The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  I watched him go in silence, Kovaks’ limp body swaying in my mind’s eye as I wondered what the hell the madman had done or said for his execution to have shaken my father’s rock-steady foundations like that.

  Something was most certainly up.

  And, despite the immortal wisdom of Johnny Wingard, I was starting to think it couldn’t be something so simple as an affair.

  2

  Hotshot

  The thinly-matted training floor slammed into my back at just the right angle to drive the air from my lungs in a sharp whoosh. The familiar sensation flooded in, like someone had opened my chest cavity to vacuum and shocked my diaphragm into paralysis.

  “That’s twice today, Tyro,” a gruff voice barked. “You got something you want to share with the class, or did you just get bored with making everyone else look like a herd of softsteel-sipping goat groppers?”

  I looked around the permacrete lot, taking in the glances flitting my way from indignant tyros and satisfied doceres alike. My eyes found Johnny’s, and he shot me a grin. Finally, I looked up to meet the ebony-skinned drill instructor’s stern gaze. Mathis’ reaction to my sorry excuse for sparring this morning was understandable—and, honestly, probably kind compared to what some of the other doceres would have said.

  But that didn’t stop a flicker of irritation from flaming up in my oxygen-deprived chest.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I grumbled as best I could with my shocked diaphragm as I rose to my feet to face him again.

  It was true. I hadn’t slept so well last night. But he didn’t need to know more than that.

  He didn’t need to know about my concerns for my father, or my wriggling uncertainty about whether the Kovaks execution last night could really be called justice. He definitely didn’t need to know that the same thoughts that had troubled my sleep had continued tugging at me all morning.

  “Apologies, Docere Mathis,” I added. “It won’t happen a third time.”

  It was only then I noticed that even some of the patrolmen walking the top of Sanctuary’s massive perimeter wall had paused to look down at the spectacle of Martin Raish’s boy yet again failing to live up to his father’s heroic deeds.

  Heat crept into my face.

  The patrolmen were a fair distance away, but I knew they had zoom toggles in their helmet displays. Perks of being an officer’s son. Everyone was always waiting to see you fall on your ass. Waiting to receive that overdue confirmation that you are in fact an incompetent silver spoon whose only real accomplishment was being born to the right parents.

  Mathis extended his open palm to me in invitation for another bout. “Daddy’s boots are going to be awfully big for those flowers you call feet if that’s all you got, Tyro.”

  The scuddy bastard.

  A part of me wanted to sucker punch him right then and there, demons to the wind with the consequences. The rest just wanted to scream that I knew I was never going to live up to my father’s name and to sink straight into the permacrete and escape all those watching eyes. But neither was really an option.

  So, I squared up with Mathis and tried to put my head on straight.

  At just under six feet tall and an aggressively lean hundred and eighty pounds, the docere had physically outclassed me up until a few seasons ago. Now that our training was beginning to fill out some of the height I’d gained in my last growth spurt, though, Mathis’ physical superiority over me had been slowly diminishing. Now, his main advantages were experience and skill, and I was fairly confident I was closing the gap on the latter of those two as well.

  I was never going to be Captain Martin Raish. That much had been made abundantly clear to me pretty much since I’d learned to walk. But at least I might be able to put Mathis on his scudspout ass and regain a scrap of my wounded dignity.

  I slapped my palm to his in the customary gesture.

  Mathis surged forward without hesitation, eager to teach me yet another lesson in humility. I caught his jab and aimed a kick at his ribs. Mathis twisted into it and caught my knee with one arm while delivering an elbow strike with the other. I snaked an arm up, shielding my head and grabbing around the back of his neck in one motion. Mathis drove in, dropping my leg in favor of a quick gut punch, and tried to lever me into a hip throw before I could do anything more than cough for air and clutch for balance.

  I fought, battling for balance like a boulder teetering on the edge. But Mathis’ feet were planted in a sturdy base, and mine were caught flat and nearly in-line with my shoulders, forcing me to fight the strength of his legs with the strength of my torso.

  It wasn’t a fight I was going to win.

  But I would’ve rather eaten scud than let him take me down a third time.

  So I abandoned my lifeline grip on his neck to grab his chin and drive his face skyward. At the same time, I rotated in, forfeiting my balance and dropping my weight onto the leg Mathis was so insistently trying to trip me with.

  The move wasn’t exactly regulation, but it worked. Mathis’ right leg buckled under my weight, and in his surprise, I managed to scramble into position behind him. I got his throat in the crook of my arm—the first half of a solid chokehold—before victor’s pride took over and I decided a chokehold wasn’t good enough.

  Instead, I yanked the dull, springy polymer practice knife from the sheath at the back of my belt and planted the tip behind Mathis’ clavicle, right above one of the major kill points.

  Mathis stilled. I tensed, half-expecting him to hit me with a concealed stunner or something. But, finally, he reached down and tapped the mat.

  I immediately released him and stood, moving around to his front to offer my hand.

  “Well look who decided to wake up and come to drills.” Mathis kept his expression carefully neutral as he rose to his feet without my aid. He glanced down at his palmlight then around at the several dozen pairs of combatants who hurriedly looked away from us to resume their own contests.

  Mathis shook his head, a hint of irritation finally bleeding onto his ebony features. “That’ll do for the sorry lot of you scud sippers,” he called. “Maybe tomorrow one of you can pull your heads out of your asses long enough to give an old man a break and give Tyro Raish here a proper match.”

  It almost would’ve sounded like praise if I hadn’t recognized the comment for what it was—a double-edged sword, half compliment to me, half encouragement of the festering dislike several of the tyros (and the doceres, for that matter) already harbored for me.

  Oh well.

  After morning drills, Johnny and I filed into our customary seats at the back of the sleek lecture hall where we studied everything from military history and small unit tactics to the more standard hard and soft sciences that every kid, Legion and civilian alike, studied through their teens.

  Normally, I actually kind of enjoyed class. According to my marks, I was even a decent student to boot. Today, though, I couldn’t have told the instructor what he’d been talking about over the two-hour lecture, outside of that it had something to do with communications systems. And that much I knew only because it was written in big block letters at the head of the lecture materials I’d pulled up on my tablet.

  An hour later, Johnny and I sat in our usual corner of the mess hall, mechanically shoveling down highly nutritious, highly bland foodstuff before afternoon drills and lessons. That I barely remembered having arrived or left our live weapons training session just prior probably should’ve been more alarming, but the fact that I hadn’t been yelled at by any doceres told me my years of Legion training must’ve carried me through the mental fog on passable autopilot.

  Why was this whole thing bothering me so much?

  “I mean, I get it,” Johnny was saying. “The comms bunker can backdoor its way into basically every display on Enochia. That could be big if the scud really hits the turbines. Like if our dearly departed Kovaks hadn’t been totally gropping crazy, for instance.”

  The mention of Kovaks snapped my at
tention fully back to Johnny. “What did you say?”

  He studied me, clearly sensing something was up. “I’m just saying that they didn’t need to spend two whole hours talking about it.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Alpha’s wrinklies, man, where have you been off to all day?” He looked around the room, craning his neck as if looking for the source of my inattentiveness. “I didn’t miss a hot new piece of tyro swell walking around, did I?”

  I rested my face in my hands and couldn’t help but smile.

  Johnny Wingard, loyal friend and relentless—if fruitless—swell hound.

  Then again, the fruitless part wasn’t necessarily Johnny’s fault. We didn’t exactly have a plethora of available candidates to choose from in Sanctuary. As tyros, relationships with our fellow trainees were forbidden. Once we became full legionnaires, they were merely heavily frowned upon, with plenty of complicated regulations to boot. And outside of the few non-tyro girls our age in Sanctuary, it wasn’t like we got out to go scope the scene in Divinity very often either.

  “Huh…” Johnny’s voice broke into the stream of my deliberately benign thoughts. I looked up and realized he was still glancing around the mess hall. “Hey, you ever seen that guy before?”

  I followed his gaze through the throng, searching. It didn’t take long to spot who he was talking about. Civilians always stood out on base, both in dress and in behavior, but this guy…

  There was something odd about him, though I couldn’t quite say what it was. Gray hair, though he couldn’t have been more than mid-thirties. Plain clothing of dull tones, not quite ragged, but not far off. Mostly, he just looked unassuming. Almost too unassuming.

  As I watched, his brow wrinkled, his pace slowing by a fraction.

  Then he looked straight at me.

  His eyes were pale, almost colorless. They searched my face for all of two seconds before he gave what looked like a forced smile and continued on. I watched him slide smoothly through the crowd and vanish.

  “That was weird.”

  When I finally turned back to Johnny, he just shrugged. “Hey, you’re a good-looking dude. As far as you non-gingers go, at least.”

  “Mmm,” I grunted in non-reply, glancing back to where the gray-haired man had disappeared.

  “What’s up, buddy?”

  I turned back to find Johnny watching me expectantly.

  “Come on,” he said, wiggling his fingers in a gesture of invitation. “Never mind the mysterious stranger. Tell Uncle Johnny what ails you this fine day.”

  “Cheeky gingers, for starters,” I grumbled.

  He just beamed and plopped his chin down on his bridged fingers, waiting for more.

  “I dunno, man.” I shook my head, my thoughts returning to the matter at hand. “It’s just… What if there’s more to the story?”

  “Forgive me for missing the Hal Express, but which story are we talking about again?”

  “Kovaks.”

  Johnny frowned at me, then his eyebrows slid up as understanding dawned on him. “You don’t think… Andre Kovaks was a crazy person, broto. Full on lunatic. Mad. Loopy. Weapons-grade nut—”

  “I know,” I said, holding up a hand to stop him. “I know, I know.” I blew out a breath and studied the bustling mess hall with a scowl. “But the whole thing was kind of… I dunno, off, don’t you think?”

  Johnny considered that for a few seconds.

  He’d agree with me. He had to. Executions did happen, but they weren’t overly common these days—ceremonial executions in the Great Hall of the High Cleric himself even less so. Normally, the latter were reserved for people who’d done something truly horrendous, like actively trying to sabotage the Sanctum or the Legion.

  “I guess it seemed a little heavy-handed,” Johnny finally said. “Guy probably could have used help, but sweet Alpha, Hal, he was spouting off against the Sanctum. He accused the High Cleric. Are you surprised they wanted to make a point with him? Let that kind of thing go, and all of a sudden we’re sliding back into the dark ages, with a dozen nations spilling blood for a shot at the driver’s seat. That doesn’t sound like a good time to me.”

  I pursed my lips, considering his words. It was far from the first time we’d had this discussion, or ones very like it, at least.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in our mission. Like every other soul in Sanctuary, we were devoted to the Legion. To Alpha. To keeping the peace of Enochia. All of it.

  It was just that I was a touch inept at the whole not to ask, but to serve thing, and Johnny was one of the few people on base willing to entertain my nonsense. Entertain as he might, though, even when we found ourselves thinking a situation like Kovaks might’ve been handled better, I knew Johnny tended toward the mentality of, Hey, as long as it’s better than the alternative…

  But the lesser of two evils could still be pretty damn evil, right?

  Sweet Alpha, I was being paranoid. Blowing this Kovaks thing out of proportion. I had to be.

  At the end of the day, the Sanctum and the Legion were doing what they thought best for Enochia. I believed that, even if I didn’t always agree with their ruling on what that “best” was.

  “Brighten up, man,” Johnny said. “Hey, if a few seasons down the road it turns out Kovaks was right and we find ourselves fighting a bunch of invading, blood sucking aliens, you get to have the most satisfying ‘I told you so’ in human history. That’s something, right?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Something. Totally, broto.”

  Johnny’s recoil probably would’ve escaped a stranger’s notice, but it was enough to tell me my words had come out harsher than I’d intended.

  “I’m sorry, man,” I added, dropping his gaze. “I’m just driving myself crazy thinking about the way my dad’s been acting and everything.”

  “Hey,” Johnny said, his expression serious, “if I didn’t have you and your heavy thoughts around to drag me down, I’d be liable to float away on a happy cloud.”

  “That doesn’t make me sound like the best friend.”

  “Ahhh,” Johnny said, wrinkling his nose. “Friend is kind of a strong word, don’t you think? Let’s not get carried away, man.”

  “Oh, grop you,” I said, smiling despite myself.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he replied, waggling his eyebrows.

  I shook my head and checked the time on my palmlight. When I looked back up, Johnny’s expression had sobered.

  “You could always ask him, you know. Old Captain Martin is a pretty reasonable guy, as far as CO fathers go.”

  I nodded slowly, playing out how that conversation might go for about the twenty-thousandth time in my head.

  “Or,” Johnny said, splaying his hands, “orrr you could run away from your problems and come move in with us. Problem solved. Or, you know, not. But that’s kind of the point, right? Plus, Belle would probably be too flustered to speak anymore with you around, so that’s a win for Johnny, right there.”

  I frowned a little thinking of Johnny’s younger sister, Anabelle, and the peculiar habit she’d recently adopted of turning rosy red and shortly vacating any room I entered. “Yeah. Tempting, buddy, but I think I might have to wait until at least tomorrow to run away. We’re having Kublich over for supper tonight.”

  “As in the High General of the Legion? That Kublich?”

  I inclined my head. “I believe that’s the one. What?” I added at Johnny’s awestruck expression. “It’s not like this is the first time it’s ever happened.”

  It was Johnny’s turn to shake his head at me. “What’s it like, living up there in your white tower?”

  I looked pointedly in the rough direction of the distant heart of Divinity. “Probably not as nice as living in their White Tower.”

  Johnny tilted his head in concession. “Fair point. So what’s the occasion, then? Business? Pleasure? Are they gonna go ahead and just promote you straight to captain when we graduate next season, demons to the win
d with regulations?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. My mom only told me this morning. Might just be a social call.”

  “Well,” Johnny said, leaning forward, “whatever’s going on, let’s just hope the good General doesn’t bring that foxy little servitor of his.”

  The thought didn’t improve my focus for the remainder of the day.

  Every other tyro in Sanctuary—and most of the legionnaires, at that—would have jumped at the chance to lick the High General’s boots in person for an entire evening.

  I was dreading it.

  Adrian Kublich was a nice enough man, I guess, but I wasn’t in any mood today to play politics and dance the dance. Plus, for some reason I’d never quite been able to distinguish, Kublich had always kind of given me the creeps.

  So maybe my position as a Captain’s son actually had spoiled me.

  Still, all I really wanted to do was find out what was scratching at my father’s brain, because now it was scratching at mine too. So I decided I was going to listen to Johnny for once and talk to him after dinner. I’d never confronted him like that. Something told me it wouldn’t be a fun conversation. But I needed to know—for my own sanity and for my mom’s sake.

  One way or another, I was going to find out what the hell was going on with him tonight.

  3

  Meat and Gravy

  “This pie is to die for, Klara,” High General Adrian Kublich said from across the dining room table as his fork descended for another bite.

  I couldn’t disagree. The meat and gravy pie was delicious, as usual. But something about the way Kublich looked at my mom while he said it made my stomach squirm.

  My mom smiled, inclining her head at the compliment, but didn’t say anything.

  “How’s your work coming along?” Kublich added. “I imagine you’ve had a productive season with Martin running around, as busy as he’s been.”

  Was it my imagination, or did my father tense at that?