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

“Welcome to the Science Guild.”

* * *

The robotic doctor finished installing the computers in his brain. They called it Mesh, which was a strange name. It had taken a week of surgeries, all painless, luckily. At least until they started calibrating them—then he went through something he could only call torture. He felt every sensation, from agony to orgasm, all so the tiny implants could map his brain and fully integrate with all of his biological functions.

“You are the first Human to undergo this process,” his handler, Skoowa, explained. “And you are the first Human to be recruited into the Science Guild.”

Sato was proud, to some degree. The work, the study, the conditioning his body was undergoing via nanite treatment, the Meshes, all of it to make him an agent of the Science Guild. It kept him from thinking about his life, and that was fine. Still, he wondered, science secret agents? Wasn’t that kind of odd?

Skoowa was his supervisor, or Jōshi, as he called it. He was going to be a Himitsu, an investigator. At the installation were lots of science researchers, Hajimeru. Giving everything Japanese names was a habit dating back to Sakura Maru. He didn’t think there was any reason to stop.

“Sato,” Skoowa called.

“Yes, Jōshi-san?”

“You’ve got a mission.”

“Excellent.”

* * *

“How did it go?” Skoowa asked.

“Had to destroy their ship to extract.”

“That’s unfortunate. Ready for the next mission?”

* * *

Sato watched the two ships exchange missile fire as his escape pod spun away. A small smile crossed his face. He so rarely got a chance to kick the Aposo in the teeth. It made the job all the more worth doing.

* * *

“They suspected,” Sato said.

“What did you do?” Skoowa asked.

“I deployed an Enigma box. I didn’t know their entire planet’s computer network was dynamically linked.” Sato frowned. He recalled the site of the antimatter explosion from orbit. The planet would be uninhabitable.

“It’s their fault for experimenting with antimatter,” Skoowa said.

“I think I just killed the entire Altok race.”

“There has to be a price for reaching outside their bounds.”

“Genocide?” Sato asked.

Skoowa shrugged. Sato looked away. “Word of your work has reached the Saisho.”

Sato looked back up. That was the name he’d been given for the leader of the Science Guild. The first, the beginning. It made sense to him. Like any other Human word assigned the first time to a translator, it was then used automatically going forward. “Me? I’m only a Himitsu.”

“You are to be a Kahra’ak,” Skoowa said.

“What are they?”

“You will teach those who go too far the limits of technology, and the price for exceeding those limits.”

“Kantoku-sha,” Sato said. “Kahra’ak will be Kantoku-sha.” Kantoku meant warden. Proctor was good, too.

* * *

Sato struggled within the Mesh-induced torture. He knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t make it feel any less. He had to work the complex mathematical problem, despite feeling like his legs were on fire. He screamed and lost the process.

<Get control of yourself!>

“I’m trying, Saisho!” he cried as he flayed about for something to grab.

<Fear is your worst enemy, Human. Master it!>

“I-I can’t,” he sobbed. Inconceivable agony lashed his brain. An eternity later, he felt tiny clawed hands moving him, and the cool steel of a stanchion pressed into his hand. Tiny glowing eyes regarded him. “Thank…you,” he gasped.

“You can do this, Human,” the Jōshi said.

He nodded, missing Skoowa yet again. This new Jōshi was Flatar, as many of the proctor trainers were. “I am ready to try again, Saisho!”

“Very well.” He was thrown into the spinning dark abyss once more, and pain lashed at him.

* * *

He received his proctor clearance by a code installed within his Mesh. The last step had been the modified nanite treatments that would slow the aging process by several orders of magnitude. He’d thought of it as the Lazarus nanites. They didn’t know how long it would make a Human live. As long as there were enough nanites remaining in his body to counteract the effects of replicative fading within his cells and cure cancer, who knew? It was all to help do the job. Years of combat training and mastering the many tools of the Science Guild proctors were now behind him. It was time to do his job.

* * *

Once he’d established a base of operation back on Earth, he set up several caches. One was, ironically, aboard Sakura Maru. The old family ship was grounded at the edge of the starport. It had suffered catastrophic computer failure and was unrepairable for any reasonable fee. The family hadn’t scrapped it yet. There was talk of preserving the ship. It would do as a stash. His codes still worked, so he locked backup gear in the computer section and took the key.

Later, while running down leads, he established another cache in the United States, near their new starport at Houston. A drop box was sufficient while he developed a credible cover.

Before long, he gained entry as a low-level computer code writer at the California office of Binnig. It wouldn’t take long to do some serious damage to their powered armor program. He considered seeing family, or something. The thought of going off mission set off some of his conditioning, and his Mesh punished him. He continued with the job.

* * *

He finished destroying the storage devices and made sure all the HecSha were dead. There was a record of another researcher, a prisoner. Human. That was interesting. But the Human had been freed some time ago by other Human mercs. He considered the risks that the Human had done any significant part of the research and considered it minimal. The HecSha hadn’t yet tried to sell or share their version of the Lazarus nanites.

This version