The Soldier

  Copyright © 2021 Terrance Mulloy

  Tiny Empire Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

  This publication is a work of fiction. All characters, locations, and events are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission from the author.

  TerranceMulloyAuthor.com

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  Contents

  Techical Notes

  Timeline

  Mission Map

  Quote

  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

  Thank you for reading

  Also by Terrance Mulloy

  About the Author

  Language warning: for the purposes of authenticity, this book uses some bad language.

  Technical note #1: throughout The Soldier (and the Earth Epsilon Wars trilogy), you may notice ammunition magazines referred to as cartridges. This is intentional. The futuristic rifles depicted here, along with the highly incendiary nature of the jacketed plasma rounds they fire, means they are chambered inside specially insulated box cartridges. It’s also worth noting I do use the accurate term of magazine when describing conventional firearms in present-day scenes.

  Think of them as the same thing.

  Technical note #2: British USC infantry in the second half of this book are referred to as officers, unlike their U.S. counterparts who are referred to as either troops or soldiers.

  TIMELINE

  2048

  The Wraith invade Earth.

  2050

  Mankind unites under the newly formed United Space Command (USC), and begins to fight back using captured Wraith technology.

  2052

  The Wraith suddenly abandon all battlefronts and retreat to their homeworld.

  2054

  The USC decides to pursue them, launching the biggest military counter-strike operation in the history of mankind.

  2055

  Utilizing the Wraith’s zero-point-field technology, the first USC armada arrives at Epsilon 382-IV.

  2065

  With no victor in sight, the war still rages on...

  “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

  ~ G.K. Chesterton

  One

  1.2 billion miles from Epsilon 382-IV

  Five-Earth-years after the USC’s counter-strike launch…

  The air inside the USC Intrepid always felt cool around this time. Not uncomfortably cold or anything, but cool enough for Private Matt Reeves to throw on his light softshell jacket. The air quality was also stale and musty – like it had been spewed from a rickety old air conditioning unit that was in dire need of a new filter.

  Since thawing from his cryo-sleep three weeks ago, Matt was beginning to understand why some of his fellow enlistees were calling this ship the USC Decrepit. To his knowledge, the Intrepid had only completed two rotations, but deep interstellar travel had already taken a toll on the integrity of this huge carrier, or coffin rocket as this vessel was so endearingly referred to by the flight crew on board. Everything was looking a little worse for wear. The ship was effectively a giant aircraft carrier zooming across the gulf of space, but the more they tried to make the bowels of the ship appear earthly and familiar, the stranger it felt.

  Despite never laying eyes on them since deployment, Matt wondered what shape the other frigates and battleships in this small fleet were in. They had made the journey out here alongside them, hurtling through the vacuum, their hulls bombarded with micrometeorites traveling at velocities upwards of fifty times the speed of a hypersonic bullet. If those ships were anything like the Intrepid, they would now look like enormous slabs of dented steel, bristling with plasma cannons, each one capable of projecting enough power to destroy a small moon. No doubt, they would be a sight to behold.

  A few years after the Wraith invasion of Earth, Matt remembered seeing the famed Indian warship, the USC Vikrant, break atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean near Fiji. At the time, it was the largest military vessel ever built by mankind. Seeing it hover in a stationary position at ten-thousand feet over a dormant volcano forced him to wonder how humans could envision such awesome and powerful things.

  However, the dorm he was currently housed in certainly did not cause any sense of wonder or awe. It was a dump. A melting pot of fresh-faced soldiers of varying sex and ages, with as many languages as shades of skin, all ready to defend their homeworld with valor. Some had experienced combat before. Most had not. For that reason alone, they were almost always referred to as greenies by the higher-ranking officers and personnel. Additional monikers such as bullet eaters, gore buckets, and cannon fodder were also used on occasion. It mostly came down to the individual leveling the insult.

  Matt had noticed the higher-ranking senior officers tended to be a little more respectful towards greenies. That was probably since most people who signed up for this war found themselves in the afterlife rather quickly. So they seemed to hold a quiet reverence and humility when it came to matters of their mortality. They knew what all greenies on this ship were about to face. They knew how bleak the survival rate was during the first year of service. Most people aboard this ship would die out here in space. That was the harsh truth. That harsh truth was also what USC recruiters, along with their army of PR firms, desperately tried to keep the public from ever knowing back home. Staggering death tolls were not only bad for public morale, but they were also bad for business. And this war was big business.

  But despite the sobering reality of this war, it wasn’t all doom-and-gloom inside this stale tin bucket. Matt had already made some friends since thawing. Over the last few days, he had been watching a middle-aged Kuwaiti man in the opposite bunk with total fascination.

  After pridefully announcing himself as Sayeed, he began to make a supply of tea from cardamom pods and saffron powder he had somehow managed to smuggle aboard. Each morning, he would rise to quietly pray, then methodically begin stirring his tea clockwise over a small saucepan of boiling water, occasionally adding a pinch of sugar. It was a ritual. A mediation. When he caught Matt watching him, he smiled and offered him a mug. Out of respect, Matt graciously accepted.

  Yesterday, Matt also befriended the young Japanese greenie named Niko who was stationed on the opposite bunk to him. Unfortunately, without a translator app or field device, they both struggled to communicate anything beyond their names and some polite gestures, due to the language barrier. But from what he could discern, she was from Nagasaki and had enlisted after losing her husband to the invasion. They shared that in common as Matt had done the same thing. Although, after losing his wife, he continued serving as a Police Officer in Kentucky for anoth
er year, newly deputized by what remained of the State government. Once he had helped to rebuild his community, it was time to enlist and deploy to Basic Training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.

  The overall mood in Matt’s dorm was neutral, and despite the odd scuffle or misunderstanding, everyone was mainly focused on their training and deployment. The racial, religious, and cultural differences one might expect to encounter with such a multi-national force this size were minuscule. Ultimately, everyone knew the stakes involved transcended any earthly squabbles or conflicts. This was not a territorial fight, or a fight over resources, or some holy ideology. This was a fight to save the entire species, and for humanity to prevail, everyone had to be on the same team. Every soldier crammed aboard this ship understood that.

  However, since thawing, Matt had also picked up on an unspoken sense of dread permeating throughout the ship. No one spoke about it openly, but everyone felt it. It was undeniably there, wafting through the dormitory hallways like an unseen fog.

  It was most notable in the chow halls where the COs would sit at separate tables. Some would mingle among their ranks, offering the nearby greenies nothing but guarded murmurs and snickers. Others would sit alone, hunched over their vacuum-sealed meals, staring vacantly at holograms of family, and loved ones. They all knew where this ship was headed. They all knew what awaited them. No doubt, greenies like Matt did too. But the more seasoned officers, some of whom were shipping out on their second tours, knew the real hopelessness of the situation:

  Earth was losing this war.

  Aside from the sprawling chow halls and dorms, the United Space Command did not discriminate in terms of keeping any soldiers on this ship within the confines of their ranks. For an entire year, everyone on this coffin rocket was in the muck - mashed together like tinned sardines – waiting to be vomited onto a hellish clump of alien rock known as Epsilon 382-IV, endearingly often referred to by combat infantry as the Bog.

  Shipping out for the big freeze, Matt had been assigned to the 22nd Division, which was a mix of international brigades from various parts of Asia, the UAE, and North America. But the higher-ranking officers, including those who awaited them on Epsilon, were mostly American by origin. So there was a good chance Matt would be assigned to an all-American platoon before he deployed to USC Camp Rhino; a Joint Forward Operating Base located in the Northern equatorial region of the planet.

  From what he had heard, this was one of the toughest and most unforgiving fronts in the war. Rhino housed a variety of military personnel from Army Special Interstellar Forces (ASIF), the U.S. Marine Space Corps (USMSC), Allied Naval Orbital Corps (ANOC), and the Strategic Allied Air Command (SAAC), which was made up of Canadian, Danish, British, and Australian Air Strike Squadrons. The base was also home to various civilian defense contractors, including supply, logistics, engineering, medical, and combat communications companies from Unified Korea, Qatar, and Japan.

  But if Rhino was known for anything, it was home to the infamous Praetorians; an elite American ASIF ground force that dealt solely in rapid deployment, covert reconnaissance, and special combat operations behind enemy lines. Aside from the Navy’s clandestine Spectral Unit, and the USMSC’s Night Raiders Regiment, they were arguably the deadliest, most feared, and most revered warfighting force currently operating on Epsilon. There were also vague rumors of smaller, offshoot Praetorian units stationed on Rhino as well. They supposedly undertook unsanctioned black ops that were so classified and sensitive, only a handful of USC brass on Epsilon knew of their existence. It was speculated these covert strike teams were solely tasked with infiltrating and dismantling the enemy’s senior command structure.

  Two days out from his atmo-drop, Matt had spent the last few hours hanging around his dorm, going over digital copies of legal and financial documents he had finalized before deployment, comforted to know his family would be looked after in the event he was gravely injured, or KIA. Although he felt duty-ready, he made certain to reread the deployment manuals he had been issued, along with the USC’s mission mandate.

  Even on his second read-through, Matt thought the mission mandate was quite seductive in its pro-war message. The writing was eloquent and carried a rousing pithiness that was designed to tug the heartstrings of any man or woman wanting to defend their place in the universe. He could tell it was not written by some stiff, over-funded think tank or oversight committee, but more likely outsourced to some trendy PR firm in New York or London. That was somewhat expected, given the fact this was the first full-scale interstellar war humanity had ever engaged in. It had to be sold to an already battle-weary public. It also had to appeal to the current generation of teenagers and young adults, many of whom felt disenfranchised since the invasion and were looking for purpose and belonging. And the governments of the world, now united under a common cause, also had to deliver the overarching message to their citizens in a way that was not only unifying but easy to absorb.

  This was a war for the ages, and without a steady stream of bodies to throw into battle, there was no war to win.

  Aside from those factors, there were other crucial elements at play. The feats of engineering and logistics involved in Matt’s off-world deployment, which had kept him alive and relatively comfortable to this point in time, was enough to make one’s head spin. The new war effort was truly global, and it had required an unprecedented funding push in public education and advanced technical training, the likes of which the world had never seen before.

  Two

  It was nearly chow time, and the dorm was starting to get rowdy.

  Matt sat up and tapped the screen of the small comms unit that was attached to the wall of his bunk, waiting for it to connect with the ship’s relay antennas.

  Until they had passed the threshold of what was considered the outermost ring of Epsilon’s solar system, every greenie could send one, five-minute personalized message back to Earth each week. Using the same zero-point-field tunnel the ships were traveling through, the data was encased in something called a Gravity Sack, then sent back in the opposite direction to connect with a relay of USC satellites located throughout the solar system. From there, it would be directly transmitted to a secure tablet device Matt’s parents were given by officials after he had deployed. Despite the incredible speed these messages traveled, it still took each data packet three months to reach Earth.

  When a red light clicked on with a soft chime, Matt straightened his posture and stared at the comms screen, not quite sure how to begin. The last two messages he had sent his parents, and four-year-old daughter were essentially the same. Apart from the few greenies he had befriended, post-cryo life aboard the Intrepid was mundane at best.

  At times, the ship felt suffocatingly overcrowded, the food was always terrible, and almost everyone wondered if they would ever see blue sky or fluffy white clouds again. Nothing had changed much since he last spoke to them, but a simple message, no matter how trivial, would be something his family would have been anxiously waiting to receive. After all, this was probably the last time he would be able to speak to them until he returned to Earth in five years.

  Matt watched as the words, speak now, and record your message, appeared across the blank screen. He had no idea how to begin as he sat there fiddling with his wedding band, turning it endlessly around his finger, the skin rubbed raw. Somehow, he found this act calming.

  “Space phones, man. They suck,” said a voice from behind with a distinct American accent. Matt turned to see Private Mike Pinehurst standing there with a firm smirk on his face. “You’ll already be home by the time that message reaches any USC satellites.”

  Born and raised in Truckee, California, Mike Pinehurst was around four years younger than Matt. He carried a shorter, stockier build, with tufts of light facial hair that barely passed as a beard. By default, his demeanor was affable and laid back, but he was also prone to being smart when he had no business being smart. During his time at Basic Training, it did not take long for him
to realize he held an uncanny ability to piss off every Drill Instructor with a simple look. There was something about him that exuded mischief. Matt had briefly met him earlier on the USC Lexington, which was a deployment-prep frigate that orbited the Moon. They shared a chow table the night of their deep freeze. Once secured in their cryo-pods, they were shipped out to Neptune with the other greenies and transferred to the Intrepid. From there, they would complete the year-long journey to Epsilon.

  “Pinehurst, right?” Matt queried with an easy smile.

  “Yo, that’s me,” he replied, putting his hand out for Matt to shake. “Good to see you didn’t freeze to death. Guess it’s nice to still be alive this far out.”

  “Don’t get too excited, we’ve still gotta make it down to Epsilon’s surface yet.”

  Pinehurst gave a cynical snort; fully aware Matt was only half-joking. “Point taken, dude.”