Bound by Blood Read online

  Bound by Blood

  Glynn Stewart

  Terry Mixon

  Bound By Blood © 2019 Glynn Stewart and Terry Mixon

  Illustration © 2019 Jeff Brown Graphics

  Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

  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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  About the Authors

  Other books by Terry Mixon

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter One

  The underlying assumption of house arrest was that the person being arrested had a house to keep them in.

  Since Commodore Brad Madrid normally lived aboard the mercenary destroyer Oath of Vengeance, a warship that spent most of her time around Jupiter, placing him under house arrest on Earth had caused the Agency—the primary intelligence organization of the Commonwealth—at least one headache.

  His sympathy for their problems was limited. The Agency was one of his employers, but the decision to arrest him had been one of paranoia, not of cause.

  And keeping him in house arrest on Earth sucked. The dark-haired mercenary leaned into the soft fabric of the lounger on the house veranda with a groan. The Agency had decided to lock him up in a safehouse on a Mexican island. From what he could tell, the covert operations organization owned the entire island, which made it perfectly secure.

  Brad had been born in space and spent almost his entire life aboard ships and space stations. He regularly worked out in full gravity, but the vast majority of human spacecraft kept their gravity at seventy percent of Earth’s.

  Living in full gravity was very different from working out in it. Even if he’d wanted to run, he wouldn’t have made it very far—and that was ignoring the polite-but-cold sentries who guarded the property or the tracking implant in his left shoulder.

  The sun and beach were nice, he supposed. It had taken him a week of angry muttering to even begin to appreciate them, but he’d been trapped on Earth for a month now.

  A month in which he’d had access to news but not communications. The entire Solar System was reeling from the consequences of his visit to Earth. The President of the Commonwealth had been revealed as a traitor and then shot down by his own allies in the courtyard of the United Nations building.

  Brad had been there for all of it. Had been the man to stand on the floor of the Commonwealth Senate and accuse President Mills of trying to create a war to allow himself to seize power.

  And as a reward for that, he’d been arrested. Placed in “protective custody” because the Agency had run a genetic analysis and discovered that President Mills’s main ally, the pirate warlord known variously as Jack Mader or the Phoenix, was Brad’s brother.

  Brad wasn’t even sure how that was possible. Certainly, he’d never worked with Mader—quite the opposite, they’d been on the opposite side of a covert war for years.

  “Commodore.”

  Brad looked up with a sigh at the speaker. Lieutenant Florencio Araya was the Mexican Army officer the Agency had arranged to act as his jailkeeper. Araya was a squat and broad-shouldered man with sun-darkened skin, quite unlike anything Brad had encountered in space.

  Outside of their hair color, the two men couldn’t be more opposite. Brad was tall and slim, his skin pale from a lifetime under artificial lights.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” Brad asked. Araya might be his jailer, but the man was polite and helpful for all that.

  “I think you need to see the news,” the Lieutenant told him. “There’s an announcement coming out of Oberon.”

  “Oberon?” Brad repeated. He had history with that particular moon of Uranus but he still couldn’t see why an announcement from Oberon would make the news on Earth.

  “Why would the news here be carrying an announcement from Oberon?”

  Araya snorted.

  “Dinero, Commodore,” he told him. “Someone paid them to. Seems odd…and Oberon is out near your home, isn’t it?”

  Brad chuckled at the naïve lack of knowledge inherent in calling a moon of Uranus “near” to his homeport at Io, a moon of Jupiter.

  “More relevant than here, I guess.” His chuckle died and he nodded. “May as well take a look. The beach isn’t going anywhere, after all.”

  The house might have looked like a colonial beach home from another century, but it had state-of-the-art everything. Including, of course, state-of-the-art security and enough controls over data flow to allow Brad to access incoming news feeds but not send out communication.

  Since they’d taken Brad’s wrist-comp, the ubiquitous personal computer of the Solar System, away, he needed those systems to stay sane.

  They got inside in time to see the screen on the interior wall showing the promised announcement. The camera feed from the reporter passed through the garish doors of the meeting chamber of First Oberon’s Council of Speakers as Brad took a careful seat. Those familiar doors were a huge bronze affair with mosaics of the original Council on them.

  All of that Council were probably dead now. Outer-world politics were brutal.

  The inside of the chamber, however, was almost empty. Brad had seen the wide horseshoe-shaped table and the garish paint and velvet curtains before. Instead of the seven-person Council of Speakers, though, there was a single man sitting in the middle of the table.

  There appeared to only be the single camera, but it was enough for Brad to recognize that there were also a lot fewer guards than there had been when he’d met the Council of Speakers—and that the three apparently decorative women in the room were a far better security force than the dozen guards the Council had retained.

  Once the camera reached the center of the table, Brad finally recognized the figure with a sigh. Knowing what to look for now, he could see the family resemblance. Jack Mader was slightly taller than he was but just as slim, and they had identical black hair and dark eyes.

  “Greetings,” Mader told the camera. “I’m sure some of those watching have met me by one name or another; my life has been a complicated one.

  “Let’s begin by laying out the simplest point: my name is Jack Mantruso and I am the Admiral of the Independence Militia. My organization, funded by several of the Outer World colonies as well as allies on Earth, has spent the last few years opposing Commonwealth oppression out here.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “I did not want to be the man who broke humanity,” he
continued, his voice dripping sincerity and regret.

  Brad wanted to reach through the screen and strangle his supposed brother. He’d been born Brad Mantruso himself, and the concept of them being brothers might have occurred to one of them sooner if either of them had used their actual last name. Not that it would have changed where they ended up, but it would have avoided the surprise, at least.

  “With the murder of President Mills and the ongoing coup on Earth, the governments and councils of the Outer Worlds no longer feel that they can trust the Commonwealth. They no longer feel that the Fleet will protect them from the pirates and slavers we have struggled with for so long.

  “And they feel that we can no longer bow to a government more kilometers away than we can even comprehend.”

  Mantruso shook his head.

  “No transition of this scale is easy and we do not expect Earth to calmly permit us to leave, but it falls to me to announce the formation of the Outer Worlds Alliance and our secession—our true and inevitable independence—from the Commonwealth of Earth.”

  He let those words hang on the video for several seconds.

  “To secure the safety of this new nation, I have agreed to bring the Independence Militia in from the cold, so to speak. We will now become the Outer Worlds Navy…and I have, with both regret and great sobriety, accepted the position of Lord Protector of the Outer Worlds Alliance.

  “I have been charged to protect these stations and settlements that will no longer kneel to the tyranny of Earth. I will not fail in this charge, no matter the cost. No matter the sacrifice.

  “We are free, and I am entirely willing to water this tree of liberty with the blood of any damned patriots who’d change that.”

  Chapter Two

  Without any ability to communicate directly with the outside, all Brad could do about the sudden sea change in the politics of his world was to go back onto the beach and stare at the waves. A robot trundled out after him with a drink tray and he patted it gently on what passed for a head as he took the soda.

  It had taken him almost as long to convince the machine to not bring him alcohol as it had taken him to start appreciating the beach. The house was not normally used as a prison.

  As night fell with the usual suddenness of the Caribbean, he was still on the porch. Today, his muscles hurt too much to move around in Earth’s gravity unless he needed to.

  Looking up at the stars, he tried to pick out Jupiter. Home. After a few moments’ searching, he concluded it couldn’t currently be seen, and sighed.

  “My brother is an asshole who wants to conquer humanity,” he said aloud, just to get the words out. “Fuck. I have a brother…and he’s an asshole who wants to conquer humanity.”

  The ocean didn’t answer. There was probably at least one sentry close enough to hear him bitching out the universe, but they wisely didn’t say anything.

  So many years. So many dead friends. He’d spent his entire adult life fighting the Cadre and then the Independence Militia they’d spawned as a front and the conspiracy that had supported them.

  And now Jack Mantruso had turned all of that into a new nation. A nation that answered only to him.

  Somehow, Brad didn’t think that the older Mantruso was going to just sit by and idly enjoy the nation he’d created. War was coming. A war that the Vikings, the mercenary warship squadron he’d built up from a single salvaged pirate corvette, would inevitably be in the heart of.

  And he was here.

  How many prisoners on Earth had a warship with a platoon of soldiers in orbit, he wondered? So far as he knew, Oath of Vengeance hadn’t left in the last month. Her captain, his wife Michelle Hunt, had been allowed to visit him twice during that time, and he knew that the rest of his squadron was at Jupiter, repairing and waiting for new ships to come online.

  But his ship and his wife remained in Earth orbit, waiting for him. The Agency wasn’t going to let him leave. Not when his brother had transitioned from wanted criminal number one into the head of state of a hostile nation.

  He sighed, studying the stars…and picked out the oncoming light of the aircraft before he heard it. Once he heard it, long practice allowed him to identify it as a standard orbital shuttle—and it was headed for his little island.

  Brad Madrid, né Brad Mantruso, had been expecting them. His brother had declared his play, and the Agency was at least good enough to explain where he stood.

  Even if it was effectively as a political prisoner.

  Brad made his way carefully back into the house and started up a kettle for tea, listening for the sound of a vehicle. He wasn’t entirely sure where the landing pad was on the island—he’d been in a state of shock when he’d first arrived—but it was far enough that his guest would probably take one of the handful of electric cars on the island.

  He heard the whir of the car as the kettle boiled, and laid out two cups of tea as he waited patiently for the guest he knew would be arriving. It was a question of who would be coming, really, and the sound of a cane rapping on the front steps answered that question.

  “Director Harmon,” Brad greeted the head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency as the goblin of a man walked through the front door without knocking.

  Director Antonio Harmon was, frankly, ugly. He was squat and heavyset, with a clear pot belly and unusually large ears and nose. The red tinge to his nose suggested a long-standing drinking habit, and he walked with a cane, his left leg clearly not working quite right.

  “Tea?” Brad asked politely.

  Harmon grunted as he took a seat at the kitchen table.

  “I know damned well this place has an expensive booze robot,” he replied. “Whisky on the rocks, hold the rocks.”

  The robot apparently heard the instruction and emerged from its cupboard a few moments later. Brad was probably anthropomorphizing the machine when he saw a degree of enthusiasm for being allowed to serve its actual purpose.

  He kept the tea himself, leaning against the countertop as he studied the director.

  “You don’t visit without a reason,” he told Harmon. “What do you want?”

  “Want’s got nothing to do with it,” the smaller man replied, downing the glass of whisky in one shot. “It’s what I owe you. You saw the news announcements, I presume?”

  “About this new OWA?” Brad asked.

  “Yeah. It is, as I’m sure you’re surprised to hear, about as much of a democratic alliance of free worlds as I am a ballerina.”

  Brad said nothing, simply sipping his tea as he studied the man who’d ordered him detained.

  “The OWA is, at best, a soon-to-be constitutional monarchy and at worst an outright military dictatorship,” Harmon said flatly. “The Cadre has to have been laying the groundwork for this for a long time. Twenty million people don’t fall into line overnight, Madrid.”

  “That many?” Brad asked, shocked.

  “The Commonwealth has its detractors and its dissidents, always has,” the Director grumped. “A lot of them realized over the years that a decent solar-powered hydroponics setup and half a dozen nano-vats are all you need to set up a self-sufficient settlement in the back of nowhere. The ship to carry all that is more expensive than the gear is, so we probably see a couple of hundred thousand people a year go wandering off into the back of beyond.

  “Some don’t make it.” He shrugged. “Others come back or join one of the existing settlements out there. Others make it work. Only reason we have anything close to a census out past Saturn is because of the Doctors’ Guild.”

  “Why Saturn?” Brad asked.

  “Stereotyped as the end of civilized land, so people go further,” Harmon said flatly. “Stereotype begets reality, so the Outer Worlds were born. And now the Cadre has bound them all together at the point of a rifle.”

  “I’m guessing the Cadre gets subsumed now?” Brad said.

  “Yeah. News I’m getting is that what’s left of the Cadre is now Outer Worlds Intelligence—or has joined the Ind
ependence Militia in the Outer Worlds Navy. Our greatest enemy just metamorphized into something entirely different.”

  There’d been an attack early on in Brad’s career where the Cadre had produced thousands of assault troops and no one had been quite sure where they’d come from. With a chill, Brad realized he now knew.

  “I wonder how long this has been the actual truth behind the Cadre,” he murmured. “Even if, say, Oberon or the other large colonies were holding out, they’d still have had vastly more people and resources than we thought.”

  Harmon sighed.

  “Probably. The problem from your perspective, Commodore, is that there is no official inheritance process for the Lord Protectorship…and Jack Mantruso has no kids. Just a brother.”

  “You think he’s going to, what, bribe me by making me his heir?” Brad demanded.

  “Basically, yes,” the Agency Director admitted.

  “Pretty much every time the Phoenix and I have been in the same room, we were trying to kill each other,” Brad pointed out. “What in Everlit makes you think I’d want to be his heir?”

  “Not much,” Harmon admitted. “But it’s a risk I can’t take, Madrid. Not with a key agent and merc commander, not without some kind of assurance.”

  “What kind of assurance do you need?” the younger man demanded. “I’m not even sure how I have a brother, let alone why I’d go try and join him.”