Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

Erik asked, “how long would it take to train a new marine on the job?”
    “Well that’s just the problem,” said Crozier. “We’re not a training ship. Trainees need special environments where they can’t make a mess. Everything we do ‘on the job’ has fatal consequences if you fuck it up. And trainees are supposed to fuck up, that’s how they learn. So understrength we may be, but I’d rather keep it that way.”
    Erik knew what she meant. Training spacer crew on the job was a little easier than marines, but Erik’s Academy scores were some of the highest anyone had seen. The regular crew of Phoenix were also elite, and did not take well to the idea of welcoming anyone less qualified into their ranks. With a quarter of Phoenix ’s spacer crew missing, everyone was working overtime, and sleep, recreation, and sometimes tempers were suffering. But Erik sympathised when most of them said they’d rather keep it that way than work alongside people who’d do a substandard job.
    Marine strength was down more like ten percent than twenty-five, but as Crozier said, marine skills were more exacting and less forgiving. And then there was the question of augments, the various physical enhancements that all Phoenix marines possessed that brought them up to the superhuman levels required. Augmentations could be had out in these territories for a price. But for humans, it was unlikely, and probably unsafe and substandard too.
    “Though if you could find me a fifteen-year-experience Squad Sergeant to fill in for Third Squad,” Crozier added. “That’d be nice.” Staff Sergeant Kono had recently been Delta’s Third Squad Commander, until Trace had lost Command Squad’s veteran First Sergeant and taken Kono to compensate. Crozier understood, and knew Command Squad’s priority was higher than Delta’s, but still griped about it. Sergeants like Kono didn’t grow on trees.
    “Plenty of people lost worse than you, Lieutenant,” Erik told her.
    “Yes sir. Well aware.”
    “If Third Squad needs a Sergeant, promote someone.”
    “Thinking on it, sir.”
    “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Lieutenant,” Erik told her. Captain Pantillo had said that a lot.
    “No sir. So when are you going to take the promotion to captain, sir?” Erik just looked at her, to let her know she’d gone too far. He didn’t have to answer questions like that from marine lieutenants. Marine majors, on the other hand…
    “Yo!” said Master Sergeant Wong on coms up ahead. “We’ve got spiders, dead ahead.”
    “Keep walking,” Crozier said calmly. “Real careful, everyone. Let’s not jump at shadows, but real careful.”
    Sure enough, amidst the milling foot traffic between stalls ahead, there stalked five thin, spindly shadows. Back-canted lower legs, elastic limbed, they did not walk across the deck, they flowed like water. Many-eyed heads turned their way, inset mandibles flickering. Creepy as hell, to human eyes.
    “Five of them,” Crozier murmured. “That’s neutral. Don’t trust it though.”
    “They don’t look armed,” Wong added. “Merchants, it looks like.”
    “They’re sard,” Crozier disagreed. “Merchants, soldiers, no difference.”
    Sard socialised in groups. Brilliant mathematicians, their societies were ruled by numbers. The only emotions they appeared to feel were toward those numerical arrangements, not to the individuals who comprised them. Sard had compassion for patterns, not people. Those who deviated from acceptable patterns, meaning most non-sard civilisation, could find themselves subject to ‘rearrangement’.
    They hadn’t been in space much longer than the barabo. Endlessly tolerant of dangerous things, tavalai had found ways to impress and control them, and when Spiral politics turned bad for tavalai, had used them to do the various dirty things that tavalai found distasteful to do themselves. Tavalai were undoubtedly far ‘better’ than sard, from a human perspective,