Scorched Earth Read online

  SEEDS OF WAR

  BOOK 2

  SCORCHED EARTH

  A Semper Fi Press Book

  Copyright © 2018 Lawrence M. Schoen and Jonathan P. Brazee

  A Semper Fi Press Book

  Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Brazee & Lawrence M. Schoen

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945743-25-2

  ISBN-10: 1-945743-25-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this work are either the products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Edited by Elektra Hammond and with input by James Caplan and Kelly O’Donnell.

  Cover by Jesh Snow

  Seeds of War — Book II: Scorched Earth

  Part I: Any Landing You Can Walk Away From

  You never forget your first taste of combat. That first low orbit insertion where you plunge from the belly of a spacecraft and plummet like a fireball, your battlesuit ready to take on any opposition. Every mission is different, as is every world—the feel of the gravity, the taste of the air—but the planet of your first fight with the enemy gets imprinted on your brain, good or bad. For Lieutenant General Colby Merritt Edson, Republic Marine Corps (Retired), that world had been New Mars, more than fifty years ago.

  It had also been the site of his greatest failure, a battle of politics and misplaced trust. He’d tried to do what was right for the Corps, tracking down and ferreting out the bastards sending substandard equipment and ordnance to the men and women who were risking their lives for the Republic, only to be screwed over by politicians and corporate ladder climbers eager to make money without regard for the damage they did along the way. But those bastards enjoyed the wealth they had skimmed, and they had power. Colby had been willing to risk his career for the good of the Corps, but in the end they had won by threatening his people. He could walk away or watch as they destroyed the lives of men and women like Jonas Venango and Li Siniang Greensboro, whose only crime was being extraordinary Marines. For their sake Colby accepted “voluntary retirement.”

  To avoid unfavorable optics they’d pushed him through one of the many wormholes on the elliptic above New Mars and dropped him on Vasquez, a nearly empty agricultural world. He had a farm, an agcomputer that did all the work, an old dog, and a kit full of recriminations and regrets.

  And now he was heading back again, albeit not in any fashion anyone could have ever imagined. Alien plant soldiers had destroyed almost everything and everyone on Vasquez. As proof, Colby had hotwired the boss alien’s ship for his ride.

  The absurdity of sitting on the deck of an alien vessel felt oddly calming after the last couple of days of fighting plants. He absent-mindedly rubbed Duke’s head as the ship continued its climb into the space surrounding Vasquez. His command-grade implant had managed to connect with what was a one-level vegetable control system. It wasn’t a perfect interface, though; there were many blank areas his implant could not interpret. Colby had been able to take off from the planet’s surface, however, as that was nothing more than feeding the engines power and pointing it in the right general direction. Trying to make it through the wormhole and then back to New Mars would not be so easy. A slight miscalculation, a slight gap in the ability to work the controls, and instead of easing smoothly over the event horizon of transition, he and Duke could nick the perimeter of the wormhole and be rendered nothing more than pink mush by tidal forces beyond the explanation of physics.

  Assuming that didn’t happen, they’d either get there or they wouldn’t; there was no chance of ending up somewhere else. Vasquez’s star system was no different from eighty percent of systems with wormholes, which is to say it only had one. Fly a vessel into it without bouncing off the edge and you came out the other end, sometimes hundreds of light years away. Sol system was one of those which filled most of the remaining twenty percent by boasting two different wormholes, one on the ecliptic above the orbit of path of the asteroid belt—and there was no shortage of boffins and squints who thought one had a lot to do with the other—and one further out above the Kuiper Belt.

  But a fraction of a percent of star systems had more than two wormholes. Ninety-eight percent of these had between three and six, providing not just gateways between worlds, but interstellar highway interchanges. And the remaining two percent of that original fraction had stupid numbers of wormholes. No one knew why. There was no pattern. It didn’t seem to relate to the type of star, the number or kind of planets (if any), moons or not, or anything else. It was just the luck of the draw. To date, the Republic had identified seventeen star systems with an excess of ten wormholes each. The system containing New Mars had thirty-three, the fourth most of any of them, and all of them clustered in the ecliptic above the one planet. It wasn’t an interstellar highway, it was a freaking hub of endless high-volume traffic with well-regulated guidelines and time tables for what could come through which wormhole when, which despite a fleet of AIs still saw the occasional collision at speeds where even a small nudge or graze was deadly, and none of the objects coming through any of the holes in space were anywhere near small.

  He would be arriving above New Mars without benefit of the schedule for when something was expected to emerge from the Vasquez system transit. Space is vast, but the sheer amount of traffic—both manned and automated—coming and going above New Mars made it seem snug. There was a very real chance that he would collide with something before the traffic control AIs could do anything to stop it. It didn’t matter how fast their dedicated brains could calculate, some things just came down to mass, velocity, and distance.

  Colby chose not to think about that.

  The ship didn’t have anything that looked like seats, so he sat on the deck, back up against the rubbery bulkhead. Duke was lying beside him, head on his lap as he petted her. She was calm, happy to be with him. She wasn’t thinking about the wormhole. She didn’t have the imagination to picture what could happen, what could go horribly wrong.

  No, I’m not going to think of that. Think of happy thoughts, Edson, like just being alive.

  Most of the people on the planet had evidently been killed during the plant invasion. For all he knew, Topeka was the last human left on the planet—well, she and Riordan, stuck in his med chamber. Staying behind as she had done was probably the smart thing to do. Eventually, someone would come to find out what happened, why the agricultural shipments had ceased.

  Colby didn’t have that luxury. He had to report back to the government reps on New Mars so they could get word back to Earth. He had to prove to Vice-Minister Greenstein and the rest that there was a threat out here in the far reaches of human space, that aliens had arrived at Vasquez without benefit of any wormhole. Which in turn suggested technology beyond anything humanity possessed. And if aliens had stumbled upon Vasquez, then how long before they noticed the wormhole to New Mars and its cornucopia of routes to dozens of other human-inhabited worlds? Fifty years before, Colby had helped wrest control of the system from a fringe government, back when they’d only discovered five wormholes there. He’d damned well do all he could to ensure aliens didn’t get their hands on it now. Before lifting off from Vasquez, he’d downloaded a complete account of the plant invasion and sent that forward. He couldn’t be sure it’d be read, or if anyone would believe him.

  In a way, he couldn’t blame t
hem. It was pretty fantastic. A sentient plant had invaded Vasquez with millions of plant minions that had destroyed everything in their path. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  “How about you, Duke? Would you have believed it?”

  Her eyes remained closed, but her tail gave a weak thump on the deck.

  He looked around the ship. It was somewhat sparse, but with the help of his implant, he’d worked out which mossy patches and which knobs and roots were actually instrumentation, enough to let him know he was inside a ship. Instead of control seats with harnesses, there were ropy, vine-like arms that were pressed against the bulkheads. Several had been connected to the king plant when he and Topeka had entered the bridge, but they had released it once the fight commenced. These tendrils still slowly reached out, as if wanting to embrace him. Colby wasn’t up with that, which was why he’d settled on the deck just out of their reach.

  With dampeners that were not as effective as in human ships, the gentle shifts in pressure were evidence enough that they were in motion. He contemplated querying his implant to find out how long before they entered the wormhole, but after a moment, he decided against it. Better to be like Duke and remain blissfully in the dark.

  He couldn’t just sit there, though. He gently slid Duke’s head off his lap, then stood up, looking around the bridge. He wandered over to the so-called instrument panels and tried to make some sense of the displays, noting the vines and keeping away from the leafy ends.

  “What’s this?” he asked his implant, touching one of them at random.

  “That displays the atmospheric content inside the ship.”

  When he’d first followed Topeka and her machete-wielding charge into the ship, he’d worried whether the atmosphere was even breathable. After taking his first breath, he’d forgotten about it. Now, his curiosity was piqued.

  “What is the oxygen level in here?” he asked.

  “O2 level is 17.9 percent.”

  That was a little light for most terraformed worlds, but well within human tolerance. Some of the Phase 2 worlds, already inhabited, had far lower percentages while the terraforming process continued.

  He was about to ask what other traces were in the ship’s atmosphere, but he realized he didn’t care. He was breathing. Duke was breathing. That was enough. He asked because he was trying to keep his mind off of the wormhole.

  Nope, I’m not going to think about that.

  He turned away from the displays, ran his hand across the bulkheads, and wondered as to their structure. They weren’t metal or any of the substances used in human ships, but they didn’t quite feel organic. They were clearly made from some sort of vegetative matter.

  Maybe a plant alloy? Is that even possible?

  Whatever it was, it would keep the scientists busy for years—if he got it back in one piece. If he didn’t wreck the thing by clipping the edge of the wormhole or smashing into other traffic once he reached the other side.

  For God’s sake, Edson! Get your mind off of it. You’ve faced death before, so put on your big boy pants!

  And he had faced death—more than once. This time, though, was different. He didn’t have much control over what was happening. He could fly the ship, but not well. He was essentially a piece of cargo, an unexpected shipment that wasn’t on anyone’s schedule.

  It was what it was.

  One of the vines reached his boot, and he spun around and strode to the back of the bridge in search of another distraction. He pressed the side of the slit along the bulkhead. Nothing happened. He raised his hand higher, pressed again, and was rewarded when the slit opened up to a small cold storage locker. There, trussed up on the deck, was the headless body of the dead plant-thing, with its head jammed between the body and the bulkhead at the back of the locker. Inside, several vines had emerged to encase the body, but he thought it was a little late for whatever they could do for it.

  “Sorry,” he said, poking the body with his finger. “But maybe you’d prefer this than to be a lab sample.”

  He’d wanted to keep the thing alive, and he’d had it restrained when Topeka, angry at losing her co-worker Sestus, had taken the thing’s head off with her machete. If that was its head, that is. For all he knew, its brain was deep inside the torso. One thing was for sure, though—it was stone-cold dead.

  Colby didn’t know how long it would take to navigate the alien ship. He was gambling that once he emerged from the Vasquez wormhole, an AI traffic controller would send a cargo drone to tow him safely planetside. He wanted to make sure the alien didn’t decompose like the plant soldiers had on Vasquez, so he had his implant query the ship’s control system. There wasn’t anything that could act as a morgue on board, but the locker/alcove/whatever in the back could be kept at a cooler temperature. That had to be better than nothing, and even if the thing did decompose, whatever was left would be easier for the science-types to scrape out.

  It had taken a good five minutes to horse the thing into the locker. Its limp, dead weight had not been easy to handle. But he managed to stuff it in, Duke looking on in frank confusion as he did so.

  With a sigh, he touched the other side of the opening, this time hitting it correctly, and the locker closed.

  Now what?

  He hadn’t explored the rest of the ship yet. The bridge took up at least a third of the ship’s length, but that meant there was still two-thirds that he could explore. He doubted that he could learn much, but it was better than just sitting around with his thumb up his ass.

  “You coming?” he asked Duke.

  She opened her eyes, wagging her tail twice, before she got up and padded over to him. He reached down and petted her head.

  “Yeah, who’s a good girl, huh?”

  A ripple passed through Colby’s body, as if his insides were trying to become his outsides and then back again.

  Duke shook herself once, twice.

  “Did we pass through the wormhole?” he queried his implant, standing up and looking around as if he expected the ship to be coming apart.

  “Affirmative.”

  “And, are we. . . are we OK?”

  “Wormhole insertion accomplished within standard parameters.”

  “Well, hell, girl. That wasn’t bad at all,” he told Duke, who wagged her tail in response. “A little more topsy-turvy than usual, but what the heck, right?”

  Duke thumped her tail. Good enough. But they wouldn’t remain in the wormhole for long. Time inside was relativistic. Some claimed it lasted days, others just seconds. After what seemed only a minute another ripple ran through the ship. They were back in normal space.

  “And. . . uh, where are we?”

  Colby had the coordinate inputs to get back to New Mars, courtesy of Topeka, but that didn’t mean they’d entered the wormhole at the slender window to arrive at a known location.

  “We are within the RS402 funnel.”

  Colby gave a sigh of relief. Every wormhole had an active outer rim where piloted vessels emerged and a narrower, inner funnel used by automated cargo pods and similar craft.

  “Are we within range of a cargo drone?”

  “Affirmative. I have activated the transponder, and it is aligning for an intercept.”

  Getting through the wormhole to the RS402 funnel had been the hard part. Between his own implant and the transponder codes that Topeka had provided he anticipated no difficulty in getting the funnel’s designated AI to assign a cargo drone to react and capture it. They were still a long ways from the planet, and by surrendering control to the drone Colby wouldn’t have to rely on his limited skill with piloting the alien ship in order to get there on his own. If the drone could grab the alien ship, then it would carry them to New Mars without any more action on his part.

  He wandered back to the control panel. Surely there had to be some form of video display.

  “Can you show me the cargo drone?” he asked.

  “Affirmative. It is on the display now.”
>
  Colby didn’t see anything that looked like a view of space, and certainly, he couldn’t see a drone.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “The feedback circuits indicate that it is being displayed.”

  Colby could swear that his implant sounded a little peeved—but that was impossible, right?

  “Upload a visual.”

  Colby gave the mental command, then blinked three times, taking a biological snapshot that his implant could analyze. Controlling his beta waves like that was beyond most people, and most implants didn’t have the capability, but he’d had years of practice, so it was almost second nature to him.

  “The feed is not visible,” his implant told him.

  No shit.

  “As I said. I guess the interface isn’t perfect. But, you’re sure the drone is on its way to us?”

  “Affirmative. ETA in eight minutes, forty-two seconds.”

  Unless your interface is screwing up.

  Colby chose to assume the drone was approaching. If it wasn’t, he’d figure out how to navigate the plant ship to New Mars under its own power.

  “Well, Duke, we’ll just see what happens now, huh, girl?” he said, patting her on the head again.

  She leaned into his leg and wagged her tail, forehead pressed up against his hand. He was suddenly struck by how much she trusted him. He’d never had a pet while on active duty, and he’d taken care of her at the farm more out of responsibility than anything else. Yet here she was, on an alien ship, trusting him to keep her safe.

  And he was glad she was with him.

  “Give me a countdown on the drone’s arrival,” he said, still petting Duke.

  “Five minutes, twelve seconds.”

  He took a seat, out of reach of the vines, and Duke snuggled her head in his lap. Unlike the last time he was sitting, he was now totally relaxed. What could go wrong now? It was nice to be able to simply sit back, petting his dog. As soon as he landed, he’d have to jump into action, forcing Greenstein and the command to understand the threat. Hostile first contact, right on the doorstep of one of humanity’s most critical systems. Assuming they believed him.