Inferno: An Exile War Novel

By Bowen Greenwood

A race against time to overthrow a tyrannical interstellar government

The Archon Dominion grinds the planet Summerwell under the heel of its boot. Mercy Hail started an uprising, but it’s a long road to freedom, and the Archons have reinforcements coming. Even with outside help, liberating her people won’t be easy, especially when things get complicated with one of the Archons.

Dante Matter isn’t sure he’s on the right side. Archon society is cruel. The strong survive and the weak are crushed. He’s made it this far, but his future isn’t clear, and he’s not sure it’s a future he wants. Mercy Hail is on the other side of the war, and she’s the only future he cares about.

A desperate uprising flares into white hot war as two interstellar empires clash over the farm planet Summerwell. To survive, Mercy and Dante will need all their abilities, all their courage, and all the help they can get. More than just their planet, all of Human Space hangs in the balance in Exile War: Inferno.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowen Greenwood
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215716069

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

CHAPTER

ONE

Mercy Hail pointed, and lightning struck the ground.

From a clear blue, cloudless sky, a jagged bolt of electricity ripped the air in two, momentarily deafening her, and left her smelling ozone.

Static lifted strands of long, wavy brown hair from her scalp. Mercy was a tall woman, graceful with the soft lines of youth. She still wore the black turtleneck she’d had on since the night before last. Her eyes, brown like her hair, had become the hard eyes of a fighter. Yesterday Mercy Hail had seen war for the first time, and now everything was different.

Very good. Again.

The words came from a figure clad in military khaki. Her dark curly hair and dark-skinned face perched above the high collar of a smooth, featureless tan jacket. She wore baggy tan fatigues that were tucked into black and tan boots. Jayda Carlsbad’s clothing was the uniform of a Gentle Hand, and she was one of the last two anywhere in Human Space—the last two who could teach Mercy how to employ her powers.

Jayda’s husband, Hal Sable, was dressed exactly the same, although his hair was yellow and his skin much lighter. He instructed Mercy, Let me see you target a little to my right this time, and further away. Easier on the eardrums that way.

The three stood in a expanse of blackened detritus, a crashed spacecraft off in the distance. Once a field of corn, which grew pink here instead of the green and yellow of Earth, all the crops for miles in any direction had been burnt to charred dust in yesterday’s uprising.

The cigar-shaped, stubby-winged vessel on the horizon had brought the Summerwell Underground the military aid they had needed in their fight to throw off their tyrannical government. The ship hadn’t survived the aftermath, but the free people of Summerwell had weapons now, including armor. And they had uncovered their own secret weapon besides: a homegrown telepath.

Mercy closed her eyes and tried to pay attention to the web of quantum entanglements around her, to do as Jayda and Hal had asked.

Just as she got ready to coax more electricity from the sky, though, a new voice interrupted the training.

Jayda? Hal? Mercy? You guys need to come see this.

Raysen Pilak waved them over. He wore a baggy flight suit, olive green in color and open at the neck to show a white cotton shirt underneath. His brown hair had gotten shaggy and, atop it, he wore a cap with two stars embroidered over the curved brim.

This’d better be good, Ray, Jayda replied. Mercy’s got a lot to learn and not much time to learn it.

It’s not good. It’s bad. They’re gone. All of them. The entire Underground.

Jayda and Mercy both rushed so fast to speak they rode over each other.

What! Every last one?

My father?

Every single fighter, and yes, Mercy, Uriel too. I woke up late—too much celebrating after yesterday—and there’s no one around. Tracks lead off toward the city.

There’s no time for this. We’ve got weeks, at best, to get Mercy ready for what’s coming. She can barely throw a punch.

Mercy narrowed her eyes. Yeah, I’m not sure I understand that part. Who needs to learn hand-to-hand stuff when you can call down lightning?

Jayda replied, Electrocuting your enemies is not always the answer.

Doesn’t matter, Ray said. Everybody in the Underground took off. If I had to bet, I’d say they think they won the whole thing yesterday and the city’s theirs now.

It’s not? Mercy asked. But we did win. Summerwell’s free. We killed every last hog.

Ray shook his head. No way it’s going to be that easy.

The hogs were technically pig-human hybrids, a product of the same ancient genetic engineers who had created Mercy’s ability to summon lightning. Coming in at around ten feet tall, with a mostly human body but hairier, it was their faces that set them apart. The hogs’ piggish snouts and tusks had embodied tyranny’s presence on the planet Summerwell. With human intelligence and animal ferocity, they made perfect foot soldiers for the Archon Dominion. They had no sympathy for the ordinary human population of planets they were sent to garrison.

Worse, like every other creature that shared their porcine ancestry, they weren’t picky about what—or who—they ate. Too many friends and neighbors had been devoured. Mercy’s people had risen up against their oppressors.

Led by Mercy’s father—the only father she knew, anyway—a collection of Summerwellians had been meeting in secret for years trying to figure out a way to throw off the Dominion and their barbaric occupying soldiers. They called themselves the Summerwell Underground.

It wasn’t until they had made contact with the Free Worlds of Human Space that the Underground began to see results.

A few planets still held out against the Archon Dominion, clinging to the idea that no person was born to rule another. Those worlds had smuggled military aid and advisors to the Underground. With railguns and nanometal battle armor, the people of Summerwell had staged an uprising. Even with the proper equipment, though, it might have resulted in disaster if Mercy hadn’t come to understand her power.

The quantum sense.

All of reality is made of particles: atoms, protons, electrons, and smaller things still. And all those particles are connected in a mysterious way called quantum entanglement. From one atom to another, they bind the world together. Most people can’t see them, measure them, or even describe them, but Hal and Jayda could. And now Mercy could.

Like a few human beings for the last few centuries, she had been born with the ability to perceive those connections—and to manipulate them. Quantum entanglements tied her to the air, to the ground, to other people, and more. With enough concentration, Mercy could make those entanglements do things.

The two Gentle Hands had been explaining quantum entanglements to her since she had met them, and she had finally started to see them. In every direction, microscopic threads of otherworldly light stretched between everything, connecting it all. By manipulating entanglements to air, she could make the atmosphere around her so hard that bullets couldn’t penetrate it. By manipulating quantum entanglements to carbon and oxygen, she could throw fire. And by manipulating entangled particles with an electric charge, Mercy Hail could call down lightning.

Centuries ago, the order known as the Gentle Hand had been created for the purpose of taming this quantum sense that Mercy had apparently inherited. It had been genetically engineered into a few select people. The name telepathy had come from people who didn’t understand quantum mechanics, and it had stuck.

It had been a source of conflict ever since.

An inheritable trait that made some people vastly more powerful than others had the whiff of a master race about it, an idea some telepaths bought into with eager abandon. Those called themselves Archons. From the beginning of the quantum sense, they had been trying to make everyone else live under their iron rule.

The Gentle Hand had banded together on the opposite side. They trained from birth in the idea that being born one of the fortunate few with telepathy imposed an obligation to serve, to obey, and to be humble. For most of the past few centuries, the Gentle Hands had thought they had won the conflict, until the Archons came roaring back from exile.

Since their return, over the course of a years-long war, telepaths nearly exterminated each other. By the end, somewhere around a hundred Archons remained alive to rule the planets they had conquered. Of the Gentle Hand, only Hal and Jayda had survived. All their brothers and sisters, all their elders, almost every single person who wore the tan uniform, had died. The Exile War—so called because the Archons had returned from exile—had left Human Space in the grip of an oppressive Archon Dominion except for a small number of planets. Those few called themselves the Free Worlds of Human Space.

Mercy had learned only yesterday that she was, apparently, the child of two Gentle Hands.

Langston Wheeler and Cleo Sable had once been two of the most skilled, gifted Gentle Hands ever to wear the tan uniform. They had, or so the story went, given their lives trying to save the ordinary humans from the worst depredations of life under the Archon Dominion.

Mercy had never met either one of them. The only thing she knew about her parentage was that Uriel Hail had been by her side from her very first memory. He had adopted her from a spacefaring pilot who had been trying to find a home for her. Then he had married the pilot. Together, the two of them did their best to give Mercy a full, normal life. Uriel had finally told Mercy about her past after the uprising. Although she was still a bit angry at him for waiting so long to tell her the truth, in the end, knowing she was adopted didn’t change who she loved.

If Ray was right, and Uriel was in danger, she was going to help him. The Gentle Hands and their training would have to wait.

They think they can take this planet from me? They killed a couple hundred hybrids. They don’t even know what real war is yet.

The speaker wore all black: Black boots, baggy black pants, and a black coat. A black hood and a black mask left only her eyes visible—her eyes and the scarred, burnt skin around them. She had no hair to hide because none grew from the ruined follicles of her scarred scalp.

She had started life with the name Alice Poole, but after the fiery battle that had permanently ruined her face, she had taken the name Char and used it to govern the Archon Dominion.

To Char, one thing seemed obvious: being born with the quantum sense made her superior to ordinary people. Moralists might consider her perspective cruel, but to her it was simply a matter of fact. She could do things ordinary people couldn’t. She had abilities ordinary people didn’t. She could exercise power over those ordinary people. It was real. It existed. Facts were neither right nor wrong, they simply were.

The ancient name Archon meant something like the ones who rule and Char was the Ruler of Rulers.

Although being a telepath made one better than ordinary humans, one power in particular could make an Archon better than ordinary Archons.

Mind control.

It had supposedly been wiped out during the Exile War by the hated Cleo Sable. The Archons called it The Genocide because every Archon capable of mind control had been deliberately murdered.

Every Archon but one, that was. Char. And though she detested Sable for reasons of her own and cursed The Genocide along with all her fellows, Char quietly acknowledged that it wasn’t all bad. Being the last mind controller left alive made it a lot easier to rule.

Beside her walked a young man dressed in almost as much black as she was. Instead of the black coat, though, he wore a skintight black shirt that showed off his complete absence of stomach fat. He also didn’t wear the mask and hood. His dark hair and unblemished skin made it obvious he hadn’t seen as much of war as had Char.

So, what? the young man asked, we’ll just go to their camp and kill them all?

Char snorted. "Yes, you’d like to be sent there, wouldn’t you, so your friend Mercy could talk you out of victory again? Don’t get your hopes up.

You failed me once, Dante Matter. I would have killed you already except that you’re the only Archon I have at my command until the reinforcements get here. So no, I won’t be sending you to visit Mercy. I have a much better plan.

Dante didn’t reply. Char rolled her eyes. Any mention of Mercy was guaranteed to make the boy go contemplative and silent.

You want her.

Dante shook his head. No, of course not. She’s—

"Lying is a fool’s errand among telepaths, boy. Did you hear a question mark at the end of my sentence? Because there wasn’t one. That was a statement of fact. You want her. Very well.

You can have her.

Dante looked at her askance.

"Make no mistake. The Gentle Hand will never let the two of you be together. The Gentle Hand is entirely about control, Dante—who you serve, whose orders you follow, even who you love. When I was one, I studied their art of matchmaking. They will not let Mercy choose her own man.

"Only I can give you that.

The Archons are different. We believe in taking what we want. Under my rule, you can be with Mercy. If she stays with the Gentle Hand, you will lose her. Do you understand?

His face didn’t show any kind of certainty, but Dante at least nodded.

It was enough.

Good. We will shortly be receiving a visit from Mercy and her friends. When they arrive, your job is to bring her to our side.

"Won’t you need my help dealing with the rest of them? They have a whole