The Eternity War: Dominion Read online

  CHAPTER ONE

  RAID ON VEKTAH MINOR

  Space was bright with plasma fire.

  “Is it too much to ask that you just get us down there in one piece?” I argued as the dropship made another sudden jink. Safety-harnesses held the occupants of the troop cabin in place, but we were still liberally thrown around. There was a harsh clatter as armour struck armour.

  “Christo!” said the dropship’s pilot. “You Sim Ops are all the same. This isn’t as easy as it looks.”

  “Who cares?” growled Novak. “Are plenty more bodies where these came from.”

  Lopez shrugged, lifting a perfectly arched eyebrow behind the face-plate of her tactical-helmet. “Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, right?”

  We were somewhere in the Drift, on the outer edge of the Maelstrom, and approaching the planet Vektah Minor. An ancient Krell dynasty that Science Division had labelled the Red Claw Collective once occupied this sector. The Red Claw was one of many Collectives that had fallen to the Harbinger virus, and that was the very reason space was currently on fire.

  I was in a new state-of-the-art simulant, armoured in a Class X Pathfinder combat-suit, and armed with an M125 plasma battle-rifle. Printed across my torso was my callsign CALIFORNIA, along with other miscellaneous battle-honours. Most importantly, a stylised dog-head was stencilled on my shoulder-guard.

  “The orbital defences have woken up,” said the co-pilot. “We can expect the drop to get hotter from here on down.”

  “Hot, I can take,” said Feng, chewing the words around his mouth. “Scalding? Not so much.”

  I scanned the battle-net, both visually through the images projected onto my HUD, and mentally via my combat-suit’s neural-link. The net was constantly refreshed with data from our dropship and the other nineteen ships that were also involved in the mission. Among the squads on those transports were such stalwarts of the Sim Ops Programme as Tsung’s Finest, Walker’s Dead, the Gallow Dancers, and even Phoenix Squad.

  Our current mothership was the UAS Providence. The strikeship was the base of operations for this mission, and where our real bodies currently lay in state: immersed in simulator-tanks, remotely operating the simulants via neural-link. The entire strike-force—all twenty dropships, and all forty squads—was composed of simulants. Another stolen glance at the surrounding battle space made it pretty clear that simulants were a necessity for an operation like this. We were being hit, and hard.

  Lopez was reviewing the same data, and she sucked her teeth. “Got to be said: when the Alliance goes to war, it puts on a damn good show.”

  “When Sim Ops goes to war,” Feng corrected. “It’s us doing the dying, Lopez.”

  “I hear that,” Novak growled, rousing from his seat.

  Our Cougar’s cabin was tightly packed with two squads of troopers. Each wore a tactical-helmet, like mine, with the visor semi-polarised so that the wearer inside was only just visible.

  These were my dogs: Jenkins’ Jackals. My HUD showed the biological signs for each trooper, confirming that they were at optimum combat-performance. A carefully balanced cocktail of combat-drugs kept them that way.

  “Is going to be fine, people,” Novak drawled in his laconic Slavic accent. “Is all under control.”

  Private Leon Novak—callsign CONVICT—was strapped into the seat opposite me. His face was blunt and hard. In his real skin, Novak was covered in tattoos and scars. The tattoos were the reward for decades as an enforcer for the Old Earth bratva, while the scars were the prize for his time under my command.

  Novak stroked the hilt of a sheathed knife, taped to his thigh. He carried a bewildering selection of weapons across his armour. His Pathfinder suit was covered in Cyrillic script and crude pictograms; imitations of the markings on his real skin, back on the strikeship. Novak’s dark eyes widened and twitched as he tracked the Cougar’s external cams. He was almost entranced by the flashes of light and explosions that populated the interior of his HUD

  “Is beautiful, yes?” he said.

  “Only you could describe something like this as ‘beautiful’, Novak,” replied Lopez.

  PFC Gabriella Lopez—callsign SENATOR, after her father—sat beside Novak. She too was watching the conflict, but her reaction was very different. Lopez was the daughter of Secretary of Defence Rodrigo Lopez. Some said that Lopez Senior was the greatest man in politics, while others said that he was the most dangerous. Whatever the truth, he was a serious future contender for the position of Alliance Secretary General. My Lopez was smart, sharp and pretty: another dangerous combination. Her dark, curly hair was pulled back from her angular face; a pale moon behind the visor. Like Novak, she looked very different in her real body. She was the product of an opulent upbringing, and had enjoyed the benefit of the best skin-sculptors in human space.

  There’d been a time when Lopez had struggled with military leadership, and I’d questioned whether she was taking it seriously. But now I knew who she really was. She caught my eye, through her face-plate, and gave a slight nod. That communicated everything I needed to hear from her. I’m ready for this, the look told me. I’m hungry for this. Lopez had a Widowmaker sidearm holstered on her thigh, and she kept one hand there, the other on the strap of her seat, prepared to disengage when the moment came.

  The Cougar shuddered again. In no sort of formation, the dropships made hard thrust towards the objective, moving at maximum velocity. They were streaks of light against the blackness of space; engines firing on all cylinders. Each laid down a blistering wall of weapons-fire as the battlegroup advanced, filling near-space with missiles and defensive flak-gun fire.

  “Hey, what warheads are you carrying?”

  The question was directed at the Cougar’s crew, but it pulled me back into the cabin. It came from PFC Chu Feng—callsign CHINO, former Directorate clone-trooper, latterly turned Alliance simulant operator. Of all the Jackals, Feng’s simulants looked most similar to his real skin. He was muscular and broad, which made his boyish-looking face almost out of place. Feng had been custom-grown in an Asiatic Directorate military creche, and his features were a handsome South Asian mix.

  “Banshee-type 3As,” said the pilot. “For the air-to-air, at least.”

  “What about for ground targets?” asked Feng, leaning forward in his seat.

  The co-pilot clucked his tongue. “This guy knows his stuff, right? We’ve got Delta 3s, cluster munition. That satisfy you?”

  “Interested to see how they work out, is all,” said Feng.

  There were two flyboys in the pit. I’d never flown with them before, but they were both veterans, and operating next-generation simulants.

  “Ah, ma’am,” asked another voice. “Permission to speak freely?”

  I swivelled my head and searched for the speaker. The name REED, PIERRE and the rank CORPORAL flashed up on my HUD, by way of identification. Reed was from the other squad being dropped in our Cougar: Reed’s Rippers. Unfortunately, the squad name appeared to be ironic, because the Rippers were about as green as they came. They were fresh meat for the grinder, wearing recon-suits that denoted their junior role on the operation.

  Corporal Reed looked very young; his ruddy complexion visible through his face-plate. The simulant tech is weird like that. The cloning process was supposed to capture the operator in his or her prime, and to breed a sim that represented the best that a user could be, but so many operators coming up through the ranks were barely in their prime. Reed was such an example; his simulant’s nose was freckled, and he looked too young to be playing soldiers.

  “Go on, kid,” I offered.

  “Is it true? What they say about the Jackals, I mean?”

  Now that was a question. People said a lot of things about the Jackals. Some good, others not so much.

  The kid could’ve been referring to our achievements in the war to date. The Jackals had rescued the Pariah from North Star Station. We’d been on Kronstadt in the hours before it fell. We’d secured vital intel
ligence on a third alien species, the so-called Aeon.

  On the other hand, the Jackals had gone rogue. We’d disobeyed standing orders by not returning to Unity Base after our mission into the Gyre. My Jackals had even worked against the Alliance on Darkwater Farm, under the auspices of former Lieutenant-Colonel Harris, the legend also known as Lazarus.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Reed eyed up Feng, sidelong, reminding me that there was still hostility towards the trooper. Through no fault of his own, Feng’s loyalty to the Alliance had faltered during the closing stages of the Kronstadt operation. He had been “activated” as an enemy agent by his creator, Surgeon-Major Tang. Science Division had removed the control module from Feng’s skull, and given him a clean bill of health, but that wasn’t exactly reassuring. They’d done just the same prior to his activation: no one had even realised that Feng was carrying around Directorate tech in his skull until it was too late.

  It was Lopez who spoke in Feng’s defence. She narrowed her eyes.

  “What exactly have you heard, trooper?” she asked, pointedly.

  Reed looked nervous, as though he was worried he’d insulted us.

  “That y’all have done this before,” he said. “That you’ve seen infected Krell, up close.”

  I was relieved that we weren’t going to have a situation here.

  Lopez nodded and answered for the squad. “It’s true. No big deal. They die just like anything else.”

  “Is this your first transition, Corporal?” I asked.

  Reed’s squad nodded in unity.

  “First combat transition, ma’am,” Reed said. “We’re damn glad to be going in with the Jackals.”

  Novak made another grunting sound, which he probably intended to be a laugh. Lopez provided some encouragement.

  “Everyone has to start somewhere,” she said. “We’ve all been through it.”

  There was a chime over the joint battle-net.

  “Stow it, troopers,” I said. “Incoming comm.” I thought-activated my suit’s communications-system and accepted the transmission. “This is California. We read you, Command.”

  “This is Providence SOC,” came the response. “You’re looking good, Jackals. Your feeds are clear.”

  I recognised the voice. Zero—Sergeant Zoe Campbell—was the squad’s intelligence handler. She was currently aboard the UAS Providence, in orbit around Vektah Minor, manning the Simulant Operations Centre. From there, she watched the op via our combat-suit video-feeds, and monitored intelligence provided by other Alliance assets in the theatre. Zero was the squad’s lynchpin and a great intel officer.

  “Looks hot and heavy down there,” Zero said. I could sense the smile in her voice, and imagine her poised over the vid-terminals, hungrily drinking in every aspect of the mission.

  “Just how the LT likes it,” Feng added.

  “Just how you like it, if the rumours are to be believed,” Lopez countered. “Or that’s what Zero says after a few drinks, anyhow.”

  Feng blushed and fell silent. He and Zero were having some sort of relationship—the details of which weren’t really known to me, and to be honest, I didn’t really want to know. Zero and I went way back, and we were friends more than anything else, but she was a big girl now and she had to make her own mistakes…

  Zero was a little too professional to take Lopez’s bait, and she ignored the comment.

  “Standby for mission update,” she said. “Captain Heinrich wants to give a further briefing.”

  “Captain wants to give us briefing now?” Novak probed. “We have fiery ass!”

  Lopez sighed. “You mean we have fire on our ass, right?”

  “Is what I said,” Novak muttered.

  “We’re ready to receive, Zero,” I said.

  Putting it as neutrally as I could, Captain Heinrich was a piece of work. His face appeared as a transparent blue holo, right in front of mine, and he scowled critically. Even though he was addressing the entire strike-force, I couldn’t help but feel that the expression was directed at me. Heinrich and I had never got along, and the Jackals’ most recent foray into the Maelstrom hadn’t changed that. Although I’d travelled light-years to escape Heinrich’s command, history had a funny way of repeating itself, and Jenkins’ Jackals had fallen back under his leadership.

  Heinrich had a youthful appearance; more boy than officer, and the moustache that graced his upper lip was blond and thin, somehow making him look younger still, although it was obvious that the opposite had been his intention. He wore formal Alliance Army uniform, which bristled with accolades and badges, and his bright blue eyes peered out from beneath an officer’s cap. Although he seemed to know an awful lot about it, Heinrich had never actually been in combat. He was the epitome of a desk jockey; a real REMF. Heinrich held a senior post in the Simulant Operations Programme, but he wasn’t actually operational: he wasn’t even capable of operating a sim.

  He solemnly pursed his lips, and I had no doubt that he was assessing the data-feeds, tracking the progress of every dropship individually. “Micro-management” was Heinrich’s middle name.

  “Listen up, troopers,” he said. “This is Captain Heinrich, aboard the Providence.” He paused dramatically. “You all have your orders, but you can expect the LZ to be hot. The Krell down there are infected, and this place is crawling with the Harbinger virus.”

  “Tell us something we do not already know,” Novak muttered.

  Heinrich neither heard nor responded to him. I’d muted Novak’s line so that he couldn’t communicate with Command.

  “There can be no deviation from your orders. Follow them to the letter. In the case of extraction, we have further dropships ready for launch. You’ll be sent back into the fray until we can secure the objective. In T minus two minutes, the spearhead will breach Vektah’s orbital defences. That’s when things are really going to get dangerous.”

  Across the cabin, Reed’s squad collectively grimaced. The Jackals remained cool. We’d all heard this sort of spiel from Heinrich before. He had a way with words, to say the least.

  “The Science Division ships are to be protected at all costs,” Heinrich said.

  On the external cams, those ships towards the centre of our flight group were highlighted. They were heavier, bulkier craft; up-armoured, much bigger than the Cougars. They reminded me of civilian cargo haulers, except these ships were equipped with null-shields and carried automatic cannons on their noses. Their grey camouflaged hulls were plastered with the Science Division badge.

  “Exfiltration of the target requires that the Science Division transports get down to the surface. Once the spearhead makes planetfall, I want a foothold established. The primary objective is to secure a specimen.

  “For those squads with special orders, you know what to do,” Heinrich said. That was obviously directed at the Jackals. We had the most special order of all. “Support assets are inbound.”

  There was only one asset that mattered. Despite myself, I thought-activated my scanner and watched its progress. Even without checking the battle-net, I knew that the asset was still alive.

  “No slip-ups,” Heinrich said. “I want this done by the book. Do me proud. For the Alliance.”

  His words were echoed over the channel, both from our ship and across the whole strike-force.

  “One final reminder,” Heinrich said. “You all know the protocol. Last man standing initiates the hammer fall. Captain Heinrich out.”

  The briefing ended, and the channel closed.

  “Sorry about that,” Zero said. “Captain Heinrich insisted. But like I said, your feeds are looking good.”

  Another chime on the comm, this time accompanied by a shuddering of the Cougar’s chassis that suggested a particularly violent manoeuvre.

  “You might want to quit your blabbing, trooper,” said the pilot. “We’ve just made atmospheric entry. You’re about to start earning your pay.”

  “I hear you,” I said. Back to Zero: “Jackals out.”r />
  “Solid copy. Kill some fishes for me.”

  A range-finder that signalled the expected distance to the LZ appeared in the corner of my HUD.

  “Eyes on the prize,” I said. “We’re coming up on the target. Here we go.”

  We were landing during what passed for morning on Vektah Minor. It was a planet swathed in jungle and primordial forests. Thick clouds cloyed the atmosphere, while the foliage beneath was cloaked by dense, choking marsh gas.

  “Two klicks out from Nest Station Gamma,” the co-pilot confirmed.

  Nest Station Gamma: our objective. The largest Krell settlement on Vektah Minor.

  “Christo and Gaia…” the pilot said. “You might want to get a look at this place before you get dirtside.”

  According to intel, the planet beneath us had once been a thriving Krell nest-world. The Krell liked things hot, wet, humid as all hell, and green. Very green, usually. But if that was how Vektah Minor had once appeared, it was now anything but. The Harbinger virus had come to Vektah and claimed its dues.

  The Cougar screamed low over a brackish, dead swamp, and advanced on a forest. Or rather, the remains of one. The trees of the alien jungle had been replaced with black, crystalline forgeries, twisted effigies of what they had once been. Petrified like burnt wood. Further mountainous black structures tipped the skyline.

  “What in the Core is that?” asked Reed.

  His voice trailed off. The Cougar cut through the mists, gliding lower now, and the landscape changed again. Something rose out of the desiccated forest. Coralline and almost waspish; an ant-mound of epic proportions. The construction was honeycombed and studded with further living structures.

  “That’s our target,” I said.

  “It’s infected, right?” Reed asked.

  It was hard to argue with that. Most of the nest had turned black, and parts of the coral had died. Fluid wept from the open orifices, like blood from a wound, and veins of silver criss-crossed the nest’s outer surface.

  Lopez looked over at Reed. “All Krell tech is prone to infection from the Harbinger virus. This is what happens on every infected planet.”