Hunter (The Hero Rebellion 0.5)

  Contents

  Title page

  Join the mailing list

  A note on chronology

  In the Beginning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Author’s note

  The story continues

  Do you want more?

  Did you enjoy Hunter?

  About the author

  Also by Belinda Crawford

  Dedication

  Copyright, etc

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  Details can be found at the end of HUNTER.

  A note on chronology

  Hunter takes place seventy-eight years

  before the events of Hero.

  In the Beginning

  Humans colonised Jørn; they travelled across the galaxy intent on a better way of life, away from the influence of Earth. But the drones they sent ahead, the ones that told them that Jørn was their new paradise, missed something. Something important.

  The colonists arrived, settled on the surface. And started dying.

  The culprit, a native spore, carried on every wind to every corner of the globe.

  Genetic engineering, blending DNA from Earth and Jørn species, saved their crops and livestock, but for humans there was no cure. Instead they took to the skies, turning their five great colony ships into cities that floated above the spore's reach.

  Times were hard. All the resources they bought with them to start their new lives went into the fight to stay alive. They scavenged, they scraped, they made every morsel and every scrap go as far as it could, but it was not enough.

  A few brave souls risked their lives to explore the planet. They scouted the surface, locating the resources the cities needed to survive, with nothing more than the thin membrane of their envirosuits and the claws of their genetically engineered steeds to keep them alive. They died in their dozens, victims of the planet's deadly wildlife and treacherous terrain.

  They became known as Riders.

  Legends.

  Heroes.

  They did their job well, and now, two-hundred years after the first human set foot on Jørn, humans are beginning to thrive.

  The era of the Riders is ending.

  But not just yet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Subria skidded around the corner, only her grip on the hangar's door jamb keeping her on her feet.

  'Not the day to be late, Venere!' Instructor Bayard yelled over the clang of cargo and the low of giant, shaggy cow-ocs lumbering across the deck.

  Subria didn't have the breath left to yell back. She let the pound of her boots do the talking, sprinting across the cavernous hangar, dodging hover sleds piled high with supplies for the new biodomes being built on the planet's surface.

  It was hard to hear over the thump of her heart and the heavy thrum of the shuttle's engines, but she could hear her classmates' yells, even if she couldn't make out the words. They sounded urgent, frantic almost, but there was no time to figure them out, just enough to scramble up and over a hover sled, squeeze between cargo containers, leap off the other side—

  And hitting the deck a second later as a cow-oc lumbered into her path. She skidded under the beast's belly, getting a new appreciation for its shaggy hide and six legs before vaulting back to her feet.

  Her classmates' yells made sense a moment later. The old Morague Academy shuttle was lifting off the deck, the down rush of its engines making their own tornado.

  Bayard was standing in the shuttle's open hatch, feet spread, arms crossed, the lift of her brows and the tilt of her chin challenging Subria to push harder. Or fail.

  No way.

  Subria pumped her legs faster.

  Ten metres.

  The shuttle was hovering an arm's length above the deck.

  Seven metres to the open hatch.

  The hatch was waist-height now.

  Three metres.

  This would hurt.

  Two.

  Chest-height.

  One.

  Subria leapt.

  She caught the edge of the of hatch under her ribs.

  Breath left her lungs in a rush, pain exploding in her belly, but there wasn't time to worry about that. No time to breathe. The ground was gone and her feet were dangling in air as the shuttle continued to rise. She hung on with her elbows, gripped the smooth deck of the shuttle with her fingers and used every muscle in her body to inch herself forwards. The instructor's shoes were right there, bulky black boots, the nano-leather scratched and scarred, dominating her vision. She didn't need to see Bayard's face to feel the weight of her gaze, didn't need to see beyond the airlock to know her classmates were there, watching, waiting. Silent now, but their tension vibrated the air.

  They watched but didn't move. Help wasn’t coming. On the surface, a Rider had only themselves, and so she had only herself now.

  She slipped.

  For a second, the flight hangar flashed in her vision: the cluttered deck, the cargo crates, the other shuttles just a few metres beneath her feet. She could let go and survive, perhaps break an ankle if she didn't land properly.

  But that would be failure, and she wouldn't fail. Couldn't fail.

  Subria gritted her teeth and pulled herself up. The muscles in her shoulders screamed; her elbows, wedged against the sides of the shuttle's airlock, ground into the metal; her fingers scrambled for purchase. Slowly, so slowly every second was an hour, and her shoulder blades felt like they were going to pop out of her back and her biceps were molten strings of steelcrete, she pulled herself up. Ribs scraping against the deck, cutting into her belly, making it harder to breathe. She didn't stop. And then she was in the shuttle, the airlock's outer hatch snapping closed, cutting out the roar of the engines and the whip of the wind. Subria flopped onto her back and stared blankly at the bulkhead, dragging oxygen back into her lungs.

  Then the bulkhead was gone and she was staring past green-clad legs to arms crossed over a nano-leather coat, all the way up to Bayard's flat, dark-eyed stare.

  'What are you doing, Venere?'

  'Breathing…ma'am,' she said between pants.

  'I don't pay you to breathe, recruit.'

  Subria drew another breath before replying. 'You don't pay me at all, ma'am.'

  'Hmm.' She turned on her heel. 'Get off that deck.'

  'Yes, ma'am.' Subria took one last second to draw in air and rolled to her feet, ignoring the dizziness that said perhaps she needed a little more oxygen before moving.

  Take a beat. A memory of her daddy, his hand on her shoulder holding her steady. She took a beat. Breathed, drawing the air deep, holding it the pit of her belly, giving it time to saturate the tissues before letting it out. Head steady, she stepped into the shuttle's main cabin.

  The airlock's inner door shushed shut on Subria's heels.

  There were no windows in the Academy's old shuttle, but she knew when they dropped out of the shuttle bay and into the sky below Cumulus City by the lurch as they left the city's mag-net behind.

  Subria gripped the nearest seat.

  A row of hard seats ran down both sides of the cabin, enough for forty recruits, let alone the eight that were there.

  A decade ago, before the new biodomes were built on Jørn's surface, the shuttle would have been crammed with recruits. The cities almost didn't need Riders to scout resources anymore; the biodomes had seen to that, freeing up resource
s for the engineers and scientists to do things like build better shuttles.

  But it was Subria's dream. She didn't care about the credits, or the kudos. Jørn's surface was in her blood, and spending her life in the cities, floating kilometres above the ground, wasn't.

  Her older sister thought she was mad, but then, anything that involved dirt made Husna cringe, and her mum…

  Her mum had stared hard at the Morague Academy application, expression carefully blank, but she'd gripped the kitchen bench hard enough to whiten her knuckles and make the holo-chef flicker.

  'A Rider,' she'd said, and there'd been something in her tone that reminded Subria of brittle plasglas a second from breaking.

  Subria had straightened her spine. 'I need your signature.'

  Her mum had looked up, and it'd taken every last bit of will not to step back. There'd been fire in her mum's dark eyes, an inferno of pain and pent-up rage, of old memories and newer nightmares, nightmares Subria shared. It was enough that it should have burned through her mum's pale gold skin and seared Subria's retinas.

  She remembered the way sweat had trickled down her spine, the burning urge to shift her feet and to fiddle with the stylus she'd carefully placed beside her application.

  'You know what it means if I sign this.' It hadn't been a question.

  Subria had nodded. 'Yes,' she'd said.

  Her mum's jaw had tightened, lips compressing into a thin line, and she'd stared hard at the stylus, as if she could crush it by thought alone. She snatched it off the bench. 'Anything but Farm Control,' her mum had said as she signed the application.

  Anything but the job that had killed her dad, even if the alternative was the one responsible for the white lumps of scar tissue and the limp her mum would never talk about.

  Subria could live with that.

  She made her way between the rows to the back of the shuttle, pushing aside the plasglas that separated the main cabin from the smaller one behind, shutting out the soft whispers as she slid it closed behind her. The back compartment took up a third of the shuttle, but it was empty now, except for the small crate secured in the shelving of the bulkhead.

  The crate was what she wanted. Subria deactivated the mag-lock keeping it in place, pulling it out and setting it on the deck.

  It was heavy for its size, although most of that was the thick black plasform, reinforced with a super thin layer of steelcrete, the only material strong enough to resist Erberos' talons. Her thumb on the top of the crate activated the control pad, and eight digits disengaged the four steelcrete rods holding the door closed.

  She held her hand in front of the crate, palm up, and waited.

  The door stood open for several long heartbeats, and she thought Erberos had escaped again, somehow twisted his nimble little paws through the holes in the plasform and bypassed the thumb lock to tap in the code. How it was possible she didn't have a clue, but she'd seen the wan-adder do stranger things.

  She was bending down, canting sideways to peer into the crate, when a shadow slinked out of its depths.

  Light was needed to really see Erberos, to make out more than the slim, lithe outline of the wan-adder as he stepped onto her hand and wound his way up her arm. There wasn't enough of it in the shuttle – was barely enough under the full, blazing light of her sister's lab, where he'd been made.

  His sleek, sharp muzzle kissed the nape of her neck before the last of him was out of the crate, the wicked claws on his nimble forepaws sinking into the thick nano-leather of her coat, tips pricking her skin. The claws matched the teeth crammed into his narrow, triangular head, sharper and deadlier than an animal his size had a right to, the gleaming white tips the only points of brightness in his otherwise black body. Even his eyes, all four of them, were dark.

  'Pitiless pools,' her sister once said. 'As dark and merciless as his soul.'

  Subria had scratched Erebos's head, finding the spot behind his right ear with the tip of her nail, causing the little flyer to close his eyes in bliss. 'He's a sweetheart,' she'd said.

  Her sister, older than her by over a decade, had scoffed. 'He's the Devil little sister, and he'll steal your soul just because he can.'

  She reached up and scratched that same ear now, smiling at the sibilant purr that vibrated through his throat. 'You aren't going steal my soul, are you?'

  Erebos rubbed his head under her jaw, his scales warm and silken against her skin, and purred louder.

  Subria smiled and, still scratching his ear, returned to the main cabin.

  'Heads up, the shadow beast is out!' The words cut through the hubbub of conversation, said in the joking-but-not tone she'd come to expect from Tyvian.

  She flicked the boy a glance but didn't acknowledge him. Jealousy wasn't a good look on Tyvian Joshi. It pinched the skin around the leaf-green of his eyes and twisted his mouth, as if he'd sucked a cherry-lemon. Fear looked even worse, and he wore both expressions. He tried to hide them, covering up the fear with jest and the jealousy with a smile, but she saw it in his eyes, eyes that were stuck on Erebos, longing and nightmares in their depths.

  She brushed past him, noticed the way he twitched, like he didn't know whether to flinch or snatch Erebos from around her neck, and felt…satisfaction.

  She saw her dad in her mind's eye, the downwards cast of his face, the disappointment he would have felt if he'd known, if he'd been alive to know, the way the satisfaction slithered through her chest, warm and sleek.

  Subria shook it away. Satisfaction at the expense of another was an ugly emotion, unworthy.

  Sinful.

  Her dad wouldn't have approved, would have looked at her with that half-frown between his eyes, the one that was felt more than seen: a solid punch below the heart. The kind that reminded her of the duty, responsibility and privilege that came from being a Venere.

  Erebos's tail wrapped through her fingers. She caught the tip. Maybe the little shadow was stealing her soul. Part of her didn't care, but the bigger part, the one that remembered the way disappointment would shadow her dad's eyes, did.

  It was a long ride to the Farm on the shuttle's hard seats. By the time the pitch of the engines changed, climbed for a heartbeat before cutting out altogether, Subria's legs were stiff and her bum sore.

  Instructor Bayard sat at the front of the cabin, a few seats away from the recruits, but it might as well have been miles.

  There was a shudder and a gentle clunk as they landed. A ripple of excitement passed through the recruits.

  Instructor Bayard stood.

  The shuttle fell silent. Tension shivered through the deck.

  'This is your hardest exam. There are no right answers, no strategies. The bond between Rider and companion cannot be taught, forced or willed into existence.' The instructor stalked the aisles, eyeing each of them in turn. 'Some of you will find such a bond, some of you won't.' She stopped in front of Subria, looked her in the eye. 'There is no shame in failure.'

  Subria stroked Erebos.

  Bayard kept walking. 'The surface doesn't give you second chances, and neither do its creations, no matter how much of Old Terra we put into them. If you do not return to this shuttle with a companion, you'll be packing your bags and going home.'

  A hush filled the silence in the wake of the instructor's words.

  Bayard stopped in front of the airlock, the door cycling open behind her. 'Welcome to the Farm.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  'Welcome to the Farm!' The man's smile split his dark face. 'We're on level three, just below the site where the very first colonists made landfall.'

  'Uh...' Canavan's hand rose in the wave of his voice. '...sir? The first colonists landed on Englic in the Petal Plain.'

  The man laughed, pale green lab coat flaring about his knees as he spun around. 'Not so, Recruit...?' Perhaps it was the way the man stuck his finger in the air, the imperious rigidity of it, the way the fat silver sheath encasing it from knuckle to middle joint flashed in the light flooding through the wall of plasgla
s, but no one laughed as he swung back around to face them.

  'Uh... Canavan, sir.'

  'Recruit Canavan!' The man must be a spinning top, Subria thought, as he completed another turn. Once facing away from them again, he marched towards the big double doors, boots cracking on the shiny floor. 'It's a common mistake, Recruit Canavan. While the bulk of the colonists did land in the Petal Plains, the first actual human to set foot on Jørn soil did so right here.'

  He spun again, feet coming together with a snap, forcing Subria to jerk to a halt before she ran into him. Her back wasn't so lucky, and she winced as someone rammed a datapad between her shoulder blades.

  She didn't turn to see who it was, barely heard the mumbled 'sorry'. There was some kind of weird power about the man's finger, the way he held it stiff and straight, pointed towards the ceiling, that transfixed her, left her unable to tear her gaze from the shiny ring.

  'Actually,' he said, leaning close and lowering his voice. 'It was twelve point eight metres that way.' He motioned upwards, and Subria's eyes followed, looking straight up at the ceiling along with the rest of her classmates.

  Maybe it wasn't his finger; maybe the power was in the flash of his too-white teeth against the dark umber of his face. The twinkle in his eyes, the hint of a secret, a joke buried in their depths? Perhaps it was all of those, or maybe it was a magnet in that damned ring, calibrated not to metal but overeager recruits.

  Whatever it was, it was a lodestone in her gut, bending her spine, drawing her eyes, stretching her hearing so she wouldn't miss a single word. She felt Canavan, Bank and Elstra draw closer behind her, crowding up against her back. The other recruits huddled in at her sides, the ring sucking them all in.

  The metal gleamed silver. She never wanted to take her eyes from it, never wanted to—

  A ringing in her ears, the sharp piercing sound reaching into her brain, winding around neurones and telling her to let go. A loud click sounded somewhere deep inside.