Judas Kiss by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

16

Gareth McKenzie should have been working. Despite the nowhere outpost where Rhianna Hale had assigned him, he hadn’t reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel at only thirty-five years old by being lazy. Laziness in others galled him. In himself, it brought disgust and self-loathing. Even when there was a break from training, a break from planning, he always had a tablet in his hand, mapping out schedules for the battalion. Or before that, the company, and before that, his first platoon right out of the Academy.

And before that, in the factory next to my sister, or in the house with my mother, always planning for the next project.

Maybe it was genetic. He couldn’t remember a time when his mother or father weren’t working. Yet orders were orders, and even though no one in Wholesale Slaughter could actually go on leave due to security concerns, everyone, even senior officers, were required to take two days off per month from everything. No training, no running, no organized exercise, not even planning.

Supposedly, it was a mental health thing, an attempt to let people decompress from the constant state of war they’d been under for months. Perhaps, if there’d been any hunting or fishing to be had around here, he might have found the time off more enjoyable, but the only animals around worth eating were domesticated and the fish were of the bony, scummy, shallow-water variety. Supposedly, there were bigger fish in the deeper waters of a nearby lake, but that required a multi-day boat trip and he didn’t have the time for that, even if he’d been willing to be out of contact with his command for so long. His company commanders had gone on a weekend rock climbing trip, which he’d considered but rejected because a team bonding exercise was in violation of the spirit of the order.

So instead, he sat alone in the base ready room in the middle of the day, drinking a locally-brewed beer, watching a documentary about the Reconstruction Wars that he’d seen at least a dozen times before, and stewing in his own juices. A nuclear detonation consumed a colony world in fire on the screen and McKenzie mimicked the narrator’s pretentiously grave tone as he spoke the script from memory.

“And here, in the shadow of the radioactive ruins of the Trafalgar colony, the Reconstruction Wars finally came to an end with the historical Treaty of Trafalgar…”

“I’m not sure if watching military history films doesn’t go against the whole ban on training.”

McKenzie scrambled out of the recliner and hopped to his feet, coming to attention as Logan Brannigan stepped through the door to the ready room.

“Relax, Gareth,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. “No duty today, remember?”

He motioned at his own pullover shirt and jeans, and it struck McKenzie that this was the first time he’d seen the man in civilian clothes. Without his uniform, and with the longish blond hair and the weathered tan from the suns of dozens of backwater colonies just like this, Logan looked more like a square-jawed farmer than the prospective ruler of all Sparta.

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