Convergence (Galaxy's Edge Book 13), page 1
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
PART TWO
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
EPILOGUE
Copyright © 2021
Galaxy’s Edge, LLC
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
All rights reserved. Version 1.0
Edited by David Gatewood
Published by Galaxy’s Edge Press
Cover Art: Tommaso Renieri
Cover Design & Formatting: Kevin G. Summers
Website: www.GalaxysEdge.us
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PROLOGUE
They were larger and more menacing than any war bot Andien had ever before seen. And there were so many of them advancing on her ship, Forresaw, that the fight was nearly drained from her. Here was her death. Here were odds that could not be overcome. The truths of these thoughts hammered at her stomach, making her physically nauseated.
This was as close as she had ever come to giving up.
Instead the Nether Ops agent began to calculate. It didn’t matter if she survived this encounter. That was never guaranteed. But how much you made them pay… that was worth something. Long ago, when she was still herself and yet someone entirely different, she had been trained to never quit.
Never quit. Her father, Stieg, had reinforced that simple code all throughout her time growing up. Before every race and after every defeat, his advice was the same. “Never stop fighting, Dini. If you only ever remember one thing I tell you: be like your mother and never stop fighting. Don’t forget nothin’.”
Forget Nothing. Her entire life, which now looked to have nearly reached its conclusion, could be summed up in that simple two-word directive. Her father had drilled it deep into the fiber of her being. The Republic marines, and later the Legion itself, had reinforced it on her journey into Nether Ops. And it mattered there just as much as anywhere… until she found herself pulled down the winding and dark path that had unfairly deposited her with the Carnivale. The kiss of death.
Her previous director, the man who had brought her into Nether Ops, had shown her that there were things worth doing in the shadows. There was purpose there, honor in the darkness. But now she reported to X. She’d had no choice. He was a man with connections. A man who got what he wanted. And for whatever reason, he’d wanted her.
Her trip on the Forresaw wasn’t her first outing for the Carnivale. For a time, she’d been limited to performing the more mundane tasks of a new operative. Simple espionage and infiltration. Check this zhee warlord. Watch this planetary senator and see who’s paying her off. That kind of thing. Nothing compared to the big one X had lined up once he felt that he could trust her.
“Had to be sure you were properly vetted and aboveboard, you know,” he had explained. “Now for the real task at hand…”
And what a task it was. Kidnap and illegally detain the crew of a Dark Ops agent, though Broxin didn’t believe X knew that much about the man he’d sent her after: Captain Aeson Keel. In fact, she rather doubted it. In her time in Nether Ops, working closely with Dark Ops and seeing things from both sides not usually revealed to the other, Andien had gotten the sense that X knew less than he pretended to. Not that it mattered in this case. He would have sent her after the Maydoon girl all the same, rather than go through Dark Ops and try to get their man to turn her over.
“It’s not ideal, is it,” X had said in his office as he laid out the plan. “Usually the type of thing we want to prevent happening in the galaxy. But… we need that girl. The House of Reason has a mission for you that requires her. It’s the mission you’ve been training for all your life. The one you were built for.”
That’s how X had put it. Built for. The little tell that communicated to Broxin that whatever he might know or not know about Dark Ops and Aeson Keel, he knew enough about her and her history in the Legion. Everything she’d gone through and endured to become a legionnaire. Everything that was done to her by those who knew better and never thought to ask her about any of it. The House of Reason’s little toy that couldn’t afford to be broken.
In Nether Ops, there were no protections for whistleblowers. There was no open-door policy or bureaucratic process to refuse orders you felt were unjust. Agents who had a problem with what they were asked to do got disappeared. Simple as that. Or at least, that’s how it went in the Carnivale the way she’d heard it. She’d been warned about things “over there.”
“Place stinks,” her friend, another Nether Ops agent, former Legion, had said. And then, “Jump ship and go underground if you have to. Don’t sell your soul for those bastards, Andien.”
She’d sold at least a part of it when she captured the girl and the crew. Stole them from Keel while he was actively fighting the sort of attempt on the Republic she had always believed was her job to ferret out before it could happen. And she almost had. Almost.
But maybe she hadn’t sold her soul so much as mortgaged it. Took on a debt of bad actions that was leveraged against unspoken and earnest good intentions. Maybe.
Still, she had done it. Someone was going to, either way. If not her… someone worse. One of X’s less capable and less moral attack dogs. The House of Reason wanted the fleet activated. X was the man assigned to make it happen after Goth Sullus killed Kael Maydoon and, according to intelligence, absconded with the body. It was going to happen. The only question she had a part in deciding was who would be in command of the mission.
Andien Broxin didn’t have to imagine how things might turn out if another Carnivale agent took the mission. She’d watched Hutch, the Carnivale’s pet legionnaire. She’d observed his callous disregard for anyone beyond his own team. Hutch “joked” about simply snuffing the girl and taking her head—and said it too many times for it to be anything but some dark fantasy. Kill the girl. Kill the crew. Deliver the fleet and eliminate the witnesses.
Another day at the office.
That’s how it would’ve gone had she turned the job down. With Andien running the op, the crew would survive at least. And they would be returned to Keel once the fleet was dealt with.
There’d been plans about that as well. Of course they’d all crumbled to ash the moment it became clear that whatever the Mandarins of the House of Reason had created was now under the control of someone else. Someone who wanted them all dead.
She could hear the blaster bolts furiously moving back and forth deeper in the ship where Hutch and his Ghost Team had vanished. Her comm link with them was jammed. The ship had accepted them—they had brought on board the bio-signature passkey—but not as friends.
As the fearsome war bots began to approach the Forresaw, the wobanki abandoned ship. Skrizz was his name. The powerful catman had seen the same thing that Broxin and the moktaar Nether agent at her side had: a platoon of imposing war bots, each eight feet tall and wielding tri-barreled N-50 blaster cannons.
Skrizz loped out of the Forresaw with a speed that did his species justice, but not before raking the back of the moktaar’s head with its claws, sending a spray of blood onto the equipment panel. It was a blow meant to kill an ancient enemy, even though they were all about to die. Just because.
The two species, wobanki and moktaar, were both apex predators—agile, cunning, powerful. They were capable of dominating most galactic species on a purely physical level. But their history was deep and intertwined. Brutal and merciless. For centuries they had lived in too-close proximity with one another, resulting in a constant battle to see which species was the alpha and which the beta, a bloodbath that washed back and forth like ocean tides while the rest of the galaxy grew stronger. So many centuries later, the residual hatred hadn’t lessened in the slightest.
The moktaar gave a primal scream of pain. He was alive, though tatters of flesh on the back of his head and neck hung loose and sent blood onto the deck in rapid drips.
Broxin’s blaster was in her hand. Her reflexes matched those of both the moktaar and the wobanki. In every test she’d had against either species—and there’d been a few—her reflexes had exceeded the predators’. She had a shot; she could have put Skrizz down. But to what end? The Carnivale wasn’t her family. The moktaar, like every other member of Hutch’s team, likely deserved to die. And Skrizz… he would have to face down the mechanical doom outside, the same as she would.
Their fate rested on a fight against overwhelming numbers and firepower. Her preference would have been that they faced it together, first using Forresaw’s weapons systems as an equalizer against the advancing bots and then attempting to link up with any survivors of the crew and Ghost Team. That plan went out the airlock quickly, the way most plans do.
She salvaged what she could of it, turning to the moktaar and commanding, “Get on the guns and start shooting or this ends before it starts!”
The moktaar, hands drenched in his own blood, sobered from thoughts of violent revenge against the wobanki and took the first step toward the Forresaw’s exterior weapons controls. The first volleys from the war bots came a second later.
The ship rocked from the impacts of sustained, simultaneous fire from the tri-barreled N-50s. It was taking a pounding, but not at the cockpit or anywhere else Broxin could see. It wasn’t until the moktaar excitedly told her that the weapons were dead, even manual control, that she realized what had happened. Precision machines took precision shots, and they had preemptively disabled her ship’s ability to shoot back.
Out the airlock went the rest of her plan.
Andien’s mind came up with two options. Two ways forward that didn’t involve quitting. The first was to hunker down and wait for the war bots to board and attempt to flush them out in what would very likely be a brief and violent close-quarters battle. Andien knew a few things about this ship and the war bots on board. She’d seen things classified at levels most didn’t know existed. Levels outside the scope of the Republic. “Where the big boys play,” X had put it. She might destroy a few before being snuffed out.
Or they could take a page out of the wobanki’s playbook, exit the ship now, and attempt to evade the war machines. If the wobanki and the moktaar could put off killing each other long enough to jump and leap and dart and roll and spin their way through the maelstrom of blaster fire, moving with the quickness and unpredictability their species were known for, they might escape the sophisticated targeting software that attempted to cut them down. If they could do that long enough, they might find a place to hide.
For a human, even that slim chance of survival would be zero. But Andien was an exception. She had become something more than human prior to becoming a legionnaire, and not just in the sense that Legion instructors mean when they tell their graduating class that they’ve become “more than humans,” recognizing their transformation into an elite, unmatched warrior class. Andien had done that, too—but she was also, physically, something different. Something post-human. A mix of biologic and cybernetic that hadn’t been seen since the Savage Wars. In fact she suspected her design was taken from Savage tech. The cybernetic enhancements—untraceable unless you were to physically open her up—were what it took for her to pass Legion selection. She hadn’t been asked about it. She hadn’t been told. It was done by others for her good and their glory. So they could be right. So they could have their I-told-you-so moment.
Only it didn’t work out that way. Her Legion career was as short-lived as it was tragic.
Still, she’d put her skills to use. In Nether Ops, she’d tracked down criminals, terrorists, and seditious elements inside the Republic. She’d given men like Major Owens a trusted source inside the labyrinth. Most notably, she’d tracked down the weapons dealer Scarpia and his inner ring of psychopaths who had set the table for the disaster at Kublar. She’d brought them to face justice, and with the help of Dark Ops, she’d foiled what would have been the single greatest attack at the heart of the Republic since its inception.
Her skills, her physical abilities, surpassed those of any other human trapped on this nightmare ship. And she would need to rely on those abilities, just as the wobanki and moktaar would rely on their own, if she was to survive what came next.
“Out of the ship,” she ordered the moktaar. “Our only chance is to make a break for it and try to hide or link up with the others. The Republic will send help once they realize what’s happened here. They still want this fleet.”
The moktaar stared pitifully at Broxin, no doubt thinking that while he might dance between the ferocious blaster bolts, the human stood no chance. The look of pity lasted a second at most and then the simian-like creature ran on all fours down the Forresaw’s ramp.
Heavy N-50 blaster fire screamed outside, and Andien wondered if the two predators were already being cut down. Both had escaped down the rear cargo ramp. Skrizz might have caught them by surprise. Maybe the moktaar, too. Yet surely the sensors on board this vessel could identify how many lifeforms were aboard the Forresaw. The war bots outside would be ready for number three to come down the ramp.
It was a good thing, then, that she wouldn’t be using the ramp.
Because the Forresaw was a ship in the service of Nether Ops and because Nether Ops planned well for contingencies, there was a quick-release hatch in the cockpit, opening a simple chute that would drop her onto the deck beneath the prow of the ship. Andien removed the navigator’s chair, revealing the hatch’s hidden location, and cranked the manual release. A thick plate of impervisteel receded into a pocket in the hull, and from down below the artificial glow of the hangar lighting reflected up from the gleaming deck, letting her know the bottom plate was likewise out of the way.
Blaster in hand, Broxin swung her legs down into the tube and slid to the bottom. She landed in a crouch on the deck ten meters below, the sound of her slide and impact covered by the torrential storm of blaster fire. Skrizz and the moktaar were, amazingly, still alive and confounding the war machines.
The war bots were everywhere, organized in precise, mechanical columns, every last one of them firing in an attempt to bring down their agile targets, swinging their long weapons left and right as the two predators darted and leaped like crazed animals running amok in some zoo they’d just escaped within. It was an impressive sight to behold, and Andien couldn’t help but be momentarily mesmerized by the grace and elegance of their lunges and leaps. Eventually, she knew, probabilities would win out, as probabilities always do, and one of them would catch a blaster bolt—but for now, they were beating those odds by using the exceptional firepower of the war bots against the machines. The war bots’ tri-barreled N-50 blaster cannons were more than powerful enough to damage the other war bots themselves, and their targeting software seemed to recognize this—so Skrizz and the moktaar were obtaining temporary reprieves from the onslaught by moving in close to the standing ranks of hunter-killers, who would then switch tactics and attempt to crush their targets in their powerful arms… always too slowly. Unless protocols changed and whatever was guiding these machines decided that the loss of a few war bots was worth putting down the targets, the escapees stood a chance.
Maybe so did Broxin.
She considered her weapons. Her blaster pistol, a Phantacore U320, also known as a stinger, was quick, light, easily concealable and accurate, but it lacked the punch of a big hand cannon like an Intec x6 due to its smaller, specialized charge pack. Unless she were up close and firing into a processor or through a gap in the war bot’s thick ceramic armor, the best she might hope to do would be to make a harmless dent.
The micro-bangers on her belt were a different story. She pulled off three of the marble-sized devices and tossed them in a spread in the direction where she intended to make her break. Like every piece of her kit, the bangers were neural-linked to her mind, and their countdown to detonation superimposed itself over her vision, telling her how long she had to avoid being caught up in the blast. As the last second ticked off, she leapt back up into the Forresaw through the same shaft she’d dropped down and threw her arms and legs out to lock herself in the middle of the chute as the deafening bang—and more importantly, the blinding flash—erupted outside.
Broxin then pulled her limbs in, arms pressed against her sides, and dropped back down. The bots who had taken the brunt of the blast were frozen in place, their systems rebooting. This common approach to disrupting the sophisticated machines was something the engineers simply had never been able to correct, at least not without adding size and reducing mobility. Andien was relieved to see they still hadn’t figured it out even with this newest generation of killers.
