by S. A. Lusher
SATURATE
–A NOVEL OF SCI-FI ACTION–
Book #15 in
The Shadow Wars
written by
–S. A. Lusher–
cover by
–M. Knepper–
editing by
–Sarah Lusher–
Dedicated to Michael Cartwright,
the original fan
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
CHAPTER 01
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
What you are about to read is the fifteenth and final novel in The Shadow Wars series. This is a continuation of the other books and cannot be read as a stand-alone title. I highly recommend that you go back to the beginning and start reading.
You can start here, with the first book, Necropolis.
If you've already read Necropolis 1, 2, & 3, Absolute Zero, Ceaseless, Syberian Sunrise, Snowblind, Quarantine, Rogue Ops Rising, Countdown, Necropolis 4, Starck's Lament, Deathless, The Blind War & Into the Void, then thank you for reading this! I hope you enjoy it, as well.
For the sake of convenience, here is a list of all titles in The Shadow Wars in the order in which they are meant to be read.
-Dead Ice [Companion]
-Dead Skies [Companion]
-Necropolis
-Necropolis 2: Endurance
-Nerves of Steel [Companion]
-Necropolis 3: Annihilation
-Absolute Zero
-Blood & Tears [Companion]
-Ceaseless
-Syberian Sunrise
-Snowblind
-Quarantine
-Rogue Ops Rising
-Countdown
-Warm Memories [Companion]
-Laid To Rest [Companion]
-Necropolis 4: Terminal
-Small Acts of Kindness [Companion]
-EB-303 [Companion]
-Alone? [Companion]
-Starck's Lament
-Deathless
-Outpost 88 [Companion]
-The Blind War
-Lethal Cargo [Companion]
-Into the Void
-Saturate
CHAPTER 01
–Isolation–
Pain.
It always seemed to start with pain.
Specifically, in this case at least, it was in his head. Greg shifted and groaned quietly as he was unceremoniously dumped back in the land of the conscious. He laid there with his eyes closed, trying to take stock of the situation.
What was wrong this time?
How drunk, exactly, had he gotten and what, exactly, had he done?
Keeping his eyes closed, he began running his hands along his arms and chest, trying to feel if he had any bruises or sore spots. But as he did this, he frowned, sensing something was wrong. No blankets.
He sighed. “Babe, come on, give the blankets back,” he groaned. No response. “Vanessa, come on,” he said.
Still nothing.
Sighing, he reached over his right shoulder. His hand collided with something hard, solid and entirely unyielding. Something that absolutely should not have been there. “Fuck!” he snapped, opening his eyes and pulling his hand back.
That's when it occurred to him that something was very wrong. He found himself staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling of sterile white tile. And something was wrong with his bed, too. Primarily: it wasn't a bed.
Greg sat up immediately, a growing fear slowly turning his insides to ice, and realized with horror the truth of the situation.
He was not in his own bedroom.
In fact, he was not aboard the Dauntless. There wasn't anywhere on the ship that looked like this. The aesthetic of this place was different. So where in the fuck was he? And why did his head hurt? As he gently probed his head for wounds, he studied the room he was in. It was small, clearly a cell of some kind, a holding room. He'd been resting on a flat metal slab sticking out of the wall meant to serve as a cot. It just had a thin pad, a flat pillow and a simple blanket on it, all of which he'd been lying on top of.
The room itself was mostly just sterile white tile. No windows, only two vents, both of them tiny and tightly sealed, not even able to be opened. Only a single door, firmly closed, no way to open it from inside. Or so it seemed. Greg found that there were no external wounds on his head and, after another search, his body, either. Though he had some bruises. And he was wearing a generic blue jumpsuit that he didn't recognize.
Where in the fuck was he?!
Greg got up off the cot. He swayed briefly as he stood, his equilibrium thrown off. He spent a moment trying to remember how he might have gotten here, but his thoughts were a confused, incoherent mess. He made himself stop, clearing his head for the moment. Then, once his mind was settled, (or as settled as it was going to get), he began slowly going over the room, trying to find either a way out or a clue as to where he was.
He began trying to remember, going back to the end of his last mission.
They'd killed Erebus and rescued Allan, but they'd lost Mertz and Porter in the process. His relationship with Eve hadn't really recovered. The government had been on their ass, going over the Dauntless with a fine-toothed comb for...well, they wouldn't say what they were looking for. Greg and the others had gone on a week-long vacation on Mezzanine. It had been nice. He'd ended up inviting Vanessa Martel to go with him, kind of like, with him specifically, as his date, since they were already kind of-sort of involved.
It had been a good vacation, and he'd needed it, because once they got back, everything kind of turned to shit.
He'd spent whatever time he could with Allan and Callie, but it was difficult because the investigators were all over the place all the time. They'd asked him all sorts of questions, some of which he hadn't been able to answer because they pertained to his past. They'd had him go over everything, from Dis to Rogue Ops to Ash to his most recent mission. They asked a lot of questions about his decisions, his relationships with the others onboard, (that had been kind of weird to talk about), his perks and payments.
They'd asked about freaking everything.
It had gone on for another solid week after they'd gotten back from their vacation. When it was over and they left, seemingly dissatisfied with what they'd gotten, Allan had recovered enough to leave with Callie. They'd had a going away party, and then they had left. Just like that, they were gone. During this time, Greg had ended up moving in with Vanessa and he'd also started seeing Weller on the side after confirming that Vanessa didn’t mind keeping the relationship open.
Apparently he had a thing for pilots.
This also helped him keep his sanity together because, for another solid two weeks, right after Allan and Callie had left, the missions had begun. All of them had been thrown into mission after mission for the government and the military. Greg was lucky because Hawkins was nice enough to pair him up with Vanessa each time as his pilot. Having a partner around seriously helped his misery. The missions had been becoming stressful.
They'd still been investigating the break-ins at the top secret research facilities, which he was becoming more and more convinced was an inside job. The security measures were apparently disabled remotely, all information from the security systems themselves was erased each time, and these attacks always coincided with some kin
d of convenient changing of the guard or weather-based interruption or convenient power failure.
Greg realized he was getting closer to the here and now in his memories.
There had been other missions in between the investigations. He'd had to help investigate a mass disappearance at an isolated snowbound outpost, then help deal with some kind of outbreak of an alien virus, recover a piece of Cyr technology from a crashed vessel. Stuff like that. But...Greg stopped his investigation and sat down heavily on the bed. There was no way out of here, nothing he could work with at all.
But that last mission he'd gone on…
It had been weird. He was to be dropped off, alone, with no back up but Vanessa, who had to stay with the ship anyway. There had been a strange power signal discovered on an isolated, distant moon. He'd been asked to take some scanning equipment to a site on the moon and run some scans. However, hardly a minute after he'd left, Vanessa had called and told him she was being ordered back to the Dauntless, as another mission had come up and she was the nearest. She'd sounded very unhappy about it, but orders were orders, and Hawkins had said they were scrambling another Spec Ops speedship to pick him up.
He'd walked through a mostly barren, rocky region of the moon.
He'd made his way down into a valley, where this signal was supposed to be.
Then he'd gone into a cave system and…
Someone had attacked him, he remembered slowly. Someone in a power suit that he hadn't been able to make out the details of. They'd hit him with a stun round and he'd been knocked out. And...that was the last thing he could remember.
He'd apparently been taken here.
But where the fuck was here?
So someone had captured him. The whole thing screamed setup. Combined with all the sudden interest from the government, Hawkins’ assessment that someone had an axe to grind with Anomalous Operations and how fucking weird everything had been recently...yeah, definitely some kind of inside job. But who? Who the hell wanted to capture him? He didn't know anyone inside the government beyond the people he worked with. He'd probably just gotten caught in the crossfire between Anomalous Ops and...someone else.
But who?
He kept coming back to that, but each time he did, he came up against the fact that he wasn't going to figure anything out locked in this damned cell. But what could he do to escape? Wait for someone to come open the door, to bring him food maybe, or to come take him somewhere. He'd certainly had to put up with this before, although the last time he'd been locked up like this, he at least had more to work with.
This cell was pretty damned barren.
Since he was sitting here with nothing to do, he decided to check himself over again. His jumpsuit had pockets at least. He stuffed his hands into each one, feeling around, and came up with absolutely nothing. He checked his boots over and then frowned, studying the socks on his feet. That made him think of boxers…
He unzipped the jumpsuit and glanced inside, checking his boxers. Blue. He'd been wearing black, last he remembered. He sighed, zipped the suit back up and pulled the boots on, lacing them up tight. That means that either he’d changed and didn't remember it or someone changed him while he was unconscious.
What lovely thoughts.
Sighing heavily, he stood up and began pacing about the small cell. Something was wrong. He could sense it, somehow. Something was...off. And not just the obvious. Not just the fact that he was in a cell, obviously that was wrong. But something else about this situation. It could just be the sense of isolation, but...no.
Frowning, Greg closed his eyes and made himself become still, trying to open his senses to the world around him. He listened, he smelled, he waited. Abruptly, it came to him. There. It was a scent, very faint, very subtle, but it was there. Death. Blood. It was in the air. Greg opened his eyes. He'd definitely been drinking too much lately. He should've picked up on that right away. Although maybe they'd given him something…
He had no idea about anything.
Greg jerked in surprise and let out a small cry of fear as a power surge hit the area. The light in his cell brightened considerably and then burst in a spray of glass. Greg was plunged into darkness. Okay, well, this was new. New wasn't exactly good, though. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then realized that the darkness was not absolute. Looking around, he tracked the source of the light: it was coming from the floor ahead of him.
The door. It had opened a little bit and light was leaking in from beneath it.
Hope surged through him and he dropped to his hands and knees. Laying his head level with the floor, he tried to stare through the crack. There were maybe two inches of space. Outside, he could see faint light and what seemed to be a hallway made of the same material his cell was. Well, it was enough to work with. He didn’t see or hear anyone or anything. Greg got up and squatted down. Slipping his fingers under the door, he grabbed and began applying pressure. It took him all his strength and about a minute of forcing and straining and sweating, but the door finally began to give. He brought it up to about a foot and that was all he could manage.
It was enough.
He slid out on his back, headfirst, and surveyed the area as he escaped his holding cell. Yep, just a hallway. More doors around him, all but one of them resembling the door to his own cell. Okay, so...a holding area.
It was time to get some answers.
Two of the cell doors were open. Greg moved cautiously over to the first one, peering slowly inside, ready to put his unarmed combat training to use. But there was nothing inside, just an empty carbon copy of the cell he’d just escaped from. Same with the other cell. There were control panels outside of all the doors. He took a moment to open the rest of the cell doors and found more of the same. Greg sighed softly. What an anticlimax. As he approached the final door, he hesitated. He felt like crap. He took a moment to lean against the nearest wall, closing his eyes, trying to marshal his thoughts.
He needed some painkillers, to take a leak and to get some food.
But that would all have to come later. Obviously someone had put him in here, and the more time went by, the more of a chance there was that they would notice he was out of his cell. He moved over to the final door, pushed himself up against the wall to the side of it and hit the open button. Nothing happened. For thirty seconds, nothing continued to happen. All he could hear around him was the dull hum of power, (definitely something off about the sound), and the quiet respiration of oxygen. For a second, he wondered if it was just air conditioning, but no, he knew the difference. Which meant he was in space.
Great.
He peered around the corner, steeling himself for some kind of attack, but there was just another hallway waiting for him. Four more doors for him to inspect. Only one of them was open. Two were along the left side, one to the right and a fourth at the end, opposite where he was now. Greg stepped into the sterilized, white-tile hallway and moved slowly to the only open door. It led into a small bathroom. He moved into it and secured it, checking out the two stalls and finding nothing. There was nowhere else to hide.
He almost stopped and pissed, as the urge became almost overwhelming at the sight of the toilets and urinals, but no.
Security first, pissing later.
He left the bathroom and moved to the second door on this side of the hallway. His mind felt jumbled and confused, anxiety and fear gnawing away at him. Greg forced himself to focus. He was in danger, others might be. Typically the stakes were high. Either way, he’d need a clear head to get out of this alive. He opened the next door and found a break room, just a little kitchenette tucked away into one corner, a pair of couches and a coffee table in the other and, finally, a duo of old-school arcade cabinets.
No one in here.
He made a mental note to order some of those cabinets for the Dauntless. He kept meaning to, since they were so much fun, but always forgot. They were fairly expensive, given that they were pretty niche and therefore rare. Greg shook the tho
ughts off as he moved to the third door, across from him. Focus, he needed to focus. Now was a strange time to be thinking about video games, but his thoughts were kind of like soap bubbles right now, drifting away, popping easily.
He shook his head and opened the third door.
This one immediately got his attention. It was a security station. All of it intimately familiar to him, given how many he’d run into in his life. A bank of monitors to his left, a workstation beneath it, a swivel chair sitting in front of it. Gun lockers along the back wall, all of them open and vacant. A table with some emergency supplies scattered across it to the right. Greg moved into the room quickly, first going through everything that was available to him. Supplies and weapons were his bread and butter in a situation like this.
He spent ten minutes combing over the room, first checking out the gun lockers. At a glance, they appeared empty, but he’d been diligent in the past and it had paid off then. Sadly, this time, there was no pistol tucked away somewhere out of sight. The lockers really were just plain empty. Not even a single bullet to spare. He got down on his hands and knees and checked under, around and behind whatever furniture there was. But still nothing. Sighing, he moved to the table scattered with emergency supplies.
Well, they were at least something to work with.
He saw a gasmask, for all the good that would do him. A combat knife in a sheath, which was probably the most useful thing and which he attached to his belt after checking it out. A bottle of water, which, after checking it out, he drained, as he was thirsty as hell. And, finally, some emergency flares. Well, waste not, want not. He shoved the three of them into one of his pockets. That was it. Nothing else.
Now, Greg turned his attention to security monitors and workstations. They didn’t really have much to show him, he realized after a moment of study. Most of them just showed the empty cells, another showed the hallway, another the break room and another...he frowned. It looked like a transitional junction between sections. It was clearly atmospherically compromised, as they were a big hole in one of the walls.
