It was common for soldiers to form lifelong bonds with their boot camp comrades, which was part of why command kept new recruits in the same unit after they graduated. The downside to that, in Samuel’s thinking, was that the new blood and the old blood tended to stick to themselves both on and off duty. In a morbid moment of clarity, Samuel found himself looking at the recruits and realizing that after a year or more of Reaper duty they weren’t really recruits any more, and that they likely saw Samuel and the other veterans in much the same light as he had once seen Mag. Samuel looked away from the soldiers and let his gaze take in the grand spectacle of the staging area as Ben slugged his shoulder and pointed.
“Wow, it really has been a long time since we’ve deployed heavy,” breathed Ben as he looked out across the staging area, “I’d almost forgotten just how much hardware we can drop on a target.”
It was indeed a grand sight, thought Samuel as he took in the full sight of the staging area. Dozens of bulky salvage craft that would transport all of the 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.
3. 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 transport, he had a clear field of vision across the sea of humanity as it swelled and broke against the hastily constructed barricades that separated them from the food and water.
Behind the ceramic battlements was a refugee relief center that had been erected by the newly bonded cor-sec forces. Samuel and the other members of Tango Platoon could feel the waves of anger and resentment pouring from the mob, and each silently gave thanks that they were the outsiders to this spectacle. The marines scanned their perimeter in all directions, prepared to engage at a moment’s notice.
The Reapers were combat soldiers and salvage operators, and had neither the training nor the disposition to be utilized for crowd control. However, thought Samuel, as he checked the safety on his combat rifle and gripped the handle for reassurance, neither did the former Vorhold cor-sec. From what Samuel witnessed it looked as if the cor-sec forces were just as likely to set off the spark of violence as the angry mob.
The seven vehicles that constituted the Reaper column broke through the lines of the mob and pushed across the makeshift grated roads and tent cities to move deeper into the freshly abandoned spire city proper.
As Samuel looked at the vast urban sprawl before him he shuddered, not just because of the size, but also because of the realization of the brutal door-to-door and street-by-street fighting that was about to happen here.
“What is Grotto going to do with an empty city?” asked Ben as he turned his helmeted head back to face Boss Marsters.
“You’re not looking at it like one of the Anointed Actuaries,” answered Marsters, as he too took in the magnificent and strange view, “Grotto intends to depopulate the city and scrap most of the buildings.”
“They’re likely to maintain only a few of the forges and a minimal cor-sec presence,” added Boss Ulanti over the com-bead, “They’ll keep the forges and maintain the shipping lane, but that’s about it. Everything else is going to be liquidated.”
“What about the people?” Virginia asked, keying into the platoon channel on her com-bead, “I thought we were sweeping out armed gangs and militia clans. Aren’t the refugees going back to their homes?”
“Tillman, you’ve been a Reaper long enough to know that the shift manager never tells us the whole story,” snorted George Tuck from his seat near Spencer and Boss Ulanti, “Grotto is liquidating the people too. They’re assets, just as much as the buildings.”
“Ah, yes, the projected value of their labor,” Patrick chimed in with a grim laugh, “Makes sense, they might not be Grotto, but our corporation will treat them like they do us. I’ll bet you they have to agree to a life-bond or pay the expatriation fee.”
“But the elites are gone, they left when Vorhold pulled out, everyone here is a low-rating worker,” protested Virginia, “There’s no way any of them have that kind of cash, regardless of whether or not Vorhold was a life-bond economy.”