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  Icharus

  Books In the Argon Adventures Series

  Tesla’s Revenge

  The Cthulhu Crisis

  The Fall of Neverland

  The First Law

  The Summoner’s Sigil

  Books in the ARC Series

  Icharus

  Other Books

  Scared Shirtless

  Published by Renee Sebastian

  Text Copyright © 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people, even if you received a downloaded free copy. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, then please return to your book retailer and purchase your own copy.

  Table of Contents

  Icharus

  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 1

  "He's down there. Trust me." I ran a hand through my thick, dark hair, which needed cutting. I would put in a card for it tomorrow. It was anyone's guess when the fatemakers would get around to actually scheduling time for it, however.

  Damus raised his gun and asked, “I hate pipes. Send in some flashers.”

  “Can’t. Might push him deeper into the pipe. He’s not worth the pipe becoming crushed. Do you want the water authorities breathing down our necks?”

  “Not those stratholes,” he said with a sneer and a laugh. “Are you sure it’s even him?”

  “Have I ever been wrong before?”

  “No,” he reluctantly admitted.

  A woman walked briskly by us, saw Damus's gun, turned around, and ran away from us. We had been partnered for five annos and liquidated over a hundred defectives. No one wanted to get in the way of a Friend at the End officer. An obstruction could result in their termination as well.

  “We wait?” he asked.

  I knelt down and looked into the pipe. It was a standard irrigation pipe. With the way the laws were, we could not chance killing him in the pipe, because the pipe could then become contaminated. We did not need the horts coming after us for a sanitation violation as well. We'll let time work in our favor on this one. These pipes worked on timers, so case number 429, ThianΣ4, needed to come out now, or the water would force him out within the next twenty tigs. We will have him either way.

  "We wait," I said as I leaned my back against the hip-high main.

  Damus was never one for waiting. He took out his oculus and began scanning for messages as he paced back and forth along the grated metal floor.

  I next walked the length of the pipeline until it split into three smaller pipes that seemed to stretch into infinity in different directions. Each one would connect to a small pump collection station on the Torvan side of the planet, the dark side. Would he be able to fit into one of the smaller pipes? I knocked on the larger pipe with my medclub as I sauntered my way back to the opening where Damus waited.

  I knelt down and examined the pried off lid where ThianΣ4 had forced his way into the conduit. Setting my oculus on thermal mode, I scanned the lip and noted his heat signature that endured along its edges.

  Since Damus’s attention was still riveted to his oculus, I asked, “Anything on the fodder feed?”

  “No. Just weather reports.” We didn’t have weather deviations often, but when we did, it was extreme and sudden.

  “Go over there, where the pipe divides off,” I told Damus quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  He glared at me for a moment longer, but finally walked to where I had instructed him to stand.

  I crouched back down in the entrance again. "I sent my partner away. I told him that the water is going to flush you out and then I will end your life. You know I can make your death painless, or we can do it the other way, incredibly hard."

  I unsheathed my medical grade club and pushed the release button. I was not being exactly truthful when I said this could be painless. Hard contact with it would release a needle syringe that would deliver a heavy sedative which would paralyze him, but he would be conscious when Damus would finish him off. Damus was not nice when he killed them, which usually included some sort of hand to hand violence. Worse yet, he told me once that killing people was the best part of the job.

  I hit it against the end of pipe five times and said, “Believe me, you’ll want to come out now, Thian.”

  I pressed my ear against the pipe. Come on and make a move. Nothing… nothing… then I heard a soft sizzle.

  “He’s going to pop the top,” I called out.

  “Frack he is!” Damus raised his gun and aimed it at the pipe.

  “No – don’t!”

  He shot his arcgun into the pipe. While it wouldn’t make a hole in the metal, the electrical current might weaken it structurally. If this pipe became a casualty of the job, the Council would come breathing down our necks, which was infinitely worse than just the horts.

  I stood to the side of the opening and waited. How much longer until the water was due to come?

  “Knock on the top of the pipe, Damus,” I whispered.

  “Why?” he mouthed.

  “It should confuse him as to our location. Remember, he’s going deaf.”

  “He is?”

  I sighed and shook my head. Damus never read the case files. He simply stayed on this job because he enjoyed eliminating people, which wasn’t why I was here.

  “He’s cutting through the pipe!”

  What an idiot. “Just go knock on the pipe down there,” I huffed. I climbed on top of the pipe at the entrance and listened. “No, he isn’t,” I quietly said to myself. He had set his plazcutter on and positioned it so it would look like he was still back there. I climbed on top of the pipe and waited.

  I saw him long before I heard him. I saw a crop of brown hair pop out of the pipe. He looked both ways and then attempted to crawl out of it. I slammed my club down against his neck. The syringe went in, and he instantly collapsed. I hopped down and finished pulling him out of the pipe. He was much thinner than the report had filed on him, and either the force of my club or the single dose administered from it had apparently knocked him out. Either way, Damus was not going to be happy about that. I flipped off his mask and looked him over.

  Hard to believe that a man in his prime had been deemed defective, but regardless, without his hearing, he was a drain on the Icharus’s resources. We could not afford to be working at anything other than one-hundred percent efficacy, or life would collapse on this harsh planet.

  “Over here Damus, before the water comes! I’m going in to retrieve the cutter before it breaches the pipe.”

  He came right over, and I left him to dirty his hands. The pipe was cold along my legs, but the light from his cutter lit it up well enough. I scraped along the bottom of it as I inched my way closer to the arc of plasma etching steadily away at the pipe.

  Just before I reached it, I found a scrap of fabric plastered to the wall of the pipe. That was
odd. I lifted it up in the refracted light and read it. Zει. What did that mean? Was this an alias he liked to use, or the name of a friend or lover? It was odd in the way it was spelled, using the letters used strictly in classifying people rather than a common name.

  I should have kept it to show Damus, but on impulse, I threw it into the beam where I watched it vaporize. I reclaimed the cutter by snatching the handle and then I turned it off. Right after that was done, I heard the first rumbling of water. Frack!

  I had just enough room to turn around. After which, I slid down my mask, adjusted the straps on it, and then I tightened my grip on the cutter. Then I sluggishly began my return to the opening.

  Before I made it to the end of the pipe, my entire front half of my body became soaked through, a precursor to what was to come. I crawled along the bottom of the pipe until I could wrap the fingers of my left hand around the lip of the opening. That was when the rush of water caught me, and I was spewed out onto the hard, metallic floor. My body slammed into the wall and the bloody version of case number 429, some fifty feet away. Damus always did work fast.

  Damus had already placed the call to stop the water, and once it was finally redirected to the areas below the grate floor, I said, "You could have moved him out of the way."

  “I didn’t know the water was coming.”

  I knew he saw the trickle before the storm. Damus was turning into a real pain. Maybe it was time to request a reassignment from the fatemakers.

  Chapter 2

  "Here's to another successful run," Damus toasted us with his synth drink. We would get a couple of dags reprieve, and then we would get either a new run or a different assignment until one became available. Knowing my luck, I'll be working with the horts, as some sort of a karmic payback for flooding the platform before we could get the water redirected.

  The common room in sector two was crowded tonight, although it had been thinning out as the hours grew long. The weak red light from the dwarf star Aka filtered in through the radiation tempered glass. The band was loud with a driving bass line. People gyrated against each other, but they didn’t hold my attention this night. I shot back my synth drink, feeling the acrid burn of it coat my throat.

  Zει. I couldn’t get the name out of my mind. What did it mean?

  “Ready for a fill-up?” I asked Damus.

  He looked at his empty glass. “When am I not? You got this round?”

  I looked at our party of five and thought what else did I have to spend my diras on?

  “I don’t want another,” Astrid told me. “They upped the dosage on my s-pack. I think I’m going to go home early.”

  “Would you like me to walk you home?” I asked, more from obligation than any real desire.

  “No. I think you need to unwind a little more,” she said as she rubbed my shoulder. “Maybe you could visit me tomorrow night. You’re still off, right?”

  “Yeah sure, whatever,” I answered noncommittally.

  She waved at everyone and then left. That left Damus, Tora, Damus’s current girlfriend, and Min, a girl who was waiting for Damus to be done with Tora so he would turn his attention to her. I got up and went to the bar.

  Gris was behind the bar tonight. He had short blond hair that was thinning with age. He saw me coming and asked before I got there, “Another round?”

  “Yeah. But make mine a water.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing as he started preparing the drinks.

  “I guess you know a lot of what happens in sector two,” I said.

  “Some.”

  “Do you ever see other hunters that come through our sector on hunts?”

  “Rarely,” he replied.

  “But sometimes they do?”

  “I think twice while I’ve been working at this dump.”

  “Ever heard of anyone called Zει?”

  Most would have missed his tell, but I was a tracker, so it was my job to notice. His brows drew together minutely. Then he looked me in the eye when he replied, "I don't know anyone who goes by that name." He hadn't lied precisely. He knew something, even if it was not much.

  I leaned up against the counter, took a napkin, and asked for a pen. He complied, but he looked a little too relaxed for his customary work stance. He was overcompensating, which ticked off every alarm bell I had.

  I said, “I’m not on a hunt now. I’m just Jett P2. The same Jett that has been coming here since I was assigned to this sector.” I finished drawing out the word, and after pushing it to him, I asked, “What does this mean?”

  He glanced at it and said, “I can’t help you.” That at least was truthful.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Damus chose that moment to sidle up beside me. He threw an arm around me, and then said in a slightly slurred manner, “What’s the slow up? I want my drink buddy.”

  Gris pushed out the three new glasses he had already filled with the preferred additives along with my water. All of them looked like straight up water, so Damus would be none the wiser. “Here you go,” Gris said sternly. Our conversation was over.

  “Which one is mine?” Damus asked.

  "You sir, are far too gone for another, but these two," he said as he indicated the two furthest to my right, "Are for the ladies. You might be able to enjoy both of them tonight and remember it tomorrow if you stop now." Damus tipped his head to the barkeeper, and then he took the two drinks meant for the ladies at our table.

  Gris turned around and walked towards the door that led to the storage room. Since he was done talking with me, I drank my water and lowered the glass to place it back on the napkin. It was then that I saw something scribbled onto it. I picked it up, and it said she lives.

  Out came the other tender, Chiki. “Where did Gris go?”

  “His shift is over, can I get anything for you?” she asked.

  “Jett, I miss you, come back,” Min called over.

  “No,” I told Chiki. I balled the napkin in my hand and put it in a pocket. I flipped my glass upside down onto the bar and then went back to our table.

  • ѻ ● Ѻ • ○ ☼

  My head hurt, and my stomach was a tight fist. I turned over and found Min passed out on the floor wrapped in a sheet that was half on the bed and half around her. I idly wondered what Astrid would think, but knowing how many partners she had taken over the last anno while still visiting me, it wouldn’t be much.

  I went into the bathroom and opened a cabinet. After taking out an a-pack, I added it to a glass of water and drank it in one go. Then I went and opened my oculus. Payment had been received for the last run, and I noted that a new run had already been assigned to me. After I sent the request in for a haircut, I opened up a bottle of goo, which was officially called nutri-on-the-go. It was tasteless enough, but the consistency had room for improvement.

  Next, I tended the Herba cibum, which had carnivorous hairs that caught little bloodsucking chits that were native to this planet. If you plucked the hairs, they added a sweet herbal aroma to warmed water. While most people kept one in their rooms, most did not have the other specimens I did. I scanned my small collection of local plants collected while on assignments. Two of the more unusual ones were lichens, one from Ostrovo and the other from Senja. Another was a Herba lateus from Sinai. Its colorful thick leaves were coated in a sticky substance that filtered out the harmful radiation from the star. I tended to all of them, adjusting their water drip and exposure to artificial light.

  Once I was done, I went to my door and picked up the morning mail, which was actually a pile of cards that had accumulated over the last tad. It was padded with daily newsies, which were not very informative, but mixed into the pile was a personal thank you from the Council for services rendered. I opened it and found the standard form letter, signed with a stamp instead of a real signature.

  There were five people on the Council, one representative for each of the habitable sectors on this tidally locked world. Usually, the elected official f
or Senja became the Prime, as its population far outnumbered all the others put together. Senja was the twilight area between the sunny side the dark side of Icharus. It was dotted with small cities that made up the bulk of humanity that encircled the planet like a belt.

  Sinai was the name for the sun-scorched, desert region, which was by far the largest continent. Most of the interior of that sector was inhospitable for a couple of reasons. One was that it would periodically be ground zero for the electromagnetic solar flares from Aka, frying both electronics and any form of life that had tried to make a foothold since the previous flare storm. The other reason was that the atmosphere was also thickest there, making it far too hot and dark for us to grow food without some sort of climate modification. We currently weren't able to fix it, but the government told us regularly that they were working on it.

  Aoki was the name for sector two. This was my original assignment after my birth. It was a region between Sinai and Senja, and was a place where lichens and moss were the predominant plant life. Most of the time when I slept, the howling winds of my homelands haunted my dreams.

  Sector four, Ostrovo, was a nearly uninhabitable island chain of volcanic rocks in the shallow sun seas. It was close to Sinai and had extremely active six k-lo high volcanoes, which made it an unpredictable place to live.

  Torva was the name given to the last sector. It encompassed the entire dark half of the planet, which was also known as sector five. Whatever wasn’t snow covered rock was frozen in sheets of ice, but if you went deep enough, near the Senja sector, there was cold, clean water for the taking. Mainly only water farmers worked there. I only had been there for the occasional run.

  The first colony landed here only seven generations ago. Not much remained of their trials except a few stories handed down through oral traditions, but I was betting the Council knew more. My ancestors had been the first to leave the sanctuary of the ARC, the automated restoration of civilization, in search of a new cradle for civilization. Most would stay on board to find a better planet, but my people were tired of traveling. The ship had been exploring for a millennium using a variety of propulsion techniques which mainly consisted of electromagnetic propulsion and an ion drive assisted by gravitational assists.