Swapship Troopers Read online

  Swapship Troopers

  By Walker Long

  Copyright 2017 Walker Long

  Kindle Edition

  Electronic Edition License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re–sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  Author’s Note: All characters depicted in this work of fiction are fictitious. Anyone finding resemblance with real persons, living or dead, are really taking it way too seriously. All characters are 18 years of age or older at the time of the events depicted. All readers should be at least that old as well.

  Also By Walker Long

  Invasion of the Snatch Snatchers

  *

  The Lesbian, the Bitch, and the Bathrobe

  *

  The Power Receiver

  *

  Terminal Case

  *

  Like a Good Neighbor

  *

  The Fire Red Arrows

  *

  Smokey at My Backdoor

  *

  Dora’s Box

  *

  Amanda Baker Shakes Her Moneymaker

  *

  The Dual Turntable

  *

  The Right Gift at the Wrong Door

  We should not focus so much on protecting ourselves that we lose the things that make us worth protecting.

  Governor Bale Hardaway, ILC

  Chapter 1

  C224A

  Private First Class Arlon Quantrill checked his ammo pack one more time. He had two spare magazines of AP – armor piercing rounds – and two magazines of standard. The standard was little more than dead weight though. Against a Formid carapace standard ammo was more effective than throwing spitballs, but only slightly. Even so, command kept issuing the stuff. Quantrill and the other Marines kept firing it. Theirs was not to question why.

  “The LZ is hot people,” Lieutenant Hardaway yelled back from the front of the landing craft. “Pop your reds and let’s be smart.”

  Quantrill popped a red pill from the dispenser on the chest plate of his body armor. He placed it in between his front teeth and crunched down. His mouth was flooded with a bitter, medicinal taste as the red went to work. If this landing zone was active with Formids he would need all the aggression and energy he could muster.

  The Lieutenant made his way down the rows of Marines. He would check each man’s body armor, his rifle, and his data uplink. All of these things had already been gone over by the platoon sergeant, squad leaders, and by the men themselves – it was their own ass on the line, after all. Even so, the boss would find something now and then. Hardaway had a nose for sloppy battle prep.

  “Jordan,” the Lieutenant barked at the man next to Quantrill. “Dial down your grenades. That setting will buy you a farm.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jordan answered. The Marine’s hands flew to the small dials on the hand grenades hanging from the front of his battle armor. The explosive yield of a fusion grenade depends on the mass of the deuterium injection. This mass is set by a dial on top of the baseball sized explosive. A setting of 1 would be good to blow down a doorway. A setting of 10 would bring down the whole building.

  “Three, Jordan. Three!” Hardaway insisted. Fusion grenades come from the armory set to 5 – probably just because it’s halfway to 10 and that made sense to some bean counter somewhere. The Lieutenant, however, often said a level 5 explosion was as likely to kill the man who threw the grenade as it was to kill the target. He required the platoon to pack grenades at level 3. You could dial them up if you needed a bigger bang, but only if your ass was safely hidden behind something large and immobile.

  The Lieutenant moved on to Quantrill. He looked the smaller man up and down, tugged at the straps of his ammo vest, gave a curt nod, and moved on. Quantrill felt a small surge of relief. If he was good enough for the boss, maybe he was good enough to get through this deployment in one piece, too.

  The landing craft dropped with a stomach turning lurch. The pilot would be making a hot pass. They wouldn’t be on the ground for more than a minute. This wasn’t much time to unload a whole platoon, but the pilot wasn’t going to risk his ass to give them an easy send-off. Formids didn’t often take down aircraft, but it wasn’t unheard of, either.

  Even so, piloting a lander was hell of a lot safer than being in the dirt with the Marines. It seemed like a lot more fun, too. Quantrill applied for pilot track when he was drafted. He did well enough on the aptitude tests to qualify, but his family didn’t have the money for a slot in Officer Candidate School. Otherwise he could have been the one behind the controls of the big bird. Instead he was riding in the back, waiting for the loading door to fall open onto God only knew what.

  “Two minute warning!” Lieutenant Hardaway yelled as he made his way across the lurching aircraft. The Lieutenant always took position by the landing door. He would be the first man off the bird, no matter how hot the landing zone might be. Hardaway was an exception to the rule – he didn’t graduate from some fancy college like most of the coddled rich kids with lieutenant bars. Hardaway came up through the ranks. Once upon a time, he was a grunt like Quantrill. It was hard to imagine, but it made Quantrill proud to be a part of Hardaway’s platoon. It made him think he might actually make it to the end of his tour in one piece.

  “Target is a low, concrete bunker,” Hardaway yelled out some last minute instructions. “We will touch down on a hilltop about half a click downwind. Bugs will be between us and the target. Fan out in a one-hundred-thirty pattern. Let’s lock and load!”

  The landing craft gave one last crashing lurch and then was still. They were on the ground. Quantrill slapped the release on his harness and hopped to his feet. He could feel the red pill stimulant surging through his system. His body was ready to fight – and he was going to get the chance. The loading door dropped down with an angry, metallic screech and dim light from the overcast skies flooded into the cargo bay.

  Quantrill shouldered his AR316 rifle and rushed down the ramp. Once out of the lander, the platoon spread out in a fan pattern to secure their position. They were on a barren moon orbiting a gas giant in a system known only as C224A. The system was uninhabited – not so much as a bacterium to be found for half a light-year in any direction. There was only one reason for Quantrill and his platoon to pay a visit to the lifeless rock.

  The bunker was on a hill directly across a shallow valley from the landing zone. It was low with sloping, gray walls. The roof was studded with an array of antennas like giant, exotic flowers. It was a subspace relay station, like one of the hundreds built all across the Gamma Loop. Without the network of relays, communication between the far-flung Alliance colonies would take years. More importantly, hyperspace jumps would be impossible. All those ships carrying their trillions of dollars of cargo across the galaxy every day would be stuck.

  So Quantrill and his platoon had to protect the ugly gray building at all costs – with their lives, if necessary. They needed to keep the hyperspace highways open. Nobody really knew why the Formids were there. The Bugs just showed up now and then and disabled a relay station or two. The fleet would send in the Marines to fight them off and then it would be back to business as usual – except of course for the unlucky jarheads who bought their farm while fighting over a building full of glorified radios.

  “Hostiles incoming,” someone yelled from Quantrill’s right. The words were quickly followed by the staccato roar of automatic rif
le fire. Quantrill turned in that direction but saw nothing but the dull, brown rock that was scattered everywhere. Behind him he heard the lander spool up its dual turbines. He spared a look back over his shoulder to see the bird lift into the air. The landing door wasn’t even finished closing – that pilot was in a hurry to get his ass back home. Typical..

  There was another thunderous rip of weapon fire. Quantrill’s head spun back around. This time he saw a shape creeping over a boulder fifty meters down the hill from his position. It was about the size of a horse back on Earth. That little tidbit was something Quantrill had read during basic training – he’d never seen a horse in person. He grew up in the Clevelinatti ghetto. They didn’t have much use for livestock.

  This creature was no horse, however. It had a segmented body covered in a hard exoskeleton. Multiply-jointed legs extended outward from both sides. The head – if it really was a head – had meter long mandibles with sharp, jagged jaws. Formids looked like the nightmare you would have after watching a documentary about spiders and then getting high on spray paint fumes.

  On Quantrill’s left, Private Jordan fired a panicky burst at the Formid as it came over the boulder. Quantrill held his fire – the Bug wasn’t close enough to kill. He didn’t know if the Formids felt pain or not, but he did know no injury would stop them. Intimidation wouldn’t stop them. Fear wouldn’t stop them. A Formid was either dead or it was coming to kill you.

  “Hold your fire, Jordan,” the Lieutenant admonished. “Wait until you have a kill shot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jordan replied in a shaky voice. It was only his second action with the platoon and he was clearly shaken up. Formids took some getting used to.

  “Remember, hit a Bug hard…” Hardaway began.

  “…or don’t hit ‘em at all!” Quantrill finished.

  “Exactly,” the Lieutenant chuckled. “You’re not as stupid as you look, Q.” He slapped Quantrill on his helmet and moved down the line.

  Quantrill smiled to himself and drew a bead on the Bug heading up the hill. As he watched, two more came over the boulder after it.

  “Shouldn’t we shoot now?” Jordan suggested.

  “Count to five,” Quantrill told him. “Then shoot.”

  “Okay,” the new private agreed. In that instant, the Formid charged at their position. Its three meter long legs churned. Quantrill unleashed a burst from his AR316 into the creature’s abdomen between where the front two legs connected. He was firing armor piercing rounds and punctured the hard carapace easily. He adjusted his aim and triggered another burst – through a combination of luck and skill he hit almost the same exact spot. The Formid dropped to the dirt ten meters down the hill.

  “You said to count to five!” Jordan protested.

  “Well, the fucker ran faster than I expected,” Quantrill shot back. The two Bugs behind charged and three more were coming over the boulder. “We need support here!” Quantrill keyed the squad channel on his radio.

  He fired another burst at the closest of the charging Bugs. This time Jordan fired as well. The young private’s aim was off, unfortunately. He did manage to splinter one of the creature’s legs, but didn’t slow its attack – the thing had seven more after all. Quantrill scored a few hits on the abdomen, but only glancing blows. Finally the two Marines managed to bring down the Formid just two meters from their position. Close enough to see the individual lenses of the beast’s compound eyes.

  “Fuck that was close!” Jordan exclaimed. Quantrill couldn’t argue. Unfortunately, there was one more right behind. He dropped the empty magazine from his rifle and grabbed another clip of AP. He was about to fire another burst, when he heard boots crunch on the gravel to his left. He turned to see Private Jabara running to his side. Jabara was a towering man with deep, coppery skin and arms as big around as Quantrill’s legs.

  “Glad to see you!” Quantrill yelled. “What took you so long?”

  “You’re not the only one with problems!” the big man replied in his deep, rumbling voice. He swung his long gun toward the approaching Formids and took aim. Jabara carried the M-290 heavy machine gun – the SAW for short. Not only did it fire rounds with three times the mass of AR316 ammunition, it could also sustain twice the rate of fire. The SAW was hand-held destruction.

  When Jabara opened up with the SAW he brought down the lead Bug almost instantly. Quantrill and Jordan combined to take down another and Jabara knocked off two more. They had only had boots on the ground for ten minutes and Quantrill was already standing in front of a pile of dead Bugs the size of a small house. Unfortunately he was also out of armor piercing ammo.

  “We are moving into the ravine!” Corporal Vanlanding informed them over the squad channel. Quantrill brought up the topographic view on his helmet vid. The rocky ravine to the right of their position looked to be the only way across the valley that didn’t involve climbing over boulders the size of cars. Quantrill nodded and headed in that direction. Jabara and Jordan followed. The Lieutenant was apparently flanking the Bugs – a tactic that usually worked like a charm. Formid soldiers were vicious and hard to kill, but had about as much brains as a bag of hammers.

  Somewhere, out there in the darkness of the universe, there was an intelligence directing the Bugs. Something was sending them out into the galaxy to wreak havoc on human colonies. Something intelligent enough to figure out interstellar travel and how to sabotage subspace relays. Fleet command supposedly had thousands of analysts in a lab somewhere trying to find the brains behind the Formid invasion. Quantrill, for one, couldn’t wait for them to find it; he was eager for a chance to stop by and say “Hello.”

  They met up with Sergeant Prince directing traffic at the head of the ravine. Prince was born to be a Marine. His father and his father’s father had been jarheads before him. Some guys in the platoon said he’d slept with an AR316 in his crib. That might have been a joke, but one thing was certain – Prince was the boss, second only to Lieutenant Hardaway.

  “Double time it, gyrenes,” Prince ordered. He pointed down the ravine at two Marines making their way through the boulders. “Keep a visual on Shrike and Potter. LT wants us on the other side of the valley before the second wave hits.”

  “Roger that,” Quantrill acknowledged. He and the other two Marines took off into the valley at a quick trot. The Lieutenant would be at the point position, leading the platoon through the ravine. They would have to move quickly to keep up. Quantrill put the safety on his rifle and set out at a jog. Jordan was right behind.

  “Gaa-gh!” Jabara cried out when they were down at the bottom of the ravine. Quantrill looked back and saw the big man drop to the ground. He had fallen behind – lugging the big machine gun and 30 kilos of ammunition would slow anyone down – and was about twenty meters back. As he watched, Jabara was dragged across the dusty ravine floor and out of sight behind a large boulder.

  “Jabby!” Quantrill yelled. He ran past Jordan in an all-out sprint and vaulted onto the top of the boulder where he had last seen Jabara. The big Marine had been pulled into a wash-out. His leg was pinned in the mandibles of a dusky, gray Formid. The beast was tugging at Jabara, trying to maneuver itself and its prize backward through the narrow space between two huge rocks. The Bug barely fit, otherwise Jabara would have been long gone.

  “Gahh! You bastard!” Jabara screamed. He clawed at the hard rock wall but couldn’t get purchase. The Bug pulled him slowly and inexorably toward certain death.

  Quantrill leaped down into the crevice and thrust his rifle at the huge Bug. He only had standard ammo left, but he unloaded into the monster’s head at point blank range. He barely scratched the Formid’s hard exoskeleton, but did manage to stun the creature enough to get it to open its jaws. When the Bug let go of Jabara, Quantrill whirled around and made for the ravine. He grabbed Jabara by the collar of his ammo vest and tried to drag the big man up the washout.

  “Go! Go!” Jabara yelled. Quantrill was not a large person – he was the smallest in the platoon in fact
. He was short and skinny, with thin wiry muscles and a narrow frame. He nearly washed out of basic training because of it. Quantrill suspected a helpful drill sergeant had moved a few points from his marksmanship scores – where he excelled – into his physical strength and endurance scores – where he was pitiful – in order to let the scrawny recruit pass. On that day, however, Quantrill found strength enough to drag Jabara – who outweighed him by nearly sixty kilos – several feet across the rocky terrain in just a few seconds.

  It was a tremendous effort, but it wasn’t quite enough. The Formid was only stunned for a moment. Then it lunged for Jabara. The big man screamed as the Bug clamped its mandibles onto his wounded leg one more time. Quantrill tugged with all the strength he could muster, but couldn’t match the 400 kilo Formid in a tug-of-war.

  Quantrill looked around frantically. Just ahead, he saw Jabara’s machine gun on the ground where he dropped it when the Bug grabbed him. Quantrill let go of Jabara and dove for the gun. He rolled over and swung the long barrel toward the Formid. Quantrill had fired a SAW in training a few times. On the firing range he would carefully position the weapon and assume a proper firing stance in order to absorb the recoil from the massive M-290. That day, however, he just grabbed the gun and squeezed the trigger.

  Quantrill felt as though the recoil would break his wrist, but managed to hold on to the bucking SAW and keep firing. His first shots were low – zipping right under the belly of the monstrous Bug. Muzzle rise from the recoil brought the next shots right on target. At such short range, the high-velocity rounds tore through the carapace of the Formid like it was tissue paper. The creature was dead in seconds.

  “Corpsman!” Quantrill screamed. “I need a corpsman here!” He tossed the heavy machine gun aside and scrambled to his feet. Jabara was finally free of the Bug’s jaws, so Quantrill dragged the big man back toward the ravine. The crushed leg left a garish trail of blood on the dusty ground. The man needed medical attention immediately.