Salvage Marines (Necrospace Book 1) (6 page)

“As you can see from the surveillance photos, the squatters have grafted much of the hulk together, using spot welds and even high tension cables to further bind the various pieces of the ship,” said the shift manager as she used her remote to zoom in on one particular portion of the massive ship. “Intel advises that this particular vessel is our most effective means of entry.”

Samuel looked at the vessel, a yellowed, oblong ship of a sleek design that he’d never seen before. Though Samuel was in no way a master of ship identifications outside of the Grotto hive fleet with which they had been serving for the better part of the last year, he did recognize the Praxis Mundi logo etched into the side of the ship.

Praxis Mundi was a long range shipping company that made regular runs into the Baen system. The company was a smaller player in the galactic trade wars and tended to operate as a neutral shipping option for companies and individuals moving modest volumes of cargo extra long distances.

Next to Samuel sat Ben, who was engrossed in the briefing and taking notes as it went along. Ben had never paid this much attention in academy and it was evidence of a much larger change in the man. They were only a year in and it had already been a hard tour. Change had become part of the daily struggle.

After the mission on M5597, the Baen Reaper fleet had been assigned to leave the 5500 sector and rendezvous with Grotto Hive Fleet 822 for an extended mission. The hive fleets were essentially mobile factories and refineries that move from region to region within Grotto space.

The fleets would strip entire worlds of their natural resources, then after a few months or years, they would move on, leaving the planet to its fate. The fleet carried only a modest military element since it was not a frontline endeavor, however, it did travel with a small contingent of security forces that operated out of a single, mid-sized battle frigate.

In the event of a full-scale engagement, the fleet would undoubtedly succumb to a professional combat force, though the single frigate was sufficient to ward off any pirates or Red List ships that might prowl the space lanes.

Samuel was later informed that some one hundred or more standard years ago, Grotto had engaged in a major trade war with Aegis Inc. over a somewhat remote solar system that was, at the time, thought to be rich with natural resources.

After two years of bitter conflict Grotto withdrew from battle. The board of directors determined the war had reached a point of diminishing returns against the projected profits to be yielded from the resource exploitation.

For Aegis Inc. it had been a pyrrhic victory. They had committed so much money, manpower, and material to the war effort that despite their ‘victory’ the mining and harvesting operations continued to operate in the red. After another five years of dwindling profits and relentless raids by Red Listed pirates, the entire sector was abandoned and had sat idle for a full seventy years.

Aegis had maintained a loose picket of the sector with a few frigates, though even those were finally pulled back.

Grotto, while not interested in permanent occupation, had seen an opportunity to exploit the now lawless and undefended sector. Hive Fleet 822 was dispatched to plunder the system, and at the vanguard of the fleet’s advance would be the Baen Reaper fleet.

With the entire sector having been classified as necrospace, the corporate protocol demanded that Reaper elements sweep, clear, and salvage it as part of an overall reconnaissance mission to support the hive fleet.

Those orders had come down nine months ago and since then Samuel and the salvage marines had been marching through the dead system. For the most part the missions planetside had been general sweep and clear engagements met with little resistance beyond the occasional squatter community.

Most of the time the various facilities and factory outposts were completely abandoned. The salvage marines were free to chop the scrap and haul it to the tug ship without firing a single shot. Samuel, like the rest of the recruits, had become quite expert at operating forklifts, gravity cranes, and hand welders.

Tuck, a marine from Squad Ulanti, had taken to calling the hand welder the true symbol of the salvage marine, not the death’s head image that was etched into their ships, weapons, and armor.

There had been a handful of violent encounters over the past months, though none as savage as the campaign on M5597. Red List ships made regular runs through the sector. It was a convenient shortcut between various corporate held territories for those ships and individuals who sought to remain outside said corporate notice or attention. Due to the traffic flow, a number of squatter communities had sprung up as the otherwise nomadic space folk who lived on the fringes of human society claimed the abandoned buildings as their own.

While most ships and communities scattered and fled at the approach of the Reaper fleet, some of the squatters rejected the notion of “corporate salvage rights”. Those few squatters who chose to fight were quickly routed by the salvage marines, and generally after the initial firefight, most would lay down arms. One void battle with the Reaper frigates that destroyed several Red List ships was all it took to send a clear message to everyone in the sector to vacate or be destroyed.

It had sickened Samuel to drive people out of their homes, more so when he had to shoot squatters, which he had done on three separate occasions. Though as time passed, Samuel found that the continued soldier wages and hazard duty bonuses stacked up higher than his compassion for strangers, so, for the sake of his family, he hardened his heart. As Ben had begun to say, there were only two kinds of people in the universe, those behind the gun and those in front of it.

Samuel’s thoughts were grim as he recalled Ben’s words. Watching his friend take notes, he found that he begrudgingly agreed. He wondered if Sura could see the world in such stark contrast, and smiled to himself as he acknowledged that, of course, she couldn’t. Her unassailable optimism was like a beam of light that seemed to be able to touch him in his darkest moments while in the depths of necrospace. For her, and for his son, he could be a soldier and a provider, even if that meant other people, like the squatters, had to be pushed out of his way.

With the hazard pay and soldier wages he’d earned in the last year he had paid off half of Orion’s life-bond. He would have already paid it completely if he had not been required to make minimum payments on his own life-bond. Now that Sura was nursing a newborn at home they’d decided that she should leave the workforce, so Samuel was covering her minimum payment as well. It tore him up to have only seen his wife once in the last year since joining the marines. His son was in his third month of life and Samuel had never physically seen him, but it felt good every time a pay cycle would hit.

A new photo was illuminated on the shift manager’s display and Samuel looked away from Ben’s notes to see a wide-angle shot of the full space hulk. He’d always heard of their legendary size, had even seen photos, but seeing one that he knew he was about to assault was awe inspiring.

Hulks were colossal conglomerates of miscellaneous space junk that had, over countless years, become so large they acquired their own gravitational pull that drew in even more flotsam. Hulks usually began their lifecycle as single ship, typically large freighters or tugs that, for one reason or another, ended up dead and floating through space.

Other ships, satellites, and various bits of scrap would collide with them and either become embedded in the larger ship or hovered nearby in a tight orbit. Over years and years more bits would collect until the gravitational pull would hold the whole thing together.

Space Hulks were both a sought after prize and a likely deathtrap. Because they were comprised of so many ships, in addition to assorted space junk, they were often rich with salvage. Because of the haphazard method of their creation, the hulks could be affected by any number of dangers. Many were filled with toxic chemicals, fuel spills, breached and radioactive engine cores, and destabilized heavy machinery.

In addition to those risks, there was always the likelihood that portions of the hulks were populated by various organisms.

Squatters from the Red List would often seek shelter in the hulks even though scavengers and pirates frequently made raids into them for resources, scrap, or to carry off the squatters. There were also rumors, blasted as tall tales, about insectoid alien creatures that infested some hulks, using them like massive nests. (Though there was no official Grotto statement as to the truth of any such claims.)

As Samuel looked at the photo he could see several gun emplacements bristling along the more stable sections of the hulk and he leaned over to Ben.

“From the looks of those guns I’d say we’re going up against a pirate clan, not squatters,” he whispered.

Ben nodded, “Calling them squatters must be more politically correct. I don’t know why they bother, we’re going to fight them, one way or the other.”

“Personally, I’d rather them just say pirates, at least then we’d be more prepared,” grumbled Samuel, despite the fact that he was having difficulty in not being both excited and terrified at the prospect of carrying out a boarding action.

“Hulks & Pirates,” whistled Harold Marr quietly, a marine from Squad Marsters, who sat behind the two friends, “Man, I used to play that game with my brothers. I think I might even have a few of the action figures in my closet back home. This is surreal.”

“Me too, I always pretended to be the Pirate King,” Jada agreed from where she sat next to Harold, directly behind Samuel, “None of the boys could handle the crown.”

“So does that make Tuck the Queen?,” said Ben amiably as he leaned back in his chair to smile at Jada.

Samuel and the rest of the small group shared a quiet laugh as Jada blushed and gently kicked Ben’s seat before she joined in the laughter.

It had taken Samuel several months and a few more firefights to clear his conscience of his tryst with Jada.

After their very next mission, the first of the Hive Fleet 822 operations, he had taken a bullet in the side before gunning down two squatter resistance fighters as the marines were sweeping a small communications facility.

Squad Ulanti had been down in the power plant and encountered similar fighting. Both he and Jada had sought the now familiar comfort in each other’s naked embrace after the fight. After that time, however, both of them had discovered a growing awkwardness, as if being together once more had changed their lovemaking from celebrating survival to something more towards romance.

Samuel had felt ashamed of himself, and it seemed that Jada has as well, for she and everyone else in Tango Platoon knew Samuel was married and had a newborn. After that uncomfortable morning another two months of operations passed before the two of them spoke to each other again. Though now, over nine months into the campaign, they had found space for friendship.

Samuel slotted his magazine and racked the slide on the combat rifle, chambering the first round as he let his breath out slowly. Tango Platoon was only moments away from boarding their assault craft and despite his months of combat duty this would be his first boarding action. It was the same for the majority of the rest of the salvage marines in the Reaper fleet, since only their squad leaders were veterans.

There were a handful of exceptions, like Oliver Putin, who were survivors of other Reaper fleets that had been liquidated. Samuel looked out across the hangar bay of the great Reaper tug ship and saw that dozens of platoons also stood in tight rows as they, too, waited to board their respective assault craft.

Finally, warning klaxons began to sound while yellow and red lights flooded the hangar bay. Mag walked down the line of Squad Taggart, double checking their void gear and giving them last minute pointers on the coming fight.

“Void battles are fought in a full three hundred and sixty degrees,” barked Mag, raising her voice to carry over the engines of the assault crafts as they revved to life. “No doubt the hulk has artificial gravity in some sections, but you need to be prepared to fight in zero gravity. You’ve all had void combat training during basic, but for most of you that’s nearly a year in the past. If Grotto cared more about making an investment in our continued survival they would have issued this boat with a training deck, but seeing as how they didn’t, we aren’t and this briefing is as good as you’re going to get.”

Samuel listen with rapt attention. He’d heard many tales and stories about void battles. Tales of the unfathomable emptiness of space, the fragility of the very ships upon which they rode, and the surreal silence that accompanied even the most brilliant of conflicts.

The marine could feel the additional weight of the void seals that had been screwed into the sockets of his standard issue battle armor. All marine armor came pre-drilled and threaded to support additional void equipment which made Samuel think that it would have indeed been wise to provide them more training for void combat during basic. He’d learned the hard way though, over the last many months of his tour through necrospace, that Grotto Corporation only cared about human life in so much as it affected the Bottom Line.

He understood that it was a grim view of the world, and one that he’d neither explained to Sura, nor even attempted to make her aware of. In many ways, he felt that being in the Reaper fleet had opened his eyes profoundly to the vast and uncaring world of Grotto Corporation more than any of his time in the factories.