Recruit, Jonathan Brazee [which ebook reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Jonathan Brazee
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The Peacemaker was a sonic disrupter. It had that certain historical panache that some weapons seem to capture among the public. That panache was lost on Ryck, though. Even with his body armor, that weapon would be deadly. The bones would stop and reflect the blast, at least where they covered, but with his exposed face, his head would be turned into so much mush. The weapon had a very limited range, and took a lot of energy, but this close to the miner, Ryck wouldn’t stand a chance.
Without thinking, Ryck fired his M99 on full auto, stitching from low and left to high and right, exactly as he was taught at recruit training. Multiple rounds hit both men, and they immediately collapsed. Ryck stared at them, his intense adrenaline boost turning to numb amazement. He’d just killed two men—two living, breathing men.
Corporal Büyük rushed up behind him, staring around at the two men who seemed to collapse like slowly deflating balloons. They were already gone, but their bodies both continued to settle around each other.
The M99 darts didn’t leave too many visible signs of damage. They were small, only a few millimeters across. What they were, though, was very, very fast, and not much could stop their progress. When they hit soft flesh, the vanes that kept them running true flipped out, becoming four small blades that slice through muscle and blood vessels.
From the front, the two men—boys might be more accurate—looked like they had fallen asleep in each other’s arms. Blood was seeping out through several entrance wounds, but their miner’s overalls were still whole, and in the shadowy light, the dark blood was not extremely noticeable.
“Damn, boot. Nice shooting,” the corporal said to him.
Ryck felt both elated and a little nauseous at the same time. He was elated that he was still alive, that he had won this small battle of life and death. He had vindicated all those months of training. But these two men were not just electrons in the latest game. These were two people, and he had killed them. The first one, the one with the bloody arm, looked barely into his teens. He could have been a schoolboy back on Prophesy.
“Jenkins, you and the boot stay here and secure this intersection. Hu and Aesop, back to Pallas’ team and let’s see to them.”
Without a word, Lance Corporal Jenkins flopped down on the deck, pulling one of the dead miners closer to provide a tiny bit of cover and act as a rifle rest. Ryck was a little more hesitant as he mimicked the more experienced Marine, gingerly placing his own M99 on the shoulder of the younger miner. The boy’s sightless eyes stared back at him.
More to escape that gaze than anything else, Ryck made a quick glance back to where, much to his surprise, the buried Marines were being helped out from under the rubble. They were covered in dust, and one of them, who Ryck couldn’t make out, was limping and had to be helped to the side of the corridor where he could sit, but no one looked seriously hurt.
“Um, boot, what say you look down there, you know, where the targets are?” Jenkins asked with a sarcastic tone.
Ryck wheeled his head around to look back down the corridor. He studiously kept his eyes elevated to escape the accusing, if dead gaze, of his rifle rest. He was quite relieved when Third Squad arrived on the scene and made a passage of lines to clear farther down the mine, and he was pulled back to provide security. He’d done what he’d been trained to do, and he felt no regrets. In all truth, he felt elated.
Boot or not, he was no longer a recruit. He was a blooded Marine.
Prophesy
Thirteen months earlier . . .
Chapter 1
Ryck knelt next to the field of GKA Wheat, picking up some of the dirt and letting it tumble through his fingers to the ground. A good portion of it simply blew away as dust. United Ag had GM’d the GKA strain specifically for Prophesy, optimized for the planet’s soil mix and lack of water. “Lack of water” did not mean “no” water, though, but since the bankruptcy and closing of the Prophesy Communal Development Corporation, PCDC, the water had ceased to flow in the irrigation canals with not enough rainfall to fill the reservoirs.
Ryck hadn’t been born yet when his father had made the investment to become a shareholder in PCDC, moving the family from Ellison to Prophesy for a fresh start. Ryck didn’t know anything about Ellison other than the fact that his parents and older brother had made a home there in a small apartment. He couldn’t imagine living like that, in a small apartment in a huge building. The open plains of Prophesy were all he had known while growing up. Life had been tough on the newly terraformed world, but for Ryck, life was good. He reveled in the freedom to run around on his own without constant parental supervision. Together with Lysa, his twin, they had the full run of not only their own property, but also that of the entire community, something they could never have had on Ellison. The urban goliath of that planet was not conducive to children running around free and unsupervised. He was vaguely aware of his father’s struggles to get crops in, but that didn’t affect his early childhood of school and play.
Things changed when Ryck was ten, though, when PCDC went belly up. The planet was not completely terraformed, and without PCDC pulling up the water locked deep within the rocks, the reservoirs dried up, and the little moisture already released in the air was not enough to sustain a normal agricultural cycle.
PCDC had been a subsidiary of the universal giant, Excel Holdings, Ltd. When PCDC folded, not only was Ryck’s father’s stock worthless, but also through some legal machinations, he owed Excel for the remainder of his initial settlement buy-in. With the then value of the crops being grown at the time, that meant Excel would get 2/3 of the revenue for the wheat for the next 25 Earth years, which corresponded to 27 crop cycles on Prophesy.
That did not take into account that with PCDC gone, the planet’s ecosystem itself tried to swing back to its natural equilibrium, and that meant a dry, dusty landscape. Crop yields plummeted, and it became clear that with interest on the debt, the family could never hope to pay it off.
Ryck’s father tried, though. He scraped together some cash, and along with Mr. Choo on the next plot, tried to dig their own shared well. Over 200 dry meters later, they had reached the limit of the capabilities of the small drilling company they had hired, and they had no money to bring in a company with a bigger rig.
Ryck watched his father transform from the irreverent, fun-loving man he had known into someone breaking his back and spirit in an attempt merely to survive. Myke, his older brother, dropped out of school to help, but with less and less rain, even the GKA Wheat suffered, providing smaller and smaller yields.
The tipping point was when Ryck’s mother caught the Dust. Ryck was fifteen at the time and still in school. He and Lysa had come home from school that fateful day when Myke met them at the door. He took both of them in his arms, saying nothing. Fear had swept through Ryck. He didn’t know what was wrong, just that it was something big.
“Mom’s got the Dust,” he told them.
Ryck had just stared at his older brother, speechless. “The Dust” was the name given to the virus that struck the settlers each year. Not many people contracted it, but for those who did, 80% died within hours, coughing out their lungs. Ryck and Lysa quietly followed Myke to the community clinic.
Their mother lay on the hospital bed, her face sallow. Their father sat by her side, holding her hand. Every few minutes, she would erupt into a coughing fit. The first time she did that after they got there, Ryck jumped up and ran to her, grabbing her other hand. Behind him, he could hear Lysa quietly sobbing.
The virus that caused the Dust had been identified, but without PCDC’s funding, the research to figure out an effective treatment had been abandoned. With new worlds opening up, there were so many new diseases that the big pharmaceuticals focused on those diseases where they could help the most people—and make the most profit. On Prophesy, the medical technicians could treat the symptoms and ease the suffering, but that was all. Survival was up to the individual. Some made it, some did not. Ryck’s mother was one of those who did not. With her family around her, she had one last coughing attack before she died, gasping for one final breath before letting go.
With Ryck’s mother gone, his father sunk even further into depression. He still tried to farm, but it had become obvious that he was never going to be able to dig himself out of debt. Ryck offered to quit school to help out, but his father refused the offer.
A year after his mother’s death, almost to the day, Ryck’s father was driving the family Deere when it overturned into the gully that lined the western edge of the property. He was ejected from the cab and killed as he tumbled down the rocks.
Myke had erupted when TerraLife refused to pay the insurance policy, claiming “suspicious” circumstances of his father’s death and citing their dad’s treatment for depression as evidence of suicide. Myke fought the decision, but to no avail. Privately, Ryck thought the insurance company might have been correct. His father had been extremely withdrawn before the accident, and the insurance payout would have given the farm five or six more years of operating expenses. Most importantly, it would erase the debt to Excel. Ryck and Lysa were born on Prophesy, so legally, they could not owe a settlement buy-in. Myke had been a minor at the time, so he could not be assessed the fee, either. While the three of
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