by C. G. Hatton
THIEVES’ GUILD
THE COMPLETE eBOOK BOXSET SO FAR 2018
By C.G. Hatton
RESIDUAL BELLIGERENCE #1
BLATANT DISREGARD #2
HARSH REALITIES #3
WILFUL DEFIANCE #4
KHERIS BURNING LC#1
BEYOND REDEMPTION LC#2
DARKEST FEARS #5
•
Published by Sixth Element Publishing
Arthur Robinson House
13-14 The Green
Billingham TS23 1EU
Great Britain
Tel: +44 1642 360253
www.6epublishing.net
© C.G. Hatton 2011-18
www.cghatton.com
Also available as individual books in eBook and paperback.
C.G. Hatton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works.
•
For Hatt, as always
CONTENTS
Foreword by Book Blogger Mark Hayes
RESIDUAL BELLIGERENCE #1
BLATANT DISREGARD #2
HARSH REALITIES #3
WILFUL DEFIANCE #4
KHERIS BURNING LC#1
BEYOND REDEMPTION LC#2
DARKEST FEARS #5
FOREWORD
By Mark Hayes, Author, Blogger, Pugilist Literati
‘Residual Belligerence’ is a title that grabs your eye. It grabbed my eye at a sci fi fair one hot sunny afternoon in June 2014, stacked up against two other novels with equally eye catching titles, ‘Blatant Disregard’ and ‘Harsh Realities’, on a stall in the corner of the main marquee. Standing behind the stall were a perky diminutive woman with a broad smile, and a tall skinny bloke with a face like begrudging thunder. As a bibliophile and hobbyist writer myself, my first novel still a year in the future at this point, I loved then, as I do now, talking to writers about their novels. Almost as much as I like discovering new authors to read, and eye-catching titles with equally eye-catching covers draw me like a bear to honey. So I wandered over to say hi, buy the books and chat with the author CG Hatton, who given the nature of the titles and the ‘face like begrudging thunder’ was obviously the tall bloke…
So that was my introduction to CG Hatton’s novels. CG who, if you haven’t guessed already, is not a tall skinny bloke with a face like begrudging thunder. She is however one of the most brilliant writers of fast paced, character driven, immersive sci fi thrillers it has ever been my privilege to meet or indeed read. She also has never held my glaring misplaced assumption back in 2014 against me. Indeed, she even pretended to remember the odd bearded bloke in the top hat who made such a facile error the following year when I gleefully picked up a copy of the fourth novel set in her Thieves’ Guild universe, ‘Wilful Defiance’, and after a short chat, told her enthusiastically that our chat the year before had inspired me to actually finish writing my first novel, which I was about to publish.
Remarkably no one has yet thought to blame CG for inspiring me to finish my first novel, but if you ever feel to need to complain about my novels it’s all her fault…
After picking up ‘Wilful Defiance’, that year I drove home and lost a couple of evenings, enraptured and enthralled in her vividly drawn universe. A universe where the human race stands teetering on the brink of all-out war between the two great power blocks of the galaxy – the old power of Earth and the younger but no less powerful faction based around the corporate world of Winter. Between them a demilitarised zone of systems holds a fragile independence only because they keep the two sides apart, and striving to maintain the balance is the Thieves’ Guild. Which isn’t an easy balance to hold, as the principals of both sides will do anything to get the upper hand. So the guild, under the shadowy guidance of its founder, must walk a fine line. A line that would be easier to walk if its best two operators, Zach Hilyer and LC Anderton were not AWOL, top of the galaxy’s ‘Most Wanted’ list and hunted by both Winter and Earth, as well as every bounty hunter with a ship and a gun, after their last job. Because they are in procession of something that could tip the balance between Earth and Winter either way, and that isn’t even what makes it so dangerous…
By the end of the first four books I was hooked, a fanboy, and come the following June desperate for Book 5. Which proved to be a problem because Book Five wasn’t written yet. The galaxy would have to stay poised on the brink of disaster, and the cliff hanger that was the end of ‘Wilful Defiance’ would have to stay hanging on by its finger tips a little while longer. What there was however was Book One of the Thieves’ Guild Origins books, ‘Kheris Burning’, a novel set on one of the lost little worlds in the great divide between Earth and Winter and telling the tale of the early life of one of the guild’s top field operatives LC Anderton, as told by LC while hiding out in some tunnels somewhere in the midst of the elusive Book 5.
It was hard to stay disappointed that Book Five was still unwritten when your appetite was sated by a novel as extraordinary and enthralling as ‘Kheris Burning’, a tale of a street kid caught up in events beyond his understanding, just trying to survive and find enough to feed himself and his friends, torn between the occupying forces of Earth and resistance leaders who use the street kids as a recruits and cannon fodder, with oh so many echoes of places in our own much begotten present.
A year later and Book 5 was still as elusive as ever, but LC was in another fox hole somewhere in a universe gone to hell, telling the story of his first job for the guild and how he met another character for the main series, Zach Hilyer. ‘Beyond Redemption’, the second Origins novel, pulls on threads that you have read in the first four novels and ties them in new knots, making the Thieves’ Guild universe all the more complex and real, and giving you, the reader, a deeper understanding of the characters at the heart of everything. Which is what makes these novels stand out so much, the characters are so vividly realised, while the pace never lets up.
Then finally after waiting so long, along came Book 5, ‘Darkest Fears’ and the war that was always coming arrives in its full horrifying splendour. Though it’s not perhaps the war you were expecting way back in Book 1, and Book 5 is really Book 1 of the new series, or Book 7 of the series as a whole, and if you thought the first six books were full of pace, action, adventure and wonder, you haven’t read anything yet…
Which leave two questions to my mind, when is Book 6 (or 8 or possibly 2 of series 2) going to arrive? And why of all the people who could be writing this foreword did CG ask me to do it? Possibly it’s an act of residual belligerence on her part for my mistaken thinking one hot day in June 2014 that the author of these wonderful novels was the tall thin bloke with a face like begrudging thunder.
Mark Hayes
Author, Blogger, Pugilist Literati
markhayesblog.com
RESIDUAL BELLIGERENCE
(Thieves’ Guild: Book One)
By C.G. Hatton
•
Published by Sixth Element Publishing
Arthur Robinson House
13-14 The Green
Billingham TS23 1EU
Great Britain
Tel: +44 1642 360253
www.6epublishing.net
© C.G. Hatton 2011
www.cghatton.com
Also available in paperback.
C.G. Hatton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
•
For Hatt
Chapter 1
“Where is he now?”
The atmosphere in the Man’s chambers was heavy at the best of times, the scent of spices and oils from all corners of the galaxy mingling into a warm intoxicating concoction. The question hung in the air like a wisp of smoke, swirling provocatively between them.
The Man spoke again without giving him time to think up an answer, a warning edge to his voice, “Don’t try to read me, NG.”
He should have known better but it hadn’t been a conscious effort, more a gentle testing of the mood to gauge what the tone of this meeting was going to be.
“We don’t know,” NG said finally.
“Sit down.” The Man nodded towards the heavy set wooden chair in front of his desk. It wasn’t often that he’d get summoned to the chambers and only rarely was he asked to sit. He sat.
“Outright war between Earth and Winter,” the Man said and shook his head slowly, his hands clasped in front of him on the desk. “Factions finding the audacity to make moves against us. Our own demonstrating questionable motives. And we don’t know where he is?”
•
There wasn’t usually much that could go wrong with an easy acquisition. He wiped blood from his cheek with a shaky hand. Senses still spinning, he tried to lean forward to disengage the drive but the restraints tightened and pulled him back into the seat. An alarm was sounding, distant and irregular, only now becoming an insistent irritant inside his head, which was pounding and wondering where the hell things had gone wrong.
He tried to twist around in the harness to check on the package but his neck resisted and a pain shot through his side with enough bite to make him straighten up and groan. The proximity alarm, he thought. And remembered it sounding much louder not so long ago. It faded as he closed his eyes.
The voice that penetrated the fog was soft and feminine, nudging gently into his awareness. “Hil,” she said in persuasive mode, “Hil honey, you need to wake up now.”
He could taste blood and smell hydraulic oil. That couldn’t be a good combination and his survival instinct was screaming at him to jump up and fight, or run, he wasn’t sure which because it was being soundly beaten into submission by his immediate need to fade out again.
“Hil,” the voice was louder now. “I need you to get up and help me, hon, because I can’t fix this by myself. My suppressant systems are shot and if you don’t get back there and do something to control the pressure that is building up, the drive is going to explode and we’ll both die here on a godforsaken planet in the back of beyond and no one will care or miss us except for that damn package you had to go get.”
It was a dream he had too often so he embraced it and decided to let it run out. Usually he’d wake abruptly and go get a beer to calm his nerves. The nightmares had been more often of late but this was the first that hurt so bad. And the first where Skye was so polite. And come to think of it, the first where he could feel his head spinning from the smell of fumes.
He jerked awake and gasped as the movement reignited all the sparks of pain.
“God dammit, Hil,” Skye was screaming, “you worthless son of a bitch dragging us out here on a goddamned wild goose chase and dying on me.” He’d never heard so much emotion from the ship before.
He couldn’t help the smile that crept across his face, sore as he was and in no way sure enough of the state of the ship to be cocky. But he’d gotten hold of the package and made it away. So why was he sitting here grounded on god knows what planet with his wits scattered as far as wreckage from his ship?
The smile faded.
Skye shut up mid-flow. Then tentatively whispered, “Hil, you with me? Hil? Trust me, you need to move. We have three ships moving in on our position and if that damned package means as much to you as you make out, we have to go.”
He couldn’t even remember what was in the package, but he had a vague recollection of taking the tab and the guild would be unimpressed to say the least if he lost it. The chances that they’d crashed by accident were slim and that three ships were bearing down on them probably meant that someone had taken offence at losing whatever it was that was sitting back there. That wasn’t good. And the cold chill of that reality seeped through faster than any nagging from the ship.
Hil freed himself from the restraints and staggered to the back of the compartment. He squeezed into the tiny maintenance area and got access to the main controls, coughing from the smoke, each cough sending a shard of pain spiking through his skull. The bonus in working solo was that the split of credits, both financial and performance points in the guild standings, was always one hundred percent his.
The worst thing, he decided as he hit manual over-rides and released the building pressure in the main conduits of the jump drive, favouring his left hand because the right one didn’t seem to be working properly, was that there was no buddy on the way in to pull off a rescue in the nick of time, to clink beers with as the sun set on each close shave. Unlike some people that he didn’t have much time for, he’d never worked with a partner, never needed to or wanted to. So as he squinted at the flickering displays, it was down to him and Skye, the ship he’d known and flown with since he was a kid, who was now wittering on about company closing in.
As far as he could tell, the ship was just about intact, the package was intact – if battered – and although they were leaking fuel and the jump drive was burned out, at least it wasn’t going to explode now and they should be able to fly out of this and get some place where they could figure out what had happened.
No matter how hard he tried to think through the pounding in his head, he couldn’t remember any specifics about the tab he’d taken. The three craft heading for their position might be local farm dwellers come to investigate the crash or they could be bounty hunters out for his head for all he knew.
He paused and tried to clear his mind and calm his heart rate. There’d be no reason why they would be bounty hunters, no one ever messed with guild business. Unless the package had more baggage than had been declared.
He crawled out of the maintenance space and struggled to make it back to the bridge, vision blurred and not helped by the trickle of blood that was running into his eye.
As he passed the stowage area, he paused, one hand resting for balance on the package tied securely into place. He resisted the urge to crack open the seals and take a look. Never interact with the merchandise. It was a guild mantra and one that Hil had only broken a handful of times, all with good reason. Was this one of those times? He stared at it, sitting there in its silver case, sealed with a mark that would get him thrown into the jail on Io Optima for the rest of his life if he was caught with it.
It was about briefcase sized and he had no memory whatsoever of acquiring it, or what could be in it. But whatever it was, he was fairly sure he’d been shot down on his way back in with it.
“Honey, get back up here,” Skye said quietly, this time directly into his head through the neural implant embedded beneath the skin on the side of his neck. “C’mon, leave it. We need to get out of here.”
She was right.
He grabbed a medical kit from the compartment above it and fell back into his seat. He held a patch over the gash on his forehead and watched nervously as the ship went through the checks, most lights red, some burnt out and safety parameters out of the window but so long as they could fly, they’d fly. He didn’t want to encounter the ships that were closing in, friendly or not. He needed a place to hole up, fix the ship for jump and stay under the radar for a while. He’d get the package back, grab the credits for it and take that break he’d been promising himself and Skye for too long now.
Simple.
Taking a package from A to B always gets more complicated when A doesn’t want to lose it and C will pay and do anything to get their hands on it. Hil was good, one of the best in the guild. Problem was, he couldn’t remember when it had gone wrong.
Skye was being no help, concentrating as she was on outrunning the three ships that were chasing them. She’d said, snapping in frustration
at his insistence, that he ran on board with the package, yelled at her to go and then they’d taken a hit after dropping out of jump and crashed.
He couldn’t even remember who the client was or where he’d acquired the package. He recalled saying yes to a tab but that could have been three jobs ago. Or three years ago. His memory seemed screwed up and that was more than a bit disturbing. What was worse was that while he knew his guild handler was Mendhel, he had not the slightest detail in his head how to get in touch or get back to base or where he had to take the damn package to.
Skye was getting up some decent speed now. Hil watched the ships lose distance on them then break off, flying away in opposite directions. One shot vertically up, heading for orbit and jump, he reckoned. That was odd. Probably not locals then.
“How far to town?” he said and cringed at how pathetically weak he sounded. He cleared his throat and tried again. “How long ’til we make the space port?”
“Three minutes,” she replied curtly. Skye was a typical female AI. They all cared and fretted when they thought you were in trouble and as soon as you were fine, the sympathy evaporated.
Hil sat back. He knew Skye was fast. She’d been built for speed. She was the fastest ship in the guild because they’d refused any weapons. Apart from some light shielding that would barely diffuse the effects of the smallest energy weapons, they didn’t even have any defensive measures. His philosophy was along the lines of run to live another day. Hil fought his battles on his feet. If he’d wanted to shoot guns, he would have joined the navy. But fast as they were, they’d taken some serious damage in the crash and bless her for doing her best, but Skye wasn’t flying at top notch right now. Anyone should have been able to catch up with them. So why had the three ships chasing them down suddenly given up the ghost? It was enough to give him a headache. If his head hadn’t already been pounding. They’d been called off, he decided, so what now? Should they be expecting a welcome party when they landed?
