The Hunter: A Military Sci-Fi Series

HUNTER ©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 Thank you for reading Hunter! About the Author ALSO IN SERIES RECON THE HUNTER THE MERCENARY THE OPERATIVE 1 The wet grass at the crest of the high hill coiled beneath us, a carpet of discomfort that soaked through my shirt in the chill dampness of the autumn morning. I tried to ignore it, tried to keep the camera steady as I panned across the breadth of the massive herd of elk. They covered the rolling hills below us, shifting this way and that at the insistent bugling of their horned lord, the brawny bull with a fire in his eyes and wickedly curved antlers arching over his shoulders like sabers. “You think we’re far enough away?” I asked Sophia, not whispering but speaking in a normal, low tone that carried much less distance. “He looks crazy with the rut.” “We’re just under a hundred meters,” she responded in the same tone, shrugging slightly, not looking away from the binoculars. “He won’t notice us.” Sophia’s dark brown hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, gathered away from the soft curves of her high cheekbones except for a few strands that had escaped and clung tenaciously to her ears. I caught the corner of her mouth turning up slightly. “Besides, he’s going to have other things to worry about in a couple minutes.” She tapped me on the arm and pointed off to the left, where the trees skirted the river. I turned the small camera in that direction, just now noticing the black, white and grey shapes slinking up between the trees. “Four greys, a white and three blacks,” Sophia listed off, almost in a mnemonic chant. “That’s the Twisted Creek pack. They had twelve until this last winter, when the Round Hills killed their old Alpha Male and three of the females went over to the White Crest pack.” “You know,” I said, not for the first time, “you could have the drones take footage of this instead of making me run the camera.” “I sure could, sweetie,” she agreed, smile broadening. “But then I wouldn’t have an excuse for bringing you along, would I?” “Good point,” I acknowledged, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. “Between your job and mine, we don’t get much downtime, do we?” “No one said you had to go work for the planetary constabulary, love,” she reminded me. “I know the Demeter Ecological Survey would have let me hire you as a strong back. It’s been almost three years since the war ended and we’re still understaffed.” “What I know about genetics, zoology, and ecological engineering could fit in a pamphlet,” I said. “Carrying a gun and being intimidating, that I know how to do.” “Shhh,” she hushed me, lowering her binoculars, and pointing again. “Here they come.” The wolves went straight for a calf only a few months old, born in the late spring. The mother tried to run them off, but their packmates circled back around to corner the young animal while the other elk edged away like a school of fish scattering before a shark. I looked over the top of the camera’s display screen, wanting to see it through my own eyes and not through the filter of the device. This was too real, too raw for that. This was why I loved living here. The Revenant Forest on Demeter was like stepping back in time tens of thousands of years and watching an Earth before humans built their cities. Here, animals that had been extinct for millennia, mastodons and saber-tooth cats and megatherium and dozens more, stalked and grazed and lived alongside wolves and elk and deer, all of them engineered and incubated here for the Revenant Project. Demeter was one of the oldest colonies in the Commonwealth, and when we’d found it, it had very little in the way of complex life. There was enough of an ecology of fungi and lichen to keep the atmosphere breathable, but not much more. It had been the perfect place to introduce Earth life without worrying about destroying an existing ecosystem, and it had been the perfect place to start the Revenant Project. DNA samples