Burning Suns: Conflagration (Book One)

Burning Suns: Conflagration (Book one)

  First edition: November 2015

  ISBN: 978-87-998323-1-6

  Published by SunTzuGames (owned by Emil Larsen)

  Leragervej 4a - 4640 Faxe - Denmark - www.suntzugames.com

  Burning Suns © 2015 SunTzuGames (development & publishing). All rights reserved.

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of SunTzuGames.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author and creator’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Author - Lisa Wylie

  [W] www.facebook.com/wyles77writes

  [M] [email protected]

  Creator - Emil Larsen

  [W] www.suntzugames.com

  [M] [email protected]

  The cover is composed of artwork done for the Burning Suns universe by the illustrators Angelita Ramos, Gabriel Barbabianca and Caner Inciucu.

  JENNIFER

  999 ATA - Hel’s Market, Hel, Asgard System, Neutral Space

  I hate this place.

  The coffee’s terrible.

  And the smell’s worse.

  Jennifer Bronwen, freelance entrepreneur, sometime mercenary, occasional criminal, and skipper of the independent merchant freighter Bronwen’s Fortune wrapped her hands around her stained polymould mug of alleged coffee and tried not to breathe too deeply as she watched the other patrons of the all-day diner going about their daily lives.

  It wasn’t one of Jen’s usual haunts; in fact, it was a long way out of her usual sphere of social and commercial interaction. Most of the people who frequented the grubby little back-alley dive were employed in desperately low-wage jobs in the Market. Cargo handlers, refuse collectors, cleaning and maintenance techs and the like, all of whom were too used to the squalor to pay it much mind. Normally, Jen would not have been caught dead within a quarter-click of the place, making an exception only on the rare occasions when a specific business associate called.

  He had called this morning (rousing her with some reluctance from the sinfully soft bed of her local squeeze) and issued a summons, naming the location then ringing off without waiting for her agreement. The choice was hers: if she showed up, there would be work on offer, if not, he would call her another time. With no current contracts, a rapidly diminishing credit account, and a ship in increasingly desperate need of a number of repairs, she’d decided that hearing what he had to offer would cost her nothing more than a little time and a bit of a sulk from the pretty boy she’d have to leave in bed. And so it was that she found herself sitting with her crap coffee in an establishment that was a dive even by the Outskirts’ barrel-scraping standards, waiting for her contact to make an appearance. As per fucking usual, he was late.

  She drained the mug, grimacing at the mouthful of grit at the bottom, but was nonetheless contemplating ordering a second—bad as it was, it was still parsecs better than anything on the food menu—when a shadow fell across the stained, grease-smeared surface of the table. She looked up, nodded a curt greeting. “Took your own sweet time, didn’t you?”

  “Worth waiting for, Captain Jennifer, worth waiting for.” Orden Snake-Eyes smiled winningly as he slid into the cheap polymould seat opposite hers. “How’ve you been?”

  “Earning an honest, if modest, profit,” Jennifer shrugged, keeping her tone noncommittal. None of your damn business.

  “Oh, I doubt it was all honest, was it?” Orden grinned. “As a regular retainer of your services, I’m well aware of the truly, ah, eclectic range of your commercial interests.”

  Jennifer glowered at him: he was entirely too chipper for this god-forsaken hour of the morning. “Whatever. Listen, Orden, you called me. It’s too early to be out of bed, this coffee tastes like shit, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna catch something terminal just from breathing the air in here.” The scrubbers bordering the ceiling were crusted with garishly coloured scabs of mould that was growing into a network and colonizing the condensation-streaked walls, and she didn’t think the tickle at the back of her throat was her imagination. “Your bizarre affection for this cesspit is as irritating as it is incomprehensible, so do me and my life expectancy a favour and get to the point. What do you want?”

  “All in good time, my dear Captain Jennifer. You may be a woman of discerning tastes, but I’m a simple, down-to-earth fellow and I’m starving.”

  “You’re going to eat here? Seriously?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Jennifer wrinkled her nose. “Well, leaving aside the fact I’ve seen cleaner field latrines, you should never eat anywhere where they show you 3D holos of the food.” She leaned back in her chair with an expansive grin. “Bronwen’s first law of survival.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Orden decided. He banged a fist off the wobbly polymould table top, spattering the dregs of Jen’s coffee over the surface as the mug toppled over with a dull clunk. “Hey, could I get some service over here, please?”

  Jennifer studied her prospective employer as he entered into an extended barter with the apathetic waitress about changes to nearly every ingredient of one of the special orders. Orden was one of the numerous hybrids that seemed unique to Hel’s Market, the unwanted offspring of whores and destitutes too poor to be able to afford contraceptive medication or forced by their owners and pimps to carry their unanticipated children to term to provide the seedier side of the Market with a cheap source of labour. Hybrids were often exotic in look, some commanding a fortune in the slave markets. Orden was one of the luckier ones—he’d been born ugly, a half-human, half-neomorph with fast wits and a faster tongue. His shock of golden-blonde hair was trained neatly between the scaled crests that swept back from his forehead, and tied into a short club at the base of his neck. His pale-green, over-large, lidless eyes were bright with inquisitive interest in everything going on around him; the vertical slits of his pupils lent his gaze a sinister quality even when he was smiling. His scales bore a faint, irregular pattern of golds and pale browns, thickening and darkening over his nose and forehead to give him a noticeably reptilian cast. Taller than most humans, he seemed to be built entirely of gangling limbs of ropey muscles. He was relatively young as humans went, but his neomorph father meant he had developed quickly, rendering him dangerously intelligent at a comparatively young age. He had already charmed the waitress into acquiescing to his numerous requests, and his attention had now returned to Jen. “I have a client who is a collector of… let’s call them historical artefacts. He has a particular interest in items dating from the fall of the Psyonic Empire and the Hundred Years’ War.” Orden leaned back in his seat, crossing his legs at the ankles and lacing his fingers across his stomach. “Around eleven hundred years ago, in case you weren’t up on your history.”

  “That much I knew,” Jen returned dryly. “When the races of the galaxy rose up in righteous rebellion, threw off their persecutors, took back that which had been denied them by centuries of oppression and greed, and formed a new brotherhood of peoples in the Galactic Assembly of Sovereign Civilisations. New era of peace, liberty, fraternity, yada, yada, yada.”

  Orden chuckled, amusement mottling his skin more strongly with shades of gold and brown. “A textbook quotation, Captain Jennifer. Exactly so. My client has a specific interest in weapons from that period, and as you can imagine, such items are somewhat scarce.”

  “And well guarded, I would guess,” Jennifer observed. Collectible artefacts and we
aponry from the fallen Templar empire were worth an absolute fortune. They were seldom to be found on the black market, and private collectors had been known to stoop to murdering their rivals to obtain particularly rare or significant pieces. It was an incredibly lucrative and lethal trade, one that Jennifer hadn’t been aware Orden dabbled in. One she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to get tangled up in herself. For sure it was well-paid, but the life expectancy of artefact dealers wasn’t considered to be a perk of the job.

  The hybrid tapped the scaled skin between his slitted nostrils with a sly smile. “In certain cases it’s not so much that they’re well guarded, rather that they’re simply… inaccessible to honest entrepreneurs such as myself.”

  “Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”

  “Not exactly, hence my interest in subcontracting the work to you.”

  Interest piqued, Jennifer raised one eyebrow. “Well, it certainly sounds pretty profitable. Must be, if you’re willing to cut me in on the deal. So where exactly is this rare, historically relevant, poorly guarded yet curiously inaccessible trove of treasure, Orden?”

  Orden shrugged nonchalantly. “In the Modeus system, of course. Thanks so much,” he smiled at the waitress as she brought his meal. “Sure you don’t want to order something?”

  “No,” Jen declined. “Thanks, but I prefer not to have to worry about someone having eaten my food before me.” As the waitress retreated, she leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Modeus? You want me to go to Modeus to acquire a cache of archaic Templar weapons? Are you out of your half-lizard mind?”

  “Not at all. Of all of my contacts, you’re the one who’s uniquely suited to this job.” Orden paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Unless there’s some ridiculous and nauseating residual loyalty to the old Terran culture lurking around in your psyche? Some genetically encoded morality check that your Marauder upbringing can’t entirely erase, perhaps?”

  “Hardly,” Jen snorted. “It’s more that I’ve got absolutely no desire to go to Modeus if I can avoid it. Frankly, it’s fucking miserable as systems go, and I don’t care for the company of all the po-faced, self-righteous, stiff-assed bastards that live there.”

  “Oh come on. You don’t like the people? You’re going to throw away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for that? Don’t be such a child.”

  “Hey!” Jen protested, stung by the barb. “I’m not being childish, it’s…” Orden cocked an expectant eyebrow as he watched her flounder, “experience. It’s an opinion born from experience. And every time I go there, that opinion is reinforced.”

  “Your cut will be sixty percent,” Orden announced with a thread of impatience weaving into his tone.

  “Sixty?” Jen echoed in disbelief. For Orden to be happy with a minority take, that had to mean the total value added up to some serious credit. “What am I looking for, Ex-fucking-calibur?”

  “Not quite, but surely that’s enough of an incentive to make you suck it up and park your prejudices in holding for a few weeks? Besides, you can look upon it as your chance to shine. You do pride yourself on your professional skills, don’t you?”

  “Almost as much as on my tact and my manners,” Jen drawled insouciantly.

  Orden laughed. “Then what better stage on which to prove yourself? This job, done right, will live in infamy.” He slid a piece of polyfilm across the table. “That’s the market value, the location of the package, and the drop point. If you want the job, let me know by zero-hundred. Otherwise, I’ll have to find an associate with a little more… oh, what’s the word...”

  “Balls?”

  Orden smirked. “Chutzpah,” he corrected. He put his fork in his mouth, chewed, then swallowed the mouthful with a grimace of utter disgust. “Christ and all the Universe, that’s revolting.”

  “I warned you.”

  “Yes, you did. You’re clearly smarter than you look.” Dabbing at his mouth delicately with the paper napkin provided, he pushed his chair back and looked down at Jennifer. “Opportunity of a lifetime, Captain Jennifer. Don’t pass it up.” He pointed two fingers at her, pistol style, winked, and sauntered off.

  Jennifer watched him go, waiting until the rest of the clientele had forgotten his passing before looking at the note. The pay was the best she’d ever seen for a job, and the location… She read it, shook her head, then read it again to be sure she hadn’t imagined it. “Oh wow,” she breathed. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” She folded the film up, tucked it into a pocket, and rose to leave.

  It was only then that she realized that Orden had left his bill for her to pick up.

  Shit. I hate this place.