The Mercenary: A Military Sci-Fi Series

THE MERCENARY ©2023 RICK PARTLOW This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors. Aethon Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Aethon Books www.aethonbooks.com Print and eBook formatting by Steve Beaulieu. Art provided by Luciano Fleitas. Published by Aethon Books LLC. Aethon Books is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is coincidental. All rights reserved. CONTENTS Also in Series Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Thank you for reading The Mercenary! About the Author ALSO IN SERIES RECON THE HUNTER THE MERCENARY THE OPERATIVE 1 I took a step out into the darkness and felt solidity fall away beneath me. The drop was over ten meters, and every instinct bred into my brain from evolution and experience screamed at me that it was too far, that I was going to die. But I hung in the air for what seemed an unnaturally long time, and my conscious mind locked down on my fear with the knowledge that the gravity here was less than half Earth normal. Everything was the muted color that night vision turned the world even with the best software, but I could see that the stone rising beneath my feet was shaded a deep red, powdered with sand and refreshingly free of any large, ankle-breaking rocks. I winced involuntarily when the balls of my feet struck the surface, but I felt nothing more painful than a slight twinge in my knees as I stumbled forward, digging in my heels to arrest my momentum. Behind me, the whine of the ship’s turbojets changed in tone, and it screamed upward, the boarding ramp closing as the matte-gray delta shape climbed, having left its human cargo behind like a bird shitting before it launched. There were seven others lined up behind me, a light squad in identical armor, their faces hidden behind visored helmets. IFF transponders displayed their names like a halo in my heads-up display, but I didn’t need them; I could spot them by their height, the set of their shoulders, the length of their stride. They spread into what my instructors in the Marines had called a “Ranger file,” ten meters between us, rifles at low ready as they followed me, and I followed the map coordinates projected in my helmet’s HUD. Without it, I’d have been wandering endlessly: the plateau was barren except for a kind of bacterial growth that wasn’t much more than a film of algae clinging to the rock, identical in structure to the rafts of it that floated in the moon’s seas, working as hard as they could to maintain an atmosphere just this side of breathable. The gas giant it orbited described a glowing orange arc in the night sky, brooding and godlike in its dominance, blotting out the stars and trying its best to distract me from my purpose. I’d seen the like before, of course, both during the war and in the six years since. I’d traveled to more star systems than most people had heard of, seen wonderful and exotic things, met interesting people. And killed them. We’d only gone a kilometer before we came to the canyon. It had been dug by a river when this moon was younger, but there hadn’t been any free-flowing water down in it for millennia. Somewhere down there, below the surface, there might be an underground stream, but it was hardly worth tapping into on a place this distant and desolate. I waved Kurt forward, and he slipped out of his backpack, yanking it open and pulling out a double handful of self-setting pitons, then passing one out to each of us. I took mine far enough down to make room for the others, found a likely rock outcropping and jammed it into position, letting the chemical agent in the base bond with the rock for a moment before I let go. It stood in place another few seconds, then shuddered as it sank its telescoping anchor bolt deep into the rock. I played rappelling line out from the spool attached to my tactical harness, then clipped the end to the bracket on the piton, giving it an experimental yank. It felt nice and solid, and at this point in what I might laughably refer to as my career, that was good enough. I barely hesitated as I threw myself face-first off the side of the cliff. Again, that sensation of not falling quite fast enough teased at the edges of my thought, warring against the fluttering of atavistic, hindbrain fear of the looming impact. Both were wiped away as