Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2) Read Free

Reaper non-combat gear were being fueled and taken through the pre-flight rituals. Unlike the more compact ship-to-ship assault pods, the troop transports were large rectangular craft designed to house entire platoons, along with their reserve ammunition caches, spare armor, and a portable med-bay unit. In the personnel quadrant of the bay there were dozens of other platoons performing a final refit on their weapons while they waited to board their launch crafts.
    Boss Ulanti, Boss Marsters, and the other platoon leadership officers entered the bay through an elevator hatch, presumably having just been given their final briefing by the shift manager. Boss Ulanti looked over at the group of Reapers and gave them a curt nod. It was time to suit up and go get some.
    Samuel’s heart started racing, and the familiar pre-war rush filled him. Hazard deployments paid the best, and as the merc, Imago, had told him so long ago, it was all about maximizing the day rate. Samuel had spent over a year on basic salvage duty, and that was never going to get his family out from under Grotto’s heel. The prospect of a combat salvage tour inside one of the largest spire cities in mapped space had given Samuel the ray of hope he desperately needed.
    He just had to survive it.

SPIRE CITY VORHOLD
     
    Tango Platoon had arrived in time to witness the final death throes of what was once a proud spire city that served as the capitol for a planetary venture gone bankrupt. The planet was called Vorhold, and prior to liquidation, was a mighty factory world, with one mega-city by the same name dominating much of the planet’s three continents.
    Pirates had swarmed out of deep space to wreck the shipping lanes that were now unprotected by the usual corporate security forces, effectively isolating Vorhold as its economy rapidly crumbled.
    The Vorhold Venture elites defaulted on everything and sold the whole planet to Grotto, which is what brought the Reapers to sit astride former Vorhold cor-sec armored transports as the column wound its way through the once glittering streets of the city.
    Samuel recalled from the brief, that the Vorhold Ventures Corporation had made some bad gambles on the derivatives market and had been doing so for many decades. When the market turned against it, Vorhold Ventures had defaulted on a number of trades and loans, creating a cascading effect where one corporate enemy after another ceased trade with Vorhold. While perhaps in other, gentler times, such business brutality would have been spun in a more positive light, this was Grotto, and the Reapers got their briefings as raw as they came.
    As a factory world Vorhold had been dependent on the importation of necessities like food and water, so, thanks mostly to the aggressive intervention and embargos by creditor corporations, such basic needs were almost immediately in short supply.
    Now, refugees clogged the streets, standing shoulder to shoulder as they pushed and shoved to gain a better position in the haphazard food lines. They had been forced from the city proper at gunpoint by the cor-sec units that had bonded with Grotto. While once the cor-sec had patrolled the streets, fought gangers from within, and defended the city from without, they had also sold themselves to Grotto.
    The cor-sec had, under close Grotto supervision, emptied the above ground portions of the spire city, commonly known as upspire. Now there were millions across the borders of the city proper who lived in tent cities and relied exclusively on Grotto and their new cor-sec allies for food, shelter, and medicine. In the days since planetfall, the situation had gone from dire to worse as the one-time citizens of Vorhold learned the hard way what it was like to belong to a corporation that declared bankruptcy.
    The sound of so many thousands of voices raised in need and protest was not unlike being in battle as far as Samuel was concerned.
    From his vantage point atop the re-appropriated armored