Justiciar Read online

  Justiciar

  The Vigilante Chronicles™ Book Five

  Natalie Grey

  Michael Anderle

  Justiciar (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/

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  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, October 2018

  Version 1.01, October 2018

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

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Author Notes - Natalie Grey

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books by Natalie Grey

  Books by Michael Anderle

  Connect with the authors

  The Justiciar Team

  Thanks to our JIT Readers

  John Ashmore

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Nicole Emens

  Mary Morris

  Daniel Weigert

  Keith Verret

  Peter Manis

  Paul Westman

  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.

  Chapter One

  Thirty minutes out from the stranded ship, Shinigami reported.

  “Heading to the bridge.” Barnabas whistled as he made his way through the white corridors of the Shinigami. The ship raced through a particularly lonely patch of what Shinigami had nicknamed “the Jellyfish Sector.”

  The name referred to one of the more noteworthy races in this area of space, the Jotun. They looked like multicolored blobs of jelly and tended to transport themselves around in mechanical suits with a range of intriguing features.

  Barnabas had worked with some of the Jotun Navy in his last mission, which had given him a great deal of respect for the Jotuns as a species and an absolute hatred of the Jotun Parliament.

  Corrupt bastards, the lot of them. They had signed their people over to a bloodthirsty corporation in return for a few beach houses and Lord only knew what other trinkets. Shinigami had uncovered enough dirty money trails running through their system that Barnabas could have made nearly every member of Parliament a pariah in society. He hadn’t released the information yet, but he fully intended to if they pissed him off in the future.

  Shinigami had accused him of blackmail. Barnabas maintained it wasn’t blackmail if they didn’t know his plan. Gar and Tafa, meanwhile, had wisely opted not to weigh in.

  Barnabas turned a corner and gave a yell as he tripped over a body. Eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling while pale hands lay palm up, fingers slightly curled.

  Ghostly snickering echoed from the nearby speakers. “You look ridiculous,” Shinigami told Barnabas in deep amusement.

  “For the last time…” Barnabas recovered his footing and adjusted his vest, glaring at the speakers, “do not leave your body in the corridor. You have rooms of your own now. You pestered me about them for days.”

  “I need clothes.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t use your body.” Barnabas hauled the limp thing up by the armpits and dragged it to the side of the corridor.

  “I do too!”

  “Then I don’t suppose you’d help me with this? Mechanical bodies are heavy.”

  “You could use the exercise. Too much fruit juice.”

  “Low.” Barnabas knew she was only teasing. With his upgrades, he was practically incapable of carrying extra weight. Still, Shinigami had discovered something that he had managed to hide from nearly everyone else: he was incredibly vain. She needled him about it at regular intervals, making fun of his hair, his clothing and now his looks. He smoothed a hand over his stomach and glared at the speakers again. “And you’re hardly one to get on my case about exercise. How long since you last used this body?”

  Shinigami flickered into being as a projection. With her arms crossed and one hip jutted out, she looked unimpressed.

  “It is not the same thing at all. I don’t need to work my muscles or increase my cardiovascular function.”

  “On the contrary.” Barnabas leaned forward with a smile. “It’s very similar. You, like anyone in training, need to learn to make your body do what you want it to. You need to learn to interpret its feedback. You find this process frustrating, as we do. Therefore…” His smile broadened, and he shrugged slightly, “you slack.”

  Shinigami’s face turned stony. “I am not slacking. I am flying this ship!”

  “Says an AI who once told me that she had plenty of capacity to handle multiple projects at once. Are you running out of memory? Do you need a defrag?” Barnabas took pleasure in waltzing directly through Shinigami’s projection.

  “Listen, you ingrate, I am not going to take this abuse from you!”

  “Mmmhmm. Well, may I remind you that you very much wanted to—what was it you said, exactly?—ah, yes ’smash some skulls in.’” Barnabas cast a look over his shoulder.

  “I can do that!”

  “You definitely cannot. I am not letting you off this ship and into combat until I think you’re ready.”

  Shinigami created another projection right in front of him, causing him to stop briefly on instinct. She snickered at his expression. “Ah, yes, the much-vaunted human intellect. We’re much better off with you in charge.”

  “Let’s try that experiment with you,” Barnabas muttered. “You’ll trip over your own feet.”

  “I will not. This body is an atrocity and is far too difficult to use.”

  “So we’ll take the body back,” Barnabas said airily.

  “No! It’s mine.”

  “You don’t want it, and I’m sure Achronyx could use one.”

  Shinigami huffed but did not answer. A moment later, Barnabas heard a sound behind him. He turned to see the body come to life. It was always a somewhat disturbing process to watch it animate, and he grimaced when the chest shuddered and the eyes blinked.
r />   It took two tries for Shinigami to get up off the floor. “This is harder for me than you,” she complained to Barnabas. “AIs aren’t meant to have to learn this sort of thing.”

  “You wanted to learn this,” Barnabas pointed out. He made sure not to let his face twitch with amusement while the body walked jerkily toward him. “Besides, you have far more memory to create things like subroutines. You can build an entirely new way of learning to use a body. And have you seen little kids learning to walk before? They’re not good at it.”

  “I saw holos of Christina— “

  “Christina doesn’t count.”

  They made their way to the bridge, Barnabas ambling with his hands in his pockets, Shinigami swearing both out of the speakers and the mechanical body as she struggled to walk smoothly.

  Barnabas refrained from suggesting she speak to Jeltor. He had mentioned it already, and Shinigami had been resistant to the idea of, as she said, “Having a jellyfish teach me how to walk.” Barnabas thought Jeltor was probably the best person to teach her, but he was trying to learn to keep his mouth shut.

  He wasn’t very good at it yet.

  On the bridge, he found Tafa sitting at the navigator’s desk watching the charted route and making minute adjustments. She flashed them both a smile.

  “I thought you said you were flying the ship,” Barnabas said to Shinigami.

  “I’m backup,” Shinigami replied, with great dignity. “Tafa doesn’t know all the ins and outs of the ship’s capabilities yet.”

  “Mmm.” Barnabas thought Tafa was showing an innate grasp of the skill, but he did not voice that thought. He took a seat in the captain’s chair and watched while Shinigami struggled to sit gracefully in the next chair over. “You’re getting better at that.”

  “I still tip at the end.” She sounded disgruntled. “How do you all avoid doing that?”

  “It has to do with the balance of the weight and committing to the movement.”

  “Show me,” Shinigami ordered.

  With a roll of his eyes, Barnabas complied, standing up and sitting down several times while Shinigami watched.

  When he finished, he sat down and crossed his legs, only to jump as Gar’s voice said, “What in the sea was that all about?”

  “Shinigami is learning how to sit.” Barnabas looked over as Gar joined them. Gar prided himself on being more cosmopolitan than most Luvendi, who were famously insular. He was also a good deal less amoral than many others of his species who had left their home planet.

  Still, the more comfortable he became with his new shipmates, the more Luvendi colloquialisms peppered his speech. Using “the sea” when others might use “the universe” was one of them—a giant ocean covered Luvendan, and the Luvendi lived in giant submerged towers.

  Gar sat on Barnabas’ left, unaware of Shinigami leaning forward to watch.

  “He’s more graceful than you are,” Shinigami told Barnabas, needling him again with a wicked grin.

  “Mainly because I have spent most of my life worried that my bones would fracture if I weren’t careful,” Gar pointed out. Tall and thin, he nonetheless had muscle tone that no other Luvendi in the universe could claim. Shinigami had modified him in the Pod-doc, increasing his bone strength—Luvendi were famously fragile—and increasing his healing speed and his reflexes, and enhancing his senses.

  Now, unaware of the argument going on under the surface of the conversation, Gar nodded at the screen. “Any more details on the stranded ship?”

  “Only a few,” Shinigami reported. “I ran what I could through the reports from local stations. If it’s the ship I think it is, it’s civilian. Has a large cargo hold, probably for food transport as a side business but is mainly for passengers. Lots of bunks.”

  “No word on the nature of the emergency?” Barnabas had picked up the distress call a few days earlier while attending a celebration of the defeat of the Yennai Corporation. Since the ship was stranded in a very remote area, he had decided to pursue the lead.

  After all, it was unlikely that anyone else could get to them faster than the Shinigami could. With the best of Etheric Empire technology, the ship had the security features necessary to venture into an area potentially filled with pirates.

  In all honesty, Barnabas was hoping they would encounter a few. He was longing for a nice uncomplicated bit of work, something that didn’t involve massive shadowy corporations that had infiltrated multiple governments and business sectors.

  Perhaps someone on the ship would have a good lead to follow.

  Shinigami’s face went blank. While she had learned the knack of emoting with her projections, she still did not think to do so when she was inhabiting her new mechanical body. “I’m picking something up,” she said in an emotionless voice.

  She brought the disturbance up on the screen, and everyone frowned and leaned forward to look.

  The ship most likely thought it was invisible to the Shinigami’s detection. It was approaching from a nearby cloud of debris, which Shinigami now scanned. The scan turned up pieces of two distinct ships, one Brakalon and one Shrillexian.

  “The wrecks are recent,” she told Barnabas.

  Barnabas sat back with a frown. “What do you think the odds are,” he asked no one in particular, “that a ship hiding here with two recent wrecks is not connected to the ship making the distress call?”

  There was a silence. Tafa, who had not been involved in any of their combat missions before, was staring at the screen with wide eyes. Gar looked intrigued, and Shinigami still looked blank as she sorted through data.

  Finally, and somewhat mechanically, she turned her head to look at Barnabas. Her features were a mix of Bethany Anne’s and Tabitha’s, but the feral grin was entirely her own.

  “Shall we say hello?” she asked sweetly.

  Barnabas grinned back. “It would only be polite.”

  Chapter Two

  “Hail them.” Barnabas nodded at the ship on the screen. “And tell me as soon as you know anything about where this ship originated.”

  He was curious. It was a type of ship he had never seen before—a light, sleek scouting vessel, perhaps. The wreckage of the other ships, however, suggested that this ship had more weapons than most scouts Barnabas had seen.

  They had taken down a Shrillexian vessel, after all, and you couldn’t do that without some combination of skill and weaponry. Shrillexians had fully earned the hatred they received from other species—they weren’t slouches in the fighting department.

  Shinigami’s avatar would have nodded, but her body didn’t yet. She was spending all her energy hitting the buttons to hail the other ship with her actual fingers rather than using her internal processes.

  As a result, Barnabas and Gar were both still craning to look at her hand when the holo connected. Both sat up, Barnabas clearing his throat self-consciously and Gar crossing his legs in a vague mimicry of Barnabas. He also tried to clear his throat, but the sound came out sort of like a hiccup. Barnabas felt his lips twitch and hoped he didn’t look too undignified.

  He peered at the darkness of the screen. “Shinigami, the call hasn’t connected.”

  “The connection is—”

  “I do not wish to be seen,” the pilot of the other ship said. Barnabas guessed that the voice had been run through several filters to distort it, because it was oddly mechanical. “How are you seeing my ship?”

  “Oh,” Barnabas asked innocently, “was it cloaked?”

  Gar gave a snort and pressed his lips shut to hold back more laughter.

  On the other end, there was a cold pause. “Leave this area,” the pilot ordered finally. “This will be your only warning.”

  “Why do we need to leave?” Barnabas was quite enjoying acting oblivious. He painted a look of concern on his face.

  “I have ordered you to leave. As I said, there will be no further warnings.”

  “Yes, but who is ordering us?” The words didn’t have quite the same aura of innocence
to them this time. Barnabas did not like the tone of the phrase, “I have ordered you.”

  There was another pause. “I have ordered you to leave,” the pilot repeated.

  Barnabas tried a different tack. “We can’t leave, unfortunately. We’re responding to a distress call.”

  “I responded to that call.” The answer was too quick, and even through the language barrier and the various filters, it had the cadence of someone telling a lie. “The situation has been resolved. As you can see, the distress signal has stopped broadcasting.”

  “On the contrary,” Shinigami interjected. She had perfected a single posture: straight-backed, with her hands on the arms of the chair and her legs crossed, and, since she never slipped out of that posture or slouched, she looked like a queen.

  Barnabas guessed it was something she had learned from watching Bethany Anne interact with people. Bethany Anne might despise the tedium of court appearances and the uselessness of political wrangling, but one thing was certain: she knew how to make an impression, and she did.

  “The distress signal is still being broadcast,” Shinigami confirmed now. Her face did not change as she spoke, and she forgot to blink. It was fascinating to watch. “However, the signal is being blocked by a network of devices that share programming similarities with your ship.”