Legion of Traitors: An Exile War Novel

By Bowen Greenwood

Once, telepaths almost wiped out humankind. Centuries later, a brotherhood called the Gentle Hand lives to keep it from happening again. But their foundation crumbles at the moment their ancient enemy brings war back to Earth.

Langston Wheeler, a young Hand with a scandalous past, survives the first strike in an interstellar war. He comes home to warn his fellow Gentle Hands of a shadowy threat already at their door. But his message falls on deaf ears, not least because everyone remembers his infamous dalliance with a woman he should never have loved.

Cleo Sable endured nearly six years of exile before the call came, summoning her back to Earth for the war. Coming home is sweet. Sweeter still is the thought of the man she left behind -- the man for whom she gave up everything. But the first thing she sees on the voyage out of exile is Langston Wheeler in the arms of another woman.

Lang and Cleo must face their past and understand their future, if they have one. But the rules of the Gentle Hand won't let them be together, and the war won't give them time to figure it out. Each must choose between the path of service and the path of power, with no guarantee that the other will make the same choice. Their decisions echo across the stars as cataclysmic war explodes all around them, plunging the Gentle Hand into a bloody fight for their very survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowen Greenwood
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005144500

Bowen Greenwood

Bowen Greenwood is an Amazon charts bestselling author of thrillers and science fiction. His experience as a police beat reporter and as a court clerk inform his thrillers. His lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy led to the Exile War series.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Reality flashed back into existence. The plunge through a wormhole only lasted a second, but it was the most disorienting second in human existence. From one reality to another reality in the blink of an eye was, after all, not what the human brain was built for.

On the bridge of a massive, circular singularity cruiser, three people shook their heads to get past the moment of shifting consciousness. The vessel took the shape of a circle open at one end: a 20-kilometer-wide particle accelerator built to create microsingularities and collapse them into wormholes. The empty middle of the circle normally held cargo, but no one had given a thought to stocking up before they stole the ship.

The escape had cost them everything. Their desperate flight from the pig-human hybrids had begun with dozens of people. Only three still survived.

Is everybody back up to speed? The words came from Langston Wheeler, his tan uniform bloodied and filthy. Instead of the famous tan jacket, he wore only a torn and holed tank top, black as the hair on his head, other than the dried and faded bloodstains. The three of them had escaped with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Lang had no new uniform jacket to replace the one he had lost on Felicitas. He’d been wearing the same clothes for weeks.

Ready, came the voice of Tia Dynn, her stained, disheveled, casual clothes belying her social station, her blonde hair casually tied off in a short ponytail rather than the elaborate braided updo for which she used to be famous. Burns, tears, and blood covered her clothes as well.

Ready here too, said Raysen Pilak, sitting in the driver’s seat, turning as if he were answering Tia rather than Langston. He wore a baggy flight suit and crew-cut brown hair, still growing back from when it was burned off in battle. Like the others, bloodstains spattered his well-worn clothing.

Roger, Langston replied, and then, Streaming in three, two, one …

He tapped in some authenticator codes, threw a switch, and the virtual reality comm took them all in for broadcast to Earth. Wheeler spoke the message that would change Human Space forever.

War! War! This is not a drill!

CHAPTER

ONE

Blackstone was a failed experiment. The man who funded the colony on this desiccated world hoped to find a way to refine exotic matter on a planetary surface instead of a deep space refinery, but it turned out to be far too expensive.

Yet, the colony he had planted carried on, bearing his name, teetering along the edge of insolvency. No new colonists had come since the first ship. Each generation produced fewer descendants than the last. One day, Blackstone would dry up like its famous expanses of parched gray dust.

Despite all that, it was a source of exotic matter. It was still important. It was important enough for the Gentle Hand of the Union of Human Space to have an emissary there.

Of a sort.

Streevel’s Still was a tavern in the largest city on Blackstone: dusty artificial flooring under dusty barstools in front of a dusty bar with dusty bottles behind it. On Blackstone, dusty fast became an overused adjective. Streevel’s, like most drinking establishments on the planet, took the Blackstone version of vegetation that grew near the hot springs on the equator, let it rot and ferment, and distilled it into an alcoholic beverage that humans could drink. The semi-official name for this homebrewed concoction was Blackstone blast.

A (dusty) pack of refiners celebrating their payday and the end of a workweek dominated the scene in Streevel’s. They laughed, shoved each other, drank, and grabbed at the passing waitress. No one on Blackstone owned dress clothes, and these men were no exception. They wore a collection of grease stains, wrinkles, and rips cobbled together into pants and shirts.

One of them tried to get up off his stool, but drunkenness dropped him back onto it and almost onto the floor. First, his friends and coworkers guffawed, and then two of them took his arms and hoisted him to his feet.

Another refiner shouted, Alright, boys. Let’s ditch this dump and go find some place where they serve real blast!

With that, he lurched away from the bar, more successfully than his friend but not much so. His fellows moved toward the door too, like small boats trapped in the wake of a larger. They laughed, bumped into each other, and headed for the exit.

Behind them: Gentlemen? Your tab?

The lead refiner encouraged the barkeep to perform an anatomically impossible act. The barkeep threatened to call the police. The refiners evinced varying degrees of disrespect for the police, each more profane than the last.

Come on! I can’t afford not to get paid.

The responses only demonstrated more creativity with the profanities of the language.

The refiners opened the door.

Without fanfare, one of them flew ten feet backward, bowled over a table and three chairs, sprawled on the ground, and coughed, the wind knocked out of him.

His coworkers swore and peered about them in confusion.

The leader struggled up off his back. He glared around, trying to find who pushed him.

Pay the man.

The words came from the far corner of the bar where a figure slouched over several empty glasses of blast, plus a half-full one.

Her blonde hair hung in a long braid. Several perfect light gold strands escaped and flew in the breeze from the open door. Her tan fatigues, pockets decorating nearly every inch of them, wore as much dust as everything else on Blackstone. Her black boots and tight black tank top were just as dusty. Riding on the thighs of her trousers, restrained by loops and fasteners, were two gleaming black sticks, about two feet long, with emerald-green floral patterns etched in the side. Those two sticks were the only thing on her person—in the bar. Maybe on the planet—not covered in dust.

It did not seem possible for her to have been responsible for pushing the lead refiner. She sat at the bar a dozen or so feet from him. Yet, she appeared to be taking responsibility for it, so the offended ruffian approached her.

Are you kidding me?

Actually, the refiner did not say Are you kidding me. He included a fifth word, between you and kidding, that started with an F.

He glared at the woman’s back slouched over the bar. She did not respond. She just polished off the remaining half of her blast and waggled a finger at the bartender for another.

Twice her size, the refiner loomed over her as he asked, What did you just do?

I encouraged you to pay the man, she replied, her lilting, almost musical voice sounding at the same time weary and too pleasant for Blackstone.

The lead refiner drank in the sight of her: slender, willowy, smooth. A slow smile spread across his face.

No, what you actually did was invite more trouble than you can handle, little lady.

He laid his hand on her shoulder.

Chaos slipped the cords that barely held it back.

She flashed from the barstool so fast that no one quite saw how it happened. Suddenly, the woman was on her feet with the man's hand bent up behind his back. No one’s face showed more surprise than the victim’s. He cried out in pain as she twisted his joints just short of breaking them.

What happened next was a blur of fists and feet. One of the refiner’s friends raced over to help him, but she shoved the first man into the second with a force that did not seem possible in such a thin woman. Both men tumbled to the floor. Another man ran up behind her. She never turned but simply shifted her weight and kicked backwards, landing a blow to the man's groin. He buckled instantly.

She left that one curled up on the floor groaning and focused again on her first two assailants. They struggled up off the floor, cursing. With one on the floor and out of commission, two very drunk and already injured, and a fourth lurking near the door unsure about joining, the woman’s fighting stance became loose, easy, casual. Her ice blue eyes shot the man by the door a look made to freeze molten steel, and he made his decision not to join in.

Their leader carried a lot more bulk, about evenly divided between his muscles and his gut, and the weight made him slower to get up. The smaller man gained his feet first and charged, screaming as he swung his fist. She slipped to the side calmly, almost bored. A graceful sweep of her forearm blocked his swing and then a hard uppercut landed square on the man’s jaw. He fell to the floor again, and this time he showed no sign of getting back up.

The first refiner, each of his fists a small ham, pulled himself to his full height, towering over the blonde woman. The look on his face changed to determination. He advanced on her, pulling back a fist for a strike.

Everything stopped.

He froze in that pose: one foot in front of the other, one arm at shoulder level cocked back to strike. Yet, he didn’t.

The look on his face changed from anger to panic. He struggled as if to move but didn’t. The slightest hint of a breeze curled around him and gave a few strands of the woman’s hair momentary flight. The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly, but there was nothing friendly about it.

Then his feet were off the ground. To the bartender and the shocked but entertained bystanders, it almost looked like she took him by the collar and threw him up against the wall, but that wasn’t exactly what happened.

Thrown or not, he hung on the wall like a mounted work of art. Again, to outsiders, it looked as if she were holding him by the scruff of his shirt, pinned there, heels lifted off the ground.

However, the hand that looked like it held him actually pointed an index finger right at the refiner’s face, shaking it. It didn’t touch him at all, let alone hold him there.

I have had it up to here with people who treat other people like dirt! the blonde seethed.

With her free hand, she pointed at the bartender and went on.

He works all week to make enough booze for people to drink on weekends, and you come in here and treat him like all the work he did means nothing! Like everything he’s ever done all his life is disposable!

The bartender said, Cleo, it’s OK.

"It is not OK! she replied, never taking her eyes off of the man hanging on the wall. The man himself now grabbed for whatever unseen object held him by his throat. Nothing is OK," she continued so quietly only the bartender and her victim could hear her.

She closed her hand, making a fist. The man, thinking that she was going to hit him, closed his eyes in helpless anticipation of the blow. Instead, she opened her hand, palm up, in front of him.

A blazing ball of fire erupted on her hand. It roiled and crackled like a campfire. It was about the size of a man’s head, but it gave no sign of doing any damage to the blonde woman, although the man felt the heat of it.

Somehow, the refiner never moved from where he hung suspended against the wall, no matter where she looked or how she moved her hands. Now, as she faced him, he inched down the wall—without any effort of his own, his feet sliding forward by the heels on the tile floor—until he was at her eye level.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words made it out.

Pay the man, she said in a quiet voice which left no room for discussion or disagreement. The man gave a very slight nod in agreement, eyes wide with fear. The woman closed her hand, and the flame went out. You are going to take out your comm and pay the man who poured his whole life into working so you could enjoy weekends, she said. And if you speak to me, if you move toward me, if you look at me, or if you even think about me, I would love to finish what we started here. A frosty, dangerous smile punctuated her sentence.

She turned and walked back toward her seat at the bar. When she was halfway across the room, the man suddenly collapsed to the ground. And, yes, I absolutely can tell what you’re thinking.

Then she returned to her stool and her slouch, belting down the entire drink she had ordered before the fight started, and signaled for another one.

The refiner stumbled to his feet, paid with a shaky hand, and left. His fellows rose from where they had been incapacitated on the floor and followed him out, groaning.

Two different kinds of vessels voyaged from star to star in Human Space.

Sublight ships used antimatter colliders to accelerate as high as 90 percent of the speed of light. They mostly operated within solar systems but, if needed, could be sent on interstellar journeys with the help of an exotic matter refinery to make the wormhole.

Singularity cruisers, on the other hand, carried their wormhole generators with them, but they still needed the exotic matter refineries to load them with the necessary fixings to make the system work.

Twenty kilometers wide, the massive hollow circle of the HSS London accommodated millions of tons of cargo in containers held by magnetic fields in the middle. She parked in an orbit shared with Earth’s exotic matter refinery as shuttles zipped back and forth between the two, tanking the FTL ship up with EM.

The last shuttle arrived at the London. The shuttle bay door closed, and the most recent addition to the Human Space fleet prepared to open a wormhole to the colony world Avenstar.

On the bridge, the ship’s captain ordered, Warm up the collider.

Aye aye, skipper, said a man at a console, and he threw a switch.

Let me know when we’re ready to create the singularity.

Aye.

The collider in question was the reason for the vast ring that made up the majority of the ship. It would accelerate particles to near light speed, collide them into each other, and, as they annihilated, a microsingularity would come into existence. It would collapse almost instantaneously, resulting in a wormhole. By controlling the spin, mass, and other properties of the singularity, the outlet point of the resulting wormhole could also be controlled.

In the crucial seconds between its coming into existence and its collapse, the London would inject exotic matter into the wormhole to increase the size until the ship could get through and stabilize it to remain open long enough.

Collider online, Captain.

Very well, Mr. Child. Fire at will.

Belay that order!

All conversation on the bridge screeched to a stop. The captain swiveled to look at the comms officer who had called out the words. Belaying any superior officer’s order was legal, but only if there was a good reason. Belaying the Captain’s order? The reason had better be more than just good.

We’re getting a stream from Earth, Skip. Putting it through to you.

The captain’s stance, posture, and presence shifted a little bit as his reality changed, and he experienced the VR stream instead of the world around him.

"Priority signal. HSS London directed to alter course to Blackstone. Union Orders Override. This is not a drill. Repeat: Alter course to Blackstone. This is not a drill."

The stream ended, and the captain walked over to the comms officer’s desk. That came in under an authorized biosig?

The comms officer shared his own VR stream for the captain to see.

Very well then, Navigator. Figure out where in Human Space some system called ‘Blackstone’ is and reset the collider for it.

CHAPTER

TWO

A week had passed since she had beaten the thuggish refiners down, and Cleo Sable was once again drinking at Streevel’s. Even now, she still bitterly regretted casting that little bit of fire.

Not that she cared about how wrong it was. No. The Gentle Path was no longer part of her life. She just hated how everyone looked at her ever since. It might be time to find a new bar. The problem was, there were only so many on that arid hellscape, and she’d been there almost six years.

A hundred conversations filled Streeve’s until they almost sloshed over the edges. To Cleo’s telepath brain, it was entirely too apparent how many of them were about her. Essentially everyone in the bar was thinking and talking about what happened to the refiners and the woman who could do magic (or, as the very few well-read Blackstonians thought, pyrokinesis).

The problem was driven home when a new person barged into Streevel’s, knocking the door against the wall.

"Hey! There’s an FTL ship in system! Something called London. Can we watch the stream in here?"

Much of the bar turned toward him. Some murmured. Some echoed the call for the stream. But entirely too many looked at the blonde at the end of the bar, wondering if she would pummel the loud newcomer as she had the last people to make a disruption.

Cleo gave no sign of the tightly coiled violence that had slipped out of her a week ago. She, instead, straightened from her slouch and stared at the man who had just come in.

She answered the newcomer directly before the bartender had a chance to respond. There’s a singularity cruiser here? Are you sure? It’s not due for more than four years. She slurred her words a little bit, but she also spoke of the ship with more precision than most Blackstonians.

Just the word on the street, he replied, turning to her. Then, turning back to the bartender, he said, Come on, Streeve! Let’s have the stream. Only way to find out for sure if it’s true.

It was indeed early, if true. The entire planetary refining community wouldn’t have enough EM to fill an FTL ship for another few years.

The bartender answered the request of his newest guest, flipping on the tavern-wide VR stream, so all the drinkers suddenly felt like they were in a massive lecture hall with a shipboard comms officer speaking to them from the podium.

...replaces the scheduled delivery. Residents should expect no further singularity ships for a decade. You have until we arrive at Counterweight Station to have all your exotic matter ready to ship.

The entire crowd in the bar started talking at once. Blackstone did not get a lot of attention from the rest of Human Space. FTL cruisers showed up once every ten years. They collected the EM that had been refined in that time. They exchanged it for various import goods for which the people of Blackstone yearned and starved. Alcohol that was anything but Blackstone blast was a popular one. Then the world was on its own again for the next ten years.

An off-cycle FTL ship had, one learned from listening to the conversations around Streevel’s, never happened in living memory.

The virtual figure standing at the podium in front of the holographic lecture hall paused and looked down as if reading from notes.

In addition, Cleopatra Winter Sable, Hand of the Union, is to report to Counterweight Station at the aforementioned time for recall to Earth.

The stream flickered a little bit, then began to repeat. Now, though, the words of the shipboard comms officer were barely audible, competing with a dozen excited conversations about the FTL ship arriving early.

The bartender went down to the far end of his bar where the blonde woman stood up from her stool. She stared at the hologram of the comms officer speaking at a podium like she was starving, and it was a hologram of steak.

That was you they mentioned at the end, right Cleo? Isn’t that your last name? Sable?

She nodded, barely even turning toward the bartender in favor of watching the transmission from the FTL ship repeat itself. She wore an unreadable expression.

What was that they called you? Something to do with the Union?

To the bartender’s surprise, tears leaked from Cleo’s eyes, and her dusty face developed muddy streaks almost at once. She wiped the bare skin of her hand and arm over her face in an attempt to clean up, but that only worsened the mess.

Without speaking, she simply handed him her comm to pay her tab.

You OK, Cleo?

They called me Hand of the Union, she said, her voice cracking. And they said I’m going home.

Langston Wheeler sat in the comms officer’s chair of the HSS Brayenbach wrapped in a stream of virtual reality.

The hogs can’t get off Felicitas, Elder. The ship we’re on is the one they came on. We stole it. There’s no other. They don’t have the means to invade Earth yet. That’s the good news. The bad news is invasion is the least of our worries. It’s far worse.

Burnt, ripped, and bloody though they were, Langston’s boots and pants were the uniform of a Gentle Hand of the Union of Human Space. Tan and covered with pockets from heel to hip, just the clothing alone could strike fear into the hearts of most criminals.

Or at least they could if he were wearing the rest of his uniform. Normally, a Gentle Hand would wear a high-collared, flat, tan jacket, featureless except for the seam up the front. Langston’s had been lost in the war on Felicitas, though, and he was reduced to the black tank top that was the uniform’s standard undergarment.

Arvid Blocher, the man across from Langston in the stream, wore the full uniform, of course.

Normally, it would be a real time conversation. Streaming worked differently, though, when the people on either end of the comm were too far apart for light speed communication. Now, in the stream, Blocher sat calmly across the desk from Langston. Every now and then, he would scratch his chin, or cross his legs, or adjust his glasses. These were fictional touches added by the AI governing the stream. Blocher himself probably wasn’t even at a comm desk at the moment. He would be, though, when the speed of light delivered Lang’s stream to Earth.

I’m sure it’s hard to believe, but I’m just telling you what Tremmer told me. He said he wasn’t the only Archon embedded in Servants’ Yard. He said they worked together. That’s why I’m sending this to you alone. You can decide how to break the news to the rest of the Hand. You can decide who we trust.

Langston leaned forward at the desk that should have belonged to the Brayenbach’s comms officer before it had been hijacked. He stared at the AI’s