Legions of Orion (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 1) (22 page)

“
I want your unit
with us as well, Spartan. I could do with some experience and
muscle down there in case things go pear shaped.”

“You think there might be trouble?”
asked Jack with an inquisitive tone.

“I always think there could be
trouble.”

General Rivers
looked at the young man and was reminded of Spartan two decades
earlier.
Both had the hunger in their
eyes, and in their formative years had witnessed violence and been
involved in great struggles. Spartan’s background was still blurred
and little known until his time as an illegal pit fighter. The
skills he learnt over that short career had helped hone him into
the violent and courageous warrior he had become in the Marine
Corps. Jack was an unknown to him, though. His track record on
clandestine operations had been impressive, but he’d also broken a
long list of local laws, and his criminal record already beat
Spartan’s. Although similar, there were still enough differences to
tell them apart. Spartan was the rougher of the two, but he
detected a streak of arrogance and violence in Jack that was all
too familiar in young members of the Marine Corps. He stepped
closer to Spartan.

“
I want APS to take
point when we land. You and your
Jötnar
have experience most of these marines can only dream
of.”

Spartan nodded
and
moved away to his waiting shuttle. It
was crewed by marines and carried a four-man security detail but no
passengers. The Jötnar filed aboard, each of them muttering as they
went. As they moved, Spartan noticed the youngest of the
group.

“
Wictred? I wondered
where you’d got to.”

The young Jötnar
glanced at him, but Khan pushed him inside without a
word.

Odd,
thought Spartan.

He’d known
the
Jötnar for decades now and was still
learning new things about them. He was certainly familiar with
their attitude to the young. Unlike other humans, they placed a
greater value on their adult population. He recalled an argument
he’d had with Gun back on Hyperion. A hunting party had been forced
to leave three Jötnar behind in an ambush, and Gun had selected the
youngest. He’d explained it simply, as they had so far not achieved
work of note and had a lower value than the adults. Their potential
was less important to him than the reality of the moment. It was a
strange, even alien concept, but Spartan could understand his point
of view. Osk, the first Jötnar female, had reminded him that it was
easy enough to get more children. Adults, on the other hand, took a
good many years to train and teach, now that the birthing chambers
and equipment throughout the Alliance had been scrapped. Natural
birth requires natural solutions to problems.

“
Looks like
Wictred will get to see the elephant, after
all!” said Jack in a slightly despondent tone.

“Elephant?” asked a confused
Spartan.

Jack grinned.
“The animal with four legs and a
trunk.”

Spartan shook his
head and indicated for him to climb inside the shuttle. The Jötnar
were already fitting the magnetic clamps around their suits to keep
them secure during flight. Once they left the innards of the
warship, they would once again experience the unsettling sensation
of weightlessness.

“
Thank you, Jack,
I’m well aware of the animal. What did you mean?”

Jack pulled on the straps before
replying.

“
It’s a saying I
heard used by some of the part-timers coming to Hyperion for
training. You know, the camps Gun runs for them and the tourists.
One of the scenarios is where a Jötnar would ambush them at close
quarters. Most have never seen them or combat before. One of the
officers told me that soldiers in the past would described it as
‘meeting the elephant’ for the first time. A man’s first experience
of war and combat.”

Spartan now
understood what he meant. Combat was certainly something he had
plenty of experience of, but he was dubious his son was quite as
experienced himself as he liked to think.

“
Well, Jack, it’s
not just him, you know? This isn’t a hunt or raid. There’s a good
chance this could escalate at some point, and in my experience,
when marines get stuck into action, you find a lot of
trouble.”

The deck crew
clamped the doors down shut, and an odd sucking sound indicated the
internal pressure system was stabilising, prior to leaving the
ship. Spartan’s suit showed the current pressure, temperature, and
atmospheric readings as they quickly altered to match those on the
surface below. Khan leaned over and shouted from inside his thickly
armoured helmet.

“
Spartan, It
will
be like old times!”

Spartan smiled at
his enthusiasm. He might now be forty-eight, but he was far from
past his prime. Modern medicine, diet and fitness programmes had
allowed him to maintain the body of a man almost half his age and
then some. What had changed were his attitudes and experience. The
number of missions he’d gone in that had resulted in crashes, death
and disaster were numerous, and he was tired of watching the deaths
of so many. It was that spirit that had given the APS Corporation
such a firm and solid reputation for integrity and professionalism
in the industry. The video communications display lit up in his
suit, just the same as for all the other marines and Jötnar. It was
the face of General Rivers who was now in his full PDS body armour
and stood aboard one of the other shuttles. Around him stood a
group of marines, and they were all wearing the mottled grey and
red camouflage pattern of his personal guard.

“
This is
it
, people,” he stated, and almost
simultaneously, the shuttle lifted from its docking clamps and
started moving on one of the pintle-mounted brackets to the flanks
of the ship. They moved almost fifteen metres into the launch pod
before a pair of reinforced shutters clamped behind them. There
were four pods, two on each side of the stern for launching
shuttles, fighters and landing craft.

“
The
m
arines from the rest of the Taskforce
are in the air and waiting for us. Our platoon will be taking point
on the landing with the APS Team providing recon for us. We land in
forty-six minutes, be ready!”

Spartan looked to
the others in his shuttle. The Jötnar looked both excited and
serious, ever the professional soldiers. Jack, on the other hand,
simply gazed out of the window and watched the shape of ANS
Devastation as they drifted silently from her flank. As they moved
further away, the clear glowing orb of the gas giant appeared like
a monstrous star. Spartan had seen the planet type before, but
there was something about this one, the way the light seemed to
shimmer and reflect much further than normal. Jack noticed his
interest.

“
It’s the
composition of space around here.”

Spartan
didn’t quite understand, but he was pleasantly
surprised to see his son had taken some of his studies in, rather
than just skills with weapons.

Maybe
Teresa was right about him
,
after all!

“What do you mean? Isn’t the space out
here just the same as space anywhere else?”

Jack looked back out of the window and
again before looking to his father.

“
This star system is
just one tiny part of the Orion Nebula
,
right? Well, you must have seen the photos of this place back from
Proxima Centauri. It shows lots of clouds, many of them bright
blue.”

Jack was a little
surprised his father was so unfamiliar with the basic science of
space. He was well aware that Spartan’s background was on the more
physical side of space, but even so, he thought most knew of
this.

“Well, there are massive amounts of gas
and dust in the nebula. Some areas are more concentrated than
others. There are massive bullets of gas that pierce hydrogen
clouds. That’s where the glowing blue streaks and orbs come
from.”

He looked back to the window.

“
According to the
news report I just watched, the Alliance astronomers are arguing
about what started it. One idea is that something happened a
thousand years or so ago to cause it.”

Spartan scratched his chin.

“But aren’t we seeing light on
Prometheus that originated fourteen hundred years ago?”

Jack looked back to
his father, intrigued that of all things he might pick out this
one
.

“
Yes, so back home
we are seeing events that have already happened. The event that
caused this massive disruption was vast. It would have involved
hundreds of stars, maybe thousands of them.”

Spartan nodded as
if
a number of pieces were falling into
place.

“
And yet we get here
and find clouds that are of a different composition to those we’ve
seen from the past, and even weirder, we find remains of an unknown
people.”

Jack nodded at him, both pleased with
his father but also dreading the inevitable conclusion that both of
them must have been making at the same time. Jack spoke first.

“
So something must
have happened in the past, something massive, and it resulted in
the destruction of entire colonies and ships?”

Spartan said
nothing, but it was evident to him that something bad had
happened.

“
The question then
is, what the hell happened out here?”

Khan must have heard
them speaking because he look at them both and tilted his head to
the enlarging moon to the right of the shuttle.

“I bet we’ll find out what caused all
of this down there.”

All three of them
looked through the window and the small disc of light as they
hurtled closer to the moon. Around the shuttle were the rest of
their formation, three more from Devastation and another nine from
the Taskforce. Spartan hadn’t been involved in such a large landing
for years, and the thought of thirteen armoured shuttles swooping
down to an alien world started to get his blood moving around his
body. He tapped Jack on the shoulder.

“Son, this is going to be
interesting.”

Wictred
nodded happily at the two of them, completely
ignoring the stern look from his father and the other senior
Jötnar.

“
More than
interesting!” he laughed. “This mission is going to kick
ass!”

Spartan looked to
Khan and try as he might
, he couldn’t
hold back the laughter. Khan joined in, and before long the entire
shuttle was shaking to the roaring of amusement from the entire
team. Jack looked at them all with a mixture of disbelief and
surprise.

* * *

Teresa walked along one of the many
corridors of the Prometheus Seven Space Station, and she did her
best to avoid bumping into any members of the media. This part of
the station used to be where a large number of traders and black
market sellers worked. Now it was being used by a much smaller
array of independent stores that had been granted licences by the
Alliance to sell goods to the thousands of people stationed there;
everything from food and clothing, to entertainment to amuse those
out here on their own for months at a time.

Looks just a little less interesting
than last time
,
s
he thought.

The stand to her
right caught her eye, especially the odd shaped trinkets and
artefacts that she had seen as a child on Carthago. She stopped at
the stand and leaned over to pick up one of the small green carved
figurines. It was about the size of her hand and shaped like a
monster of ancient myth. The simple design betrayed exquisite skill
in the working of ebony; a skill rarely encountered
anymore.

“
You’re from
Carthago, right?” a scrawny man asked, emerging from behind a loose
hanging curtain.

He wore beige
trousers and a poorly maintained jacket that was at least two
decades out of fashion. Teresa noted the tattoos on his
face
, marking him out as from one of the
unofficial Carthago militias that had been formed to try and help
local police and Alliance units maintain control. The shape sent a
shudder through her body as she recalled some of the rumours about
them.

Like I’m talking about it with him.

“
I’ve spent
some
time there with the military,” she
explained with a thinly disguised half-lie. There were enough
problems on Carthago, without her stirring up more out here. Teresa
still had a small number of relatives back there.

She lifted up a
figurine
that was towards the back of the
stand. Like the others, it was green in colour, but this one was
more discoloured than the rest and shaped into the body of a
multi-headed dog.

“
Kerberos,”
e
xplained the man helpfully.

“
Yes, I know, the
three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades. Not a common
sight on Carthago, from what I’ve heard,” she answered with a
pleasant smile.

The man looked back
at her with a look that reminded her of the scheming expressions
she’d seen on hundreds of crooks, smugglers and Zealots. Her gut
instinct told her she needed to speak to someone. Luckily
for her, two of her APS associates arrived. Both
wore the grey paramilitary uniforms that were the staple of all
non-combat roles in the company. It had been Spartan’s idea to keep
a military feel to their company, apart from those in higher
management. Both were about two metres tall, well built and carried
themselves with the assertiveness common with the experienced
military. They stopped alongside her and beckoned for her to move
away from the stand. She moved several paces, and the nearest
leaned in and spoke quietly.