Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy) Read online

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  August 2016 Edition

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  Adam Quinn

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  Flashpoint

  (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy)

  Summary

  What is the cost of peace?

  Guilt-ridden over her role in the cataclysmic Order War, Taylor Ghatzi decided to retire from galactic politics and dedicate her life to the Emergency Service—until a deadly terror attack strikes her home world, and she may be the only one able to unravel the mystery behind it.

  Meanwhile, Cherran DeGuavra, the son of the most important statesman in the past century, gave up on trying to reunite the galaxy frayed by his late father's greatest mistake, but now must call upon all of his diplomatic powers to prevent it from tearing itself even further apart.

  With the galaxy's powers on a war footing and their own government obstructing them, Taylor and Cherran may need to start a fight to prevent one.

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  Taylor Ghatzi raised her arms in victory as a squadron of interceptors roared overhead, releasing their electromagnetic munitions in a series of ground-shaking thumps. Floodlights went dark all across the weapons stockpile, but the stars illuminated the face of her royal companion, Prince Steve of House Cryzdeklithis. His gaze was blank, like that of a dead man looking up from his coffin.

  “We won,” Taylor said. She took Steve’s large hands in her own, unsettled by his expression. “We destroyed the stockpile. It’s over.”

  “No.” The word fell out of Steve’s slackened mouth. This was not the exuberant prince she knew. “But it will be. Soon.”

  Taylor took a step backward. Reality seemed to strain at the seams. “Why? Why will—”

  “You should know.” Steve’s eyes fixed on a point behind Taylor. “You started it all.”

  “What?” Taylor spun around to find a column of Galactic Government hovertanks advancing toward them through the gap between two warehouses.

  The leading tank launched a rocket.

  Taylor threw herself to the side, scraping her knees on the rough pavement as she rolled into a crouch with her back against a warehouse wall. The rocket was still in the air, tracing an unnaturally slow path toward Steve.

  Taylor blinked. At such a low velocity, the rocket should be falling out of the air, but it maintained its surreal course. “What’s going on?”

  “The Order War.” Steve tilted his head upward, face illuminated by the harsh white light of the rocket’s exhaust.

  Taylor telekinetically pushed on the projectile, trying to send it flying back at the tank that had fired it. Instead, it picked up speed. Taylor thrust out her arms, but she was suddenly powerless to alter the rocket’s course. “Look out!”

  The rocket engulfed her friend in a blossom of fire.

  The blaring of an alarm cut through the roar of the explosion.

  Taylor gasped for breath, her face pressed against the cool metal floor of her Emergency Service frigate. A bitter concoction of relief and loss washed through her as she spotted her bed and the rectangular window next to it that gave her a breathtaking view of the planet Cryzdeklith—her homeworld—suspended in the starry expanse of space.

  The Galactic Government was long gone.

  As was Steve.

  The alarm was still there.

  Taylor scrambled to her feet, telekinetically ripping away her heat-retentive sheets where they had become tangled around her legs, and activated the transceiver embedded in her bedside table. “Hezekiah, what’s going on?”

  “Aw, come on,” Ciro Dance said, “it’s my shift, and you still ask the new guy what’s going on?”

  “Perhaps because I’ve actually read this year’s version of the Emergency Service protocol?” Hezekiah said. “Next year, Taylor and I will cover all of the Anniversary shifts.”

  Anniversary.

  Taylor shook off what remained of her sleep-induced stupor. It was the tenth anniversary of the Battle of Meltia, the decisive final engagement of the Order War. The Meltian Republic Emergency Service had warned all of its solar-system-level branches—including the one she, Ciro, and Hezekiah ran—to be on high alert, and for good reason. In the ten years since the conclusion of that war, the one she had played a despicable role in starting, not a single anniversary of the Battle of Meltia had passed without a violent demonstration by an anti-Order-War group somewhere in the galaxy.

  Apparently this one was going to be no different.

  “Grade-O?” Taylor asked. It was the MRES designation for a suspected terror plot.

  “Almost certainly,” Hezekiah said. “The local police say an unmarked gunboat struck the entrance to the Royal City Order War Museum with some kind of chemical weapon before dropping off an unknown number of—”

  “Hey,” Ciro said. “I’m the active duty officer, so I get to tell the commander what the alarm is for. Isn’t that what your protocols say?”

  “He’s just trying to be helpful, Ciro.” Taylor moved across her quarters to grab a midnight-blue active duty uniform from where it hung by her door, changing into it with practiced speed. “At any rate, I get the point: we clear out the chemicals and round up the terrorists.”

  “Actually, the report didn’t say anything about apprehending the terrorists,” Hezekiah said. “Their gunboat was shot down by Royal Space Corps interceptors, so they don’t have an escape vehicle.”

  “Then we’ll be doing the police a favor.” Taylor felt a swell of pride for the Corps, which she had been a member of long before the war. “Is the SX-7 ready?”

  “Yes.” Hezekiah hesitated. “But you’re not planning to go in there yourself, are you? We have plenty of drones, and I already have a control boat warmed up.”

  “The drones can handle the chemicals and any civilians—they were built for that. Apprehending armed terrorists is a bit more complicated.” Taylor tapped her bedside transceiver to cut the connection before Hezekiah could reply. She might despise the Order War every bit as much as the terrorists, but if they thought that was an excuse to launch a violent attack on her homeworld’s capital city, then she—not some drone­—was going to show them the error of their ways.

  Taylor snatched the silver band lying next to the transceiver and pocketed it as she turned and sprinted out the door of her quarters. Her “Newface,” a gift from the Meltian Republic Veterans’ Agency, could project a seamless holographic disguise over her face. In theory, her SX-7’s visor should anonymize her well enough as she carried out this mission, but since her role in starting the Order War made her an unwilling symbol of it, she could hardly be too careful.

  The full volume of the alarm struck Taylor as she left her quarters, and its blaring urged her on to the hangar of their Emergency Service frigate. True to Hezekiah’s word, a “control boat”—a surplus Order War gunboat retrofitted to control MRES drones instead of fighting—was hovering just off the ground, surrounded by four spherical white Emergency Service drones, but Taylor first turned toward her SX-7 “skeleton” suit. MRES blue save for the white high
lights that gave it its nickname, the suit’s back panels were flipped open like a human-shaped flower. As Taylor slid into her suit, she closed her eyes to ease the transition from her normal vision to the stretched-out 360-degree field of view provided by the SX-7. Back when her MRES branch received the suit from the military, the warped view had been difficult to get used to, but now she was comfortable enough with it to immediately spot a furry gray blob scurrying across the floor toward the control boat.

  “Ciro!” Taylor linked her SX-7 to the frigate’s communications system as she telekinetically levitated the furball to halt its progress toward the dangerous end of the gunboat’s thrusters. “Your mua’er is in the hangar again.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Ciro burst into the hangar, rumpled uniform straining from his paunch.

  Taylor tossed the little creature into his arms and turned to leap into the control boat, though her wide field of view allowed her to see the mua’er wrap its long, flat tail around Ciro’s shoulders.

  In the ship’s control room, Hezekiah’s tall frame filled the pilot’s seat, his hands flying over the controls without a hint of sleepiness. While he was far from muscle-bound, Hezekiah’s crisply-pressed, well-fitted MRES uniform left no doubt that he possessed a toned, athletic figure.

  He turned around. “Good morning, Taylor.”

  His ash brown hair was cut short and parted neatly to the side, not daring to disrupt the orderliness of the rest of his appearance. Taylor touched the side of her helmet to retract her SX-7’s visor, intending to respond. Hezekiah had just been brought in after an older woman retired a few months ago, and Taylor still wasn’t used to having a young guy on board, but—

  Without the suit’s toxin-filtering respirator, she picked up a clean scent in the air; her first thought was some kind of cinnamon, but it was more refined than that—like incense. It was a nice scent; she took another breath in through her nose.

  “Is there a problem?” Hezekiah asked.

  “No.” Taylor slid the visor back into place before he could see her face heat. She was technically his commanding officer, so any… fraternization would be deeply unprofessional, especially considering that there were Cryzdeklithian lives on the line. “Hezekiah, do you have any de-con modules loaded on those drones?”

  “Two decontamination, two rescue.” Hezekiah tapped a button, and the hangar door slid open, though the hangar’s atmospheric integrity was maintained by a thin Airshell field.

  Ciro slouched in and deposited himself in a chair, mua’er thankfully gone. “Mighty early, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve been on-duty since midnight.” Hezekiah lifted the control boat up and out of the hangar.

  “That’s exactly my point,” Ciro said. “I don’t even know why we do round-the-clock shifts for every stupid holiday.”

  Hezekiah said, “Because we would rather apologize to you for your great loss than apologize to a hundred Cryzdeklithian families for theirs.”

  Taylor was staunchly with Hezekiah on the issue but did not intervene because she knew that nothing would come of their loose sparring. In the end, Ciro would offer up a grumble and do what was required of him—no less, but certainly no more.

  Instead, Taylor turned toward the rapidly growing sphere of Cryzdeklith. Their control boat was fast—after all, it had been originally built to go toe-to-toe with interceptors—but there was no ship in the galaxy that could deliver Taylor as quickly as she wanted to the scene of what was beginning to feel like an extremely personal attack. Not just because this was her homeworld, but because the Royal City Order War Museum (the second-largest such museum in the Meltian Republic after the one on Meltia itself) had been constructed here due to the fact that two of the five members of the legendary “Order Strike Team” had hailed from Cryzdeklith: herself and Prince Steve Cryzdeklithis.

  Somehow it felt like these terrorists were just trying to pour acid on a wound that had barely scabbed over after ten years: the fact that one of those venerated children of Cryzdeklith was in an MRES control boat, and the other was in a fancy mausoleum.

  “There she is,” Hezekiah said.

  Taylor snapped from her reverie to find the control boat breaking out of the bottom of a wispy cloud. Royal City spread out below them, a forest of towers gleaming in the light of the system’s star, which was just coming over the horizon. In the center of it all was the museum—seven overlapping blue domes in a hexagonal shape. Half of one of the exterior domes seemed to have caved in and was now surrounded by a collection of hovervehicles.

  Taylor made her way toward the back of the gunboat. “Good luck with the entrance—I’ll meet you there when I’m done.”

  “Where are you going?” There was concern in Hezekiah’s voice.

  “Whoever the terrorists dropped off aren’t going to stay in the middle of the entrance after they blew it up,” Taylor said. “If I’m going to find them, I’ll have to go deeper inside.”

  That was the logical explanation. The real reason not to use the front entrance had more to do with the Cryzdeklithians down there than the terrorists—Cryzdeklithians who, if they somehow learned her true identity, would revere her as Taylor Ghatzi the War Hero, unaware that they were reminding her of her worst, most deadly mistake.

  Taylor shivered as she opened the control boat’s bottom hatch, and not from the rushing air.

  Hezekiah must have misinterpreted her hesitation because he said, “You know, after we get this thing cleared up—”

  “Later,” Taylor said. “We have a job to do.”

  She jumped.

  The sensation of air buffeting her suit and the panorama of Royal City laid out around her sent an automatic giddy thrill through Taylor’s body that almost flushed her anxiety away. Half a second later, the SX-7, sensing her rapid change in velocity, activated what was, in Taylor’s view, its most important function.

  Flight.

  A green heads-up display materialized on her visor, and Taylor extended her arms as if to grasp the standard throttle-and-stick controls for a starship. The SX-7 had no such controls, of course, but the suit could sense her movements precisely, allowing her to control it as if it did. If this was one of the many vacation days she had taken just flying the SX-7, she might have done an aileron roll or an El-Drake spin, or some other maneuver that was easy to the point of monotony in a starship, yet still thrilling with the SX-7. Today, however, she had more important work to do. Taylor used her stick hand to orient her body so that it was facing toward the center dome of the museum below. This was not the optimal orientation for reducing air resistance, but it was the optimal orientation for the human body to handle acceleration, and when one had a pair of military-grade thrusters strapped to one’s back, that became something of an issue.

  Taylor drove her throttle hand forward.

  The blue domes expanded in front of her while the modern gray and black towers of Royal City rose on every side. As she neared the center dome, she hit it with a burst of telekinetic force, punching a small, jagged hole in the roof, before flipping onto her back and using the SX-7’s thrusters to decelerate to a relatively smooth landing in the middle of a vast gallery of holographic starships.

  Taylor disengaged the SX-7’s flight mode. The room was still, and the only sound was the quiet hissing and clicking of a holographic display that had been impaled by debris from her entrance. The museum could not have opened long before the attack, so either the museum-goers had not yet reached this part of the museum when the entrance was hit, or else they had fled, which raised the question: why did the terrorists enter the building at all? They had already killed either dozens or hundreds of civilians in the lobby, depending on how many Hezekiah and Ciro were able to save, and they might have gotten away with it if their incursion had not given the Space Corps time to scramble interceptors.

  Hezekiah’s voice came into her helmet, “We’ve inserted all four drones over here—have you found anyone?”

  “No.” Taylor looked o
ver the room via the SX-7’s omnidirectional field of view. She recognized many of the ships on display instantly, from the QQ-45 fighter-bombers that had been critical to the last campaigns of the Order War to the jellyfish-shaped Swift-class interceptor that she had favored as a budding pilot in the Cryzdeklithian Royal Space Corps. That had been her second choice—going back to the CRSC—after the Order War ended. She ultimately opted for the Emergency Service because after spending the war destroying peoples’ livelihoods in service of some ideal that never actually came to fruition, she wanted a job where she knew she was helping people.

  Taylor shook her head—she was getting distracted. “Hezekiah, can we get some scanners on this pla—”

  Off to her left a silvery spiral staircase led deeper into the museum—and its handrail was marred by a crimson streak of blood.

  “Taylor?” Hezekiah asked.

  “Scratch the scanners; I have a lead.” Taylor moved to the top of the staircase. Two floors down, a step was splotched with blood.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hezekiah said. “We’ll keep you posted on the lobby.”

  “Thanks.” Taylor bounded down the staircase to the bloody step. With the aid of the SX-7, she quickly spotted another crimson-stained section of the handrail, all the way down on the ground floor.

  Taylor swung herself over the handrail and into the center of the spiral staircase, firing her thrusters just in time to soften her landing on the ground floor. She stepped outside of the staircase’s footprint.

  “The Treaty of Galactica was signed…”

  Taylor slammed her attacker with a blast of telekinetic force before she realized she was facing a holographic woman in a Galactic Resistance uniform. The hologram projector crackled and died.