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

* * *

“It’s stupid keeping me in this thing,” Sato growled, annoyed at being treated like a liability. If it hadn’t been for him, Rick would be one of a dozen samples in a jar back in Nemo’s lab. Yeah, sure, Rick’s life had been irrevocably changed. Death had a way of doing that. He wasn’t what he’d been—he was much, much more. A fucking juggernaut. And he treats me like a helpless child.

He floated and used his pinplants, accessing the GalNet to gather as much intel on Earth as possible. The Athal had a point; going to Earth seemed like a bad decision. Only…something in him insisted they go. It was an itch he couldn’t scratch. A compulsion he couldn’t ignore.

<Sato, sir, we have a…complication.>

<What’s going on?>

<Nemo left you a little present.>

<Tell me it isn’t a Bregalad?>

Rick gave a little halfhearted laugh. <We should be so lucky. No, it’s a baby Nemo. A bud?>

Son of a bitch! Sato silently cursed. Nemo had never budded in all the years they’d known each other. Why now? Because Sato had been leaving, and the damned Wrogul knew what it was doing! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Rick was asking for guidance, but Sato had none to offer. After a minute, Rick stopped talking, and Sato was left alone, fuming. His mind was a hurricane of thoughts and angles. I need to calm down, he thought, then reached out and turned off the light, plunging himself into absolute, all-consuming darkness.

It didn’t work. If anything, his thoughts spun even faster. After a second, he gasped and reached for the switch. It was utterly dark, and he was now spinning. He had no idea where the switch was. No, he whimpered, and felt himself falling into a black hole of thoughts and memories, plunging past the event horizon.

He fell though levels of hell, feeling like Dante. He was a starship departing as he screamed and reached out, as if he could stop it.

He held a woman in his arms, vainly attempting to stop the flow of bright red arterial blood from a gaping chest wound. “Ichika, no!” he screamed over and over.

“Do your duty, Proctor.” He looked down at the detonator in his hand. Slowly his thumb pushed down on the button until it went click, while tears poured from his eyes.

He was being escorted into a medical lab with a single chair. A mobile water tank rolled into view, flashing pleasing lights. “Hello, I am Nemo, and I will be taking care of you.”

“You disappoint me,” a voice echoed from all around him. He struggled against the restraints, with no success. Metallic probes came out of the chair and connected to his pinplants. “Now learn the price of failure.” His being exploded in unimaginable agony, shattering his self into a million parts.

“No,” Sato gasped, fighting it.

He was lying in a gutter, covered in filth, as rain pelted his face. It was all he could do to breathe and remember his name. Taiki Sato. It was all he had. A mechanical whirring made him turn his head to see a big, startling blue eye looking at him. The eye was attached to an aquatic species with tentacles. What are they called? The being floated inside a fish tank on treads. It blinked once, and robotic manipulators reached for him. Sato had no ability to resist.

Slowly, from deep in his psyche, Sato found his center, and his mind slowed. A million images still collided and swirled in his brain, but ever so slowly he began to regain his center.

A new, yet familiar, voice echoed deep into his consciousness, and Sato opened his eyes. Rick floated a meter outside the chamber, staring at him with glowing blue eyes. “Are you okay, sir?”

“Fine,” Sato replied, his voice raspy. Had he been screaming? The memories were already fading, like dreams come the dawn. He looked past Rick to the case floating just behind him. “Is that the bud?”

“Yes,” Rick said, shaking his head. “The bugger is friendly, at least.”

“It should be identical to Nemo, at least for a while.” Sato checked his pinplants’ clock. “We better get moving.”

A short time later, the two arrived at the docks. It didn’t require long to find their specific ship, even though there were currently 14 free traders docked, either looking for work or transferring goods. The ship they were looking for was Tu-Plik, a free trader licensed through the Wathayat Syndicate. As they floated down the increasingly crowded companionway, an Athal wearing an equipment harness at the ship’s access hatch turned to regard them with compound eyes.

“You are the passengers Captain Ullp mentioned?”

“Yes,” Rick said.

“Yack?” the guard asked.

“Cash,” he replied and let five 10,000 credit chits float from his hand. You couldn’t see exactly where a fly was looking, because of the design of their eyes, but a hand reached out and deftly scooped the five chits from the air.

“Welcome aboard Tu-Plik,” the Athal said.

* * *

It was the second trip Rick had taken on a free trader, though the first on an alien version. When he first left Earth, he’d signed on Coronado under Captain Holland. The ship was one of the very first ever made by Humans, a Comal-class tramp freighter. Really just a free trader, but Humans always had to do things their own way, so they called it a tramp freighter.

Coronado, as the first Human designed and built starship, had reminded Rick of a poorly assembled kid’s toy. It didn’t quite look right. Later classes were better, of course. However, despite improvements, ultimately all the Human ship manufacturers went out of business, leaving customers to buy alien made ships. Tu-Plik showed why.

The ship was smoothly manufactured, efficient, and worked perfectly. Despite being the size of a small cruiser, it had a crew of only 23, including the