Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Gordian Knot book 2

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The galaxy is thrown into chaos as the wrath of The Regime gets unleashed.

Newly-promoted Warrant Officer “Pappy” Gunther is tasked with training the next generation of UEAF officers as the galaxy-spanning Regime gains ground. When a commander from his past shows up and asks him to join a covert black-ops unit, Pappy has a crucial choice to make.

Speaks-The-Truth has a chance to live a life of peace on a world far-removed from the conflict. Yet, she’s haunted by the demons of her past and feels compelled to join the greatest struggle in the history of her people. Despite her aspirations, she fears that she cannot escape her destiny.

Newly-reincarnated King Momak is the ceremonial father of the Regime, yet has dreams of a violent past life. As he learns about his own mysterious past, he gains important insight into the origins of his own civilization…and seeks a way to prevent its inevitable destruction.

Read an excerpt...


Pappy’s heart kicked against the inside of his chest. He managed his anxiety with controlled breathing and meditative techniques that he’d learned in what seemed like another life.
      His breath blotched the inside of his helmet. The cool air from his powered armor’s environmental control system promptly evaporated the patch of dew. Pappy watched the patches come and go rhythmically. The sound of his breathing was amplified by his helmet until it became deafening.
      The cabin was dark red. There was a constant hum suffusing the shuttle. Pappy imagined himself in the bowels of a beast that was about to vomit him out along with his team.
      His tactical interface unit tapped into the fleet’s VIRSIS network. He used neural inputs and eye movement to snag live feeds of the action via the ship’s external sensors and dragged them onto his retinal HUD.
      They were close to their target planet’s terminator, and it was hard to make anything out that close to the night side. He switched from optical to simulated overlay. The task fleet was rendered in translucent blue to mark them as friendlies. Their target planet, Bandua, showed as a brown sphere with vertical and horizontal lines for latitude and longitude. There was so much info that it became overwhelming. Pappy changed the settings from navigational to tactical and noticed the Regime fleet. Their ships seemed to hover next to Bandua rendered in bright red.
      Intel was right. The enemy had left only a small garrison fleet behind: one cruiser and a squadron of pursuit craft holding formation about a hundred kilometers over the drop site. Still, the Commonwealth task fleet wasn’t taking any chances. Not after the fuck-fest that happened on Modron.
      The task fleet’s drone ships flew in first – much faster than any ship with a living crew could’ve managed. Acceleration forces that would have turned a human into jelly. A diversion. Between the drone ships and the carriers spitting out waves of aerospace fighters, the transports were already moving into low orbit. The cruisers got close enough to cover ground units with orbital strikes, but the all-important command ship would hang back and support the infantry from the safety of high orbit. The task fleet would have to match Bandua’s rotation and strategically deploy itself to give adequate coverage, and the longer the surface units stayed on the surface, the harder it would be to maintain ship-to-surface synchronization.
      After months of cat-and-mouse recon runs and search and destroy sweeps, Joint Strike Force 17 was finally being unleashed. UEAF Special Forces, Eridani FROG Group 4, and a company of Centauri Sabers were working together like an executioner swinging an axe.
      Operation: Guillotine. Purpose: sever the head of Marie Antoinette – the codename for a high ranking ruler from House Duzica. She was going to be a hard target with an entourage escorting her: a cadre of Royal Guards and a reinforced company of Lion Clan Stalkers. And a camp full of Regime war gear according to the mission briefing.
      Pappy checked the time on his TIU. Four minutes gone. Time was going fast.
      The Regime took the bait. As the drone ships lured them away, the transports lined up over their drop sites. Thousands of kilometers behind them, the Regime cruisers were cranking up their plasma drives and committing to their pursuit.
      The transport shook.
      Pappy heard the whine of gears and electromechanical motors – the transport’s bay doors opening. The shuttle’s engines spooled up. He braced himself.
      BOOM.
      He was shoved into his seat. A troll sat on his chest. He exhaled, controlling his breathing as his suit compensated – the smart gel in his armor squeezing his limbs to keep the blood from draining out of his head.
      It’s not gonna be another Modron, he told himself. From now on, we fight them on our terms.
      Freefall. Zero G. The engines shut off and the shuttle’s synthetic intelligence let gravity do the rest.
      The light sturgeon shuttle was more maneuverable than the medium barracudas that he was used to. Pappy felt each bank and roll as it glided to the drop zone.
      When they were a few thousand kilometers over the landing site, Pappy used his TIU and HUD to tap into the sturgeon’s external cams and cheat a peek below. The thick blue-green canopy cover of the forest below looked like a giant rolling cushion. It looked so serene.
      “Five minutes!” the crew chief yelled.
      Pappy blinked, remembered where he was, and checked the LZ using live updates from the command ship’s long range sensors and recon drone footage.                                                                            
      The abandoned colonial settlements on the other side of the forest registered as square and rectangle shapes – what used to be modular prefab habitats got shattered during the Regime incursion. The lines were major roads, though by then they would be overgrown with Regime slime and tendrils from the Regime’s ‘cultivation’ efforts. Their version of terraforming was spreading their organic-based tech throughout the planet to prepare it for mass settlement. It seemed like they stopped the cultivation process abruptly. Less than five percent of the rock had been slimed, and almost all of it was concentrated around the planet’s capital city.
      Far ahead of them, the other shuttles – the medium barracudas and heavy humpbacks – had already landed and offloaded their troopers, drones, and vehicles.
      “Standby,” the crew chief muttered into his mic.
      Pappy could tell by the swaying that the sturgeon was making its final maneuvers over the LZ. Without needing to be told, his section stood and formed up, grabbing onto straps and handles for balance and making two columns as they had drilled time and again. He counted off in his head and got himself mentally and spiritually ready for whatever came.
      Three, two, one.
      The sturgeon’s wheels hit the deck and made a loud ker-KLUNK. Touchdown.
      The rear hatch dropped like a castle drawbridge. The section ran out, quickly switching to tactical column formation and checking their surroundings as the sturgeon taxied away. Pappy followed them out last with “Handsome” Hanzo, his signals intelligence operator. He was a lanky kid with big, cartoon eyes and a tiny slit for a mouth.
      There had been a light rain outside the capital for days. Puddles broke up the gravely limestone sand. Far in the distance, Pappy saw blackened Swiss cheese structures peppering the horizon that used to be buildings.
      Pappy thought about mumbling some orders to his section, but there was no need. He watched them silently get to work like the well-trained professionals that they were, feeling unnecessary.
      The other shuttles rolled away and formed a large diamond-shaped formation as they waited for their clearance to dust off. Ahead, troops were hustling and forming up with support drones pawing around them like excited pets. A company of Mark II sentinel drones assembled far ahead of them in a formation of their own. Humanoid tactical units – cheaper and easier to mass-produce than synths. The metal skeletons had the charisma and brains of a cave-dwelling salamander.
      The heavy humpback shuttles rolled out mobile command vehicles for the troop headquarters and the heavy stuff like armored vehicles. Pappy envied the advance units, missing the feeling of rushing in and being the first to fight.
      Hanzo took a knee and extended an antenna from his powered armor backpack so that the rest of the section would pick up his locator beacon. Pappy quickly checked the growing formation on his mini map. Hanzo looked at Pappy expectantly. His big eyes went down to the Mark IV CASA augmented situational awareness helmet strapped to Pappy’s thigh.
      The UEAF’s latest version of the “God” helmet. It allowed commanders to keep an eye on their units and stay connected to the troops. Pappy felt like a fly on the wall, and didn’t need to see every time they scratched their ass.
      He sighed and took the helmet out of its carrying case. On the outside, it was studded with long range and narrowband antennas that linked him with the fleet and the Strike Force through advanced software and funky graphic interfaces. He put the large, goofy helmet on and braced himself as it hummed to life.
      When it blinked on it immediately synched up with his TIU. He minimized his retinal HUD and brought up a multi-panel window showing his section. Ancillary units were in the corners of his field of vision. He could read their vitals and see live feeds from their helmet cams. If he wanted to, he could’ve compressed it all into a flat, two-dimensional view screen or shrunken everything down to a small diorama in the corner of his vision. He once accidentally put the helmet into isometric perspective and forgot how to reset it.
      “Eagle One Seven, this is Foxtrot Two Six,” Pappy hailed Commander Ko.
      “Copy, warrant officer. Hear you Lima Charlie,” Ko said back.
      Asshole. Everyone in the Regiment called him Pappy. He was doing it on purpose – calling him warrant officer over and over to remind him that his promotion came with new responsibilities.
      “How are we looking?” Ko asked.
      Pappy double-checked the formation on his helmet. “All teams and assets accounted for and assembling as we speak.”
      “You have a green light. Proceed with phase one,” Ko said.
      “Aye sir.”
      Pappy looked up at the sky. “Fleet’s timing is on point today,” he muttered to Hanzo.
      He gave the command to move out through the intercom and ran into one of the  waiting wolverine assault craft with Hanzo behind him. It was a rolling death-dealer with mounted weapons and medium grade armor plating. Bulkier  than most wheeled transports but with much better protection. The driver gave them both a thumbs up.
      The badger fast attack vehicles led the ground vehicles since they were the fastest, followed by the wolverines and hound drone jeeps. Over a hundred field drones galloped around them like a herd of metal beasts. Far behind them all, a platoon of leopard armored vehicles were cautiously pulling up. Pappy missed the old days of charging in with nothing but his powered armor.
      Pappy keyed a channel to the advance recon section. “Marco,” he muttered into his mic.
      He waited a few seconds. “Polo,” came the answer.
      Sergeant “Marco” Marquez. A scout from the FROG Forward Recon Operational Groups – a unit that specialized in rapidly scouting terrain – especially the terrain of inhospitable worlds.
      “Where the hell are you?” Pappy asked, checking his mini map over and over.
      “You can’t find me with your helmet?” Marco quipped. Pappy could tell he was smiling by the sound of his voice.
      Pappy kept scrolling his 2-D grid map up and up, looking for friendly blue blips and the recon team’s locator beacon. Finally, he saw a pair of blips just outside the city’s perimeter. “Jesus! You’re already at the objective rally point.”
      “What else are light infantry good for?”
      “If you’re not careful? Dying. Don’t advance any further,” he said in a warning tone.
      “Copy that.”
      “Wait for VSTOL cover – it should be there any second. How are we looking up there? Any eyes on target?”
      “If anything happened here, we missed it. The city looks abandoned – no Regime presence other than, you know… slime.”
      The beginnings of a new settlement. Or the residue of an abandoned attempt. Intel said that the Regime presence would be minimal, but it didn’t feel right. A Regime camp should have been full of busy workers – and defended by packs of no-nonsense warriors.
      “Keep your eyes open and don’t touch anything – you know how tricky the Regime are.”