Dagger's Edge: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Brutal Edge Book 2), page 1
DAGGER’S EDGE
©2023 PACEY HOLDEN
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CONTENTS
ALSO IN THE SERIES
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
Chapter 33
Thank you for reading Dagger’s Edge
ALSO IN THE SERIES
Calamity’s Edge
Dagger’s Edge
History’s Edge
Check out the entire series! (tap or scan)
1
Back for more, really? I’d call you a glutton for punishment, but that would be disingenuous to myself—after all, this story’s about me and not you—but I think we’ve gotten to know each other a little better by now. You expect me to kick some serious ass, and I expect you to…
…I guess I didn’t think about it that much. What’re we doing here?
Doesn’t matter.
You’re not here by accident, right?
You know this isn’t a bedtime story for little Nancy?
No rainbows and unicorns in this book, although sometimes, I wish there were.
My life has been anything but easy.
If you’re looking for a riveting tale about a badass brochacho that goes on a revenge rampage across the cosmos, one that involves flying right into the face of an evil, intergalactic corporate empire hellbent on monopolizing every aspect of intelligent life in the universe and burning that shit down to the ground…
Can’t help you with that, either.
What? Do I look like a superhero to you?
I’m just one guy. One. And there’s so many of them, the Solus Hegemony, that they’ve left the realm of real numbers and crossed into the territory of abstraction. You know what I’m talking about; when a thing gets so big you use vague words like sprawling or expanding to describe it. The Hegemony; they’re like that.
I can’t fight an intergalactic war all by myself.
But I did start one.
This is the story of how I single-handedly set the galaxy on fire.
“She’s doing it again,” EV said matter-of-factly.
The Electronic Voice, or Artificial Intelligence, always stated things as if I wasn’t also staring at the security monitor. The thing had almost no personality, but it did make sure to let me know that it thought humans were incapable of figuring out anything by themselves.
“Captain Edge,” EV said, “the brew cycle is complete. Your caffeinated beverage is ready for consumption. Be advised: this brew is consumed hot. Take care not to injure yourself.”
“Thanks,” I said, lifting the zero-G bulb-style mug from the desk. I slid a thumb over it, venting a tiny sip of coffee and sampling it.
Satisfied I’d gotten away with taking a sip and not burning my tongue, I leaned back in the captain’s chair, propped my boots up on the desk, slid my hands behind my head, and heaved a sigh. The past two weeks of space travel had been absolute torture with no respite. I felt like I was back in school on Malstadt, the indoctrination center for the Solus Hegemony’s Youth Academy. They don’t call it an indoctrination center, of course not. It’s a glorified military academy attached to an orphanage, and it’s no way to grow up, believe me. I’ve been doing a lot of internal wrestling with that lately; not really something I like to think about.
No matter how hard I tried to bury it, I couldn’t stop the memories from resurfacing.
I needed to get to Earth, to meet with The Syndicate and figure out how to get the last remnants of an entire race of people a new homeworld. Preferably something outside the reach of the Hegemony, if such a thing were even possible. That was a big ask, though. A lot like reaching your hand into the cookie jar and hoping not to get caught, even though you know your mother is watching you the whole time.
I had to be honest with myself; it was impossible.
But, like a determined child with an unconquerable sweet tooth, I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
“Captain Edge, she’s doing it again. Are you lucid at the moment, sir?”
“Yes, EV—”
I cupped her chin and gently turned her head. She had caught a round to the back of her skull. The hair was parted around a gaping entry and exit wound of torn flesh and…
I winced. The memory cut deep. Straight to the core, without mercy. Unfiltered pain, like swallowing a mouthful of cyanide but somehow being denied the privilege of dying. Pain like this should kill a person. The fact that it doesn’t…
I don’t know if that’s a sign of strength or insanity.
Breathing underwater would be easier.
“Damn it.”
“Captain Edge, are you all right?”
I shivered.
“I’m fine.” I glanced at the screen, hoping for a distraction.
I found one.
Our stowaway was at it again. I thought I’d made good on my declaration to return all of the abducted people back to New Lexington, but I’d thought wrong. I thought wrong about a lot of things, like thinking I’d spent a year or so on Kilmori. Once I started delving into the Roll Tide’s memory banks, what EV referred to as the “cheese shop” for reasons I didn’t understand, I found out it had been two years, five months, and thirteen days. That, and the galaxy was a lot bigger than the Hegemony had ever let me find out about.
Admittedly I hadn’t given much thought to the future, but if you told a younger me that I’d be twenty years old and trying to run a starliner, ferrying around the last remnants of an entire race of people from the glassed ruins of their home planet…
I shook off the stream of thoughts, returning my attention to the woman.
This woman, whomever the hell she was, had hidden in a residential compartment until we made the warp jump toward Sol. Skazz found her in one of the utility bays, passed out against a bulkhead with an open can of starship-grade epoxy in her lap.
That was the first time.
I tried to ask her questions, to figure out who the hell she was and why she didn’t want to go back home. It was too late then; I wasn’t turning the ship around for her. To my surprise, she insisted New Lexington wasn’t her home.
Skazz and I continued asking her questions, and we continued getting non-answers. I thought we looked pretty inviting, not so intimidating as we normally did, what with the two of us wearing our underarmor, no helmets, and not carrying weapons.
I tried her again, keeping my voice calm and soft.
“Do you have a name, young lady?”
She blew a raspberry at me and aggressively flipped me her middle finger. I noticed the nail was a mix of dark blue and natural keratin white, idly wondered where she found the blue polish.
“That’s confusing,” I remarked to Skazz, “she looks like she’s thirty years old, but she’s got the social development of a five-year-old.”
“Fuck you,” she dragged the words out in a trundling slur. “I’m twenty-five.”
I raised my brows. “Twenty-five, huh? That’s not a jar of potpourri you’re savoring, there.”
Her eyes lolled aimlessly for a moment, then settled on me. Sapphire blue,
“I had a nightmare.” She shrugged. “Just wanted a little… escape is all.”
Skazz pointedly sealed the can and returned it to the hazmat locker beside the maintenance bench. He gave me a sidelong look, saying without saying, what are we going to do about this?
“You have a name?” I asked.
She laughed, a short, high-pitched squeak. The squeaking continued until it became rolling laughter.
Phlegm crackled in her throat and she fell into a coughing fit.
I tried to be patient. Figured if she looked this rough, she must have had it rough, so a delicate hand here might be the way to get through to her. She clearly felt alone. At least, alone enough to leave her home behind. Maybe if she thought other people wanted to help, she’d start to come around.
“You can call me Stileto.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, completely missing the smear of gray epoxy stuck to the tip of her nose.
“Okay, Stileto. Why didn’t you go back with the others? Back to New Lexington?”
She shrugged, eyes roaming the bulkheads along the ceiling as she hummed a tune.
“I’m not going to dump you out an airlock or confine you to quarters or anything like that,” I assured her, “but I do need to know what your intentions are.”
She smiled and replied without looking at me. “I’m just taking things one day a time. Feelin’ it out, you know? Galaxy’s a big place. Like, omega big. Huge. Un-fucking-fathomably huge. I wanna see as much of it as I can before the night comes when I go to sleep and don’t wake up again.”
“You’re not going to find any of that in a can of starship-grade epoxy.” I pointed out.
“That’s… different,” she admitted. “It’s when I get all—” She twitched and tapped her fingers together. “—All mixed up in my head. I just need something to straighten out all the tangled wires, you know? Cross-firing signals. Conflicting thoughts. Too much, too fast. I can’t carry it all, so I make an escape. I escape and just… coast… right. On. Through.”
I stared at her, unsure of what I was looking at.
Beneath the wave of greasy blonde hair, the structure of her face was perfectly symmetrical. Soft, smooth skin buried under layers of grime and lack of self-care. The part of me that might have appreciated her obfuscated beauty had died on Kilmori. It registered as more of a fact than a feeling to me. She was uncommonly attractive, yet she looked like a beat-to-shit refugee who had been wandering the streets for years. Her words were equally as harsh, her dispassionate disposition unexpected and strange. Something about her didn’t add up. Trying to understand her felt like trying to force a puzzle piece in at the wrong angle in hopes it would give a better idea of the full picture.
Skazz jerked his head to the side. I stepped away from the girl and joined him in the corridor.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
The tall kilmori warrior gave me a blank stare, his cold, dark eyes completely unreadable. The thin scar on his left cheek pulsed as he worked his jaw. The kilmori were a mining people and stalwart warriors. His pale skin spoke to the former, while his wild mane of long, dark hair served as a sign of the latter.
“We did not plan for this,” he said.
“I know, but what can we do about it?”
“She is paráxenos. Strange.”
We both turned to look at her.
Stileto tapped the pads of her fingers on the bulkhead, drawing shapes that only she could see, while she continued humming the same tune.
“That’s not up for debate,” I said. “But is she dangerous?”
“Not to us.”
“To herself, though…” I said, picking up what he was saying.
“Exactly.”
At the time, I decided she deserved the benefit of the doubt.
So I gave her a second chance. A third and a fourth, too.
One benefit of her addiction was that I learned the layout of the ship much faster.
Rohn, another of the kilmori warriors, found her in the engineering section, standing next to a yellow and black sign that read, PPE REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT — TOXIC VAPORS MAY BE PRESENT. Stileto sat under it, taking short, rapid breaths, huffing reactor fumes as they vented through the exhaust manifolds.
Next, it was Brick who stopped her from cracking open a liquid shim cartridge in the equipment repair bay. He had to wrestle the stuff out of her hands, which earned him a bruise the size of a screwdriver handle on his temple. Brick can be a little… abrasive. I pointed out to him it could have been worse—she could have stabbed him with the narrow end.
Brick didn’t find it as funny as I did for some reason.
The last time, EV notified me Stileto was trying to start the auxiliary power plant on a transport ship, probably aiming to huff the exhaust fumes. That was when I learned something else about Stileto:
Whatever her story was, she knew how to fly starships.
After the last incident three days ago, I decided enough was enough and had her confined to quarters.
Fast forward to now, what I was watching on the screen.
Apparently, Stileto had figured out how to disable the control panel to slip out of her room—though there was no evidence of any physical tampering with the panel that I could see on the security feed—because she was now in the cargo bay working the manual control valve on the liquid oxygen servicing pipe. The dangerous liquid spilled onto the floor at her feet, billowing thick clouds of cold oxygen.
She leaned over the rapidly evaporating puddle, stuck her face in the cloud, and took several deep breaths of the icy fumes.
“I’ll go talk to her,” I said, bringing my boots off the desk.
EV replied, “We will be exiting warp in ten minutes. Docking procedures with Jupiter Station will begin approximately fifteen minutes after we exit warp.”
“Jupiter Station?” I asked, pulling on my jumpsuit top and sealing it to the bottoms. “I thought we were going to Earth?”
“Captain, Jupiter Station is the designated checkpoint of the Sol system. Do you not remember?”
I stepped over to the wall locker next to the desk, retrieved my Redhawk revolver, and holstered it on my belt. I didn’t remember the conversation. The last two weeks had been a blur, though, and in my defense, I wasn’t sleeping very much.
I wasn’t the galaxy’s best pilot, but I was getting better every day. I set a schedule for everyone, which included two hours of physical training, two hours of studying the star charts, and perusing the Roll Tide’s memory logs to familiarize ourselves with the galaxy and current events. Oh, I almost forgot, we also spent about fourteen hours a day in the flight simulators, working our way up from smaller craft like single-seater fighters to transport craft. I didn’t know what the Divine Thread had in store for us, but lately, it was feeling more like a divine knot in my noodle.
If that went over your head, just think of it as a pain in the dick.
Same difference.
Yesterday was the first time I tried maneuvering a cruiser, something the size of the Roll Tide, which I had forcibly inherited from Dexter. Turns out maneuvering isn’t all that complicated. It’s the docking part I had serious trouble with, and I wasn’t convinced I’d learn that in time to make use of it.
That was one of many reasons I was grateful for the Electronic Voice artificial intelligence Dexter had installed into the Roll Tide. It was pretty handy with the autopilot feature, and that gave us a pretty good chance of not smashing into whatever station we docked with. A ship this size wasn’t built for planetside landings, either. If it touched down somewhere, it wouldn’t break atmo ever again.
