ONE

  Commandant Maximus, Felix Tatius Blandus unstrapped from the bulkhead, leaned and brushed away the annoying gray splotch of sand from the steel toe of his black combat boot that despite their age still held a mirror like shine. He winced mid-swipe, when all the vertebrae in his spine cracked audibly in his armor’s speakers. Groaning, the sixty-two years old CM sat back up and brushed his gloved hands together to rid them of the grime. Then, he glared across the aisle of the bare bones troop transport at the young mercenary strapped to the opposite bulkhead. The man was smirking at him clearly amused by the the grimace of pain twisting his current commander’s face when the vertebrae settled more or less back into place.

  The CM huffed showing his disdain for the merc’s mirth, drew down his eight-point, padded roll cage and strapped back in. Damned Mars dust gets into and onto everything, he grumbled to himself. Blandus was fastidious to a fault, or at least that was what his family and many of his troopers thought of him. Fastidiousness, Blandus believed with absolute conviction, was a commander’s greatest asset. Fastidiousness was the difference between a weapon jamming in the midst of battle killing you or a fellow trooper, or working flawlessly, saving lives and producing heroes. Fastidiousness created failsafe plans and backups for those plans when they went sideways, which, thanks to Murphy’s law, they did with uncanny regularity.

  Blandus furrowed his brow and studied the trooper. No, Blandus corrected himself, the mercenary. There was a very distinct difference between the two designations. Troopers shed their blood for God and country. They were patriots. The mercs shed theirs for astronomical profits that made many of their ranks wealthier than the most successful Vexillum Maestros

  This smirking mercenary was Luc Arvel Madoc. Blandus knew, by face, all the men under his command at any given time. He supposed it was just another symptom of his obsessive compulsive nature, and his eidetic memory simplified the task. Luc Arvel Madoc was one of those profiteers whose coiffeurs were filled with blood money, and Blandus detested the fact that the military leaders of the Magnus Imperium had saddled him with the mercenary’s shady six man team. War should have some honor and not be waged for profit alone. He knew Madoc’s mens’ names but beyond that little else. The mercs were notoriously insular, vigorously protecting the past histories and backgrounds of themselves and their kin. All he needed to know, the Prime Magnus, Horatius Faustus, had informed him, was that Madoc’s team was the best available, and that they provided the required plausible deniability necessary for the delicate mission.

  Felix didn’t need Madoc’s mens’ dossiers to familiarize himself with them. After just over forty years of leading men through some of the most horrific battles of the Landing Wars, he could read men like open books. Luc Madoc was no different and through the gloom of the inky blue cabin lights he casually began reading Madoc’s book.

  The merc was affectionately known to his men and most of the mercenary industry as The Little Lamb. A nod to his initials and his physical size, L.A.M. Luc Arvel Madoc. Felix Blandus envied the man his simple name, an Earthen name that held no pretensions. His parents, on the other hand, had fallen prey to the Post Landing, Oceanic convention of burdening their offspring with monikers borrowed from ancient Roman civilization. Unfortunately, having been born into a family of two highly decorated Commandant Maximuses, and raised in the Oceanic capital of the deep sea Marianas Metroplex hadn’t helped Blandus’ cause. It made him feel as if he was trapped in one of the many very poorly written old earth Space Marine science fiction novels he’d grown up reading.

  Despite his pseudonym, there was nothing little lamb-like about Luc Madoc. While the mercs could hide their personal details, hiding their military feats was a bit more difficult. Word spread quickly when the merc units scored grand conquests against the Horde, and Madoc’s team of Carnelian Rogues were revered, spoken and even sung about. The blue hued lighting cast an odd shadow across Luc’s tanned face giving it a somewhat greenish tint. He was no longer smirking, Felix noted, bearing instead a terse gaze that exuded pure and unwavering confidence. He sat with his head relaxed back into to form fitting crash chair, eyes half shut. At five-foot ten inches tall and 185 pounds he was not a big man by most merc standards. His compact frame, though, was well muscled, muscles forged first by forced manual labor as a boy, then in battle; certainly not in the gyms frequented by the Elitist faux troopers he fought to protect. The Little Lamb had been hardened, and forged mind and body into a walking, breathing weapon by a childhood steeped in struggle and hate.

  It was not an uncommon story, struggle. The arrival of the mysterious Horde in orbit around Mars 157 years ago had left nearly every man, women and child marked by tragedy. The governments of Earth, overjoyed by first contact, had grossly misjudged the alien race’s intentions, and their folly left far too little time to go to ground or prepare to fight. The rich, the lucky and the leaders of several major world powers managed to evacuate to the many underwater habitats scattered throughout the world’s oceans. In an effort to escape the devastation wrought by climate change, mankind had been fabricating the new habitats for decades beneath the surface of every ocean and deep enough sea. The huge, domed deep water cities were populated by several millions of lucky inhabitants. The oceans, so long abused and taken for granted proved to be humanities salvation. The Horde had a crippling terror of the saline water and struggled to gain a footing at destroying the oceanic mega structures, buying the world the needed time to regroup and fight back.

  Blandus stretched out his left leg loosening up an old wound and looked abashedly away from the young merc. Unlike his own family, Luc’s family had not been one of the lucky ones, and he’d never tried to hide his lineage, not that he could if he wanted to. The entire Madoc family had been stationed on an agricultural mega-ship circling the warm waters off of California where his grand-father a lead horticulturist, when the first waves struck. The Horde took the ship and its inhabitants hostage ferrying them away to their massive flotilla in orbit around a decimated Mars. The Horde enslaved the entire crew thousands of men women and children. His grandfather, father and eventually Luc were relegated to toiling away on the Horde’s farms covering the newly Horde terra formed planet’s surface. Generation after generation labored to feed the invading force that was subjugating them. Luc’s mother, like so many other human women, was raped repeatedly by her Horde oppressors, his father unable to defend her. Luc was the product of one such rape.

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  A trio of beeps on the transport’s address system dragged him from his reflection. Across from him Luc yawned, looked up at the dented speaker box, listened to the message, and then after keying the mic snugged to his throat spoke quietly. Once finished, he flashed a smile across to Blandus, then relaxed back into his crash chair. The warning informed the men that they were two hours out from their drop zone and would be moving through a series of high G maneuvers setting the ship up for their final approach. Luc was probably, despite the Rogues’ experience, giving his men instructions. Fastidious as well, Blandus thought.

  At twenty-eight, Madoc was a bit young to lead a team. Felix knew, though, that wars matured men quickly. Luc’s scars were a testament to that. The blue light winked off, and an amber one replaced it. It was an old, Space Marine routine. Blue was for sub-light travel then amber once the mission moved into the complex G-force ladened maneuvering stages leading up to the drop. The amber changed Luc’s complexion from greenish to a more natural sun bronzed shade. He wore his black hair cropped short, nearly a crew cut, and his scalp was crisscrossed with scarring. Marring his somewhat angular, handsome face, leaving trails through three days worth of black stubble, was a long, thin S shaped scar snaking up from his left cheek bone, bisecting his eye lid, across his furrowed forehead, down over his right eye, back left across the bridge of his badly broken nose and left cheek before hooking back right, downward and under his chin.

  Accompanying the wicked mark were five, inch and a half long scars just beneath his right eye high up on his cheek bone. More accurately, it was a series of four nearly vertical slashes with the fifth slicing horizontally across them. It was an old earth method of counting to five. The pinkish scars were cut into his flesh with a rapier, an ancient weapon used solely in the Oceanic metropolis of Leviathan’s World, and the five slashes were an homage to losing a Fencing bout with five touches against you. Blandus knew that beneath his armor Madoc’s torso was just as decorated by the quick weapon’s tip. All were reminders of a well documented battle over a woman with CM Gaius Basilius a man renowned for his viciousness, a battle that the then twenty-year-old Luc lost and nearly died from after taking five stab wounds through his gut and chest before collapsing.

  The young merc caught Felix studying his scars and winked with his scarred left eye. The odd reaction caught the CM off his guard. It was an arrogant response, and he’d not considered the successful merc to be the arrogant type. Confident, yes, but confidence was a long way from arrogance. He nodded back and considered Luc’s eyes hooded beneath the damaged lids. It was his eyes that gave him away, that made his lineage impossible to hide. They were entirely a striking shade of red. Carnelian red to be exact, deep, penetrating and swirling with a slightly lighter hue. The Horde genetic throw backs were almost amber-like in the way they filtered light. It was the same red found in the eyes of the bulk of the mercenaries employed by the suitably named mercenary organization The Carnelian Rogues.

  The hue branded Luc and any who possessed it as, Turbovz the half breed children of human women and Horde men, or Hordlings as some referred to them. Hordling was a somewhat kinder term, but none the less it branded the unfortunate consigning them to a lifetime of prejudice and hate.

  The Horde were humanoid, but they’d evolved into a vastly different species on their home planet. The red eye coloring was just one of the many genetic variations caused by their impact on the human species. That Luc and the other members of the Rogues survived into adulthood was a testament to their durability. There were no female Turbovz. For reasons not yet understood female pregnancies always ended in the death of the infant immediately after birth. Some considered that a blessing. After the war ended and Earth began rebuilding nearly 200 years of lost civilization the freed Turbovz males were castigated and forced to the margins of society. There were even stories that claimed Earth forces, while liberating humans from the Horde work farms and prisons, had summarily executed the Turbovz’ along with their Horde oppressors. Thousands of young and old were thought to have perished. Somehow Luc, The Little Lamb, survived, survived and thrived.

  Survived was being a bit generous. The Turbovz were tightly controlled and feared by humans. They were forbidden to mate with humans under penalty of death to themselves and any family they had left. It was, at best, passive genocide. Most lived in nearly uninhabitable locales, the dead zones of Earth and Mars, or on the badly damaged Globius IV space station. There was also a large community of Turbovz freedom fighters living aboard a captured Horde generation ship. They often lived with their human families who’d refused to part from them during the liberation. Still it was a miserable lonely existence, a horrible twist of fate for the maligned caste. They’d been saved from the Horde only to be driven into near extinction by their saviors. Genetic differences made them stronger, smarter, fiercer warriors, and these traits fueled the imaginations of the traumatized human race. They feared another invasion, an invasion from within by the Turbovz and from without by their Horde progenitors. So, the Turbovz were persecuted and the persecuted tend to find a way to thrive creating men like The Little Lamb. Some chose to use their enhanced fighting skills to continue defending Earth from the new Horde resurgence and some, like those on the Horde ship Ringdruxis chose to revolt against their human oppressors trying to gain acceptance into the New Earth Imperium. Luc Madoc fell into the gray area in between, choosing to be a gun for hire. Fortunately, for Blandus, Madoc tended to side with the Magnus Imperium, because with the building threat from Earth factions the Imperium needed all the help they could get.