RED

  DUST

  BOOK 1: GODS & ASSASSINS

  Frank Kennedy

  Dedicated to everyone who wants to get paid for taking out the trash.

  c. 2023 by Frank Kennedy

  All rights reserved

  ASIN: B0C8PSXR8S

  A note from the author:

  Gods & Assassins is set in the universe of the Collectorate, which includes at least two other series. Reading them is not a prerequisite. However, if you want a wider look at the Collectorate, please check out those offerings. This book is the opening stanza of a five-book serial, which tells a complete story. The main arc of each book will conclude, but the threads of the larger story will carry forward.

  I’d love for you to become part of my literary family. Sign up for my newsletter, which drops every three weeks along with free books and special offers. You can also follow me on Facebook, where you’ll find me hanging out daily. Come on over and let’s chat!

  1

  Collectorate Standard Year (SY) 5389

  N odamnbody respects a god. Oh, sure. Humans beg when times are apocalyptic. Some take a knee. Some pray. Some plead for mercy.

  “Oh, please, solve our problems, wolf god! We’re so helpless without you, serpent god!”

  They’re just looking for an easy fix. Those flailing arms reaching toward the sky never did impress me or my business partner.

  Several years back, we whipped up some well-timed intergalactic hocus pocus and did the human race a prodigious solid.

  Royal the Wolf and Moon the Serpent saved the forty worlds of the People’s Collectorate from enemies bent on conquest. I’m talking savagery on an apocalyptic scale. We prevented several billion deaths.

  You might think humanity would recognize our achievements with a little fanfare. A monument or two, maybe a parade, or a charitable contribution. We wouldn’t have complained if a few churches popped up on the landscape.

  What was our reward?

  Pfft.

  The powers at Central Command didn’t tell a soul where the help came from. They didn’t want the rabble to worship us deities who took out their trash.

  Worse yet, our heroism came with a steep damn price.

  Omnipotence? Gone.

  Ability to jump anywhere in the universe at will? Nope.

  The skillset to vaporize whole planets? Poof!

  Instead, we woke up in the middle of a red desert on a sorry rock called Azteca, forced to live like …

  I can hardly say the word. Moon, as serpent god, took our fate very badly. Went insane for a year.

  Oh, OK. Fine.

  Humans.

  There. I said it.

  We lived like humans. Kind of.

  The first seventeen years on Azteca were grim, but we waited for the future to catch up. You see, back when we were still maximos deos, Moon and I studied the continuum of time from the creation of the universe to the last flicker.

  As wolf god, I was savvy. I saved the life of the woman who would someday run the Collectorate. The investment paid off. We have gainful employment working for the President, although she’ll deny it until her death (a certainty, I might add).

  We travel undetected to wherever the President decides to inflict a body count. We go where the government, Special Intelligence, and the United Naval Forces won’t. They’re bound by strict adherence to the Collectorate Constitution. That’s what happens when you give the unwashed too damn many civil rights.

  The gist of our verbal contract was simple: In and out, don’t create a fuss, eliminate the targets with no collateral deaths, return to Azteca, and stay clear of trouble.

  Eh. Sometimes we have to make a mess.

  Take our current job on the planet Qasi Ransome, for instance. I saw long before we reached zero hour that this thing was gonna get ugly. We ingratiated ourselves with some particularly offensive assholes – the wealthy kind – but our primary target (the one we were commissioned to kill) remained elusive.

  We landed an invitation to meet at a place where this man, Matisse Alaine, and his co-conspirators felt safe. Our hard work brought us to a reception hall at the swanky Club Moulet.

  Unfortunately, this social club featured the type of humans we hated most: Smug, humorless fools with an inflated sense of their place in the grand scheme. Self-important, self-indulgent, and all those other hyphenated selfisms.

  These people, wearing more pastels and silk than I’d ever seen in one room, drifted about as if levitating on air. They held their backs straight, shoulders stiff, noses elevated to match their self-esteem, and carried stupid-long fluted glasses with bubbly libation.

  The rich and underwhelming.

  Their children were dressed like miniature show toys, and not a single one deviated from the stiff social graces. Moon wondered whether they might be fitted with shock collars to keep them in line. How else to explain five-year-olds devoid of personality?

  Moon and I dressed for the occasion. I chose a milk-white suit with a triple breasted jacket and dayglo neck scarf. My fedora matched the jacket. I added a playful touch with wire glasses – one lens red, the other sky blue. Moon went for an ensemble with beige suit trimmed in magenta plus a Panama hat. He refused to wear the glasses. Claimed they made him look like a fool. Moon had no fashion sense.

  Frankly, I didn’t care for the vibe most humans gave off – especially these criminals drifting on the upper crust.

  These people seemed to ignore a few simple facts. One, they’d each die sooner than they had the good sense to realize. Two, very few will be remembered by folks who have their own miseries to endure. Three, their replacements were queued up to fill the void.

  Mortality is a temp job.

  Having said that, I must admit to being a fulltime hypocrite.

  I was born human. Well, bioengineered in a lab. Close enough, like in horseshoes. Turned out, they designed me to be immortal. I didn’t know until the first time I was killed. Woke up ten minutes later with a headache but came around to the idea that living forever was a sweet deal. After that, I racked up a body count. Might be fair to say I was a smug little psychopath.

  Moon was also born human. When circumstance elevated us to godhood, he also developed a jaundiced view of mortals. We wanted to hold humans in higher regard, but the job forced us to associate with the most nefarious of the species.

  So when surrounded by people of that ilk – such as in the Club Moulet – we followed the local etiquette and endured their disreputable company until time to strike.

  While we waited in the reception hall, I grabbed a glass of wine, knowing it would be too sweet for my discerning taste. Moon politely declined. He was happy smoking a fat cigar with a gold band. No one outwardly objected to the whitish cloud above us. Or perhaps they knew better than to tempt fate.

  Did our pasty white skin give them pause? Maybe the ocean blue eyes and delicious golden locks? Plus, we bucked seven feet tall. They had to be asking: What in hell were a pair of Chancellors doing on Qasi Ransome? Best they not know the answer.

  Or what it took to maintain this form for ten standard days.

  Not everyone feared us. My eyes accidentally walked into the gaze of a fiftysomething woman with a duck on her head.

  No, seriously. A blue-feathered duck with rubies in the eyeholes.

  She wasn’t the only local wearing an ornamental animal atop her hat. Status, I reckoned. Etiquette required me to acknowledge her, so I raised my glass of sickly-sweet wine.

  That was all it took. Soon enough, she accosted me. She offered Moon a blink-and-miss-it glance while keeping her focus on me.

  Poor woman. If she knew I was Royal the Wolf, she would have run without looking back. Same for the rest of these fools.

  Oh, well. Too late.

  2

  S HE RAISED HER GLASS as if to prepare a toast. “You have the entire club frothing at the mouth. Mr. Jorgensen, is it?”

  I tapped her glass. If she knew my alias, then she belonged to Matisse Alain’s group.

  “Oh, please,” I told her, with the haughty air of a gentleman. “No need to stand on ceremony. Call me Mikkel. This fine man to my right is Rudolph Hartman, but I wouldn’t try to get familiar. He’s big on honorifics and short on words.”

  Moon didn’t object. He hated verbal gamesmanship. He preferred to stand there like a silent totem, imagining how he’d stick this woman’s decapitated head on a pike, avian accessory included.

  “I’m curious, Mikkel,” she went on. “What possessed you two to make such a bold move? I doubt anyone has seen a Chancellor on Qasi in thirty years.”

  “Mr. Hartman and I have no use for the past. We’re businessmen. We go wherever the deal is most lucrative.”

  She let slip a sly little grin, the kind that said she was ten steps ahead of us. If we were human – let alone Chancellors – she might have been right. I wasn’t about to spoil her self-delusion.

  “I trust we have Mr. Alain in common?” She said.

  “Could be.”

  “Playing coy, are you? Never mind. The truth will out itself soon enough. Still, I’m dying to know. Who made the first inquiry?”

  “A good conspirator never tells.”

  She sipped her wine.

  “Ah. So, we do have Mr. Alain in common. He said Q6 had opened unexpected channels. Might he have been referring to you?”

  I shrugged. Playing coy was loads of fun.

  “Never spoken to the man. Intermediarie
s did the heavy lifting.”

  “Yet he invited you anyway. Mikkel, my name is Hari Sidras. I was twenty when the Chancellory fell. Mother and Father ingrained in me a healthy disdain for your people. The idea we’d have common cause after all these years is confounding. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  I might have if I was actually a Chancellor. Still, she made a valid point. The Chancellor caste once ruled over humans for three thousand years. Their empire, the original Collectorate, collapsed thirty years ago. The Chancellors tried to reclaim their home world, Earth, but lost a civil war. Their hardliners roamed the stellar vicinity like a tribe of nomads. When the People’s Collectorate reunited the forty worlds ten years later, the Chancellors settled in small colonies on whatever planets allowed them to sniff prime real estate. Qasi Ransome stayed far away from that business.

  “It’s true,” I told Hari. “The Huguenots and Chancellors have had their share of rough patches.”

  “Ah. Is that how you classify centuries of rape and repression?”

  “I wasn’t there. Rudolph and I were waist-high to our current status when it all came crashing down. What you call rape, I believe was nothing more than the Chancellory taking what mineral wealth it was owed under treaty.”

  “Oh, Mikkel. You Chancellors have not changed.”

  She wasn’t wrong. The Chancellory had it out for Huguenots from the first days of colonization. The relationship first soured back on Earth a couple thousand years ago. The Chancellors granted the Huguenots a colony that turned out to be one of the richest in mineral wealth, of which the Chancellory claimed a sizable cut. The Huguenots fought the terms of the deal for a millennium. No planet was happier to see those bastards leave than Qasi Ransome.

  That history lent me the brilliant idea to infiltrate Matisse Alain’s tight-knit conspiracy in the guise of rogue Chancellors. The irony was too delicious for the Huguenots to pass up. They knew we had a strong desire to reclaim what our people lost, but our deep pockets mitigated those concerns. Like the Huguenots, we wanted to undermine the People’s Collectorate and make fools of the President and her Congress. Huguenots respected zealots who loved acquiring credits.

  “We’re playing a game as old as civilization,” I reassured the woman. “Enemies often become allies of convenience. Once we rid ourselves of the current administration, all the factions will try to grab the biggest pieces of what’s left behind. Odds are, we’ll become enemies again.”

  I matched her devious little grin. She appreciated my candor.

  “Your parents trained you well, Mikkel.”

  “Just Mother.” I made sure not to deviate from the faux biography we planted for Alain’s group to find. “Father died in the civil war. He was true to his last breath.”

  “I see. And now you intend to fulfill his legacy.”

  “No. I’m servicing my own cause.”

  “To increase your credit tally, no doubt.”

  We toasted. “What the hell else is there?”

  “I look forward to our unexpected alliance.”

  The intel on Alain’s group made no mention of Hari Sidras, but her tone suggested she ranked high in the pecking order. My contact with the President’s office also didn’t say a damn thing about Q6. I almost asked Hari to explain the group’s name, but I choked down the tactical mistake before it crossed my lips.

  “It’s not a done deal until Mr. Alain gives his blessing,” I reminded her. “He might sooner have us shot than allow us to join the club.”

  She waved off the notion.

  “You wouldn’t have made it inside the facility if Matisse had ill intent. I’m sure the approval will be a formality.”

  “Good to know. I’d hate to think our long wait came to naught.”

  “Matisse is a cautious man. Avoids the public spotlight. We are servants to a schedule of his choosing. Won’t be long now.”

  Made sense. The intel on this guy was paper thin, which was odd. He was supposed to be one of Qasi’s leading industrialists. A major player for the Interstellar Shipping Guild. Yet SI couldn’t pinpoint his permanent residence. To my way of thinking, a man who did all his work in the shadows was a coward when push came to shove.

  “A piece of advice,” Hari added. “If you want Matisse to feel at ease, ask him about his golf game.”

  She had me at a loss. “Golf?”

  “Oh, yes. He has three private courses. You play, I assume?”

  Yeah, no. Never heard of it.

  I shrugged, giving her my best doesn’t-everybody? harrumph.

  “Been a few years, but I’ll muddle through.”

  “Tell him that, Mikkel, and he’ll challenge you to eighteen.”

  Eighteen what?

  I felt a familiar scratch inside my brain followed by:

  “Holes, dumbass.”

  My congenial pose held steady despite the snark inside my head. I responded to the irritable inner voice without moving my lips.

  “I told you to keep a zipper on your goddamn quips, Theo. I don’t need running commentary while I make nice with this coit.”

  My synthetic brain itched whenever my D’ru-shaya copped an attitude. A simple human mind might think of a D’ru-shaya as an AI, but that wasn’t quite the proper comparison. Moon and I both absorbed one during our ascension to godhood. At the time, we were told it was the ultimate interstellar comm, and much more.

  The extent of that last bit didn’t become clear until we lost our omnipotence and woke up on the red clay of Azteca. By the end of our first miserable day stuck in human form, our D’ru-shayas revealed their true characters. They demanded names and civil rights.

  Yeah, that’s how much sense it made.

  Moon got lucky. He and his D’ru-shaya went insane for the first year or so. When his mind broke free of the fog, his D’ru-shaya did the same but had the temperament of a woman who constantly spread her legs without objection. He named her Addis, who was a sexual favorite of his in the years before we ascended.

  I did not experience the same good fortune. My D’ru-shaya fought me at every turn. Blamed me for the circumstances that brought us to Azteca. Rather than listening to an endless string of grievances from a voice I didn’t have the power to remove, I negotiated. Six months later, we reached agreement. More or less.

  I gave it the right to consult on all bigtime decisions, so long as it exercised impulse control at mission-critical moments. A D’ru-shaya was damn helpful in a pinch but also akin to a backseat pilot who wouldn’t stop asking, “Are we there yet, dumbass?”

  And I couldn’t toss it out an airlock.

  Sometimes, I longed for the days of omnipotence.

  My D’ru-shaya wanted the respect of a fully enlightened, sentient creature, so I allowed it to choose a name. It selected Theo, who mentored me in my evolution to godhood. The choice was not a sentimental tribute; my D’ru-shaya blamed me for wiping out Theo’s entire species. He wasn’t wrong.

  So there I was, minutes from meeting my primary target for assassination, and Theo rolled out the wrong side of the bed.

  “How do you not know about golf?” Theo insisted. “They play it on seven different planets.”

  His attitude jarred loose the data.

  “Wait. Is that the game with a white ball and wide open spaces?”

  “You passed the golf course on the way in. Some god you are.”

  Nineteen years with this wag, and I hadn’t lost my sanity.

  “Theo, I’m all you got. Anything else happens to me, and you’ll be scattered to the cudfrucking cosmos. Do as you’re told. Drop into your hole and wait for the trigger. Like we planned. Feel me?”

  Theo yawned. Typical.

  I returned to my delightful Chancellor persona, a comprehensive knowledge of golf now processed, and told Hari Sidra how I’d find it a great honor to hit eighteen holes with Mr. Alain.

  “I was known to swing a mean three-wood in my day,” I told her, envisioning a perfect drive off the tee.

  Of course, we’d never get around to that silly business. Hari, Matisse, and a crap-ton of other humans were gonna be in no shape for games of any kind.

  It was time for Moon and me to earn our credits.

  3

  H ARI SIDRA SUGGESTED we mingle, but idle chatter with strangers wasn’t our game. I had a tendency to ramble while Moon stared through people with razor-blade eyes. We compromised on her advice: Rather than burn a hole in the carpet right here, we moved to an empty patch five meters to our left. It brought us closer to our key contacts, the Bosch brothers. They’d signal when the puppet master arrived.