The Sword of Damocles: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Gordian Knot Book 3) by Jonathan Hernandez

Author:Jonathan Hernandez [Hernandez, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2021-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Christ,” Gill said and swayed back and forth in her seat in the back of the Nightwing shuttle, call sign Nighthawk. Half of the team was asleep; Zoli was snoring into the intercom with his TIU stuck on hot mic. Gill took off the fish bowl helmet of her Samson powered armor and fidgeted with something inside as if performing a last minute equipment check. “How the fuck did we end up here, mate? Is this a punishment or something? A Nightwing shuttle instead of the Baroness? Really? A retrieval mission? Fuck off.”

Recon was more the team’s speed, not reinforcement or support or whatever the fuck Smalls sent them on. Their destination was a Regime world called Sumrak. Task Fleet Kopesh left a garrison there since the formerly-occupied world lay in a strategic buffer zone. They were tasked by someone high up in the chain of command to assist the personnel and possibly retrieve valuable Intel. The mission objectives sounded muddy to Pappy even as he briefed the team, and Smalls seemed a little sketchy when he issued the orders.

Ordinarily, Pappy wouldn’t have minded a change of pace. A new world with a different setting and lower stakes could have been a welcome reprieve after all the planet-hopping. Something about the mission felt off though, and he suspected that the others sensed it too.

Nightwing seemed like an odd choice for transportation, too. The pilot that Smalls teamed them up with, a stocky guy named Santa from New Veracruz, seemed professional enough, but Pappy met maintenance drones with more personality.

Underneath them, Sumrak grew from a thin crescent to a plump, blue-green marble. Pappy used his TIU to tap into the shuttle’s external cams and marry it with the top-down grid view map that they received in the briefing. Their assignment, Base Spartacus, looked like a pitiful gray box with pencil-thin lines around it—the perimeter and trenches. Smaller gray squares dotted the landscape too; gun emplacements and watchtowers. Inside the perimeter were a handful of mech repair stations without mechs and several VSTOL pads with no VSTOLs. A command module sat in the center with a comm tower rising out of it. Smalls did say that the base would be small.

“Sumrak must not be high up on anyone’s list of priorities,” Gill cracked and grinned as her eyes darted back and forth. She was using her retinal HUD, too.

Pappy’s TIU suddenly went fritz for a moment, displaying flashing numbers and letters: 2E3O7V2L3X7L.

He grunted and blinked a few times to clear the alphanumerics and made a mental note to have the techs check his suit when he got back to Determination.

He fished his retractable Regime spear out of his ammo harness. It was a light corrugated handle with ornate markings and pictographs. After his latest encounters with the warriors, he decided to bring one of their melee weapons along just in case. Truth always promised to train him how to use it, but they never got the chance.

He idly squeezed the shaft

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