Inquisitor's Wrath (Star Scrapper Book 5), page 1
Copyrighted Material
Inquisitor’s Wrath Copyright © 2024 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2024 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
Previously on Star Scrapper
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
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PREVIOUSLY ON STAR SCRAPPER
Hank Spears is content living the life of a scrapper until he unearths an AI named Ned. This intelligence is a soldier from the Old War against a cult bent on making all organic life in the universe join with the machine.
Ned warns of a superweapon that he had been investigating at the time he was offlined called Codename: Extinction and believes that it might still be out there. Before Hank can decide if he wants to help, he is caught with the AI and has to flee. Since the war, the universal Consortium Government has outlawed any artificial intelligence, and anyone caught harboring one is imprisoned or killed.
Pursued by Inquisitor John Gregory and his Acolyte Imogen Hush, the two evade capture and discover a relay station in the far reaches of space where another AI, Libby, has been hiding. With her help, they are able to find the brother of Hank’s adoptive father.
He offers to help, and they think things are turning around, but Hank is discovered by two bounty hunters hired by his old employer. Luckily, one of the bounty hunters is his childhood friend, Lara, who helps them get off the station. Though conflicted at first, Lara decides to help Hank get out from under the thumb of his criminal boss.
They earn some money collecting bounties but soon discover that Lara’s ship was destroyed by John Gregory—who also murdered Hank’s uncle. Rather than letting this defeat them, they team up and arrest Hank’s former employer.
By doing so, Hank becomes a bounty hunter and earns a large bounty. With the money, the three can now begin to look into Extinction. They begin their hunt by seeking out an Old War space station called Home.
Hunter’s Rise:
Hank, Lara, and Ned make their way to the Cult space station, Home. While aboard, they are confronted by a mysterious voice who tries to kill them. Ned is able to fight back and get the humans to safety, but he is offlined in the process.
Through Lara’s bounty hunting handler, Zenobia, they are given the name of a man who might be able to help. Edwin Stern is a researcher with the skills to repair Ned, but in order to do so, he needs a favor. They fly to meet with the man’s rival, only to discover that she is his ex-wife. Before they can come up with a peaceable solution, she shoots Hank and runs.
The two rush back to Bussel to meet with Alek, an old friend of Hank and former medic (and mob doctor). He patches Hank up and asks to join the crew. They accept but are forced to flee the planet when Inquisitorial Acolyte Imogen Hush appears.
They return to Edwin, only to find that he has been taken. Following a lead, they track him down and find he is being held by his ex. After rescuing him, he repairs Ned, and they offer him safe haven, which he accepts.
Ned wakes up and tells them that the voice they met at the space station was Twain, known during the Old War as the Enemy AI, the leader of the opposition. But Ned also has a lead on some new information.
When they follow up on what Ned has learned, they are ambushed by the Inquisition, but Imogen helps them escape in exchange for their aid in freeing her from the life of an Acolyte. With her help and some shipping manifests, they might just be able to track down Extinction.
Rebel Intelligence:
Imogen offers to exchange information and political connections for Hank’s help in getting her family off of the Consortium capital planet of Emortium. Though Lara doesn’t believe they can trust the former Inquisitorial Acolyte, Hank agrees, and after getting a ship from a Vekrass gangster, they sneak onto the planet to help Imogen’s aunt.
The crew find Louise and her husband and get them off the planet, with the Inquisition hot on their heels. She asks to be taken to a camp of the Peacer rebels, and when they arrive, they meet the charismatic leader, Shep.
While they are talking, a nearby village is attacked by pirates, and Hank is asked to help. Rather than simply setting up defenses around the village, the crew takes the fight to the pirates and manages to cripple the fleet and collect a bounty.
Shep is grateful, and they part ways with Louise to continue their hunt for Codename: Extinction. But when they find an Old War medical facility, they learn a dark truth: Shep is an ancient Cultist who appears to be helping the old Enemy AI begin to build his army anew.
Hank and the team rush back and take Shep into custody after exposing the truth about him to the Peacers sect. As they are leaving with the prisoner, the Consortium attacks, and they help the Peacers fend them off.
Back on the ship, Imogen sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night and, tired of bad people getting away with their behavior, stabs him through the heart before being caught by Lara.
Deadly Ghosts:
Hank finally has the opportunity to use the political connections that Imogen promised. Despite her decision to kill Shep, he still believes she can be trusted in this endeavor, and they travel to meet her “Uncle” Vince: Governor of Sector Three.
They chat with him about getting him to present evidence of Codename: Extinction to Parliament, but he needs solid proof. Before the meeting concludes, Vince is shot at by a mysterious assailant who disappears. That night at dinner, he is attacked again, and Hank manages to kill the assassin. Doing so not only indebts Vince to him, but it also helps him rank up as a bounty hunter.
With the money from the bounty and some… encouragement… from famed bounty hunter Mane Malak, Hank upgrades his armor and then consecrates his spear.
Once he has, they follow up on some Peacer intel at a refugee camp that they suspect is being used by the Cult to kidnap new followers. Hank sees some of his remaining family there before Imogen allows herself to be captured so they can hunt down whoever is behind this.
They follow Imogen’s signal to a nearby planet, and the Peacers attack the front as Hank goes in the back. They rescue the children and Imogen, but her aunt is killed in the conflict. Just as they are about to leave, Inquisitor John Gregory arrives, and Imogen is so overcome with anger and grief that she attacks him and is taken, along with Hank’s newly consecrated spear and the location of Codename: Extinction.
1
“This has to work,” I muttered as we lay in wait, the Buzzard holding onto a piece of debris in space with its retractable scrapping arms.
“It’ll work,” Ned, my highly illegal AI companion, assured me one more time. “Jackson relayed that the ship left the High Cloister on a bearing that would bring them here. And we know that they heard the news we planted. Everything is going to plan.”
I knew he was right, but my stress was still through the roof, and even sitting in the cold cockpit of the Buzzard, sweat dripped from my brow line.
Since Imogen had been taken by Inquisitor John Gregory, we had been working on this scheme to get her back. Every passing day had felt like an eternity since I expected that she was going through a living hell. The man had tortured her when she was his Acolyte and working by his side, so I couldn’t even imagine what he was doing to her now that he deemed her an enemy. What he was putting her through to find out about us… and Ned.
I had watched a video of the man committing murder, and he had killed my uncle just for meeting with me. He was the purest of evils, and I knew that we needed to get Imogen back as quickly as possible.
Ambushing this Inquisition ship would be our ticket in. I wasn't entirely sure what we would do once we got inside the High Cloister, the base of operations for the Inquisition, but I knew that we had to try. Only Inquisition ships could get anywhere near the superstation. It was a risk to have Jackson hiding in a stealth ship in the system, but it was a risk we were willing to take.
Even Lara, who had never fully trusted Imogen, wanted the young woman back and had been willing to do whatever it took to rescue her. Especially after Imogen’s aunt Louise had laid down her life to save her niece. Lara was not one to let a sacrifice like that go unanswered. She might not be Imogen’s biggest fan, but the young woman had been a member of the team, and her aunt had been a rebel hero.
Ned, despite being the primary target of the Inquisition’s wrath, wanted desperately to help as well. Though I believed he had an ulterior motive in the fact that the former Inquisitorial Acolyte knew where the superweapon we had come to know as Codename: Extinction was.
“How long before they arrive,” I asked, my patience wearing thin.
Ned wasted no time in answering. “Five minutes and twenty-eight seconds.”
“Might as well be a year,” I said. “Time always takes so long when you are waiting.”
“What an odd concept,” Ned observed. “And something that my creators had obviously been unable to replicate in me. Time, as a construct, passes exactly as it passes regardless of me and my perceptions.”
I tapped my hand impatiently on the armrest of my chair. “You’re lucky,” I told him. “I can’t explain it, but I promise you that time goes a hell of a lot slower in moments like this.”
“But if you counted, it would take the same time now as if you counted when you were doing something enjoyable,” he noted.
I took a slow breath in through my nose, exhaling through my lips. “I literally just said that I can’t explain it.”
“And we don’t need to hear some whole essay about the colloquial use of ‘literally’ either,” Lara added from the seat beside mine.
“I can’t help myself,” Ned said. “And I mean that quite literally.”
Lara smiled slightly. “I see what you did there.”
“You can’t ‘see’ a conversation,” Ned said, and I felt like I could hear the shit-eating grin.
“It’s a turn of phrase, and you know it,” she complained. “Help me out here, Hank.”
I was listening to them but hardly paying attention. I was just watching the scanner display on the console at the front of the cockpit, waiting for it to light up and indicate that another ship was nearby.
“Hank,” Lara said, seeing my distraction and reaching out to lay a hand on mine. “We are going to get her back.”
“We are going to get some version of her back,” I corrected. “After what he does to her, who the hell knows what she will be like.”
“Maybe it won’t be like what you think,” Lara offered, but it was mostly to make me feel better, and I knew it. “They might have other things on their plates or some kind of oversight that prevents them from hurting her too bad.”
At that, I couldn’t help but turn and look at my old friend. I had known Lara longer than anyone. We had been raised at the orphanage on Bussel together and had been as close as any two kids could be. That was until I got caught when we snuck into a scrapper’s repair shop and I ended up being adopted by the man who owned it.
Since being reunited, Lara and I had grown close again. Our styles were different, and the way we approached things was often dissimilar, but that only made us closer. She forced me to think about things in a way I wouldn’t otherwise and challenged me to be better.
Of course, the same could be said for Ned, but that was different.
“I appreciate what you are doing, but we both know that she is being tortured as we speak,” I said, the words heavy.
“You can't know something definitively unless you're present for it,” Ned offered as a way of helping. “You can suspect what is being done to Imogen, but you can't say with any certainty.”
“I can say with certainty even though I'm not there,” I asserted, thinking back to something that Lutch, my adoptive father, used to say. “If you walk into a restaurant with a friend and have dinner for a while before walking back outside to find the ground wet and people holding umbrellas, you don't need to see the rain to know that it happened.”
Lara had nothing to say to that, but Ned answered quickly. “While it is true that the circumstantial evidence would suggest rain, you wouldn’t know it for certain.”
“You are assuming that seeing something counts as definitive proof?” Lara asked, and I felt my mind begin to drift again as I thought about Imogen.
I had promised her aunt that I would continue to look out for her, and it had only been a few minutes after Louise had been killed that I let Imogen be taken. My friends had repeatedly assured me that there was nothing I could have done for her, but that didn’t assuage my guilt.
“Ah, well,” Ned began in a tone that let us know he was about to wax philosophic. “You are beginning to question the very nature of reality and—”
But before he could continue, the screen flashed, and a new blip appeared in the near distance. My eyes darted up and out the window in front of me. There was nothing yet.
“Standing by,” Alek informed us from his hummingbird class ship.
After our run-in with the Inquisition, we had a lot of injured people whose wounds needed tending to. Suniuo Relay Station, where we had made our headquarters, contained the rudimentary medbay of a non-combat facility, but it certainly wasn't enough to triage and treat all of the wounded Peacers.
So, Jackson had led a small strike force to get more supplies but also came upon this payload delivery ship and took it too. But because nothing can ever be easy, the light craft designed to precisely drop a single heavy weapon on a single target was designed for a Kyrog pilot. Since Alek was all we had, he was now hovering just beside us.
I watched the blip on my display get closer as it moved in the direction of the planet where we had reported an AI to the local Consortium prefect.
“They are approaching short-range scanner radius,” Ned said. “Alek, move.”
The former Kyrogi Clan Wars medic accelerated the tiny ship, rocketing toward the Inquisition vehicle without delay.
“The irony is not lost on me that if the Inquisitors had an AI aboard, its reflexes would be fast enough to disable the incoming hummingbird, whereas none of their humans will be quick enough,” Ned said with an undeniable air of superiority.
“Well, maybe when we are taking them hostage and stealing their ship, we can put that in the suggestion box,” Lara said with a little grin and looked to me for a laugh that didn't come.
I was staring out the window, watching as the tiny craft hurtled toward the black and red painted Inquisition ship.
I imagined the Inquisitors seeing the signal appear on their scanners and rushing to their weapons; then realizing that the attacker was coming too quickly. I wondered if they suspected who it was or if they simply thought it was going to be someone who wanted them dead. There was no shortage of that in the universe.
Whether you believed in the cause of the Inquisition or not, most people still feared the sight of them. Even squeaky-clean folks with nothing to fear shook with terror when an Inquisitor was near. And that was partially the point. They were few in numbers but felt more ubiquitous because of the shadow they cast.
From the bottom of Alek’s hummingbird, a missile streaked forward. It was the most expensive payload from the most expensive ship in our possession. The engines of the tiny spacecraft were so delicate and powerful that they were almost prohibitively expensive to make. And the missile, whose front opened and peppered one small section of the Inquisition ship's shield with enough dartmissiles to allow the actual rocket to pass through, cost nearly as much as the ship it was fired from.
“Let's see if it was worth it,” I said almost breathlessly as the weapon passed through and detonated just before crashing into the hull of the ship.
There was no massive explosion or cool lightning surge or anything exciting. Instead, Ned simply informed us, “Detonated,” and the Inquisition craft died all at once. The thruster was deactivated, the lights went off, and it began continuing forward on the trajectory it had been on.
