Future Unleashed Read online

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  Future Unleashed Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

  Book design and layout copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

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

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  Daniel Pierce

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  Future Unleashed

  Book 5 in the Future Reborn Series

  Daniel Pierce

  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

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  1

  The teeth closed on my forearm with a crunch just as my blade slid into the creature’s gut. Soft coils of intestine flew out like wet confetti, and I kept my hand moving forward until my hand shattered a vertebra. With a long, piteous shudder, the creature went limp, falling on top of me as the world went dark.

  “This is unpleasant.” I rolled the beast over; the corpse began a slow descent down the incline where our fight had ended. The fight began some thirty meters up the hill, when I was trying to drink some of the superb tea that we were now carrying in our canteens, but the hungry predator had other ideas.

  Uphill, where I dropped my canteen, my tea was now a fading stain on the sand. “Well, I’ll be fucked.”

  “Jack, you okay?” Mira called from the crest of the hill. She was smeared with blood, her chest heaving from a fight of her own.

  “Yeah. The bastard spilled my tea,” I said, kicking the dead animal with a boot, but not hard. It was about four meters of hybrid cat-lizard, somewhere between actual life forms that had actually walked the earth at some point in the distant past. The hide was sand colored, with a cream belly and fine scales underneath the fur. The head was stunning—nearly a meter across, with massive fangs and a tongue covered in rasping spines. The tail was short, the legs long, and the claws even longer. It had to weigh seven hundred kilos, easy.

  “I’ve got some. Killed its mate. Smaller, but just as pissed,” Mira said, climbing down to me. Looping arterial blood covered her vest and armor like work of modern art—if it had been painted twenty centuries earlier. And by a human. This was something quite different; the leftover evidence of a killshot from her rifle at close range. Other than the blood, she appeared unscathed.

  “Have some of mine,” she said, holding out her canteen. Her intense green eyes were narrowed as she looked me over, and her honey-colored hair was damp with sweat. Mira was a heluva fighter, and a rare beauty. She was taller than me on the slope, and her freckles stood out in the midday sun. She wiped her face to clear some spots of blood, then nodded toward the dead animal. “Got a lock on your arm?”

  I started at that, then realized I was bleeding, but only a bit. My ‘bots were closing the wounds, and all that was left of the attack was the dead beast, some score marks on my arm, and fading streaks of blood.

  “What a desert. Everything under the sun and a few things that have never existed, all in a day,” I said. We were scouting deep into the southern reaches of our area, well beyond the working oil field and growing network of highways connecting the Free Oasis and our satellite communities. Aristine and the Eden Chain provided daily updates to our data, and what they were finding in The Empty was at odds with the name. The desert was crowded, and not just with creatures out of a nightmare.

  There were camps, towns, and outposts of every size, and ruins in between them, usually little more than collapsed walls and bleached bones. The Empty was an unforgiving place filled with easy ways to die, and the virus, now loose for two thousand years, made new and interesting ways to end your life. Some people died of thirst, some ended up in the belly of a beast. Either way, dead was dead, and our push to rebuild some kind of civilization was beginning to meet resistance in the form of enemies both human and animal.

  “What do you think about the water?” Mira asked, waving to a drone that flew past at a hundred knots. The drone dipped its wings and cut hard north, most likely under control of the Daymares who had taken up residence at the Cache. Members of Aristine’s people were cycling into our society now, coming up out of their long stay underground. The results were excellent—people from the Eden Chain were intelligent, hardworking, and curious about what was topside. In fits and starts, our societies were beginning to merge as we passed 3000 residents at The Free Oasis, with many more scattered in our outlier colonies.

  But for every new settlement, there were new beasts. Like the corpse soaking the ground in front of me, its muscles now slack in death. I winced as my ‘bots began closing the wound left by the creature’s fangs, then took a swig of Mira’s canteen.

  “They hide in plain sight. Where the hell does something that size find a place to ambush us, especially when we’re looking for it?” I asked with disgust.

  “That bush?” Mira said, pointing to a small scrub. The growth was no more than a meter high, and there were deep grooves in the earth behind it. “Lotta cat-lizard to hide in a small place. They’re built for it.”

  “Just like we’re built to kill them. But our luck is going to run out one day scouting these springs. It’s like back in my time, when new homes went up close to the desert, and coyotes would come into people’s yards and take their pets. It’s a clash of worlds, but here the clash isn’t forty pounds of canine. It’s a ton of fangs.” I kicked at the ground, thinking. We were growing fast. Maybe too fast. Sooner or later, we were going to start losing people, and then we would have to decide how to keep The Empty at bay on a more permanent basis. There were too few people to worry about preserving a landscape filled with monsters that were neither natural nor ripe for domestication.

  Someone would have to lose. “It’s not going to be us,” I said.

  “What?” Mira asked, confused.

  “This fight. We have to win, and that means more security. Everything needs water, but only one side gets to keep it. It has to be us.”

  Mira stared at the dead monster, nodding. She’d spent all her life in The Empty. She understood. “We will. One spring at a time. Like that one,” she said, waving toward a ring of succulents huddled around a low spot. “Think that’s it?”

  “I’d say that’s the second one. We were supposed to find three.” Aristine sent us data on three springs, each larger than the last and connected by an underground source that promised to support a community all on its own. We were moving out faster than our forests could keep up, even with their accelerated growth rat
e. It was a nice problem to have, as long as people didn’t get eaten.

  “Let’s pin all three and send Lasser back with Breslin. They can give me an estimate on population support based on water volume,” I said.

  My communicator clicked, and Silk’s voice floated out into the desert air. “Jack?”

  “Go on. Here,” I said.

  “How fast can you get back here?” she asked. There was no alarm in her voice, only something like amused concern.

  “Four hours if we haul ass. Everything okay?” I asked her.

  “You might say that. We have visitors incoming, and I think you’ll want to meet them. Traders, I think, or perhaps some kind of messengers. They’re twenty klicks out, so you’ll be here before they arrive,” she said. “Take your time and get here in the morning. Get sleep. I don’t want you wrecking over something like this. As I said, you’ll still beat them here easily.”

  “Easily? Are they walking?” I asked.

  “No, they’re in some kind of long wagons. The drones have done flyovers, and their vehicles are long, narrow, sitting up high on advanced wheels. It’s their beasts that are . . . interesting,” Silk said.

  “Not ogres?” I asked with a flush of anger. My policy was simple. All ogres were to be free. Period.

  “No. I think you call them—” She mumbled, speaking to someone else. When she returned to the channel, there was a note of laughter. “Um, hippos? A hipp-po-potamus?”

  “Hippos? In the Empty? This I have to see. We’ll be right there. Offer them a drink if they get there first, okay?” I said, thinking that some sleep might be in order before the headlong dash back home. My ‘bots needed time to work.

  “Will do. What about the hippos?” Silk asked.

  “See if we have any ripe cabbages for snacks and tell them not to sit on the furniture. See you soon.”

  2

  We saw the inner forest before anything else. The trees were growing well, their rings of greenery casting a cooling shadow over the Oasis and our system of broad, white gravel paths that serves as streets.

  “At some point, we might be tempted to pave or put concrete. Don’t let me do that,” I told Mira, who was grabbing her bag as we slowed to a halt. Two of Natif’s team—kids of no more than twelve—ran out, took the truck, and whisked it away for cleaning and service by the time I could thank them. Mira looked to our house with longing.

  “Shower and sleep?” I asked her.

  “And food. But mostly sleep. My ass is numb from too much travel, and I have to upload the new survey data before I can rest,” she said, groaning as she stretched her back. Mira was long and athletic, but her eyes were tinged with exhaustion and there was a fine coat of dust in her long hair.

  “Give me the tablet. Go get clean, and rest. Seriously,” I said.

  She handed it over and kissed me, then slid gratefully toward home, her long legs eating up the distance as a crew of people went by in a bustle carrying the material for a row of lights. The Oasis wasn’t just busy. There was purpose to what happened, and I spent the next few minutes chatting as I wound my way through everyone until I could get to the newest building, our circular command center. I’d gotten the idea from Aristine, who thought a simple hub was best for command and control. We could still have important, more exclusive meetings in my home, but for the public, we needed space, efficiency, and most of all, room.

  Andi greeted me as I went inside the sliding doors. Around her, there were no less than ten people working on maps, logistics, and what appeared to be the plans for a tethered blimp station.

  “How’s the arm?” she said, looking me over with her intense hazel gaze. Her hair was short, elfin, and damp. She’d come from home, and it occurred to me it was early in the morning, meaning Mira and I had made superb time despite our distance.

  “Clean. Another bite, but this was a hybrid. Part cat, part lizard, all asshole,” I said.

  “Get any pics?” Andi asked. She compiled species for us, if only in hopes of tracking what new and terrible things the virus was still producing in the wild. At my nod, she turned her attention to the tablet, then whistled low at the images. “Big bastard. Mean looking, too. How many?”

  “There were two. Mira popped the other one, but the pins are set and we have three good sources of water. We can move in that direction when we have enough people,” I said.

  “People we have. Another sixty arrived in three groups, Derin and Scoot have a few of them, Lasser has some, and Beba has the rest at the clinic. A few kids, some grandparents. Family groups, like you expected once word got out we were changing management out here in The Empty, “Andi said.

  “Good. Any fighters? Engineers?” I asked.

  “A few. One guy seems to be the closest thing to a dam builder I’ve ever met. He was interested in our water channels. Says there was—emphasis on the past tense—a huge system of farms out east, along a river. They used irrigation, water wheels, even flood control. I told him you would want to talk to him, but Beba is operating on his foot first. He’s got a porcupine spine driven into his ankle that has to come out.”

  “Ouch. And I say that as someone who just had teeth in his arm,” I said.

  “Right? Beba can save the foot, but he’ll be off it for a few days. In the meantime, I told him to draw anything he thinks we might use. His name is Floston.” She peered into my eyes and shook her head. “You look tired, babe. Time to stay here for a few days.”

  I stretched, nodding. I’d been pushing hard in the field, and being wounded by everything in the desert wasn’t helping my overall wellbeing. “I will. But first, tell me about our incoming guests.”

  Andi snorted, her eyes twinkling with devilry. She tapped her communicator. “Silk, come to command. Got to tell Jack about the flyover.”

  “Be right there,” came Silk’s voice.

  “She saw them first?” I asked.

  “She was on the drone, practicing with Yulin and the new crop of Daymares. There were six of them putting the drone through a lazy eight, and they saw our visitors first. I’ll let her tell you what she thinks. She says they look familiar,” Andi said with a shrug.

  Silk walked in a moment later, serenely beautiful and unhurried. Her black curls were pulled back in a tumble, and she wore the red and blue tunic that was turning into our default uniform, but on her body, it was anything but standard. “Hi. Glad you’re back.”

  Andi raised her brows, looking at Silk’s cleavage. “How is it you make that tunic look . . . lewd?”

  Silk looked down at her breasts, then smiled. “Can’t help it. I’m built that way.”

  Andi snorted again, waving to a nearby screen. “Show him the idiots with the hippos, if you please. I’m still trying to figure out how those animals are crossing a desert, but what the hell do I know. I was a scientist.”

  Silk drew a finger across the screen, and Condor drone footage came to life. Immediately, the camera locked on a caravan of people, odd wagons, and—hippos.

  “Holy shit. They’re actually hippos,” I said.

  “You doubted?” Silk asked, lifting a sculpted brow.

  I pulled at my chin, watching the footage. “Well, not really. But still. It’s bizarre, even for this place. Hippos are river beasts. Or at least they were in my time. And they’re--well, that’s something new. They’re armored. Or, at least they’re wearing some kind of armor. And colors. Like warhorses.”

  “This fucking place is wild, man. Armored hippo cavalry. And I thought the Konnodar were hardcore,” Andi said.

  “Apparently not wild enough,” I mused. “I make about thirty people, plus their beasts.”

  “Are they flying—is that banner?” Andi asked.

  “I think there are two,” I said, then the image clicked in my mind. “Diplomats. They’re here to treat with us, but to what end, I’m not sure. Okay, that makes this easy. You’re both with me, get Breslin, Lasser, and the Daymares. Aristine and Yulin, full battle rattle. We wear colors and carry every we
apon we can. We meet them at the outer ring. Assemble in four hours. We’ll be waiting for them when they rumble up to the gates, so to speak.”

  “What do we do until then?” Silk asked.

  “I’m glad you asked, darling.” My smile was a leer, but I had plans before I could get to my bed. “Come with me. I have an idea.”

  3

  Four hours later, we stood in the sun, arrayed in battle order and armed to the teeth.

  Silk, Mira, and Aristine all took turns shooting me looks of disgust, but Yulin kept looking down and laughing.

  “If you had a fetish, all you had to do was ask, you dirty goat,” Silk said. “This may surprise you, but it takes a lot to shock me.”

  “Could you not talk just now? I’m concentrating on being magnificent,” I said in my most adult voice.

  Yulin laughed outright, but there were a few snorts from my people, Aristine included.

  “I think you look hot, actually,” Andi admitted. “Granted, it’s a lot of boobs for me at one time, but if I were an envoy, can’t say I wouldn’t be impressed.”

  “And the icon is—well, it’s kind of pretty,” Silk said. “Are we dressed like this because of how this war party appears? I’m assuming you think they’re going to respond to the whole tribal thing we’ve got going on.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” I said. “I made a mistake by letting the people in the river villages think they had the upper hand. I know you’re not happy about being—well, costumed, but it’s going to have an impact. Believe me. We’re not just the Free Oasis.” I pointed to the painted image on everyone’s black leather armor. A brilliant meteor streaked across a field of black with stars. “As the first members of the Falling Stars, we’re going to present an elite fighting force to them, with all the medieval bullshit they expect. Plus, it’s kind of easy on the eyes.”