Ceaseless (22 page)

And now, a sneak peek at Book #6

in the Shadow Wars series, Syberian Sunrise.

Out now.

Syberian Sunrise Sneak Peek

Chapter 01

–
Dark Advent
–

Pain.

He'd been exiled and cast into a universe that was constructed entirely of agony. Murdered, and his soul had gone to Hell. It was the first thought that entered his mind. The pain was without end. It consumed his entire being. Every nerve ending hooked up to its own personal shock therapy unit, or perhaps he'd been given a hardline of misery. A pure, uncut shot of torment directly into his carotid artery.

The pain enveloped him. He bathed in it.

Time passed, what might have been seconds or eons. The suffering began to dissipate and withdraw, moving with the agonizing lethargy of fossilization. He began to recover information, like bits of debris from a particularly brutal wreck floating amidst the ocean's surface. His name: Enzo Rains. His occupation: mercenary. His exact height: six foot one and a quarter inch. Enzo pieced together a personal history, slowly gathering up everything that made a life. Memories, emotions, experiences...at the center of it all...

The pain.

As time pressed relentlessly forward, Enzo was awarded more, this time not from within, but from beyond his body. His senses reasserted themselves. His nose told him that something nearby reeked, but it was a familiar foul odor. Death. His ears reported nothing but an irregular hum of power, the omnipresent whisper of oxygen circulation. His mouth signaled dryness and the kind of awful taste you only got after a day of binge drinking followed by another day of unconsciousness.

His flesh, however, was nearly numb, and telegraphed hints of chill and suffering. He became aware of the fact that he was lying on his back on an uneven surface. But blanketing all of that, spearing straight through it like a crimson thread, was the pain. It had abated, retreating from his senses until it fell back to its intimately familiar core: his right shoulder. The first truly conscious and fully formed thought that entered Enzo's mind then was a bitter one. People always said that if something went on long enough or occurred regularly enough, you could build up a tolerance to it. In his case, that was utterly, totally false.

Enzo opened his eyes, using the raw, burning throb of agony that was supposed to be his shoulder as a source of motivation.

He no longer cared where he was or what the situation was, he wanted morphine. He wanted a shot of morphine directly into his fucking shoulder. The need was all-consuming, pushing out any other thoughts. Enzo studied what he was seeing, focusing through a thick lens of unfiltered anguish. He was in some kind of chamber, not a very big one. Walls of metal, brushed stainless steel showed through in some places, but for the most part everything seemed to be covered in some black substance. A new smell came to him then.

Burnt meat.

It took a second, but finally the two thoughts connected: the stuff on the wall was ashes. He blinked, groaned sickly as the pain in his shoulder continued unabated, throbbing with hot agony, like someone was jabbing a fiery poker into his tissue. Enzo fought hard to focus, ashes...container...burnt meat...

“Oh, fuck
me
,” he groaned.

Had they thrown him in the fucking incineration unit? He sat up abruptly as the fear shot through him. That old chemical reaction that was very much machine-like at this point in his life. The fear of dying. The terror.

“Gonna kill those bastards,” he growled, moving and then letting out a startled noise as the ground shifted beneath him. Enzo looked down. No, not ground, corpses. At least a dozen of them, a pile. What the hell had
happened
? He glanced up, saw a trio of openings that were sealed off. Chutes. He groaned, crawled, tumbled off the pile. Rolled down and screamed outright as he landed on his right shoulder. It took a moment, but the pain returned to its barely tolerable level, and he pushed himself up. He was lucky enough to wake up before they torched him, so maybe he'd be lucky enough to find some way out of this place yet.

Hell, he was forty four, he'd been lucky enough for that long.

Enzo forced himself to focus. He measured out the dimensions of the burn unit. It was just shy of being tall enough to stand in, maybe five and a half feet high by ten wide and long. He looked around, hunting among the ashy walls, trying to ignore the corpses. His mind tried to work as he hunted, looking for some kind of emergency escape hatch.

What was the last thing he was doing?

Why, hitching a ride on a prison ship, of course. Enzo was a mercenary and largely transient by nature. He was exceptionally good at his job but exceptionally bad with money. And, in keeping with his tradition of taking increasingly stupid risks, he'd casually hitchhiked aboard a ship carrying a hundred death row inmates with about two dozen security guards and maintenance personnel. They were kind enough to let him sleep in one of the unused cells. He'd been about four days into the journey and-Enzo's train of thought derailed.

He spied something, an anomaly among the ashy metal.

Enzo hurried across the chamber, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling and the protrusions of the hatches overhead. He came over to it and studied it for a moment. He grinned bleakly as his inspection yielded some positive results. What he was seeing was a manual release maintenance hatch. It was how whichever poor bastard's job it was to clean or fix this thing got in. Enzo grabbed the hatch and began twisting it.

Still no sign of the unit heating up, not that he wasn't properly motivated to escape. The effort it took to twist the hatch was great and sent lances of pain radiating out from his shoulders. But in the end he used the extra strength afforded to him by his artificial right arm and forced the damned thing open. The hatch swung out and he went with it, all but hurling himself through the aperture and crashing onto the cold metal floor.

Yet again he let out a tired, hoarse shout as he landed on his bad shoulder. The smell of death fell away, but not completely. What largely replaced it were the scents of industrial disuse, the hidden areas of vessels and space stations and colonies that made them function, gave them life. Behind the scenes. Enzo slowly hauled himself up off the ground, moving like he'd just awoken from invasive surgery, and took a look around. Or tried to, anyway. It was very dark where he was. What bare minimal light there was came from a couple of dim illumination strips in the ceiling. They cast a pallid white light, hiding most of the area in a nest of shadows.

In the poor light, he could make out nearly a dozen other maintenance hatches, identical to the one he'd just been birthed from. Lots of furnaces. So he was in the bowels of the ship, then. The only way out, as far as he could see, was a corridor up ahead. His legs hurt,
everything
hurt. Enzo limped into the corridor.

He tried to piece together a scenario. He'd been aboard the prison transport and...the prisoners must have escaped. Somehow, they overran the ship, tossed all the guards and maybe everyone else down the incinerator chutes. But why him? Unless he was missing some segments of time, he would have been asleep in one of the cells. Wouldn't they have figured him for one of their own? Well, who knew? Either way, he'd made it out.

So now what?

The pain spiked again, his shoulder feeling like someone had lit it aflame. His ability to plan was currently compromised. Wasn't it always? He felt a cold fury settling over him. His shoulder...it
always
hurt. There was no escape, only reprieves. Enzo continued down the corridor, the light very slowly becoming better and brighter. As he came to a crossroads of more corridors, a revelation abruptly dawned on him. Looking down, he realized he was stark naked and coated in blood in a few places. He blinked, considering this for a moment.

Why the fuck was he naked?

In a flash, he'd realized that all the other corpses in that furnace had been as well. What the hell was going on? Did the prisoners need clothes
that
badly? He supposed it was possible. Enzo took a moment to look around, studying the three passageways. They all looked the same but...his eyes fell on a faded symbol plastered to the wall near the left corridor. It was immediately and mercifully familiar: a red plus inside of a white square.

An infirmary.

He turned and, gripping his shoulder, limped down that passageway. While the light was better, it was still terrible. For a moment, a pang of fear shot through him. What if the prisoners didn't know how to run the damned ship and were going to either crash it into a moon or blow it up on accident? All the more reason to hurry.

He pressed on down the corridor, naked and cold and in agony. How long had his shoulder been hurting like this? It was a question he asked himself with less and less frequency as the years went on and he continued carving out a miserable existence among the stars. The answer came to him after a little bit. Twenty eight years. Nearly three decades of this shit, this white-hot suffering that tormented him day and night.

No escape, only reprieve.

Enzo checked the doors he passed. Most of them led to derelict storage bays and one admitted him to a disused machine shop. He ignored these, almost ready to just sit down for a minute, massage his shoulder. Sometimes that helped, sometimes it didn't. How long had he been out? Usually this level of pain didn't occur unless he'd gone without some kind of medication or recreational activity meant for alleviation for several days.

And this felt worse.

Worse than it had in a long, long time.

Enzo stumbled, losing his balance, falling into a door. He glanced up and saw that it was the infirmary.

“Oh, thank
god
!” he moaned, hitting the access button and lurching through.

He slapped the lights on. They flickered weakly to life. Still not great, but at least better than the miserably light strips out in the corridor. The infirmary looked like it had never been used. The examination tables empty, the cabinets firmly shut, the floor nice white tile. His eyes fell on an emergency medkit attached to the wall above a sink across the room. He hurried over to it, all other thoughts vacating his mind.

Enzo ripped the pack off the wall and tore into it. As soon as hand wrapped around a syringe, he studied it the bare minimum of time it took to confirm that it was morphine and tore the plastic tip off the needle with his teeth. He took another agonizing few seconds to flick the glass tubing and squirt a little bit of liquid out the top, confirming that there were no air bubbles, then jabbed the needle into the flesh part of his shoulder and hit the plunger.

Warm liquid ecstasy slammed into him, enveloping him in pure, momentary release. The pain was gone. He fell to his knees, letting go of the plunger, arms dropping to his side. He felt his mouth unhinge, jaw dropping as the pleasure overwhelmed him. If someone came up and killed him right now, he wouldn't have minded.

Too quickly, it was over. The pleasure dissipated like smoke on the wind, leaving him hollowed out and shaking. When his senses were returned to him from some higher plane of existence, what might have been Heaven, he found himself lying on the ground, the syringe still jutting from his shoulder, vaguely painful.

Enzo sat up, groped for the plunger and pulled the needle from his flesh. He tossed it aside and stood up. Now that his suffering has been dialed back to a more appropriate level, Enzo could think. Unfortunately, another result of this was that he was now acutely aware of just how damned cold he was. Not to mention a collection of other cuts and bruises. He scanned the infirmary once more, his eyes falling on a shower unit in the back corner.

Enzo moved across the room and cast a paranoid glance over his shoulder, focusing on the only entrance or exit, as far as he could see. He hesitated, then turned and made his way back over to it. Locking the door down, he allowed himself to feel a small ration of comfort and hurried over to the shower. First thing was first, getting all this blood and ash off of him would go a long way towards getting his head clear.

He fired up the shower, setting it to as hot as he could stand it, and slipped in. For a long moment, he just stood there. There was some primal pleasure in showering, some simple, thoroughly invigorating comfort in it. Enzo spent a few moments losing himself in the warmth, then felt the press of time. He grabbed some soap and spent a few quick moments cleaning himself up, getting the blood and dirt and ash off.

When he was finished, he stepped out and grabbed a towel. After drying off, he took a moment to examine himself further. There were a few cuts and scrapes on his body that he'd have to deal with, but for now he focused on his artificial arm. It looked like a normal limb, wrapped in synthetic skin that matched his own. It felt real to the touch and could even heal at normal rate. It didn't, however, feel pain. He'd made sure to disable that function.

The arm looked good. He rolled it around, flexing it, testing all of its motor functions. It still seemed perfectly functional. Which was good, he'd hate to be on an overrun prison ship and have a dead arm. Enzo spent a moment hunting through the various cabinets for things he could use. After a moment, he happened on a uniform. It was a simple black jumpsuit that bore no insignia or any other affiliate markings. It came with a pair of solid combat boots, black socks and boxers. He gathered these items up, (first pulling on the boxers), then set them on the counter. He then turned his attention to the medical kit he'd previously ravaged.