Chapter 1

  Our shuttle shook as it finally set down inside the docking bay. It had been way too long a ride for a bunch of army guys used to sitting on their asses planetside, and by the look of it I was the only one still half sane after thirty hours of elevator music playing on the shuttle intercom, courtesy of an insufferable pilot. A message popped up on my NeuroHUD.

  [Welcome to the ASN Alice Cooper. Linking your SAC Suit to the local Navy Information Network (shipcom). Complete.]

  [Ship layout download. Complete]

  [Rules and standing orders download. Complete]

  [Quarters allocation download. Complete.]

  ‘Thank you, Sys, good stuff,’ I muttered, and ignored the incoming files. It was always the same on every ship: “don’t get drunk, don’t steal anything, smoke only in designated smoking areas, and always smile when officers are present”.

  [Docking complete.]

  Sys made the final announcement, and to corroborate the statement, green light flashed around the hatch as it opened. The ramp lowered onto the docking bay floor, the noise and lights from outside flooding in. My platoon got ready to disembark, twenty-six soldiers in their bulky SACs getting up from their seats, securing their rifles and backpacks to their armour, their relieved groans and curses saturating the comms. Squad by squad we clambered down from the shuttle, officially boarding the Alice Cooper.

  Most of the soldiers in my platoon were young and had only been in space a couple of times at most, probably on vessels much smaller than this troopship. I couldn’t help but smile as they were looking around the shuttle bay with their visors up, eyes bulging and whispering to one another. I had to admit, it was impressive; a three hundred meters long and almost as wide floor-to-ceiling steel-clad hive of activity, filled with several dozen shuttles, hundreds of crew members, cargo specialists transporting enormous crates on their buggies, and of course marines in their more modern, higher spec SACs than what we army guys had.

  ‘Alright you sad bunch, form up and follow our designated path. Shipcom says we’ll be jumping in twelve hours, so let’s get some rest in!’ Lieutenant Sarkis bellowed into the platoon channel, waving his arms around at the head of our group.

  A few more groans later we formed up by squads and followed our commanding officer as he led us through the jungle of equipment and crew filling the place. I trudged after my squadmates, the heavy footfalls of my SAC thumping on the floor panels. I opened the file containing the Alice Cooper’s layout, putting it up on my NeuroHUD, making notes of the locations of every mess hall, canteen, cafeteria, shop and food store the troopship had to offer. It seemed like I could visit all of them within two or three hours, and I was hoping I’d get lucky sooner than that.

  [ASMC Marine Corps ID TRX45532, Lieutenant J Kessler, requests comm-link.]

  Sys informed me out of nowhere. I stopped and looked around. A marine was walking towards me, waving her armoured hand at me. What the hell? Why would a marine officer want to talk to me? And why request comm-link? She wasn’t far, in fact, as she approached with her visor up, I saw her face clearly, and I had no idea who she was.

  ‘What the hell, sergeant?’ Sarkis barked at me through our comm.

  It seemed the marine lieutenant wanted to pull me out of squad to talk to me. Why, though?

  ‘Don’t know, sir.’ I told my CO.

  ‘Well, we ain’t waiting for you sergeant, so find it out quick then rejoin your squad!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ I barked back at him, then as the platoon marched off and disappeared behind the bulkhead separating the shuttle bays from the rest of the ship, the marine arrived to stand in front of me. I accepted the comm-link, even though I didn’t think it was necessary.

  ‘Sergeant Hyde!’ the woman greeted me excitedly, with a huge smile on her face.

  I looked her up and down as unobtrusively as I could. Her SAC was the latest model, the armour plating new and not a scratch on it, the camo pattern immaculate. And it looked a little less bulky than older models like ours. This … Lieutenant Kessler knew me, and not just by my ID beacon. I could tell that by how happy she looked to see me.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, how can I help you?’ I asked, giving a half-hearted salute to the officer.

  ‘You … don’t remember me?’ she asked, happiness falling from her face as she performed a crisp and proper salute.

  ‘I’m sorry ma’am,’ I said and shrugged as much as one could inside a SAC.

  ‘But … you are Sergeant Calvin J. Hyde, aren’t you?’ she demanded, leaning left and right to see the pauldrons of my suit. ‘You still have the same SAC,’ she stated, then pointed to each of my shoulders. ‘That burning skull patch there, and red cross on the other side.’

  ‘I am Sergeant Hyde, ma’am, Army Medical Corps,’ I confirmed, but I still couldn’t remember if I’d ever met this particular marine. ‘Are you sure we know each other?’

  ‘The Pirate Purge? Aboard the Aurelius? You were on loan to us, sergeant. You saved my life, you saved many of our lives!’ she blurted the words quickly like an embarrassed teenager, quite unbefitting of an officer of the Allied Systems Marine Corps. She was young, couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but still!

  ‘That was … five years ago, ma’am,’ I said, smiling at the woman. ‘A lot of boarding action, lot of injured marines, not enough corpsmen. I did my job as a medic, ma’am, but …’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine, sergeant,’ she said, lifting both armoured hands up. ‘I don’t know why I’d expected you to remember. A busy and bloody time, wasn’t it? I was a corporal back then, so who’d remember a corporal anyway?’

  I squinted my eyes and leaned closer to her, my helmet almost touching hers. Pretty face, blue eyes, quite familiar now that I thought about it.

  ‘Hm …’ I hummed thoughtfully. ‘Left shoulder? Gunshot wound, fragment of AP round and armour stuck in tissue, plus crushed collarbone and broken ribs on the same side?’

  ‘Oh, you remember!’ she squealed. Again, not very marine-like.

  ‘Your SAC looked like a crumpled tin-can with life-support gone. It was quite tricky to get you out of it alive,’ I said, the memories of the event coming back to me. ‘Was that really you, ma’am?’

  ‘As I said, I was a corporal back then, but yeah,’ she confirmed. ‘It was my first time in combat.’

  ‘Well, congratulations on making lieutenant,’ I said, saluting her again.

  ‘I’d be dead instead of lieutenant if not for you, Sergeant Hyde. I owe you my life, and I never got to thank you,’ she said, beaming at me.

  ‘I was doing my job, you don’t owe me anything, Lieutenant Kessler.' I gave her a smile, hoping she'd just let me go already.

  ‘Right, fine,’ she said, smiling back at me. ‘But if you need help with anything while you’re aboard the Alice Cooper, let me know. Although, we’ll be jumping in about twelve hours, so not a lot of time.’

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  I thought about that for a moment; twelve hours indeed wasn’t a lot of time, and I had a mission to complete before then.

  ‘What would be the best place here to stock up on cigarettes and Crunchymel bars?’ I asked.

  ‘Crunchymel bars? No-one likes Crunchymel bars. Too sweet,’ she said, her expression horrified.

  ‘I happen to like them.’

  ‘I’m … sending you a couple of markers for your ship layout file.’

  [ASMC Marine Corps ID TRX45532, Lieutenant J Kessler, sent you a file update. Accept?]

  I thought accept, the file came through, and Sys updated the ship layout for me. I brought it up for a moment to see what had happened, and there they were: red exclamation marks on two canteen locations.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to her.

  ‘No problem, sergeant. Do you need anything else before I let you rejoin your platoon?’

  ‘Well, you could tell me where you guys are going and why you need us army folks to go with you.’

  ‘Uh … that’s top secret,’ she said, sighing. ‘I only know the rumours going around the fleet.’

  ‘I know, top secret. Of course. Army-side only the colonels know, and they’re not telling.’ I nodded, then sighed too. ‘Rumours will do, if that’s all you have. I’ve got seven months left and I’ll be done with my eighteen years. I want to go back to Earth, so anything to help me stay alive, wherever it is we’re going.’

  ‘Earth? I’ve never been to Earth. When did you go?’ she asked, incredulous.

  ‘Born and raised on Earth.’

  ‘Ah. Long way from home then.’

  ‘Indeed.’ I sighed. ‘So, what are those rumours, lieutenant?’

  She looked around as if looking for eavesdroppers, then stepped so close our armoured breastplates were touching.

  ‘Chances are we’re going to Ripper’s World in the Sentarym system,’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s … out in the space-boonies, isn’t it? What’s happening there?’ I whispered back.

  ‘It’s being contested. Rumour is this will be the second attempt to reclaim it. I’ve heard the first expeditionary force suffered 80% casualties, and never even made planetfall. Well, that’s the rumour. A part of it at least.’

  ‘And the other part?’

  ‘My Navy friends say it’s … well, aliens.’

  ‘Hm.’ I hummed.

  ‘Hm?’ she questioned my humming.

  ‘Yeah. Hm. Four hundred years of space travel later we finally bump into aliens, and it’s a fight. Makes sense,’ I explained.

  ‘It’s a rumour. We don’t know. But the bosses do expect prolonged surface action. Two army battalions tagging along prove at least that. Fleet will clear orbit, hopefully, marines will land and clear out any surface threats, but then building and holding down the fort is an army job.’

  ‘Good stuff. Thank you lieutenant.’ I nodded to her, trying to decide if I should believe these rumours.

  We said goodbye, and I embarked on my mission to replenish my dwindling stores of cigarettes and the crunchiest of all salted caramel chocolate bars ever produced by humanity.

  ***

  Twelve hours flew by fast. By the time shipcom began broadcasting the half-hour countdown to jump, I had checked and re-checked my SAC suit, my rifle, my sidearm, my medical tools and supplies, and I was twenty packs of cigarettes and two whole cartons of Crunchymel bars richer than I had been on arrival to the Alice Cooper. And as an added bonus, I had managed to piss not one but two navy guys off during the requisition, so not bad. I was also happy I’d had the chance to get out of my SAC for an hour or two, to stretch my limbs a bit without the servos and synthfibers in it mimicking my every movement.

  Unfortunately, our commanding officers had quickly ordered us back into our SACs; they wanted to be ready for immediate combat, so in the end we were all geared up and stuffy hours before the jump. Everyone in my squad — who were with me in the narrow cabin — knew better than to complain out loud, even though we all knew the army was going to be the last to deploy. As was usually the case. Lieutenant Kessler’s predictions had turned out to be right; our orders were to get our asses planetside to build bases and to garrison them, so battle weary marines would have a place to temporarily call home. And also to show whatever enemy we faced that we were somewhat serious about holding the particular star system.

  And I couldn’t wait to get planetside. First of all, I was used to proper gravity, not this one-third nonsense. Second of all, unlike on a ship or a shuttle, I could point my gun at an enemy, or run away entirely if the situation called for it. Out in space? If an enemy hit our ride, we’d be blown to bits, ship and all, and it would be so fast we wouldn’t even know. Space combat was … weird.

  Shipcom’s countdown finally ticked down to zero, and all anyone could perceive of the jump — something that took the entire fleet who knows how many lightyears away from where we had been — was a strange moment of distorted vision. It was as if reality was a hologram, and for a moment it flickered and blurred. Then, it was back to normal, and we knew we had arrived to wherever we were supposed to arrive.

  [Jump complete. Please remain seated!]

  Sys made the announcement. That was all. None of those in charge saw it fit to inform us army guys where we were, no-one on the open channels said any names. We all remained seated, but I could hear it through the bulkhead as all hands scrambled to perform their various post-jump tasks out there.

  It wasn’t long before the order came that all army personnel were to assemble by platoons at their respective shuttles. Whatever alien threat was out there — if I could believe the rumours Kessler had shared with me — it was soon time to face it. Damn! Seven month of service left, and they had the audacity to throw me into the most unknown of all unknown situations. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought they were doing this on purpose, hoping I’d die and they wouldn’t have to pay me my army pension. Aaaah … and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I stuffed half a Crunchymel bar into my mouth, lamented the fact I hadn’t had a chance to smoke for two days now, then closed my visor, and followed my squadmates back to the shuttle docking bays.

  ***

  As I sat in the shuttle, sealed in and waiting along with my platoon, I had Sys tune into some of the open channels so I could listen in on the navy rumour mill, and get some sort of picture of what was going on. The chatter filling the ether indicated several battle groups of the fleet were already engaging the enemy — whom the navy boys and girls seemed to refer to as “Ghosts” — and losses were already occurring. Some parts of the chatter worried me more than others; hearing about “entire ships being cut in half or just fucking disappearing altogether”, did not fill me with the kind of confidence I usually had in the Navy. What the hell did they mean? Ships didn’t just vanish in the middle of an engagement, did they? Well, I was no navy guy, so I had no clue.

  Someone at some point judged that the time was right to launch nearly a hundred shuttles to take a couple thousand marines planetside, so they could look around and introduce any aliens to the ever popular marine issue AP rounds. Of which they had plenty. And thank the gods, new and old, for the latest bout of cross-branch standardization: compared to the guns some out-of-the-way backwater army garrisons were still using, ours were compatible with the superior ammunition types the marines had been using for ages.

  Finally, an hour after the marines had been launched, our time arrived.

  [Shuttle began a 15 second countdown. Please brace for launch.]

  Sys relayed the message from the cockpit.

  The countdown reached zero, the shuttle lurched as it lifted off and slid out into the vacuum of space, hauling twenty-six fully armed and armoured soldiers, a couple of army engineers I hadn’t seen before, and several tons of base-building equipment and materials. I hated this part. Shuttles had no viewports, passengers weren’t allowed in the cockpit, so the only thing anyone could do was trusting the pilots to get us to our destination safely, and hope for the best.

  An hour of smooth sailing later I was increasingly worried about the chatter in the ether, or the lack thereof. I wasn’t sure how far we’ve got from the main body of the fleet — twenty, maybe thirty thousand kilometres — but the open channels vanished one after another, replaced by heavily encrypted ones Sys had no clearance to tap into. I had no way to know what was going on, no way to know the general situation or if the marine shuttles had made it planetside or not. No indication whatsoever of what awaited us.

  The shuttle lurched violently, and I grabbed the harness securing me to my seat just as the other soldiers did the same.

  ‘No panic people, just some turbulence,’ Lieutenant Sarkis bellowed into the comm.

  No-one bought it, obviously; the pilots hadn’t announced entry to atmosphere as they usually would, and it would have been quite the feat to get into turbulence out in the blackness of space. The shuttle jerked again, and again, and finally a message from the cockpit popped up on my NeuroHUD.

  [Enemy fire, brace for evasive maneuvers and imminent impact!]

  The words barely registered, when a blinding, orange-tinted light shone through the polarized visor of my helmet. For a second my mind screamed at me: “We’re hit, this is it, game over man, game over!” The next second I realised my mind was still in panic mode, therefore I wasn’t dead yet. Which was worse; a quick painless death was preferable to being thrown into space and drifting until my SAC’s life support system ran out of O2. But neither happened. Another second later the light faded somewhat, and all I could see in front of me was a wall made of a swirling, smoky, orange and blue light, cutting through the compartment of the shuttle I was in … and through private Baxter sitting next to me. That second was eerily still and quiet; nothing moved, not a sound, not a message on my NeuroHUD. What the hell? Then the moment passed, and the sheet of light vanished along with everything and everyone beyond it, including half of the soldier next to me. Sound and movement returned. I was hit by the pull of gravity, a sensation of falling and spinning, and I stared dumbfounded as I realised that the shuttle compartment was cut completely open, the outside world whirling, wind and debris battering my SAC.

  ‘Shiiiiit! Pilot, do something!’ I yelled, forgetting that the channel to the pilots was one-way, and the fact that the front part of the shuttle, including the cockpit, was now missing. It had vanished. And my platoon! They were gone too, seats and harnesses and all.

  And then came the crash.