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

Sato caught the ubiquitous handhold at the exit to the tunnel they’d arrived through, swinging out into the space before arresting his momentum on the wall. As he’d fought with seemingly forgotten martial prowess, he maneuvered in zero gravity just as well.

Rick used his jets to push himself into the room. Just as he crossed the threshold, he looked back to check on Dakkar’s progress. There was no sign of the Wrogul. Did he find an access shaft I missed? The Wrogul could use his vent to jet around easily with puffs of air. “Sato, have you seen—” He was cut off by a voice in his head, transmitted on all pinplant frequencies.

<Welcome back, Proctor.>

A second later, all the lines connecting the lights erupted with bolts of lightning. Rick didn’t have time to scream before he was plunged into darkness.

* * * * *

Chapter Seven

Sato opened his eyes and looked around. He couldn’t make his head move, nor anything below his jaw. His pinplants weren’t working. The fuck? He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to regain control of his pinplants. It seemed as if they weren’t there. He tried harder.

“There is no reason to struggle.” This was said in Japanese, the accent distinctively mechanical, such as came from a translator.

“Who are you?”

“Your judge, Proctor.”

“I have done nothing wrong,” Sato insisted. “I just want to know who I am.”

“Despite your claims of amnesia, the evidence of your actions speak otherwise. Executing the Jōshi on Earth proves otherwise, as well as your somehow extracting the mission details and secure account codes. We found the mission tube on your ship! I do not know how you are managing to evade our neural probes, but we will find out. Oh, we will.”

“Who are you?” Sato demanded again. This time there was no answer. He could still feel the rest of his body, though it wouldn’t respond to his commands. It seemed like they were moving. He cast his gaze around as much as he could and saw the familiar interior of the common area on Vestoon. They’d taken his damn ship!

As he cast about for the speaker, he saw something not from his ship. It was capsule-shaped, maybe a meter and a half long, tapered at both ends, and a dull gunmetal color. A single bluish glowing band ran around one end. It made him afraid, and like so many other things, he didn’t know why.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked after a few minutes of fruitless attempts to access his pinplants.

“To your judgement.”

He silently cursed, then he remembered something from the earlier encounter with the opSha. “To Saisho?”

A single yipping laugh. “As if the Saisho would waste its time with a traitor like you.”

Like I thought, opSha. “Traitor? What are you talking about?”

“Shut up, or I’ll muzzle you.”

Sato bit back a reply. His mouth was just about the only thing working. He stared at the capsule-thing for another moment, then took a calming breath. There wasn’t much more he could do, so he waited.

Without his pinplants, Sato couldn’t be sure how much time had gone by. Maybe 15 minutes was his best guess. Whatever the time, he eventually felt Vestoon’s breaking motors fire. They’d reached their destination. For the first time, his opSha jailor floated into view.

“We’ve arrived, Proctor.”

“How many of you do I have to kill to get some answers?”

The little simian’s head came around, eyes narrowed in anger. He turned his head to the floating capsule. “Take him.”

With a hissing sound, a trio of long tentacles slithered out of the capsule’s center and wrapped around Sato. Their strength and surety were surprising. Whatever it used for propulsion in zero gravity was both silent and effective, because he was quickly towed along in its wake. As he was turned around, he got a brief look out a porthole next to the airlock. It looked like they were docked to a burned, charred piece of hull plating.

The battleship, Sato realized. The entropy-cursed battleship! He’d been wrong, or the asteroid was a decoy. Whatever the reason, his guess had led them into a trap. There was no sign of Rick, and his last memory of him was as they entered what should have been the data core of the asteroid base. He didn’t remember seeing Dakkar once they boarded the asteroid. As he berated himself for being a fool and buying their ruse, he was towed through the airlock.

The interior of the battleship was far from its outward appearance. The corridors were in excellent condition and didn’t match the military appearance he was expecting. Lighting was dim, the same as it had been on the decoy asteroid, but without the strange strands of lights.

“The lighting,” he said. “Some sort of EM generator?”

“A little surprise for your ham-fisted attempt at a Peacekeeper.”

Gears moved in his brain. “Not as good as this one,” he said, looking at the bot towing him.

“Of course not,” the opSha said. “This is a Peacekeeper.”

“I didn’t think there were any operational.”

“You know better than that, Proctor. Once we figure out how you’ve shielded your mind from us, we’ll pry out what secrets you have. The Himitsu are quite interested to know what happened on your last mission to make you…disappear.”

I wish I knew, Sato thought.

He was taken down a series of corridors, then up two ladders to different decks. Nothing was quite level. Since no races built their ships’ interiors as haphazard, not even the Izlian, he believed it was a reconstruction. Whoever had taken the wrecked battleship had rebuilt the interior for their uses. An intelligence base, perhaps. But who was running all this? Who had the millions of credits to throw at an operation to retrieve him? What were these positions he kept