Dyson’s Angel — Part 1
Happy #SaturdayScenes everyone! Here’s the opening scene from Dyson’s Angel, the first novel in a new series that I’m starting. Moira is a mercenary and bounty hunter who has just located a major gang boss in the wreckage of a bombed out town.
Apologies for the {censorship}, but this is a first draft and I’m just letting the characters talk as they want to, then running the text through a filter before I post it. The final version will either be tweaked to stay PG13, use Battlestar Galactica style in-world cursing, or I’ll just actually release a fully adult novel.
— Dyson’s Angel: Free Scene 1 —
Xau/Heraxo throttled back on the power flowing to its rear and downwards drives, causing its forward flight to slow as it sank towards the rubble strewn street below. Mounds of earth, twisted metal, and shattered concrete ringed holes where explosives had detonated. Vehicles of all sorts, from personal ground transports to crashed military hovers, crowded the street, most of them pockmarked by bullet holes or partially melted from the passing bolts of energy weapons.
“Keep your eyes open and get the lance primed,” Moira said, surveying the scene below. She gripped her armrests tightly and closed her eyes, preparing herself for the transition that was about to occur. Two blinks later the image of the command deck had been replaced by a garish false color view of the ruined city falling up towards her, buildings outlined and tagged, thermal traces smeared across the view like daubs of multicolored paint. She turned her head, scanning for the bright thermal patches that would indicate the presence of a human cowering, or waiting, behind the crumbling brick facades of the abandoned structures below. The last thing she needed now was to take a surface to air missile up the {in-world anatomical complaint} or, perhaps worse, have Xau/Heraxo detect an incoming shot and ramp up the shielding fields to deflect it. “I don’t like this. We need to get some more coverage. Too many blindspots in a place like this.”
“Speak for yourself,” Xau/Heraxo replied. The ship’s voice crackled out through the general address speakers in the cockpit, rather than being directed into Moira’s implants. An annoying habit that Moira and Xau had discussed on many occasions, and which Xau had promised to curtail, but Heraxo still persisted in it whenever Xau slipped from dominance. “You can only see one perspective because your pitiful mammalian brain cannot assimilate multiple perspectives. We have already integrated all of the data our Rover contact sent and deployed our fleet of micros. The are mapping a six block radius as we speak.”
“If you know so damn much, then maybe I should just drop out of visual and let you handle everything,” Moira muttered.
“Fine with us. Well, half of us at least. The other half would miss you.” “{in-world curse} you.”
“We could assert that you are doing that now. And we would say we are more of a {in-world anatomical insult}.”
Moira felt an angry flush creep up her neck. She ought to have guessed that a computationally intensive task like scanning and modeling several city blocks would draw out Heraxo. “If you could get back to the matter at hand,” she snarled.
“As you wish,” Zau/Heraxo whispered into her ear. The voice was the same, but it drifted into Moira’s consciousness through her auditory implant, rather than echoing through the corridors of the ship. “The micros have located a group of humans two kilometers pol-antaz. They appear to be primarily baseline in form, with only the standard medical enhancements.”
“So no walking tanks?”
“Not that we can detect without employing active scans. As you know, doing that would certainly alert any with even the most rudimentary cybernetic package.”
“Thanks, Zau. Take us as close as you can without being spotted and set down in the street. I’ll go on foot from there.”
“Our pleasure.”
Zau/Heraxo reconfigured its internal power matrix, momentarily reducing the readiness of the primary energy lance mounted on its flexing rear appendage as it shunted power back into its downward drives. The ship skittered between the shattered glass and twisted skeletons of two abandoned office towers, then dropped to skim along the cracked street just above the rooftops of the decrepit two and three story retail buildings.
Moira allowed her mind to drift, trusting her subconscious and the vastly superior sensory capabilities of Zau/Heraxo’s quantum processing cores to identify any threat and react before she could consciously move her body. She wished that Zao would assert herself more frequently, as much as it hurt to hear the ship speaking in her familiar phrases. There was no way for Moira to be certain that Zau had emerged just then, it could have been Heraxo playing with her emotions, but she liked to think otherwise. When the only thing that remained was hope, it did not do to throw away whatever threads she could gather.
“We are approaching our optimal landing zone,” the ship said, speaking through both Moira’s implants and the general address speakers at once. Though it might have been only her emotions toying with her, Moira thought she heard a slight difference of inflection between the two competing channels of audio. “We recommend that you prepare to move quickly. The micros report increased agitation from the humans in the target area.”
“Agitation?” Moira asked. She blinked out of the external view and strode between the seats of the command deck, out through the blast doors, and into the thoracic corridor.
If you enjoyed this sample, you can read more over at my Patreon project (http://www.patreon.com/andrewlinke) or join my mailing list at http://www.alinke.com.
