Fire strike, p.1
Fire Strike, page 1
Fire Strike
Edge of Sunrise
Elsa Jade
Copyright © 2019 by Elsa Jade
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.
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Cover Design by Victoria Cooper
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Published by Red Circle Ink, Portland, Oregon USA
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For information about all books in the Obsidian Rim series go to: https://obsidianrim.com
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Fire Strike: Edge of Sunrise / Elsa Jade. -- 1st ed., Book 5 in the Obsidian Rim series, Book 2 in the Edge of Sunrise Trilogy
Contents
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
About the Author
The Obsidian Rim Series
Excerpt - Mercenary Royal by Shona Husk
Also by Elsa Jade
Chapter 1
When he dreamed, splinters of who he’d been would pierce through his unconscious. Rio-Jaguar Adamsrinivasan, assistant deputy chief of global security on AlpesPrimus, mentored for a potential vice presidency, beloved spouse… But then he’d wake up, and cold, hard reality would smash those memories to dust.
So Miner 870 preferred not to sleep.
Lucky for him, ever since the mutiny on Ydro-Down, he had a galactic tonne of vacced-up shite to keep him busy. Besides, the deep tunnels were as black as the backside of his closed eyelids, so that was almost sleeping, right?
As Arjay trudged ever farther downward through the guts of the mining moon, his nerves sparked with exhaustion—frayed wires losing electrons. He’d perfected insomnia during his turns as a political prisoner on Frio, mindlessly hacking chunks of ice and trying not (but sometimes wishing) to get shanked by ice picks. The not-sleeping trick had saved him more than once when he was sold to Ydro-Down and handed a pickaxe to bash at rock instead of ice, burning instead of freezing. Not really the advancement he’d been promised. But every meter of ice and rock he excavated was another layer he could wrap around himself, to not remember.
If he dug deep enough, maybe some night he’d be able to sleep without dreaming. Until he completely buried himself in the ruins of recollection, he’d just stay awake.
Defeating QueCorp’s cruel overseer had been just the start, and now the miners were working harder than ever. Which was saying something since they’d been slaves before. Most of the miners who’d been forced into the backbreaking labor had been innocent of any wrongdoing. He, on the other hand, had fought and stolen and killed—guilty as charged.
And he’d been an idealistic fool. Sometimes that seemed like the worst of his crimes. Or at least the first.
But the leader of their uprising, Gavyn Grey, had demanded that Arjay finally rest. “I need you,” he said simply. “This revolution wouldn’t have happened without you, and I can’t let you burn out now.”
It was meant to be a rough praise; really, Gavyn’s knack for inspiring people had been the key to their survival. But though he knew Arjay’s past as well as anyone—which wasn’t saying much—sanctioning his complicity in the rebellion stung like rocksalt.
There’d been a time when the “River Jaguar” of AlpesPrimus had been lauded for hunting down and terminating such lawbreakers. He’d been paraded and feasted after his highest-profile cases, and prominent families had presented their suitable envoys for spousal unions. He declared himself a champion of his enlightened, civilized worlds.
Now he was the very thing he’d opposed.
When he cursed quietly to himself, the ugly words ricocheted off the uncaring rock. He was so tired that those impossible memories were starting to leak through to his waking life.
Or maybe it was just the darkness of the deep mines, almost as complete as the night behind his closed eyelids, that was dredging up these waking nightmares.
Almost asleep on his feet, he shook his head hard, and his dry eyeballs practically rattled in his skull. But he couldn’t rest yet, not when they were barely holding on to what they’d won.
Since Gavyn kicked him off any major assignments, Arjay had decided to tackle some of the smaller tasks that had been ignored while they fought for their lives. One dirty, dangerous chore was to complete a full survey of the mining planetoid. The rebels had made good use of the patchwork shafts and tunnels to prepare their mutiny, but unmarked passageways remained from generations past that needed to be mapped and locked down. The deeps had been infiltrated once during the mutiny, and though the intruder had advanced their cause in the end, Arjay wasn’t going to let them be taken unawares again.
He’d programmed several crawlers to run the survey, but he needed to double-check their work. Though he’d once been considered the cleverest forensic detective in his system, that ability had been nearly hacked out of him with ice picks and pickaxes. He wouldn’t trust his own work without verifying. Besides, not even a foolish idealist would rely on the old, substandard machines of Ydro-Down to keep them alive.
When he stopped in one dark tunnel to align the schematics of the official map, the initial survey, and his actual on-site observations, he scowled. The three were wildly different. This was going to take time. And time was the one thing the miners had in even less supply than weapons and food and potable water and breathable air—
“Vac it,” he muttered. There’d always been a million ways to die on Ydro-Down. Rebellion wasn’t even the most romantic. Or the stupidest.
Wearily, he aligned the three maps and crouched down to the crawler to upload the corrected schematics, so at least it started in the right place. The knee-high bot was missing a few legs, and most of the diodes on its control panel were burned out, but it had gone into danger and rescued more miners than all of QueCorp’s human personnel. And when he laid a tired hand on its squat, battered bulk, the remaining legs didn’t waver at all.
For a heartbeat, a memory flashed in front of his eyes, and he was Rio once more.
Gemma had barely loosened the velveteen ribbon on the box when the top flew off and a fuzzy, brindle shape launched into her arms. Chen had laughed so loud and delightedly that Rio had started smiling even before he realized what it was.
“A dogbot? Since when have you wanted bots in the house?” Rio gave his spouse a mock glare. “I thought you loved playing house the old-fashioned way.”
Chen nodded vigorously. “But every kid needs a dog.”
Rio stiffened. “A…kid?”
“Well, they start out as babies first…”
Rio pivoted to Gemma. “A baby?”
She gave him another smile, not as vivacious as Chen’s but excited in its own way and every bit as beautiful to Rio. “We didn’t want to tell you until we were sure,” she said softly. “You’ve been so busy at work.”
Rio swallowed hard. “Never too busy for you two.” When he went to gather them into his embrace, the dogbot squirmed up to lick his face. It was soft, warm, awash with life even though he knew it was just a bot. “Okay, you three.” The dogbot stuck its tongue in his mouth, and they all laughed.
Later, when Gemma had retired, and it was just Rio and Chen cuddling on their new extra-wide couch—Chen’s insistence on the big, plush furniture suddenly made sense—Rio had fretted about the cost of the clearly top-end robotics, Gemma’s apparent exhaustion, the necessity of moving to a better educational district.
Chen silenced him with a kiss. “You got the big DICs,” Chen said with a snicker. “Why work all those hours for vaccing digital interstellar credits except to get the best for all my babies?”
Rio tucked his spouse against his chest. “We do it to make this system a better place for everyone.”
Chen kissed the underside of his jaw. “That’s the kind of talk that will get you elected president someday.” He fluttered his dark lashes. “And get you some dirty loving now.”
But when they slipped into the dark, quiet bedroom—angling to shelter Gemma and the puppy bot between them—Rio had lain awake, staring at the sky simulation projected on the ceiling.
He hadn’t grown up on AlpesPrimus as Gemma and Chen had, and he knew the true cost of things—of realistic bots, of beautiful houses, of loving someone so much that sometimes he couldn’t sleep for fear of missing a single second with them. Lately, work had been taking his every waking moment, but his mentor had been badgering him to learn some work-life balance. With a quiet chuckle, he figured he’d be doing that now for sure. With a child, his love for his spouses would be given its own shape and breath…
He’d fallen asleep with only the sweetest of dreams in his head.
That might’ve been the last time he saw any stars, and they’d been false. Like so much of his life. If he’d known…
Arjay swayed, and only the spasm of his grip on the crawler kept him upright. Its cold, scarred shell was like the worst puppy ever.
He gave the crawler a gentle nudge to send it on its way. It would be a long time before Ydro-Down could afford the kind of luxuries he remembered. For now, the most enthusiasm he could muster was that the new alignment he’d fed into the bot seemed to be working, and with a little effort eventually they’d have an accurate map of the dead moon that was their lodging, their workplace, their prison.
He followed along behind the crawler for a ways. These weren’t the oldest or the deepest tunnels on Ydro-Down, but he’d never been this far. While the bot trundled along—pinging quietly and dutifully marking its location against the map, updating with every step—Arjay gazed at the marks left by some old whomper.
It must’ve been a huge machine, gouging gigantic wedges of stone with each pass. Maybe back then, QueCorp had been willing to invest in decent equipment Apparently now, human lives were cheaper.
He peered closer at some shallower scratches. The marks looked like the hand-etched carvings that miners left as notes to themselves and to other crews, signaling a warning of possible gas pockets, or a suggestion to follow a particular vein to see where it might lead. Or maybe this had been the site of an old cave-in where some luckless losers had made their last notation, chipping away one more line in the stone before the end.
He slanted the lume-stick on his hard hat at a different angle, but the markings didn’t seem like any shorthand he knew. It might be very old. Curious, he reached out to brush his fingertip over the etching. The edge flaked under his touch, and the newly revealed facing was the same color as the scratching.
As if that mark had been recently made.
The silence in the tunnel suddenly echoed in his ears. The crawler wasn’t pinging anymore.
Stiffening, he swiveled his head to aim the lume-stick farther down the tunnel. The crudely carved corridor was straight as far as his light could reach.
And empty.
He glanced down at his tab screen. No locator beacon from the crawler. “Vac,” he muttered. He’d just recharged the thing. It shouldn’t have gone dead already.
When he swung his light down the tunnel again, he caught a flicker of movement. Something too high to be the squat crawler.
A flicker of shock jolted his veins. There was nothing this far down.
Nothing except the deep-creeps…
No, he didn’t believe in subterranean monsters. All the monsters he knew were comfortably and safely floating through space on the enlightened, civilized worlds he’d left behind, cocooned in all the luxury that Q had brought them.
Vac this, he couldn’t afford to lose a crawler. Clamping one hand to his hard hat, he raced down the corridor after the disappearing bot.
He kept his lume-stick sweeping across the floor ahead of his feet. Not impossible that the crawler had fallen down an unmarked shaft. Exploratory digs weren’t always marked, especially if they petered out quickly, and natural fissures could open without warning under pressure from gas and tectonics. Any of those holes could be large enough to swallow a bot—or him.
A glint as thin as his patience at nostalgia caught his eye as he ran. He jerked his head up to center the light from the lume-stick—
Just as the strong wire caught him across the visor.
It threw him down hard. If not for the protection of the thick protective shield, he might’ve been beheaded. The material cracked off his face, and as his feet flew up, the back of his head smashed down on the unyielding stone.
He had a half breath of his vision swimming as if the corridor had flooded, and a monster glided up to him with huge black eyes shining in the light.
“Gremlin,” he whispered. And then he blacked out.
Chapter 2
He wasn’t unconscious long. At least he didn’t think he was. And he’d been knocked into oblivion enough to be familiar with the strange sense of timelessness, as if he’d been gone forever. At least the dull pounding in his head hadn’t yet ripened into the split-skull agony of a concussion. He knew he’d fallen on his back, but now he was half propped against the rough wall, his bare shoulder grinding on the rock.
Naked?
Knocked himself out of his visor and apparently out of his clothes. Despite the simmering heat of the deep tunnels, a chill swept over him. He’d awakened like this before: sick, confused, naked, and beaten. It never ended well.
At least he was still breathing? Although for how long… The air in the mines was theoretically breathable, sometimes. But sometimes not. And with the visor cracked away, he’d lost the air filter that was part of the mouthpiece. He calmed his breathing. That was the first thing he’d learned in the mines. Even breaths were in short supply.
The lume-stick was lying on the floor, its light beaming across his bare shins. Staring down dully, he wiggled his toes. At least he hadn’t cracked his neck. Movement at the corner of his eye made him jerk his head to the side. Ouch. There was the headache he’d been expecting.
And there was the gremlin. Not a monster of the deep after all, but something stranger. The squat creature was wrapped in an amalgamation of hundreds of turns of mining equipment and QueCorp uniforms. Including his utility belt with his precious data tablet tucked into one pouch.
“Hey, gremlin. That’s not yours. Give it back.” As cease-and-desist orders went, he realized that wasn’t one of his more eloquently persuasive commands. But even though he would’ve sworn he’d gotten used to being a slave, it had been a long time since he was this vulnerable. Even QueCorp let him have pants.
The gremlin half turned toward him, obviously no more impressed by his threat than he was. What had seemed like a terrifying bug-like visage was actually a modified visor.
Gavyn had received ocular modifications to enhance his ability to perceive changes in rock around qubition, and he needed protective lenses in many situations. These goggles seemed like an external version of what had been done to Gavyn. Faint lights flickered on the backside of the dark glass, and Arjay suspected the wearer was seeing all sorts of information that the fading lume-stick couldn’t share. Hopefully his galvanic skin responses weren’t revealing how uncomfortable he was. Except he was showing a lot of skin.
“Who are you?” Again, as conversational gambits went, this wasn’t inspired. He could just imagine what his spouses would’ve thought; where was the platinum-tongued aspiring planetary politician now?
When he tightened his fist—whether to grab hold of the memories or deflect them, he wasn’t sure—the cable ties around his wrists cut into his flesh. He hadn’t even noticed he was bound. He held up his wrists. “This is what you give me in trade for all my clothes and tech?”
Not answering, not even glancing up, the gremlin rifled through all Arjay’s possessions, wrapping everything into a tidy pile. Not so different from how he was trussed.
A shuddering unease iced his spine. The miners talked about the deep-creeps, the hallucinations that plagued humans too long underground exposed to the unstable qubition isotopes. Sometimes they laughed about the delusions that haunted them. But they spoke in only the lowest, most horrified of whispers when they mentioned the lost miners. The ones who went into the dark and never came back. They ate scrapings from the bacterial mats that formed on the carbonaceous minerals. And they drank the blood of the helpless, unwitting miners they stalked in the deepest tunnels. Maybe they’d been human once, but not anymore.
Arjay swallowed. He didn’t believe any of that vaccing shite.
Well anyway, he hadn’t believed it. Until now.
The gremlin rose to its meager height, flinging the bundle of his former possessions over its shoulder. It certainly didn’t look human, the proportions completely off. Though it wasn’t tall, its boots were large. Those bulky, miner-width shoulders held the bundle of his belongings easily, but his heavy utility belt was strapped so tight that it looked about to cut the gremlin in two at the midpoint. Wispy bits of wire stuck out from beneath the strangely cut-down hard hat. No, that wasn’t wire, it was small, tight braids.
