The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Read online

  THE GRAY MATTER

  By A.G. Claymore

  Edited by B.H. MacFadyen

  Copyright 2016 A.G. Claymore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and brands are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Sign up for Andrew’s New Release Mailing list and get a free copy of the novella Metamorphosis. Set in the Black Ships universe, this story can be read before or after book one. Evolutionary Design is another novella from the same universe and is best read before book three.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  New Opportunities

  The Old Gang

  Stirring the Hornets

  Gloves off

  Ascendancy

  New Release List

  From the Author

  New Opportunities

  Thanks for the hospitality…

  Detention Specialist, Second-Grade Edmund Riley tuned out the echoing bedlam of Tango Block. Ignoring things was a valuable part of getting along in the Imperium. He approached the small knot of laughing guards, his features sour.

  He usually managed to ignore the fact that his own quarters, as a Block Superintendent, were nearly as small as a one-man cell. In reality, the only place a guard could stretch his legs on a supermax asteroid like Mictlan was out on the gen-pop decks, surrounded by the scum of a thousand worlds.

  He reached his small group of subordinates. “Why’s ‘Captain Indigestion’, here, wearing an EVA suit?” He waved through the heavy plate of glaz-armor to where a size 1.3 prisoner was crammed into a size 1 suit.

  The men chuckled. Alvarez, the next most senior in Tango after Riley, spoke for the group. “Ain’t no biggie, Riles – he just kept insisting ‘they’ were talking to him and he needed a suit.” Alvarez shrugged. “He’s quiet now and, considering how many antacid tabs he goes through, I’d rather keep his carbon-dioxide-filled ass inside that suit.” A grin. “Let him hotbox himself to death – save us having to space him if a sentence ever comes down.”

  “I’d like to know how he’s gonna eat that meatloaf with his helmet on,” Melchit, the youngest and newest member of Tango’s guard force, spoke up.

  Riley turned to look. Prisoner ap Rhys was scooping his dinner from the acrylic serving platter. He turned to the steel toilet at the foot of his bed and shook the gray chunk of meatloaf from his gloved hand, dropping it into the bowl with a splash.

  “Can’t really say I blame him,” Melchit said. “That last shipment of beef must have come from an infected vat. I’ve no objections to feeding it to prisoners, but they should at least send us something that won’t leave us too sick to hold down the riots.”

  “No,” Alvarez warned darkly, “don’t do it…”

  Prisoner ap Rhys put a hand to the side of his helmet as though trying to hear the guard through the thick wall of glaz-armor. His left foot was resting gently on the flush knob of the toilet.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna clean that up for you,” Alvarez shouted uselessly.

  “You’re at least gonna have to clean up whatever comes out into the corridor, Javi,” Riley insisted, “‘cause I don’t want him in that suit.”

  “Aw, come on, Riles,” Alvarez protested. “What’s the harm in letting him wear the suit?”

  “He’s an engineer, Javi. The same engineer that turned an old piece of gǒushǐ into an effective strike-carrier. The same engineer who invented the source-directed wormhole generator.”

  “Cái bù shì!” Alvarez looked back at the prisoner, who now had five centimeters of meatloaf-fouled water on the floor of his cell. “That oaf?”

  “That’s right.” Riley sighed. “And you idiots gave him a suit that’s packed with all sorts of electronics and emergency equipment. Get him out of it before he works some kind of mischief.”

  Before anyone could move to follow Riley’s order, prisoner ap Rhys grabbed his mattress and pulled the end zipper open. He grabbed it by the middle and started shaking the open end over the growing pond in his cell. A shower of antacid tabs fluttered down to the liquid.

  “What… an… asshole,” Riley muttered as the hundreds of tabs began to jump and hiss across the surface of the water. There’d be no getting the door open with the extra pressure those carbon dioxide tabs were releasing.

  Riley’s eyes grew wide. “Oh jiàn tā de guǐ.” He gripped Alvarez’ shoulder. “The pressure!”

  “Relax, Riles.” Javi waved a dismissive hand. “That glaz-armor’s rated to forty-eight atmos. It’s impossible to blow it.”

  “Yeah, but the back side of this cell’s an outer wall. It’s hull-plating, Imperial Standard, designed to hold in the atmo and keep the crew from falling out when you make a sharp turn.”

  “So,” Javi frowned. “How much…”

  “One point four atmos,” Riley answered, his face a mask of fury.

  Prisoner ap Rhys had turned around to point his backside at the guards and he was smacking his left cheek when the outer hull blew. He went cartwheeling out the ragged hole, smacking his right arm on the edge of the torn seam.

  “That’ll leave a nasty bruise, at least,” Alvarez muttered.

  “Get over to Maintenance,” Riley told him. “Have them take you out on a sled and pick him up before he freezes to death out there. He may not even have enough oxygen to…” He trailed off as a large, dark gray mass came into view, just beyond their drifting prisoner.

  “That’s the same piece of gǒucàode debris that came drifting out of the asteroid field yesterday,” Alvarez exclaimed. “Wasn’t Maintenance going to check it for survivors?”

  Riley’s shoulders slumped. “Somehow, I don’t think they got around to it, Javi. Who’d have thought that thing could actually fly?”

  As they watched helplessly, a lightly armed shuttle bearing three stars and a ‘1GD’ on the hull came to a stop next to the prisoner and he was thrown a boarding net.

  “Fixing that breach is gonna eat up our bonus for the next five cycles,” Riley groused. “And they’re gonna want somebody’s head for this. He wasn’t an ordinary zek. That guy was a political detainee.”

  “Tāmāde!” Alvarez suddenly found it hard to meet Riley’s eye. Even though he’d been the one to give the prisoner a suit, it would be the Block Superintendent who’d quietly disappear.

  And Alvarez would get his job – promoted by his own incompetence. His ears were turning red with the shame of it.

  “It’s a shame Maintenance’s avaricious attitude made this all possible.” Melchit scratched at his patchy chin-stubble. “They probably dragged their feet, hoping any survivors aboard the derelict would die from exposure, thereby giving them a nice fat salvage fee.” He belched delicately into his fist. “S’cuse me. And so their greed ends up facilitating a prisoner’s escape.”

  Riley looked at Alvarez, who’d lost his reluctance to meet his gaze. They grinned.

  Happiness in the Imperium didn’t take much. Three squares a day, a place to lay your head…

  And a plausible scapegoat.

  Reassignment

  Julia sat on the low stone wall of the third-level ventilation gallery. A hundred meters down the canyon, she could see a large, scaled pterobat drifting in and out of the deep shadows. Its high-pitched shriek echoed up to her as the sightless creature mapped the surroundings and searc
hed for prey.

  A smaller, fur-bearing avian darted across its path, bouncing a chittering call of its own off the cliff face before turning to circle its forty-kilo adversary. It began emitting a piercing shriek as it flew circles around its prey, confusing the pterobat and calling in reinforcements.

  Julia shivered, despite the warm sunlight of the gallery. She’d lost four people to the quarter-kilo not fur nothings, as the smaller creatures were known. Now, nobody went down the canyon unless they’d been trained by young Caleb on how to avoid drawing the wrong sort of attention.

  A blur of the smaller creatures came pouring out of the cracks in the rock, circling the large creature, darting in to take small bites. They worked with a communal precision, disabling the large avian’s flight muscles, so its only remaining choices were to glide on or dive to its death.

  They continued to feed on the doomed animal until it finally chose a quicker death and relaxed the extensor muscles that the smaller attackers had left intact. It plummeted out of the ravenous cloud to the rocks below, the sound of its impact lost in the roar of the fast-flowing river at the base of the canyon.

  She turned from the scene as the sound of approaching footsteps heralded her next meeting. A man in a hood was flanked by Rodrigues, the Marine they’d turned from Kinsey’s service, and an imposingly built man with a clean-shaven head. Mullins.

  Oddly enough, Mullins’ distinctive look didn’t get in the way of his almost supernatural ability to blend into a crowd. If nothing else, that one fact told her that he’d truly mastered his trade.

  He was a retired Maegi and he now led her intelligence network, consisting largely of commandeered Maegi. The secretive society, dedicated to the task of ensuring the Imperium continued to forget about the colonies, was a logical choice. Their members were excellent information gatherers and skilled influencers.

  The insectoid monks who’d agreed to serve in that role had been shuffled aside when the Grays had been tricked into a civil war.

  Brother N’Zim and any other members of the Brotherhood who’d served on any of Julia’s ships were on this world for the duration of the conflict and so they’d been re-assigned to the Gray Brainwashing problem.

  The minute any one of them left, every member of the Brotherhood would know who’d plunged the Grays into a civil war. Julia wasn’t keen on taking that kind of risk and N’Zim’s team understood the reasons. They weren’t very happy about it, though.

  That left her forces with an intelligence shortfall but she’d found an excellent spymaster in Mullins.

  Julia turned, dropping her left foot to the rock floor, sitting with her back to the canyon, and nodded to Rodrigues.

  He yanked the hood from the man’s head and Julia felt a wince of conscience at his pale face and ragged beard. Still, considering the circumstances surrounding his capture, she hadn’t been inclined to make him a priority.

  Mullins came to stand in the sunlight to her left as she addressed the prisoner. “You gave your name as Edgar Prestonby,” she told him, “which, I gather, was intended to draw the attention of people like Mullins, here.” She nodded beyond him to where Rodrigues stood.

  Prestonby glanced at the Marine over his shoulder and turned back to her with a grin. “Nah.” He shook his head. “That ain’t Mullins.” He nodded at the actual article. “That’s Mullins.”

  Mullins nodded slightly. “A Roanokan, a Spirian and a bandicoon all meet in a clearing in the forest, facing each other to form a perfect triangle. Which shadow is the shortest?”

  Prestonby cocked his head in thought for a moment. “Tricky,” he muttered appreciatively. “Did the bandicoon bring his own vehicle?”

  Julia frowned but kept silent. As far as she knew, the bandicoon was a small, nocturnal forest animal.

  “Of course,” Mullins replied as though such a thing should have been self evident.

  Prestonby‘s features lightened. “Well then, that means they all cast an equal shadow which, I’m sure, aggravates the poor little bandicoon to no end!”

  Mullins nodded. “He’s one of ours, Commodore.”

  Rodrigues stepped forward to cut the bindings on Prestonby’s wrists.

  “Grade and assignment,” Mullins demanded.

  Prestonby sighed as he rubbed his wrists. “Field agent, 1st grade. I was enroute to take up a new posting to TC-452e when our ship got waylaid by the same fellows who raided this place.”

  Mullins’ eyebrow lifted a full centimeter. “Not many Maegi of your rank stay in the field. Promotion to 1st always comes with a choice of jobs. You could have a nice office in one of the chapter-houses, managing an entire sector of agents. Why were you taking another assignment in the Imperium?”

  “I like the work.” Prestonby’s gaze slid over to Julia. “And I don’t care for the confining spaces of office work.”

  Mullins kept his eyes on Prestonby, a thoughtful look on his face. He nodded to himself at whatever it was he saw there.

  Julia felt the heat in her ears at the veiled rebuke. “It’s true that we took far too long in getting around to you but, considering the company you were keeping when we found you…”

  The crew that had plucked him from the debris of his original ship had gone on to raid the mine where Prestonby was now being questioned. They’d killed every man, woman and child, except for Caleb, who’d hidden in the crypt. Prestonby had been found with one of the last surviving enemy crewmen. The rest had either been killed in a cutting-out expedition against the Walter Currie or they’d killed themselves, victims of Gray brainwashing.

  He nodded. “I’m just glad you were looking for prisoners to interrogate. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of complaining about my incarceration, for which I’m absurdly grateful.”

  “Well, I’m glad we sorted this out,” she told him. “And I’m also glad to hear you like field work because we’re giving you to Resident Mullins.”

  Prestonby’s gaze darted to Mullins, his eyes slightly widened but he quickly brought his reaction under control and gave the man a respectful nod. “A Resident.” He allowed a tone of mild surprise. “It seems I’m not the only Maegi who prefers field work.”

  Mullins returned the nod. “A retired resident, obviously, or I’d still be running a station on a Rim world right now. Nonetheless, even a retired Resident can invoke the right of override on any agent’s mission. I’m in charge of the field agents for this force and I’ll be sending you out to join them.”

  Prestonby frowned. “Resident, has this been approved by the Maegi Council?”

  “It hasn’t,” Mullins admitted, “and you’re perfectly correct to ask me that.” Mullins sat on the low wall, gesturing for Prestonby to sit between him and Julia.

  “Let’s put your new mission in context,” he offered as Prestonby sat. “Your mission, indeed, all Maegi missions, share the common goal of keeping the Imperium out of the colonies. Mostly, you make sure the folks that come our way aren’t looking to open trade routes or sneak back to the Imperium with news bulletins that the public can’t conveniently ignore.”

  He grinned. “The Imperium helps the process by not wanting to know about us. They still assume we’d be more trouble to assimilate than we’re actually worth.”

  Mullins waved to indicate the mine they lived in. “The forces based here are engaged in nurturing and maintaining a civil war between the Gray Quorum and a splinter faction, the Purists, who want no contact or involvement with Humans whatsoever. If they should learn of our role in their conflict…” He took a deep breath.

  “Then they’d declare open war on us,” Prestonby finished the thought for Mullins.

  A nod from Julia. “And that would almost certainly draw the Imperium into the conflict. They may pretend the colonies were lost, but enough Imperial agents have been captured out here, over the centuries, for us to know that a steady flow of information makes its way back to CentCom.”

  “So you see,” Mullins continued, “we need to manage the balance of
this conflict and keep a lid on our own role in it. For better or worse, it’s where our choices have led us and we need to stay the course if we’re to have any chance of saving the colonies. The only other choice we saw before us was to sit back and watch our worlds be turned into subject farms for Gray experiments.”

  “Alright,” Prestonby said heavily. “I’m under your orders, then. Where do you need me?”

  Mullins stood, waiting for Prestonby to follow suit. “The Mot Juste is leaving for a ‘trading run’ through the Spiral Archipelago. They’ll depart the moment you step aboard. Do what we always do,” he advised. “Keep your eyes open and your ears tuned.”

  Just Passing Through

  Daffyd stopped at the entry to the forward riser. “Is it possible she’s even lovelier than she was on the day we took her from the Grays?” His right hand came to rest gently on the grav-control panel, just to the right of the riser door.

  “Well, that sulphurous Gray smell is gone, if that’s what you mean.” Edrich offered morosely. “So that’s an improvement…”

  Daffyd quirked an eyebrow over his shoulder at his fourth engineer. You could give Edrich his own planet and he’d still find a reason to be glum about it. “You’re sure you entered the right coordinates while I was making an ass of myself in Engineering?”

  Edrich grunted. “You’ve never doubted my solutions before…”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a lot riding on it this time.”

  “And there wasn’t when we inserted the 488 directly into Narsa and brought out all those civvies?”

  “Fair enough,” Daffyd conceded. “It just shocked me to see how the Imperials have pulled the reactors half apart. I’m surprised she’s still able to pinch space at all.”

  Now Edrich’s blood was up, or at least by his standards it was. “Are you ready to play your part when we get up there?”

  A chuckle. “You mean the part of a half-drunk hooy morzhovy who’s pretending to be the inventor of the source-directed wormhole generator?” Daffyd jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “The Imperial Exchequer’s been paying me to rehearse the role for more than a year now. I’d better be ready for this!”