Daikon (ESS Space Marines Book 2) Read online

  Daikon

  ESS Space Marines, Book 1

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Free Story

  Preview: Discovery

  Copyright © 2017 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  An obnoxiously loud buzz sounded and orange lights flashed.

  Andy pursed her lips as the snap of electricity told her the energy field had been dropped. A moment later, the old-fashioned metal-bar door slid back. She apprehensively looked at the field of orange-uniformed humanoid bodies just ahead of her as the door slid into the wall.

  “Proceed,” the stern voice from the protected box to her left said.

  She looked at him through the window and nodded once, not wasting any time as she moved away from the foyer and into the hallway.

  At twenty-six years old, Andrea “Andy” Dolan had been in buildings like this dozens of times since she was born, including the time she actually was born. This infirmary and the nursery attached to it filled her earliest memories, and she had no love for any of it.

  Members of more species than she could count lined the cells on either side of the corridor, and she heard a wild combination of languages coming at her, all of which she ignored. At the end of this hall was the visiting room. She was in no hurry to get there.

  But she was a marine, and a squad leader. She wasn’t going to shy away from this either.

  Andy reached the door and waited again for the containment field to drop and the door to open. Once it was open, she stepped into a sterile room with mirrored windows, a table, and two chairs.

  Harnari Penal Colony was a medium security facility that layered on its protections not because of the severity of the criminals inside, but simply because of the disparity of the races it housed. The only thing they had in common here was that they were humanoid—and criminals.

  Andy’s mother, however, was human. That was it. She just was a very badly behaved human, and maybe a kind of stupid one. Andy loved her mother, but she also was entirely honest about the woman’s foibles. Among other things.

  On the other side of the room, the door opened from the prison interior and she watched a guard escort her mother in.

  The woman was older by about twenty years, but mother and daughter shared many physical similarities. They had the same light brown skin, the same dark eyes, and the same dark hair. They were of a similar height and body type, although where Andy had the toned, strong body of a soldier, Leta Dolan’s body was more wiry, slightly underweight. Andy thought that this latest stint in prison wasn’t doing her mother any favors.

  Leta approached with an insolent swing to her body as she crossed the room and sat down. Everything about her demeanor said that she wasn’t happy to see her daughter, but that wasn’t shocking. She never was.

  Andy sat down across from her mother, noting the guard remaining at the door. The energy field snapped back up, but the barred-door remained open, teasing the occupants with a glimpse of an unreachable escape.

  “What do you want?” Leta asked without any preamble.

  Her daughter sighed. “Hello, daughter. Why, it’s been a while. Have you been busy? I’m glad that you’re not dead. It’s nice to see you,” she mocked before she could stop the words from coming out of her mouth, then she pinched her eyes shut.

  “So you want me to lie?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t know why I ever expect you to be any different,” Andy said, opening her eyes and blowing out a breath. “I thought it might be a nice change of pace to have you act like you’re actually my mother, but I realize that’s asking too much.”

  Leta didn’t reply. She pursed her lips and lifted one brow, waiting for Andy to go on. For a moment, the younger woman recognized an expression that she made and was caught off-guard, but she soldiered on.

  “I came because I need you to tell me about my father,” Andy went on, since nothing else was going to come of this.

  Her mother instantly shut down, shields slamming up, like they always did when Andy brought the topic up. It was obviously not the first time she had tried, and she was sure that it wouldn’t be the last. Maybe once she had considered letting it go, but she knew now—after what happened on Starbase Zenith—that she just couldn’t.

  “No,” Leta replied.

  “Mother,” Andy said, trying to keep exasperation out of her tone. “This isn’t just curiosity anymore. It’s important. I actually need to know about the other half of my genetic heritage.”

  Dark brows drawing down, Leta stared at her for a long moment. There was something in the older woman’s dark eyes that Andy couldn’t remember seeing before, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Why?” Leta finally asked.

  Andy blinked. She had expected more stonewalling, not a question. She couldn’t let herself be shocked for too long, however, because it wasn’t her training to be frozen in the middle of a battle. And this conversation was just that: a battle.

  “Starbase Zenith,” Andy said. She went on to describe the events on that station, at least what was need-to-know for this conversation. The sergeant told her mother about the species that controlled people’s minds. Everyone on the star base was lost, yet she wasn’t; she was able to resist their power, even as she stared down the alien. She was the only one who could, so she knew there was something different about her.

  She wanted to know what that was.

  After she finished her story, her mother was quiet for a long time. Andy didn’t want to disturb her thoughts, because she hoped that the silence would end in some answers, at long last. The silence went on so long, however, that Andy began to worry she’d fallen asleep, or died, or something.

  “I can’t,” Leta finally said quietly, shaking her head and looking at her hands where they were folded on the table. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  After all that waiting, Andy felt frustration rise in her throat like bile. “Why not?” she demanded before she could check herself. “Do you realize that this could be a matter of life or death for me? I need to know what’s going on in my own DNA.” She realized just how strange it sounded that modern medicine couldn’t do that, but so far, no tests had given her an answer, so she had to go to other roots.

  She needed the answers that only her mother could give.

  “I’m sorry, Andy,” Leta said, taking her daughter by surprise again by using her nickname, which she never did. “I really wish that I could tell you, but I can’t. When I say I can’t, I mean it.”

  The older woman didn’t bother giving Andy another chance. She stood up and walked right to the guard and the door. There, she paused and looked back over her shoulder, and Andy thought she saw true regret in those dark eyes for the first time...ever.

  It was only a moment, though, before she was gone and Andy was left no better off than she had been when she arrived.

  Chapter 1

  Two weeks later...

  “All right, people, sit down and shut up!”
<
br />   Major Carson walked into the room like a storm cloud, ready to strike everyone down with bolts of lightning. It would have surprised and concerned Andy more if this wasn’t pretty much the way he always walked into the briefing room. He was firm and no-nonsense, ready to knock heads and get things moving.

  The five other squad leaders for the 33rd sat up a little straighter and turned away from whatever casual conversations had been taking place. They all knew that the Star Chaser was en route to their next mission, and now they would find out what that mission was and what their part in it would be.

  For the past two weeks, the marines of the Star Chaser had been training hard, both on the squad level and the detachment level. After the events at Starbase Zenith, time had been needed to heal mentally, but now training was just as needed to work back to unit cohesion. Everyone had unraveled a little during that time on the station, even as short as it was, but it was time to get back to business.

  Meanwhile, Andy felt like it had taken those two weeks since coming back on board the ship to get her head back on straight after that...depressing visit to her mother. The rest of her team had known that something was going on with her, but after one initial foray and rebuff, no one asked again.

  “We are presently heading to the Daikon Colony,” Carson was saying. He tapped a button on the remote in his hand and an image of a distant star system appeared. With the press of another button, the screen zoomed in on the Daikon Colony. It wasn’t an ESS colony, that much Andy knew right away.

  “I presume it’s not for a further vacation,” the leader of beta squad—Atad—said with a small smirk. She was the new squad leader, promoted from within after the previous leader had been sent on medical leave following Zenith.

  “No, no more of that crap,” Carson replied. Andy recognized her commander’s dry sense of humor, but he was serious as ever. She thought she saw a tightness around his eyes that suggested this mission wasn’t going to be a happy one, or easy. Then again, they rarely had missions that were either. Easy, happy situations rarely called for marines.

  Before Carson continued, Marcus Krall, leader of delta squad, chimed in, “Isn’t daikon also a type of radish on Earth?”

  The major looked at him and blinked, very clearly, three times. “How the hell would I know? I didn’t name the bloody place; I just know that we’re going there. Now shut your yap and listen, before I put you on latrine detail.”

  No further comments were forthcoming.

  “First, we are going to talk about the Kriori,” Carson went on, changing the image on the screen to a Kriori male.

  He looked about the size of an average human male, with pale orange-red skin and several antennae rising out of the pale hair. The eyes were black with blue irises but no pupils.

  “The Kriori are not part of the inter-species alliance with the ESS, which is why you don’t see any of them serving in the Earth Space Service,” Carson went on, gesturing at the picture. “They take issue with our stands against the enslavement of sentient beings. We know that they routinely send out ships to find new bodies to traffic and we do what we can, but typically they manage to avoid detection. We only see the aftermath. We try to find and shut down their trafficking hubs and processing centers, but usually with very little luck.

  “Until now.”

  What he had said up until those last two words was something everyone already knew. The Kriori were practically galactic bogeyman tales. Be good or the Kriori will get you. They knew that people, entire ships, had been taken, but they could never catch them in the act or find where they had gone. Those people were usually never heard from again. Even when they were, they couldn’t provide any useful information.

  “In the past few months, ESS has tracked a drastic uptick in the number of raids.” Carson gestured for everyone to quiet their murmuring. “That is a big change from how they have operated for decades. We don’t know the reason for the increased activity, but it’s allowed us to gather more information than we ever have. They have even started targeting some of the more remote ESS stations and colonies.

  “They have now taken not just members of ESS alliance races but ESS ships and stations as well. This is going to be their downfall.”

  Andy had been listening intently and now spoke up for the first time. “One of the ESS members they took had a tracer, didn’t they?”

  Carson smiled and inclined his head toward her. “Very good, Sergeant,” he said. “You are correct about that. I’m sure the ESS wishes they could say that it was part of some skillfully executed plan, but...it was little more than dumb luck. That’s where we come in.

  “Thanks to our ability to not only trace but gain some basic information from the device, we know that they are on Daikon Colony. This colony is in neutral territory and is run by a corporation of alien business magnates. We have known it for a hub of business, but now we know there is something else going on. Further reconnaissance has discovered an entire underground segment to the compound there, which is where the Kriori are trafficking slaves. We’re going to shut them down and rescue our people. “

  Atad spoke up then. “Do we expect any issues from the corporations? Do they maintain any security, or anything else we’ll need to be aware of?”

  Carson shook his head. “While it’s not an ESS locale, they do trade with us and I’m sure the threat of sanctions should keep them from giving us too much trouble.”

  Every head in the room nodded thoughtfully, absorbing the task at hand. “So what’s the plan, sir?” Andy asked after a moment.

  Carson clicked again and a general map of the compound and surrounding terrain popped up on the screen. “The first thing you need to know is about the Kriori themselves. I am sure you noticed the antenna in the picture of that handsome fella from before. Well, those are part of the species’ ability to use their bodies... Well, long story short, they shoot lightning from their hands.”

  There was some intrigued murmuring, although Andy just listened.

  “They prefer to use their bio-electric abilities before weapons, but don’t let that fool you, they do have and use weapons.” He gestured at the map. “We’re going in hard and fast. We’ll take out any resistance before they know what hit them. Here’s what each squad will be doing...”

  Chapter 2

  Andy and the rest of gamma squad were taking a turn in the Star Chaser’s gym. Their own briefing about the upcoming mission had been notably more informal than the other, but it didn’t really need to be anything else.

  “Are we going to get capes? I feel like we should get capes,” Dan said as lie on the weight bench, Anallin spotting him to make sure the fairly old-fashioned device didn’t drop and squash him. “We’re gonna charge in and save the day for some poor enslaved souls, rescuing them from the evil grips of villains that actually shoot lightning from their hands. I mean, come on, this is legit superhero stuff. I think we should get a cape.”

  “One cape for everyone, Dan?” Roxanna quipped from the leg-press machine, her skin swirling with her concentration. “I know we get along pretty well, but I think that’s too much even for us.”

  Jade laughed from where she sat on the edge of a bench, drinking water and watching the rest of the squad. She was young, and seemed to not just absorb everything from those around her but actively tried to do so.

  “You know what I mean, smart-ass,” he returned without rancor, before grunting and bench pressing a weight that far exceeded Andy’s entire bodyweight. The image of her laying straight and him just lifting and lowering her amused her for a moment.

  “Thomas, this is just our job,” she pointed out, although without admonishment. “I’m fairly certain we will not get any special uniforms with capes for the occasion.”

  “Aha!” Dan said, putting the weight-bar back on its cradle and pointing at her like she had just made his argument for him. “You’re only fairly certain. So we might!”

  Andy chuckled and shook her head, lying on the bench beside him. H
e sat up and Anallin moved to spot her. Andy wouldn’t stop Dan when his humor was running away from them. It wasn’t something she’d been inclined to do before, because it was integral to who he was, but after what had happened to him, and them, on Zenith... Well, it had taken a long time for his humor to return. Now she was glad to hear it.

  They had all been effected, in some way, but her fellow humans—Dan and Jade—seemed to have taken it the hardest in the aftermath. Jade wouldn’t have left her quarters if she had been given a choice, but the Star Chaser’s counselor was very proactive.

  Andy was just glad she hadn’t lost any of her squad. Others weren’t so lucky.

  “Sergeant,” Jade chimed in, “do you think we’ll meet a lot of...resistance?”

  There was a hesitation in her voice that hadn’t been there a couple of months ago. Andy couldn’t help but notice it, but she didn’t call the girl out on it. She was going to give them all the time they needed. As much as possible, anyway.

  “I can’t answer that for sure, Martin,” she said, gripping the metal bar above her head. “I imagine we’ll run into some trouble, yes. We know there are guarded checkpoints and I’m certain that there will be guards once we’re inside. However, the Kriori don’t have any telepathic or empathic abilities that have ever been recorded. It’s just, you know, lightning coming out of their hands.”

  “Oh, is that all,” Roxanna chimed in again.

  “Are you just here for comic relief?” Andy teased with a grunt as she lifted the bar, bringing it down and up again slowly.