Rogue Ops Rising (The Shadow Wars Book 8) Read online

  ROGUE OPS RISING

  –A NOVEL OF SCI-FI ACTION–

  Book #8 in

  The Shadow Wars

  written by

  –S. A. Lusher–

  cover by

  –M. Knepper–

  editing by

  –Sarah Lusher–

  Dedicated to Eli Stanley,

  because I could rely on Eli.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER 01

  CHAPTER 02

  CHAPTER 03

  CHAPTER 04

  CHAPTER 05

  CHAPTER 06

  CHAPTER 07

  CHAPTER 08

  CHAPTER 09

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  COUNTDOWN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  What you are about to read is the eighth novel in The Shadow Wars series. It is absolutely imperative that you go back to the beginning of The Shadow Wars and read all of the books in order to enjoy this novel, otherwise, you will be lost.

  You can start here, with the first book, Necropolis.

  If you've already read Necropolis 1, 2, & 3, Absolute Zero, Ceaseless, Syberian Sunrise, Snowblind and Quarantine, then thank you for reading this! I hope you enjoy it, as well.

  For the sake of convenience, here is a list of all titles in The Shadow Wars in the order in which they are meant to be read.

  -Dead Ice [Companion]

  -Dead Skies [Companion]

  -Necropolis

  -Necropolis 2: Endurance

  -Nerves of Steel [Companion] (Bundled with Necropolis 2)

  -Necropolis 3: Annihilation

  -Absolute Zero

  -Blood & Tears [Companion] (Bundled with Absolute Zero)

  -Ceaseless

  -Syberian Sunrise

  -Snowblind

  -Quarantine

  -Rogue Ops Rising

  -Countdown

  -Warm Memories [Companion] (Bundled with Countdown)

  -Laid To Rest [Companion] (Bundled with Countdown)

  -Necropolis 4: Terminal

  -Small Acts of Kindness [Companion] (Bundled with Necropolis 4)

  -EB-303 [Companion]

  -Alone? [Companion]

  -Starck's Lament

  -Deathless

  -Outpost 88 [Companion]

  -The Blind War

  -Lethal Cargo [Companion]

  -Into the Void

  -Saturate

  CHAPTER 01

  –The Downward Spiral–

  Enzo stood in a long corridor of brushed steel. Narrow strips of titanium white light were placed at perfect intervals along the length of its tall ceiling. The lights hummed gently overhead. Placed with equal precision along the walls were doorways. Each was unmarked. The corridor had a hushed presence that reminded him of a hospital. The air smelled of nothing. The floor was covered with plush blue carpeting.

  He did not know where he was or why he was here.

  But there was a sense of peace, a calming serenity that enveloped him like a gentle, warm light. He felt no rush, no hurry.

  He did feel curious, though.

  Enzo walked over to one of the nearby doors. He reached out and pressed a square with a concave surface that glowed a gentle green. The door whispered open and there was a brilliant light. Suddenly he was running across a warehouse-sized room, fighting with men in dark armor, lights overhead strobing wildly as power surged. A rifle in his hands. He aimed, fired, watched glass and blood fly on the air, a man go down without a sound. Behind him, beside him, Special Operations soldiers clashed with the Rogue Ops troops.

  He gasped slightly and suddenly found himself standing back in the long, metal corridor. The door in front of him had slid shut. It was a memory, he realized with an abrupt certainty. He'd been looking into a memory. That was last week, when reports of Rogue Ops activity on a seedy, backwater colony led to a raid. He and a squad of Spec Ops boys and girls had gone shooting. They wound up with two dozen dead guys in black armor and not much else to show for it. The rest got away and fried their database before leaving.

  Enzo walked down the corridor a ways, suddenly curious. He passed several more unmarked doors. As he stopped by another one, maybe a dozen doors down, abruptly, the entire corridor shook. He paused, alarmed.

  “Enzo! Can you hear me?!”

  A voice, very distant, very faint, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  He ignored it for the moment and opened the nearest door.

  Snapping into another memory, he was getting up in the middle of the night, stumbling through a darkened hotel room. He kicked an empty bottle of booze, grunted as the mild pain that permeated through his foot. Behind him, two women, a redhead and a brunette, were asleep. He stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, flipped on the light. Stared into the cracked mirror, stared at his own bloodshot, baggy eyes. On the counter beneath the mirror were more bottles, some of booze, some of pills. He reached out, grabbed one of the tall, narrow black containers of pills, rattled three out into his hand and washed them down with a slug of something that burned bad going down. His shoulder was killing him.

  This could have been any time in his past.

  It was a hauntingly familiar scene.

  Blackout, and back in the corridor. Enzo felt compelled to keep going, so he did, passing more doors. He'd made it another two dozen footsteps before the corridor shuddered again. Reality seemed to shift subtly, as though he were staring at a reflection in a perfectly still pool of water and someone had tossed something small into it.

  “How much did he take?!”

  “I don't know!”

  “You were with him all night!”

  He recognized the voices, but he couldn't place them. It didn't matter anyway. He was at the next door he intended to open.

  He opened it.

  Now he wore black armor trimmed with silver. He crept across the hard-packed, sunbaked dirt of a canyon floor in the dead of night, beneath a moon that glowed a dull blue-silver. Ahead, he spied the dark bulk of an enemy compound, rising against the night sky. This was years ago, he was leading his squad across the surface of an isolated world where a group of rogue military personnel had fled with important information. His task was simple: eliminated the traitors, recover the data. The mission had gone well, it was a good time in his life.

  Something slammed into his chest.

  Again and again and again.

  “You are not dying on me you fucking asshole!”

  “He's not breathing!”

  “No shit! Where's that fucking medic?!”

  Then it was gone again.

  Enzo walked until he found another door. When he opened this one, he came into a world of pain. This memory was hazy, his eyes watering, the suffering that wrapped his soul was bad this time. He was looking in a mirror again. The eyes that looked back were younger, less stricken, red from crying. Looking down, he saw his fist, clenched, shaking. Something moved behind him. He looked back up, saw Kylie standing behind him, worry staining her gaze.

  “Enzo, honey, you can't have anymore,” she said.

  “I need it,” he groaned sickly. The pain. It burned through him, a steady pulse that started in his shoulder and spiraled into his chest. “Kylie, please.”

  “No! You remember what happened last time!? You slipped into a fucking coma for ten days because you took too many! Enzo...please, just go back to therapy. Please.”

  “It doesn't fucking work,” he s
napped. “This is the only thing that works!”

  He reached for the pills, but Kylie was faster and she grabbed the clear, orange prescription bottle away from him. Rage surged through him and he screamed, an inarticulate sound that exploded from his throat. Before he knew what he was doing, he smashed his fist into the mirror. Kylie shrieked in surprise, but held her ground.

  “Enzo, listen to me,” she began.

  His will seemed to leave him them. Everything drained away. He felt his legs give out and he collapsed to the floor, gripping his shoulder.

  “I can't do this,” he whispered, the tears coming again. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Kylie, I can't fucking do it. It hurts so much...”

  She knelt down beside him, reached out, tentatively running her hand through his short hair. “Oh, Enzo, I'm so sorry,” she whispered, her voice cracking.

  He kept crying.

  It was a bad memory, a bad time in his life, three years after his accident. The relationship had lasted surprisingly long, but not much longer beyond that memory. It was a long, long time ago. Back when, despite everything, he still clung to the notion that he might again be pain free at some point in his life.

  Enzo was in the corridor again. It was losing substance, losing reality. He started running, knowing that there was something he needed to see, somewhere he needed to be, before it all collapsed around him. As he pressed on, he noticed the corridor was less clean and clear. The lighting was poorer, flickering occasionally. The walls and ceiling were becoming weathered, dirty and rust-eaten. The carpet was torn and stained in places.

  Seemingly at random, he found the door he wanted.

  Enzo reached out, hit the access button.

  He opens his eyes. Ahead of him is a windshield, shot through with cracks, sprayed with blood. Something hurts. Everything hurts. His vision is hazy and red. He can't think. There's sirens. Rain is leaking in. He can smell blood on the air.

  His right arm hurts like nothing in his life.

  It feels like the apocalypse.

  Enzo twists his head, but the pain is too much. He tries to move, but it's difficult. Thoughts come sailing into his head seemingly at random.

  Where am I?

  It smells bad in here.

  I'm cold.

  What happened?

  I've got that damned report due in Mr. Connelly's class tomorrow.

  Someone was shouting. Screaming, actually. And there were other voices. They sounded calmer, but stern, worried.

  He tried to look over again. This time, he succeeded, pushing against the pain in his neck, his head. He looked down...and couldn't figure out what he was seeing. It looked like his right arm had been almost totally severed, hanging on by slim slivers of meat. Blood was everywhere. But that couldn't be right. Not his arm. It was impossible.

  Enzo suddenly felt dislocated.

  Darkness boiled at the edge of his vision.

  He closed his eyes.

  “He's not breathing...fuck, his heart's stopped! Get the paddles!”

  “Okay, here we go! Charging...clear!”

  A sharp pain tore through his chest. When he opened his eyes, everything was still hazy and mired in red pain, but he was somehow aware that this was no memory.

  “Clear!”

  Another jolt.

  He was thrown headlong into darkness.

  * * * * *

  This time, when he opened his eyes, he found an old, frowning man standing at the end of the bed he was lying in, staring pointedly at him. Enzo groaned and closed his eyes, unwilling to return to the shores of reality. He listened to the soft whisper of oxygen, the quiet hum of power, the steady beep of a heart monitor, the occasional murmur of someone else. Obviously, he was in an infirmary. His chest hurt, his throat was dry, his head was pounding.

  “Enzo,” Hawkins said, his voice low and angry. “Open your eyes.”

  “I'm tired,” Enzo replied.

  “Open them!”

  Enzo, who had spent years in the military, knew an absolute command when he heard one. Even after spending years as a mercenary who made it a point to only listen to himself and follow the credits, he felt his body respond.

  He opened his eyes.

  “What?” he asked. “What do you want, Hawkins?”

  “To yell at you!” Hawkins roared. “What the fuck do you think we're doing out here?! You think this is some backwater, chucklefuck operation where it doesn't really matter?! What we're doing out here matters! We need all hands on deck, Enzo! It seems to me like you haven't internalized that particular fact of life yet!”

  Enzo had to admit, Hawkins was intimidating when he wanted to be. A fiery fury blazed in his eyes like supernovas and he was clenching his hands into fists. He looked like he was half a second away from leaping onto the bed and punching Enzo's face in.

  “Can we get to the point in this conversation where you leave?” Enzo replied.

  Hawkins closed his mouth and a violent tremor shivered through him. For a moment, Enzo thought he had really pushed the old man past his breaking point. Hawkins suddenly whipped around and made quick hand motions to whoever else was in the room. Enzo caught a brief glimpse of a trio of white-suited medical technicians leaving.

  Soon they were alone.

  Not good.

  Hawkins leaned forward, his longer, gnarled fingers curling around the end of the bed frame. “Enzo, you were once a great man. I've read your file. You were a leader of a Spec Ops squad. You did...amazing things. You led your squad to triumph again and again, often against overwhelming odds. For years you did almost everything right.” He paused for a moment, seemed to collect his thoughts. Enzo took the opportunity.

  “Yeah, and I left, and-”

  “You left for good reasons,” Hawkins growled. “I get it. A lot of us felt the same way. Still do some days. But you can't make changes from the outside. The only way to do any good is to grit your fucking teeth, hang around and do the work. Try to convince your superiors otherwise sometimes, sometimes push the envelope, tell the politicians to go to hell. But you...what you did....your file doesn't just end when you quit Spec Ops. It follows you. You did a lot of nasty work, a lot of questionable jobs, killed a lot of good people one way or the other...”

  Hawkins stopped again, looked down for a moment. “On a cosmic scale, I'd say you've just about broken even so far. But the stakes we're playing for are too big. I pulled your ass from the fire, I offered you the job of a fucking lifetime, a job that's perfectly suited to you. We give you guns, gear, money and you get to play hero again without all the red tape. You save the galaxy, save humanity, kill the bad guys. It's a goddamned fairy tale in your book, and you're living it. So when I find you dying on the floor, od'ing on fucking booze, Vicodin and morphine-”

  “You didn't hold up your end of the deal!” Enzo roared suddenly, fury igniting within him, white hot and all consuming.

  “Bullshit!” Hawkins yelled back. “We've been bending over backwards, doing everything-”

  “My shoulder still hurts! It's getting worse! You think it's easy, putting up with this?! You think I'm happy, being in pain every day, every waking minute?! I do whatever I have to do to make my pain, my LIFE even remotely tolerable!” Enzo screamed, sitting up now, half out of his mind with anger and pain. His shoulder was flaring up.

  Silence fell as he stopped yelling, as his breathing came back under control.

  “We've been running every test, trying every treatment, scouring the corporations, R & D, fringe groups...everything, Enzo,” Hawkins replied, his control returning. “It's only been a month, Enzo. We need more time-”

  “Some of your idiot doctors have suggested that my pain is psychosomatic, that it's all imaginary. All in my fucking head. So what about that miracle treatment you had Allan on?”

  Hawkins immediately shook his head. “No, Enzo. Based on what little data we have on that treatment...you have basically a zero percent chance of survival. It's too dangerous.”

  “I'm mor
e screwed up than Allan is?!”

  “Yeah, basically. You've lived longer with your psychological problems and buried them deeper. You've come closer to an actually stable lifestyle.” He shook his head again. “No, you wouldn't survive.” He sighed and then seemed to remember his anger. “That was still fucking stupid, Enzo. I'm not convinced that I shouldn't throw you in prison, or at least cut you loose again.”

  Enzo grinned. He felt it wasn't a pleasant grin. “But you need me,” he replied coldly. It wasn't a question.

  Hawkins' features darkened. “Yeah...I need you. We're still in a state of emergency. You're one of the best.” He straightened up, took a step back, regained his composure. “Something big has come up. We've had a breakthrough. I'm going to send the med-techs back in to pump you full of drugs and get you back up to snuff.”

  He turned and began walking away, but paused about halfway across the room. He turned back around. “When this assignment is over, Enzo, something's going to change. Either for better or for worse, something is going to change,” he said.

  Enzo nodded. “Yeah, you got that right.”

  Hawkins stared at him for a moment, then turned and left the infirmary. A few seconds later, the door opened and the three med-techs came in. They silently crossed the room and set to work putting him back together again.

  CHAPTER 02

  –Making New Memories–

  Waking.

  It seemed to Greg that his most vivid memories were of waking. If he were forced to answer the question of why this was, he supposed he would say that it was because it reminded him of when his new memories began, of that terrifying origin of his new life. It seemed that it had been at least a year, perhaps eighteen months since he'd awoken in that ruined troop transport vessel, in the middle of a rainy, midnight wasteland.

  He had to keep reminding himself that in all actuality it had been a little under two months. So very much had happened in those scant few weeks. He'd gone all over the galaxy, fought on a couple different worlds, become a member of the very organization that he had sworn to take down. How could so much happen so fast?