Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (good books to read for teens txt) 📗

Mindful to avoid touching the machine, he lined up the fusion knife carefully, braced the small handle against the inside of his right hand, and shoved as hard as he could. The fusion-hardened edge punched through the relatively thin alloy of the vision slit and into the subprocessor underneath. It shorted out and exploded.

Luckily, the fusion knife was highly insulated, and the high-voltage explosion didn’t affect him. He’d rather have taken the machine over, but that wasn’t in the cards. He needed it offline and not left behind him as a threat. The vision slit armor was designed to create a frangible situation with any rounds and was laser resistant. It had no way of dealing with the fusion-hardened carbon-carbon blade. Overloading the sensor subprocessor there was the best chance of quickly disabling one.

Even so, Sato pushed back, in case his attack hadn’t had the desired effect. The Peacekeeper gave a single twitch, all four tentacles slid out, and it floated away from where it had been waiting. Sato nodded; it had worked. He checked his hand, where a little blood was pooling. It was his right palm, which he’d used to shove the knife in. It didn’t look bad. He wrapped it with a scrap of fabric from his pack and went out the door.

It was so much better, maneuvering in zero-G now. With the return of his memories came the abilities he’d spent countless hours honing. Now he moved with the same assurance as the marine-trained Rick. It was exhilarating, even with the memories of the horrors he’d perpetrated. Regardless of what Dakkar had said, the Science Guild had to have material to manipulate. It seemed a young Taiki Sato had been a killer carefully concealed under a naïve surface.

He had detailed memories of his time here. This had been his operational base, and where much of his training had taken place. He’d seen others of many races; likely some were proctors as well. Were they busy destroying technological developments wherever they found them? Did they prey on their own races? Maybe they were soulless monsters like he’d become, driven mad by some inconceivable tragedy?

As he moved down the service corridor toward his destination, he hoped Rick was alive and that Dakkar had made it. He didn’t know what they’d used on his companion, probably an EMP weapon. They’d tried to bait him in. Ultimately it had been the bits and pieces left behind by Nemo wiping his Mesh that had caused the end results. Sato just wished he’d remembered that the battleship was the base. The asteroid hadn’t been there the last time he’d been here. This was a curiosity, and he wished there was time to understand.

Sato reached the operations center. The door was open, and he could hear conversation inside. He caught the handhold by the door and stopped himself. Inside was the Flatar, a Shinjitsu, and a dozen opSha, which always served as Himitsu. They were relentless in pursuit of whatever the guild sent them to do, if not terribly imaginative in their solutions.

He drew his pistol and took a calming breath. There were so many memories he wished he had time to go over. A lot made more sense now, like how he’d helped develop the Human version of pinplants shortly after Nemo had wiped his memory. Lots of residual stuff bouncing around his brain. He’d nearly caused as much damage after being brain wiped as he had before, though the former was more the result of his unstable residual personality.

Of all the knowledge he’d lost, and now recovered, the most important were the secrets of how hyperspace interacted with the various realities. This was the biggest secret the Science Guild kept to itself, and potentially the most dangerous. As he’d suspected in his time with the Winged Hussars, when they’d traveled to 2nd Level Hyperspace, there were clues in the Science Guild official data. You can’t delete everything in databases as epically extensive as the GalNet.

What frustrated him the most was how much of the ‘memory’ of his early life was just plain wrong! Other than his name and his childhood, the rest was a mess of false memories created by the Science Guild to give him covers on many of the missions he’d performed on Earth. There had never been a Sato Intergalactic, he hadn’t won a Nobel, and while he had gained many degrees, they were after he’d been offworld aboard Sakura Maru, before leaving on Beagle. The rest was a mishmash of fake identities and delusions so thick, he could barely tell what was real. His lips skinned back from his teeth as he stared at the Flatar. Payback time.

“Are we prepared to deconstruct the traitor?” the Flatar asked an elSha.

“Probes are being programmed,” the reptilian replied. “Any minute.”

“I want this done,” the Flatar snarled. “The asteroid base destruction was not part of the plan, and I still don’t know what happened!”

Rick, Sato thought. Well, he went out like he would have wanted to.

“The probes are finished,” the elSha said.

“Let’s see to our proctor,” the Flatar said.

“Don’t bother,” Sato said.

All eyes turned to him at the entrance. Most were confused, some were surprised, and the Flatar Shinjitsu looked like he’d just found a turd in his lunch. “How?” he demanded. “Entropy, we left a Peacekeeper. A fucking Peacekeeper!”

“Never leave a machine to do your dirty work,” Sato suggested. The Flatar snarled, and one of the opSha began to move. Sato killed it instantly. His grip on the door kept him braced against the gun’s recoil. The GP-90 really was a fine weapon.

“You used me as a weapon, forged me into a sword to do your evil work.”

“It wasn’t hard,” the Flatar replied. “A simple push. Where do you think you can go?” the Shinjitsu asked, casually watching