Warden Read online

  Warden

  The Vigilante Chronicles Book Three

  Natalie Grey

  Michael Anderle

  Warden (this book) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2018 Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle

  Cover by Jeff Brown, http://jeffbrowngraphics.com/

  Interior Artwork by Eric Quigley

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, July 2018

  The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2018 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.

  Contents

  Yofu Image

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Jotun Image

  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

  Author Notes - Natalie Grey

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books by Natalie Grey

  Books by Michael Anderle

  Connect with the authors

  Warden Team

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Daniel Weigert

  Mary Morris

  James Caplan

  John Ashmore

  Peter Manis

  Micky Cocker

  If We’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  Lynne Stiegler

  From Natalie

  For M and T

  From Michael

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  To Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  To Live The Life We Are

  Called.

  Yofu image by Eric Quigley

  1

  Sweat dripped into Gar’s eyes, and he winced in pain. His whole body ached. Things he hadn’t known existed ached. Could internal organs ache? His did.

  He had to focus on the real threat, however.

  “I told you two I was uncomfortable with this.” He looked at Barnabas and Shinigami, who were playing chess in the corner. Both Barnabas and Shinigami’s avatar sat cross-legged. Lately, she’d been adding aspects to her avatar—for dramatic effect, she claimed. Today she had chosen wind, which fluttered the cape she wore draped over a full suit of armor.

  Barnabas looked up at Gar and grinned. “I think her costume is probably making this seem more serious than it is. It’s just a friendly match.”

  Gar jabbed a finger at the two of them. “There is nothing friendly about you two when it comes to chess. You’re both total lunatics about it.” He lowered himself into a nearby seat with his water.

  “I’m an AI,” Shinigami declared. “I can’t be a lunatic. I am inherently logical.”

  “That’s demonstrably fallacious, and you know it.” Barnabas moved a piece. “You justify every illogical thing you do by saying you feel like it. By that logic, all sentient life is inherently logical.”

  Shinigami stuck out her tongue at him and laughed at the look on his face. “Tabitha taught me that.”

  “Next thing we know, you’re going to start carrying holographic sandwiches around.” Barnabas looked mournful for a moment. “I miss the juice at Aebura’s already.”

  Aebura’s was a bar on High Tortuga, nestled away in one of the smaller cities. Barnabas had gotten hooked on the fruit juice she served when he’d helped the owner lead a slave revolt. When Tabitha had come to town, she had grown similarly partial—to the sandwiches. Now owned by Carter, a human, the bar was one of Barnabas’ favorite hideouts.

  Unfortunately, he’d done his job a little too well in Tethra. Everyone who might cause trouble was very, very dead, so he had no good reason to be there anymore. It was a great disappointment.

  He shook his head to clear it and looked at Gar. “Keep training.”

  Gar grimaced, but he stood. Barnabas’ voice was mild, but there was an unmistakable command in it. As a Luvendi, Gar had previously been too physically fragile to endure combat without fracturing multiple bones and dying. His time in the Pod-doc had made him stronger, both in muscle and in structure, but learning to fight was difficult for someone who had spent his whole life avoiding altercations.

  In the past week or so, Gar had learned more about pain than he had ever hoped to know. He learned the feeling of muscle strain and strength conditioning. He now knew what his hearts felt like as they pumped blood faster and faster to circulate oxygen through his system.

  He’d also learned about the bruises that came from slamming his fists—not to mention his knees, elbows, and feet—into a punching bag over and over.

  Not to mention the fact that normal people might get a reprieve after a hard day’s workout, but not Gar. The Pod-doc had also altered his body’s various healing mechanisms so that he woke up each morning good as new—and ready, Barnabas pointed out, for more learning.

  When Gar said that the learning was painful, Barnabas only said that pain was an excellent teacher, and provided the infuriating fact that the Pod-doc was capable of upgrading Gar to heal within minutes instead of hours.

  “Why didn’t you give me that upgrade?” Gar demanded, a bit desperately. He had a large bruise over one eye and was finding it difficult to see.

  Barnabas blinked at him. “Pain is useful,” he said again.

  Gar privately swore that someday he would find a way to give Barnabas a bruise that wouldn’t heal for a few hours. He’d bribe Shinigami to help him. He just needed to find something she wanted, first. Maybe a way of cheating at chess.

  Unfortunately, it was difficult to be too angry at Barnabas, because the man pushed himself even harder than Gar did. He would strike the bag in a flurry of punches so fast Gar could not follow. The man always discussed the physics and efficacy of new techniques with Shinigami. They worked out new strike combinations, and Barnabas would train until he was covered in sweat.

  All this had impressed Gar, and that was before they had gone back to High Tortuga for a few days. During that time, Barnabas had sparred with a few of his colleagues from the former Etheric Empire. Gar had watched in awe, totally terrified. Potentially bone-crunching blows missed by mere fractions of an inch—or landed, and somehow didn’t slow the combatants.

  Even covered in bruises and blood, the humans seemed to enjoy brawling. Gar had decided that this was either inspiring or a sign of madness. He still hadn’t figured out which
.

  He started his exercises again, taking care to follow form and not go too fast or over-extend. Barnabas had said time and again that form was the most important thing. Everything else flowed from that. Practice a strike incorrectly, and you could spend months un-learning poor habits.

  Gar was already behind the curve. He didn’t have time to unlearn anything. He barely had time to learn things in the first place.

  “How close are we to—ow.” His knuckles hit the bag wrong and skidded, leaving a trail of irritated skin. “How close are we to the syndicate’s base?”

  “Not far,” Barnabas replied. He looked down at the chessboard and gave Shinigami a mock-angry look. Whatever move she had made—or whatever cheating strategy she had employed—had him rolling his eyes. “We’re heading to Shu Base first to meet up with someone who might have the schematics. I want to make sure there will be no nasty surprises.”

  “That’s why we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Gar exclaimed in understanding.

  “You lived on High Tortuga,” Barnabas remarked. “That’s in the middle of nowhere. Shu Base is only moderately in the middle of nowhere.”

  Gar shook his head and went back to the punching bag. He was glad he was on the Shinigami. He would not want to fly out here all alone. A lot of people made their living as pirates, robbing the ships that passed through.

  In the case of this ship, though, they would be biting off considerably more than they could chew.

  Zinqued was exhausted. They’d drifted out here waiting for a mark to come along for the past three weeks, and so far, there had been a lot of nothing. In the first week, two cargo haulers had come by, but both had looked like they might be too well-guarded to be viable targets.

  Now Zinqued thought maybe they should have gone for those.

  He poured himself a cup of Stim-Drink. The stuff tasted terrible to a Hieto palate, but it did its job and would keep him awake for the three hours left on his shift.

  He plodded back through the ship and up to the cockpit. He yawned and scratched at his scalp where the scales were more densely packed. Hieto had built-in armor over their torsos and somewhat tougher skin on their heads, which was both a blessing and a curse. They were hard to stab, for instance, but a lot of space suits and other technology didn’t work as well.

  Zinqued had barely sat down before the alarms started to wail. It had been weeks since they’d sounded. He startled so violently that most of the cup of scalding Stim-Drink hit him directly in the face.

  He was still swearing and wiping it away with the sleeve of his coveralls when the rest of the crew bolted in to see what was going on.

  “What kind of ship?” Chofal, their Yofu mechanic, asked as she tumbled in the door, swinging her head side to side excitedly. Yofu’s eyes were on the sides of their heads, which made them ill-suited for anything that involved a standard screen interface, but their wide-angle vision and double-thumbed hands were fantastic for mechanical work. The engine room had never been in better repair than it was now.

  “I don’t know yet,” Zinqued replied. He put the empty cup on the desk with a disgusted look. Now he was going to smell like Stim-Drink until he could wash his clothes again, and there was no telling when that would be.

  What a day.

  “It’s probably just a—”

  Chofal cut him off. “It’s a small ship.”

  Zinqued groaned. The first excitement they’d seen in ages, and it was—

  “A human ship,” Chofal continued. She was definitely not the best person to be sitting in the copilot’s chair, but she couldn’t leave with everyone else crowded into the cockpit. She didn’t look like she wanted to, either. Her head was cocked so she could read the information on the screen with one eye. “The...Shinigami?”

  The rest of the crew shrugged, but Zinqued would have spilled the Stim-Drink if he’d still had any.

  “The Shinigami? Are you sure? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says here.” She frowned at him. “Why?”

  “Because—” Zinqued flailed his hands excitedly.

  Whenever they would stop to refuel, the other members of the crew would go through the shops and call their family members. Zinqued didn’t care for trinkets and he had no family to call, so he tended to spend his time in bars.

  And he had heard something very interesting the last time he was in one. Something very interesting, indeed.

  There were a lot of people who stole ships for a living. Some even tried to turn it into a legal business on one end, re-registering the ships and sending them back onto the market, untraceable.

  Rarely did Zinqued and his group bother with that. They were generally way out in the middle of nowhere. Who was going to come after them for stealing tiny ships? No one; not unless their victims wandered right into a Law Enforcement station and complained.

  Even then, it was even odds that the police would be too lazy to do anything about it.

  Like most people involved in the same business—legal or otherwise—they liked to trade stories, and even engage in some friendly rivalries. So when a captain named Klafk’tin had gotten rather spectacularly killed on Virtue Station, and his former first mate had started telling people never to mess with the Shinigami…

  Well, word had spread. Especially when people found out what the Shinigami had on board—an incredibly powerful AI. You could sell one of those for more than you’d otherwise hope to make in a lifetime.

  They’d heard the rumors of the captain, who was apparently terrifying, and knew a ship like that was bound to be armed. But no one was really worried about that. All ships had security, and any security measure could fail.

  A friendly rivalry had been born. Everyone wanted to steal this ship now. Tik’ta’s warnings had taken what would normally be a totally unremarkable event—just another ship stealer dead in the line of work—and had turned it into the biggest catch anyone had heard about in years.

  Zinqued peered at the readouts popping up on his screen. Normally, he would say to let such a highly-armed ship go by. Better that than the chance they’d have to escape a trap and damage the equipment.

  But this was the Shinigami. It was worth some risk.

  Zinqued looked at the rest of them and grinned. “Warm up the net. We’re gonna be legends.”

  2

  The only sound in the gym was Gar drawing a breath like air was going out of style. The Luvendi lay spread-eagled on the floor and was staring at the ceiling with a glazed look.

  Shinigami was examining a chessboard where her king was presently in checkmate.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she said finally. Though her avatar’s eyes weren’t functional and she saw via the various cameras around the room, human mannerisms were getting more and more instinctive. She looked at Barnabas. “Did you cheat?”

  “Look over your video logs,” Barnabas suggested. “You’ll find that every move is accounted for. No double moves, no moves where my hand went one place and the piece went somewhere else…” He shrugged elegantly.

  Shinigami narrowed her eyes at him. “I noticed that lovely little speech didn’t include the phrase, ‘I didn’t cheat.’ You just mentioned a few specific ways you didn’t cheat. You totally cheated.”

  “That’s preposterous.” He stood and retrieved his coat from where it lay on top of a set of weighted balls. He put it on and adjusted his cuffs. “You like to make a fuss, but we are roughly tied in how often we win.”

  “Only a human would call 52-48 roughly equivalent,” Shinigami said in deep disgust.

  “How many decimal points does it have to go before you’d call it roughly equivalent?”

  “At least it should be within one percentage point!”

  “Duly noted. We are extremely roughly equivalent, then.”

  Shinigami bit back a shriek of annoyance. Barnabas was incredibly adept at finding the subtle tells in anyone’s behavior that indicated when they were annoyed by something…and then mercilessly explo
iting that information to his advantage.

  Barnabas glanced at the Luvendi. “Gar, how are you doing?”

  Gar only whimpered in response.

  “Mmm.” Barnabas buttoned the suit jacket. “Well, I am going to go make myself a nice meal before we get to Shu Base. Somehow I don’t think it will have very good food.”

  “Elitist,” Shinigami uttered.

  “I prefer to think I’m someone with taste buds. That’s hardly—what was that?”

  Everyone had looked toward the bridge when the proximity alert went off.

  Shinigami’s avatar vanished and Barnabas took off for the bridge. Left behind, Gar tried to sit up, moaned, and eventually settled for flopping onto his stomach and crawling over to the stack of mats to pull himself up. He tottered in the direction of the bridge, cursing his decision to get upgraded. His life before had been more dangerous, but significantly less painful.

  He found Barnabas and Shinigami scrolling through information on the screen. They spoke so quickly that it took Gar a moment to understand the English. He could use his language implants, of course, but he enjoyed the process of learning languages.