Black Sword (Decker's War, #5) Read online

  BLACK

  SWORD

  Decker’s War — Book 5

  ERIC THOMSON

  Black Sword

  Copyright 2017 Eric Thomson

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are 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.

  Published in Canada

  By Sanddiver Books

  ISBN: 978-0-9948200-9-9

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  About the Author

  Also by Eric Thomson

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  One

  “Major Zachary Thomas Decker, this court-martial has found you guilty on all counts of culpable homicide. Therefore, I have no choice but to accept the prosecution’s recommendation and sentence you to dismissal with disgrace from the Armed Services and to exile for life.”

  The military judge, a Navy captain in black robes, paused to let his words sink in before continuing.

  “As a result, you are hereby stripped of your commission, your medals and awards, and your pension. The provost marshal will take you from this place and put you on the next naval vessel heading for Parth. There, you will be landed on Desolation Island within sight of a suitable exile settlement, where you will spend the rest of your days. Upon your arrival on Parth, your dishonorable discharge from the Commonwealth Armed Services will come into effect. Until that time, you remain subject to the Code of Service Discipline, albeit those sections applicable to a military convict. Do you understand your sentence?”

  “Yes, sir,” Decker barked out, his square features betraying no emotions.

  “Do you wish to address the court one last time?”

  “No, sir.”

  The judge then turned to the panel, five Marine officers in the ranks of major or lieutenant colonel, recruited from the Corps’ Special Forces units.

  “I know it is always distasteful to sit in judgment on a fellow officer, especially a fellow member of a small, elite community of professionals. The court thanks you for your sterling service and releases you to your regular duties.”

  The senior among the five nodded in acknowledgment, and they filed out of the room without giving Decker so much as a parting glance. He was no longer one of them.

  The judge motioned to his clerk.

  “Please summon the provost marshal. This court is dismissed.”

  With a final nod at both the prosecution and defense counsels, he vanished into his chambers.

  Decker pivoted on his heels to face the people who’d been sitting behind him throughout the trial — his partner, Commander Hera Talyn; his commanding officer, Captain Konstantin Ulrich, head of Naval Intelligence’s Special Operations Section; and Commander Manfred Yang, Ulrich’s chief of staff. At that moment, a lieutenant from the Army’s military police branch entered the courtroom via the main doors, accompanied by a pair of muscular sergeants.

  Decker removed his uniform tunic, folded it carefully to protect his medals, and handed it to Talyn.

  Then, he turned to Lieutenant Commander Ty Buell, his attorney and stuck out his hand.

  “Thanks for trying, Ty, but you had it pegged right from the start. I didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Good luck, Decker,” Buell replied. “And thanks for not being a wise-ass during the proceedings.”

  “Prisoner Decker,” the lieutenant said, ignoring the Navy officers, “present your wrists for shackling.”

  “I promise I won’t try anything stupid,” Decker replied.

  “Nevertheless, you will be shackled. Present your wrists, or I will have my sergeants seize you.”

  Decker gave Talyn a brief glance, only to see her return an almost imperceptible shake of the head. He grinned at his partner and said, as he held out his hands for the restraints, “As if I’d be dumb enough to resist, darling.”

  “That’s still Commander Talyn to you,” Yang growled. “Prisoner Decker.”

  “Take good care of her, Manny,” Decker replied with a wink, knowing how much Yang hated the diminutive form of his first name.

  One of the sergeants grabbed him by the biceps and nodded towards the exit.

  “Time to go, Decker.”

  Two

  Eight weeks earlier.

  Two dead bodies where they should have found one live informant told Zack Decker and Hera Talyn their mission had just gone sideways. The howl of police sirens slicing through the night air meant matters were about to get worse.

  “Any idea who they are?” Talyn asked, eyes scanning the dark, empty second floor of the abandoned riverside factory.

  “One of them could be our contact. The guy on the left fits the description,” Decker replied as he knelt beside the man in question and rifled through his pockets. “The other? Not a clue. But they’re dead thanks to matching third eyes in the middle of their foreheads.”

  “Coincidence, or were we set up?” She walked over to a grimy window and tried to catch sight of the approaching police vehicles. They would likely come up the slow moving river that snaked through Angelique, Celeste’s planetary capital, like a main circuit cable.

  Decker snorted.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences. Someone executed these guys and left them here for us to find while they called it in and summoned the cops. We’re meant to become murder suspects number one and two.”

  “Then we’d better move now. I can see four skimmers out over the water. Since they seem to be slowing, odds are they know exactly where to find us and the stiffs you’re molesting.”

  “The things I do for entertainment in this job.” He shifted over to the other body and gave its pockets the same treatment, with the same lack of results, then stood. “I guess we won’t be swimming for it.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to, anyway. Between the nasty native life forms and whatever crap they’ve been dumping into the water, it would be hell on my porcelain complexion.”

  “Not to mention your stylish togs. Let’s take the front stairs.”

  Talyn and her partner wore the usual space tramp disguise of dark trousers, equally dark jackets loose enough to hide large-bore blasters, black boots, and collarless white shirts. On this mission, a shiny bald scalp of
fset by a gray goatee replaced Decker’s sandy hair. Talyn, in contrast, sported a face made leathery by life in space and a shock of purple locks. Both moved through the warehouse with the practiced ease of veteran field operatives.

  When blue flashing lights flooded through the stairwell’s cracked windows, he risked a glance out at the courtyard.

  “The cops have landed. Looks like two person cars, making it four to one odds. Shouldn’t be a problem for us.”

  “We won’t start a gunfight with the Celeste Gendarmerie, Zack.”

  “Who said anything about us starting it? The buggers have a reputation for itchy trigger fingers. Helps keep the gangs in check, I suppose. They’ll be coming through the loading dock which means we’re heading for the street.”

  They darted across the ground floor in silence, dodging abandoned machinery. When they reached the far end, Decker slipped under a half-open rolling service door and out into the damp night. Something struck the cracked concrete by his side, ricocheting off into the darkness with a muted whine. He immediately ducked into the shadows, moving on pure instinct.

  “Sniper,” he called out in a stage whisper just loud enough for Talyn to hear. “I figure he’s using a railgun, which means we won’t see a flash.”

  Another slug made a divot near his head, forcing him to shift back towards the door.

  “Probably trying to keep us from escaping,” she replied in the same tone. “They want us arrested, not dead.”

  “Or the sniper’s incompetent.” He gathered himself to dash for a rusted garbage container leaning drunkenly into the buckled street when another slug hit the ground squarely in front of him. The sniper clearly meant it as a warning. “Nope.”

  “The cops are about to move in,” she warned. “If they have decent sensors, they’ll know where we are soon enough.”

  The unseen shooter fired again, and this time the slug smacked into the rolling door above Decker’s head. A weary grimace tugged at his lips, and he pulled out a worn blaster that couldn’t hold a candle to his preferred Shrehari-built model.

  However, he had lost so many of them on missions that his usual supplier refused to give him any more of the hard to find weapons. He slipped back into the factory and crouched by his partner, placing his lips by her ear.

  “Since we can’t go out through here, we’ll have to use the loading dock. If we’re lucky, maybe we can steal one of the police skimmers and put some distance between us before ditching it.”

  “And you intend to punch through a line of cops with no one getting shot how, exactly?”

  “Ours not to reason why,” he intoned in a solemn whisper, “ours but to place a few explosive charges.”

  Talyn let out a soft groan.

  “Why is your default option always to blow something up?”

  “You’ve also been known to indulge in recreational detonations, my dear, and I am open to better ideas.”

  “Which I don’t have.” She opened the small satchel at her waist and pulled out several walnut-sized lumps, handing half to Decker. “Scatter?”

  “Scatter.”

  They tossed them along the wall on each side of the door, then she drew her own weapon.

  “Shoot high. If we leave a trail of bodies, it’ll only motivate them to look for us that much harder. Besides, this isn’t their war.”

  Hugging the walls, they made their way back to the other side. They reached the loading dock at the same time as six armored gendarmes, weapons held at the ready, cautiously entered. That left two outside.

  Visored helmets swiveled left and right, scanning the shadows. At an unheard command, three of them headed for the stairs, while the rest came towards where Decker and Talyn had taken cover. The moment those detailed to clear the second story vanished from sight, the Marine squeezed Hera’s hand. She reached back into the satchel and touched a small remote control device. The first charge exploded, momentarily lighting up the factory floor as bright as day.

  Stunned, the cops stood rooted to the spot for a moment or two, then Talyn fired the next charge, sending them into the stairwell on the heels of their comrades. She triggered a third for good measure before both operatives rose from their hiding spot and rushed for the exit, Decker in the lead.

  A fourth charge went up, and one of the two cops left outside came running through the loading dock door. The woman bounced off Zack’s broad chest and went tumbling backward, trying to draw her weapon. As soon as it left her holster, the Marine’s foot came up and sent it flying into the night.

  The last of the gendarmes stood by the parked skimmers, arms akimbo, as if unsure about what his eyes saw.

  Talyn pointed her weapon at his face and yelled, “On your knees.” With her other hand, she fired the remaining two charges.

  Then, Decker slammed into the hapless cop, knocking him against one of the cars with such force that he slumped to the ground. Talyn pulled another micro-bomb from her satchel and tossed it into the factory.

  She triggered the device at once, to give the six inside more to think about while they climbed aboard a skimmer. Decker slipped into the driver’s seat and, the moment he saw her sitting beside him, gunned the fans. The light craft swooped up and around the other skimmers, its nose pointed at the river.

  “Where are we headed?” He asked, taking the car out over the water.

  She hesitated for a moment.

  “Left, towards downtown. Find a spot to land as soon as we’re clear of the industrial park. They’re bound to have remote access to this thing’s controls. Once our friends back there recover from the shock and awe we served them, they’ll be calling it in. When that happens, we’ll be taken directly to the cop shop.”

  “Roger that.”

  A few minutes later, his eyes spied an open, grassy area by the riverbank fronting a seemingly endless expanse of low-rise buildings. He pointed at it.

  “There, for example?”

  “It’ll do.”

  Decker brought the skimmer down as soon as they cleared the water’s edge and killed the fans.

  “End of the line.”

  Talyn jumped out with the supple movements of a trained athlete and immediately headed for the nearest alley. But as Decker put one foot on the ground, the engine started up again, and he dove for safety when the car jumped into the air. His instinctive Pathfinder’s tuck and roll allowed him to recover with a grace surprising from such a large man.

  As he was about to follow his partner, a startlingly loud voice said, “Stop. You are under arrest for assault and theft of Gendarmerie property.”

  It took the Marine a few precious seconds to realize the command didn’t originate with a cop appearing out of nowhere but from the skimmer. He broke into a ground-eating run, however a glance over his shoulder told him the car was right on his tail.

  “I’m about to add damaging Gendarmerie property to that list,” Decker muttered, pulling his blaster from its holster. He stopped at the mouth of the alley Talyn had taken, turned around, and opened fire on the hovering vehicle, stroking the trigger as fast as he could until the magazine ran out of copper disks. Without waiting to see if he had disabled it, he resumed his run into the shadows while his hand dove into a jacket pocket and dug out a fresh magazine.

  “Over here,” Talyn called out from the doorway of an abandoned tenement. Decker slowed, realizing the cop car no longer bathed the blind alley walls with flashing blue lights.

  “We need to keep moving.”

  “Of course.” She turned and entered the building. Decker gave the alley one last look and then followed.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if this old housing complex has a decent maze of connecting corridors,” she said. “They always do. It allows the inhabitants to escape come roundup time. Some of the fine deportee specimens we met on Garonne could easily have lived here.”

  “I’ll take a wild guess and say some asshole betrayed us again,” he stated in a conversational tone as they made their way through the complex. B
oth wore night vision glasses that allowed them to see their way in complete darkness. “This is the third operation in a row that’s gone tits-up, and no one in this business has that much bad luck. Someone who doesn’t like us got information that should have been kept close-held. Not even we knew who the contact was ahead of time, yet we found him neatly executed, along with an equally dead companion.”

  “If that was him.”

  “Granted, but that doesn’t change the fact another mission was somehow compromised. We sure as heck didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot this time around, just as we didn’t the two previous times.”

  Talyn stopped at an intersection of three corridors and, glancing at a handheld sensor, oriented herself.

  “This way.”

  A small creature skittered across the broken floor, spooked by the two humans. They resumed walking.

  “We have to change faces before showing up anywhere that’s covered by surveillance cameras,” he said. “Or at least I have to. Whoever took remote control of that damned skimmer got a real good look at my ugly mug.”

  “We both should. Someone’s shopped us to the cops, and it’s a given our pictures will do the rounds soon if they haven’t already. Once we’re other people, we need to leave Celeste without further ado.”

  “That’ll be the trick. Did you leave anything with sentimental value in our room?”

  “Other than my new face? No. Do you have a new face in your pocket, sweetie?” She smirked at him.

  Decker swore.

  “I guess we’ll have to risk the fleabag hotel.”

  Faint light began to trickle through the darkness ahead. Talyn looked at her sensor readout again. “We’re nearing the other side of this complex.”

  “Let’s hope the cops aren’t waiting for us, because this time, the non-lethal approach won’t work. I doubt they’ll be gentle with someone vicious enough to shoot at a perfectly defenseless skimmer.”

  “Celeste doesn’t have a law against killing artificial intelligences, as I recall.”

  “It doesn’t have a law against killing intruders either,” a raspy voice called out from beyond a darkened corner, “and you’re intruding.”

  “I thought you said this place was empty,” Decker said to his partner.