Orphan's Destiny
Orphan's Destiny
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Overview
At 25, General Jason Wander has fought and won man's only alien conflict. Now, after long years in space, he's coming home...but to what? Earth's desperate nations, impoverished by war damage and military spending, are slashing defense budgets. There's just one problem with this new worldwide policy—the first alien invasion was merely Plan A.
Suddenly, the real assault begins: Earth is attacked by a vast armada of city-sized warships. To block their invasion, mankind has only one surviving craft and a single guerrilla strike force...a suicide squad led by Jason Wander.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781522608141 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2016 |
| Series: | Jason Wander Series , #2 |
| Sales rank: | 269,902 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Robert Buettner is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology and has published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He lives in Georgia. His website is: www.RobertBuettner.com.
Read an Excerpt
Orphan's Destiny
By Robert Buettner
Warner Vision
Copyright © 2005 Robert BuettnerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-446-61430-0
Chapter One
"ANYBODY OUT THERE? OVER."Static, not a human voice, cackles back through my earpiece.
Sssss. Pop.
Ten feet across this egg-shaped chamber, the hull-plate barricade I've thrown across the entry glows red. The Slugs are burning through their own ship to finish me. Roasted metal's tang singes my nostrils. Two minutes, tops, then Slugs will surge through their opening like man-sized, armored maggots.
I reverse the pistol in my hand to use it as a club. The gesture measures my resolve. The pistol's empty magazine well measures its futility.
I sigh and my breath worms out and glows purple in Slug interior lighting. Before my heart can beat, my helmet ventilator wicks away the condensation like a stolen soul.
My legs sprawl across the quaking Slug metal-blue decking and I thump my numb, armored left thigh with a gloved fist. Leg infantry needs two good legs. I could limp if I had to. But to where?
I let my back sink into the rescue-me yellow mattress of the Polytane hull-breach plug. That's how we boarded this monstrosity, like pirates in Eternad armor, but the hull breach is no way out for me. Behind it stretches vacuum, the emptiness that fills space between Earth and the moon.
My visor display freezes the year in emerald digits at 2043. The timer, though, rushes down to four minutes and keeps falling.
When those timer digits spin down to zero, the human race will live or die. I die either way. I'm Jason Wander. For now, history's youngest and screwed-est major general. For a while, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant. For eternity, Infantry.
I'm also the human speed bump between the Slugs and Brumby. A mile beneath me in this beast's belly, he may blow this invasion transport into rutabagas and both of us with it. If I can buy seconds here at the price of my life. If we fail, Slugs by the millions will overrun Earth in slimy waves. Mankind will struggle, of course, with a brick-by-brick tenacity that will make Stalingrad look like a pie fight. The Slugs don't know mankind yet, not when it's defending its own turf.
The oval that outlines the Slugs' emerging doorway glows white. We didn't know they could do that. We know even less about them than they know about us. Soon, we may both know too much.
One minute left before they break through, just over three minutes until detonation, if ever.
My shoulders sag under my armor.
It has, all things considered, been a fine twenty-four years. I knew my parents, though not for so long as I would have liked. I grew up. I met good people. The best, in fact. I experienced the one great love of my life, albeit for just 616 days. I had a godson I came to love like my own child. Oh, and, depending on which version of history one read, I saved the world.
My 'puter beeps. Three minutes.
They say contemplation of death comes in phases: denial, anger, some other stuff, then, finally, acceptance. Maybe that was the thing I had been luckiest about, compared to the other orphans I had known. A soldier's destiny is to die young and unexpectedly. Soldiers often die nobly. Soldiers often die for others' hubris or stupidity. But it is rarely a soldier's destiny to have the time to accept his death.
The first molten metal plops, then sizzles, on deck plates as the Slugs burn through. I grip my spent pistol tighter.
In some alternate reality, there may be truth in the soldierly deception that war is bloodshed that brings life. I cock my head. That is, word for word, what the woman who bore my godson said when I delivered him in a cave on Jupiter's largest moon.
That's where this started for me, three years ago.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Orphan's Destiny by Robert Buettner Copyright © 2005 by Robert Buettner.
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