Star Soldier: The Complete Series, page 1
Star Soldier: The Complete Series
Odette C. Bell
All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Star Soldier
The Complete Series
Copyright © 2018 Odette C Bell
Cover art stock photos: licensed from Depositphotos.
* * *
www.odettecbell.com
Contents
Star Soldier Episode One
Star Soldier Episode One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Star Soldier Episode Two
Star Soldier Episode Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Star Soldier Episode Three
Star Soldier Episode Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Star Soldier Episode Four
Star Soldier Episode Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Crucible - Sample
www.odettecbell.com
More complete sci-fi series by Odette C. Bell
Star Soldier Episode One
Star Soldier Episode One
Her world is dying, and only she can help.
Ami is a soldier, nothing more than cannon fodder in a war that’s threatening to tear her world apart. When creatures from a cross-dimensional rift spill over her world, society as she knows it shatters.
All must fight to live. But when a creature with near limitless power choses her to save her world, Ami is swept into a fight for everything and everyone.
…
An action-packed sci fi, Star Soldier is sure to please fans of Odette C. Bell’s Axira.
1
Ami
The sun is setting. Its dying rays light up the city and glisten off the megalithic, tall towers that reach to the sky. Though the higher levels are white and gleaming silver-blue, the lower levels are nothing more than a mess of dirty brown, gray, and black.
As the troop transport bucks and heaves along the narrow rail line, I find my breath.
I sit along one of the long benches, squeezed in between several other soldiers.
They all check their armor. Methodically. Carefully. Obsessively. Because it will be the difference between life and death.
Me, I don’t check my armor. I checked it before we boarded the transport. Instead, I sit there, eyes locked ahead, body rigid, hands clasped with tension, shoulders and neck muscles as tightly wound as a fastened spring.
The transport keeps bucking as we continue further down the hastily made rail track.
A few lights flicker on and off inside the transport as electrical surges power through the ship’s badly insulated systems.
This vessel – like all of its class – has been hastily made, sloppily scraped together. It doesn’t matter if it won’t last a week, because it wasn’t intended to. In many ways, neither was I, nor my comrades. Not, of course, that the other men sitting around me would refer to me as a comrade. I am the only woman here, and I have a reputation – not a particularly nice one.
We’re closer now, I can feel it. Anticipation turns to sweat as it trickles along my brow, and my heartbeat triples until it thrums hard into my jaw. I clench my teeth so tightly together every knock of the transport is transferred deep into my chest and down into my stomach.
They are coming.
Ever since I’d joined the army, I’ve had an almost preternatural ability to sense them.
The enemy.
The void, as the official scientists of Gordana – my home world – call them. Monsters that appeared out of a cross-dimensional rift five short years ago. Our society hadn’t exactly been peaceful before. Prosperous, yes, ambitious, absolutely. But the rift changed everything. A planet that had once been obsessed with interstellar travel became occupied with only one task – surviving. Surviving the almost nightly incursions of the void.
They call them half ghosts – the monsters that came from the void. Fighting them is unlike fighting any other enemy I’ve ever seen, let alone heard of. They don’t always stay in one place. They can transport, disappearing from one spot only to reappear in another several meters away.
That isn’t the end of their incredible, physics-defying abilities, either. Depending on the class of half ghost you’re fighting, they all have different skills. Some can conjure the elements, drawing with them water, ice, fire, lightning even. In many ways, it feels like it’s right out of a storybook, a movie, some useless bit of fiction. But it isn’t. It goddamn isn’t, and it’s destroying my world one day after the next.
The only defense against the ghost walkers are the light sentinels. Or at least that’s what the scientists call them. A strange kind of being that appears to exist in an interdimensional realm.
Just thinking about them makes my head spin.
“Five,” the lieutenant in charge pushes up from his seat, grabs a handrail with white clenched knuckles, and spits the word.
Collectively, every soldier tenses. I feel the seat beneath me shudder as 24 grown men clench their teeth and lock their armored boots on the floor.
… I can hear it now. The hum. That strange, growing, shifting crackle that fills the air. The void.
Just across from me, there’s a tiny computer screen that shows the view from the front of the transport. The long vessel powers along the rails, its glistening body catching the light from the city above.
The lieutenant keeps counting down the minutes, and I keep staring at the screen, a sense of anticipation tinged with true fear coiling in my gut. I would clench a hand on it, but I can’t.
No fear. Never show fear around these bastards. It’s my motto. The only reason I’ve come so far. I’m not just the only female in this transport – I’m the only woman in my whole unit.
Gordana society wasn’t always so sexist. The rift changed everything. There are those in society – the ones with the power – who believe we simply can’t afford to waste any more women of childbearing age in the fight.
I bucked the trend. Because I’ve never stopped fighting. Anyone who knows me says one thing about me – I have something to prove. What that thing is, nobody knows. Hell, I don’t know, either. I’ve always just felt… pushed. Thrown into the fight by some force beyond me, some force I’ve never understood but can’t push away.
“One minute,” the lieutenant says, jaw clenched, eyes drawing wide.
Dark, fearful anticipation swells through the transport like a hurricane about to hit shore.
Now the buzzing in the air is almost unbearable. There’s nothing that can shield it. No amount of technology that can dampen it out. You could be in a thick lead box, but that godawful buzzing would still creep its way in.
The sound of the multiverse – that’s what the scientists call it. The beginning of the end – that’s what the grunts call it.
What do I call it?
… The beyond.
I feel it again – that preternatural sense. My eyes suddenly widen, my body tenses, and I wait.
One second, then another.
I lock my gaze on the computer screen by the door.
The transport powers over the rails. But suddenly – in a mere 100 meters – the rails give out. They drop away. Into nothingness. Into a void.
Because there’s an enormous black crackling ball in their way. It obscures a region of approximately 5 km² in the lower districts of the city. According to initial reports, the void has already torn through 80 building complexes.
80. I shudder to think of how many lives that was. No one else aboard would care. Or if they did pause to think of all the souls that had been sucked into the dimensional rift, they’d banish the thought in a hurry.
It didn’t take long from when the void appeared to society’s morals changing. In the beginning, it was about saving everybody. But when it became clear Gordana simply didn’t have the technology and resources to fight this war, the sanctity of life became the first real casualty.
Soldiers just don’t care anymore. They’ve seen it too many times. Too many people have been consumed by the monsters who live beyond the rift. And if you’re exposed to defeat on a daily basis – to loss, to death – the mind just starts to tune it out. What’s another body? Especially if it’s no one who’ll be missed. Losing a menial worker from the lower realms is nothing compared to losing a senior scientist from the towers that rise high above the city. If Gordana is to have any hope of surviving the war, it’s with those scientists.
“Contact,” the lieutenant spits.
I watch with wide eyes as the transport punches into the black void. I see it on the screen first – the view of our ship simply disappearing – practically throwin
Then I feel it. All around me. That dark, crackling, eddying power.
Everyone reacts to it differently. The soldier beside me begins to clamp his teeth together. The soldier on my other side shakes his head, jitters back and forth, legs jumping up and down as he hits his open, sweaty palms on his knees.
Me – I barely react at all. Or at least not visibly.
Over the years I’ve learned to internalize everything. Make no movements. No expressions. Say nothing.
Keep a completely cold, unreadable expression.
And I do. I’m the only soldier aboard the entire transport who doesn’t react to the energy snaking through the air.
Charges of electricity begin to discharge along the sides of the railing and down the walls. A few soldiers jerk back, trying to get away from them – the older ones, the ones who’ve been through this before, barely bother to move at all.
Though those crackles of dark, pulsing energy sink deep into your bones and set your teeth jittering in your skull, they can’t kill you.
There’s plenty that can kill you, though – but that stuff’s in the heart of the void.
“Contact,” the lieutenant suddenly roars.
I feel something slam into the side of the transport. It’s so strong, so goddamn violent it feels as if the metal casing will be ripped in half.
I jerk my head to the side, my gaze slicing up half a meter above my head. I see claws protruding through the metal, parting the inch-thick steel with all the ease of a finger poking through a clean sheet of paper.
“Move,” the lieutenant says.
Suddenly there’s a scream from outside. So powerful, so deadly. It’s like nothing else that exists on Gordana. It seems to shake through not just the floor and my bones, but pierce deep into my mind, too.
Suddenly the door on the opposite side of the transport opens. It’s every man for himself as every soldier rushes toward it, bodies packing through the doorway like sardines being chased into a net.
I hang back. Though another pulse of terror rips through my heart as I see that protruding claw curl against the metal, I go for my gun – not the door.
The claw is suddenly yanked back, and it pulls off a massive section of the transport wall.
Enough that I get a perfect view of a massive eye suddenly pushes close to the hole. I see it blinking. See its energy-covered skin. It crackles with green pulses – deep bursts of power that rise over its glistening eyeball then sink deep into the charcoal-black skin around it.
I take a single second to stare into that eye before I yank my gun up and start firing. Not at the eye, mind you – at the claw.
After a few mad blasts, I finally manage to obliterate a chunk off the claw. It sails past me and slams into the floor, gouging through the metal, several charges of electricity escaping everywhere and charging up my boots.
I grit my teeth and keep firing as I strafe backward. Finally I reach the door and I pitch outside, falling down to the cracked street below, rolling and punching to my feet.
All of the other soldiers have already fled the transport, pushing into the broken remnants of this section of the city, desperately trying to find cover.
There’s no point.
There’s nowhere safe from these fiends. You could find some overturned hover car and press your back against it, hoping the bigger ones wouldn’t see you, but the smaller ones – they can appear and disappear at will. The bigger ones will just distract you, and the smaller ones will creep up from behind, and… you’ll be dead in seconds. A screaming puddle of blood.
I’ve seen it too many times now.
So I don’t push backward toward the tempting cover of a half-destroyed metal wall.
Instead, I grit my teeth, sling my pulse gun over my shoulder, and surge forward like a wave from a tsunami.
Though I concentrate fire on the massive birdlike creature that’s torn through the transport, I know I can’t get too close. Get too close, and not only will its claws rip through me with all the ease of a finger pushing through hot butter, but it will be able to use its neural blocking technique. If you dare touch its body – if you dare expose yourself to too much of that green, crackling energy – it will shut you down. You’ll become a dribbling, twitching mess on the broken city street. And seconds later, the monsters will tear through you.
The lieutenant valiantly tries to give orders, but there’s little point.
This battle is too frantic, too goddamn messy.
As I twist my head to the side, rolling to my feet and dodging one of the small creatures as they appear right next to me, I see the blood and body remains. Already several soldiers have been ripped apart. That’s no overemphasis.
These monsters are so powerful they can tear you to shreds and spit you back out again.
I’ve never been to this particular section of the lower city. It doesn’t matter. They are all the same. Dingy, broken, cobbled-together with whatever resources the unlucky, hapless inhabitants can find.
That doesn’t change the details, though. Those striking details I’ll never be able to push from my mind when I settle down to sleep at night. The half broken dolls made from scraps of fabric, metal, and wood. The unfinished meals. The straps of blood soaked clothes.
Lives. Details of people’s lives. Lives that have been taken away by the rift and its monsters.
I clench my teeth as a bitter swell of emotion washes over me. It has just enough violent force to see me vault over the smoking remains of a broken hover car. One of the green half ghosts appears below me, a massive mouth forming and stretching toward my leg.
I’m wearing a few sections of armor. The fact is, I’m not important enough to be worth wasting a full set of mechanical plating on. Still, my boots and shins are protected by insulated plating. Meaning I can kick that half ghost with impunity and not fear that its green, crackling energy will turn me into a vegetable.
So I do. I spin around, catch it on the underside of its gaping open mouth, and send it spinning backward across the cracked street.
I yank up my gun, bare my teeth, and shoot it three times, three powerful hot blasts of energy snaking from my pulse rifle and slamming into its jittering form.
As soon as I’m done, it twitches, once, twice, then three times. Then finally it disappears in a halo of sparks that sink into the street and smell like burnt hair.
I barely glance at it as I swivel my attention back to the massive bird.
Whenever a void opens up there will always be one key monster you’ll have to take down if you have any hope of ending the infection.
This time I guess it’s the birdlike creature. It’s a class I’ve fought before. Class III, to be exact. Nasty big bastards who take a hell of a lot of coordinated fire to take down. Unless you’re lucky enough to have one of the light callers, that is. A super specialized group amongst the Gordana Security Forces who can summon the light sentinels.
And the light sentinels… I always shiver whenever I so much as think about them, let alone see them.
They are these amazing beings made of pure, dancing light. I can barely describe them. They look like glowing outlines that surge with power like blasts of a lightning storm seen from space.
There is one thing, however, that I can describe. Their abilities. They are possessed with such power it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Some of them have control over elements, like ice, fire, lightning even. Others shift the very ground. Just thinking about it sends shivers snaking down my spine and sinking hard into the base of my back.
_preview.jpg)
