Eye of the Storm: Defenders, #1

By Brenden Shouse

A SOLDIER. A BROKEN CYBORG. A ROBOT WITHOUT A HOME.

Can one crew change the galaxy?

Kane is a soldier who ran from his academy when he saw the evil of the government he'd been born to serve.
Will the crew of an aging starship pull him back into the conflict he's so desperately trying to avoid?
Will a soldier, a genetic freak who shouldn't exist, be able to save everyone, or will he become the very thing he's fighting?

Start reading the first installment of the Defenders series now!
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brenden Shouse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393325352

Brenden Shouse

Brenden Shouse was born in 1998 to two hardworking parents. His mother instilled in him a fierce love of reading. He is a writer of Sci-fi and fantasy. When he isn't reading or writing he's probably eating pizza. He lives in scenic, central Illinois in the middle of the endless fields of corn.

Book preview

Chapter One

I woke up in an alley choking on my blood. Gritting my teeth, I realized that it was the second time this month.

I felt a weight slam against one of the trash cans beside me. I groaned and rolled onto my back. I looked down at my chest and noticed a dark circle of dried blood all over my shirt. I grabbed my shirt just beneath the bloodstain and pulled on it, lightly. I was weak from the injury, and I didn't want to open the wound back up again.

They'd almost gotten me in the lungs. I had to admit, out of the two assassination attempts, the guys who'd done this one had done a better job.

I coughed again, but this time, less blood came out. I'd already lost too much blood. They would do a test on the blood, and when it came back. Well… I’d rather not be on the planet when that happened. I picked myself up off of the ground, groaned, and rolled to my right side, before leaning against the wall. Seriously, what had happened this time? If I could just remember who stabbed me, just one time, that would change everything.

Groaning and in severe pain, I stepped out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. Neon lights advertised the various businesses on either side of the street and bathed the sidewalks in a strange, multicolored glow. This was a bad part of town. They didn't even have hologram projectors to advertise their establishments. What had I gotten myself into last night? I covered my mouth and coughed again. I lowered my hand and saw it was covered in a thin layer of blood.

Blood often mixed with saliva, making it seem like there was a lot more bleeding going on than there was. I had learned that from a plethora of personal experiences. I turned and stepped into Slammers; It wasn’t too far from the Spaceport, but it was far enough away that the guards rarely came out this way. The Bar’s name certainly inspired confidence.

The music boomed, and people danced in the center of the room. This area was for people who were drunk enough to think they could dance, but not quite drunk enough to fall over when they tried dancing. My head pounded with each beat, and the strobe lights nearly blinded me. Slamming into a table and I walked through the crowd, a pain shot through my body from the stab wound. I may have only been twenty-five, but I was way too old for this crap.

The bartender, an alien life form, turned to face me. Strangely, its front side looked identical to its backside. Its form was a gaping blackness. Colors in its skin shifted, its face and body morphed into a general approximation of a human female. The entire transformation took ten seconds at most, just fast enough for me to realize what was going on.

So, the bartender said, putting a hand on what seemed to be her hip. What are you doing all the way out here? Her eyes stayed on my stab wound just a few seconds too long. She wouldn't suspect anything, not out here, but the wound didn't look pretty.

I cleared my throat. I could ask you the same question. I've got to admit, I've never seen an Aoao this far from home.

I kicked myself for saying this. Humans normally didn't take much of an interest in alien species and cultures, especially ones that were on the other side of the galaxy from our own. Academics always cared about random stuff, but the stab wound in my chest would give away that lie immediately. For me, the obvious answer was that I was a soldier, but I didn't want her thinking down that line. I was in enough trouble as it was.

I need clothes. I'll take anything you have, I said.

I flicked up my projector and showed my bank balance. It was pitiful, but that's exactly how it was supposed to look. This was a separate account at a different bank. I had put just enough money into it to help get by in most situations, while also making it look like I was poor. All the money I had was just about gone. I swallowed, knowing it wouldn't be too long before I wasn't just playing broke.

The bartender pursed her lips, looking between the bank balance and my face. She held her arm over the top of mine and finished processing the transaction before moving her wrist back beneath the bar. She dropped a black rectangle on the desk in front of me.

Fourth door on the right. You can't miss it.

I flashed her a grin and turned to walk out of the back door. In a city like this, people had to get in trouble all the time. Seeing a wound like this shouldn't be anything special. Hopefully, that meant she wouldn't end up calling the cops.

I stepped into the bedroom and locked the door behind me. There was a dresser full of clothes of different styles, shapes, and holes made for extra limbs. Even though bipedal forms were the most common in this area, there were still an awful lot of creatures sprouting extra arms or even some that had no extremities at all.

A bathroom was off of the main room. I found a medical kit under the sink. It wasn't anywhere near as advanced as the one I'd had back in the military, but it would do. It contained alcohol, invisible bandages, a handful of different medicines, but no nanobots or healers. It figures. Those had been reserved for hospitals and military applications. It didn't matter. It wouldn't take me but another day or so for the wound to completely heal, but it was always nice to have something speed the process up just a little more.

I pulled my shirt off and took a few deep, calming breaths. Finally, I placed the towel in my mouth, popped the cap off the alcohol, and poured it over the wound. I screamed and bit down on the towel, hard, until I was sure no one in the bar could hear me over the music.

It took about another five minutes before the burning subsided. I used up about a fourth of the bottle cleaning out the wound. I threw on some weird alien clothes. Many of the alien subcultures among the stars found human music interesting, especially the edgy bands. Who would've thought people would still wear AC/DC shirts in the year 2558? I didn't think there would be such a resurgence in ‘classical’ music. The music was so loud it hurt my head. I’d been stabbed in the chest before, and it always gives me quite a headache.

I took a deep breath, turned, and walked back out of the bar. I took the back exit out of the building, just to be sure. The police would be on their way if the bartender suspected who, or rather, what I was. It was better to be safe, but; I needed to be sure I wasn't being followed. If they found me, I doubt they'd even send me back to the Academy. They would make me disappear.

I scanned both sides of the street before heading down. So far, there didn't seem to be anyone following me, but it was too early to tell. There were a lot of tricks to check whether somebody was following you, but most of them only worked if the other person didn't notice you making four turns in the same direction in a row. The difference was that anyone coming after me would be highly competent. They would've finished their training. I'd still be able to spot them... I hoped.

I made my way towards the spaceport, but I kept enough streets between me that would make it look more like I was heading over to the industrial sector. A lot of those empty buildings or warehouses were great places to buy contraband, and I hoped that would put anyone who was following me at ease. If they didn't think I was heading to the spaceport, that might give me an advantage.

I checked over my shoulder again. Everybody still seemed to go about their own business, but there was no way for me to tell just yet. I gulped, I was in so far over my head.

The spaceport would be my best and only chance to get out of here in one piece. If I wanted to get out of here, this was going to be it.

They would watch the port. Only the most unscrupulous or anti-authoritarian pilots would be interested in helping me. That didn't bode well for my odds of surviving this for very long. I closed my eyes and swallowed. One person behind me put his hand up by his face and pointed towards me. I could only barely see him in the glass's reflection. The man were talking, but there was no one next to him. I turned down another street; I wasn't going back, not now, not after all of this. I'd come too far to fail now.

If I had just gone straight to the spaceport, I would've aroused a lot of suspicions, but I'd made a bad call in going to that bartender. It was possible that she hadn't called them, but there was no way that the Aligned Worlds was looking for a different fugitive. The Aligned Governments wouldn't be out in force today. Everyone knew that nobody got away from them, everyone left and then died of natural causes within a few days.

I turned down a back alley and ran as fast as I could towards the hanger bays. Finding a pilot now was going to be a tad bit more rushed than I would've liked. I turned around a corner and ran around the block, walking towards where I'd seen the man who was following me. I stopped and admired the storefronts until they had passed me by. My heart pounded in my chest. They'd almost found me. The thumping of my heart boomed in my ears. They didn't have jurisdiction out here, that was only a small consolation. They could still get rid of me without a thought. There would be some public backlash but it wouldn't be enough to stop them. They always seemed to get what they wanted.

The little fact that this wasn't in their jurisdiction would help me, but only barely. If there was one thing I'd learned about the Aligned Worlds, it was that they knew how to skirt around the law. They did so frequently, and I'd even been a part of a few of those missions.

I turned down another street and made my way closer to the port. They would close in fast. I would have to find somebody who could get me off the planet quickly. Smugglers or people who felt rather disenfranchised by the Aligned Worlds would help. The first was expensive and unreliable; the latter was even more costly but fairly reliable. The walls of the spaceport swelled up in front of me as I ducked behind a trashcan. A patrol walked by. These were Belter forces.

The Belters were nearly eight feet tall, and although they weren't naturally very muscled, their powered-armor made up for that deficiency. They carried shoulder cannons as well as a plethora of other fighting implements. I'd fought one back at the Academy. The scars had taken months to heal.

The Belters turned a corner. I ran across the street and ducked into the shipyard. The sounds of grinding and people talking filled the space. Other guards marched down the hall. They wore a lot less armor than their counterparts outside the wall. They were in a certain circle formation around two aliens.

The creatures looked like a thick yellow stem with red spindles covering their bodies. They didn't even have proper eyes. The stem swelled up into a more bulbous shape at the top, making their overall body look like an ancient rivet that was covered in fungal growths. When I was walking at an average speed, I would've been running faster than any of them. Droseras were some of the most conservative bankers in the entire galaxy. Wars were often funded in part by borrowing enormous sums of money from the Drosera. They had their hands in many pies on a galactic scale. Entire worlds had been pulled out of abject poverty because of their investments.

They stepped slowly, only moving a dozen feet every minute. They were carnivorous, but it was incredible that a species like them had achieved dominance and then sentience on their world. Whoever it was they had been fighting against must have been far weaker and slower than them.

I ducked against the wall until they passed and continued down the hall. The crappier births were always those furthest from