MERCY RISING

  An Exile War Novel

  ALSO BY BOWEN GREENWOOD

  Exile War Series

  Boxed Set

  Distant Thunder

  Onslaught

  Legion of Traitors

  Liberation

  Hope for Mercy

  Sherman Iron Mysteries

  Irons in the Fire

  Iron Law

  Forging Iron

  While the Iron is Hot

  Iron Curtain

  Secrets Series

  Death of Secrets

  Life of Secrets

  Born with Secrets

  Deeper Secrets

  Sons of Thunder Series

  Sons of Thunder

  Fire and Thunder

  Standalone Novel

  The Prophet Conspiracy

  Table of Contents

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MERCY RISING

  An Exile War Novel

  By

  Bowen Greenwood

  Copyright © Bowen Greenwood, 2023

  All rights reserved.

  All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this novel are fictitious or are used fictitiously. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and/or products is intended or should be inferred.

  Edited by: Sherrie Dolby (dolbyduranduran@yahoo.com) at Sanhedralite Editing and Publishing and by Courtney Oppel.

  Cover Design: Fiona Jade Media.

  CHAPTER 1

  Detection meant death, and that night, it meant worse than death. If they were caught, they’d be eaten alive.

  Starting a revolution carried a brutal price tag, and Mercy Hail had no intention of paying it. Dressed all in black, she low crawled on her stomach painfully slowly, across empty farmland, preparing for the worst. With any luck, only her allies would even be around to see, but she wasn’t going to trust her life to luck.

  She dug a small hole in the topsoil. From a pocket she produced two wires and twisted them together. From another pocket she pulled a gray lump of clay-like matter, into which she pressed the ends of the two wires. She placed the device into the hole and covered it with dirt.

  A deadly booby trap. If the hogs crashed the party tonight, they’d be in for a nasty surprise.

  She kept her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail to keep it out of her brown eyes and off her slender face. At eighteen years old, she maintained a healthy, athletic figure thanks to her physically demanding day job and just-as-demanding side gig.

  Other than the black of night, the fallow field offered no cover. Nothing but mown-down stalks of harvested pink corn interrupted her line of sight. In the distance to the east, the tall buildings of Gabardine stretched toward heaven. In every other direction, as far as the eye could see, was nothing but flat farmland.

  Finished with her trap she stood up, confident no one had seen her. Despite the risk of hogs, despite the tension of an illegal meeting, Mercy took a few moments to stand still and make sure nothing odd seemed to be happening.

  Lately, odd was the least of it. Strange and unsettling things had been happening—things she could neither predict nor explain, things that might harm the people she cared about. So before she came near anyone else these days, she liked to be as sure as possible that nothing weird was going on. That’s why she’d insisted on limiting the number of people at tonight’s meeting. If lightning struck again, it would be better to hurt as few people as possible.

  Tonight, though, as far as Mercy could tell, the world around her seemed completely ordinary. With a last glance at the spot where she’d planted the booby trap, she hustled to her meeting.

  Sorren Westerly was an expert in dealing with the AI. Tonight being a rare exception, he otherwise sat at a comm desk all day, living in streams of virtual reality, speaking specialized command words and watching the results. It showed in his waistline and his jowls—Sorren did none of the running and sneaking around that Mercy did.

  To this point, their scheme had already been illegal and dangerous. First, Sorren’s technical wizardry had disabled all the input devices and biosig sniffers at the AI’s physical plant in Gabardine. Less than an hour ago, Mercy had visited that plant while its sensors were down, jimmied the locks, and snuck past the guards.

  The third step, though … ah, the third step. The third step was to sell what Mercy stole. The third step was the most dangerous of all.

  They had to meet with an off-worlder, completely unknown to either of them. They had to meet outside of town, because Sorren could only knock the AI’s eyes, ears and nose offline in one place at a time, and his attack at the physical plant used up his one shot. They had to keep their fingers crossed that none of the recent unexplainable occurrences would repeat themselves.

  And the off-worlder they had to meet with was an agent of the Free Worlds.

  Mercy and Sorren were both already at risk of death for what they had done, but meeting with someone from the Free Worlds? In all the Archon Dominion, almost nothing was more illegal than that.

  The reward made it worth it, though. The Free Worlds would give a lot for this. They would give military aid, advisors, weapons, aircraft. With their work tonight, Mercy and Sorren were going to earn their people a revolution.

  Tonight’s meeting was supposed to open the next stage in relations between the Underground and their off-world allies. Mercy would give the stolen data to Sorren. Sorren would turn it into miracle tech and give that to the buyer. The Free Worlds would pay the Underground in decacopters and railguns, and in men and women who could teach them how to wage war.

  Sorren tapped his foot as Mercy double timed up to the meeting. She could see his head canted to the side, checking the time.

  And no wonder he was impatient. The uniform standing next to him was even more illegal than Mercy expected.

  The third person at their meeting, a woman, wore tan from her neck to her feet. The only other color was a bit of black at the heels and toes of her boots. Her baggy fatigues and high-collared jacket covered everything else but her hands, her dark hair, and the equally dark skin of her face.

  Up until her recent so-called graduation—“got rid of her the easiest way possible” was a better way to put it—Mercy had skipped school more than she’d gone, but she’d made it to enough history classes to recognize the woman’s clothes.

  It was the uniform of a Gentle Hand.

  The government hated everything about the Free Worlds of Human Space, of course, but they hated Gentle Hands worst of all. Mercy almost turned back around, but then remembered the mysterious fire the last time she’d stalked angrily away from a group. Not that it was anything connected to her, of course. But just in case, she wasn’t going to risk any harm to Sorren and their ticket to freedom.

  Her ponytail shifted with the wind as she looked over her shoulder. No hogs yet. She hurried the last few steps up to Sorren and the Gentle Hand, her long legs gobbling up the distance.

  Sorren’s impatience was bad enough, but the woman was worse. She stared right at Mercy the whole time. So intense was her gaze Mercy almost felt it in her head. It was like she could see the woman in her brain. Finally, she introduced herself.

  “Jayda Carlsbad, Hand of the Free Worlds.”

  Mercy took the offered hand, but not without a sense that they were wasting precious seconds. “The shipment’s coming?”

  Sorren said, “You’re late. We’ve already talked about that. They have a cargo ship in orbit that can land as soon as we get them the spoofer. Let’s move—we need that ship. You got the PML?”

  Mercy rolled her eyes. After all these years, he ought to know better. Yes, she’d been having some trouble lately, but it wasn’t her fault.

  “Course I got it. Have I ever not gotten what you asked for?”

  “Last time was too close for comfort.”

  “That was not my fault.” It was exactly as she feared—Sorren pinned all the recent troubles right on her. “You can’t blame me for a drone full of corn catching fire for no reason and drawing the hogs.”

  “Never mind,” Sorren said, his chins rippling. “Let’s do this before the same thing happens again.”

  The supposed Gentle Hand cut in with, “Actually, I’d like to hear that ‘catching fire for no reason’ story.”

  Sorren shook his head. “After we’re safe from the hogs. Mercy? The PML?”

  She slapped a small rectangular metal card into Sorren’s palm before she spoke.

  “There it is. The AI’s pattern-matching library. Every single thing. Every biological signature, every infrared signature, every shape. Everything the Intelligence uses to see.”

  Her chubby compatriot turned the card over and over in his hand, contemplating it.

  Jayda said, “You can really do this? Turn this library into a device that will keep our ship invisible to the Intelligence?”

 
Mercy said, “If we get out of here alive. Less talk.”

  All she got in return was another of the Gentle Hand’s stares. It felt like the woman knew everything about her, almost as if she read Mercy’s mind. Gentle Hands were supposed to be able to do that, right?

  Sorren took out his comm, a cylindrical device that fit almost perfectly in his closed fist, sticking out just a bit at either end. Then he took out a second one.

  The tech specialist touched his comm to the card Mercy had handed him. He began an arcane incantation of words and acronyms that meant nothing to Mercy. That was how AI worked, though. Deep inside the Intelligence were buried passwords and code phrases that, if you could find them, could make it dance to your tune. Mercy knew none of them, but Sorren did.

  A low pulsing sound started almost below the auditory range. Mercy felt it more than she heard it, a kind of thrum, as if augmenting her own heartbeat. She shot a glance over her shoulder but saw nothing.

  Sorren kept up his chant, speaking commands to his comm. Then he switched and began the same process with the second comm he’d taken out. As he did, the Gentle Hand said, “While he’s working, do you want to tell me what you meant about the harvester full of corn catching fire?”

  Behind Mercy, the bass thrum rose in pitch, and it became possible to distinguish individual drumbeats to it.

  She called out, “Sorren! We’re out of time!”

  As if her words had done it, Sorren handed the comm he’d been working on to the Gentle Hand.

  “There you go. One genuine PML spoofer. Carry that, and the AI won’t even be aware that you’re there. The freedom to go anywhere. No more—”

  But Mercy was right; they were out of time. The air filled with a high-pitched whine. It grew louder and louder until it became a roar that hurt their ears.

  Mercy cursed. “Hogs!”

  From the black sky, equally black aircraft were right on top of them before Mercy and company could see them. They looked like elongated dark eggs with ten spindly arms sticking out at equal intervals. At the end of each arm was a ducted rotor. Ten of the vehicles descended faster than dropped boulders and came to a hover just above the surface.

  Sorren yelled “Run!” He needn’t have, though. Mercy had already bolted, sprinting toward town, heading right for the trap she’d set for this exact purpose. Their little cabal scattered. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the woman in tan raced off in the other direction.

  Mercy ignored the Gentle Hand. If even half of what people said about them was true, she could look after herself. Mercy’s concern was Sorren. Running wasn’t his strong suit. She deliberately slowed herself down to wait for him.

  The decacopters disgorged their horrible cargo. Standing between nine and ten feet tall, the creatures that emerged looked like humans, bare-chested, covered with tattoos, wearing rough black pants.

  They looked like humans—that is, until one looked at their heads.

  With slavering snouts and tusks gleaming in the moonlight, those heads properly belonged at a trough, on pigs. The pig-human hybrids, or hogs as everyone else called them, were the bane of life on Summerwell, and every other world in the Dominion. They were the reason detection meant worse than death—getting caught by the hogs meant getting eaten alive.

  Of all the unusual, unexplainable stuff that had happened to her lately, there was one thing … Far more than a random fire or an unexpected gust of wind, this one thing …

  Mercy prayed for it to happen right then, but no such luck.

  Glancing back again, she saw Sorren lumbering after her, the hogs hard on his heels.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hundreds of years ago, the same genetic engineers who created telepathy had created the pig-human hybrids by accident. The idea had been to use the bodies of pigs to grow unlimited amounts of human organs for transplant into sick people who needed them. To achieve it, they spliced human and pig DNA.

  The transplants worked, but the unintended consequences had horrified the entire world. Now humanity shared Earth and all the colony worlds with a hybrid creature of their own creation, a second species imbued with the worst traits of both its ancestors.

  The Archon Dominion used the pig-human hybrids as soldiers, as law enforcement, and as a weapon of fear to keep the populace in line. From the human half of their DNA, they were cunning, organized and brutal. But more fearful than that was a tendency they had inherited from their porcine DNA.

  The hybrids would eat anything.

  Mercy’s home planet, Summerwell, had a garrison of them. On decacopters, they could be deployed anywhere at the first sign of disobedience from the populace. All the input devices going offline at the AI’s physical plant had been exactly such a sign.

  It hadn’t always been this way.

  Before the Archon Dominion a different government, called the Union of Human Space, had been, if not benevolent, at least harmlessly standoffish. The Union’s genetically engineered peacekeepers were just telepaths, not cannibals. The Union had overseen a long period of peace and expansion to ever more worlds.

  It collapsed in the Exile War, though. A few small systems escaped to become the Free Worlds of Human Space. Other than them, the new Archon Dominion had a garrison of pig-human hybrids on every planet they controlled.

  Dissent was illegal. Unauthorized gatherings were illegal. And creating the means by which anyone could sneak past the planetary AI? That would get you eaten alive.

  ***

  As the town rose in front of her, its tall buildings and spiky skyline silhouetted by a blue moon, Mercy looked back one last time. What she saw stopped her dead in her tracks.

  Sorren wasn’t keeping up, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He was heading right for her trap.

  Every single instinct in her body blared a unified command: Run. Hide. Flee. But Mercy couldn’t abandon her friend. She couldn’t let him blow himself up on a trap she had laid.

  “Left, Sorren! Dodge left!”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. Eyes fixed on the slavering horde of hybrids behind him, Mercy kept calling to him, trying to get him to change course. “Left, Sorren! Left!”

  Everything inside her screamed at her to run. She kept turning away from her friend and back toward town, even taking a step or two toward it. Each time she forced herself to turn back. Fighting the fear that rose like a tide inside her, she even found the courage to jog back in Sorren’s direction, pointing with her hands, trying to direct him out of danger.

  “Dodge left, Sorren!”

  He heard—or seemed to. His blotchy red face took on an aspect of confusion, and Mercy repeated the same warning she’d been calling. At last he did what she said, sidestepping to his left a little bit.

  Just in time. Almost.

  When Sorren finally heard and understood, the pursuers were so close it didn’t matter. He dodged the bomb, but the hogs didn’t. When the first hybrid stepped on the spot where Mercy’d planted her device, the explosion right behind him sent Sorren flying forward, screaming, propelled through the air.

  Mercy turned away and covered her face from the blast, then turned back to look for Sorren as the dust settled. Seeing their pursuers either dead or squealing in agony, she ran back to her friend and knelt beside him. “Are you OK?”

  Clutching one arm to his chest, Sorren groaned out, “I think I broke it.”

  Mercy took him by the other arm and pulled him up. “On your feet, come on. Those won’t be the last hogs.”

  No sooner did she have him on his feet, though, than the man gave a yelp and lurched into her. “Ankle,” he winced out.

  “Can you move?”

  “I think I can walk.”

  Once she had his good arm around her shoulder, Mercy replied, “Walking’s not good enough. We’re not out of this yet. Come on.” As quickly as they could, they closed the distance to the town, and the dirt track became a paved road. They limped into Gabardine—only to discover that the entire wall of every building showed Mercy and Sorren’s faces. The Intelligence had transformed the construction material of every building—concrete infused with nanobots—into garish glowing billboards that shone brightly through the post-midnight dark. Under the pictures of their faces, plain for every pedestrian to see, was the same message: