Salvage Marines (Necrospace Book 1) Read Online Free

of space, and though he knew it was just as much of a daydream as anything else, he clung to it. There was strength in his goals, a purpose beyond himself that he hoped would push him to excel in combat and to survive whatever the universe had in store for him.
    So it was that Samuel and Ben were rolled into Tango Platoon, along with orphans Patrick Baen and Aaron Baen. Their squad leader position, known as Boss, was filled by Maggie Taggart. The marines called her Boss Taggart to her face, but thought of her as Mag when they weren’t addressing her.
    Mag was a tough-as-nails veteran, as was Boss Lucinda Ulanti and Boss Wynn Marsters, assigned from other Reaper fleets to be leaders for the Baen 6 founding fleet. It was these veterans who set the standard for what it meant to be a REAPER. It was they who would not only lead the marines, but also teach them through action, how to take what the new recruits had learned in basic and execute it in the field.
    Samuel’s grip tightened on his combat rifle as he looked behind him once more into the darkness of the tunnel, silently hoping that the training had been enough.
    “Everybody watch your corners, just because someone already swept it doesn’t mean something hasn’t show up in the meantime,” Mag growled into her com-bead as she raised her combat rifle to point the muzzle into the darkness of the corridor in front of her. The mounted light on the rifle illuminated a small bend on the right that indicated a side passage. “We don’t want to get flanked if there really is something in here with us.”
    “Copy that, Boss,” said Samuel in a low voice, partly through the com-bead and partly to himself, as he’d certainly not double checked either of the last two passages they’d come through since entering the labyrinth of corridors that made up the underbelly of the compound.
    His imagination threatened to conjure up any number of horrors from childhood stories, and he retreated into his firearm routine to calm his nerves.
    Ever since basic, he habitually checked the safety of his weapon, and then looked at the ammunition read out on the side of the gun. He had not fired a single shot outside of training, and certainly not twenty minutes into his first salvage mission, but the young man took an obsessive comfort in the assurance that he had control of his weapon and a full magazine.
    The fleet had set anchor in low orbit around a small planet with no name beyond designation M5597. In the pre-drop briefing the shift manager had informed the marines that fourteen years prior, a mining branch ship was sent to this planet in response to data returned by unmanned probes revealing large deposits of biridium and mordite gases. As both resources were labor intensive and time-consuming to extract, a ship outfitted with the ability to found a mining compound was dispatched. After several years of acceptable levels of production yields, communication with M5597 abruptly ceased.
    The entire 5500 sector was considered low security space, so keeping military vessels in the area was deemed unnecessary. The transport way station, after missing two consecutive deliveries, had filed an automatic report.
    Once the regional managers of the sector, who worked out of the Home Office on Grotto Prime, were made aware of the report they determined that the cost of a response effort would outweigh the projected profits of the facility.
    At the time, Grotto Corp. was engaged in a bitter trade war with the Hadrian Conglomerate in several of the surrounding sectors. To re-task even one response ship to pass through the war zone and into sector 5500 would have not only resulted in the loss of the ship to one or more of the many Hadrian frigates that picketed the area, but also ran the risk of Hadrian management discovering that there were precious resources hidden on a small planet deep within the largely ignored and unmapped sector.
    The report was buried and the fate of the mining compound on