This Bloody Game

by Dan Schiro

  ALPHAOMEGA I:

  THIS BLOODY GAME

  By Dan Schiro

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental and unintended.

  ALPHAOMEGA I: THIS BLOODY GAME

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 by Dan Schiro

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Owen Richardson

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  www.danschiro.com

  For Dad and guys like him.

  Chapter 1

  “Recording in five, four, three…”

  The lizard-like mystskyn woman standing in front of the grand palace took a deep breath and smoothed her burgundy suit. The datacube floating next to her scaly producer winked with blue light as he reached the end of his silent count, and the reporter began.

  “As the sun rises on day 18 of the Crisis at the Painted Palace, there’s still no resolution in sight. Though Union negotiators have agreed to release the political prisoners Dawnstar has named, they have reached a standstill regarding the terrorists’ other demands. Despite Dawnstar’s insistence, Parliament has reiterated that SpaceCorps will not withdraw from the Rammgod Rift star cluster under any circumstances.”

  The mystskyn reporter paused and looked sternly into the recording eye of the floating datacube, her vertical pupils narrowed to slits. “Now, as communication begins to break down, the Dawnstar terrorists are threatening to kill the heir to the throne of Phantak Ro — wait, cut, cut.” She shook her head, her scaly tail twitching with agitation behind her.

  Her producer shrugged, his forest-green coxcomb bobbing with a tilt of his head. “Problem, Ms. Rath?” he asked, an annoyed furrow vexing his yellow-green brow.

  “That emphasis was all wrong,” huffed Lamia Rath, adjusting her earpiece with her daintily clawed fingers. “Threatening to kill the heir to the throne. Threatening to kill the heir to the throne.” Her forked tongue flitted in and out of her short-snouted face as she considered it. “Which do you think sounds the most tragic?”

  Her producer held up his hands to frame her with the crowded lawn and towering palace gates behind her. “I think we should circle west,” he said, squinting. “We’ll get a better shot of the Painted Palace behind you.” He glanced up at a sky crowded by a distant sun, a massive gas giant and several of the Phantak Ro’s sister moons. “Plus, the light might be a little more… flattering on your scales.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Lamia snapped. “One way or another, this had better end soon so I can get back to the galactic core. I need a goddamn spa day.”

  A mere mile away, Orion Grimslade III sat on a grassy hilltop, looking down on the Painted Palace and the throng of interstellar media crowded around its courtyard walls. He found himself surprised at how relaxed he felt as the morning breeze danced through his short, spiky blond hair and the sunshine warmed the thrusting cheekbones of his pale face.

  For a few moments, he let his mismatched blue-and-green eyes rove, taking it all in. Phantak Ro’s beautiful sky was half-full with a pink-and-white striped gas giant. Spots of color glimmered against the surface of the giant where other moons chugged steadily along their orbital tracks. The Painted Palace of the sephilons sat proudly in the valley, a vast, walled stone complex capped with a great stained-glass dome that twinkled with hundreds of colors. Phantak Ro was not a military power, and its people were just a handful of threads in the great galactic tapestry of races. But it was a beautiful planet, and thanks to its ancient manacite spring, it was fabulously rich. Orion thought it a fine place to make a name for himself.

  Reaching into a pocket of his blue-gray smartcloak, Orion retrieved a brassy datacube and tossed it in the air. The cube opened at hidden seams and became a kind of polyhedron as its artificial gravity field came to life. A lens glowing with blue light blinked on a second later, awaiting Orion’s command. “Link to crew, audio only,” Orion said to the floating datacube.

  “Here,” said a bright female voice.

  “Here,” growled a male voice.

  Orion unfolded his lean, tall frame and stood, straightening his cloak with a sharp jerk. “You guys ready?” he asked, his datacube floating up beside him.

  “This is a foolhardy plan,” said the rough male voice.

  “I agree with Kangor,” said the female. “Is the risk worth the paycheck, Orion?”

  “It’s about more than the paycheck, Aurelia.” Orion’s mouth fell into a comfortable smirk. “With all the media here, this is the stage we’ve been waiting for. We pull this off, and everything changes for us.”

  “And this is… legal?” asked Kangor, pronouncing the last word tentatively.

  “Absolutely.” Orion flexed his right hand anxiously. “The old duke put his signature on the contract, didn’t he?”

  “It will be interesting to see if that stands up in court,” Aurelia said.

  “Come on,” Orion hissed. “Did you guys forget your balls back at the office?”

  “All six of my reproductive pods are firmly attached, human,” snarled Kangor across the link.

  “Yes, and my people do not need them.” Aurelia chuckled. “We talked about this Kangor, but I’ll say it slowly — figure of speech.”

  Orion shook his head and pinched the bridge of his straight, sharp nose. “Look, testicle-like organs aside, this is our moment.” A steely edge crept into his voice as he narrowed his heterochromatic eyes. “This is our moment, I can feel it.”

  After a brief silence, Kangor grunted. “I’m in position.”

  “As am I,” Aurelia sighed.

  “Good.” Orion clapped his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “I’m going in. Expect my signal within the hour.”

  Chapter 2

  Orion snatched his datacube out of the air, slipped it back into his smartcloak and took a moment to check over his kit. His charcoal-gray kinetic bodysuit hugged his muscular body, and his light shield clung tightly to his left bicep, its gauge reading fully charged. The many small pockets sewn into the adaptive nanofiber of his smartcloak held dozens of items that might be useful, or even life-saving, depending on how the situation turned. Yet amid all of this gear worth tens of thousands of Union credits, his most important tool lay hidden beneath the silver A-within-O tattoo on his right wrist.

  As for the pulse pistol and charge cartridges that could have hung from his belt? Well, Orion didn’t tend to carry a sidearm. He found more often than not that others underestimated him when he didn’t, and that was always an advantage.

  Orion flexed his right hand as he took one last look at the magnificent view, and then he turned back to the metal grate he had spent the last hour locating and unearthing. As he pulled the rusty bars loose with a grunt, Orion called on his training — a particular mental exercise his mentor had called Memory’s Prism — and saw the map in his mind’s eye. He lowered his legs into the hole and braced himself on the mossy edges for a moment. Then he let go, straightening out with his arms above his head, and dropped into the swirling dust of centuries. Orion plummeted some 60 feet before he splashed down into dank shadows, glad for the kinetic bodysuit that absorbed the brunt of the impact.

  The stinking water rose to his knees, part sewage and part runoff from a foundry somewhere on the grounds of the Painted Palace. “Illuminate,” he said softly as he tossed
his brassy datacube in the air. Light flooded the waterway, and Orion saw a tunnel about seven feet tall by the same width. The brown-green water looked still but for a few eddies, and tangles of mildew-painted pipes lined the round walls, some no bigger than Orion’s thumb and others as wide as his thigh. As the elderly sephilon duke who had hired Orion had promised, the moldering waterway seemed to be passable.

  Orion pulled a tube-shaped breather out of a pocket of his cloak and plugged the two soft nozzles into his nostrils. Then he slogged along in his datacube’s gentle light, the languid water of the tunnel soaking him to his knees. As he went deeper into the tunnels, he found that the old duke’s claims of “artisan workmanship” hadn’t completely stood up to the slow whips of time and moisture. Twice Orion had to double back because of caved-in walls that blocked his path, and an unexpected sinkhole soaked him to the middle of his chest. Eventually his memory of the twisting blue lines proved true, and he reached the great door the duke had described.

  The door stood taller than Orion’s lanky frame and several times as wide, presumably to provide passage for ancient dredging equipment. “Substance analysis,” Orion said, rapping a gloved knuckle on the door.

  His datacube ran a quick sweep of blue rays over the door. After a beep, it projected blue holographic text that read, Non-magnetic titanium alloy, approximately three feet thick.

  Orion stroked his tapered jaw. The explosive paste in his smartcloak might be enough to take it down, but he was directly beneath the Painted Palace by now, and that kind of noise would sacrifice the element of surprise. Stepping up to within a few inches of the door, he reached out and felt around the edges. His gloved fingers streaked through a thick layer of grime until he found an old-fashioned lock welded into the frame of the door. This wasn’t anything he could hijack with his illegally modified datacube, fool with a counterfeit biometric signal or deceive with a fake iris scan. Only a thick piece of metal shaped just so would persuade the ancient mechanism to open.

  The time had come. Orion and gazed at the silver A-within-O tattoo atop his wrist, the design glittering in the white light of his datacube. With a mental command as natural as flexing a muscle, Orion woke the spellblade living in his flesh. Liquid metal bubbled forth from the tattoo and flowed over his skin, ensconcing his fist and forearm in pure manacite before solidifying into a spiked silver gauntlet.

  Orion took no time to admire the living tool, as ancient as it was rare, for his training had demystified it long ago. He extended his chrome-swathed index finger and held it to the keyhole in the door. As he concentrated, the liquid metal of the spellblade stretched out. Flowing silver slipped in and touched the heavy pins and tumblers gently, and soon everything clicked into place. Bolts popped back, and the door slid open an inch. Orion plied his spellblade again, this time sending a thin wedge of alloy slithering into the crack and hooking around the other side. The old door opened slowly as Orion wrenched it back, its huge rusty hinges groaning and its front edge gathering a wall of muck from the waterway floor.

  Beyond the door, what had once been an entrance to the palace sub-basement was now just a dusty crawlspace between two stone walls, one very old and the other ancient. Orion popped the breather out of his nose and spent a few seconds of silent meditation visualizing his ascent. Then he leaped up. He braced himself with his arms and legs and dug into the porous stone with the claws sprouting from the fingertips of the gauntlet on his right hand. With easy movements, he shimmied up a few dozen feet until he reached a crisscrossing support structure of iron bars. There he ripped a hole in the thick insulation above him, stifling a cough as fine yellow fiber rained down, and found the underside of a heavy marble tile. With a few thrusts of his shoulder, the plaster binding the edges gave way, and he peeked up into a well-lit hallway.

  At a glance, the Painted Palace looked every bit as opulent as he had heard. The marble floor shone with a high polish, its tiles a checkerboard of pearly white and dazzling lapis lazuli. Intricately chiseled stone arches created a portal-within-portal perspective down the long corridor, and latticed glowglobes floated high in each arch. Old paintings, woven tapestries and long cases displaying gleaming artifacts made every few feet of the wide hallway a unique attraction, and colorful alien flowers nestled in stone alcoves filled the air with bright scents. Just as Orion made ready to slide the heavy marble tile aside and creep out, he heard two plodding sets of footsteps.

  Orion let the tile settle and listened as they trod past above him. “Do not worry, my young friend,” one told the other. “Today we start down the Luminous Path, and paradise awaits us. That is all that matters.”

  “Will it hurt?” asked the other, a younger voice. “We do what we do so that Dawnstar can rise… but could the Kalifa of Light not spare us the pain?”

  The older voice laughed. “Pain is a badge of honor worn by the faithful.” Their footsteps receded. “When we get to paradise, the Pantheon of Prophets will see the badge you wear, and they will know…”

  Orion pushed the tile up to see the backs of two stocky poxgane men wearing the white-and-gold robes of their cult and carrying heavy pulse rifles. It didn’t surprise him that Dawnstar had put more than a few poxgane on the path to “paradise.” Thick and gray, the four-armed humanoids had evolved on a vicious, high-gravity world. They had only ever entered the galactic community because the powers-that-be had uplifted them for use as shock troopers against invading Dark Spacers some 700 years ago. Since then, the dull-witted and aggressive poxgane had been popular cannon fodder for anyone hoping to do violence in the name of a cause. Orion waited until the pair trudged to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and then he shifted the tile aside and climbed up soundlessly into the hallway.

  He moved quickly to the end of the corridor, treading softly on the plush runner down the center of the hall to muffle his footsteps behind the two-man patrol. Poxgane had bone density twice that of humans, tough gray skin and fortified, redundant organs that made them hard to take down, but Orion’s spellblade instinctively put the perfect tool in his hand. Liquid metal danced in the palm of his silver gauntlet, and after a split-second Orion gripped the handle of a long mace crowned by a heavy round head. Just as he was about to fall on them and strike them down, the two Dawnstar devotees stopped in their tracks.

  “Do you smell something?” the younger said with a sniff that wrinkled the piggish nose of his gray face.

  Though his smartcloak had automatically shed the moisture, Orion’s boots and bodysuit had not, and the stench of the stagnant waterway had preceded him. The two poxgane men spun, their beady eyes gleaming, and Orion moved quickly to strike first. His swinging mace came up to meet the older man’s jaw and send him sprawling, unconscious before he hit the marble floor. The younger poxgane managed to raise his pulse rifle and pull the trigger, but the safety was still engaged. The weapon clicked twice before Orion spun the mace in his hand and brought it down on the poxgane’s forehead with a crushing blow.

  As blood spread like great gory blossoms on the marble floor, Orion looked at the silver mace and the gauntlet that held it. Dark-red poxgane blood spattered the blunt head, but the metal itself had changed too. Fine, bright-red veins etched their way down the shaft of the mace and pulsed across the surface of his gauntlet. The two poxgane might survive his attack, they might not — Orion wouldn’t feel bad if two hostage-taking extremists didn’t, if he was honest. Either way, the blood they had shed gave his spellblade the fuel it needed to do more than change shape. Orion planned to make the other terrorists sorry for that fact.

  He called the mace back into his gauntlet, and it vanished like mercury swirling down a drain. “Voice drop to crew,” Orion whispered as he activated his datacube with a squeeze. “I’m in. Move to action positions and hold for my signal.”

  Orion knew that his friends doubted his plan, but he also knew they were fully committed now that he was. After listening at the corner of the ha
llway for a moment to make sure he was alone, Orion took off in a sprint. He dashed through the halls of the first floor, passing great rooms with jewel-encrusted hearths and plush furniture, solariums filled with leafy plants and fainting couches and studies rich with old smoke and books. He saw the dead bodies of palace guards and servants all along the way. Orion could tell that though some had died fighting and others had died running, Dawnstar had slaughtered everyone who had no value in terms of galactic publicity.

  He crossed a vast rotunda decorated with flowers and sculptures, found a wide, switchback stone staircase and followed it up. On the second floor, Orion called on a technique his grizzled old teacher had dubbed Sliver of a Shadow. He slipped soundlessly from alcove to alcove, ears tuned for slightest noise, always conscious of the hallway sightlines and never in them for long. After a few quick turns, he stopped and listened. Then he vaulted off a wall, leaped up into the stone joint of the nearest archway and waited, his heartbeat slowed to a crawl. When the lone robe-clad terrorist — a cat-like timba nubu man with a twitching tail — wandered beneath him, Orion dropped. A curving silver shape formed in Orion’s hand as he fell, and the furry, tiger-striped humanoid barely had time to hiss before Orion drove his blade home and silenced him.

  The veins of his spellblade gauntlet glowed a little brighter as Orion rose from his prey, the cherry-red blood of the timba nubu dripping from the curved blade. For a moment, he found himself savoring the feeling. Then he shook his head, knowing that was the spellblade, not him. He forced the bloodlust from his mind and vanished the knife. Then he strode down to a set of gold-leafed doors bound with a heavy chain and listened to the hushed voices inside. They sounded scared.

  Orion slashed the chains asunder with a cleaver conjured from his silver-swathed hand and burst into the room. The sephilon royal family gasped and stifled screams, and for a moment, Orion recoiled. Though some humanoids found the sephilons quite erotic, for Orion they only aroused a lingering childhood phobia. They had humanoid torsos and arms, and even five fingers, though the configuration was tweaked a bit. Their pale, sculpted faces also looked very human, if you could get past the six eyes and extra-wide mouths. The eight jointed legs were what really threw Orion, of course, and the skittering way the creatures retreated across the parlor floor gave him shivers.