Guardians Inc.:Thundersword (Guardians Incorporated #2) Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where real life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

  Copyright© 2012 by Julian Rosado-Machain.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Julian Rosado-Machain / Trueba Interactive S.C. Homero 136 Desp. 601, col. Chapultepec Morales. Mexico City, Mexico. C.P. 11570

  http://www.GuardiansInc.com

  Rosado-Machain, Julian.

  Guardians Inc: Thundersword (Book two of the Guardians Inc. Saga).

  p.cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4675-3334-8

  1. Fantasy-Fiction. 2. Science Fiction-Fiction 3. Conspiracy Theory-Fiction 4. Historical Fiction-Fiction 5. Adventure-Fiction 6. Robots-Fiction 7. Magical creatures-Fiction 8. Magic-Fiction

  Cover by Fabian Cobos.

  Published by Trueba Interactive in Polanco, México.

  http://www.Trueba.com.mx

  To my brothers Leo the scifi freak, Mac the fantasy freak and my sister Tere…..just the freak.

  Family above all.

  Guardians Inc.: Thundersword (Book two of the Guardians Inc. Saga).

  Part 1

  All for One

  Outflanked

  Thomas crouched behind the column base, making sure that his legs were completely protected by the rock. One of the centipede bolts the Azure Guards used with their crossbows dug itself deeply into the rock behind him. The black-and-yellow centipede came to life almost immediately and began to pull itself out from the rock.

  A puff of pulverized marble came out from the broken column behind him as another bolt embedded itself. As imposing as the ruins of the Caracalla Baths were, the eighteen-hundred-year-old rocks where soft and brittle and spidery cracks ran from each hole the centipede bolts made.

  As more bolts cracked the walls and columns around him, Thomas knew that the Guardians would have to deal with very angry Rome officials.

  Thomas crushed the centipedes with his boot before the bugs could attack him. He wasn’t going to let eight inches of poisonous insect finish what his grandfather’s Azure Guard had failed to do when they were bolts.

  Tony landed beside him with a thump. His chest was splattered with squashed centipede; the bolts either exploded on impact or bounced off the new body armor developed by the Guardians’ engineering team.

  “Remind me why we left Henri at the Mansion?” Tony yelled as a couple of bolts impacted the stone he had just jumped over. He squashed the animals as they came to life. “It’s the middle of the day.”

  “So?” Tony lifted his compact dart gun and blindly sprayed toward the enemy.

  “People would be a little spooked, don’t you think?”

  “Spooked?” A centipede appeared from the top of the rock where they were hiding, and Tony blew it away with the dart gun, splattering them both with centipede goo. “How do you think I feel right now? They’re shooting bugs at us, Thomas! Bugs! And we only brought these peashooters with us!” He shot blindly again, yelling in frustration.

  Thomas shared in that feeling. When he had joined the Guardians last summer, Doctor Franco had told him that he was a Cypher. Only a few Cyphers emerged every couple of hundred years, and only Cyphers could read and decipher the signs needed to keep the world in harmony. His grandpa Morgan, another Cypher, and the Azure Guards had beat them to this sign for the Book of Concord in the Baths of Caracalla as they had done almost three months before in Aoudaghost, Mauritania.

  The Azure Guard where now a little closer to gaining control and influence history for the next five hundred years.

  Thomas already knew what his grandfather and the Azure Guards would do if they controlled the Book of Concord. It was a roadmap of the future, and with it they would make sure to tilt the eternal conflict between technology and Magic in Magic’s favor.

  It was already happening. The powerful Oracle on Earth wrote the book every five hundred years and had increased the Magic in the world. The most precise technological instruments were already feeling its influence. From NIST’s Atomic clock to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, reports of minor malfunctions from the most advanced labs in the world had begun to flood the Guardians’ command and control center.

  Thankfully, none of the malfunctions had caused any casualties so far, but Thomas knew that it was only a matter of time. Humanity depended on its technology. What would happen when the Internet failed? What kind of chaos would ensue when electricity stopped flowing?

  His grandfather believed he would help bring a new Magical age upon the world. The Warmaster, the leader of the Azure Guards, had convinced Morgan that hunger, war, and even death would be eliminated, and he had even given him magical proof. Morgan’s seventy-year-old body had been magically rejuvenated to his late twenties. His grandfather had been given what all men dreamed of, and by doing that the Warmaster had gained a Cypher to his cause.

  Through their abilities Morgan and Thomas could read and understand any language, they could break any code, but more importantly, they could sense and understand the Magical signs the Oracle left as clues to the Book of Concord.

  The Warmaster’s plan of a Magical world was a great, brilliant dream, but at what cost?

  Billions of humans would die.

  A purely magical world would not be able to sustain humanity, a new Dark Age would descend on the Earth, and the Guardians were sure that the Wraith, the ancient enemies of all life, would gain a foothold upon the world.

  Attuned to Chaos Magic, the Wraith could not survive for long in a world permeated with the order technology brought.

  Technology was the best defense against the Wraith. Thomas and the Guardians had stopped a Wraith incursion already. The Wraith city of Ormagra had been sealed off completely, but the Guardians had lost Tasha Hergelin to them. One of the most powerful Magic users in the world and the second highest level Guardian had become ensnared by them, transformed by their Chaos energies into a creature of nightmare.

  Tasha was to be the Wraith’s leader in the war to come.

  Thomas still felt the pain of losing Tasha. He had had a crush on her, maybe even loved her. She had used his feelings for her and his Cypher powers to transform into a Wraith, but he couldn’t shake off blaming himself for what had happened to her.

  He still hoped that somehow Tasha would return to them.

  Maybe even to him.

  “Get that thing!” Tony yelled beside him bringing Thomas back to the fight.

  Thomas shot a dart at a centipede that was racing through the ground in a beeline for them while Tony let go of another wild spray above the rocks.

  “Stop wasting darts! They’re gone!” Elise shouted from behind another rock. Doctor Franco had forbidden her to use Magic in this mission, and she had held back with the Tech team that arrived minutes before to cordon off the area from the rest of Rome.

  “Oh yeah?” Tony yelled back. “And how do you know that?”

  “I saw them go in the baths,” Bolswaithe chimed in as he walked right out in the open. The butler was wearing the same Guardian-issued fatigues and armor vest as the rest of them, although Thomas knew he probably didn’t need them because Bolswaithe was a robot. Pieces of centipede and green goo covered Bolswaithe’s chest and arms whe
re he had been hit by the living bolts. “They’re gone,” he said, and gone with them was the third clue to the Book of Concord for sure.

  “So there.” Tony stood up. “Let’s see the damage.”

  The baths built by Emperor Caracalla in 212 AD were among the most beautiful ruins left from the Roman Empire. They covered about twenty-five hectares, and its main bath building could hold about 1,600 bathers every day when it was in operation. Even today, the ruins were sometimes used as a stage for open-air opera concerts.

  Guardians Inc.’s Watchmen Teams and the Rome Police had closed the baths to the public claiming some minor emergency, which allowed Thomas to search for the sign. But somehow, Grandpa had beat him to it.

  Again.

  Their firefight with the Azure Guards had pinned them in place while Grandpa decoded the sign and made an escape through the inner buildings of the bath, just like in Mauritania.

  Like them, the Azure Guards had a quick method of transportation, but Thomas had to either find a door connected to Pervagus Mansion or walk two streets on the left to enter its main gate. Pervagus Mansion was connected to everywhere in the world, and all Thomas and other Guardians Inc. employees needed to do was walk through any street and two streets on the left the entrance to main gate of the Mansion would appear. How strange it had been the first time he had walked that private corridor to find a mansion fit for a European noble in the middle of Carlsbad, California. Bolswaithe assured him that it wasn’t Magic; instead the Mansion used a very advanced system based on quantum mechanics.

  A system which, of course, Bolswaithe had tried to explain to him, but as always, he had understood only a quarter of the words.

  Unlike the Guardians, the Azure Guards relied purely on Magic. They opened magical portals on specific walls or areas where a remnant of Magic or a minor flux line was already present. A couple of years ago their reach had been limited, but with the Oracle present in Earth, Magic was becoming more pervasive and places where Magic portals could be opened had multiplied.

  It was all interconnected to the balance between Magic and technology, and the more Magic in the world, the more technology failed and vice versa.

  Elise had tried to explain how the Magic portals worked, but if Thomas didn’t get the mechanics and physics involved in their own mode of transportation, Magic was even more confusing.

  “This way.” Bolswaithe led them through the entrance of the baths; remnants of the mosaics that adorned the walls were scattered on the ground along the ruins.

  They reached a small doorway; the small chain that restricted access to the public was broken.

  “This is right beside the ‘Laconicum,’ the Steam Room,” Bolswaithe offered. “It was probably a storage room of some kind.”

  “So they had steam rooms?” Tony was on-point, weapon ready, and peeking into the doorway.

  “And warm and cold pools, masseuses, doctors, a gymnasium…”

  Thomas liked having Bolswaithe as a friend. The robot was an excellent chef, a great tourist guide, and an accomplished bodyguard. Bolswaithe also had a direct connection to the Library Computer net and the satellites orbiting Earth. With him by their side, they could never get lost and had access to all the knowledge in the Library Intranet.

  The small corridor opened up into a large room. The roof, like all the others on the ruins, was long gone, but the floor still had the original orange- and white-tiled motifs. Dozens of doves walked around the room pecking food from the floor.

  “Anything?” Elise asked. She could sense the remnants of the Oracle’s Magic.

  “Here's a bug,” Tony said with distaste. A centipede was scurrying toward them, and he aimed his gun, but Elise was faster. In a swift move, she captured the centipede in a glass jar. She lifted it up to her face to take a closer look. The little beast clacked its pincer-like jaws at her.

  “New pet?” Tony asked with a grimace.

  “Kiran asked me to catch one alive if I could.” Elise placed the jar in her backpack. “You know how she loves animals...Baboon.”

  Tony scoffed. It was bad enough that Killjoy called him “Baboon” every time they practiced, but ever since Elise had began taking martial arts classes with them and earned the moniker of “Wasp,” she rubbed it in every time she could. Thomas couldn’t help but snort at his friends.

  Thomas walked around the room trying to figure out what the sign the Oracle had left for the Book of Concord was, and although he could sense the Oracle’s fading signature, the actual sign was gone.

  He nodded. Grandpa had beaten him again, and his “friend”—the Warmaster—now had an advantage over them.

  Two signs to the one he had decoded in Hussahassalin. His grandfather was one step ahead of him at finding the Book of Concord.

  “Over here, Thomas,” Bolswaithe called from a corner.

  A small stiletto was embedded in the wall holding an envelope with the words: For Thomas. He recognized Grandpa’s handwriting immediately—the elongated capitals and the slight angle he gave to each letter. He reached for the envelope, but Tony stopped him.

  “Might be a trap,” Tony cautioned.

  “I sense no magic coming from it,” Elise said.

  “It might not be magical.”

  “There is no apparent chemical tampering,” Bolswaithe offered. “No traces of biological venom or toxin either.”

  Tony opened his hands at the butler. “Now tell me how you know that?” he asked. “Did you take it to a lab already?”

  Thomas and Elise knew that Bolswaithe was probably the most advanced robot in the world, but at his request, they kept his identity to themselves. Tony and Henri, the grotesque who guarded Pervagus Mansion along with his brothers, remained oblivious, but Tony was getting wiser every day, and he’d already said something about Bolswaithe’s abilities “not being natural.”

  Bolswaithe patted his goggles nonchalantly. “Built-in Spectrophotometer.”

  “Really...” Tony grabbed his own goggles and checked them against Bolswaithe’s. “Same model, same brand, but mine are only tinted. Why would yours be different?” He flashed Thomas a puzzled look.

  Bolswaithe extended his goggles to Tony. “You can check the results yourself if you want. Just use the transient absorption instead of the time-resolved Spectroscopy, and be ready to compensate for inter-modulation when using the four wave mixed setting. Just be careful with the feedback, or it might blind you for a couple of hours. Nothing permanent.”

  Tony froze short of taking the goggles, and Bolswaithe lifted an eyebrow. Thomas suppressed a giggle.

  “You…ah…” Tony hesitated. “You double-checked?”

  “Triple-checked. There are no traces of chemical or biological agents or contaminants.”

  Tony pulled back his hand. “Then we’ll take your word for it.” He smacked his lips together. “Go ahead, Thomas.”

  Thomas pulled the stiletto from the wall and handed it over to Tony. He was more interested in whatever message his grandfather had sent him than the little dagger. He pulled out the white card from the envelope and opened it. It was a simple message written in the same elegant handwriting.

  Happy 16th, Tom.

  Love,

  Gramps

  P.S. Enjoy and be careful!

  Thomas’s eyes watered, but he held back his tears. His birthday had been a couple of months ago, and only those close to him in Guardians Inc. had thrown him a little celebration. He had moved from his hometown in Ohio to Carlsbad, California to live with his grandfather after his parents disappeared. They were going on a cruise and were never heard from again. Thomas had received a couple of e-mails from his friends in Ohio, but he'd attended less than a month at the high school at Carlsbad—not enough time to make a lasting relationship at all. In the nine months since he had become a Cypher and joined the Guardians his life had been completely absorbed by the company. Just learning the basics of the seven-thousand-year-old organization was daunting. Most people spent years of study just
to become Guardians with the most basic clearance. Others like Tony, whose family had been with the Guardians since the Renaissance, had lived in the organization all their lives and still didn’t have the clearance or knowledge Thomas had as a Cypher. Working in Pervagus Library, with its unlimited access to all human knowledge helped, but part of him still wished for the simpler life he had before, away from secrets he wasn’t supposed to know, or the burden they brought now that he was at the forefront of Guardians Inc.

  Above all, he missed Gramps.

  Something else was at the bottom of the envelope. He turned it over and a key fell on his palm. An old key—its teeth were a little bit eroded from use, but Thomas knew that it still worked fine.

  It was a wonderful gift, and Thomas smiled in a way he hadn’t smiled since becoming the Cypher.

  “So?” Elise asked. “What is it?”

  Thomas held the key for all to see. “I got a car,” he said, beaming.

  An Infinitesimal Change

  “So, is it an old car?” Elise asked as she stepped over the armor carrier bag the engineers had given each one of them, and then pressed the release button on her shoulder. The armor lost cohesion and its scales fell neatly inside the bag.

  Wearing the armor was like being encased on a magnetic building toy, like the ones Thomas had as a kid with a big magnet base he’d built by adding little, metal rods, ball bearings, and flakes into a sculpture. The armor worked exactly like that except he didn’t have to attach each of the scales; the scales remembered their place in the armor and they reattached themselves when the shoulder unit was activated.

  As always Bolswaithe had begun to explain to Thomas how the armor functioned, but Thomas stopped him the moment he started talking about the Einstein-de Haas effect and the Biot-Savart Law.

  “So, it’s like one of those magnet toys?” Thomas asked and Bolswaithe nodded. Thomas felt bad every time he had to interrupt Bolswaithe, but sometimes his explanations were like listening to a lecture about how a Formula 1 car automatic transmission worked…in Latin. And the one thing his Cypher powers didn’t do was translate spoken languages. He could read Chinese, Finnish, or even Egyptian hieroglyphics, but he could only understand spoken English, and thanks to his grandmother’s heritage and his time living in California, most of the curse words in Spanish.