Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  That he’d also realized she was handy in a fight only helped their relationship. He was a smuggler and pulled good paying ops.

  His shuttle wasn’t equipped with an AI. They set off too many sensors in the belt and everyone knew that. Pirates didn’t like them. The military certainly didn’t approve of them. AI’s were too observant and inductive analyses that neither party appreciated. Typically, they were restricted to a single network for the majority of their program, able to search the net, but not leave their assigned ship. Too smart. So, they’d had to leave JIN and ILO behind on the Allorian along with the rest of Hale’s crew.

  At least, Hale thought Keva had left her AI behind. Being ex-military and having grown up in the belt, she was privy to information Hale wasn’t. For instance, how the military sniffers worked. She also knew how the pirate sniffers functioned, since they piggy-backed off the military’s signal. ILO simply had to transmit on a frequency most people couldn’t hear, something no AI would bother to use since they served humans.

  Ex-military. Her unit had put her in a suit and shot her into the Black through the trash chute to die a slow, painful death for disobeying an order sent to her implant chip. Overriding the command was supposed to be next to impossible thanks to DNA coding and behavior modification. She’d succeeded, and for that, her commanding officer was more than happy to send her off to die, discarding her like any other broken thing, like trash.

  The solitude wasn’t what almost killed her, and running out of air didn’t sound like the worst way to go. What threatened to drive her insane was the silence. The deafening, never ending echo of absolute nothing. Looking out into the absolute black with nothing but distant stars that died thousands of years ago listening to her own breath for hours. With nothing to do, but deal with her own thoughts. Thoughts… something she had avoided her whole life, still did. But for those hours floating alone and hopeless, her deepest truths filled her mind, and with nothing to distract her, she had no choice but to face the facts. As alone as she felt at that moment, it wasn’t the first time she’d felt that way.

  She’d been alone since her first breath, except for Yling, her podtwin, now even she was gone, and Keva would never be with her again. Would never be with anyone ever again. Before then, she’d never realized how dead she already felt; when the air began to run out, and her shallow breath made her head float, she welcomed it, maybe then she wouldn’t hurt anymore. When Evelyn Starider’s ship stumbled on her body, it was almost a disappointment.

  As far as the military knew, she was still a corpse floating in deep space.

  But her military upbringing came in handy in situations like this. As an engineered human, Keva was designed to interpret frequencies beyond the norm. So, she could communicate with ILO even outside of normal range. She just had to be careful to stay as far away from other engineered humans because they could intercept the messages just as easily.

  That shouldn’t be too hard. She knew the location of all the training grounds and travel lanes. She just had to keep Hale out of them.

  But to do that, she needed to see his navscreen.

  He looked up at her, his full lips flat. “Can I help you?”

  “I can’t see where you’re taking me to die?”

  He quirked his lips at her and moved aside. “Normally, you don’t care.”

  Which was true. “You’ve never taken me to a graveyard before.”

  “I took you to HUMP. Wasn’t that graveyard enough?”

  HUMP stood for Hexium Ubiquium Mecka Plentea. The entire system consisted of planets rich in highly valuable minerals, like hexium, from third or fourth generation stars. Hexium was used in everything from metal to fuel and was, by all rights, the blood of the known universe.

  Humans had tried terraforming that system a century ago—their first attempt at it—but the success rate was abysmal. Now, half-habitable planets, moons, and asteroids were all slowly killing the inhabitants. The air was toxic, but as each generation grew more accustomed to the living conditions lifespans gradually increased.

  For an outsider, death didn’t take long.

  For most outsiders.

  Keva had also been engineered to survive long durations in HUMP should the military need to take control over mining rights.

  A field of debris cluttered their vision outside the plasteel windows of the cockpit. Keva glanced up as they flew under what had once been sleeping quarters, the beds still secured to twisted hunks of the floor. An old plasma gun floated in front of them, barrel pointed down. Hale continued to focus on the navscreen.

  Keva pointed to the plasteel window above his head and raised an eyebrow. “Did you want to dodge that?”

  Hale looked up to see what she was talking about. “Oh, well.” He rubbed his eyebrow, unlocked his chair and slid it over to take the yoke. “I guess I should.”

  Plasma guns were an abandoned technology for a reason. They were extremely reliable—until they weren’t. That ship might have been blown up by the plasma gun malfunctioning.

  Or it could have been blown out of the Black by the inhabitants of the belt.

  Keva looked down at the navscreen again. His trajectory line glowed orange and wound through the belt to miss most of the larger asteroids. To the unpracticed eye, his course appeared efficient.

  “Re-adjust. But she knew they were headed right into a training field. “Readjust your path to go around that series of asteroids. We want to go behind them.”

  He frowned at her. He locked the yoke and slid back to toward the navscreen to make the necessary adjustments. “Like that?”

  “A little further out.” She tried to keep her tone as nonchalant as she could.

  “Want to tell me why?”

  He’d been trying to figure out her background since they first met. She wasn’t going to suddenly drop her shields and let him in now, though. “Nope.”

  “Just another one of your feelings that turn out to be impossibly true, then?” With the corrections to the course laid out, he leaned back, ran a hand over his short curly hair, and looked at her. “You are going to tell me one day.”

  “Only in your dreams, tough guy.” She patted him on the shoulder.

  It was enough that the Codex Syndicate knew her secret. That and the debt she owed Evelyn for rescuing her was reason enough for her to stay with them until she was dead or they no longer needed her. All they had to do was tip off the wrong person at the wrong time about her real identity.

  Next time, the military wouldn’t throw her out like trash. She’d be reassigned to Heliac Nine for testing. Like Beryl and Gilda and some of the others in her pod had when they’d failed to obey their chip. Or at least that had been the rumor in the ranks.

  No one came back from Heliac Nine.

  Stekil—Hale’s tech genius and general mechanic—bumped into the bulkhead on the other side of the shuttle as he fiddled with the straps in the cargo hold muttering to himself. He looked like a pusher. He had a slight frame and nearly nonexistent muscle mass. Combined with his pale skin and permanently rimmed red eyes, he had to be, though how he’d managed to get off a push station was a story worth listening to. His eyes had a faint green glow, a sure sign he came from somewhere in HUMP. Some component of the poorly terraformed air eventually turned everyone’s eyes bright green.

  Whatever they were off to salvage, it apparently needed to be strapped in tight. His gnarled hands and wrinkled face spoke of a longer life than most spacers enjoyed. He must be tough, or insane, to last that long out here.

  It took another thirty minutes of maneuvering through the belt, moving slowly, doing their best not to nudge anything too large out of their way. Eventually, their target came into sight.

  “Field Station 14? You’re kidding me, right?” The highly volatile mineral mined from the HUMP System was stored at that station. The cases were heavily guarded and were equipped with fail safes within fail safes. A mission like this stood zero chance of success. N, no escape.

  He
closed his eyes for a moment, and his lips slid into a knowing smile. He folded his hands over his abdomen and looked up at her. “I knew it. You were in the military.”

  It wasn’t unheard of for people to leave the military. Typically, they were the unfortunate conscripted or the volunteers. Volunteers signed on for shorter contracts while conscripts received what amounted to a life sentence as they were positioned in the most dangerous sectors, on the least maintained ships. But volunteers had their discharge show up on their records.

  Her ident chip didn’t include that.

  “I did my homework,” she said, her voice low.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Homework on a place you didn’t know we were going?” He shook his head, dismissing it. “I don’t care. I did mine, too, and this mission is going to be a cake run.”

  Unless he had someone on the inside feeding him intel in real time, that was rather unlikely. They needed help.

  Keva’s ship and ILO were too far away for real-time audio transmissions, but not far enough for other communications. Keva tapped her wrist above the communication chip she and her AI had devised to send a coded message. FS14. Can you tap into the surveillance?

  Within moments, a message returned. The vibrations ran through her arm, the chip in her brain translating ILO’s communication. Attempting surveillance piggyback operation now, Keva Duste. Will advise.

  “We’re stealing hexium,” Keva said with dry derision. How could Hale be so stupid? This was the dumbest idea he could have had. Ever.

  He snorted a laugh. “No. We’re not.”

  What else was there to steal of any value?

  He plugged something into his communications monitor. “We’re in.”

  The shuttle slipped through the atmosphere and Keva braced herself for impact or for their shuttle to be electrocuted.

  Neither happened.

  Hale stood and shot her a grin as he headed for the door of the cockpit. “Didn’t I tell you? Cake run.”

  Something wasn’t right, but what? She followed him out into the cargo hold. Her experience in high-risk missions should steady her heart rate, but it raced. Life as a civilian had made her soft. “What are we here for then?”

  The shuttle landed via the autopilot landing sequence.

  “Food and medicine.”

  That, oddly, was kind of smart. All the security was focused on the hexium ports. The food and medicine would be relatively easy pickings if they didn’t trip any sensors. And since the military never held up their end of the supply bargains with spacers, it only made sense to steal it from the source.

  Hale hit the button to the back hatch a little too hard.

  Stekil gave her a crooked-toothed grin.

  Keva peered through the cargo door but didn’t step out. Cake run or not, the atmosphere was only a flip of a switch away. She grabbed one of the space helmets off the rack beside the door and hooked it to her belt.

  Hale raised his eyebrows. He shrugged, walked back into the shuttle, grabbed a helmet, and followed her lead. Another thing about him she couldn’t help but be impressed b. He wasn’t afraid to let her take the lead, even if he didn’t completely agree. He trusted her and, out here, that was rarer than H-83.

  Stekil followed suit without so much as a blink of his nearly glowing green eyes.

  “You’re after the food and medical supplies?” Keva asked quietly. There might not be a lot of security measures in place around the food, but surveillance gnats could be anywhere. That didn’t help her unease. She tapped a message to ILO. Any surveillance yet?

  The response came almost immediately. Have I advised you of it yet, Keva Duste?

  Sometimes, Keva’s AI seemed a little too familiar. There were protocols in place for updating AI programs whenever a ship docked at a major station. This kept them from forming personalities. Anomalies were erased and were replaced with System approved defaults, but Keva hadn’t updated ILO since she’d bought the AI. She didn’t know why. She simply hadn’t. It was enough that Keva had to call the AI by her letter call-sign that denoted her serial number. ILO-1271621.

  And since then, ILO had been growing more of a personality, one that she hid pretty well most times.

  Hale took one of the sonic rifles beside the door.

  Keva grabbed his hand to stop him. “That will pop the atmosphere bubble and send us all out for a nice, deadly spacewalk.”

  His dark eyes met hers for a long moment before he moved to put the rifle back where he found it. “One day, Keva Duste, you are going to tell me how you know this shit.”

  She doubted that. “We can use knives.”

  “I’ve got a bow.”

  That wasn’t uncommon. Rifles and guns set off security scans set up at every station and planet in the system. Bows were harder to hide but avoided detection. “Gravity’s off-kilter on this asteroid.”

  “By how much?”

  “Enough to ruin your shot.” Keva checked the knives strapped to her arms, thighs, and tucked into her boots. “Also, when you get out there, you’ll feel dizzy. It’s because the rotation of the rock we’re on is fighting the artificial gravity.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “The shuttle is countering the effects. Just trust me. Don’t fall down.” Keva stepped out the door.

  The tang in the air hit her first. Forced, human-made air tasted different than screened air. She didn’t know the science behind it. She knew how it tasted.

  The immediate area was dark. No lights on the exteriors of the low, box-shaped buildings. Flat roofs. Square walls. No windows.

  Why would they need windows? To take in the view?

  Stekil popped his head out with a smile. “I disabled their tech.”

  He thought he’d disabled his tech. “Pulse?”

  He nodded.

  “EM pulse?”

  His smile broadened, and he nodded again.

  “Are you a fucking idiot?” Keva wanted to wrap her fingers around his throat. “You just let them know we’re here.”

  “Focused pulse.” He lifted one shoulder, giving her a smirk. “Mimicked a normal power fluctuation which happens out here all the time. Their servers’ll reboot. Buy us the time to get in and out.”

  “Please, you think the military doesn’t know that trick?” Keva scanned the immediate area. Stekil seemed to be right, though. The atmosphere was still up. Gravity was still working. No electric shocks or weapons’ fire.

  Maybe they were okay. She led the way, her senses on high alert.

  “No, no. This way.” Hale stumbled a step but kept himself upright.

  Stekil joined him with a g-levitation trolly in front of him.

  Hale pointed to the largest building in the wide lot.

  Keva turned, catching a glimpse of the large push station on the other side of the expansive rock field all around them. It dominated the sky behind the sea of granite. The light emitting from its shiny silver surfaces was their only illumination. “If someone told you the supplies you wanted were there, then that someone wants you dead.” Or had false intel on the replenishing stations.

  Hale blinked and jerked his head. “Then, after you.”

  Keva kept her head on swivel as she moved toward the much smaller building to the right, her helmet bumping against her leg with every step.

  The door lock took only half a second for Stekil to break open. The man may be a complete idiot, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a genius with his hands.

  Keva pulled out a blade and crouched as they snuck into the large storage bay, expecting to find it lined with guards. There was no way opening that door hadn’t tripped an alarm. Even Stekil wasn’t that good.

  The massive room was empty, metal crates had been piled in the center as if waiting for them to come pick them up. What the fuck was going on?

  “This is wrong,” Keva said, hanging back as Hale and Stekil began loading the crates onto the trolly.

  “No. It’s just well planned. The station has been cut back to a s
keleton crew, even if they walked in on us now, it wouldn’t be more than we could handle. Besides, they’re too busy rebooting the servers.”

  “It’s too easy. You don’t know these people.”

  “And you do?” Hale raised an eyebrow as he dropped the last of eight supply crates onto the trolly.

  He stared at her for too long.

  She hated to look away, but what could she say that wouldn’t give her away, any more than she already had. Letting her guard down around him was becoming a little too easy. Time to pull back, she was better off alone anyway.

  “What’s this for, anyway?” Keva asked, maintaining point on the way back to the shuttle. The light from Kalamatra Station overhead lit up the flat path, casting few shadows on the main supply house.

  Still no movement. Every nerve was on high alert. Something wasn’t right.

  “Push stations along the derelict traffic lanes of Qo System.”

  “Derelict?” Keva had no idea what he was talking about. The lack of military activity worried at her. What was going on here?

  “The ones that fell in the uprising.”

  They were within a few steps of the cargo door of the shuttle.

  Keva had heard about the uprising. She’d thought, like everyone in the four systems, that the people manning those push stations had died, wasting away from lack of supplies. She opened her mouth to say something.

  We have chatter, Keva Duste, ILO’s message pulsed to her chip. Get out of there now.

  A red light blinked in Keva’s peripheral.

  She spun. Knife in hand.

  But the light disappeared.

  Surveillance gnat. And it probably had all their pictures.

  “Helmets on!” She slammed hers over her head just as the sparkling light of the atmosphere field winked out of sight.

  They ran the short distance to the shuttle, their feet losing traction. Keva leaped inside, grabbing onto Hale to reel him in. Hale dragged Stekil, who pulled along the trolly. The gravity of the shuttle kicked in, nailing their feet to the floor for a moment.