Infiltration: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Drop Trooper: Pirate Wars Book 2) by Rick Partlow & Ralph Kern

Author:Rick Partlow & Ralph Kern [Partlow, Rick & Kern, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

My muscles ached from delayed onset muscle soreness from training with the Marines in Scorpius’s well-equipped gym. On our last flight out, Covington had PT’d the shit out of me and turned me into a machine. This time, he’d really built on that foundation. I had to say, I was in better shape than I had been since I was at boot. And back then, I’d had the advantage of youth. My abs were popping. My chest felt thicker. I’d developed boulder shoulders. My legs were solid. My cardio was good.

And I had one hell of a tight booty.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that had the potential to make time with the Diaspora more or less... interesting, considering Petrov’s threats last time. If he wanted to use that pear contraption, he’d need a goddamned crowbar to open me up.

We’d arrived.

I entered the CIC. It had that calm, measured bustle of a well-oiled team communicating between itself sharply. The Carmalita was docked on top of the Scorpius. A position which was uncomfortably familiar considering that was where she’d been on the Vollmer when we’d gone into Coracaesium.

Grainger lorded over the space from his command podium seat. Looking, as ever, like the patrician British Royal Navy captain of yesteryear. His cultured tones snapping out orders with brevity and observations with dry humor.

“Ah, Ranger. About time.” Grainger gestured magnanimously to the bulkhead I was moving around. Webb was already buckling in, in anticipation of zero gee when we dropped from Transition. “Pull up a pew.”

I flipped down a padded seat from its stowed position, and threaded my arms through the harness.

“Ten seconds.”

The hum of the Teller-Fox drive rose to a crescendo as we breached the integument between the abyssal darkness of Transition, and the star-speckled night of real-space. With a snap, the hum gave way to silence. A moment late, the rumble of fusion drive rose as the Scorpius throttled up.

The tactical display rapidly populated. Scholz star hung like a purple bruised fruit. The shoal of transponders of the Russian Diaspora blinked into existence as the limitations of light speed caught up with us.

They’d raised their orbit. Clearly they were done with the dredging they were doing the last time we’d been here. The big ships of the Diaspora had extended long umbilical connections between themselves, no doubt transferring the fruits of their efforts between themselves to best effect.

One ship, though, lay noticeably above the flotilla. A stream of shuttles moving back and forth. The ID pinged up. The Ceres Gastorum, a tanker.

She was ugly, in the way that only those old pre-Transition ship could be. The Ceres was the most basic of basic craft, a drive and hab section barnacled with decades of upgrades at the rear, the ability to mount stowage modules, whether freight, gas, liquid, or colony transports on the skeletal truss reaching out ahead. Back in the day, she would have been one of the bigger ships plying the trade routes of Sol. Her name suggested she had been on the busy Ceres run, moving ice and water among the disparate asteroid colonies.

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