Tamn Read online

  TAMN

  A HEAVEN’S EDGE NOVELLA

  Jennifer Silverwood

  Copyright 2017 Jennifer Silverwood

  Edited By

  Jessica Augustsson

  Published by JayHenge Publishing KB

  Cover Art By

  Najla Qamber

  najlaqamberdesigns.com

  Formatting by

  Champagne Book Design

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  I : PIONEER

  II : NUKVAR

  III : DATURA 3

  IV: WAR

  V : REFUGE

  VI : MEMORY

  VII: WEAKNESS

  VIII : HEAVEN

  IX : LEGACY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS

  I : Pioneer

  My life both began and ended with a crash.

  “Strap in! Shields are down!” Captain shouted over the alarm blaring throughout the shuttle.

  I barely had time to make sure the rest of my crew was strapped in before the second shudder hit the outer hull. “Qori, hang onto our chole packs!”

  I couldn’t find my brother in the blur of shapes, could only hope the straps held fast.

  Adi swung in front of me, wrapping an arm around my waist. “Hang on to your scythe, Royal,” she said with a cheeky grin. Her arm was the only thing that kept me from colliding with the pipes and gears overhead.

  For a moment, we hung together suspended midair, legs flailing, as the lights flickered inside the compartment. Adi used her miner strength to curl me into her body until we were a tangle of limbs.

  We slammed against the metal grating above as our shuttle impacted with the sea.

  Alarms blared and I turned my head, trying to keep calm as I met Adi’s solemn eyes. She was always the one to make light of any situation with her sharp words. But we had just been shot down by an unknown enemy vessel after our brief visit to this hostile world. There was no precedent for this, no words that could make it better.

  Our enemy’s ship was at least three times the span of our shuttle, more than double our mothership, Datura 3. Stood to reason their weapons and defenses would be better than a patched-up mining vessel.

  There had been no warning, no terms, nothing about our attackers that we recognized. So far from the Core Worlds, we had grown used to the bands of smugglers and pirates, the dredge of society. Other planets had been peaceful and independent, but hostile to invaders. Some had seemed totally barren and inhospitable to sentient life. When we discovered this new world, we thought maybe luck had finally returned to us. We were wrong.

  Will they attack the others?

  Adi helped me find my footing and pounded my chest with a sharp hit. “Chin up, Royal.” She flashed a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Let’s get the others out of here before you faint.”

  Her words did the job of pulling my head out of memory and reminding me of the role I was born to fulfill.

  “Right, grab the gear.” I turned to find the crew falling from their harnesses. I found Min first and pushed aside the crate pinning his leg to the wall. His eyes met mine gratefully as I struggled against the weight and again after Qori helped me set it aside.

  “Min!” Her hands fluttered over him in a nervous gesture.

  “Just a scratch, love,” he said with a forced smile and wince. “Tamn, not even a rubbed gill again, I see.”

  “Ready to take on the beasties, brother?”

  Min choked on a laugh as I helped him up and into a firm embrace. We separated—me still supporting him by his upper arms—and exchanged a brief, meaningful glance that said, We’re not dead yet, thank the heavens. Qori took the moment to reel him in for a quick kiss of the lips.

  “Time to assess our damage later,” I announced as I turned to the others. “Gather what supplies you can.”

  Captain pressed his hand to his side but slung a pack over his shoulder. “You heard Tamn! Get it in gear, mates!”

  This was what we had trained for. We had been through worse before, had lost crewmates a time or two since I Ascended and joined the Pioneer. I picked up my belt scanner and checked our position, then led the others to the leaking hatch.

  No one spoke as we left the shuttle behind and swam through strange, thicker waters. The ocean covered most of this world’s surface, but we had crashed closer to the beach we’d left behind earlier that day. The rich sea wrapped around us like a sensitive caress as we half swam, half floated to the shoreline.

  We dragged ourselves up onto the sand and stood together, breathless, a motley crew of scavengers and formerly royal pirates, abandoned on the surface of a hostile world. All in the quest for chole dust, our most marketable mineral on our journey to heaven’s edge.

  This wasn’t the first time we ran into trouble, but it was the first time we had been shot down. So far from Datura, our home, we were starting to resemble the underlings we associated with. The alien vessel was still visible from our vantage point, a massive almost membranous structure unlike any we had encountered before. I watched with the others, helpless, tears smudging our eyes, while our families blew up in a shower of burning golden comets, singing overhead.

  Qeya’s eyes are that same shade of gold. The memory of her was the only thought I could process as our world and my reason for living burned.

  “Tamn, we cannot stay here for too long,” Qori urged beside me, her hand on my shoulder. She smelled of spilled grease.

  I couldn’t move, afraid to look away as I tried to keep hold of the image of Qeya’s eyes.

  “Get your metal together and move, you bleeding Royal!” Adi screamed in my face and shoved me back with her considerable strength.

  Captain put it to me straight, his voice weary but firm. “Let’s clear the area before we attract more unwanted attention.”

  “You heard Captain,” Qori said, her tone softening as she continued to pull me along. “Please, Tamn, we need you.”

  They needed my expertise in killing, she meant. Countless hostile worlds, some where the very ground swallowed you whole, others where the predators were invisible to our eyes, a sea of bodies. Bodies stretching back into my Memory, the bleeding gift my ancestors passed down to me on the day of my Ascension, ages of warfare and bloodshed. Now the people I was sworn to protect, our last hope for the future, were falling out of the sky. I had saved our people time and again. Now my parents are nothing more than falling ashes raining from the sky.

  The golden comets streaking across the surface of this new hostile world were the same color as Qeya’s eyes.

  As I watched Datura 3 break apart above the atmosphere in a shower of light, something irreparable snapped inside me. All my past lives came crashing forward in a relentless tide, like they had during my Ascension. Only now they refused to recede again. Or at least some of them did.

  Drown this world in fire! The loudest voice chanted.

  Find the leaking clankers and tear their ship to shreds…another hissed.

  Show them what we do to miners who dare challenge our rule!

  “Tamn! Wake up!” My little brother, Min slapped my face. I caught his next punch with my hand, restraining the force with strength I had built for fights worse than this. He gra
bbed me by the collar of my suit and pulled me forward. “We need you, brother.”

  Pushing aside the howling voices, I nodded and let the only family I had left pull me away from the broken shore and drag me deeper into the jungle.

  Manic laughter bubbled up and broke past my numbness, earning an odd look from Qori and a scowl from Adi. We were doomed if we were all that was left. No one would heal our wounded crew now, or fix whatever was slowly breaking inside my head. We were already dead.

  II : Nukvar

  I was trained to separate feeling from logic and suppress the emotions that sought to rule over us. Some Royals were naturals at it, some of the children like Bruv and Kahne made it look easy.

  “It is unnatural how good they are, Tamn,” Qeya once lamented. “They don’t have the memories yet and already they’re better than me.” The memory of her frequent complaints made me smile still.

  “To be fair, they were the designers of most of our modern weapons.” I had reminded her as we watched the others spar.

  “Sounds to me like you’re jealous, General,” she had teased me with a jab to the ribs. The same spot Kahne managed to nick me earlier with her short-handed scythe. The sound of Qeya’s laughter was fresh to me now as it was then, bringing a tide of fresh pain with the memory.

  I kept an outward appearance of collected cohesive thought in front of my crew. Meanwhile chaotic thoughts stormed through my mind, tearing at the hard mask I tried to keep in place.

  The first mindless days of our exile swept us from shore, through protective caves and into the jungled valley behind the mountain range. We were a team, used to navigating through harsh terrain and alien worlds more treacherous than this one. Only there was no purpose guiding us now, nothing but the base need for survival.

  This planet seemed bent on hunting us down, be it predators stalking the caverns or poisonous plants within the valley. As we ran through the night from beasts with razor-sharp teeth and claws, the good men I had once been fell silent. Only the blood-curdling demands from my most violent past selves remained and they demanded tooth for tooth, claw for claw.

  Captain tried to find shelter, but our tech was sparking, fading in and out, in need of the repair kit currently resting on the bed of the sea we crashed in. Lost without a ship, without anything but the packs we salvaged and tools on our belts. We were running low on water and food just three days in, with no sign of rivers or an acceptable food alternative in sight.

  I ran on auto-navigator, obeying Captain’s orders, protecting my crew and scouting out a path through the dense undergrowth. There was water aplenty hovering in the air, coating our skins and teasing our gills.

  I cut a path with my scythe using the same practiced motions I had taught the children, and focused on tracing the outlines of Qeya’s face in my mind. Lately, it had been the only thing keeping my inner gears in check.

  You let her burn, one of my past selves hissed, and you deserve to burn.

  “Shut up,” I growled, grasping instead for that image of Qeya again, the curves of her face, and the way her golden eyes illuminated when she was with me.

  “Tamn?”

  I blinked, flashes of green plants interspersed between flecks of gold and laughter.

  “Tamn!” A rough hand pulled at my shoulder.

  I pivoted, taking the hand and twisted it until the body attached was thrown against a nearby trunk, then pressed my blade against the jugular. A pair of wide emerald eyes so dark they were nearly black stared in horror back at me.

  “Adi,” I stuttered the miner’s name, then grimaced. “Do that again and I really will slice your neck.”

  “I tried calling your name, stupid wren.” Her words were strangled and I realized my blade was still tilted just beneath her jaw line.

  Do it! Kill all the miners and throw their chum into the sea where it belongs, a dark voice from my past whispered. I shivered and blinked, pushing the voice aside.

  For a fractured moment, I wanted to follow through with the command. It was growing harder to ignore the mad voices in my head.

  “Tamn!” Despite her fierce tone, fear flickered in her murky gaze.

  I pulled away, dropping my arms, but kept a tight grasp on my scythe to hide the trembling.

  Adi scowled and rubbed her neck. “You do be cracked, you know that, Royal?” She shook her head and thumbed over her shoulder. “Crew wants to make camp. Tried to tell you to stop blazing a path but you were long gone.” She pointed past my scythe arm as though I hadn’t almost slit her throat. “Good thing I caught up before you ran into that razor pack ahead.”

  I followed her direction, eager for the promise of death and meat so near. “We should hunt,” I said.

  Adi choked on a laugh. “Already tried hunting the bloody beasts. Too many of them.”

  “We need fresh meat.”

  After a brief pause, Adi sighed and came to stand—beside my free hand, I noted. “Leviathan be diced. I can’t let you go after them on your own, now can I? What would your land-loving Captain have to say, after all?”

  I ignored the jab, well aware of her disgust for my kind. I focused on the pattern of the forest ahead, again finding the game trail I had been unconsciously broadening and bent to follow it.

  “Here.” Adi pressed something hard and metallic into my free hand. “I had an extra and if we really are doing this, we’ll be needing all the firepower we can muster.”

  I looked down at the miner weapon, a metal knuckle set marked by a set of gears. I wrapped my fingers around the handle and several gears came whirring to life with a low hum. A blue chole blade emerged above my knuckles, meeting at a deadly point. I smiled over the blade at Adi. “It’ll do.”

  * * *

  We trailed the razor pack two leagues deeper into the valley core, over tangled roots and rubbery leafed plants. I kept the chole blade humming on stand-by.

  Adi touched my elbow, then crouching to the earth, crawled into a thicket of blue ferns. I touched the ground and followed. We paused twenty paces in. Adi pointed and I looked through the thin leaves the same moment I heard the low-crawling beasts snorting in the clearing ahead. I assessed the pack. Twenty strong including their young, all marked by the odd spikes lining their hunched spines, short snouts and curved claws waiting at the end of their four feet. Last time we attempted to hunt these beasts, they’d swarmed my brother’s mate. It wouldn’t happen again.

  Don’t let them be a threat, a sinister voice coaxed. “Grind their bones and spread it with the ash of the earth.”

  I shook my head, determined not to give into the madness. I had to stay in control.

  Adi caught my attention again with a gesture, motioning she would try and circle around, take a high position to fire. It was a tactic we had used before. She was stronger, yet had better accuracy with her projectile. I briefly watched her creep away to my left with barely a sound. The beasts continued to grunt and nose at the earth, snacking on roots or grubs. I shifted to the balls of my feet and pulled my scythe free, looking over the pack for the sign of the weakest prey.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Adi peek through the branches of the opposite tree. She lifted her gauntleted arm and aimed.

  One of the beasts lifted its head, sniffing the air with a grunt.

  A scream pierced the air, unlike any beast we had yet heard, drawing the pack’s attention. Wooden spears, lined with powdery blue dust impacted with the dirt an arm’s reach in front of me. A cloud of electric blue filled the clearing.

  Tall, furred figures followed with more spears and screams matching their warning cry. The razorbacks squealed as the tall creatures found their pray.

  Chole dust…they must be using chole.

  The cloud began to dissipate, leaving a fine coat on the fallen razorbacks and the alien beings hunting them. We didn’t know there were sentient beings living on this world. Our scans had shown no technology resembling ours. They shouldn’t be here.

  While some of their pack continued to
chase the remaining herd, five lingered to gut the felled beasts. I struggled to make sense of the creatures entering the clearing. They weren’t furry, I realized, any more than my kind, but they did wear fur over their bare skins and carried long jagged spears tipped with glittering blue dust. Around their waists, they wore leather belts hung with pouches. I could smell the pungent scent of the chole from here.

  I looked for Adi but she was no longer in the trees. I jerked back when she suddenly appeared at my side, knocking against the ferns. She grimaced at my reaction, then looked back to the clearing.

  The alien beings turned their heads, some standing up from their crouched positions on the ground.

  Were they related somehow to the ones who destroyed Datura 3?

  Burn them all! Raze their village to the ground!

  The madness roared against my head and I squeezed my eyes shut, desperately clinging to Qeya’s face. Her eyes were slightly mismatched. Her inner lids flickered every time we were together.

  Adi squeezed my shoulder and I opened my eyes. The alien beings were entering the jungle, their meat in tow.

  Stealing our meat! Cut their throats and steal it back, the loudest voice demanded.

  But then Adi was hissing against my ear, entirely too close. “We should trail them, steal their chole dust.”

  I shook my head and cut a glare at her. Adi flashed me a crude gesture with two fingers and crawled into the clearing, drawn to the scattered dust. I hissed between clenched teeth, tempted to leave her behind. It would serve her right if she brought the wrath of those creatures upon herself. Chole dust powered our vessel, true, along with much of miner tech. But there were some it was rumored, who were addicted to the substance. I had spent enough time around Adi to suspect her interest went deeper than tech.

  Then I thought of the crew, the oath I took upon Ascension.

  Live by honor, to protect the memories unto death.

  Keep the code, live to die another day.