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  DARK OPERATOR

  DARK OPERATOR BOOK ONE

  BY DOC SPEARS

  WITH JASON ANSPACH & NICK COLE

  Copyright © 2020

  Galaxy’s Edge, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  All rights reserved. Version 1.0

  Edited by Lauren Moore

  Published by Galaxy’s Edge Press

  Cover Art: Tommaso Renieri

  Cover Design: Ryan Bubion

  Formatting: Kevin G. Summers

  Website: www.GalaxysEdge.us

  Facebook: facebook.com/atgalaxysedge

  Newsletter (get a free short story): www.InTheLegion.com

  The Savage Wars might be all but over, but that doesn’t mean there’s peace in the galaxy just yet.

  Legion Dark Ops has always been a unit shrouded in secrecy. Tasked with performing covert missions, its kill teams are filled with the best warriors from within the ranks of the Legion.

  Kel Turner is one of the youngest legionnaires ever to be selected for Dark Ops. After many battles and trials he is faced with the greatest challenge of his life—operating by himself on a remote planet at the galaxy’s edge, a foot soldier for the policies of the duplicitous House of Reason, tasked with solving a crisis that would take ten kill teams to resolve.

  Diplomats, spies, shadowy terrorist groups, and an enigmatic general work with and against him as he fights to save a society from itself.

  What can one operator do alone, separated from his kill team, fighting a war that has no name?

  This lone operator doesn’t know what it will take to win. He only knows he’s not going to lose.

  Prologue

  I know a true believer when I see one. I was one myself once.

  I know in my heart that I still am.

  I’ve been here since the beginning, selected by General Rex himself at the very end of what most people thought was the end of the Savage Wars.

  And I still believe. Fervently. But what I believe in isn’t the mission. Not anymore. It’s the people in this organization. Even after thirty years, I believe in them now more than ever.

  The rest of it? Better not to think about that.

  The kid in front of me sits like a granite statue. He looks like they all do when they’re selected to come to this unit. I’m not only talking about his physical appearance. It’s his bearing. He’s coiled and ready to strike, but he has it under control. He’s smart. You can tell. He needs to get a new Legion black dress uniform. This one is getting too tight across his chest and shoulders. He’s reaching that age when he’s getting thick, laying muscle on top of muscle instead of losing weight from all his exertions.

  The team coming back from Antione spotted this kid’s talent. Gave him good marks. The best. I agree. He’s a performer. All the indicators are there of him being a good fit for this unit.

  I don’t have any doubt that he’s the kind we want. The kind that’s going to soak up whatever we teach him. The kind that’s going to drive himself harder than anyone else ever could. The kind who cares more about the mission than anything else. He’ll always put himself last in the equation. The equation we all try and conjure the answer to. How do I crush this?

  So, do I tell him?

  Do I tell him… it’s not going to be what he thinks? Do I tell him that in the end, he’s going to question everything he believes?

  Do I?

  I’ve tried before. Even the older selectees have trouble absorbing it when I tell them.

  Some of them just don’t want to believe it.

  Some of the them, the selectees, decide to return to their units. What we offer is just not for them. The Legion was already the best fit for them. They were already in the most elite fighting unit in the Republic. They have status, and anyone can see it. There’s plenty of camaraderie, regimentation, and of course, KTF.

  They ask, “What was I thinking, leaving all that?”

  Because this… it’s not all that. We’re the guys doing the jobs that no one ever hears about. There’s no recognition for what we do. And though there’s a mystique that, like a siren’s lure, draws some to us—those types, they don’t stay.

  It takes a true believer. To stay.

  I’ve heard us called a cult. Most don’t call us anything, because our existence is largely unknown, even within the ranks of the Legion. The difference between us and a cult is that you can leave at any time and we won’t stop you. Over the years, we’ve released many for cause. Better to have killed them. If this is where you want to be, there’s hardly anything else in life that’ll fill the void in your soul when you’re not counted within our ranks.

  That’s why I’m still here.

  It’s best to be honest about it all instead of pretending it’s about something it isn’t.

  I’m looking at this kid sitting at perfect attention, and like I always do, I see some of myself in him. I’m older now. I’m here more for what I can do with my brains than with my body. But I still KTF with the best of them. I keep up with the younger guys. Many times, I’m in the lead. It hurts more now than it used to, though. In many ways.

  I know where this path will lead them. Him.

  So, do I tell him?

  “Have a seat, Turner. I’m Sergeant Major Nail.”

  Firm handshake. The kid’s got a big toothy smile. I can feel the electric excitement he’s putting out.

  Was I like that? Was I? I think I was. It doesn’t seem possible now, but I believe that’s the truth. I was just like him. Once. A long time ago.

  No, I won’t tell him. Won’t even try. He’ll find out on his own. We’ll be here to help him through it when he does learn the truth.

  Only one thing left to say now.

  “Welcome to Dark Ops.”

  01

  Fear welled up in Kel’s chest.

  Only he knew it wasn’t fear. He was amped up and the adrenaline flowed as they left the staging area to start the purposeful movement toward the objective. His armor was comfortable, and comforting. Familiar. Leej armor augmented many of his senses, but often when making a stealthy approach to a target, he felt more comfortable without it, better attuned when he was part of the environment instead of inside the most advanced combat protection system the galaxy had ever
known. Inside a shell.

  Moving out to KTF with his team and the I-squared troops produced a cocktail of mixed feelings. Excitement and concern about the op, and always the anxiety about not letting anything slip—not letting anyone down—in other words… not failing. Failure. The greatest sin. All of this combined to heighten his performance during any mission. He’d learned most operators experienced the same feeling at zero hour. It was a good feeling.

  From a life spent in the crucible, Kel knew this: just about every good thing in life lay on the other side of fear.

  Through the augmented night vision inside his bucket’s HUD, Kel saw the controlled chaos of the oddly shaped troops gathering into their assigned groups for the assault. In Legion Dark Ops, kill teams like Kel’s frequently found themselves working with local planetary militaries and militias. There wasn’t enough Legion to go around for the Republic’s needs.

  “Where’s the captain?” Kel heard Tem ask over the L-comm.

  “Rigors of command,” Tem replied. “He’s in the rear with the I-squared kraltan.”

  “I heard that, jackass.”

  Of course Captain Braley Yost heard it. That’s why they’d said it over L-comm. Jerking each other’s chains mercilessly was a constant pastime and one of the reasons the team was so strong. Their team leader was not immune just because he was a captain. There were no distinctions by rank on a kill team during a mission. A patrol might be led by the most junior man on the team, and when it was time to lead, everyone else on the team followed.

  “And if either of you wants to babysit the kraltan, be my guest,” said Braley.

  Non-Republic human forces were indig, short for indigenous. Mostly these were local police or military who need a little help in getting that KTF done and restoring order. In a big galaxy, not every planet had a Republic military presence. Especially out along the edge.

  On a planet like this one, Dark Ops often trained indigenous non-humans to provide the killing work that always needed to be done somewhere to someone. Not only did the alien indig have alien cultures, language, and technologies, they shared the same major drawback as the human indig: they were not Legion.

  Alien races were always twice the trouble. Double that of indig. Indigenous squared. When you said I-squared, everyone knew what you meant and the headaches it implied.

  “I’ll stay with the command group,” Braley said. “The kraltan needs some hand-holding, I think.”

  “You’ll always be our kraltan, Captain Yost,” Kel joked.

  Kraltan was the local’s rank for the leader of a unit of any size. In their culture, there was only leader and follower. Teaching the I-squared that individuals also had to take initiative to be effective warriors was too difficult a concept for them. Rather than attempt to change their host’s rank structure, they decided to fight other cultural battles while training the hamsters.

  One thing you learned as a legionnaire and especially so in Dark Ops… you can’t fight every battle. So just fight the important ones.

  The Kylar were a minor space-faring species contained to one main planet on the edge. They traded with other systems along the edge and even the mid-core, and were largely a peaceful species. “Hamster” was a bit of a misnomer. The Kylar didn’t particularly look like rodents. Bipedal, short, and covered in a multi-colored velvety fur, they had a humanoid form. Their faces were rather flat and not at all rodent-like, and their teeth were more evocative of a bovine rather than the sharp incisors of their namesake. Some of the Kylar understood Standard, but spoke it less proficiently. This was true of the security forces Kel’s team worked with. Yet when time was critical, the hamsters demonstrated they could understand most commands issued in Standard, avoiding the slight delay necessitated by translation.

  As far as alien troops went, the Kylar had not been the worst they’d ever worked with. But theirs was not a warrior culture. They loved to burrow and build, plant, bake, brew, and share. That made them eminent hosts, but ones eminently vulnerable to the problem the kill team had been sent to confront.

  Other species were now intruding on the Kylar home world, and one species in particular was getting particularly nasty about the whole affair. The zhee.

  As usual. They were the galaxy’s uninvited and incredibly boorish guests who never failed to make a menace of themselves.

  Like the Kylar, the zhee had starfaring capabilities. But whereas the Kylar did not show the proclivity to expand their domain and influence beyond their home system, the zhee were ever the violent expansionists. Only Sergeant Bigg had any experience with the zhee, and he had little good to say about the zealous interlopers now on the Kylar home world and looking to cause harm.

  Kel had studied the zhee at length while preparing for the mission back on Victrix along with the rest of the team. A species dedicated to war, the donkey-like aliens had equine faces and odd, claw-like paws. And while their cold expressions in the holopics warned him that here was an enemy not to be underestimated, nothing could replace firsthand knowledge. On Kylar the team learned that quickly. The first week planetside and they’d seen the results of a zhee attack on a Kylar farming village. No one had been spared. Nothing had been stolen. The attackers only left behind smoking remnants, and a declaration scrawled on a wall with a charred Kylar femur bone. Kel didn’t need to know the zhee hoof scratch language to read what it said.

  Death to all the Unclean.

  This wasn’t Kel’s first tragic sight. He’d seen the reality of war all his adult life. At seventeen, he joined the Legion and reached adulthood in their ranks. But nothing ever affected him the way their inspection of the devastated village did. Kel tried to forget the image of a child’s small body, decapitated, trodden upon, her soft form surrounded by crushed toys.

  It was the toys that bothered him the most. Because the toys told you everything. It had been a child. Playing. And the killers had disregarded that information and done what they’d done. To a child just playing…

  You tell yourself you’ll be hard and the galaxy won’t change you. But the galaxy just laughs right back in your face and shows you some new horror.

  The kill team came to a rapid realization that day: The House of Reason might be many things—duplicitous, fallible, aloof. Many pejoratives could be deployed to describe the political body’s boundless inefficiency. But sometimes, sometimes, they got it right.

  Sometimes KTF needed to be done to stop the horrors for at least a moment. Sometimes people needed to die so that children could go on playing with their toys in the dirt.

  Kill Team Three absolutely needed to be on Kylar.

  They stalked through the silence of the night, watching for zhee sentries and doing their best to remind the hamsters that making noise now could cost them their lives. Kel’s ears strained for the slightest hint of zhee, whether it be sentries or patrols. They were where they shouldn’t be—where the zhee didn’t want them; past a southern line that always seemed to move northward as the zhee ravaged more farms and killed more natives in their effort to consume the entire planet.

  The five-man kill team had been dispatched to assist the Kylar in dealing with their zhee problem. An initially small and seemingly reserved settlement of zhee were allowed to relocate onto the planet some dozen years ago. In that time their numbers had grown almost exponentially and exploded into what had become the current problem: a foreign invading force seeking to displace the Kylar from their own home planet.

  Mass murders of several small rural communities had occurred in the past year, and it was no secret who had perpetrated those heinous acts. The zhee made it known that Kylar communities were no longer neighbors, but inferiors to be removed by any means necessary from the region. The unclean and profane who did not worship the four true gods could not be allowed to exist alongside the zhee. Now that the four gods had blessed the zhee on Kylar, their will must be fulfilled for the planet.


  Expecting goodwill and mutual respect from the refugees they had cheerfully welcomed, the Kylar failed to appreciate the destructive force the zhee posed to their peaceful communities. The planet had rarely known war in its history. The government tried its best to negotiate with the zhee, sending its most friendly ambassadors. Only their bloody and maimed heads returned. The House of Reason encouraged patience and appeasement as a means to prevent further violence, and so no restraints were placed on the zhee community. Instead, the planetary government tried resettlement. They sent out long caravans of repulsor sleds and rounded up as many Kylar communities near the zhee as they could, leaving villages and burrows behind to be pillaged and burned at will.

  With further acts of savagery against the helpless Kylar, the government eventually accepted the harsh reality of their situation: an increasingly uneasy Kylar populace was demanding protection from a species who wanted them exterminated from their own world.

  Finally the House of Reason agreed that some form of assistance was beneficial; most importantly to the Republic, and secondly to the Kylar. The Kylar had some value as a minor trading partner on the edge, and as allies, looked particularly endearing in holovids. It would not do for the core planets to catch sight of bucolic Kylar villages burning. Yet the situation on the planet was complicated, and when problems became unclear, the politicians knew that it was best to do nothing, or, commit little.

  The House of Reason in its ultimate wisdom considered the use of Dark Ops legionnaires to be a small commitment.

  “Contact…” Over the L-Comm, Kel who was working with the indig scouts spotted two zhee on patrol. “Hold.” In one word, Kel spoke volumes. “Braley, I’m going to take these two unknowns.”

  “Do it, Kel.” The next few minutes would determine if they would keep the advantage of surprise or whether they would pay the butcher’s bill. “We hear anything, we’re launching the assault. Do it right, man. Good luck.”

  Thanks Braley. Just so long as there’s no pressure.