Home > Home Front (Drop Trooper Book 5)

Home Front (Drop Trooper Book 5)
Author: Rick Partlow

 


1

 

 

“Storm’s coming.”

I pulled my head out of the guts of the torn-down auto-harvester and wiped sweat away from my eyes.

“What?” The question was a reflex. I’d heard what Vicky said, but I’d been so absorbed with the attempted repairs that it hadn’t processed through my overheated brain.

“Out there,” she expounded, nodding at the western horizon.

I looked at her for a second before I checked out the westward sky. The sunsets here were beautiful, but nothing was more beautiful than Vicky Sandoval; not to me. Her work coveralls were stained with soot, her dark hair matted with sweat and tied back into a messy ponytail, and she still took my breath away.

She noticed me checking her out and the corner of her mouth turned up.

“I was talking about the weather, Cam.”

“Oh, yeah.” I grabbed at an insulated bottle sitting beside my toolbox and sucked down a swig of cold water. The summer heat turned it into wine more effectively than any divine miracle and I sighed with relief.

The horizons were always distant here on the Danuvian Plateau, the mountains a rumor, a shimmer on the edge of existence that might have been an optical illusion. Even the shimmer was invisible now, lost in curtains of rain kilometers away. The advancing front was a dark line across the sky, lit up here and there with lightning, the thunder still too far away to hear.

“Might not make it this far,” I mused, turning back to the open maintenance panel. “And this piece of shit isn’t making it another centimeter until we replace the secondary power coupling.”

“Jesus, that’s the third coupling we’ve had to swap out in the year we’ve owned the damned thing.” She dabbed at her forehead with a rag, then tossed it down onto the maintenance catwalk of the harvester, hands on her hips. “I think we need to consider biting the bullet and just buying a whole new machine.”

I winced, leaning against the metal, making sure my bare skin didn’t touch it. It wasn’t thermoplastic or Duralloy or BiPhase Carbide or any of the sophisticated materials I’d grown used to in the Marines, and it could leave—had left—a nasty burn on any unprotected flesh you were foolish enough to expose to it after a long day in the fields.

Still, I wasn’t sure which hurt worst, the memory of the burns, or the idea of spending that much money.

“We’d have to dip into our separation bonuses. The Commonwealth Colonization Authority gave us the initial equipment investment at no charge, but until someone gets a production facility up and running in town, anything new is going to have to be imported from out-system, and you know how much that’s going to cost.”

“It’s either that or keep running back to the fabricator shop every month.” She was winding up for an argument so I counted to ten and concentrated on deep breaths. “We have enough left.”

“It’s a lot of money,” I agreed. “But it’s only been a year, and it has to last us until we get this farm profitable.” Whenever that might be.

“It’s not like we have anything else to spend the money on,” she pointed out. “The land was free, the seed was free, they sold us the livestock at cost, and if it all goes completely to shit, we can grow enough to live off and still save enough to plant for next season.”

She was right, but I was stubbornly reluctant. It was a lot of money, enough to buy us both a ticket off this world. But not if we spent half of it on new equipment.

A flicker of movement caught my eye, something undulating in and out of the fields of corn with flashes of multicolored scales, and my teeth bared instinctively.

“Goddammit,” I muttered. “It’s a rock dragon.” I looked longingly at the squatting, utilitarian ugliness of the rover, but I remembered I’d left my rifle back at the house.

“Another one?” Vicky spat, shading her eyes with a bladed hand, trying to spot the thing. “That’s gotta mean the sonic fences are down again.” She speared me with a glare. “Which is something else we need to replace before the dragons kill all of our goats.”

I sighed, knowing she’d eventually come around to trying to repair everything ourselves one more time. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation and I knew it wouldn’t be the last.

Something rumbled off to the west and I thought for a moment Vicky might have been right, that the storm was heading this way after all, but then I realized it wasn’t thunder, it was an internal combustion engine. This colony was so remote and primitive, we didn’t even rate a dedicated fusion reactor, which meant the vehicles ran off grain alcohol, like the cars in Tijuana when I was a kid.

The rover was identical to ours, built on local fabricators from plans over a century old, like everything we owned that hadn’t come off the colony ship with us. It could have been from any of dozens of farms on the plateau, but I knew it wasn’t. There was only one man who’d be coming out here this late in the day.

The slope-backed rover skidded to a halt beside the harvesters, throwing up rooster-tails of dirt, and a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted figure squeezed out from behind the wheel, his mop of blond hair compacted under a wide-brimmed hat. He didn’t wear coveralls, opting instead for the loudest and most garish shirts his personal fabricator could manage, matched with cargo shorts and knee-high socks.

“Hey Cam, Vicky,” he called, clambering up the access ladder on the side of the harvester without asking leave. “Did you see that fucking rock dragon? I got my rifle in the cab. Wanna go hunt the son of a bitch down?”

“Too far away now,” I lamented. “Anyway, I’m wiped out. Been up on this piece of junk all afternoon.”

“Oh, yeah?” He leaned over and peered into the maintenance hatch. “You need any help with it?”

“Sure, Dave,” Vicky said, arms crossed, regarding him with strained patience he would have had to be blind not to notice. “You got a secondary power coupling in your truck next to the rifle?” Vicky didn’t dislike Dave Clines, but his personality was like chili powder, best served in measured doses and on special occasions.

“’Fraid you’re going to have to hit the industrial fabbers in town for that, darlin’,” he told her, ignoring her mood, which he could get away with because he didn’t live with her.

“Don’t call me darling, Dave,” she reminded him for what had to be the hundredth time.

Clines grinned at her, not at all apologetic.

“I don’t blame you for being pissed off, Vick,” he said, using an appellation she found only slightly less objectionable than ’darling.’ He spit off the side of the harvester. “This equipment the government gave us is a bunch of obsolete junk. They don’t give a shit about any of us, that’s why they stuck us here in the Forbidden Zone.”

Vicky sighed.

“No one actually calls it that, you know.”

“What would you call it then, Vick?” He spread his hands, motioning above us at the sky, beginning to turn a darker blue as the sun sank lower. “All these systems with habitable worlds on the other side of the Tahni Imperium and the damned klepto aliens never even tried to settle here? You know how fanatical they were about putting colonies on every single living world between Tahn-Skyyiah and the Commonwealth, but they just didn’t get around to places like this? They just left a dozen systems with habitable worlds for us to find and settle after we beat them in the war? Come on.”

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