Red Gambit: Book One of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “So what are you gonna do if they try to get stingy about handing over your suit?” she asked.

  He glanced in the direction of the council room, as if he could see right through the walls. “I’ll figure something out. These boners aren’t just gonna keep Fela for their own. She’s—”

  He paused, frowning down at his comm. “… mine …”

  His expression went flat.

  “What is it?”

  He looked up, his face a little pale and his expression more uncertain than she’d ever seen it.

  “It’s Pryce.”

  Twenty-One

  Jarek couldn’t think of a time he’d been more afraid to press a button.

  Part of him (and not a small part) had begun wrapping itself around the idea that Pryce was gone. It was easier that way. But now here his comm was, buzzing with the dead man’s call. So maybe he was okay. Maybe he’d managed to give the Reds the slip.

  While holding onto his life and his comm in the process?

  Not probable. The more likely scenario was that the Reds had held Pryce to use as bait in case Jarek and the others managed to slip Mosen’s team. And the Red King would know by now that they had.

  Of course, there was one easy way to find out. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter; if Pryce was alive, he was going after him, trap or no.

  He gritted his teeth and reached for the Accept button. Rachel watched from the other bed, looking almost as tense as he felt.

  The holo sprang up between them to reveal Pryce seated in a worn armchair. Jarek registered that he was looking at Pryce’s home. Pryce sported a few bruises, a patch of his shirt was stained with blood, and he looked sullen as all hell, but he was alive. As far as Jarek could tell, he wasn’t terribly injured.

  Jarek sat stunned silent by the warm relief that poured through him, so strong for a moment that he thought it might lift him straight up from the bed and have him bouncing on his toes. Quickly enough, though, the sensation gave way to the uneasiness tugging at his guts.

  He bit down the urge to start crying things like “Pryce! Are you all right?”

  Something wasn’t right. The way Pryce was sitting, the angle of his camera that clearly indicated his comm wasn’t on his wrist, the somehow intensely neutral look on his face … Someone was there with him. Three guesses who.

  “You look like crap, old man.”

  Pryce flicked an eyebrow. “You should see the other guy.”

  Before he’d even finished, the image in the holo whirled as someone moved Pryce’s comm. The image settled on the face of a man with sandy blond hair and a strong jawline. He might’ve been in his late forties, but Jarek had a feeling he wasn’t. He recognized the face. He’d seen it just last night. Only then, the irises hadn’t been pale blue. In fact, there hadn’t even been irises.

  “Your Highness,” he said.

  “Jarek Slater.” The Red King’s voice was less raspy than the last time he’d heard it. “I will make this simple. You give me back the nest, and I will give you Jay Pryce, alive and unharmed.”

  He thought about bullshitting the raknoth, but what good ever came of that? If this was going to be a hostage situation, what he needed was to make sure they’d actually bring Pryce to whatever meeting they arranged.

  “I need Pryce by my side before I give you a location.”

  “The exchange will happen at the location, once the presence of the nest is confirmed.”

  He wasn’t sure he particularly cared about what happened to this nest thing everyone was raving about, but he wouldn’t be able to find the damn thing either way without Alaric’s help. Bursting into their little Command meeting to borrow Alaric and go turn over the potentially uber-dangerous alien toy probably wasn’t going to fly.

  They should have gone straight to grab Fela when they’d had the chance. Without her, he didn’t stand a chance against the Red King. He was sure of that. But with Fela, and maybe with Rachel’s help, they might just be able to save Pryce and eliminate one of the Resistance’s most powerful enemies at the same time. Everyone could win.

  All he needed was enough time to get Fela back.

  “What if I don’t have the location?” he said.

  The raknoth’s eyes pulsed with a menacing scarlet glow. “Then you must get Weston to talk, if you want to save your friend’s life.”

  The King passed off the comm to a new cameraman and strode around to stand behind Pryce with ominous intent. Pryce tensed as the King placed a hand lightly on his head.

  “Hey—”

  “You have one hour.” The King said. Then he struck at the side of Pryce’s neck like a viper. He sank his teeth in, eyes coming alive with crimson fire as darker red pooled around his mouth and dripped down Pryce’s neck.

  Pryce gave a faint cry of pain and surprise but quickly grew subdued, even languid, as if the bite had some narcotic effect. The King continued lapping up his blood like a thirsty dog.

  “Stop,” Jarek said through gritted teeth. “Stop!”

  The King took a few more slurps of blood, then parted from Pryce’s neck to shoot Jarek a serious look.

  “One hour, Jarek Slater.”

  The call ended.

  Jarek held the icy hand of panic at bay long enough to set a timer on his comm. Then he squeezed his hands into fists and slammed them down on the bed.

  “Dammit!”

  He bounced to his feet and began pacing back and forth.

  What the hell was he going to do?

  The image of that sick bastard drinking Pryce’s blood hovered in his mind, pushing out all attempts at productive thought.

  “Focus, sir,” Al said quietly in his ear. “Deep breath.”

  Jarek suppressed the urge to tell him to take a deep breath of his ass. Al was right. Pryce needed him.

  Think.

  The Resistance wouldn’t care about Pryce, certainly not enough to risk losing this allegedly world-endangering artifact. Asking them to make an honest deal with the Red King was off the table.

  But getting them to back his reclaiming Fela so he could go kill one of their biggest problems dead? He might sell them on that one.

  He turned to Rachel. “I need Fela. And, uh …”

  Just say the words, you pansy.

  He held out a hand. “And I need help, Rachel. I can’t—”

  She clapped her hand to his forearm, then looked up at him expectantly. “Go on. Don’t let me stop you there.”

  “—can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when I …”

  Her brow arched.

  “Fine.” He pulled her to her feet so that they were less than a foot apart. “I can’t do this without you.”

  She looked up at him, searching his face, leaning in almost imperceptibly. His mind went momentarily blank, his chest fluttering in a way he’d nearly forgotten it could.

  Then she reached up and thwapped him on the forehead with a flick of her finger.

  “Ow!”

  She pushed past him and grabbed her staff from where it leaned against the wall. “Let’s go, dude!”

  He touched his forehead. What the hell had just happened? A glance at his comm timer reminded him that the answer to that question mattered about zero percent right now.

  He slung his sword over his shoulder just as Michael opened the door, looking frustrated.

  They all exchanged a look and then, at almost exactly the same time, all said, “What happened?”

  He pushed ahead. “Pryce is alive. The Red King has him over at the shop. Get me to Fela right now, and there might be a raknoth head in it for the Resistance.”

  “Oh,” Michael said, his eyes wide. “Oh, Jesus—okay.” He licked his lips, glancing between Jarek and Rachel and slowly nodding to himself. “Okay, well, the commanders want to move on Hux’s safe right away anyways, but …” His mouth drew into a tight line, and he looked down. “Shit.”

  The word sounded foreign coming out of Michael’s mouth, but it wasn’t the light profanity Jar
ek cared about. Something was up.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  Michael glanced at her, then, seemingly with great effort, turned his gaze to meet Jarek’s eyes. “I need to show you something. Alone.”

  Rachel scowled at them. “Screw that.”

  “Now’s not really the time, Mikey,” he agreed. “We have less than an hour.”

  Michael directed a sobering look at each of them. “Please. It’s important, I promise.”

  “I think you should see what he wants, sir,” Al said quietly in his ear.

  A look with Rachel told him they were equally taken aback by Michael’s odd behavior. “Go find Alaric?” he asked Rachel.

  After a slight hesitation, she nodded.

  He turned back to Michael. “Two minutes, Mikey. Make it snappy.”

  They split in the hallway outside, Rachel turning back the way they’d came as Michael guided him left and then right at the end of the hall.

  “So what’s the deal?” Jarek asked quietly as they moved down the empty cinder-block hallway at a brisk pace.

  Michael didn’t meet Jarek’s eye. “I might have screwed up.”

  An uneasy feeling tugged at his stomach. “You might have to be a bit more specific, buddy. What’s going on? Out with it.”

  “I …” Michael shook his head. “Easier to just show you.”

  A minute later, Michael guided them into an antechamber that led to heavy vault door. The tiny room was similar to the others throughout HQ and empty but for the guard who sat behind a small desk, staring at his tablet.

  The guard frowned at them with a bulldog face as they entered, then nodded at Michael. “Carver. Glad to see you made it out alive.” He turned his bulldog stare to Jarek and added, “Who’s he?” in a way that strongly implied an unspoken, And what the fuck is he doing here?

  “New recruit,” Michael said. “Apparently, he might be able to work with that exo we found a few weeks back.”

  Jarek had taken punches to the head that left him less stunned than Michael’s words.

  “I didn’t hear about this from Command,” the bulldog said. His frown deepened as he glanced down at his tablet then back up at Jarek. “And it’s the middle of the night, man.”

  Michael shrugged. “Orders.” He crossed to the keypad by the heavy door.

  Could Fela really be in there? Had Michael been lying to him this entire time?

  The beginnings of anger licked at the base of Jarek’s stupefied mind.

  “Hey, hold up a second.” The bulldog stood up and moved toward Michael.

  Michael spun around counterclockwise and shoved the guy into the wall. The bulldog’s eyes went wide, but Michael was already pulling the stun gun from the guy’s belt and turning it against him.

  The bulldog made a couple of jerking grunts and slid limply down the wall. Once his bulk was resting on the concrete floor, Michael pulled the comm from his wrist and turned back to the door’s access panel.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  An odd combination of brewing anger and hopeful excitement swirled in his chest as Michael swiped the comm over the panel and tapped in a string of numbers.

  By way of reply, Michael pressed the Enter key and stepped aside. The panel’s LED flashed green, and the door unlocked with a series of heavy clicks.

  Jarek stepped numbly to the door and peered through.

  Fela. Finally.

  He crossed the room in a stupor and put a hand on the flimsy cage that contained her—a Faraday cage, he took it. That probably explained why Al (ship Al, that is) hadn’t been able to get a fix on her all this time—that and the fact that her power pack had been removed. He spotted it on the nearby table beside the scattered assortment of explosives, heavy weapons, and other rare gadgets they kept in the vault.

  The dark gray exosuit was deactivated, collapsed down into compact form in the cage, just waiting for someone to come power her up. Waiting for him.

  And she’d been here this entire time.

  He turned slowly to face Michael. He’d risked his ass to free Michael from the Fortress. He’d nearly lost his life twice more running around the country on Michael’s damn quest.

  And his suit had been here within easy reach throughout all of it.

  “You lied to me.”

  Somehow, those four words seemed to express every violent thought that was coursing through his mind.

  Michael certainly cringed enough to think that was so. “Hux and I found it a few weeks ago. And once you showed up at the Fortress, I thought if I could just get you to … It doesn’t matter. I was wrong. And now they’re talking about keeping it until they can get past Al and put one of their own—our own—people in the driver’s seat. I’m sorry, Jar—”

  Scarlet lightning crackled through his brain. The next thing he knew, the knuckles of his right hand were pulsing with pain, and Michael was lying in an incoherent heap on the floor.

  He clamped his right hand over his mouth, clenching his jaw and squeezing until the pain grew strong enough to pierce the numb haze that clogged his mind. His eyes were moist with unspilled tears. The anger came flowing back in, calmer and more controlled, but hot and bitter nonetheless.

  “Sir,” Al said quietly in his ear, “is it …”

  “It’s her, Al. We’ve got our girl back.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Al should’ve been excited. Just like Jarek should’ve been. But he was too angry to be excited.

  He’d been stupid. Worse, he’d been naive. He’d broken the goddamn golden rule: don’t trust anyone but Al and Pryce. That was it. If they were a living human and their name wasn’t Jay Pryce, you didn’t trust them. Because if you did, bad things happened. Every. Damn. Time.

  Simple enough.

  You sure as hell didn’t let yourself think that maybe, just maybe, these Resistance a-holes weren’t so bad just because you were chumming it up with a few people close to them.

  “Dammit!” He kicked at the Faraday cage.

  He grabbed at the cage and gave a few yanks. Maybe it wasn’t so flimsy after all. It was, however, bottomless and not fixed to the ground, probably because it had been meant to shield Fela from outside signals, not to keep her locked up. That was what the vault door had been for.

  He could tip the cage, but it’d be noisy if he wasn’t careful.

  Fuck it. Let them try to stop him.

  He bent down, grabbed the mesh, and heaved upward. The cage was heavier than it looked, but he cast it over with a wordless cry. It hit the floor in a jostling crash, freeing Fela’s collapsed form.

  He grabbed the power pack from the table and crouched behind the suit to pry out the manual release lever and open the housing. He slid the power pack home, closed the small hatch, and began stripping off his weapons and clothes.

  “Sir!” Al cried from Fela’s external speakers as she rebooted from hibernation.

  Relief sped his fingers over the last fastenings of his clothes. “Hey, buddy.”

  “I’ll begin synchronizing my data with Fela’s storage momentarily,” said the Al that was still aboard the ship’s computer.

  He stepped into the collapsed suit’s open boots and quivered as Fela responded to his presence. She began folding up around him, wrapping him in her armored embrace. The sensation of the smooth, flesh-like polymer membrane closing in on his skin was like coming home after far too long on the road—familiar, comfortable, and, above all, safe.

  Michael shifted on the floor, mumbled something incoherent, and then lay still again.

  He buckled on his gun belt and sword. “You had your shot, Mikey.”

  Thanks to Fela’s auditory sensors, he heard the Resistance agent step into the antechamber outside well before the man’s startled intake of breath.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” the agent whispered outside.

  “Sir,” Al said, through the earpiece in his helmet this time, “what the hell is going on here?”

  With a delibera
te thought, he slid the helmet faceplate closed and brought the display to life. The feed from his comm timer ticked away in the lower left corner.

  “Oh, you know, Al.” He grabbed the hefty sword he used with Fela from the nearby rack and clipped the sheath to the connectors Pryce had installed on Fela’s back. “Burning bridges. Saving Pryce.” He clenched his fists, relishing the power at his fingertips. “Just another day at the office.”

  The one bright side to this betrayal was that he had plenty of time left on the Red King’s one-hour deadline.

  In the corner of the room, an orange alarm light flashed to life, accompanied by a quiet but irritating rhythmic buzzing tone.

  Plenty of time. Sure.

  Twenty-Two

  Rachel was urgently explaining Pryce’s predicament to Alaric outside the council room’s double doors when the orange strobes and the annoying, buzzing alarm began. At the end of the hallway, a few men trotted through the common room, sidearms drawn. Further off, someone was shouting something.

  She had a bad feeling whatever was going on had something to do with Jarek and Michael’s mysterious disappearance.

  Before she could say anything to Alaric, one of the double doors pushed open. The slightly paunchy but solid-looking man Alaric had identified as Commander John Nelken emerged. Nelken had a hard face and an ex-military air about him. He’d clearly been as pleased as a cat on bath day when she’d interrupted their meeting to speak with Alaric.

  For a second, Nelken looked confused himself. Then a gunshot from the direction she’d seen those men running snapped all three of them into action. Alaric’s revolver appeared in his hand, and Nelken turned to call something to his fellow commanders back in the chamber.

  She set off for the common room at a jog. As she entered, shouts echoed from the hall to her left. Three more Resistance men with shotguns came storming out of a room further down the hall and barreled off in the direction of the sounds.

  Before they reached the end of the hall, a man-shaped form blurred around the corner, moving far too fast to control its turn. Instead, the thing leaped up and reoriented in midair so that its feet touched down on the wall. Its legs continued pumping without missing a beat. It skittered along the wall a few steps before launching itself at the foremost of the men running toward it.