The Human Chronicles Saga Box Set 5

by T. R. Harris

  It’s been a great journey and I owe it all to my loyal fans. I write these stories for you (and a little for me), shocked and humbled by the response I’ve received over the years. Just think, you sit down at a computer one day to write a story and have to come up with a name for your main character. “Cain…Adam Cain. Yeah, that works.” Then six years and twenty-nine books later, the series has evolved from The Humans Chronicles Saga to An Adam Cain Adventure. That’s because for the fans of the alien with an attitude, Adam Cain is just as alive to you as he is to me.

  And he will live on—despite all the evil alien efforts to stop him!

  As I’ve said before, if you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.

  Thanks, again.

  T.R. Harris

  Adam Cain is an alien with an attitude.

  His story continues…

  57

  Adam Cain: Destroyer of Worlds

  No, that’s too dark.

  Adam Cain: Protector of the Innocent.

  Nah, that sounds like some Boy Scout superhero.

  Adam Cain: Broke and Desperate.

  Well, at least that’s the most honest, but how would it look on a business card?

  Unfortunately, Adam had to put aside his musings over a slogan for his business and tend to more pressing matters. The giant Balmornac quadra-ped had just crashed through a wall of the room where he was hiding, and now survival became his top priority.

  The huge tiger-on-steroids swayed its massive head back and forth, displaying a pair of two-foot-long horns at the Human, while snarling through a mouth lined with three-inch long fangs. Adam was behind a wooden table, gripping the edge, grimacing with pain from the wound in his left side. He was waiting for the moment…and it came in a flash as the giant cat jumped. Adam lifted the table and flipped it toward his attacker. The long horns penetrated the wood, slipping by Adam’s head and missing his flesh by only a fraction of an inch on each side.

  He pressed forward with all his Human strength while twisting the table, using its length for leverage. The head of the giant cat spun, taking the rest of the body with it. The beast was on its back when Adam slammed a booted foot down on the thick neck, just missing the taming collar it wore.

  His advantage only lasted a second. The cat was much stronger than he was and flicked him away like he was a fly. But the animal was hurt. When the next mighty roar came from its injured throat, it sounded more like a kitten than a six-foot-tall-at-the-shoulders savage beast.

  Adam backed away until he was standing in front of the room’s only window, his left hand on the puncture wound to his side. The cat was shaking off its own pain and preparing to attack.

  The animal wasn’t the only one getting ready to jump. With his enhanced leg muscles, Adam pushed off, reaching for the bare conduit lines in the ceiling twelve feet above. He pulled up his legs just as the huge tiger streaked by beneath him.

  The window shattered and the animal fell eighteen stories to the ground below. Adam dropped to the floor and looked out the shattered portal. The quadra-ped was on the ground, lifeless, while curious bystanders cautiously approached. Then it moved. The huge beast staggered to its feet, sending the panicked crowd running for their lives.

  One of its horns was broken in half, and the cat limped from an injured front leg. But still it hobbled back into the building.

  Adam didn’t have much time. The cat’s keen sense of smell was how it found him the first time. He thought he was being clever when he entered an elevator on the fifteenth floor a few minutes before, knowing that the cat couldn’t conceive of nor operate the control buttons. But then the beast took the stairwell up three flights, following his distinctive Human scent.

  With its hurt leg, it would take the animal longer this time to climb the stairs, but it would track him relentlessly as long as he was in the building.

  Adam rushed from the room and to another bank of elevators. The building was tall and the elevators only went fifteen floors at a time before requiring a transfer. He had to reach the forty-eighth floor.

  After three transfers he eventually reached his destination, and as the door slid open, he took a level-two flash bolt to his chest. He barely reacted, more pissed than hurt. He looked at the stunned native guard and wondered what the hell was he doing? He should know by now that all a level-two flash bolt did to a Human was make him mad. And with Adam’s special abilities, it would take a number of even level-one bolts to kill him….

  He ran to the stunned guard and slapped the bolt launcher from his gun hand before he could make the intensity adjustment on the weapon. Impatient, pissed off and hurt, Adam planted an elbow into the guard’s chin. It only took one hit. He’d already taken out nine other guards when he first entered the building; he knew what it took to lay them out. But then the giant cats had been sicced on him. He’d killed one already, although it came at the cost of a deep puncture wound to his left side. The bleeding had stopped—thanks to his rapid healing ability—but the pain was still there. He wasn’t looking forward to another encounter with the giant tigers.

  Earlier, Adam had sent a mosquito drone into the building to locate the fugitive. He was on the forty-eighth floor, just down the hall from where Adam now stood. He reached the door and crashed through it without even trying the handle.

  Adors Gin was cowering behind his desk, an MK-17 flash weapon in his hand, waiting for the targeting computer to lock on. Adam was on him before it could, knocking the annoying weapon away before grabbing the alien by the front of his clothing and lifting him over the desk.

  Adors was a gunrunner who had been selling weapons to the rebels on Solon-Manoc. He had been captured but escaped with the help of the rebels. He fled the planet, and a few weeks later, Adam and his team found him hiding here on Cranis, surrounded by a small army of native guards and his two wild cats. He controlled the animals with neurological taming collars, making them do his bidding. Adam was pretty sure Adors didn’t have the animals in the building exclusively to protect against him. That was just an unfortunate coincidence.

  Adors blinked several times as his mouth fell open, staring at Adam.

  “You are…you are Adam Cain,” the alien gasped.

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to take you back to Solon-Manoc.”

  “You are a reward hunter?”

  Adam shrugged.

  “But you…you killed the Sol-Kor queen. You destroyed the homeworld of the Nuoreans. And you eliminated the last of the Klin from the galaxy. Surely you can’t be here for the reward?”

  “Hey, everyone has to make a living.”

  The greenish-blue face of the alien became more animated. “I understand there is a forty thousand Juirean credit reward for my return. I will offer you fifty thousand if you let me go.”

  Adam stared into the green eyes of the fugitive. Forty thousand credits—the bounty on Adors—would keep the Klin Colony Ship he lived in running for a month; fifty thousand, not much longer. No, it wasn’t enough to risk his business and his reputation.

  When Adam hesitated, Adors upped the bribe to one hundred thousand.

  “Do you have it with you?” Adam asked.

  “I, eh, well, no,” Adors stammered. “But I can get it.”

  Adam winced and shook his head. “Sorry, Adors, but I can’t risk it, not even for a hundred. You’re going back to Solon-Manoc and I’ll be content with the forty-k.”

  “Forty kay?”

  “Forty thousand.”

  As Adam guided the alien toward the shattered door, Adors took him by the arm. “A favor, Adam Cain?”

  “What?”

  “Will you look into the security camera in the corner?” Adors pointed toward the ceiling. “I want a record that I met you.”

  Adors huddled in close and smiled for the camera. Although the alien faced a possible death sentence back on Solon-Manoc, he was beaming with excitement as Adam took him into custody.

&nb
sp; At least now he had a selfie with him and the famous Adam Cain.

  Adam got Adors out of the building and back to his ship, where his alien friend Kaylor was waiting. Four days later the pair left Solon-Manoc with a stack of Juirean blue chips and returned to the huge Colony Ship/space station in orbit around the gas giant Andos within the Formilian star system. The forty thousand credits would help, but it wouldn’t make a dent in his current financial woes; however, it was more than he had a week ago. That was progress.

  The twenty-mile-in-diameter starship he called home had seventy landing bays of various sizes, but only one was active. Kaylor expertly slipped the small Klin saucer into the bay, closed the outer doors and then filled the chamber with atmosphere. Adam grimaced. Just that sequence alone cost about seven hundred credits.

  The pair made their way through a long passageway with dimmed lighting and into the section of the station where Adam, Kaylor and Jym lived. It was less than ten percent of the volume of the huge ship, leaving the other ninety-plus percent dark, cold and powerless.

  The station had once been home to twenty thousand Klin and was capable of supporting the colony for an indefinite period. But something that big took a lot of, well everything, to run. Adam didn’t have that kind of money. Hell, he couldn’t even afford to move the damn thing

  His friend Arieel Bol—the Speaker of the Formilian People—had fought tooth and nail with her governing council to get the funding to bring the ship from Vesper to its present location. After that, the powers-that-be said no more, not even enough to keep the station powered.

  Arieel didn’t have the clout she once had on her homeworld. Her title was more ceremonial than official now, not after it was revealed that her so-called supernatural ability to control electricity and commune with their gods came from a brain-interface device and not by divine intervention. If it wasn’t for the two-thousand-year history of the Bol females leading the planet, she wouldn’t even have the title.

  Adam was grateful, nonetheless. It got him closer to the power center of the Expansion and closer to Arieel. When he first arrived nine months ago, they saw each other often, but now, not so much. Since he’d started his bounty hunting business, he was gone most of the time, working his butt off just to keep the lights on in the small section of the Colony Ship he called home.

  Jym was in the central meeting area near the bridge of the Klin starship when Kaylor and Adam entered. The lighting here was brighter, at least while the room was in use. Jym was munching on a piece of Filiean bark held in one tiny paw, while tapping on a datapad with the other.

  “With the forty thousand, we now have ninety-eight in total,” he said without greeting, as if his two associates hadn’t been gone for the past nine days. “I have ordered a fresh supply of standard food stocks, and we should be looking soon for a new power module for the Davion.”

  The Davion was the only small craft left aboard the Colony Ship when Adam took it over; all the hundreds of others were on Vesper when the Nuoreans destroyed the planet. That was a shame. Normally, a station this large carried an entire fleet of smaller vessels, ships Adam could have sold to cure his current financial crisis. But the Klin were in the process of moving their operations to land bases at the time and had stripped the Colony Ship of all but one lone starship, used to shuttle the skeleton maintenance crew back and forth to Vesper.

  Now Adam and Kaylor used the Davion for their bounty hunting excursions. Davion was an alien name Jym assigned the ship, which meant…well Adam never understood the meaning. But it was small and fast, with an effective range of about ten thousand light-years on a single power mod. Jym was right; it would need a new energy supply module pretty soon. And that would cost even more money.

  Adam went to the food processor and ordered up a helping of bacon and eggs, or what passed as bacon and eggs aboard the Klin ship. Jym had modified the unit to conjure up a few traditional Human meals, since the bulk of the programming was for Klin food alone. Kaylor and Jym didn’t have a problem with the Klin diet, but Adam did. Now he had his choice between bacon and eggs, a pale pork-like dish or cereal. He was getting tired of all three.

  However, the processor did make a decent cup of coffee, and that was what he really needed. He’d been running at a frantic pace just to keep his head above water. It was six months into his new business and he was paying the bills but failing in his ultimate goal to get closer to Earth.

  “Your law advocate left a message for you two days ago,” Jym said just as Adam dug into his depressingly bland meal.

  “Did he say why he was calling?”

  “No, just asked for a return link when possible.”

  “When possible, or as soon as possible?” Adam was hoping it was an urgent call with good news.

  “When possible were his exact words.”

  Adam would call his lawyer back when he finished eating.

  “And Adam, I have located another of our target fugitives. He initiated a CW link three days ago on Risnos.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Sector Nine…near Hyben.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An Andorian named Lundin. The reward is twenty-five thousand.”

  Adam grimaced. Hyben was two thousand light-years away. It would take him and Kaylor over a week just to get there and use up the last of the energy in the mod. They would need a new one before they left on the mission, at a cost of four thousand credits. That, plus the time it would take getting there and back, made the bounty hardly worth the effort. Twenty-five thousand wasn’t enough.

  “Anything closer…and for more credits?”

  “I have thirty-five potentials within the current search. That’s all the Klin computers can handle at a time. So far, Lundin was the only one who made a link.”

  “Keep looking.”

  After the trio had taken over the Colony Ship, Jym discovered the Klin computers had the ability to monitor all the Continuous Wormhole communications in the galaxy—for an entire day. It was an incredible amount of information and only possible because the Klin had the most-advanced technology in the galaxy. But it was only for a day. After that the data had to be dumped to make room for another.

  When Adam decided that bounty hunting might be a good way to earn credits, Jym put together a facial-recognition program to search a day’s CW links looking for fugitives or warrant subjects. Since ninety percent of all links involved video, Jym’s program was remarkably successful at locating Adam’s targets—as long as they made a video link during the monitored day.

  After six months as a bounty hunter, Adam success rate was phenomenal, even if the money wasn’t. It seemed those carrying the higher bounties were more cautious with their communications and used cutouts or other methods. So far, the largest reward he’d collected was seventy-five thousand Juirean credits, with the average around thirty-five. Adam needed the Colony Ship’s computers to run his business, and that meant putting up with the high cost of running the station. It was a Catch-22 that had him trapped in a depressing loop of hard work for little gain. But at the moment, it was the only job he could get.

  Adam made the link with Aaron Jarvis back on Earth. Aaron had once been a Navy SEAL—just like Adam—and when he left the service ten years ago he earned a Juris Doctorate and opened his own law firm, catering to military personnel, both present and former. Adam knew him from the old days. Now he had the attorney working on his behalf on at least three fronts back on the homeworld.

  “Tell me you have some good news,” Adam said when the nearly bald and rapidly weight-gaining attorney came on the screen. At least someone could afford more than processed bacon and eggs.

  Aaron grimaced. “I wish I did, buddy. I just thought I’d give you the latest since we haven’t talked for a couple of weeks.”

  “I’ve been out collecting a bounty.”

  “A good one?”

  “Not really, just subsistence pay. So, what do you have?”

  “First of all, your bank accoun
ts. As before, everyone is as apologetic as they can be. They all acknowledge that what happened to you sucks, but there’s nothing they can do about it. When your accounts were confiscated, you were a criminal, having stolen the trans-dimensional starship from the military. That was a major crime back then, and the authorities threw the book at you, along with the rest of your team.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Aaron shrugged. “They keep coming at me with the simplistic example of a person who robs a bank in order to feed his starving family. It’s still a crime, no matter why you did it. Even though you used the TD-ship to keep the Klin from conquering the galaxy, it was still a crime. Your three million dollars—and everyone else’s money—was absorbed into the system and no one is willing to step up and essentially donate money—their word—to make you whole again.”

  “That’s the same thing they said a year ago after the Klin war. So, they haven’t budged an inch?”

  “I’m afraid not, Adam.”

  “What other rays of sunshine do you have for me?”

  Aaron glanced at a datapad on his desk. He didn’t need to look up any details on the device; he’d been working on Adam’s case for nearly a year and had everything committed to memory.

  “The property tax lien on your Lake Tahoe land was filed properly and all the time periods have elapsed. The redemption period after the foreclosure expired fourteen months ago—”

  “About the time Panur and I were captured by Robert McCarthy and the Klin. It’s a little hard to respond to a tax lien notice when you’re locked away on a planet at the edge of the galaxy and about to be executed in a very sadistic manner.”