Without a firm location or a trackable path for the Atlantis ship, Kenwright wouldn’t commit a destroyer group to a search mission. It would leave sections of the Salus Sphere wide open. The old dog was cautious about this for a reason. The horan always looked for signs of weakness. If the Atlantis ship continued attacking CW stations, it would expose parts of the frontier and would require a destroyer presence to plug the gap.
The pod slowed and stopped outside the stone gates of the marshal’s residence. Two soldiers guarded each side and held their X50 carbines across their chests. Only vestan heavy armor could stop a caseless round fired from an X50. With the motion finding and enhanced vision scope, it was the best on the market in terms of energy efficiency but lacked the stopping power of the energy weapons.
Morgan stepped out and straightened his dark blue jacket. The door slid closed behind him and it hummed back toward the central pick-up point.
“Good evening, Admiral,” the left soldier said and waved him through.
Morgan returned the nod and thought they were getting younger with every year that passed. Or perhaps that was just him getting older. He walked up the road toward the large three-story lilac dome. The former marshal used to be a fidesian and had the place remodeled to look like the best houses on the planet. Kenwright didn’t bother changing it back to the typical square colonial style. He loved the fidesian culture and art.
It showed in the way Kenwright arranged the residence gardens with native plants and statues of fidesian gods. Most humans liked to have their own little slice of Earth. Even though almost everyone had moved to the Salus Sphere over two hundred years ago after resources dried up and the ozone layer disappeared.
Eight, ninth, and tenth generation humans lived in the Sphere along with a few sevens like Kenwright. Some humans crossbred with genetically modified fidesians to create fidians, but most still had reminders of the old world like grassed lawns, wooden benches and genetically engineered flowers made from DNA blueprints.
Morgan saw it as misplaced nostalgia for a place they would probably never visit. If any did, they’d be bitterly disappointed to find a crumbling empty world, used as an outpost for pirates. The Salus Sphere provided everything they needed to sustain the species and a whole lot more.
A junior officer met him at the pair of open front doors. He saluted. “This way, Admiral. The marshal’s expecting a strategy to find and destroy the ship.”
“What does he know about it?” Morgan said, surprised that Kenwright already had the details.
“He read the black alert order about the wormhole attack.”
Morgan turned the chip in his hand and thought about the ideal person to send out in search of the Atlantis ship. Most of the well-drilled crew of the fleet were excellent in formation attack, but that wouldn’t do it. A set-piece battle would prove costly against the kind of weaponry used to take out an orbital station with a few shots. He needed something completely different to avoid exposing the Sphere to a horan invasion.
Kenwright sat behind his white marble desk and gazed at a pair of monitors. Morgan’s footsteps echoed around the empty cream walls as he walked across the polished stone floor toward the desk.
“I see the Atlantis ship’s back,” Kenwright said, keeping his focus on the screen. “I take it we haven’t managed to locate it?”
An orange glow reflected across Kenwright’s face. Morgan guessed he’d ordered a copy of the Orbital Forty’s feed to watch in advance before their meeting. It didn’t surprise him that the old marshal would be all over this like a rash.
“No, sir,” Morgan said. “It’s just like the historical reports from decades ago. A scout ship reported most of the station missing.”
“And now we’ve finally seen the big ugly brute. I don’t recognize the design.”
“Somebody once told me it was built by an ancient alien race who no longer exist. All part of the myth, I suppose. I’d like to put myself forward to take a capital ship out and hunt it down.”
Kenwright slowly nodded and smoothed his gray mustache. “We lost two hundred good people today. I want you to put your best crew on it. You’re an admiral. I don’t expect my top team to put themselves forward.”
“With respect, sir,” Morgan said but didn’t mean, “we need an experienced crew to capture something like this.”
Kenwright rolled his eyes and sighed. “You’ve got your own responsibilities and I can’t allow it. Do you have anyone else in mind?”
The response didn’t surprise Morgan. He expected it, but it was worth a shot. It was always worth having a plan B when dealing with the old goat.
“I’ve already been thinking about that, sir,” Morgan said. He paused briefly, wondering if his suggestion would appeal to Kenwright’s maverick nature, or if he’d receive a dressing down. “We need to keep our frontier defended, but we have our own special predator. I’d like to ask your permission to contract Carson Mach.”
A smile crept across Kenwright’s face. “Bleach is just the sort of crazy bastard that could pull this off. You have my authority to make the transfer from our central funds.”
“Thank you, sir,” Morgan said. The use of Mach’s nickname irritated him, but it was well deserved. Whenever a dirty job needed doing, they always used him to clean up the mess. “I’ll start the ball rolling and update you later.”
Kenwright narrowed his eyes. “Make sure you do. And not a word about this to anyone. If it’s known that I sanctioned a Bleach mission, it won’t be just my head on the block.”
Morgan nodded, turned, and headed back outside.
Dusk had firmly set in and he peered up at the tiny white dots of the drones buzzing around in the starry sky.
Carson Mach had served with him on a destroyer twenty years ago and left the fleet after a string of charges and short spell in military prison. He couldn’t take discipline back then, but always delivered on his contracts after going freelance.
The only nagging doubt was if Mach had finally let his vices completely consume his life. For the sake of the Salus Sphere, Morgan hoped that wasn’t the case.
Chapter Three
Carson Mach chambered a round in his SamCore Stinger, his favorite illegal firearm, and glared at the most hideous horan he’d ever seen at the far end of the bar.
The horan, an ex-commander of an Axis Combine warship, glared back, the hate distorting his reptilian face. This one had dark crimson scales that looked wet and glossy under the bar’s neon lights.
Ralex was the big bastard’s name, and he carried a bounty that Mach desperately needed to pay off his bar tab here in The Tachyon, lest he himself received a bounty on his head by the criminal owners, the Laverna.
The horan wore a thin black robe over his muscular body. He leaned forward on the bar, propping his thick, bony elbows onto the surface. His green and yellow eyes stared right at Mach, not even pretending that he didn’t want to rip Mach into shreds and then feed him to the horan’s pet dogs—although dog was a generous term for the quadruped lizards with razor teeth and claws that slice through titanium.
It was at this point, as Mach downed another shot of Gasmulch to stop his hands from trembling, that he thought about the terrible situation he was in.
Ralex was the head of a rogue group of horans who had fled from the Axis Combine after they lost the war with the Commonwealth powers of the humans and the fidesians. This rogue group, unaffiliated with their former commanders, was free to roam the CW worlds as they saw fit, spreading their hate and bile as they went.
Mach knew that the reptilian swine was planning something, some attack on one of the CW home worlds in the Fidesian system. The Commonwealth had gotten soft in the previous twenty years of peace.
While they continued to expand the cultures of art and exploration throughout the now peaceful Salus Sphere, the Axis Combine were rebuilding their forces beyond the Non-Combat Zone: the ring around the sphere, where all parties had agreed not to establish any military outposts and to
maintain a free-fly zone for all.
It didn’t take a genius to know that the Axis were preparing for another attack. Letting scum like Ralex travel freely was naïve at best.
“What are you looking at, filthy human?” the horan said in his dry, raspy voice. It was barely audible over the pulsing electronic music blaring out of The Tachyon’s speaker system.
Mach squinted his right eye, the black one, and read the temperature of the horan. The beast was ten degrees warmer than his natural body heat. Mach had learned, through his prosthetic eye, that the horan’s lizard-like bodies became much hotter as they prepared for battle. He presumed it was a speeding up for the immune and metabolism systems—the very things that gave them their ability to regrow limbs.
A tall thin fidesian wearing a leather waistcoat hurried behind the bar, serving people as quickly as she could, perhaps sensing things were about to hit the fan. The fidesian glanced at Mach; her ruby red eyes glinted under the lights, as though they were miniature nebulae as seen through a Hoffberg telescope. Her head, like the rest of her body, was almost bald. She, like all of her race, had a fair, almost transparent thin layer of hair on her skin, which under the right kind of sun had a hint of green to it. It was a look that appealed to Mach greatly.
He liked the tall, lithe bodies of the fidesians, their shape the result of their home planet, Salus Prime’s lower than the average human world’s gravity.
Her slight, thin mouth tensed at the edges.
Mach knew this look; it was the disapproving look she had given him just that morning when he asked her to stay in bed for another round of copulation. That word always made him laugh; the fidesians loved their euphemisms almost as much as they loved to copulate.
“I asked you a question,” Ralex rasped again. This time the big creature stood up from his stool, knocking it back, making a group of younger fidesians dart out of the way.
Mach ignored the horan and took another gulp of his drink, finishing the bottle. The sweet buzz of the genetically modified alcohol spread throughout his body and limbs, loosening up forty-three-year-old muscles that had seen more combat and action any human had any right to.
The Stinger vibrated gently against the leg of his GraphTech fatigues, letting him know the molecular disruption module was fully charged. Mach would only have two shots at this. If he missed, it was unlikely he’d beat the horan in hand-to-hand combat; they were just too big and powerful, even with Mach’s varied prosthetic upgrades.
Even a human with advanced tech couldn’t regrow limbs or benefit from having three compartmentalized hearts like a horan. And it was those differences, among others, that made the horans think they were superior to the CW species.
The bartender saw Mach empty his bottle. She swiped it away from the bar and gave him a knowing look that said, “Don’t do anything stupid,” but copulation aside, she didn’t really know Mach all that well; being stupid was what he did best.
“You really are ugly, even for your kind,” Mach eventually said with a growl to his opposition. The hush in the bar seemed to get heavy as the varied patrons sucked in their breath at the insult. From the corner of his eye he watched as most of the bar emptied. A few others stayed, hiding in shadows to watch the fight.
“I’m serious,” Mach added. “Were your parents experimenting or something? They must have either laughed or cried when they saw what crawled out of their egg. It’s no wonder you were chucked out of the Axis Combine.”
Through his temperature filter, he saw the horan’s body continue to enflame. Ralex pushed away from the bar, swiping the barstool violently to one side with his thick, barbed tail.
This was what Mach was hoping for; he spotted the black matte blade attached to the end of the tail; the bastard was equipped with a stun knife. One hit from that, and Mach would be paralyzed.
Better make this one quick, he thought.
He turned to the bartender. “You better duck for cover while you make me a cocktail. I’m gonna need a drink after this,” he said in Salus Common, an amalgamation of English and Fidesian that had become the majority language all across the Salus Sphere.
She blinked her beautiful eyes and did as he suggested, moving in her elegant way. She really was quite a special one and the sole reason why he had spent the last six standard months drinking away his gambling winnings here… totally nothing to do with forgetting about his court-martial with the Commonwealth Defense Force, and totally nothing to do about his broken, now nonexistent marriage, and least of all the loss of pension and earnings.
Letting the Gasmulch help with his denial, and sheer stupidity, Mach picked up a shot glass and threw it with his cybernetic right arm toward the horan. As soon as the glass left his hand, Mach rolled to his right, falling to the ground.
Ralex roared as the glass struck him on the face. The horan leapt up onto the bar with the spring of a Salusian wildcat, smashing his tail left and right, the stun tip sparking as it struck against the wall of bottles, each one smashing, sending fragments of glass spraying around the bar. His robe, although looking thin, was a mesh of graphene and deflected the shards as though they were nothing more than seeds in the wind.
Coming out of his roll, Mach rose up on one knee and pulled the Stinger from his hip holster. The horan likewise had raised a weapon: a small laser blaster from a hidden compartment on his forearm.
“Sneaky fucking lizard,” Mach muttered as the scenario started to slow down for him, the BuzzKill stim finally reacting to his adrenalin. He got off a shot before the horan could aim the laser.
Both men fired… and missed. Mach’s blast flew over Ralex’s left shoulder. The horan’s laser bolt struck a fidesian somewhere behind Mach in the shadows, the yelp telling him it was a young male.
Ralex leapt off the bar with a low hiss.
Mach staggered back and ducked below the swipe of the tail. He dodged to his right, rolling over a table and firing his second blast from the Stinger. The shot hit this time, catching Ralex on the ribcage. The blast sent the horan crashing to the ground, clutching his wound as the disruption bolt ate away at the muscle and sinew.
A loud explosion erupted from behind Mach. He swung around to see three massive silhouettes appear in a nonlethal cloud of paralyzing gas.
Shit, Invidian security droids!
Although not unexpected, they were quicker than he had hoped. Someone must have set him up; they didn’t normally give a crap about bar fights, or… anything, really. The planet Invidia was the place that let anything go, which was one of the many reasons why Mach liked it here… well, like was a strong word, but few planets would allow the likes of Mach to stay around for long. He was the portent of trouble, after all; the Ill Wind, some factions had called him; Bleach, by others for his ability to go in and clean up a situation no matter how dangerous or risky it might be.
Just like this one, he thought.
Before the droids could open fire, Mach used his heightened senses to locate the exits now that the droids had cut him off from his previously planned route. There was a door to the staff office in front of him and behind the horan that stood in his way, now even more furious.
Mach noticed that the effects of the disruptor blast hadn’t lasted; Ralex’s system was already repairing the damaged tissue and the horan was stalking Mach with murderous intent.
This really wasn’t going to plan, but when did it ever?
Mach hit a button on the smart-screen wrapped around his left forearm. He had earlier spent two eros on a jukebox playlist. The blaring sounds of space metal, his favorite fighting music, drowned out the sounds of screams and droid servos.
The pounding beat and the driving riffs helped the BuzzKill stim to further enter his system, slowing time down further, making his reactions borderline impossible. He would pay for this in the morning, but right now he didn’t care.
He had a big damned horan wanting to rip his face off, a group of droids sent by god knows who, and great music pounding into his ears. Bliss!
This was goddamned bliss.
Without looking behind him, he unclipped an EMP grenade from his GraphTech utility belt and tossed it somewhere toward the back of the bar. The bright blue flash and the fizzing sparks told him that the droids hadn’t yet been upgraded to defend against nanopulse technology.
With a big grin on his face, Mach crouched down to receive the charge from Ralex. “Come on, bring it!” Mach yelled as he dropped his Stinger and pulled out his combat knife.
There was nothing technologically special about this thing, just a sharp piece of metal that could cut through granite given enough force.
Ralex bounded into Mach, slugging him around the face with a heavy, scaly fist. Mach didn’t feel the pain, but the physics of it sent him flying two meters back into the bar. His head hit the surface, making his vision blurry.
The horan stepped closer and whipped his tail around.
Mach just about managed to fall out of the way. As he did so, the creature’s momentum brought him close enough that Mach was almost laying directly beneath him, between Ralex’s pair of thick, powerful legs.
The music hit the chorus and a chugging riff blared out as Mach grinned as wide as he had for months. He slammed the knife upwards, driving up with as much strength as he and the various stims in his blood would allow.
Ralex’s tail whipped frantically, but he wasn’t articulated enough to be able to reach down to hit Mach.
Green blood poured from the horan as Mach twisted the blade and jerked it forward, splitting the alien apart. Ralex’s innards flopped out, bringing with them an acidic stench that made Mach want to gag.
On some worlds, these would be cooked into a delicacy. He never bothered to try and this would likely put him off forever.
With a piercing yell that was audible even over the jukebox, the horan slumped back onto his own tail, the stun tip striking his back, sending the beast into a frenzied spasm.
Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship Page 2
