Invasion by David Ryker

Author:David Ryker [Ryker, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ryker's Rogues
Published: 2018-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

19

Hess

The walls reverberated as Hess thundered in through the door, past the short window and the decorative waterfall. A squat collection of pillows in one corner of the room functioned as a makeshift bed. He swung his foot and a cloud of feathers burst into the air. As they floated around him, Alison leapt to her feet.

“What the hell happened?” She tried to grab Hess’s arm as he spun in furious circles.

Hess shrugged her off. Their Spartan quarters were practically bare, the furniture sculpted from lightened concrete and painted in dry colors. He felt the desperate need to snap necks and he had nothing to break. He balled his fists, leaned back, and shouted.

“Hess!” Alison urged. “Please!”

In the ten minutes it took to calm him down, his blood sank from a frothing, monstrous fury to a simmering boil. Ten hours spent locked in negotiations, he told her, wasted. Spartans on one side, the Senate on the other, and neither relented, not even slightly. A waste of everyone’s time, especially considering the grand scale of Fletcher’s failure. Hess felt his nerves fraying at the edges; he was pumped full of so many stimulants he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a week.

Alison sat him on a stiff concrete bench, on top of a hastily re-stuffed pillow. Hess felt embarrassed that he’d caved to his foolish emotions so quickly. But ten grinding hours, coupled with the medication cocktail, had shattered him.

He lay still and listened to Alison explaining Loreto’s message. Nothing surprised him anymore. Invading aliens reanimating the dead, threatening the Federation, and it wasn’t even his biggest problem. He took comfort in the notion that an admiral still existed somewhere in the universe, one so reviled by the Senate that he might actually be worth a damn.

Alison dusted a feather from Hess’s shoulder. They were real, he noted, likely bred on Sparta. Legitimate breeding programs were one way to circumvent the cloning ban but they cost a king’s ransom. His tantrum might have fed a colony family for a month. The guilt added to his embarrassment as he wondered what his mother would say.

“What’s this?” Alison dragged him back to reality. “Here, on your neck.”

Hess lay on his side on the bench, facing the short window with views of the distant black mountains above the clouds. He covered the scab with his hand.

“It’s nothing,” he murmured.

“It looks serious.” She sounded worried. “I thought the doctors–”

Hess sat upright and looked into her eyes, debating whether she needed to know. There’s an alien invasion about to crush us and I can’t even organize a trade meeting, he reasoned. What’s left to lose? He lowered his hand, allowing her to see. The toenail-sized wound still hurt.

“It’s right on top of your pip,” Alison exclaimed. “You’ll damage it!”

Shaking his head, Hess removed her curious fingers from the scab. It ran deep into his neck, a half-centimeter at least. It had taken an hour to carve the little glass bead out from under his skin. All the liquor and basa in the world couldn’t numb that pain.

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