The Weapons of War Read online

  ALPHAOMEGA II:

  THE WEAPONS OF WAR

  By Dan Schiro

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental and unintended.

  ALPHAOMEGA II: THE WEAPONS OF WAR

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 by Dan Schiro

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Owen Richardson

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  www.danschiro.com

  For Mom. Thanks for making my capes.

  Chapter 1

  This was his last lead.

  Orion had heard rumors of a human woman who had come to a distant frontier planet as a stowaway. Arriving with nothing more than the rags on her back, she had used her cruel cunning to become a colony vice lord. For the way she posed her dead rivals, the local media had called her “The Artist.” After crisscrossing the known galaxy a dozen times and coming up empty-handed, this was the last thread Orion had to follow.

  And so he sat in a rundown brothel on dusty Katmak, waiting for his moment to come. From time to time, the doors of New Horizons Bordello opened, and a warm breeze brought the mining colony’s scent of dirt and oiled metal into the perfumed brothel air. Coriolis Mining stamped its orange drill-bit logo on most everything here, including the brothel and the tepid booze in Orion’s hand. He sipped a glass of watered-down Rumble Horse whiskey at a table by the window, across from a freyan prostitute with honey-colored wings. He had spent the last three days with Nella, and his attention drifted as she nattered on about some new hiver funk band. His mismatched eyes had been wandering the wide-open barroom of the backwater brothel, inspecting the rough walls and rustic ornaments, when he realized he had missed Nella’s question.

  “Uh… I mostly listen to Synthetic Symphony,” Orion said, hastily rewinding the conversation in his head. He ran a hand through his spiky shock of blond hair. “That and Mars Explorer, a band from where I grew up. You ever heard of them?”

  “Old people music,” she groaned, rolling her warm hazel eyes.

  “Hey,” Orion said with a wounded tone. “I’m into some new stuff, too.”

  “Oh really?” Nella sipped the flute of nectar champagne he had bought her. “Like what?”

  Orion scrambled to think of something a girl almost 10 years his junior would appreciate, but a flurry of activity in the street saved him. Miners wearing orange jumpsuits streamed through the dusty stone roads and hurried into the red stone buildings. A handful of dirt-caked men and women from a variety of galactic races entered the brothel and ordered sudsy mugs as fast as the lizard-like mystskyn bartender could fill them.

  “What’s going on?” Orion asked.

  Nella glanced out the window, her eyes turned to the suddenly overcast yellow sky. “Must be a storm coming.”

  “Perfect.” Orion stood, straightening his blue-gray smartcloak over his kinetic bodysuit. “Just what I was waiting for.”

  She snapped her surprised eyes to him, reaching out a slender hand. “What are you doing? You don’t think you’re going outside, do you?”

  Orion smirked. “Yeah, that’s the idea.” Outside, the storm broke, and hissing rain fell from the yellow clouds like a thousand tiny hammer blows.

  The alarmed freyan girl stood, her thin blue robes clinging to her taut form. “Man, you’re on Katmak. That rain out there is acid, literally, and it will melt your pink human flesh to goo. Why do you think the whole colony’s made of native stone?” She shook her head. “You really should read up on a place before you visit, you know.”

  “Believe it or not, I do know what I’m doing.” Orion shot her a wink as he lifted the hood of his smartcloak.

  He stepped out into the flesh-melting rain, and the caustic drops ran in harmless rivulets down the expensive nanofabric of his cloak. Crossing the empty street, Orion went down an alley to an unmarked steel door set in red stone. He flexed his right hand, calling forth the manacite symbiote bonded to his flesh. In a split-second, living metal flowed forth from the A-within-O tattoo on his wrist, covering his arm with a spiked silver gauntlet. Then he simply put a clawed fingertip to the reinforced lock and let the living metal of the spellblade flow forth into its seams, caressing its pins and tumblers. After a moment, the lock popped and the door swung open, squealing on its heavy hinges.

  “Gentlemen,” Orion said to the trio of tattooed poxgane men lounging in the gangster-chic crash pad. “I’m here to see the Artist. I’m afraid I don’t have an appointment.” A studded mace, conjured from his spellblade with the flex of a thought, leaped into Orion’s hand.

  A handful of seconds later, Orion kicked in a flimsy wooden door and stepped into a cramped office. The smoky space was cluttered with crates of pulse weapons, old-fashioned human books and boxes of yakka, a cheap amphetamine inhalant popular with miners working long shifts. He brandished a blood-spattered mace, and glowing red veins crawled down the weapon’s shaft and spread through his spellblade gauntlet. Groans and the scrabble of broken bodies trickled in from the hall, the music of his handiwork.

  “It was unlocked,” said the wrinkled human woman behind the desk. She pointed a snub-barrel pulse pistol at him and stared him down with unblinking brown eyes. A long cigarillo smoldered in the ashtray on her desk, its curling wisp of smoke rising like a charmed snake. “You left my men alive?”

  Orion held his ground, ignoring the pulse pistol. “If everyone who worked for a scumbag deserved to die, the galaxy would be a pretty empty place.”

  “I agree,” she rasped with a coy smile.

  Orion sighed. The woman sitting at the desk in the windowless office was of Earth’s Asiatic persuasion, a fact that Orion’s durok contact had failed to mention because of course aliens didn’t account for — or perhaps even recognize — the minor variations in humans. “You’re not her,” Orion said.

  “Her?” The old woman wrinkled her brow. “I’m the Artist. Who were you expecting?”

  Orion narrowed his gaze. “I was hoping to find my mother. She was an artist too.”

  The shabbily dressed, small-time vice lord looked at him blankly for a moment. Then she laughed hard and loud, but never took her wrinkle-framed brown eyes off him. “Perhaps I am your mother, young man. After all, if your first mother pushes you into life, perhaps your second mother pushes you out of it.”

  “Perhaps not.” Vanishing the mace in a swirl of liquid metal, Orion flexed the spellblade gauntlet. He said a single word, not sure why he picked it. “Stone.”

  The red veins winding through his silver gauntlet coursed with a bright glow, spending the life force absorbed from the badly beaten bodyguards. A spark of pale fire danced in Orion’s palm, and the puzzled expression on the Artist’s face froze as her skin turned to cold, gray stone. For a moment, Orion listened to the caustic rain patter on the roof. Then he walked around the desk and stooped to peer closely at his perfectly wrought statue. From the look of the aborted motion, she had been pulling the trigger of her pulse pistol when he cast his petrifying spell.

  “There you go, Mom,” Orion said bitterly to the empty office. “Now I’m a sculptor like you.” He thought for a moment and straightened up with a sour expression. “Stupid,” he spat.

  It wasn’t that he regretted turning the Artist to stone; he had seen the hollow eyes of people addicted to yakk
a. Instead, he cursed himself for letting his frustration goad him into reckless spell-casting. He shouldn’t have spent the word “stone” on her, someone he could have easily dispatched with the flash of a blade. No doubt it would have come in handy to be able to turn a future enemy to stone, but that was the way of it with the Blade of the Word. While other ancient spellblades could cast one spell over and over provided they had access to raw life force, Orion’s ancient weapon could cast any spell — but only once. Once the word was spent, it could never be used again.

  Orion was considering heading back to the booze and women waiting a few blocks away when the datacube tucked in a pocket of his smartcloak vibrated. He snatched out the brass-plated cube, checked the projected caller ID and tossed the cube in the air. It hovered with a hum and opened at the seams, becoming a kind of floating tetrahedron with a winking blue light at the center. After a moment, it projected a full-sized hologram of Zovaco Ralli.

  “Orion,” said Zovaco. The three-eyed, inky-skinned trislav wore his usual finely tailored suit, but Orion saw the beginnings of wear on his face from his first year on the Parliament of the Galactic Union. “Good to see you, my friend.” The politician smiled, his lips tight, his skin thin-looking. “I hope you’re not busy?”

  “Busy?” Orion shrugged, and the gauntlet on his right arm disappeared into his silver tattoo like water into sand. He forced a smirk to his face, hiding the deep disappointment that his last lead on his mother had turned out to be another dead end. “No, I’m just screwing around.”

  “Oh, very good.” He laced his four-fingered hands with a weary chuckle. “I was hoping I could talk to you about a job. It’s rather urgent.”

  Orion nodded, glad to have some new challenge to distract him. “Fire away.”

  “Well, it’s a group of slavers.” Zovaco gestured with his cybernetic arm, as if his open hand held the topic. “They’re harassing a backward little place out in the Purple Yoke Nebula, near the border of Union territory. The sentient creatures there are still in a pre-industrial phase, so of course contact is forbidden by the Union Sovereign Destiny Edict…”

  Orion’s smirk dissolved and something harder filled his eyes. “And these slavers are snatching the natives.”

  Zovaco nodded.

  Orion had killed a fair amount of people, and though all of them were bad save one, he still regretted it sometimes. Yet when it came to slavers… well, he felt the least remorse about killing them. Slavers had, in fact, been the first people he had killed. It all seemed so long ago now — fleeing his pampered life on Mars, getting seduced and enslaved, meeting Crag Dur Rokis Crag in chains and revolting against their masters. And of course, the training and the spellblade and everything else that had come after.

  “Where are they selling them?” he asked Zovaco.

  “Nearby planets that aren’t under Union law.”

  Orion cocked an eyebrow. “Big balls to venture into the Independent Kingdoms. What kind of fight am I looking at?”

  “Nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure. This is a single-ship operation and a crew of three or four. They’re poachers, really.”

  “That’s it?” Orion thought for a moment, trying to add it all up. “Sounds a little… ordinary for my crew. Why not just send in a half-dozen SpaceCorps cruisers and catch them in a gravity net when they head for the ether routes?”

  Zovaco nodded as if he had been expecting this question. “Did I tell you about my office?” he said, his demeanor turning sunnier. “I’ve been here a year now, and I’m still rearranging, still finding spots that need fixing up, sweeping out. It’s phenomenally dirty.”

  “It’s not so bad, if you do a little each day.” Knowing Zovaco Ralli as well as he did, Orion could tell that he was alluding to the corruption he had been cleaning up since being elected Member of Parliament. That meant he needed Orion to do this job without every MP and half of the galactic representatives hearing about it. “What you really need to worry about are spiders. Those things can live forever behind the walls, and you never know when they’ll come crawling out.”

  “I haven’t seen a spider in months.” Zovaco’s mouth tightened for a moment. “But you’re right, that doesn’t mean they’re not still there.”

  Orion exhaled a long, slow breath. According to their code, that meant this job wasn’t directly related to the ancient Assassins Guild that had tried to kill Zovaco before he could reach Parliament. “Anyway,” Orion shrugged, “of course I’ll take care of it. I owe you, Zo. You’ve done a lot for me, for the whole team.”

  “I’ve told you, I won’t hear that.” Zovaco’s hand cut the air with a swift, negating chop. “Without you, I wouldn’t be drawing breath, let alone drafting ridiculously wordy legislation. I owe a debt to you, my friend.”

  “Don’t forget, you saved my life, too.” Orion pointed at Zovaco’s right arm, a limb that looked and moved like the real thing but was not.

  “Well, one good turn.” Zovaco smiled. “Thank you for looking into this for me, Orion. And though this may be a small thing for your team, I still insist on paying your regular rate.”

  “Zo, really, that’s—”

  “I mean it, Orion.” The thin politician feigned a stern face. “I’m a Member of Parliament, damn you, and it’s time you started respecting my authority. I shuffle sums 20 times your rate before breakfast.”

  The smirk returned to Orion’s face. “Send the coordinates to my office, and I’ll call in the heavy hitters. And Zo? Donate our regular rate to a charity, your pick.” His smirk slipped into a glower. “I hate slavers.”

  Chapter 2

  The past year of high-profile contracts had made Orion and AlphaOmega Security rich — not wealthy, like he would have been if he had simply sat on his trust fund and not used it to start the private security firm in the first place, but rich. The Prodigal Star Series XI sitting on the Katmak landing pad in front of him was proof of that. The dropship was probably the most indulgent thing Orion had purchased since his recent success, but he had at least half-fooled himself into thinking it was a business expense.

  Among the other boxy, ore-hauling dropships parked on the scorched expanse of concrete, his nimble ship stood out like a jewel surrounded by pebbles. Asymmetrically shaped, almost like the lone wing of a bat, its shift-skin was tuned to bright red and gleaming clean from the caustic rain. Prodigal Star had only produced a few Series XI models, and Orion had coughed up — make that “invested” — a not inconsiderable sum to paint the white A-within-O of his company on the hull. He lowered the ramp with a signal from his datacube and strode up into the ship, glad to be rid of acid-soaked Katmak and the false hope it had held. With his datacube floating along beside him as walked into the sleek, well-lit central cabin, Orion said, “Link to Koreen, audio only.”

  The datacube whirred for a moment, its transmission racing through the ether routes and back to the Maker Rings. After a few gentle beeps, a rough voice came back to Orion across the void of space. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah?” Orion repeated as he took a seat in the black bio-mold captain’s chair. “What kind of way is that to answer, Koreen? What if I was a customer?”

  “But you’re not a customer,” sighed the old durok woman. “There’s a little thing called caller ID that datacubes have had for the last thousand years.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m still your boss.” Despite his gruff tone, Orion smiled. “Would it kill you to say, ‘hi boss,’ or ‘how can I help you, sir?’” He laid his hands on the curved black glass of the control dash and began to key in his preflight sequence, bringing to life the large viewscreen. “Hell, maybe even, ‘Orion, so good to hear from you, how are you doing?’”

  “It might.” A smacking sound on the other end suggested he had caught her mid-snack. “Kill me, that is. Do you know what time it is here?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care.” Activating the array of thrusters on
the underside of the ship, Orion took the Prodigal Star up into Katmak’s burnt-yellow sky. “I need you to get Kangor and Aurelia in hand now and send them to the coordinates Zo just pinged to the office.” After ascending a few thousand feet, he fired the ion engine on the back of the ship and took it up into the stratosphere at a sharp angle. “Tell them it’s a small job, but it’s time-sensitive. And tell them it’s easy money. That should get them moving.”

  “May take some time,” Koreen grumbled. “Mr. Kash is out hunting in the Kapata Wilds, so you know how that goes. Ms. Aurelia Deon is out — what did she say? — ‘indulging herself.’ I guess I’ll just look for the trail of destruction and limping young men.”

  “Please, Koreen,” Orion said as the yellow sky dissolved to pin-pricked black space on the viewscreen. “Just earn your paycheck and get them.”

  “I earn my paycheck answering calls,” she said, with what Orion imagined was a roll of her lemon-bright eyes. “I earn bonuses for wrangling those two overgrown children. That, and cleaning up your dog’s diarrhea on the lobby floor.”

  “So Bully’s blockage cleared up?” Smiling, Orion activated the manacite drive to enter the ether routes. “That’s a good boy!”

  “Goodbye, sir,” Koreen grumbled. “I hope you have a pleasant and fulfilling day.”

  Some hours later, Orion exited the pastel tunnel of folded space and approached the Lorobane system. He activated his ship’s stealth package as soon as he returned to material space and checked the coordinates Zovaco had sent him. When his destination was pinpointed on the starry field of the viewscreen, Orion piloted his ship past a pair of sleepy blue gas giants and through a sparse band of broken planetoids. Eventually he stopped in distant orbit of a green planet with two moons. Officially designated Lorobane-1, the verdant orb and its pre-industrial people were strictly off-limits by decree of the Union’s Sovereign Destiny Edict. He had hoped Aurelia and Kangor would beat him there, since the Maker Rings were much closer to Lorobane than dusty old Katmak. Unfortunately, his scans turned up no other space traffic in the little yellow star’s neighborhood.