by Ramy Vance
Nest Under Siege
Dragon Approved™ Book Four
Ramy Vance
Michael Anderle
The Nest Under Siege Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Kathleen Fettig
Misty Roa
Dorothy Lloyd
Diane L. Smith
Deb Mader
John Ashmore
Larry Omans
Angel LaVey
If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
This Book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020 by Ramy Vance & Michael Anderle
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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First US Edition, February 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-726-6
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Author Notes Ramy Vance
Author Notes Michael Anderle
Other Books by the Authors
Connect with The Authors
Chapter One
Alex watched the orcs standing outside of the room through Gill’s holographic display. At first, she stared at the screen through Manny’s eyes, but the detail was too much. Manny saw everything. Every little hair on their chinny-chin-chin… (Seeing gave so many of the stories she knew new context.)
She switched to her own eyes, dulling the sight through her HUD.
She held her breath, trying to make as little noise as possible. It didn’t matter that they were all huddled in a room. It just meant that if the orcs heard them, they were all dead.
After a few minutes, the orcs wandered away and continued on down the hall.
Alex let out a deep sigh as she leaned back against the wall and tried to catch her breath. “How many do you think there are?” she asked after she was sure she could breathe regularly.
Gill looked through his HUD, changing between different cameras throughout the Wasp’s Nest. “There could be hundreds,” he murmured. “There’s a lot of these guys.”
Jollies fluttered around the room manically before finally going into a fit of hiccups and retiring to Alex’s right shoulder. “What should we do?” Jollies asked.
Alex looked from Brath to Gill as the two young men thought the question over. Gill was the first to speak. “We should watch for a bit longer,” he suggested. “It doesn’t make sense to run out there until we know what’s going on. I mean, if we had gone out earlier, we’d be…” He ran his finger across his neck
Alex nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. If we had gone out, we’d be dead by now. There’s no way we could have taken that many orcs.”
“What do you mean, taken? Were you thinking about fighting them?”
Alex shook her head. She knew this wasn’t VR anymore. This was real life, and real orcs were very capable of killing her.
One-lifers. Guess we’re all one of those now, she thought with a heavy sigh.
For a moment, Alex thought back to Middang3ard VR. She had been a hero there, ready to step into danger at a moment’s notice. People knew her throughout the game as someone who would not walk away from a fight.
Yet here she was crouched in a room with a bunch of teenage boys, shaking with fear. How the mighty have fallen, she thought.
Brath was pacing, his arms folded over his chest, his body language expressing how unhappy he was with the decision to stay and hide. “How long are we going to be doing this?” he asked.
Gill lowered his visor and met Brath’s eyes. “It would be a mistake to go out before we have properly assessed the situation,” he reminded the other rider. “Haven’t you been paying attention to anything during our tactics lessons?”
Brath sat down on his bed, his arms still crossed. “Yeah, I pay attention,” he muttered under his breath. “I thought the first word of that class’s name was ‘Battle.’”
“Yeah, it is. And the second word is ‘Tactics.’ Arguably, it’s the more important word. Let me just see what else is going on for a while, all right? Then we’ll discuss what we should do.”
Alex sat back and listened to Gill. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Who died and made these guys the bosses? she wondered. They’re not even asking for Jollies’ or my opinion.
Brath stood back up and continued pacing. He looked like he was going to say something else but was concentrating very hard on not speaking. His face had gone red from concentration.
Jollies, on the other hand, wasn’t trying to hide how worried she was. The color of her skin kept fluctuating between deep blue and purple.
Alex tapped Jollies on the foot, hoping to distract her from her fear. Maybe distract herself as well. “Do all pixies change color like you?” Alex asked.
Jollies looked up suddenly as if she had forgotten she was resting on Alex’s shoulder. “Huh? Oh, yeah. It’s like an emotional thing. Kinda like how you humans have mood rings. I’m one big mood ring. It helps pixies empathize with each other. Totally inconvenient when talking to non-pixies, though. Makes lying harder. You’ll never catch a pixie playing…poker? That’s the human game, right?”
Alex reached over to Brath’s bed, grabbed a pillow, and threw it at Gill. “Hey, do you have any cards in here?”
Gill hardly responded to being hit with a pillow. He looked away from his HUD visor for a moment before returning. “Yep,” he replied. “Over there, on top of my dresser. Why?”
Alex got up and grabbed the cards. They weren’t like any cards she’d ever seen in Middang3ard before. They reminded her of a description she had read of tarot cards, but other than that, they were completely confusing to her.
She took them anyway.
Brath scoffed loudly as he sat down on his bed. “Are you seriously going to play cards right now? While the Nest is going through an orc invasion?”
It took all of Alex’s self-control to speak in an even tone to Brath. She was terrified, but sitting in a room thinking about how scared she was wasn’t going to help anyone.
Even if Brath didn’t want to admit it, Alex could tell he was afraid too. All his pacing and sitting and standing were dead giveaways. Gill was the only one in the room who didn’t seem worried about the orcs.
Alex sat down across from Brath and looked at the cards. She looked at them, and even never having seen playing cards before, she knew this wasn’t an Earth card deck. The images were too… She struggled for a word before settling on “fantastical.”
She handed them to Brath. “Do you know what these are?”
Brath snatched the cards from Alex’s hands and sighed loudly. He thumbed through the cards before handing them back to Alex. “Of course, I do,” he said. “These are drow Fate cards.”
“What are those?”
Brath looked taken aback by Alex’s asking for more details. For a moment, he forgot about the orcish invasion and was more concerned with trying to understand why she would be interested in the cards.
Alex took the cards back from Brath as he started to explain, “It’s an elvish thing. All kinds of elves get these when they’re born. Every elf gets their own specific deck—someone makes it for them or something—but they use them to tell the future. Usually their own future.”
Alex nodded to show that she understood. They weren’t much different from Tarot cards then. She needed to do something to wake these guys up. Jollies was in full panic mode, and Brath wasn’t far behind.
Panic meant being stupid.
She shook her head. “I’m going to show you some human magic now. I’m going to read your fate.”
Brath scoffed. “Humans don’t have magic.”
“That’s not true. We humans have magic. Maybe not blow-‘em-up-with-a-fireball magic, but we are powerful divinators.”
Gill looked up and stared at Alex for a moment before going back to checking the camera feeds.
Brath laughed before realizing he was making noise and covering his mouth. “You didn’t even know what those were a minute ago,” he growled. “Why do you think you’re going to suddenly know how to read my cards and my future with your human magic?”
Alex thought back to her Aunt Maisy, who used to read fortunes for fun. Maisy would read Alex’s future, vividly describing the cards to her as she turned them over. When she was in Middang3ard’s VR world, Alex had looked them up, wanting to know what Aunt Maisy had been doing. It was incredible how good Aunt Maisy’s descriptions had been.
And how fun her tarot card readings had been.
Maisy had said that the most important thing with divination was confidence. You could say anything you wanted, all you had to do was sell it. Brath hadn’t challenged her on the divination part, so she had a chance.
As she shuffled the cards, she did her best to channel her Aunt Maisy. She thought about how, when Maisy spoke, it sounded as if there was no doubt in her mind. “Yeah, I am going to read your fate. I used to be quite the card reader on Earth.”
“How did you learn when you can’t see?”
Alex looked up from the cards for a moment. She couldn’t tell if Brath had said that with the intention of hurting her or if she was just sensitive due to all the prior teasing. “Special cards with ridges,” Alex lied. “Just because I was blind, it didn’t mean I was helpless.”
“So, you read with ridges?”
“Yeah, same as with books. You get that I know how to read, right?”
Brath shrugged as he tried to look uninterested. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he muttered.
Alex cut the cards and then shuffled them again. “On Earth, we have a special written language called Braille. It’s just for blind people. It’s a series of raised dots that mean certain letters or words, and I had cards with that.”
Alex watched something she had never seen before. She couldn’t have put it into words even if she wanted to. Brath’s face had changed slightly. It wasn’t as if he had raised his eyebrows or smiled, but as she spoke, Alex saw Brath’s eyes soften a little bit and his face loosen up.
Alex passed Brath the deck of cards. “All right, choose three cards,” she instructed. “Any three cards you feel drawn to.”
Jollies floated down and took a seat next to Alex’s foot.
Brath chose three cards from the top of the deck and handed them to Alex, who took them and put them on the floor. Alex looked over her shoulder at Gill, who was watching. She winked at him before turning back to the cards.
Alex flipped the three cards and leaned over them as she clasped her hands together, her chin on her knuckles.
The first card was a raven, the second a burning building. And the third was a black circle.
Alex nodded theatrically as she picked up the first card and stared at it, pretending to draw some meaning from it. “This right here represents your past,” she said mysteriously. “It looks as if your past was filled with anger. Anger about things you couldn’t control.”
Next, Alex picked up the card depicting the burning building. “But something changed,” she went on. “There was a sudden shift, and everything fell apart. You had to start asking questions, inspecting the foundation, figuring out why things had collapsed.”
Alex looked up to check if Brath was buying it.
The gnome was silent, and his brooding eyes peered out from behind his scruffy beard.
Alex took up the last card. She stared at it for some time, drawing out the anticipation. “Ah. The sacred ring is your future.”
Brath leaned forward but caught himself quickly and tried to downplay his interest. “Oh yeah?” he asked.
“That means your future is…well, I guess the best way to say it is that you have infinite possibilities with where you go from here. After the past and present stuff that I said before, you get to choose what your future is after you’re done asking questions.”
Brath chuckled as he leaned back. “You could have said that about anything.”
Alex took the three cards and put them back into the deck. “True,” Alex admitted. “I could have said them to anyone. But I said them to you and only you. Right now. So, take that as you will. But I see that today will not be your last.”
After shuffling again, Alex had Jollies draw cards. Hers were dove wings, dragon fire, and a skull. “Oh, that’s bad,” Jollies said. “The skull means I’m dead.”
Alex shook her head and gave the pixie a sly smile. “No, you misunderstand. It means that you are the bringer of death.” She looked at the two recruits and saw them both emboldened, their panic subsiding. Good. She had gotten through to them.
No panic meant they were thinking again, and that gave them all a chance.
Gill, the only one who had been calm the whole time, raised his finger to his lips, turned off the lights, and motioned for them all to get closer.
Gill threw up a holograph from his HUD that showed their hall. There were more orcs walking down the hall, but this time, they were kicking open every door. The orcs were only a few doors away.
Gill shifted the view to another hallway. Dead bodies covered the floor.
Alex grabbed her mouth to keep from yelping. She had never seen anything dead before. She wanted to look away more than anything else in the world.
Gill changed back to their hallway. “There’s worse going on right now,” he said. “Fights throughout the Nest and they’re coming our way. Real soon. Any ideas?”
Brath jumped to his feet and pulled out a knife hanging from his waist. “We fight them,” he whispered. “Better than sitting here and waiting for them to find us. At least we choose how we die.”
Jollies was shaking her head as she tried to fight back tears. Alex could see that the pixie was terrified, and there was a part of Alex that was scared too, but she felt the same way Brath did. If there was going to be a fight, it should be on their terms.
The images of the dead cadets in the hallway flashed through Alex’s mind. Her desire to fight instantly dissipated. She could be one of the corpses in the hall. Her parents would never know.
Gill stood up and turned off the holograph. He walked over to Brath and coaxed him into putting away the knife. “I know you’re looking forward to using your father’s blade for revenge,” Gill said softly. “But there’ll be a better time. We need to figure out what we’re going to do to stay alive.”
Alex pointed up to the unlit light bulb in the middle of the room. “Can you get into the systems and turn off the lights for the whole place?” Alex asked.
Gi
ll looked at the lightbulb and then at the darkness of the room. “I can try.”
Chapter Two
Gill attempted to hack into the entire Nest system. His brows were furrowed as he tried to figure out how to get past the firewalls. Alex wondered how such a young kid had managed to acquire that much hacking expertise.
Manny sat quietly in the corner. He hadn’t spoken a word since they had been ushered out of the mess hall. Alex wondered if Manny was panic-stricken, but that seemed unlikely. It wouldn’t have made sense for Myrddin to assign Manny to Alex if he spooked so easily.
The desire to walk over to the dorm room’s door and peek through the peephole was overwhelming. Alex pushed it down along with her fear, which was doing its best to take over her reasoning. She kept imagining the orcs breaking into the room and tearing them all to shreds.
The lights in the hallway flickered. Alex could see light through the crack where the door didn’t quite touch the floor, but they still remained on.
Outside, there was another explosion. This one was big enough to rock their room. Orcs started yelling in the hallway. Alex couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she assumed that it was something violent in Orcish.
Brath sighed as he started to pace and finger the knife hanging from his waist again. Once in a while, he would stop and look at Gill, who would glance at his visor and shake his head.
Alex had never missed the HUD in Middang3ard so much before, not even when she was on Earth, trying to stay awake during her homeschooling lessons. The HUD she had received when she got her armor was noticeably different.
