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OVERDRAFT: THE ORION OFFENSIVE

OVERDRAFT: THE ORION OFFENSIVE

John Jackson Miller

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2013 John Jackson Miller

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by 47North

PO Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 9781477857526

To my father,
who showed me how the world worked

Table of Contents

Episode 1: Greenmail

There was life in outer space, but you didn’t want to get it on you.

“
Spore, three o’clock!
” Hearing the call, Bridget spun and pointed her rifle. Her armor’s systems took it from there, targeting the laser beam within angstroms of the Spore’s most vital place. Crimson energy flashed. An instant later, the greenish boil went gray and shattered, surrendering its peculiar life to the asteroid’s night.

“Confirm kill,” Bridget said into her helmet mic. “Eyes wide, people. Where there’s Spore, there’s more.”

“Right, Chief,” her flanker responded.

Bridget Yang knew the Spore wasn’t really a spore, but “Exotic Formation Seven-Alpha” didn’t scream omnivorous alien terror. She didn’t come up with the names. She just did the shooting — or, at least, she carried the gun close enough to do its job. No drone could do this work. Not even out here, on an airless clump of rock orbiting Altair, a star that had been just a twinkle in humanity’s sky forty years earlier.

Humanity had reached the stars and found them open for business. But just as the pioneering sea traders of Earth’s past had disturbed strange natural enemies, things weren’t any different in 2138. Chief Yang and her armored teammates were needed. No one knew where the space-borne Spore had come from, or how to curb its appetite; Earth had simply joined the Signatory Systems pact in part to combat it. “Surge teams” — surgical strike units like hers — had proved the best defense by far.

Laserfire flashed from beyond a shattered wall in the devastated compound.
O’Herlihy
, Bridget thought. A glimpse at the data feed projected against her helmet’s faceplate confirmed it: her other fire team had found another small outgrowth. Specimens of Seven-Alpha ranged from pea-sized to gargantuan; the largest Bridget had ever seen had been chowing down on a moon…or what was left of a moon when she and the traders had found it.

But large or small, each lump of Spore had something like a nucleus inside its transparent membrane. Where a precision shot caused the mindless beings to disintegrate, even a slight miss released living particles that took root promptly on anything nearby. That was where the technology helped — and it did now, as she spotted another splotch of green. As she touched the trigger, the systems in her HardSHEL armor unit kicked the suit’s internal servos into gear. Bridget became a puppet, her arm and rifle smoothly guided into the exact position for a perfect shot.

It was almost too easy. All her teammates had to do was bring their weapons reasonably close to their targets — and then decide to fire. That final decision was one no professional would ever give up to a computer.

“Not much fun this way,” her flanking gunman said, watching Bridget’s body return to her control.

“This isn’t supposed to be fun,” Bridget snapped. “You want laughs, Dinner, look at yourself in the mirror after you get out of the shower.” It was known throughout the barracks that Arbutus Dinner had more hair on his body than a sheepdog. “I don’t care that it’s easy,” Bridget said. “I care about people not screwing up. If this gear can help…”

Her eyes suddenly flashed onto the feed from the surveillance drone hovering meters above them. She turned her head. “Watch it, Stubek!”

Someone
was
screwing up: the rookie in the rear. A bulging growth of Spore to her right, Lynn Stubek went into a firing stance, ready to fire a point-blank shot. But she triggered her weapon before her boot could adhere properly to the asteroid’s low-gravity surface. The motion of her servo-assisted arms shifted her mass enough that her shot went a centimeter wide. The beam lanced the Spore, which ballooned outward — alive and more dangerous than ever.

“No!” Stubek saw the goo on her gun first and threw it aside. No good. It was on her armor, too.

“Dammit, Stubek!” Bridget slung her weapon and stood fast. Her armor’s systems identified and highlighted other Spore fragments tumbling in the low-gee. It would be seconds before she could navigate through them to Stubek. The rookie fell to the rocky surface and writhed, clawing frantically at the splotches on her breastplate.

“That won’t work,” Bridget said. “Burn! Burn!”

Stubek’s eyes fixed on her discarded rifle, glowing as the metal-loving organism feasted. Her armor’s composite coating was distasteful to the Spore, but nothing known was truly proof against its appetite.

“
Burn!
”

“I can’t remember,” Stubek howled, rattled. “I can’t remember the command!”

Bridget threw her rifle aside. Seeing a meter-wide path between the drifting particles of Spore, she dove forward, letting the servos guide her. Her arms wrenched painfully as the suit stretched and moved her limbs into a bizarre contortionist’s swim through the darkness. Landing beside Stubek, Bridget ripped the foil towel from her utility pack. Wiping clean the external override port on Stubek’s armor, Bridget keyed in her code — one half of the confirmation. The chief’s voice was the other half. “Surge Altair, Yang, commanding unit Stubek, Lynn.
Burn! Burn!
”

Bridget tumbled clear as a blaze of energy enveloped Stubek’s form. Half the megawatts in Stubek’s armor redirected to its skin, cauterizing the Spore in a silent sizzle. The chief’s visor went dark, adjusting against the flash.

Rising, Bridget saw Dinner and the other two members of her fire team directing tiny laser bursts at the remaining globs. Stubek lay on the ground, her armor a fused ceramic cocoon. That was why it was a last-ditch method; it made million-dollar units into mummies.

Bridget looked down at the rookie. “You’re all right. Your unit says so.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Stubek said, catching her breath. She forced a chuckle. “I’ll just lie here.”

At least she’s got a sense of humor
, Bridget thought as she stepped over the immobilized trooper. For this sweep, she’d brought Stubek over from Hiro Welligan’s crew, hoping to try to undo any bad habits her most slapdash squad leader had probably instilled. She’d make Hiro retrieve the woman and pry her out of the suit. It’d serve him right.

Incompetence had nearly killed them all this week. Four days earlier, the parent Spore had first attacked the asteroid facility. It should’ve been an easy defense for Bridget to mount, with their technology.

Only she didn’t have it. Having returned from another action, Surge Team Altair was outfitted with its high-grav armor. The correct gear for asteroid combat was supposedly on its way to them. But some idiot at the provisioning center had sent armor for the wrong species. Only Bridget’s quick thinking — and her team’s willingness to stuff themselves into combat suits meant for their starfish-like Uutherum allies — had saved the whole asteroid from being digested.

They had nearly been killed by a clerical error.

Bridget was still livid. More so now, triple-checking what was left of the place she’d called home for two years.

“Heard you lost one, Chief.” Michael O’Herlihy led his wedge of warriors around the corner of a half-eaten wall. He looked around, his toothy smile visible through his faceplate. “So where
is
the rookie?”

“Staring at the stars and thinking it over,” Bridget said.

“I want y’all to learn from that,” he told his team. “Wanna feel worthless fast? Just lose a firefight with a germ.”

Bridget smirked. O’Herlihy and his drawl always cheered her up.

One of their jokes was that she was more Irish than he was. Bridget was the black-haired and green-eyed daughter of a Chinese Greenlander father and a mother from Kilcorney; O’Herlihy had grown up in Little Arkansas, just outside Beijing. And never stopped growing, it seemed; the man towered over her even without a battlesuit.

His team looked no worse for their recon. “What have you got?” Bridget asked.

“There’s a spot where everything caved in,” he said, drawing on his hand with a gloved finger. A mark appeared on the map display inside Bridget’s helmet. “Back near the unit’s storehouse. It’s a god-awful mess, Chief.”

Bridget wasn’t surprised. That was where the Spore had first awakened. A small amount had come in on a bangbox, the basic cargo unit for space travel, somehow slipping past the inspections at the interstellar transit station.
More incompetence.

“Found a box that looks intact,” O’Herlihy said. “Fell in when the ground collapsed.”

Bridget’s eyes narrowed. “Show me.”

O’Herlihy started to write on his hand.

“In person,” she said.

Bridget stood over the maw filled with undigested rubble and bits of steel that had once been her team’s home. There it was, all right: a bangbox, half buried in the pile, its frame reflecting the floodlights from their suits. The ’boxes were twice the width of an old-time railroad car; sixteen light years away, similar containers were running on maglev tracks between every major Earth city.

“No signal,” she said. The container should have been broadcasting what it was and what it held. “Must be damaged.”

“The hard way, then,” O’Herlihy said, grinning. He handed his rifle to Dinner and scrambled down into the mess. The top of the box’s doorframe could just be seen. Bracing himself against the container, O’Herlihy began digging, heaving the rocks away as if they had as little mass as they had weight.

A red light flashed in Bridget’s helmet. Falcone, her expedition’s administrator, was paging. She ignored this call, like the others. Corporate impatience had no place while security forces were in the field. Yet, the clean-up phase of the operation seemed finally done—

“
Gaahhh!
”

Bridget looked into the crater. Green bubbles blasted from a gash in the ’box, spreading into the vacuum and spattering O’Herlihy, who stumbled backward.

“Spore!” At the cavity’s edge, Dinner and the others called down. “
Burn! Burn!
”

O’Herlihy struck the ground, verdant paste smeared on his faceplate. Bridget heard him start to recite the code that would trigger his own armor to react as the rookie’s had earlier.

Then she took another look at the green globules, boiling from the container.

“Wait a minute,” she called, leaping downward. “Mike, wait!”

“Chief!” Dinner yelled. Bridget clambered into the pit, heedless of the spray hitting her.

“Wait!” She scrambled to O’Herlihy’s side. Two flicks of her right ring finger called up the spectral analysis tool, and a beam of light from atop her faceplate washed over her companion’s midsection.

That’s not right
, she thought, examining the readout. She knelt over O’Herlihy. The man struggled as she neared. “Bridgie, are you crazy?”

“Hush,” she said. She opened her utility pack and withdrew a plastic tube. Quickly, she scraped up a clump of the green substance from the armor’s surface. Then she inserted the vial into the feeder port just below her helmet’s mouthpiece and cycled the vacuum lock. The port was a means of getting oral antidotes into the environment suit; now, Bridget used it to bring the would-be death organism to her mouth. She stuck out her tongue.

O’Herlihy’s stunned eyes locked on hers. “Chief, are you nuts?”

Licking her lips, Bridget ignored him. Her human taste buds confirmed what her electronic sensors had told her. It made no sense.

And then it did, all at once. Bridget Yang realized there was much more to what had happened to her base than anyone had imagined.

She started climbing back out of the hole, more furious than before.

On his knees, O’Herlihy gawked. “You’re crazy, Bridgie. You’re gonna die!”

“Nope,” Bridget said, looking back on the seeping ’box. Anger flared in her eyes. “But I
am
going to kill someone!”