Mercy Rising Excerpt, Chapter 1
Detection meant death, and tonight, it meant worse than death. If they were caught, they’d be eaten alive.
Starting a revolution carried a brutal price tag, and Mercy Hail had no intention of paying it. She was about ten minutes away from being rich enough to finally buy her way off world. Deliver one last stolen item, collect the promised payment, and zoom! Off of Summerwell and into real life.
Her current life had been getting more and more complicated lately, but tonight would fix all that. Mercy would give the stolen data to Sorren. Sorren would give his miracle tech to the buyer. The buyer would pay both of them more CU than either of them had ever seen.
Then, zoom. Sorren could have his revolution if he wanted. Mercy Hail would be somewhere else when it happened. Somewhere with better dance halls. Somewhere with jobs that didn’t involve harvesting pink corn. Somewhere where she could buy cooler clothes, hang out with cooler people, meet a cooler guy.
Somewhere without hogs.
Sorren Westerly worked with the Artificial Intelligence. He spent all day at a desk speaking codewords and watching VR streams. It showed in his waistline, and he was already losing his yellow hair. The jowly young man tapped his foot as he waited for her, and she could see his head canted to the side in the way that meant he was listening to his comm tell him the time.
And no wonder he was impatient. The tan uniform standing next to him was the reason they’d be eaten alive if they were caught.
The third person at their meeting, a woman, wore tan from her neck to her feet. The only other color was a bit of black at the heels and toes of her boots. Her baggy fatigues and high-collared jacket covered everything else but her hands, her dark hair, and the equally dark skin of her face.
Mercy skipped school more than she went, but she’d made it to enough history classes to recognize those clothes. It was the uniform of a Gentle Hand.
In the Archon Dominion, being a Gentle Hand meant death, of course. Far worse from Mercy’s perspective was that aiding and abetting a Gentle Hand also meant death. Sorren said this Gentle Hand could afford to pay them both an astronomical amount of money, though, and Mercy wanted off of Summerwell bad enough to take the risk.
Mercy’s long brown hair shifted with the wind as she looked over her shoulder. No hogs yet. She hurried the last few steps up to Sorren and the Gentle Hand, her long legs gobbling up the distance.
Sorren’s impatience was bad enough, but the woman was worse. She stared right at Mercy the whole time she walked up. It made her feel like a circus freak or something. That intense gaze didn’t waver at all as the woman stuck out her hand.
“Jayda Carlsbad.”
Maybe it was the stare, but Mercy’s answer was curter than intended. “I don’t care that you have a name. I care that you have the money.”
“She does,” Sorren said, “You got the data?”
Mercy rolled her eyes. After all these years, he ought to know better. Yes, she’d been having some trouble lately, but those were just weird coincidences.
“Course I got it. Have I ever not gotten what you asked for?
“Last time was too close for comfort.”
“That was not my fault!” She knew it. Sorren was blaming her for the bizarre troubles lately. “You can’t blame me for a drone full of corn catching fire for no reason and drawing the hogs.”
“Never mind,” Sorren said, his chins rippling. “Let’s do this before the same thing happens again.”
The supposed Gentle Hand cut in with, “Actually, I’d kind of like to hear about that ‘catching fire for no reason’ story.”
Sorren shook his head. “After I’m away from here and safe from the hogs. You’ll probably have to pay her more if you want information, though.”
Mercy smirked. “Too right you will.”
She slapped her comm into Sorren’s palm. A small cylindrical device, perfectly sized to fit in a human fist and stick out a little at either end, a comm was a portable portal to the Intelligence. Sorren modified them so they couldn’t rat people out to the government; it was how he made his living. Tonight, though…
The tech Sorren was selling tonight was much bigger.
“There it is” Mercy said, nodding at the device she’d given her friend. “The biosig database. Every single one. Every biological signature the Intelligence has ever encountered, going all the way back to when the Intelligence became the Intelligence.”
Her chubby compatriot turned the tube over and over in his hand, contemplating it.
The mystery woman in tan –Jayda? – said, “This is it. Real freedom. People can go anywhere, do anything, and the Intelligence will never know.”
Mercy rolled her eyes. “Lady, the only freedom I want is the freedom to get off of this cornfed borefest. The money for my ticket off world. Pay up.”
Sorren sighed. “You should stay. The Underground could really use you. The ability to get past guards and get through locks is valuable.”
“I’m sure they could, but the problem is, I can’t use the Underground. Pay.”
It wasn’t her fault that stuff had started catching fire for no reason. Stranger things than that had started happening too. Her fault or not, though, it was just one more reason to get off Summerwell. The more this Carlsbad person stared at her, though, the more Mercy felt like the Gentle Hand might know about those things.
Almost as if she read Mercy’s mind – Gentle Hands were supposed to be able to do that, right? – the woman in tan said, “We should talk first, but I’ll definitely pay. The Free Worlds sent me with more than enough money. I’ll pay. I need the biosig spoofer first, though. Is it going to work, Sorren?”
As she said that part about talking, the woman again stared at Mercy. It made the young woman fidget. This was the reason she had insisted on limiting the number of outsiders at this meeting. Just in case any of the bizarre stuff happened, she didn’t want too many people to know.
Sorren took out his own comm – a cylinder indistinguishable from Mercy’s – and touched it to the one Mercy had handed him for a moment. He muttered to the device. Then he handed Mercy’s comm back to her. He turned to the supposed “Gentle Hand.”
“It works. Give me your comm.”
The woman in tan passed over her own version of the same device. It didn’t look any different than the first two. Sorren touched the two together at their ends, and muttered some more. At last he handed the woman’s comm back to her.
“There you go. The freedom to go anywhere. No more Intelligence tracking our every move. Let’s burn the whole system down.”
Before Carlsbad could reply, the air filled with a high-pitched whine. It grew louder and louder until it became a roar that hurt their ears.
Mercy cursed. “Hogs!”
The aircraft looked like an elongated black egg with ten spindly arms sticking out at equal intervals. At the end of each arm was a ducted rotor. Ten of them descended from the sky faster than dropped boulders, and came to a hover just above the surface.
Sorren yelled “Run!” He needn’t have, though. Mercy had already bolted, sprinting toward town. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the woman in tan race off in the other direction, but not without frequent glances over her shoulder – right at Mercy.
Whoever she was, whatever the reason she kept staring, that woman would have to take care of her own survival. Mercy was focused on Mercy. She started whispering a mantra to herself. “Happen, thing! Come on thing, happen!” If she was going to have Sorren sticking his nose in her business about all the unusual stuff that had been happening lately, the least it could do was happen when she needed it.
The decacopters disgorged their horrible cargo. Standing between nine and ten feet tall, the creatures that came out looked like humans, bare-chested and wearing black pants. They looked like humans, that is, until one looked at their heads.
With slavering snouts and tusks gleaming in the moonlight, those heads properly belonged at a trough, on pigs. The pig-human hybrids, or hogs as everyone else called them, were the bane of life on Summerwell, and every other world in the Dominion. This was the reason detection meant death, and worse than death. The hogs were the reason getting caught meant getting eaten alive.
Glancing back again, Mercy saw Sorren running after her, and the pig-human hybrids hard on his heels. Silently, she prayed for “the thing” to happen.
***
Hundreds of years ago, the same genetic engineers who created telepathy had created the pig-human hybrids by accident. The idea had been to use the bodies of pigs to grow unlimited amounts of human organs for transplant into sick people who needed them. To achieve it, they spliced human and pig DNA.
The transplants worked, but the unintended consequences had horrified the entire world. Now humanity shared Earth and all the colony worlds with a hybrid creature of their own creation, a second species imbued with the worst traits of both its ancestors.
Mercy and Sorren lived in a world rife and overflowing with the fallout from those decisions. The Archon Dominion used the pig-human hybrids as soldiers, law enforcement, and as a weapon of fear to keep the populace in line. Most fearful of all was a tendency they had inherited from their porcine DNA.
The hybrids would eat anything.
Mercy’s home planet, Summerwell, had a garrison of them stationed in the planetary capital city. They could be deployed anywhere at the first sign of disobedience from the populace. Mercy’s theft of the biosig database had been exactly such a sign.
It hadn’t always been this way. Before the Archon Dominion, the Union of Human Space had been, if not benevolent, at least harmlessly standoffish. Their genetically engineered peacekeepers were just telepaths, not cannibals. The Union had overseen a long period of peace and expansion to ever more worlds.
It collapsed in the Exile War, though. A few small systems escaped to become the Free Worlds of Human Space. Other than them, the new Archon Dominion had a garrison of pig-human hybrids on every planet they controlled.
Dissent was illegal. Unauthorized gatherings were illegal. And talking to a Gentle Hand? That would get you eaten alive.
***
Hal Sable paced back and forth over mown-down stubble; this sector’s crop of pink corn had long-since been harvested. He checked the time yet again. His wife was a long way from late, but that didn’t ease his nerves even a little bit. She was meeting with the Underground, after all. Such things were dangerous.
Blond, athletic, wearing his tan uniform, he peered into the darkness, hoping for some sight of her approach, checking his comm one more time.
Something had gone wrong. He just knew it deep down in his gut. Something had gone wrong.
Sneaking onto a Dominion-controlled world had been hard enough already. The meeting with the actual revolutionaries was more dangerous by far.
But Summerwell fed the Dominion. Its pink corn met the nutritional needs of three fourths of Human Space. If the Free Worlds really wanted to change the balance of power, seizing control of the food supply was the way to do it, and there was no way to do that without danger.
Sneak onto an enemy world. Make contact with a so-called “Underground.” It was risky to begin with. Throw in his own history with Summerwell, and a hard mission got even harder.
Worse, Jayda was making the actual contact alone. One of the partisans had been too paranoid to meet too many of them at once. The whole thing stank to Hal, and he once again checked his comm for the time.
At last he did catch sight of his wife, but it confirmed his worst fear. The woman came sprinting over the field, felt via telepathy long before she could be seen.
Hal set out at a trot in her direction, since she was obviously in such a hurry. Then he saw the reason for her flight.
A mob of pig-human hybrids pursued her. It looked like about ten of them. She yelled aloud, and their mental connection echoed the words between his ears.
“Earthquake, Hal! Earthquake!”
She stopped, whipped around, and flung a fireball at her pursuers. Then she dashed forward again, crying out as she did.
He trotted off to the side at an angle, eyeing the distance between the woman and the hogs.
It was a question of line of fire. The trick was to get the hogs without harming his wife, and when your weapon was an earthquake, precision aim got a lot harder.
Once he was sure he could hit the hybrids without hitting Jay, Hal put all his awareness on the quantum entanglements around him. Old habits die hard, and he gave the old Gentle Hand battle cry as he did: “Even to dying!”
He pulled the quantum entanglements. He stomped on the ground.
The overwhelming sound of rending rock punished his ears, and a crack in the crust of the planet appeared at his feet. It grew and grew, the underlying rock making a horrible noise as it did, until a massive fault line in the ground tore open from Hal to the hogs.
Squealing, screaming, the beasts plunged into the massive crevasse. The ground quit shaking as they did, the quake over. The only sound that remained was his wife’s labored breathing as she backed her speed down and came to a halt, hands on her knees, panting. Hal let her catch her breath for a moment, but only just. Then he wrapped her up in his arms.
“Jayda! You’re safe! What went wrong?”
Mercy Rising is the first book in Act II of the Exile War series. If you haven’t tried any of the previous books, click here to pick your favorite retailer and try Onslaught, Book one of Act one, absolutely free on every eBook retailer.