees working a clover patch. Several of the units looked like they’d been rescued from the scrap heap.
“Master Sergeant Sage.”
Tracking the voice, Sage turned toward a lean man in his early thirties. The man stood at attention and fired a quick salute. He was nut brown, wide in the shoulders, and watchful. His faceshield cleared so his features showed.
“Sergeant Richard Terracina.”
Sage recognized the name. Terracina was 3rd Battalion’s First Shirt, the first sergeant and top non-com at the fort. Technically, at the moment Terracina didn’t have to salute him. That he did so now was a sign of respect. Sage was going to be taking over for him. “At ease, Top. We’re both working men here.”
Terracina smiled. “We are.” He nodded at the dropship. “Give you a hand carrying your gear?”
Sage shook his duffel. “Got everything here.”
“You travel light.”
“Got what I need.”
“Figured maybe I’d run you around the base, give you a look, then treat you to dinner.”
“I came down early. I don’t want to waste your time.” Sage also preferred to do his own looking.
Terracina looked a little embarrassed. “I heard about what happened in the Azure Mist. Gotta admit, I enjoyed listening to how you handed those bashhounds their heads. There isn’t any love lost between the corps and our people down here.”
Sage wasn’t surprised, but the hostility concerned him. Especially if his actions exacerbated the situation. “That much of a problem?”
“It can be.” Terracina shrugged. “They’ve got their agendas and we have ours. We try to stay out of their way and we bulldoze them out of ours when we need to. Here in the sprawl, we hold our own, but out in the bush, it’s a different story.”
“How different?”
Terracina’s face hardened into a scowl. “Out in the Green Hell, you gotta worry about the local critters, the crime cartels that sprang up from civilian support when they got introduced to the idea, the occasional Phrenorian scout team, and the anti-gov locals who don’t like us being here in the first place. But the corps do a lot of business out there too, and most of the time they don’t want us to know what they’re doing. Makes the whole situation volatile.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got a crawler. I’ll give you a lift.”
“Sure.” Sage followed the younger man.
THE CRAWLER WAS a four-man transport unit with an open square cargo area. Painted a bright orange that had dulled and showed dozens of scars from past impacts and abuse, the crawler sat on six wide tires that came up to Sage’s waist. The two rows of seats were back to back and barely covered by a sunshield.
Sage tossed his duffel in the rear compartment but kept his rifle with him. “No armament?”
“Nope.” Terracina slid in behind the wheel and shook his head. He locked his rifle into the brackets beside his seat. “No air conditioning either. And a really rough ride if you get onto Makaum’s side streets. Keeping everything clear of vegetation is almost impossible.” He pointed.
Sage slid into the passenger seat, locked his rifle into the brackets, and followed Terracina’s forefinger. Four men equipped with backpacks walked a grid over the spaceport. As they walked, they blasted sections of the tarmac with solvent.
“Defoliant.” Terracina pushed the ignition button on the dash. The crawler quivered to life as the engine caught. “We have to devote a lot of manpower to keeping the Green Hell beat back, and the jungle just figures new ways and DNA strands to beat what we throw at it. This planet is nothing if not adaptable. Got a big budget for defoliation, and some of the corps even have R and D funding earmarke
d for genetic research to make the local flora more controllable. That’s part of what makes us unpopular with the anti-Terran movement.”
“The locals don’t want the jungle contained?” Sage looked out over the rolling green density that surrounded the city. Trees and brush ringed the city like an emerald ocean that wouldn’t be denied.
“Some of them wouldn’t mind it so much, get more living space and arable lands without breaking your back, but most of the Makaum people have accepted the ongoing battle with the environment as part of the price they have to pay for survival. They’ve found interesting ways to make it work for them.” Terracina shook his head. “Others believe that the existing balance in nature shouldn’t be tampered with. Something this big but tightly ingrained, if an outside change is introduced, they’re afraid it could start a chain reaction of falling dominoes, maybe kill off everything here.”
Aware of all the jungle on the other side of the military base to the south, Sage nodded. “That would be a lot of dominoes.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it will ever happen. This whole planet is just too mean and nasty.” Terracina maneuvered around a group of cargo handlers offloading a dropship of supplies.
“How much of a problem is the local resistance?” Sage had read up on that as well.
Terracina drove through the spaceport. “More annoying than difficult. We’re limited in how we can interface with the locals. Usually you can depend on a sizeable civilian population to shore up noncombat positions. The mess. Janitorial. Services. That way we don’t stretch the combat units thin with comfort care and day-to-day. We provide jobs for the locals, a new way of living, an economic infrastructure they didn’t have before we arrived. You know the score.”
Sage did. The army and civilian camps had to grow together in populated areas. Usually the gestalt was mutually beneficial because the local civilians provided a much needed labor force the military couldn’t muster and the fort enhanced the local economy with government creds and soldiers’ pay. That practice was usually deemed a win-win scenario. But it also allowed a lot of areas for civilian and military personnel to get “creative.”
Unless the solder was in a war zone. Then everything was kept more separate, more carefully monitored.
“The resistance is more disgruntlement than hostility.” Terracina negotiated a pass around another newly arrived dropship. “We keep the fence up just to keep the honest people honest.” He waved in the direction of the city. “At the other end of Makaum, the corps’ spaceport sector does the same thing, but with better equipment and more men.”
“Local looters?”
“Negligible. And we’re safe from the corps vultures because they have better equipment than we do. We don’t have anything they want.” Terracina gave a sour smile, then wiped it from his face with a big hand. “Do I sound whiny?”
Sage grinned. “Maybe a little.”
“It’s deserved, trust me. I’ve thought about a cushy corp job running sec somewhere.”
Most Terran soldiers had. The military had lost a lot of good soldiers to the corps.
“So what’s holding you back?”
“I got kids.” Terracina answered soberly. “When I get back to them, I want to be proud of what I do. Even if I don’t beat the face off some poor guy just trying to lift enough cargo from a fat corp to make life a little safer or easier for his family, I want them to know I worked to make lives better. Not enhance some corp’s bottom line.”
“Yeah.” Sage had turned down several corp headhunters over the course of his career. “The corps take many personnel from the fort?”
“Every now and again, if they run short of bodies. Hire our people with fat bonuses. Technically, those soldiers are AWOL, but we don’t go after them. Not cost effective, with everything else we’ve got going on. And the last thing we need is to create a hostile force in our own brig. We’ve got enough enemies outside the walls.” Terracina shook his head angrily. “You’ve seen our stats. The guys we get out here are bottom-of-the-barrel soldiers, or they’ve broken under fire on some other planet, or they’re too green to know much more than which end of their weapon is dangerous. When you don’t have manpower the corps want to steal, you know you’re working in the sewer.” He paused. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make this posting sound any harder than it is, but it’s plenty brutal.”
“I appreciate the honesty.” Sage had already come to that conclusion. Whoever had put the intel package together had all but spelled out the lack of experienced soldiers with boots on the ground in Makaum.
Five vertical meters of fence separated the spaceport from the city on the other side. On the military side, the tarmac lay relatively level, marred by chips and stains, and jumpcopters, crawlers, powersuits, and drones, while ATV Razorback fighting transports occupied neat rows.
On the other side of the fence, Makaum lay disheveled. Even some of the cobblestone streets next to the spaceport had been buckled and broken by rampant undergrowth. Vines and roots twisted through the walls of stone buildings. Most of the nearby flora had curled up in brown and ash-gray death and near death. Evidently defoliant had been applied, or had drifted from the military area.
“You get out farther from the biz sector, you’ll find people living in structures formed from trees and brush.” Terracina shrugged. “The people who live and work there don’t fight against encroaching growth. They just adapt to it.”
“Learned to live with it?” Sage was fascinated, wondering what those buildings looked like. Intel had been sparse regarding the intermediary area between the fort and the Green Hell.
“More than that. Some of the Makaum people have a real knack for cultivating the growth. Can almost get it to grow—or not grow—any way they want to. They can make shelters, grow crops, transplant different branches to trees so they grow separate fruits. Several of the corps are exploring those abilities but they haven’t discovered much yet. Some of them think it’s some kind of psi talent that was either latent in the colony ship or a self-preservation mechanism that developed once the people were onplanet. That jungle also helps them hide from the larger predators out there, and there are plenty of those. You get out far enough from the sprawl, the natives are like ghosts—can’t be seen or heard unless you’re teched up.” Terracina batted at a large, brightly colored bug that resembled a butterfly. It fluttered around his faceshield.
The insect was larger than both of Sage’s hands together. Scarlet wings edged in yellow held violet spots in the upper centers. When the insect abandoned Terracina and came for him, Sage slapped it to one side and was surprised at how meaty and heavy the butterfly was. Astonished, Sage watched the insect flap away.
“Weird, huh?” Terracina smiled. “Get used to it. Makaum throws curveballs at you all day long when it comes to insects and lizards. Planet grows stuff that you wouldn’t imagine ever seeing. Our imagination is limited compared to what comes out of the Green Hell. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you see something new. Some of the corp biologists think that’s because the planet is constantly mutating, creating new species, but always lizard or insect, no mammals or avians. One of them told me Makaum is in a state of ‘creative flux,’ whatever that means. Like the planet is fighting a battle against itself.”
The butterfly disappeared behind the immense hulk of a battle tank. The four-man crew huddled around the armor was talking more than working. For every hour used in the field, heavy armor required three hours of maintenance. Sage made a mental note to have a word with the armored cav unit commander.
“You’d be surprised how many of those insects and lizards are edible, too.” Terracina smiled. “That Crimson Granny—the thing that just passed us by—was named because of the color and of the curious way it hangs around. It’s tasty if you roast it up.”
“You’ve eaten them?”
Terracina grinned. “I have. When I had to.”
During his tours on other worlds, Sage had eaten many vegetables and animals not nati
ve to Terra. There had been a lot of insects as well, toasted, roasted, and raw. He wasn’t looking forward to eating anything Makaum had to offer, but it was good to know the possibilities existed.
“Wouldn’t recommend the Grannies.” Terracina grimaced. “Leaves you with the worst cottonmouth you’ve ever had.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
FIVE
A-Pakeb Node
BioLab
Makaum
3817 Akej (Phrenorian Prime)
Clad in his battle armor now because he did not want his troops to realize he had undergone a recent moult, Zhoh walked through the bio lab. His disappearance from his tasks would also lead some to suspect that he had undergone lannig. Despite his fairness, there were some in his unit who wanted his rank, who chafed under his command. Officers only maintained their positions as long as they were physically capable. Phrenorians hated weakness and were genetically coded to kill individuals that were deemed too weak to live. The gene pool had constantly evolved, pushing the species toward perfection.
Zhoh pulled at his combat armor, a bare latticework that protected the softer abdomen, shifting it so it didn’t wear against his developing exoskeleton. He was pleased with the work going on in the labs under his command. He had been tasked with discovering as much as possible of the local flora and fauna.
Most of the genetic work continuing there was legal, made in accordance with the agreements with Makaum people, and he was in charge of it. Even if he didn’t understand everything the scientists were doing, he knew it was profitable. The Phrenorian Empire ran on lifeblood and credits, which could be wielded as a weapon to buy loyalties and spies.
But the work in Lab 9 was off the books and aggressive. Technicians labored there to deliver the secrets of the planet to the Phrenorian Empire. And to come up with weapons to strike against the Makaum people and the creatures that shared the planet with them. The checkpoints the Terran military kept around the world prevented the Phrenorian Empire from bringing weapons of mass destruction onto Makaum, but no one could prevent the Phrenorian labs from constructing one if they found the proper resources.
