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  Violent Wonder

  Universal Wilderness: Book One

  Fredrick Niles

  Fever Garden Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 by Fredrick Niles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  VIOLENT WONDER

  First edition. May 1, 2020.

  ISBN: 978-1-950021-02-4

  Fever Garden Publishing

  Cover design by

  TheCoverCollection.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Kilo Base

  2. Escape

  3. At the Void Gate

  4. Adrift

  5. Marauders

  6. The Signal

  7. Boarding Party

  8. Encounter

  9. 49

  10. The Choice

  11. The Flesh Weaver

  12. A Light at the End

  Epilogue

  Also by Fredrick Niles

  About the Author

  “Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here.”

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  “There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal.”

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

  1

  Kilo Base

  A storm of bullets and energy charges hit the massive support beam Raquel had taken cover behind and chewed it into dust. She choked as the cloud of particles hit her in the face and sent her ducking and stumbling to the next pillar, which was then blown apart as well.

  Short and trim with a perpetual air of wonderment, Raquel Fisher was less than pleased so far with the results of what should have been a quick little snatch-and-grab. However, when one of her companions, King, had needlessly tripped an alarm while trying to hack into Kilo Base’s monitoring system, the snatch-and-grab had quickly devolved into a smack-and-grapple.

  The whole order of events pissed her off. King should have been just fine being guided by Byzzie over the comms like they had agreed upon—the wiry little 20-something with charcoal skin and frizzy hair had been giving them clear and concise directions around Kilo’s maze of security—but King had a paranoid streak to him. If someone was going to be packing a gun, it had to be him, even if he wasn’t the most qualified to use it. Someone has to negotiate their way out of a tense situation with silver-smugglers in Olympian’s underbelly? Sign King up. Shit, the man wouldn’t even let anyone else cook their goddam dinners. Granted, he was the best cook onboard the Leopold, the sleek space-corvette they’d been putting around in for the last seven years, but that was beside the point.

  The point was: unless King trusted someone to do something important, he would insist on doing it himself, even if the captain said otherwise.

  And now, thanks to him, Raquel found herself in the exact situation the chain-of-command was supposed to keep her out of. As soon as the alarm had been tripped, the loud clanking of service hatches flying open could be heard all around the hangar they had been hunkered down in.

  The security response happened automatically. King was just supposed to have run a bypass on the heavy set of blast doors that had been barring their way into C-section, an authorized-personnel-only wing of Kilo Base; and as soon as he had botched his little maneuver, no-less than five combat synths stepped out of their cramped little quarters set directly into the walls on both the top and bottom levels of the hangar. Each synth was armed with a semi-automatic NR-19, a heavy-duty energy projectile weapon that interfaced with the artificial neural network stored in the base of their steel skulls, and even though their default setting when initiated was a “cautionary stand-by” mode, all it took for them to be switched into “hunter-killer” mode was a single person sitting at a security terminal hitting a button. And that person had done exactly that.

  Naturally, the very live surveillance system King had been trying to hack zeroed in on the small group of infiltrators almost immediately, and some pencil-pusher who was probably still holding his morning coffee in his other hand had almost instantly flipped the switch to turn the five combat synths from armored coat-racks into unstoppable killing machines.

  “I’m sorry,” King yelled from behind a giant metal bulkhead that seemed to be faring far better than the concrete pillars Raquel had tried. Ritz was there with him, looking simultaneously worried and pissed off.

  To his credit, King sounded genuinely sorry.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Raquel yelled back at him. She had finally managed to find some secure cover behind a metal crate full of something solid enough to absorb the impact from the NR-19 rounds. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much time. The standard maneuver for five combat synths was for two to hold their positions and provide cover while the other three quickly closed in and flanked their attackers. Raquel had ten-seconds at most.

  Firing blindly around the corner, she took her own weapon—a compact 30-round submachine gun—and hosed the direction the shots were coming from. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard a sudden gurgling grinding noise, and the number of energy rounds chipping away at her cover seemed to drop dramatically.

  Must have hit a fluid line, she thought. Her attackers were heavily armored, but if the deadly .45 rounds she had loaded into her submachine gun could find their way through a crack or wrinkle in the heavy titanium plates the wore for armor, then the bullets would bounce around inside the synth’s body, tearing up its inner-systems. In this case, it sounded like she had severed at least one of the main artificial arteries that pumped circulatory fluid through the synths’ bodies. When one of these stopped working the way they should, the effect was almost instantaneous. Gears started seizing. Circuit boards started frying. All manner of things ceased to work, and within a few seconds, Raquel heard the tell-tale thunk and groan of one of the huge bots collapsing to the floor like so much scrap metal.

  Never failing to seize an opportunity, Ritz suddenly jumped out from behind an industrial trash can. The can itself wouldn’t have stopped anything larger than a .22 short round, but the captain of the Leopold had become so adept at fighting combat synths, that he knew they wouldn’t have been able to track his progress as he snuck through the maze of hangar equipment unless he tripped over something and the sound gave him away.

  Combat synths felt no fear or any sense of self-preservation, so they couldn’t be driven back like a normal squad of human soldiers. What they lacked, however, was a sense of imagination.

  They could track a target as it ducked behind cover, but as to where that target might pop out next? The hard-wired programming onboard the synth’s drives had no way of predicting. At least, not the way twenty-years of guerrilla-style combat could.

  And that was their advantage in this fight.

  Raquel had done all she could to increase her odds of success when she picked her armament—the .45 caliber submachine she was currently using and the
.50 caliber “Slugger” she had holstered at her hip were both great for close-quarter skirmishes—now all she had to do was use them.

  As soon as Ritz came up blasting from behind his cover, the four other synths turned to fire on him. Their rifles flared and energy bolts zagged across the hangar. A synth’s aim was incredibly precise, but they had been predicting that.

  Standard calibration on security models went for center-mass, meaning they’d prioritize shooting their targets in the chest rather than the head or limbs unless directed otherwise. The bolts banged off of Ritz’s armor as he brought down a synth with the automatic carbine he was firing. Like Raquel’s weapons, it fired good old fashioned lead bullets. The thing went down seizing and gurgling just like the other had, clear fluid gushing out of its wounds.

  That’s when things went wrong.

  Someone must have been eager at the controls, because as soon as the second synth went down, the others switched to limb shots, and in less than a second, Ritz folded to the floor with twin holes in each leg.

  “No!” Raquel screamed, but she was drowned out by her captain’s own scream of pain. Without thinking, she brought the gun up and depressed the trigger into the nearest robot. The last five rounds in her magazine cracked out and into her target, but it didn’t go down.

  Shit. She threw down the gun and reached for her sidearm. Should have switched mags.

  She hadn’t though, and if she had been thinking, she wouldn’t have fired at all. But the sight of his blood short-circuited her. It wasn’t just Ritz going down—to be honest, she had had enough tense moments with him over the last few months to make the moment something close bittersweet—it was the whole plan going down. As soon as she saw him collapse screaming, the dark streams of blood running out onto the cold concrete of the hangar floor, she saw the plan begin to fall apart.

  They needed this. The plan had still been salvageable when the firefight had begun, but as soon as the favor tipped, it wouldn’t stop. Not unless they tipped it back.

  “King!” Raquel yelled. The big man was currently pinned down by two separate sprays of energy fire—one from the railing directly over the door through which they needed to go, and the other from the bot that had just taken out Ritz’s legs. That bot was now holding Ritz down with a heavy foot on his chest, and even as Raquel noted the synths’ positions in the back of her mind she knew it was too late. She knew what was coming but she chose to speak anyway. It was their only chance. “POP the door!”

  “What?” King yelled back. “That’s for exfil’.”

  “There’s not going to be an exfiltration if-”

  A massive robotic arm punched through the wall beside her and wrapped her into a headlock. The mesh clothing it wore pressed into Raquel’s neck and squeezed the air out of her throat. She struggled against it as she tried to say those final words to King—that final order, not on her authority, but on the authority of the mission. Of survival.

  She had been expecting it. They had taken two of the security bots down, and two others were laying down suppressive fire while this one moved in to flank. She hadn’t expected it to come through the damn wall, but she should have. The walls were metal, but they were thin enough to conduct sound. It probably would have sounded muffled from the other side, but all of the shouting and firing she had done in the past minute or so must have been enough to triangulate her position.

  “D-D-D-” she stuttered against her clenched cheek. King looked lost and frantic. Ritz lay on the ground, blood leaking out onto the floor. Raquel fought, but darkness began to swim into her head, pushing out against her eyeballs.

  Hit the door with the POP. Hit the door with the POP. At first, she thought she was saying it, but then she realized that the words were just in her head, reality and the potential of reality merging together until she couldn’t tell which was which.

  Obviously, the thing wasn’t going to kill her. If it wanted to do that it could have gone all the way when it first locked in its arm—could have just squeezed her head off—Lord knows it had enough power to do that. But no, once Ritz was on the ground, it must have been clear that her squad was done because the bots had been switched to “incapacitate” mode.

  The crew of the Leopold would likely die anyway, but either from torture or public execution.

  The base they had broken into was owned by the PUC: People’s Union Coalition. They were the authoritarian regime that controlled the vast majority of known space, and they didn’t take kindly to people who trespassed on their security installations.

  They called them security installations because “military installation” sounded too harsh, even though that’s what it was. Kilo Base was a small outpost that housed military personnel, vehicles, and supplies. And it was the “supplies” part that had drawn the Leopold there.

  Darkness clouded Raquel’s vision and she felt the pull of unconsciousness on her body—that seductive song of sleep that comes when the body doesn’t want to be moving anymore. When it wants to rest—wants to stop.

  Is this where it ends, she thought to herself. Is this what my life has come to? Has it all just been a dream?

  For Raquel, this thought was actually a possibility. Unlike her friends aboard the Leopold, she wasn’t anywhere near being familiar with this. To tell the truth, she wasn’t exactly sure what world she should be familiar with.

  One day five years ago she had awoken alongside a stream on the planet Lithoway with no memory of who she was or how she had gotten there. It was suspected that she was actually one of the lab-grown units from the PUC medical facility just six miles north and it was personnel from that facility that found her and brought her back.

  The problem was: according to most of the doctors and other staff, they didn’t seem to have any record of her having been there. No name, no file, no nothing. Which must have been a mistake, obviously. There were no other settlements on Lithoway. In fact, most of the planet was uninhabitable to humans. The planet was basically one giant desert with a median temperature of about 152 degrees Fahrenheit. The only places that were even remotely habitable were the northern and southern poles which had vegetation and their own water tables.

  She had spent almost two years there in a cage being pumped full of drugs and being forced to undergo a number of experiments, most of which brought with them heavy bouts of vomiting and nausea. Then one day, the facility had been raided by the Leopold crew. They hadn’t taken the place over exactly but they were able to sneak in and shut down the security system which let all of the test subjects go, of which there had been about twenty-one total: fifteen fully-developed subjects that didn’t require any sort of mechanical support and six viable subjects on life support in amniotic vats.

  With the security system down the combat synths hadn’t been able to activate—one of King’s actual successful bypasses, so Raquel guessed she owed him that—and with the synths unable to activate, it had just been the other staff and they didn’t put up much of a fight.

  When all was said and done, the Leopold left the medical staff there to wait for transport, which was over a day out. The rest of the subjects were taken to be dropped off on Nueva, a planet that supported a sophisticated underground network of rehabilitating synthetics and lab-grown humans for everyday life.

  Everyone except for Raquel.

  Raquel had gone and found Ritz and asked him if he needed another hand on board. They hadn’t, but after some convincing from Byzzie and a few bitter comments from Ritz, she had been welcomed on anyway. She thought that maybe she would help them out hauling things on and off the ship or something—a job which there was no shortage of—but what she hadn’t expected was to be lobbed into firefights almost immediately.

  If someone had asked her why she had done it—had turned her back on what could only be called “her kind” to knock around restricted space with a bunch of cutthroats and barroom brawlers—she wouldn’t have been able to give them an answer. Having no memory of who she was before, she had no re
al sense of herself—of her wants and needs and desires, the things that excited her or piqued her interest. At that point, she knew nothing of herself but the deeply ingrained impulses that governed her actions. At times, she felt like an empty body being steered by someone else.

  And now, here she was.

  A deep well of darkness was yawning beneath her, and it was all she could do not to simply let go and fall in. Would it be so bad? After all, most of her life at this point was just running and fighting. And before that, she was caged and treated like an animal. And before that? Who knew?

  When the northern wall of the hangar exploded, Raquel wasn’t sure if it was real. Her head had almost completely faded into the dark and hissing static of unconsciousness, so at this point, she could hardly trust her senses. Still, when the ground shuddered beneath her feet, it gave her hope. Raquel had passed out many times in the last few years—some due to drugs or alcohol, some to pain, and some to being choked out like she was right now—but the sensation was always the same: it was as if the planet was shifting beneath her and she was sliding backward into eternal night. The nausea, pressure, and feeling of being pulled apart into nothingness usually came on and didn’t stop until, sometime later, she was waking up with a pounding headache.

  This time was different though. She was pulled right to edge of the void, the world flying apart around her, and then she was falling back to her body, the pressure receding in her head to be replaced by pain and soreness. She saw what happened but wasn't able to piece it together until later.