The Unbelievable Mr. Brownstone Omnibus Three
Books Books 13-18
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Michael Anderle
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
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First US edition, May 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-297-1
The Oriceran Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2017-19 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Vax Humana
One Epic Ring
Spontaneous Justice
Shadow of the Ring
Horsemen Gather
War of the Four Worlds
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
Vax Humana
The Unbelievable Mr. Brownstone Book 13
1
The woman relaxed in her red chaise lounge, the tension fading from her shoulders after a long day. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view of a stunning expanse of the ocean. Only a few clouds floated in the sky, and the bright sun illuminated the crystal-blue water below. A few white dots glided in the distance; gulls, she assumed.
So much life on this planet.
She smiled, taking a moment to appreciate the gorgeous sights. A few seconds later, she lifted her communicator and activated the feed to her ocular implants. Her smile vanished as the same message she’d been looking at the previous day appeared.
Sentry 7921, Shepherd 2nd Class Aiyn Noraz Hal. Report received.
Command is evaluating all provided intelligence. All standing orders remain. Do not engage any non-Earth or non-Oriceran targets except in self-defense, including suggested Vax Forerunner candidate identified in your report as the human James Brownstone.
He’s not a human!
At this time, analysis suggests target confusion. Candidate behavior is well outside known Forerunner parameters. Based on low probability and potential magical explanation, no resources will or should be tasked at this time to engage target.
Repeat: All standing orders remain. Existing Concealment Protocol remains primary order.
When Aiyn had first received the response weeks prior, she had thrown her communicator across the room so hard she’d cracked her window. Less sturdy glass and her communicator would have tumbled into the ocean below. While repair of her equipment was within reach, full fabrication of new advanced devices would require help from off-world. Protocol dictated a potential follow-up after loss of communication for a lengthy period, but the Alliance might take months to check on her in such a case.
Aiyn sighed. She wasn’t sure why she continued to torture herself by reviewing the message, as if she thought it would change or they would inform her they’d been wrong and that reinforcements were on the way.
Each new report she’d sent from Earth had received only standard replies. Her few follow-up inquiries had been answered with nothing but “All standing orders remain.” A monster walked on Earth, and her superiors only cared about her not exposing herself to humans and Oricerans.
What was the point of being a Shepherd if she ignored the monsters threatening her flock?
The truth was undeniable. Her superiors intended to do nothing despite a Forerunner preparing the battlefield for its comrades.
She had hoped that sending verbal reports instead of text messages would have communicated the gravity of the situation, but they didn’t care. They’d sent her to Earth to watch for trouble but now acted as if she’d spotted an inconvenience distracting her from her real mission.
The damned Forerunner walked freely on the planet. A Vanguard would soon follow. Then the Destroyers would come, and the Vax would lay waste to Earth and Oriceran.
The Nine Systems Alliance could still prevent an invasion. All they had to do was stop Brownstone. Despite their holes in understanding the Vax, all available intelligence pointed to a successful defeat of a Forerunner forestalling an invasion. Permanently? Who could say, but at least then the world could be fortified.
If we told the damned humans and Oricerans, they could probably figure out some way to stop the Vax gates with magic.
No one understood fully what it meant or why the Vax didn’t send the Destroyers first, but the pattern was undeniable. Aiyn didn’t care if it was religious, strategic, or mere bravado—the invasion pattern was one of the few exploitable weaknesses they could use against the mysterious and deadly enemy.
Aiyn had held some small hope that magic would prove an effective counter against the Vax, but the encounter at the theme park had only reinforced the opposite conclusion. The symbiont could adapt to anything, even the strange magic of the creature calling itself “He Who Hunts.” She snorted and deactivated the communicator before tossing it to the other side of her seat.
Could she be missing some brilliant strategy employed by her superiors? All right, mere visual records weren’t concrete proof, but the probability of Brownstone’s armor and weaponry coincidentally resembling Vax technology so closely was low even if he wasn’t demonstrating the same level of destructive power yet. Brownstone behaving differently made perfect sense to her if he were adapting to local conditions, so she didn’t understand why the analysts offered idiotic conclusions.
It’s a trick or a strategy. Even the Vax must realize that the scope of magic on Earth and Oriceran is so vast and different from what they are used to that their standard strategy might not be enough. It’s obvious that Brownstone has been using his job as a bounty hunter to expose himself to different attacks and slowly build up his defenses. The theme park battle must have forced his hand, but he’s still vulnerable. Otherwise, he would have initiated the next stage.
Even if the Forerunner is being stealthy, the Vanguard won’t be.
Aiyn took a deep breath and slowly let it out. She didn’t have good information on Brownstone’s adaptation range, so she could only assume it was already deep and vast. He’d been fighting both conventional and magical threats for years. He might be one of the most well-adapted Forerunners in the entire galaxy.
She couldn’t remember a single case of a Forerunner spending years on a planet before initiating open attacks. Perhaps her superiors felt that proved there was no threat, but a continually adapting symbiont was a weapon slowly becoming undefeatable.
Few Vax invasions had been stopped by the time the Destroyers had arrived, unless they wanted to count bombarding and glassing an entire planet’s surface. Several had been stopped by defeating the Vanguard.
No. They needed to stop the Forerunner, so they needed to take the present opportunity.
Her superiors wouldn’t do anything. Thus, it fell on her.
Aiyn paced, her hands clenched into fists.
Wh
y did I join the Alliance Military? Why did I become a Shepherd? I knew I might never encounter a Vax, but I was supposed to be watching Earth for outside influences, and the damned Vax are certainly that.
“No,” she whispered, “not this time. Not this planet.”
No reinforcements or supplies would be forthcoming, and if she went to the human authorities, she might only risk other trouble, not to mention earning the wrath of her superiors. Even if the self-sacrifice were worth it, an open attack against Brownstone using her full technology might speed up the invasion if she failed and he realized Alliance forces were on Earth.
Aiyn walked over to the window and placed a hand against the cool glass. “I’ll give you what you expect, Brownstone, until it’s too late, and then you’ll die. You’re nothing but a puppet of a biomechanical machine anyway. I’m doing you a favor. May the Spirits be kinder to you in your next life.”
It was time to save the Earth.
A few hours later, Aiyn sat on the edge of her lush four-poster bed, a red robe clinging to her. Her human form was attractive by their standards, she supposed, even if it was still hard on her after many years to look in a mirror and not see blue skin and yellow eyes.
This is the sacrifice of a Shepherd—to give ourselves up to save others.
She ran her finger across a silver bracelet on her wrist, an AllBand computing device disguised as human jewelry. It always reminded her of the day her life changed. The day life had changed for many of her people.
It’d been many years, but the day remained seared in her soul, so much so that many things that hadn’t made sense when she was a child became clearer as she aged and understood more about the true nature of the galaxy.
Aiyn closed her eyes and let the memory take her.
Her younger self’s eyes fluttered open as she yawned. The seconds after that were confused. She was at the spaceport, and it took her a moment to remember how she’d gotten there.
Her father had picked her up and rushed her to an air speeder. He’d told her to go back to sleep, so she’d let her exhaustion retake her.
He’d seemed so frightened in recent days, and none of her friends came over to play anymore. Her father had forbade her to do anything but play in her room, except when he took her to the sprawling spaceport where he worked fixing ships. Even there, he made her wait in an office and play with a doll. He wouldn’t even let her have an AllBand.
She wasn’t sure what bad thing she’d done, or how she’d made her father angry. That was the only explanation for why he was forcing her to stay in her room and wouldn’t let her use an AllBand.
Now they were at the spaceport again, but he’d never before grabbed her at night and taken her there. She stared at the silver AllBand around her father’s wrist longingly.
All those thoughts swirled through her head as the door to the already-grounded speeder slid open. Aiyn’s father grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the vehicle.
A crush of people rushed toward the massive open hangar in front of her. Only a handful of shuttles remained inside. The squat, bulky short-range craft were disappointing compared to some of the sleek ships her father had shown her in happier times.
Aiyn gasped as something far more impressive caught her eye. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of huge transports hung in the sky, like a cluster of oblong metal clouds. She’d never seen so many ships above the city at once.
Huge lines of people stood in the gleaming hangar, rushing into the open shuttles one by one as the doors opened. Some wore grim expressions, others sobbed.
Several loud, distant booms sounded. Her father sucked in a breath and looked in that direction. She followed his gaze.
“I should have never stayed,” he murmured. “Even if they needed help to get more ships ready, I should have never stayed. I didn’t think they would get to the capital so fast. I thought they’d hold them farther to the south. They told us they would.”
Dark smoke billowed up from the city, shrouding the gleaming crystal spires and dulling their light—at least the ones that weren’t already collapsed. If it weren’t for the red-orange glow over the city, the night might have swallowed it. Distant shiny dots zoomed back and forth, bright white light blasting from them toward the city below. A few green beams shot into the sky, turning the shiny dots into red flares for a moment.
Aiyn’s eyes widened. “What’s going on, Father?”
He frowned. “Don’t worry about anything.” He pointed at the transports. “We’re leaving soon. We just need to get to a shuttle.”
There was another loud boom, this time closer. Screams and shouts erupted from the crowd.
“They’re coming!” a man yelled.
A massive energy bolt shot upward, bathing the entire hangar in a green glow, and struck one of the transports. The resulting massive explosion blew the ship into a cloud of debris, and three huge burning chunks fell to the ground. Her stomach tightened. She knew all too well what she was seeing. She also knew how many thousands of people could fit on a transport. Her father had told her.
“What’s going on?” she cried.
“Damn it,” her father muttered. “Six of them. There are only six of those monsters! How can thousands of our soldiers lose to six?”
“Six of who?”
He shook his head, his breathing ragged. “Evil monsters. Don’t worry. We’re escaping. They can’t follow us into space. They travel a different way.”
Monsters. Not mere enemies, but monsters.
Aiyn’s heart pounded, and her shaking became uncontrollable.
Protect us, Spirits. Protect us from the monsters.
Several of the transports slowly pulled out of orbit.
“They’re leaving,” someone in the crowd screamed. “They’re leaving us to die.”
A herd charged the shuttles, people throwing the uniformed men monitoring entry to the side or punching and kicking them. Some of the crowd trampled others or shoved them out of the way. Panic gripped almost everyone.
Her father scooped Aiyn into his arms and rushed toward the closest shuttle. The sea of people around them jostled and bumped them, but no one knocked them over.
Tears blurred her vision, but she managed not to wail in her father’s ear.
Another bolt passed overhead. A second ship exploded, turning night into day. Some of the shuttles in the hangar lifted off, the dull pulsing hum of their grav drives echoing in the hangar.
Their boarding doors remained open. A desperate man clung with one hand as one ship zoomed out of the hangar, falling with a scream to his death. In a similar situation, another passenger pulled a woman hanging from the door into the vehicle. The door slid closed, and the shuttle shot out of the hangar.
Aiyn stared, her blood pounding in her ears. The last few shuttles lifted off, clearly not at full capacity. People screamed and cursed. Some fell to their knees, sobbing and burying their faces in their hands.
We’re all going to die here. Monsters are going to kill us.
Something thudded close behind her. A moment later, a green beam cut through the remaining hovering shuttles. The bisected vehicles rained to the ground, sending the people below scrambling. They weren’t fast enough. Debris crushed dozens of people, their screams forming a haunting chorus.
The girl slowly turned her head. An armored figure stood in the distance, the glow of the burning city highlighting it. Silver-green metal covered its entire body and a featureless helmet covered its head, or maybe it was its head. Claws tipped its hands, and sharp blades extended from both arms. She wasn’t sure if she was looking at armor or the skin of the monster.
The figure roared. The sound twisted her stomach, and Aiyn’s lip quivered.
Her father spun around and hissed, then sprinted from the hangar toward a door in the distance. Something dark flew through the sky, arcing toward the other monster. The new arrival landed near the first monster with a thump and crouched as if it’d leapt a huge distance.
Aiyn trembled in he
r father’s arms as he continued running, his labored breathing loud in her ear. It helped distract her from the horror of two of the monsters being so close.
Green sparks flowed around the blades of both monsters, a loud hum building as the glare of the sparks intensified. Energy flowed from each monster toward a central point between them. A small dot grew into a blinding ball of energy.
Her father broke into a mad rush toward the doorway.
The energy ball shot away from the monsters and smashed into the hangar roof. A massive explosion ripped through the entire structure, the shockwave knocking Aiyn and her father to the ground. She screamed as her arm snapped.
The remnants of the hangar crashed to the ground. Smoke and dust billowed out, coating the few survivors. Shattered crystal shards of the building lay everywhere, some having impaled victims.
Her father hopped up and wiped away some of the green blood gushing from the side of his head, then slung his daughter over his shoulder and started running again. Her broken arm dangled and each bump produced a new jolt of pain, but the carnage before her eyes dulled her anguish. Half the building had collapsed, burying thousands of people. Even the few people she could see laying on the ground were covered in soot and debris. All were motionless.
Both monsters roared and raised their arms to feed a new destructive blast.
Her father rushed through the shattered doorway and veered into a hallway on his right. The entire area shook again, flame and heat knocking him to his knees. Aiyn let out another scream as her arm shook. Tears poured down her face.
“We’re almost there. Just hold on,” her father whispered into her ear. “I should have brought you here to begin with. Or we should have left, but I wanted to do my part. But I have a plan to escape. It’s why I’ve faked the maintenance records these last few days. You’ll have a way out. I promise you that, Aiyn. No matter what else happens, you’ll have a way out. It’s very small. You’ll escape, especially with so many transports left to draw their attention.”
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