Fire Rage Read online

  Fire Rage

  The Fire Planets Saga #3

  Chris Ward

  Contents

  By Chris Ward

  Contact

  About the Author

  Fire Rage

  1. Lia

  2. Caladan

  3. Lia

  4. Karr-Urd

  5. Harlan5

  6. Caladan

  7. Beth

  8. Raylan

  9. Lia

  10. Beth

  11. Caladan

  12. Harlan5

  13. Lia

  14. Harlan5

  15. Caladan

  16. Raylan

  17. Beth

  18. Lia

  19. Harlan5

  20. Caladan

  21. Lia

  22. Beth

  23. Raylan

  24. Harlan5

  25. Davar

  26. Lia

  27. Beth

  28. Lia

  29. Paul

  30. Caladan

  31. Lia

  32. Beth

  33. Lia

  34. Caladan

  35. Beth

  36. Lia

  37. Harlan5

  38. Caladan

  39. Beth

  40. Lia

  41. Raylan

  42. Caladan

  43. Lia

  44. Beth

  45. Caladan

  46. Raylan

  47. Lia

  48. Beth

  49. Lia

  50. Caladan

  51. Harlan5

  52. Lia

  53. Beth

  54. Lia

  Glossary of Races

  Glossary of Systems and Planets

  Glossary of Terminology

  Acknowledgments

  Contact

  “Fire Rage - The Fire Planets Saga #3”

  Copyright © Chris Ward 2018

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  The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author.

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  This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  By Chris Ward

  Novels

  Head of Words

  The Man Who Built the World

  * * *

  Endinfinium (YA Fantasy)

  Benjamin Forrest and the School at the End of the World

  Benjamin Forrest and the Pay of Paper Dragons

  Benjamin Forrest and the Lost City of the Ghouls

  * * *

  The Fire Planets Saga (space opera)

  Fire Fight

  Fire Storm

  Fire Rage

  * * *

  The Tube Riders series (dystopian)

  Underground

  Exile

  Revenge

  In the Shadow of London

  * * *

  The Tales of Crow series (SF horror)

  The Eyes in the Dark

  The Castle of Nightmares

  The Puppeteer King

  The Circus of Machinations

  * * *

  The Tokyo Lost Series (mystery)

  Broken

  Stolen

  Frozen

  Also Available

  The Tube Riders Trilogy Boxed Set

  The Tube Riders Four Volume Complete Series

  Thank you for your interest in my work.

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  Readers Group - click here to join

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  You can also chat to me on Facebook at

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  Chris Ward (Fiction Writer)

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  and follow progress on new books on my website at

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  www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

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  Thank you for reading!

  About the Author

  A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Chris Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004. There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat. He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country.

  He is the author of the The Tube Riders series, the Tales of Crow series, and the upcoming Endinfinium YA fantasy series, as well as numerous other well-received stand alone novels.

  Chris would love to hear from you:

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  www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

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  [email protected]

  Fire Rage

  1

  Lia

  It was much easier to breathe without an electrified staff prodding into your back, Lianetta Jansen thought, as the Oufolani guards herded her like cattle into a glass elevator. Surrounded by more guards on the other side of the transparent box, the pilot of her ship, Caladan, gave her an awkward wink out of his swollen, blackened right eye, a gesture he thought was funny or ironic. Then the elevator moved, and in moments they were dropping fast enough to make her eyes water, the grub-like Oufolani around her contracting like squeezed sponges.

  ‘Hold her,’ one of the guards said in a robotic voice that came from an embedded translation box in the roll of flesh below its tiny, caterpillar-like head. ‘Her intelligence might be compromised if she bumps her head.’

  Stumpy forelegs pressed around her arms, hundreds of tiny hooks tickling her skin. Not content to hold her with a single pair of legs, the nearest guard lifted the second and third of its six segments off the ground to hold her with six legs at once. The pair nearest her waist secreted a sticky liquid that smelled like rotten plant matter. Certain the Oufolan was getting aroused by its closeness, Lia closed her eyes and tried to think about the shipment of Whir-town brandy they had picked up at their last stop as she swallowed down the urge to vomit.

  As quickly as it had fallen into freefall down the outer edge of Ergogate’s third-largest tube-city, a fifty-mile deep glass tube known as Rock Haven, the elevator came to a jolting stop. Lia opened her eyes as the nearest guard released her. The one at her rear prodded her toward the opening doors.

  ‘Wow, he liked you.’ Caladan chuckled. ‘Pretty sure you’ve never turned me on that bad. Not even on laundry day.’

  ‘Your beard looks better when it’s on upside down,’ Lia fired back, feeling mildly victorious as Caladan frowned.

  He blew flat the part of his long beard that had curved up during the viciously swift descent. ‘I thought you’d got used to my face.’

  Lia scowled. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’

  ‘Move,’ the Oufolan guard captain said. ‘No dawdling.’

  The guards pushed them close together. The group headed down the corridor, a glass tube like most of Rock Haven, the uniform transparency broken only by a black felt carpet that collected a slime trail as the Oufolani passed.

  Caladan nudged Lia in the ribs with his only elbow. ‘Look at that.’ He nodded at Rock Haven’s vast outer wall, through which the planet’s surface was visible. ‘A firestorm is rising. Just think, if the glass wasn’t here, all these grubs would be incinerated. Like how I used to pour boiling water on the ants’ nests in my parents’ garden.’

  ‘I never knew you had a garden.’

  ‘You should ask me more personal questions. I was a proper horticulturalist.’

 
‘What happened to it?’

  Caladan shrugged. ‘Bandits, warlords, civil war. One of the three. Could even have been an implanted memory used during a torture session. I forget now. Wow, here it goes.’

  As the Oufolani pushed them along the corridor, Lia peered out at Ergograte’s barren surface, the firestorms that stripped everything on a near-daily basis leaving the rock scorched free of any hint of vegetation. The desert landscape had darkened, storm clouds gathering overhead, their grim undersurface betraying the devastation they were set to unleash.

  ‘Here we go.’

  Even through the tube city’s three-meter thick glass walls, the air rumbled as the clouds burst, the very air itself igniting as the flammable atmosphere self-combusted. The glass walls darkened, an automatic tinting system designed to protect the eyes of residents switching on, but beyond the glass the raging fire that enveloped all the visible landscape was still apparent.

  The Oufolani had stopped, Lia and Caladan coming to halt with them. As one, the ten caterpillar-like off-worlders dropped onto all six sets of legs and turned to watch the firestorm, umming and aahing through their robotic voice translators like children watching their first fireworks display.

  ‘Should we try to escape?’ Caladan whispered.

  Lia shook her head. ‘There’s nowhere to go. The spaceport will be in lockdown until the storm passes, and there aren’t a lot of hiding places in a city that’s ninety percent glass.’

  ‘We could skin a couple of those grubs and wear them like disguises,’ Caladan said.

  ‘You might be able to, but I’d die from the smell.’

  ‘I guess death is a better option, then.’

  ‘What is it you always say about my tongue? That’s it’s my greatest weapon. Give it a chance.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘What did you mean, then?’

  The Oufolani resumed their positions, rising onto their three rear sets of feet to stand at Lia’s shoulder height. Even though she’d dealt with Oufolani before, Lia found it uncomfortable to be around them. She knew from studying Harlan5’s databases the Oufolani were highly intelligent, with an IQ twice that of an average human’s, and their scientists were sought after by technology companies all over the galaxy.

  It didn’t matter.

  They were giant caterpillars.

  The group passed through another glass door, this one tinted to hide what lay inside, and found themselves in a meeting room. A table stood in the center, piled high with dark green organic matter that resembled algae.

  Another Oufolan stood on the other side of the table. Unlike the guards, who were all a dull gray, this one was a kaleidoscope of color, everything from luminous yellow to chrome purple. A deceptively small head was disguised by large fake eyespots on its upper segment, which were backed by multi-colored spines curving forward like giant eyelashes.

  ‘Ah, Lianetta Jansen,’ came a robotic woman’s voice. ‘The legendary outlaw. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to my office.’

  ‘Adjunct Seefontik,’ Lia said. ‘I’d hoped to meet you in less pressing circumstances.’

  ‘Come,’ the Oufolan said. ‘We’ll leave my guards to feast while we talk.’ The tiny head turned. ‘Release them.’

  Lia and Caladan had their bonds removed and followed Adjunct Seefontik through a glass door into a wider chamber. As the door closed behind them, an automatic tinting system hiding the other room from view, she caught a glimpse of the guards hungrily gathering around the table of green mulch.

  ‘A moment, please,’ Adjunct Seefontik said. One stumpy foreleg pressed a control panel on the wall, then the whole room moved, gliding like a giant elevator through a series of glass tubes until it came to rest on a side of Rock Haven near the cliff. Lia, who had visited many of the galaxy’s wonders, still marveled at Ergogate’s tube cities. On a fire planet rich in trioxyglobin, the government of Quaxar System had utilized the only other resource—sand—to create giant test tubes embedded into fissures in the earth, each containing an entire city. While the lower levels, where complex generators harnessed the firestorms’ energy to power the city, were built of more conventional metal alloys, the upper levels were almost entirely glass. You could watch hundreds of people going about their business as though floating in the air, while tinted blocks would wink out while private matters were given attention.

  Adjunct Seefontik pressed another button and a doorway in the glass itself appeared, leading into a tunnel bored into the connecting rock. Without waiting, the adjunct headed into the tunnel, moving on all six sets of legs, leaving Lia and Caladan hurrying to keep up.

  ‘What’s this, a giant ants’ nest?’ Caladan muttered.

  ‘Seriously, I know you think that’s a joke, but I wouldn’t go there,’ Lia answered, nudging a small bug aside as it attempted to mount her shoe. ‘I’ve heard there’s an Oufolani subspecies which requires a live host for incubation. Their homeworld used to incarcerate an unnaturally high number of off-worlder prisoners.’

  ‘Best say nothing more about that.’ Caladan grimaced as he looked at his feet.

  Up ahead, Adjunct Seefonik slowed. She lifted her two front sets of legs and moved at a slower pace to allow them to walk side by side. ‘I thought I’d show you what you were doing when you decided to run with your cargo.’

  ‘We didn’t run,’ Lia said. ‘Like I told your guards—our ship suffered a malfunction. It automatically assumed a flight sequence. The autopilot had been glitchy for weeks.’

  ‘We’re refugees out of Trill System,’ Caladan said. ‘We’re tired of running. We were glad we’d found somewhere safe to hole up for a bit. We were looking forward to becoming productive members of the community.’

  Adjunct Seefonik sighed. The colors of her fake eye spots flickered, as though she were rolling giant eyes. ‘I don’t care about Trill System. It’s a million miles from here.’

  ‘Technically, it’s a lot farther than that,’ Caladan said.

  ‘The wormholes are being monitored,’ Adjunct Seefonik said. ‘We have nothing to worry about here in Quaxar.’

  Lia shook her head, refusing to argue, aware she had no leverage with people who hadn’t seen what she had seen. ‘Where are you taking us?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  They reached a staircase cut into the rock. Adjunct Seefonik led them down, moving slowly. The Oufolani, an off-worlder race originating from a marsh world, had never adjusted to human inventions such as stairs. Lia and Caladan followed behind, Lia trying to ignore the pilot’s confused glances.

  Finally, they came to a steel door. Adjunct Seefonik pressed a button then muttered something in her own language into an intercom. The door swung open, and the adjunct went inside. ‘Come, come.’

  Lia found herself in a nursery. Heaps of stinking vegetable matter filled the cavern’s corners. Oufolani infants the size of small dogs crawled among it, eating and playing. A couple of adults, their colors brighter than the guards but not a match for the adjunct’s vibrancy, walked among them, supervising.

  ‘Here,’ Adjunct Seefonik said. ‘Do you know what you’re looking at?’

  ‘A personal nightmare?’ Caladan muttered into Lia’s ear as the adjunct turned in a slow circle.

  ‘This is an orphanage,’ Adjunct Seefonik said. ‘These children have lost their parents to accidents in the trioxyglobin mines.’

  One grub attempted to climb up Caladan’s leg. Lia suppressed a grin as he nudged it away, revealing a coating of slime left behind.

  ‘You attempted to depart with a cargo of protective chemical used for safety in the mines around Rock Haven. I wanted to remind you your actions will only cause more children to lose their parents in the future.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But like I said, we had an autopilot malfunction. It attempted to launch our ship without authorization.’

  ‘No doubt you were planning to deliver the chemical to one of the bases aligning with the dissenters, but you’re forgetting how y
our actions affect the people on the ground.’

  Lia sighed, wishing she had a better excuse. It was one they had used numerous times, but on this occasion it was true. Harlan5 had slipped while attempting to repair the autopilot, fusing two rogue wires and jolting the ship into a launch sequence which had seen it seized by the spaceport guards.

  ‘There must be something we can do.’ She scowled at Caladan as the affectionate grub now attempted to climb her own leg. ‘I mean, it was a simple mistake.’