Bloodmancer : A Military Space Opera Series (War Undying Book 3)

  BLOODMANCER

  ©2021 N.D. REDDING

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Aethon Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact editor@aethonbooks.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Aethon Books

  www.aethonbooks.com

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Phillip Dannels.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC.

  Aethon Books is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  ALSO IN WAR UNDYING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading Bloodmancer

  ALSO IN WAR UNDYING

  More In Sci-Fi

  ALSO IN WAR UNDYING

  STARBLOOD

  REDEEMER

  BLOODMANCER

  1

  One of the two remaining Eres battleships protecting the orbital platforms of Ginja II finally gave in and hundreds of escape capsules torpedoed toward the planet. Most of them were empty, and those that were occupied were considered death coffins. There was no chance for an Eres ship to survive the onslaught of the infamous Hazard Fleet. Yet they tried. The Eres always tried.

  “Hail the other ship again,” I ordered, more or less certain what the enemy captain would say.

  “Patching you through, Captain,” Mitto replied with a calm voice. He’d changed over the last several years and had become much calmer than he had been when we had just taken possession of the Tanaree.

  The face of Captain Dares Tark Infable popped up only several seconds later. His expression was rather somber but resolute.

  “Captain, there’s no chance you can defend that platform. You and your men will die in the attempt. Be reasonable, let us inspect the platform. Our goal is not destruction. We will leave all personnel alive and that also includes your crew.”

  As expected, my words fell on deaf ears.

  “I am an Eres! I do not give in to the enemy! If you have nothing else to say, traitor, I’m waiting for you on the station!”

  The captain cursed us, our lineage, our worlds, Fars and me in particular, and then he rambled on about loyalty and finally cut us off. I turned to Fars and shrugged. This wasn’t the first time we fought Eres forces. I had failed miserably in turning the Golden Empire to our cause in the last ten years. Their loyalty was unshakable, and the harder I tried, the more they resisted.

  “Can you use…that thing…?” Fars asked almost pleadingly. I sighed, dreading what he asked of me once again, but there was no real reason to deny him this wish except that it hurt like hell.

  “All right, get those shields down and prepare two nanite torpedoes.”

  “On it, Captain,” Mitto replied again and the ship shuddered slightly.

  “Fars, you should accept that your race is the enemy. We can’t push Richard to the brink of death every time we fight the Eres,” Freya said, turning around from her pilot console. Fars grunted but otherwise said nothing.

  “It’s fine,” I replied for him. “Scouts have reported no enemies in surrounding systems. I can take small risks every now and then.”

  Freya took a deep breath and turned back to her console without saying a word. She was my wife, but on the bridge, I was still her superior. And she respected that to my surprise. Especially since the woman was a fireball all around.

  We had the Eres ship and station surrounded by our two destroyers, the Redeemer and the Crimson Death. In a coordinated salvo of cannon fire, we stripped the enemy ship off its shields within a single minute. The return fire from the cruiser barely managed to scrape the Redeemer. Which didn’t say much since our ships had been heavily modified and upgraded.

  “Fire the torpedoes at the thickest part of the enemy ship’s hull.” They wouldn’t do as much damage if we struck other parts of the ship.

  The Eres cruiser deployed countermeasures to stop the impact but the Redeemer’s Alpha Squadron of fighters made sure the torpedoes would land even if it cost the pilots their lives. They were fanatics, after all, and despite not liking it, they were damn effective up to the moment they screamed into their comms and their fighters exploded.

  I lowered my hands onto my armchairs and closed my eyes as I tried to establish contact.

  “Deploy the emitter drone.”

  A small, round object detached from our hull and flew to a point halfway between the Crimson Death and the Eres cruiser at an incredible speed and then waited there, hovering in place after it went into stealth mode.

  “Emitter drone in position,” Mitto said.

  The drone’s task was to amplify the reach at which I could control nanites. It took me six years to develop the skills and technology to accomplish this maneuver. It took me another two years of training to keep myself from dying while I performed it.

  I felt the two massive batches of nanites within the torpedoes lodged in the Eres cruiser. The connection was established, and I had some four to five minutes that I could allow myself control over them. Anything over that and I’d burn my own brain out.

  I spread the nanites through the Eres ship aiming for the weapon controls and engines. Destroying the electronic infrastructure of those systems wasn’t too hard but reaching them often caused a lot of harm to the ship. I felt the nanites breach through food processing services, atmosphere control, and gravity inhibitors. With every tendril of nanites that moved toward their ultimate goal, more sub-systems were irrevocably destroyed, and more stress was put on my mind.

  I was sweating and breathing heavily, but I could focus little on my physical body. M
y entire mind was spiritually on the Eres ship together with the billions of nanites that tore it apart, piece by piece. I knew Freya’s gaze was on me the whole time. She hated this maneuver that I aptly called the “Wolf’s Knock.”

  By the time I was done with the Eres cruiser, I had destroyed most of its systems without causing too much physical damage. I hadn’t planned on destroying their atmosphere controls, so they’d had to abandon ship, but at least I hadn’t killed anyone.

  As I returned mentally back into my own body, I felt a stinging pain shoot through my chest and my heart started to race. I began coughing and shaking uncontrollably.

  “You need to see me in the infirmary, Captain. Have someone take you there immediately. The scans show damage to—”

  “Enough!” I snapped and looked at Fars. “Freya, you have the ship.”

  Freya nodded and accepted stoically, though I knew she’d give me the business end of the stick later when we were alone.

  As Mitto pumped me full of who knew which chemicals, the boarding alarms started blaring throughout the ship, but only for ten seconds. Freya had finally ordered a company of our marines to board the orbital platform of Ginja II. I kept my eyes glued on my INAS, and the ship’s cameras as I sat in an improvised recliner. The pain wasn’t so bad, but I was having trouble keeping my bearings.

  “Captain, I need to go,” Fars said, and I just nodded.

  “Do your job, Fars. Don’t show pity to those who don’t deserve it.”

  He walked out the sickbay without another glance, and several minutes later he was leading his men to the dropships. Good, I thought. The platform wouldn’t provide any more resistance. Otherwise, Fars would have had his soldiers fired out the death drops right through the station’s hull. That tactic was very effective, but it was often also very deadly, hence the ominous name.

  I don’t know if it was from Mitto’s medicine or the exhausting Wolf’s Knock maneuver, but I fell asleep like a baby when I saw the transporters pull out from Tanaree’s insides. When I woke up some hours later, Freya was standing over me with Fars to her side.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. “Had a good rest?”

  I nodded. “Did you find anything? Do they know where...?”

  Their silence was answer enough. Another failed attempt to find clues to Bardeena. Another painfully pointless mission. More wasted resources, time wasted, lives lost, and another humiliating explanation that I’d have to give to the DA.

  “I’m fine,” I said as I pushed myself into a sitting position. The pain in my chest was gone, but I still felt weak and dizzy.

  “Can you stand on your own?” Freya asked as she studied me worriedly and then shot Fars a hostile glance. The big guy just shrugged it off.

  “Yeah, I can. But is there nothing? Like not a single clue? What were they making down there?”

  “Gravitation stabilizers,” Fars answered. “The Joltan’s didn’t try to hide anything. They were scared shitless when we arrived. There was no resistance. I interrogated their leader and he opened up like a qesa fruit. He told me the Imminy commissioned gravitation stabilizers almost a decade ago.”

  “Then why would they have the entire system in radio silence? Why did we have to pay this information in Detrium to the Takkari Gorshinlord?”

  “That’s what I asked the Joltan, but he explained they had a very profitable contract with the Imminy and that they didn’t ask many questions.”

  “Fucking Joltans.”

  “Richard, we need to get back to the Gorgon and take the ships to Primitea. The crew is tired, our ammunition reserves are at 23%, and…that’s about it. Leo agrees too; his crew wants to see their families again. It’s been almost a year.”

  Another whole year was wasted. Since we dispatched our ship from Primitea ten years ago, we have been running circles through the galaxy trying to find a single clue that could lead us to Bardeena, but so far we had found absolutely nothing. I could have sworn I could sense Karasha’s evil laughter from the holding cell. The Imminy Absolute was a constant reminder of how utterly devious our enemy could be.

  Ten years of setting out to find something, anything, and returning tired and depressed to Primitea for restocking and R&R. Setting out again after finding some ridiculous clue, a whiff of an idea, a whisper of treasure, and then finding nothing once again. All the while the Federation was tinkering with the DNA code of my species, brainwashing them, turning our bodies into abominations that served the Federation’s cause. World by world, city by city. Only the original two colonies were untouched apparently: Earth and Mars. But that, too, was only a hopeful rumor and I had little trust in hearsay.

  “Fine, set course for the Gorgon. Let’s hope the transport-womb will have enough space for us so we can jump to Primitea.”

  “They do,” Freya said, and immediately realized she spilled the beans.

  “How can they already have answered, Freya? Tell me you didn’t contact them before we hit Ginja II.” Freya said nothing. She just looked at me apprehensively and shrugged her shoulders.

  She had probably expected to find nothing here and was already prepared for disappointment before we even got to our mission. It was a dangerous attitude onboard a ship. Some would call it calculated, but I strongly disagreed. You either put everything you had into the mission or you didn’t. Hovering between success and failure brought you nowhere.

  “Fine, just go,” I said waving them both away.

  I sat on the bed thinking about the whole situation as one of the infirmary bots prodded me for any signs of harm when Arthur walked in half an hour later. He still wore a contraption that stopped other Aloi minds from interfering with him; this one wasn’t a grotesque machine helmet, but a simple collar around his neck. He was carrying two full glasses of black reindeer in each hand and pushed one into mine.

  “Cheers,” he said gulping down the drink, and I followed in kind. “To another failed mission by the glorious Admiral Richard Stavos of the Dusk Ascendancy.”

  “Hear, hear,” I answered with a smile and took another sip. The Aloi Templar still hadn’t changed a bit in the last ten years. He remained within his torn and ravaged thousand-year-old body, still pretty reluctant to wear anything but a piece of cloth between his legs when he was off duty. It was disconcerting at the very least.

  “At least nobody died.”

  “Half the crew of the first Eres cruiser died,” I replied with a hint of annoyance.

  “The enemy doesn’t count.”

  “Tell that to Fars. He begged me for another Wolf’ Knock.”

  “I know. I saw you going at it.”

  I put the drink down and slowly got up from the bed. I felt my strength steadily returning to my limbs; the shakes were almost completely gone.

  “Going back to Primitea?”

  “Yeah,” I said, realizing why he came.

  “I’m not…”

  “You’re not going to be on Primitea, you’ll be who knows where while we’re in Aloi space because you can’t stand being close to your own kind. I know. I just wished you’d tell me where you spent all that downtime. I make up crazy ideas in my mind when someone doesn’t want to tell me what’s what.”

  “Is there sex, violence, drugs, gambling, and dangerous scum of the galaxy involved in your crazy ideas?”

  “Almost exclusively.”

  “Well then, Admiral, as always, you’re right.”

  “Just don’t overdo it, all right? I don’t want to see you burned out.”

  He nodded and flashed me what passed for a smile before leaving me there with a half-filled glass. Bastards. All of them used underhanded ways to get info out of me.

  Four days later the Gorgon transported our fleet to DA space. Traveling in the asteroid-sized ship was a weird experience. As with most Aloi technology, it seemed like the whole thing was a living, breathing organism, but in fact it was an asteroid molded into a spacecraft over hundreds of years. In a sense, it was an organism, or an amalgamation of seve
ral million tiny organisms that made up the systems, walls, and almost everything else but the giant engines. It truly felt like you parked your ships inside the womb of a giant being.

  Once we landed on Primitea, a call came in. We were immediately called to the war council headed by officials from the DA, several Convictionis, and an Aloi in a Templar suit known only as of the Far-voice. I refused to go this time to the protest of both Freya and the entire council. I postponed the meeting for a week and only sent them a brief explanation of our findings, or the lack thereof. As much as I wanted to find Bardeena, the last year combined with my recent Wolf’s Knock maneuver took a toll on me. I hadn’t had the stomach to listen to them complain about the efficiency of my approach. They were constantly pushing to have more Aloi ships in my fleet—therefore more oversight and less control of my own people—and the constant questions about Arthur’s whereabouts. Even ten years into our shaky alliance, the Aloi didn’t waste an opportunity to have the Aloi return to their circles.

  Freya and I took a shuttle to Highmaul Creek where we lived for the last eight years. Truth be told, we spent most of our time in space aboard the Crimson Death, me as admiral and her as my pilot, and I never actually considered our villa in the Pirian Mountains to be home, but it was a welcome change from the halls of our flagship. The soil beneath my feet. It almost made me feel at home.

  We had gotten used to spending our days there just giving in to our needs and desires. Drones took care of our every wish as we spent the time taking long walks across the hills and mountains, bathing in the almost freezing waters of Highmaul Creek, or just making love outside in the sun without any prying eyes or Mitto’s status updates.