Smuggler's Bounty: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Space Hunter War Book 4), page 1
SMUGGLER’S BOUNTY
©2023 RICK PARTLOW/PACEY HOLDEN
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ALSO IN THE SERIES
PIRATE BOUNTY
CORPORATE BOUNTY
CULTIST BOUNTY
SMUGGLER’S BOUNTY
CONTENTS
ALSO IN THE SERIES
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Also by Rick Partlow
PROLOGUE
Rule number four, if you’re still trying to figure out how to make it in the galaxy: don’t stand still.
If you’re not moving, chances are you’re already dead and you just don’t know it yet.
Stagnation is a killer.
The lander was coming in hot, the wail of atmospheric thrusters and turbojets spilling down over the snow-capped mountains of Valius, reverberating through the crevasse and echoing over the crash site.
The Tahni were coming in hotter.
It was a race to the crash site, and we’d won.
Getting there and assessing the crash site stole something from that victory, however slight.
The devastated Space Fleet missile cutter’s BiPhase Carbide hull was now a twisted, molten hunk of scrap metal. Debris radiated from the impact site like a disemboweled animal, everything from the structural ribs and longerons, which had completely sheared from the frame—many of them protruding from the snow and capped with active flames—to computer systems with filaments, sensors, and connectors stubbornly clinging to fractured pieces of the control console. Most everything emitted the amber-hued glow of metal that had lost the fight to maintain its shape against the unbearable force of friction and a sudden, violent introduction to a massive amount of energy.
The calling card of a direct hit from the electron beamer of a Tahni anti-aircraft battery.
I removed my hand from the smart bandage I’d just applied to the unconscious Fleet crew chief’s exposed neck. In seconds, the analysis sprang up in my helmet HUD, a familiar sea of information that told me some second-degree burns and a few broken ribs were the worst of the damage. I resisted the urge to cross-check that assessment with another glance at the absolute carnage the crew chief had crawled out of.
I did a visual assessment, blood sweep, checked for a broken neck… it all came back clean. Heart rate was slower than I liked, but he could move.
“It’s your lucky day,” I told the unconscious man, reading his name off the HUD display, “Chief Petty Officer Dominguez. Didn’t think you could go your whole career without a concussion and a few broken ribs, did you?”
CPO Dominguez didn’t respond. He was unconscious, and he was probably going to stay that way until he got into an autodoc. The smart bandage was helpful, but at the end of the day, it was just a bandage.
Visual assessment complete, the smart bandage seeping painkillers into the patient’s system, I decided he stood a pretty good chance of making it. He had no life-threatening injuries, no internal bleeding. It was a miracle, like returning from a walk through an active minefield. Not that the Tahni would ever use weapons they didn’t actively pull the trigger on. Killing unarmed civilians wasn’t a problem for them, but booby traps… those were against their religion.
“Val, I’ve got him. Patient’s stable.”
“No sign of the pilot,” said Lieutenant Bolesky.
I knew her well enough to recognize the cadence of the words; it was as much a question as it was a statement of fact.
“Negative,” I replied. “Patient prepped and ready for evac.”
“Roger that, Commander. Chip’s bringing our ride in now.”
Punctuating her words, a momentary darkness fell over the whiteout surrounding the crash site. For a split second, something blocked the light of the primary star from reaching down to our vantage point. As soon as I noticed it, it was gone, as if it had never been.
The phenomenon repeated one more time.
A roaring thunder chased those passing shadows as the two ships punched holes in the sky. I felt the rumble in my chest, sensed the sonic waves rumbling across the mountains that surrounded us. Those were the escort ships; two missile cutters on alert status that had been scrambled to provide close air support for the rescue mission.
It was an Attack Command pilot and crew chief pair we were coming to save, after all.
The sonic assault of the flyby did wonders for morale. The hike up the hill, trading shots with Tahni infantry that raced us to the crash site had been an unexpected development, but not anything my team couldn’t handle.
Sergeant Higgins reported, “Commander, we’ve got ground forces approaching from the north. Five hundred meters.”
“If you’ve got the shots, take them. Everyone else, move to the extraction point. Corporal Almario, take point.”
“Roger that, Commander. I’m on point!” she responded with enthusiasm.
If it were anyone else, I might have given a verbal reprimand for screwing around on the radio frequency, but not her. She was a huge boost to morale, a young Filipina whose antics skirted the line of professionalism, but in such a way no one ever really called her out on it.
Not even me, and I was her CO.
War is hell, and in my experience, it’s the little things that help carry you through it.
A dumb joke. An embarrassing story about your life before the military. All the stupid things you plan on depleting your retirement account over once you take the uniform off for the last time. I had something lined up for me when I got out—a fiancée, and a cushy gig as a manager in my parents’ shipping business.
I was five years into this war, and from the looks of it, the Commonwealth was determined to bring it to a violent end for the Tahni. The brass pushed hard, which made the Marines more brazen, and that, in turn, made my job more complicated. Conducting combat search and rescue on unfamiliar worlds where the enemy had the home-field advantage and our intel was developed off-the-cuff wasn’t meant to be easy.
I draped CPO Dominguez’s unconscious form over my left shoulder. He was a big guy, but that didn’t stop me from carrying him and being able to operate my carbine if I needed to—I made it a point of contention with my team to not let a single day cycle go past on the carrier ship without two of those hours being spent in the gym. That dedication was paying off now.
Patient secured, weapon at the ready, I keyed the mic in my helmet. “Let’s move!”
Lieutenant Gorski brought the ship in fast and low. It streaked in over the horizon, going nap-of-the-earth at full throttle, soaring parallel to the mountain range. Hiking to the snowy peaks wasn’t an option—we needed to head back to the base of the icy terrain and cross a klick or two into the plains if we had a chance of getting out with our patient.
Sergeant Higgins fired a steady stream of rounds from his gauss rifle, each discharge cracking the air with a sound like the slap of skin on wet duracrete. He was hitting targets, the slugs hyper-accelerating right on through the Tahni Shock Trooper armor with little resistance.
Moving under fire, I foll
We were nearly there. Just another kilometer and Chip could bring the dropship in to our makeshift landing zone. Just another kilometer, and we’d be out of here.
The Tahni had other plans.
KE guns cracked, spewing tantalum darts that lanced into the snow-covered expanse between us and the landing zone. High-velocity needles whistled through the air before biting into the permafrost with a layered crunch, kicking up miniature mushroom clouds of snow.
We were just outside their effective range, but they had the height advantage on us.
Spiraling coils of smoke chased a sporadic cluster of rockets fired from entrenched positions in the landscape at our three o’ clock. The angry thump of combustion in the launch tubes was rapidly overtaken by the scream of high explosive rounds barreling down on us. The snow pack bloomed with fresh fire as the rockets impacted on our scattered positions with deadly precision.
The tremulous force caused me to lose track of the jackhammering beat of my heart.
I shouldn’t have been able to feel it that intensely. The fact that I did meant the rockets were hitting dangerously close. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. My graphene armor felt paper-thin, but I didn’t have time to entertain the fleeting thought. The time for thinking came and went before the rockets were fired. I’d used up all that time stabilizing the wounded crew chief I was carrying.
Heat wash splayed over me and the patient. CPO Dominguez, crew chief to the flight lead for the Attack Command—the ship that had just gotten blown out of the sky—was the sole survivor of a laudable attempt to destroy a Tahni outpost that ended in a bittersweet blaze of glory. The outpost was smoking rubble, but it had cost six missile cutters and eleven lives.
All that went into the box, stuffed down deep somewhere that I hoped I’d never dig up again. It was my job to save lives. What the survivor did with themselves after the fact wasn’t my concern. This operation hadn’t gone as planned. The chances of things getting easier between here and the LZ were about as good as the snow melting off the mountain tops in the distance.
Corporal Almario ran through a wall of fire, nearing the LZ.
Snow and permafrost rippled and bloomed, billowing clouds of slush and flame that walled off my approach to the extraction point. It happens that way when the enemy has the home field advantage—and we learned a long time ago to respect the lessons of history, because those are lessons written in blood, and if you don’t want them rewritten in your blood—or worse, the blood of the lives you’re responsible for—you make sure not to repeat the mistakes of those who came before you.
In austere and non-permissive environments where the enemy has an intimate knowledge of the landscape, weapons superiority is a must.
“Higgins, fall back to the LZ,” I said, keeping my voice level despite my increased rate of breath, “Harlowe, smoke their positions.”
Higgins acknowledged the transmission. He was too much of a professional to grumble about it, but I could hear the crisp tone in his response that indicated he wasn’t ready to give up firing on the enemy.
“Smoke out!” Corporal Harlowe called. The whoompf of his launcher made it through the frequency before he finished announcing his intention.
I continued running, transmitting to Chip, “Rescue One, this is Rescue Lead, requesting air support. Tahni Shock Troopers mountainside,” I glanced at the map and read off the coordinate pin, “marked with red smoke.”
To my surprise, it wasn’t Lieutenant Gorski who responded.
It was one of the Attack Command’s missile cutters.
“Rescue Lead, this is Delta One, I see smoke. We are in position to deliver payload.”
Sergeant Higgins jumped in, “Last man clear of the area!”
That was what I needed to hear. Area clear, I gave the missile cutters final clearance to drop their payload.
“Delta One, Rescue Lead, hit my smoke.”
They did. The two missile cutters streaked by at attack speed, turbofans howling, jets flaring. Almost too fast to follow, they were there and then they were gone. In their place, two plumes of firelight, like the pulsing of a flare star, shone through the monochromatic skyline.
Just as quickly, they descended with furious shrieks, boring into the mountainside.
Shock Trooper armor sublimated in the intense heat. Fleshy bits of Tahni emulsified and fragmented in a confetti cloud of biological material, riding the waves of an ear-splitting sonic boom.
Air strikes never ceased to disappoint. They were the modern-day equivalent of lightning bolts hurled from Mount Olympus by Zeus—an angry god lashing out with unbridled, raw power.
The smile in the pilot’s voice was evident when she said, “Rescue Lead, Delta One, targets serviced.”
The devastation began to settle. First with a low rumble, then with the groaning creak of stress-fractured glass.
“Effective fire, effective fire!” Corporal Harlowe reported. “Looks like we’ve started an avalanche too.”
We were nearly there. My lungs burned, my muscles strained, but I pushed until I was doing high-knees, kicking up snow powder a few hundred meters from the LZ.
I had just enough time to taste a sample of victory when it happened.
Sergeant Higgins called in, “One Tahni High Guard, he’s hitting the jets!”
Just one? I thought.
The High Guard was the Tahni’s armor division. They never worked with single units. The rest of his company might have been destroyed in the missile run conducted by the Attack Command—the run that led to our rescue mission—but clearly not all of the High Guard battle suits were destroyed.
So the question was: was this guy a lone survivor, or was he running point for a larger contingent of Tahni armor in the area?
Variables like that chafed me. The bulk of Fleet was already one foot out the door on their way to the next Tahni system. We were essentially the clean-up crew. It was way too late in the game to call in the Drop Troopers to deal with them. We weren’t staying here anyway. It was supposed to be a hit and run. I’d only gotten clearance for the rescue mission because it had been the wing commander’s boat that went down.
Chalk that one up to the politics of war, I guess.
The unforgiving terrain was one thing, but now we were spread out over a wide sprawl of snow and ice-covered plains with no cover, our only means of escape still airborne and banking into missile range of the enemy.
The Tahni High Guard battle suit hit the snow, centimeters-thick armor creaking as it articulated itself, positioning its shoulder-mounted electron beamer in our direction. Covered in carbon scoring and pockmarked with superficial scars from shrapnel damage, the behemoth was a pillar of darkness in the diffuse light of the overcast sky.
My heart leapt into my throat, pulse pounding painfully.
Corporal Almario and Lieutenant Bolesky were well within the effective firing range of the Tahni’s electron beamer. Their graphene plates were tough, but not tough enough. It was a commander’s worst nightmare—the threat of imminent enemy fire when your people were exposed with no cover, no concealment, and no recourse.
Sergeant Higgins was smart—the best designated marksman I’d worked with in the war so far—and he didn’t wait for me to clear his fire. He tagged the enemy position with a coordinate pin and fired.
Gauss rounds smacked into the High Guard’s center mass, one after another in rapid succession. Repeated pings of high-velocity slugs lanced into the armor plating, biting into it but failing to penetrate. The High Guard didn’t even shrug at the blows—it ignored them the way recruits at basic stay locked up at attention while mosquitos buzz and bite at their sweat-soaked skin.
