by Ryan Kirk
Primal Destiny
Ryan Kirk
Copyright © 2017 by Waterstone Media
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For Justin
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Thank you!
Also by Ryan Kirk
About the Author
One
Tev landed softly, considering the fact that he was wearing an exosuit that weighed twice as much as he did. The rocky outcropping he had jumped from was almost ten meters overhead, but his muscles, enhanced by the artificial strength of the suit, absorbed the impact with ease.
The jump itself held no significance to Tev. He had made dozens just like it in the past week alone. But the feeling of freedom he experienced while wearing the suit was addicting. He moved faster, jumped higher, and was more dangerous than he had dared to dream when he had been younger.
Tev was the complete master of his environment. He was the apex predator, afraid of none of the beasts that once kept him awake at night. To know that he was the most dangerous predator freed his mind from the background hum of fear that had once been a constant companion.
Tev snapped out of his reverie as he heard the approach of his opponent. Unlike Tev, who was quieter than a breeze, his opponent crashed through the environment, heedless of the noise he created. That was the danger of the suits. If nothing could harm you, you lost the skills you once relied on, skills that gave you an advantage, even armored.
To his credit, Xan, Tev’s opponent, showed no fear in the face of a challenge. He had been pursuing Tev for several minutes now, and Tev could tell by the sound of Xan’s footfalls that the big man had no plans to slow his chase. As Tev predicted, Xan took the drop a few moments after Tev had landed.
Tev leaped out of the way, less out of fear for his own safety and more concerned about Xan having a flat place to land.
Xan hit the ground Tev had just vacated with tremendous force. Xan was huge, and Tev had been surprised to discover the Vigilance carried a suit large enough for him to squeeze into. Together, man and machine outweighed Tev by a substantial amount, but for a moment, it looked like Xan would be able to control the impact from the fall.
The moment lasted less than a heartbeat. Xan hadn’t fallen straight down, his drop maintaining some of his forward momentum. That energy transferred to his landing, and he crashed face first into the ground. Without armor it might have been a deadly blow. Fortunately, Xan was protected, the metal skin of the exosuit dimpled in several places, a testament to Xan’s willingness to push the edges of his ability.
Tev aimed his rifle at Xan and pulled the trigger, just to drive home the point. There were no rounds in the weapon, but the computers would register the hit all the same. He didn’t stick around for more than a few seconds. The lesson wasn’t over yet. He jogged down the crevasse they had leaped into, looking for a place to climb or jump back up.
Behind him, Tev heard Xan struggle to his feet. He knew from firsthand experience that such falls hurt, even armored, and he didn’t envy Xan the pain he must be feeling. But Xan was a hunter worthy of the stories told about him around the campfires, and Tev could hear the chase begin again.
Distracted by the sounds behind him, Tev missed on his first attempt to jump out of the crevasse. Cursing his own lack of focus, he leaped and grabbed the ledge just as Xan turned the corner, careening off the rock wall towards him. Tev pulled himself up and over the lip just as Xan lunged to tackle him.
Tev got to his feet as Xan sprang from the bottom of the crevasse to come down right beside him. The move startled Tev, who hadn’t believed a jump of such height was possible. Xan landed awkwardly, stumbling forward as he fought to find his balance.
Tev seized the opportunity, pushing gently on Xan’s back, laughing to himself as the larger hunter fell to the ground once again.
This time, Xan was back on his feet in an instant. He lashed out with a fist aimed squarely at Tev’s head. Tev saw the blow coming and leaned back, allowing the roundhouse to pass in front of his face. He watched in amusement as Xan’s momentum twisted the big man.
Xan was, by most accounts, an excellent pilot, but Tev was pushing him harder, trying to get him to pilot the exosuit like a second skin. Xan still forgot to restrain himself in some of his movements, which led to a loss of balance. In a real fight, such mistakes would be fatal.
Xan seized on Tev’s moment of distraction and grabbed his right arm, twisting it into a powerful throw that sent Tev flying back towards the crevasse. Instinctively, Tev extended his hands and tucked his head, turning his short flight into a dive roll. He came to his feet less than a meter away from the edge of the crevasse, and Xan’s thundering footsteps were a powerful clue to Tev’s immediate future.
Tev used the forward momentum he still had to lean into a soaring leap across the chasm. The crevasse was about three meters wide, and unpowered, Tev never would have made the jump. With the suit Tev landed on the other side with ease, his footfalls as light as ever.
Tev turned to see Xan making the same jump. With the power from his short sprint, Tev could already see Xan was going to overshoot him by at least two meters. The other hunter hadn’t realized that truth yet, and he raised his fist to pummel Tev as he arced through the air.
The more experienced hunter stifled a laugh as Xan went barreling through the space in front of him. The large man landed lightly, though, and quickly turned towards Tev. This time, instead of a roundhouse, he came in with a strong series of jabs, where a lack of control wouldn’t twist him off-balance.
The idea was a good one, but Xan’s execution was poor. Tev retreated a few steps and then stopped and bobbed down, allowing a right jab to pass over his left shoulder. With one quick move, Tev grabbed and controlled Xan’s wrist, pulling it down as he lifted his hips up. Xan went crashing onto the forest floor, and Tev thought he heard the big man let out a small groan.
Xan tried to get back to his feet, but Tev opened the radio channel between them and spoke in their shared language, a language that still sometimes felt alien to him after the months he had spent among Kindra and her people.
“That’s enough for today, Xan. If we go much longer it’s going to be difficult for them to repair our suits.”
Even with the armor on, Tev could see the tension evaporate from Xan’s body as he allowed his frame to collapse back against the ground. “Thank Lys. I’m tired of getting beaten by you.”
Less than an hour later Tev, Xan, and several other hunters gathered in a small circle. This small group represented the best pilots their planet possessed, each one responsible for training several others. In the terminology of Kindra’s people, they were lance commanders.
When Tev first started training his fellow hunters several months ago, he and Derreck had quickly come to the realization that by themselves, they couldn’t train everyone as quickly as they wanted. Most hunters could pick up the basics of piloting a suit in a few days, but to protect their planet, they needed far more than just the basics. They needed to be the best pilots the galaxy had ever seen.
Derreck was the one who proposed the solution. They chose the best pilots from their volunteers. These were the warriors that Derreck and Tev spent
the most time with. After a training session, the lance commanders had the responsibility of going back to their lance and teaching the concepts to their team.
Becoming a lance commander was an honor, but keeping the position was a challenge. The title and responsibility was given to whichever student Derreck and Tev considered the best pilot in each lance, so there was constant friendly competition to be the top of the squad. The only one who had kept his position in the top of his lance was Xan, but that was to be expected from the greatest hunter in all the clans.
As the warriors relaxed into deep squats, Tev took a moment to laugh at the incongruity of it all. They were deep in the forests claimed by Tev’s birth-clan, and the hunters all wore traditional garb, clothing that Tev wouldn’t have given a second thought to three years ago. They wore skins of the animals they had killed, many wearing a minimum of clothing due to the heat of the summer days. Tev was no different. He wore a pair of pants and nothing else. Even his feet were bare.
But they weren’t gathering around a fire, as his people had for so many generations. Instead, they gathered around a holographic projector replaying scenes from Tev’s and Xan’s skirmish. The clash of the traditional and the alien would have been bizarre a few months ago, but it was quickly becoming a new normal. Outside of the circle, Derreck stood.
The captain of the Vigilance wasn’t flexible enough to sit in a deep squat, and his uniform set him apart from the rest of the assembly. Despite his status as an outsider, many of the hunters looked up to the captain. Time and time again, Derreck had given the perfect advice to each new pilot. Many of the hunters were almost equal to Derreck’s skill with the suits, but his real gift was as a teacher, a role revered among the clans. Even Tev, who could pilot circles around Derreck, frequently came to the captain seeking guidance.
Tev settled into a squat and picked apart the duel with the commanders. As was his custom, he started with a broad question. “What do you think was the primary reason I defeated Xan in this duel?”
Several answers were suggested, but all were timid. This reluctance came up whenever Xan was involved. The big hunter was a legend, and outside of a suit, Tev was certain the man had no equal on the planet. Xan’s fame made many of the students hesitate to criticize him. One young woman, though, had no such problem. Tev called on her.
“Mara.”
The woman reminded Tev in many ways of Neera, once the love of his life. Like many of the men, she wore only the minimum necessary to be appropriate, and even a quick glance at her confirmed her physical strength. Unlike Neera, her dark hair was cropped short, and her eyes were sharp and focused as she watched the replay.
“Xan still struggles to control his strength in the suits. Because of that, his attacks and movements often throw him off balance.”
Tev agreed. Using a small remote, he brought up Xan’s leap across the crevasse, which had sent him flying in front of Tev.
“Look here. There’s no doubt of Xan’s strength. He’s proven it many times over.”
That statement was very true. At night around the campfires there had been many impromptu wrestling matches, and even Tev had been ground beneath Xan’s great arms more than once.
“The challenge with such strength is that the suit amplifies everything we do. It’s a problem each of us need to solve, but it’s even more challenging for the strongest among us. The good news is, once Xan masters his control, he’ll be able to jump farther than any of us. So, how do we solve this problem?”
The ice broken, the hunters started speaking up, sharing practices that had worked for them and brainstorming new ways around the problem.
This was the part of the reflection Tev most enjoyed. He had started the conversation, but the hunters, in their pursuit of mastery, had no problem taking the lead from him. Ideas bounced around the group and were constantly refined and improved. Tev and Derreck made suggestions, but the weight of improvement was shouldered by the hunters themselves.
After almost an hour of discussion, Tev broke the commanders up. Each of them would spend the afternoon with their lance, practicing and improving upon what had been discussed this morning. It was their new routine, and a demanding one at that. Few of the hunters here had seen much of their clans or families since volunteering.
Unfortunately, the clans and families would have to continue waiting. Tev wouldn’t stop training his hunters until they could defend their planet from the threats from space.
The debriefing done, Tev offered to walk with Derreck back to the Vigilance. Their pace was slow, both of them lost in silent thought. At times, Tev winced as he stepped on an exposed rock or root. He had lost the callouses on his feet in his years in space, the surfaces of Derreck’s world smooth and even. They were growing back, but if his attention wavered, he was liable to step where he would injure himself.
His weak feet were just another reminder of how stranded he felt. As a youth, he had always wanted to explore, his travels often taking him to the edges of the land of his clan. He had so desperately wanted to cross those boundaries, to explore as far as his feet could carry him. Two years ago that desire had come true in the most dramatic fashion, and he had volunteered to go into space. But in space, his attitude had changed. His driving desire became coming home, to walk the well-known paths and feel the familiar surge of excitement as he tracked his prey.
But Lys, the goddess of the hunt, was unkind to him. The world he returned to was different from the one he left. He had been foolish to think nothing would change. Time always pushed forward, and life didn’t pause like one of Kindra’s holodramas. You couldn’t just leave for years and hope to find the story in the same place.
His feet had become soft and nearly useless. Neera married Xan, joining their two clans into one of the strongest the storytellers could remember. The two of them had a child, a young boy who showed all the promise of having two well-regarded parents. Tev wasn’t shunned upon his return, but he wasn’t welcomed either. There was no feast for his return. Shet, Tev’s mentor, was no longer strong, but old and sick.
Tev thought about home and what that idea meant. When he was a boy, home had been the place he wanted to escape from. Home was small and confining, full of rules Tev hadn’t fully understood. In space, on board the Vigilance and its parent jumpship, Destiny, home had always been here, on his home planet among his clan. Home was the place he longed to return to.
He didn’t know what home was anymore. Perhaps it was just a feeling, a sense of security, love, and acceptance. All he knew was that whatever home was, he didn’t have one. He was trapped between two worlds, part of both but welcomed by neither.
They were almost halfway between the hunter’s camp and the dropship when Derreck stopped walking. Tev came to a halt beside him instinctively.
Derreck’s voice broke through his reverie. “How are you doing, Tev?”
Tev turned to look at his captain, a term he didn’t even know two years ago. For others, such a question might simply be a way to start conversation, but that wasn’t how Derreck thought. The captain shunned empty words, so if he asked, it was out of genuine concern.
Tev looked back at the camp they had come from and looked forward to where the dropship stood. Derreck seemed to read the hunter’s thoughts.
“You know you are always welcome on the Vigilance. All of us would love to see more of you.”
Tev shook his head slowly. “I don’t belong there any more than I belong there,” he said as he gestured towards the camp.
He appreciated that Derreck didn’t try to fill the silence with meaningless words. Another man would have protested, would have argued Tev did belong among his crew, but not Derreck. He understood that as welcome as Tev was on the Vigilance, he was still an alien.
Derreck’s voice carried clearly on the afternoon breeze. “Acceptance will take time, Tev. We haven’t been here long, and there’s been a lot of change. Someday there will be a new normal. The process is hard, but life will get better.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The expression on Derreck’s face shifted, and Tev knew the captain had come up with a new thought.
“What if your problem is a matter of perspective? You’re trying to fit into one of two existing groups, but what if you considered it differently? You aren’t an outsider caught between your first home and your second, but instead, you’re the first of a new generation.”
Tev let the idea sink in. He liked how it sounded, but his heart didn’t believe it. He gave Derreck a sad smile, to let him know the effort was appreciated, and together they continued toward the ship.
When they reached the Vigilance, Tev took a moment, as he almost always did, to admire its clean lines. Even after months on the planet, the dropship still seemed so out of place, an alien artifact on an otherwise natural world. But even though the ship’s appearance was unnatural, Tev couldn’t help but be impressed by the design. Derreck’s people were capable of beautiful creations, once one developed an eye for them.
Derreck walked up the cargo ramp into Vigilance’s hold, but Tev didn’t follow. Derreck turned around and looked down at Tev. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“No.” Tev looked back down the hill towards the encampment, where the first sounds of afternoon training could be heard whenever the breeze stilled. “I need to keep practicing, otherwise they’ll be better than me soon.”
Derreck gave a single laugh and turned around, calling behind him as he did. “Fair enough. Don’t be a stranger, though.”
Tev waved and turned back towards the encampment. His statement to Derreck had only been half-true. He did need to practice, but he knew a storm was coming, and his people needed to be ready. He wouldn’t give them a break until they were, and he wouldn’t take one either.