Retribution (Galaxy's Edge Book 9), page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
01
02
03
04
One Republic News
05
06
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08
09
10
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13
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17
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One Republic News
29
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Epilogue
Coming Soon...
Join the Legion
Honor Roll
About the Authors
RETRIBUTION
by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole
Copyright © 2018
by Galaxy’s Edge, LLC
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
All rights reserved. Version 1.1
Edited by David Gatewood
Published by Galaxy’s Edge Press
Cover Art: Fabian Saravia
Cover Design: Beaulistic Book Services
Formatting: Kevin G. Summers
For more information:
Website: GalacticOutlaws.com
Facebook: facebook.com/atgalaxysedge
Newsletter: InTheLegion.com
01
From the memoirs of Cohen Chhun
I’m crouched inside a shipping container marked “Radioactive. Do Not Handle.” It wasn’t supposed to be in the cargo hold of the Imperial corvette De Zuan, but there it is, along with three others.
And yes, I said Imperial.
It’s all the rage nowadays. Like it adds legitimacy to the regime that resisted Article Nineteen and put a tyrant at its head. So now we’ve got an Imperial House of Reason and an Imperial Senate. See, that’s the trick: you don’t have to actually make the galaxy better. You just have to declare an empire and expect the rest to fall into place.
Only, Kill Team Victory doesn’t play nice with tyrants. No matter how many times the House of Reason and Senate insist Goth Sullus was duly elected as emperor.
An elected emperor.
Only in the Republic.
But no one ever asked Cohen Chhun if the galaxy was headed in the right direction. And they wouldn’t like my answer if they did.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, guys.” The voice over my L-comm belongs to Aldon Masters. One of my best men. The earnest—albeit sometimes annoying—heart and soul of this kill team. “What are the odds that the Legion actually bought new labels that said ‘radioactive, do not handle,’ and put them on these crates? Because we’ve done this trick a bunch of times, and when I think about it, the stickers have always looked beat-up. But if they were new stickers… they’d look new, right?”
Bear, the only one of us with a crate all to himself, answers. “First of all, shut up. And second, they’re supposed to look old. It’s intentional.”
“Possibly, possibly,” says Masters, not missing a beat. “Or they just grabbed actual crates that were once used to house incredibly volatile radioactive elements, and now we’re just sitting in a sort of rad soup.”
Bombassa, who’s sharing a crate with Masters, says, “Our helmets would warn us of unsafe radiation levels.”
“Unless our buckets got fried because there’s so much of it, ’Bassa! The next thing you know we’re all going to start mutating. Or possibly dying. But probably mutating. Like… Bear will become an actual bear. So a little less hairy and drooly.”
“Bombassa, will you please shoot him?” says Bear.
But Masters is on one of his rolls. “We’ll all become hybrids of who we normally are. Like, Exo will have like a… skull face. And Chhun will be even more boring. And Bombassa will grow twice as tall. And… worst of all, I’ll go from being handsome to being radioactive-super-handsome.”
“A skull face would be pretty badass,” says Exo. He and I are sharing a crate. It’s nice to have him back on the team. “But Bear is right. Shut up, Masters.”
“You know what?” Masters says. “I won’t shut up. Because, quite frankly, the galaxy is not equipped to handle smoking-hot radioactive Masters.”
My legionnaires fill my comm with laughter. And it’s all fine and well, but if we keep up with the small talk, there’s too much of a chance we’ll miss our narrow window to take control of this Imperial corvette.
“Let’s maintain L-comm discipline,” I say.
I bring up the display on my bucket’s HUD. It’s linked to the hull-tracker that Wraith affixed to the ship while we were sneaking on board at the last port of call. We’re still in hyperspace, but not for much longer. Based on the time we’ve spent cooped up in these possibly radioactive dummy containers, we should be arriving any minute.
“Call it three minutes tops before we dump out of hyperspace,” I tell the team. “Everybody be ready to KTF.”
“Dude,” Exo says to me via our direct comm. “I never stopped being ready.”
Ain’t that the truth? I’ve never met a legionnaire who’s ever come close to Exo in terms of tenacity and a willingness to fight.
I get a warning indicator that the De Zuan has emerged into real space. This is the first stop since the ship made the jump, and according to the data Ravi sent our way, the initial jump coordinates lined up with an Imperial deep-space station.
An isolated space station seems like an odd place for a Republic senator to visit. But then, the galaxy has become an odd place.
“Okay, Victory boys,” I say through the L-comm, repeating an old term that Pappy used to call us. “You know the drill. Time to KTF.”
“We go fast and we go hard,” Bombassa adds.
It’s been an interesting dynamic, blending Exo and Bombassa in with the rest of the team. For Exo it was like riding a hoverbike, almost like he’d never left. And while Bombassa wasn’t Dark Ops before he left the Legion, he probably should have been. He’s become an unquestioned assistant team leader in the months since the Legion fell.
But only assistant. No one doubts that Kill Team Victory is led by Bear.
My role is similar to the one Major Owens placed me in, only now I have the freedom to go out with my kill teams when I say so. And so far, I’ve always said so.
I have a lot of say now. After I healed up, we found that Intrepid was still out there, along with a number of other ships loyal to the Legion. We started consolidating. I started planning operations with Admiral Deynolds to bring about Article Nineteen. The Legion is a shell of its former self, but we’re enough of a force to be able to bloody anything else in the galaxy. And we’re growing.
“Do it to it,” growls Bear, speaking the words with such casual aplomb that you’d think he was just giving the okay to start up a backyard barbecue.
We pull quick-release triggers inside the crates. Immediately the lids pop off and the sides partially collapse so that we’re right up in close company among the freight—and crew—of the cargo bay. Two loadmasters are in the hold, right where protocol requires them to be after dropping from hyperspace. Our sensors told us they were out there. No surprise there.
But them? They’re just a wee bit surprised.
Both of them jump back in fright at our sudden appearance. The smart one throws up his hands and drops to his knees almost immediately—before Exo even has the chance to shout for him to do so.
The other one—the dumb one—reaches for a small service pistol. The type that has no hope of getting through our armor. Exo drops him without so much as a word, double-tapping his blaster rifle and sinking two bolts into the chest.
“Oba!” cries the surviving loadmaster as he covers his head. He looks panic-stricken at his dead comrade.
“Search ’em and put ’em in the crates for now,” Bear orders. “Separate crates, Exo.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Other than giving updates on what Wraith feeds to me—he and his crew are shadowing our course on board the Indelible VI—I do my best to remove myself from the team dynamic, leaving Bear and Bombassa to run the mission. Bear was a promising team leader before everything went to hell, and ’Bassa is a natural.
But I won’t clint you. It isn’t easy to suppress a desire to run the show after leading Kill Team Victory for years. Still, leadership is now a scarce commodity in what’s left of the Legion, and people like Bear—really, all of my leejes—need to be able to reach their full potential so they’re prepared to step in and fill my shoes should the time come.
Because after us, there’s no one else. If we fail, that’s it. We’re the last line.
“Okay, buddy, in the crate,” says Masters, swinging his blaster rifle to show the loadmaster where to go.
“But it says radioactive,” the crewman protests.
Masters grabs the man by the back of his jumpsuit and pushes him into one of the crates. “Don’t worry, your armor will protect you.”
“I don’t have any armor…”
“Sucks to be you, then!” Exo slams the lid down and punches in a security key that disables the interior escape latches.
“How we reading?” Bear asks me.
“Holocams are on loop, alarms disabled… standard setup.”
Garret, Wraith’s skinny code slicer, has made our jobs a whole lot easier. He seems to have a million ways to keep us operating in the shadows, and without him I don’t know how we’d have endured the loss of support and resources that came with the majority of the Legion going up in flames over Utopion.
That hardly seems real most days.
But I guess that’s the way it goes. You want a final showdown… sometimes you get it.
“Let’s go kick some teeth in, nab us a traitor,” Bear says.
Other than some new branding—such as a replacement for the flag of the Republic, because that’s what the galaxy really needed—the interiors of these Imperial ships are unchanged. Same polished black decks and white walls. Secure in the knowledge that we’re invisible to onboard monitoring holocams and other sensor screens, we move swiftly from the cargo bay and down the access tunnel, our combat boots not making a sound. Sometimes there are guards in these access tunnels, but not today. We move on into the main corridor that runs from the bridge of the ship all the way to the engine rooms at the aft.
And that’s where we get our first contact.
Four shock troopers—though they’re called legionnaires now. Or actually, Imperial legionnaires. As if it could ever make sense to put those two words together. As if the Legion weren’t in ruins. Clad in the dark armor of the Black Fleet, these shock troopers are being dispersed throughout the galaxy in lieu of the actual Legion as if that’s just how it always was.
They might adopt the name, but when these defending soldiers see a kill team jocked up and moving down the corridor with weapons hot, they don’t play the part. They fold immediately. Hands go up and weapons drop. Almost like they were looking for an opportunity to surrender.
“Chain ’em to the deck,” Bear orders as he kicks their discarded rifles away.
Bombassa and I take a knee, our weapons aimed farther down the primary corridor for any new arrivals, while Bear watches our backs. Exo has his weapon pointed at the kneeling shock troopers, and Masters ener-chains their hands behind their backs and magnetically locks the restraints to the deck, forcing the captives to lie prone. He then removes their buckets.
We can only hope that their surrender is genuine and they didn’t already report us over their comms. But we’re ready for the alternative. And anyway, a blaster fight would have notified the ship of our presence no matter what.
“Recognize any of these guys?” Masters asks.
I glance over. “No.”
Neither do the rest of the team. Which doesn’t mean anything; the Imperial Legion is a big force. But sometimes it has familiar faces. It includes some old legionnaires who were unhappy with the direction of the galaxy—guys like Exo—as well as a bunch of psychotic ex-leejes who never belonged in the Legion in the first place. Plus, according to Exo, plenty of former mercs, muscle, and malcontents who saw a new power structure forming and wanted to get in on the ground floor.
“Okay, we can check ’em out once we have our target,” Bear says. “Hood ’em.”
“You best hope you check out,” Exo says to the captives as he unfolds an isolation hood. “’Cause if you’re Nether Ops trying to sneak in our ranks again… you get shot on sight.”
Nether Ops went in whole-pigasaur for Goth Sullus. He’s all their black little hearts ever wanted. Not surprising, really, that his brutal, ends-justify-the-means philosophy turned out to be popular with people who betrayed their principles ages ago. People who refuse to acknowledge that their manipulations have taken them down the wrong path, and so have no hope of turning themselves around.
Four hoods are draped over the prisoners, and we leave them to the sleeping arms and pins-and-needles that will come along over the next few minutes.
Better than getting shot.
We continue down the main corridor, creeping toward the bridge at the end of the ship. Each door we pass gets locked up with a special slicer package that affixes to the control panel. This is standard Dark Ops tech, but Garret punched it up considerably. The kid could make a fortune doing R&D somewhere if the galaxy weren’t on fire. Or if he weren’t so enamored with being a part of Wraith’s crew.
“I really figured we’d have shot more people by this point,” Masters remarks. “I think this might be a setup.” There’s an edge of concern in his voice—a concern I share. He’s just saying what we’re all thinking.
Thanks to our man on the inside—Imperial Legion Commander Washam—we’ve been busting up the plans of every senator and House of Reason delegate stupid enough to leave Utopion. We are the galaxy’s outlaws, dedicated to bringing about Article Nineteen, while Admiral Deynolds and the Intrepid, leading what little is left of the Legion—the real Legion—are working to cut off the corrupt wealth of the House and Senate.
So far, we’re making them howl.
Eventually they’d have to set a trap for us, right?
In fact, we’ve probably already fought our way through more than one. There’ve been some pretty stiff battles—too stiff—in the tight confines of the corvettes and luxury shuttles popular with delegates desperate enough to leave Utopion to check on their crumbling empires off-planet. We’ve won every time.
But success is never guaranteed.
“Trap or no,” Bombassa says, pausing to seal up another door, “we know the senator is on this ship.”
“Worst case, we dust one more scumsack before going out in a blaze of glory,” says Exo. “Besides, it can’t be any worse than Pride of Ankalor.”
“Here’s the VIP suite,” Bombassa says.
We stack up outside the door, not simply sealing this one up. The senator is most likely either here or on the bridge.
I unlock the door with a slicer box and keep to the side as the team storms in under Bear’s supervision. By the time I’m up and following them inside, they’ve already cleared the room. It’s spacious but open—a bed, kitchenette, and lounge-like work area.
“Empty,” Bear says. “We’ll check the bridge next. I hope this doesn’t turn into a game of hide-and-seek throughout the ship. Ain’t got time for that.”
“Ah, that sounds fun,” says Masters.
We file out of the room and seal up the suite behind us. Still no one pays us a visit. Something’s definitely up. Way too quiet.
When we finally reach the end of the corridor, we stack up outside the blast doors that lead to the bridge. It’s funny Exo brought up the Pride of Ankalor. We trained for that mission so much that stacking up outside a corvette bridge almost feels nostalgic. I remember how often we got dusted in those simulations. How Twenties and Kags got dusted when it went down for real.
Possessed by a sort of premonition, I say, “Exo, let me go in first.”
“Uh… all right.”
We switch positions, Exo pulling out his own code-slicer box to get the doors open.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Do it,” says Bear.
“Go!”
The doors slide open with a whoosh and I rush inside, the rest of the team behind me. The bridge is devoid of crew, as if run by AI—but standing before the bridge’s main holoscreen is our target senator, a slight man who looks ill, like he’s taken with a virus. Above him, holocams buzz and hover. The senator is holding a device in his hand. Some kind of activator. He’s speaking for the cameras.
“The galaxy will witness the end of—”
I thumb the selector on my rifle to stun, and send a pulse of energy that completely paralyzes the senator. He falls over like a toppled statue.
Masters rushes over and removes the device from the senator’s hand as the rest of the team clears the empty bridge. Bombassa works at the command console.
