by Kal Spriggs
Odin's Eye
Kal Spriggs
Edited by Leo Champion
Cover by Jack Giesen
Published by Henchman Press
ISBN 978-1-941620-21-2
Copyright 2015 Jacob ‘Kal’ Spriggs
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this book to all those who head towards the sound of gunfire, be they police, firefighters, EMTs, or those in the Armed Forces. These are the men and women who pay the toll that freedom and peace requires. They do it for all of us and they do it for each other... and far too few of them have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
CHAPTER ONE
Time: 1730 Zulu, 23 June 291 G.D.
Location: Outer System, Hanet System
Melanie Armstrong let out a startled yell as a plate-sized mechanical spider leapt at her face. Why, oh why, she wondered, did I ever trust this damned sneaky ship. She interrupted the spider's leap with a downward blow and watched it balefully as it scurried away.
She spun at the polite applause behind her.
“Well done,” Marcus said. The former spy sat at the lone table of the small mess quarters. Other than a few more lines on his face and a few more scars, he looked much the same as the first time she had met him, shortly after the death of her parents. He had the same brown hair and the same cocky smile. His eyes, though, were different. It seemed that now that she knew the truth about him, his eyes showed all the guilt and pain that his face hid so well.
“Bravo,” Brian Liu said. The genetically modified man seemed mildly impressed, though she knew he probably could have fended off the repair bot while fighting an entire enemy tactical team bare-handed. Even with the other arm missing, she thought as her eyes caught on the stump of his right arm.
“I hate you both,” Mel said, but she didn't put any force behind the words. She did, however, look to the ceiling and shake a fist at it, “That goes double for you, you damned robot!”
A deep, growling voice answered her, “I am not a robot, I am a fully autonomous warship guided by a quantum computer capable of self will and original thought.” Fenris being deliberately obtuse didn't surprise her, though his decision to go along with Marcus's and Brian's plan to ambush her when she least expected it had.
“That's what I said,” Mel growled, “You're a damned robot.” She turned back to the cupboard and pulled out her breakfast ration bar. “I still fail to see why having his repair bots jump out at me all the time is supposed to prepare me better for a fight.”
She sat at the table and glared at Brian who shrugged, “Being ready at any time for anything is the best way to prepare yourself. Constant vigilance and paranoia are valuable survival traits... especially since you are undoubtedly marked for death.” He smiled tightly, “Paranoia is a valuable survival trait.”
“The Guard think we're dead, the terrorists think we're dead,” Mel savagely tore open her ration bar's wrapper and bit into it. She spoke around the almost indigestible mass: “Everyone thinks we're dead. Why be paranoid?”
The one good thing about having her adrenaline up and being mad was that she didn't notice as much how disgusting the bar tasted. They were down to the last few of them at this point and those were mostly the ones that tasted so vile that no one had wanted to eat them until they had no other choice.
“Well,” Marcus said as he continued to chew on his ration bar, “that's all well and good until we show up alive. The Guard have your biometrics in their systems, which will flash an alert when a match for you pops up.”
Mel shrugged at that. While they had discussed the problem before, they hadn't yet found a solution other than the obvious, “We avoid worlds with Guard customs control. Head out to the Periphery.”
“While you or I could survive out there on our own,” Marcus said, “that's not much of a life.”
“I've done it for centuries,” Brian Liu nodded. “It gets old, eking out a life, barely scraping by, always looking over your shoulder.” He swallowed the rest of his ration bar in a single motion, clearly the foul taste didn't bother him as much as it did Mel. “Besides, the frontier is getting smaller every day. The Drakkus Empire is expanding, the Guard are pushing out into the Periphery, only a matter of time before you run out of places to hide.”
“Easy for you to say,” Mel grimaced, “you can change your biometrics.”
Brian was a genetically engineered super-soldier, designed back on fabled Earth. From what Mel had seen, he seemed to shrug off injuries that would incapacitate or kill a normal person, and he had claimed that, besides regrowing severed limbs, he could also alter his fingerprints, facial structure, and even iris, not much, but enough to fool most scanners. It wouldn't give him a new identity, but it would cut ties to his old one.
“I didn't say it wasn't a painful process,” Brian admitted, “but it is an option for me.”
Brian, Marcus, and she were the only survivors from the shanghaied crew that Guard Intelligence had sent to stop the Fenris from destroying everything in the Vagyr system. Well, she thought, really we were sent to trigger the ship to attack Vagyr, but we didn't know that at the time.
Bob, who worked for some unknown agency, had infiltrated the Guard Free Now cell sent to hijack the Fenris and so, in theory, Guard Intelligence wouldn't be looking for him. Jerimiah Swaim was a programmer recruited by Guard Free Now; he was a young kid, fairly clueless, and Mel could admit that she mostly thought he was pathetic but harmless.
Stasia, the fourth survivor, had been revealed as Lace, a mercenary who specialized in infiltration. The woman had linked up with a shuttle only a few hours earlier and departed for Hanet, where she said she would arrange for their arrival.
Mel didn't know if she could trust the mercenary. They'd offered her a sizable amount of money in exchange, but it was always possible that she might double-cross them for a reward anyway.
For that matter, the money they had offered to pay her with was looted from the terrorists who had tried to seize Fenris. An undercover Guard Intelligence officer had offered bank account numbers and access codes in exchange for his life. After he had died, they had quietly funneled the money out of those accounts and into new ones here in the Hanet system. Fenris had done all that through remote access, sending signals for money transfers from the outer limits of different systems on their way here.
Not all of those accounts were still active, a certain sign that either the terrorist organization known as Guard Free Now or the secretive organization of Guard Intelligence had locked them down. However, enough of them had been active, with enough money, to make them all very, very wealthy.
Which brought them to Hanet. The system was the central hub of the Mercenary Guild, which was the only place to hire mercenaries legally in the entirety of Guard Space. It was also one of the few non-Guard systems with the resources and shipyards to repair a vessel like Fenris. Assuming, of course, that the Mercenary Guild would allow such a thing to happen, seeing as it would violate a dozen of the Guard Security Council's standing laws in the process.
It was something of a complicated problem, given the enemies that Mel and her companions had made. Most of human space, almost all of the worlds colonized from the Star Portal, was dominated by the United Nations Star Guard, most commonly called the Guard. While officially they merely oversaw interactions between worlds and prevented large-scale bloodshed, in reality they controlled just about everything of importance. They regulated interstellar travel and commerce, they restricted the size and composition of planetary defense forces, and they enforced laws on “threats” to humanity.
The last was the main problem for Fenris, mostly because of a general distrust, often with good reason, for non-human intelligences. The Culmor Empire, humanity's long term enemies, had
killed billions of humans, military and civilians alike. The Erandi, another alien race, had raided human worlds for generations, and it was common enough for humans to be killed as collateral damage in their ongoing civil war.
The violence and bloodshed from contact with those two races was the root of why contact with any non-human alien species was forbidden by the Guard. Human built Artificial Intelligences had a tendency to go mad, often with catastrophic results and as a result, they too, were banned. After a chain of murders tied to a mutant almost three hundred and fifty years earlier, the original United Nations Security Council had passed the Mutant and Telepath Act, which made genetic engineering of humans illegal, classified a range of “normal” humans, and made anyone outside that range subject to imprisonment and deportation to one of the penal colonies.
It fell on the various Guard military forces to enforce those laws and on Guard Intelligence to find violations as well as to provide information on external and external threats to humanity. While Guard Army forces often acted as peacekeepers and even policing forces, the Army was the least funded of the Guard Military Forces on an individual basis, which meant their training and policies adopted a shoot first and ask questions later strategy. They had to cover too many worlds, with too diverse populations, to worry about peaceable solutions for irregular situations.
While Guard Fleet officers tended to be better trained and educated, they were also often from the core systems, where prejudices were more entrenched... and where conformity was seen as more important than critical problem solving. The Guard Marines, the smallest of the Guard Military Forces, were the most likely to think outside of the box and perhaps even to try to find a solution with Fenris... yet their force was most often used in direct action or high intensity conflict situations. The most likely situation in which Mel and her companions would encounter anyone from the Guard Marine Corps was if they were there to kill them.
The fact that they most often had to enforce violations of the Security Council's laws, and the fact that most of the laws carried extremely hard penalties, meant that the Guard and the criminals they caught often clashed violently. All too often a pirate or criminal would rather go down fighting rather than be caught alive. This had only reinforced many of the prejudices common among the ranks of Guard Military officers... especially the idea that all non-humans were dangerous.
Which meant that not only was Fenris illegal, the Guard would see him as a threat. Worse, Brian as a genemod, or genetically modified human, would also be seen as a threat. So the last thing that either of them could afford was for the Guard to become aware of their true natures. Given the fact that Mel, Marcus, and Brian had been recruited by Guard Intelligence as a cut-out for their planned destruction of a human-inhabited world, it didn't make their survival very likely either should they be discovered.
This became a problem when most worlds and systems were considered ‘protected’ rather than ‘member’ planets. Member worlds had full local autonomy, while protected worlds had Guard-appointed local governors and garrisons. Member worlds were allowed larger planetary militia forces, internal elections, and even representation on the Security Council. Protected worlds had greater restrictions on their planetary militias and essentially no local autonomy.
All of which meant that Hanet's Mercenary Guild was their best option. Only a few systems within Guard Space had any autonomy that extended past their atmosphere. Hanet, as part of their founding charter, had full system autonomy, so long as the Mercenary Guild followed its agreement and policed their own ranks.
Somewhat ironically, the better location to get such repairs done would have been the Vagyr system. While technically a protectorate system within Guard Space, it's distance and isolation meant that it had far more autonomy than other such systems. Everyone well knew that the shipyards there regularly built and repaired pirate craft, laundered illegal money, and sold stolen and pirated goods.
They probably would have taken a hefty bribe and looked the other way... except of course they'd been notified that a robotic warship was on its way to annihilate the planet. Somehow, she thought, I doubt they'd overlook that minor detail when they started looking at repairs.
Outside of Guard Space lay their other option: the Periphery. A sparse band of worlds, most distant from the Parisian Sector and the Star Portal which had brought humanity to this region of the galaxy. The Periphery was frontier space, the limits of human expansion. Life on the Periphery was hard for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that the Guard defended their own systems first... and while it wasn't uncommon for them to enforce laws on the Periphery, it was less common for them to come to the defense of the worlds out there. Her own homeworld, Century, lay in the Periphery... but so did Drakkus, another pirate haven, far worse than Vagyr.
“So,” Brian asked, “have we heard anything from Lace?” His voice was pleasant enough, but Mel could hear the note of tension that underlay it. While he trusted Mel, he didn't trust the other woman. Neither, in fact, did Marcus. Nor, Mel knew, did Bob. In fact, Mel didn't entirely trust the mercenary woman, but she seemed like the best option as far as her contacts being able to help them.
“Not yet,” Mel said as she tried to swallow her first bite of ration bar. She couldn't force herself to swallow, though. As soon as they had any money they were going to buy food.
Mel looked up as the hatch opened, but it was only Swaim. The young hacker had hired on with the terrorists to help hijack the Fenris, but Mel couldn't hold that against him. He was too young, too absolutely clueless, for her to blame him.
“Uh, hi guys,” Swaim said. “Anything good to eat?”
Marcus spoke around the first bite of his ration bar that he had yet to finish chewing, “Yeah, kid. They dropped off a buffet bar when they picked up Lace. Shrimp scampi, steaks, these great little french pastries, fresh salad, the works.”
Swaim's eyes lit up, “Really?
“No,” Marcus said. “We've got red and orange ration bars, just like we did for dinner.”
Swaim sighed. “Oh, okay.” He pulled a ration bar out of the cupboard and then sat down next to Mel. “Hey, you've got a purple one, I'll trade you!”
Mel frowned down at the ration bar. In her opinion, the purple ones were only slightly less horrible than the red and orange ones. Still, slightly less horrible beat postivily wretched any day. “I don't know...”
“Oh, come on!” Swaim said. “I'll give you two of the red ones for that one.”
“Um,” Mel said, “I think I'm good.”
Swaim sighed again. “You guys suck.”
Mel restrained herself from mentioning that she had saved his life multiple times. She bit off another bite and tried to ignore the flavor as she looked over at Marcus. “So, any thoughts on what we should do?”
He shrugged, “I'm still mostly in agreement with Lace. Membership in the Mercenary Guild, either as a Charter Company or working for someone else would be good pay.” He frowned, “I'm not sure how far our windfall money would go towards that... especially considering the bribes we'll probably have to pay out to keep Fenris a secret.”
“We could always just go our separate ways,” Swaim said. “You know, I'll take my share of the money and just...” he trailed off as he saw the other three stare at him. “What?”
“I didn't know we were giving you a share,” Brian said with narrow eyes.
“Well, maybe not a full share, but I was helpful, right?” Swaim asked.
Marcus nodded, “That's why we didn't space you. You were working with Guard Free Now. They're kind of terrorist scumbags, you know.”
“We aren't spacing anyone,” Mel growled, though that was mostly because she didn't want to set a precedent. Her little brother, after all, had fallen in with Guard Free Now. Sooner or later she would catch up to him and beat some sense into him, but she didn't want Marcus or Brian venting him out an airlock before she had a chance. She looked at Swaim, “Nor are we cashing out. The only reason we are
alive to spend that money is because of Fenris... who needs some serious repairs.”
Fenris's growl spoke up a moment later, “Thanks, Mel.”
Who can also hear everything we say, Mel thought. She could see Swaim blanch as he realized he had implied cutting the AI out of the deal... the same AI who had proven he had free will and could kill. Not that he would kill them, Mel knew, but a little healthy fear on Swaim's part wouldn't hurt. She felt uncomfortable at how that thought mirrored her conversation with Brian and Marcus. It's not the same, she thought, I'm not having metal spiders jump at him when he isn't ready.
Swaim looked down at his ration bar. “I can't manage to swallow,” he said around his single mouthful. He had a look of such intense concentration on his face that Mel suddenly wished she could have one of Fenris' repair bots leap out at him, just to see his expression.
“Me neither,” Marcus said. “I keep hoping if I chew it up enough, I'll be able to overwhelm my gag reflex, but it's just too wretched.” His morose tone somehow made Mel feel a little bit better about her own bar.
Swaim looked down at his bar, “Maybe the red ones are rancid?”
Brian plucked the bar out of Swaim's hands and wolfed it down in three bites. “Tastes alright to me.”
From what Mel had seen, Brian had an excellent metabolism, but it seemed both blessing and curse. He was able to keep going despite horrific wounds and total exhaustion. On the other hand, he consumed two or three times the food that the rest of them did and when Giran had cut the flow of oxygen to the bridge, Brian had passed out before the rest of them. Mel reminded herself to ask him if he had any other issues, but she figured it was even odds that he wouldn't share any details or even give her false information.
Swaim looked down at his empty hand. He looked back at the cupboard. “I think I'm not hungry, anymore.” He left without another word.
Mel shook her head after he left, “God, he's young.” The two men stared at her for a long moment before they both burst out laughing. “What?” Mel demanded.
