Syndicate Wars: Empire Rising (Seppukarian Book 5) Read online

  SYNDICATE WARS: EMPIRE RISING

  GEORGE MAHAFFEY KYLE NOE JUSTIN SLOAN

  Syndicate Wars: Empire Rising (this book and all the books in the series) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Syndicate Wars: Empire Rising is Copyright (c) 2017 by Kyle Noe, George S. Mahaffey Jr., and Justin Sloan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of above names.

  SYNDICATE WARS: THE RESISTANCE

  The Team

  Beta Readers / JIT Team

  Alex Wilson

  Becky Young

  Holly Lenz

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Leo Roars

  If I missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editors

  Diane Newton

  CONTENTS

  1. Quinn’s Loop

  2. New Friends

  3. Take Down

  4. Cody’s Loop

  5. This isn’t Kansas

  6. Back with Friends

  7. Kill ‘em All

  8. Take Down

  9. The Plot

  10. On Fire

  11. Breaking Out

  12. The Gloom Ahead

  13. Solve the Riddle

  14. Back Home… Maybe

  15. The Insignia

  16. What Happened

  17. Reunited

  18. William Rane

  19. The Green Zone

  20. Black Sunshine

  21. Mr. Q

  22. Parting Ways

  23. Finding Luke

  24. The Deal

  25. Incoming

  26. Shut it Down

  27. Just The Two of Them

  28. A Glimpse

  29. Pyrrhic Victory

  30. Evac

  31. Old Beginnings

  32. Something Has to Give

  33. King Solomon’s Choice

  34. Transference

  35. Empire Rising

  What Next?

  About the Author

  Author Notes

  1

  QUINN’S LOOP

  Q uinn woke with a jolt and an icy gruel-like taste in her mouth, her body swaddled in snow and semi-darkness. She elbowed herself up and the first thought that came to mind was: the darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable.

  Staring out over the never-ending sheets of ice and snow that lay before her, Quinn wondered where the hell she’d heard that before. The darkness was indeed hungry, and bitterly cold. Even with her armor she could feel the sting of the icy wind as it whipped against her. A digital gauge on her combat helmet revealed the temperature outside was fifty degrees below zero and dropping as the sun, just a sliver in the sky, beat a hasty retreat, leeching the color from the area in front of her until it resembled the background in one of those eerie old tinted photographs from the Civil War hundreds of years before.

  She took a step and staggered, woozy, disoriented. Her head throbbed, reminding her of the after effects of the last time she used Black Sunshine. Vague memories of the assault on the time ship bombarded her mind, along with images of her daughter, Samantha, the primary reason she’d joined the attack on the time ship in the first place. The assault on the ship had been a deliberate effort to go back into the past to change the future and they’d done it, hadn’t they? They’d started up the time travel mechanism on the ship which meant they’d gone back … but gone back where?

  “Don’t fucking move!” somebody shouted.

  Quinn struggled against an urge to swing around and start fighting, but she had no idea what she was facing, who was ordering her to freeze, or where or when she was. Better to get a lay of the land first.. Slowly she turned to see a figure in a helmet squaring up on her, slicked with ice and snow, aiming what looked like a rifle.

  “Didn’t you hear what I just said?!” the voice screamed at her. “Do not move again!”

  “Where would I go?!” Quinn yelled back. “I’m stuck on a goddamn iceberg!”

  The figure lowered its gun and stared at Quinn. There was something about the figure’s voice and small frame that was familiar to her. “Renner?”

  The figure smacked a hand against a leg to reveal the red markings of the Syndicate’s battle armor. Quinn hesitated, then plodded through the snow, shocked at how happy she was to see the little man.

  “Christ, Quinn, I almost took your head off!” Renner shouted.

  “I don’t think that thing would’ve fired even if you’d tried,” Quinn replied.

  Renner held up his rifle which was as white as a bone. He fumbled the weapon and it fell on the ice and shattered like a pane of glass.

  Quinn stared at Renner who held up a hand. “I feel like I’m stoned and not in a good way. Let me be the first to ask. Where are we?”

  “And where are the others?” she replied.

  “Last thing I remember is we were on the ship and all these lights were glowing and Cody – whoa, baby, what was up with Cody?!”

  Quinn shook her head. “I remember the ship powering up and then I was falling through this hole in the darkness—”

  “Me too,” Renner said, nodding.

  “It was sucking me down—”

  “Like the world’s strongest undertow—”

  “And then I woke up.”

  He nodded. “Maybe we made it. Maybe we’re in the past.”

  “Yeah, but how far in the past?”

  They looked around and saw nothing but a vast expanse of ice as far as the eye could see. Quinn tapped a panel on her helmet, but all of the internal applications that she normally would have used for situational awareness, aside from the temperature gauge and a sound amplification device, weren’t functioning. Where were they? A lake? An ocean? Nah, that couldn’t be right, she thought. How the hell could an ocean freeze?

  Quinn’s gaze swung heavenward. There was something about the way the sun was fading. Too quickly, too … unnaturally. As if somebody was slipping a lens cap over it. And in place of the light appeared a profound darkness that began sweeping across the land like a massive curtain. The sight of the blackness tripped a fuse inside Quinn. It was the same kind of reaction she imagined the first people on Earth must have felt at that initial sunset hundreds of thousands of years before, startled by the dying of the light, fearful that it might never come back.

  She started running after what was left of the light, plunging into the murkiness, Renner screaming for her to stop. Galloping blindly, she scrabbled up a hillside, hands outstretched, fingers dancing off the last tatters of light which had turned golden.

  That’s when she saw something in the distance, their forms silhouetted above, little more than dark cutouts against the fading light.

  A huge cluster of … what were they? Objects of some kind out on the ice.

  Trees? That’s what she thought they were at first. A small forest of trees.

  The sun suddenly vanished.

  Darkness devoured everything.

  She lost her footing, tripped, and fell.

  She slid face-first down over an ice-floe that spooled toward a chute that time and the elements had weathered into the ice. She rocketed past, as if on a waterpark slide. The ground rushed past at an incredible rate of speed, and then she was jettisoned out the end of the chute and sent spinning across the ice.

>   Quinn came to a rest and looked up.

  Her helmet lights clicked on and she could see the outline of the objects she’d noticed before, maybe ten yards out in front of her.

  Definitely not trees, but what were they?

  She stood and stumbled forward and bit back a scream.

  The objects before her were people!

  Humans.

  Dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of them.

  Frozen in place like statues.

  Quinn spotted Renner peripherally. She turned to him, but he didn’t utter a word. Instead, the pair walked silently through the forest of the frozen.

  Death shall have no dominion, a voice whispered to Quinn. Bullshit, she thought. Death was everywhere. It had even found a way to apparently snuff out the fucking sun.

  “What happened?” Renner asked.

  Quinn didn’t initially respond. She was too busy peering into the glassy eyes of one of the frozen dead. And she got lost in her thoughts. Any one of them could be Samantha, she feared, and she choked up. Forcing herself to look away.

  “They were prepared,” Quinn said, glancing at her boots. “For Crissakes, they were all dressed for the cold.”

  “But maybe not this cold,” Renner said. “Temp’s dropped to seventy-friggin’ below. If we didn’t have this armor? We’d be popsicles too.”

  Quinn turned and bumped into a frozen woman who crashed to the ground, disintegrating into thousands of frozen tiny blue and red curds. Dropping to her knees, Quinn reached down a hand and spread the pieces of ice out, wiping away the woman’s outline. Overcome with emotion, she set out, head down, walking gingerly between the rest of the frozen civilians until she was able to haul herself up over a small mountain of ice.

  Quinn and Renner picked their way across the deep-frozen ground, struggling as the wind picked up. Periodically, they spotted strange lights out over the ice in various directions. What might have been torches in some instances, and spotlights in others … and then the ground began rumbling.

  The ice underfoot began cracking and Quinn lost her footing.

  She fell to the side and Renner grabbed her arm as—

  WHOOSH!

  Something immense slashed through the air overhead.

  A machine of some kind.

  A drone.

  No … too large for that, bigger than anything Quinn had seen before on Earth, a massive construct with a series of green lights blinking on its underside.

  The outline of the craft was barely visible against the black sky. The form arced around and Quinn stared up, waiting for it to fire at them. But then it broke off and flew out away from them, over the frozen landscape.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked.

  “A lucky break,” Renner answered.

  “We didn’t do it,” Quinn said, deflating. “If the Syndicate’s still here that means we didn’t go back far enough. We didn’t make it to the days before the invasion.”

  “You don’t know that yet,” Renner answered. “Maybe that’s one of ours up there.”

  Quinn nodded, praying that Renner was right, the two watching silently as the shape vanished over the horizon. They moved in the other direction, cresting a rise. The darkness was overwhelming, but their eyes had adjusted as much as they could, allowing them to see the outline of buildings in the distance.

  A pitch black skyline.

  What looked like a small city.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, they pulled themselves up onto a bridge that had collapsed into the frozen water. The cement was covered in a thick layer of snow and ice that made forward progress exceedingly difficult.

  “Goddamn bridge is as slippery as a trout,” Renner said.

  Quinn braced herself against a light pole and looked up. There was a road sign a few feet away that had fallen from its perch and was lying in the middle of the road. Quinn advanced and brushed away ice and snow. The sign was marked with the words “Tampa,” and “St. Petersburg,” and Clearwater – All Exits.”

  Renner looked up and muttered, “If this is Florida, that Jimmy Buffet guy was seriously full of shit.”

  “There’s no way this is Florida,” Quinn replied.

  “Maybe it’s another psyop,” Renner mused. “Like when we saw those bodies buried under the frozen lava on the asteroid. Maybe the scuds are messin’ with our minds ‘cos they’re scared of what we’ll find here.”

  Quinn considered this, wondering whether everything they were seeing might indeed be a mirage, or maybe an illusion brought about by whatever had happened back on the temporal ship. She continued moving forward, inching across the slippery bridge. After an indeterminable period of time the pair dropped down from the other end of the bridge and shuttled across downtown city streets, moving between stands of deserted, darkened buildings that stood sentry over the frozen city.

  The wind continued to gust as they struck out and around abandoned cars and trucks, navigating around the bodies of hundreds of frozen civilians. Quinn was the first to notice it, the telltale signs of conflict: blackened trenches hidden under a crust of ice, unexploded ordnance lying scattered in snowy mounds, black bloodtrails and spatter barely visible under pools of frozen water and on the facades of nearby buildings. Quinn dropped to her haunches and stared down at the corpse of a man who was lying partially frozen in a block of ice. The man’s mouth was tugged wide in a silent scream, a machete still clenched in his left hand. Quinn grabbed the machete and broke it free, the man’s fingers shattering like icicles.

  “I’m thinking there was a fight here,” Renner said.

  Quinn flashed the machete at him. “Ya think?”

  “Maybe we fucked up,” Renner said. “Maybe we went back into some – what did Cody call it? A loop? Maybe we went back to some other loop where the planet got iced.”

  Quinn remained silent. She had more pressing concerns. Straightening herself up to her full height, she held out her arms and felt her extremities slowly going numb as the wind continued to howl. She checked her helmet’s temperature gauge. Eighty-five below zero. “At some point our armor’s gonna give,” she said. “It’s already starting to feel brittle.”

  At the same time a gust of wind hit her, Quinn’s Marine sense spiked. There was a disturbance in the air. She closed her eyes, tapping her helmet, amplifying the sound. There it was again.

  A note hung in the air.

  As if the world’s largest wind chime had been struck.

  Renner hadn’t seemed to notice it.

  Before she could utter a word to him, there was a flash of light from somewhere down the street.

  She heard the rush of air and then—

  WHAM!

  Something slammed into Renner’s right arm and he fell to the ground, screaming.

  2

  NEW FRIENDS

  A gush of red spurted from Renner’s wrist. Quinn saw that a quarter-sized hole had been punched through the man’s armor, which was frozen and fractured near a joint at his wrist and hand, spiderwebbed like a shattered windshield. The armor had been compromised by the extreme temperatures. Almost immediately, the cold seized at his exposed flesh, Quinn watching as the skin around the wound began turning the color of ripe blueberries.

  “IT’S IN ME!” Renner screamed, clawing at his arm.

  Reflexively, Quinn grabbed Renner and pulled him toward a building as gunfire rang out. Bullets hissed and snapped and stitched the ground all around them. Quinn and Renner fell behind a junked sedan.

  “IT’S BURNING!” Renner shouted. “IT FEELS LIKE MY ARM’S ON FIRE!”

  The flesh around the wound was mangled and black. Quinn inched a finger down and tugged on the shattered armor. She could see that the blackness was using the wound as a base of operations, spreading over every inch of exposed flesh, working its way up Renner’s arm. God in heaven, she thought, he was being frozen from the inside out! In seconds, the blackness would likely cover the entirety of his body and suck the life out of him. Her eyes found his and then Renner’s
gaze wandered to the machete. There was a look of recognition on his face.

  “Do it,” Renner said. “We’re pinned down so do it. It’s the only way.”

  Measuring her weight, Quinn pulled back and brought the machete down near his elbow, slicing it off in one violent motion. The severed portion of his already brittle armor fell to the ground and shattered like glass. The wound immediately stopped bleeding, the puckered flesh seemingly frost-cauterized by the extreme cold, the margins around the amputated area turning bright blue.

  Quinn grabbed the edge of the torn armor and wrapped the semi-pliable material tight like a tourniquet. Then she threw Renner over one shoulder and carried him through the shattered front door on a nearby building as gunfire continued to echo.

  The temperature inside the building was a balmy five degrees below zero as Quinn slid Renner to the ground. His face was visible under the helmet, the color seeping away from his skin. The bastard was tough, but even he couldn’t fight off the shock. His eyes widened.

  “BEHIND YOU!” he yelled.

  Quinn wheeled around to see a figure clothed in what looked like a biohazard suit, clutching a heavily wrapped rifle. Pure instinct, that’s the only thing that saved Quinn’s ass. The gun came up, but Quinn was a hair faster, hurling the machete—

  WHACK!

  Into the figure’s chest, opening a hole in the biohazard suit.

  The figure staggered back, dropping the weapon, grasping at the machete.

  Quinn ran raggedly forward, lowering her shoulder. She slammed into the figure, knocking it back out onto the ice. The figure shrieked as the biohazard suit was torn wide open. Quinn watched as the figure, and now she could see that it was a man, began freezing from the inside out.

  The figure convulsed, the same black coloration spreading over his flesh, covering his face. Quinn removed the machete from the man’s chest as he twisted on the ground. She spotted forms darting down the street. Dropping low, she gripped the machete in one hand, the other retrieving the frozen man’s gun. Then she crouch-ran laterally, using a cluster of cars for cover. She dropped behind a small vehicle and checked the man’s fallen rifle which was padded, wrapped with what looked like several layers of some kind of insulation.