Lost Galaxy (Books 4-6): The Last Deceit, Swept Away, On Redemption, page 1
LOST GALAXY (BOOKS 4-6)
THE LAST DECEIT, SWEPT AWAY, ON REDEMPTION
DANIEL YOUNG
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Young
Cover Artwork by Phil Dannels
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
Enter If You Dare…
Lost Galaxy series
The Last Deceit
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
Swept Away
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
On Redemption
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
Also by Daniel Young
Free Books!
ENTER IF YOU DARE…
A starship captain faced with an impossible choice.
An amnesiac awoken on an alien world.
A timecop lost in a constantly-changing history.
These stories and many more await inside the page of Portal, a short story collection from the mind of Daniel Young. Six distinct worlds with their own strange rules, pitfalls, and challenges.
Nothing is as it seems...
Enter the Portal if you dare!
LOST GALAXY SERIES
(ALL BOOKS IN KINDLE UNLIMITED)
Books 1-3: The Last Enemy, Beyond Revolt, Shadowland
* * *
Books 4-6: The Last Deceit, Swept Away, On Redemption
THE LAST DECEIT
BOOK 4
1
Constable Sergeant Jack Bowman flattened himself in the dust behind a spiked bulwark. He fumbled with his repeater while he scanned the dusty street beyond his hiding place.
The stacks on which the bulwark sat gave him a two-inch gap to see the abandoned buildings across the street. Other fighters peeked into view before they took cover from the bombardment.
Crashes and explosions went off all over the area, but only one of those other fighters interested Bowman. He flipped onto his back, made a hasty check of his weapon, and took a deep breath.
He scrambled onto his knees, but he made sure to keep his head out of sight. He took a firm grip on his repeater and sprang to his feet.
He charged into the open before he fully acquired his target, not that it mattered very much. He shouldered his repeater and scattered lead across the street. He deliberately fired above the windows where the Republican Guard soldiers hid.
Plaster and concrete rained through the windows and they hunkered lower under his assault. He wheeled sideways and sprinted toward a single Pteran marching up the street.
New lab-constructed laser gauntlets surrounded her wrists and she sprayed shots in all directions. She fired through the windows where the Republican Guard tried to ambush her. A few brave souls popped off shots to slow her down, but their repeater fire only bounced off her metal body.
She saw Bowman the moment he appeared. She spun around and lasers sliced across the street. They cut toward his head and chest. She would blast him off his feet any second now.
He aimed for her head, but she evaded him. Her twin gauntlets converged in the center and sizzled past Bowman’s ears.
He barely ducked in time to keep his head attached to his neck. He hit the dirt and skidded the last few yards to crash into her legs.
Her lasers rotated downward following his flight. She would have killed him for sure, but the soldiers hiding in the buildings reacted just as fast. The moment he distracted her, they vaulted to their feet and pounded her with hundreds of shots.
She didn’t flinch. She concentrated all her energies on Bowman alone, but the soldiers’ attack jostled her enough to finish the job.
He crashed into her legs and grabbed. He yanked hard and flipped her over. In a second, he jumped on top of her and snatched one of her gauntlets. She wheeled the other toward his head to cut him in half, but he was too quick for her.
The laser spouted from the weapon and he pointed at her elbow. The laser sliced through the joint and her forearm separated. Her gauntlet fell away along with the severed limb.
Bowman seized his repeater in one hand, threw all his weight against her remaining arm, and slammed her last gauntlet to the ground. He stabbed his repeater barrel into her other elbow and fired.
A crushing explosion burst in his face. The impact threw him off her still clutching the powerless gauntlet and ZAK’s forearm in his clenched fingers.
Gunshots and explosions resounded on all sides, but Bowman already heard them fading. His ears rang and his pulse hammered in his eyes and ears, but he didn’t have to worry anymore. The battle was over.
The seconds ticked by and the noise dwindled until it died altogether. Bowman struggled back onto his knees. He hurled the useless gauntlet away, but he didn’t let go of his repeater.
He crawled over to ZAK. She lay flat on her back staring up at the sky with her glassy compound eyes. He didn’t see any other damage, but she didn’t move. “ZAK! Are you all right.”
“I am sorry, Lieutenant. My programming has been altered.”
“I know. It isn’t your fault. Are you damaged in any other way? Can you stand?”
She didn’t answer. She glanced toward the buildings. The soldiers stood in their windows holding ZAK and Bowman at gunpoint. A few of them advanced shouldering their weapons.
Bowman clambered to his feet and let them see him lowering his weapon. They surrounded the pair with weapons, but ZAK no longer posed any threat to them. Her broken arms hung from her shoulders. She was defenseless.
“Stand up. It’s okay. We’re going back to the lab. This disaster has gone on long enough.”
He tugged her across the street. The soldiers followed still aiming their guns at both of the friends.
“Stand down!” Bowman called to them. “She’s unarmed. The exercise is over.”
They didn’t back off. They tailed ZAK and Bowman to the gate where they entered this training range. The gates didn’t open when Bowman got near them. Would Brigadier Duke Falkner let them out?
Bowman pushed those thoughts away. He didn’t spend the last thirty years trusting his brother to start questioning Falkner’s loyalties now.
The gates rumbled aside in answer to his thoughts. Bowman led ZAK out of the range. The soldiers only lowered their weapons when the gate closed with themselves inside.
Falkner met them outside and Bowman took the offensive right away. “What the hell, Duke? You told me your technicians reprogrammed ZAK to target Pterans instead of humans. You swore up and down this wouldn’t happen.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. There must be a glitch in the programming.”
“A glitch in the programming? Is that the best you can come up with? There was no glitch. You left her programming the same so she would target humans.”
Falkner made a face. “Give me a break, Jack. We would never do that, but it isn’t like we can just call in a couple hundred Pterans for training exercises. We have to use humans with their life signs disguised as Pterans. She must have been able to break through the disguised signatures. That’s the only explanation.”
“That makes no sense at all, Duke. If she could see through their life sign disguises, then she would have seen they were human. She should have broken off her attack.”
“My programming…” ZAK began.
“You don’t have to explain. I know perfectly well what happened.” Bowman took hold of her arm again and turned her away. “Come on, ZAK. We’re going back to the lab.”
He marched her across the yard. The Alleria sun blistered the hard-packed soil and Bowman sweated inside his Republican Guard uniform.
He had to continually remind himself that this uniform was just a disguise, too. Falkner gave him this uniform so he would blend in with the rest of the soldiers in the exercise.
Bowman wasn’t really back in the Guard. He would never be back in the Guard, especially not the way things were going lately.
He and ZAK didn’t talk all the way back to the High Court building at the Republican Guard Headquarters. Bowman took ZAK to the lab and she took her usual place on the pedestal.
Silence enveloped them and he allowed himself to look at her broken arms. “I’m sorry I had to break your arms. The technicians will reattach them.”
“Perhaps they shouldn’t, Lieutenant.”
Bowman winced. “Yeah, well, I’d like to say it won’t happen again. I just don’t know what’s going on around here lately.”
“I told you the truth, Lieutenant. My programming…”
“I know all about your programming. Just…don’t do anything…not yet. I need to decide what to do about this.”
“If you know all about it, there is nothing to decide. It has already been done. You are a prisoner here. You have said so yourself. You cannot leave and I cannot remove you from Republican custody without both of us being recaptured.”
“I know that, ZAK. I’ve been racking my brains for a way out of here.”
“As have I.”
Bowman looked up at her. “You have? Do you have any ideas?”
“Not for you. I could return to the Pteran collective…”
“The Pteran collective would destroy you. They consider you a traitor.”
“Indeed they do, but it is one avenue of escape. I would bring back intelligence the collective would find useful. The Pterans might decide to spare me in exchange for that.”
Bowman averted his gaze. He didn’t want to think about that. He’d already been over this a thousand times in private moments by himself.
He spent so many agonizing hours trying to escape from Pteran space to return to his beloved Republic. He might have been better off staying there.
The Republic was his only home. The only people he cared about lived here. He had nowhere else to go and nowhere he wanted to go.
He just couldn’t figure out why the Republic turned against him like this. He’d been locked in this lab for a month with no one but ZAK and Duke Falkner for company.
He had regular communication with Constable Luke Van Dyke and his father General Theodore Van Dyke, but he never saw them in person. That was it. He never saw or spoke to anyone else. How long did the Guard plan to keep him here—forever?
Falkner deflected those questions with the most milk-toast excuses imaginable. He claimed Bowman would be released once the Guard learned all they could from ZAK, the Assailant core processor that the Reflex crew brought back, and the mobile gauntlets still attached to Bowman’s wrists.
Falkner consistently failed to specify when that would be. The technicians might study the Pteran technology for the rest of eternity and Bowman would die in this lab. That would be just great, but not even that would surprise him.
It was so typical of everything that happened ever since the Reflex came back from Pteran space. The Republic went to great lengths to misconstrue and manipulate Bowman’s efforts to help save everyone from the Pterans.
The Republic Bowman loved so much went out of its way to criminalize him. The Republic imprisoned him and turned his efforts against him. Why should he cooperate with these people at all?
2
Brigadier Falkner strolled into the lab and grinned at Bowman. Falkner set ZAK’s two severed arms on the worktable. “That was great! That exercise was a big success. The Guard brass is going to be delighted with the results.”
“How can they be delighted about ZAK firing on human beings? You said you were going to reprogram her to target Pterans.”
“We did reprogram her to target Pterans.” Falkner bent over his computer to avoid eye contact with Bowman. “You saw the programming yourself, Jack. We couldn’t exactly reprogram her without you translating the language for us. You practically programmed her yourself.”
“Don’t pin this on me. I saw you program her to target Pterans, so why did she target humans on the training range? Her reactions make no sense at all. She completely ignored the Pteran decoys and went straight for the Guard.”
“That’s nothing we can’t work out. We’ll just go back into the targeting system and…”
“She also targeted me, Duke. Did you see that? She was shooting at the Guard, and when I showed up, she stopped what she was doing to come after me specifically. How do you explain that?”
“Lieutenant…” ZAK began.
He held up his hand to silence her. “That could only happen if one of your technicians pulled up the programming and altered her targeting system when I wasn’t around. Olsen was working with me to reprogram ZAK. If you didn’t do it, she must have.”
Falkner rolled his eyes to Heaven. “Please, Jack. Olsen has been exposed to the Pteran language for a matter of weeks. Are you telling me she learned it well enough just from watching you to be able to reprogram ZAK without your help? That’s impossible. You know it is.”
Bowman narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Why are you running me in circles? Why won’t you give me a straight answer?’
“I am giving you a straight answer, Jack. I’m telling you there was a glitch in the programming, which is understandable considering that none of us has any experience with Pteran technology. We’re reinventing the wheel here. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times. Do we really have to have it again?”
Bowman measured Falkner up and down. He didn’t really need to have this conversation again. He knew what he saw and heard. His gut told him something was off-kilter here. This shit had been going on way too long.
Why did he even bother to question his instincts? They told him he couldn’t trust Falkner on this project. Bowman just hated to start doubting the one person he most trusted in the world.
He was so happy when Falkner took over this project. Bowman thought he could count on Falkner to help him figure out who and what was messing with his life. Now he found out his own brother was twisting the situation to make it worse instead of better.
Bowman pointed to ZAK’s forearms. “Reattach those…without the gauntlets. Do you think you can do that without screwing that up, too?”
He stormed out of the lab. Falkner called after him. “Jack, wait…!”
Bowman ignored him. He stalked upstairs to his apartment, but he had come to loathe the comfort and privilege of it. It was just another way for the Republican Guard to mess with his head. It was another way they pretended to be nice to him while holding him a prisoner. They could dress it up any way they liked, but he knew the truth.
Assigning Falkner to supervise this project was more bullshit manipulation. They put someone in charge that Bowman wanted to trust, someone Bowman found nearly impossible to resist.
It took a month of underhanded tricks and broken promises to bring Bowman to this moment, but he still couldn’t bring himself to come right out and accuse Falkner of manipulating him.
Could Falkner be telling the truth? Could Bowman explain what happened on the training range as an innocent mistake? Could a simple glitch make ZAK act the way she did?
Bowman might be willing to believe that if he hadn’t seen countless examples of the same thing since he started this project. Only his personal relationship with Falkner made him still question it after everything he’d seen.
He threw himself down on the couch and flung his arm over his eyes. Even if he allowed himself to believe that Falkner was manipulating this situation, what could Bowman do about it?
Like ZAK said, fleeing to Pteran space was the only option available. Bowman could think of plenty of worst-case scenarios if he backed out on this project.
