EDGE OF IMPERIUM BOOK 2

Cascade Effect is Out Now!

Check out the first chapter for Edge of Imperium’s Book 2: Cascade Effect

Chapter 1

The heavy lift shuttle shook and shuddered, the drives roaring and rattling First Sergeant Cul Draven’s teeth as he hung on, strapped into his acceleration couch and feeling every single one of the three hundred ninety kilograms he currently weighed under this thrust.

This operation was already going poorly. There shouldn’t have been this sort of turbulence—or maneuvering—on the way down to the surface of an airless moon.

Despite the deformation the Gs were forcing on his eyes, he fought to focus on the display splashed across his faceplate. The rest of the enlisted in the company—even the platoon sergeants—wouldn’t necessarily get this information, but the officers had been forced to concede that the first sergeant needed just as much situational awareness on the way down to Dina Chandra as they did.

Captain Breck was one of the more military competent officers Draven had ever dealt with, yet that came with a degree of arrogance that made even the late Captain Thill’s attitude pale by comparison. He had granted Draven access to the tactical feed, but he had been extremely grudging about it.

That feed was still populating, even as the sixteen heavy lift dropships descended toward the darkened face of Dina Chandra, the gold and blue bow of Dur Udyaanm’s limb looming above the craggy horizon. The dropships were blue bullet-shapes descending on plumes of fire, backed by the sleek shapes of the starships of the Grand Fleet, most of them front line classes with their spherical main hulls connected to lozenge-shaped thrust sections by long, slender booms.

That was the easy part. The angry red dots blossoming on what was supposed to be the clear side of the moon, even as the red, angular shapes of the Mytunese starships retreated toward the far side of the planet, were much more concerning.

Lines flickered from the surface into space, tracing railgun and laser fire, forcing the dropships to jink and maneuver, at a point on their trajectories where that was becoming more and more dangerous. One of them flashed, then began to drift to one side as it fell faster and faster toward the cratered surface of the moon. The drives must have taken a hit. Draven could only watch as the heavy dropship accelerated and hit, turning into a soundless explosion as it struck the surface and shattered, sending a cloud of debris and dust billowing into the vacuum in slow motion.

An entire company of the Grand Army of Zolah had just been wiped out.

“Thirty seconds!” The pilot in the cockpit above sounded like she was close to panic. Watching that crash would have shaken the most hardened combat veteran, and from what he’d seen so far, few of these pilots had seen much action. There had been plenty of brushfire wars along the periphery of the Grand Democracy’s sphere of influence, but few of those had involved a regimental drop under fire.

Draven was tensed in his hardsuit, waiting for the hit that would send Able Company to join Fox in a cascade of fragments and dust on the lunar surface. There was no way to brace for it. If it happened, he doubted he’d even be aware of it, at least not for long.

He almost flinched as the dropship hit, hard enough to make the hydraulic landing struts sag. It took a second to realize that they were down, and they hadn’t taken a catastrophic hit.

“Hard contact!” The pilot wasn’t getting any less excitable down on the ground, and Draven could hear the thrum of the capacitors running the point defense lasers in the dropship’s nose. The LZ was supposed to be at the bottom of a large crater, but the Mytunese must still have had ground forces within line of sight.

Either that, or the gunners were blowing rocks up out there, just to be on the safe side.

“Everyone out! I want a perimeter at least a hundred meters from the ship.” Draven was already getting unstrapped. They hadn’t descended in the crawlers—blowers were grounded in vacuum—since the Mytunese hadn’t been expected to have any forces outside a hundred kilometers of the main base, set into Kamakshi Crater and permanently facing the gold, green, and blue orb of Dur Udyaanm.

Intel screwed it up. Again.

Draven shouldn’t have been surprised, especially when he’d tried to bring it up and been shut down by Captain Breck. The space battle that had left the glowing debris of half a dozen Mytunese wrecks in decaying orbits over the planetoid, and the quick strikes on the surface by starship-mounted weapons and ZX-74 Hunter II starfighters should have driven any ground forces back to the crater.

Apparently, they hadn’t. The Mytunese had taken full advantage of the time they’d had on the moon’s surface, since their initial invasion of the planet had stalled and the Zolarian fleet had arrived.

The ramps lowered all too slowly, the last of the internal atmosphere hissing out into the void. They had descended pressurized, which was another thing they probably wouldn’t have done if they’d expected contact on the way down. Fortunately, as soon as the first hostile fire had been registered from the surface, Draven had ordered the company to pressurize their hardsuits, just in case.

That Captain Breck hadn’t intervened when he’d put that order out over the comms was a good sign, since it meant that the captain had been considering it as well, and Draven had beaten him to it by seconds. That didn’t mean he wasn’t in for a dressing down later, but after the career he’d already had, that was less concerning for him than it would have been several thousand hours earlier.

He was halfway to the ramp before half the men and women in the lower personnel compartment had even freed themselves from their harnesses. Adrenaline coursing through his veins nearly made him launch himself several meters into the sky as he went off the ramp, forgetting about the considerably lower gravity on the surface for a moment.

It was eerie, out there in the stark, sharp-edged silence of the airless moon. He was sure he was taking fire, and that the point defense guns on the heavy dropship were returning it, but there was no indication by sight or sound.

His visor started to populate a moment later, as his suit’s sensors, bolstered by the scanners aboard the heavy lift dropship, began to pick out Mytunese fighting positions. There were some along the rim, though one was obliterated a moment after it was highlighted, a laser turning it and the hardsuited Mytunese soldiers into a spray of superheated dust and fragments.

Several more of the defensive positions, however, were dug into the floor of the crater, below ground level and protected by berms of rock and dust. Right at the moment, where he’d landed and settled to a knee as he fought to keep his balance after leaping much too far out from the dropship, Draven could see one of those positions only about half a klick ahead, though none of the Mytunese were currently exposed.

“On me!” There was no time to organize more than that. He looked to right and left, seeing nearly a dozen hardsuited figures, two of them lugging the components of a combat laser, and he quickly tagged them each, sending a ping to their helmet visors to let them know he was talking to them. Their names floated above their heads in his own visor, but he was too absorbed in the task at hand to notice.

Charging forward with a long lope that he’d learned a long time ago for use in low gravity environments, a sort of lean and push motion that would propel him over wide swathes of ground without popping him too far above the surface, he checked that the contacts in his gauntlet were still working, connecting his suit with the MA-57 rifle’s optics, painting an aiming pip on his faceplate.

Half a klick wasn’t that far when he could cover twenty meters at a stride, effectively gliding over the surface, his rifle up and the buttstock tucked into the pocket built into his pauldron as he went. The movement was actually smoother than it would have been in normal human-comfortable planetary gravity, making aiming easier. So far, he’d covered half the distance without any of the Mytunese exposing themselves, even as the bright flashes of laser strikes blew puffs of molten dust and rock into the sky, fountains of glowing sparks rising far higher than they would have planetside, floating down slowly.

The gunners on the dropship were laying down covering fire, which was probably the reason the dozen or more Zolarian soldiers bounding across the open, dusty plain of the bottom of the crater hadn’t been fired upon already.

The Mytunese knew what was happening, though. Draven came down once more in a puff of dust, now only about a hundred meters from the berm, and he saw movement. A faint flash made him duck, though it took some doing to throw himself down in that gravity, and while he couldn’t see or hear the bullet, he wasn’t hit.

Zolarian hardsuits weren’t built for fighting in the prone. He had to lever himself onto his side and point his rifle with one hand. It would have been nightmarish in one G or higher, but on Dina Chandra, it was easier than aiming a pistol. The pip in his visor settled on the top of the berm, and he stitched a dozen rounds across it, kicking up puffs of dust made far larger than he was used to by the vacuum and low gravity.

The muzzle flashes disappeared, and then he was moving again, this time angling off to his right to avoid giving the enemy any chance of pinpointing him as soon as they stuck their heads up again. He twisted his head as far as his helmet seals would let him, to make sure he wasn’t about to run into a junior soldier’s fire as he bounded forward.

That was when he realized that with the exceptions of only two or three, the little impromptu assault element he was leading was just running after him, instead of laying down fire as they maneuvered.

“Get that combat laser up!” He pointed, even though there was effectively no cover on the blasted plain that had been scoured flat by a relatively recent meteorite impact. That was why they needed covering fire.

The two troopers froze for a moment, then looked down at the gear in their hands as if just realizing that Draven was talking to them. The one with the power pack set it down a moment later, just before a bullet smashed a scar across the side of his helmet, then a second shattered his faceplate, glittering shards floating away, catching starlight as they tumbled. He fell slowly, settling to the ground with a faint puff of dust.

Draven returned fire as he bounded toward the fallen trooper and the combat laser, forcing himself to notice the names and ranks of the troops around him. He cursed as he realized that he had one sergeant third class, the only NCO who had been nearby when he’d started this charge. “Sergeant Waithe! Take half and set up a base of fire here!” He realized that with so little experience, he needed to be in charge of the maneuver element. “The rest of you, with me!”

Barely taking a moment to make sure the other privates, from fourth to first class, were still with him, he bounded forward again, as Sergeant Waithe plunged to a knee next to the dead trooper, grabbing the laser gunner and forcing him to hand over the power cable, doubtless barking over the comms to get the tripod set up.

Draven drove himself forward, keeping his glide as low as he could, punching his MA-57 out toward the enemy and stitching another line of bullets across the top of the berm. They had to get in there and deal with the Mytunese in that position, or they were going to be well positioned to take the LZ under fire. And if they had the heavy stuff on the other side of that berm, they could wipe out half the landing force in seconds.

He reached the berm in the next bound, even as the combat laser raked it, blasting rock and dust into more molten gobbets that scattered sparks across the landscape. In vacuum, the molten rock would take a while to cool.

A gauntleted hand went to his belt, and he was gratified to find that he had remembered to pack a full combat load, including two shredder grenades. There would be no shockwave without an atmosphere, and the Mytunese were guaranteed to be wearing hardsuits, but the shrapnel could still do damage, and it might just force them to cover long enough to go over the berm without getting shot.

A push of a button armed the little device, and he lobbed it over the berm, careful to give it as little impetus as he could. In this low gravity, throwing it the way he’d practiced for thousands of hours would only fling it across the Mytunese position entirely, to explode harmlessly out on the flats.

He gave it a couple of seconds, as the laser and some of Waithe’s riflemen raked the berm again, a few of the impacts close enough that he began to wonder if some of the junior troopers didn’t have a grudge against their first sergeant. More likely they were just rattled, but worse things had happened in the Grand Army.

Draven had been around for a few of them.

There was no immediate feedback in the void to let him know that the grenade had exploded, but he counted down from three and then he went over the berm. He’d counted a little fast; the shredder detonated just as he topped the pile of rock and dust, and he felt impacts on his hardsuit, though fortunately his rifle seemed to be unscathed. Not that he could be sure until he’d leveled it at one of the Mytunese crouched at the base of the berm and pulled the trigger.

The rifle bucked in his hands, the only sensation of it firing, and the bullets hammered into the bulky, slightly angular hardsuit of the man crouched behind the berm. They splashed and spalled off the hardened plates, as the Mytunese soldier twisted and returned fire. Draven felt the impacts hammering at his own hardsuit, but then, as he landed and walked the rounds up the other man’s armor, he found a weak spot. A bullet tore through the flexible plating at the neck, and blood sprayed into space, droplets forming weird, dark bubbles of liquid as they slowly descended toward the dust.

The Mytunese soldier collapsed, throwing a gauntleted hand to his neck, as the other Zolarians poured over the berm, rifles spitting four-millimeter bullets at high rates of fire. Most of those rounds disintegrated against the Mytunese armor. Once again, the unpreparedness for a contested landing had struck. They should have had armor-piercing ammunition loaded.

Draven leveled his rifle at the man he’d shot. The Mytunese soldier still had one gauntlet to the wound in his neck, but he was bringing his own weapon back up again, still not out of the fight. So Draven shot him through the faceplate.

A puff of crystalized moisture and blood blasted out of the shattered plastene, and the man shuddered and went still.

More gunfire spat silently around him as he swapped his magazine for an AP mag, and turned toward the lower level of the pit carved out of the moon’s surface.