Suicide Run (Engines of Liberty Book 2) Read online

  ENGINES OF LIBERTY

  SUICIDE RUN

  Published 2015 by DreadPennies USA, via the CreateSpace platform.

  Engines of Liberty: Suicide Run. Copyright 2015 © by Graham Bradley. All rights reserved.

  This entire novel was written by one dude who mostly crouched over his laptop in the sleeper berth of a big International ProStar Eagle+ semi-truck, hoping that maybe, just maybe, it could someday make him eleventy jillion dollars. The dream lives on. No part of this publication, be it the text or illustrations, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, ranging from carrier pigeon to telepathic emission, and maybe even more than that, like digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, tattooing, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site, without my expressed permission, most likely in writing, unless you’re just quoting it for a review or an article or something, in which case by all means, spread the word. Basically all I ask is that you don’t steal this book, distribute it for free, or for profit for yourself or something, ‘cause that’s not cool. Even if I were an eleventy-jillionaire, the principle stands. And it’s not like I wouldn’t spot you five bucks for some tacos in that situation anyhow, you know? Thanks, go Colts.

  Cover illustration by Carter Reid (wwwthezombienation.com)

  Interior illustrations by Graham Bradley

  Got inquiries? My Twitter handle is @GrahamBeRad

  As of 1 January 2015, this book is not registered with the Library of Congress. I reserve the right to change that as soon as I have the resources, and/or feel like doing so.

  Printed in the good old United States of America.

  SUICIDE RUN

  Engines of Liberty, Book 2

  . Graham Bradley .

  Also available:

  Rebel Heart

  DreadPennies USA

  “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

  -Spymaster John Adams

  Spring 1772

  For Mom, my first fan,

  who was always proud to tell people about her “writer son.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Fitz was dead, so whether he minded that Godfrey had stolen his badge was of no consequence.

  Godfrey needed the badge for the secrets it held; it had resided on Fitz’s chest for the whole of his career, absorbing and retaining impressions of magic like a second memory—one that didn’t decay with age, or misremember. He’d half-expected the thing to kill him just for touching it, but it had done no such thing; true to character, Winston Fitznottingham had been too lazy to fit his badge with a death curse. For this, Godfrey Norrington was grateful: it would have been exceptionally difficult to fulfill his new mission if he were dead.

  Naturally.

  He’d spent the better part of an entire day meditating, probing

  the badge’s contents with his mind, seeing what Fitz had learned over the years. He was not disappointed. Fitz had crossed paths with a very powerful sangromancer some time ago, and the badge indicated that it could tell where he was. Perfect. Guess my luck’s coming about, Godfrey thought to himself. A good sangromancer was rare.

  “Wissung!” he said, tapping the badge with his wand to cast a compass spell. The badge hovered in his hand, buzzing with energy. It spun, slowly at first, then whipped around fast enough to give a hummingbird a headache. Just as abruptly, it jerked to a stop, its bottom tip pointing south by southeast.

  “You’re sure?” Godfrey asked.

  The badge pulsed once in affirmation.

  “How far?”

  It pulsed again, nine times.

  “Nine what? Miles?”

  Fitz’s memories floated to the forefront of Godfrey’s awareness, showing acres and acres of land that rushed past at great speed until all was a green blur. When it stopped, he saw a murky swamp next to a rundown shack, and he knew the exact distance as if he’d walked every step of the way. Godfrey sighed and pocketed the badge.

  “Nine hundred miles. Sod all,” he muttered. This wouldn’t be

  some casual day trip, and there was perhaps nobody else who could help him like a sangromancer.

  Stowing his wand up his sleeve, Godfrey sat cross-legged on

  Fitz’s carpet and headed south at a full power, using a wind-wedge charm to keep the air from chapping his pale skin. He might have grown bored if he hadn’t needed to constantly adjust the other spells on the carpet, keeping it connected to the main source of magic back on the eastern seaboard; enchanted objects like carpets and brooms tended to recalibrate themselves as time went on, but it was still bound by British magic, and Godfrey was at the edges of Nova Brittania.

  The farther he flew from the Atlantic Lodestone, the more he found himself muttering Saxon words under his breath to maintain speed. As long as he stayed within the Empire’s Merykan borders, he’d be fine—beyond that, any mage was tempting the fates. Nervously Godfrey tapped a finger against his thigh, chewing his lip in thought.

  The flight took all day. Somewhere around mile seven hundred, he noticed the carpet’s rear tassels coming apart. At eight hundred, the tight-knit edges were unraveling. With twenty miles to go the carpet resisted his reparation spells altogether. Before reaching his destination, Godfrey scarcely had time to jump off the falling pile of woolen threads as it collapsed in a heap on the bank of a Louisiana bog.

  “Ugh.”

  Stretching the stiffness out of his bony legs, he fished around in his pocket and grabbed Fitz’s badge. “Where am I?”

  The badge pulsed. In his head, Godfrey heard, Belle Chasse,

  Louisiana.

  His heart skipped and he spun in a circle, holding his breath so as to hear better.

  Louisiana.

  Louisiana.

  The stupid badge had led him into French territory! No wonder his magic struggled to function—he was too far from Port Atlantis, and the source of every British wizard’s magic! The thought of being as defenseless as a common duffer was enough to make his skin crawl. What a cruel price the fates demanded.

  He stopped his mental tirade, inhaled slowly, and reminded himself why this was important: someone killed Fitz and Birty. If Godfrey captured this rebel, broke his mind and learned the duffers’ secrets, it would all be worth it. Cursing the moment’s luck, Godfrey prompted the badge to guide him to the sangromancer.

  Another ten minutes passed, trudging through the swamp, before the mossy foliage parted to reveal a ramshackle cabin that seemed to have grown out of the ground. The shack from his vision was there too, but it was not the primary structure of the estate. The place reeked of offal, and next to the main house was a heap of pigs’ bones. Fitz’s badge pulsed; this was the place.

  Tell me more about this sangromancer, Godfrey thought.

  He saw fragments from Fitz’s memory as the badge struggled to channel magic. A shady figure—presumably the sangromancer—featured in most of them, large and foreboding with a dark presence. Little was known of his origins. Occasionally he worked as a bounty hunter for Mage Corps. For whatever reason, he’d retired to the swamp years ago. Fitz had met the man once, on just one job, and the badge had scant details about it. Godfrey was about to ask more when its magic cut out altogether, brushed aside by an unseen hand.

  Godfrey snapped to attention. Someone was home! His whipped out his wand and readied a curse.

  “Calm yourself, garçon,” said a rumbling voice from inside the moss-covered cabin.

  “Who goes there?” Godfrey tried to keep his spell handy but between the sudden jolt of fear and his precarious location, he cou
ldn’t focus.

  “You come so close and don’t know who I am? Mmmm. Tres dangereux.”

  Though Godfrey couldn’t see the sangromancer, he could hear the malicious smile in his words. The blood magician’s confidence added to Godfrey’s discomfort. He swallowed hard and held up Fitz’s badge as though it were a shield three feet across.

  “I know that you’re an elite practitioner. I seek your services in the name of King Charles.”

  “Then you should present your own badge, Godfrey Norrington.”

  A sooty cloud materialized at Godfrey’s left, swirling and contorting into the shape of a man over six feet tall. He had black skin and graying hair that dangled to his waist in hundreds of thin, tight braids. Scars and patterns of ink crept up his neck, and even under his bulky cloak of shredded cloth, his muscles bulged. Beads and small animal bones hung from his beard, and his leering feline grin drove into Godfrey’s mind the idea that the sangromancer was in complete control here. The only thing whiter than the swamp-dweller’s perfectly straight teeth were his eyes, completely devoid of pupils and colored irises.

  Blind, no doubt, but Godfrey felt the man’s sight on him.

  “You possess youth and great ambition, Godfrey,” the sangromancer intoned. “One of those is an admirable quality.”

  Godfrey didn’t know how to reply to that, so he composed himself and tried to take charge of the situation. “What’s your name, sangromancer?”

  Again, his lips parted and spread into a bemused expression. “Je suis Maitre Kalfu LeVeau. You may call me Kalfu.”

  “‘Kalfu’?” Godfrey found it in himself to snort. “That can’t be your birth name.”

  “I took it in lieu of the name that was stolen from me long ago.”

  “You stole that name from a god of the voodoo religion.” Godfrey rolled his eyes and pocketed his wand. “Maybe if this were West Africa I would bite, but I’m too well-read on this continent’s history, mate. Tell me another.” He meant to say more, but Kalfu’s next words provoked silence.

  “Don’t assume it’s only a name, child.”

  An unspoken power rippled out from Kalfu. His milky white eyes fixed on Godfrey and held him fast. Such power! He’d heard that sangromancers could generate their own magic without a lodestone. It seemed impossible—nobody could make magic—yet here it was now, staring him in the face: this magician was powerful in a way that Godfrey couldn’t match. He swallowed again, fingers still trembling, and he forced steadiness into his voice despite the rapid-fire thudding in his chest.

  “Very well, then. I require your services, Kalfu. You will be richly compensated, and—”

  Twin puffs of oily smoke exploded to his left and right. Kalfu disappeared in one and reappeared in the other instantaneously. Godfrey flinched.

  “I am blind, and yet I see! You cannot guarantee compensation. You have no wealth to promise.”

  Godfrey gritted his teeth. “That . . . will change when I finish my mission.”

  “A weak man buys present spoils with future labors, and only a weaker man would believe his promise,” Kalfu drawled, leaning on a staff that he’d seemingly conjured out of nowhere. “I know when you lie. Final chance, mon petit garçon. Why are you here?”

  Godfrey cast off all pretenses. “I’m in exile. There’s a rebel I must catch. If I do, I can return to my homeland, and at a higher station. But I am at the edge of my talents, and I require your services. Satisfied?”

  “Ha! That is more like it.” Kalfu rested his weight against the staff and held out a hand to Godfrey. “Your palm.”

  Godfrey extended a hand, thought better of it, and jerked it

  back. “Why?”

  Kalfu fixed him with a hard stare that demanded capitulation.

  Reluctantly, Godfrey reached out again. Kalfu produced a hair-thin needle and pricked the center of Godfrey’s palm, but rather than draw a single drop, the needle extracted a slender line of blood that flowed upward out of Godfrey’s skin, twirling in the open air. When it grew to six inches in length, it detached from his hand and floated into Kalfu’s own palm, where it seemed to phase through his flesh and disappear. Kalfu chewed his lip thoughtfully.

  “Hmm. Very good.”

  “What was that for?” Godfrey demanded, rubbing at the tiny wound. The skin had healed by magic, leaving a telltale itch in its wake.

  “Verification, jeune wizard. Blood never lies,” Kalfu said. “Now, how do you intend to track this rebel?”

  Fiddling through his breast pocket, Godfrey handed over the bottled tracer spell. Kalfu popped the cork off and sniffed its contents. “Clever spell, if a bit feeble. Nevertheless . . .” He raised his nose to the sky and sniffed again. “Yes. Follow the trail to its end, and you’ll find him. Claim your reward, and then we will discuss my payment.”

  A weight sank in Godfrey’s stomach. “What? I’ve already been to where the trail ends. There’s naught but the ruins of a battle. The city is razed and its inhabitants gone. If you provide no service, I owe no debt.”

  Kalfu sighed and shook his head. “Go back, Godfrey. Look

  deeper.”

  A final puff of black smoke marked his disappearance. The wind blew it away, and Godfrey was alone in the swamp.

  CHAPTER 2

  For three days Calvin Adler thought of only one thing at Camp Liberty: escape. When he had secured that, he would focus on revenge.

  Peter. Brian. Maybe even John Penn and his crew; there was no way that Calvin was the first person they’d lied to, the first person they’d used.

  He’d get them. What a cowardly trick, dispatching him like that!

  Bitter as he was, Calvin had voiced his thoughts on the matter after arriving, and he’d soon learned not to broadcast too loudly. Hank Duncan, the Rebel Hearts’ brigade leader, had told him that a lot of new recruits were brought there under a dubious pretext, but he assured Calvin that they all learned to pull for the cause. Personal grudges were for after the war, and if Calvin made too

  much noise in the meantime, he’d likely find himself in the brig.

  Hank was a nice guy, and honest, and that made it hard for Calvin to dislike him. Still, his words were hard to bear. On top of that, Calvin had gotten his fill of the brig at Mount Vernon, although being down there was how he’d met Amelia.

  He wondered if she thought of him as much as he thought of her.

  After the war, after the war. Hank’s words echoed in Calvin’s head. Supposedly the main offensive would launch in under three weeks. It felt more like years to Calvin. He hadn’t risked his life and abandoned his family just to trade one tyranny for another, yet here he was. Thus he stewed, studied his surroundings, and watched for an opening.

  All things considered, life at Camp Liberty was more comfortable than the weeks he’d spent at Mount Vernon. (For one thing, Hank didn’t awaken the Rebel Hearts with buckets of cold water.) There was plenty of work to do, and not all of it involved running or swimming or going through firing drills at top speed. In his first two days, Hank and the others walked Calvin around the base to help him get an idea of the layout—where the mess hall was, where they showered, and where they kept busy by servicing their machinery each day. They told him the meanings of the various sirens and alarms that would go off to announce a returning brigade, a required berth in the medical bay, or mage activity within ten miles of Youngstown.

  There was a careful simplicity to it all, designed to keep the

  technomancers occupied and the mimics battle-ready—in that order.

  The work was dull, so his thoughts drifted. When he wasn’t dreaming of Baltimore or Amelia, Calvin thought of his friends from Mount Vernon. What had happened to Stitch, Rusty, and the others? Some recent graduates had trickled into Youngstown after Calvin had, but they were all adults. The rest of the new arrivals were transfers from other bases. They filed in, got their assignments, and moved into their new barracks without much fanfare. Calvin kept an eye out for familiar faces, even hoping for a g
limpse of Edsel. But no; Edsel had been dispatched to Pittsburgh.

  It would be hard to forget Major Tyler saying so.

  Days moved swiftly despite the hours crawling by. Brigades usually fulfilled assignments together, so one day while they worked on mimics, Calvin talked with his fellow brigadiers and learned their stories. He was pleased to see that he had a lot to relate to with all of them.

  The only female Rebel Heart was brunette belle named Emma Crosby. She was almost twenty, and she reminded him of a more grown-up version of Rusty—a worker and a fighter both, with a sense of calm assurance usually reserved for women twice her age. She came from a family of Carolina fishermen, with parents who were just as complacent as Calvin’s when it came to appeasing the mages.

  When Emma had finally decided to “rock the boat”, she’d hitched a weighted fishing net to a horse and ran down the local mages. With the skill of a lifelong tradesman she’d cast the net, snagged her bounty, and dragged the wizards to the docks, where she ordered the horse to jump into the water. Caught unawares as they had been, the mages were unable to draw their wands and free themselves, and they drowned. Emma had cut the lines from the saddle horn to spare the horse the same fate, and fled the scene.

  Her hometown, Litchfield, had plenty of wooded area to hide in, and she made use of it. It didn’t take long for new mages to come after her. They were chasing her down when she came across a technomancer safehouse, and the rest was history; Emma had made the cut at Mount Vernon, and was looking forward to winning the war so that she could get her life back.

  From the same recruiting class as Emma came the son of a New York metalsmith, Adam Paige, who was second in command of the brigade. His ancestors had been brought to Meryka on a slave ship from West Africa over a century ago. Adam’s grandfather had eventually earned his freedom, and spent the rest of his life establishing a good life for his family. His fear of ever being enslaved again had trickled down to Adam’s father, making him hesitant to engage in an illegal rebellion.