Relic (Awakened Chronicles Book 2), page 1
Awakened Chronicles:
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Relic
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Harley Austin’s
Awakened Series
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Dominion
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Valor
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Awakened Chronicles
RELIC
HARLEY AUSTIN
Harley Austin Publishing
harleyaustin.com
RELIC—Copyright © 2017 Harley Austin. All rights reserved.
Published by Harley Austin Publishing | HarleyAustin.com
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-5489-3172-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyright materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Version 1.0—RELEASE COPY. This work may be periodically updated by the author/publisher with various corrections, additions and/or deletions to the work without a change of ISBN and without notice, guarantee or warranty of any kind.
For my beautiful angel;
the love of my life and the very best friend
anyone could ever hope to have.
Preface
A wakened Chronicles began as a series of short story novellas all tied in some way to the original Awakened Series milieu. These are the stories of the people on the periphery; and all of them have been deeply affected by the events taking place within the main story.
I honestly did not intend to write a sequel to any of these short stories, but after my readers’ response to Siren, I knew that I needed to follow-up that story with a sequel—thus Relic was born.
Awakened Chronicles also allows me to spread my wigs, just a bit more, by writing about things and people that I otherwise would not be able to because such things are just not germane to the main story.
I hope you enjoy reading Relic as much as I enjoyed writing it.
RELIC
Prologue
R oberts lifted himself from the bed of his small cell. It wasn’t anywhere near the opulence of the stateroom of what The Neptune had been, but it also wasn’t even close to some of the Middle Eastern hellholes he’d found himself breaking others out of a decade ago either.
He sighed. Fifteen years he’d spent aboard her, his flagship, the mighty Neptune. She’d been good to him, and he to her. There wasn’t an equal to that vessel anywhere at sea. They’d taken on Eastern battleships and left them on fire and sinking, with her taking barely a scratch. His team was the best Naval crew on the planet—at least they had been, until that Ra god had dropped her crashing onto the grounds of the White House.
Sinclair. Bastard. Sniveling whelp.
The government called them ‘gods’, but they weren’t—not even close. They weren’t immortal and they sure as hell weren’t invincible. He’d bagged men a helluva lot tougher than this kid. His only mistake was underestimating the kid’s ability. Fucking teleport, he fumed silently in his mind.
The bar door of his cell opened automatically, right on time, just as it had done for the past nineteen months while he and his team cooled their jets at a maximum security installation in Florence, Colorado. ADX they called it. The ‘Alcatraz’ of the Rockies. Built to house America’s most vile underworld criminals, the prison was a veritable fortress; designed to withstand an assault from outside as much as it was to quell any kind of riot or disturbance inside. Once you were in ADX, you were never coming out.
Twenty-thee hours a day he’d spend cooped up in the small, soundproof twelve-by-seven-foot room. No contact with other inmates and very little entertainment, unless you happened to be a fan of Jesus, then all of those channels were wide open all day long.
Three armed guards now escorted Roberts in handcuffs to an open-air atrium, where he could feel the warmth of the sun on his skin through a high-domed, thick-bar and screen-wired ceiling. Only today, it wasn’t summer and it wasn’t sunny. The air was chilly cold, maybe a little below freezing. The guards waited, like they always did, for him to walk around the small snowy space, stretching his limbs.
Perhaps they were bored. Or too cold. The guards he’d seen here at ADX didn’t impress him much. They didn’t make much money. That was a good thing. Little money attracted little talent, and that opened the door to offers and rewards—offers and rewards a handful of them had been unable to resist.
Nineteen months he’d spent in the solitude of his cell—and now all of that peace and quite was about to come to end.
The small device slipped from his sleeve. They’d missed it during their pat-down search after cuffing of him. A quick, gentle push of the button and the device emitted a soft flash that melted the links between his cuffs in a near instant of time.
“Hey!” Roberts watched as one of the guards who was actually paying attention began approaching him from across the atrium. His Glock already out and pointed directly at the trained ex-Navy Seal. He stopped a good distance from Roberts. “What was that flash?”
Roberts shrugged. Had the day been sunny, it was likely no one would have seen it.
“Turn around. Slowly.” The guard waved his gun.
Roberts turned around, keeping his now freed arms together, the device still in his hands.
“What’s that?” The guard ordered.
Roberts moved the black fob-looking device in his fingers. “Just a toy.”
“Give it to me,” the guard ordered.
“Sure,” Roberts agreed. Holding it between his fingers, the guard approached to take it. The guard saw the second flash, but for him, that was all he saw before everything for him went suddenly dark.
Alarms sounded all over the facility as hundreds of guards ran to their posts, grabbing shotguns and other small arms.
“What the hell is going on out there?” The warden entered the control area while his eyes flashed over a war room of monitors showing everyone in their cells and the atriums filling with more of his people.
“Looks like a prison break attempt, Warden.”
“Where?”
“Atrium 5”.
“Let me see it—”
“Can’t. Been trying to. The video’s out for some reason.”
“Yea. Some reason my ass. Get me online with someone’s bodycam in the room!”
“I’ve got two coming online now—”
Both the technician and the warden watched as one of the officers walked cautiously up to the side of the thick reinforced concrete—where a five-foot hole had been burned cleanly through the twenty-four-inch wall.
“What in the hell—?” The warden breathed slowly; he wasn’t exactly sure what he was seeing.
The guard surveyed the still hot smoldering reinforced concrete wall that looked like someone had just cut clean through. Beyond the wall, another three walls had similar holes, including the charged electric fence a hundred yards away.
“Jesus—” the warden stood, his hand moving over his face; he was not believing what he was seeing looking at the walls that seemed to have been slagged into now cooling molten lava. “Who was in there? And where is he now?”
The technician brought up the scheduling records. “Roy Roberts. And,” the tech punched in a video number, “there’s no one in his cell. It’s empty.”
“Dammit! I knew that rascal was being far too quiet. Notify the other prisons where the rest of his men are. Tell their wardens to go to lockdown. I don’t want—”
“Sir—there’s already intersystem messages coming in.”
“Oh?”
“Looks like we’re too late. Prison breaks also being reported in progress at Allenwood and Beaumont.” Another alert faded onto his monitor, “And Lee,” the worried tech looked up at the warden.
“Jesus. Dammit!” he fumed, punching the top of the technician’s desk. “We should have saw this coming.”
“Looks like the same kind of damage, Warden. Images are coming in now from Allenwood.”
“I’m sure. Alright. Get me DOJ on the double. And conference in the other wardens. I want to know what the hell they have.”
“Calls are already coming in, Warden.”
“Alright, patch us in, Andy. This is about to become a very long day.”
1
S unshine broke into the round stone tower room through several of the open French doors draped in fine sheer fabrics that waved softly in the gentle morning sea breeze. The recently re
“We’re supposed to be using protection,” Tori kissed him whispering, a smile crossing her lips.
“Hmm mmm,” Liam groaned softly. “That’s only in the States.” Both kissed softly. “Your boss isn’t in-charge here. You’re on vacation, remember?”
Both laid side-by-side, their arms and legs entwined, with Liam intimately filling her, bare and unsheathed. He moved ever so slowly inside her, delivering warm tingles both against her clit and over certain very sensitive places deep within her only his god-like member seemed to be able to reach.
The couple moved with each other, their feelings deeply entwined. Liam shimmered his feelings through hers; giving her the full but subtle sensation of how she made him feel. Tori bit her lip to keep from whining too loudly while the sensation floated through her.
“I love watching you do that.” Liam moved his hand gently over the side of her face, watching her exhale now.
“Ahhh, God, Liam,” she breathed into another kiss. “I love it when you do that …”
Mac watched as her chopper landed smoothly on the helipad of The Neptune that now floated in the docked lagoon of the island somewhere north of Madagascar but not quite to the Seychelles. The private island mountain was technically a nature preserve of the Commonwealth, but all it took was money and a little U.S. Government influence to keep the locals and their municipalities out of the area.
Dressed casually, the demigoddess exited the aircraft, which departed just as fast as it had flown in. Mac kissed her sweetly on the lips as she embraced him and both began walking arm-in-arm into the main living areas of the newly redecorated and refurnished main cabin.
“I was surprised to get your text. Everything okay?” Mac turned to look at her once they were indoors.
“No. I got out here as fast as I could. There’s been a prison break, Mac. He’s out. Very armed and dangerous.”
Mac nodded. “I told you he would. It was only a matter of time.”
“You did, Mac. I tried to get all of them sent to maximum security; but they didn’t listen.”
He nodded. “It wouldn’t have mattered even if they had, Monica. You don’t know Roberts like I do. He’s very patient. Meticulous.”
“Temperamental,” she added.
Mac nodded. “Only when things are going badly, and usually because other people are screwing up.”
“Where are Tori and Liam?”
Mac walked to the windows and pointed to the tall stone tower sticking straight out of the jungle halfway up the short mountain.
“Not much of a castle,” she quipped with a smile.
“Oh, it’s bigger than it looks—especially from here.”
“It looks old.”
“Liam and I have been doing some remodeling. It was built around the 1500’s, used as a stronghold and watchtower by—well,” Mac paused.
“Pirates?”
He smiled. “Enterprising sea farers,” he corrected.
“We’ll need to wake them up.” She turned her attention back to him. “There’s more, Mac. Roberts didn’t just have help from your former gang.”
“Monica,” Mac interrupted. “Roberts did not have ‘a gang’.”
“Team.” She corrected.
He shook his head. “You still haven’t got this.”
She gave him a quizzical look.
“Roy Roberts didn’t just build some gang, like some off-shore drug cartel. He has a small army, people and friends all over the world. Any one of them capable of knocking over an ADX and not even slowing down.”
She nodded. “I know, you’ve said that. It was in the reports. We still haven’t been able to find many of them.”
“And you won’t. With me feeding you everything I know about them, they’ve retooled big time by now. Reorganized. Disappeared.”
“Your intel was helpful, Mac. But they’ve done a lot more than just retooled; they’ve also re-armed.”
“Rearmed? With what?”
“One of these.” She reached into her bag and produced a palm-sized metal box that she handed to him.
He opened it and examined the small fob device with several inset black buttons. “What’s this?”
“We lifted it from one Robert’s extraction teams. He didn’t make it busting out one of your former team members.”
“What is it?”
“Near as we can tell it’s a weapon—a Ra weapon.”
“Ra—?”
“We got a good twenty or so test shots from the thing before it stopped working.”
“What does it shoot?”
“Ions.”
Mac groaned, letting himself fall back against the window. “Ah, Jesus—”
“You’ve seen this before?”
He nodded. “Not looking exactly like this, but I know what something like this can do.”
“It cut a five foot hole through two feet of reinforced concrete in only a few seconds.”
“I bet it did.”
“Roberts’ men are now armed, with these,” she nodded at the device.
Mac fumed and closed up the box, handing it back to her. “These are unbelievable kinds of weapons, Monica. The ones I’ve actually seen could drop whole buildings. If the team has these? No one’s going to be able to stop them. Something like this makes automatic firearms look like—” he shook his head.
“Bows and arrows?”
“Yea.” He nodded. “Exactly.”
“We need to find out where they’re getting these. And how many they have now.”
Mac nodded. “I already know exactly where these came from.”
“You do?”
“About ten years ago, I didn’t even know what a Ra was. None of us on the team did. We were on another of Roy’s treasure hunts, deep in the jungles of Brazil.”
“What were you looking for.”
“What everyone’s been looking for for centuries in that part of the world—El Dorado.”
Monica chuckled. “You’re not serious?”
Mac nodded. “We’d found a credible source. Someone who’d actually seen the place, and had been there. They had all kinds of details, Monica. It was more than just a story.”
“A city of gold—?” she was still smirking.
“Not just a city of gold, but a golden city filled with people, superhuman people. Like gods. People like you.”
“A hidden city of halfbloods?” she lost her smirk. The clans were notorious for hiding well. A city of demigods was not outside the realm of possibility. “So, did you actually see this El Dorado?”
Mac nodded. “We did. We lived there, for months; until Roy got bored. But the problem with their people was, once you saw the city, they never let anyone leave.”
“Oh.” Monica’s face held concern now. “So how did you get out?”
“They’re very superstitious about the gods. Especially about the new gods.”
“Newbloods?”
“Yea. It was the first time we’d ever heard about the Reborn.”
“Maybe Tori and Liam can help us then?”
“I don’t know that that’s a good idea, Monica. Roberts made a deal with the chief of the Zuruahã; if they let us out he promised to bring them a newblood, one of these Reborn.”
Monica’s eyes widened. “So that’s what Robert’s interest was in finding Liam—”
“Yep. It’s also why he made the team available to Treasury. He smelled a god, a young one. Someone he might be able to easily bag and return to El Dorado. Then you showed up with Tori as bait. It was like all the pieces were just falling into place. Just like their prophecy said.”
