Pursued by the Alien Lord (Warriors of the Lathar Book 16), page 1
Pursued by the Alien Lord
Warriors of the Lathar
Book 16
Mina Carter
New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author
Copyright © 2022 by Mina Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
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
Epilogue
About the Author
1
“Mr. James,” Raven Haverington said, suppressing her irritation. “I’ve told you before that having me on site personally costs more.”
She wasn’t amused—either that a client was querying her bill or that she actually had to come here in person rather than appearing through a video link—and didn’t bother hiding the fact. Video was always her preference.
She didn’t like leaving the safety of her apartment. Although apartment was somewhat of a misleading term. She had no windows, no fancy little balcony, and more importantly no neighbors. She lived in an old converted bomb shelter, a concrete basement hidden under one of the big high-rise towers downtown. It wasn’t the best neighborhood, but she wasn’t bothered about the real estate value, the local amenities, or transport links. The only thing she was interested in was the proximity to the data relay stations. Her apartment sat under a nexus of relays like a big fat spider in a web. She pulled the strings of the web, finding information and rooting out all the secrets that people wanted to keep hidden from her, and drew her prey to her… Digitally, of course.
Sighing, she refocused on the problem at hand. Mr. James. The only reason she’d been lured out of her lair was because this particular client was a high-paying one with little risk. Corporate espionage was one of her favorite side jobs. It ran a relatively low risk of being spiked in the datastreams and having her brain wiped to leave just an empty body—an empty husk that hadn’t gotten the memo that its occupant had vacated the premises. Just as his jobs were relatively low risk, so was coming here in person.
Charles James was a corporate type through and through—from the top of his styled hair, swept into a small quiff without a hair out of place, through the suit and tie no doubt purchased from a store with a guard on the door to stop the riffraff getting in, right down to the expensive Italian shoes that were no doubt tucked under the desk. He even had an expensive office with a penthouse view of the city stretched out below them—a good view as well. Someone had put thought and time as well as money into selecting this building for his offices. She couldn’t see even one of the sewage plants, and the Anselm industrial plants were just out of view. Given the city plans that she’d dug up said this building was originally low-cost housing, James’s business had really put a chunk of change into renovating it. She knew better than to ask where the people he had displaced had gone for housing. People like James didn’t care about things like that.
She looked at him with a stare that would have given a rattlesnake a headache. She knew she made him nervous; she made most people nervous, and that was on a good day. On a bad day like today when she was irritated, it was a hundred times worse. To his credit, though, James was not fidgeting too much.
She’d refused a seat when she’d arrived, instead leaning her ass against the back of one of the big leather couches in the middle of the room. They were really leather as well, another display of wealth that continued around the room. Almost as large as the main room of her lair, it had picture windows across two walls, plush carpeting that her heavy boots sank into, and mood lighting that highlighted the works of art dotted around the room. She was no art dealer, but she could tell real pieces when she saw them, even in the real world. It was the work of a moment to dip into the datastream, identify the artists, and get a price for the last time the pieces were sold. Interestingly, several were listed as stolen.
Focusing on the man behind the desk, she kept her expression level and neutral. Charles James was everything that was wrong with the corporate world. Greedy and avaricious, she saw them all the time in the datastreams. They didn’t travel on the metro or the trains, instead utilizing private vehicles… be that land-based or flyers, belching yet more contamination and pollution into the air. Didn’t matter to people like him that he was killing a world that countless future generations needed to survive. His hands were “clean.” The only blood he spilled was on spreadsheets. If he saw the real thing or even a body that had been spiked, he’d probably lose the very expensive lunch whose wrappers she could just see in the rubbish bin under his desk.
“That’s what I’m disputing.”
James sat back in his chair behind the huge real wood desk, his fingers steepled like an archetypal holo-movie villain. She barely cast it a glance. Real wood meant it was an antique, quite the statement since hardly any trees remained anymore, apart from the nature reserves and the collections of rich assholes like James.
“The job is the same whether you are on site or at your own location, so this extra charge is—”
“One you agreed to,” she interrupted him, her voice blunt and uncompromising.
Folding her arms across her chest, she fought the urge to pull her sleeves down. Most people put the movement down to the dataports embedded on the inside of her forearms, but it wasn’t. She was a cyber-hunter… She couldn’t care less about what people thought of her alterations or of them staring at them.
It was more about the now barely there scars that lay like a fine lattice over her skin, the result of a car accident that had claimed the lives of her parents, and almost taken her own. She’d lain in a coma for nearly a year and been paralyzed from the neck down for a year after that. Her first dataports had been her only lifeline, a way to access some semblance of life outside her crippled body.
“Regardless, company policy is not to pay extra for work dependent on its physical location.”
She snapped back to the conversation, giving him a hard stare. A lot of her clients assumed that just because she was female, she was a doormat. It was time to stop playing nice.
“That’s not going to work for me. Pay up or—”
He grinned broadly, like a shark. A corporate shark. The kind who looked down on other people they thought were somehow “less” than they were.
“Or else what, Ms. Haverington?” he asked, silky smooth, his voice filled with arrogance and his own self-importance.
She bit back her smile. He obviously thought himself unassailable—her favorite type of asshole to take down. But he wasn’t done digging his own grave.
“Sue me for nonpayment if you like.” The grin broadened. “Since your services are technically illegal… I’d like to see how that one turns out.”
She sighed. “Assholes like you never learn. Do you?”
Without moving, she opened herself up to the datastream. Although she had physical jack-ports, she didn’t need them to tap in to the streams. That was the beauty of viper-tech. She could piggyback off any nearby data cable and use it for access. It took her less than a microsecond to disable the digital security in the entire building. Then everything went crazy.
She killed the lights, every screen in the building flickering randomly. Apart from James’s screen. She displayed everything for him as she set about destroying his business in brutal, nitpicky detail. She had control of his company from the roots up, ferreting out each and every asset he had, even the ones he’d hidden in various offshore bank accounts and other places that assholes like this hid stuff they didn’t want the authorities to know about.
James’s face leached grey, beads of sweat forming on his brow as he watched his company’s value plummet.
“No! No! Stop!” he begged, his eyes wild as he looked up at her. “We can come to some arrangement here, surely.”
She’d have thought about believing him if he hadn’t reached for the button under his desk to call security. She’d seen them on her way in, besuited behemoths with no neck and more weaponry than a small army.
“Ah, ah, ah,” she clucked her tongue at him chidingly, the click of the lock on his office doors resounding in the room. Shutters rattled down over the windows as she triggered the panic room protocol. Now no one would get in or out unless she wanted them to.
“Now it’s just you and me.” She smiled at him, her shark grin even bigger than his. This was the part she liked the most, when she brought an asshole to his knees and made him beg. Only he wasn’t begging enough, not yet.
James surged to his feet and slammed his hands down on his desk as he snarled at her. “You’ll pay for this.”
She saw the moment he looked her over, assessing her slight, delicate frame compared to his gym-honed physique, and bit back her sigh. It was
As the thought of using physical violence occurred to him, she reached around and pulled the butterfly knife from the back pocket of her jeans. A quick, easy flick of her wrist opened the blade, the complicated movement evidence of her experience with the blade, and she carefully picked under her fingernails. Just because she was a cyber-hunter, lethal in the digital world, didn’t mean she couldn’t take care of herself in the physical world as well.
“Oh?” She looked up as he stalled, mid-lunge around the desk, his eyes wide on her blade.
“Sorry… were you talking? Personal hygiene, you know. Very important,” she said, extending her free hand in front of her and studying her nails critically.
He folded, sitting back in his big leather chair with a thump. She recognized it as this year’s model Zeus-tech gamer couch, fully automated with massage and media functions. She’d been looking at one for her lair but had decided against it. Her gamer couch was specially adapted to her specific implants.
“I’ll pay your bill.” He grabbed the keyboard in front of him. She nodded, releasing her lock on the input console. A quick thought canceled the simulation she’d been running and restored his company to where it had been when she’d walked in.
“Plus twenty percent,” she added, pursing her lips as she folded the knife and slid it away. “Goes up to eighty if any of your goons try and jump me as I leave the building.”
His eyelid flickered and she shook her head. So fucking predictable.
“Done. Paid. Twenty percent on top.” He pushed the keyboard away, looking at her in angry challenge.
She smiled and pushed off from the couch. “Nice doing business with you, Mr. James. Don’t contact me again. Our professional relationship is now at an end.”
“But… who will I get—”
“Not my problem.” She cut him off with a wave of her hand as she walked toward the door. The panic room protocols disengaged, and the shutters rolled back with a clatter, sending dappled slices of sunlight over her face from the world outside.
Leaving the office, she nodded at the wide-eyed secretary and breezed past the security guards as she stalked toward the elevator.
It was an external glass one with an awesome view of the city. She sighed as she leaned back against the handrail, taking a moment to appreciate the ride down. Leaving her underground bunker was a rarity, so whenever she did, she liked to appreciate the sights and sounds of life not in the datastreams.
She’d almost reached ground level when a comms request nudged at the back of her brain, fed through from her implants. Ignoring the ping, she left the elevator to walk across the immense lobby of the James building, aware of the hard stares from the security team. She gave them a smile and a small wave as she walked out the front door.
As soon as she did, the serene silence of the lobby was replaced by a deafening cacophony, the symphony of a city well past its recommended occupancy level, with traffic and people packed in like industrious ants as they went about their daily business. She pulled her hoodie up to cover her face and did an about face to cross the road, weaving between the traffic to reach the other side. Even if James’s goons ventured out of the building to try and follow her in some sort of ill-judged quest of revenge, she was headed in completely the opposite direction to the one they expected. Street training 101, never be where they expect you to be.
Crossing a few more intersections, she headed for a subway station, her heavy boots rattling against the metal stairs as she jogged down them lightly. Leaving ground level meant she lost connection to the top-side data junction, but her implants had searched ahead, picking up a connection to the nexus that the subway trains ran on, so her stream was uninterrupted.
She walked along the platform, her personal comms device in her hand. It was an act. Unlike the rest of the drones packed onto the platform around her, she didn’t need anything as crude as a device to access the datastreams… but it allowed her to blend in seamlessly. Pretend she was one of the masses. Her dyed black hair and silver nose ring added to the cover. She could have been anything from a college student right through to a waitress waiting for her big break on the silver screen.
While waiting for the next train, she turned her attention to the comms ping. As soon as she saw the ID code, she stilled. It was Buchanan, her boss. Technically. She was on retainer with him, but most of the time he let her work on whatever projects she wanted to, like the contract she’d had with Charles James. He didn’t care if she made money on the side, as long as she was available when he needed her.
But… for a conversation with him, she needed to be in her lair with all her firewalls in place. Out here, where anyone could potentially hack her transit stream and listen in, was not a place she needed to be talking to Buchanan.
She sent a ping back, with a timestamp to account for how long it would take to get back to her apartment and secure it, and then leaned against the station wall, apparently mindlessly scrolling through her personal device. The wall opposite showed an animated poster for that new Latharian mate program.
She wrinkled her nose. Aliens. The Lathar… everyone was mad for them, but she couldn’t give two hoots. She had way more important things to do than worry about little green men.
Like what the president of Earth and all her systems wanted with her.
Raven pushed open the door to her bunker to be greeted by Crow, her AI. It appeared in the form of… none other than a large crow perched on the console table where traditionally she’d have dropped her front door keys before venturing further into the apartment. Since her “keys” were her implants and inbuilt, that would have been rather messy, so she just paused to ensure the door locks cycled correctly and nothing had crept through with her. She wasn’t worried about intruders of the two-legged variety, not this close to her home, but instead those with four legs.
Rats were an ongoing problem down here. They liked to congregate in the stairwells, watching her with their little beady eyes as they planned their assault on her home. Their usual method of entry was either to rush the door when she entered or left, or they chewed their way in through the vents and maintenance shafts.
“Report,” she ordered Crow as the last lock cycled and she was sure they didn’t have guests of the rodent persuasion.
Crow cawed softly, his response a burst of data direct into her personal stream. The jumble was a mix of everything that had happened while she’d been gone. Everything from the fact that one of the lightbulbs in the bedroom had flickered through the need to order more of the soft cheese she preferred and right to the fact that the show Crow liked had a new episode streaming.
She smiled, running her hands in the air over his feathered head, using her implants to ruffle the databytes he was constructed of. He blinked in pleasure, hopping off the table to follow her through the large living space.
It was, in essence, a huge concrete box. The space was divided up with moveable wall panels, not that she’d ever bothered to move any of them since they’d arrived. One wall separated her bedroom off from the main area, while another ensured the bathroom was hidden from view. The rest of the space was taken up by her living area and the kitchen to the left of the main door, a long breakfast bar with stools breaking up the areas. Two huge plasti-leather couches, battered after years of use, were pushed up against the walls on one side to make space for her work area. Monitors covered the wall opposite the door, several showing progress on the different hunter algos Crow was monitoring while one ran his show. He cawed and settled in front of it, his head turning slightly as he followed the action on screen. She chuckled to herself. Her bird-presenting AI was into rom coms…
