Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2)
Read Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2) Online
Authors: Sean-Michael Argo
DEAD WORLDS
Necrospace - Book II
Sean-Michael Argo
Copyright by Sean-Michael Argo 2015
Edited by TL Bland
Thruterryseyes.com
PROLOGUE
It is the Age of the Corporation; where the common man toils under the watchful eye of the elite and their enforcers. The rule of law has long been replaced by the politics of profit. For many centuries the Covenants of Commerce have ruled mankind, from boardroom to factory floor, from mine deep to fertile field, and upon the battlefields of heart, of mind, and distant star.
The dark ages of feudalism have returned with capitalistic ferocity, and while there is no peace amongst the stars of mapped space, business is booming.
Impoverished workers drown in debt while they labor for subsistence income, mercenaries of every kind wage war under the banner of any company willing to meet their price, scavengers and space pirates loot what they can, all to the backdrop of a ceaseless struggle for economic dominance.
To be a human being in such times is to be one among countless billions in a civilization spread across a vast universe, all ensnared in the same blood-soaked web of capitalism, most doomed to be ground to dust amidst the gears of progress. There are some people however, those rare few, who rise from the ranks of the faceless masses, to make their mark upon history.
This is one such tale.
ON THE FRONTIER
Sura Hyst slowly opened her eyes as the lighting on her faux window unit gradually shifted to day cycle. The artificial sunlight panel was intended to help citizens maintain their health and mental state, though Sura had grown to loathe it. Teague lay next to her, on his side and facing away from the panel, still asleep. Sura remained still and fought to remember the dream, to capture the details of it and run them over and over in her mind as she desperately searched for meaning in it.
Her parents had been believers in dreams, at least the sort one had while sleeping. They had instilled in her very early in life that paying attention to them was important; whether or not they were simply the mind sorting and cataloging the events of the day or perhaps something that came from deeper within.
As an artist, Sura had always found value in her dreams, though all she found in this one was heartbreak and a familiar ache of longing. She knew at this very moment her Samuel was out there in necrospace, scavenging and fighting whatever horrors the universe saw fit to hurl at him. The man had killed, lost friends, and even been injured nearly beyond repair, and yet still he soldiered on for his family. All the while she waged the war at home, a bitter and grinding struggle against loneliness, despair, and the mundane minutiae of raising a child alone in the vastness of Baen 6.
They had a plan, a dream that they shared of a life away from Grotto space. Of forests and open spaces, of natural food and clean water, and the freedom of simplicity. It had been a good dream; one they’d both held burning in their hearts, undaunted by the wars Samuel fought or the carnage he witnessed.
They had been saving aggressively, and they knew that if things continued as they had been then by the time Orion was ten they would be able to leave Grotto space as a family with enough resources to start a homestead on one of the distant worlds of the frontier. They would travel to the frontier and carve out a place for themselves amongst the free stars of unmapped space.
That was before Tetra Prime.
Samuel typically spent only one or two months out of any calendar year at home and they had prepared themselves for that. To achieve their frontier dream it seemed worth it. What was ten years of their lives compared to the lifetime of their children and their children’s children away from the shackles of Grotto’s debt-based society? It was a hard tithe, but one they chose to pay, and it had been a functional arrangement for a few years.
However, when Samuel returned from Tetra Prime he was a changed man. He had witnessed the horrors of war plenty of times before, though to hear him tell it Samuel had seen the inherent atrocity in the business of war itself.
Sleep came hard for him, and he often awoke in the night covered in sweat and calling out for someone named Bianca, other times Ben, or his former squad leader Mag.
Samuel did not like to share war stories, instead preferring to talk salvage and space travel. On one occasion though, he had awoken in the night and needed to talk. It seemed as if he was still half asleep, describing the death of Andrea Baen, how her body looked as it sprouted bright red ice crystals that spun in the lazy arc of zero gravity.
She did her best to let it all go, and sometimes, she could. Samuel was out there risking his life, and she knew that men and women who shared such experiences often formed a kind of bond.
Samuel never mustered the courage to tell her about other women he slept with, though Sura knew her husband well enough to know that Samuel was carrying guilt that wasn’t all war related. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, even feel it in his body when they made love; her silent forgiveness of a transgression he never confessed was part of her war, and she fought it as best she could. Sura was a woman with her own needs, and Teague wasn’t the first man she’d brought into her bed since Samuel had shipped out just over five years ago.
Bedding ‘Reaper wives’ was something of a sport among men who lived in some of the less than savory quadrants of the city. Sura herself cared little for what they thought or said. Teague was a good man, and she was confident he didn’t see her as a trophy, but had actually begun to fall in love with her. It was sweet, though that same fact meant that she would have to send him away soon. In truth, Sura knew that once Teague was gone there could be no more after him, regardless of her wants and needs. Orion was beginning to reach an age where Sura knew that he would begin to ask questions, about his father, about his mother’s ‘special friends’, and soon even the physical comfort of a man’s body would be lost to her.
Sura wished she could fall asleep again, to find herself in that dream, though without Samuel there it meant little. He could die at any moment out there, and though his death benefit would be sufficient to wipe out much of their debt, Sura and Orion would still be trapped in the Grotto life, only without Samuel. Sura wept quietly into her hands, doing her best not to wake Teague as she lost her willpower to hold it back any longer.
“This is the job,” she whispered to herself, and clenched Samuel’s spare Reaper tag in her fist as she blinked back her tears and put on a faux smile before getting up to help Orion with his breakfast, “This is the job.”
A DAY OLDER AND A DOLLAR DEEPER
“Mister Hyst, the injury to your spine would have left you paralyzed from the neck down, though due to the extensive bone and nerve damage the possibility of your expiration due to complications in the weeks and months post-surgery was exceptionally high.
You were unconscious and deemed unable to give consent to alternative procedures, however, pursuant to Reaper Battle Protocol 16, the Tango Platoon Commander, Wynn Marsters, was on hand to execute those decisions on your behalf. With the executor’s consent an Augur cybernetic spinal unit has been installed in place of your damaged bone and nerve tissues.
It is important that you are aware that neither the unit nor the installation, are covered by the Standard Reaper Health and Wellness Plan provided by Grotto Corporation. As such, please find the attached invoice.
If you are not able to pay the amount in full, a financial administrator has been assigned to your account and is available to negotiate a low interest payment plan that will best suit your financial capacity.”
The typed letter fell from Samuel’s hands and landed on the floor as he groaned and put both of his hands to his head. Samuel was sitting up in the cramped bunk space of the Reaper tug as it plodded through space towards the planet Vorhold. According to the mission clock they were only three hours from being planetside, so the marines were rousing from their bunks and heading to muster.
Samuel had been pouring over his finances, trying for what seemed like the thousandth time to make some kind of sense of his predicament, to guesstimate how many more years of Reaper duty he would have to endure before he and his family could leave Grotto. It had been nearly eighteen standard months since the battle on Tetra Prime, and still he awoke with nightmares about the mech.
Back on Baen 6 his wife Sura continued to work part-time to help Samuel chip away at the mountain of debt their family owed Grotto Corporation. With what remained of their two life-bonds, the usual costs of living, and now Samuel’s monumental medical expenses, the only way they were going to make any progress beyond just paying the interest on what they owed, let alone trying to save for expatriation and a homestead, was for Sura to return to work.
Samuel had found himself actively hoping for combat deployments. The chance to earn the increased hazard wages that accompanied hostile salvage ops would go a long way toward eliminating his debts even if it did increase his chances of being killed on the job.
In the time since his injury the Baen Reaper fleet had been pulling operations in parts of necrospace that had been somewhat picked clean. The scavengers and pirates on the Red List had little in the way of heavy extraction equipment, much less the kind of tug ships to haul scrap tonnage the way the Reapers did.
In many ways it made Samuel feel as though the Reapers were the apex scavengers of the galactic ecosystem, like the bone worms sometimes found in the cesspools beneath Assemblage 23; unstoppable scavengers who mowed over anything weaker and ate them alive.
His father had taken Samuel down there once, when he was only ten, to show him the bowels of the forge. That had been back when the Hyst family had still hoped to secure a place for Samuel at his father’s side.
Under the massive forge was a hub of network waste tunnels, where inedible bio-mass from three nearby food processing plants was piped in and channeled to various dump exits. Part of the function of Assemblage 23 was to maintain the hub, patching pipes to replacing valves, in addition to fabricating the materials for the other hubs and tunnel networks throughout the Bean system.
For the indentured workers of Baen 6, being part of the Assemblage crew was about as prestigious an achievement as was possible without being born into a wealthy family.
It had been with pride that Samuel’s father had helped the boy don a hazard suit to venture with him into the subterranean darkness.
Samuel’s father was happy to show young Samuel how the molten slag or toxic runoff from the forge would inevitably breach some of the tunnels beneath. No matter what they did to stop spillage it would always happen, and even when it didn’t, parts would just sometimes fail.
That was the lesson of industry on such a massive scale, that everything found a way of breaking down somehow over time. It was the same for the human body, thought Samuel as his wandering mind returned to his chamber and the mission clock as it steadily counted down.
Ben was leaning against the wall in Samuel’s chamber, having dropped by to check in on his friend before muster. After the letter fell from Samuel’s hands the bulky soldier knelt down and picked it up. He’d seen Samuel reading it over and over, crunching numbers on his data pad, and his friend’s face was always grim at the end of it.
“No matter how many times you read that letter or how many times you punch those numbers I’m pretty sure the answers are going to be the same,” laughed Ben with false mirth as he folded up the paper and returned it to the small stack of files on Samuel’s nightstand.
“Well, at least the lifetime warranty on your new hardware is made null and void if you engage in any routine heavy lifting or take part in any military or security force activities.”
“You always see the upside so clearly?” grumbled Samuel as he got to his feet and grabbed his deck jacket, “Or just when it’s not you getting saddled with another life-bond’s worth of debt?”
“Come on, man, lighten up, I’d rather you be fit to fight than be a head on a stick,” said Ben as he opened the door and held it for Samuel to walk through, “Can’t get paid just sitting around right? Besides, Grotto disability payments are barely enough to keep people out of debtor’s prison, much less raise a family.”
“I get it Ben, really, I do. I just get pissed sometimes that I wasn’t able to make that choice for myself,” responded Samuel as the two men walked down the narrow corridor of the barracks section of the tug, slowly making their way towards the main hold, “I now owe Grotto more money than I did before we hit the ground on Tetra Prime.”
“Mags would say that you just had some bad luck, and then something snarky about how you’re still alive when folks like her got early retirement,” whispered Ben as they passed several crewmen in the hallway, “You’re here, I’m here, and we’re still in the game.”
“I swear, Ben Takeda, it’s like you took an elective course on speaking in clichés,” Samuel retorted as they reached the service shuttle that would carry them through the engineering sections of the ship on their way to the staging area, “But I get it, the numbers don’t lie. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually glad we’ve finally pulled a hostile salvage.”
“Is blasting somebody going to get you some payback jollies?” scoffed Ben as the shuttle rumbled along the enclosed passage, taking them through the bowels of the ship.
“I’m thinking about pay
days
, brother, you were at the same mission briefing I was,” said Samuel, nodding to Virginia Tillman and Harold Marr as the four Reapers fell into step together towards the staging area, “A city with an upspire the size they showed us will have a downspire easily ten times the size once you factor in the unrecorded expansions and abandoned ventures and that’s just what’s been mapped.”
“It’ll be a bigger haul than our entire tour with Hive Fleet 822,” added Ben as he punched his fist into his open hand. “Not that I’m looking forward to spending months or years wading through sewage having to look over my shoulder for toxic mutants while I’m trying to weld.”
“That’s why we got Prybar here,” kidded Harold as he clamped his hand on Samuel’s shoulder, “He kills monsters.”
“Vorhold sounds like a nightmare,” Virginia chimed in, “What the shift manager said about the landscape of downspire reminds me of being in Mining Unit 5597, and Prybar isn’t in Squad Marsters, Harold, so we’re probably going to be on our own.”
“Hey, at least it has gravity,” answered Harold while the group passed through the sliding door and into the bustling staging area. “If I live the rest of my life without another zero-g firefight I’ll call it a win.”
“Well, don’t you lot sound like a bunch of hardass war veterans,” hailed a smiling Jada Sek as she sauntered over to the group, already kitted out in her combat armor.
The group continued to swap pleasantries as they were joined by Spencer Green and George Tuck, who had several recent Reaper recruits tailing behind them. As Samuel looked over the new faces he had to remind himself that he’d known these people for nearly eighteen months. In the years since Samuel’s first deployment there were only six of his boot camp comrades still alive and serving in Tango Platoon. He had always done his best to remember the names of the other Reapers who joined the unit, though beyond Bianca Kade he couldn’t manage to hold their names on his tongue for more than a few months at a time. Samuel was positive that Mag would have had some phrase of pithy wisdom or at least a redemptive shrug to help Samuel make sense of it.
It was common for soldiers to form lifelong bonds with their boot camp comrades, which was part of why command kept new recruits in the same unit after they graduated. The downside to that, in Samuel’s thinking, was that the new blood and the old blood tended to stick to themselves both on and off duty. In a morbid moment of clarity, Samuel found himself looking at the recruits and realizing that after a year or more of Reaper duty they weren’t really recruits any more, and that they likely saw Samuel and the other veterans in much the same light as he had once seen Mag. Samuel looked away from the soldiers and let his gaze take in the grand spectacle of the staging area as Ben slugged his shoulder and pointed.
“Wow, it really has been a long time since we’ve deployed heavy,” breathed Ben as he looked out across the staging area, “I’d almost forgotten just how much hardware we can drop on a target.”
It was indeed a grand sight, thought Samuel as he took in the full sight of the staging area. Dozens of bulky salvage craft that would transport all of the Reaper non-combat gear were being fueled and taken through the pre-flight rituals. Unlike the more compact ship-to-ship assault pods, the troop transports were large rectangular craft designed to house entire platoons, along with their reserve ammunition caches, spare armor, and a portable med-bay unit. In the personnel quadrant of the bay there were dozens of other platoons performing a final refit on their weapons while they waited to board their launch crafts.
Boss Ulanti, Boss Marsters, and the other platoon leadership officers entered the bay through an elevator hatch, presumably having just been given their final briefing by the shift manager. Boss Ulanti looked over at the group of Reapers and gave them a curt nod. It was time to suit up and go get some.
Samuel’s heart started racing, and the familiar pre-war rush filled him. Hazard deployments paid the best, and as the merc, Imago, had told him so long ago, it was all about maximizing the day rate. Samuel had spent over a year on basic salvage duty, and that was never going to get his family out from under Grotto’s heel. The prospect of a combat salvage tour inside one of the largest spire cities in mapped space had given Samuel the ray of hope he desperately needed.
He just had to survive it.