The Unincorporated Future by Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin Read Free Book Online

the lauded veterans would swear that the asteroids knew the plow was the cause of the solar system’s consternation and had attacked the hated offender with glee. Then they would laugh and pretend they were joking. But the shadow of the memory would stay in their eyes even as their voices denied it. Behind a wall of ice, they’d braved the fury of space—and it did not come without a price.
     
Ceres
Near the Cerean Sea
Hour 31
     
    Rabbi waited patiently, scratching his foot at the now hardened sand of Tabor Beach. He was dressed in his best Sabbath garb, which consisted of a black, calf-length silk jacket tied neatly at the waist by a black, buckle-less belt. He also wore a traditional fur-rimmed hat known as a shtreimel. Sergeant Holke and Agent Agnes Goldstein were also in attendance, having taken up positions near him, turning from time to time to scan the various horizons. And lastly, Holke’s TDCs. Rabbi had always found the Cerean Sea to be a strange duck. He’d spent the overwhelming majority of his life on the seven small asteroids of Aish Hatorah and never saw a body of water bigger than a lake. To see an actual sea with all that water had been both exhilarating and terrifying. But what he’d cast his eyes upon now was out of a dream, or a nightmare.
    The Cerean Sea was frozen solid. It had been done, as with all large open sources of water, to prepare for the battle. Instead of the warm, almost tropical ocean with the inviting sandy beaches, groves of trees, and verdant flower beds Rabbi was used to seeing, all that lay before him was a frost layer spreading out for miles, and all he felt was the cold. The air was filled with tiny glittering ice particles dancing around large multifaceted chunks of floating sea jarred loose by the recent bombardments. The blocks would detach from the frozen sea, hang in the air for a few seconds, and then, by force of Ceres’s natural gravity, be pulled toward its center, mountainous region at ever-increasing speeds. Once blocks hit the mountain range, they’d explode into thousands of smaller shards, creating a short-lived plume of ice crystals. It was oddly wondrous, thought Rabbi, how something so oneiric could come from so much devastation. And it also made perfect sense why the site had been chosen for a wedding that Rabbi was soon to officiate.
    Taffy and Claude were part of a hundred-person-strong unit of assault miners from the Spirit of America . They’d been detached from Omad’s flotilla after three months of active combat to refit and integrate new members to replace combat losses. Much to their annoyance, they missed the opportunity to join the main fleet and were bumped from rejoining Omad’s flotilla when he had to take a hundred mystery passengers aboard the Spartacus at the last moment. In order to make room, Omad had been forced to transfer a hundred of his assault miners to the Spirit of America, which resulted in the leaving behind of a highly decorated and experienced combat battalion with no one to fight and nothing to do.
    That didn’t stop Captain Claude Brodessor from keeping his Unicorns busy. They’d received the nickname from their fellow assault miners because of the little square boxes the men in the mostly male unit wore on their heads while praying. As the moniker had been chosen with as much respect as jest, the name soon stuck and the captain’s unit wore it proudly. Brodesser was one of those people who viewed every setback as an opportunity, and he seemed to love the opportunity to train his unit in the varied environments of Ceres. They learned how to move in forests, both temperate and frozen. They learned urban combat in the warrens of Ceres and waterborne combat until the seas froze. And if by some small chance some of his assault miners got bored, he’d make one round in five hundred live. After a couple of his assault miners had to have their limbs regrown, the rest learned to take the exercises quite seriously indeed. Even