Shadow Watch: Kethurg War, page 1
KETHURG WAR
©2023 ELLIS/WOLFE
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CONTENTS
ALSO IN SERIES
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Thank you for reading Kethurg War
ALSO IN SERIES
KETHURG WAR
Click or scan to see the full series!
CHAPTER 1
I’m up to my chin in war. Another day in paradise.
The icy wind cuts through the fractured landscape like a monofilament wire, starkly reminding us of the unforgiving world Dominion sent us to defend. My fireteam, consisting of Sergeant Maltim, Sergeant Limour, and myself move forward like ghosts, our steps muffled by the constant thunder of distant artillery. We advance toward our own burning APC. The neon haze of the smoke, a sickly fusion of the war-torn world and the machine's innards, surrounds us. We press our bodies into the frozen ground, our positions forming a lethal crossfire, each of us cold, calculating cogs in the lethal contraption we’ve become. War brings out the best and worst in people.
Time hangs suspended in the ether, an illusion in the chaos of battle. The enemy's counter-push strikes with the ferocity of an airblast shockwave, shattering the momentary stillness. The enemy appears to spawn from the very ground itself, their battle-hardened faces obscured by a mix of sweat and grime. It must be at least three divisions out there in the haze.
Captain Kowle, a hard-ass with a permanent snarl, barks orders through our comms, his voice rising above the din, a beacon of clarity amidst the confusion. He knows how to motivate. We move as one, a well-oiled machine born from countless skirmishes and the unyielding will to survive. Our tactics evolve with every passing second, adapting to the ever-shifting tide of the conflict.
Sergeant Limour, a grim specter of death, methodically picks off targets with ruthless efficiency, each shot a calculated decision. His unwavering focus, a testament to his years of experience, remains unbroken even as the battle rages on around him.
“Having fun, Thorn?” Limour asks me.
I run through another mag and slap a new one home. “Always.”
The familiar rush of sweet adrenaline courses through my veins, sharpening my senses, honing my instincts. It’s when I’m about to die that I feel the most alive. I move to my feet. My body moves with a fluidity, muscle memory guiding me as I weave between cover, my weapon an extension of my indomitable will.
The fog’s deep before us. I huddle behind a tank built to rain down destruction. It’s now nothing more than a charred, blackened husk. Kowle and few men crouch with me.
“How many you got?” one of the new guys asks me.
“Focus on your sector.”
Our fire squad holds strong. As this battle keeps raging, the minutes get longer and longer.
Bright oranges and fluorescent yellows dance across the battlefield, lighting up the cloudy night. Skyscrapers from a necropolis burn in the distance.
A valley sits in front of us and behind it, a big ol’ pile of dirt they call Crimson Hill, and our orders are to scale her and get to killing. It might as well be a mountain with how vast and towering it is. Once we cross it, we'll breathe a little easier.
My DRIG team, a Dominion Recon and Infiltration Group, has come to Nara Prime to scout, observe, analyze, (SOA) and report back on enemy positions, movements, and activities. All to gain a better understanding of how to kill them better.
After we hustle to a foxhole, I pull up the holoscreen at a console and pull off my glove. Sweat drips from my palm as I wave it over the display. The screen authenticates it’s me and the red light near the AGM’s trigger glows green. I turn to an ensign who’s tapping frantically on a datascreen, his helmet dented across the side. “It’s activated and ready.”
We DRIGs build the best of the best. Our subterranean fortress is a state-of-the-art stronghold, fortified with nanocomposite alloys and graphene plating to withstand even the toughest kinetic and energy-based attacks. We’ve got a suite of top-notch sensory systems in place too, including gravimetric scanners, phased-array radar, and quantum entanglement communicators, for real-time intel and covert communication with HQ.
You want to know what the war is about? Okay. The Union of Free Worlds says they want their freedom. They say they won't be under Dominion rule. They like to run their mouths haphazardly. We are here to shut it for them. War isn't pretty, and if I sound like I've been on the field too long, you'd be right.
"Keep it up, A Company!" Captain Kowle hollers. Across from barbed wire, a crazy number of targets swarm across the valley—red and black figures, rolling or walking machines. The woods in the distance blaze, spilling smoke. Union Stalkers, a ragtag group of penal colony soldiers tossed into the fray, show up in droves, too. They race ahead of the enemy like massive, angry dogs, barking all sorts of noise. Some are just enormous and are so hyped up on the good stuff, they’ll surely die with a smile on their faces.
We jump from cover. My boots pound the hardened soil. I sprint past a foxhole that’s four bodies deep. Laser fire, a.k.a. lasfire, echoes around me, my focus on the incoming CLEO drone bearing down from the southwest, a silhouette in the sky ready to turn us into ash. Its guns won’t stop thumping.
In the next instant I’m off my feet, an eruption propelling me through the air. I hit soil and tumble into a charred tree, my battle suit and helmet softening my fall. My rifle nearly slips from my grip, my power armor’s inertial field glowing.
I lay there and catch my breath, my HUD piercing through the darkness in infrared monochrome greens and black-and-white.
Whirling around, Kowle faces a bunch of Dominion tank crewmen backing away up a grassy slope from their wrecked vehicle. "Well? What are you doing? This is war. You gonna run?" They hesitate, and Kowle shoots one in the head to show he means business. "Turn! Face the enemy!" The remaining crewmen turn and run toward enemy lines, only to be blown away by a tank round a second later.
My team lets loose a barrage of firepower into the valley. The Union forces just keep coming. My thoughts race between orders from HQ to hold our position and the need to keep my squad alive and finish our mission. Command seems to have ditched us.
“Thorn, your boys ready to get atop that hill?” Kowle asks.
“Born ready, Captain.”
“You don’t have my permission to die,” Kowle says.
“Hadn’t planned on it, sir.”
“Good man.”
I move down a path to the west of A Company, the last of our buddies move south, disappearing in
“Ready to die, sir!” A Company cries.
“A Company!” The captain draws his saber. “Fix bayonets!”
Kowle gives the signal, and we charge. Lasfire cuts a few men down before they can take their second step. With a massive leap, I clear the barb wire as my boots crunch on burning branches from the sparse trees dotting the landscape. In the horizon, flames lick the forest at the foothills of Crimson Hill. It makes our oncoming enemy stand out like pitch-black ghosts against the fiery glow.
They may have numbers and weapons. We’ve got guts and grit. We make short work of the Stalkers, leaving them in the dust of wartime memories.
By the time we advance across the valley and overrun our opponents to reach the forest, half of A Company falls. The sprint through the woods proves eventless. When we reach the hill’s base, we climb toward a clear victory.
Sometimes, things aren’t clear at all.
Explosions hail down on us as Kowle orders us to muster every ounce of strength and scale the peak. Union forces swarm over the ridge from the opposite side, aiming their weapons down on my team and A Company from up high. As the enemy unleashes hell, it’s a blood bath. I slide down the hill, losing all progress I gained. Dominion soldiers tumble over me, some gurgling their last breaths.
This time, we’re overrun, and Union troops run down the hill’s descent, their voices calling for our deaths.
Whistles sound behind me. “Fall back!”
CHAPTER 2
Five Years Later
A Slith ganger named Frokk aims a needler pistol at my temple, and I’m pinned up against a bar wall. Patrons from across the galaxy stare at me in amusement, some raising their glasses to me, others betting to see how fast I’ll have my brains scattered on the floor. The hazy air reeks with sweat and BENT smoke, the illegal drug fuming like burning petrol. Over by where the ice is kept, a Terran sewer roach crawls up the bar and disappears on the other side. Yeah, I’m never coming back here.
As Frokk hisses, his voice modulates through a universal translator attached to his olive-green scaly throat. “We warn you last time. Credits due first work cycle! Now pain!” He balls a clawed fist and rams it in my gut. Frokk knows where to hit a human, and he knocks the wind out of me. I collapse. His band of five friends hoists me up, so I don’t fall.
I over exaggerate a wince, clamping down hard enough to clack my teeth. I’m hoping he doesn’t hit me again. He does anyway, four more times. “That’s starting to hurt, Frokk.” My voice carries over the thump-thump coming from the DJ bot.
I hate getting punched in the face. My left eye is swollen, and my lip is bleeding. It’s nothing next to my nose. It’s gushing and splashing on the only good pair of shoes I have left. My jaw pounds with the steady beat of my heart. I’ll have to get a few tooth implants when this is over.
Slith are the worst species to travel the stars. If you’ve ever seen a lizard trouncing through the desert, you’ve seen a Slith. The only difference is that Slith developed star travel and stand on two legs. One of them is named Frokk, and he’s the one holding the needler pistol.
Pink and blue letters flash on the mirrored ceiling. It’s in Slith. I have no clue what it says. A group of gangsters comes through the door, dressed in midnight black synthweave. The two enormous bouncers at the door let them through without searching them. What’s that about?
Frokk pauses while they come in, and the bar got a little quieter. Aside from them, I am the only human in here.
“You know, Frokk, I’d love to pay you. I really would. Shooting me won’t magically make a stack of credits appear at your feet.” I cough up some blood and spit. “I’m the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. How about you and me work this out?”
Frokk takes a deep breath through the four thin slits on the front of his face. “Ten thousand credits! Overdue is overdue is disrespect.”
“Wait, what? I think your translator broke. Listen, I know a guy who can set you up with some serious tech. Let’s work something out.” I blink the sweat out of my eyes and look past him at the holographic tavern sign: a sexy femme bot pouring endless glasses of Britch wine to eager customers. I used to love this place. Thugs like Frokk ruined it.
One of Frokk’s minions stomps his spiked boots, sparking the ferrocrete floor. “Shoot him! Shoot him! Needles through the brain!” Once he starts jumping, he can’t stop. The Slith is like a spring, pointing at me and demanding my death.
I sneer. “Hey, no need for that. I can work this out. Let’s see. When did I promise to get you the money?”
Frokk flickers his forked tongue and snorts. “Two weeks prior.”
“Not really. More like ten days. You’re thinking about it incorrectly. You see, it’s like this…” I catch a kick in the gut. My vision goes dark. When I finally catch my breath, one of the bouncers is laughing at me. I have a long memory for scum like that.
That one actually hurt. He might’ve broken one of my ribs. No matter what, I refuse to give these guys the show they want.
Frokk pistol whips me, and I kiss the ground. As he leans down, his forked tongue lashes out and touches my ear. Talk about slimy. “Hssss. I give you sixsss work cyclesss.”
“Got it. Six work cycles.” When I try to stand, one of them slams their boot on my lower back. The impact catches me by surprise, and I nearly break a tooth when my face smacks the ground again. “Then you’re going to kill me?”
He leans closer, his long snout a few inches from my face. “No.”
His two strongest men yank me up by my arms and hold me while the smallest one runs his claws through my pockets. He searches and searches. I didn’t bring anything other than my ID, transit pass, and a few credsticks.
As Frokk takes everything, though somehow missing my transit pass in my back pocket, he slaps me across my face with my ID. “I knowsss your living ssspot. I come find you if you no pay. Good timesss for Frokk. Bad timesss for Hex Thorn.”
Then they’re gone. So is my pride. If I’m caught on the streets without my ID, I might spend the rest of the night locked up in a Dominion prison unit until they look me up. Even though I’m a vet, laws are laws this close to the Core Worlds. Luckily, when I landed, I bought a lifetime continental transit pass at the starport. Getting from one place to the next isn’t a problem; avoiding security will be.
When I go to pay my tab, I realize Frokk stole my credits.
A bot friend of mine named Lyndha holds a dataslate and winks at me behind the bar. Out of all the bots, she’s the cute one, the one with flaming red hair and a bit of an attitude. “Well, hello, hello. Your total comes to two hundred and two credits.”
Lyndha is one of the new designs. Nowadays, it’s hard to tell they’re bots anymore, especially when they listen to you and know just what to say. I feel like I’ve known Lyndha my whole life. That’s cognitive AI for you.
“About that. You saw me get beat up over there. Would you mind handing me some ice and a towel?” I glimpse the roach crawling bravely over the ice. A real warrior, that one. “Never mind the ice. Listen, I’ll come back tomorrow and pay you in full. Okay?”
