by Hal Archer
He heard a whirring sound overhead and looked up. He let his eyes adjust for a second to peer into the long shadow from the building on his right to the one on his left. Once they did, he spotted the source of the noise. Forty feet off the ground hovered a drone. It was about the size of his hand. He figured it had at least six blades. They were spinning too fast to see them clearly, but he could see the black lines of the framework that extended out to six points. He caught a reflection from what he figured to be a lens suspended below the center of the craft. He watched the drone, and it seemed to be watching him.
He stood for several seconds, waiting it out. The drone stayed above him. He placed his hand on his blaster. The drone lifted higher. Then it flew off around the side of the building.
A guy can't walk dark alleys in a crime-infested city without being spied on. What's the galaxy coming to?
FORCED VENGEANCE, CHAPTER THREE
T iffin sat against the wall of the long-vacated room on the twenty-sixth floor of a mixed-use tower. The bottom two floors were various stores, some open, some shuttered, all the open stores selling stuff below and in some cases over the counter that would have the owners locked up, or worse in any other place. Above those, a storage company took up the next ten floors. Half the remaining floors were rental units, living quarters mostly, but a few offices as well. The apartment she was in, along with the rest of the floor, hadn't been officially occupied in over a year.
She wasn't the only squatter on the floor. Three other people each claimed one of the two-room apartments, but all of them took a corner unit. They had an unspoken agreement to keep to their own part of the building, each separated by six similar apartments.
Hers was the best unit on the floor. Most of the wall dividing her two rooms was already collapsed when she laid claim to the space six months ago. She knocked the rest of the framing and panels down her first week there. The open space was more to her liking, and she liked the cross breeze it created. She had grown quite fond of the large room. Much better than huddling behind a dumpster in an alley. The room only had two windows busted out, one on each outside wall. With just one floor above her and no adjacent buildings quite as tall, she had a penthouse view of the grimy city she'd known since birth.
The wind blew in through the south-facing broken window and out the west-facing one constantly, but she had grown used to it. North had been fixed to City Hall when Eon outgrew its trading post status and became a city. She slept near one of the interior walls to avoid the gray polluted mist she and most city-dwellers called rain. Her bed was the tattered couch she'd pulled from behind her former residence, a dumpster five blocks away. It was a bitch hauling it up the stairwells, took her two days. It was worth it, though. All the springs had worn out in just the right places. She couldn't sleep on anything else now. She knew that meant she was spoiled, but hey, if she didn't look out for herself, who would, she thought.
She maneuvered the two joysticks on the controller to her favorite drone, Birdy. Watching the view Birdy's cameras beamed to the screen on her controller, she guided the craft away from the stranger below it. She flew it higher and then around the corner of her building.
She looked up from the screen of the controller in her lap, her legs stretched out in front of her on the floor. She wore long green shorts with cargo pockets on the thighs. She had her ankles crossed, one clunky brown lace-up boot resting across the other. Peering over the tips of her boots, she spotted her drone outside the glassless window. She moved the toggle stick on the controller box and Birdy flew into the room, settling to a hover a few feet in front of her.
She heard the patter of tiny feet to her right. "Oh, did that startle you, Squeakers?" She looked over at the mouse peering out a hole at the end of a doubled-over scrap of carpet on the floor. Leaving the drone controller on her lap, she reached into the pocket of the tan vest she wore over her brown t-shirt and pulled out a tiny chunk of cheese. "Here ya go." She tossed it across the room toward the mouse. The crumb settled a few inches in front of the loose carpet. Squeakers twitched his nose. He scampered out of his hiding spot and plucked the cheese from the ground before scurrying back under the carpet. She watched him nibble the morsel. Then she took another piece from her shirt pocket and popped it into her mouth. She rolled it around with her tongue for a moment before chomping it up and swallowing it. "You're right. Not bad."
She glanced around the room, taking a second to admire the torn poster tacked into the crumbling plaster on the wall to her left. It was an advertisement for some place called Erith. She liked the picture, even if she had no idea where Erith was. There were oversized greeners, more than a hundred, she figured. They weren't the two-foot-high ones that grew in the air-making factories. They were so much bigger. She knew the picture was probably a fake. No place made greeners that size. Still, she thought, wouldn't it be cool if they weren't fake. What if she could go there someday? What if she could actually leave Eon, she thought. Deep down she knew she'd never see it. She knew it wasn't possible. She was born on Eon and would die on Eon. But looking at the image, she often allowed herself to imagine she had plans to go there soon.
"I'll take you too, Squeakers. I'm sure there's lots of cheese."
She drew in a deep breath and sighed. "Right. Let's see what else is going on out there today."
She placed her thumbs onto the two toggle sticks on her drone controller and flew Birdy back out the south-facing window.
The sky was dim, most of the light came from signage on hers and the other buildings, but much farther down than her floor. The other glow, the sky glow as she knew it, shone from halfway across the city, an area she'd only been to a few times. The glow was always in the sky, but it didn't do much to light up her neighborhood.
She guided Birdy by the view on her controller's screen. She knew the neighborhood well. She could've flown the drone around every building within ten blocks without more than an occasional glance at the screen. But she watched the image Birdy's camera sent back.
Scouting—knowing what's going on in the streets and alleys below—is how she stayed alive on her own for as long as she could remember. She did it on foot, or hands and knees really, hiding and scampering like Squeakers until she was nine.
That's when she ran into a lady she came to call Nan. She spent six months living with her. She liked it. She'd heard about family. It was good while it lasted. Nan showed her how to take things apart and how to make things. She got good at turning scraps and broken bits into gadgets and tools. That's what Nan did. They had a lot of fun creating gizmos and mechanical tricks.
One night Nan went out looking for scraps. She told Tiffin she was going to bring her some good parts, and they'd make something great together. Tiffin waited three days before she realized Nan wasn't coming back. The next week, after she'd gathered up the best bits and scraps from the small place Nan rented in a line of two-story buildings made into apartments, Tiffin moved out and went looking for her own place. That was eight years ago.
She flew Birdy along the street that ran in front of her building, and down past the next four buildings. Then she backtracked, guiding the drone past her place again and the street the other direction, about the same distance. Nothing looked out of place. Dozens of people, this race and that. Scaled. Hairy. Tall. Short. Four arms. Two arms. Making deals. Heading places. Causing trouble, but not enough to draw the attention of the checkered hats. The usual traffic, she decided.
"Let's check on that alley guy, Squeakers."
She ran the controls with an effortless touch, guiding her drone down the alley on the opposite side of her building than she'd taken it before, hoping to watch from behind the man that stared her drone down earlier. She didn't like how he'd threatened to shoot Birdy the last time.
Her screen dimmed for a moment before Birdy's auto-correcting lens kicked in, compensating for the darkness of the alley. She kept Birdy a little higher than before, but nudged the slider between the two toggles to zoom the camer
a focus. She had a good view down the alley, from the edge of her building on past the next two towers. Beyond that, it was too dark too see.
She didn't see the man from before, but there was another figure below. He looked a little bigger than the other guy, not a race she'd seen before. "Probably passing through." Wonder where they go from here. Or where they come from.
She saw the thick-set guy lift a palm-sized device near his mouth. He looked like he was talking into it. Tiffin pressed a button on the controller.
"He's here," the man said. "I think I know what he's after."
"Who?" Tiffin said to herself, listening to the audio coming through her drone controller.
Birdy's directional microphone picked up more. "I'm going to take care of him, but I'm going to enjoy it too. He won't get off Eon. Just leave it to me."
Tiffin turned to the carpet where Squeakers had been hiding. "Oh, that's interesting, huh?"
FOLLOW JAKE MUDD ON HIS NEXT GALACTIC ADVENTURE
Read book two in the series and see what happens next.
FORCED VENGEANCE
JAKE MUDD ADVENTURES BOOK TWO
Get your copy now!
[link to book here]
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
A Word from the Author
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Thank you for reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books By Hal Archer
Preview of Forced Vengeance, Jake Mudd Adventures Book Two
Forced Vengeance, Chapter One
Forced Vengeance, Chapter Two
Forced Vengeance, Chapter Three
Follow Jake Mudd on His Next Galactic Adventure