by Natalie Grey
Paladin
The Vigilante Chronicles Book Four
Natalie Grey
Michael Anderle
Paladin (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 © 2018 Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle
Cover by Jeff Brown, http://jeffbrowngraphics.com/
Interior Artwork by Eric Quigley
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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First US edition, July 2018
The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2018 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Author Notes - Natalie Grey
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Books by Natalie Grey
Books by Michael Anderle
Connect with the authors
Paladin Team
Thanks to our JIT Readers
Mary Morris
John Ashmore
Daniel Weigert
James Caplan
Peter Manis
Paul Westman
Micky Cocker
If We’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
Lynne Stiegler
From Natalie
For M and T
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
1
Coyopa had a reputation as a despicable hellhole.
The planet had disappointed nearly every species that had come upon it. At first glance, clear blue waters held a seemingly-endless archipelago of tiny islands, each with white-sand beaches and an assortment of lush green vegetation.
The islands, however, could and often did move with each major storm, so building was next to impossible. The rains were fleeting and unpredictable, and the vegetation that grew so quickly was poisonous to most species.
Every once in a while, some cult or other decided Coyopa would be the site of their idyllic return to nature. Nature promptly ate them and spat out the bones.
The Jotuns, however, loved it. The saltwater was just the right temperature for them, they didn’t need to eat the vegetation, and they had their ships on standby so that they could escape if any particularly bad storms roared through. Plus, they had the amusement of watching the cults fall apart.
Otherwise, hardly anyone ever came there.
When twelve carriers appeared in the skies above Coyopa on a lazy summer day, therefore, it was cause for considerable comment. Procedures were followed. The Jotun Navy was alerted by encrypted message, and satellite trajectories were altered to give the Jotun Coyopan Guard an idea of what they were dealing with.
When the satellites were shot down, one by one, they realized it was time to evacuate. It didn’t matter who they were dealing with; they needed to get out, and get out fast.
Surface cruisers were readied and sent skipping over the water toward each major cluster of islands. Jotun civilians piled into temporary suits and holding tanks that had laid submerged, ready to be lifted into the bellies of the ships.
Jeltor, a member of the Jotun High Command who was presently on vacation with his family, bobbed worriedly in the tank of his loaner suit and wished he had access to the encrypted channels. Who would send carriers to Coyopa, of all places, and why?
An alert message blared through all of the suits: “There is time for one pass of the ship. Tanks 1-8 will be picked up. Tanks 8-16, proceed with all possible speed to the submersible vehicles for evacuation.”
“I don’t like this,” Jeltor’s wife said nervously. At 348, Lillik was old compared to many species, but barely middle-aged for a Jotun. Her body displayed the faint turquoise flush it bore when she was worried. It disappeared when their children clanked over to them in the tent. She didn’t want them to see her fear. “There you two are! Stay close. We’re in one of the tanks that will be evacuated by air.” To Jeltor, she added, “Who would attack this planet? There are no resources here.”
Jeltor said nothing at first. He followed her line of reasoning. Most issues that involved attacks were over things like mines or forests, perhaps plentiful flora or fauna. Coyopa had proved definitively over the years that it had none of those things.
However, Lillik failed to take the next step in her reasoning. If the fleet was not here for resources, why else could it be here?
To make a point. To make a point by killing Jotun citizens.
And while the Jotuns weren’t at war with anyone right now, Jeltor had a pretty good idea who fit the criteria of both having a fleet and wanting to make an example of people.
The Yennai Corporation had been unchallenged in this sector of space for years. They didn’t really have a main industry. They just seemed to show up everywhere. They had their claws into many of the banks, even running a few. For a while, they had owned one of the largest munitions companies in any sector of known space. They traded in information, mercenaries, arms, drugs, slaves…
That was, until a human had taken their main base, killing both heirs to the company in the process. Barnabas had judged both Uleq and Ilia Yennai and sentenced them to death for their misdeeds. Koel Yennai, who had not been on the station, was still free.
Now no one could figure what the Yennai Corporation was up to.
But Jeltor knew that anyone clever enough to build something so far-reaching in the first place had a plan—and he was very afraid that Koel had decided to make an example of Coyopa. After all, the Jotun Navy had helped Barnabas find the Yennai base.
A shadow passed overhead as their evacuation ship slid into place over the open water. Jeltor bobbed nervously in his tank while long arms came down to start lifting tanks into the hold.
Come on, come on, come on…
Other shadows streaked overhead, casting everything into flickering darkness and light, and the distinctive whine of defensive ships sounded as their engines primed for maneuverability in Coyopa’s atmosphere. Jeltor was telling himself that it was just a patrol when one of the first missiles struck the water nearby.
Helpless, Jeltor watched as the shock wave rippled toward them. He grabbed his elder daughter and sh
oved her suit behind his, and Lillik did the same with their younger. It was all they could do. When the shock wave reached the holding tank—
The tank groaned and creaked, and a single crack spiderwebbed along the side of it. The shock wave continued past on both sides of the tank, and Jeltor felt a pang of relief…and fear.
They had survived one blast, but it was unlikely to be the last.
The captain of the rescue ship must have reached the same conclusion. Heedless of protocol, the ship shuddered and began to rise into the air, tanks still hanging from the retractable arms. Unsecured in the tanks, some of them not even in protective suits, the Jotuns cried out.
Their fear doubled when the ship rose high enough for everyone to see the battlefield. The Jotun Coyopa Guard had scrambled every ship available to fight off the enemy, but their efforts were ineffectual. The carriers weren’t descending. They, and what must be destroyers, shot missiles from their position in orbit while smaller ships darted down to harry the Jotun fighters and confuse the antimissile tracking.
As Jeltor watched, one of the antimissile measures streaked into the blue sky and impacted a warhead of some kind. The passengers in the tank cheered, distracted from the fact that they were in an unprotected and swaying tank high above the ocean, and Jeltor didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that what they had seen was a meaningless victory.
Every system here was state of the art, but Coyopa was so small and unimportant that Jotun High Command had never put very much here in the way of defense.
And now they were paying for it.
The rescue ship banked, the tanks creaked, and Jeltor looked up as the ship’s unsecured occupants screamed once again. The tanks were still retracting as fast as they could, but the arms weren’t meant to hold them in mid-air while doing maneuvers.
He counted the seconds as they came closer to the shadowed interior of the ship. The fighters created a barrier from the missiles and smaller Yennai ships for them—it had to be them, because who else would do this?—but it was clear they could only hold on for so long. When the tank at last disappeared into the ship, Jeltor caught a last glimpse of a Jotun pilot spiraling out of control toward the water.
Be safe, he thought, but he knew that pilot was not likely to survive either the impact or the ensuing explosions.
As soon as the tank thunked into place and began to drain, Jeltor opened a channel to his wife and daughters.
“I need to go speak to the captain and offer any help I can. You be safe and strap yourselves in, okay?”
They all nodded, and his wife managed a brave smile for the children. Jeltor felt a surge of love for her as he clanked toward the bridge.
He found the place in disarray. The captain yelled orders, the communications officers calculated whether they should transmit them or pass through the information they were receiving, and a quick glance at the sensor arrays showed that the Guard was in complete disarray.
The captain glanced at Jeltor distractedly. “Who the hell are you?”
“Commander Jeltor Howauc.” Jeltor looked around. “Do you want assistance, captain?”
He tried to be polite. There were few breaches of etiquette more severe than someone throwing a captain off the bridge of their own ship, after all. On the other hand, this captain was clearly outmatched, and Jeltor was worried that years guarding a sleepy vacation resort had dulled the male’s reflexes.
The captain clearly thought the same, because he stepped away from his chair with a little sigh of relief.
“All right, let’s get everything back in progress.” Jeltor swung into position and hooked the loaner suit into the ship’s information feeds. He winced. In his own suit he’d be able to modulate the flow of information better, but in this suit, everything seemed to be echoing around in his head.
He’d manage it. He had to. His children and his wife were in a hold downstairs.
He charted a path through the battlefield and fed it to the other evacuating ships, then studied the arrangement of Yennai battleships, comparing it to theirs.
“This is Commander Howauc of Jotun High Command.” He broadcast the message to all ships. “I am taking command of this portion of the fleet, and I am ordering a retreat. Jose and Nodred, rendezvous at the following coordinates to retrieve submerged evacuation vessels. The rest of the ships—”
The explosion was so bright it washed all the screens out. The electronics on the bridge of the rescue ship flickered, and Jeltor had just enough time to picture the ship tumbling from the sky before everything came back online.
“Gods have mercy,” someone whispered.
Three mushroom clouds climbed into the air from the archipelago, and from the sudden blinking lights on the fleet screen to the side of the room Jeltor knew that the bulk of the ships hadn’t made it out.
He shook even as he ordered that the ship accelerate as fast as it could go. They had to get out of here, and if their opponents had more of those missiles…
“Sir, the enemy ships are disappearing off our sensors,” one of the officers reported. He brought up the display. “Only one is left, and it’s sending a message.”
Jeltor hesitated.
“Bring the message up.”
Koel Yennai’s face appeared on the screens, and Jeltor felt a strange mix of satisfaction and grief. The Torcellan had lost two people, both of them murderers in their own right, and he dared to retaliate by killing thousands of innocent civilians?
When Koel began to speak, his voice was hard and furious.
“We are aware that the Jotun Navy gave assistance to a human operative, enabling him to kill my children. This will be only the first of many attacks on the Jotuns if my demands are not met. First, the Jotun operative who helped the human must be turned over to face the justice of the Yennai Corporation. My second demand—”
“Turn it off,” Jeltor ordered. “Record it, but turn it off. That is for High Command, not for us.”
He fidgeted as the crew obeyed and began their preparations for high-speed travel.
Jeltor told himself that they weren’t staring at him. They didn’t know he was the Jotun operative Koel had spoken of. How could they, after all?
But he knew, and he had never felt guiltier in his life. He had helped persuade the brass to give Barnabas aid, and now their citizens were suffering for it.
Barnabas. He realized with a stab of misery that someone had to tell Barnabas.
2
“Put your hands up. Yes, just like that. Now if I were to punch, you could bat my strike away with one if your arms.” Gar gently pulled Tafa’s arm up to demonstrate. “See?”
Tafa looked dubious. “I don’t know.”
“Of course, you don’t. You haven’t tried it yet.” Gar smiled encouragingly. “Come on. Light on your feet, make sure you use the stance I taught you—yep, that one. Now we start a little bit apart, and…go!”
Tafa skittered sideways and Gar patiently circled opposite her, waiting for her attack.
“He’s good at this,” Barnabas murmured to Shinigami.
“He is.” She nodded.
They sat on the sidelines, a game of chess forgotten between them as they watched Gar teach Tafa how to fight. Today Shinigami was dressed like Bethany Anne on a day off: dark jeans, royal blue Christian Louboutin shoes with their scarlet sole—Barnabas had asked why you would put red on the bottom of shoes and had been roundly told off—and a grey blouse that accentuated the color of her eyes.
Shinigami had been playing around with the avatar she projected into the corridors of the ship. At first her goal had been to make the avatar look as human as possible, complete with tiny mannerisms such as blinking and fidgeting.
Now she was learning to accessorize.
Unconstrained by comfort, any underlying physical appearance of her own, or physics, Shinigami materialized in a variety of different forms and outfits.
Barnabas was still trying to deduce how any of it correlated to her mood.
Right now she appeared to be contemplative, even approving, as she watched Gar and Tafa circle on the mats. Gar had been teaching Tafa how to spar all morning, and despite her complete lack of knowledge and his relative inexperience, he had not once lost his temper. Whenever Tafa made a mistake he went back to square one, telling her where she had gone wrong and how to do things correctly.
Barnabas was impressed. When he had first met Gar, the Luvendi had been determined not to take a single bit of responsibility for his actions. He had blamed the terrible things he did on his employer, and he had run away from Barnabas rather than ask questions.
Only a couple of months later, he had proved himself to be a valuable ally. What he lacked in experience he more than made up for in enthusiasm, and he’d developed the same slightly prickly sense of honor that Barnabas recognized in all his allies.
And in himself.
Really, the worst that could be said of Gar was that he took kung fu movies a bit too seriously.
As they watched, Tafa darted in and landed a flurry of punches on Gar’s arm. She shot away again at high speed as soon as Gar even twitched, and he smiled after her.
“Sometimes it makes sense to retreat before the other person can hit you,” he told her. “Sometimes you want to stay close and take the hit.”