Ruins of the Galaxy Box Set: Books 1-6 Read online

  To her credit, Awen appeared to have conquered whatever she had been wrestling with internally—whatever the ambassador had said to her. She brought the item forward and held it in the cup of her open palms. Then she ascended the dais and stopped a meter from the massive Jujari, whose fangs were as tall as her head.

  “This,” she said, “is for you.”

  Just then, Magnus noticed that the ambassador was seething on his cushion and pounding his thighs with his fists. Magnus pinged Wainwright. “We might have a situation here.”

  “SITREP,” Wainwright demanded.

  “It’s the ambassador. He’s agitated.”

  “Can you get to him?”

  “Doubtful,” Magnus said.

  “We abide by your wisdom,” Awen continued, “as your will is perfect. However, I cannot in good conscience remain silent. I speak for your sake, Great Mwadim, no matter the cost to me.”

  The ambassador was repeating something to himself, his face turning red.

  “I want options, Lieutenant,” Wainwright ordered.

  Magnus glanced over to see the captain step out of formation. “I’m not sure I have any, Captain. The ambassador’s going manic. Talking to himself.” Magnus looked back at Awen. Amazingly, she was still talking to the mwadim, despite the fat man’s misbehavior. But what she said next pulled the pin from the ambassador’s emotional grenade.

  “Oh, Great Mwadim, this drive contains all the reasons you should be wary of the Republic’s proposed alliance.”

  “Sabotage!” spat the ambassador, struggling to his feet. “Sabotage, I say! Stop her!”

  Chief stepped in front of the disgruntled man. It was probably the only thing that saved Awen’s life in the end, for the ambassador had barely stood up when the first explosion detonated, and everything went sideways.

  6

  Awen hurtled into the mwadim’s chest then cartwheeled into a cluster of decorative urns. Her body felt like it was on fire, and she couldn’t catch her breath due to the pain. Blinking, she tried to focus on the ceiling. Her ears rang. Blood pooled in one side in her mouth, and the sharp smell of thermite bit her nose.

  She heard blaster fire and screaming—so much screaming. The floor shook underneath her. From an explosion.

  Explosions. We’re under attack. She had to tell the lieutenant. She tried to prop herself up, but the pain was overwhelming.

  Another wave of sound and heat shoved her farther back. Small objects peppered her skin, and more pain racked her body. She was crying—she was sure of it—and she felt embarrassed. She felt exposed.

  Something clutched her hand. Something big. A deep voice and hot breath rushed against her head, then the scent of burning hair.

  “Guard it,” the voice said in Jujari. A warm paw pressed a cylindrical item into her hand, and another jab of pain pierced her palm. Awen heard a short confirmation trill from the item. “Never let them find it. Never let him.”

  Awen smashed her eyes closed again and willed them back open. Focus. Come on, Awen! On the ground beside her lay the large face of the mwadim. A portion of his muzzle was missing, and his eyes and ears leaked blood. She could make out wet, labored breathing over the sounds of the assault.

  “Swear it,” he hissed then coughed a spray of red over her. “Swear!”

  “I swear it.” She wasn’t sure if it was her voice talking. Her throat burned, and it felt like someone was standing on her chest. “I swear it,” she said more confidently, but the mwadim had stopped listening.

  * * *

  Magnus’s first thought as he shook off the blast and moved to one knee was not for his platoon or even himself—it was for Awen. She was, after all, his mission; failing to execute his objective was not an option. What surprised him, however, was that he felt some measure of genuine concern for her despite his disdain for the Luma. Though, by the looks of his environment, there wouldn’t be many Luma left to aggravate him.

  Focus, he commanded himself. OTF.

  He brought his MAR30 to ready-up position as his instincts went through the OODA loop.

  Observe. TACNET was a frenzy of activity, and his helmet’s AI did its best to arrange the communications according to chain of command. Distinguishing between orders and the screams of the dying was nearly impossible. Yellow icons for wounded and red icons for killed in action lined the side of his HUD. But there was no indicator for Awen.

  Men and women twirled about in the death dance, their arms flapping in a desperate effort to extinguish the fire on their skin. Even Jujari raced around, clawing, mauling, and biting, their coats alight with flames. Magnus thought to open fire on several Jujari who attacked the Luma—one of the victims had to be Awen—but he realized it was a waste of firepower since both groups of combatants were doomed. The only people he could logically defend were those who had a chance of survival: his men. Recon armor was a decent defense for this kind of incendiary assault, though it still seemed like the platoon had suffered more casualties than he could count. Awen, of course, wore only robes.

  Orient. The once-ornate ballroom had become a hellhole in the blink of an eye. Fire licked every strand of fabric, which made Magnus feel as though he were standing inside the sun. Wind from outside fed the inferno until everything that could burn did burn. To his right, primary exfil looked accessible, but he didn’t have the best view. To his left was the stage and, most likely, Awen.

  Decide. The warrior ethos taught that the last order was always the standing order until the objective was completed. For Magnus, that order was, Escort Emissary Awen dau Lothlinium to and from her meeting with the mwadim and protect her with prejudice. So he would find her and stay with her until she was safe or until he could no longer protect her.

  Action. It was time to move, time to look for—

  A second explosion tore a hole in the floor not ten meters from his position. He flew backward and slammed into a sandstone pylon, narrowly missing the open window. Several Marines weren’t as fortunate, however, and sailed past him. Their bodies ripped the translucent fabric from its moorings and shot over the city like comets trailing atmospheric entry flames. The Hunters’ screams spiked the team channels as they fell to their deaths, their armor’s thrusters failing to engage.

  Magnus’s power level flashed. One of his cells had been crushed in the impact, leaving him with just over half power. Several other icons blinked at him, indicating damage assessments. The only two indicators that really mattered at present were his oxygen level and his weapons system: both nominal.

  “Get up, Adonis,” he said to himself. He climbed to his feet and saw a flame-covered Jujari thundering toward him. The fated creature swung its keeltari at his head, but Magnus ducked. He raised his MAR30 and drilled the beast with a blaster bolt to its skull. The Jujari toppled, and Magnus stepped over it. A second canine warrior lunged at his flank, but his armor’s proximity sensors registered the motion in time for him to dodge the attack. The Jujari swung a clawed paw with such effort that it spun itself over in midair. The warrior’s back elbow hammered Magnus between the shoulder blades, but his armor absorbed the impact. Magnus pivoted and landed a blaster bolt in the beast’s burning midsection and another to the side of its head. It was dead before it hit the floor.

  A man in Republican attire, or what was left of it, threw himself at Magnus. Bloodied arms slid down his armor, which was bathed in flickering orange light. Magnus begrudgingly pushed the man away, torn about whether to end his misery, and moved toward the dais.

  Burning bodies littered the platform; several still moved. Magnus’s AI raced to identify non-Jujari life-forms, but the brutality of the ordnance was so indiscriminate that it made the computer’s job next to impossible. Against the back wall lay the mwadim with most of his backside blown out. Magnus’s helmet’s AI suddenly tagged a body between the mwadim and the wall with “high probability.”

  “Awen!” he yelled through his speakers and bounded over the Jujari carcass. Her robes were burned, and she was bloody
, but she was alive. A quick bio scan showed high concentrations of adrenaline, high heart rate, low blood pressure, the onset of shock, and maybe a few broken ribs, but—amazingly—nothing fatal.

  She clutched her hands to her chest, mumbling something over and over. “I won’t let them have it. Won’t let them.”

  “Awen, can you hear me?” Magnus said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Awen! It’s me, Adonis—it’s the lieutenant. We’re getting you out of here. Hold on.”

  She screamed as Magnus picked her up in one arm. His servo-assisted armor made the task effortless even though Awen hardly weighed a thing. However, Magnus was more concerned about not causing her any more pain than with the amount of energy he had to expend to carry her.

  “Asset secure,” he said over TACNET to no one in particular. He wasn’t even sure who had comms left. When no response came, he decided to ping the shuttle. “Falcon One, do you copy?” He waited a beat then repeated himself.

  Nothing. More yellow icons switched to red as the seconds ticked by.

  Finally, a static-riddled voice came over TACNET. “This… right. All hands… exfil… Zulu Niner.” It was Wainwright. Magnus’s HUD couldn’t pinpoint his signal, but the captain was alive, and now he knew the revised exfil location.

  Most of the humanoids had succumbed to the smoke and flames in the ballroom. Meanwhile, a small battle raged between the Jujari and the Marines, most of it in CQB—close-quarters battle. Even though the canines were on fire, they did not go down easily. It seemed like the only sure way to take them down without a blaster was a blade to the carotid or femoral artery or a skull penetration—all while avoiding their razor-sharp teeth and claws.

  Magnus took out three of the stronger enemies from his place on the dais while his AI simultaneously laid a course to the exfil coordinates. His HUD projected an illuminated path that ran through the center of the ballroom and back to the main entrance. Magnus jumped off the dais and moved to the right, retracing his earlier steps along the room’s perimeter but careful to shield Awen from any burning fabric. As he shifted right, new cackles filled the air.

  Magnus saw movement at the entrance, and dozens of Jujari reinforcements stepped into the room. “Perfect.” Over general TACNET, he asked, “Anyone got eyes on a secondary egress?” But the channel was still flooded with screams and shouts as men fought for their lives.

  Blaster fire streaked at him from across the room, and Magnus ducked behind a pedestal. One shot glanced off his shoulder, deflected by his armor’s resonant defense generator. He cursed, knowing Awen’s head was there, but when he looked down, he saw that she’d repositioned to his center mass. He had to get her out of there.

  The thought had no sooner passed through his brain when a third explosion detonated. The force threw him and Awen backward, only this time, there was no sandstone pylon. Magnus felt the lurch of free fall. He still clung to Awen as she screamed and grabbed at the air. The pair rolled away from the building and plunged toward the city street, but not before Magnus saw a fire spout erupt from the window, the space above their heads filling with debris.

  Stabilization measures deployed, his HUD flashed.

  A series of powerful rocket bursts jerked Magnus upright and worked against their descent. But the effort was short-lived as the low power warning sent the jump system into fail-safe. Gravity stole them back, and Magnus’s stomach lurched. He detached his sling’s quick-release clip and threw his MAR30 over his head. The mag lock pulled it between his shoulder blades. Then he selected his grappling hook and aimed his forearm at the building opposite him.

  Shoulder and elbow servos whined as the tip launched from his wrist in a concussive burst. Microfiber filament trailed the projectile as it buried itself in concrete and then snapped taut. Razor-sharp hooks deployed in a puff of dust, and Magnus saw the instantaneous secure indicator in his HUD.

  “Hold on,” he yelled to Awen over externals. He wasn’t even sure if she was conscious. He hoped she wasn’t, for her sake.

  His armor’s servos had strained to absorb their fall’s kinetic energy when the filament snapped taut, more precious power draining from his remaining fuel cell. Their fall suddenly redirected to a lateral pendulum swing, and Magnus extended his legs toward the oncoming building. Both feet crashed into a concrete pylon, the fabric on either side blowing away from the concussion.

  Magnus initiated the rappel command. He backpedaled the building face like a spaceball player in spring training, the soles of his boots thumping rhythmically down the side. He cast a quick look over his shoulder to see a street filled with curious Jujari. Fortunately, they seemed distracted by the ball of fire atop the building and not the figures coming down in the debris—at least, not the living ones.

  Magnus armed the variable-output detonator on his hip, selected smoke and ring pattern, and let the grenade self-deploy from his torso. The VOD fell the remaining twenty meters to street level and deployed a ring of thick white smoke wide enough for them to land in. His filament reserves had more than enough to get them there, but he wouldn’t need it. At ten meters, Magnus severed the line and sailed the rest of the way down. He used both arms to cradle Awen and slammed into the ground.

  They’d made it but with little time to celebrate. The words proximity warning flashed brightly in his HUD. Magnus did a quick visual scan, but no collision was imminent. Then he looked up. A burning chunk of debris the size of a speeder had broken free of the mwadim’s building and was hurtling toward them. Magnus’s brain was faster than his helmet’s AI as he concluded, You’re not getting clear.

  7

  Awen knew they were falling. Her stomach lurched just like it did during shuttle entry. She felt the urge to reach for the small bag in the seat back as the image of a bowl of sorlakk spun in front of her. All she really wanted, however, was a soft bed. Vomit and sleep, she told herself, feeling like a small child with the flu. Just throw up, and then you can go to bed.

  A loud pop startled her. Then the feeling of a thousand knives stabbing her rib cage replaced the nausea and fatigue. She tried screaming, but a jarring change of direction took her breath away. Her head slammed against… a trooper’s chest plate. And then she was swinging sideways toward a building. No, they were swinging sideways, she and the cranky lieutenant in the black-and-gray armor.

  The trooper’s feet extended and crashed into a vertical support. Awen noticed the shrouds ripple away from her as if someone had dropped a large stone in a pond. Then she felt herself descending again, a fast-paced thunk-thunk-thunk churning beneath her. More stabbing in her sides. And then free fall.

  When is this going to stop?

  Awen was wide awake when the trooper hit the ground. Somehow, by a miracle, they’d made it out of the building. The explosion. The mwadim. She couldn’t think straight, but she knew they were safely on street level. The trooper had saved her.

  As that thought registered, she felt something deep—deeper than nausea, deeper than the stabbing pain in her ribs, deeper than the headache that threatened to crush her temples together. In the fabric of all things, a disturbance cried to her. It was the tremor of something important. No, something dangerous. And it was racing toward her like a comet.

  Awen saw it then, a wave pushed by another wave pushed by another wave. From behind the waves, a force full of dark energy hurtled at her and at the trooper. It threatened to silence them. To silence her. It had the power to shatter her life into a thousand shards, to end all the breaths that were so painful to take.

  So she stopped it from coming.

  * * *

  Magnus covered Awen with his body and braced for impact. He was reasonably sure that this was the end, and he was only sorry that he couldn’t preserve her life any longer. In fact, the thought of protecting her filled him with a strange emotion, a sense of purpose beyond his duty—perhaps even a sense of a calling.

  And then he grieved. For the briefest of moments, he mourned not being able to see this
last mission through to a successful end. He thanked his warrior ethos, which had seen him through so much. It could not see him past this. It wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong enough.

  But more, he grieved for Awen. He believed she had more to see. More to do. Despite her insufferable love for this degenerate species, she was worth something. Worth more than him. It was just ironic that she’d die while trying to save a species that wouldn’t think twice about killing her.

  Then Magnus got tired of grieving. It was exhausting. And he was pissed off. Couldn’t death get on with the business of killing him already? Apparently, “hurry up and wait” was not only the unspoken motto of the Galactic Marines but of death too. It was infuriating.

  He opened his eyes. Proximity alert still flashed in his HUD. The whole “life flashing before your eyes” thing felt overrated.

  Proximity alert.

  He looked at the clock and watched two interminably long seconds tick by. He chanced a glance at the falling debris.

  Like a shooting star suspended in flight, the concrete slab hovered a meter above them.

  Proximity alert.

  “What in all the cosmos?” he said aloud. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or shout. He’d gone mad. Or maybe he was dead, and this was the afterlife: one continuous image of your last moment. But he felt himself breathing. He felt Awen in his arms.

  Awen. The Order of the Luma. But they couldn’t achieve this sort of manipulation… could they?

  Suddenly, the mammoth block started shaking. Time to move, thought Magnus. He pulled Awen in and rolled out from under the concrete. Whatever power had held it aloft vanished, and the thing crashed into the street, not as if it had only fallen a meter or two but as if it had dropped from the top of the skyscraper with all that kinetic energy stored up inside like a capacitor set to discharge. The force threw him forward. He rolled again, careful to keep Awen close. Bits of debris peppered his armor, scattering around them.