by Essa Hansen
One of the hooded security cocked their head and glanced at the others, perplexed. A species less affected by Graven genes. Usually the most affected in a group influenced their peers. Confusion filled the gaps.
Caiden swallowed the sour taste and stared into the guard’s eyes. His Graven effect, paltry as it was, enhanced with focus. He still wasn’t sure what he was made of that constituted the Graven part of his space-garbage genetics— that answer lay in the Casthen Harvest with Threi, the last place he would ever go.
The gelese plucked a sayro from its dangling stem and whisked back down the tree.
The flower head was a ruffled cone with gossamer filaments weeping off. The chemical it had concentrated from the tree fungus gave it a cyan luminescence. Now plucked, the filaments began drying up from the bottom like a fuse. Five arcminutes or so and it would be worthless.
The gelese sealed the sayro in a padded bag before lowering it into Caiden’s hand.
“On with your business.” Caiden forced the words. “No trouble.”
The security bowed to him.
The acid in Caiden’s stomach curdled into ache. He pulled up his hood again and strode back to the bridge. As proximity widened, the sight, sound, and scent of him gone, the Graven effect faded and the merchant’s group began to mutter in confusion. Ahead, the bar crowd of several hundred buzzed with inebriated energy. The bounty hunters were lost in the mass.
Farame had fled— good. He didn’t need liabilities.
Caiden nestled the sayro in his coat, then looked up and halted. The amber-eyed hunter stood at the other end of the bridge.
She stared, unnaturally still. Uncertainty frowned over the bridge of her nose.
Caiden froze too, puzzled by unrecognizable materials. She wasn’t a xenid, but clearly only an approximation of humanoid. Heavily augmented? Lustrous metal, obsidian, ashen hair, patchwork face.
“Butcher!” screamed one of the gelese’s security, pointing at Caiden.
The crowd swiveled, hushed. Insects hummed in the gap of sound. Amber Eyes took a step forward and the whole place erupted.
“Crimes,” Caiden swore. The moment’s delay had been one moment too long. The crowd tangled, confused. Bodies clotted the bar’s fenced exits. Drunks brawled anyone nearby, and drinks became weapons, flying across the room, liquor igniting.
Caiden darted into the fray. A shadow poured after him— fast. Her forearm snapped around his throat from behind and his momentum yanked. He rammed an elbow into his attacker’s belly with all the strength in his augmented left arm. Amber Eyes doubled over. He twirled her hold down to lock her by the arm in front of him, then swung a leg over for leverage and snapped her arm at the elbow. The juicy crack suggested organic bone.
She didn’t blink or make a sound, and grappled for a hold with her good hand. No pain recognition was a massive problem. Her flat stare wasn’t a Graven-loyal sort of look. Had she expected a different creature, more like the rumors?
He flipped his position and kicked her knee broken too.
A glass drink shattered against the back of Caiden’s head. He swore and dodged from the chaos flooding off the bar platform. Wails and insults stuffed his ears. His morphcoat puffed and hardened into armor.
Fully armed security forces streamed in on illuminated walkways. The saisn hunter finally spotted Caiden, nicked a glave off the security, and was the first to fire. A scarlet blast roared through the night. The darkness hissed in revolt. The energy bolt skimmed the edge of Caiden’s hip as he rolled aside and floundered to his feet, biting back a cry. Heat keeled into sudden chill. Torrents of birds launched off the bar canopy.
Caiden smashed a quick-heal pack on his hip and dodged behind a tree wall. The fall had angered his fractured rib. His heartbeat pumped sparkling adrenaline.
The saisn hunter’s aim had targeted everyone’s attention to Caiden.
Chaos was familiar. All his tension snapped into action. Reflex glittered in Caiden with the deadly precision and speed that had built his reputation as he darted through the fray. Ghost of Azura. He snapped limbs, cracked skulls, snatched drunks to shield from glave fire, pinched pressure points, made weapons of glass and stones, matched violence with bloodshed, while an involuntary mirth bubbled up in his chest, forming a grin on his face— and the volume rose on that dark little voice that said Caiden was better this way.
Uncompromised. Alone. Blood and violence and a hot blade through tallow.
He plowed through the confused crowd and sprinted off into the lightless forest. His hip burned with pain, ribs sparked, legs leaden.
Behind him, Amber Eyes tore out of the brawl, sharp as a flash of light. She stopped hard and leaned into the air, crookedly, like a scentbeast on his trail. Her arm was fixed, somehow, the knee still crooked but bearing her weight.
Caiden weaved around massive tree trunks, dodging the clouds of lightflies that would betray his position in the dark. He slowed to fumble the sayro from his pocket. It was squished and the filaments three-quarters charred. He unbuckled a chemical canister of fluid off his belt, flicked the lid open, and shoved the sayro inside. The flower melted purple and luminous. A reaction fizzed up, and Caiden snapped the lid closed as the fluid boiled and flared. He sighed in relief: This part wasn’t a waste, at least. He could make the medicaments he needed.
The Azura was docked on a landing platform a quarter kilometer away in a giant clearing in the trees. The darkness and walkways all looked the same, but he aimed for the unnatural gridlike plantings of fungus that illuminated a flight path into the canopy.
Behind him echoed the mangled, rasping sound of Amber Eyes dragging her leg as she tried to follow him at speed.
But no one knew running like Caiden.
Fourteen years old, he’d run for his life. Then ran from the vision of the slaughter. Then ran from the little world that’d been all he knew. Ran from nightmares on repeat. Now he ran from Threi Cetre’s bounty hunters, and there was nothing more to life than feet pounding, wings sailing, heart beating. He kept moving.
He leapt from root to root and over quartz slabs, avoiding the transparent soil because what was solid or gel or liquid all looked the same to him. Bioluminescent fish coursed deep below and hinted at the planet’s freshwater veins— absolute drowning.
The sounds of fight and pursuit faded off into a mush of echoes.
The ship dock was a series of platforms populated by a variety of vessels. Caiden stumbled with relief when he spotted the Azura’s disguised back piercing up. Paces from his ship, the neural connection congealed. Serenity glowed into his mind, wrapping his muscles around the vanes and thrusters of the Azura, filling his heart with the hollow of the bay, and sparking his mirror neurons with the components of her engine.
Bay doors— all it took was the thought command. The alterskin disguising the ship tore and flickered as the back iris swirled open. Caiden dashed inside. He was greeted by darkness, jaws, nightmare. A huge body rushed at him, maw gaping, paws slamming the ship like explosions as killing muscle rippled.
“Stay!” Caiden yelled at C.
The nophek beast whined. Rough skin roared across metal as his tail whipped back and forth in greeting.
Caiden barreled for the storage wall, yanked a drawer out, and dumped the contents of his chemical canister into a waiting tub of culture. The sayro light purled through inky tissue inside. Caiden gushed another sigh of relief and refocused, bursting the engines online with a mental command.
C roared an earsplitting screech. Caiden swiveled around to see him leap at Amber Eyes dashing inside. The ship shook when he landed. Caiden pitched to the floor. The nophek took up a sixth of the whole ship’s bay, and bore that weight on the bounty hunter to pin her inside. Her hands flew up, catching C’s sharp-toothed maw inches from her throat.
Caiden scrambled up, hissing expletives. Out the back of the bay, between the trees, small security vessels jetted toward the dock like a school of silver fish, glinting as they veered in the dark.
Out of options. Caiden signaled the doors shut and limped to the cockpit, shouting, “C! Keep!”
The nophek’s giant paw pinned the hunter’s whole chest to the floor. He snarled in her face.
Caiden plunged one hand into the cockpit’s misty glow of particles. Light gathered up into bright nerves, threading his fingers and forearm, whispering into his skin. Thrusters fired and the Azura detangled from the berthing. The other half of Caiden’s control was mental, the ship linked to him as if he were armored in it, its muscles cladding his, engine thrumming with his pulse. He had little attention to spare for the ruckus in the bay.
The ship’s alterskin disengaged— no point in it now. The Azura’s liquid glass shell showed some of the forest surrounding them, rippled past pleats and curves. The security ships spiraled in their wake.
Amber Eyes twisted to elbow C’s throat and wriggle free. She launched at Caiden, and he could only catch her in his augmented left arm. His blue machine muscles plumped, his shock system wheezed, and he crushed her in a one-armed choke hold. “C!”
The nophek whimpered, sliding to one side as the ship veered. Light-studded tree trunks slithered past. Caiden clawed his right hand, fingers straining. The ship’s glass wings splashed into liquid around three-meter-thick tree limbs, re-forming on the other side, speed dropping. The ship crashed upward like a water drop through a lattice.
Amber Eyes struggled. Small muscle groups tensed or dissolved, joints dislocated, and she started to melt out of Caiden’s hold. He flipped her to the floor while his other arm was still raised and shaking, orchestrating the Azura’s flight out of the forest. Limbs tangled in the darkness, and flocks of luminous creatures swerved from their path. “Brace, C!”
He tipped the Azura vertical and kicked the bounty hunter toward C, who crushed her under a paw. His other limbs braced, claws crunching into gaps in the wall plating as the ship yawed sideways. Caiden vaulted into the pilot seat and pulled his arms through the light guides, heaving the ship around tangled boughs and slapping leaves. The Azura’s Glasliq wings splashed and crackled. Her inner scaffold skeleton tightened, ribs folding together to forge a sleek glass blade cutting the forest open.
Blips in the cockpit holosplays marked the security-jet flock, scattered and quickly lost in the canopy.
Through the neural link, Caiden felt shielding blows, fuel load, spicy chems, and unhappy engine parts. Only a flicker of his attention remained for the hunter.
She was jellying again, joints rotating, humanoid body adjusting more intuitively than any augmentation Caiden knew. She broke half her body to squirm free from C’s claws. The nophek snarled thunder and bit at her ankle, but the slim running blade of her foot hissed through his teeth. She kicked off C’s skull to propel herself at Caiden again.
The whole ship jarred as she crashed into his side. The Azura ricocheted into the canopy, resonance armor screeching and ripping tingles across Caiden’s skin as the neural link mirrored the impacts. He clawed his hands into fists to power upward.
Rain clouds, sunlight, water drops. They jetted through lightning and out of atmosphere, streaking into empty space.
Unity’s rind bloomed in the cockpit view. Like a glossy, vaporous membrane, the vast surface formed the border between Unity and outer bubble universes. The next universe over had micro-differences of physics in which the Azura’s engine would fly smoother and Caiden could chemically think clearer.
Velocity peeled the hunter off his side. She clung to the seat and wrapped him in a choke hold much more effective than his had been: whatever she was didn’t feel pain, could go without breathing, and regenerated rapidly.
Five seconds before he lost consciousness.
“Listen,” the hunter hissed.
Caiden choked. He clawed his fingers in the guides, boosting the Azura’s speed.
Unity’s rind bowled over the ship’s nose, an iridescent storm licking the windows, colors birthing and dying against the pane. The bounty hunter seized up and emitted a hacking sound. Her arm slackened. Caiden turned to see her eyeballs glazing turquoise like oxidized copper.
As the Azura cruised out the other side of the rind, the hunter crumpled to the floor. Swirled patterns started splitting open in her skin, bleeding liquid crystalline and sapphire fluids as inner tendons melted. The paler strips of her skin pussed into foam and sloughed off.
The Azura sailed on smoothly while Caiden stared at the hunter’s bizarre, twitching body.
The tightness in his chest whittled his voice to a whisper. “Too close a call this time.”
Multiple factions chased him now, a new type of hunter, a trap he couldn’t avoid. His previous wounds were barely healed before each next close call.
He couldn’t keep this up. It was changing him. Sucking life from everything.
Caiden crept close and gave the bounty hunter a solid kick in the hip. No response.
C stalked over and sniffed her disheveled ashen hair as the ends of the biosilk strands turned black and crisp. More than half her parts didn’t seem built to exist outside Unity.
“Watch her.” Adrenaline fizzled into clammy pains. Massaging his throat, Caiden turned back to the cockpit. And froze, cursing, “Nine crimes.”
Just across the rind, a Casthen armada of hundreds waited for him, netted out across space.
if you enjoyed
NOPHEK GLOSS
look out for
VELOCITY WEAPON
Book One of The Protectorate
by
Megan E. O’Keefe
Dazzling space battles, intergalactic politics, and rogue AI collide in Velocity Weapon, the first book in this epic space opera trilogy by award-winning author Megan O’Keefe.
Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction.
However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. Ada Prime and its rival, Icarion, have wiped each other from the universe.
Now, separated by time and space, Sanda and Biran must fight to put things right.
CHAPTER 1
THE AFTERMATH OF THE BATTLE OF DRALEE
The first thing Sanda did after being resuscitated was vomit all over herself. The second thing she did was to vomit all over again. Her body shook, trembling with the remembered deceleration of her gunship breaking apart around her, stomach roiling as the preservation foam had encased her, shoved itself down her throat and nose and any other ready orifice. Her teeth jarred together, her fingers fumbled with temporary palsy against the foam stuck to her face.
Dios, she hoped the shaking was temporary. They told you this kind of thing happened in training, that the trembling would subside and the “explosive evacuation” cease. But it was a whole hell of a lot different to be shaking yourself senseless while emptying every drop of liquid from your body than to be looking at a cartoonish diagram with friendly letters claiming Mild Gastrointestinal Discomfort.
It wasn’t foam covering her. She scrubbed, mind numb from coldsleep, struggling to figure out what encased her. It was slimy and goopy and— oh no. Sanda cracked a hesitant eyelid and peeked at her fingers. Thick, clear jelly with a slight bluish tinge coated her hands. The stuff was cold, making her trembling worse, and with a sinking gut she realized what it was. She’d joked about the stuff, in training with her fellow gunshippers. Snail snot. Gelatinous splooge. But its real name was MedAssist Incubatory NutriBath, and you only got dunked in it if you needed intensive care with a capital I.
“Fuck,” she tried to say, but her throat rasped on unfamiliar air. How long had she been in here? Sanda opened both eyes, ignoring the cold gel runn
ing into them. She lay in a white enameled cocoon, the lid removed to reveal a matching white ceiling inset with true-white bulbs. The brightness made her blink.
The NutriBath was draining, and now that her chest was exposed to air, the shaking redoubled. Gritting her teeth against the spasms, she felt around the cocoon, searching for a handhold.
“Hey, medis,” she called, then hacked up a lump of gel. “Got a live one in here!”
No response. Assholes were probably waiting to see if she could get out under her own power. Could she? She didn’t remember being injured in the battle. But the medis didn’t stick you in a bath for a laugh. She gave up her search for handholds and fumbled trembling hands over her body, seeking scars. The baths were good, but they wouldn’t have left a gunnery sergeant like her in the tub long enough to fix cosmetic damage. The gunk was only slightly less expensive than training a new gunner.
Her face felt whole, chest and shoulders smaller than she remembered but otherwise unharmed. She tried to crane her neck to see down her body, but the unused muscles screamed in protest.
“Can I get some help over here?” she called out, voice firmer now she’d cleared it of the gel. Still no answer. Sucking down a few sharp breaths to steel herself against the ache, she groaned and lifted her torso up on her elbows until she sat straight, legs splayed out before her.
Most of her legs, anyway.
Sanda stared, trying to make her coldsleep-dragging brain catch up with what she saw. Her left leg was whole, if covered in disturbing wrinkles, but her right … That ended just above the place where her knee should have been. Tentatively, she reached down, brushed her shaking fingers over the thick lump of flesh at the end of her leg.
She remembered. A coil fired by an Icarion railgun had smashed through the pilot’s deck, slamming a nav panel straight into her legs. The evac pod chair she’d been strapped into had immediately deployed preserving foam— encasing her, and her smashed leg, for Ada Prime scoopers to pluck out of space after the chaos of the Battle of Dralee faded. She picked at her puckered skin, stunned. Remembered pain vibrated through her body and she clenched her jaw. Some of that cold she’d felt upon awakening must have been leftover shock from the injury, her body frozen in a moment of panic.