Red Gambit: Book One of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  The space inside was small and unremarkable, a palette of beige tones from floor to ceiling that somehow managed to be both soothing and depressing. The only thing that stood out was the large bulletin board on the wall, overflowing with pinned papers ranging from handwritten notes to honest-to-god wanted posters that looked as if they’d come straight from the rootin’-tootin’ Wild West.

  She tensed as a door sprang open at the back of the room.

  “Honey, I’m home!” Jarek called.

  The man who stepped into the room was a dead ringer for Albert Einstein’s evil twin gone mad scientist (and starting to bald).

  “And I see you’ve brought guests.” The man’s eyes scanned her and Michael briefly before fixating on her staff.

  “Long story.” Jarek cocked his head. “Okay, maybe not so long. Mostly, lots of asses pulled out of lots of fires—some nicer than others.”

  “The asses or the fires?” the older man asked, still studying her staff.

  Jarek gave a bark of laughter. “Pryce, you old rascal, you!”

  She cleared her throat.

  “Ah, right,” Jarek said. “Guys, this is Jay Pryce, tinkerer extraordinaire. Pryce, this is Michael and Rachel.”

  “Utterly intrigued, I am sure,” Pryce said, stepping forward to offer his hand.

  “Uh, thanks?” She slowly reached out to take his hand.

  Pryce didn’t really shake her hand so much as hold it up for closer inspection. His curious eyes flicked back and forth between her hand and her staff. This guy’s wheels were definitely turning. Did he know about arcanists too?

  Jarek rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to excuse Pryce. He thinks he’s a scientist or something.”

  “Sorry.” Pryce released her hand with a guilty grin. “It’s nice to meet you.” He offered his hand to Michael. “Both of you. I’ve heard your name mentioned more than a few times, Mr. Carver.”

  Michael took his hand, and they exchanged a more conventional handshake.

  Pryce looked back to Jarek. “So, the Red nation is combing the city for you.”

  “You already heard about it?” Jarek said.

  “No …” Pryce stroked his chin. His eyes flicked over her and Michael once more. “But I don’t see how they couldn’t be, considering that you were clearly there and now you’re here. So. You come to grab your things, or is there some other wonderful reason you decided to pay me a visit with an angry army on your back?”

  Jarek grinned and offered Pryce his submachine gun. “Don’t pretend like you don’t love it. Where else could you find this kind of excitement?”

  Pryce snatched the weapon from Jarek and studied it dubiously. “Oh, the glory.”

  She couldn’t quite place a finger on what the relationship was between these two. It was almost like father-son but without the responsibility or obligation. Whatever Pryce might be to Jarek, she just hoped he had food and maybe a soft place to lie down for a few hours.

  Jarek seemed to be stalling. “Well, I guess if you’ll bring my comm, I can just call the ship in and we can, you know, be on our way, or …”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Pryce pulled a comm and an earpiece from one of the many pockets of his tool-laden shop apron and handed them to Jarek. “Any luck finding our girl, by the way?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Jarek slipped on the comm and popped in the earpiece, then clapped Michael on one shoulder. “I held up my end of the deal.”

  Rachel’s stomach fell. “What deal?” She looked at Michael. “What did you promise him?”

  Michael shifted. “I think I know how to find—”

  “Think?” Jarek said.

  Michael pursed his lips. “I know how to find something that belongs to him.”

  She stared and waited for more. None came. “Aaand what the hell is this ‘something’ that you’re willing to sign up with this … person over?”

  Jarek touched a hand to his chest as if mortally offended. She wasn’t amused. If Michael was indebted to this asshole, that could make their return to Unity more difficult.

  “Jarek lost his exosuit,” Michael said. “Hux and I found it when we, uh, knocked over a shipment from the Reds to the Overlord.” A shadow crossed his face. “Hux stashed what we found in his safe place before … before they found him.”

  Her apprehension bled away at the grief on his face. She’d never met Michael’s mentor, but she knew he’d looked up to Huxley with fierce respect, and they’d been friends as well.

  “Sorry, man,” Jarek said. “You two were pretty close, I take it.”

  She was almost surprised to see what looked like genuine sympathy on Jarek’s face. Maybe he wasn’t utterly heartless.

  Michael nodded, then gave a little shrug. “Nothing to do now but make sure it wasn’t for nothing.”

  Jarek clapped a hand on Michael’s other shoulder. “Hallelujah, man. Let’s get cracking on finding this safe place, then.”

  “I suppose you could all stand to sit down and breathe for a minute or two,” Pryce said. “I can’t help but notice you could all benefit from medical treatment.”

  That brought the pulsing ache of her bullet-grazed shoulder back to the forefront. It wasn’t bad, but it could certainly use cleaning and dressing.

  “A drink might not hurt either,” Jarek said.

  “A medical professional might feel otherwise,” Pryce said.

  “Guess it’s good you’re just a crazy old geezer, then.”

  She looked away to stifle a smile as the two shared a fit of amused chuffing. Grown-ass man-children though they might be, even after the night they’d had, there was something mildly charismatic about Jarek and Pryce.

  “Well, c’mon back then.” Pryce turned to stroll to the back of the room.

  Jarek hesitated. “You’re sure? We do have some serious heat on us.”

  “Sure, sure. Where else am I gonna find this kind of excitement?”

  Jarek gestured for her and Michael to go first, mumbling something about crazy old bastards.

  Michael followed Pryce, and she and Jarek fell in behind. When they reached the door, each paused to see who would go first. Then they both did, shouldering into one another with almost perfect synchrony.

  She scowled at him. He stepped back and offered the right of way with a dramatic bow.

  “Sexist,” she grumbled.

  He winked at her.

  She rolled her eyes and stepped through the door into a workspace that was much larger than the front room and chock-full of all kinds of stuff. That was the best word for it: stuff.

  An astounding variety of tools decorated the wall over a large, L-shaped work bench. Across the room, several metal shelves hosted an eclectic assortment of items including electronics, garden fertilizers, blocks and bars of different metals, and various other raw materials. Behind the shelves, another long bench housed a grab bag of lab equipment: scales, glassware, a microscope, and a few other machines she wasn’t sure about.

  Pryce strolled past two large tables in the center of the room that were heavily laden with more stuff to a dark, tightly winding spiral staircase in the far corner. “Upstairs?”

  “Perfect,” Jarek said behind her. “As long as there’s—wait, what?”

  She turned. He was touching his earpiece, his brow deeply furrowed.

  “Patch it through,” he said.

  His eyes darted back and forth, focused somewhere far away as if he were reading text that wasn’t there. After a moment, he seemed to remember the rest of them.

  “Local broadcast,” he explained.

  He reached down to touch his comm. A crackling voice filled the shop.

  “—as gone on long enough.”

  Despite the crackle in the line, she recognized the voice. She’d only heard him speak four words that night, but they’d stuck with her, right in the place where all of her darkest nightmare material hung around.

  The Red King.

  “You have twenty-four hours to
return the nest,” he continued, “at which point we will grant you amnesty and allow you to leave the city. Refuse this offer, and you will be opening the world to horrors like it has never known before. You have no idea the power you meddle with. Twenty-four hours. Do not make us find you.”

  With that, the line went silent. The silence lingered as they traded looks and tried to puzzle out what exactly they’d just heard.

  “Say, Mikey,” Jarek finally said. “I’m thinking now might be a swell time for you to tell us what the hell it is you stole from the Reds.”

  Ten

  “Here’s the thing,” Michael began.

  Jarek braced himself. Here it was. Good news never started with “here’s the thing.” What if Michael couldn’t really get him to Fela? What if he’d busted his ass and brought the entire Red army down on his own head for nothing?

  He let out a breath, leaned back into the soft armchair, and found a practiced semblance of relaxation as Michael continued.

  “We’re not really sure what we found.”

  “The nest, apparently,” Al said in his ear.

  “The nest, apparently,” Pryce unknowingly echoed from the small kitchen space that adjoined his cozy but perfectly adequate living quarters, where they’d decided to hold council once he’d seen to their wounds.

  Jarek stifled a smile. It was good to have Al back, even if he and Pryce were redundant at times. Being without Al for any amount of time always felt wrong after all these years, as if he’d left a physical part of himself behind.

  He took a long sip of whiskey. The liquid fire passed down his throat, leaving behind tingles that spoke of spices and cherries. He watched Michael over on the couch next to Rachel, waiting for him to get to the point.

  “Honestly,” Michael said, “it was kind of dumb luck that we stumbled onto the thing at all.”

  Jarek sipped the delicious whiskey again and rolled a hand in a let’s hurry it up motion.

  “So what exactly did you find?” Pryce said. “Other than Fela, that is.”

  “There were some munitions and other supplies,” Michael said, “but the main thing—the thing I assume the King was calling the nest—was a, well, some kind of device. It looked kind of like a giant metal egg standing on its base, almost as tall as me. At first I thought it was just a weird statue or something. It didn’t have controls or anything like that.”

  “But?” Pryce said.

  “But when I touched it, I felt something. There was this low buzz, like the thing was on or using power or something. But there was something else too. It was like”—he frowned, scratching at his dark bush of hair—“like the thing was trying to communicate. Like it was partially conscious or something. I don’t know. I just know that it felt powerful and that the Overlord wanted the thing in his possession. Badly.”

  Rachel frowned at Michael. “Do you think it was trying to reach you telepathically? The way I used to try?”

  Michael considered. “I guess it kind of reminded me of that. But my glyphs would’ve stopped that kind of thing cold, right?”

  Jarek ran a hand through the back of his hair and tapped his foot on the ground, resisting the urge to tell him to hurry the hell up and tell him what any of this had to do with Fela.

  “I don’t like the sound of this, Michael,” Rachel said.

  “And how, I wonder, would such a device ‘open the world to horrors it’s never known before?’” Al said quietly in his earpiece.

  That was a good question, but not quite as good as where Fela was and how he was supposed to get her back.

  He polished off his whiskey and reached for the bottle. On the couch across from him, Rachel took a sip of her own whiskey, wrinkled up her face, and failed to suppress a small cough. He grinned. Michael shot a frown her way.

  “Right, then.” He leaned back with a fresh glass and propped his feet up on the worn wooden coffee table between them. “Giant, mind-bending metal egg thing. Fascinating stuff.”

  “Eloquently said, sir,” Al said.

  He ignored Al. “Now why the hell is the Red King threatening us with doomsday over this thing, and, more importantly, what does any of this have to do with my suit?”

  Michael fixed him with a serious look. “I have no idea what he meant by that, but this could be big, Jarek. Bigger than you or Fela. We’re talking about potentially stopping the raknoth here. About getting this world back on track. Can’t you see that?”

  “You know,” Jarek said, “I’ve probably heard people make claims like that a dozen different times now. It’s always something big, always the turning point you’ve all been waiting for. It’s bullshit, Mikey. You’re sitting on a giant egg. That’s it. You have no idea why they want it. And even if you were right and this was the time for us to all hold dicks together and fight the raknoth, you know I’d be a hundred times more useful to everyone if I had Fela. So before we get high on dreams of saving the world, first things first: where’s my suit?”

  Michael shifted in his seat. “Like I said, I don’t know, exactly.”

  “Right. But I take it you know who does.”

  “I do.” Michael took a deep breath and let it out before finally meeting Jarek’s gaze. “But it’s Alaric Weston.”

  “What?”

  That wasn’t good. That was the opposite of good. The man who knew how to find Fela just so happened to be a legend who’d disappeared like a ghost years ago. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Fuck. Fuck!”

  “Not good,” Al agreed in his ear.

  Pryce placed a food-laden tray on the table and sat in his own armchair beside Jarek. “Did you say Alaric Weston?”

  “That can’t be your only lead,” Jarek said.

  Michael looked down at the thick white carpet between them, his expression that of a dog who’d just crapped on said carpet.

  “Who’s Alaric Weston?” Rachel asked.

  “He’s kind of the father of the Resistance,” Michael said, not looking up.

  “The absentee father,” Jarek said. “Who hasn’t been seen or heard from for at least, what?”

  “Five years,” Pryce said. He took a sip of his own whiskey and calmly began to assemble a sandwich from the tomatoes and cheese and homemade bread on the platter in front of them.

  “Five years!” Jarek set his whiskey to the side and leaned in to follow Pryce’s lead. He’d been content enough to enjoy the sweet fire of Pryce’s homemade whiskey as he waited, but now that the scent of fresh-baked bread was hitting him full blast, he was ready to eat. Busting out of fortresses was hungry work, it seemed, because the others quickly followed suit.

  “I have to say, Mikey,” Jarek said around a bite, “I really hope the next seven words out of your mouth are, ‘I know where Alaric Weston is.’”

  “That’s six words, sir,” Al said in his ear.

  He paused and began counting off on his fingers. “Jarek. I know where Alaric Weston is, Jarek. Make my day, Mikey.”

  “I know where Alaric Weston is,” Pryce said. He took a bite of his sandwich and shrugged. “Or where he went, at least.”

  That came as a surprise. Jarek knew Pryce had been acquainted with Weston on some level, but he was pretty sure they weren’t pen pals these days. And of course, Pryce just had to milk his delicious intel for all it was worth.

  “Thanks for speaking up sooner, ya old goat,” he said. “So where’d the big bad rebel go?”

  Michael leaned forward. “Resistance intel—”

  Jarek snorted.

  “—puts him in Deadwood.”

  “South Dakota,” Pryce said at Jarek’s questioning look. “That would be my strong guess too, but I don’t think finding him’s the real problem. It’s getting him to come back here that’s going to be the hard part.”

  He didn’t know much about Weston’s disappearance save that the guy had bailed after his role in the Resistance had gotten his family killed. Jarek could fly to South Dakota hi
mself, no problem. But opening this particular can of worms?

  There had to be another way.

  “Are you sure we really need Weston to find this place?”

  “That’s what Hux told me before he …” Michael’s eyebrows knitted together. “He said Alaric was the only other person who knew. He was going to show me the place someday, but that’s …” He sighed. “Yeah. Weston’s our best bet.”

  “And we’re sure Al can’t get a fix on Fela?” Pryce said. “Even knowing she’s probably somewhere in the city?”

  “No dice,” Jarek said. “Believe me, we’ve tried, and—oh, come on, Al.” He rolled his eyes at the confused looks Michael and Rachel were shooting him over their sandwiches. “Might as well say hi.”

  Al’s voice came out of the comm’s external speaker now. “Um, right. Hello! I’m Al.”

  “Hi,” Rachel said, her eyes shifting back and forth uncertainly.

  Michael stared at the comm. “Is that …”

  “My robot sidekick, yep,” Jarek said. “Moving on: Al’s done his best, but Hux must’ve shielded this safe place of his, because we’ve got nothing. Al’s also …”

  He actually felt bad saying it. Despite what the few who knew about him might’ve thought, Al had feelings too—real feelings.

  “ … not at my best, sir,” Al said. “Not running on this confounded ship’s computer.”

  “He almost crashed the ship a few weeks ago,” Jarek said.

  “The computer?” Pryce said. “Or the actual ship?”

  “Well, you know, when one goes …”

  Al sniffed. “It’s a rubbish computer, sir! I’ve no space to stretch my legs in here.”

  “I agree,” Jarek said. “Which leads us back to needing Fela.”

  “Well that’s a fine pickle, then.” Pryce tucked the last bite of his sandwich away.

  Michael and Rachel were still staring at Jarek’s comm.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “You’re telling me this Al guy is, like—”

  “An artificial intelligence construct, if you please,” Al said, “though ‘Al’ will do fine. Alfred, actually, is the name.”

  “I’d heard rumors you had some kind of lost-gen AI riding around in that exo,” Michael said, “but I didn’t know—wow, man.”