Osdal (Harmony War Series Book 3) (6 page)

Heok saluted and left the room.

Ortiz used his hands linked to his implants to open a channel he saw on his projected HUD.

“Need a new Captain?” Nerva asked as the line connected.

“Yeah, you want to talk to Mark?” Ortiz asked, knowing how Nerva regarded Jerome, Mark and Tyler like sons and Alexis as a daughter.

“You bust him down and I’ll have a talk with him,” Nerva said.

“Gotcha. Hell, I hate doing this shit, he was in the right! He’s been fighting for his life for so long now that punching someone barely feels like it warrants a dressing down.” Ortiz sighed.

“We’ve been at war since we arrived on Sacremon. With only a few weeks of rest at Earth and leaving Masoul, and the rest being filled up with training, I don’t expect he’ll be the last person to react a bit aggressively to situations. He’s not even the first case I’m dealing with. People are stressed, and they know this is only the beginning,” Nerva said.

“Yeah,” Ortiz said, weary from fighting and heavy with the knowledge that there was no end in sight.

Before, Sacremon rebellions hadn’t been all that well organized, and most times it had just taken one Earth Military Force Carrier showing up in a system to get the rebels to agree to their planet’s partnership terms. Few had real weapons, and certainly no grenade launchers, or heavy machine guns.

Chapter 5

Mining City Twenty-One

Osdal Actual, Osdal System

2/3266

Caroline Evers was woken by the banging on her lean-to. Harmony didn’t waste their time transporting people to and from the strip mines, they simply had them build lean-tos around the strip -mine, and they collapsed there into sleep while others worked.

She pulled herself up, feeling worse than when she’d gone to sleep. The metallic taste of Osdal Actual’s air filled her lungs; thankfully she had an augment to clear out the metals before they got into her system. Too many of her fellow workers sounded like they had metal lung, judging by their coughing.

She touched her face, and felt the disfiguring scar which ran from her forehead down her nose and through her lips.

Bored Chosen with guns watched from inside their air conditioned air car that floated above the ground. Caroline didn’t look at the Chosen, instead she pulled up the rags around her face. A pretty girl like her was just prey for the Chosen. The scar across her face had been self-inflicted, a promise to her parents and a way to get passed over as ugly.

The pretty ones had it the worst. So far she had escaped their attentions, and she hoped to keep it that way.

She looked at Ellie who was rubbing sleep from her eyes, she was older and wiry, she wasn’t beautiful, but sometimes the chosen weren’t picky.

Ellie and Caroline smiled at each other. They’d survived the night and they were alive. There wasn’t anything else they could look forward to.

She trudged with her shift, some went into the bottom of the pit, and she took over her place on a massive truck. She had been a shuttle pilot, and she loved the freedom of space. Now, just looking at the stars made her eyes itch, and made her want to cry out at the unfairness of it all.

Instead, she pressed the start-up button on the truck. Her mobile prison. It rumbled to life and a route was overlaid on her glass window.

Turning her truck, she saw a Chosen beating on a small boy. It would be so easy for her to run them over with her truck, but she didn’t do it. Shame built in her; it would end the boy’s life, but sometimes, most of the time, she thought that death would be better than living. Yet, she still woke up, ate her meager bar each day and continued on.

Her mother and father were dead already, and her brother had screamed for days as the Chosen tried to skin him. She had wept with guilty relief when his screams had died on the ninth day.

Her truck rumbled after the others in line, and crushers with massive rotating bits ate into the walls of the strip mine and it was scooped up and dumped in passing trucks. Then the trucks ran back out and dumped their load off at the processing plants.

Those that didn’t know how to drive carried fuel, oil and parts, they kept the machines in working order.

Harmony, in their infinite wisdom and need for specific materials, were using shaft mines across the planet. With the entire planet being made from metal, it was just a matter of time until the strip mine got what they needed.

The mining gear on Osdal wasn’t made to create shaft mines. Thankfully the infusion of Earth Sympathizers meant that there were plenty of people to swing pick-axes. The rate of people contracting metal lung was astronomical. Workers did two runs in the shafts for every run in the strip.

Caroline saw a commotion at the side of the mine as she descended, people were running away from it as a rising plume of dust told the reality. Another shaft mine had sunk.

Caroline felt pity for those that were undoubtedly stuck in the mine. Harmony would have people in the mine within the hour, not to save lives but to clear it out and continue their progress.

They were lucky that they hadn’t aggravated one of the few native species still left on Osdal. The Diggers lived off of the metal of the planet, there were tunnels all over the planet. Diggers crapped out rare metals, making them a CEO’s wet dream.

Problem was Diggers didn’t give a shit what they ate and they were massive, kilometers long and with skin made of whatever metals they’d eaten.

Some days Caroline wished that a Digger made it past the countermeasures and ended her hell.

Caroline looked away and focused on driving truck, trying to not think of the stars, or the Chosen, or anything. Reality was a place she seldom wanted to live.

Chapter 6

EMFC Reclaimer

Moving from Masoul to Osdal System

2/3266

Mark walked into Nerva’s office, and after Ortiz’s tongue lashing he didn’t know what to expect from Nerva.

“Sit,” Nerva said, his arms crossed on his desk. Nerva took a breath, revealing a momentary break in his almost manicured features. He looked like he was about 35, but his eyes and manners pegged him as older. Those eyes were tired, they’d seen a lot, little of it pretty.

“So I guess that Ortiz told you how you could have easily killed that man, and that you better think about your actions before you carry them out? Probably something about striking someone in a higher position?” Nerva said.

“Yeah,” Mark said wincing; he looked up to Ortiz and Nerva, they were leaders, the kind of person he hoped to be. Hearing those words from them hit home.

“I think it’s time we had a talk about shit,” Nerva said, standing from his chair and moving to the couches. Mark rose and followed.

“Shit?” Mark asked.

“Life, troubles, worries.”

Mark sat on the opposite couch, pulling the beret from his head and stuffing it in his leg pocket. He didn’t really know what to say.

“We’ve been at war for longer than most carriers are operational in a given decade. None of our fights have been anything less than wars. Which means that’s a lot of stress and little down time. Throw in the fact you were down on Masoul Actual in the midst of things… That stuff tends to wear on the mind.”

Mark didn’t feel pressured to speak; he knew that Nerva was just making it clear that if Mark had something to say then he’d listen.

“I think I’m losing it,” Mark said, leaning forward and looking at his clasped hands.

“Losing what?”

Mark looked him in the eyes, his fear clear.

“My humanity,” Mark said, fear chilling him to his core, but also feeling the seductive release of letting go of rules, pushing them aside.

Without rules he would be free to kill, free to wage war. He felt alive when he was fighting, it was exhilarating, the universe’s sickest joke on the human being. Humans hated war, but a part of them, a part of them loved the thought of violence, a part of them showed their best and worst qualities in war.

Mark had seen people do amazing things during war, but he had also seen terrible things.

He no longer looked at it as some kind of honorable fight. It wasn’t clean or pretty, and people didn’t just slap medals on you like he’d seen in holo-movies.

People died, brutally, accidentally, from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, all of that shit, and he was tired of it. He’d embraced the fact that he would probably never see retirement, even the 35 years that the EMF gave a Trooper before kicking them out.

He’d come to embrace his anger; it was his shield, the thing that kept him going. Anger and care, anger at his enemies and care for his brothers and sisters.

“I don’t know what I would do if I lost them,” Mark said, crying. Nerva made no move to comfort Mark. For that Mark was grateful, he didn’t want a hug, he didn’t want pity, he just wanted to be told how to fix the scars that lined his mind instead of his body.

Mark restrained his simmering, his need to destroy his enemies totally, else he might drive away his section and the people he cared for. His resistance was slipping away, and as Harmony got crueller, he continued to become numb.

His anger was starting to feel justified, and that scared him.

Mark wanted to kill all of the Chosen, he wanted to kill those that had come up with Harmony. He wasn’t just a Trooper any more, he actually
cared
about the colonists.

What he’d seen on Masoul he wouldn’t wish on anyone, it was worse than any slum back on Earth.

Mark let it all out, his fears and doubts for controlling himself. If he let himself slip an inch, he might fall a mile. The anger inside him was just looking for an excuse to be released.

Nerva listened, and the weight of it all lifted from Mark’s shoulders.

I never knew that just talking about things could help so much.

***

Jerome got up from the medical table, and checked his implants, the settings had changed over from his first set to his second.

While augments improved things within the body, like a person’s chemical outputs, accelerating healing, improved lung capacity and so on, implants referred to everything else. Things that didn’t necessarily improve the body, but gave someone more tools.

The implants that Jerome had been given were made to look like another part of his body, they were thin and with sensor baffling equipment throughout. He could now talk through his implants without ever moving his lips.

Better sensors dotted his skin, microns big and unseen, others were linked to his hands and arms so he could change things on the HUD, which was being relayed into his optical nerve, without using voice commands or specific gloves or non-stealthy implants.

Moretti made them all mandatory, and augments were usually small and worked in someone’s body, few people were looking for them. Implants connected someone to the net and allowed communication across the known universe, if you had the credits to pay for a FTL relayed message.

Harmony would be looking for them. Those that they found with implants they disabled, usually by pulling out the command chip that was located in the collarbone.

Jerome checked himself over; there weren’t even any scars from the surgery, just those left behind from Sacremon and Masoul.

He pulled his clothes on and stepped out of his cubicle. He’d seen these floors awash with blood and bodies crying out for aid. Now it was almost empty, with bored medics at the desks.

Memories hit him as a wave, he knew it had been coming, but there was nothing you could quite do to protect yourself from the emotional turmoil of seeing so many injured people, knowing only too well that it could be you, or that under that blood they might be a friend, someone you’d shared a beer with, or talked to at the gym.

He pulled his smart clothes tight, letting them connect themselves, and made his way out towards the training areas.

Jerome was going to head to the cafeteria but he no longer felt like he had an appetite. His implants alerted him to people in his platoon in the auditorium, they had added their green icons to his view even through the doors and a level down. Holm was going over the heavy machine guns that they’d seen on Masoul and they even had a few hundred of the weapons.

Holm was talking about the heavy machine gun in detail; one was mounted on a crude tripod, the other was pulled apart into its component parts.

“Anything interesting?” Jerome asked, using his sub vocal implant as he looked at the stage, his lips unmoving.

“You sound like a Resolute Station hooker,” Dashtund said, hearing Jerome’s voice garbled as he got used to the sub vocal implant.

“And you would know?” Dominguez asked. The two of them had a thing but they kept it on the down low while they were in the same section. From what Jerome had seen they were more open about it now they were in separate sections, but they were still testing the waters.

It was odd to see the strict Dominguez and snappy Dashtund’s verbal sparring.

“Course he did, all of us do,” Niemi responded, the whole platoon clearing their throats to hide their smiles and laughs.