Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Read Free

got me?”
    “ Aye aye, sir!” roared the line doggies, most of whom had exactly one real battle under their belts – the assault on the Weapon on Afrana’s moon, ten subjective years ago. Bull hoped the extensive VR training would be enough, that and the improved Avenger battlesuits. He had so few Marines.
    Bull still wished Captain Absen had brought a lot more troops, but these eight squads of six Marines each were all he had. They couldn’t even take more than a few of Conquest ’s Recluse battle drones, one on each assault sled. Fortunately the pilots had proven quick studies, using their cyber-links to control the ground support machines.
    Bull snorted. Aerospace. As usual, it would be Marine infantry that would do or die. Tip of the spear, end of the shaft, he thought.
    Though he couldn’t forget the thirty Ryss he’d been forced to use. At least they had their own customized Avengers. Unwilling to link in to VR space, the aliens had trained for the assault in an enormous converted cargo bay. Even without cybernetics or nano-augmentation, they made fearsome warriors, if not as deadly as his own troops, pound for pound. They were just so very, very green.
    Bull switched freqs. “Slash, you copy?”
    “I hear, War Leader Bull.” Between the chip in Bull’s head and the translation software in his suit, the big Ryss officer he called Slash might as well have been speaking English.
    “Three minutes. You good to go?”
    “We yearn to spill blood and taste Pureling flesh, War Leader. Again, I request the honor of first assault.”
    “No. You’ll damn well follow your mission orders or I’ll rip your fuzzy mane right off your neck, you got me?”
    “I hear and obey, War Leader.”
    Slash, like all the Ryss warriors, was young, a bare yearsmane. Scarcely adult, he had a good head and heart, but like most unblooded troops seemed terribly eager to die gloriously. More than once Bull had cuffed him hard enough to send the young warrior stumbling. Not a recommended method of discipline with human troops, Absen had been adamant that Bull use Ryss training methods on Ryss.
    Once again, Bull wished Trissk hadn’t been sent off on some secret mission. The experienced Ryss warrior could have helped get the cat-boys ready, or better yet, led them.
    Bull switched his HUD to the forward external view, looking at what the sled pilots saw. Before his eyes stretched Io’s hot yellow surface, colored with the massive amounts of sulfur dust thrown up by the moon’s many volcanoes. Unlike other moons, Io was a hot planetoid on the inside, with violent tidal forces pulling and twisting at its silicate crust and molten core, generating massive amounts of heat.
    Despite this, its distance from the sun meant usually that seething heat remained trapped beneath the surface, except when it erupted as lava from a volcano. Most of its surface stayed cold, very cold, even if a few hundred meters down flowed rivers of magma.
    The Empire’s command center over the horizon occupied a geologically calm area. Perhaps the aliens had stabilized it by draining the heat below and using that to energize the Weapon just beyond. That massive laser had the power to burn through the heaviest ship armor over ranges out to ten million kilometers, and thus controlled space all around Jupiter.
    At least, it controlled the space within the laser’s ever-moving arc of fire. The Marines’ assault was coming in from below the horizon.
    Bull looked up to see Reaper staring at him. “Awake now, are we?” he said.
    She snorted. “Who can sleep through all your yakking with Slash?” As if in reply, the assault sled bucked again and picked up a harmonic as it skimmed lower, bleeding off speed in the moon’s chill atmosphere. “Besides, we’re about to get hit.”
    “Crap.” Switching his HUD view to flight tactical, Bull watched as a swarm of Meme stingships fell toward them, trailing tongues of fusion fire. The enemy launched hypers, tiny ones that