Soft Target
A Tab Novak Journal (#1)
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“War itself is the enemy of the human race,” they say. Too bad no one told the belligerent psychic aliens.
Lance Corporal Novak proves himself beyond all doubt in battle and is selected into Ground Corps’ most elite force, the HAMMER powered armor unit—wearable engines of destruction. Here, he pushes to succeed in everything: his rep, his family’s esteem, a burgeoning romance, and especially at arms.
But no matter how much firepower or speed or strength his new suit grants him, far too often he still watches his fellow combatants die at the enemy’s hands.
Carving swaths of destruction, Novak finds his hatred for the mysterious aliens growing more personal and overwhelming as he suffers losses both on and off the battlefield. No matter how sturdy his armor, it affords little protection against his raw emotions or fractured relationships, whether familial, romantic, or professional. And death continually stalks him.
The philosophic trooper faces an impossible dilemma: leaving the fight to save humanity to preserve his own, or continuing to battle monsters and risk becoming one.
Warhammer 40,000 meets John Steakley’s Armor in Soft Target, a page-turning yet incisive examination of war’s impact on the warrior.
Available now on Amazon as a paperback, ebook, or on Kindle Unlimited!
Chapter 1: Something Stinks Here (brief excerpt)
The stench! The alien Tocs living in their ramshackle domos, their so-called food cooking out in the open. Atmo reeking of brimstone and hellfire because they need traces of sulfur to breathe. Tendrils of prismatic smoke seeking to coat noses and lungs. The pungent residue of SSX explosions. Chemical snaps of accelerator bullets mixing with ozone flashes from rail-assisted rounds. Murky, stagnant water stinking up the place. And the burning, oh God, the burning of who knows what refuse and biomatter in the squat little trash fires spread among whatever dryish ground can be found on this mudhole.
Thank Christ my suit’s lid is down and intact.
Currently, we’re deployed on Erato IV, a mucky, wet, and slimy swamp, worse by far than the Stymphalian Marshes of myth. Again, I’m stunned: how can there be so many fires on such a wet shitpile? And what grave sin did the Muse of, I want to venture, erotic poetry commit to earn the punishment of having this hellhole of a joint settlement détente planet named after her? (I can never remember which Muse is which, except Terpsichore: dance and chorus.) Chunks of sickly green and brown land and murky water and sumpy mud and mire and marsh, an artist’s discarded, overused palette, all stretch as far as the eye can see. That’s until you reach the dingy plascrete blocks ringing the settlements, whether human or Toc, the ramshackle fencing that bounds the pastures—and whatever can graze here, I don’t want to eat—or the few solid roads that usually double as the demarc lines crisscrossing the dreary terrain, sectioning off the treaty-defined settlement zones of the two races, broad scars beautifying the hellish terrain of this godforsaken world.
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