Dueling Planets 02: Supremacy's Bounty by T. Eric Bakutis

Author:T. Eric Bakutis
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Space Opera
ISBN: 9780999693520
Publisher: SF Productions
Published: 2019-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE RIDE TO ELENA RYKE’S MANSION, out in the Perennial Desert that sprawled south of Star’s Landing, took them down a lonely stretch of road Mackenzie couldn’t see. The armored personnel carrier CSD had pulled out of surplus had no windows in the back, since that would defeat the point of being an armored personnel carrier. Mackenzie knew there wasn’t much to look at save sand and the occasional piece of abandoned mining equipment, so she didn’t mind.

The APC’s interior had eight worn jumpseats, discolored walls of gray metal, and a torn up rubber floor that looked like it belonged in a shitty bar. On the upside, its large troop transport area was big enough for Mackenzie inside a crouching Faux, Clayton in a worn smuggler’s outfit, and Arno Summer, drooling blissfully as his head lolled against the backrest. Summer was strapped into one jumpseat with Clayton sitting across from him, swiping through augmented reality windows Mackenzie couldn’t see.

Clayton had dressed for his cover, taking on the smuggler identity he’d suggested earlier, and he looked convincingly smugglerish. He wore thick cargo pants, a brown weatherproof shirt, and a light armor vest with enough pockets to tuck away every type of ammunition on the planet. If Clayton did one thing well, it was blend.

He looked up. “Got the live feed. Want it?”

“Sure.” Watching drone feeds beat staring at a drooling Arno Summer, and it would be good to see if anything had changed in the year since she last visited Elena Ryke.

Two windows opened on Faux’s heads up display, both from Guardian drones stealthed in the airspace above Ryke’s mansion. The first followed the progress of their blocky six-wheeled APC as it rumbled along an abandoned two-lane road through scrubland and desert. The second showed an aerial view of Ryke’s complex, zooming slowly in and out.

A field of solar collectors a block long occupied one side of the house and grounds, drinking in energy from Ceto's blistering thirteen hours of sunlight. The drone’s zoom swept across the field to armored walls topped with electrified barbed wire and visible gun turrets. Those turrets fired dumb bullets, but even dumb bullets of that caliber could cut through Vindicators.

Inside the wall, an open plaza of flat biocrete surrounded the actual house, leaving zero cover. Though the plaza appeared empty, Jinx claimed Elena Ryke had all sorts of hidden defenses built into it. Pop up turrets? Shredder grenades? Mines?

As for the house itself, Ryke's “mansion” was more like a three story box without windows. It had only one door, visibly armored. The house had no nods to beauty, just brutal strength on display. Its flat roof held four soldiers in black Vindicator armor who even now watched the biocrete plaza and the desert beyond. They were probably sweating their asses off.

“Is everything like you remember?” Clayton asked.

“All that and a minefield.” Mackenzie eyeballed the feeds aside but kept them in the corner of her gaze. “You’re sure they can’t detect your drones?”

“Not Guardians,” Clayton said. “They’re Supremtech shrouded by mimetic camouflage.

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