Operation Grendel Read online

  OPERATION

  GRENDEL

  OPERATION

  GRENDEL

  DANIEL SCHWABAUER

  Operation Grendel

  Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Schwabauer

  Published by Enclave Publishing, an imprint of Third Day Books, LLC

  Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

  www.enclavepublishing.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, digitally stored, or transmitted in any form without written permission from Third Day Books, LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-62184-161-6 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-62184-163-0 (printed softcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-62184-162-3 (ebook)

  Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, www.DogEaredDesign.com

  Typesetting by Jamie Foley, www.JamieFoley.com

  Printed in the United States of America.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Half-Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Confession

  PART ONE

  1. Story First

  2. Deletion

  3. Resistance

  4. Captain Sterling

  5. Invasion

  PART TWO

  6. Insertion

  7. Wyrm

  8. Grendels

  9. Feature Writer

  10. Corporal Dahl

  PART THREE

  11. Control

  12. The Isnashi

  13. Laclos

  14. Traitor

  15. The Strangler

  PART FOUR

  16. Implant

  17. Peace Talks

  18. The Storytellers

  19. Great War Story

  20. Psyop

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CONFESSION

  Like every journalist, I lie for a living.

  In this case, I had to become someone else in order to get the story. I’m not who I say I am.

  My name isn’t Ansell Sterling, and I’m not a captain. I’m not even a marine.

  The only military training I’ve ever had was grunt basic, just after I joined the reserve infantry back on Kanzin.

  The real marine died at Camp Locke, New Witlund, during the grendel invasion of Quelon. Captain Ansell Sterling took a round through his right lung and choked on his own blood in an air-conditioned office.

  A few minutes after he died I stole his identity, along with his comms bracelet.

  It was the only way I could get the story. The only way I could tell the colonies how we’re being manipulated.

  My name is Corporal Raymin Dahl.

  I’m a military journalist for the Orbits News Syndicate, and I’m going to show you what happens when you compromise with the grendels. Even if that means a court-martial.

  Since I don’t have the recordings from my own comms, I’m writing this old-school, fingers to pad, with no input from my AI.

  Sterling agreed that if I went through with his mission, I could write the story however I wanted.

  So this is how I want to do it. A war story by Raymin Dahl that finally tells the truth.

  Which sounds more courageous than it is. For me to face a court-martial, I’ll have to survive long enough to load this story into the net.

  And really, what are the odds?

  PART ONE

  GRENDELS INVADE QUELON!

  BY CPL RAYMIN DAHL

  EMBEDDED WITH MADAR TEAM TWO

  1

  Story First

  The grendel wars started twenty-eight years ago. One week before I was born, and welcome to the galaxy.

  Back then, most of our military strategists thought we had a reasonable chance of winning. Twenty years later, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before the United Colonies bled to death. The Grand Alliance was going to conquer every free, autonomous human being in the Milky Way mind-by-mind, planet-by-planet, until we were all grendels and absurdly happy about it.

  Grendels. We didn’t even know what that meant. All we really knew was that integrated AIs had transformed our former trade partners into something other than homo sapiens. Homo integris, maybe.

  Sure, we’d taken a few as prisoners, but they always killed themselves.

  In twenty-eight years not one grendel had ever defected.

  But we weren’t going down without a fight. Even the press corps was trying to do our part. So, naturally, when my commanding officer and editor at OrbSyn, Major Weston, sent me an assignment to the back end of the tip of the spear, I saluted and grabbed my go bag.

  He wanted me to interview a Psychological Operations officer about the launch of a new combat unit with the impenetrable designation of MADAR. And the interview had to take place on the tropical hellscape of New Witlund, where it was always summer but never a holiday.

  We couldn’t have met on, say, Quelon, the planet that New Witlund orbits as a slowly spinning moon. A place with clean air and moderate temperatures and eleven Fleet military installations.

  Nor could we have, I don’t know, opened a secure channel and done the interview from our respective offices. Maybe sent a few text pigeons.

  No, according to Major Weston, this particular story required “texture.”

  So there I sat in the cafeteria of a remote Marine Corps training base, waiting for Captain Ansell Sterling of the PSYOPS unit to walk in and explain what the acronym MADAR stood for. It had only taken me three days and seven different flights to get there.

  I stared out the cafeteria window at the jungle and fidgeted with my comms bracelet, as if jiggling the thin circlet might bring up some new background material, some clue as to why I was really there.

  It was a newer unit, with a military-grade AI and a neural interface capable of ghosting my eyes and ears from the safety of a wyrm-resistant firebox. Our techies were serious about shielding my God-given, human-born, colonial free will.

  Surprisingly, nothing had changed since I last checked it, ninety seconds ago. Sterling’s personnel file was functionally empty. The man’s career was a thin curtain of white space autofilling next to his official—and lengthy—list of commendations and unit connections.

  Just outside the window, a platoon of marines jogged past, their PTs saturated in sweat, their voices trailing after the drill instructor’s:

  One fine day signed my life away.

  Gave my life to the Corps.

  Two months in boot, sergeant taught me to shoot.

  Found my life in the Corps.

  The cadence of the training song poked a bruise at the back of my brain as the group moved out of sight.

  Everywhere I went, I was reminded that Fleet had no place for my unpatriotic existence outside of a tiny cubicle at OrbSyn.

  A reservist, you see, wasn’t a real marine.

  And a journalist wasn’t even a real reservist.

  In the distance the platoon’s voices salted my wounded pride with more of the same tuneless jody.

  Three meals a day, plus a rack and some pay.

  No better life than the Corps.

  Four days in space with puke on my face.

  Ain’t life grand in the Corps?

  After I could no longer hear the words, I passed the time trying to remember what followed. There were eight lines, each beginning with the next number in sequence, and each ending with the word Corps. It was the perfect training song for jarheads, since most of them could in fact count all the way to eight, and Corps was their second-favorite word.

/>   But for the life of me I couldn’t recall what happened in line five. Looking it up would have spoiled the exercise.

  Then Sterling came through the door and spotted me by the window. Camp Locke was in the last stage of decommission, so finding me wasn’t hard. We were the only people in the room.

  He stood about my height and was maybe four years older, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Sterling was pure United Colonies Marine Corps, right down to the citation patches on his lapel.

  Since he chose to be interviewed in Camp Locke’s dining hall, I kept my seat and my silence, even though I wasn’t eating. It’s an old tradition, and who was I to challenge military etiquette?

  He pulled up a chair across from me and sat. “Corporal Dahl.”

  “Sir.”

  Sterling studied me briefly and said, as if I’d had a choice, “Thank you for meeting me.”

  “Of course. I’m excited to find out what this new program is all about.”

  He gave a wry smile, the faintest suggestion that he understood my Kanzin reservist sarcasm, and folded his hands on the table. “You’re not here for the MADAR story, Corporal. You’re here because we’re losing this war.”

  “I can’t write that,” I said. “They’ll say I’m giving comfort to the enemy.”

  Sterling’s dark hair was going prematurely gray, but he had the body of a young man. Even the loose cut of his utility fatigues couldn’t hide the impression of a high-performance engine idling at poll position. “Today maybe. Not by the end of the week. It’s why you’re here. Fleet doesn’t have the resources to protect nineteen systems. Coffee?”

  I gave him an expression that hovered between false humility and blissful ignorance. “Thank you, no.”

  Sterling shoved his chair back and retreated to a wall of auto-dispensers for a cup.

  It never hurt to let a source feel they had the upper hand. Especially when they were wearing captain’s bars and a combat recon badge with six(!) stars. How he’d achieved that without also being promoted to at least Lieutenant Colonel had to be a story in itself.

  Through the mess hall’s curved windows, heat blurred the air above the parade ground, turning the jagged green horizon into a smear of color, like an impressionist painting. Higher up, Quelon’s crescent balanced on one point, as if deciding which way to fall.

  I’d spent the last four years writing stories about wounded veterans and combat fatigue and the difference between colonials and grendels. Now they wanted me to help throw in the towel?

  Sterling took his time with sugar, cream, and more coffee. Probably wanted me to stew a little. To ponder the idea that Fleet Intel needed something badly enough they were willing to disperse it through the features of an OrbSyn journalist.

  More specifically, through me. Corporal Raymin Dahl of “Three Days on a Wounded Cruiser,” and “Life and Death as a Harpy Ace.”

  That Raymin Dahl.

  So what did they want? And what did Captain Sterling have to do with it?

  The AI on my comms bracelet noticed my curiosity. It couldn’t read my mind, of course, because it was a Colonial AI, but it tried to be helpful by returning to my most recent query. The white space of Sterling’s personnel file projected a quilt of transparent fog across my optics.

  I thrust the file off my grid with a mental flick as Sterling sat down and put the steaming cup between us.

  “You need me,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I requested you, yes. I need a writer of your caliber who isn’t perceived as pro-military.”

  I arched one brow. “I’m not perceived as pro-military? By whom?” I liked to use whom with officers. It kept them off-balance. Usually.

  “My job is to read people, Corporal. And I’ve done a lot of reading about you. Every feature, every column, every blast and mock-over and psyad you’ve penned going back to your junior exams. And I think I know something about you. Something you may not have figured out for yourself.”

  I barely kept the sneer out of my voice. “Let me guess: I want to be a real soldier?”

  His face was granite. “No. You just want a real story.”

  The implications of that statement brought a wave of heat to my cheeks. “So all the work I’ve been doing for OrbSyn is what? Propaganda?”

  He sipped his coffee and glanced casually out the window, as if expecting someone else. “You write puff pieces that serve a very specific purpose. Believe it or not, I respect that. You at least volunteered. You crawled out of a Kanzin backwater and made a life for yourself apart from the expectations of your father. Not to mention everyone else. Being the son of a decorated Fleet officer couldn’t have been easy.”

  Intimidation. He was showing me how deep his info-well was. Proving that on his comms my personnel file wasn’t redacted at all. “I don’t need your approval, Captain.”

  “I wasn’t offering it.” His expression hadn’t wavered. “You write a lot of drivel, Corporal. I know it, and you know it, and most of my superiors at Fleet Intel know it. What some of them don’t understand is that you’ve actually found ways to tell people the truth. You’ve gotten more past your editor than anyone in twenty years. That’s how I know you want a story with teeth.”

  I wondered just how deeply he’d seen into my work. I didn’t have loads of respect for most officers, especially ones who considered themselves intellectuals. But the PSYOPS unit had a reputation, and I would be stupid to underestimate any of them. “And you’re going to give it to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s your readers who need to see it.”

  My readers. Meaning edgers. Colonials in the backwater militias who loved freedom and hated big government of any kind. People who preferred a Colonial senator to an Alliance oligarch only because a senator could be bribed into leaving them alone. People who loved it when some lowly corporal, some Kanzin reservist with press creds, say, poked a rear admiral or congresswoman in the eye.

  So I’d been right. Sterling needed me because he wanted help selling a story to groundlings. Which meant that I suddenly had a little leverage, if nothing else.

  I lit an insubordinate grin and nudged my AI to begin recording. I couldn’t have trusted Sterling less if he’d been the senate press secretary. He may as well have been a grendel.

  Recording our conversation would provide some security if things went sideways. However bogus his fake story turned out to be, I’d have the makings of a real one stored on my wrist. Later I could use my notes to write an alternate feature on the reality of psychological warfare. I’d call it something like, “Liar, Liar, Planets on Fire!”

  “All right, Captain,” I said. “I’ll play along. What’s the story?”

  “Check your grid.”

  I hesitated, then prodded my AI for a terminal overlay.

  A transparent display of colored icons, holographic images, file indicators, and status alerts should have appeared at the periphery of my natural vision, sent to my brain from my comms bracelet.

  Instead I saw a battery of offline warning ticks blinking red.

  “What is this?”

  “Security,” Sterling said. “You’ll be offline till we’re ready for your story to go live.”

  “I can’t work if I can’t access the net,” I protested.

  “And I can’t risk this story getting out. Even if I trusted you, which I don’t, we can’t have an enemy wyrm hacking into your comms and accessing your notes. That trinket on your wrist would leak like a French colander. You’ll have to work offline. Pen and paper if necessary.”

  The fact Sterling had the authority to shut down my link to AFNET when I wasn’t even in his chain of command irritated me. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given the reputation of the PSYOPS unit, but I resented the feeling of powerlessness and isolation it created. On the other hand, I wasn’t about to let him know how I felt. “All right. I’ll work offline. What’s the story?”

  “We’re going to
negotiate with the grendels,” he said, leaning forward. “Secretly. So that no one will know what we’re doing until it’s too late.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I looked for physical clues that he was lying but saw none. This was not the sort of story Fleet sent to Raymin Dahl. “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Last-minute notice would make it hard for me to leak the story early. Even if I found a way to send a file to Major Weston without going through AFNET, I’d still need to dig up enough details to prove the story was credible. Otherwise Weston would never run with it. “Where?”

  “Here. New Witlund. A compound owned by the Trevalyan cartel.” He nodded west out the window. “Sits about twenty klicks into the mountains southeast of Seranik.”

  That fit the story too. Cartel property could pass for neutral ground. “Who’s doing the negotiating?”

  “I am,” he said. “And an Alliance emissary who will arrive soon via consular shuttle from the Corgan system. You and I will be hiking up into those mountains tomorrow morning with a small MADAR team.”

  “Our bodyguards.”

  “They are quite capable.”

  I still knew nothing about the MADAR designation, but the fact Fleet Intel thought there was a credible threat to our safety implied something else. Was it possible this mission had already sprung an intelligence leak? “What are we offering the Alliance?”

  “The goal,” Sterling said, “is to negotiate a peaceful transfer of authority over the edge colonies—and only the edge colonies. None of the core systems are on the table. That needs to be clear in the story. We are not negotiating from a position of strength, but neither are we rolling over. We can survive without the edge worlds, but we’re not turning over even one core system.”

  “Which ones, then?” I asked, mind reeling. “Which colonies are on the table?”

  “The whole edge. Quelon, Moadi, Inawa, Holikot and, well—” He paused as if not wanting to say the last name. Must have seen it in my file.