Blood Oath Read online

  Blood Oath

  Belt War | Book 1

  David Ryker

  Roy Foster

  Ryker’s Rogues

  Available Now

  Love action packed Science Fiction? Why not check out my other series?

  Iron Legion

  If you're into twenty foot tall steel beasts of war, and recruits going through punishing basic training before being thrown into battle with the Federation's most vicious enemies, then this series is for you...

  Veteran - Get your free copy

  Recruit - Book 1

  Soldier - Book 2

  Hunter - Book 3

  Warrior - Book 4

  Fugitive Marines

  But that’s not all, if you’re a fan of military science fiction, why not check out my other series, Fugitive Marines, co-written with Douglas Scott. It’s the A-Team, in space, and the first four books are available now!

  Framed - Prequel

  Breakout - Book 1

  Wanted - Book 2

  Lockdown - Book 3

  Uprising - Book 4

  With special thanks to my fantastic beta readers

  David Harrison

  Joseph Palmer

  Reesa Tatro

  Hoke Wilcox

  Joe Cunningham

  Owen Van Straten

  Keith Dodd

  Jason Carroll

  Bernie Allen

  Jeff Palmer

  Rebecca Davis

  Ray Lee

  Lawrence Jacobson

  Michael Thomas

  Contents

  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

  Available Now

  Prologue

  How pleasing it was to come to a room that had been darkened! How accommodating are the hominids - each instance called a human, each one so attuned to the differences between their instances. They extrapolate from those differences. They extrapolate to assume differences between themselves and other species, and they ask such helpful questions! What is a comfortable room temperature? What is a comfortable lighting level?

  Comfort is a hominid concept we must acquire.

  We packaged all of this information and transmitted it to the hominid who met us. The way these hominids store and lose information is curious. It is inefficient. Each one of their instances has a complete non-transferable memory storage bank, and each individual’s memory is lost forever when it dies.

  And yet, even knowing how fragile their memories are, they make war. And such wars! The inefficiency of their memory inspires them to make their warfare unforgettable, so that many individual instances can retain the sacred memories of sacred combat.

  The hominid before us had a female morphology. Her body was aging, far too rapidly for such an accomplished instance. Such a magnificent being, so well-suited for warfare. How could this species’ biology allow for such an instance to die and never be reintegrated?

  We must correct this.

  The hominid thanked us for our kindness. Thankfulness is understood. We can divide the universe most neatly into the thankful and the unthankful. The friend and the enemy. A metric of worth.

  The hominid’s name was Striker Laurence. She had another name, too, but we could not parse why. The name Striker denoted her function within her occupational grouping, and the name Laurence denoted her genetic grouping.

  She had killed the others of that genetic grouping. They were unthankful. There was thus only one Striker in her occupational grouping with the genetic denotation of Laurence. She had no need of another indicator.

  More hominid inefficiency. We must correct this as we take them into our protection. We must take careful consideration of the methods we use, so that we do not create further inefficiencies.

  The hominid had information for us. She was vocalizing, because hominids cannot transmit information directly – not without enhancement – and vocalizing is their tradition. This instance was more compatible with our way of communicating. We had made her that way, enhanced her as part of our agreement with her occupational grouping. She knew that to vocalize was to transmit the entirety of her informational packet.

  “I know that it is not your tradition to bandy about formalities,” the human vocalized. She was impatient, and she was thankful that we were also impatient. The universe can be divided into the impatient and the patient. The fast and the dead. A metric of worth. “I’ve brought you...our assurances.”

  She had come to confirm the bribe. The occupational group named The Coalition was inefficient. Its individual instances could be persuaded to act contrary to the group’s interest. An… alien concept.

  Now Striker Laurence was displaying a map. The map contained information that she could not vocalize. “In the end,” she vocalized, “We were unable to secure our first choice of system.” She was referring to the star Maranta, and all the populated planets that circled it. Far away from centralized power, far away from help from The Coalition.

  An unholy inefficiency. The Coalition was unthankful for the Maranta System’s cooperation. The population of the Maranta system was similarly unthankful for the Coalition’s protection.

  It is a sacred thing we do, a holy symmetry we are drawn to as if by a gravity field. We must punish the wicked. It is our imperative. The star Maranta is surrounded by wickedness.

  “I understand,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “However, the Maranta system is protected by not just the strength of the Coalition, but also the strength of several other...occupational groupings.” She liked our term. It caused her face to distort its expression. “It’s called a smile,” she said, sensing our query. “But to go on - we have secured the Coalition’s cooperation with regards to another planetary system on the outer reaches of Coalition territory.”

  We understood where the system was before she indicated it on the map. We understood that Striker Laurence had an incomplete view of our grasp on the world. We transmitted this understanding.

  “I see,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “Well. We humans are quite used to communicating in our traditional method. I would be eternally thankful to you if you permitted me to continue my presentation in my traditional style.”

  We communicated our generosity to Striker Laurence, and Striker Laurence was thankful. How efficient was our hierarchy! How reciprocal was Striker Laurence’s response!

  “Thank you, thank you,” Striker Laurence vocalized. Another beautiful inefficiency, an elaboration of the foreseen order of the universe. Humans, when acquired, will make beautiful subordinates. It will be most sacred.

  “Now as I was saying.” Striker Laurence cleared her throat (a hazard of vocalizing and most inefficient). “There is a system near the Maranta System that the Coalition uses to house...degenerates. Lawbreakers. Instances of humanity who have been deemed, ah, inefficient.”

  A sacred thing, to wage war on one’s own species - a sacred thing that our own kind cannot do without influence from outside. It makes the hominids attractive.

  “Indeed,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “Therefore, the Bathys
System is nearly worthless to the Coalition. It was easy to bribe the local commanders to ignore our...adventures here.” She smiled again.

  A whole planet of the unthankful. Crawling with them. An unholy thing.

  “Indeed,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “Quite repulsive. But you must not kill them all - we have an operative down there who carries the blood.”

  A friend, yes! Perhaps this Bathys star will be ours more easily than the star Maranta. Perhaps its hominids will be easier to sanctify.

  The image of the map switched to an image of a male human. His face was round and furrowed; his cheeks were dark with short facial hair. Like Striker Laurence, he covered his carapace in protective layers of fabric. Hominids do not feed on the wickedness of stars and of flesh. They must seek comfort and compromise between the universe and their bodies. Perhaps it is sacred; perhaps it is an unholy thing they do.

  “Indeed,” Striker Laurence vocalized, confused, perhaps taking offense. “But you will recognize Silas Salter by his face. The clothing is unimportant.”

  Then she was thankful for our wisdom. Efficient of her.

  “Here he is in various other circumstances,” Striker Laurence vocalized. Silas Salter could change his appearance easily. He grew hair on his face; he removed it. He was thin; he was fat again. A beautiful inefficiency, a martial necessity.

  “He is an unimportant person and he has frequently proven himself to be of dubious... thankfulness, so you may kill him,” Strike Laurence continued. “But if you do, be advised that he has another blooded Belter under his control. If Salter dies, I cannot guarantee this man’s behavior. It would be best to kill him as well, and any companions he has gathered.”

  The picture of another man appeared on the screen. This one’s face was square, and his hair was ruddy. His nose was large and ridged - a sign of combat, yes, and a mark of sacred brutality. His body had been broken and reassembled. He was like us even before we had made him holy.

  “Don’t get too excited about him,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “He’s...unthankful for all we have done for him. He’s being punished for his crimes, and Mr. Salter is there to make sure he behaves himself while he serves his sentence.”

  We are grieved to hear that a hominid could make the substance of our bodies into something unholy. We pray that he can be sanctified once more.

  “If you think you can do it,” Striker Laurence replied. “His name is Kevin Collins. Kill him if you like, capture and reprogram him if you must - God knows we’ve tried.”

  What an odd and inefficient way to think, that the sacred is separate from the self. A consequence of experiencing death without reintegration. We must correct this.

  “Right,” Striker Laurence said. “And you may do as you please regarding Collins. I only request that you do not let him get out of Salter’s control. I doubt you’ll allow Salter to come to any harm, and we shall be most thankful.”

  And we were thankful as well! We obeyed the holy symmetry of thankfulness to thankfulness, and we had brought along in our bodies the agreed items.

  Hominid bodies were so frail that they could not produce their own instruments of war. The concept of comfort ruled their lives, made them ideal subordinates: it was our task to provide them with the instruments to make themselves comfortable.

  “Huh.” It wasn’t a word, but a sound indicating a thought that was new to the hominid. “I hadn’t considered Beezer guns in that light before,” Striker Laurence vocalized. “You truly are a beautiful species.”

  1

  When I first heard the scream, I thought it was a human.

  So did my foreman and the other breakers on the belt line. Tomlins didn’t even wait for the foreman’s signal before running to the emergency shutdown switch. As she ran, it dawned on everyone standing there that the god-awful sound wasn’t coming from anything constructed of flesh and bone.

  That was good, but then I realized that the screaming sound was coming directly from the main motorcore of the power disassembler they were working on.

  “Kill the belt!” the foreman yelled, waving his yellow-gloved arms above his head. “Kill the…”

  “Parker! The hell is going on up here!” Vinny, the line boss, had a very distinctive way of speaking, mainly owing to the bionic voicebox that did his talking for him after a run-in with a xeno gang in ‘94. “Shut the machine down before I…”

  “Done!” Tomlins, strong for her size and quick as a pseudocat, had been scaling the ladder to the emergency shutoff before either of her bosses realized what was going wrong with the machine. “I think it’s the 2G engine, boss!” she said.

  “Then get down from there and check it out,” Parker said.

  “I’ll do it.” I had this habit, which has caused the majority of the problems in my life, of speaking out loud before I realize that other people can hear the words coming out of my mouth.

  And now everyone on the disassembler line was looking at me, wondering what had possessed me to be the sorry sucker who volunteered to go do something on par with playing in survee traffic.

  “Thanks, Kev,” Tomlins said, waving cheerfully at me as I started shuffling down the line toward the motors of the big recycling machine.

  “It’s just protocol,” I said, audibly. “Not that either of you big-headed bugfucks give a damn if one of us gets shredded,” I continued, less audibly. “We’re all gonna wind up as goddamn chili meat one way or another around here. Makes no difference to you if it’s today or the next, does it?”

  That was an exaggeration, but not a big one. Not a single one of us was working on a recycling op way out in the Bathys system because the Coalition Judiciary thought of us as real people. And in a way, there were plenty of us who no longer thought of ourselves as real people, either. Take Tomlins, for example. Now there was a jungle predator, in more ways than just her movement. That girl might look sweet as a Sacchabite, but even she couldn’t tell you how many casualties she’d left in her career as a thief and a small-time terrorist. She also claimed she didn’t know if she was doing it because she felt she had to, or if she was doing it for fun.

  The last part was a lie. After more than a decade in with the Belters, I know when someone has a nasty habit of killing for sport. And I liked Tomlins - good thing, too, after everything that happened - but when I looked her in the eyes I could see it.

  Or, maybe, not see it. I’ve always been a watchful kind of guy. It’s helped, the way my life has gone. I’ve learned to watch people when they talk, to see if they’ve got that spark of life behind their eye, that capability to be worried about something. I never saw that in Tomlins, not once in the time I knew her.

  And that’s how I knew - she was just like me. She was here because this was the only place in the galaxy where she belonged. The Judiciary didn’t really know. All they knew was the body count, and the names of the families left missing loved ones, and the credit value of everything she’d stolen.

  It took her fellow crooks, like Harris and Massoud and me, to understand why she was still on this planet. Someone with her stealth skills could stow away on a supply freighter and be back to work for their gang of choice (or whichever gang conscripted them) within a month. But Tomlins liked it here. Here, she was amongst people like herself. People who’d realized that their humanity was optional, and who liked it that way.

  And so she stayed.

  “Opening the hatch,” I called back to her. Now, some people might think twice, or maybe a few more times than twice, before going into the bowels of a machine like this with a hunter-killer like Tomlins sitting at the emergency shutoff switch.

  But Tomlins and I had an understanding. Maybe it wasn’t a genuine friendship, but it was close enough. Mainly, she understood that if she got me killed down in the motor shaft, there would be nobody there to stand between her and Mr. Salter. Mr. Salter was the kind of guy you didn’t want to interact with directly. If you could help it, which I couldn’t.

  “Unrolling the rappel line,�
�� I said.

  “Well, get on with it!” Parker said. “This line’s already getting behind pace for the day, and we’ve got a freighter full of screen housings waiting in orbit to offload. Sixty thousand credits a minute, they’re burning!”

  “Then maybe they should get a better fuckin’ engine,” I muttered to myself as I unrolled the rappel line and threw it down the shaft, where the end flopped against part of the motor. But maybe sixty thousand credits wasn’t that much right now. This was my seventh year serving time on this recycling op, and real currency didn’t mean a hell of a whole lot to me anymore.

  Hell, I didn’t even get a safety harness for going down into a pitch-black pipe that held a motor that could shred me before you could say “disposable convict.” I held the knotted rope tight in my hands, kept myself from looking down, and sucked it up. They knew I could suck it up. You didn’t work for the Belters without developing a really unique knack for sucking it up.

  I was about twenty feet down when I smelled it - or felt it, I guess. The way my senses work, I pick up gases in the corner of my eyes first. Kind of like when you’re cutting up onions. By the time the rotting egg smell hit my nose I was already scrambling right back up to where I’d come from.

  “We have an H2 leak somewhere in there!” I was yelling. “Get off the line! Everybody off! We have an H2 leak!”

  Good old hydrogen sulfide. Back before the Terran Expansion, it had mainly been a hazardous waste product; now, the decomp byproduct was one of the Coalition’s favorite fuel sources for use on recycling ops. It was cheap. It was abundant. It was highly explosive.