Nightmare factory, p.1
Nightmare Factory, page 1
By
JK Franks
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by JK Franks
eBook 978-1-7362153-5-7
Paperback 978-1-7362153-6-4
Hard Back 978-1-7362153-7-1
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Published by JK Franks Media LLC, 2022
Editor: Debra Riggle
Cover Design: Tom Edwards
Email the author at author@jkfranks.com
Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/groups/JKFranks
Visit the author’s website at www.jkfranks.com
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All rights reserved. With the exception of excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
First Edition
For Noelle
Who convinces me daily that goodness still exists and heroes are not just make believe.
War does not determine who is right
- only who is left.
— Bertrand Russell
PROLOGUE
Banshee came out of the darkest corner of the sky, silent and deadly, riding the glide-path programmed by computers thousands of miles away. The war-torn terrain was pock-marked with craters and darkened by fires. The team’s approach was tight, but they didn’t need much space. Banshee Team rode the night in bullet-shaped capsules opening at over sixty thousand feet to eject their human cargo into the cold night air.
The thin wind screamed past his body at just under 500 miles per hour, but that would slow considerably in the next few minutes. One more drop, one day closer to getting the hell out of this.
Fifteen minutes earlier, I’d been aboard the orbiting battleship Hermes.
“Master Sergeant, did I just hear you make a disparaging remark about Ramiro’s sister?”
I had to stifle a laugh. “Absolutely not, LT. I hold the corporal’s siblings in the highest of respect. I simply stated that I didn’t think it was right for her to be pinned up on his bedroom wall like that.”
The entire squad broke out in laughter, as they all had seen the centerfold someone had tacked over the man’s bunk the prior day. The lieutenant tapped his comms and listened intently. He then looked up, all humor suddenly erased from his face. “We’re on in three, people. Lock into your coffins and remember to check your O2. Review the mission brief as the objective has changed… again.”
I groaned along with many of the others as I stared at the ceramic-composite shell of the orbital deployment pod, or ODP. What we all collectively referred to as, yep…our space coffins. This is my sixth rotation with the spacers, and I hate it as much now as the first. While Hermes was the newer class of battle wagons that Space Force had, it was still just a smelly, cramped, troop carrier. The advantage of a combat deployment vessel in LEO, or Low Earth Orbit, was you always had the high ground. One of the Alliance ships could be over nearly any spot on the globe within forty minutes and boots on the ground within another twenty minutes, assuming all went well. It often did not… go well. That was the problem.
The LT slapped the outer casing, making me wince. “Sergeant Kovach, you good?” the muffled sound nearly lost inside the suffocatingly tight pod that was essentially just enough insulation to keep me from burning to a crisp during the initial part of reentry. My gloved fingers found their way inside the control slots, where I grabbed the handles and braced for launch.
“I’m a fucking Space Force Ranger. What in the holy hell am I do…”
The rest of my complaint was cut off by the ballistic launch out of the firing tubes. What had been an onrush of muffled noise was suddenly replaced by an absolutely total silence, a silence that only the cold vacuum of space could offer. I was moving away from Hermes at tremendous speed, me and the other half-dozen members of Drop Team Banshee. We first have to cancel orbital inertia before the pods’ built-in maneuvering thrusters would center us for trans-orbital ballistic insertion down onto the target vectors.
Today’s fun little trip was coming via some nameless hellhole on the African continent, again assuming all went well. While Hermes was a Boeing Aries class battleship, the personal launch pods were designed and manufactured by a subcontract outfit in New Mexico that reportedly had already gone bankrupt from the many lawsuits of failed deployments.
I passed the time going through my loadout trying to see what ridiculous inventory the ship’s AI had selected for today’s mission. Months earlier, we had dropped into a blizzard in the Italian mountains without cold-weather gear of any kind. I hated the bastard AI. Pretty sure it felt the same for me.
I felt the pod’s thrusters kick on and off in rapid succession as it attempted to orient the small craft correctly. Apparently, today the internal gyros were not cooperating, as the thrusters fired again in a longer and even more jarring sequence.
“What we bringing to the party today, Sergeant?” The woman’s voice was crystal clear despite traveling at ballistic speeds in her own pod a few kilometers away.
I triggered the squad channel. “Rocks and pointy sticks, probably, LT.”
She laughed.
I gave them all the weapons load-out, “Our Standard issue Glisson MK4 Rattlers, one MK5 for Darko, and several of the Apex disruptors. Think you can hit anything with those?”
“Don’t worry about me, Boss. What was it your old man used to say? ‘The only thing you should feel when you shoot an enemy is recoil.’”
I cringed inwardly. Yeah… my father was an absolute legend in the Corps’ Special Forces. What Dad had mostly told me was if I ever found myself in a firefight, I should find a ‘real’ Space Marine and give him all my ammo. Colonel Jackson ‘Bones’ Kovach had been highly decorated and much beloved by the corps. That had not made him great father material, but his misfit of a son was now Master Sargent Kovach, and yes, I still very much admired the man.
A massive jolt rattled my teeth as I felt the braking jets come to life. “Damn, never gets easier.” Outside, the shell protected me from the thickening atmosphere as the craft slowed from thousands of miles per hour to just a few hundred. The pods would not take the drop team all the way down, as its role was simply to protect the humans during the initial descent phase. Somewhere around 65,000 feet, the canister would release us into the cold, thin air high above the target and then fire off to a pickup spot somewhere safe. If everything works correctly. Many Space Force operators had cratered into the surface, still locked inside their coffins. Those drops were called smear bombs, as that was all that was typically left of the soldier inside.
I pushed the thought away as the sound of one of the drogue chutes deploying slowed the pod even more. I braced myself for the shock of bitterly cold air as the warning alert sounded. My hand cramped as I held onto the control handles while the bullet-shaped pod fired to slow all momentum and in the same maneuver, ejected its human cargo into the dark blue, morning air. I had eight minutes of terrifying freefall before knowing if my battle suit’s own systems were flight worthy.
Reflexively, I reached back to ensure my rifle was still slotted into its magnetic receiver on my back. It’s like a baseball player touching the brim of his cap or licking his fingers. It means nothing… and it means everything. My heads-up display assured me it was locked into place and of its current ammo count, but I liked to be sure. I flipped through the map overlaying my field of vision. The GPS had shaded much of the view in red, presumably enemy territory. The U.S., China, and Russia had all been fighting proxy wars for years, starting one military brushfire after another in little shithole countries like this.
The Rapid Drop Teams were incredibly effective for Alliance Command in putting out the brush fires. I was second in command of Team Banshee, behind my best friend, Lieutenant Rollo ‘Hinge’ Hanson. We were all elite members of various special forces in the revamped Alliance organization, primarily the U.S., Great Britain, France, Korea, Canada, and occasionally Germany. The Alliance boasted forty-two countries, all in a mutual defense pact, but the Power-Five, as they were called, provided most of the soldiers, funding, and decision-making.
After the various Crimean Wars of the 2030s, followed closely by the near melt-down of the remnants of oil producing gulf-states where my dad had become legend, wars had adapted to a new, smaller landscape. No longer was it two brutes battling for supremacy. Now, with a flick of a button, even an individual could start a cyberwar that might quickly escalate to real bullets flying. Hackers, criminals, and even a few third-world city-states had been terrorizing the planet for the last three decades. Now the threats were getting worse; computer hacking had paved the way for bio-hacking. Corporate research labs had been the first targets, then exotic defense technologies divisions.
Before those in charge had caught on, many of their secrets were available to the highest bidder, and now… well, now, the planet was being overrun by terrorists trying to outdo each other with the deadliest, most menacing shit imaginable. Banshee no longer felt like a special operations fighting force, but more of a global SWAT team. We’re meter maids with automatic pulse-rifles.
I was relieved to feel the big silk wings of the canopy fill out overhead. The glider wings’ semi-flexible composite ribs locked into place, providing a highly maneuverable and silent descent system. Instinctually, I looked to verify that all the drop team’s icons were green on my heads-up display.
Pulling back on my control lines, I saw Hinge moved forward and lead the flight of lethal nightbirds through the still black, early morning skies. We were following a river that glowed in blue outline on our map overlays. Far below, I could see the chalky white marks of rapids and swells that humped up as they climbed from deep water to shallows and then curled over the hidden boulders on the riverbed.
Banshee lined up in perfect formation, one to my left and the rest on a wedge to the right. There were five of them, apart from Hinge and me. The mission brief told us we’d be more than enough for this gig. My HUD displayed the world below in various shades of green. The diminished remnants of an ancient volcano bordered the lush valley to the south. It looked more like a trash dump to me, but the nav system called it Mt. Kickapoopoo or something similar. I didn’t speak the local language, but that’s what my mind tagged it as.
Our target was a suspected subterranean compound in this overgrown patchwork of jungle nothingness. Today our band of well-armed meter maids was going after Abdul Feraz, a suspected bioterrorist who had developed a component supposedly capable of delivering an even more lethal version of some shit that I couldn’t care less about. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the bad guys. I just now question if we’re doing any good. Maybe we just make the problems worse, you know? Whenever we take one of the bastards out, someone else, usually someone even more crazy, more brilliant, more greedy steps in to take over.
Soldiers wondering if they are making a real difference must be a universal truth. Had I known going in that the owner of the covert research lab was actually just the front man for a group of other even worse assholes who had their fingers deep into the global industrial, military black market, would I have acted differently? Maybe. None of us knew this backwoods tribal fucklord was a key member of something called the Third World Coalition, an assemblage of angry extremists busy acquiring the kinds of fun shit that would allow them to do extensive damage to our modern way of life. Okay, even meter maids stop real criminals some days. Sadly, this was not shaping up to be one of those days.
CHAPTER
ONE
BANSHEE
The ground underfoot was loose gravel, and despite the sound-deadening boots, the ability to move undetected was going to be tough. The CO motioned me to take Bayou and go right. Ramirez, call sign Robot, Danny ‘Halo’ Jenkins, and a late addition filling in for Priest was a British SAS officer named Walter Highsmith whom they’d been calling Bond for lack of a real call sign. They all took the opposite side. Banshee had one more asset, that would be the spooky-ass shooter named Smith, or more often, just Darko.
“Darko, you are overwatch,” Hinge said, looking back toward the shadow standing just inside the tree line. “Halo, check the tablet, make sure we didn’t set off any alarms.”
“Roger, LT,” the man said, getting into position before slipping his battle computer onto his left arm.
I should probably point out that I am not the most patient man, not even just a little. My palms were getting sweaty inside the tactical gloves, and I was getting those damn itchy, crawly feelings up the back of my neck again.
“Hey, Boss,” I whispered into my tactical comms.
“What is it, Prowler?”
“Just my spidey-sense, Hinge. Something doesn’t feel right,” I answered. All RDT jump squads were given various cocktails. Some to fight off infection and fatigue, others to make us hyper-aware, improve eyesight. And some guys, like me, well, we occasionally picked up on shit a few heartbeats before everyone else. Hinge and I had been together for five full rotations, and beyond that, he was my best friend, so yeah, he didn’t dismiss my feelings. Sure, it could be nerves or paranoia, but we were fucking space monkeys. We didn’t get nerves.
“Everyone, Prowler has an itch. You know what that means. Watch your flanks, people!” Hinge called out.
“Hey, Sarge, your old man ever get the bad JuJu out in the field?” Bayou asked from twenty yards away.
I saw her scanning with a precision that was nearly unmatched among operators at any level.
“Shit, Bones never felt nothing, he gave other people nightmares, didn’t he, Dog?”
“Cut the chatter, Ramirez!” the lieutenant called out. “Head in the game…”
The man’s words were drowned out by a massive explosion in the jungle off to my left. I knew Bond and Robot would have that, so I swept my weapon in the opposite direction, mirroring my partner as we looked for targets. My finger moved instinctively to the trigger, and my heart skipped when I saw the creatures hunting us.
Lieutenant Debra ‘Bayou’ Riggs is a shooter, one of the absolute best, trained by none other than the absolutely, freakishly perfect legend of a sniper named Pearson West. Still, she was the number two trigger-puller in our squad. Second to a man who is the personification of deadly from a distance. Darko was locked in and methodically put lead down range on target again and again. On my HUD, I saw both shooters lighting up separate targets coming out of the mouth of a cave we hadn’t even seen until then.
“What in the holy…” The only intelligible words that came to mind.
They were dark-skinned, vaguely humanoid, but had grotesquely misshapen heads. The body’s upper torso was massive with sharp ridges of bones that do not occur naturally in most humans I’ve met. Their arms were similarly oversized, ropey muscles cording along each forearm, ending in a fist carrying a double-headed ax. The metal weapon was covered with intricate engravings that looked less tribal than maybe Celtic. Stupid to be thinking about the warrior monster’s artwork, but I’m easily distracted. Just one of the many fine traits that make me special.
“Shit, Boss, this is a genomics lab,” Halo said as one of four snipers put two into the closest beast man on his right. Part of the skull exploded, but the thing simply sagged to one knee and never let go of the weapon. The other one came toward me with a speed that would have seemed impossible for anything that large. One of the thick arms lashed out as a fist caught the side of my helmet before I even got the Rattler raised to fire. An instant later, a massive arm was wrapped tightly around my chest.
“Shift left, Prowler!”
I heard Bayou’s voice, but my mind couldn’t have distinguished left from the color purple at that moment. I felt rather than saw a round hit the beast in the chest and—it bounced off. Yeah…it bounced off. Admittedly, she was using the rail gun, not the pulse rifle, but the sheer kinetic energy of one of those rounds is incomprehensibly high. It should have left a bloody trail of creature; instead, the damn thing had me in a one-handed death grip. My suit systems were beginning to fail. Warnings were going off all over, the million-dollar battle armor seconds away from being scrap parts. I could feel the thing’s chest was indeed rock-hard, but the abdomen moved in and out when it flexed or moved.
“Coming in!” Hinge said.
The creature still had me immobilized. I did everything I could to free just one of my arms. I felt an impact that was so close I first thought the round had hit me. Blood spattered across my visor. Another headshot on the beast from one of my team. It flared back, and with my newly freed hand I grabbed for my fixed blade knife. I was okay with a gun but brutally wicked with the German made vibrasonic blade. The only problem was my angle was bad. My own body was shielding me from hitting anything truly vital. Still, I stabbed, then slashed, trying to gut the creature. I felt a flinch, but the death grip didn’t loosen.
“Need help, Prowler?”
I heard Robot ask. “Nah…I’m goo…” Pretty sure I briefly passed out then.
Hinge stuck the Rattler under the chin of the boney beast and unleashed a plasma burst that seared off the front half of the face. I was released instantly. My CO looked at me as I struggled to breathe for the first time in what seemed like weeks.
