Defiant Foes: (Monster Girls in Space Book 4) by M. Tress

Author:M. Tress [Tress, M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M. Tress LLC
Published: 2024-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

This ‘Hegemony’ sailed in here and demanded we conscript and hand over private citizens to join some kind of elite military force in space. And Congress just allowed it.

It’s bullshit is what it is. I know what really happened. Those seat-warmers in charge of passing laws saw the opportunity to get ahead of the near-peer nations, not realizing that the same offers were going out to them.

They sold those men and women off like baubles while trapping those they could with predatory contracts. No wonder none of them want to come back. I can’t blame them.

I just have to hope that our new overlords know what they are doing and will actually step in to help us if one of these ‘system-level threats’ they mentioned shows up.

If some kind of interstellar predator, pirate fleet, or wacky space-cult shows up, I wouldn’t shock me if our best weapons just bounce off the damn things based on what I’ve seen.

~General Rawley Yates, on his opinions of the ‘Hegemony situation.’

After Desmond recorded several stills of the scratched outline, he and his squad scouted the room on the far side of the adjoining tunnel. They found several more scrapes in the stone, but none that looked anywhere near as intentional as the ones that they had found outside. He attributed several of the scrapes to the Rift monsters wandering around or fighting with each other. But anything out of the ordinary they were now studying intensely.

Despite their efforts, there was no evidence found inside the room that would point to some external actor having done something inside the Rift. Ever since finding that bit of trash in the first Rift they had run, Desmond had been on high alert almost constantly.

There had been other odd things he’d seen in Rifts before, but they’d always fit the theme of the Rift. In a Rift stylized after a mining complex, he’d seen drill holes in the walls that might have been attachment points for some bit of equipment. In Rifts that were space-stations, he’d seen signage in a language that he could recognize, if not read, as well as maps of the complex. But this whole place had the feel of ancient lava tubes in a planet passing between volcanic stages.

Basically, not somewhere one would see gang-symbols carved idly into a stone wall.

When they couldn’t find anything else in the alcove next to the mark, Desmond led the girls down into the pool to collect the lumps of Rift-made metal. The entire time, he kept Einherjar running on all of them.

Desmond could tell that the girls were also on edge. It wasn’t just because Chloe stuck even closer to him than she normally did, or because all four of his girls made it a point to touch him as they moved to reassure themselves he was there. It was also the sharpness to their movements and the alert way they watched their surroundings.

Digging through the corpses, Desmond made it a point to get into the

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