Prologue
The lumbering freak of nature standing in front of him let out an ear-piercing shriek that burrowed into his bowels and made his ass pucker.
Dixon was pretty sure he’d pissed himself a little.
Why am I here? he thought as he watched a thin line of reddish liquid lubricate the cracked mandibles that extruded from its insect-like face. It looked like all of Darwin’s mistakes, poured into one ugly-ass bucket.
It let out another growl, louder than the first. This one made Dixon’s chest quiver, overpowering the hammering of his own heart. He pulled the foreign-feeling plasma rifle tighter against his aching shoulder. He fumbled for a moment, lost the trigger, then found it again as a bead of sweat trickled down his neck.
“Why the hell aren’t we just shooting this damn thing?” he whispered under his breath. It smelled like a rotting carcass.
“Easy, Dixy,” said the voice from his neck AI.
“I told you to call me Dixon,” he shot back, enunciating clearly. “Technician Allan Dixon.”
The AI went silent. It wasn’t his. It had come with the bulky battle suit he was wearing, the one the Marines had made him wear. The one that didn’t fit him at all and kept digging into his crotch. The one he was pretty sure he’d just pissed in.
The ugly freak show in front of him was scanning the ring of humans surrounding it. The raised weapons and dull red combat suits of the Cardinal Order Marines cast long shadows on the rocky ground.
There were no gaps in the line. The beast was trapped.
So was Dixon.
He kept his shaky rifle trained on the thing. He felt the moisture on his trigger finger. He couldn’t stop sweating.
“What the hell’s it doing?” Tex called out to no one in particular. Tex was the only Marine in the forward team who’d speak to Dixon.
“Zip it, Private,” barked some officer whose name Dixon couldn’t recall. He was having trouble remembering his own name.
Dixon thought it was pretty clear what it was doing. It was listening for shallow breath. It was looking for quivering legs. It was sniffing the air for fear. Fear and piss, Dixon thought.
It was looking for its bitch.
It stopped on Dixon.
Of course it did.
Another bead of sweat dripped into his eye and down his soft cheek.
He was terrified. He shouldn’t be here. He was a scientist, a clone. He had no business here. He’d barely had a week of training with the weapon he now held.
A moment of panic hit him. Had he engaged the plasma canister? Did he have to? No, it was automatic unless he disabled it. Or was it? Shit. He couldn’t remember.
He didn’t take his eyes off the creature in front of him. They had to kill it, or mortally wound it. They’d never get off the planet if they didn’t.
“Stand tall,” Lord Assura said, his voice clear and firm—though noticeably behind the Marines. Dixon thought he could just hear the flapping of Assura’s cape and the dull clank of his sword against his armor.
In the pecking order of the Cardinal Order, there couldn’t be much more distance between two stations in life than Dixon and his Lordship: a clone and a royal duke.
“Damn ugly son of a bitch,” Oakley whispered, stating the obvious.
“His Lordship or this damn thing?” someone whispered a little too loudly. A couple of nervous chuckles followed.
“Gonna be uglier impaled on my spear,” said Tex. “Oorah, bastard.”
Spear?
Dixon looked down. His pulse rifle was gone. In his trembling arms was a rudimentary spear. Something out of a history vid on ancient man.
What the hell?
He looked around at the Marines. They all had spears.
Dixon shook his head in confusion. He could vaguely remember the jumpship landing. But after that, his memory got hazier than the thin fog that permeated the cave he’d inexplicably found himself in. It was as big as the dock on the ESS Eberly. It looked artificial, though, too perfect to be a cave. More like a giant hangar.
A thought suddenly appeared in his mind, a command from their Lord. They couldn’t discharge their weapons in here.
Dixon felt more sweat pouring down his face. He tasted the salt on his lips.
“Easy,” said a low voice in his ear. Dixon risked a furtive glance to his right. “You got this,” said Tex with a wink.
Dixon knew bullshit when someone shoved it in his face.
He knew for a fact that Tex hated him, friendly or not. They all hated having a clone in the squad to babysit on this mission.
The creature snarled and screamed and Dixon’s head snapped back to attention, his pulse exploding anew. The damn thing looked like a giant lobster mixed with a dinosaur.
“Advance,” commanded Lord Assura.
Dixon sensed the movement in his peripheral vision as the half-circle of Marines took a step forward, closing the distance on the cornered beast.
He took a faltering step of his own.
Then another.
Dixon wanted to run. He shifted the weight on his leg and felt his hips turn slightly. He knew himself well enough to know that he was preparing to turn and run. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to shift forward again, leaving nowhere to go except through the beast in front of him.
You aren’t going to run. They all expect you to run. Screw them.
This was the first time he’d ever seen a Da’hune in the flesh. He’d seen them in his nightmares. He shared nightmares with his fellow clones, and some of them had definitely seen them. Now he’d be adding his own nightmare to the collective.
Sorry, guys.
“Step up,” commanded Lord Assura again, and Dixon was sure he was talking directly to him. He felt the tightness in his chest squeeze the breath out of him. His eyes watered.
He began to take another hesitant step.
The beast exploded forward, straight at Dixon.
Dixon had never seen anything move so fast. A terrifying shriek rattled his mind. It came from all around him, bouncing off the walls of the cave. It might have been the Da’hune. It might have been him.
He jerked his arm back at the sight of the charging Da’hune and, to his horror, felt the spear shift. It began falling backward out of his sweaty grasp.
He reached up for it with his other hand, clutching it with both hands. He wasn’t even pointing it toward the charging beast now.
The Da’hune didn’t seem to touch the ground. It crossed the distance in two quick moves of its lower appendages. It had more than two legs! It was huge. Twice his size. It sprang forward as two spears criss-crossed the space where it had been a moment before. It was too fast, even for the lightning reflexes of the Marines.
Dixon stood paralyzed. In his mind, he could feel those sharp mandibles ripping him open and spilling his guts onto the muddy ground.
The voice of the sadistic drill sergeant who’d loved any excuse to humiliate a lost, sweaty clone appeared in his mind: Face your enemy. If you run, you die. Trust the man at your shoulder. Act or die, you fat piece of shit!
Dixon screamed and vaulted forward to meet the creature, his instincts all wrong and his form forgotten.
The Da’hune crashed down on him.
Pain exploded from every part of Dixon’s body. He tried to yell, but bit his tongue in half. Sticky putrid juices splattered across his face. The ground smashed into the back of his skull and his vision blurred.
The creature flopped past him. He felt like a boulder had rolled over him.
Dixon rolled over and staggered up. His bloody hands were empty.
His spear! Where was his spear?
He saw it a moment later, protruding from the back of the Da’hune. The impaled beast was lying in a heap on the rocky ground. It looked smaller now, almost human in its death throes.
Dixon stared in shock.
I did it.
He fell back to his knees as salty blood poured out of his mouth. He turned, shocked, to face the rest of the squad.
But they were gone.
He wasn’t surrounded by Marines. He was surrounded by Da’hune. Dozens of them. They exploded out of the walls, leaping from their hiding places.
He turned to wrench his spear free, and found that it wasn’t a spear after all.
It was his pulse rifle. The hot energized end of the bayonet slipped free of the dead Da’hune at his feet.
He turned back, struggling to find the trigger.
Too late.
The first of this new wave of Da’hune attackers was on him.
He fired anyway, screaming the words of his drill sergeant aloud. “Kill, you fat bastard, kill!”
His finger mashed into the trigger assembly so hard he felt it burn. It bucked in his hand as he swept the room, shredding anything that moved. The Da’hune on top of him sank its huge jawbone into his chest.
He felt searing pain rip through him. He knew the warmth oozing down his legs was everything that should still be inside him.
He fired again.
Kill, you fat bastard, kill!
Act I
Chapter 1
Forward Operating Base Dallas
Empire-Designated Zone
T-8 hours
Lucky was having one of his nasty dreams again. They’d started up as soon as the coalition invasion force had passed through the Great Corridor. It could be a coincidence, but Lucky wasn’t stupid enough to believe in coincidences.
The Hate was chasing after him. Lucky was running through some kind of dark hallway strewn with debris. It felt like the walls were closing in. Something nipped at his boots as he ran. Thick smoke made it hard to see or breathe. He looked back. He couldn’t see the Hate, but he knew it was back there. The giant bag of evil dicks was gaining on him. He could feel the bastard laughing at his panic. He tripped over something and went sprawling. Had it been debris or something else? He turned, and–
Lucky jerked upright in bed.
The room lights instantly snapped on with his movement. Even at low waking mode, they made his head pound.
“Lights,” he said to the room. The lights immediately jumped to full brightness.
“Off!” he yelled, squeezing his eyes shut. “Lights off, dammit!”
The room lights died, but the room wasn’t completely dark. Light from outside seeped into the windows, reminding him that the artificial lights inside the ESS Blankenship were coming up, welcoming the citizens of the largest city in space to another glorious day in service to the Empire. The Empire flagship was 20 klicks bow to stern, but the heart that beat inside the giant was the city of Dallas.
Since they had passed into the NewVerse, as the universe on the other side of the Great Corridor was now called, Dallas had been transformed from a typical starship depot into the lead operational base for the Empire fleet. And since the Empire had the largest presence in the coalition of human powers that made up the invasion fleet, it was the de facto lead operational base for the entire invasion force.
Lucky’s sheets were drenched in sweat. He was still wearing his boots. In fact, he was still wearing all his clothes.
“Good morning, sunshine,” echoed Rocky.
“If you say so,” Lucky echoed back. He crawled out of bed. He rubbed at his chin, and something like mucus and dried vomit flaked away. “What time is it?”
“Oh-six Standard,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping later and later since Jiang left.”
Lucky grunted. That had been six weeks ago. She was one of the Emperor’s Elite Marines now. She was off doing Elite things for April, even though April had promised her to his team.
It was for the best, he thought. She was willing to forgive him for everything he’d done. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t. That was that.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he echoed.
“Last night you said you’d run head-first into a wall if I woke you this morning.”
“And you believed me?”
Rocky paused. “Is that a trick question? Because it sounds like a trick question. It sounds like you’re asking me to discount the possibility of you doing something self-destructive and stupid. Is that really what you’re asking me?”
Lucky grunted. He really needed to get a roommate who wasn’t in his head. He glanced around the messy room. Hell, he really needed to remember how he’d gotten here. He hadn’t stayed here in over a week. He’d been staying at the barracks while they were in the middle of joint drills.
It wasn’t freezer burn, either. He hadn’t been in cryosleep for damn near two months. This was the longest he’d gone in real-time without being deployed in as long as he could remember. The drills with his new team took priority over time-shifting. Well, that and the fact that the invasion force needed all the juice they could get for de-burning and FOB ops. The Empire was stretched thinner than meat on a spit. But now the fleet had all down-transited, and the drills were coming to a close. He expected to go back in the box any day now.
It was fun while it lasted.
He looked at his weathered face in the energy mirror across from his bed.
He looked like shit.
He felt like shit.
He was hung over as shit.
“Should I even ask about last night?”
“Oh, you should,” she said. “You really should.”
He had a vague memory of celebrating the last day of drills at Frisky’s, which meant getting hammered as shit at Frisky’s.
“Did I ride my bike home?”
“I put you on autopilot when you started vomiting,” Rocky offered. “Not sure if it was the hangover or the beating you took from those eight Reds.”
He had forgotten the Reds were in town. And the Alliance. And everyone else. All the members of the coalition were here for the joint drills. It wasn’t the first joint training since the invasion force had ventured into the NewVerse, but it was the biggest.
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