In a Galaxy ruled by the regressive Kingdom, Bryant Jones’s mission of medical advancements was seen as perverted. Now Jones is on his way to a Penal Colony on the far reaches of the system… a colony he never intends to reach.
Once the Kingdom’s war angel, Captain Aurora Campos has been humbled by scandal. Now a lowly prison transport commander, when her ship is shot down by the ancient alien defences of the penal planet, she will fight the world to keep her charges safe.
Two destinies collide in an epic battle that may shatter the very core of The Kingdom itself.
~
Chapter One
When the riot began, Bryant Jones was sitting against the damp metal wall, apparently sleeping. He’d been careful to position himself in the focal point of the closest security feed, careful to do nothing suspicious since he’d clapped Mike ‘Ramjet’ Norton on the shoulder this morning over one of the man’s lame jokes. An onlooker would have to be suspicious to the point of paranoia to have noticed that small escalation of Bryant’s normally cheerful, friendly behaviour. The fact that none of the guards had paid any attention to him since argued that he had got away with it.
When he gave that casual pat on the shoulder, he had let the side of his hand come into contact with Ramjet’s bare neck. Just a fleeting touch. Nothing obvious. Certainly nothing that would give the man the idea that Bryant was available or interested. Just a brush of dermis, apparently accidental.
But Bryant had been his own best testing ground, and his insides were crawling with programmable nanobots. A brush of skin was all it needed to transfer a few onto his – he preferred not to use the word ‘tool’ – onto his client. They would have sunk through Ramjet’s skin, into his bloodstream, and there they would have multiplied like a fast acting virus. And now…
Bryant’s eyes were already closed. He flung an arm over them to deepen the dark, make it look even less likely that he was watching. He blocked out the clammy chill of the vibrating metal deck beneath him. Then he activated his transmitters and links, the command as easy as thinking it, relayed to his own nanobots by the electrical impulses of the axions in his brain.
It took three seconds for the client’s body to come on line. Bryant became slowly aware, as in a lucid dream, of the world as Ramjet was seeing it. He felt the lurch of an extra foot of height, a sharp change in his sense of smell – everything had an undertone of oranges – and the itching, reckless impatience that lived beneath the murderer’s skin.
Bored, cleaning under his nails with the tines of a plastic fork, Ramjet was jabbing them in just to feel something other than the incessant hum of engines and the hiss of stale, sweaty air. Bryant subtly suggested that he should look up, glare at the guards outside the laughably old fashioned cell door.
That one there, with the damn product in his slicked back hair. All proud of the pressed neatness of his uniform and the winged cross on his shoulder. That one with the shiny shoes, who thought he was better than Ramjet. Look at him picking his nose, the dirty bugger.
Ramjet had gained his name because he had a punch like a jet engine. He was not a subtle, nor an introspective man. Bryant had chosen him for that.
Ramjet looked up, he disliked on command.
From what Bryant had seen as he was marched through the Froward’s rust-stained corridors and shoved unceremoniously into the cage, she had once been a troop transport. Well, that was typical of the Kingdom of Peace, which produced little more than farmers, soldiers and dupes. But it meant that in order to convert her to the transport of condemned prisoners to the penal colonies, all that had been done was to bolt a cage of steel bars around the troops’ living areas.
Now the criminals (of whom Bryant was perhaps the most illustrious) slept in the bunks that had once belonged to soldiers of the Kingdom, ate in their mess hall and used their facilities, while the ‘free’ soldiers were cramped together in a tiny unfenced enclave close to the bridge.
He wasn’t sure if the glossy-haired, pressed-trousered freak over there understood the irony of it – that he was treated with less consideration than the criminals he condemned – but Bryant was getting off track.
The point was that the grill of steel bars was too fucking stone age to be accessible to Bryant’s bio-tech. His bots drew their power either from a mechanical power source, or from the metabolism of their host. They couldn’t function in the absence of either.
Bryant spared everyone around him a moment of regret. He disapproved of violence in principle, and more, he found it upsetting. If he had been held behind a proper computerized lock, he could have dealt with it without the need for any of this. But they were a week out from the remand center, mid-point in their journey to the penal colony of Cygnus Five, as far away as they would ever get from other Kingdom spacecraft. He really had to move now, and this was the easiest way to do it.
No one would get damaged. A little scuffle was all he needed.
Look at that freak he thought, more urgently now that the connection with Ramjet had had time to solidify. Strutting around out there like he owns us. He’s going to dump my ass on a cold ball of rock with the worst dregs of the Kingdom. Why does he get to stand there all peaceful like and pick his fucking nose?
The bots had reached, bred in and established themselves in Ramjet’s nervous system. Bryant directed the man’s endochrine system to reduce serotonin and release catecholamines and adrenaline, in effect nudging the slider on the man’s aggression up, his inhibitions down. What more can they do to me after all?
He could feel a ritual challenge coming on, a ‘hey you!’ and he clamped down on it hard. No, no alerting the guard, no taunting. Hair product guy had forgotten himself enough to lean a shoulder on the bars as he paged through a book – a book, these fucking people! – and he shouldn’t be warned to move away before…
It came together like any act of tipping a boulder off the top of a hill. There had been lots of apparently fruitless effort and then it all bounded away from him at once. He smiled under his concealing arm as Ramjet burst to his feet, took the two paces to the bars in a run, seized the guard by the elbow and pulled.
“What the hell?” The guard fumbled with the other hand for his stunner. Firing as he was shaken, he misaimed, and the burst of non-lethal lightning lit up the whole steel structure of the cage, zapping himself as well as Ramjet. At the flash and crack of it, the other prisoners leapt to their feet. Ramjet roared, shaking the bars with one hand. They were cold, colder than the air, and condensation rolled over his fingers as the knuckles whitened and blood began to seep out from beneath his nails.
Bryant pinched his eyes shut as if that would help, while he thought his way through the fine control needed to slip Ramjet’s grip on the guard’s arm downwards until it met the uncovered skin of his wrist.
But “Ramjet! What are you doing? Leave him alone!” Carrow tried to intervene. A tall, skinny guy, imprisoned for blasphemy and homosexuality, Carrow used to run some kind of newspaper on Thunor 3, before the Thunor system had been conquered and ‘cleansed’. “You’ll make it worse for yourself and for us. We’ll be flogged the moment we’re set down.”
Fuck, Bryant thought, as all Ramjet’s engineered rage found a new target. Out of all of them, Carrow was the one Bryant least wished to harm. But the man should have maybe minded his own business then, shouldn’t he? The plan was for Ramjet to get a good grip on the guard’s hand – or face, or throat – somewhere with unprotected skin. Transfer a few bots, then calm down with no real harm done and no one the wiser. Now Carrow was going to end up decked, and the bots wouldn’t get out of the cage. Damn fuck and blast the material he had to work with in this place.
Ramjet picked Carrow up by the legs and threw him. Skinny as a scarecrow, articulated like a puppet, Carrow sailed flailing through the knot of thugs playing Kaluki on the nearest bench, and then the game was really on. Bryant crawled under a table to get out of the way, as the violence spread.
Oh, and look. The freak outside the cage – Ignatious, judging from the name embroidered on his uniform – was radioing for help. Bryant took a long deep breath and blew out frustration and nerves together, watching carefully, because this might still work.
A moment later, the door to the cage was opened and six more guards poured in. Growling with rage, spittle flying from his mouth, Ramjet tackled the first to the floor.
Hand on the face. Hand on the face. Bryant thought at him. But the man’s rage had grown to the stage where Bryant could no longer get a fine grip. There was nothing left of Ramjet’s mind to influence. Ramjet ignored him, got the guard by the collar, and smacked his head into the floor. Bryant cringed internally. No, don’t hurt him!
Shit, this was slipping completely out of his control. See? This was why he didn’t like violence. It was too unpredictable, too blunt edged and too inclined to end up being sent back his own way. Ramjet’s waves of intense rage had begun influencing him through the link between them, and he couldn’t have that. He was a healer and a scholar, and he needed his objectivity intact.
Although the sudden deceleration of Ramjet’s mood might look suspicious to anyone with the brains to work it out, it was also his last chance to get a decent result before the goons re-established control. None of them had yet shown the slightest sign of knowing he was up to something. Why should they start now? Probably didn’t even have bot technology on their backwards little worlds. They’d probably just call it possession and leave it at that.
Bryant took Ramjet’s purely limbic aggression back down, enough to smuggle through the suggestion Spit. Spit in the guard’s face.
Rhythmic and urgent like a metal heartbeat, a clanging interrupted the incipient riot. The roars of protest from his fellow inmates faltered as – Bryant poked his head out from under the table to see – the actual captain of the ship had deigned to visit them, was beating on the bars of the cage with a cudgel.
Captain Aurora Campos had two of her officers with her. Lt. Funar, whose skin wasn’t so much white as utterly colourless, and whose pink eyes sheltered behind an arch of dark glass, and Lt. Roimata, a pretty blonde girl who ought not to look so fierce. Both of them had their stun guns pulled, levelled at the crowd, but Bryant thought Campos alone would have been sufficient to quell the riot. She had a powerful presence, stately as any war machine. “That’s enough, gentlemen. Sit down.”
Fucking hell, Bryant thought, and with one last push he insisted Spit on him, damn it. Spit. Do it now.
It couldn’t have been more obvious. In all that frozen tableau, only Ramjet moved. He took his hand off Ignatious’ collar, wound it into his hair, and then he spat directly into the man’s eye.
Finally.
Bryant hardly registered the drone of stunners, as the captain’s officers put Ramjet out, put down the one knot of fighters who had not heeded her words, he was too relieved that the entire thing had not been a waste of time. He wasn’t sure if his nerves would have stood having to do it all again.
He smiled with satisfaction, and as he did, the captain gave one more solid thwack to the cage, startling him into looking at her.
She was an odd looking woman, somewhere between olive skinned beauty and prize-fighting troll. Past the first bloom of her youth – if she ever had one – she was well into hard-bitten military middle age. He’d heard of her, of course. Who hadn’t? Until last year, the Lioness of the Phoenix Nebula had been all over the Kingdom approved Feeds – a new Joan of Arc.
My how the mighty had fallen! Gossip was not his forte, so he had not noticed her disappearance from public life, the scandalous rumours, until he had come on board and something about her face had rung a bell. Then he had run her through his internal database and now he knew all about it. Heroine turned whore – lucky to be clinging on to the fringes of respectability as captain of a mean little prison transport like the Froward.
“Mr Jones? You look pleased with yourself.”
Her large, black lashed golden-brown eyes might have been pretty on another woman. On her they were too shrewd, full of a kind of mocking self-confidence that rubbed up against his own and raised his hackles. Apparently being revealed to all the galaxy as a hypocrite had not humbled her much.
“This was the first prison riot I’ve ever been in,” he ventured. It was a good explanation because it was true. “I got through without a scratch. That deserves some celebration. Plus, it always brightens my day to see you.”
“Right,” she said, nodding to her subordinates as they filed back out of the cage with order restored. The other criminals were now huddled well back out of the range of the stunners. Two of the guards hauled Ignatious out between them and laid him down by her feet. He was already stirring, lifting a hand to the spittle and wiping it away – rubbing it into his palm and cheek as he did so.
For a moment Bryant thought – oh yes please – that Captain Campos would bend down and touch the man’s skin. They hadn’t had time to propagate yet but just one nanobot on the captain and the ship would be his by tomorrow. But she moved away, and it was young Dr. Atallah who checked Ignatious over for bruises and concussion with gloved hands. She glanced up at Campos with reassurance.
“He’ll be fine, ma’am.”
“Some of the witnesses at your trial testified you had powers of mind control,” the Captain regarded him thoughtfully. “And here you are looking like the cat who’s got the cream. What are you up to, Jones?”
“Me?!” Bryant laughed. He hoped it was convincingly. He hoped it didn’t sound like the laugh of a man who had anything to hide. Damn her. She was a two bit has-been zealot, she was not supposed to be clever as well. “I don’t know what you mean. I was asleep when this started. Check the cameras for yourself.”
“Right,” said the captain again. “Bored were you? Thought you’d have a bit of fun? I hope it was worthwhile because you’re all on half rations until we get there. I will not have my people used for your amusement.”
When they’d come for him, he’d had enough warning to ingest the really delicate tools of his trade and to wipe his computers of the evidence. They’d found only the crude stuff – the scalpels, the operating table. Low tech luddites that they were, they didn’t know what they were dealing with. Only doctors from deeper in the Source, or fellow underworld criminals like himself ought to have a clue about the forbidden scientific marvels of which he was master. So where the hell was she getting this from?
He laughed again, a little more nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re paranoid as well as ugly.”
As he crawled out from under the table and stood up, there was a shift in the atmosphere of the mess hall that he could feel like the static of an oncoming storm. His heart sank as a shoe scuffed the floor behind him, and he felt them look, all those big guys, bigger than him. Men who had not devoted their minds to knowledge. Men with calloused knuckles.
“Personal insults? Nice,” said the captain, turning to go, Ignatious now up and swaying beneath the doctor’s supporting arm in her wake. The mocking light in the Captain’s tawny eyes strengthened. “Enjoy your meal gentlemen, It’s the last you’ll have until tomorrow.”
She walked away, and Bryant focussed on the tight pleats of her modest headscarf rather than on the whispering behind him. Had she meant to get him killed? Did she know what these men would do if they thought that he – friendly little curly haired intellectual that he was – was infiltrating their minds, controlling them with his own?
He licked his lips. Three hours at the least until Ignatious’s bots propagated – if they were going to take at all. That was not completely guaranteed. He just had to survive until then. Swallowing, he closed his eyes and turned around to face the wall of hard faces.
“What a bitch, true?”
It didn’t look like they were impressed.
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