Invasion (Vegetable Wars Book 1) by Jonathan Brazee & Lawrence M. Schoen

Author:Jonathan Brazee & Lawrence M. Schoen [Brazee, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Semper Fi Press
Published: 2018-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

Part II: Reinforcements and Retreat

“Come on, Erin, I really need to talk to the Dickhead,” Colby said.

“You shouldn’t call the vice minister that, General. You know that. But I told you, he isn’t taking your call.”

“Did you ask him face-to-face? And what did he say?”

There was a pause, then, “I don’t want to repeat it.”

“Tell me, Erin.”

“It wasn’t nice, General.”

“I’m a big boy. Tell me.”

“Well, OK. He said he that you are a worthless piece of shit who should rot in hell.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. He knew that Vice Minister Asahi Salinas Greenstein hated him, but this went beyond the pale. This was a matter of security, not petty politics. Besides, the vice minister had won. He wasn’t the one exiled to a backwater agricultural planet at the edge of human space.

When Colby had uncovered the corruption at the highest levels, the siphoning of war supplies to personal accounts, he’d thought the vice minister would have led the pack to throw the criminals into prison. He hadn’t realized the depth of the corruption or how high it went. When he’d been given the choice between resigning or being court-martialed over trumped up charges, he’d wanted to fight. It wasn’t until the threat of levying charges against his loyal subordinates that he’d given in and taken the poison pill.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t afford to get the vice minister’s personal secretary upset with him as well.

“Erin, I’m going to record what I’ve observed here, all of it. If I’ve still got the connection, I’ll upload it to you. Please, please, get that to the Di. . . to the vice minister, or if not him, to General Tybor. This is important.”

“I’ll forward it up, General. But with the resumption of hostilities with the Borealis Pact, some agricultural pest isn’t going to be high on anyone’s priorities.”

Colby wanted to scream his frustration, but he damped that down.

“Just do what you can, Erin, OK? I’ve got to go now.”

He cut the connection, fuming. He was trying to report an invasion, because after examining what little was left of the marauding plants, he was convinced that they were not some lab experiment gone wrong but a full-scale alien attack.

He’d been lucky just to make it through to his old boss. Communications, both on Vasquez and off-planet, had been cut. With the full capabilities of his implant, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but his implant had been stripped of those when he’d left the service. It had only been through some convoluted routing and hacking that his implant had been able to route the call through the local wormhole’s comms bot and back to New Mars, and then only to Erin’s public line. His implant estimated that he had fewer than 400 seconds before the bot’s AI caught up to his implant’s machinations, realized there had been a hack, and closed off the pipeline. Colby’s call had taken 405 seconds before he cut it off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.