The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

The commanders had a word for this weakness, the one no soldier wanted to hear: Regression.

“Not you, Bouchet,” Valentin told himself for weeks. “Not you.”

He repeated the mantra after the firefight on Zwahili Kingdom, through to the inquest, and back to Earth. He came too far, overcome too many skeptics, to let them revel in his failure.

“Show them you are not a cudfrucking washout.”

His conviction brought him here, to this Mongolian wasteland where he determined to recapture his manhood. He found success here before. Once again, he needed to smell the blood of a successful hunt, to solidify his mettle as a peacekeeper.

Victory is morality.

Those words guided him: Even in the face of rising insurgencies, of scandal and civil war among his own kind, of comrades surrendering to nativist ideologies and defecting to the colonies.

Victory is morality.

“It is all a peacekeeper ever needs to appreciate,” Valentin told his father upon his fourteenth birthday, announcing his intent to join Forward Operations Special Division. “I will cut them down where they stand. The Collectorate belongs to the Chancellors.”

“Are you sure?” His father said. “Will stacking their bodies guarantee our future?”

When Valentin spat on his father, he cut short the celebration of his adulthood. He turned to the six hundred Chancellor guests that day, asked who among them also believed in his father’s treacherous swill, and stormed out with his comrades. They drank deep into the night, filtered poltash weed into their blood, and watched children tear each other apart at the regional kwin-sho matches. The soldiers were ready for their orders, bound to each other no matter how many light-years might separate them in the coming months.

Victory is morality.

They streamed each other from their remote postings, cheered outcomes of successful operations, and worked to manipulate their leave-calendars to reunite for a few days of debauchery on Xavier’s Garden. Most of them made it. Not Valentin.

After the riot suppression on Zwahili Kingdom, his commanders did not attribute his carelessness to peacekeeper losses and determined him fit to resume combat. Yet Valentin detected a slip in performance – not in tactical efficiency, but where it mattered most – in his heart’s resolve. Regression led to compassion, even empathy, for the indigos. He refused to travel that road.

He begged his superiors for leave to engage in Dacha. Officially, they denied him since the Dacha program existed off-book. However, they granted enough shore leave for travel to Earth.

Valentin needed this, as he did his Dacha training runs two years ago. He wanted to enjoy the pride of a successful kill, a confirmation of his inherent battlefield cruelty. He needed to bury a knife in the gut of his quarry, twisting it until his victim stared forever into nothing.

Now, two weeks after the riots on Zwahili Kingdom, Valentin ran barefoot across a jagged, rocky plateau near an escarpment in the Mongolian Desolation, with a twelve-inch, serrated Manville knife in his left hand, prepared to strike. The partial moon cast a pale mist over the copper-tinged landscape, enough light to help Valentin track – and sometimes spot – the quarry who had thirty minutes head-start.

“I will have you,” Valentin whispered when he found the footprints of his target, a man set loose into the night with no weapon, no clothes, no discernible hope beyond his own wits.

No one ever asked which colony the victim came from, whether he or she was kidnapped or transferred as a prisoner of war. They heard rumors about how some targets weren’t colonists, but had been captured from among the Solomons, right there on Earth.

He heard a small rockslide. To the east, thirty degrees.

“Didn’t they tell you?” Valentin smiled. “Silence is golden.”

Valentin’s target made his first tactical error in an hour. Valentin sensed the glory of the moment, the validation of principles which served him well until that single second of indecision during battle.

He felt the greatest glory 372 standard days earlier when he tapped his stream amp, and his orders floated before him in holographic majesty.

Unification Guard Dispatch Notice No. 45-6621-44905

Attention Given:

Specialist Valentin Bouchet

Marks Presidium, Philadelphia Redux

Q#Z,1,06

Congratulations on the fulfillment of your highest duty!

We have honored you with the immediate rank of First Specialist to Forward Operations Assault Battalion, Special Division, attached to Ark Carrier Oberon in defense of Zwahili Kingdom. Report to Hinton Station by 15.30 standard hours for orbital rendezvous with U.G. Cruiser Maelstrom.

He uttered the words over and over. Special Division. Special Division. An elite corps of snipers.

Within two months and more than 170 light-years away, Valentin bagged his first five kills. He took out another twenty-three during the riots near the royal capital of New Kampala. His success continued – until he allowed one second’s delay to cloud his vision.

He replayed the sequence in his mind. What was it about the girl charging the front lines? Was it the tears in her pleading eyes? Or that she brandished nothing more than a battle-torn flag? Why did it take him the extra second to realize the insurgents threw her forward as a shield? Were they hoping for peacekeeper rogue syndrome, a malady that turned sympathies toward the natives? Did they use children as shields to weaken the UG’s resolve? Were they fools enough to believe could defy waves of soldiers in the impregnable armor along with storms of flash pegs and energy slews?

“I had their flank,” Valentin said as he closed within thirty meters of his Dacha quarry. “They never would have gotten off that disruptor gun if I’d just …”

He spied the silhouette of his target, crumpled by the edge of the escarpment. The fool had tried to descend but realized too late the face was unstable. He struggled to keep from falling a hundred meters to certain death. And now, he waited in silent surrender for the