The Plague of Pyridian (The Other Worlds Book 2) Read online

  S.K. HOLDER

  Copyright © 2016 S.K. Holder

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by Rogghorn Press

  KINDLE EDITION

  Cover art by DaCostaArtDesign.com Copyright © 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  www.rogghornpress.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PYRIDIAN SECTOR ONE MAP

  RACES

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  PYRIDIAN SECTOR ONE MAP

  RACES

  Peltarcks

  Citizens

  Echoes

  Koracks

  Telquorkhan

  ONE

  Lin launched herself down the rock face. Leaping the last two feet, she unsheathed her dagger, lunged at the alien and ran the coarse blade down its back. She immobilised another before it descended on her by pinning a flap of its skin into the dirt, and then hacking off its head. It gave a shriek of indignation and a grey mucous bubbled from its mouth.

  That’s what you get for killing aliens: no respite and little reward.

  She whirled in the direction of the screams. They came from a young woman dressed in civilian clothing. Caught in the grip of the alien’s tentacle, she looked a bloody, fleshy mess.

  Lin clambered back up the precipice and over to where she lay writhing, drew her Ryber weapon from its holster and thrust it into the creature’s tentacle. The alien screeched and its tentacle went slack. She gripped the civilian by the waist and attempted to haul her back to her feet. The woman screamed and slammed her arm into Lin’s legs. She howled in pain as Lin’s spiked armour pierced her skin.

  ‘Get up. Get up you fool!’ Lin yelled at her. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?’ It became clear that the woman could not. Her eyes were closed; one had a purple bruise. Her clothes were spattered with blood. She had a bloody lip, half of her lustrous hair looked as if it had been ripped out at the root and she had a deep gash in leg.

  Her hand jerked towards the lifeless limb. ‘I can’t feel my leg.’

  Lin slapped the civilian’s arm away and shook her by the shoulders. ‘You need to stand. Try!’ Did the woman not grasp the urgency of the situation? And what was she doing out here anyway, without combat gear and without courage? She suspected she was another halfwit who thought they would try their luck at hunting aliens.

  ‘My leg,’ she screamed. ‘Help me. My leg!’

  Lin released her hold on the civilian and told her the truth. ‘Your leg is the least of your worries.’

  The woman flopped on her side and made a feeble attempt to crawl away. She cut a pathetic figure, squirming and clawing at the dry rock bed with her bruised fingers and her eyes shut.

  Another alien closed in and Lin drew her Ryber weapon again. She hit the protractor key on the alloy steel device, extending it by seven foot. She took a firm grip on the Ryber and raised her right knee to her chest. She ran with mighty force, using her raised leg to drive herself through the air. She vaulted over the alien and rammed her blade into the top of its head before it had seen her.

  The creature crashed to the ground, emitting a rattling sound before disintegrating in a cloud of ash. The Ryber contracted in Lin’s hand. She then slapped it to the magnetic strip on her belt.

  The civilian had witnessed Lin’s kill. She started to scream again. She squirmed dangerously close to the edge of the rock face on which they were situated. Sighing, Lin resigned herself to mounting a rescue before she tumbled off the ledge or into an alien’s open mouth.

  Grunting with effort, she dragged the civilian away from the precarious edge by her feet. She then knocked her out with the handle of her blade. She parted the civilian’s hair on one side in search of the tattoos that were the Peltarcks hallmark. She was not surprised to find no sign of them. She did not bother to check the palm of the woman’s right hand. If she were a Citizen her Mark had failed her as her wounds had not healed.

  She heard the whir of a fleet carrier above her and saw it in the distance banking south. The fork-shaped carrier flew low on approach.

  Massaging the knots in her shoulders, she watched it land close to the mottled blue corpse of the eighth alien she had killed that day. She thought she heard two more carriers drawing in from the west. They sounded close. She shifted her gaze west where a band of white light dripped over the horizon and a single star sat over the steep ridge tracks of Baya Mountain. Lin could have sworn she saw the mountain quake. Baya Mountain does not quake she told herself. It had been a long day and her eyes were tired. She closed them for a moment and caught her breath. When she opened them, the quaking had stopped and so had the sound of the carriers.

  Lintheia Aroda had done a great deal of killing in her eighteen years. Too much, she thought. In her infancy, she had killed alien hatchlings. As she grew older, she moved on to the bigger ones. She had once killed an alien with her bare hands.

  She had joined the Citizen Taskforce at thirteen years of age. The Taskforce had many guises and many names. On Narrigh, it was the Shardner’s Special Army, on Kaltharine it was the Military Academy, and on Pyridian it was the Octane Resistance. They all had one thing in common: they were all led by a Citizen, and their chief aim was to resolve war and conflict by any means necessary. Or so one would think. For while Odisiris had peace, it was a well-known, yet unspoken fact that all the other worlds occupied by Citizens were plagued by wars and unrest. Lin did not have the heart to read into it. She was a warrior born and raised. She spent most of her time on the battlefield. And while she had the utmost respect for the superhuman race of Citizens, her loyalties lay with her own race: the Peltarcks.

  A laser gun went off, blowing the head off one of the alien’s she had taken out earlier. Given the chance, she would have finished the beast off herself.

  ‘You’re slacking,’ said a voice over her shoulder.

  She waited for the cloud of rock dust to settle around her, and then turned to address her commanding officer, Garis Kyson. His eyes were the colour of algae and his white hair made him look older than his thirty-eight years. ‘I don’t think so sir. It was half dead when I found it.’

  She held the First Status Citizen in high re
gard. As her commanding officer he reminded her when to step up and when to step down. Nonetheless, he spent more time above the battlefield than on it, and as a consequence had no idea how many aliens she had killed that morning or the day before.

  His eyes lingered for a moment on the unconscious figure lying on the rocks. He jammed the laser gun into his leg holster and met her gaze. ‘You missed cadet training yesterday.’

  Lin scowled. ‘I had other business to attend to.’ She disliked teaching anyone and had not given the cadet training any thought. Most of the new recruits were Citizen youths. Eager to take up the family mantel, they joined the fleet with little notion of what awaited outside their city walls until it was too late.

  Garis ran his thumb under his chin, watching her thoughtfully. ‘Other business?’

  ‘Killing things.’ Lin threw her Ryber weapon into the open jaw of the alien looming up behind Garis, the one he thought he had killed. The alien gave a long screech and drew itself up before crashing to the ground. Garis hopped forward with wide eyes, and then spun round to survey the alien’s corpse.

  ‘What was it you said about slacking?’ she asked.

  His cheeks coloured and he fixed her with a glare. ‘I was saving it for you.’

  ‘I’m sure you were.’ Eager to retrieve her blade, she strode over to the alien’s carcass and prised open its mouth.

  ‘You haven’t been the same since Narrigh. Did something happen?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to my father.’ Her father had conveyed his concern about her well-being in front of the entire family. The recollection of it made her cringe. He had wanted to counsel her regarding her feelings for Thorn. Her father had said she had not stopped speaking of him since she returned home. He didn’t know she had used Thorn’s name in place of another. In the past she had spoken of Thorn with such venom it was no wonder her father thought that he was the cause of her brooding moods. ‘Take no notice of him. I’m fine. And as to your question. Yes, something did happen. It always does. That’s why I went.’

  ‘You seem less focused.’

  ‘I’m always focused.’ Holding her breath against the stench, she stuck her hand into the creature’s mouth and felt for the handle of her dagger. She tugged it from the alien’s porous tongue with effort. She plucked up a rock slate from the ground and used it to wipe the gore from the blade. Then sheathing her weapon, she made her way over to the groaning civilian, who was slowly regaining consciousness. She knelt over her.

  In a short time Garis had joined her. His arms folded, he circled Lin, keeping a look out for more alien scavengers. ‘I thought she was dead.’

  ‘I had to knock her out. She was hysterical.’

  He spared the civilian a swift glance. ‘Where’s she from?’

  ‘Not this world. Her screams were too raw. Peltarcks know that screaming won’t help them.’ She examined the woman’s right hand out of protocol more than anything. ‘No sign of a mark and her wounds aren’t healing.’

  There were no pockets in the civilian’s shirt or trousers for Lin to rifle through. The woman had a blue ribbon around her neck. Lin lifted it free. Suspended from it was an identity card made from an unfamiliar material. The civilian at her feet matched the one in the photo: a woman in her late twenties dressed in an unappealing grey and white striped blouse with dark brown hair and a mole-speckled face.

  Garis read the identity card from over her shoulder. ‘Beth Crosswell. Senior Level Designer. Tridan Entertainment.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of Tridan Entertainment. You?’

  ‘No. We’ll take her into custody. And when she wakes, she can tell us.’

  At that moment, Beth Crosswell’s eyes popped open. She took one look at Lin crouching over her and screamed.

  TWO

  Another late night. Ted Carthy’s head felt as if it were splitting in two. A lack of painkillers and seven cups of coffee a day had that effect on you. And yet he couldn’t stop. He had to concentrate on the games. They were all he could think about. They were his life. If you died in the games, there was no way back. It was a scary thought and his mind often gave way to scary thoughts whenever he was overtired.

  He took a sip of cold black coffee and tried to remember the last time he had drank a hot cup, the last time he had wolfed down a decent meal. He could, however, remember the last time he had popped his last two pain killers: exactly four hours ago.

  He had finished his last packet. He clenched and unclenched his right hand where the mouse cramp had hit.

  The bunch of papers on his desk vibrated. He pulled his phone out from under them, reeling a little as he caught the whiff of B.O. from his armpit. He took the call. It was none other than his boss, Steve Lepton. Who else would be calling him at two in the morning?

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Steve.

  Ted kneaded the throbbing pain above his brow. ‘Almost done.’ He would have to work another five hours straight to come anywhere close to being done.

  ‘Graphics are good,’ said Steve.

  Ted was not in the mood for trivial talk. The 3D graphics were better than good; they were phenomenal. But Ted didn’t do graphics, he did code, thousands upon thousands of lines of computer code that the paying public was never going to see. He had been seeing damn code in the short snatches of sleep he had managed to get in the past week.

  ‘I’m working on two games simultaneously here,’ said Ted, one hand scrambling through his desk drawer in search of a stray aspirin. ‘It’s a lot of work.’

  His love of the job was waning, his debts mounting. Ted was loathed to constantly remind Steve of the enormity of the task and the risks; lest he forget. He wanted to be paid big money in advance. He wasn’t prepared to stand in line with everybody else.

  ‘Just tell me we’ll have The Quest of Narrigh back online in the next 24 hours.’

  So Ted told him. ‘Sure.’

  The game Steve was referring to was the latest massively multi-player online role playing game to be released by Tridan Entertainment, The Quest of Narrigh.

  Tridan Entertainment sought a mammoth surge in profits. It had not yet been a month since The Quest of Narrigh’s release. The games development team were busy adding the first of many new expansions to the game. Expansions were usually added annually.

  Expansions meant new features.

  Elaborate new graphics had been added to The Quest of Narrigh, fresh beasts, and a new race. The level cap had gone from 65 to 70.

  The second game that occupied Ted’s time was The Plague of Pyridian. Complete with alien races, a formidable level cap, a captivity land mass, and an arsenal of weaponry, it had all the elements needed to keep the subscribers spending money. It was due to be released in a month.

  The game play strategies for each were unique. Ted had placed a bet with his friend Howard Collins − one of the lead artists − that The Quest of Narrigh would get the most subscribers. Ted and his thirty-strong team had deposited over 110 portals in that one game, not to mention 90 dungeons and enough characters and critters to keep even the most ardent gamer happy.

  Howard had hedged his bets on The Plague of Pyridian, insisting that top graphics and digital art were the crowd-puller to any game; Pyridian had them in abundance.

  Ted sighed. It looked as if Howard wasn’t going to be around to see the release of The Plague of Pyridian and Ted wasn’t going to get his winnings.

  He found one dusty aspirin sitting in the back of the drawer. He set the phone down and put it on loudspeaker. He washed the aspirin down with a mouthful of coffee.

  He hadn’t heard from Howard for a long while. He knew what that meant.

  ‘Any word from Howard?’ He cupped his hand over the mouse. His fingers were as stiff as a waxwork dummy.

  ‘I believe he’s still on sick leave.’

  ‘That official?’

  The silence on the other end of the line lasted three more seconds than Ted had the patience for. A question like that was likely to infuriate hi
s boss. He was never going to be privy to that sort of information. He banged the phone on the desk.

  His boss squawked, ‘What’s going on there?’

  ‘Sorry, I dropped the phone.’

  ‘You done what I told you?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ted. In fact, he had done more than Steve had told him, he had to if he wanted to protect himself. ‘When do I get paid?’

  ‘End of the month, Ted, just like everybody else. The team at Lasgrove will take a quick sweep when you’re done. That good enough?’

  Ted didn’t respond straight away. It wasn’t good enough. He stared at the computer monitor. A few short hours − that’s all he had. The games had more bugs than he could count, many more than he could ever hope to discover. He didn’t care as long as he got paid. Someone would discover them soon enough.

  ‘That good enough?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ted.

  ‘Good. I’m off to bed. I’ve had a tough day. You don’t want to know how many meetings I’ve had to attend. I’ll check in with you again around six a.m.’

  Ted disconnected the call. He went back to work. He’d have to get through to Steve about the money, and then he could get a restful night’s sleep, lose his scraggy beard, take a shower. He’d be real tactful about it though. He wasn’t a brutal man and he really didn’t want to go on sick leave.

  THREE

  Connor was lying in bed pretending to be asleep when his brother walked into his bedroom.

  One, two, three, four…He counted in his head. His brother would stand at his bedroom door for twenty seconds − more or less − before returning to his own.

  Three weeks had passed, three weeks since he had returned from Narrigh. Aside from the fact that he thought he was going crazy, nothing remotely interesting had happened to him.

  ‘Luke,’ he said. He was done counting. Twenty seconds had passed and his brother still stood at the door like a stone fortress.