Contents
Carter: Inland Kublar
01
02
03
04
Bowie: The Soob
05
06
07
08
09
10
Carter: Inland Kublar
11
12
13
14
15
16
Bowie: The Soob
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Bowie: The Soob
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Carter: Inland Kublar
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Epilogue
Reading Order
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About The Authors
Honor Roll
TAKEOVER
SEASON 2, BOOK 1
BY JASON ANSPACH
& NICK COLE
Copyright © 2019
Galaxy’s Edge, LLC
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
All rights reserved. Version 1.0
Edited by Lauren Moore
Published by Galaxy’s Edge Press
Cover Art: Tommaso Renieri
Cover Design: Beaulistic Book Services
Formatting: Kevin G. Summers
Website: InTheLegion.com
Facebook: facebook.com/atgalaxysedge
Newsletter (get a free short story): InTheLegion.com
CARTER
INLAND KUBLAR
01
I’m up to my ankles in dead koobs. And they stink.
Back in the day, when I was still active duty in the Legion, I wouldn’t have noticed. My bucket—that’s what we legionnaires call our helmets—would have filtered this fishy stench right out. But now when I do my shootin’, I get a nice, deep base tan while I’m at it.
So it’s not all bad.
“Yo, man!” calls out Aguilar, a former hullbuster who served with the 1st Republic Marine Division right up until that maniac Goth Sullus declared himself emperor. He’s pulling up his flak jacket over his nose to cover up the smell. “This ain’t what I signed on for, man. I’m here to kill koobs, not work body detail. Big Nee gotta be able to afford bots to do this work.”
“You signed on to do what I tell you to do,” I shout back as I poke a koob airsac that’s swollen to the size of a beach ball with the toe of my boot. It quickly ruptures and spills out a near-congealed ooze of the alien’s phosphorescent yellow blood.
Koobs are a nasty species. Tribal warriors, willing to die for just about anything. Mean. Sneaky. Violent.
They got famous a bunch of years back when a destroyer blew up and then a company of legionnaires were nearly wiped out on planet. Nearly. But since they were leejes, they survived, kicked ass, and got off Kublar just as a civil war erupted. Things have stabilized since then. The Republic came in as soon as it was clear which rival koob tribe was going to win the genocidal war engulfing the planet. Then they started building up the coastal cities.
Kublar was on the fast track to becoming an assimilated Republic world. The hell that happened to Victory Company just an afterthought. A little bump in the road.
Well, now the Republic has fallen and the galaxy is trying to figure out what comes next. But the people in power on Kublar are staying the course. Continuing the vision of Utopion’s executed House of Reason way out here at galaxy’s edge.
But Big Nee, our boss, he has plans of changing all of that. And we’re the paid guns to make sure it happens.
“Yeah, that’s what I signed up for,” Aguilar replies, a half-smile on his face. “So I’m thinkin’ you can just tell us to head back to the truck and wait for some bots, Carter.”
I shake my head and can feel the sweaty ringlets of my hair brushing across the back of my neck. I pull off my ball cap and wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my forearm, soaking my Legion tattoo in the process.
“Can’t do that, Easy,” I say. “Because I signed up to do what I was told. And I was told this is on us. No bots.”
We call Aguilar Easy mainly because his first name, Elias, starts with an E. Easy-E. It’s catchy. But I guess in this instance, it’s fitting, too.
By now the other men on my team have stopped hoisting up dead koobs and tossing them into the back of the repulsor-powered troop transport truck we rode in on. This little diversion seems to have marked the start of a kaff break. Not that we have any with us.
“Get some water in you,” I tell the guys.
Other than Easy, there are four men on my team.
Lana Romnova, who isn’t a man, but work with me on this. She’s one of the guys. A former basic who’s as good as any medical bot I’ve ever seen and much better with a blaster rifle.
Then we’ve got our other hullbuster, Abers. Team sniper. He was in the middle of carrying the bottom half of a dead koob to the truck while Winters—he never bothered joining the military, long story—holds the corpse underneath the arms.
The two men drop the body unceremoniously onto the Kublaren hardpan and go for their canteens.
“Bots would be nice,” says Abers.
Winters shakes his head. He’s a young kid. Twenty-five at the oldest. The rest of us are closer to forty than twenty. “No. Can’t do bots for something like this.”
“Why not?” asks Easy.
“Can’t do bots,” Winters maintains, as if repeating it will make everyone understand.
I take a drink from my canteen. The Kublaren heat has managed to outperform the thing’s ‘evercool’ technology. But, for a knockoff of the real thing bought at the Soob for a few credits, that’s not so bad. Usually these things run north of one-fifty. For a stinking canteen.
I mean, we get paid really well on this contract. It’s why we’re all here. I got a family to keep fed. But even if I can afford it, I’m not about to drop those kind of credits on a cooler. That’s how people stay broke.
“Dude,” Abers says, talking to Easy across the rows of dead indigs—the indigenous species of this planet, “the kid don’t know. He’s just talkin’ to talk.”
Easy laughs.
“Yeah, I do,” insists Winters. “Bots won’t work.”
“Because why?” asks Lana.
I see the kid hesitate. Almost like he doesn’t know… but something tells me that’s not it. It’s more like he does, only he doesn’t want people to wonder how.
“Because.”
Soon they’re all talking past each other.
The only one still working is Lashley.
