Kheris Burning (Thieves' Guild Origins: LC Book One): A Fast Paced Scifi Action Adventure Novel

by C. G. Hatton

  KHERIS BURNING

  (Thieves’ Guild Origins: LC Book One)

  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.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  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.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  “Full of action and intrigue, as well as being heartwarming. The pace is fast and the plot twists and turns, but we are right there gunning for Luka from start to finish!”

  No one in the galaxy gives a damn about Kheris, a war-torn mining colony in the Between. Thirteen-year-old Luka is used to running from trouble, living rough with a gang of street kids, stealing from the Imperial troops and selling scavenged tech and intel to the Wintran-backed resistance fighters to survive.

  But when a mysterious ship crashes in the desert, his life is turned upside down overnight. Suddenly Kheris is on everyone’s radar and he finds himself caught between the two warring factions, with the lives of those closest to him threatened. He’s desperate to find a way out, but will the cost be too high?

  Welcome to the high-tech Thieves' Guild universe of galactic war, knife-edge intrigue, alien invasion, thieves, assassins, bounty hunters and pirates...

  “…this is FANTASTIC! I couldn’t put this down and I read the whole story over two nights. It has the same fast-paced style that I love about the other Thieves’ Guild books.”

  “…the most exciting scifi writer that I have read in the last 30 years.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is not an ordinary book. I wrote this book about LC (Luka) between Books 4 and 5 of the main Thieves’ Guild series. You could read it now… as a stand alone or part of its own Origins series with LC#2 Beyond Redemption and LC#3 Defying Winter… or you could read the main series, Residual Belligerence, and the others, and then read these when you get to them… It works either way. I love this book. It’s my favourite in the whole Thieves’ Guild universe. I hope you enjoy it too…

  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. It 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 antenna
e 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.

  It was clear. I swung round and crawled into the main conduit. From there, it didn’t take much to work my way through into the main outer ring where I could see down into the top floor.

  I sat watching for a while. There weren’t any sensors or motion detectors in there because the AI wasn’t programmed to consider that anyone could be in those spaces.

  To be fair, it wasn’t that stupid. On the AI gradient, it was about as smart as a ten year old. Its primary functions were pretty routine – heating, lighting, security, monitoring the sensors and auto sentries across the garrison and the dozen or so checkpoints and outposts dotted across the city. Watching every inch of the garrison’s main complex wasn’t that important to it because no one should have been able to get in. I didn’t know anyone else who could get in there. None of the other kids had ever been able to follow me. It wasn’t that there was a knack to it. It was just that I could do it and no one else could. It was starting to get tight in a few places, and there was one spot where I had to almost dislocate my shoulder to get through, but I reckoned I had some months yet before I was too big.

  I sat there, curled up in that tiny space, and watched the movement down below me through an air vent, timed the comings and goings to check they hadn’t changed the patrol patterns, and waited patiently until someone stopped to key an elaborate string of characters into a terminal. That’s all I needed.

  I waited until it was clear, then dropped down into the room, right into the heart of enemy territory.

  It was cool inside. Someone had left a pass on the table. That went into my pocket along with a snack bar I pilfered from a drawer. They had plenty. They wouldn’t miss one. I pulled the terminal access point off the desk and sat on the floor with it, out of sight in case anyone wandered past. It took seconds to key in the code I’d just seen, access the main system and instigate a power surge to the main grid. That was simple, just a mass of redirected utility resources with a few neat command strokes. The buildings and crumbling infrastructure of the garrison were built badly enough that it didn’t take much to tip it over in spots and I did this often enough with just enough modifications each time that they thought it was a regular glitch. They moaned about it but they didn’t suspect anything was awry, putting it down to gremlins.

  The lights flickered, failed, and the emergency back up kicked in. It was that easy. I had another trick I did that was even more cool, that’s why I needed the pass, but I’ll tell you about that later. That night, I didn’t need to go too far in, I just needed to grab something valuable enough to sell. I couldn’t resist looking deeper into their system though as I saw something that caught my attention. I started to pull up schedules and rosters, and like a fool, I took too long, heard footsteps outside, way too close, and had to hustle to get out, abandoning the terminal and scrambling back up through the vent with seconds to spare as the door opened. I pulled my foot clear as someone walked in, held my breath and eased the ceiling panel back into place.

  I didn’t have long after that but I knew exactly what I was after. I crawled through, found the workshop I was looking for and dropped down into that strange dim cast of red light.

  The drones were all stacked on shelves, a couple spread out on workbenches in bits. I didn’t know for sure that none of them were activated, hunter killer drones just sitting there watching, waiting and looking for an enemy to attack. I stood still, staring at them. Nothing moved. There were no blinking lights, no signs they were alive, but that didn’t mean a thing, they were designed to be stealthy, invisible, fast as hell. I reached for the workbench, fingers hovering over the array of components lying there, half expecting to get shot at, but still nothing moved.

  I wanted to stay longer but there was a noise outside, voices right outside the door. I grabbed a module that was tiny but heavy like it should have been ten times the size it was, and scrambled under the table.

  The door opened and I watched combat boots approach, listening as they bitched about the power failing, the weather, the damned dust that was screwing with the sensors they’d spent so long calibrating. The Imperial troops hated Kheris.

  They started clattering about with stuff, talking about where they wanted to be posted next, not Abisko, that was as bad as Kheris, they reckoned, and trying to figure out how to get the damned drone back together when there weren’t even enough memory mods there. I was starting to think I could crawl out to the door if I was quiet enough when one of them dropped a screwdriver. It clanged to the floor right next to me as the lights flickered back onto full power.

  I made myself as small as possible, squeezing backwards without a sound, as a hand reached down, with more swearing, to grab the screwdriver.

  Chapter 2

  My heart could not have beat any faster. I backed away to the other side of the bench, hearing the door open again and more footsteps approach. I moved without thinking, crawled out and half ran, half scrambled for the door, hidden from sight by the workbench and managing to slip through the gap as it closed.

  Out in the hallway I could hear voices, distant but getting closer. I ran in the opposite direction, turned a corner and saw a bunch of soldiers up ahead, talking, not looking my way. I ducked back, trapped out in the open. We’d all heard the stories about what they did to prisoners, and that was resistance fighters they caught out in the streets. I’d never heard of anyone being caught inside the base before and I didn’t want to be the first to find out what would happen. I looked around fast, running the layout through my head. There were no ventilation panels in the ceiling, no maintenance access in this section of corridor. The voices were getting louder. There was a janitor’s cupboard somewhere near. I ran for it, pushed my way inside and clambered into the garbage chute.

  It was a vertical drop down, fifty feet at least. I fell, banged my head, curled up tight and bounced. Something jagged in there tore another chunk out of my arm as I tumbled and I clutched the memory module in my pocket, no way was I going to lose my prize.

  I hit an intersection and managed to brace myself, legs and arms jammed wide against the walls. There was a hatch just above my head. I edged up to it and fell out into another cupboard. At least two levels down into the base and not where I wanted to be. It was time to split.

  It was almost midnight when I got out. There were still a few hours to make it back before curfew ended and the streets started to fill. I climbed out of the vent and made my way back to the fortified wall. I lay there for a moment, fl
attened against the skyline. Rockets were still screaming overhead, the defence grid pounding out interception after interception. It was only ever the Wintran-made rockets the resistance smuggled in that were that accurate. Most of the time, it was the homemade, cobbled together weapons they used. Those were the ones that did the damage to the rest of the city.

  I crawled to the edge and looked over. Outside the garrison wall was a killing ground surrounded by a rubble barrier. The Imperial troops didn’t hang out in that open rough area, they stayed inside their walls. They’d bulldozed this part of the city eight years ago when they’d arrived in force to retake the colony and suppress the rebellion, clearing the area for their base, and shoving the remains of our buildings unceremoniously into a twenty foot high barrier that protected them. It encircled the entire complex. The open killing ground was lit up by the sweeping searchlights of the towers all along the wall. There was a trick to getting through it but you had to know the pattern. They changed it and it had a randomiser inbuilt that gave it an extra edge. I’d never had a problem.

  I climbed down, careful not to get snagged on the line of barbs and spikes all along that edge. I jumped down, watched the pattern and ran. The rubble barrier was easy, a fair amount of effort but with plenty of handholds and no problem so long as you didn’t skewer yourself on the rusting rebar and nails that stuck out all over it. I made it up and over and clambered down to crouch at its base while I sussed out what was happening on Main.

  Main Street cut east to west across the city, stretching across in front of me like a no-man’s land of broken concrete, dust and grit swirling in the stiff wind that was blowing in from the desert. The brilliant white circles from the searchlights scanned up and down that open drag, glinting off the coils of razor wire blocking each road leading north off it into the civilised half of the city. We lived in the south, the not so nice part of town where you were lucky to find a building with windows intact.