Thieves' Guild Series (7 eBook Box Set): Military Science Fiction - Alien Invasion - Galactic War Novels

by C. G. Hatton

  He slowed his breathing, drastically and intentionally slowed his breathing, felt the organism around him pull back somewhat.

  “Is NG here?”

  “Yes,” Elliott replied.

  Yes but an ominous yes like he wasn’t saying something.

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Still ominous.

  “Elliott, dammit, is he okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had a bad feeling the AI was lying.

  There was a pause, then, “Believe me, there is nothing you can do.”

  ‘Where is he?’

  “Luka, just concentrate on getting yourself out of here alive.”

  He tensed as another strand of the pulsing organism wrapped around his chest, forcing himself to breathe slowly.

  “Where’s Yarrimer?” he sent.

  Elliott’s reply was cold. “She has her own mission.”

  “How do I get out? Elliott?”

  There was no reply.

  He switched into cold neutral nothing. He just needed to bide his time.

  It wasn’t long before he sensed more shamans close by. Really close. He couldn’t move. What felt like a knife blade rested against his abdomen for a brief second then sliced deep. He would have screamed if he could have, but his throat was frozen, paralysed as much as the rest of him.

  ‘It feels pain.’

  Damn right he felt pain.

  It was the hive he could hear. He could feel its scrutiny.

  He was bleeding, badly. Couldn’t sense any human lifesigns nearby.

  “I’m still here.” Elliott. That was something. “They know you’re drawing energy from them. They’re fascinated. They want to know how you survived the bio-weapon they shot you with.”

  The organism from the shaman staffs. If they didn’t know, it wouldn’t take them long to figure it out.

  He could feel them drawing a blade across his ribs, tracing the pattern of winding flashes as if they could dig it out of him.

  The pain spiked as they cut him again and he couldn’t think, grey closing in.

  “Stay calm, Luka. We will get you out of here.”

  He felt something take hold of his right arm, pin it down, numb, like it wasn’t his. He screamed, “Fuck you”, the words caught inside his head, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything as something heavy and sharp came down and impacted against his outstretched fingers.

  Chapter 31

  Sebastian stared across at the Man, this alien being who had taken him at the age of five and twisted every aspect of his life for its own, caging the anger and frustration, tempering the power he could wield.

  “You can’t beat them,” he said, adding it up. “The human race can’t beat them. You didn’t create the guild to maintain balance. You’ve been fuelling the conflict. You’ve been actively stoking humankind’s self-destructive nature, its innate aggression and paranoia.” Pieces clicked into place. “Redgate. The mysterious benefactor looking to invest, in a shit-hole colony that suddenly becomes the hottest property in the Between? The atrocities at Derren Bay? The acquisitions, the industrial espionage, military operations… You fuelled the antagonism between Earth and Winter, using the Order to do your dirty work and the Thieves’ Guild to do the donkey work. You haven’t maintained a delicate balance, you’ve been forcing the entire galaxy to the very brink without ever tipping it over into outright war.”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention,” the Man said. “Isn’t that what humans say? Keeping humanity at the brink has driven so much development, progression, in such a short space of time. A content man is a being in decline.”

  “Alpaca shit,” Sebastian snarled. “You want conflict. You’ve been breeding it. All this time… You haven’t been preparing us, you’ve been setting us up.”

  •

  After that he lost track of time, trapped inside the living organism that wrapped strands around his whole body. His side was aching, right where he’d been shot as if they’d gouged out a chunk of flesh, right hand burning as if dipped in acid.

  The virus was fighting it, but he was still bleeding, he could feel it dripping as he lay there, suspended, could feel his strength ebbing away.

  It took him a moment to realise Elliott was trying to get his attention.

  “Luka…”

  He couldn’t control his breathing.

  “You need to get free now, Luka. They’re coming for you again. You need to find a way to get free and get away. Now.”

  If he fought it, it got stronger. If he ignored it, it sucked out every ounce of strength he had.

  “Now LC.”

  He was damned if he was going to let them cut him up again.

  He drew in as much energy, vicious, as fast as he could. He felt the shock in the organism. It withered around him, shying away, withdrawing to protect itself.

  He didn’t stop and didn’t hold back.

  It let go.

  He fell, crashing to the floor and scrambled away, slipping in the blood. His right hand was in agony, fingers missing, he realised with horror, and he had to use his elbows to push himself to his feet, hugging his arm around his side, and looking up into a dark chamber that was filled with the pulsing mass of the alien entity. The pod-like thing he’d been inside was attached to the walls by throbbing strands, growing from it. The whole place was a crazed hybrid of mechanical structure and biological organism.

  He dry-retched, stomach empty, nausea dragging him sideways.

  “Find a way out,” Elliott urged.

  As if he could just open the front door and walk out or sneak out into a ventilation shaft.

  “Where’s NG?”

  “Luka, you can’t get anywhere near NG. Get out of here and get out now.”

  He could sense a shaman drawing close. He looked around, struggling to stand up straight. Twisting strands of alien biomass disappeared into the walls, melding with it, pulsing, living tissue. He had no idea where it went. No idea if he could breathe in there.

  The shaman was getting closer.

  He touched his left hand to the soft, warm mass. Felt it give. And went for it.

  Even before the guild, he’d spent a lot of time in some seriously confined spaces. But nothing – nothing – like this. It was warm. He squeezed through gently. Eyes closed. Kept moving slow and steady.

  He ended up falling out into some kind of vent that was about two feet in diameter, the walls spongy and pulsing with a faint bioluminescence. He couldn’t put any weight on his right hand so he had to crawl on his elbow and forearm, bracing himself awkwardly whenever the vent pitched downwards. He stopped whenever Elliott told him to wait and tried to speed up when urged. He was moving on automatic, like running a tab where he’d had a team directing him. It hadn’t happened often and it was never his favourite way of operating.

  But the virus was drawing energy from the walls, starting to heal, he could feel it as he moved, felt like he was going to make it then he felt a change in the air, a sting at the back of his throat. Gas.

  “They know you’re in here. They’re not going to let you go that easily.”

  His head was spinning.

  “Which way?”

  “Back up. There’s a manifold. You can split off and go through the substructure.”

  He backed up, dizzy, chest hurting. He felt an opening to his left and swung round into it, almost missing Elliott’s warning. “No, not that way.”

  Too late.

  It was a vertical drop. Wider than the first vent and no way he could brace himself. He fell, twisted midair and snatched for a grip on a tangle of thin sinew-like cables hanging down through the space, bumping against a vertical wall that was so hot it burned his elbows where he touched it. He slowed himself and hung there, steadying his breathing, wrapping his foot around a cable, knowing he didn’t have time to waste and realising time was up as there was a hiss and the shaft began to fill with gas. He kicked his foot loose and slid down, almost m
issing an opening in the wall and having to climb back up to swing into it, breathing in so much toxin he thought he was going to throw up.

  He rolled into the horizontal vent and crawled, climbing out onto a ledge. The space ahead of him was vast. His head was fuzzy and it took a second to register that Elliott was speaking to him.

  “What?”

  “Climb down to the beam. You’re in an exhaust vent, Luka. You have two minutes to climb down to that beam and get across to the other side before the entire chamber is flushed through with superheated gases.”

  There was a ladder next to him, the spaces between rungs too big so he had to drop and catch himself each time, ignoring the pain in his hand, losing his grip a couple of times as the rungs became slick with blood. He made the beam, turned and ran.

  It was wide enough so it should have been easy but a massive tremor half way across made the entire structure shake, the beam bouncing, and his legs giving way beneath him. He tumbled, fell off and grabbed the beam by the fingertips of his left hand, holding on, eyes squeezed shut, until it stopped moving.

  “Go. You have twenty seconds.”

  He clambered back onto it and pushed into a run, counting in his head

  “Another ladder,” Elliott said. “Climb five rungs. There’s a conduit to the left of it.”

  He had a stitch in his side that was burning, breathing harsh.

  Ten seconds.

  “Get out, Luka.”

  He was trying. The ladder loomed. He reached and grabbed the first rung, throwing himself up and catching the next and the next as clangs sounded down below. He made it and fell into another conduit, as an immense rumble billowed up the vent, the heat of it burning through as he scrambled to get away. He was left curled in a ball, struggling to breathe, every inch of his exposed skin so hot it felt like he’d been torched.

  “You can’t stop.”

  He started to crawl. He knew he couldn’t stop. The damned AI didn’t have to keep saying it.

  Apparently he did. He wasn’t aware he’d stopped moving until something nudged his mind.

  “Elliott?” he thought, not even sure if he was thinking it clearly enough to send, or transmit or whatever the hell it was.

  “You need to find a way out of here.”

  “Not without NG.”

  “LC, you’re bleeding, and you are standing out like a beacon. They’re closing in on you and they are not going to let you go. Listen to me, if they catch you again, what they’ve just done to you will be nothing compared to what they will do when they capture you again.”

  He started crawling, inch by inch. He had no idea where he was going but the stench was getting worse. He fell more than climbed through a pulsing valve system and rolled up against a metal mesh barrier as the conduit stopped in a dead end, overlooking a huge factory space. Conveyor belts rumbled above immense vats containing some kind of red sludge that steamed and bubbled. As he caught his breath, squinting out across the processing facility, one of a mass of writhing tubes suspended in the ceiling ejected a payload of objects that tumbled and crashed onto the belt beneath. He couldn’t make out what it was, the scale playing tricks with his eyes, then he saw an arm, a leg, a human torso. The stench of human blood and guts was strong. Another tube deposited another mass of body parts that trundled along to be dropped into the vat. A rendering plant?

  His stomach clenched, would have thrown up if he’d had anything in him. He backed away, trembling. The Bhenykhn didn’t eat humans for sustenance but they were sure as hell boiling them up for something, breaking bodies down into their base chemical components? Biological parts to feed their breeder units? To grow the walls of their structures, their ships?

  “Don’t think about it, LC,” Elliott cut in. “Just get the hell out of there.”

  Easier said than done. He scrambled back up the conduit and took a different branch as soon as he could, eventually becoming aware of a pressing mass of human emotion below him, pain and fear swirling, shouts and cries of agony echoing amongst an occasional scream or clang of metal on metal.

  “Prisoner pens,” Elliott said. “Don’t go near them.”

  He had no intention of going anywhere near them. He turned away and shimmied forward, ended up over a walkway that looked out over a line of cells. The one right below him had a poor sucker in it stretched out on a table, a shaman standing by and other Bhenykhn he’d never seen before, tall but hunched over, slender, equally hideous, moving in with knives and tools to gut and dissect.

  He almost gagged. Not from the smell. From the piles of bones and body parts strewn on the blood-covered floor. His stomach twisted.

  As he watched, the Bhenykhn raised a cleaver. The prisoner screamed and thrashed against his chains. It chopped down and cut him in two. The body twitched, the pop of void so sudden, LC curled up and had to bite his lip to stop himself from crying out. The Bhenykhn swept its arm and brushed the man’s head and torso onto the floor, repositioning the legs and abdomen and picking up a knife.

  LC backed away, pausing, head down to breathe, then he backtracked, no choice but to head towards the prisoner pens, and came up against a huge gaping chasm, a dark space filled with a swaying mass of chains and pulleys. He flinched back into the conduit as one of the chains snapped taut and started to rattle upwards.

  He waited until it clanged to a halt, then leaned out, grabbed a hold of one of the chains and looked down into a vast chamber, dark, warm, flickers of orange light dotted around and cage upon cage, all crammed with prisoners, stretching as far as he could see.

  And as far as he could make out, that was going to be the fastest way down.

  “If you’re going to do it, do it now.”

  He didn’t hesitate, swinging out, wrapping his legs around the chain and sliding down it. Difficult having only one hand he could use but not impossible. Until his good hand caught badly on a sharp edge. He lost his grip, and fell.

  Chapter 32

  The Man’s eyes were darker than ever. “And why would I do that, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife and pulled it free. “You tell me. And I warn you, tell me the truth. All you’ve ever done is misdirect, manipulate, deceive. Tell me something I can believe. Tell me, in all this, that there is a way out, a way to win, because right now I am very close to deciding that your next breath will be your last.”

  “Believe me or not,” the Man said carefully, “it makes no difference to the predicament in which we all find ourselves. The Bhenykhn are here. They have conquered. That is indisputable. What is not clear is what happens next. I did choose this galaxy for a reason. You think I have thrown you to the wolves. But I know exactly how much wolf you have in you. In all of you.”

  •

  He bounced off two cages and landed next to another, sprawled, flat out, breath driven out of his lungs, senses rattled.

  Something nudged his arm.

  He flinched away.

  It nudged again as a voice on that side of him said, “Take it. You’re bleeding.”

  He felt someone staring at him and turned his head to see a woman, eyes feverishly bright, crouched inside the cage. She was holding out a dirty cloth.

  He managed to sit and shuffled closer to the bars, reaching and taking the rag in his left hand, muttering a thank you, and wrapping it around his right hand without looking too closely at the state it was in. The rag soaked through fast but he pressed that hand against his abdomen, using the cloth to apply pressure to the wound there.

  He wasn’t healing, whatever they’d done to him still suppressing the virus.

  He leaned his head against the bars and breathed through the pain, closed his eyes and let his mind ease, trying to ground himself and give the virus some space to recover.

  “Excuse me for being forward,” he heard her say, “but you seem to be on the wrong side of the bars. And naked.”

  He opened one eye and turned his head slightly. He wasn’t just butt naked, he was
covered in blood and drenched in stinking alien bioslime.

  She wasn’t as young as he’d thought, and there was something about those haunted eyes that yelled military.

  “What unit are you?” he asked, breath catching as he moved to shift his weight.

  She gave him a look and said, “Twenty First Infantry. Xùnzhí Corps. Sergeant, First Class. Whatever that means now.”

  “A penal battalion. I thought they weren’t allowed on Earth.”

  “Seems an alien invasion changes the rules.” She smiled ruefully. “They keep us chosen few in these cages. The suckers below don’t last as long. You look like you’ve had a going over already.”

  There was a rattle of chains some way off, a clang, pleading, crying as a cage was hoisted into the air and dragged upwards.

  “They take us for experiments,” she said. “The cages come back empty. Or with fresh meat.” She was staring at him intently. “How come you’re not in one?”

  She was looking at the top of his right arm. He had a fresh brand burned there, he realised, twisting his arm to look at it. He hadn’t felt them do it but it was throbbing now.

  She reminded him of Sienna. Same type. Blunt. Tough. Pragmatic. The cold knot of loss that was nestled deep, buried way deep beneath layers and layers of numb nothing, twisted with a pang.

  She gave him half a smile, compassionate, as if she could read his mind or maybe just that she felt bad that he looked so shit. She didn’t say anything else for a while, then she said quietly, “Do you want me to look at that hand?”