Sowing the Dragon's Teeth by Jonathan E. Hernandez

They got recycled all the way back to first training phase and had to repeat drop school from the beginning. Salads snapped an ankle during drop school and Johnny Pants requested to suspend his training while his battle brother recovered. The two cousins were joined at the hip ever since they signed up and joined the RAIDERs. Frankie “Salads” Saladino and Johnny “Pants” Pantoliano. Two of them made sheepish faces as the quartermaster barked at them for improper weapons checking-out protocol. Pappy blinked and slid to a halt as a team of young-looking RAIDERs in ballistic armor spilled out of the armory backwards. Pappy glanced disapprovingly over the black-and-gray metal skeletons with plates of additional armor fastened to their torsos. A platoon of the new MK II sentinel tactical drones stood in their recharge racks in standby mode. Major Smalls’ seven meter tall Talos mech with its thin waist, chrome-and-white color, and sleek attachments was in a kneeling position to save space. The techs and maintenance drones barely had enough room to move around and work in. The skipper had sounded the alarm for battle stations, and the team had a posting in control thanks to Major Smalls advertising the usefulness of their skills and experience.Īs Pappy squeezed through the crowded corridors, he tapped into the ship’s internal monitoring system using his retinal heads up display and TIU-tactical interface unit-to see the main cargo and hangar bay below them through a series of cameras. They had been drilling rotation after rotation, and he was as ready as he would ever be for their final confrontation with the Regime.

Pappy dragged himself down a Y-shaped corridor full of scrambling crew members, feeling anxious but in control. Pappy heard her reactor howling three decks below in the engineering section. Pappy missed the organic feeling of ground underneath him.Įven with the ship’s inertial dampening system-reverse-engineered from Regime tech-he could tell that the ship had dropped out of wormhole travel. Then again, it took him years to get used to the rotating sections that most Commonwealth ships used to simulate gravity via centrifugal force. Invisible elastic bands were constantly holding him to the deck. The way that the Higgs field polarizer acted on his body-dimensions much smaller than a planet-felt more like an alien force than a familiar one. The artificial gravity on Determination didn’t quite feel right to Pappy.Īt a hundred and thirty meters in length, the prototype command ship was still smaller than most transports.

Sowing the Dragon's Teeth by Jonathan E. Hernandez