Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

One single link in the chain, both the strongest and the weakest.
    “Someone like that could rise quite high in the Fallschirmjäger , you know. That level of software expertise? And the military planning capabilities to go with it?”
    “I’m the planner here,” the Doctor snapped.
    “In fact, I would be able to cite ‘special circumstances’ and pardon that individual for all his crimes, if he were to apprentice himself to our program.”
    The sounds of struggle were louder now. “Stop him!” the Doctor shouted and a great deal of crashing was heard.
    “Get ready,” the Captain said.
    The LEDs around the door went from red to green. As soon as the door flew open, Weapons threw a flash bang grenade inside. The squad’s earpieces noise-cancelled the explosion, and before the stunned colonists could respond, they were inside in room-clearing formation.
    “Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons!” Engineering shouted in his deep commanding voice. Warning lights flashed as the smoke set off fire alarms.
    Their contacts automatically switched to infrared in the smoke-filled room. Most of the ten people in the room were down, coughing and covering their battered eardrums. One was raising a weapon.
    Medical threw a dagger and missed. Engineering threw his dagger as well, burying it in his forehead. The man dropped.
    The safety systems sucked the smoke out of the room, revealing the eight remaining hands raised in surrender. Weapons and Comms quickly whipcuffed them.
    “Eng?” the Captain asked.
    “On it,” he replied, taking over a console. “The tank drivers are saying that if they don’t hear a response from Central, they’re gonna fire on the city.”
    “Do what you need to do.”
    “Roger that,” he said, sending override signals to the tanks that would turn their weapons systems on each other. Garbled, panicked shouting came out of the console speakers, then silence.
    “Threat removed,” Engineering said.
    “Okay, genius,” the Captain said, “where you at?”
    “Here,” came a scratchy version of the young male voice he’d heard on the comm. “I’m, uh…bleeding.”
    “Medical, over here.”
    The voice belonged to a young man. A teenager, actually, skinny and pale and astonished at the wound in his side, and the amount of blood he had inside him.
    “Knife wound, kid, you’ll be fine. Sorry about my aim.” Medical opened a skinpack and sealed it over the wound. “You’ll need a new kidney, and some blood, and a lot of rest.”
    The Captain knelt next to the whiz kid. “What’s your name, son?”
    “M…m…Marcus.”
    “Okay, Marcus. I meant what I said. Provisional pardon. That means, you go straight upline from your hospital bed to the station, and then to FJ Tech School. But provisional means that if you fuck anything up like you did today, you’re on the next transport to Eden One. Sound good?”
    “Sounds…fucking awesome. Sir.”
    Comms had wrestled the Doctor to his knees when she cuffed him. His snowy white hair, usually so carefully arranged into sweeping piles and waves like a symphony conductor’s, was disheveled and dirty now.
    “This can’t go on,” the Doctor said. “This whole…thing you’re doing. You’re holding us back, all of us, you’re killing the human race,” he spat. “For what? To save a bunch of fucking savages.”
    “I believe you and your co-conspirators are the savages today, Doctor. Comms, read him.”
    Comms launched into a litany of the crimes committed that day, every one of them a Class 1 Felony, any one of which had the same sentence.
    “You are hereby sentenced to transportation to Eden One, for the rest of your natural life.”
    Even the Doctor’s proud, angry demeanor flinched at that.
    The Captain bent down, close to his face.
    “Doctor, let me explain something to you. A terrible mistake was made, that let you slip through the profiling system to this level of authority. It’s people like you who killed Earth. People like you