Forged in Shadow Read online

  “You really think so?” Rykal inclined his head in the darkness before he froze, listening. “Shh,” he whispered, digging the tip of the dagger into the Human’s skin with dangerous precision, just a little more, just deep enough to draw a spot of blood. The Human hissed in pain. If Human anatomy was anything like his own, the man’s spinal cord would be easily accessible through gaps between his bony vertebrae.

  In many ways, Humans looked quite similar to Kordolians. As he tracked the tiny noises echoing around the hold, Rykal’s thoughts once again drifted to her. Arin. His favorite Human. Exactly how similar was their anatomy?

  Kaiin’s Hells, he wished it were Arin he was getting close to, instead of this idiotic peacekeeper who stank of fear.

  How had these Humans obtained weapons anyway? Rykal thought all of their weapons had been seized.

  Apparently not.

  They must have kept a secret stash somewhere. The freighter was a large craft, after all. Too big for them to check every nook and cranny. Not that it mattered. Weapons or not, the outcome would be the same.

  The Human began to move, but Rykal placed a hand on his throat. “Don’t,” he murmured. The Human froze. Rykal’s senses were stretched taut, demanding absolute concentration. His ears twitched as he listened, searching for variations in the silence.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…” He mouthed the words silently in Kordolian, counting the footsteps, reading the patterns, detecting subtle differences in scent. “There are six or seven of them,” he said softly, “including you.”

  “H-how?”

  “Shh,” Rykal repeated. “If I have to tell you to be quiet again, you’re dead.” He flipped his dagger, turning it so the blade was facing towards him. He slammed the hilt of the dagger into the Human’s skull, sending him crashing to the floor. The Human slumped into an awkward pile of armor, weapons, and limbs. “Better yet, sleep for a while.” The Human had been a pain-in-the ass, but he’d also been a valuable source of information. The only reason Rykal hadn’t killed him was because of a promise he’d made to Arin.

  “Fine,” she’d grumbled. “I’ll do as you ask and go down to Nova Terra. But only if you promise not to harm any of my people while I’m gone.”

  Rykal was a killer, but he didn’t break promises. That would be dishonorable. That’s why he rarely ever made promises.

  “I’m not going to make any promises I can’t keep, but I’ll try my best not to harm them,” he answered honestly, “although it depends on whether they can behave themselves.”

  A sharp buzz diverted his attention, bringing him back to the present. There was a small comm device in the unconscious Human’s ear. Someone was babbling in Human-speak. Rykal carefully extracted the comm from the man’s ear, untangling the crude speaking piece from his collar. “I’m coming for you,” he said, speaking into the comm. “If you give up now, I might let you live.”

  The response was a few sharply uttered Human words that sounded like cursing amidst crackling static. Rykal sighed. Why did these Humans have to become difficult all of a sudden?

  When Arin was here, they’d been disciplined and sensible, but now, this rabble of Humans seemed to fancy their chances against him. Rykal was about to show them how misguided they were. He had to act fast. There were thousands of Humans onboard this freighter, including fifty-odd peacekeepers.

  There were six Kordolians.

  The Humans had to be kept in a state of fear. It was the only way to keep them controlled.

  So far, the Humans had been too afraid of them to try and take them on, but it was only a matter of time before someone got cocky and stupid and decided he or she could start a revolution.

  Point in case.

  Two more Humans approached him. They were spooked now, judging from the way they walked, their steps shuffling and hesitant. Humans were so awkward and clumsy, just like children. Rykal sheathed his dagger and issued a mental command, summoning the virus-impregnated nano-particles that dwelled in his bloodstream. They were reinforced with Callidum, and when they coalesced over his body, they formed an impenetrable barrier.

  Rykal’s body was already protected by his hard-yet-flexible suit of exo-armor, but he’d left his face bare. Now he summoned his helm, welcoming the familiar burn as the sub-cellular particles swarmed through bone and tissue and skin. They could try to punch him, stab him, shoot him, burn him, and impale him, but nothing would get through.

  Rykal began to run, heading towards the source of the sound. He left every one of his weapons sheathed or holstered. He didn’t want to kill the damn Humans unless it was absolutely necessary, so he would use only his hands.

  For a First Division warrior like Rykal, not killing was much harder than taking a life. It required restraint, and when it came to fighting, Rykal had never had any reason to show restraint.

  But now, he thought of Arin, and for some reason, he wanted to please her.

  Like a swift shadow, Rykal descended on the Humans, who were moving in some kind of back-to-back formation, their guns held before them, their green goggles glowing in the darkness. One of the Humans had enough wits about him to fire off a shot of bolt-energy. The white beam struck Rykal in the chest, but it didn’t slow him down. His fist smashed into the Human’s face, sending him crashing to the floor. The second Human whirled, cursing.

  Rykal’s hands closed around his neck as the Human tried to angle his gun towards Rykal’s head. “It won’t work against me,” Rykal grated, as he tried to figure out how to put this one down. He settled for squeezing the points on the Human’s neck where he presumed the large arteries ran.

  The Human struggled a bit, then slumped. As soon as his body went limp, Rykal released his grip. He didn’t want to strangle the guy.

  Well, he did. For stupidity.

  But for now, this would do.

  There were four left.

  The next three were easy targets. All Rykal needed to do was punch, chop, elbow, and strangle. He dropped them all, sustaining only a few blasts from those irritating bolt-weapons. The shots hurt like hell as his armor absorbed them, but they didn’t cause any permanent damage.

  The last Human had managed to climb onto one of the cargo containers. The empty metal cargo shells sat in a long interconnected row. They were about one-and-a-half times Rykal’s height, and they were arranged on metal tracks.

  This Human had a larger weapon, some kind of tubular launcher thing that he hefted over one shoulder. “I can see you, fucker,” he yelled, his Universal clipped and awkward. A tiny red light flashed, and Rykal found himself the target of a missile. “Take this!”

  “Oh, come on,” he groaned. Instinctively, his hand found its way to one of his throwing knives, and before he could think twice, the thing had flown out of his hand, hurled in the direction of the Human. Rykal turned and tried to dodge, but the missile had some kind of tracking feature, and he couldn’t lose it.

  So he did the only thing he could.

  He crouched down into a ball as the missile hit him, knocking him to the ground. It exploded in a storm of fire and heat. Rykal’s armor held firm, protecting him from the brunt of the blast, but some of the heat still managed to seep through, searing his skin.

  Rykal swore. It had been a while since he’d been caught in a firestorm like this. He’d forgotten how much this shit could hurt.

  As the fire died down, Rykal picked himself up, groaning as pain shot through his body. His skin felt as if it had been stretched taut and dipped into the boiling lava pits of Keldork. Every nerve ending was seared. The missile’s fire hadn’t killed him, but a small amount of its heat had penetrated through the flexible layer of his armor, superficially burning his skin.

  His exo-armor was impervious to most things. It could resist fire and plasma and bolt-weapons, so whatever this Human had just thrown at him must have been powerful stuff.

  Still, all he’d come away with were superficial burns. A nuisance, nothing more. Rykal grunted in pain as he ros
e to his full height, listening carefully for any signs of life.

  Silence.

  There were no more attackers. Groaning, he recalled the majority of his nanites into his body, wincing as they passed through cell and fiber and membrane.

  It hurt like a bitch.

  But he needed to heal. The nano-particles would get to work now, repairing his damaged skin. It would be quick.

  Goddess knew, he was a freak, a supreme aberration. They all were.

  Naked apart from the thin straps that held his weapons in place, he jumped and grabbed hold of the top of one of the cargo containers, grunting with pain and exertion. His skin was covered with rapidly healing blisters, and every movement was excruciating.

  Rykal hauled himself to the top, landing on the roof in a crouching position.

  The Human was a few steps away from him, flat on his back.

  Dead.

  Rykal’s knife had hit him square between the eyes, splitting his green-lensed goggles in two.

  Sighing, Rykal limped over to where the Human lay and retrieved his throwing knife. The goggles fell away, revealing a pale face dotted with small brown specks of pigment. A bush of reddish colored hair covered the Human’s jawline and cheeks. Dark red blood trickled from a slit-shaped hole between the Human’s eyebrows, forming a stark line across his pale skin.

  Humans grew hair on their faces and their blood smelled like the dry, metallic earth of some of the red-dust planets they’d visited. They were such strange creatures.

  He hadn’t meant to kill this one, but his hand had moved of its own volition. Certain things were hard-wired into him, such as the need to kill everyone and everything that posed a threat to him.

  Arin would probably be annoyed.

  But then this guy shouldn’t have fired a Kaiin-cursed missile at him in the first place.

  Rykal flicked the blood off his throwing knife and placed it in a small sheath close to his chest. Without the rest of his armor, the remaining structures holding his weapons in place appeared strange. The nano-structures depended so much on his ability to hold perfect visualizations of prototypes in his mind, even in the face of overwhelming pain.

  The Empire had made him into something other, even as they had taken everything else away from him. They’d stolen his memories and fractured his identity. They’d tried to take away his free will too, but that hadn’t exactly gone to plan.

  Rykal shook his head. There were six unconscious Humans and one dead one in the cargo hold, and he had to figure out what to do with them. He looked at the dead Human and made a decision.

  It wouldn’t be pretty, but he needed to make an example of the Humans who had tried to ambush him, so others wouldn’t try and follow their lead. General Tarak had always said that fear could be more effective than the sharpest Callidum blade.

  Rykal made a face and drew his long dagger, the one he used for stabbing and filleting and close-quarters bladework.

  It wouldn’t be pretty, but he knew what he had to do. Arin would freak out when she heard, but he would just have to explain to her later that things weren’t always as bad as they seemed.

  Chapter Three

  When Arin finally escaped the Senate Chambers, the sun was throwing long shadows across the forecourt. Her hand flew to her pocket, but then she remembered she hadn’t smoked Juvi in years. Smoking had been prohibited on Fortuna Tau, helping her to finally break the addiction.

  Stupid old habits. They always resurfaced when she was stressed.

  Arin tore off her formal navy blue jacket, which felt tight and constricting, and took a deep breath. She’d forgotten how sweet the salty sea air smelled. It refreshed and calmed her as she strode across the plaza, making her way towards the hoverail station.

  Nova Terra hadn’t changed since she’d last been here. It was the same old sterile, pristine, boring, soulless place. It was a world in a bubble, far removed from the harsh realities of the Universe. Its only saving grace was the fact that the azure ocean surrounded it on all sides, blessing it with the perfect balmy tropical climate.

  On this tiny island, decisions were made that determined the fate of the Human race.

  As she rode the escalator up to the platform, Arin became painfully aware of the discreet electronic eyes that watched her from every angle. Constant surveillance was a Federation thing; everyone who lived here accepted the fact that their public movements were watched and monitored, but it was still an unnerving feeling.

  The South train pulled up as she approached the departure point. It was a sleek, noiseless vehicle made up of five cars. It followed a trackless route through the Diplomatic Zone and out to the southern tip of the island, where the Peacekeeper Barracks were situated.

  That niggling feeling that she was being watched and followed; it never went away.

  Arin took her seat and stared through the floor-to-ceiling windows as they sped away from the station, leaving the Diplomatic Zone behind. The hovertrain carved a route along artificial concrete cliffs, and out to one side, the glittering ocean stretched beyond the horizon, azure and endless.

  By the time they reached the Peacekeeper Barracks, there were only military personnel left on the train. Some were in uniform, while others just had that look. They all got it after a while; there was a certain hardness about them that told of sleepless nights and intimate brushes with death.

  A faint buzz resonated through the cabin as they glided through the security checkpoint. That strange sensation told Arin their biological signatures were being logged as they passed onto the base.

  The hovertrain pulled into its final stop, Nova Terra South, the entry point to the largest peacekeeper barracks in the Southern Hemisphere. As Arin stepped off the train, she found herself flanked on both sides by a couple of government types in suits.

  They stared at her for a moment, studying her through dark datalenses. The man was short and stout, with a thick jowly neck and thinning blond hair. The woman towered over him, tall and angular, her dark hair cut into a neat bob.

  “Can I help you?” Arin asked coldly as the hovertrain pulled away, creating a sucking vortex of wind that momentarily ruffled their clothes.

  “Sergeant Varga,” the woman said, as tiny lights flickered across her datalenses. No doubt they had access to every single bit of data the Federation had on her, from her shoe size to her favorite brand and the ice-cream flavor she liked. Incidentally, that was pistachio choc-chip. “We are from the Department of Planetary Security. Nonhuman Affairs. We need to speak with you.”

  “I gathered that,” Arin said dryly as she started to walk. Now and then, she’d see a familiar face and offer a sharp nod in greeting. She passed out of the station with the two officials trailing behind her, their synthetic shoes echoing loudly on the pavement.

  “It would be best if we spoke somewhere private,” the man added as they reached a black bot-car with darkly tinted windows. The doors slid open as they approached, and he gestured inside. “Let’s ride.”

  Arin stopped dead in her tracks. “You haven’t even identified yourselves properly, and you expect me to just ‘hop in’? How do I know you are who you say you are?”

  The woman pulled out a datapad. “Our names aren’t important, but for convenience, you can call us E1 and E2. We have the highest level of clearance. Clearances beyond clearances. You have no idea. We have informed your CO and he’s aware. Even your mother’s aware.” She recited the words in a tired monotone, as if she’d delivered the same speech a hundred times before. “See for yourself.”

  She activated the datapad’s holographic display and two biological signatures appeared. Arin held her link-band up to the signatures to verify them. It was no surprise that they checked out.

  One was from her Commanding Officer on Earth, Major Singh. The other was a very familiar, very irritating bio-sig.

  It belonged to her mother, General Alison Varga.

  Arin stiffened. Not many knew that she and the general were related. Most people, i
ncluding the squad under her command, thought their common surnames were just a coincidence, and she preferred to let them think that.

  Orders were orders. Arin sighed and nodded. “Fine.” She slid into the car. That was the problem with returning to Earth. Everyone wanted a piece of her. She hadn’t made contact with her family since she’d arrived, but of course, her mother knew she was on the ground.

  Not that her mother was anywhere near Earth right now, but the general, bless her soul, always seemed to know what was going on, even if she couldn’t summon the balls to break fucking protocol and get her own daughter off a doomed mineral freighter.

  That was why Arin preferred the relative freedom of space, even if it meant sharing a freighter with a group of rather scary and very dangerous aliens.

  There was less drama in space.

  She almost missed Rykal’s easygoing nature. It sounded stupid, but when he wasn’t killing Xargek, threatening Humans, scaring the living shit out of them, or blatantly pursuing her, he was rather easy to get along with.

  He was chillingly, effortlessly lethal, and at the same time, rather nice.

  Nice looking, too, in an unearthly kind of way. He was the prettiest one out of all of the Kordolian warriors, and that was no mean feat. They were all so exotic looking, like characters out of some dark fairytale, but Rykal was downright ethereal.

  Looks could be so deceiving.

  As the bot-car pulled away from the curb, she stared back at the two agents, wishing she were back on the Hendrix II, as crazy as that seemed.

  “So,” she leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees, her ceremonial jacket draped across her lap, “what do you nameless folks want to know, and what exactly do you want me to do?”

  The woman leaned forward as the man sat back in his seat, watching her through his datalenses. He was probably recording their conversation.

  The woman removed her datalenses, revealing cold grey eyes. These two were just like the agents Arin remembered from her childhood. They had the demeanor of people who dealt so deeply in secrets and lies that they lived in a distorted version of reality. As a child, she remembered sneaking out of her room late at night to eavesdrop on conversations she hadn’t understood. They had always visited her mother late at night, interrupting her as she’d pored over countless classified documents, the smell of Juvi and strong black coffee lingering in the air.