Dirty Deeds Read online

  Dirty Deeds

  Book Six of The Omega War

  by

  Mark Wandrey

  PUBLISHED BY: Seventh Seal Press

  Copyright © 2018 Mark Wandrey

  All Rights Reserved

  * * * * *

  Get the free prelude story “Gateway to Union”

  and discover other titles by Mark Wandrey at:

  http://worldmaker.us/

  * * * * *

  Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko

  Original Art by Ricky Ryan

  * * * * *

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Beware an old man in a profession where men usually die young!

  To America’s warriors who guard us night and day, I offer you a tale of steadfast determination with a healthy side dish of destruction.

  * * * * *

  Contents

  Prologue

  Sixty Years Later

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Interlude

  Part II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  About Mark Wandrey

  Titles by Mark Wandrey

  Connect with Mark Wandrey Online

  Excerpt from Book One of In Revolution Born:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Earth Song Cycle:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy:

  * * * * *

  Prologue

  2064

  “But Abe, why a merc?” His mother was in tears, begging him and trying to pull the duffel bag from his hands.

  “Because, Ma,” Abe said, “y’all can make a lot of money!”

  “Yous can make a lot of money here, son.” Tears fell from her cheek and landed on his arms, shaking his resolve. “Stay in school, them councils say yous have a high ess-aye-tee thing!”

  Abe suppressed a small smile at his ma not understanding an SAT score. She’d never finished junior high school. “I have an even higher VOWs score,” he said. He was rightfully proud of his VOWs score. Short for ‘Voluntary Off-World’ assessments, they ranged from the lowest score of 233 to the highest of 1167. He’d scored a 1012, the highest ever in Sheridan High School history. The Yellow Jackets football coach was as pissed as his mother was heartbroken; he was losing a star tackle in his senior year.

  “Please,” she begged, sobbing, “don’t go off and get ya’self killed.”

  “I won’t Ma; you’ll see.” As gently as he could, Abe pulled himself away. At the door, his baby brother and sister watched with huge eyes. Ruth was five, old enough to understand her brother was leaving. Joshua was two and didn’t understand.

  “You leavin’ your baby brother and sister too!” his mother wailed. The result of a failed second attempt at marriage, he didn’t hold it against her. Little Ruth shot daggers at him; Joshua just cried.

  Abe knelt next to Joshua and patted him on the head. “I’ll be back, big guy.”

  “Why go?” the little man asked.

  “I just gotta,” he said. The boy bawled and ran for the bedroom.

  Damn it, Abe thought. His watch beeped; he had to go. Abe Murdock did the hardest thing he had ever done, he got up and walked out without looking back. The maglev station in Sheridan wasn’t completed yet—cost overruns. He needed to take an Uber to Pine Bluff, twenty-five miles away. As he walked down the street to where an Uber would come into the rundown neighborhood, he caught himself looking back. His mother was standing in the doorway crying, but there was no sign of his siblings. He quickened his pace.

  * * *

  Sixty Years Later

  The missile detonated just behind the Phoenix’s cockpit. In a split second, the fuselage, drastically compromised, shattered. The engines ran wild, and the G forces crushed the combat-suited occupants, until the ship completely came apart. Ten CASPers were scattered into space, spinning away, their drivers unconscious from the extreme Gs.

  One suit was trapped in the forward section of the Phoenix. The missile detonation ravaged the superstructure, tearing the titanium and ceramic framework apart and pinning the forward-most occupant. First Sergeant Murdock was in that seat, also known as the Hot Seat. The blast wave should have killed him instantly, but in war sometimes things don’t work the way they should.

  Murdock came around slowly to the sound of alarms in his CASPer’s cockpit. The Combat Assault System – Personal was tough, and it was hard to completely knock it offline. Binnig Industries designed them that way. It was that edge which had allowed Humans to compete with alien mercs, who were almost always bigger, stronger, and harder to kill. Redundant systems made sure the pilot could survive anything, including having their dropship shot out from under them.

  “Shut the fuck up already,” he grumbled as his eyes tried to focus on the HUD, or heads up display. Blood floated around inside the cockpit area, spinning and drifting clouds of red. “Well, that ain’t good,” he said. The suit’s audio interface hadn’t responded, either. He used finger controls to silence the master alarm, which thankfully worked, and to call up the main consumables inventory. Oxygen down to 29%, and his suit integrity was compromised, but the emergency sealant had worked. Both main hybrid hydrogen fuel cells were offline, only one of the backups was working. He grunted. It was a damned good thing it was a Mk 7 CASPer; the Mk 8 only had a single backup.

  His head throbbed, and it felt like he had several broken limbs. Blood had soaked into his haptic suit throughout, making it feel like he was wrapped in wet pajamas. The bleeding must have stopped, or he’d be dead. Another series of finger commands showed the medical system was working. Bio sensors told him his blood pressure was weak, heart rate elevated, and neural response down. Blood loss and shock was the pronouncement. He triggered an internal dose of nanite medical treatment and ground his teeth together.

  I fucking hate this part, he thought, and a second later pain shot through him like he’d just injected himself with red-hot liquid metal. He roared inside the suit until the pain subsided. Afterward he felt
better. The microscopic machines repaired some damage, and the visceral dose of pain helped clear his senses.

  Murdock brought up the CASPer’s navigational system. Amazingly, one of the three gyros was still spinnin’ and grinnin’. While it wasn’t enough to give him a fix on his position, it was enough to tell him he was spinning around in freefall. He pulled a bloody hand free from the suit’s arm, found a compress bandage in a storage compartment, and used it to mop up most of the floating globs of blood. Getting blood and shit in your eyes was a pain.

  With his arm back in the suit, he started testing general function. His right leg was nonfunctional; the electricals were out. A dozen other warnings for actuators and the more powerful electro-muscular systems displayed on the suit’s status board. Not bad, overall. He checked his radio and found it dead. His emergency beacon was there, but you generally didn’t use it. Mercs didn’t treat their opposite numbers well in these sorts of situations. He brought his suit lights and cameras on to assess his surroundings.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said aloud. It looked like the damned dropship was smashed around him like a ham wrapped in tinfoil! “Well, this is unacceptable,” he said, and flexed all his limbs. The CASPer was made of sterner stuff than the dropship had been, and he tore himself free in seconds.

  Murdock checked his flight pack. The CASPer had been configured for a HALD insertion, High Altitude, Low Deploy. Perfect to slip in and catch an enemy merc unit by surprise. The reentry shield he’d worn around his suit was shattered and gone, which had possibly helped to cushion the impact. The flight pack still remained. The computer said his flight systems were fine, and he could alter his course by 600 meters per second of delta-V if necessary. Still, he didn’t want to let go of the remains of the dropship. He used the maneuvering jets to push clear of the wreck and get a look.

  The tumbling remnants of the nose of a Phoenix class dropship were easily discernable to him. It was a mangled mess. The cockpit looked mostly intact. Jane, he thought. The stars wheeled around him. Jane Wheeler. Murdock grabbed the fuselage, the metal crushing under his grasp, and he fired the suits thrusters. Hard.

  The CASPer weighed 500 kgs by itself, the remains of the Phoenix a little over 9 tons. Countering the wreck’s rotation cost him ninety-meters-per-second delta-V. As soon as it was steady, Murdock slid over to the cockpit and looked inside.

  The Phoenix was a two-seater, with a gunner who sat in the rear and slightly to the side of the pilot. A neat ten-centimeter hole was punched clean through where the gunner sat, and the inside of the cockpit was painted black with dried blood. “Jane,” he said as he grabbed the external release on the cockpit canopy and pulled. Explosive bolts fired and the cockpit was thrown away into the void.

  Jane Wheeler, commander of Cartwright’s Cavaliers’ dropship air wing, was still strapped in, her arms floating loosely away from her body. He moved in close and checked the readouts on her suit. There were no life signs. He sighed. Nobody in the Cavaliers knew they’d been lovers for months. He’d worked for her family’s outfit before joining the Cavaliers. Who would have thought a beautiful woman like her would go for a used-up merc like him? Yet she had, and they were some of the best months of his life.

  The darkness of the void spun around him, and he occasionally saw flashes of light out there. The space battle that had claimed his ship and his lover was still going on. He knew he was fucked. No radio, no hope. He just wished he knew what had happened to the rest of the Cavaliers, especially the commander. Jim Cartwright was just a fat kid, but a fat kid with the heart of a lion. Murdock dearly hoped the rest of his squad, including Commander Cartwright, had survived.

  He clipped his armor to a stanchion on the side of the cockpit, next to his…girlfriend. All he had to do was jerk the emergency release, and his canopy would blow clear, just like hers had. He knew death in vacuum wasn’t instantaneous. Still, it would be quick enough. Or he could float there and wait for his life support to crap out. His oxygen was down to 22%. He’d run out of air long before he ran out of power. He glanced at the space suit next to him.

  “Sorry, babe,” he said, knowing nobody would ever hear him. He opened a little access hatch on his suit and pulled out a special connector, then attached it to the life support pack on Jane Wheeler’s suit. Her display showed it was full. Another few hours of life was better than death. Out in space, weapons continued to flash.

  * * *

  “Big chunk of debris, boss.”

  “You said that last time,” Peeska said with a laugh. Afook was a decent sensor tech, but their sensors weren’t the best. Being a member of the reptilian elSha race meant you usually possessed good mechanical ability, and that was a marketable skill in the Galactic Union. But Peeska had something more—he had business savvy. He’d gotten a loan and bought a dilapidated free trader. He’d hired his cousin, Afook, who was as good a mechanic as Peeska was a businessman, and they’d fixed the ship up. Renamed K’roos, or Chance in their language, they went into the salvage business.

  “Send me the vector,” Peeska said. For five years they’d made pretty good money chasing battles and following up on crashed ships. The battle in the Chimsa system was big and had gone on for over a week. Peeska and Afook had been in a different system, working the remains of an asteroid collision with a transport, when word of the developing battle got to them. They jumped out of the system hours later.

  Chimsa was everything they lived for; there were dozens of wrecked ships. Of course, Chance wasn’t the only salvager there, and they’d arrived weeks after the battle was over. They’d found some junk and stashed it in the hold, but nothing super valuable yet. So he kept letting Afook run them around the star system, hoping for a prime find.

  He got the vector and maneuvered the ship. The reading was only a hundred kilometers off. When they were halfway there, the reading began to resolve itself. Flickering power indications. Power meant something worth selling. A good-sized chunk of a ship, maybe with avionics or weapons systems! The face of an elSha wasn’t really designed to smile; they expressed excitement by flicking their tongues out repeatedly. It was a leftover instinct when excitement was linked with possible danger, and they tasted the air for predators.

  “I think you found something good this time,” he told his partner and cousin.

  “Yesss,” Afook hissed in equal excitement.

  Soon they flipped over and used the torch to slow themselves as they approached. It was part of a wrecked dropship. The nose section, by the looks of it. Peeska didn’t recognize the design. There was also a suit of powered armor clinging to it. That must be worth something as well!

  An hour later, they’d used a pair of drones to push the wreck into their main cargo bay and repressurized it. Peeska and Afook hurriedly floated inside to investigate what they’d found. Amazingly, the suit’s hydrogen fuel cells still functioned. Afook studied the design curiously, consulting a slate computer, and found its origin.

  “Human,” he said.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Peeska said. “Merc race. Violent monkeys.”

  “Wonder if the suit’s worth anything?” Afook said, examining the evident battle damage.

  “Open it and let’s see what condition it’s in.” His cousin plugged a cable into it and started hacking the simple controls. In a minute, the suit beeped, a light flashed a warning, and the canopy opened up. “Excellent,” he said. Inside was one of the Humans. It was big and hairy. The smell was horrible.

  “Great,” Peeska said, “we’ll have to clean it out before we can sell it. Still, we’ll probably get a good price.” Then, to their surprise, the Human opened its eyes and spoke a series of grunts their translators rendered understandable.

  “You ain’t sellin my fucking CASPer.” Both elSha screamed and pushed away from the suit. The Human was very much alive, and as violent as they’d heard. It had produced a gun and was pointing it at them.

  “How are you alive?” Peeska demanded. “You’ve been floating for weeks!
”

  “Yeah, and it sucked,” Murdock said. “The grub ran out six days ago. Get me something to eat and drink before I start shooting. Then we’ll talk.”

  “What are we going to talk about?” Peeska asked, nervously eying the gun.

  “How you’re going to get me home, for one.” Keeping an eye on the alien, Murdock turned and popped the thigh compartment on his CASPer. Inside was a vacuum-proof container holding a dozen Bongani cigars. He smiled. “We’ll play the rest by ear.”

  * * * * *

  Part I

  Life After Death

  Chapter One

  The ship settled into its cradle with a groan and the hiss of hydraulic supports. Robots and technicians moved in to ensure the ship was properly secured. Once the gangway mated to the main airlock, other people moved in to open the ship’s cavernous cargo hold. Cranes rotated out of their recesses in the ship to begin unloading cargo.

  Murdock walked down the boarding ramp, swaying slightly under the gravity. After half a year without feeling a full gravity, it was a bit of a surprise. An annoying surprise. He reached the other end of the gangway where it led into the starport proper and stopped to catch his breath. A pair of Jeha skittered past on dozens of legs, their bodies only centimeters from the floor. “Fucking bugs,” he mumbled. A Human ship would have at least had some gym equipment. He’d been reduced to using rubber workout bands for static exercises in zero gravity, and his body felt like it.

  “You must be grateful to be on your home world,” Captain Ja’blu said. The Cochkala was a decent enough ship’s master. He was also so cheap he could squeeze a credit chit until the red diamond turned white.