Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Read online

  Endless Night

  Book Three of The Guild Wars

  By

  Tim C. Taylor

  PUBLISHED BY: Seventh Seal Press

  Copyright © 2020 Tim C. Taylor

  All Rights Reserved

  * * * * *

  Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

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  For a suggested reading order guide to the Four Horsemen universe, go to:

  https://chriskennedypublishing.com/the-four-horsemen-books/4hu-suggested-reading-order/

  * * * * *

  For a listing of all the Four Horsemen books, go to:

  https://chriskennedypublishing.com/the-four-horsemen-books/

  * * * * *

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and 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 purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko

  Original Art by Ricky Ryan

  * * * * *

  For my favorite LEGO CASPer technician. And his mum.

  * * * * *

  Contents

  Two Years’ Earlier

  PART1: A HIDDEN WAR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  PART 2: BETTY’S BITCHES

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  PART 3: THE INFINITE FLOW

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  PART 4: THE GREAT ENGINE

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  About the Author

  Join the Merc Guild

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of The Progenitors’ War

  Excerpt from Book One of the Earth Song Cycle

  * * * * *

  Two Years’ Earlier

  Shaloyl-Huk Trading Camp, Secret Location in the Spine Nebula

  “Cool me,” snapped Olvanjie, not troubling to glance up from her slate.

  The four Jivool eunuchs worked harder at their bellows, pumping sweet perfumed and lightly refrigerated air over their mistress.

  A bead of sweat dripped from the trader’s whiskers. Jenkins prayed it was due to the sultry air in the tent and not the revised terms of their contract she was reading on the slate. Rachid had sworn he’d made only very reasonable changes, hardly anything worth sweating over.

  The eunuchs on the other hand…

  A hard edge of desperation cut through their hitherto graceful air conditioning service. Jenkins could see muscles bulging in the long arms of the aliens who resembled hunchbacked bears. Their fur was bare above their baggy, diaphanous pants and their sweat flowed freely along the furrow shaved from the crest of their heads down along their spines. It was this shaved strip that denoted their exalted status as eunuchs.

  Jenkins had plied the trade routes of the Spine Nebula for 30 years and more, but he’d never possessed the courage, or the alcoholic lubrication, necessary to ask why being a eunuch was so highly regarded. By their looks of panic, though, it wasn’t exalted enough to escape the wrath of the mistress they had failed to please.

  Three decades living, working, and trading with aliens, and they still held a multitude of mysteries.

  Jenkins liked it that way.

  Though there were some alien mysteries that he did not appreciate. Even here, in a flyover region of the galaxy such as the Spine Nebula, there were deep secrets of pure evil.

  “Could I trouble you for more iced sherbet tea?” asked the Merchant Guild representative from her nest of plump cushions. “The tent air is a little close in this unseasonal heat.”

  The guildswoman was a Bakulu, a species whose protective shell helped them thrive in a region of space prone to sudden outbursts of violent stellar radiation.

  Jenkins nodded politely at the kindly old snail. Everyone in Olvanjie’s negotiation tent was aware that she would be perfectly cool within her jeweled shell. She was merely attempting to take the pressure off the Jivool.

  “Iced tea for me too, please,” said Jenkins, taking the guildswoman’s cue by pointing at the tent roof. It was beautifully decorated with overlapping scales coated in gleaming metals. In the gentle breeze running through the summer trading camp of Shaloyl-Huk, the scales flexed like the flank of a sighing dragon.

  Pretty they may be, but beneat
h the polished veneer of those scales were the lead sheeting of radiation shielding.

  It was the same throughout the nebula. The ever-present shielding meant any dirtside outing required a good scrub after returning to the coolness of Jenkins’ ship, the Unlikely Regret.

  “No,” said Olvanjie with absolute finality. She put aside her slate with the revised contract written upon it and regarded Jenkins down her long snout.

  He returned the attention neutrally. Olvanjie was one of the premier traders of the nebula. She was a Zuparti, a stretched pseudo-mammal analogous to a four-foot-long weasel with a reputation for paranoia. In his years as a free trader, Jenkins had come to appreciate the often-maligned race. Olvanjie felt she had every reason to be paranoid, and he didn’t doubt her.

  It was the explanation for her nomadic existence.

  And the carefully calculated displays of wealth, from her diadem of red diamonds to the jewels and precious metals that adorned her trading tent. All impressive up to a point, but Olvanjie was vastly more wealthy than she allowed anyone to see.

  Her trading tent appeared seemingly at random throughout the nebula, never in the same location for more than 170 hours: the duration of a single hyperspace jump.

  Then there was her protection squad of heavily armed shaved eunuchs. Half of which were on watch outside the tent.

  The Spine Nebula was the trader’s home, but she clearly did not feel safe here.

  It was sometimes said that the nebula was cursed. That long ago a great evil was committed here that had threatened the entire galaxy, and ever since, the people of the nebula had paid the price for their ancestors’ crimes. Happiness, wealth, success—wherever they sprung up, the curse would surely cut them down. It was called the Doom, the Darkness, the Well of Despair. It had many names, but when Jenkins had first heard the stories, it had been called the Scourge.

  When he had fled from the overreaching bureaucratic bean counters of Earth, winding up eventually in the nebula, Jenkins had laughed at the idea. The Scourge? It was a stupid tale for the infinitely credulous, and if that meant traders were too scared to operate here, then it meant more opportunities for him.

  Now Jenkins wasn’t so sure.

  Not sure at all.

  Olvanjie certainly believed the nebula was cursed by dark forces. And now, it seemed, her heightened level of paranoia meant she was rejecting his very reasonably revised contract.

  “You disappoint me, trade mistress,” he told her. “It was my second, Rachid, who suggested these changes, and I know you like him. They were added for clarity and effectiveness, not to rob you of your rightful share.”

  The black orbs of Olvanjie’s eyes stared back impassively. “Really?”

  “Yes, trade mistress. You have dealt with the Unlikely Regret many times over the years. We are traders like you, not thieves. Have you forgotten that?”

  “No,” she said, not releasing her stare from him. With a hind limb she beckoned forward a pair of servants who had been waiting at the rear of the tent.

  The Zuparti’s words were translated by the pendant dangling around Jenkins’ neck. He couldn’t speak Olvanjie’s Zuparti dialect as such, but he knew enough of the language to pick up on a deep swell of amusement.

  Deep, as in, if Olvanjie were Human she would be peeing herself with laughter.

  “Son of a gun.”

  “Indeed.” Olvanjie’s lips flicked into a smile. “I am toying with you, Captain Jenkins. You have been so distrusting of late. I have often speculated you have a little Zuparti in your ancestry. Now I am all but certain.”

  Jenkins tugged at the tuft of beard that sprouted from his chin. “Well, now that you mention it, when I was growing up, I heard some very peculiar rumors about great-grandpa Marvin.”

  The servants—more Jivool with the shaved strip—came forward carrying silver trays bearing frosted goblets of Cumuni.

  Jenkins grinned. Cumuni was a Zuparti celebratory drink, akin to champagne in some Human cultures. Unlike champagne, it was thick and black, fifty percent alcohol, and tasted like fermented asparagus blended with distilled cough drops.

  Olvanjie lifted a small glass of Cumuni in her paw. “Let us celebrate the agreement of this contract.”

  Jenkins lifted his glass in reply. “To a profitable trade, and long may it continue.”

  “Hear, hear,” said the old snail, who would cream a cut of the contract’s value for herself and her guild.

  Jenkins grinned like a lunatic. He was too old to bother with all that keeping cool and inscrutable bullshit.

  “Here’s to the credits,” he proclaimed and downed the drink in one. Ohh…that burned in a very special way.

  The guildswoman and the trade mistress registered disapproval in the respective ways of their kind. Jenkins didn’t care about that either.

  Captain Lenworth Rushby Jenkins would hit 70 years of age in a couple of months, and he’d been determined to show retirement that it could bite his ass if it thought it was time for him to hang up his space boots.

  The year had begun with a bang with a marine on his ship that he’d been coaching as a trainee pilot. One day she had blinked her weird lashless eyes at him and informed him that she was going to seduce him. She wasn’t kidding. Man, what a way to feel 110 percent alive.

  She’d been wild, weirdly beautiful, and kind of terrifying in equal measure.

  When her contract expired, and she had left with her sister to find a new berth on the huge orbital hub of Station 5, he’d been as much relieved as saddened to see her go.

  He still owed her. If it hadn’t been for the kick in the butt she’d given him, he’d never have let Rachid talk him into this deal with Olvanjie. It was a departure for the Unlikely Regret. He’d traded weapons before, but this was something new. He would be gun-running, supplying the Zuparti with arms on the sly. Assuming, of course, the roguish Bakulu kept her part of the deal and obfuscated the nature of the shipments.

  This wasn’t to arm Olvanjie’s guards but to establish arms caches throughout the nebula. Whatever that was about, it was definitely not his business to enquire.

  On a whim, Jenkins decided to honor the girl who had de-coked his sense of adventure. He grabbed a second goblet of Cumuni.

  “Here’s to Blue and whatever shenanigans she’s currently dragged her sister into.”

  The others stared at him in silence.

  “What? Can’t Humans have their little mysteries, too?”

  The deal sealed, Jenkins bid his partners farewell, slipped into his second-best greatcoat, and walked back to the flitter he’d parked on the outskirts of the tent town.

  There was no practical reason for leaving it outside Shaloyl-Huk, he simply enjoyed the pleasure of walking through the encampment and soaking in its atmosphere. Aromatic cooking smells wafted through the avenue of glittering tents. Laughing children from a score of species played together at the margins, the shared desire to enjoy a new toy or game overcoming language and species boundaries with ease.

  Here in the Spine Nebula, life was often hard. Jenkins held no illusions about that, but the rough camaraderie and instinct for self-sufficiency suited him far more than Earth, where the credit-stealing, elitist, bureaucratic, so-called government had dared to declare him a smuggler and issue a warrant for his arrest.

  It was sad, but his home world had been going to the dogs ever since the creation of the Earth Republic.

  No, the Spine Nebula was home now.

  Those kids scrabbling around in the dusty red ground? They were his people.

  With the Cumuni a pleasant warmth in his belly, he activated his flitter and drove off into the red afternoon sun, headed for the starport an hour’s drive away.

  A few miles later, the crump of an explosion punched the air, echoing off the hills surrounding him.

  It was followed by weapons discharges.

  There was only one place that could have come from.

  He settled the flitter’s ducted fans into vertical mode
and slowed to a halt, six feet off the ground.

  “It’s not your fight, Lenworth.” He pushed the words through gritted teeth. They tasted false.

  There could be a hundred reasons to explain the fighting at Shaloyl-Huk, but a deep welling of fear told him there was only one answer that made sense.

  The curse of the Spine Nebula had finally come for Shaloyl-Huk.

  They’re my people now, he reminded himself. That makes it my fight, too.

  He pulled his volley gun from its concealed compartment, slewed the flitter around, and sped toward the sound of gunfire.

  * * *

  The Scourge. No one knew who they were. Nor their real name.

  They weren’t an army. They weren’t connected to the guilds. Some said they were an insane death cult, whose origins and purpose were lost to the mists of deep time, but whose lust for killing had never diminished.

  It was as good a theory as any. Most people still believed the stories of a curse were but a rumor, as Jenkins once had. Picking his way cautiously through the burning tent city, its dusty streets strewn with the corpses of its inhabitants, he no longer had the luxury of believing that.

  Why would anyone do this? What purpose could it possibly serve, other than to perpetuate the misery of the Spine Nebula?

  Jenkins itched to empty his volley gun into whoever had perpetrated this atrocity, but the raiders seemed to have completed their murderous task and moved on.

  With rounds chambered in all nine barrels of his hefty Nock Niner, he desperately wanted some of the bandits to have stayed behind.

  Familiarity led him back to Olvanjie’s tent. As soon as he saw its side blown out and its fabric shredded with projectile fire, he knew his friends and trading partners were dead.