Breach of Trust: Breach of Faith Book Four Read online

  Breach of Trust

  Breach of Faith Book Four

  Daniel Gibbs

  Gary T. Stevens

  Contents

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  Also Available from Daniel Gibbs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Epilogue

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  Acknowledgments

  Breach of Trust by Daniel Gibbs and Gary T. Stevens

  Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Gibbs

  Visit Daniel Gibb’s website at www.danielgibbsauthor.net

  Cover by Jeff Brown Graphics—www.jeffbrowngraphics.com

  Additional Illustrations by Joel Steudler—www.joelsteudler.com

  Editing by Beth at BZhercules.com

  3D Art by Benoit Leonard

  This book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permissions please contact [email protected].

  Get Two free & Exclusive David Gibbs Books

  FREE BOOK: Read the story of Levi Cohen and his heroic fight at the first battle of Canaan in Echoes of War: Stand Firm.

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  Echoes of War

  Book 1 - Fight the Good Fight

  Book 2 - Strong and Courageous

  Book 3 - So Fight I

  Book 4 - Gates of Hell

  Book 5 - Keep the Faith

  Book 6 - Run the Gauntlet

  Book 7 - Finish the Fight

  Breach of Faith

  (With Gary T. Stevens)

  Book 1 - Breach of Peace

  Book 2 - Breach of Faith

  Book 3 - Breach of Duty

  Book 4 - Breach of Trust

  Prologue

  Thyssenbourg

  Hestia, Independent Space

  19 October 2546

  Sixteen Years Ago

  The roar of weapons fire and the repeating rhythm of mortar blasts echoed through the air. Smoke clouds from lit fires and burning buildings billowed into the skyline of Thyssenbourg. The battles engulfing the capital city of Hestia seemed poised to burn the entire place down.

  Tia Nguyen's concerns weren't for the city but for her cell. They were outnumbered and confined to their position in a company retail store. Fallen shelving acted as barricades and defensive cover from the weapons fire coming into the building.

  The fierce fighting's effect was clear on the appearance of her people, exhausted and wounded. She had been fortunate so far. Her only wound was a small cut that tore the material from her urban camo suit's shoulder, creating a mark of angry red on her olive-yellow skin.

  The same couldn't be said for her friend Linh Khánh. Tia's hands were sticky with Linh's blood as she finished tying the tourniquet around the stump that remained of Linh's right arm. Linh's face, usually a shade darker than Tia's skin tone, was pale. Her expression twisted from pain.

  "Comrade Tia!" The high-pitched voice of Ngoc Soun drew her attention to the teenage fighter, the youngest in her cell. He indicated the commlink set, one of many provided to them by the League of Sol. "Comrade Guillaume and Comrade Thaksin are no longer transmitting!" Panic was evident in his voice.

  She felt a stab of worry for her uncle, Guillaume, but even greater concern for their cause. Everything was going wrong. The megacorps' security forces weren't supposed to be in the city in such force, at least according to their best intel. Their carefully-planned revolution was falling apart, and nobody knew why.

  Tia heard a clatter nearby and turned in time to see a grenade clink off a shelf and roll toward her and the others. With only seconds to act, Tia leaned over and snatched the deadly device into her right hand. Without even winding her arm up, she lobbed the grenade back toward their enemies. She only had enough time to duck back down before it exploded, raining fragments of metal on the turned-over retail shelving.

  From the entrance of the store came a brief electronic squawk. A male voice spoke with an off-worlder accent. "You have no route of escape. Surrender immediately."

  Tia cupped her hands and screamed, "Go to hell!" at the top of her voice. The fury in her heart matched her defiant words. We've been their slaves for long enough! We will be free!

  The enemy replied with bullets. Tia peeked over her cover and saw figures in tactical gear moving forward with heavy weapons, their outfits marked with the stylized emblem of Rigault Corporate Security. The enemy was making their push.

  Tia picked up her rifle, a League-provided charged plasma model. "Here they come, comrades!" she shouted while setting her weapon's barrel on the shelf. She squeezed the trigger. The gun converted gas into plasma rapidly, creating a stream of plasma bursts that acted like solid-matter bullets. They tore through armor and burnt the flesh within.

  The others joined her for what looked to be their last stand. Their fire was not always accurate, nor did it need to be at the shortening range. Corporate troops fell in their advance, one by one.

  But there were more.

  The enemy swarmed over their barriers, and it became a free-for-all. Tia's comrades might have yet fled, but none would abandon their friends to do so. The whole unit fought in their places, shooting and using their weapons as clubs when necessary.

  Tia did the same. She shot a man scrambling over the shelving in front of her, taking him point blank between the eyes. As he fell dead, his buddy came up on her side. She brought the rifle over toward him and fired, but missed as he ducked under the barrel. She fell back to avoid his bayonet, which left another cut on her instead of stabbing her through the collarbone. The extra room allowed her t
o squeeze the trigger once more and put the man down.

  Cries, screams, and shouts filled the air, from comrade and foe alike. Tia fired again and again, draining her rifle down to its last wisps of gas, constantly moving with the fight. The battle became unreal to her senses. Everything was running as if it were a holovid, not bloody real-life warfare.

  A familiar voice broke into an agonized scream. Ngoc fell, a bayonet buried into his gut by a large man. There was a burst of flame, and a bullet tore through the young man's chest. His body fell to the ground, lifeless.

  Tia's gun swept over before Ngoc's killer could change target. Plasma seared through the man's hip and arm until he fell over with a strangled cry.

  A hot pain came to Tia's side, where strips of metal tore through fabric and flesh. She whirled around to find an enemy soldier's flechette shotgun aiming for her head.

  Another plasma shot filled the air. The soldier's head flash-fried, and he fell over.

  Linh's remaining arm was holding up her rifle. She drew in a hard breath and tried to smile at Tia. "Always watch your back, Comrade," Linh admonished her weakly.

  "Thank you." Tia's abused ears heard only distant combat sounds. We got them all. We won! Her heart lifted with the victory. She turned to congratulate her comrades on the well-fought battle.

  She found only corpses.

  Ngoc, dead from the bayonet and gunshot wounds. Quang was on his belly, his eyes staring vacantly at the ground while some smoke still rose from the shots to his back and head. Thuần lay beside Mathilde; the dear lovers were fighting back to back when their end came. Nhung's hands still clasped his rifle, with his bayonet plunged into a Rigault trooper's heart just as said trooper's bayonet was in his. Kanda's eyes remained wide with disbelief and fear, and a face that Tia long associated with sweet smiles and good humor was marred by blackened flesh. Other wounds showed on her body; she had not died quickly.

  All gone. Her heart started to still. My entire cell.

  "Tia!"

  Linh's warning came just in time. The man who'd killed Ngoc was reaching for his hip. Tia rushed up to him and slammed his face with the butt of her rifle to stun him. His hand released its grip on the pistol he'd been drawing.

  Tia bent down and picked up the weapon. It was a Rigault Heavy Industries plasma assault pistol, and not an ordinary model. The stock had the fine texturing and coloring of finished wood while the plasma charging chamber glowed softly with blue light. This was not a subtle weapon, nor a cheap one. She turned it and found the stylized R of the company etched on the butt, another irregular feature.

  A low chuckle brought her attention to the gun's owner. The man was still conscious. He was a man of African descent, built powerfully, and his deep blue eyes glinted viciously at her as they met the storm-gray of her own eyes. "You haven't won," he said, a sneer forming on his mouth. His foreign accent was French in tone. Tia guessed he was New Gabonese. Maybe even a Rigault himself.

  He continued speaking. "In fact, you've already lost, Hestian. You and your little revolution are dead. Give it up already."

  "We haven't lost yet," she insisted. She brought the pistol up and pulled the trigger.

  The blast seared through the man's right eye. His head fell back, and Tia saw no further movement.

  She turned back to her dead comrades and Linh, who remained on her knees, pale and hurting from her lost arm and other wounds. The grief came in a great wave, crashing through instinctive disbelief to smother her senses. The tears flowed freely from her eyes at all of the memories of times that they wouldn't share again.

  An electronic tone came from Ngoc's body, forcing her out back to her surroundings. She went over to him and pulled the cell's radio set from his belt. "Who is this?" she asked.

  "Felipe," came the answer.

  Tia breathed in relief. "Comrade Felipe. You are alive."

  "Barely. They ambushed us as we came through the park. They had our route mined. Mined, Tia! We were betrayed!"

  Grief and fury warred for their place in her heart, adding to Tia's frustration. How did they know?! Who betrayed our cause?! "Most of the cell is gone," she informed him. "Only Linh and I survive, and Linh is hurt. Have you heard from the party leaders?"

  "Comrade Guillaume and Comrade Thaksin have been captured. Our headquarters was overrun half an hour ago. We… " His voice choked up. "Comrade, the battle is over. We've lost. They were waiting for us; they knew everything. We have to flee."

  "Where? Flee where?" she demanded. "They will hunt us throughout the countryside, and any who give us shelter will suffer! If we stay and fight, maybe—"

  "If we stay and fight, we are captured! Some of us must escape, Comrade, to become the kernel of a reborn movement!" Felipe's voice grew in pitch, booming over the line. "Comrade Raymundo's cell took a ship from the spaceport. If we run now, we should be able to get out to the L5 point and jump before they get us. We can find shelter with the League, or other systems, and plan our return!"

  "I am not fleeing!" Tia insisted. Fury started to win out over the grief. "Our comrades died for this chance, Felipe! We've put years of work into this! All of our hopes for freedom! We can't just run!"

  "We have to, dammit! Or all hope for liberation dies with us! Think of what it will do to the liberation movement if we are all killed or captured!"

  Tia knew full well what he meant. The mega-corps' usual humiliations for strikers and industrial saboteurs would be amplified. They would be marched through the streets of each town, publicly beaten, likely whipped, held up to forced ridicule, eventually sent to labor camps or executed… it all depended on how sadistic and vicious the Hestian Business Council's Security Directorate decided to get, and they were quite capable of the worst.

  Tia's eyes met Linh's. Looking at her friend and her condition clinched it. She frowned and thought she might crush the radio with her grip. "We're on our way."

  * * *

  Millerton Colony Resocialization Camp

  Millerton, League of Sol

  18 November 2558

  Five Years Ago

  The teal-clad orderlies were big men. One had the coppery tone and long dark hair of a Pacific Islander, the other was Caucasian with reddish hair. Their size allowed them to easily push along the gurney, and their presence was mostly due to the defiant figure chained to it.

  From his place in the lab, Doctor Oskar Kiderlein's eyes went to the woman on the gurney. Her dark skin and facial structure were African, and in her curses, he heard the Anglo-African accent of the colonists assigned to the Millerton Colony by the Colonial Settlement Bureau. Her head was shaved completely. She was either a new prisoner at the resocialization camp or a repeat offender vexing the Social Defense authorities.

  Given her presence and behavior, Oskar surmised it was the latter. He surprised himself with the surge of pride he felt at that defiance. The idea of being proud of anti-social behavior was in itself anti-social, and something he'd been raised to avoid and despise. How much things have changed.

  The woman's eyes glared hatefully at Oskar's colleague, Dr. Jan Breivik. Oskar looked to the man with the mixed feelings of affection and disgust that his old friend now stirred up in him. Breivik was looking over a digital tablet with the woman's record on it while the first orderly read from a file. "Brigitte Tam'si. Repeated anti-social behavior. Actively resists resocialization despite repeated examinations and rehabilitative attempts."

  "Stuff all that!" the woman cried. "I won't be your good little drone! No more! Shock me and hit me all you want!" With the look in her eye and the way her voice sounded, Oskar figured she was already giving herself up for dead. This was the courage of someone who'd already suffered the worst and had nothing left to fear.

  Breivik predictably ignored her. He spoke to the orderlies. "Thank you for your assistance. Please bring her over here and be on your way. You will be called when I am done."

  The orderlies moved the gurney into the operating area and departed.

  "I do
n't care what you do to me, I'm tired of it! Just finish it already!"

  Oskar took a breath and stepped toward them. He knew how this would go.

  "Oskar." Breivik glanced in his direction. "I know how you feel about this, my friend, but it will be the start of a better Society, I promise," he said, his tone one Oskar knew to intend reassurance. "Would you mind getting the anesthetic? It will make this easier."

  "Of course." Oskar casually went over to the table and picked up the anesthetic aero-injector. He considered the item in his hand and his coming actions. Once he started, he couldn't afford to stop or give up. He would be an enemy of Society, and the defenders of Society would show no mercy.

  The thought chilled him, but with that chill came a strange excitement. He was really going to do this. He was going to act, not just think. After all the terrible things he'd seen, he was finally going to do something about it.

  I'm sorry, Jan.