“No,” Jim said and held up a hand. “Look, Splunk, I just want to know. Why?”
“We help, Jim,
“How did they get to Karma?”
“Stowaway,” she said and spread her hands. Jim nodded; that made sense. They were natural sneaks.
“How about Upsilon 4? You hacked that computer to get a lower price. Did you know this place could do this?”
“My friends found it. We’ve been all over Karma, exploring.”
“Lastly, why didn’t you tell me you could read my mind?”
“
“Yes, Akee,” he agreed.
“I thought you knew, Jim
“No,” he said, “I want Splunk to stay.” With a coo she jumped into his arms and snuggled under his chin. He sighed and snuggled her back. There was more to what was going on; he knew that much. But she’d answered his questions, and that would have to do for now. His story about discovering the hyperspace shunts when he’d bought the base had satisfied Captain Su and the others. After all, the base weighed more than a hundred million tons. It took less power to keep them in it than to run life support. Lots of spacers had surmised you could take a planet into hyperspace, if you had enough shunts or a big enough stargate.
“When can I talk to the others?” he asked.
“When they’re ready. Okay?
“Good enough.” They went to dinner on Bucephalus.
* * *
There was a sizeable war fleet waiting at the emergence point in New Warsaw. It seemed Alexis Cromwell was no longer in a trusting mood, but everyone was stunned when an asteroid base appeared. After Jim verified who he was, he convinced Alexis to save the questions for later while they got a few dozen ships to tug the incredible mass of the station out of the emergence point before another ship materialized inside the rock.
Nigel Shirazi arrived with Walker. Their rescue of Sansar Enkh had been a success, just like the breakout from Karma. The Four Horsemen had spit in the face of Peepo and her efforts to subjugate the Humans. Now there were 21 Human merc companies, in addition to the Four Horsemen, in New Warsaw. Alexis called them all to a meeting but wanted to meet with her fellow Horsemen first.
In a hallway on Prime Base crowded with boisterous, excited merc commanders, Walker walked over to Jim and shook his hand. “I found you another Raknar,” he said and held up a portable Tri-V. The Raknar was a different model than the ones he had; it seemed shorter and more powerful.
“That’s awesome, thanks,” Jim said. On his shoulder, Splunk eyed the image keenly.
“My guys couldn’t resist crawling around inside it.”
“That’s okay,” Jim said. “I doubt they could hurt anything.” Walker nodded and took something out of his pocket.
“In the cockpit, hanging from a support, we found this.” He handed it to Jim. It was a perma-V, a miniature Tri-V that didn’t need power and lasted forever. Jim looked at it in amazement. He’d seen articles about them before, but he’d never actually seen one in real life. “Look at the image.”
Jim took the device, about the size of a credit chit, and touched the control. An image sprang to life. Obviously taken from just outside a Raknar’s cockpit, the first thing he noticed was a Fae dressed in an outfit that looked like it was armored. In fact, unless Jim missed his guess, it was combat-armored and air-tight when a helmet was added.
The image pulled back automatically to show the Fae was riding on a shoulder. For a moment he thought it was a Human. Then he saw the rough features, and a moment later the extra set of arms. It was a Lumar. Jim looked from the image to Splunk and back. Splunk had nothing to say.
“Unless I’m wrong,” Walker said, pointing at the image, “now we know who the Dusman are. Who would have ever believed they were the Lumar? They’ve been right under our noses the whole time!”
“Can I hang onto this for now?” Jim asked.
“It’s yours,” Walker said. “It goes with the Raknar.”
“Thanks,” Jim said. The doors to the conference room opened.
Nigel Shirazi walked up and, to Jim’s surprise, held out a hand. “Congratulations on being the first asteroid ship captain!”
Jim laughed and took the hand. “Great job rescuing Sansar,” Jim replied. They locked eyes and held hands for a long minute.
“If you two are done bonding?” Sansar asked. Both men smiled and went in. They were surprised to see a table made in the shape of a four-pointed star, with four chairs placed between the points. Alexis stood behind one, waiting for them. To Jim’s amazement, the table looked like pure gold.
“I had this made from a single piece of gold we found in an asteroid here in New Warsaw,” Alexis said, confirming his belief. “You’ll notice there’s no head of the table. Here, we’re all equal.” She locked eyes with each of them, and they with her. “I wanted to meet for a few minutes before we go in with all the other commanders, so they understand. We are the Four Horsemen. We are united.”
“The Four Horsemen for Earth,” Jim said.
“The Four Horsemen for Earth,” Sansar repeated.
“The Four Horsemen for Earth,” Nigel agreed.
“The Four Horsemen for Earth!” they all said in unison.
Alexis gestured them to seats. “Now, let’s talk about kicking the fucking aliens off our planet.”
* * * * *
Epilogue
SOGA HQ, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Earth
“This was just received from the guild headquarters,” General Chirbayl said as she put an image on the monitor. The scene was grisly—several Besquith were lying in pools of blood; all of them had their throats cut. Chirbayl zoomed in on several red marks in between them. Paw prints could be seen moving away from the bodies. “The prints are consistent with the prints of a Depik, as are the throat slashes of the victims. Of note, the Depik governor was nowhere to be found during the Human assault on the guild headquarters.”
Peepo nodded thoughtfully. “So the Depik have chosen sides, have they? They refuse to take our contracts on the Four Horsemen and other mercenary company leaders, but they’ll aid in a jailbreak from our very headquarters?”
“It seems so, General.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. I believe the time for the Depik to roam the galaxy without regulation has passed. They want to live above the law? No more. They’ve provided a service for us in the past, but it’s time to bring them to heel. Send a fleet to their planet and destroy any of their craft that try to come or go. Their planet is under quarantine until they remember they work first and foremost for us.”
“What about the Human mercenaries that escaped from Karma and Capital Planet?”
“We have them right where we want them. Their planet is ours, and now they’re all grouped up together. I’m expecting information soon on where that system is; once I have it, we’ll go there and wipe out the Horsemen and the other upstart Human mercenaries that fled with them. Soon, they’ll trouble us no more…”
# # # # #
The following is an
Excerpt from Book One of In Revolution Born:
The Mutineer’s Daughter
___________________
Chris Kennedy & Thomas A. Mays
Now Available from Theogony Books
eBook, Paperback and (Soon) Audio
Excerpt from “The Mutineer’s Daughter:”
Kenny dozed at his console again.
There he sat—as brazen as ever—strapped down, suited up, jacked in…and completely checked out. One might make allowances for an overworked man falling asleep during a dull routine, watching gauges that didn’t move or indicators that rarely indicated anything of consequence, perhaps even during a quiet moment during their ship’s long, long deployment.
But Fire Control Tech Third Class Ken Burnside was doing it—yet again—while the ship stood at General Quarters, in an unfriendly st
ar system, while other parts of the fleet engaged the forces of the Terran Union.
Chief Warrant Officer Grade 2 (Combat Systems) Benjamin “Benno” Sanchez shook his helmeted head and narrowed his eyes at the sailor strapped in to his right. He had spoken to the young weapons engineer a number of times before, through countless drills and mock skirmishes, but the youthful idiot never retained the lesson for long.
“Benno, Bosso,” Kenny would plead, “you shouldn’t yell at me. You should have me teach others my wisdom!”
Benno would invariably frown and give his unflattering opinion of Kenny’s wisdom.
“Get it, ya?” Kenny would reply. “I’m a math guy. Probability, right Warrant? The Puller’s just a little ship, on the edge of the formation. We scan, we snipe, we mop up, we patrol. We don’t go in the middle, tube’s blazing, ya? We no tussle with the big Terrans, ya? No damage! No battle! So, something goes wrong, back-ups kick in, buzzer goes off, we mark for fix later. And when’s the only time you or the officers don’t let a man walk ‘round and don’t ask for this, don’t ask for that? When’s the only time a man can catch up on the z’s, eh? One and the same time! So I doze. Buzzer goes off, I wake, make a note, doze again till I can work, ya? Such wisdom!”
Benno usually lectured him about complacency. He asked what would happen if they were hit, if the shot was hot enough, deep enough, destructive enough to burn through the backup of the backup of the backup. What if they did have to face the Great Test, to rise and work and save the Puller themselves?
Kenny would always smile, relieved. “Well, then I be dead, ya? No more maintenance either way. Good enough reason to doze right there!”
Benno could have reported him any number of times, but he never had. Putting it on paper and sending it above them was a two-edged sword. It would solve Kenny’s sleepy disdain for order, of that Benno had no doubt, but he also knew he would lose Kenny’s trust and the vigorous drive the young ALS plebeian applied to every other task. Plus, it would signal to the officers above that Benno couldn’t handle a minor discipline problem on his own. And it would indicate to the ranks below that Benno was no longer one of their own—when he had gone from Chief to Chief Warrant Officer, he had changed his ties, forever.
So Benno growled, but he let it slide, content only he would know about Kenny’s acts of passive rebellion. No one else would ever know why the young tech kept getting extra punishment duties. Besides, it wasn’t as if Kenny was actually wrong, in the fullness of things.
Then, before Benno could check his own side of the console to verify whether things were indeed alright, his internal debate was blown away by the unforgiving, indiscriminate lance of an x-ray laser blast.
The single beam struck the Puller a glancing blow, centered on a space just beneath the outer hull and aimed outboard. Armor plate, radiation shielding, piping, wireways, conduit, decking, internal honeycombed structure, atmosphere, and people all ionized and ablated into a dense, mixed plasma. This plasma exploded outward, crushing the spaces surrounding the hit and dealing further physical and thermal damage. Combat Systems Maintenance Central, or CSMC, lay deep within the Puller’s battle hull—three spaces inward from where the x-ray laser struck—but that meant little next to the awesome destructive power of a Dauphine capital-class xaser warhead.
The forward and port bulkheads in front of them flashed white hot with near-instantaneous thermal energy transfer and peeled away, blown out by the twin shocks of the outward-expanding plasma and the snapping counterforce of explosive decompression. The double blast battered Benno in his seat and threw him against his straps to the left. As the bulkheads vanished, their departure also carried away the CSMC monitoring console the two watch standers shared with them into the black, along with Kenny’s seat, and Ken Burnside, himself.
The young engineer disappeared in an instant, lost without ever waking. Benno stared, dumbfounded, at the blank spot where he had been, and of all the possible panicked thoughts that could have come to him, only one rose to the forefront:
Does this validate Kenny’s wisdom?
Benno shook his head, dazed and in shock, knowing he had to engage his brain. Looking beyond, he could see the glowing edges of bulkheads and decks gouged out by the fast, hot knife of the nuclear-pumped xaser. Only vaguely could he recall the sudden buffeting of explosive decompression that had nearly wrenched him through the straps of his acceleration couch.
He knew he had things to do. He had to check his suit’s integrity. Was he leaking? Was he injured? And what about Kenny? Was he gone, unrecoverable? Or was he waiting for his poor, shocked-stupid boss Benno to reach out and save him?
And there was something else, something important he needed to be doing. He wasn’t supposed to just sit here and think of himself or unlucky, lazy Kenny. Oh no, thought Benno, still trying to marshal his thoughts back together, Mio is going to be so angry with me, sitting here like a fool…
“CSMC, report!”
Benno shook his head against the ringing he hadn’t realized filled his ears. He reached out for the comms key on his console, swore at how futile that was, then keyed his suit mic. “Last station calling, this is CSMC. We’ve taken a hit. I lost my technician, console is…down, hard. Over.”
“CSMC, TAO,” the Puller’s Tactical Action Officer said through the suit channel, “pull it together! We just had a near miss by a capital class Dauphine warhead. The battle with the Terrans has spread out of the main body. I have missiles up but zero point-defense. I need guns and beams back, now!”
* * * * *
Get “The Mutineer’s Daughter” now at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BRTDBCJ
Find out more about Thomas A. Mays and “In Revolution Born” at:
https://chriskennedypublishing.com
* * * * *
The following is an
Excerpt from Book Eleven of The Revelations Cycle:
Assassin
___________________
Kacey Ezell and Marisa Wolf
Now Available from Seventh Seal Press
eBook, Paperback and (Soon) Audio
Excerpt from “Assassin:”
Deluge closed his eyes and let the taste of spiced Khava explode over the inside of his mouth. It burned its way over his tongue and down into his belly, filling him with heat from the inside.
“You like it?” the Besquith trader growled. Deluge opened his eyes and looked up at the hairy alien. Besquith were not known for their charm, and this one seemed a representative member of his race in that department. It had somewhat beady eyes that glared at Deluge as he sat on the trading counter. Doubtless, the trader would have preferred for Deluge to remain on the floor in his bipedal stance. However, that didn’t make sense in the Hunter’s mind, given the immense difference between their two heights. Far better that he should spring to the counter and sit like a civilized being.
It wasn’t his problem if his movements were too quick for the Besquith to track. Nor was it his problem if that fact made the other being nervous. Though Deluge had to admit it was amusing.
“I do like it,” the Hunter said. “Your batch has a very good flavor.”
“I have more,” the Besquith said. “Five credits gets you the whole fish.”
Deluge slow blinked at the outrageous price, and let his mouth fall open in his Human smile.
“And what would I do with a whole fish?” he asked. “Especially at that larcenous rate?”
“Larcenous?” the Besquith growled, its voice dropping lower. “Are you calling me a cheat?”
“Larceny means theft. Technically I’m calling you a thief,” Deluge said. “But I suppose your language may not have such subtleties.”
He didn’t, truly, mean it as an insult. The Besquith didn’t seem to care. It let out a low snarl and bared its teeth, then lunged at Deluge, snapping his teeth a hair’s breadth from where the Hunter sat.
Or more accurately, where the Hunter had been sitting.
Because, of
course, Deluge was in motion as soon as the Besquith started his lunge. He drove his powerful hind legs against the firm surface of the trading counter and leapt up into the air. A quick twist of his body allowed his front claws access to the large, pointed ears that sat atop the Besquith’s head. He dug his claws into those sensitive ears and used them as a pivot point to anchor his leap. His lower body flipped up and around to the point where his back claws could grab on. One caught the alien’s throat, just above the jugular, and the other hovered scant millimeters from the being’s vulnerable eye.
“Hunter, your pardon.”
The voice that spoke was Besquith, and female, unless Deluge missed his guess. It was also smooth and laced with respect, unlike the nervous, aggressive tone of the one he now had by the ears. That Besquith was busy whimpering in pain and fear as Deluge wrenched its head around so that he might look at the newcomer.
The newcomer stood in the curtained doorway at the back of the booth. She wore the rich silks of a wealthy Besquith trader, and the grey about her muzzle spoke of some experience. She inclined her head as Deluge met her eyes.
“I greet you,” Deluge said. He didn’t want to be rude, but he rather thought that in this particular situation, he might be excused the use of an abbreviated hello. “Welcome to our negotiation.”
“I am Jhurrahkk” she said. “I am the alpha for our people here on Khatash. You hold the life of my pup in your claws.”
“I am Deluge,” he answered. “Your pup was rude and attacked me. His life is forfeit on my planet.”
“This is where I propose we begin our negotiation.”
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