Recruit Read online

  Recruit

  Iron Legion | Book 1

  David Ryker

  Daniel Morgan

  Ryker’s Rogues

  Contents

  Available Now

  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

  Available Now

  Available Now

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  Iron Legion

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  Lockdown - Book 3

  1

  Planet: Genesis-526

  Earth Date: 2734AD

  All the glasses rattled on the table top as a freighter swung around the dustball that was Genesis-526, and slingshotted into deep space.

  I sighed and watched the surface of my drink settle.

  “All’s I’m saying is that,” Zed belched, “Ninety-Three could definitely benefit from a Sim-Stack.” He shrugged and drained the last dregs of beer before slamming the cup down on the steel table top. He was a skinny guy, a Tuber like me, grown for purpose, with a shaved head.

  Sybil squinted at him, one eye half closed. He was older, Ex-Federation Ground Corps. Dishonorable Discharge. I watched him choose his words, fishing drunkenly for them. It was crazy that, for anyone from off-world, getting shipped to Genesis-526 and being put on terraforming duty was the worst punishment conceivable. For us Tubers, it was a career. And a life-long one at that.. Not like we had a choice, though. I stared at the flat surface of my beer, watching it bubble slowly. I wasn’t much in the mood for drinking. I wasn’t much in the mood for anything.

  “Sim-Stack, eh? You just want to,” Sybil hiccoughed, “get your digital di—”

  “Hey!” Zed cut back in. “I appreciate the fine form of a woman as much as any guy — probably more so considering how fucking few of them the almighty goddamn Federation saw fit to grace this barren rock with — but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “For once,” snorted Crash, the ex-Federation cargo pilot who’d ploughed into one of the moons off Zebox while he was flying shitfaced. They called him Crash for obvious reasons.

  “I’ve never been off this fucking planet, alright?” Zed snapped, sucking on his empty cup. “I’ve never seen anything other than goddamn dirt and algae. I don’t want to fucking die here, not without seeing somewhere else, something else.”

  I grimaced but stayed quiet. I knew that ache.

  “Listen, kid,” Sybil kicked back in, sighing, “the universe ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, alright? Terraforming for a colony planet’s not a bad gig. It’s safe, secure, and you’re making a decent—”

  “You developed Stockholm syndrome, or are you just a fucking idiot, Syb?” Crash drained his beer and cocked an eyebrow.

  I looked at the three of them, an utter bunch of misfits, and wondered how the hell, firstly, that it was our responsibility to turn a planet into something habitable, and secondly, that I’d somehow managed to throw in with three guys I could barely stand. I shook my head. I could already see how the conversation was going to go — Syb and Crash would start arguing about the Federation, both ragging on it and defending it at the same time, angry at themselves for fucking up their lives and getting stuck down here. And Zed would just get shitfaced, and then cross them both, and then they’d brawl, get kicked out, and we’d get stuck with the bill for the damages. And I’d have to foot my part, despite not getting in the middle of any of it. I was sick to my back teeth of it — of them. And then, after all was said and done, they’d stagger home and fall into bed, wake up hungover and bruised, go to work, pretend like everything was peachy, and then go do it all over again.

  I left my drink untouched and stood up, pulling on my jacket.

  “And where d’you think you’re going, Jim?” Zed piped up.

  I tried to smile but found it hard. I knew this was my lot in life, but I didn’t want to get reminded of it every single night. “I’m not feeling drinking tonight, guys. I’m gonna see if I can’t squeeze in some overtime.”

  I saw their looks of disapproval at my intention to do any more than the bare minimum required by the Federation. In truth, my options were either stay and listen to their bullshit, head back to my cramped little hab and lie in bed staring at the ceiling until sleep swallowed me up, or get back to work and earn a few extra credits. At least the last option might afford me a little bit of luxury to make my existence just slightly less unbearable. The wage we got was hardwired into the system from the Federation protocols that governed the universal currency — Federation Creds. It was practically impossible to earn enough money to do anything other than sleep and eat. And if you wanted to drink, you had to forgo one of the others. Syb and Crash, for all their bickering, shared a hab like a pair of kids, freeing up enough cash to get drunk enough every night to forget they were consigned to this life until they both died of old age — or cirrhosis, whichever came first. Any way you spun it, things were spread thin. But the Federation liked that. It kept us in line — kept us controlled.

  “Overtime?” Crash laughed. “Fucking scab.” There was venom in his voice, like it was an affront to him. If he didn’t have so much bile in him, or a habit that needed quenching, he’d probably be out there too. But he did, so it was easier to try to make me feel bad about it than face his own demons. I just let it roll off my back. I was used to that now.

  The others mumbled in agreement. I shrugged and turned away, waving over my shoulder. Before I even reached the door, they were back to talking about the Federation, and how it was fucking them three ways from Sunday. Underpaid. Overworked. Taken for granted and not appreciated. Because, of course, who wouldn’t want three discontented and mutinous drunks in their ranks?

  The Federation didn’t care though. They were just one group in a thousand just like them in every settlement from here to the poles and back. The Federation fucked everyone, though. It’s what they did. They ran half the universe.

  I walked the length of the steel catwalk outside Marcy’s, one of two bars in Ninety-Three, one of the terraforming settlements on Genesis-526. The settlement itself was a mess of stacked habs, loaded on top of each other, tied together by catwalks and walkways, covered by a huge dome. In a couple hundred years, the dome would come off — but for now, the air outside was lethal, so the dome stayed, keeping us safe, keeping the air in. Keeping the stink in. I hacked and spat the stale air over the railing, watching it sail into the murky depths below. It splatted on the ground with a dull slap, hidden by the darkness, and a grunt of indifference rang up. People lived on the ground — but no one bothered with them. They were fade-outs. We called them that because that’s what they did. They just faded out. Either they stopped working, or ret
ired, or just pissed away their money until they couldn’t cover hab-rental. Either way, they lived under tarps, sleeping on anything that kept them off the ground — the sludgy, algae-covered ground. No one went down there if they could help it. The fade-outs didn’t take kindly to workers. They’d shiv you for a couple of credits. They had nothing and the Federation wouldn’t do shit about them — nothing except scrape them up and toss them out when they finally did fade.

  I pushed the thought out of my mind and kicked down off the catwalk onto another one, clearing the miniature ladder that connected them. The fade-outs didn’t need thinking about, or pitying. Everyone was fighting for what they had out here. They were the ones who’d given up. My Blower was calling. It was the only place I felt comfortable. Most people hated the claustrophobia of it, but for me it was the opposite. I liked that isolation, that feeling of protection, that feeling of power, of moving something big like that, of having so much strength at my fingertips.

  I went on autopilot, and before I knew it I was scanning myself into the airlocked hangar of one of the surface ports. The Blowers, terraforming machines like snowcats, with treads and autonomous arms, were lined up in a row — mine, Zed’s, Crash’s, Syb’s. I headed across the catwalk suspended over them and dropped onto the roof of mine with practiced ease.

  I popped the hatch and climbed into the cockpit, a windowed bubble equipped with a chem shower for decontamination following a walkabout, and not much else. I pulled the hatch shut after me and basked in the silence as it sealed.

  The hangar was dark and still, and the only light in the cockpit was coming from the clock on the center console that told me it was about two hours to sundown.

  I settled into my chair, sponge bulging from the cuts and gouges in the fabric, and pulled on my headset. I pushed the ignition switch and the system buzzed to life, the console lighting up. Telemetry and readouts filled the screen in front of me, and then settled into the corners, and a big smiling face popped up in the middle of the screen.

  “Sal,” I sighed, glad to be feeling comfortable again.

  “Good evening, James,” she said in her dulcet tones. “A little late for work, isn’t it?”

  Sal was about as close to a woman as I’d ever been. The settlement wasn’t exactly a hotspot for women. Without them there, it was one less thing for the drunken, dishonorable terraformers and traders to fight over. As such, they were few and far between. But it didn’t really bother me. You couldn’t miss what you’d never had. Sal was the closest I’d ever come, and she did alright for me. I shrugged. “Never too late to earn some money.”

  “If you say so. What would you like to do?”

  I took a breath and reached for the joysticks, pushing into the throttles with my heels. One for each track. “Pull up all available overtime jobs.”

  “Of course.” The screen filled with a list of titles, none of which seemed appetizing.

  “Prioritize those with the highest pay.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Please,” I laughed. Sally was full of sass for an AI. Her old driver must have been more polite. Or maybe she just liked to remind me who was in charge.

  “Sorting.”

  The jobs rearranged and I expanded a few, casting them aside with a swipe of my fingers. I wasn’t looking for anything hard, or dirty. “Any suggestions?”

  “I can see that a radio relay is in need of repair.”

  “How far out?”

  “Thirty-one kilometers.”

  “That’s a trip.” I rubbed my eyes. The other option was just going back to the bar, and the thought of that was even worse than trekking thirty kilometers into the desert at seven at night. “Screw it.” I tapped on the job and marked it ‘in progress.’ Sally pulled up the coordinates and plotted a course. The telemetry showed up in a dotted line on the windscreen. A tiny green blip flashed in the distance, somewhere beyond the hangar doors.

  “Whenever you’re ready, James. Systems are all functioning correctly.”

  “Thanks, Sal. How about some music?”

  “What would you like?”

  I smirked. “How about some rock?”

  “Martian?”

  “Earth, for a change.”

  “Would you like me to choose?”

  I hit the button for the airlock doors and they began to part. The cab rocked gently as the air washed out and normalized the pressure. “Sure. Make it a classic. Pre-Expansion.”

  I planted my feet and we rumbled into the desert beyond Settlement Ninety-Three just as Born to be Wild kicked up.

  It took almost an hour to reach the coordinates. It turned out that it was a simple enough thing — a cable exchange that needed rerouting. Usually, this was droid’s work, but just like everything on Genesis-526, the droids seemed to be too broken down to do their jobs. The Federation was supposed to take care of all that — delivering supplies, providing new equipment, but they didn’t. It was a big job, looking after a thousand planets, and some little dust ball in the middle of an undeveloped system wasn’t at the top of their priorities list. So here I was, doing droid work. And yet, the peace and quiet was almost nice. And of course the extra credits were a welcome bonus.

  I pulled my feet off the throttles and let the engine settle to idle. “Sal, would you be a dear and route the audio to the external speakers?”

  “Sure thing, James,” she said softly as I got out my my chair and stretched my neck.

  I stared at it for a second, the cracked veneer, the sponge sticking out of the tears, the word ‘FUCK’ unceremoniously carved into the headrest by one of the previous owners. Guess even his manners ran out at some point. Or maybe it was because of behaviour like that that Sal developed her authoritative air. I couldn’t say. It was against policy to discuss former employees. I’d asked what had happened to him when I’d first climbed into Sal, but she’d told me straight. And we’d just sort of gone on from there. I’d be lying if I said she hadn’t softened some since then. I curled my lips down. But fuck what, exactly? Was it an exclamation of anger? FUCK! Or maybe a statement of hopelessness. Fuck. Or was it more an act of rebellion? Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck everything. I couldn’t say, but whatever they were trying to say, I got it.

  I pulled on my walker suit and slammed the helmet down, listening to it seal with a hiss. The hatch that led outside was accessed through a chute — a glass screen that slid out of the wall to seal off the cabin, and then opened into the air above. I hit the release button and felt the dust and sand swirl around me. I wasn’t an engineer, but this was easy money. I took the ladder in hand and climbed out, looking around at the endless sea of pale orange dust streaked with green and brown veins of algae. The beginnings of oxygenation. But there was still a long way to go — another half a dozen centuries before anyone would take their first rancid, stinking, sulfur heavy breath of surface air.

  One of the restaurants back in Ninety-Three, the bubble-domed excuse for a town I called home, had a landscape like this painted on one their walls. I asked the owner about it once. He told me it was called a prairie. It had come in a pre-painted pack from the Federation. He’d never been to Earth himself — no one ever had. It was a thousand light years away.

  He’d said that ‘Earthscapes’ were reproduced from datafiles and shipped all over the universe — wherever humans were. For some reason there seemed to be a focus on that. On remembering ‘home’ like it was some fairytale land to travel back to one day. From what I’d heard it was a wasteland. There was nothing much left to visit except ash and sludge. But then there were people who said it was everything but. They were all rumors, millenia old, drifting across the universe. So which was right? Maybe both were true in different times. Either way, I’d never know unless I saw for myself, but I didn’t think that would ever happen, so what was the fucking point in giving a shit? It was a pretty picture, so what did it matter?

  I clenched my fists in my rubbery gloves and let myself down the external ladder into the shad
ow of Sally’s square body. The Blower cast a long dark square in the sinking sun, red and tired on the horizon. I went to a storage hatch on the dark side and got out my tool bag.

  I circled her, knocking on the chest-high treads with a spanner, drumming to the beat of the song blasting in the thick air. I wondered what sort of fun and games they had in the jungle, and what exactly a jungle looked like.

  The dust hammered my walking suit as I approached the exchange, a half-buried metal box that regulated cable currents across the surface. The steel had already started corroding and the door was hanging half open. I stared at it, wondering how in the hell they thought it’d last for another seven hundred years. I grimaced, realising that they knew it would last because they had chumps like me to come and fix it every time it broke down. I repaired the door first, the route of the problem. Without it, the wires inside were exposed. The wind and dust had already eaten through the rubber and into the metal. I did what I could. It really needed replacing, and I put that in as a note, but I knew it’d just stay like it was until it needed repairing again. I shut the door and got up.

  It was dark by then and the stars were glittering overhead. I looked up at them and paused. One was big. Really big. And growing, fast. I narrowed my eyes, watching it. A freighter coming in for a slingshot? No, wrong angle. Satellite falling out of orbit? No, too small.