The Warlord (A Broken World Book 3)

By Dean Murray

Faced with helping to murder hundreds of thousands of innocents—including Brennan, the rebel leader she's grown to love—Skye did the only thing she could. She defected and fought her way through the Society's troops, bringing along all of the people who meant the most to her.

Armed with a captured Society dropship and the advantage of surprise, Skye and Brennan finally have a chance to make a future for themselves but first they are going to have to fight their way past the Society's single most dangerous asset, and this time even Skye might not be able to guarantee their success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Firshan Publishing, Inc
• Release date: Sep 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370078752

Dean Murray

Dean started reading seriously in the second grade due to a competition and has spent most of the subsequent three decades lost in other people's worlds. After reading several local libraries more or less dry of sci-fi and fantasy, he started spending more time wandering around worlds of his own creation to avoid the boredom of the 'real' world.Things worsened, or improved depending on your point of view, when he first started experimenting with writing while finishing up his accounting degree. These days Dean has a wonderful wife and daughter to keep him rather more grounded, but the idea of bringing others along with him as he meets interesting new people in universes nobody else has ever seen tends to drag him back to his computer on a fairly regular basis.

Book preview

Faced with helping to murder hundreds of thousands of innocents—including Brennan, the rebel leader she's grown to love—Skye did the only thing she could. She defected and fought her way through the Society's troops, bringing along all of the people who meant the most to her.

Armed with a captured Society dropship and the advantage of surprise, Skye and Brennan finally have a chance to make a future for themselves but first they are going to have to fight their way past the Society's single most dangerous asset, and this time even Skye might not be able to guarantee their success.

The Warlord

by Dean Murray

Copyright 2015 by Dean Murray

Also by Dean Murray:

The Reflections Series

Broken

Torn

Splintered

Intrusion

Trapped

Forsaken

Riven

Driven

Lost

Marked

Left

The Greater Darkness (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

A Darkness Mirrored (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

The Dark Reflections Series

Bound

Hunted

Ambushed

Shattered

Burned

The Awakening

Reborn

Immortal

Endless

A Broken World

The Society

The Destroyer

The Warlord

The Founder

The Outsider

The Desolation

The Guadel Chronicles

Frozen Prospects

Thawed Fortunes

Brittle Bonds

Shattered Ties

The Compelled Chronicles

Stone Heart

Table of Contents

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

Other Books by Dean Murray

Chapter 1

Just about anyone in the world would agree that, under normal circumstances, interrupting a kiss from the guy you'd been crazy about for what felt like forever was a bad idea, but we were most definitely not in a typical situation.

The feel of Brennan's lips against mine and his strong arms wrapped around me was enough to wash away the pain of being shot, stabbed, or otherwise beaten to within an inch of death just hours before, but even finally having Brennan kiss me wasn't enough to distract me from the fact that he was risking everything by having stayed in the city for so long. He should have left immediately after capturing the ant dropship that had been sent to the city with the sole purpose of kidnapping him and stealing the prototype he'd been working on for an antimatter energy generator.

As much as I just wanted to stay there in Brennan's arms forever, I couldn't do that. I'd sacrificed too much and had to wreak too much destruction on other human beings to throw it all away now. Besides, despite having grown up in the Society where public displays of affection much more intense than simple kissing had been commonplace, I was very conscious of the fact that Lexis and everyone else I'd led through the tunnels were watching us. That made me surprisingly uncomfortable.

I pushed back, breaking contact with Brennan. What are you still doing here? The plan was for you guys to leave—it's not safe to be here with the mobile command center still floating above us.

Brennan shook himself slightly as though waking up from a daze, and then looked around at Lexis and the others. You're right—we don't have any time to lose. Brennan pointed to Steve and two of the other guards. I want the three of you to get everyone moving toward that open patch of rubble. We need to have everyone loaded into the dropship within the next fifteen minutes or none of us are making it out of here alive.

Brennan reached down and picked me up, cradling me in his arms as though I weighed no more than a child. Even with what was left of my tattered body armor, I didn't weigh much more than a hundred and thirty-five pounds, but that was still a lot to be carrying so casually across the rough, broken terrain so common inside the city.

Carrying me would become even more difficult when Brennan got to the edge of the bombardment zone where the ants' mobile command center had hurled massive tungsten rods down into the city, but I somehow knew Brennan would manage even then. Part of his strength came from the nanites currently swimming around inside his bloodstream, but unlike me, Brennan's nanites were on loan from someone else.

I'd been injected with all of the necessary ingredients required to create a tiny manufacturing node inside my thoracic cavity, and then had it upgraded by Brennan's mentor, Tyrell. That meant that nothing short of extreme amounts of blood loss—which was ironically exactly what I was suffering from at that moment—was capable of dropping the nanite load in my body down to the point where I would be no stronger or faster than any other normal human.

Brennan, on the other hand, had never set foot inside the enclave, which was the only remaining location on the face of the planet with the technological base required to build things like precision optics and massive aircraft. That meant that he'd grown up surrounded by violence and cut off from the kinds of things that even just a hundred and fifty years ago had been considered necessities.

Tyrell, Brennan's mentor, and Jax, his bodyguard, had seen to it that Brennan grew up with clean water and sufficient food to make sure that his growth wouldn't be stunted, but even the two of them—each of who viewed Brennan as a son—hadn't been able to provide Brennan with the permanent nanite injections that were one of the basic rights I'd grown up with.

Compared to most of the people living on the outside of the impenetrable energy barrier that protected the enclave, Brennan had lived a blessed life, but he'd still been deprived of something that would've made him even more amazing than he already was. It was an undeniable tragedy, but I'd come to realize that almost every aspect of life outside of the Society involved tragedy. Brennan's tragedy was just all the more bittersweet because Tyrell had been one of the two men to advance nanite technology to the point where it could have cheaply been given to every man, woman and child on the globe.

As Brennan carried me toward the open but treacherous area he'd pointed out to Steve and the others, I wondered what Tyrell had been like a hundred and fifty years ago. More trusting—obviously—than he was now, or he wouldn't have been deceived by his research partner, Alexander.

Their work together had been the kind of intellectual collaboration that came along only once in a century. Tyrell had been an expert in all of the hardware involved in making nanotechnology a reality, while Alexander had been a self-proclaimed savant when it came to merging man-made hardware with the human body.

The two of them had taken a technology that had unrivaled potential, and transformed it from something too expensive for any but the top tenth of one percent of the world's wealthiest citizens into a self-propagating miracle with the ability to grant the entire human race immortality.

Sickness and disease had been on the cusp of being eliminated from the human condition when Alexander had tried to kill Tyrell so he could claim credit for their work. Tyrell was convinced it wasn't the first time Alexander had done something like that, but there was no way of proving that after so many years, not when all of the records and knowledge of the old world had been destroyed by what everyone—ants and grubbers alike—referred to as the Desolation.

Once Alexander had obtained what he thought was the key to all of Tyrell's work, and ensured that Tyrell wouldn't be around to dispute his narrative, Alexander had triggered an apocalyptic war between the most powerful nations on the planet, a war that had been unable to penetrate the energy barrier surrounding Alexander's enclave, but which had devastated the rest of the world.

It was as heinous an account of betrayal and subterfuge as I'd ever heard, but there was at least one spot of justice in what had happened. Alexander hadn't actually managed to get his hands on the final critical bit of research after all, and Tyrell's nanites had succeeded in keeping him from bleeding out for long enough to escape Alexander's clutches.

The end result was that the two men still each had part of the solution to their joint nanite technology. Alexander had the bio serum used to stop the body from rejecting the manufacturing node when it tried to wire itself into the central nervous system, and an earlier version of all of the associated hardware, while Tyrell possessed the finalized version of the manufacturing node, the microcomputer used to control all the hardware, and the nanites themselves.

Alexander was capable of injecting new users with an older version of the nanites, which was how I'd received mine, while Tyrell had the ability to take someone who'd already been injected with the full treatment and make them immortal. Tyrell was desperate to get his hands on the formula for Alexander's serum, but so far the most success he'd had in that area was turning not just one, but two of Alexander's agents.

The balance of power was simply too far in Alexander's favor for Tyrell to move openly against him, which made it all the more astonishing that Tyrell had agreed to remain in the area after Brennan's people had succeeded in capturing the dropship.

We were almost to the dropship now, which was hovering mere inches off of the ground with the large landing ramp resting on the wreckage left behind by the high-altitude bombardment. The more I thought about it, the less sense everything made.

It wasn't out of the realm of possibility for Brennan to stay behind in an effort to find me, but even if he'd managed to convince Tyrell that it was the right course of action, all it would do was get everyone killed. The mobile command center—a massive dirigible floating tens of thousands of feet over our heads—should have blown the dropship up within seconds of deciding that it had been taken over by grubbers.

You don't have time to get everyone in, Brennan—you don't even have time to get me in the dropship. The mobile command center is going to blow us all up any second now.

Brennan shook his head stubbornly. We still have time. Tyrell and I had a couple of tricks up our sleeves that you didn't know about. As soon as the ants touched down, we overloaded the wide-spectrum jamming device we've been using to keep the micro drones from spying on us. The mobile command center has been completely cut off from their people on the ground since before you led the bulk of their forces into that deathtrap of a building.

I blinked a couple of times, shocked that I hadn't seen all of the things that could've gone wrong with just the initial effort to capture the dropship. Apparently I'd been even more caught up in my own piece of the puzzle than I'd realized. It was understandable, but it was still the kind of mistake that I couldn't afford to make if I was going to be one of the people helping call the shots in our little war against Alexander.

Brennan seemed to understand at least some of what was going through my mind. I assume Tyrell knew that you had plenty of other stuff to worry about, so he didn't want to burden you with the details of how we were going to stop the mobile command center from blowing us up as soon as we tried to storm the dropship.

I still don't understand how that's working. With the geothermal plant gone the only remaining source of power is the solar panels, and there's no way those are sustaining a jammer strong enough to shut down the communication equipment on the dropship—especially at night.

Brennan wasn't even breathing hard as he started up the ramp. "You're right—although technically we haven't destroyed the geothermal plant. Tyrell dropped the first few feet of the bore, but I expect that he had Beth and the others open the valves on the cooling system all the way up before they were evacuated, so the rest of the installation should be fine.

The jammer is being powered by a small water turbine, which is in turn being fed from one of the cisterns on the roof of the building off to the west of what used to be the headquarters building. We put it in as a reserve power facility for exactly this kind of situation.

I shook my head in amazement at just how completely Tyrell and Brennan had covered all their bases. If Katya—the first and only other operative Tyrell had turned—hadn't abandoned them, I had very little doubt but that their plan would've worked.

How long do you think your hydro power facility will be able to keep the jammer up?

Before Brennan could respond, Tyrell's voice came over the intercom. Not much longer. Based off the readings I'm getting here we're just about out of time.

Even as Tyrell spoke, the ramp behind us started to rise, and I felt the slightest downward thrust as the dropship started to put more distance between itself and the ground. Brennan increased the pace of his steps, but both of us knew it was too late to convince Tyrell to go back for Lexis and the rest of the people who'd been following along behind us.

The dropship had been designed to transport—and even house on a short-term basis—a much bigger group than Brennan's surviving guardsmen, which meant that there weren't very many people on the route between us and the cockpit, but those few people we passed got an earful as Brennan and Tyrell maintained a running argument over the intercom, a feat which was possible only because of the pseudo-AI installed in every Society aircraft.

Get back down there, Tyrell. We're not leaving all those people behind—they're counting on us to get them to safety.

There isn't time to embark several hundred noncombatants, Brennan. The mobile command center is freaking out up there, and probably has been ever since your jammer went to full strength. We used the dust cloud set off by their high-altitude strikes to screen our attack, which means that they don't know we're the ones in control of the dropship, but unless we're in motion when they realize what's happened, they're going to drop one of those tungsten rods right on our heads.

I'm not going to be the kind of guy who turns tail and runs at the first sign of danger, Tyrell. I know it's a risk, but there's still enough dust in the air that they can't be getting great optical reads and there's no way for them to know for sure what's going on via infrared either. Set the dropship back down and we'll get everyone loaded into it. We only need a few minutes, and that will look more realistic anyway. The ants would have taken a lot of prisoners in an effort to make sure they got me.

Tyrell's only response was to increase the thrust coming from the dropship's engines at the same time that he ramped up power to the counter-grav unit that was the only reason something so big was capable of a vertical takeoff. For someone who couldn't have flown more than once or twice with Katya before she'd disappeared, Tyrell was a remarkably good pilot. He was so smooth that I barely felt any increase in apparent gravity as we shot upward.

Brennan tried one last time as we headed down the last straightaway before the cockpit. I know it's a risk, Tyrell, but we've got to do this. We have to take the chance and go get those people—our people—before we make a run for it.

We're long past the point where we can just run away, Brennan. Assuming we survive the next ten minutes, we'll come back and pick everybody up. If that's not the case, then they're better off on the ground anyway.

Tyrell said that last bit quietly, almost as though he hadn't meant to verbalize what he was thinking, and I found myself wondering what it was like to face the prospect of death after so many years of life. Knowing that I had the seeds of immortality in me hadn't affected my decision-making processes yet, but I could only assume as time went on that it would get harder and harder to put my life on the line, knowing that I wasn't just giving up thirty or even forty years of life, but rather endless centuries of existence.

While I was still contemplating Tyrell's probable emotional state, he continued speaking. Rather than coming up here to the cockpit where you can't do any good, you should detour over to the dorsal and ventral guns. If things go as badly as I'm expecting them to, there's a distinct possibility that I'm going to lose fire control and it will be up to individual gunners to bring that monstrosity down.

Maybe it was just because I'd lost so much blood. By now my nanites should have been starting to get a handle on things, but I was having a hard time coming up with any other explanation for why I hadn't realized exactly what Tyrell was planning. He wasn't going to make a run for it—dodging incoming fire from the mothership the entire way—he was going to go head-to-head with the most advanced, most powerful piece of equipment in the entire ant arsenal.

It was crazy—quite possibly suicidal—and probably the only thing guaranteed to shut Brennan up instantly. Brennan spun around and headed back down the corridor, his head turning back and forth as though he was looking for something. Fortunately I was familiar with the layout of every ant aircraft.

Take a left at the next cross corridor. The guns are twenty yards that way.

I know. I'm not looking for the guns, I'm looking for a place to get you buckled in for when things get rough.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm the only person on this deathtrap who's actually checked out on the weapon consoles for the dropship-mounted guns. I need to be in one of those turrets.

We were almost to the cross corridor and so far Brennan hadn't showed any sign of slowing, so I tried the only other thing I could think of that might convince him. I know you're worried about me, but my nanites have had time to put me back together and if we're all going to die up here, I want to at least shoot back at the guys trying to blow us out of the sky.

That got through to him. If there was one thing Brennan understood it was the desire to not sit around helplessly while other people ran all of the risks. That was probably because he'd spent more than a year now surrounded by bodyguards who'd all pledged to take a bullet for him and who did everything they could to ensure that he never exposed himself to any kind of danger, but that wasn't the only reason.

At least some of what was driving him was an innate goodness, and a refusal to believe that his future was something that he couldn't control. There was something inside Brennan that was rare among the inhabitants of the cities, and completely nonexistent inside of the Society. No matter what situation he found himself in, Brennan instinctively believed that there was something he could do to make it better and he was always willing to act on that belief. I hadn't realized it at the time, but it was a big part of why I'd fallen so fast and so hard for him.

Being around somebody like that made me want to take control of my destiny. Without Brennan's influence on me there was a chance I never would have decided to act against the interests of the Society that had raised me.

Still moving faster than anyone without at least the borrowed, temporary nanites floating through their veins could've hoped to match, Brennan tore down the cross corridor and seconds later we were standing at the entrance to the dorsal turret. I'd been expecting him to go ten feet further down the corridor so he could lower me down into the belly gun, but he seemed to have other plans.

I grabbed hold of the rungs on the ladder and was hit with a bout of vertigo that made me doubt my claim from just a second before. I tried to stand, but my legs were shockingly weak. It was a good thing that Brennan had put me part way up the ladder or else I might've collapsed to the ground simply because it was easier than trying to climb the ladder.

I knew we didn't have time for me to lollygag, but I simply didn't know how I was going to make it up to the gunner's seat until Brennan bent down and wrapped his hands around my legs at about mid-thigh. Even despite all the blood loss and pain, I still felt my face get hot at having him grab hold of me like that.

Before I could get a word out—in the affirmative or negative—Brennan straightened up and I was suddenly moving towards the top of the ladder with frightening speed. I managed to get my hands working long enough to keep up with the rest of me, moving them from rung to rung and even skipping rungs as Brennan continued to lift me even higher, and then I was at the top rung and I was as high as he could lift me.

There was a split second where I thought I was going to lose my grip on the ladder and descend just as quickly as I'd gone upwards, but Brennan got my feet securely positioned on one of the rungs and I reached deep for whatever strength I still had left. I didn't even realize that I'd told my neural computer to reroute nanites down to my legs until after I'd successfully managed my first step upward.

The nanites helped—in fact, I probably couldn't have taken the second step without them—but as always when it came to rerouting them to a new set of tasks, their assistance didn't arrive instantaneously. Taking that first step was a function of pure willpower, and I was proud to have managed it. My friends back home never would have ended up in this kind of situation, but if they had, they would've fallen and let Brennan and the others down.

Willpower was just like any other muscle. It needed to be exercised in order to become strong enough to be there for a person when they really needed it.

Once I was moving, it got easier, and less than a minute later I was closing the hatch at the top of the ladder and locking it to ensure that any damage to my turret wouldn't blow downward and destroy the inner mechanisms of the dropship. I dropped myself into the firm padding of the gunner's chair and buckled myself into the three-point harness as my mind ran through a quick refresher course on how to bring up the weapons console.

As I flipped the main power toggle, the speaker at the top of the compartment came to life.

I've instructed the AI to patch you and Brennan in to each other, and I'll keep a line open to the pair of you. That will let you explain how to use those overgrown pea shooters and maybe you'll be able to keep me from saying the wrong thing on the approach to the command center.

Even as I listened, Tyrell's voice was changing, and I realized that he'd activated a subset of the chameleon protocol he used to impersonate other individuals. That begged the question as to who he was impersonating this time around, but there wasn't time to ask him.

I walked Brennan through turning on his console at the same time that I tried to remember all of the different settings on mine and how to calibrate them to what we were most likely to be up against. I successfully found the ammunition queue and made some quick changes to the order of the rounds in my first magazine.

As the high-speed robotic loaders went to work with a reassuring, high-pitched hum, I instructed Brennan to replicate my firing queue. The tungsten, discarding-sabot rounds that had been loaded into my turret were just as ideal for destroying armored vehicles as the antipersonnel rounds inside Brennan's turret were at shredding unprotected flesh, but neither of them were ideal for taking down something like the command center if we approached in the manner I expected Tyrell to take us in.

Okay, Skye. My ammunition queue has been updated. What next? Katya told me about these mobile command centers, and it even sounded like she got her hands on schematics at some point, but I never actually thought I was going to be trying to shoot one out of the sky from close range like this.

It's massive, but most of the volume is taken up by the bladders containing the lighter-than-air gases. The bottom side contains all of the crew quarters, and most of the equipment that makes everything work. It's armored, but that was more because they needed to make sure the bottom compartments were heavy enough to keep the dirigible from rolling when dropships land on the top, than because they expected to have anyone shooting at them.

I'm still having a hard time believing that anything is big enough for something like this monster to land on.

Go ahead and believe it, I've seen it with my own eyes. The top of the command center is constructed of high-density solar panels that provide it with all of its energy. They are durable enough to survive takeoff and landings from any of the aircraft in the Society's lineup, but they won't stop the solid slugs that I just had you load into your magazines.

So what's the plan? I'm guessing that the armor you just mentioned will be more than equal to the task of stopping anything but the armor-piercing rounds you just finished switching out of your gun.

Yeah, and it may even be thick enough to stop the armor-piercing rounds too.

That's not promising…

No, but we don't have to blow up the crew quarters to win this. If we somehow make it high enough that you've got a shot at something and we're not getting through the armor, then aim directly for the center of the zeppelin. If we can punch enough holes through the anti-ballistic material they're using to hold all of the helium in those massive air bladders, then gravity can take its course.

And if we don't have enough time for that?

Then switch over to the incendiary rounds in your backup magazine. They won't do anything against the helium in the bladders closest to the surface of the command center, but there is a set of bladders in the center that contain pure hydrogen.

Before Brennan could respond, we were interrupted by a new voice. Gravedigger, this is Oden. You've been out of contact for more than three hours now. What's your status?

Tyrell responded in the voice I'd heard him start to assume while Brennan and I were still trying to get our ammunition queues sorted out. This is Gravedigger, all systems are nominal here. The grubbers put up some kind of jamming field, but it didn't do them any good. We chased them down into a tunnel and then collapsed one end behind them so that they couldn't get away from us after we set up an ambush on the other end. You can let the powers that be know we got our hands on the target. The Inventor is in our custody now, but we had to leave a team behind to begin trying to dig out whatever is left of the other half of the objective.

There was a period of silence as whoever was on the other end of the radio signal digested what Tyrell had just told him. I was impressed. Tyrell couldn't have known very much about ant radio procedures, but he was sticking close enough to actual events to craft a believable story without making the kind of obvious procedural missteps that would've brought the full wrath of the mobile command center down on us within seconds.

"Congratulations on getting hold of the Inventor. I'll pass the word along, but you may want to start thinking about what story you're going to spin when they start asking