Battle Scarred (The Fever Brothers #8)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Scar

The seam runs wrong on the east wall.

I hold my head lamp up to it, even though I technically don’t need the light to see.

Down here at level twenty-six hundred the dark is total, but my eyes see fine.

The lamp is for the detail work. And there it is, a fracture that’s hairline thin, running up through the rock where the new shaft meets the old.

The kind of crack that means nothing today but could result in a collapsed ceiling in a rotation or two if no one corrects the load.

I press my palm flat to the stone and feel the cold of it through my glove.

Then I mark it.

We do most of this by hand down here. The big drills are faster, but the Illibrium doesn’t like them, the vibration makes the crystal flinch and pull back into the rock, so they go dull and small.

Therefore, we drill slow, haul debris out the old ways, one cart at a time, and mark the fractures by hand.

It’s punishing work and this is probably the worst job on the crew.

But I asked for this.

I load the cart. My personal crystal sits warm in my chest pocket, glowing its low steady blue, the way it always does when the seam is good and the rock is honest. It likes it down here too. We’re alike that way, my crystal and me. Neither of us has much use for company.

I haul the cart to the cage line and stack it with the others and go back for more.

The shaft echoes with the sounds of the crew further inside the cave.

Cannibal’s grunt as he sets a charge, the scrape of Trunk’s blade through soft rock and somebody laughing at something I didn’t hear.

Their voices carry down here and bounce off the walls and come back wrong, doubled, like there are twice as many of us in the tunnels.

The Fever Brothers are the most productive crew in the mine. We’ve been awarded that status for the last three years in a row. And now we plan on keeping it that way.

“Time,” Chief calls out from somewhere deeper in the shaft. A cheer goes up that rattles down the tunnel.

Lunch.

There is nothing this crew loves more than the announcement that ends the morning stretch, except maybe the food waiting for us when we arrive. We’ve been very lucky with the addition of Jana, Heavy’s bride, as Head Chef of the Minecorp employee cafeteria.

“Finally.” Claws shoulders past me toward the cage with his lamp swinging. “I could eat the rock.”

“You’ve tried,” Cannibal comments, following. “I’ve seen you.”

“Once,” Claws chuckles. “When I was young.”

I stack the last cart and head with them for the cage. All of us are finishing up and filing out of the dark in a loose, loud knot, lamps bobbing.

First, we all pause to wash up very carefully, so that we arrive with clean hands and our claws free of debris.

Trunk falls in beside me as we head toward the lift, a load manifest in one claw. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“No,” I grumble, annoyed that he continues to ask such personal questions.

What does it matter if I’ve slept or not?

My mind is full with the matter at hand—solving the murder of our parents by mysterious assholes on Chronos.

I only recently discovered that there is a plot to replace the Margol Xylan who mine on Timbur.

House Vaszneth on Chronos wants to force the Illibrium to bond with Royal Pigment instead of Margol, preferably with members of House Vaszneth only.

My jaw clenches.

Not on my watch.

Finding these assholes who are trying to tear down life as we know it on Timbur and taking them down is a big job, and someone has to do it.

It’s all I can think of and I will end this and get justice for my parents, who were murdered in their own home for the original sin of trying to take down this conspiracy.

I will finish what they started, one way or the other.

“Cannibal said you didn’t sleep last diurnal either.”

“Cannibal should mind the Illibrium and not me.”

Trunk grunts in response. “We appreciate all you do, but remember you are not alone in this, Scar. You can delegate, you know. There’s no reason to work so hard you make yourself sick. You need sleep in order to think clearly.”

I don’t bother to answer. But my personal crystal flickers in my pocket, letting me know it secretly agrees with my brother. “Traitor,” I mutter.

We reach the lift along with the rest of them, all of us packing in shoulder to shoulder. The door shuts and we start to rise.

“Heavy’s getting us a special dessert today,” Rook announces.

“Not happening,” Heavy grouses. “My bride will not play favorites amongst the crews.”

Cannibal crosses his massive arms. “She will give me something extra.”

The cage rises and we pass level after level…

twenty-five hundred, two thousand, the long stretches of worked-out rock left dark to regenerate.

At level fifteen hundred the doors open and another crew of miners push inside.

The new ones move past and go quiet when they see me.

It’s the face. A young Margol near the door stares for half a beat too long at the deep scar on my cheek and then studies his own boots like they’re the most fascinating things in the Four Sectors.

It is unsettling to them that I never went into the med lab to get this removed.

But why would I want to make sure that no one remembers that night our compound was attacked and my parents murdered?

Why make it easy for everyone to forget that happened?

Let them look at me and remember. Remember until I receive justice.

Cannibal continues to discuss dessert with Rook. Trunk starts in on the manifest numbers with Hook over my head. All the miners in the lift are talking with each other now, the two crews amicably comparing work ratios.

Everyone talks except for me.

The cage continues to climb. More levels slide past, the processing floors where the raw crystal gets sorted, graded and crated for the transport runs, the long windows where you can see the whole operation laid out below like the inside of a machine.

Then the noise drops away and the light goes flat and artificial.

We surface into the Admin level, the ground floor of the whole mine, where the rock ends and the offices begin.

The staff cafeteria takes up the near end. Jana runs the place with an iron ladle and a soft heart, feeding lunch to the whole mine.

“There she is,” Heavy says, his voice tinged with pride.

Jana stands behind the buffet, her hair tied back, belly round under her apron, pointing two junior cooks in two different directions at once.

We all get into the long, fast-moving food line.

“You eating with the living today, or are you getting your food to-go again, so you can disappear into your fancy office?” Chief questions, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder.

And there it is.

Everyone else grabs a tray and a plate. I grab a to-go box.

“He’s going to the office,” Claws confirms. “Look at him. He’s already gone.”

“Our brother,” Heavy announces, “has an office now. With a door. That locks.”

Cannibal starts loading a plate. “Cayzor of Eighteen. Special Advisor to the Office of the CEO.” He says the title the way you’d hold something up to the light to check it for cracks. “Grytel gave him a plaque.”

“Grytel did not give me a plaque,” I grouse.

“He gave you an office.”

That part’s true, and I still don’t fully know what to do with this new situation.

Two moon cycles ago the CEO of Timbur Minecorp wanted us gone, quietly and permanently, the way the Royal Pigment have always wanted my family gone.

But now Grytel of Thirty-Nine knows what I know, that the real criminals worked from Chronos.

And a male like that, once he sees how badly he’s been used, doesn’t take that lightly.

I’ve been learning that Grytel is actually reasonably honorable, for a Royal Pigment asshole.

He asked what I needed and when I told him I required access to the surveys, shipping records, years of manifests his own administration had been sitting on…

he gave me a room on the Admin level and the clearance I needed.

Minecorp security moved their extra equipment elsewhere and now I am installed.

My brothers think this is hilarious. The most paranoid male on Timbur, the one who kept his whole investigation in his own head because he trusted no one, was handed a sanctioned office by the very being he used to want dead.

“Does it have a window?” Heavy chuckles.

“It has a window that leads to the hallway.”

A low whistle goes down the line.

“Eat something first,” Trunk says to me, quieter, under the noise. “You need to keep your energy up.”

“I will eat when I get there,” I tell him.

And then I leave with my box of food in my hand, ready to get back to my second line of work. Each diurnal I start in the mine and then finish up my shift in the office.

I march down the main corridor, filled with other Xylan moving toward the cafeteria I just exited.

I clock the exits as I cross the Admin level.

Two on this hall, the lift bank behind me, the long corridor to the new transport platform ahead.

I can’t switch it off and stopped trying a long time ago.

My office is at the far end, past the office dwellings, a door most beings walk by without thinking about.

Inside it doesn’t look like much. A console and a wall of screens.

There’s an unused second console beside mine that sits dark right now, because the female it belongs to is home in the compound with a newborn at her chest. Ines set this up herself before she went on maternity leave.

She continues to send over what she digs up from the compound between feedings, and I send back what I can’t make sense of, and her tablet lights up at odd hours the way mine does.

Neither of us sleeps much. Different reasons, these days.

The rest of this research is mine. Survey maps, shipping manifests going back years, recordings, schematics, the slow patient accumulation of everything I’ve been able to learn about everyone who’s ever wished my family harm.

This isn’t a job for Minecorp security. They are here to guard the Illibrium and manage the safety of the transfers of the Illibrium off planet.

For all I know, there might be a mole planted within their ranks.

I’m still searching to discover if they have been compromised.

This is why I do this alone, outside of security.

I sit and pull up the grid schematic, the way I have most nights for the last two moon cycles, since the attack.

Since three House operatives walked onto Timbur trained well enough that I didn’t catch them until they were already aiming at Rook’s chest. And the power grid chose that exact moment to cascade and fail, dropping the whole med wing into the dark while my youngest brother bled.

That wasn’t bad luck. Power grids don’t fail on cue.

I’ve been over it a hundred times. The grid’s failed before, there was a cascade years back, during a scheduled upgrade, that blacked out the whole outpost. Bad wiring, they called it then.

I didn’t like that silly explanation then either.

I don’t like coincidences. I especially don’t like the same impossible thing happening twice, years apart, the second time with a blast aimed at my brother.

House Vaszneth.

We have the name now. Hallie brought it off Chronos with her along with the proof of all of it, the plan to phase the Margol out of the mines, to take the Illibrium for the Royal Pigment and leave my species with nothing.

We know someone, or a group of Xylan, within that house killed our parents.

We know why. What we don’t know is how to reach these killers and bring them to justice.

They sit on Chronos behind their old money and ancient House, untouchable, a whole world away, and laugh at the eight of us stuck on the one planet they can break from a distance.

I open my box of food, turn on another screen and continue to work through lunch.

The knock comes mid-afternoon.

“Come in,” I shout.

It’s Gruten, from Xylan Resources, with a tablet. “Grid contractors,” he lets me know. “Coming in on the noon transport. Two of them.”

I don’t look up. “Minecorp’s bringing in outside help now?”

“After the cascade? Admin wants the whole network hardened before storm season. None of our crews do systems work like that. We mine, we don’t engineer the wires.” He shrugs. “They’re human. A male and a female.”

That gets my attention. “Why humans?”

“I was told these two are the best in the Four Sectors at exactly the type of energy audit we need.”

I shrug. “They cleared intake?”

“Both attuned. Tested clean.” He says it like it’s a marvel, and it is, humans almost never attune, and two off the same transport are amazing odds. “Admin signed off this morning.”

I take the tablet and see two names. A. Wilson. M. Wilson. “Are they related or are they mates?”

“Related. They are siblings. We think that’s why they are both attuned.”

I nod in agreement.

Then I open the door and step out. At the end of the hall I can see down onto the transport station, where the noon arrivals are exiting.

Two of them stand apart from the rest. Both of them are colorless humans.

The male says something and the female laughs and shoves his shoulder, and he shoves her back, the easy unthinking way of two beings who’ve known each other a long time.

“Security has already cleared them. But do you want their backgrounds run again?” he questions.

I almost say yes. My thumb is already moving toward the tablet and then something catches. My crystal shifts in my pocket, a flicker I feel more than see. “No. They’re here to fix the grid and leave. I’ve got bigger problems than two random humans.”