The Terran Cycle Boxset

by Philip C. Quaintrell

  “There are more coming.” She was doing that weird thing they did. He wasn’t sure how it worked but he wouldn’t mind having the ability. “Of all the bounties you had to take this one? A highly valued member of one of the Conclave’s biggest corporations? What were you thinking?” Esabelle moved to the shattered window peering down into the broken remains.

  “The job was simple: kill him and retrieve some data-file from his private terminal. In return, I get a hundred thousand units. So if you don’t mind, that’s what I’m going to do.” Roland returned to the hover desk and reactivated the holographic display. He slammed the desk, realising his error in leaving the hacker in the Translift wall almost two miles below. Esabelle quickly turned on him, approaching the desk.

  “We need to leave, now.” With her final word, the sound of a dozen boots storming the apartment came from the broken window. There was a lot of shouting, leading Roland to believe it was corrupted local security in the pocket of Protocorps.

  “Not until I get I what I came for.” He had no idea where to start with the password. His only option would be to torture Ral-vet into telling him, and from the increasing sound of heavy boots, there wouldn’t be time for that. Esabelle audibly sighed before marching to his side at the desk.

  “Keep them busy - you seem to be good at that.” She shoved him aside while placing her right hand flat against the polished surface. The display flickered before turning into a waterfall of Conclave symbols forever in flux. Roland had no idea what she was doing but it was definitely affecting the terminal. He had a fanciful image in his head of the things they could accomplish if they worked together. He knew that would never happen though; she was all about the cause, and Roland just wanted to live.

  “Make no mistake,” she continued. “When we’re done here, you are coming back with me to the Gommarian.” That was a bridge he wasn’t looking forward to crossing. He removed his last grenade and threw it like a bowling ball down the corridor - there was a brief scream before the explosion drowned everything out. His Tri-rollers chirped like children eager to play. Ral-vet was struggling to sit up while he tentatively explored his damaged face and throat.

  “I’m in.” Esabelle removed her hand from the desk and examined the new display. Roland tried not to look impressed but wasn’t sure if he succeeded. “What’s the name of the file you need?” Using the touch-pad on his jacket he brought up the relevant information sent to him by the anonymous client. The subsequent hologram showed a series of numbers and letters the file would be found under. Esabelle continued her search as a Nix scuttled out of the smoky corridor wielding two repeaters. Of all the aliens Roland had encountered, the Nix was the most nightmarish looking. He didn’t hesitate in raising his own weapon and blowing a hole through the weird looking head, with all its eyes.

  The turquoise display changed as the appropriate file opened up. After a stream of information, the picture changed to a holographic blueprint. There was something familiar about it that he couldn’t put his finger on. The structure was tall with a large dome at each end and a multitude of connections and machine parts in between. The centre of the construct was a simple cube, apparently attached to everything via a countless amount of thin and thick cables. What was it?

  “It can’t be...” Esabelle stood back from the desk as if she had seen a ghost, her pale face reflecting the turquoise display. To answer his questioning look she adjusted the image with a hand movement. The structure vanished as the central cube magnified, filling the entire picture. The details along its surface were unmistakable, and Roland knew where he had seen it.

  Now he had questions.

  “What is this, what are we looking at?” He knew the cube was identical to the one sitting under the Gommarian’s Starrillium, but how did Protocorps have one, and what was it attached to?

  “The Conclave’s central AI,” Esabelle stated flatly. Roland was very rarely fazed by anything, the drink and violence usually saw to that, but even this was worrying to him. From the discussions he had been privy to before leaving, he knew the cube was partially responsible for the Terran war as well as Savrick’s mad search for any human life. The cube was supposedly alive, in some way, and harboured strong feelings towards Terran life, in all its forms. They had decided that anything willing to play such a long game in exterminating an entire species, by such intelligent and deceptive means, was not a force they could easily contend with. If one cube could do all that damage with a single species and one ship, what could this one do?

  Quicker than Roland thought possible, Esabelle was standing in front of Ral-vet. She lifted her hand, mirroring the rising form of the broken Shay. Once level with her she flipped her hand palm out and Roland knew his mark was telekinetically pinned to the wall.

  “I can’t get inside your head.” She physically grabbed him by the throat and closed the gap between them. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t tell me everything you know.”

  Roland had mixed feelings about why this was still turning him on.

  Ral-vet’s organic eye stared back at her with no hint of fear. Through the pain, he was obviously feeling, the Shay managed to twist his mangled face into a crooked smile. At that moment Roland knew they didn’t have enough time to break him. Backing up his revelation, the lobby below filled up with more mercenaries who cautiously surveyed the mayhem.

  “We haven’t got time for this.” Roland directed his words at Esabelle who stepped away from the pinned bureaucrat. She did that thing again where she appeared to absorb information with a faraway look.

  “Where’s the Rackham?” Esabelle asked.

  “I’ve got her parked in the cloud bank.” Roland had planned on using the thick atmosphere as an escape plan to lose any tails. Esabelle paced the room stopping at the broken window to evaluate the security between the staircases.

  “How quickly can you have it outside this building, specifically that wall?” She pointed to the far wall with the panoramic view of the planet beyond. He didn’t like where this was going. Roland had a plan and they needed to stick to it.

  “I’ve already got an exit strategy, okay?” He lifted both Tri-rollers to head level, indicating his well thought-out plan.

  “That’s not a plan.” She said the words as if they rhymed with dickhead. Esabelle turned back to the scene below. “Trust me on this one, I can protect you.” Now he knew what she was planning and he definitely didn’t like it. But he couldn’t deny everything he had seen her kind do. This is why he hated being sober; logic was just annoying.

  “Why should I even help you escape? You want to drag my ass back to human uncivilisation.” Roland looked over and counted seven security personnel.

  “Oh I will take you back, but first we need to make a stop at the Conclave capital,” Esabelle replied coolly. This new cube had got under her skin, she needed answers. He could use that to his advantage. The Conclave capital was a big enough place to lose her and get back to business. The cube intrigued him as well but Esabelle and Kalian were more than equipped to handle it.

  Using the link in his cerebrum, Roland connected to the Rackham and commanded it to leave the atmosphere and fly directly up Krono Towers. He felt the unusual response that presented itself as a green light in his mind’s eye in affirmation to his order. No doubt Ch’len was going crazy wondering why the ship was moving ahead of schedule. Roland tried not to laugh out loud at the thought.

  “Fine, we do it your way. The Rackham’s en-route.” With that, he turned to Ral-vet and severed his head with a shot to the neck. Now he would get paid.

  “After you...” Esabelle gestured for him to drop out of the office window.

  “Oh, I insist,” he replied with as much mock chivalry as he could muster. “Psychopathic bitches first.” A sarcastic smile was all she gave before stepping out, to fall the three floors into the lobby. Roland quickly followed her movement and stepped out himself, activating the Laronian boots as he did. During his fast descent, he watched Esabelle dramatical
ly throw off her cloak to reveal a tight combat suit beneath.

  She had already dispatched two of the seven with hand to hand combat before his boots’ repulsers kicked in to control his landing. Roland willingly joined the melee, breaking bones and disabling a Trillik and an Atari in the process. He killed the third with a flick of his Terran blade as Esabelle broke the neck of a Laronian with her bare hands. The last, a Shay, she telekinetically pushed into the glass wall. The impact was so strong the reinforced glass cracked in a spider web pattern around the body. This entire fight had probably been planned out in her head before they even started.

  The hallway outside filled with more security - a bigger team from the sound of it. They both looked at one another in the moments they had left. Roland was sure he heard Esabelle’s voice in his head.

  Ready?

  Thinking it to be his own imagination, he simply nodded as they both ran flat out towards the expansive view. Blue energy shot past them as the guards flooded the lobby and fired on them. It must have been a strange sight to see the suspects running to a dead end. That was until Esabelle threw out her arm and unleashed a flash of energy that momentarily blinded them all, Roland included. Whatever the energy was, it hurled into the glass and atomised everything in a colossal explosion, exposing the apartment to hard vacuum.

  This ushered in a new kind of chaos that even Roland was unaccustomed to. As they were violently sucked out he was pulled into Esabelle’s personal space, leaving behind sound and warmth and more importantly, oxygen. Immediately after being dragged out they changed trajectory, thanks to Esabelle, and plummeted down the many miles of Krono Towers at a frightening speed. Only then did it occur to Roland that he wasn’t suffering from the deadly exposure. He knew Esabelle would do something weird to keep them alive, but this was incredible. They were both encompassed in some kind of telekinetic cocoon that contained the warmth of the apartment as well as a limited amount of oxygen. The bounty hunter did his best to keep his breathing as shallow as possible.

  Looking down meant he was actually looking back at the expelling apartment, viewed between their feet. Dozens of guards were dying or already dead as they continued along their momentum into space. He was informed through his link that his proximity to the Rackham was imminent, a fact that was evident from the fast approaching ship that seemed to be above them but was, in fact, flying up the tower. Using a finer control, only available to him, Roland commanded every aspect of the Rackham’s flight. He was working fast, unsure of how long Esabelle could keep up this god-like feat.

  This was either going to be the coolest getaway of all time or the craziest death of all time…

  The Blade hung in space outside the quarantine zone, using its forward and aft thrusters to keep it from crossing the virtual line. With a holographic display overlaying the triangular viewport, Krono Towers had been enveloped inside a yellow sphere, put there by local security. Any vessel without authorised clearance would face immediate grounding if it was connected to the AI hub on Shandar. Since the Blade wasn’t, it would in all likelihood be shot down or disabled and boarded. Neither was a viable option, but the latter would certainly result in a life sentence on a Raalakian prison planet once they found all the illegal hardware.

  With all four hands dancing across the cockpit console, Kubrackk quickly calibrated the ship’s array to intercept the security laser com, as well as piggy-backing it back to Krono Towers to relay the internal feed. He was furious with his timing. Once again, his prey had swept through like a hurricane on Arakesh and avoided the retribution he had coming his way.

  “Is it him, Boss?”

  Kubrackk loathed the presence of his two companions, but they were a necessary evil if a stupid one. Asking the latest infuriating question was the Trillik, Spelnar. It was his technical skills that allowed the Blade to hack most Conclave encrypted operating systems, bypassing the AI’s first few layers of firewall. Kubrackk turned to see the Trillik’s four black eyes staring at him intently. Like the rest of his race, Spelnar had a skin combination of green and blue with two lanky arms and a muscular frame closely resembling his own Novaarian features, purely coincidental considering their cohabitation within Novaarian space. His smooth head was round with sharp elfish features fitted around the four oval eyes. It was his tail that always pissed Kubrackk off. He was forever tripping over the multitude of tendrils that split off half way down.

  Like most people who spoke to him, Spelnar’s gaze lingered on the scar that ran over Kubrackk’s left eye and down his long face, ending at his mouth. Most wondered why he had never had it removed but, the truth was, he liked it. He thought it was well suited to someone in his line of work. It said he wasn’t afraid to do what was needed when the bounty called for it.

  “Of course it’s him!” Kubrackk spat. Spelnar shot back into his seat and looked anywhere but at the Novaarian. The console chirped as it received the feedback from the security channels, before raising several holographic displays of the internal carnage. The Novaarian took a breath at the sight of such destruction.

  Like everyone else in the Conclave, he had seen the footage from the battle on Naveen half a cycle ago. It had been hard to believe such beings existed, but no one could deny the damage they had wrought to the Conclave as well as their own planets. There were so many tales and varying stories about the humans it was hard to know what was real and what was fiction. There were stories about Earth and some place called Century, but there were also whispers of an identical race called the Terran. This was where it became blurry and hard to define. Instead, the whole lot of them had been categorised as dangerous with tendencies towards mass-destruction.

  With that in mind, Roland North was something of an enigma. Kubrackk had seen first hand what the bounty hunter was capable of, and though he was not to be underestimated, North did not appear to be in the same league as the individual seen on Naveen. That particular human had been brought before the Highclave but Kubrackk couldn’t remember his name. It didn’t matter really; North was his target, his own personal bounty. Looking at the monitors gave him second thoughts. He was looking at the hangar inside Krono Towers with its giant scar across the floor leading to a bulbous cargo ship half buried in the wall. It had crushed other parked vessels and reduced most of the hangar to a smouldering wreck. The corridors were filled with smoke from hundreds of pot-shots between North and Protocorps mercenaries. One particular stretch of corridor had a dense pile of bodies where they had obviously been caught in a kill box with gravity mine bombs.

  Translifts and grav pillars had been disabled with explosive effect a mile long. His mark had clearly been Ral-vet since it was his executive suite that had been assaulted and, from the looks of it, ejected into space. The apartment looked as if a hundred war bred Raalakians had charged through it. Most of its contents and occupants, Ral-vet included, had been sucked into space, though his cause of death was yet to be determined according to the intercepted laser com. Most intriguing of all was the footage from the external cameras, specifically the ones Protocorps had aimed at their board member’s apartment.

  “There’s two of them?” This time it was Spelnar’s idiot partner in crime, Lole, who pointed out the obvious. He was an overweight Tularon with too much fur around the eyes and head to even be attractive amongst his own kind. Kubrackk noted the fear in his voice and clamped down on the urge to shoot Lole in his leathery face.

  “Apparently so...” Kubrackk said through gritted teeth. He replayed the image of their escape expecting to see a file corruption message pop up. What he was seeing couldn’t be possible; it had to be the female. North usually operated alone, using the technical skills of that useless Ch’kara from the safety of his unique ship. The image defied the laws of physics but the escape was certainly impressive, and Kubrackk hated the fact. He would make the human suffer for his betrayal, even if he had to chase him to the end of the galaxy.

  “I’m not so sure of this plan boss!” Lole continued. “These humans ain’
t right. They can do stuff that ain’t natural...” He stopped speaking when Kubrackk wrapped his lower fingers around the hilt of the Quad-roller strapped to his chest.

  “He forgot to engage that nifty stealthware of his,” Kubrackk explained. “The Rackham is on course for the capital, so that’s where we’re going.” It was mistakes like this that he needed. North wasn’t perfect and he certainly wasn’t some super-powered being like the others. Kubrackk was confident he could deal with the girl when the time came.

  He set a course for Shandar’s star; unlike the Rackham, the Blade relied on the magnetic waves from a star spot to charge the Intrinium and power the Solar Drive. When he was done having his fun with North, Kubrackk decided he would make the Rackham his own.

  3

  Telarrek’s ship had emerged into real space four hundred thousand kilometres away from Ch’ket’s sun. Having traversed the remaining distance to reach the fourth planet, where it entered a geosynchronous orbit, the crew were patiently awaiting further orders. Kalian stood on the observation platform on the port side taking in the new planet. He had seen holo-images and read about Ch’ket in data files, but it couldn’t prepare him for the incredible view.

  Using his memory like a terminal, he pulled up all the information he had ever seen or heard regarding the planet. He instantly knew it was three times the size of what Earth had been with a diameter of thirty-seven thousand kilometres. Before entering the Conclave, many millennia ago, Ch’ket had possessed two moons rich in myopallic ore. Kalian looked out knowing he would see no trace of either since the Ch’kara had mined both orbiting bodies to their core.

  Of course, the size and history of the planet were not what it was famous for, and it was clear from the observation platform why. The entire planet was haloed in colossal shipyards, each in a different orbit, while others interlinked and connected via bridges. Kalian counted five in total but it was hard to see all the rings through thousands of cargo ships arriving and departing; the sight reminded him of a beehive. The giant shipyards were made to mirror Ch’ket’s orbit so Translifts could be built from the surface, through the atmosphere, and connect to the many rings. To Kalian it looked as if the planet was encompassed in a massive head-brace.