Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3

by Devon C. Ford

  “Any sign that the Va’alen are coming back here?” he asked her, ever seeking information to update his threat assessment.

  “None,” Brandt told him confidently, “whatever went down here, we definitely missed it. Looks like if there were others, then they took off and abandoned this place.”

  “For good reason,” Zero chimed in, “what about the one left behind? The dead one?” He added, like Brandt needed reminding which of the deceased aliens she had ordered to be wrapped up in a body bag, to be recovered if possible. Specter had done it, along with Turner and Horne as the three of them manhandled the surprisingly top-heavy corpse into the tight-fitting bag. Black gore had oozed from the deep wounds caused by the carnivore’s long talons and Turner commented that they seemed incapable of having caused the alien’s death.

  “It’s dead,” Brandt told him simply, “and hopefully we can get it back to the fleet and autopsy it properly; look for a physiological weakness or something useful?”

  Zero chuckled briefly. “Like finding out its balls are actually under the armpits or something?” Brandt, despite herself and the gravity of their situation, also laughed.

  “Yeah, something like that. Still, would be good to know if the assholes have a sweet spot,” she said as she tapped a finger on the soft flesh under her nose. Zero knew exactly what she meant; a headshot on a human target face-on through that spot would obliterate the brainstem instantly before any signal could be sent from the brain to a trigger finger. Even in death, humans were dangerous creatures, but less so if they were suffering complete brain death in an instant. As a precision tool himself, Zero appreciated the thought of a magic target against an enemy that had been fairly bulletproof the last and only time he had met them.

  “Turner said this one looked smaller than the others?” he asked, posing the information as a question. Brandt had puzzled over the same fact and told him that it was indeed much smaller than the ones they had already gone up against.

  “Like, a couple of feet shorter. Only just a little bigger than Specter,” she told him.

  “Maybe they aren’t all warrior caste or something?” Zero guessed. “Like the smaller ones do the science and stuff?”

  “Makes sense,” she agreed. “Anyhow, where are we on defenses?”

  Zero filled her in, and it wasn’t all good news. The area where the outstation, or whatever the Va’alen had intended the small enclosure to be, had been built was in a shallow depression with tree cover all around. From a marksman’s point of view, which Zero’s considered to be hi-primary function in the universe, it was a bad move. He used a colorful expression to give his opinion on the site from a tactical defense point of view and saw his commander frown at his choice of words.

  “A gang fu…? Anyway. What’s the plan?” she asked, steering the conversation back above the belt. She was happy to delegate such matters to her second in command, but that was because she knew and trusted him to lead the team in her absence. She was by no means a hands-off kind of commander.

  “During darkness we’ll be forced to consolidate inside,” Zero said, “I don’t like it but there’s no other way. There are no natural underground structures here, not that I’d recommend tunnels again after the dog-sized scorpions gave me nightmare material for about a hundred years. We can’t stay outside in darkness, because there are clearly pack-hunting carnivores on this planet – which is another thing nobody’s talked about – and the only other option is to get up high.”

  “How would we do that? Brandt asked, genuinely curious about the suggestion, “Trees?”

  “Yep. It’s the only way, but it means leaving the mech and the supplies on the deck for anything to get at them. If it were me, if I was the Va’alen asshole given the job of putting an outpost here? Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t put it here, and I hope the dead ‘roach down there is the asshole responsible. If he is, son of a bitch got what he deserved for being a dumb son of a bitch.”

  “Learn from your mistakes?” she asked him with another eyebrow raised.

  “Yeah,” the marksman said, “and death is a very strong motivator to not repeat someone else’s screw up.”

  ~

  Brandt had followed Zero’s advice and consolidated her entire team inside the smallest room of the outpost they could realistically fit into. One of the rooms was too small for the large mech to get inside, and rather than run the risk of losing it, they all sat in silence as they tried to ignore the cacophony of animal calls outside during the darkness. Twice she swore she heard the sound of something getting caught and killed by something bigger, and her imagination ran riot.

  The three carnivorous bird things they had encountered played on her mind too. The one Zero had killed was the same as the one taken down by Specter, in that it was smaller and seemed to be wearing a shaggy brown fur coat of spiny feathers. The one she had killed, larger and a far more dangerous specimen, was brightly plumed and her own knowledge and logic told her that this was the male of the pack. Hopefully the alpha male, as she didn’t much like the thought of the rest of their little herd coming to look for their missing birds.

  The small energy source sat humming lightly on the deck between them, essentially a large single-use battery pack which snaked out wires to their suits, all except Specter’s, and the mech. Paterson told her it would probably top them all up to ninety percent or over, but that charge would be lucky to last them another day like the first one they had experienced on the surface of the exoplanet.

  She sat between Paterson and Specter, their shoulders pressed close as though proximity could provide the warmth that their suits managed for them. She leaned forwards, stealing a glance at Horne, who was asleep. She used her command override to access his suit, resting the tired muscles in her eyes by raising her hands to access the HUD menu, and checked his activity log. Three times since landing, or crashing more accurately, he had accessed Specter’s suit and administered something not recorded in the log. It seemed that Hyper wanted their cyborg escorted at all times to keep his true mind from reemerging, and the substance, which Paterson had guessed was dopamine or something similar, was being used to keep the emotions dead to him. She accessed his suit’s mic, opening it on her override authority, and caught the faint sound of a wheezing snore. Satisfied he was asleep, she isolated him from the comm net temporarily and sat back with another channel open to Paterson and Specter.

  “Hey, who mentioned the Sonoran Desert earlier?” she asked, feeling both of them stir, even though she doubted either was asleep. “You guys remember that training ex?”

  “How could I forget?” Paterson asked sourly. “A million degrees in the day and minus a million and four at night. Damn, those old tin can suits could never keep up with my body temperature; I’m warm-blooded, you know?”

  Specter huffed. “You always got in trouble for messing with your suit’s temperature controls.”

  “Yeah,” Brandt said carefully so as not to break the spell of Jake’s memories coming out, “and I was the one who had to chew him out for it, even though the ass never listened to me.” She leaned to her left, lightly clanging her helmet against Specter’s in an unintentional gesture from the depths of her memory.

  Chapter Fifteen – Sonoran Desert, Eleven Years Earlier

  “Hunker down, shut up, don’t move,” Master Petty Officer Carter snarled at the newest recruits to pass out of basic. They had earned their combat rating and were now officially seamen instead of recruits, but the naïve thought that the small variation in their designation meant that they had earned the right to be shown any respect was a tiny glimmer of hope that was quickly extinguished.

  The three new additions to the unit had graduated and been shipped in just in time to suffer one of the biggest career tests of all of the American UN’s ground pounders; simply referred to as the desert exercise. The sheer casual simplicity of the name they gave the ten days and nights, spent infantry maneuvering and digging-in defensive positions without aerial or vehicle
support, before culminating in a mock assault on a defended position, did nothing to advertise how grueling the experience was.

  At the time, none of the three seamen referred to as ‘fresh meat’ realized that the exercise was pure market research by the UN and their private partners in tech R&D. The last iteration of the powered armor suits had been in service for close to a decade and questions were being raised as to their effectiveness.

  What better lab rats to use than dumb grunts who bought the lie that the war games were a method of selecting candidates for promotion?

  Santana, Paterson and Brandt all hunkered down, shut up, and didn’t move. The smallest figure of the three tapped awkwardly at the comm device on the left forearm of the suit. The earpieces of the other two beside her in their tiny foxhole crackled as the telltale sign that a comm channel had opened.

  “Hey,” Brandt whispered, “do you think we’ll get attacked tonight?”

  “What does it matter?” Paterson groaned back at her.

  “Attacked?” the Latino accented voice of Jake Santana asked. “I’m… more likely to die of exposure than I am a bullet. Carajo, it’s cold, man!”

  “Stop complaining,” Brandt told him, “don’t you have cold temperatures in Mexico?”

  “I’m from California,” Santana answered flatly. “Can’t we like, I don’t know, cuddle up to share body heat or something?”

  “Through multiple interwoven layers of carbon ceramic polymer-alloy which has been ultra-heat treated and set? Sure, dude, bring it on in.” Paterson lifted an armored arm to invite Santana in for a hug. He almost accepted before he paused and slapped the arm down to mutter a curse at him.

  “You’re funny, asshole. I’m just saying, isn’t anyone else freezing their ass off?” Another telltale crackle of static hit their ears, indicating that their private chat was being interrupted.

  “Is there something you little pukes want to share with the rest of the unit?” Carter snarled at them, having seen their private channel courtesy of his command override authority.

  “Sorry, Boss,” Brandt answered for them, eager to take the full blame, “I opened the channel an–”

  “I literally do not care,” Carter responded. Everyone knew he was angry because he was due for a promotion to Command Chief, but their unit’s senior NCO seemed incapable of being killed or wanting to ever retire from service. Carter was left with the choice of waiting patiently in line or leaving for any other unit in the territory that had an opening for a senior chief NCO. He had decided to stay, so rumor had it, and he made up for it with sheer malevolence towards the fresh meat. “If you want to cuddle up and have some kinda twisted ménage à trois, then do it on your own damn time and not mine. Now. Hunker down, shut up, and don’t move.”

  They did as they were told, keeping their mouths closed, as anything they said would be transmitted over the squad channel and be picked up by NCOs and officers who would be just as willing as Carter was to tear them new waste chutes. Shivering throughout the night, the three of them took turns to turn and half stand to put the very top of their helmets above the dusty level of the hole they had dug in the heat of the day so that their rudimentary HUDs could link up with the drones providing overwatch to their camp. Nights like those were long, exhausting and so uncomfortable that they left a memory strong enough to last a lifetime.

  Some units were lucky and never caught the exercise, whereas members of others were unlucky enough to live through it twice in their careers. That was only a likelihood if you served more than your mandatory minimum to earn the civilian privileges the UN used to lure recruits to them.

  The unit commander, a hard man who had served twice in the vaunted CP special operations division, was in just as foul a mood as Carter had been when he caught the new additions to the recon squad chatting like girls on a sleepover. He had been on that same exercise as a lieutenant, and it didn’t get any easier with rank advancement.

  “All units,” he said into the microphone built inside his uncomfortable helmet. The clothing he wore beneath the armor suit rubbed and itched and he pushed the discomfort away. “This is Dassiova. I want all sentries to have their heads on a swivel throughout the night. Make no mistake; there is every chance we will be attacked at this position during darkness. Do your jobs. Out.”

  Brandt glanced at her two friends either side of her, both of them turning to meet her slight sheen of visor reflection in the gathering dark, and she imagined them both looking as frightened and cold as she did.

  ~

  The watch chime, set to sound every four hours, jolted Jake even though he was expecting it. The sudden sound, no matter how soft it was, came through loud and harsh to him. He steadied his breathing, glancing at the rudimentary HUD display to see how much his heartrate had elevated, before reaching down to nudge Brandt awake. Jake had taken over from Jamie Paterson and both of them were tall enough to lay their service rifles over the lip of their foxhole and lean over it, but their only female comrade in their position had to stand upright and not lean to rest her body weight, because she was fractionally too short.

  “You’re up,” he whispered to her with a light tap on her shoulder. She looked up, glanced at her forearm device and tapped it to speak to him alone, and stood stiffly.

  “Anything?” she asked him in another whisper.

  “Don’t you think I would have woken you up if there was?”

  “True,” Brandt acknowledged, recognizing the logical stupidity in her words.

  “Link to the drones,” Jake told her, “see you in four hours.” He withdrew his rifle from the lip of the trench and nudged her armored shoulder with his own in a gesture of muted solidarity. She hefted her own gun, used the comm device on her forearm to show the active sweep from the sentry drones on her HUD, and settled in to wait.

  ~

  The chime of the watch bell woke her, making her take a gasp of still air from inside her suit as momentary panic filled her mind. I fell asleep? Oh my God, I fell asleep! She looked around her, expecting to find the commander or the chief or Boss Carter watching her as she nodded off on her feet like a farm animal, but nobody was there. She closed her eyes, breathed out to calm herself, and opened her eyes again.

  To see a flashing red icon on the HUD.

  She opened her mouth to say the words, but nothing came out. The breach of their virtual perimeter was there, right in the sector manned by the three new soldiers fresh out of training, but she hadn’t seen it and hadn’t called out the warning. There should have been a central overwatch, a command-level operative watching all the feeds, but still nobody had seen it. She tried to speak but a single, strangled noise came from her throat and made her cough.

  “Contact,” Santana’s voice barked over the squad net with authority. “Perimeter breach in sector two, permission to engage?” He was suddenly beside her, the bulky service rifle next to her as he took aim with his left index finger on the trigger guard, ready for the orders he anticipated.

  “Recon squad, open fire,” came the order through their suit speakers. Jake squeezed the trigger, rounds ejecting and pinging her in the visor as rapidly as if she was being shot. She heard grunts and noises of confusion as Paterson rose, watched where the bright blue tracer was going and added his own gun to the fray. Brandt, realizing that her first live exercise had resulted in a monumental choke, clicked off her own safety and let loose with the non-lethal training rounds where one of the other units on the exercise were attacking their temporary camp.

  Brandt was sheepish an hour later when the sun rose rapidly, and her squad had been sent forwards to make the ‘bodies’ of the dead enemy safe and to provide emergency battlefield medical care to the ones designated as casualties. She was on body clearance with Paterson and Santana. The process involved scanning the supposed corpse for life signs and any evidence of active circuitry which could be an explosive detonator. When they were satisfied there was nothing obvious, one of them activated a small damping field of electroma
gnetic energy to stop any remote line of sight triggers, and one unlucky trooper got to do what they called ‘the roll’.

  “You’re up,” Paterson said to Jake as he activated the damping field on the heavy case they had to lug around on body duty. Santana sighed, handed his rifle to Brandt, who locked it to her free left leg to save it going in the dust, and covered him as he lay on top of the armored soldier playing dead and rolled onto his back, using the strength in the suit to roll the body with him and expose the front.

  “Clear,” Brandt told him, watching as he pushed the body back off him and got to his feet before marking the position on his comm device as having been secured.

  “Can’t wait for our turn at this,” he complained, “knowing our luck they’ll kill our suit’s aircon as well as the movement actuators and let us cook to death out here.” Brandt didn’t like the thought of that, and tried to push it from her mind as she handed Jake back his rifle. She hesitated, opened a channel between them and ran the risk of another ass chewing from Carter, and said what was on her mind.

  “Thanks for this morning,” she said briefly, “you saved my ass.” Jake didn’t look at her, didn’t give any physical indication that he had heard her words, but answered casually.

  “It’s what I’m here for.”

  Abandoned Va’alen Outpost, Unnamed Moon Surface

  Brandt moved as quietly as possible to try and find a more comfortable position to sit in without success. She glanced at the readouts for the others, seeing that Payne and Specter were awake; Payne on duty watch and Specter, well, because he was Specter and probably didn’t need to sleep.

  They had argued about deploying the single reconnaissance drone from the emergency crate as it acted as a comm relay. Zero made the point that in the deep canopy where their shelter was, the drone was fairly useless as it had too small of a field of view. They had settled on leaving it on the highest point of the building and set to activate on remote control if they needed it. As ever, Horne had supported whatever plan offered him the highest probability of personal survival, revealing once again that the world of private military contractors didn’t exactly support the team mentality of the UN forces.