Antagonize (From the Logs of Daniel Quinn Book 2) Read online

  Antagonize

  From the Logs of Daniel Quinn

  Antagonize: From the Logs of Daniel Quinn

  Copyright © 2014 by Thomas R. Manning. All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Thomas R. Manning

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  www.thomasrmanning.com

  Cover Design: Megan Kennedy www.abuseofreason.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9895068-2-3

  Novels by Thomas R. Manning

  From the Logs of Daniel Quinn

  Energize

  Antagonize

  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

  For my father, who has taken the journey beyond the final frontier.

  I love you dad, and I’ll see you again one day.

  One

  There’s something to consider when you’re traveling between alien planets—they have no idea how to cook a human meal. I sat in a bistro, created by the Karthans to facilitate comfort for smugglers and travelers who delivered to their planet, and all the while I stared down at the plate of ‘food’ and used my fork to poke at the grey looking pasta. The respite was a welcome one though, considering I wanted to lay low and stay hidden from any prying eyes throughout the galaxy.

  That’s when a distraction in the form of a young alien joined me at my table, his small, oval shaped mouth turned in a wide grin. His skin was pale blue and there were no ears on the sides of his head. Instead a pair of antennae protruded from his thick, blue hair. I knew he wasn’t a Karthan because they never showed themselves to you above the surface of their planet.

  “Rotu nah-oh,” he said to me in a high pitch voice. “Nah-oh ja Daniel Quinn!”

  I recognized the language . . . He was a Restran from the planet Tristain. I never traveled there personally, but I spent the past year familiarizing myself with all of the aliens and languages in my ship’s database. Twice in my mind I played his words over so I could translate them.

  I know you, you are Daniel Quinn!

  Confusion would be an understatement. I figured Karth to be the perfect planet to visit. From outer space it appeared desolate and floated within toxic nebulae, making you wonder how the damn thing was habitable. I arrived less than a day ago, transporting chemicals and weapons to their dock, and now I sat waiting for payment. Smuggling jobs were the only kind I accepted. When you use the Starcade to apply for jobs, you risk taking something more extreme, such as sending a message to the buyer’s enemy or outright killing someone.

  Somehow in my short time here, this Restran found me. Alarms in my head rang out, warning me that potential danger could lie ahead. The Restran just sat there with the goofy grin on his face and tapped two of his four fingers on a computer tablet of some kind.

  I did my best to appear hospitable to the young being, but under the table I cocked back the hammer of my revolver.

  “Ih na, buu Ihn rinya ri tis karta-oh,” I said. I am, but I’m confused why that excites you.

  “Oh ja rikrik?” Are you kidding? The more he spoke my mind translated the words—almost in real time—making it less difficult to understand him. “You’re a hero! Is it true that you went to an uncharted planet and saved the lives of the natives?”

  I nearly fell out of my chair when he described my time on the planet Dawn. How the hell could he possibly know this, unless he was working with one of the enemies I made on the planet? I slowly gripped the handle of my gun, wrapping my finger against the trigger.

  “Who the hell are you and how do you know about this?” My voice broke slightly.

  Tress’s excitement faltered as he registered my confused, frustrated expression.

  Don’t dwell on the past. Just worry about the present, I thought. I breathed deep and exhaled slowly in an attempt to relax.

  “You know about me, and you’ve met me, but you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here or how you found me in the first place.”

  “I can answer that for you, Captain,” a voice said from the entrance. Turning, I found a stocky man gripping the door frame. His forehead glistened and his chest heaved.

  Although there were accommodations for humans, the chances of two of us being on Karth at the same time were slim. The man stepped over to my table, favoring his left foot as he did so. My stomach churned like a raging tornado and I felt cornered. I blinked hard, disguising it by rubbing my eyes. When I opened them again my right eye—a bionic one that replaced my biological eye after a skirmish against Sarah King—displayed a series of scans and readings of my surroundings, including the human and Restran. From the outside, the eye appeared real unless I shifted my vision to night or thermal imaging so they didn’t know I was scanning them. The human’s pulse was racing, his heartbeat dangerously high, but he didn’t carry any luggage or even identification. All he had was his clothes. His clean shave and combed hair made his appearance this far out in the galaxy odd. And when I looked at the Restran, a faint energy signature emanated from behind him. A weapon?

  “His name is Tress,” the man said, his hand gesturing toward the alien beside him. “And my name is Damon Derringer. Tress’s planet is within the same solar system as mine, Captain Quinn. I enlisted his services to help locate you. It would seem that I made the right call.” He gave the young alien’s back a large pat. His hands, however, trembled. The alarms in my head and my uncomfortable stomach—they indicated something was wrong here—and I’d be damned if someone tried to make a fool out of me.

  I eased my revolver from its holster, lifted it above the table, and pointed it at Derringer.

  “Captain! What are you doing? I’m not here for trouble!” He practically spit out the words as he raised his hands.

  “I don’t really care who you are,” I said with agitated roughness. “The fact that the two of you know who I am makes me nervous, and I don’t like being nervous.”

  “Please, sir—”

  “Shut up.” I kept my composure calm. If things escalated, I wanted to maintain control. “The last time a strange man joined me at a table, it resulted in a few near-death experiences and he almost enslaved an alien race. So here’s what we’re going to do. Get up and get out of my sight before I count to three and pull the trigger.”

  “Captain!” he yelled as I counted to one. “I know about what happened on Dawn! That’s partially why I’m here!”

  “Two,” I growled. Damon backed away to the door.

  “Please, sir! Ju
st let me explain! I am here for your help!”

  A high intensity plasma beam burned straight through Damon’s midsection and passed within inches of Tress. A smoking black hole was scorched into the wall of the bistro. Damon didn’t get a chance to react. One second he lived and pleaded for his life, and the next he fell onto the table, dead.

  I never counted to three. I didn’t fire my weapon. The target reticle in my eye scanned behind Damon’s last position where a hole had been burned through the door.

  Tress dropped to the floor squealing as I jumped behind a table for cover. My hands gripped the revolver hard as I kept myself low to avoid the additional shots, but none came. I risked a glance to the side, but no one attempted to fire on me.

  Seconds later, energy shields activated and dropped from the window and door frames. We were locked in, and even better, the killer was locked out.

  The Karthans don’t take well to killing, especially when an off-worlder does it. The planet’s surveillance system was advanced by my standards. An electronic security web runs down from the dock to the town, and everything is under the scope of a camera. Whoever shot Damon Derringer, it’s likely the Karthans were pursuing him now.

  With the blast shields activated, I felt safe enough to stand and take stock of the situation. The weight of Damon’s body on the table caused it to topple during the lockdown, and he was now on his back, facing the ceiling. The wound in his chest smoked and smelled like charred meat. It had been cauterized from the plasma. Tress stood beside me and stared at the recently deceased.

  “Is he gone?” he asked.

  In reply, I shoved him against a wall with my forearm and pushed my gun under his jaw. His hands flailed and smacked my arm and the wall, but I was stronger. His mouth moved erratically and his eyes shifted color to a shade of indigo, which announced his fear.

  “Enough! What do you want with me?” I asked. The revolver’s chamber spun and charged its plasma round. The weapon was lighter and more compact than my multi-chamber rifle that I destroyed some time ago. I’d spent months building the new one. Well, no, that’s a lie. Technically I built it, but my advanced artificial intelligence on the Belle instructed me on how to do it.

  “Please,” he muttered. “Please, please… don’t kill me! We came here to talk to you!”

  “Right.” I growled. “Talk. Except your buddy down there has a hole blown through him, so the time for talking is over.”

  “I don’t know anything about that! I don’t know why he was shot! Please! I don’t want to die!” The alien, no older than a teenager, cried out hysterically. The indigo in his eyes glowed brighter and radiated a neon kind of intensity. My conscience overpowered my survival instinct at that point and I eased off Tress.

  There was a time when I couldn’t hurt a bug, let alone another humanoid, but after the events on the planet I named Dawn, I wasn’t sure what kind of person I was anymore. I killed men on that planet and now I had been ready to kill Tress.

  Get a grip Daniel, I thought.

  A loud humming emanated from behind the bar across the room. A small, square-shaped droid hovered toward our position. At the top of the cube, a bright read beam scanned Damon Derringer.

  “Human. Dead,” it said in perfect English. Behind the robotic voice and static, I heard another voice with intonations native to the Karthan language. Since Karthans kept to themselves underground, they used service bots and droids to play as hosts to visitors. Rumors suggested that they were short people, half my size, and large around the midsection. I also heard the under city of planet Karth was a thriving utopia, but since they never allowed any aliens access, none of the rumors ever changed to facts.

  These droids were controlled by operators and I could only assume depending on the alien species, that each droid was outfitted with a vocal translation module. The droid rotated and scanned the two of us.

  “Human. Restran. Elevated heart rates and minor scratches, but no critical injuries detected. Do you require assistance?”

  “Just finish my payment so I can get off this rock,” I said while moving to a table with a little less Damon on it. The droid lingered but when Tress didn’t say anything, it returned to its point of origin behind the bar.

  Tress reluctantly joined me at my table, his hands entangled in one another and shoulders hunched. He never took his eyes off of Damon.

  “So, you’re not going to do anything?” His voice was soft.

  I shrugged. “If you don’t have any idea what Damon wanted me for, then it’s none of my concern.”

  The words felt foreign as they left my mouth. I was jarred by the murder of another human being who seemed innocent. I wanted to stay off everyone’s radar as best I could, but the knowledge he had of me and my past left me wondering what he wanted. Of course, that answer died with him.

  “He wanted your help” Tress said. “He said you could save lives . . . that you are a hero.”

  I laughed. I never thought of myself as a hero. A hero saves lives, sacrifices his needs over others. Was I a hero when I saved Captain Gregory Smithson’s life on the Echelon? If I didn’t act, Sarah King wouldn’t only have taken the ship, but also his life and the artificial intelligence program. But in the end, the captain and I fled. King still got the ship, killed people, and even used my best friend Jason Hobbes as a cyborg experiment.

  Was I a hero when I saved the Dawnians? It was my fault they were discovered in the first place. Sarah King and Raymond Erebos had the information on its location, but they would have needed months, maybe years to translate it all. I found it and tried to sell it, and that led them to the most powerful energy source in the galaxy. How did I save the Dawnians? I blew up their processing facility and destroyed their technology which harvested the energy. King and Erebos didn’t get it, but now no one could.

  Hero was the last title I’d give to myself. If anything, I’m just a guy who gets in over his head and has to make up for it later.

  The droid’s buzzing sound returned. It hovered toward me.

  “Is my payment complete?” I asked.

  “We would like to negotiate the terms of your contract, Captain,” the voice said.

  “No, absolutely not,” I replied. “We agreed the price on the contents I delivered—$575,000. I am not lowering it.”

  “Nor are we. In fact, we would like to double the amount.”

  My jaw gaped open. With more than a million dollars I could refit the Kestrel Belle, get her engine replaced, strengthen the hull, and more. But the Karthans weren’t just offering that money freely. No one ever did, especially not after an establishment was damaged with me in it.

  “What are your new terms?”

  “The murderer of your fellow human has proven difficult to apprehend. We would like to hire your services.”

  “Why me?” I asked, interested in the offer, but curious about why they weren’t looking elsewhere. Smuggling items was the best use of my mercenary talents. I sorely lacked skill in the bounty hunter department.

  “You are the only other human on this planet, which makes you somewhat responsible for this situation. Our security droids have been unsuccessful up to this point and we feel a sentient life form above the ground may benefit our efforts.”

  “Wait a second, how the hell am I responsible for this? This man came to me. I was here first. It’s not my fault he got himself shot.”

  “Those are our rules Captain,” it replied. “Visiting species on our planet are responsible for their own kind.”

  “Well, all you had to say was please,” I said with a sarcastic tone. I guess I should be glad Damon died in front of me and not on the other side of the planet. In truth, I could really use the money, but did I really want to go up against Damon’s murderer? Was he killed for talking to me? And if so, why? What information did he intend to give me before his death? Did he have sensitive information he intended to give me before his death?

  If Damon was murdered for talking to me, that meant I was already in
volved somehow. All I could do at this point was speculate, but it nagged at me—Did the killer have the same information on me that Damon did? He might have shot me after all, but missed his opportunity when the barriers dropped over the bistro. Right now I was safe, in the sanctuary of a protected building, but what about after?

  “What can you tell me about the murderer?” I asked.

  “Leondren male,” the droid said. “We estimate his height at seven feet tall. Weight unknown. He is currently advancing to the docking gate and carrying a briefcase that likely holds the weapon responsible for the murder of the human.”

  Leondren. I heard that name before, likely from researching the alien database with Al on the Belle. I couldn’t picture them or recall their capabilities, but he was obviously a skilled marksman. He managed to accomplish a precise kill shot from outside the bistro without collateral damage.

  “Is it just one Leondren?” I asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  There was considerable danger going after the killer, but it could be worth it for the payout. Money wasn’t everything to me, but at the same time it made the starships go around the galaxy.

  “Alright, I’ll agree to your terms,” I said, pushing my thumb to a print scan on the droid. “I’ll make an attempt to apprehend this Leondren, but if I find my life at risk I have the option to pull out and receive my original payment.”

  “Agreed, Captain,” the droid said. The entrance’s barrier deactivated. I stood and moved forward with my revolver still in hand, the plasma charged and ready to fire. I turned back to Tress, who sat there silently the whole time, his eyes still the same fearful color.

  “You stay here. If you’re associated with Derringer, then you may be target as well.”

  His eyes glowed, but he nodded at me.

  “Be aware, human Quinn, you are advancing into danger,” the droid warned.

  “Yeah, don’t I always,” I muttered.