Chaos Quarter: Horde (The Chaos Quarter, Book 3) by David Welch

Author:David Welch [Welch, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LiberWriter.com
Published: 2017-05-31T20:00:00+00:00

Is a crazy man crazy if everyone around him is crazy too? Or is the sane man considered crazy to the crazy?

—Originally spoken by Myrel Coltret, newscaster; Excerpted from Accidently Profound? The Best Quotes They Never Meant to Say, 2501

It’s amazing what kind of degradation people will put up with if there’s power in it.

—Joseph Davidson, from a speech given to a small-business convention; 2073

Ingala System, Chaos Quarter, Standard Date 04/10/2509

Rex was hungry. He’d been in the Horde’s power for a whole day now, and he hadn’t been fed anything. Maybe they were trying to break him down, though he had a suspicion that it was just Steel Messenger being unused to guests. It probably hadn’t occurred to the man that you had to take care of prisoners if you expected them to survive.

Eventually he’d have to speak up about it, but for now he did what he’d done most of the past twenty-four hours: sat. He was perched on a metal crate next to a large, crude throne that Steel Messenger had placed on the bridge of this ship. The throne looked as if it had been welded together from scrap metal, and it was large enough that no flesh-and-blood man could sit comfortably on it. But Steel Messenger perched easily, staring down at the rest of the bridge. He wasn’t really commanding; he was presiding. Other Steel Men went about the actual business of running the ship.

The ship, superficially, was not that different from Longshot. It wasn’t of Terran make, but it was similar in size, about three hundred feet long. It did have the feel of a ship that had been designed for war, unlike so many of their others. Twenty-millimeter cannons and smaller machine adorned the outer hull. Plates of steel had been bolted on to the whole of the fuselage as armor. He’d seen that when they’d marched him onboard, along with fifty-odd tally marks representing the vessel’s kills. That seemed to be a running thing with these guys. Both the ships and the individual warriors seemed to have them, as if slaughtering people was a competitive sport and they were just keeping track of the rankings.

But after being marched into this ship, he’d learned that the tally marks were one of the Horde’s less extreme decorating methods. The ship was covered with mementos, most of them macabre. Skulls and skull caps seemed to be the most common, often mounted on walls. Some even had crude words painted underneath. Rex couldn’t read the script, but he figured it was some sort of caption to remind them of a past kill.

The Horde weren’t above putting other bones into use. Even now one of the bridge crew, not having any pressing issues, was holding the freshly cleaned pelvis of some poor soul. He held a small hammer and chisel, and was busy engraving scenes of battle and conquest into the bone. He’d already done one side, inking the carved lines after finishing them to make his “art” stand out.

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