Life of a Freelancer Read online

  Life of a Freelancer

  By G.S. D’Moore

  Copyright © 2022 by G.S. D’Moore

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission, contact [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-7377036-1-7

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  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

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Yesterday was a bad day, in a terrible month, in the worst year of my fucking life. Shit rolls downhill, and I was the poor bastard standing at the bottom like a masochistic Oliver Twist.

  “Please, sir, may I have some more.”

  I’d laugh, but it wasn’t funny. It started out funny; just a routine mission among a lifetime of routine missions. It was supposed to be a hop, skip, and a jump away. Boys at some megacorp lost contact with one of their mines. That usually meant one of two things: the radio was busted because they didn’t spend the credits to do annual maintenance, or the miners rose up in rebellion and killed every suit they could find. It was fifty-fifty what we’d find.

  The galaxy was a no-holds-bar cage match, and so far, humans were the heavy weight champions. Being assholes came easy to us. We’d kill anyone who threatened what was ours, even our own. Either way, I was supposed to be back by the weekend.

  As usual, intel was so fucking off they might as well have been in the wrong galactic quadrant; but there was shit-all I could do about it. I was just another grunt, another sergeant tasked with completing the mission. This one just happened to fuck me and my squad in the ass with the long dick of hindsight. People thought they could Monday morning quarterback this shit. Even worse, they thought they could do it when they’d never been balls deep in the suck. Pretentious assholes.

  I won’t bore you with the details, but . . . well . . . fuck it. I’ve got nothing better to do. Here’s what happened.

  ***

  “This was supposed to be a cake walk,” I wheezed. I felt like a geriatric with late-stage COPD and a side of gout.

  My whole body hurt. Every breath stung like someone was sticking a knife between my ribs, and every step felt like I was walking on needles. The two broken ribs, and dangerous level of blood loss might have something to do with that. Armor or no armor, I was still made of flesh and bone.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I looked down at the holes in the gray, matte metal covering my body.

  “Quit your bitching and keep moving,” I yelled at myself, and forced my body to take another step forward, and another, and another. It didn’t matter if I was half-dead and struggling to walk a hundred feet. I was a marine, and we got shit done.

  More exactly, I was Sergeant Paul Mitchell of the Confederation of . . . well, no one really cared about the long, glorious name some uppity politician attached to our single-system polity a half-millennia ago. In my experience, when people came face-to-face with me it was either, “hey asshole” or “die, fucker, die”; there wasn’t much in between. If the enemy was feeling especially charitable, they called us Feddies.

  Also, no one called me Paul, Pauly, Big P, or any other stupid nicknames marines tried to bestow on each other in the Corps. To my squad, I was Sarge, or Mitchell. Anyone who thought they could break the rules learned the hard way not to fuck with me. I’d been doing this for twelve years, and I knew a thing or two.

  If you’re thinking twelve years is a long time to make sergeant, you’re right. I’d actually made sergeant twice; and, at my personal best, I was a staff sergeant for six months before getting busted back down to corporal for the third time. My file had words like “in desperate need of anger management”, “severe disregard for authority”, and “moderate sociopathic tendencies” written all over it. If this was anywhere other than the Corps, I’d have been locked up a long time ago.

  The Corps wasn’t some megacorp, public sector company, or influential trade union. Hell, it wasn’t even the army. Don’t get me wrong, soldier boys are okay; all inter-service rivalries aside. We just did different things. The army was stationed on planets and trained to repel invasions. Whether they were other humans or aliens, every planet needed a strong standing army to avoid getting steamrolled by their galactic neighbors.

  Unavoidably, that led to good living conditions, good chow, and nice big planets to run around on during the weekend. That was the upside for the doughboys; a nickname we used for our softer brothers-in-arms. The downside was that when shit hit the fan, it hit it hard, and splattered all over everything so it smelled like rotting ass. I’m talking hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of soldiers engaging in planet-wide operations to avoid the entire world getting ground under the boot of some alien warlord. Like I said, the galaxy was a kill-or-be-killed neighborhood.

  Soldiers had to be prepared for those paradigm-altering engagements, where some stupid staff officer, who’d never seen combat, could have a “brilliant” idea. Those operations tended to have one of two effects: a dramatic win, or getting everyone involved killed. Real combat isn’t a fucking movie. Ninety percent of the time you’re going to end up with the latter. As a marine, our purpose and missions were different, but no less dangerous.

  While the army played garrison on worlds, played butt buddy with civilians, and maybe engaged in some police actions if things got particularly rowdy; the marines were spaceborne infantry. We served on warships, and didn’t usually operate in a group larger than a three-thousand-man marine expeditionary force; but even that was pushing it. If a MEF got called out, some serious shit was going down somewhere.

  That wasn’t what was going on with my current clusterfuck, but we’ll get to that in a second. Normally, marines go out in squads, platoons, or companies to enforce the Confederation’s sovereignty among the stars, discourage piracy, do commerce or immigration inspections along the space lanes, and check out distress calls.

  The Corps might have busted my ass down the ranks more than once, cut my pay, and even thrown me in the brig a time, or five; but they knew I was good at my job. That was the only reason I was still around. Non-commissioned officers were the backbones of every military force in human history, and as long as you didn’t give me too much responsibility, leave me twiddling my thumbs, or give me some dumbass superior, I was good. Marines in general were the black dog, bastard step children of society. We came with a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency label, and begged to be let off the leash. Just don’t blame us when we bit the mailman.

  All of that meant I was very good at making people dead. I’d been trained to kill and had perfected my craft over the last twelve years; through three skirmishes, one small scale war, and an endless stream of calls like the one I was currently on. Today just might be the day that finally punched my ticket.

  I was leading a force of five enlisted, and one baby-faced butterbar from battalion staff. Why the officer was along for the ride, I had no fucking clue. I had a platoon leader, a good one. He was on emergency leave, but that was fine. I could babysit the squad for a few days. I didn’t need some brown-nosing, paper-pusher ridi
ng shotgun on my op; especially when it was probably nothing more than faulty comms.

  I’d been working and training the enlisted grunts for the last month, and they should get the job done without shooting themselves in the foot. I couldn’t vouch for the LT. I didn’t know the guy, had never read his service jacket, and didn’t know he was coming until he hopped onto the shuttle that would transfer us to the small cutter that was our ride to the target.

  Normally between a new officer and NCO, there would be some sort of interfacing; a handshake, a quiet conversation about expectations, something for the leaders to get on the same page. The LT barely spoke to me on the way out. We’ll call that red flag number one. Even accomplishing that cold shoulder was tough, since the cutter was basically a cramped box strapped to a pair of rockets, with a cockpit and sensor node. Like most things the marines had in their arsenal, it wasn’t built for comfort. We were all about utility, baby.

  The squad was strapped into acceleration seats in a twenty-by-twenty space packed to the ceiling with armor, weapons, bullets, and beans. Actually, I wish we had beans. I’d take bean farts over getting constipated by meals-ready-to-eat any day of the week.

  The only private space onboard was the head, and I’m not talking about the good kind a woman can provide; although, I’m sure people were punishing the purple headed pirate during the trip. It was a bare-bones shitter, and legend had it, they recycled a marine’s shit into the soy rations they made us eat on ops like this. All organic matter could be fed into a fabrication unit and reconstituted into something new. It was truly marvelous technology. I just really didn’t want to know what happened to the cum that got mixed in there.

  The first time the LT spoke to us was when he laid out the operations order; about six hours from our target. The Corps had a hard-on for orders of all kind: warning, operations, fragmentary, service and support, movement; you name it, and the Corps had one.

  The LT would have made his instructors at the military academy proud. He did it by the book, hit all five paragraphs, and then some. For me, that was red flag number two.

  While any by-the-book brass would have cum in their panties over the presentation, it told me one critical thing about the LT. The guy didn’t know shit. It was one thing to spout out an order, and something else entirely to execute it. The officer knew his basic battle drills, but there were no contingencies built into place if things went sideways. It was clear the kid, and he was a kid at least ten years younger than me, had never been in an actual firefight. If he had, he wouldn’t sound so confident that we were going to walk into a communication network issue where the mining station didn’t run the latest software update. If the LT really knew anything about the business of the marines, he’d hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

  So, that left me to do everything else; and at the same time, appear to back him up in order to not offend his delicate command sensibilities. I’d made it back to sergeant a year ago, and wasn’t looking to lose my shit on a milk run like this. I liked the extra pay, the NCO status, and the ability to move out of the barracks. It seriously fucked with my love life when I had to sneak a woman past the guard post every time I wanted to get my dick wet.

  It was shit like that which got me busted more than once before. So, I took a deep breath, soldiered on, and let the officer think he was actually in charge.

  My plan was simple. Step one: Recon. The cutter came complete with a sensor node on the nose of the spacecraft. We’d point the nose at the target and run a few scans. At such close range, there wasn’t much chance anything could hide from us. That meant no surprises. No surprises were good.

  The target itself was an asteroid; supposedly rich in the rare metals, alloys, and whatever else megacorps needed to make the economy chug along like Thomas the Tank Engine. Based on the blueprints I’d downloaded before we left the base; it was a pretty standard design.

  Asteroid mining had been pretty much unchanged for a century. Our target was a big boy, a few miles in length, and a real fatty. There was a lot of money to be made in it. The first thing a megacorp did was drill a hole and start to hollow the thing out. Once there was enough room they’d move inside, because it always cost more to do zero-G space ops. They’d attach an airlock with a dock for ore ships to anchor to, and then set up a prefab town inside. These places were straight out of Old Earth’s wild west. A single street lined with convenience stores, apartment buildings, bars, and even whore houses. It was a regular rodeo out in the galactic boondocks.

  One end of town and the main thoroughfare butted right up against the airlock, while the opposite end led down into the mines. Then, they’d encase the whole town in a polymer-plastic bubble. The number one worry in space was air, so to keep the miners safe, and avoid shutting down operations, thus costing valuable credits, the megacorps put up the protective bubble to keep everyone nice, cozy, and profitable. Mining in these big asteroids could go on for years, so it also helped to be able to cycle workers in and out. Turnover and injuries were high. Asteroid mining was a rough job. I don’t think mining in any time had ever been easy.

  The blueprints of the target were standard, but the location worried me. The asteroid was in Confederation space. We were a single-system polity with five inhabited planets, and a belt splitting them down the middle. We might have homefield advantage, but space was fucking big; even in a single system. Due to the current planetary rotations, this asteroid was out in east jahunga, where Jesus got turned around and had to ask for directions.

  It was three days from the nearest fleet presence, which meant if it was a miner rebellion, like the LT hadn’t even considered, it would be the seven of us up against hundreds of pissed off rock breakers. Our armor was good, but enough people could still beat us to death in our metal shells. Getting stoned to death was old school, but people would do just about anything when confronted with a threat. That went both ways. I wasn’t looking forward to a Uniform Code of Military Justice review for wasting a few dozen miners that tried to kill me. The bad PR of having bodies stacked in the street of a mining town would have me bumped back down to private before you could say court martial.

  I voiced this to the LT, in private, away from the enlisted. and he relayed that my concerns were noted. That was officer talk for “fuck off”. That was red flag number three. Officers, especially LTs who barely had any hair on their balls, were supposed to listen to their NCOs.

  It didn’t help my growing suspicions that the recon didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. The rock was too thick to get electromagnetic readings from inside, but there weren’t any anti-ship mines or weapons systems waiting to open up on us. Even a mining laser could do some serious damage to the under-armored cutter.

  There was an ore hauler docked where it was supposed to be. It was only a hundred-thousand-ton model, so it wasn’t one of the true monstrosities sailing the shipping lanes. Still, it dwarfed our little cutter a hundred times over, and I wanted to check it out. I didn’t want to have an unknown at my back that could shoot me in the ass. Their skipper had all the proper codes, but I was able to talk the LT into going over for an inspection. It got the kid out of the way while I did some real work.

  That led to step two of my ops plan: secure the airlock. There was only one exit and entrance to this place, and holding it would determine the course of a battle. Sun Tzu said some crap about an army fighting harder if it had no escape. While I had no doubt that was true, only a retard didn’t give themselves a way out. Plus, Sun Tzu had never been in space; so, fuck you, Sun Tzu.

  I would take and hold that airlock, or die trying. But again, there was no resistance. It was just empty. That made my balls tingle, and my balls never lied. Something wasn’t right here. We’ll call that red flag number four. There should have been company suits here to greet us, or complain about us barging in on them and costing them money. Hell, I’d even take miners with torches and pitchforks who yelled at us to get the fuck out; but nothing . . . I didn’t like it. br />
  I told my squad to keep their eyes and ears open. Aside from me, they were as green as the jolly-green giant. They’d never seen any combat outside the simulators. That was the entire reason I’d been assigned to them. The Corps liked to put some of their combat-hardened veterans in charge of the newbies; and let me tell you, these kids were still wet out of the boot camp poop shoot. They were still crying for their drill sergeant’s titties when I got them. They still weren’t much better, but they knew what end of a rifle the bullet came out of; so that was progress.

  The cutter’s recon hadn’t revealed anything, the ore hauler was clean, and passed inspection with flying colors. Of course, how thorough of an inspection could an LT and a single private conduct? Answer, not a good one. Still, we held the airlock, a tactical advantage. The next step was to get into the mining town.

  The smart tactic would be to deploy drones. With their onboard sensors, which were far superior to the ones built into our armor, they could map every nook and cranny in the town in thirty minutes. Not only would this tell us if anything was waiting for us, but it would tell us the layout of the place. These mining places were notorious for not updating data in the central databases. A good pass with the drones, complete with ground penetrating radars, would show us all the little hidey-holes in the place.

  Cue By-The-Book Bob. That wasn’t actually the LT’s name, but he was so unremarkable, I didn’t bother to remember it. Plus, if I didn’t call him sir, it got his panties in a bunch. He immediately countermanded my order. His excuse was, “improper use of resources”. That was big, fat red flag number five.

  Drones only had a certain number of hours they could fly before they required maintenance. The logs on the birds in the cutter showed they were close to that mandatory maintenance mark. If the LT authorized their use, he’d be responsible for doing all the checks and services. Sure, he’d make my squad actually do the grunt work; but there was paperwork involved, and the kid didn’t want to fill out some forms in triplicate. Lazy bastard.