PROSECUTOR OF METALHAVEN

  METAL AND BLOOD

  BOOK 2

  G J OGDEN

  Copyright © 2023 by G J Ogden

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  These novels are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Illustration © Phil Dannels

  www.phildannelsdesign.com

  Editing by S L Ogden

  Published by Ogden Media Ltd

  www.ogdenmedia.net

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Let’s get to it

  Chapter 2

  First steps into a new world

  Chapter 3

  Master and Apprentice

  Chapter 4

  The Octagon

  Chapter 5

  Lessons learned

  Chapter 6

  Room 616

  Chapter 7

  Scraps of Gold

  Chapter 8

  First Dates

  Chapter 9

  Charming man

  Chapter 10

  Methods and tactics

  Chapter 11

  The test crucible

  Chapter 12

  Sucker punch

  Chapter 13

  Combat Training

  Chapter 14

  The Fight

  Chapter 15

  Ouch-Ouch

  Chapter 16

  A pint and a fight

  Chapter 17

  Dear Diary

  Chapter 18

  Another woman

  Chapter 19

  Coming clean

  Chapter 20

  The Redeemer

  Chapter 21

  Just say it

  Chapter 22

  The test trial

  Chapter 23

  Best team

  Chapter 24

  The Boathouse

  Chapter 25

  Meeting cancelled

  Chapter 26

  Then don’t

  Chapter 27

  Just a game

  Chapter 28

  Not all of us

  Chapter 29

  Make the call

  Chapter 30

  Haven

  Continue the story

  Also by G J Ogden

  About the Author

  1

  LET’S GET TO IT

  Finn Brasa lay on the queen-sized bed in his luxurious apartment in the prosecutor barracks and stared at the ceiling. It was spotless. In many ways this was good because it meant that his room was clean and fresh, not to mention warm, but it had also spoiled his ritual process of getting to sleep. His old apartment in the Reclamation sector was damp, cold and littered with mold spots, which Finn had counted as a way to relax and unwind. It was the Metalhaven version of counting sheep. Without mold to count, Finn had spent a restless night in his new home, though he doubted he would have slept much even if he had been lying on his old, rock-hard sofa bed. Too much had happened in the twenty-four hours since his trial had ended, with Finn Brasa the sole survivor. Too much had been lost.

  “Owen…”

  Finn spoke the name out loud, hoping that his friend would reply, which he knew was impossible. Owen Thomas was dead and his body was already ash. It was his fault. He should have felt angrier about that fact, and he should have felt upset, but the truth was that he felt almost nothing. Sliding his feet off the bed, Finn sat up and ruffled his hair with his bandaged hands. The Authority sector medics had treated the many wounds he’d sustained in the crucible, not least of which were his broken knuckles; a result of beating Corbin Radcliffe to death with his bare hands. Yet because of the medical technology that the golds possessed, he was even denied the penance of pain.

  “What the hell I am doing here?” Finn said, directing the question to his robot, Scraps, who remained inactive on his desk, while he waited for the parts he needed to fix him. “A couple of days ago, I was slicing up tanks in reclamation yard seven and minding my own business, and now I’m a gold.”

  Finn huffed a laugh and shook his head. He couldn’t lie to Scraps, even when then bot was unable to hear him.

  “Minding my own business…” he repeated, sighing. “If only I had, then Owen would still be alive, and we’d been drinking shit-tasting algae beer and complaining about all the slackers in yard seven.”

  Scraps was unable to reply but even if the robot could answer, he wouldn’t have simply hit Finn with the hard truths he deserved. That had been Owen’s job. As his best and only friend – his brother in all but blood – Owen was the only person who had stood up to him. Time and again, Owen had warned him about the dangers of pissing off the Authority, but Finn hadn’t listened. He was too angry and too arrogant, and far too certain that his double-five rating would spare him from the harsher punishments that others with lesser ratings would be subjected to. And for years, it had done. As a top-rated worker and one of the few genetically undamaged men in Zavetgrad, Finn could walk on a razor’s edge, antagonizing the authority and pushing his luck far beyond the limit that any lower-rated worker could do without being sentenced to trial. Then one day he had pushed too far and everything had changed.

  As punishment for injuring and humiliating him, Captain Viktor Roth, the sadistic Head Prefect of Metalhaven, had tortured Finn and sent him to the crucible. While being sentenced to die in a macabre blood-sport designed to tighten the Authority’s iron grip on the workers of Zavetgrad was a harsh ruling, if he was honest, Finn had gotten what was coming to him. Owen, however, hadn’t deserved to be dragged down with him, and as much as he hated Soren Driscoll – the bully who had driven him to lash out – and his oafish sidekick, Corbin, they hadn’t deserve it either. Nevertheless, within twenty-four hours of striking and disfiguring Captain Roth, Finn was on trial and fighting for his life. Two hours after that, Owen was dead. He didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. He didn’t have a chance to say sorry. There wasn’t even a funeral. Owen was just bagged, tossed into the back of a ground car and driven to the crematorium without ceremony. His body was likely burning at the same time Finn was being lauded as the Authority’s latest gold and introduced to his lush new apartment and his privileged new life.

  “Feel something, damn you!” Finn barked, slapping the side of his face hard enough to make his ears ring, but the analgesics he’d been given denied him the pain he so desperately wanted to experience.

  Sighing again, Finn moved from his bed to his desk and began toying with the inanimate body of Scraps. He tried to clear his mind of dark thoughts and focus on what he’d need to do to fix the machine, but his head was still too full of the trial, as it had been throughout his restless night.

  If I had just held my nerve and ignored Soren, as Owen had told me to do, none of this would have happened… Finn thought, spinning the oil-can body of Scraps in his hands. If I had been stronger and smarter, he’d still be alive... These facts were indisputable and confronting them should have made Finn hate himself but it didn’t, and his continued absence of feeling sickened him. Maybe I do deserve to be a gold... Finn thought. Maybe I’m just as fucked up as they are…

  Then there was The Shadow, Elara Cage. Considering the grotesque sequence of events that had led Finn to this moment, the revelation that the infamous Iron Bitch of Metalhaven was a rebel – a Metal – was easily the most shocking after Owen’s death. Metals were infiltrators from Haven, a free city across the Davis Strait from Zavetgrad that had been founded by workers from the Reclamation sector after a revolt one-hundred and twenty-seven years ago. In the brief moments they had shared before Elara had left Finn alone in his room to recover, The Shadow had told him about Haven, and how it had been founded by one-hundred and forty-three chromes like him from Metalhaven, who had managed to steal skycars and escape beyond Zavetgrad’s tall, electrified walls. In the years since its founding, Haven operatives called Metals, in honor of the blood sacrifice their brothers and sisters had made, had freed hundreds more. Those refugees, plus the people born free in Haven, now numbered in the thousands. How many thousands, even Elara didn’t know for sure, but it was enough to form a new society. Maybe, even an army.

  The Authority had done everything in their considerable power to ensure the people of Zavetgrad never learned of Haven’s existence, or that of the rebellion that led to its establishment. The least insidious of these acts was to wipe all records pertaining to the revolt from the archives, but this had only been the start. Everyone involved in the rebellion, or who’d had significant knowledge of it, had been executed. This hadn’t been limited to the Metalhaven workers who had participated in the uprising, but over one-hundred Prefects and golds had also been murdered in order to ensure the Authority’s secret. Yet rumors of Haven persisted like a virus that kept evolving to evade extinction. Finn had known people to disappear simply for mentioning the name of the rumored refuge in public, yet even he had doubted its existence. And despite what he had learned, he doubted he would ever truly believe until – if – he saw the place with his own eyes.

  Elara Cage had told him all
this freely, despite the grave risk to herself in doing so. She had trusted him implicitly, though as with much of what had happened in the last two days, he had no idea why. And now he was her apprentice. But an apprentice of what? What’s her plan? And why me, of all people? All these were questions that Finn had no answers to. All he knew was that Elara Cage had saved his life in the belief that somehow he might be able to help the Metals of Haven free Zavetgrad, and perhaps even tear down the Authority itself. Nothing would satisfy Finn’s broken soul more than seeing Nimbus burning in space, and the mental image of the orbital citadel in ruin was the only thing that made him feel anything at all, but it was fanciful. What could he, a lowly chrome from Metalhaven elevated to a position he didn’t deserve – a false gold – do against the might of the Authority?

  Finn laughed and gently set Scraps down on the top of his hardwood desk. In the end, it did him no good to dwell on the past, or even to contemplate the future. At that moment he was as powerless as when he’d been a worker in yard seven, except instead of being at the mercy of foremen and prefects, his fate was now entirely in the hands of Elara Cage.

  Suddenly, the door chime sounded, and the noise jolted Finn so sharply that he almost fell out of his chair. It was a bass-rich, two-tone note, and despite it sounding nothing like the prosecutor’s voice, all Finn heard was Bloodletter shouting his name - “Bra-sa!... Bra-sa!…” His pulse was racing and he felt sick with nervous energy but his body was frozen in place, as if the door chime had been a bell tolling a countdown to his execution. The buzzer was pressed again – Bra-sa!... Bra-sa!... – and Finn squeezed his hands against the arms of his chair and forced his body to stand but his legs were shaking. Then instead of the chime he heard a voice.

  “Mr. Brasa, are you in there?” It was Trial Assistant Pritchard, his valet. “I can come back later if it’s inconvenient?”

  The sound of the mild-mannered man’s voice set Finn at ease, and he felt ashamed and embarrassed at how easily he had been stricken impotent with fear.

  “No, it’s fine, come in,” Finn said, shaking the tingling numbness from his arms.

  The door opened and Pritchard walked in, carrying a bundle of items. The man was smiling, which was his default expression. “Good morning, sir, I trust you slept well?” he asked, setting down the bundle onto Finn’s dining table.

  “Sure, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well,” Finn replied. It went against his nature to be dishonest but telling Pritchard the truth would only worry his valet and subject him to a raft of questions that he didn’t want to answer. “Whether it was the drugs the medics gave me, or that cloud-like mattress, I don’t know, but I was out like a light.”

  “That’s good to hear, sir!” Pritchard replied, cheerfully. He bustled over and checked Finn’s bandages on his hands and neck without being invited to do so. Finn flinched but reined in his urge to grab the man’s wrist and snap it like a twig. “These are healing nicely,” the valet said, blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to being beaten bloody.

  “I feel fine,” Finn said, stepping back. It was another lie, or at least a half-truth. He wasn’t in pain, but he was also hardly himself, whoever that person was now.

  Pritchard nodded and smiled, then pressed his hands to his hips and remained in front of Finn, grinning like a buffoon. His yellow hair was lustrous like strands of golden silk, while his young face, at only seventeen years old, was unburdened by the stresses and pressures that made Metalhaven workers of the same age look like they were already in their late thirties.

  “Was there a reason for the visit?” Finn asked. His valet was starting to make him feel uncomfortable.

  “Oh, yes, my apologies, sir,” Pritchard replied, darting over to the dining table and unpacking the bundle of items he’d brought in. “I fetched the items you requested.”

  Finn moved over to the table and sifted through the tools that Pritchard was methodically setting out on the surface. Everything seemed to be there, including the all-important power cell for Scraps. Furthermore, it was all grade-A, brand new equipment.

  “I’m used to working with junk,” Finn said, examining a precision multi-tool, which was probably worth more than the contents of his old apartment in Metalhaven. “This stuff is perfect, thanks.”

  “It’s my very great pleasure, sir!’ Pritchard replied, beaming with pride.

  Despite being a gold, and despite his over-enthusiastic nature, Finn couldn’t not like the man. He then noticed a mug beside the tools and he scowled at the container, which appeared to be leaking steam into the room.

  “What’s going on with that mug?” Finn asked, pointing to the container. “It looks like it’s about to explode.”

  “Oh, that’s just your coffee, sir,” Pritchard replied, hastily transferring the mug from one side of the table to the other, so it was in front of him. “I didn’t know how you liked it, so I just went with a medium-roast arabica, black.” His valet then sifted through the remaining items he’d brought and set out a small silver tray next to the mug, with various packets and tiny sealed containers. “I brought some creamers and some cane sugar. If you’d let me know how you prefer to take it then next time I’ll bring exactly what you want.”

  “I didn’t know there was more than one way to take coffee…”

  Finn picked up the mug and removed the lid to find a steaming hot brew that was blacker than Elara Cage’s roundel dagger. He gave it a sniff, but it didn’t smell anything like coffee to him. Even so, he sampled it and it felt like the taste blew the top of his skull clean off.

  “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not coffee,” Finn said, dumping two packets of sugar into the brew then tasting it again. The second time was even more blissful than the first.

  “Of course,” his valet replied, snapping his fingers in realization of his error. “I forgot that you don’t have this kind of coffee in Metalhaven. Not to worry, I’ll bring a broader selection next time, including latte, cappuccino, macchiato…”

  Finn held up his hand to stop Pritchard mid-flow. “This will do, just fine, thank you. Black with two sugars.” He tasted the coffee again and reconsidered. “Actually, make it three sugars.”

  “As you wish, sir, it would be my genuine pleasure,” Pritchard said, still smiling.

  Finn tried to detect any hint of insincerity in the man’s response but there was none. Pritchard was genuinely happy to serve. More surprisingly, he didn’t look down on Finn for being a ‘fake gold’ – the moniker that was applied to people like him who were not born into the privileged color of the Authority. Even so, the constant deference Pritchard showed him was jarring, not only because he wasn’t used to it, but because he didn’t agree with it either.

  “Thank you, Pritchard, but you don’t have to call me sir,” Finn replied. “I’ve spent all my life subservient to prefects and foremen, bowing my head in obedience to the Authority. It wasn’t right then, so it’s not right now.”

  Pritchard looked suddenly uncomfortable and for the first time since he’d seen the man, he wasn’t smiling.

  “Actually, sir, I do have to pay you the proper respect,” Pritchard replied, uneasily. “But, truly, it’s no bother. It is, as I keep saying, a genuine pleasure to serve you.”

  Finn sighed under his breath and rubbed his face. The coffee had cut through his tiredness and he was feeling much more alert. “Would you get into trouble if I ordered you not to call me sir?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pritchard replied, now smiling nervously. “If I were caught not paying the proper deference it would go on my record and hurt my chances at promotion.”

  Finn laughed and Pritchard squirmed uncomfortably, perhaps worrying that Finn was going to use this power against him, but his valet had misunderstood. All he found amusing was that repercussions for a gold amounted to reduced job prospects, whereas for the worker class, repercussions meant a savage beating, or death via trial.