by C. G. Hatton
Then one of the bodies did.
His stomach did a backflip as one of the Bhenykhn bodies twitched and started to sit.
Shit. No. He had nothing left.
NG dragged himself to his feet, looking round frantically for a weapon, nothing to hand except the hideous axe.
The Bhenykhn grabbed its rifle, joints flexing, muscles bulging as it got itself standing and started to turn.
NG reached down for the haft of the axe, forcing his fingers to curl around the thick handle, and heaved himself upright, dragging it up, dragging its blade along the floor next to him. He didn’t stop staring at the massive figure, rising from the dead, turning to face him, blue eyes startling in its alien face.
‘And what exactly do you think you could do with that, Nikolai?’ he heard inside his head. ‘Nice try, but seriously?’
The Bhenykhn stared at him, grotesque mouth twitching into a grin, or a grimace. It was hard to tell.
It was still flexing its muscles, testing its limits, breathing as if it was taking its first breaths. It stretched out one arm then the next, looking along the full length of them as if it was admiring itself. A gaping, ragged wound in its lower chest closed, healing, as he watched.
NG gaped at it, adrenaline rush competing with the poison in his bloodstream. He squared up to it, not trusting what he was seeing, what he was hearing and sensing. He expected it to raise its rifle and shoot him between the eyes.
It laughed, guttural and raw. ‘Now this is strength.’ It turned to walk out. ‘My god, Nikolai, heal yourself. Have I not taught you anything?’
He watched it go, trembling, not sure what he should do, not sure what the hell Sebastian was going to do. He felt ice cold, bereft, as if his soul had been torn in two.
“You should feel free,” Leigh said from behind him.
He turned, hardly able to stand upright, breathing erratic.
He didn’t know what to feel.
She smiled. “Let’s go home.”
The Man’s ship was quiet. Elliott and the others of the Seven had swept up whatever ships of the Bhenykhn fleet that hadn’t fled, what was left of the Earth and Wintran armada limping together under the rallying call of the Man’s ship. They sent a drop ship for them, a team of extraction agents and medics piling onto the alien ship once comms had come back on line.
NG walked onto the Man’s ship, more than most of the others managed. He’d stopped the bleeding, healed the shoulder somewhat, but not completely and this time it was his left arm that was strapped. More déjà vu.
Except it was Morgan who met them because this time Evelyn was at his side.
“Elliott wants to see you,” Morgan said.
“I know.” He’d been avoiding everyone. “There’s something I need to do first.”
He walked through, brushing off the medics who tried to intercept him, keeping his mind closed to any attempt to link up direct.
The Man’s ship felt alien. He kept thinking he could go back to the Alsatia and the realisation that it wasn’t there anymore made him feel sick.
He walked, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, keeping his resolution firm. Morgan walked next to them, waiting for orders. His orders.
“I don’t know how soon they’ll be back,” NG said. “We need to assess what we have. Regroup.” He was trembling. “Get all the survivors together and call a meeting of the most senior ranks, here in one hour, then get us out of here, get us somewhere neutral. What’s coming is worse than any of us have seen. We need to brief everyone and we need to get the intel out there. Screw what anyone thinks. No more hiding.”
Morgan nodded.
“I just need some time,” NG said. “I’ll see you on the bridge.”
He knew Evelyn was staring after him as he walked away, wanting to come after him, wanting him to want her to come after him.
He needed to be alone.
He went straight to the research lab, ignoring the stares, going to the high security biohazard vault and taking a canister without signing it out.
No one stopped him.
He unlocked doors as he went, going deeper into the ship until he reached the small antechamber, standing still while blue beams scanned across him, a full bioscan ID check.
The far door clicked open with a soft hiss.
His heart was racing.
The chamber was dark but cool, a faint white glow emanating from the isopod in its centre.
He walked up to it and looked down on Martinez. She looked as if she was sleeping peacefully, chest rising and falling gently. A million miles from the pain and dirt and agony of the battlefield where she’d fallen.
“Hey,” he said softly. He was still covered in sweat and blood, struggling to calm his breathing, shoulder hurting like a bitch. He stared at her, willing her, as always, to wake up. “I might have really screwed up this time, Angel…”
The canister was heavy in his hand.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been down here with one.
The hum of the pod was the only other sound in the room.
“I don’t know if I could have done anything differently,” he said, painfully, desperately wanting to hear her voice.
He stood there, feeling the last faint traces of toxin still swirling in his bloodstream.
“And I don’t know what to do now.”
He rested the canister against the glass.
She’d almost died trying to save him and there was nothing he could do for her. He’d tried. The high velocity bullet that had punched through her helmet hadn’t killed her outright. The one to her chest almost had but he’d healed all the damage to vital organs, repaired her body, as she lay out in the mud and rain on Erica while the rescue teams scurried around them. It was the trauma to her brain he couldn’t touch. He’d healed the physical cell damage but it hadn’t been enough. He’d stabilised her and handed her over to the medics. Backed away and watched while they loaded her into a medevac pod, shouting at them that they had to keep her alive.
Now it was the machine keeping her alive.
He’d just wiped out an entire alien fleet and yet he couldn’t bring her back no matter what he tried.
Because he was afraid.
Afraid that he’d screw up.
Again.
The strain of the virus in the canister was their most original. Second generation, direct from LC. It was still the best one they had. Fifty-fifty.
This was what it all came back to. LC had known it right from the outset. It all came back to the damned package.
He’d not been able to bring himself to use it on Martinez because he had no idea what it would do. Even if it didn’t kill her, he didn’t know if it would bring her back. He didn’t know if she was still in there. They’d told him the damage had been that bad.
She looked just like she always had.
In his heart, in the reality he needed, she was simply sleeping.
He didn’t want to kill her. This in-between state was the best he could do. For her and for himself, but it wasn’t enough for either of them.
He looked at the canister.
It felt like time was running out.
His time was running out.
There was a noise behind him.
No one else could pass the security to get in here.
He turned.
Elliott was standing there, arms folded. He raised his eyebrows. “So this is what it’s all been about?” He shook his head solemnly. “Thousands of your people have died. Following you. Following your orders. This obsession you’ve had with perfecting the virus… and this is why. To save one life? To assuage your guilt? My word, Nikolai, you really do have issues, don’t you?”
NG stared at him, unblinking, then turned and looked back at Martinez.
He had the canister in his hand.
His heart was in his stomach.
“What are you, Elliott? Some kind of avatar? Is your big AI brain just sending out this hallucination to haunt me?”
Ell
iott laughed. “What a perfect dilemma,” he said, mocking in a way far more harsh than anything Sebastian had ever taunted him with. “To save the human race, you must infect it with a virus produced from the DNA of the very aliens that threaten it. And what’s the survival rate? Twenty percent? Fifty percent at best. What bitter irony that in order to save only a part of the human race, you have to commit the greatest genocide in human history. Wipe out half the human population. And then what do you even have left, what exactly have you saved, Nikolai? Because the human race that survives won’t even truly be human any longer.”
“Get out of here, Elliott.”
“Think about it, Nikolai. You’ll be the last true human left alive.”
“Get out.”
He turned.
The chamber was empty.
It was hard to breathe.
He turned back to Martinez, holding the canister up against the input port.
She’d laugh at him and thump him on the arm if she could see him here. Tell him to man up and inject the damned virus.
He just didn’t want to lose her.
Arianne, Devon, Leigh…
Was this his fate? Tasked with saving the human race but unable to save the ones he actually cared about?
He pushed the canister into place, the isopod clicking as it received the input.
He hovered his hand over the release button to initiate the dosage.
Elliott was right, he was going to wipe out the human race whatever he did.
He pressed the button.
Fifty-fifty.
The fluid ran into the IV line, spiralling round the tube and into her body.
•
Chapter 38
“And what of Sebastian?”
“Truthfully, I do not know. I do not even know how he was able to do it. He has developed far greater powers much faster than I ever expected. Since he left Nikolai, I can’t even follow him anymore. I do not know where he has gone or what he intends.”
“So what now?”
He poured the wine into the jug, added black powder and watched the steam swirl, a fire blazing in the hearth of these private chambers.
It was warming.
They were just two but if anything, knowing the others were gone was liberating.
“Now, we help them,” he said, pouring the wine carefully.
She reached for her goblet. “We must. We opened our own Pandora’s box. We gave the Bhenykhn the means to travel, to escape from our own galaxy. How could we ever have thought that would save us?” She looked at him through the rising vapours. “We can’t undo it. How can we ever make up for it?”
“We can’t.” There was no denying it. “The Devourers are here,” he said, “and before this is over, the human race will be reduced to rats scurrying through tunnels to escape them. We have Nikolai. Luka is gaining in strength. The others? Time will tell.” He raised his goblet. “This time, we work with them. We tell them everything. We have little choice.”
•
KHERIS BURNING
(Thieves’ Guild Origins: LC Book One)
by
C.G. Hatton
•
Published by Sixth Element Publishing
Arthur Robinson House
13-14 The Green
Billingham TS23 1EU
Great Britain
Tel: +44 1642 360253
www.6epublishing.net
© C.G. Hatton 2016
www.cghatton.com
Also available in paperback.
C.G. Hatton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
•
For Hatt
With special thanks to...
Lynn Jackson, Clare Kent, Andrew and Eli Williams, Ste Baker, Jonathan and Aaron Fletcher, John Holmes-Carrington, Nathan Reynolds, Andy Harness and Steve Dickinson at Sci-Fi Scarborough, Gary Erskine, Bruce Connelly in New York and, as always, Graeme at 6E, Jan, Dave and my mum, and very special thanks to Hatt and the munchkins.
Chapter 1
I can’t stop shivering. I can still hear a distant rumble of explosions above us. I don’t know how we made it down into the tunnels alive. Luka is sitting on the floor, back against the wall. He’s hurt but he got us down here. The kids are all scared. I’m scared but we need to be quiet or they’ll find us. I don’t know what to do but Luka suddenly raises his eyes and starts to speak, grabbing their attention.
“You want to know what it takes to get to the top of the most secretive guild in the galaxy?”
They all stop talking and turn to look at him. He has them.
“Luck,” he says. “That’s it. Train and sweat and study all you want but in the end it pretty much comes down to luck. But you know the funny thing about luck? You have to make it. I learned that the hard way. When I was a kid on the streets of Kheris.”
I can’t help but stare at him. He hasn’t changed, not really. His voice is quiet but everyone is listening. It’s as if nothing else is happening. I sit on the stairs and hug my knees, watching as he tells his story, our story.
“We didn’t know what they were all fighting over on our hellhole of a mining colony on the edge of the Between,” he says, looking up to catch my eye, “why the roads were blocked by tanks, why there was never any food in the shops, why they dropped bombs on us every night. We didn’t know and we didn’t care. But I do know one thing… everything changed the night something huge fell out of jump too close to the planet and crashed in our desert.”
He looks around at them all. “But that wasn’t the only thing that happened in those few weeks just before my fourteenth birthday. What happened first, and what saved my life in the end, was that Charlie came back…”
•
A rocket screamed overhead. I didn’t stop, reckoned I could make it and ran. The massive bulk of the remote weapons installation swung round with no warning.
I was too close to the edge. I think I stopped breathing. It felt like the world slipped into slow motion. The huge mass of the weapon’s main housing punched down as it pounded one of its massive bolts out into the sky to intercept the rocket. I couldn’t move fast enough, trying to shift my ass out of the way and not lose my balance, flinching from the heat, the noise. I was too close. The exhaust port scraped past me. Pain flared in my arm. I was knocked sideways and I fell.
It’s weird how you don’t think when stuff like that happens. The real world seems distant, far off, rocket after rocket flying overhead, meteors flashing across the inky black of the sky above the city, explosions and fires burning all through the streets.
In the enclosed bubble that was my whole world, I just fell.
I bounced off the ledge and almost yanked my shoulder out of its socket, grabbing onto the edge and dangling from the wall, right beneath the weapons platform as it pounded out another interception.
My ears were ringing.
You didn’t want to be up there on that wall a second longer than you had to be. You definitely didn’t want to be hanging there, right in the open, easy target for the Imperial troops who had itchy trigger fingers at the best of times.
I hoisted myself back up and crawled out, breaking into a run as soon as I was clear and sprinting along the top of that section of wall, keeping low and taking more care as I ducked under and past the rest of the installations of the defence grid, feeling the heat radiate from them, trying to gauge each time I ran past one if it was going to fire up. My arm was bleeding but I didn’t stop.
I stumbled on, running round to the antennae array. I crouched, heart racing, looking down into the flat open expanse of the outer courtyard of the Imperial Garrison.
I should probably explain, the troops occupying our city didn’t leave their garrison except to go out on patrol in armoured vehicles or to go relieve the watches at the outposts. They didn’t have manned lookouts on that high fortified wall, they relied on their AI. That was all well and good except there was a whole stretch of wall where the stupid AI was blind. I
t was a hastily-constructed base, sensors break, wires short out, and Kheris wasn’t high on anyone’s list of priorities. You could dance along that section of wall all night and the AI would have no idea it was compromised. They had thermal and infrared detectors but Kheris was so extreme in its temperatures, they never worked properly. I was fine so long as no one saw me.
That outer courtyard was where they had a running track, shooting ranges, vehicle repair bays. Gunships were landing and taking off at regular intervals. It could get busy but that night it was fairly quiet. I stood, took a couple of steps back and ran, jumping across, grabbing hold of the antennae and using them like monkey bars to swing across and onto the roof of the main complex, the huge octagonal building that surrounded the inner courtyard and the inner sanctum of the garrison that housed the all-important squat little comms centre at its heart. I landed and flattened myself low, crawling to the edge. This was the tricky make or break point. They patrolled that inner courtyard. If someone spotted me, they’d open fire but I’d still have a chance to jump down and make a run for it. Once inside, it wouldn’t be so simple to get away if they saw me. That’s what was fun. I loved it in there. I loved being invisible, like I didn’t exist. A ghost in their military machine.
I waited, watching, then ran round the rooftop, jumping and dropping onto a part of the roof that was a level down. I landed, tucked and rolled, bumping up against the vent I was aiming for and waiting. There were no shots, no yells. No one had seen me. My chest was heaving, blood pounding so hard I could hardly hear and it always made me want to laugh that I’d got away with it. I got my breath back, dug a scrap of cloth out of my pocket and wound it around my arm, biting it to pull the knot tight. It hurt but I’d live. I glanced around, climbed up and slipped into the vent.
It was narrow. It seemed to get more narrow each time I went in there. I shimmied down, scraping my elbows on the rough surface, and braced myself above the intersection. I hooked my feet around a cross beam, hung upside down and looked along the crawl space. They didn’t ever bother to install new sensors when they broke. But it never hurt to check. Like I said, I make my own luck.