Lieutenant Colonel Read online

  Attack Ready

  As soon as the two missiles were launched, Lieutenant Felconi increased the shuttle’s speed and climbed out of harm’s way, accelerating rapidly enough that Lon thought he was near to graying out as the g-forces pressed him back against his seat. There was a roaring in his ears, the feel of blood pressing against his skin.

  “Right on target, Colonel,” Felconi announced. The view on one of Lon’s monitors changed, showing smoke coming up from under the trees in the valley below Xavier’s Beak.

  “Good shooting, Lieutenant,” Lon said. “Get ready to go in close to provide covering fire when Delta’s shuttles arrive.”

  “Yes, sir,” Felconi said. “I show them about forty seconds from touchdown, coming fast from the southwest.”

  “Let’s get the bad guys, Lieutenant,” Lon said.

  The DMC Series

  OFFICER-CADET

  LIEUTENANT

  CAPTAIN

  MAJOR

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL

  COLONEL

  Other Books by Rick Shelley

  The Spec Ops Squad

  HOLDING THE LINE

  DEEP STRIKE

  SUCKER PUNCH

  The Lucky 13th

  UNTIL RELIEVED

  SIDE SHOW

  JUMP PAY

  The Federation War

  THE BUCHANAN CAMPAIGN

  THE FIRES OF COVENTRY

  RETURN TO CAMEREIN

  The Varayan Memoir

  SON OF THE HERO

  THE HERO OF VARAY

  THE HERO KING

  The Seven Towers

  THE WIZARD AT MECQ

  THE WIZARD AT HOME

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL

  Originally published by Ace Books in May 2000. Published as an ebook by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. in July 2011.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Rick Shelley.

  Cover art by Dirk Berger.

  Contents

  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

  The year is A. D. 2823. The interstellar diaspora from Earth has been in progress for seven centuries. The numbers are uncertain, but at least five hundred worlds have been settled, and perhaps well over a thousand. The total human population of the galaxy could be in excess of a trillion. On Earth, the Confederation of Human Worlds still theoretically controls all of those colonies, but the reality is that it can count on its orders being obeyed only as far as the most distant permanent outpost within Earth’s system, on Titan. Beyond Saturn, there are two primary interstellar political groupings, the Confederation of Human Worlds (broken away from the organization on Earth with the same name, with its capital on the world known as Union) and the Second Commonwealth, centered on Buckingham. Neither of those political unions is as large or as powerful as they will be in another eighteen decades, when their diametrically opposed interests finally bring them to the point of war. In the meantime, humans who need military assistance, and do not want the domination of either Confederation or Commonwealth, have only a handful of options. Those who can afford it turn to mercenaries. And the largest source of those is on the world of Dirigent….

  1

  Major Lon Nolan allowed himself to accept the deception that he was standing in front of a ten-foot-square window looking out at the one world he had spent nearly twenty years telling himself he would never see again. But he had seen that world, spent nearly five months on it. Now he was leaving again, and this time there was absolutely no doubt in his mind. He would never return to Earth. He could not imagine ever wanting to return again. I finally broke the strings, he told himself.

  From Over-Galapagos, the space city in geosynchronous orbit roughly over the islands that gave it its name, the world looked as Lon recalled it. Two decades could not bring changes large enough to alter the view. But the months he had spent on the surface had convinced him that Earth had changed—far more than he would have deemed possible in the years since he had left to go to the mercenary world of Dirigent to fulfill his childhood ambition of a career as a soldier.

  Now, Lon’s principal thoughts were of home—and Dirigent was home now, not Earth. He had spent a month traveling to Earth, five months there, and it would be another month before he could get home. He had traveled in civilian clothes, under an assumed name. Prior to his departure from Dirigent, he had undergone genetic-level nanosurgery to make absolutely certain that his true identity could not be discovered from fingerprints, retinal pattern, or DNA testing of his blood or skin.

  There won’t be anything to tie me to Earth in a few months, he thought. He had hesitated to accept the mission to Earth, but once he had, Lon had decided to make the best use of the unexpected opportunity. After finishing his work for the Corps—and only after finishing that work—he had contacted his parents, then gone home to visit them at his childhood home on the eastern side of the Great Smoky Mountains, near the city of Asheville. Even then, Lon had been forced to stay incognito. Had his true identity been discovered by the authorities, it was a virtual certainty that he would have been arrested, that he never would have seen his wife and two children again.

  The purpose of Lon’s trip to Earth had been espionage.

  He had needed nearly the entire month he had with his parents to convince them to emigrate. Although both his mother and father wanted to see their grandchildren, the ties to Earth were strong. They needed time to convince themselves.

  “I’ve got my work at the university,” his father had said when Lon first proposed the move. “And your mother has her garden, her friends.”

  “Dirigent has a university, and students who are there, are there because they want to learn, because they hope to make a difference to mankind. What have you got? You’ve told me yourself that most of your students are just hoping for a miracle that will help them climb out of the circuses into something—anything—better. You don’t even go to the university but—what?—once each term? And then you need an armed guard. You can’t go into town safely. This pleasant little country compound you both treasure, even it’s an illusion, with electric fences, guard dogs, and armed patrols to keep the real world out. Once you get beyond the fences, casual violence is almost impossible to escape for long.” Casual violence, happenstance, had worried Lon more during his months on Earth than the possibility that his mission might be discovered by the authorities.

  “This is where our life has always been,” his mother had added, in a voice that sounded more fearful than nostalgic. “Except for you and your family, everyone we know is here.”

  “All locked away safely in guarded compounds like this one,” Lon replied.

  It still took a lot of talk to get his parents to change their minds. When the decision was finally reached, they couldn’t all travel together. Lon had a schedule to keep. He had to get off-planet
and out of the reach of Earth’s police and what remained of Earth’s Confederation of Human Worlds, the old Colonial Office whose authority no longer ran beyond the solar system. His parents would wait a few weeks, sell what they could, then book passage by a circuitous route to Dirigent. By the time they arrived, Lon would have a cottage lined up for them.

  Night was beginning to move across eastern North America. Lon stared until he saw the terminator line move across the mountains, past his parents’ home, out of what had once been North Carolina into what had once been Tennessee. He saw lights in the cities and along the major connector routes. The cities were urban jungles, with the majority of people crowded into areas known as circuses, slums where the common denominators were poverty and lack of hope.

  Lon turned away from the videoscreen that masqueraded as a window and left the observation compartment to return to his transient quarters two decks below. He would not be able to board the ship that would take him on the first interstellar leg of his trip back to Dirigent until the next afternoon. Twenty hours from now, he would be on his way out of Earth’s solar system.

  If his false identity remained safe another day.

  • • •

  Seven months earlier, Lon might have thought that the DMC had no surprises left to spring on him, that he had seen the full repertory. He had been an officer in the Corps for nineteen years, gone out on more contracts than he could easily recall, seen every variety of life in garrison, including the political byplay that suffused the higher officer ranks. He had not even considered that anything out of the ordinary might be in the offing when Major Cavanaugh Zim, number two man in the DMC’s Office of Strategic Intelligence (OSI), had asked him to stop by his office at Lon’s “earliest convenience.” The two men had known each other for some years, and occasionally paired up in bridge tournaments in Dirigent City.

  “I remember when you used to work for me in the audit department, back when you were a lieutenant still learning the ropes,” Zim had said after the usual opening pleasantries.

  “Seems ages ago, Cav,” Lon had said, nodding. Lieutenants in the Corps spent one day a week, while they were in garrison, away from their troops, helping out, learning a little bit about other parts of the Corps than their own assignments.

  “And then some,” Zim had agreed, returning Lon’s nods. “When I filed my performance report on you, at the end of your tour here, I added an observation that you might, in time, be uniquely qualified for a special mission.”

  That had been enough to make Lon sit up straight—the first indication that the invitation had not just been for a stroll down nostalgia drive. Lon had cleared his throat. “A special mission?”

  “You know our mandate in OSI—to obtain, catalog, and analyze information about as many of the settled worlds as possible. We’re always years behind. New worlds are settled, and it might be decades before we even hear about them. Conditions change, often dramatically, on worlds we do know about. The Corps would like to have up-to-date intelligence on every settled world, at least every world we might possibly be called upon to serve, or oppose.” Zim had shrugged. “Not that that rules out any world. And we can never count on being anywhere near up-to-date on any world but Dirigent.”

  “I don’t need the lecture, Cav. Just what are you working up to?”

  “We want you to do a job of work for us, Lon.”

  “Tell me something a cadet couldn’t have figured out by now.”

  “Think about it, Lon. What sort of intelligence mission would you be uniquely qualified for?”

  Lon had blinked twice, slowly, as it hit him. “You want me to go to Earth?”

  “The boss and I talked about it at length. Then I chatted with Matt.” Matt Orlis, now a lieutenant colonel, commanded 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment. Lon was his second-in-command. “Matt agreed that you would be perfect for the job, so we put the proposal before the Council of Regiments. The General remembers your work here. He mentioned your analysis of the Aldrin contract.” There was only one General at any given time in the Dirigent Mercenary Corps, head of government for Dirigent as well as commander-in-chief of the Corps, elected each year by the colonels who made up the Council of Regiments. The current incumbent was Jorge Ruiz, who had commanded the Contracts Section at Corps headquarters—which included OSI—when Lon was a lieutenant doing one day a week in Contracts. “The General okayed the mission, providing you were willing to volunteer. It will mean being gone for six months, more or less, but you’ve been away nearly that long on contract before.”

  “My son is fifteen. My daughter is nine,” Lon had said. “I’ve missed a third of their lives already, being away from Dirigent. I know—it goes with the territory. I need time to think about this, Cav. And I need to talk it over with my wife.”

  “Of course. I didn’t expect an answer right now. This isn’t like a contract where you take the luck of the draw and go out when it’s your turn. The General was adamant. Accepting this mission has to be voluntary. Entirely.”

  “The first rule any recruit learns is ‘Never volunteer for anything,’” Lon mumbled as he settled himself for sleep that night in Over-Galapagos. He had not agreed to the mission lightly, or quickly. Just thinking about the possibility of returning to Earth had brought him new nightmares. Part of him wanted to go back, almost desperately, but another part of him was frightened by the prospect. It had been two days before he even mentioned it to his wife, Sara.

  “Of course you’ll go,” she had said at once, and she proceeded on the assumption that he would.

  Lon had needed a lot longer to convince himself. The chance to see his parents for the first time in twenty years was what settled the question. “Maybe I can get them to move here,” Lon had told his wife. “I’ve been suggesting it for years. Maybe, face-to-face, I can convince them.”

  Sara had giggled. “Or just kidnap them and sneak them off-planet.”

  He had spent two weeks learning his cover identity and undergoing the genetic manipulation that would ensure that he could not be identified as Lon Nolan when he reached Earth and Earth-controlled space. He went as a trade representative from Calypso, a world he had some personal knowledge of. If necessary, the government there would vouch for his identity…but if that became necessary, it would mean that something had gone wrong, that he had made some mistake along the way.

  Real-life espionage had nothing in common with the vid-adventure variety. Lon had carried neither weapons nor ultra-high-tech snooping devices. He had done no furtive sneaking about, no suborning of government officials. His information was collected through far more prosaic methods. He had talked to people. He had kept his eyes open, looking around, questioning what he saw, what he heard. He had copied libraries of data—books, newspapers, and magazines—transferring everything to scores of high-density data chips. Fourteen ounces of chips had been enough to record everything published on Earth in the past quarter century. It would give the analysts and auditors in OSI plenty to do for the next couple of years.

  There hadn’t even been much real danger when he had contacted Dirigent’s resident agents and factors on Earth. Their covers were also impeccable. As long as his cover story and identity passed casual scrutiny, no one in authority would give him a second thought. It wasn’t until he returned to areas where he had been known as Lon Nolan that there was any serious reason for nervousness, for insecurity. Someone might recognize him, even after twenty years, and wonder.

  But nothing untoward had happened. His few encounters with authorities had been the result of what had appeared—to them—to be the casual violence they saw every day, and there had been no reason to look too deeply into Lon’s cover. Lon had his reunion, spent time with his parents, even spent time hiking around in the mountains, just as he had done when he was young. Those few weeks had made the entire mission worthwhile.

  Waiting to board the ship that would carry him from Over-Galapagos to Calypso was, in some ways, the most difficult part of the entire mission for
Lon. His mind kept conjuring up ironic climaxes—the sudden appearance of uniformed police officers, weapons raised, shouting for him to raise his hands and surrender; being carted back to Earth and a lifetime lease on a six-by-eight-foot prison cell. Or worse.

  His baggage, including the data chips, was loaded aboard ship two hours before the four passengers were allowed to board. Lon spent most of those two hours in the observation deck, watching Earth below, saying a private, final farewell to the planet of his birth…for the second time in his life. This breaks the strings, he told himself—several times. The image remained strong: Earth strings—they reached out to every world humans had settled.

  Once the ship started accelerating outbound, Lon started to relax a little. He would not feel really safe until the ship made its first jump through quantum space, five days out from Over-Galapagos—the first of three jumps it would make to reach Calypso. By the time of the first jump, it would be too late for the authorities from Earth to recall the ship or to intercept it. He would be out of their reach. Forever.

  Five days, five nights. Lon slept lightly, when he slept at all. Dreams came, the same fanciful worries he had felt in Over-Galapagos, failing to get away, being intercepted at the last possible minute and carried back to Earth to stand trial…or simply being “made” to disappear without trial.

  Five days of constant acceleration, farther and farther from Earth and its dependent colonies within the Solar System. When the first warning came over the ship’s communication system—”Q-space insertion in thirty minutes”—Lon had bit his lip. So close. Could escape possibly be snatched from me now?

  On a civilian ship, there were frequent warnings leading up to the Q-space transit. While the ship was in the void of quantum space, all the power of its three Nilssen generators—which provided artificial gravity aboard ship as well as propelling the vessel through Q-space—would be diverted to force the transit. Passengers were required to be in their bunks, strapped in, during the period of zero gravity—for their own safety…and to keep them from being a distraction to the crew, or worse, without weight to hold them in place. A crewman went to each passenger’s cabin to make sure everyone was strapped in, then hurried to his own duty station to strap himself in for the duration.