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    Scorched Earth: Seeds of War
    Scorched Earth: Seeds of War
    Scorched Earth: Seeds of War
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Scorched Earth: Seeds of War

    By Jonathan P. Brazee and Lawrence M. Schoen

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    When the alien Gardener invaded the agricultural world of Vasquez, only that planet was in immediate danger. Now humanity must be warned of possible attack and retired Marine Lieutenant General Colby Edson is the only man for the job. With his dog Duke, he jury rigs an alien ship and traverses the wormhole to New Mars, only to become trapped while more of the Gardener's soldiers invade and attempt to strip away all trace of humanity from the planet.

    But are the invaders intent on destruction and conquest, or are humans simply weeds in their garden? In a battle of wills and strength, who will irradicate whom?

    Former psychology professor Lawrence M. Schoen and retired Marine Colonel Jonathan P. Brazee join forces in this second volume of the SEEDS OF WAR trilogy, pitting Marine against Gardener, with the fate of all of humanity hanging in the balance.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJonathan P. Brazee
    Release dateDec 26, 2020
    ISBN9781393417446
    Scorched Earth: Seeds of War
    Author

    Jonathan P. Brazee

    Jonathan Brazee graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served 30 years in the Marines as a commander of infantry, recon, MSSG, and air delivery units as well as in various staff billets. He served with the 3d CAG as the military liaison to USAID in Iraq in 2006 and retired as a colonel in 2009. He is a life member of the Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the U. S. Naval Academy Alumni Association, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.              

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      Book preview

      Scorched Earth - Jonathan P. Brazee

      Seeds of War — Book II: Scorched Earth

      Part I: Any Landing You Can Walk Away From

      You never forget your first taste of combat. That first low orbit insertion where you plunge from the belly of a spacecraft and plummet like a fireball, your battlesuit ready to take on any opposition. Every mission is different, as is every world—the feel of the gravity, the taste of the air—but the planet of your first fight with the enemy gets imprinted on your brain, good or bad. For Lieutenant General Colby Merritt Edson, Republic Marine Corps (Retired), that world had been New Mars, more than fifty years ago.

      It had also been the site of his greatest failure, a battle of politics and misplaced trust. He’d tried to do what was right for the Corps, tracking down and ferreting out the bastards sending substandard equipment and ordnance to the men and women who were risking their lives for the Republic, only to be screwed over by politicians and corporate ladder climbers eager to make money without regard for the damage they did along the way. But those bastards enjoyed the wealth they had skimmed, and they had power. Colby had been willing to risk his career for the good of the Corps, but in the end they had won by threatening his people. He could walk away or watch as they destroyed the lives of men and women like Jonas Venango and Li Siniang Greensboro, whose only crime was being extraordinary Marines. For their sake Colby accepted voluntary retirement.

      To avoid unfavorable optics they’d pushed him through one of the many wormholes on the elliptic above New Mars and dropped him on Vasquez, a nearly empty agricultural world. He had a farm, an agcomputer that did all the work, an old dog, and a kit full of recriminations and regrets.

      And now he was heading back again, albeit not in any fashion anyone could have ever imagined. Alien plant soldiers had destroyed almost everything and everyone on Vasquez. As proof, Colby had hotwired the boss alien’s ship for his ride.

      The absurdity of sitting on the deck of an alien vessel felt oddly calming after the last couple of days of fighting plants. He absent-mindedly rubbed Duke’s head as the ship continued its climb into the space surrounding Vasquez. His command-grade implant had managed to connect with what was a one-level vegetable control system. It wasn’t a perfect interface, though; there were many blank areas his implant could not interpret. Colby had been able to take off from the planet’s surface, however, as that was nothing more than feeding the engines power and pointing it in the right general direction. Trying to make it through the wormhole and then back to New Mars would not be so easy. A slight miscalculation, a slight gap in the ability to work the controls, and instead of easing smoothly over the event horizon of transition, he and Duke could nick the perimeter of the wormhole and be rendered nothing more than pink mush by tidal forces beyond the explanation of physics.

      Assuming that didn’t happen, they’d either get there or they wouldn’t; there was no chance of ending up somewhere else. Vasquez’s star system was no different from eighty percent of systems with wormholes, which is to say it only had one. Fly a vessel into it without bouncing off the edge and you came out the other end, sometimes hundreds of light years away. Sol system was one of those which filled most of the remaining twenty percent by boasting two different wormholes, one on the ecliptic above the orbit of path of the asteroid belt—and there was no shortage of boffins and squints who thought one had a lot to do with the other—and one further out above the Kuiper Belt.

      But a fraction of a percent of star systems had more than two wormholes. Ninety-eight percent of these had between three and six, providing not just gateways between worlds, but interstellar highway interchanges. And the remaining two percent of that original fraction had stupid numbers of wormholes. No one knew why. There was no pattern. It didn’t seem to relate to the type of star, the number or kind of planets (if any), moons or not, or anything else. It was just the luck of the draw. To date, the Republic had identified seventeen star systems with an excess of ten wormholes each. The system containing New Mars had thirty-three, the fourth most of any of them, and all of them clustered in the ecliptic above the one planet. It wasn’t an interstellar highway, it was a freaking hub of endless high-volume traffic with well-regulated guidelines and time tables for what could come through which wormhole when, which despite a fleet of AIs still saw the occasional collision at speeds where even a small nudge or graze was deadly, and none of the objects coming through any of the holes in space were anywhere near small.

      He would be arriving above New Mars without benefit of the schedule for when something was expected to emerge from the Vasquez system transit. Space is vast, but the sheer amount of traffic—both manned and automated—coming and going above New Mars made it seem snug. There was a very real chance that he would collide with something before the traffic control AIs could do anything to stop it. It didn’t matter how fast their dedicated brains could calculate, some things just came down to mass, velocity, and distance.

      Colby chose not to think about that.

      The ship didn’t have anything that looked like seats, so he sat on the deck, back up against the rubbery bulkhead. Duke was lying beside him, head on his lap as he petted her. She was calm, happy to be with him. She wasn’t thinking about the wormhole. She didn’t have the imagination to picture what could happen, what could go horribly wrong.

      No, I’m not going to think of that. Think of happy thoughts, Edson, like just being alive.

      Most of the people on the planet had evidently been killed during the plant invasion. For all he knew, Topeka was the last human left on the planet—well, she and Riordan, stuck in his med chamber. Staying behind as she had done was probably the smart thing to do. Eventually, someone would come to find out what happened, why the agricultural shipments had ceased.

      Colby didn’t have that luxury. He had to report back to the government reps on New Mars so they could get word back to Earth. He had to prove to Vice-Minister Greenstein and the rest that there was a threat out here in the far reaches of human space, that aliens had arrived at Vasquez without benefit of any wormhole. Which in turn suggested technology beyond anything humanity possessed. And if aliens had stumbled upon Vasquez, then how long before they noticed the wormhole to New Mars and its cornucopia of routes to dozens of other human-inhabited worlds? Fifty years before, Colby had helped wrest control of the system from a fringe government, back when they’d only discovered five wormholes there. He’d damned

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