Major (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 5) Read online

  Ryck stood around as more new indentureds gathered. Twelve of the new men were Marines from his company. Ryck followed the instructions given them in their pre-ops brief. He tried to look at his Marines just as he took in the other 50 or so Natural Plantation indentureds. Completely ignoring them could also trigger alarms in any scanning programs.

  When everyone had checked in, their company rep told the gathered men and women to follow her, and they left the hangar right onto a waiting bus. No immigration, no formalities.

  Fresh Beginnings was an independent world with two separate pseudo-governments that were more like handling companies vice true governments. This was one of the reasons the planet was becoming popular with corporations: companies could do pretty much as they pleased. Citizens who worked there were still subject to their home government laws, so most of the indentureds were from the Federation—indentured servitude contracts were illegal in the Brotherhood, the Alliance, the Confederation, and most other governments.

  The entire shipload of new workers was from the Federation, and their new company simply registered their arrival, having previously taken care of any immigration formalities. Less than an hour after setting foot on the planet, Ryck and his team were on their way out of the city and to their new . . .

  New what? Ryck wondered. “Assignment? Job? Posting?

  Ryck settled back, looking out the window at Morning. Given the relative short amount of time the city had been in existence, it didn’t look much different than any other mid-sized city. Even without a formal government, it seemed to function as well as any other. The combination of a degree of normalcy and the lack of a formal government were probably why the SOG had a presence here. Living out on some barren piece of space rock, in addition to the lack of creature comforts, would be like a beacon to searching navies. Signs of life where there should be none caught the attention of the searchers. It was much easier to hide in plain sight, but maybe where there were no extradition treaties or other such controls that existed in most of human space.

  Within 20 minutes, they were out of the city proper and into the country. Ryck’s farm boy background had him evaluating what he saw of the land. With plenty of water, the land looked fertile, much more than on his homeworld of Prosperity where farmers had to scrape and toil to coax out even the barest of crops. It had taken a consortium of companies to terraform Fresh Beginnings, but it was easy to see that they would quickly make up their investments.

  The first fields he saw were full of flax grass, that hardy source of raw organics for the fabricators. Flax grass, algae, and soy were the three prime organics, making up the bulk of the bases fed into fabricators, making everything from food to plastics to medicines. Other bases were used, but in lesser amounts.

  Further out, though, farm-to-table products were being grown. Ryck saw sweet corn, wheat, tomatoes, green beans, and strawberries in abundance. Fresh Beginnings was pretty far out in the space lanes, far from the major population centers, but these were high-end products that brought in excellent prices. Real wheat was undergoing a renaissance as fresh bake shops were sprouting up like mushrooms after a rain, and there had always been a market for fresh produce among the wealthy and moderately wealthy, not to mention the several religious groups who would not eat fabricated food. A strawberry picked on Fresh Beginnings and put immediately into stasis would taste just as fresh when it came out a week, month, or even year later. It all boiled down to cost, nothing more.

  It took another hour before the bus pulled into the Natural Plantation campus. The new indentureds clambered out of the bus and waited in a loose formation for instructions. It was somewhat confusing for a few moments until names were called out, telling them where to go.

  Ryck’s three-man team, along with his other Marines and a few real indentureds were told to go to Station 3, where a very young man gave them their assignments.

  “Pockery, Banks, Templeton, you’re at Pump Station 55. Grab your bags and get on number six,” he said, pointing at a purple bus waiting at the back of the lot.

  Each of the waiting men was given his assignment, all on pump stations. Ryck’s three other teams and the two civilian teams made it six separate pump stations. Ryck casually wondered how they were assigned. Ryck could muddle along with a pump station, at least the small ones used on Prosperity, but these were much larger and much more powerful. He had to assume that the two civilian teams really were assigned based on their skills and the needs of the company, but for the stations manned by his four teams, not much real work was going to get done.

  They loaded #six, and within 15 minutes after arriving, they had left the campus with its dorms and basic creature comforts. The first team (one of the Marine teams) was dropped off 30 minutes later. Ryck watched out the window as the four Marines got off the bus, pulled their bags and supplies from the luggage compartment, and started into the squat plasticrete building that was to be their home for the next, well, hopefully not long. Indentureds might typically stay on a remote station like this for a week or ten days at a time before being rotated back, but if this mission had not been accomplished in that time, Ryck didn’t know what was going to happen.

  Ryck’s team was the third to debark the bus. The three Marines entered Pump Station 55, their new home. The square building was spartan, to say the least, but not run-down. Half of the building was taken up by a large Grundfos UP 5000. The pump was amazingly quiet as it pushed irrigation water along at 5,000 liters per minute. The silence was welcome as they would be sleeping in the bunks along the near bulkhead, only 10 meters from the pump.

  Along the north wall was a control bank, and adjacent to the bunks was a countertop, fridge, and heat bay. They had no fabricator. All the meals for a week were brought along with them. All they had to do was slap them into the heat bay for 15 or 20 seconds, and voila! Dinner is served.

  Ryck ran a quick scan with his PA. This was not normally something a PA could do, but then Ryck’s PA was not a normal PA. The room was clean, so he dumped his bag on the bottom left rack while the other two automatically took the lower and upper right rack. All three walked to the far corner in back of the pump where a grey metal case was waiting. Ryck carefully entered the code into the lock—entering the wrong code would have spectacular—and not pleasant—results. The lock sprung open, and they lifted the lid.

  Nestled in the formfoam were two rifles. Both were wicked-looking weapons that brought a smile to any Marine. The M565 and M569 were both long-range sniper rifles. The M565 fired a 250 grain semi-smart round with an effective range of 3,000 meters. The Schmidt & Bender PM90-M scope was one of the best money could buy, refined over the hundreds of years since the company first started making scopes. The M569 looked almost the same and had the same scope. The floating barrel had a slightly larger diameter, but that was about it. The difference was in the ammunition. The round was thicker, chunkier. But the visible round was only the transport system. The payload was a small meson beam. Atmosphere dissipated any energy weapon, and the M569 took care of that by firing the beam generator as a kinetic round. As the round neared the target, the casing would slough off and the beam would be generated. A typical meson beam man-packed weapon might have an effective range of 150 meters or so. The M569 matched, even slightly exceeded the effective range of its M565 cousin. There were also three M77s and three Rugers in the box, but their attention was on those two bad boys.

  There were none of the new M73s, no surprise. They still could not reliably synch up with their skins, and not matter how high-tech the handguns were, if they didn’t work right each and every time, they couldn’t be taken into combat.

  Each weapon was taken out and given a cert-check. All came up green. The weapons were good to go.

  Next, Ryck removed the slate-gray barrel-shaped stasis chamber. The status light shown green. Ryck nodded to Sandy, and the lieutenant went to the door to the pump house and cracked it open. He scanned the outside before turning back to Ryck and gave him a thumbs up.


  “OK, here it goes,” Ryck said, then began holding his breath while he hit the kill switch and cracked open the small chamber.

  What looked to be mist roiled out of the chamber a few seconds later. As if a flock of birds, the mist circled once or twice before rushing out the door. Ryck let out his breath and closed the chamber again. If he’d accidentally inhaled some of the tiny drones, not much would have happened, but that meant there would be less coverage of their sector of the AO.[12]

  The tiny drones, barely a micron across, would be in position within two hours. Along with those released by the rest of the Marines, they would have fairly extensive coverage over the two major cities, most of the minor ones, and some of the scattered open spaces.

  The Federation was limited by treaty in its use of drones in time of peace. They could surveil, but not be weaponized. Ryck doubted that would stop the Federation from covertly using weaponized drones on a kill mission, but the intel community felt that the SOG had some sophisticated surveillance measure of their own, and if larger drones were identified in the skies of Fresh Beginnings, that would run their target to ground and make him much more difficult to flush out. With the nano-drones, that wasn’t an issue. They would show up on any physical scans as nothing more than airborne dust, and individually, their emissions were too weak to pick up even if they hadn’t been shielded. Together, their linked emissions would show up as background noise, nothing more.

  The problem was that they were too small to be weaponized. There were rumors that the FCDC had nanos that could kill, but if they did, they were not being deployed on Fresh Beginnings. The nana-drones were there to find the Ferret. It would be up to the SpecOps Marines to take him out.

  Ryck looked around the pump room before telling Çağlar, “Let’s see what the chow is. You’ve got mess duty.”

  He sat down and hit the code for a hidden app on his PA. A screen popped up showing the progress of the drones as they moved into position. The three Marines had done all they could to get the mission underway. Now it was a waiting game.

  Chapter 22

  Three days later, the team was still waiting. The Ferret had not made an appearance, at least one that could be picked up by the array of surveillance gear searching for him. Each of the three Marines was taking four-hour shifts monitoring the comms, waiting for that moment when something would be passed.

  Despite the peta-compression of transmissions, the transmission itself could be picked up by gear that the SOG could reasonably have. Hundreds of compressed messages floating around could alert the SOG’s AIs that something was up even if they could not read any of them, so the Marines kept the airwaves clear. That made sense, but it also made for pretty boring watches. It had been three days without any contact from anyone else.

  During the empty hours, Ryck and Sandy had ruminated about the relationship between Natural Plantation, that is, GKA Nutrition, and the Federation. Ryck had fought for the company before. He may have been in his Marine uniform, and the orders were from the Federation, but it was at the behest of the company. Now, the company was providing a cover for the Raider teams. Someone from the company had to have arranged their “jobs” and assignments. Someone from the company knew not to come around the various pump houses to check up on things. A Federation company on a free world could become a target if others knew they were cooperating with the Federation government on an offensive operation such as this, one bordering on, if not already way past, legality.

  Çağlar had the watch, but the other two Marines were awake when the comms finally chimed. Sandy had been explaining his newest theory that Mary Beth was in fact the one who had ordered the alien Sok d’Nath’s murder in the long-running Deep Space Chronicles, a theory Ryck thought was a red herring, when all three Marines froze at the soft chime. There was a two-second lag as the comms software decompressed the message.

  “Let me see that,” Ryck told Çağlar.

  The message was succinct and to the point. The Ferret had been pinpointed, and in all probability, knew something was up. He was taking evasive action, and the nano-drones were fighting counter-surveillance to keep in contact. An image of the man was sent. He could have been right out of central casting: just under two meters, around 55 years old, dark complected, and with the look of, well, a thug, to be blunt.

  Up until this moment, there had never been a recorded image of the Ferret. No one in the Federation even knew his identity, much less his name. He’d been identified only through comms patterns, laboriously analyzed by teams of specialists and powerful AIs. Now, with over 95% certainty, this man was the SOG #2, and he’d been flushed out.

  The Ferret was on the move, heading directly for Popper’s, SSgt Kyle Nolan’s, team. Unless the Ferret turned to the south, Ryck and his team would not be involved with the takedown. Part of Ryck, a part he’d had to suppress ever since getting commissioned, wanted to call Popper, to give him instructions. Ryck was the commander of this AO, but teams operated independently, and Popper was a skilled operator. He did not need his commander taking his attention off the task at hand.

  With the trap sprung, the nano-swarm was transmitting what it could gather. Ryck and the other two Marines watched their screen with rapt attention as the Ferret faded in and out of contact as he tried to spoof and block the surveillance, but each time he broke contact, the swarm AI switched frequencies and bands enough to regain it. Ryck watched as Popper’s team split into two and moved to intercept. The Ferret, for all his reputation, seemed to be in panic-mode. His countermeasures were going full-force, but he was simply running.

  And that took him within range of Gas and Baby Girl, the two who split off from Popper. Ryck watched nervously as the Ferret got within 2,000 meters, then 1,500 meters, then 1,000 meters of the two Marines. This was well within their range, but that didn’t mean the team had a clear shot.

  Then, what Ryck had been waiting for was broadcast over the comms: “Target Ferret down, I repeat, Ferret down. Will confirm kill.”

  Ryck let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. A plan had actually worked just as it was written up, something of a rarity. They had succeeded. He and the other two Marines high-fived each other.

  “Done and done,” Ryck said, relieved.

  He looked at Sandy, who was smiling, but that smile seemed forced to Ryck.

  “You don’t think so?” Ryck asked him.

  “Oh, probably. But, well, oh, forget it, Skipper.”

  “No, tell me. What’s bugging you?”

  “It just that, the Ferret, he’s been around for a while, and he’s been wickedly hard to locate. Yet, when he ran, he never turned off his comms. He never went ghost on us. He kept transmitting. Doesn’t that seem to be a real rookie mistake?”

  “Yeah, but he’s never had Marines after him,” Çağlar said.

  “Sure, Gollem,” Sand said, using Çağlar’s team nickname. “But would that make someone in his position panic like that? And where was his security?

  “I’m probably being paranoid, but it doesn’t seem right to me.”

  Ryck’s heart sunk as he took in Sandy’s statement. His lieutenant was right, and Ryck hadn’t seen it. He’d seen what he wanted to see. That dead body in Popper’s sector might still be the infamous Ferret, but then again, it might not. Whoever that was, he hadn’t acted the part of a criminal mastermind.

  “No, you are not being paranoid. Or if you are, it is prudent paranoia. Complacency kills,” he said, quoting the sign at the gate of Camp Charles where every Marine started his basic training.

  “AI, let me see all personnel in sectors 1-5,” he ordered.

  When that showed hundreds, he amended that, “Delete known company work parties.”

  An SOG commander could easily manage to become part of a working party, just as the Marines had, but Ryck had to start somewhere. Ryck’s Marines showed up, as did several people in trucks moving up and down the main roadways. Two people were just north of Ryck’s position, several were in t
he scattered private homes and one hostel in the area, and four more were close to a small waterfall along the main road.

  “Give me visuals on the waterfall and those two,” Ryck ordered.

  The four at the waterfall looked to be having a picnic of some sort. They could be anyone, but they seemed legit, Ryck thought. They didn’t seem to be anyone who had the weight of the Federation after them.

  The two were a young man and woman, walking away from the hostel. They were hand-in-hand, and as Ryck watched, the woman turned to nuzzle the neck of the man. Hostels were open dorms, and if these two wanted some privacy, they would have to find a place outside.

  “OK, I want visuals on those inside the homes,” he ordered, knowing that the swarm AI would redirect nano-drones as required to get inside buildings not already covered.

  All three Marines watched as the screen split up into 12 views. None of them knew what they were looking for exactly, just something out of the ordinary.

  “Target has been terminated,” came over the comms. “Commencing search and collection.”

  “Search and collection” meant Gas and Baby Girl would search the body for any usable intel and take DNA swabs to upload. If the dead man was anywhere in the records of the major governments, they should have an identity within 20 minutes or so.

  No one in the buildings stood out as suspicious. Ryck felt like a voyeur, especially as one man was recorded as he grunted on the toilet. If he was really the Ferret, he was taking his time to answer nature’s call.

  Something was nibbling at the back of Ryck’s mind, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was almost within reach, yet it kept retreating just as he was about to grab it. He ordered the AI to go back to the picnickers. The two men and two woman were all in their 30’s or 40’s, dressed casually, and looked more than a little into their cups. A quick shift of the scanning mode revealed the four’s exhalations to have a heavy percentage of ethanol—in other words, they were well on their way to being drunk. That fact alone did tend to eliminate them as suspects.