Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

“Yeah, sure,” Sato said and picked up the limb, almost dropped it, and had to use both hands. It was heavier than he remembered. Of course, when he’d assembled the Æsir in New Warsaw, it was with a manufactory and through remote operations to keep it quiet.

Struggling a bit under the load, he stumbled through the rubble, both old and new, until they came to the SUV. Rick did a rather amusing one legged hop, complete with dangling wires and broken linkages from the severed stump of his right leg. It looked almost like real bits of flesh and muscle, in some ways.

“You better let me drive,” Sato said as they stood by the SUV.

“I’d say you don’t have a leg to stand on, but that would be me.” Rick nodded and put the case in the back seat.

Sato glanced at the former garbage truck. It had bulged out in places, and a burning body hung out of the driver’s door. He swallowed, then blinked.

He opened the hardened door, a wave of heat and smoke washing over him. Inside everything was ruined, burned, or melted. A trio of bodies were slumped in chairs, all contorted, frozen in their final moments of agony. He nodded at the results, then blinked as he struggled with himself. A tear rolled down his cheek.

“I only used one grenade,” Rick said. “Less than a K-bomb, you said, but it brewed up bigtime. Must have had a lot of ordnance inside.” He shook his head and spoke. “Mr. Sato, we need to go.”

He turned his head and looked at Rick, blinking against the fading dual image. Rick was already in the passenger seat, staring at him.

“There’s no legal authority here, but my grenade could draw scavengers.”

“Yeah,” Sato said. “Sure.” He handed Rick his severed leg and climbed into the driver’s seat. He examined the vehicle’s controls; nothing like modern flyers or spacecraft. The vehicle was a descendant of types that had been manufactured on Earth for well over a century.

“You ever driven—” Rick started to ask, but Sato had already started the SUV.

A tone beeped, and Sato secured the seatbelt without conscious thought, silencing the tone. He put it in gear, grasped the wheel, and moved away from the curb with calm assurance.

“When did you drive a ground car?” Rick wondered.

“It’s been a while,” Sato said. “We need to get to a hotel so I can open this box.” He glanced at Rick’s leg lying between them on the seat. “And fix you up.”

“You can do it now?”

“I’ll need a few things, but most of it is in my bag.” He accessed the AetherNet, despite the terrible connection, and located a hotel with good reviews only a few kilometers away, outside the warzone they’d been adventuring in. There also appeared to be a hardware store right across the road. “We’re good, let’s just get out of here.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

* * *

The hotel was a dump, but at least it was a dump in a somewhat safe area. Sato guessed ‘safe’ was a relative term in most of Houston just then. Maybe most of the world. While they’d driven to the hotel, he’d spent some time downloading a better take on the planet’s current situation. He wanted to know how far the storm extended. The answer was pretty damned far.

He’d spent many years away from current events. As a key player in the Winged Hussars, he’d lived in New Warsaw, the Hussars’ hidden home base. A fascinating star system where the sun had gone not-quite supernova eons ago. He’d studied the system himself and put forward the theory that one of the powerful races of the galaxy had triggered an aborted nova for the purpose of mining the system’s mineral rich planets.

The theory gained credence because of Home, the only planet to survive with an atmosphere. Simply stated, no planet should have survived such an event. It would have either been too far away to have had an atmosphere dense enough to support life, or too close to avoid being charred to a cinder. No, Home had survived by plan. It now orbited just far enough from the stellar remnant to possess a carefully crafted minimal ecosphere.

He’d always thought the biggest prize of the stellar project was the former gas giant. F11 was the fuel the galaxy ran on. The key component to fusion power. A stable isotope of fluorine, it was both an inhibitor of neutrons as well as absorbing most radiation. Without it, fusion wasn’t practical on a large scale. You only found F11 in two places: around a black hole and in the core of a gas giant. Since black holes were dangerous and the cores of gas giants impossible to get at, you needed the remnant of a gas giant left after a nova.

New Warsaw’s former gas giant was an F11 mine with reserves measured in gigaliters. It must have powered millions of starships before or during the Great Galactic War. Now it fueled the Winged Hussars, with more than enough left over to discreetly sell for billions in profit.

Living for years in such a place of relative luxury and seclusion, Sato had lost track of the events within the galaxy at large. At least until the Mercenary Guild’s war against humanity began. Even then, he didn’t wonder why, only what the war would deliver to him in the form of new technology to discover, implement, and explore. Which brought him full circle to the incident with the Keesius doomsday ship and his new pinplants.

“Earth’s a real mess,” he mused aloud as they worked together, moving Dakkar’s support cube into their rented room.

“You think?” Rick replied dryly.

“No, I mean bad. The economy is in tatters, and there are at least a half million alien mercs occupying every starport on the planet.