Home Front (Drop Trooper Book 5) Read online

  Contents

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  Also by Rick Partlow

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  About Rick Partlow

  HOME FRONT

  ©2020 RICK PARTLOW

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  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  CONTACT FRONT

  KINETIC STRIKE

  DANGER CLOSE

  DIRECT FIRE

  HOME FRONT

  FIRE BASE

  1

  “Storm’s coming.”

  I pulled my head out of the guts of the torn-down auto-harvester and wiped sweat away from my eyes.

  “What?” The question was a reflex. I’d heard what Vicky said, but I’d been so absorbed with the attempted repairs that it hadn’t processed through my overheated brain.

  “Out there,” she expounded, nodding at the western horizon.

  I looked at her for a second before I checked out the westward sky. The sunsets here were beautiful, but nothing was more beautiful than Vicky Sandoval; not to me. Her work coveralls were stained with soot, her dark hair matted with sweat and tied back into a messy ponytail, and she still took my breath away.

  She noticed me checking her out and the corner of her mouth turned up.

  “I was talking about the weather, Cam.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I grabbed at an insulated bottle sitting beside my toolbox and sucked down a swig of cold water. The summer heat turned it into wine more effectively than any divine miracle and I sighed with relief.

  The horizons were always distant here on the Danuvian Plateau, the mountains a rumor, a shimmer on the edge of existence that might have been an optical illusion. Even the shimmer was invisible now, lost in curtains of rain kilometers away. The advancing front was a dark line across the sky, lit up here and there with lightning, the thunder still too far away to hear.

  “Might not make it this far,” I mused, turning back to the open maintenance panel. “And this piece of shit isn’t making it another centimeter until we replace the secondary power coupling.”

  “Jesus, that’s the third coupling we’ve had to swap out in the year we’ve owned the damned thing.” She dabbed at her forehead with a rag, then tossed it down onto the maintenance catwalk of the harvester, hands on her hips. “I think we need to consider biting the bullet and just buying a whole new machine.”

  I winced, leaning against the metal, making sure my bare skin didn’t touch it. It wasn’t thermoplastic or Duralloy or BiPhase Carbide or any of the sophisticated materials I’d grown used to in the Marines, and it could leave—had left—a nasty burn on any unprotected flesh you were foolish enough to expose to it after a long day in the fields.

  Still, I wasn’t sure which hurt worst, the memory of the burns, or the idea of spending that much money.

  “We’d have to dip into our separation bonuses. The Commonwealth Colonization Authority gave us the initial equipment investment at no charge, but until someone gets a production facility up and running in town, anything new is going to have to be imported from out-system, and you know how much that’s going to cost.”

  “It’s either that or keep running back to the fabricator shop every month.” She was winding up for an argument so I counted to ten and concentrated on deep breaths. “We have enough left.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” I agreed. “But it’s only been a year, and it has to last us until we get this farm profitable.” Whenever that might be.

  “It’s not like we have anything else to spend the money on,” she pointed out. “The land was free, the seed was free, they sold us the livestock at cost, and if it all goes completely to shit, we can grow enough to live off and still save enough to plant for next season.”

  She was right, but I was stubbornly reluctant. It was a lot of money, enough to buy us both a ticket off this world. But not if we spent half of it on new equipment.

  A flicker of movement caught my eye, something undulating in and out of the fields of corn with flashes of multicolored scales, and my teeth bared instinctively.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered. “It’s a rock dragon.” I looked longingly at the squatting, utilitarian ugliness of the rover, but I remembered I’d left my rifle back at the house.

  “Another one?” Vicky spat, shading her eyes with a bladed hand, trying to spot the thing. “That’s gotta mean the sonic fences are down again.” She speared me with a glare. “Which is something else we need to replace before the dragons kill all of our goats.”

  I sighed, knowing she’d eventually come around to trying to repair everything ourselves one more time. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation and I knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  Something rumbled off to the west and I thought for a moment Vicky might have been right, that the storm was heading this way after all, but then I realized it wasn’t thunder, it was an internal combustion engine. This colony was so remote and primitive, we didn’t even rate a dedicated fusion reactor, which meant the vehicles ran off grain alcohol, like the cars in Tijuana when I was a kid.

  The rover was identical to ours, built on local fabricators from plans over a century old, like everything we owned that hadn’t come off the colony ship with us. It could have been from any of dozens of farms on the plateau, but I knew it wasn’t. There was only one man who’d be coming out here this late in the day.

  The slope-backed rover skidded to a halt beside the harvesters, throwing up rooster-tails of dirt, and a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted figure squeezed out from behind the wheel, his mop of blond hair compacted under a wide-brimmed hat. He didn’t wear coveralls, opting instead for the loudest and most garish shirts his personal fabricator could manage, matched with cargo shorts and knee-high socks.

  “Hey Cam, Vicky,” he called, clambering up the access ladder on the side of the harvester without asking leave. “Did you see that fucking rock dragon? I got my rifle in the cab. Wanna go hunt the son of a bitch down?”

  “Too far away now,” I lamented. “Anyway, I’m wiped out. Been up on this piece of junk all afternoon.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He leaned over and peered into the maintenance hatch. “You need any help with it?”

  “Sure, Dave,” Vicky said, arms crossed, regarding him with strained patience he would have had to be blind not to notice. “You got a secondary power coupling in your truck next to the rifle?” Vicky didn’t dislike Dave Clines, but his personality was like chili powder, best served in measured doses and on special occasions.

  “’Fraid you’re going to have to hit the industrial fabbers in town for that, darlin’,” he told her, ignoring her mood, which he could get away with because he didn’t live with her.

  “Don’t call me darling, Dave,” she reminded him for what had to be the hundredth time.

  Clines grinned at her, not at all apologetic.

  “I don’t blame you for being pissed off, Vick,” he said, using an appellation she found only slightly less objectionable than ’darling.’ He spit off the side of the harvester. “This equipment the government gave us is a bunch of obsolete junk. They don’t give a shit about any of us, that’s why they stuck us here in the Forbidden Zone.”

  Vicky sighed.

  “No one actually calls it that, you know.”

  “What would you call it then, Vick?” He spread his hands, motioning above us at the sky, beginning to turn a darker blue as the sun sank lower. “All these systems with habitable worlds on the other side of the Tahni Imperium and the damned klepto aliens never even tried to settle here? You know how fanatical they were about putting colonies on every single living world between Tahn-Skyyiah and the Commonwealth, but they just didn’t get around to places like this? They just left a dozen systems with habitable worlds for us to find and settle after we beat them in the war? Come on.”

  I shut the maintenance hatch, tossed my tools back in the chest and closed it before I looked back up to regard Clines with long-suffering amusement.

  “So why, then, Dave?” I asked, humoring him. If one of us didn’t ask, he’d just keep belaboring the point until we did. “Why didn’t the Tahni settle here?”

  Honestly, it was a good question, though not one I’d bothered to ask when we’d been offered the chance to settle here. All we’d needed to know was that the climate was temperate, the land was fertile, and the scenery was pleasant. And that there’d be no Tahni trying to kill us.

  “I’m glad you asked,” Clines said, grinning. “It just so happens I was attached to an Intelligence unit when I was working Fleet Security back during the war….”

  “A top-secret Intelligence unit,” Vicky murmured, just loud enough for me to make it out.

  “Yes, it was top-secret, Vick,” Clines said, shooting her a dirty look. “And after we’d invaded the Tahni home planet, they stumbled upon this group of systems in the captured records, and I got a look at their report.”

  “They just left it laying around for you to read, huh?”

  “Well, it was an enemy file, darlin’! Who would they be keeping it secret from?”

  I had to give him that one. I grabbed the toolbox and my water bottle and started climbing down the access ladder. I’d have this pointless conversation, but I’d be damned if I had it on this metal baking tray.

  “So, what did the report say?” I prodded, the turned dirt crunching under my work boots at the bottom of the ladder. “What was the big secret?”

  Vicky rolled her eyes, but she knew as well as I did that Clines would tell this story with or without my encouragement, and our best hope was to get it as quickly and concisely as possible.

  “Well, that’s just it, compadre, they didn’t know. The Tahni didn’t even know.” He followed me down the ladder, hopping off about a meter up and wincing as he landed. “Damn knee. Need to lose some weight.” He rubbed at the offending joint before straightening and proceeding with his war story. “Anyway, the Tahni didn’t settle on these worlds because their religious traditions say they’re unclean, for some reason. They didn’t get any more specific and the best guess any of the xenoethnographers had….”

  “The what?” Vicky demanded, face screwing up at the term.

  “Well, fuck if I know,” Clines admitted, “but that’s what the report said. The xenoethnographers said they thought it might have something to do with the Tahni equivalent of astrology that developed before they found out that the stars were all just big balls of gas.”

  “We know all about big balls of gas.”

  “Do you wanna hear this story or not?” Clines asked her, but then waved the question away, perhaps sensing he wouldn’t like the answer. “Never mind. Anyway, they….”

  “The xenoethnographers,” I clarified, carefully maintaining a straight face.

  “Yeah, them. They thought these systems were off-limits because they were in the wrong constellation and it would have been bad juju to put colonies here. But I think that’s just the easy explanation. The Tahni are superstitious, but they ain’t superstitious like we are. For them, everything was wrapped up in the Emperor, right?”

  It seemed like a question, and not a rhetorical one, so I answered it.

  “As far as we know. But I’m not a xeno….”

  “Oh, shut up. I just don’t see them writing off all these systems just because they were in the wrong part of the sky. For them, controlling living worlds was everything.”

  “Then what do you think it was, Dave?” Vicky asked, giving up on both the harvester repairs and her resistance to the conversation. She dropped down with more grace than me, a hell of a lot more than Clines, and pulled open the back of the rover, motioning for me to stow the toolbox.

  “I ain’t got no idea. I just know there’s something funky out here and I think the government believes it, too. That’s why they stuck all us rejects out here.”

  “What do you mean rejects?” I asked, frowning.

  “Vets who they got an obligation to settle on a colony,” he clarified. “But there ain’t enough room on the established colonies for us because they ain’t been rebuilt yet from all the damage the Tahni did during the war. So, they talked us into settling here because no one else would come here. No one else was stupid enough.”

  “There’s the civilians,” Vicky pointed out. That was what we called them, dividing the colonists into two camps, the vets, and the civilians. It wasn’t just our differing backgrounds that separated us, though. The civilian colonists had been settled here months before any of us vets had arrived, for the simple reason that all of us had been held in the military for a few months after the end of the war.

  “The civilians,” Clines scoffed. He reached into a cooler in the front seat of his car and pulled out an insulated bottle of the local beer, twisting open the top and taking a swig before he went on. “They’re refugees. Their worlds were too torn up by the Tahni for them to be able to rebuild, so they got stuck here whether they wanted it or not. That’s why all of the assholes are such…well, assholes. Like that motherfucker Hellnick who lives against my eastern property line. Sour-faced dick won’t so much as come to his gate and say hi when I drive by.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t have all day to bullshit because he has a farm to run,” Vicky suggested.

  “Either of you guys want a beer?” Clines asked, gesturing between us with the bottle.

  “Thanks, anyway,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m already halfway dehydrated and it’ s hot as shit out here.”

  I was exaggerating. Compared to Inferno, this place was fairly close to heaven, but I guess I’d been spoiled.

  “But you mark my words,” Clines went on, using the beer bottle as a pointer, “the Commonwealth put all us losers no one would miss out here like Judas goats, to make sure if there’s some weird alien threat out here, we get hit by it first before anyone else finds out.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Dave,” I sighed, pushing open the driver’s door of our rover and falling into the front seat, letting my legs hang out the side. “They did not just stick us here as fodder for space monsters. You sound like a bad movie.”

  “Do I?” He barked a laugh and pointed off through the fields in the direction the rock dragon had run. “I talked to one of the pilots on the lander that dropped me here over a year ago, and he told me that the plants and animals here are different than the ones on Tahni colonies, the ones they brought there from their homeworld. Totally different, evolved independently of them. But they’re also the same plants and animals that you’d find on any of the inhabitable worlds in the Forbidden Zone, even ones with different gravity. That means someone seeded the same sort of life on all those planets.” He nodded, his brows going up like a lecturer coming to a conclusion. “And all that life, here, the Tahni worlds, Earth, all the colonies we’ve settled on…it’s all based on DNA. Which shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Panspermia,” I suggested, though I only had a vague idea what it meant. I’d gone through an accelerated and abbreviated series of general education classes for Officer’s Candidate School, and I remembered reading something about panspermia as an explanation for why DNA-based life forms had developed on different worlds.