The Elderon Chronicles Box Set

by Tarah Benner

  I passed them all with flying colors, but there’s no erasing my record. There’s a stink on anyone who’s been administratively discharged, and I’m pretty sure the other officers could smell it.

  Only my COs can access my personnel file, but it doesn’t matter. If anyone in my company lets slip that I was tossed out of the army, I’ll lose all credibility with my unit. That’s why I can’t afford to give anybody a reason to doubt that I belong here.

  I do my workout in the civilian fitness center. It’s not as though I’m hiding my morning fitness regime — I just don’t want to draw extra attention to myself. I warm up with a jog on the treadmill and do some shadowboxing on the mats. I bust out fifty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups and then sprint from one end of the gym to the other.

  It’s oh five hundred, and I have the place to myself.

  Once I’ve sweated out my nerves, I head back to the pod and take a long hot shower. I’m not hungry, but I shovel down a bowl of cereal anyway and chug two glasses of water.

  I don’t see Ping at all, which is good. I can’t shake my first-day jitters, and the last thing I need is his nonstop commentary.

  Still, it’s a little weird when I make it all the way to the training center without seeing him. The PTC is the only place in Sector R that’s large enough to fit the entire company. It’s a huge open gymnasium, and for the next eleven weeks, it’s entirely devoted to new recruit training.

  I step through the double doors, and the familiar stench of Reception hits my nostrils: new uniforms, new boots, and the sweat of anxious recruits. In the army, this would be the day that everybody gets their heads shaved and gear is distributed.

  In the Space Force, the recruits already have their gear. They’ve been inoculated and given full medical clearance. All that’s left is for them to take their physical fitness test and get an official initiation into the galactic armed forces.

  I cross the room to the huge number thirteen printed on the wall and stand beneath it. This is our squad number, and the four recruits I’m expecting will be looking for it.

  I take a deep breath and face the door with my head up, chest out, and arms folded in front of me. I led my own squad once before. I can do it again.

  A few more recruits trickle in as the minutes tick by. Most of them disperse to the other squad leaders, but a couple come over to me. One is a tall blundering giant with small eyes and a flabby face. The name on his uniform says Casey, and I remember that his first name is Trevor. Trevor Casey — space weapons expert.

  I also get an angry-looking Indian girl with dark frizzy hair and a tall ginger who looks as though a strong breeze would knock him over.

  All three recruits are silent and nervous, and they don’t have a clue in the world. At least they have respect for authority. They salute me, and I rack my brain to retrieve the other two names: Lee Davis, space comm specialist, and Adra Kholi — former delinquent hacker turned NSA white hat.

  Then the doors swing open, and I see Ping bounding toward me. He’s wearing his uniform, but it looks all wrong. One of his pant legs isn’t tucked into his boots, and he’s got too many buttons undone.

  “Morning, sarge,” he says brightly, giving me the most annoying salute I have ever seen.

  I suppress the eye roll that is dying to make an appearance and fix him with a harsh glare instead. “That’s Sergeant Wyatt to you, private.”

  “Yessir,” he says, breaking into a grin and wagging his eyebrows at me.

  “Don’t you grin at me, private!” I yell. “And fix your uniform. Do you think this is a game?”

  “No, sir,” says Ping, his eyes widening in horror. He bends down to fix his pants, and I want to strangle him.

  I can’t have my squad thinking that I’m their friend. My authority would be shot.

  “Ping!” I yell just as he straightens up.

  “Sir!”

  “What time is it?”

  “Oh six hundred, sir!”

  “What time were you supposed to be here?”

  Ping glances over at Davis, as though asking whether it’s a trick question. “Oh six hundred, sir?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question! What time were you supposed to report for Reception?”

  “Oh six hundred, sir!” he yells with gusto, clearly enjoying drill sergeant me.

  “Wrong!” I yell. “Kholi!”

  “Sir?”

  “What time were you supposed to report for Reception?”

  “Oh six hundred, sir,” she says.

  “Wrong!” I let that sink in for a moment, watching them all squirm. “The schedule you were issued says oh six hundred, so you need to be here at five fifty-five. Is that understood?”

  “Yessir,” they say in unison.

  “In my squad, early is on time. On time is late. Late is unacceptable. Is that understood?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now you can all thank your new friend Ping for what’s about to happen,” I say. “Drop and give me twenty!”

  At those words, they all drop to the ground in a flurry of boots and limbs. Kholi the hacker girl is on her knees, and the ginger’s ass is way up in the air. Flabby Casey is still struggling to get in position. And Ping . . . Ping’s push-ups are out of this world. Of course.

  “Davis! What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Push-ups, sir,” Davis huffs.

  “Wrong!” I yell. “Ass down. Casey . . . What is that? Kholi, if you can’t do real push-ups, you don’t belong here. Start over. As a matter of fact, everyone start over. You’ll do this as a team, or you won’t do it at all.”

  Nobody grumbles or says a word, but I sense a general mutinous rush. Davis, Casey, and Kholi struggle through a few pathetic push-ups, and I want to gouge my own eyes out.

  “Stop. Stop. On your feet.”

  All at once, the push-ups stop. Ping jumps up as if he’s got springs attached to his boots, and I roll my eyes.

  “Six laps around the gym. Let’s go!”

  Kholi shoots me a filthy look, but Ping jets off and immediately breaks ahead of the pack. Flabby Casey lumbers after him, and the ginger one, Davis, moves like a newborn fawn.

  Where did they find these people? Is this some kind of joke? Is Callaghan punishing me? This can’t be my squad.

  But then one of the other sergeants sends her privates limping along after mine, and I hear her grumble under her breath.

  “Pathetic.”

  I turn. The girl has got to be about my age with light-brown skin and delicate features. She’s at least a foot shorter than me, but she has the compact build of a track star. I recognize her from officer training. Her name is Maya Walker.

  “Yours too?” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do with a bunch of kids who would’ve washed out of army basic.”

  “Want to drill them all together for a few hours?” I ask. I’ve seen recruits step up their game when thrown into a larger unit.

  She shrugs. “Can’t hurt. I’ll see if Jameson and Whitehead want to join.”

  Jameson and Whitehead are two tall beefy guys that look as though they came from the shallow end of the gene pool. When Walker sidles up to them, I can immediately tell that they’re friends. They laugh at some dumb inside joke, and then the tall dark one eyes me from across the room. Immediately his posture changes.

  Great. One of them already doesn’t like me. Maybe he knows about my record.

  They talk for a moment, and then they send their squads to join mine running laps around the training center. They follow Walker back to where I’m standing, and I force my head a little higher and try to suppress my instant hatred.

  “All right,” says Walker, forcing an awkward half smile and jerking her head over her shoulder at the guys. “They’re in.”

  Jameson frowns but gives a reluctant jerk of his head. The shifty-eyed pale one called Whitehead just stares.

  “Let’s whip ’em together and make it rain,”
says Walker.

  I grin. Clearly she had a similar boot-camp experience to me. In the army, “rain maker” drill sergeants are the stuff of legend, but I actually had one.

  Twice in the middle of summer, my drill sergeant locked us in the gym, shut off the AC, and worked us until we were drowning in sweat. The heat and moisture from too many bodies condensed on the ceiling, and by the end, our own sweat was dripping down on all our heads.

  My squad is the first to finish. Casey, the huge one, empties the contents of his stomach in a trash can by the door. Davis looks a little green, too, but he manages to hold it together.

  I make them do burpees until the other squads join us. Then we line them up and take turns teaching them basic drill commands for an hour and a half. Every twenty minutes, we run them through another circuit or make them do push-ups.

  Basic training hasn’t officially begun, but I can see that I’m going to need all the time I can get to whip these losers into shape.

  Walker is by far the nastiest drill sergeant I have ever seen. Halfway through another set of burpees, one of her recruits blows chunks right there in the line. Walker doesn’t dismiss the kid or stop the exercise; she just yells at him to keep going and makes him drop down in his own puddle of vomit.

  I’ve never been so glad to dismiss my squad for lunch — or what’s left of them, anyway. They’re a bunch of sweaty, demoralized flesh sacks, and it’s still just the first day of Reception.

  Whitehead fist-bumps Jameson as they head out the door, but I don’t see the close of morning session as anything to celebrate. I see it as a big fucking problem.

  I have no idea how I’m supposed to get these people up to Space Force standards in ten weeks’ time. I’m not sure a lifetime of training would be enough.

  Not one of my recruits has even an ounce of military experience. And Callaghan expects me to turn them into skilled combatants?

  Two and a half months of basic training is no substitute for actual military experience. An overseas deployment changes you — hardens you. When you’re taken away from all you’ve ever known and forced to kill for your country, you come back an entirely different person. These kids can’t learn that.

  One thing’s for sure: It’s going to be a long ten weeks. I might not be able to turn them into real soldiers, but I can get them into better physical condition and drill them until they follow orders in their sleep.

  15

  Maggie

  The story I published on the food aboard Elderon went gangbusters on Topfold. It’s been live for less than twenty-four hours, and the number of views has already surpassed the traffic on the donut piece.

  When I walk into the newsroom Thursday morning, I’m fully expecting to be Alex’s new favorite person. At least I hope she doesn’t hate me. I need her in a good mood for what I’m about to ask.

  Since my talk with Tripp on Tuesday, my every waking thought has been consumed by the Space Force. According to the budget that I lifted from his office, one sixth of the personnel hired by Maverick Enterprises were brought on board for Elderon’s private military.

  For the past three days, dozens of men and women in blue have disembarked the shuttle, and for the past two days, I’ve managed to capture it on film. That level of military preparedness certainly wasn’t in any of the press releases Maverick sent out announcing its first “civilian” colony, and it certainly wasn’t mentioned in any of the charming interviews that Tripp gave on Earth to drum up publicity for colony one.

  I can’t publish the information that Tripp shared with me in confidence, but that doesn’t mean I can’t publish the footage of Space Force personnel piling off the shuttle or ask a rep from Maverick to comment on the hordes of soldiers and intelligence specialists they hired to protect the colony.

  When I enter the newsroom after breakfast and sidle up to Alex’s desk, I’m greeted by a puff of pink vapor. “I hope you have some stunning space-walk footage for your column,” she says, taking a deep drag on her e-cig and squinting at her desktop.

  I hesitate. No congratulations on my piece? No “job well done”? It’s not as if I need the validation, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the cold shoulder.

  “I have a space-walk appointment set up next week,” I say slowly. “Today I have a piece about microgravity yoga.”

  “Hmm. All right.” Alex still doesn’t look up. “But it better be funny. Mr. Van de Graaf did not find the Franken-meat story funny.”

  “Tripp?”

  “His father Strom — chief executive pain in my ass.”

  I hesitate. “He didn’t like it?”

  “He didn’t like that you were disparaging the food they’re serving up here . . . or that we pulled back the curtain to show how the sausage was made. Literally.”

  “That piece got over a million views. That didn’t make him happy?”

  “Let’s just say that it’s not the sort of attention Maverick Enterprises was after.”

  My heart sinks. This is not going the way I’d hoped.

  “They’re trying to sell luxury space travel to trust-fund kids,” Alex continues. “You think people are going to drop millions on a space cruise or spring for a long-term stay in the colony if the food sucks?”

  “I was just reporting on my experiences,” I mutter. “You’ve tasted the food . . . Tell me it isn’t horrible.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Barnes. I’m just relaying a message from our corporate overlords.” She finally tears herself away from the projection of her desktop and meets my eyes with a serious gaze. “Tone down the truthiness, okay? We’re selling adventure, excitement . . . the next great frontier. Keep it light, for god’s sake.”

  “I wasn’t aware that we were ‘selling’ anything.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she says in a contemptuous voice. “Of course we are.”

  “Well, then you’re really not going to like this . . .”

  “What else is new?” she growls, stabbing her e-cig into its cradle and swiveling her chair around to the coffee maker.

  After one day in the newsroom, the coffee station was relocated to a cart just behind her desk. The new location makes it impossible to get a refill without giving Alex a full status update.

  “I used to field stories on political corruption, the Bureau for Chaos, and the growing pro-Russian sentiments of China,” she grumbles. “But by all means . . . bring on the space toilets and anti-gravity Pilates.”

  “Yoga.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You told me to keep it light!” I say in exasperation.

  “And I meant it,” she says. “Or else it’ll be both our asses on the line.”

  “Well, this isn’t microgravity yoga,” I say, beaming her the footage of all the Space Force personnel disembarking from the shuttle.

  She lets out a huff of impatience. “What am I looking at here?”

  “This is footage from Tuesday.”

  We watch in silence for several minutes, and I can tell that Alex is growing bored. I switch out the clips. “This is Wednesday.” Nearly identical footage takes over the screen — more men and women in blue flooding into the colony.

  The clip ends, and I can almost hear Alex’s eye roll. She yawns. “Ugh! Snooze. Where are you going with this?”

  “Did you know that more than five hundred troops have already arrived in Elderon and that almost four hundred more are scheduled to be shipped up today and tomorrow?”

  “That seems like too many,” says Alex around an actual yawn.

  “It is,” I say, dismissing the videos and pulling up Tripp’s budget. “It’s more than one sixth of total personnel that’s slated to occupy Elderon. More than a quarter of non-infrastructure-related spending on the project is going toward military training and supplies.”

  “How do you know all this?” asks Alex. The woman misses nothing.

  I enlarge the budget and zoom in on the lines that I’ve highlighted. “See for yourself.”

  Alex scans
the budget quickly, her eyes widening with every pass down the page. “Where did you get this?”

  “Tripp Van de Graaf.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Alex shoots me a dirty look, but it’s not as though she’s scandalized. We’ve all done it. You don’t leave important papers lying around when a journalist comes to visit.

  “These documents beg a lot of questions, but they aren’t enough.”

  “What do you mean they’re not enough?” I cry. “We have a line-item budget proving that Elderon isn’t what Maverick says it is. You can’t be a civilian space colony with nine hundred soldiers on board.”

  “All you’ve proven is that we’ve got a shit ton of private military personnel,” says Alex. “The Space Force isn’t the army or the navy or the marines. There’s nothing in this budget that says ‘Russian defense fund’ . . . We have no proof that the Bureau is planning an attack or that there’s anything fishy going on with the Russian military installation next door.”

  “I have a source that says the DoD suspects an attack from Russia. And they’ve gotten threats from the Bureau for Chaos.”

  “When did Mr. Van de Graaf tell you this? During your dirty rubdown alone in his office?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I say, feeling my face heat up. “I kept it professional.”

  Alex gives me a dubious look. Clearly Tripp’s reputation precedes him.

  “It doesn’t matter, Barnes. Is he willing to go on record saying that his company’s trillion-dollar investment has a target on its back?”

  “No.”

  “Then we can’t run this — not if that’s all you’ve got.”

  “Well, obviously I’m going to do more digging,” I say. “I just showed you this so that you’d see that there’s something to dig into.”

  “No,” says Alex. “Absolutely not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you forgotten who signs your paychecks?” she asks. “You think the blowback from your Franken-meat story was bad . . . If we went public with this, they would jettison us back to Earth so fast your head would spin.”