CHAPTER ONE

Aiden

T he only warning I got was a soft click, and then the hiss of rushing air. It was just enough time to brace myself, but not enough to do anything useful. Like duck, for example. Or turn my back on the fireball that came barrelling towards me, over the small row of boulders that separated me from the abandoned cargo module. As it was, distance was probably the only thing that saved my life. The blast hit me like a physical barrier, and it threw me two or three metres. I landed face down in a thick bed of soft gensaweed, proving that my luck wasn’t entirely bad today. The only sensible thing to do was keep my head down until the heat faded. But even as I waited, a heavy weight was settling in my gut. There was no way Hanes or Revier had survived that explosion.

Fuck.

Eventually, I could draw breath without my lungs locking up. I could hear the crackle of flames behind me and hastily checked that nothing immediately around me was on fire. Thankfully, the moisture in the thick vegetation meant it wouldn’t burn easily, and it seemed I was in the clear. I rolled over, peering over my shoulder…

“Oh, fuck…” There was an arm lying on the edge of the boulder. Purple. That one would have belonged to Hanes. A wave of grief and guilt hit me, and acid burned up my throat. Swallowing down the nausea, I clambered to my feet and edged my way over to the rocks, keeping my body low, lest there were more nasty surprises waiting for me.

Revier was little more than a charred corpse. Her yellow skin, with its black stripes, peeked out from beneath her helmet, but her face was unrecognisable. Hanes had fared even worse. What was left of him was scattered about the small clearing in front of the cargo module.

I turned away from the grisly sight. Deep breaths, I counselled myself. In… and out. In… and out. Stay calm, stay alert, stay aware of your surr oundings. Well, that was one thing to be said for military training, I supposed. All the routines and repetition were incredibly effective at making us keep our cool under fire.

I sank down with my back to the boulder, rifle clutched in my trembling hand, and did a quick scan of the surrounding foliage. Nothing moved. I opened the comm strapped to my left wrist and did an infrared sweep. Nothing.

Fine. I tapped a few buttons on the comm and opened the radio link. “Kent, are you there? It’s Hill. Over.”

There was a short pause. “Receiving you, Hill,” Kent replied. “What’s happening? Over?”

“Hanes and Revier are dead.” God, I sounded so calm saying that. “Someone rigged the cargo module. It blew when they tried to open it.” I had to pause to take another breath. Fuck this fucking mission. “I don’t know who rigged it, but we’re not alone out here. Over.”

“Geshtoch? Over,” Kent guessed, predictably. The Geshtoch had been fighting with the Alliance for years, squabbling over which of us got to colonise which bits of this planet, and any mission gone awry was usually quickly blamed on the Geshtoch.

“Doesn’t seem like their style,” I replied. “Too much guess work and forward planning to leave a trap like that. It’s got to be either the Culrads or the Eumadians, given the cargo that fell out of the sky, but it’s anyone’s guess which of them managed to land without being noticed. Over.”

“Are you injured? Over,” Kent asked belatedly, but to be fair, if I was injured, I would probably have led with that bit.

I stretched out my left leg in front of me and groaned. The skin on my face and arms felt hot and tight, but not so painful to be truly burned. “I’ve had worse. I’m a bit bruised, but I can make it to the rendezvous. Just wanted to let you know that you need to be watching your backs. Over.”

“Will do. Did you manage to see what’s in the container? Over.”

“I’m not touching that fucking thing,” I snapped at him. “All I know is it’s got a Culrad insignia on it. If they want the crate so damn bad, they can have it. Over.”

“Fair enough. Well, take care of yourself. See you soon. Over.”

“Hill out,” I replied, cutting off the channel. Well, fuck. If this day wasn’t just turning into a shit show. I made another quick check of the jungle surrounding me, then pulled off my backpack. I rummaged inside until I came up with a locator beacon and activated it, then hauled myself to my feet. Better to keep moving. If I stayed still for too long, my muscles would cool down and lock up, then I’d start feeling those bruises all the more keenly. I tossed the beacon over onto Revier’s body, ducking down behind the boulder before it landed. Too much of a risk that there were more traps lying around. Nothing exploded, so I stood up and gave the beacon one last glance to make sure it was in the right spot. That would let a retrieval team come out and collect the bodies – once the rest of us had finished our mission, that was. And depending on what our report said at the end of it.

I checked the map and compass on my comm. I needed to head north-west. Which was… I turned in a short half-circle. Fuck. It was directly across the maligned cargo module. With a sigh, I set off in a wide circle to get around the thing, keeping a close eye on the ground for any hints of tripwires or pressure pads, until I was far enough from the cargo module for it to no longer be a threat.

My main destination for the day was the battered half of a crashed Eumadian ship, some five or six kilometres north-west of here. According to Orbital Control, a Eumadian vessel had made an unauthorised jump through the Rendol wormhole about three days ago into our solar system, rapidly followed by an equally unauthorised Culradish cargo ship. The Culrads had promptly opened fire on the Eumadians, and the Eumadian ship had been catastrophically damaged. Bits of the ship and its cargo were now scattered throughout the jungle north of the Alliance city of Hon, and my team had been one of two sent out to scout the remains and see if anything in the wreckage was worth salvaging. The dense vegetation of the jungle made it extremely difficult to land transporters out here, and with the ongoing threat from the Geshtoch, unless there was something very valuable, no one was going to bother sending a retrieval crew out here.

But the ship itself was far from the only object to have made it all the way to the planet. There were a dozen or more cargo containers of various sizes littered about, and the one that had blown up was the fifth my team had investigated since we’d been dropped into the middle of the jungle some two and a half days ago. There was one more to go before I reached the main crash site, and after what had happened at the last one, I was less than enthusiastic about poking around inside it.

Two hours of walking later – which had got me a grand total of three kilometres, thanks to the impossibly dense jungle – the last container on my schedule came into view. It had landed in an area with few trees, though there was still plenty of ground-level vegetation. This one was a large crate – by far the largest my team had found so far. It was a roughly two metre wide cube, and there was a large parachute attached to the top that was still flapping in the breeze. That wasn’t a surprise. Airdropping cargo was a common practice, saving time and fuel by avoiding the need to land vessels, and when the inbuilt velocity sensors had picked up the fact that the container was falling, it would have automatically deployed the parachute. Hopefully that meant that any cargo inside would be intact.

Having learned from last time, I stopped a good distance from the container, taking a long look at the vegetation surrounding it. I walked in a wide circle, in order to pick up the trail of anyone else who’d come this way, and used the scanners on my comm to look for any stray heat or electrical signals. There was nothing.

I pulled up the radio channel again. “You there, Kent? Over.”

“Kent here,” he replied, after a wait that seemed longer than it actually was. “What’s happening? Over.”

“I’m about to open the last container. If you don’t hear from me in the next half an hour, you know where to find my body. Over.”

“For fuck’s sake, morbid much? You’re not going out this way, Hill. I’m not taking care of all your fucking paperwork. Over.”

“Fuck you,” I said, chuckling. Because hell, if I couldn’t laugh, I’d just go mad. “I’ll call you when I’m done. Hill out.”

I made my cautious way back to the front of the container, trying to get my heart to stop beating so fast. ‘Killed by a shipping container’ was not something I wanted listed on my service record.

There was a huge Eumadian insignia painted right over the front of the crate. Well, no surprises there. I inched closer, gun at the ready, placing every step with the utmost care. Once I was standing right in front of the hatch, I took a good, long look at the locking mechanism. There were no obvious signs of tampering. No scratch marks, no wires, no discolouration. I did another scan with my comm… and this time, it came up with a clear electrical signal. It was weak, but steady. Interesting.

There was a touch screen on the hatch, so I stood to the side and reached over to tap it, before hastily snatching my hand away. The screen lit up in Eumadian symbols, but nothing more sinister than that occurred. I lifted my comm so that it could read the screen, and then the comm projected a holographic page up above my wrist, neatly translating the information into Alliance Common.

Internal Temperature: 18°C

Internal oxygen concentration: 22%

Ventilation: Open

Atmospheric Re-entry Insulation: Intact

Pressure seals: Intact

Cargo: Activated

Condition report: Good

Open Container: Yes/ No?

I stared at the information, trying to make sense of it. A temperature controlled container? What could it possibly contain that needed temperature control? And oxygen? Could it be food? Medical supplies? Biological samples? Hm, no, not likely. The Eumadians were brutish, but they weren’t stupid. If there was anything dangerous in here, it would have had a biohazard warning on it. The battery symbol on the panel looked like it was a bit less than half full. So the container had maybe two days of power left. It would take us longer than that to get back to the base. So the choices were to open it now and risk contaminating whatever was inside, or leave it here and lose the cargo anyway when the power fizzed and the internal temperature started climbing. The nights on this part of Rendol 4 were cool, but sitting out in the sun all day, the dark-coloured container would cook whatever was inside it.

Fair enough. I hit the ‘yes’ button on the question asking if I wanted to open the container, then stepped back. A whirring noise signalled the electronic locks disengaging. The panel flashed to green, then went blank. Right, then. No time like the present. With one more wary look over the door seal, I grasped the release handle and twisted. The door swung open silently, revealing a dim and strangely empty interior. This wasn’t an empty crate, was it?

But no. I could just make out a tall figure standing motionless in the dim interior. My hand shot to my gun automatically, and I braced myself for an attack, even as my tired brain scrambled for a reason why a man would be standing alone inside a shipping container.

“Master,” a husky voice breathed.

And it was only then that my useless fucking brain finally remembered what the blue Eumadian insignia emblazoned on the outside of the crate meant.

“Oh, fuck,” I muttered, as my entire body sagged. This day just kept getting worse.