Home Front (Drop Trooper Book 5) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2020-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

15

I stared into Kayla Gruhl’s dead eyes, unable to look away. Somewhere in the sightless blue, I thought, were the mysteries of the universe, the answers to all my questions. Or maybe there was just peace and rest. I wondered if I should feel envious of her.

One of the black-armored Corporate Security Force troopers zipped the body bag over her face and the black plastic broke the spell, cutting loose my attention and allowing it to drift back to the woman’s husband. He was flex-cuffed into a chair in an ironic reflection of my own position only a few minutes before, but I hoped my reaction had been a bit more stoic. Brad Torrey was sobbing uncontrollably, his shoulders shaking, tears streaking his face.

The man had confronted death before, had seen his men die, seen civilians slaughtered just as I had, but the death of his wife had broken him. I couldn’t blame him for that, though my sympathy was constrained by the dull anger I felt at his betrayal. At their betrayal. The two canceled each other out and I sagged in my chair, sinking into numb exhaustion. Vicky’s hand on my shoulder roused me from the stupor, reminding me there were questions I hadn’t yet asked.

“Wade,” I said to our old comrade in arms, “not that you don’t have some hellacious timing, and it’s nice as shit to see you again, but how the hell did you wind up here? And how the hell did you wind up in the Corporate Security Force?”

Wade was grinning, as if the blood and the corpses scattered between the living room and the porch didn’t bother him, as if he was still used to wading ankle-deep through that sort of shit and it hadn’t been over a year since the end of the war. He stood with his feet precisely shoulder width apart, parade rest, though his arms were resting across the top of his Gauss rifle, the sling spreading the load across his tactical vest and over his shoulders. The rest of his team still had their helmets on, their visors down, their radio communications trapped inside the soundproof material, and they might as well have been robots for all I could tell.

“That message you sent,” he explained, “probably would have gotten ignored, because I’ll be honest with you, man, there ain’t too many people at the Corporate station who woulda paid attention to whining by the settlers here. But lucky for you, I was there, and I recognized your name.” He shrugged, as if it was just an everyday indicator of exactly how awesome he was. “I brought down a shuttle and took a pass over that farm you talked about, that Hellnick asshole. Couldn’t see anything, and it might have ended right there…except we couldn’t see anything. Not farm equipment, not animals, not workers, not nothin’. It was pretty clear they had a camo net stretched over everything. They must have eyes on the station and they saw when we launched a shuttle.

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