Home Front (Drop Trooper Book 5) Read online

  Clines shot me a skeptical scowl.

  “Panspermia? You really think that’s the explanation for all this? RNA on comets got all the way not just out to the Tahni but to these worlds too? Over two, three hundred light years? Naw, man, there’s only one way this could have happened, and that’s the Predecessors.”

  “Not that again,” Vicky said, slapping her palm against the hood of the rover. “I’ll sit through your conspiracy theories about Tahni superstition and hidden alien threats, but I will not listen to you go through this Predecessor bullshit again.”

  “We can’t do anything else with the harvester until we go into town tomorrow and get a new power coupling fabbed,” I declared. I looked up at Vicky. “Wanna make a day of it, grab some lunch, hit the zocalo?”

  “That sounds good!” Clines enthused. “I’ll meet you guys at the hopper pickup in the morning.”

  Vicky tried to look upset with Clines, but she couldn’t keep up the façade and finally just started laughing.

  “Sure,” she acceded.

  “And until then,” Clines said, jogging back to his rover and pulling out the rifle, cocking an eyebrow toward me. “Wanna go see if we can find that dragon?”

  I looked a question at Vicky.

  “Fine,” she said. “But you’d better be home before dinner.”

  Clines laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

  “You take the gun, compadre,” he said, sliding behind the wheel of his vehicle. “I don’t want to drink and shoot.”

  “But drinking and driving is fine,” Vicky whispered to me.

  I gave her a kiss, tasting the salt of her sweat, then picked up the rifle. Its weight was welcoming, comforting, somehow. I slid in beside Clines and pulled the door shut.

  “Let’s go kill something.”

  2

  “Get everyone out of here!” I yelled at Vicky, and I hit my jets.

  The mecha was leaning forward, its weight on its front foot, slightly off-balance because it had never been built for agility, just enough brute force to carry around an antiproton reactor and a shitload of weapons. I rammed my shoulder into the thing’s trailing leg, my teeth clacking together with the impact, and ran the jets so far into the red I could almost hear them screaming for mercy.

  It didn’t knock him over. I hadn’t thought it would. I just wanted to buy time, and that I did. He lost balance and had to slam his trailing foot to the ground, which, unfortunately, took me to the ground with it. The armor was tough. It could take a huge beating and keep working, but unfortunately, us humans had to be inside it.

  Every time we got a new guy in the platoon, they would always wind up asking why we had to be in the suits, why the Marines didn’t just put an AI program in the suit computers and let it do the fighting, and someone would have to repeat the same explanation that Captain Covington had given to the platoon leader who had given it to everyone else. It was the old story about how automated weapons had been tried during the Sino-Russian War and had turned against their own side. It might have just been because the computer systems weren’t sophisticated enough back then, but no one with the power to change things had ever trusted them again, so us poor, vulnerable humans still had to pull the triggers.

  When my back hit the concrete foundation of the building, I could really have come up with some great arguments for automated weaponry. I’d had cracked ribs before, and I was fairly sure I had them again. The pain sucked the breath right out of my chest, replacing it with white fire, and I wanted more than anything else to just lie there on the ground and rest, to let someone else do the rest of the fighting.

  That wasn’t an option for a few reasons, the main one being that if I stayed on the ground, the mecha was going to squish me flat. The massive oval of its foot pad hovered above me and I punched the jets again, sliding through oceans of debris but getting out of the way of the stomp. The mecha’s foot pad cracked the floor beneath it, shaking me right through the BiPhase Carbide of my armor. I had to get up, and even though the Vigilante would do the work, the only way it could react was by me using the muscles that I would have needed if I’d been just trying to move my own body and not the three-meter suit of armor. And moving fucking hurt.

  I rolled to my feet, screaming into the privacy of my helmet, knowing no one would hear, and turned to face oncoming death. Instinct screamed at me to get distance, but experience yelled just as loud that I should stay close. The mecha was an artillery piece, and its heavy weapons were designed for distance fire. Neither the proton cannon nor the coil gun turret could depress far enough to reach me, but the damned KE guns could.

  Tantalum needles cracked off my armor, no single one of them able to penetrate, but the combined effect of hundreds of the things enough to wear my protection down and kill me, given time. Thankfully, even though my plasma gun wouldn’t penetrate the mecha’s armor over anything vital, there was one target I was fairly confident about servicing.

  I blasted the thing’s right-hand KE gun with a plasmoid, the ionized gas melting the infantry-defense weapon to slag. The Tahni pilot must have really liked that gun, because he seemed to take its loss personally. His leg was the size of a tree trunk, and when it impacted the left shoulder of my suit, it threw me four meters, straight through the back wall of the building…

  …and I woke up screaming.

  “Cam!” Vicky said, her hands warm against the clammy skin of my arm, her voice soothing. “It’s a dream, Cam. It’s just a dream.”

  I was panting, dripping sweat and I forced my eyes open wide, trying to reassure myself that I was back in our bedroom on Hausos, not fighting for my life on Tahn-Skyyiah. The room was dark but not pitch-black, moonlight filtering in through the open window along with a cool, night breeze…and an ear-splitting roar that shook the walls.

  “What the hell?” I gasped, swinging my legs off the bed and lunging for the window.

  We left it open at night in the summer, counting on the sonic screens to keep out the insects, though given how poor a job they did against the rock dragons, maybe we shouldn’t have been so confident. I pushed aside the filmy veil of the shade and searched the night sky, holding up a hand to block the light of the Asvins, the twin moons of Hausos, sailing their nightly course from one horizon to the other.

  A few degrees below the gibbous moons, another pair of glowing circles pierced the darkness, much closer together and lower to the ground. It could have been thunder rolling over the plains from the storm that had never passed over us, but it wasn’t. It was a sound almost more familiar to me than thunder. It was a shuttle. There were a couple of small transport jets on-planet, kept mostly for the use of the Corporate Council, but they were a quarter the size of a shuttle, their turbofans almost silent by comparison with the atmospheric drives of an aerospacecraft.

  “Where the hell are they going?” Vicky wondered. I hadn’t noticed her get out of bed, but she was beside me in the window, the oversized T-shirt she wore to bed fluttering slightly in the breeze. I wore only shorts, and was beginning to notice the chill creeping up my back from dried sweat.

  Her question was a good one. The spaceport, a grand name for what was basically a field of fusion-form pavement a kilometer long, was outside the town, a hundred kilometers west of here.

  “They’re damned low,” I observed. “They’re coming in for a landing. But the only thing over that way is Dave’s farm…and his neighbor, that Hellnick guy.”

  “Klaus Hellnick,” she filled in the details. “We met him once in town.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding as I recalled the man. “Weird, shifty-looking bastard. Lives out there all alone, not even any hired hands.”

  “His wife and kids died in the war,” she chided me, smacking me lightly on the bicep.

  “Sorry.” I frowned, peering at her in the moonlight. “How do you know that?”

  “Jed and Riley told me. You know, the couple who run the fabricator shop on Main Street.”

  “Sucks about his famil
y,” I allowed. “But he’s still shifty. And I still wonder why there’s a damned shuttle landing on his property in the middle of the night.”

  “He probably had something delivered from out-system,” she reasoned. “Maybe even a new harvester.” She put an acerbic edge into the words and I flinched. “Space crews don’t give a shit if it’s the middle of the night local time. The workday on a ship is whenever they need to work.”

  I didn’t want to be quite as reasonable as her, but I shrugged.

  “We’re ignoring the elephant in the room, though, aren’t we?” she asked, putting an arm around my shoulder, pressing me into a hug. “You’re still having the nightmares. What was it this time?”

  I thought about telling her I didn’t remember, but there was no reason to lie. Not to Vicky.

  “Deltaville again. The mecha.”

  She sighed, resting her head on my shoulder.

  “At least it wasn’t Delp this time.”

  There was nothing to say to that. I’d seen poor Vince Delp’s face in my nightmares more times than I could count.

  “Sorry I woke you up,” I told her, turning, putting my arms around her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The shuttle would have done it if you hadn’t first.”

  I kissed her, suddenly very conscious of how good she looked in the light of the dual moons, in just a white T-shirt, very aware of the warmth of her body against mine.

  “No use letting the opportunity go to waste,” I said, arching an eyebrow, pulling her back towards the bed.

  “Cam,” she giggled, pushing against my chest, “we have to be up in like three hours!”

  “Who cares?” I insisted, falling backwards onto the mattress, and bringing her down with me. “We’re taking the day off tomorrow, having some fun. Might as well start now.”

  She offered a token scowl of disapproval, but it quickly turned into something more lascivious, and we both tactfully ignored the real truth of the matter. I didn’t want to go back to sleep.

  “I don’t remember Gamma Junction ever being this crowded before,” Clines grumbled, shaking his head as he stared around.

  I couldn’t disagree. Gamma Junction wasn’t a city, was barely a town. Originating as a pair of buildfoam storage domes hurriedly thrown up by the Corporate Council to stow the supplies they’d been commissioned by the Commonwealth government to drop down for the colonists, it had grown like a crystal in a growth matrix as some of the newer settlers had decided they didn’t want to be farmers. Instead, they’d built shops and bars and restaurants, all clustered around the warehouses, hugging the landing zone, turning it into what we laughingly referred to now as a spaceport. There was even a hotel now, if you can call a buildfoam half-shell with a dozen rooms a hotel. It catered to spacer crews who wanted to sleep somewhere besides their ships for the night, and we almost never had more than one ship in orbit at a time, no more than one shuttle load of strangers at a time.

  Until today. I’d noticed the crowd first from the air, flying in on the hopper taxi. The ducted-fan hovercraft ran a regular run three times daily from two different pickups at the junctions of the dirt roads running out to the farmsteads, and the three of us had caught the first flight into town. Looking down from the window seat, I’d just assumed it had to be some Settlers’ Association meeting I hadn’t seen on the schedule, but now, walking through the open-air shops and kiosks, I counted at least two dozen people I’d never seen before, men and women who sure as hell weren’t farmers or shop-keepers. They might have been spacers, but if they were, they weren’t from any Corporate crew, not the way they were dressed. Corporate Council freighter crews didn’t generally wear vat-grown leathers and fragments of old military fatigues, nor did they allow the sort of holographic facial tattoos and bare cybernetics many of these people sported.

  And that’s not even mentioning the guns.

  Guns were common on the frontier, of course. We hunted the rock dragons with them and there being no law enforcement to speak of on Hausos, everyone kept a rifle loaded and ready in their rover when they were out in the fields. But I hadn’t seen anyone openly carrying a sidearm on their hip since I’d left the military. It wasn’t something anyone thought to do, maybe because there just weren’t that many of us and we hadn’t been on the world long enough for crime to become a problem.

  “Independent spacer crews usually carry guns out on frontier worlds like this one,” Vicky told me when I brought it up. “They don’t know there’s no crime. For all they know, we could have gangs of people who hijack shuttles every time they touch down.”

  I eyed her doubtfully.

  “And how would you know any more about independent spacer crews than I would?” I wondered.

  “I follow the news.” She sniffed as if the question was insulting.

  “You saw it in a movie, didn’t you?” Clines said, grinning.

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “Come on, let’s get to the fabricator shop before we wind up waiting in a line.”

  The strangers barely spared us a look, except the occasional leer and snicker as they paused at one kiosk or another, pawing through the locally-produced tools and hand-sewn clothes with snorts of disdain. They couldn’t have been more obvious about sneering at us local rubes if they’d hung a sign around their necks, but I suppose I didn’t hold that against them. Gamma Junction made Tijuana look cosmopolitan.

  And I was staring at them like one of the rubes they thought we were as we passed, heading through the street markets towards the rows of squared-off, single-story businesses built as cheaply as possible from local wood and stone.

  “I wonder if these are the same guys who flew that shuttle over to Hellnick’s land last night?” I nudged Clines. “You must have heard it, right?”

  “Yeah, I heard it,” he said. His mouth clamped shut as if he wanted to say more but was reticent, which was so totally unlike him it worried me.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “It wasn’t the first one I heard,” he said. His mouth pressed into a tight line and I thought he might say nothing more on the subject, but he snarled his way out of the expression. “I started hearing them a few weeks ago, coming in pretty regular.”

  “And you never said anything?” Vicky seemed astonished, and I was sure it was not at the idea that Hellnick was having regular, clandestine shuttle flights out to his property but at the concept that Clines wouldn’t have been clucking about it every single day like a constipated hen.

  “I went over there once,” he admitted. “Over to the property line near where the shuttles were coming down. I just wanted to see what was going on, you know? And I saw those guys.” He nodded back toward the strangers. “I mean, I don’t know if it was those guys right there, but it was guys like that. Dressed like them, carrying guns. Rifles, carbines, pistols, loaded up like it was back in the war, you know?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked him. I mean, not that there was much we could have done about it, but news was news, especially here.

  “Because they saw me. They saw me and one of them, this big motherfucker with a big, honking gun came up to the fenceline and he told me if I didn’t get the hell out of there and not come back, no one would ever find my body.”

  “Shit, Dave! We could have helped you…,” I trailed off, wondering just what the hell we would have done if he’d come to us. Charge in, guns blazing?

  “There was nothing you could have done,” he said, waving it away. “And I didn’t want you getting caught in that. Whatever that shitheel Hellnick is mixed up with, it’s nothing good. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys are pirates.”

  “Pirates?” I repeated. “Come on, there’re no real pirates anymore, not since the Pirate Wars.”

  “Maybe they don’t raid Commonwealth colonies anymore,” Clines insisted, “but there are still criminal cartels in the Pirate Worlds. And that’s not just bullshit from action movies.”

  We turned onto a side street, stepping out of the way o
f a chugging cargo truck hauling a load of ore from the warehouse down to a fabrication shop. And then I stopped in the middle of the road, frozen in place like a statue, unable to breathe, my eyes fixed on the group of strangers walking down the road in a tight cluster. No leathers and tattoos for these. They wore odd clothing fashioned from multicolored strips crisscrossed in tunics long enough to be called dusters, trousers extending down from them into knee-length boots. They were males, all of them, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, their hair shaven into a mohawk running down to a long queue that would have hung to the center of their back if it hadn’t been wrapped around their neck.

  “It’s okay, Cam,” Vicky whispered to me urgently. “You’re okay.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Clines said as if he hadn’t noticed my reaction. “Those fuckers are all over the place in the colonies now, I hear. Got all fucked up in the head because their Emperor turned out to be a false god and a bunch of the veterans who’d fought in the war just dropped out of their society and volunteered for work on cargo ships or whatever, just to get off planet.”

  I heard the words, but they didn’t register. Both of them might as well have been speaking a different language, the same sing-song gabble barely audible over the engine of the truck. All I could see were the faces, so close to human, yet so obviously not, the ridged brows, the black, piggish eyes, the pancake ears and flattened noses, the steam-shovel jaws.

  “Cam,” Vicky said, her hand grabbing at my arm. It wasn’t until I tugged against it that I realized I was surging forward, heading towards them, hands balled into fists. “Stop. It’s okay, you’re safe here.”

  But I wasn’t safe. None of us were safe.

  They were Tahni.

  3

  My hand shook as I poured, splashing droplets of amber liquid around the rim of the shot glass, tequila beading on the polished wood surface of the bar like raindrops, glinting in the glow of the small lamp. I set the bottle down before I dropped it, then grabbed a rag and wiped up the mess with sharp, angry swipes. Grabbing the glass, I downed the shot, barely tasting it as it burned its way along my esophagus.