Home Fires Burning (Galaxy's Most Wanted Book 4) by Michael LaVoice

Author:Michael LaVoice [LaVoice, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

It was the ringing in my ears that brought me back to consciousness. It was loud as hell. A collage of hazy memories drifted through my barely-awake mind.

Long, greenish fingers plucked my weapons out of their holsters, and someone said to take them to the weapons lab for testing and analysis, but the words stuttered and were eventually replaced with a language I didn’t understand. I really didn’t want them to have my disruptor, but there was literally nothing I could do about it because I was restrained. It felt like straps across my chest securing my arms to my sides.

All my other remaining toys were systematically removed from my various pockets and pouches. My vision was still blurred, so I couldn’t tell how many of the Greens were in the room with me, but from their voices it was at least three, maybe four. They all sounded alike to me. Wait, that shouldn’t be. My implants assigned different voices to individuals when it translated their speech into the audio processing centers of my brain. Were they offline? That was bad.

My vision slowly focused and Dr. Lizardo came into view, talking to a Green by the door.

“The sample I obtained before was degraded by nanites that self-destructed, so we’ll need more genetic material,” the man said as he touched his fingertips to his face.

His face, no, it was worse than that, all the skin and hair covering his head came away from it with a hiss to reveal another Green.

“I’ll handle it,” the other Green said as Lizardo nodded and left the room.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d told me he was an alien. Just not which flavor. But it was also kind of a lie. His species weren’t aliens technically. They’d been home brewed by the Daostel. Classifications were so complicated.

I decided to worry about that later. I was in deep shit, and it was time to call in the cavalry.

“Stan, it’s time to send in the clowns.” I transmitted. “I got knocked out and the Greens have me in a secret section of the top floor of the facility. That’s the good news. The bad news is they have all my weapons and gear.”

I was greeted with silence.

“Stan?”

Nothing.

Shit.

I’d taken a blow to the head with that silver wand thing in the Green’s hand, but I didn’t think it hit me that hard. I wondered if it possessed some other property that affected my implants. Knocked out the short-range comms somehow? That made sense. The wrist terminal had a new and improved subspace comms array, so I tried that before they hauled it off, too.

I reached out to the terminal, expecting the display to pop up in the usual place in the lower right of my vision. It flashed into existence for a few seconds, flickered once or twice, and then vanished.

Uh-oh.

Houston, we have a problem. I was cut off.

A few seconds later it didn’t matter anymore, because one of the Greens removed the wrist terminal from my arm and held it up for examination.

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