The Operative: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Drop Trooper: Recon Book 4) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

11

I lifted the plastic tote with a grunt of effort and stacked it on top of the others I’d already loaded onto the hand truck, then smacked dirt and dust off my hands and sucked in a deep breath. The damned things were packed with handmade, cold-cast bronze sculpture pieces, and each weighed probably seventy or eighty kilos. And of course, there was no machinery here to lift it because physical labor brought us closer to the purpose of the Ancients…

“Do you need a hand, Brother?”

I turned and saw the man I knew only as Anshar walking over from the other side of the workshop, his pale face and the front of his simple, white robe smeared with the same dirt and grime that stained mine.

“No, I have it, thanks,” I assured him, waving him away.

I’d only been here a few days, and I was already getting tired of the man who’d been assigned as my personal mentor. He was young, close to my age I thought, but his face was weathered and lined from working outside and lacking access to modern health care for the last few years that he’d been a Dedicant to the Church. I’d initially thought it was odd that someone so young would be put in charge of a fresh convert like me, but that was before I’d been brought inside the compound and got a sense of the raw number of converts they had here.

Aphrodite was the home of the first established Church of the Ancients commune, and it was also the biggest by a large margin, bigger than it had looked even from the aerial recordings we’d taken when we’d overflown it with the Nomad on the way to the Kennedy spaceport. The compound was a good three kilometers on a side and surrounded by security fencing that was a good deal more high-tech than any of the equipment that Dedicants like us were allowed to use. Apparently, you had to grow closer to the spirit of the Predecessors before you were considered ready to be trusted with anything as complicated as a powerlifter or a pallet jack.

I wiped sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my robe and grabbed the business end of the hand truck, leaning it back towards me and wincing with the load I was balancing precariously on its two large wheels. I rolled it out the open door of the shop and onto the sand-covered pathway between the wattle huts they used for making the handcrafts to sell in the local markets and via the net to collectors as far away as Earth. Kennedy was right on the edge of the northern desert, and this compound was a few kilometers south of Kennedy, and the white glow of Tau Ceti beating down reminded me that it was midsummer here. There were water buckets with dipping cups hanging from posts set in the edge of the walkway every fifty meters or so, but I’d still seen three or four newbies keel over since I’d arrived, from working too hard and forgetting to hydrate.

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