The Horseshoe Nail (The Donn Book 1) Read online

  The Horseshoe Nail

  S Thomson-Hillis

  Text copyright © 2016 S.Thomson-Hillis

  All Rights Reserved

  Thanks to Fran Jones for patience, tolerance and support and to Rushmoor Writers for the constructive criticism and the encouragement.

  Table of Contents

  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

  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

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter One

  On a dead moon, in the middle of nowhere, a Union scouting party came across a derelict tower and wondered what the hell it was doing there. The Union’s main aim was to restore law, order, peace and goodwill to all sentient races, but it wasn’t easy. The galaxy was kick-starting a precarious recovery after a thousand years of war and you never knew what you’d trip over out there. That dirty old tower looked like Autocracy Tech and that was never good news. It could hold or set-off anything from a T-1 dirty device to a bio-Z-drop. The first made your brain freeze and the latter punched holes in your genes. Neither was welcome.

  Or it could be none of the above.

  It was.

  The tower formed part of a ring of automated beacons. The scouting party, a rather clumsy crew, accidentally managed to activate it. It gave a strangled bellow then subsided.

  And on another world, more or less at the hub of the ring, the signal was received.

  They say life is a game of consequences and coincidences.

  Let’s play...

  * * *

  Harth Norn was a useful stopover if you were a Commercial Trader plodding through the hyperspace Bylanes plying your trade. If you wanted to deal in fish it was even better, especially if you were not worried by the Union’s new and extremely picky licensing regulations. It was a spitball of a world, ocean dotted by islands, its minimal government cuddling up to a dilapidated spaceport on a ridiculously small centre called Long Island. The planet’s main claim to fame was a type of tiny fish with roe that could be sold as a top-notch delicacy across several systems and processed into A-vine, the poor man’s equivalent of Spangle Juice brandy, on many others. So if you let the little fish do what little fish do naturally and reaped the consequences, nobody needed to fight the warring tides and hunt monstrous Pisceans for their meat and fat, or brave the deeps to work the Kelp Farms.

  Tye Beven didn’t.

  He was the man who ran the sole entertainment centre, as well as a small and lucrative fisher-fleet, on an islet sufficiently downwind of Long Island to be unnoticed.

  He was the man who woke up one evening to find the top of a giant Dome poking through the unused plot of scrub, sand dunes and rock between his inn and the tiny harbour.

  For this was where the beacon’s signal had arrived.

  Beven wasn’t stupid. He was an old-school opportunist, an ex-Autocracy man who was tragically short of livestock to work his inn. In his day he’d heard enough rumours about the Autocracy’s final desperate projects to hazard a guess about the Dome’s contents, and if he was right it might solve his recruitment problems. Tye quickly rounded up a herd of likely (mostly quite unlikely) investigators and sent them in to do a reckie.

  Then he poured himself another A-vine, sat back, and he waited.

  * * *

  Tye’s suspicions were soon proved correct.

  The Dome was a gigantic cryogenic storage facility. Cryogenic stasis was a capital crime on every civilised world, a ban even the Autocracy had enforced, yet this had to be Autocracy work. Sheek, Beven’s Giagosian head barkeeper and first lieutenant, made short work of breaking open the sealed hatch and cautiously led the way in (from behind). The top floors were crowded, stacked with two-metre high, coffin-like Cryo-capsules, and on many of them cold blue lights along the diagnostic side-plates showed the inmates were alive.

  Underneath many levels drove deep into the earth.

  Each was reached by an elevator shaft and iron steps, next to which stood decrepit weapons caches. There was a lively market in ex-Autocracy hardware if you knew where to fence it, and any source of income was welcome, but these were chock-a-block with large moth-eaten S-II Automatics. Sheek took one glance and warned his people to leave them be, but in every gang there’s always one. One absolute and total pillock who has to grab hold and have a go. Firing an S-II Auto in a confined space was never going to work, without a locked-in target they simply boomeranged. Shrapnel showered as the live-bolt pinged off walls and dented capsules, finally grounding with a dull boom and a toxic dust cloud. Sheek swore up a storm as he stomped back. There wasn’t much left of gun or man. Blood splatter and pulp was not considered artistic and after that the stashes were left seriously alone.

  Lower down the cryo-capsules grew visibly older and dirtier and clunkier and more of their lights were off than were on. One was prised open, you know, just to make sure. The contents stank so bad it gouged out your eye sockets and hooked up your last meal. Not many species survived hasty cryogenics. Freezing techniques seemed more modern on the higher floors and Sheek reckoned they were better bets for Tye’s needs; clearly the Autocracy stocked its meat-bots on a classy last-in, first-out basis. More than satisfied, if wary, he decided to send off men in pairs to check the lower levels (and don’t take long about it).

  One of them quickly lost his partner and wandered off alone. His name was Rocket, though no one knew why, a string knot of a fisher, shrivelled by wind, sea and work. High on A-vine, he’d followed the crowd to the Dome with little idea of what was going on.

  All he wanted to do was find somewhere quiet to sleep one off.

  He ended up in the basement.

  The stink was less rancid down there but the passages were rougher. Metal gave way to stone and Rocket was grateful when a few ancient cell-lamps functioned, though they were dim and erratic. He crept along with his torch firmly at eight-o-clock so he could see what he was treading in. Just in case. As he passed he glimpsed nightmare laboratories, whipped clean as medical staff evacuated. Blessed with little imagination, he still shuddered. Finally, he discovered natural caves where giant pylons groaned under the Dome’s weight.

  It was quiet down here, eerie, shivery.

  Booze
kicked in. So too, fear. Rocket began to trot, weaving from side to side.

  Trying to scrub his nose and step at the same time, he lurched sideways into an alcove off the main passage. It was the shallow arch of an entrance porch leading to a faintly outlined and very heavy-looking door in the rear wall. Flicking his torch about he discovered a head-height panel-lock so simple it had to be complicated, with a twin on the opposite wall of the alcove. Nervously backing up to get a better look, he tripped and slid down rough stone. His shoulder caught something hard and painful sticking out at an angle.

  There was a faint clink as it bounced.

  Clink?

  When his heart stopped pounding, he prised open a bloodshot eye. Clink?

  Clink was the sound of credit bars. Credit bars equalled A-vine, sex and good times.

  Wildly flashing his torch about, he almost trod on something lying in the dirt next to his boot. A dial of silver intaglio, about a thumb’s length at the base, topped by a loop.

  Not a credit bar. It glittered in the yellow beam, danced and flirted.

  Rocket scooped it up. Pretty, it was really pretty.

  “What you got, Rocket?”

  Life stalled. Then...

  “Nothing,” he croaked automatically, dropping it into his pocket.

  Keeping much of his shoulder glued to the wall for support, he poked torch and head around the corner and cursed. The man coming out of the gloom was no friend.

  He was a grinning skull on legs.

  A hollow, bald man with sly rat eyes taking encrypted notes for future use, his name was Dandy Minon. He loomed, he always loomed. “What you doing down here?”

  “Tye said to look,” mumbled Rocket sullenly.

  Minon’s torch circled the alcove. “Think you’ve looked enough.” He jerked the torch beam back the ghostly way they’d come. “After you,” he invited. “Time to leave.”

  * * *

  Later that evening Tye Beven watched as men struggled to unload defrosting bodies from the top floors of the Dome, tumbling them in heaps on the hillside. It was a bizarre scene, rank with mute desperation. Distant tides roared a soundtrack as they grappled with the pull of four moons, and the ochre sun pancaked sullen waves. It was cold. It was always cold, but sunset’s chill was particularly pernicious and Tye couldn’t dodge the sharp winds. Built for comfort not speed, he didn’t do wind, weather or zero temperatures by choice and his natural habitat was his inn. Digging his stubbly chins into his collar, he shivered and even his thickening layers of blubber couldn’t keep him warm. He wasn’t supervising by choice, he was wise enough to realise a personal presence guaranteed matters went right.

  “Sheek?” he grunted.

  The Giagosian materialised like magic. Quite a feat as Sheek was taller and heavier than Beven, though he carried muscle not fat. Giagosians had minds like calculators and fists like pile-drivers, but they were good at people even if they couldn’t speak Basic, the common tongue, without a Universal Translator. The UT was a convenient gadget for those with tricky vocal cords, but Sheek, even without one, could read most folk better than many. His world, Giagosia, had been one of the first raped in the wars and its refugees had beached on many random shores. They weren’t popular, possibly because their thick skins were pale green and they grew hard head-plates instead of hair, which made them look daunting. You didn’t argue with a Giag. Nobody argued with a Giag. They were solid. You wanted Giags on your side.

  “What’s he doing here?” asked Tye.

  Sheek squinted over to where a thin figure could be made out directing operations down by the rocks. “Minon?” he shrugged. “Thought you sent him down.” Minon was a newcomer at the inn and far too quick at assembling a clique for anybody’s taste. Tye sometimes used him because he preferred the man kept where he could be seen.

  “Nope.” Beven snorted and tapped his ear. “Not me. We don’t want no Tokkers round here.” Tokkers were Autocracy diehards who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take no for an answer. Union forces smelled Tokkers, they came, they bashed Tokkers and then they stuck around and got in the way of free enterprise. Worse, Minon had a Shiny Ear, a crystal globe covering the lobe and ear-canal. Having paid a small fortune to get rid of his, that Shiny Ear bit at Tye. It was a cheap imitation of the Crack-Crystal nodes the Autocracy drilled into the brain to create instant and mindless obedience. The real thing had turned troops into cannon fodder, neatly solving the twin problems of total obedience and of captives leaking information to the other side. The Autocracy pressed a button and a thousand brains exploded simultaneously.

  Sheek nodded slowly. Tye was right. Tokkers were dangerous crazies.

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” he decided. “Done deal.”

  They spent a couple of moments watching Minon’s rough revivification techniques with, to be honest, something approaching admiration. The man had got four women spread-eagled on the rocky hillside and was fairly obviously measuring them up for future use. Bending down, he flashed his torch, checking teeth and blinding eyes that hadn’t opened since their owners had been shoved into stasis, poking bodies roughly with his toe to see how they moved. Imagination sketched in yelps from throats still too frozen to crack any noise.

  The woman on the far end struggled up as Minon leaned over another.

  Nobody saw exactly what happened next.

  Suddenly she was astride, pounding him, knees planted firmly either side of his back while he gasped and flailed and ate dirt. It took two of the other men to rip her off.

  They held her while Minon made his feelings known.

  She spat at him. Once. Insolent. As if he wasn’t worth her spit.

  Beven was pleased to see Dandy use the flat of his hand to slap her down and that he didn’t punch any vital organs. After all, that was valuable merchandise down there.

  “She’ll take some sorting.” Chuckling, he turned away, briskly rubbing warmth into pudgy hands. “Keep the younger ones, females and the pretty males, get rid of the rest. Dig a pit, burn off waste and dump the rubbish. Seal up the hatch and hide it good. I don’t want anyone getting ambitious.” Now there was a notion. Word of this would get out one way or another in a fairly closed community and, as well as the Union, there were rivals who might need to be seen off. Tye had only revived the two top levels, there were plenty more to play with but Beven had never cared to share. “Leave sentries. I want it watched.”

  Sheek barred his teeth in a grin. They were a shade paler than his lips. “Pleasure.”

  * * *

  That first night of new life for the Dome survivors was spent in the rotten cattle-pen where they were herded by Beven’s men. Its cracked, sagging walls and rickety roof hardly did service as shelter for their poor souls. For some the longest night never ended. Denied treatment or revivification protocols a quarter died before the morning. At least another quarter puked up guts and gore and bile and ended up hardly worth the energy bolt used to put them out of their misery. They’d been infected by Ging-mould, a killer, and the real reason why cryogenics was a blind alley. It was like dead meat left out too long, and once Ging-bacteria infected a body there was no escape. The residual crystals destroyed the frozen cells and once that set in, well, let’s just say it was kinder to kill sooner than later.

  While they lived they made sounds.

  Some were guttural, some were worse. They tied up nightmares in a filthy package that would open in the dark of every night you lived. You’d never forget those noises.

  The pen reeked of pus and spew and crap and death.

  The woman who had attacked Dandy Minon lived.

  Her name was Ellis Matheson and before she’d been captured she’d been a Donn pilot, recalled to fight the siege of Typhin. Belly churning with Autocracy drugs, colder than a corpse and bruised and cut from Minon’s slapping, yet she lived. And if you could get through the first night, she reckoned, you might make a day. Then another, another and so on and on. If you did that, you’d live to get out. Yes, you would. Then you
could come back.

  And get the bastards.

  The telepathic Donn race had their ways, their means, their laws but most of all their wits. Minders, the Autocracy had called them, and hunted them without mercy. They slaughtered them for many reasons but mostly because the Donn terrified them.

  Dawn exploded onto the savage seas and night ran screaming.

  The sun rose and Ellis burned.

  She spared no time to admire the blazing day.

  Instead she saw the ruined lives in the byre and it was to them that she made her promises. She promised that none should ever find out that she was Donn, that she would survive and escape, and that one day her captors would grovel in their own filth.

  Chapter Two

  Lost in the maze of the first dead days, Ellis Matheson called to her people for help.

  She called the only way she was able, the only way any Donn would call.

  With her mind.

  She called for her father, who had also been her commanding officer. Then others, friends from the same squad, more, many more. Then anyone. Any living Donn.

  No one replied.

  There was no answer, nothing, but she never gave up. It wasn’t in her to give up.

  And she was heard, one way or another, though, then, she never knew it.

  * * *

  On a very young and extremely unstable planetoid a young man screamed out in his worst nightmare and jerked awake, sweating and shaking and panting for air.

  The bedroom door clicked open. “Sam?” called a voice gruff with concern. “You all right there? You were yelling fit to wake the dead. I heard you through the blocks.”

  “Fine. Sorry, Soren, sorry.” The dream was sickening, someone was in trouble, the stench of fear clogged his throat and Sam was scared. “Just a dream. It’s ok.”

  “Well then, go back to sleep. Go and get a drink if it helps,” said Soren Nevus, his guardian, uneasily shutting the bedroom door. “We have an early start tomorrow.”

  He didn’t sleep again that night. Sam’s dreams were far too frequent nowadays.

  Instead he spent the rest of the night wondering what the boy’s parents would have done and most of the next few days praying that he’d got the answer wrong.