Shoot the Messenger Read online

  Shoot the Messenger’

  1# Messenger Chronicles

  Pippa DaCosta

  Urban Fantasy & Science Fiction Author

  Subscribe to Pippa’s mailing list at pippadacosta.com & get free ebooks.

  Copyright © 2018 Pippa DaCosta.

  March 2018. US Edition. 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.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictions, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Edited using US English.

  Version 1.

  www.pippadacosta.com

  Contents

  Summary

  Part I

  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

  Part II

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  What to read next by Pippa DaCosta

  Also by Pippa DaCosta

  Summary

  In the Halow system, one of Earth’s sister star systems, tek and magic—humans and the fae—are at war.

  Kesh Lasota is a ghost in the machine. Invisible to tek, she’s hired by the criminal underworld to carry illegal messages through the Halow system. But when one of those messages kills its recipient, Kesh finds herself on the run with a bounty on her head and a quick-witted marshal on her tail.

  Proving her innocence should be straightforward—until a warfae steals the evidence she needs. The fae haven’t been seen in Halow in over a thousand years. And this one—a brutally efficient killer able to wield tek—should not exist. But neither should Kesh.

  As Kesh’s carefully crafted lie of a life crumbles around her, she knows being invisible is no longer an option. To hunt the fae, to stop him from destroying a thousand-year fragile peace, she must resurrect the horrors of her past.

  Kesh Lasota was a ghost. Now she’s back, and there’s only one thing she knows for certain. Nobody shoots the messenger and gets away with it.

  IMPORTANT NOTE: The Messenger series is a reverse harem. The harem elements develop during the series. This is NOT a love triangle.

  Part I

  "Father, O Father, what do we here,

  In this land of unbelief and fear?

  The Land of Dreams is better far

  Above the light of the Morning Star."

  Old Earthen, William Blake

  Chapter 1

  You have eighteen seconds to live.” My hovering drone’s voice sounded flat, the words spoken in the same way all secure messages were delivered. He might have equally said the weather outside Calicto’s environmental domes had settled today—no ion storms on the horizon—or reminded the recipient to pick up a case of salt on his return journey from the mines.

  An awkward silence fell over the restaurant. The recipient—a stocky man of some fifty years with arms and legs the size of ventilation ducts—blinked in disbelief at the drone, and then narrowed those gritty eyes on me.

  “Sota?” I asked, professionally formal.

  Sota—the drone—wasn’t much larger than a soccer ball. He didn’t look at all threatening to anyone unfamiliar with military tek. “Sixteen seconds.”

  The recipient dipped his greasy fingers into a small cup of synthetic cleaning fluid and wiped his hands dry on the shirt stretched over his barrel chest. “Is this some kind of joke, Messenger?”

  I had delivered some unusual messages—a happy birthday ditty at a funeral, dates for illegal inter-species rendezvous, packages of cyn, and parcels that squeaked in a decidedly living and illegal way. It wasn’t my job to query the messages, just deliver them. But an eighteen-second death threat delivered by a drone and what he saw as a harmless messenger girl? Yeah, some might consider it amusing.

  I flicked my fingers against my palm, activating the ocular display and schedule for the day. The recipient’s name blinked low in my vision, along with his date and place of birth, occupation and current address. “You are machinist, José Crater of Calicto’s Sector C, Level Four, Container Zero Zero Five, born GE thirty fifteen?”

  He smirked, fat lips stretching. “That’s me. But you’d better check your source. That message is definitely not for me.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms, oozing confidence. Too much confidence.

  I discreetly scanned the other tables. Seated at all of them were men and women equally smug as Crater. They chatted and laughed and did all those normal things, but several were carefully side-eying us with more than a passing interest. Most wore the typical ragged mineworker overalls. Probably just clocked off the day shift. Crater and his crew weren’t just machinists. People like him were the reason I delivered messages armed with a hot pistol and electrotek whip.

  I ignored the urge to reach for my whip and tacked a smile on my face that suggested, “Hey, I’m just the messenger. Let’s all just get along.”

  Crater grinned back. He was in his territory, surrounded by his people. If this was a joke, it was on me.

  Sota buzzed in the air to my left, hovering around seven feet off the ground, patiently waiting for my instructions. SOTA—Secure Observational Tactical Assistant—was seldom quiet.

  I pulled a palm-sized signature strip from my coat and tossed it onto the table. “The contents of the message are not my concern, sir. Acknowledge receipt and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  I winced. The guy likely had more hair on his back than on his head. His big grin wobbled. “I’m not acknowledging anytang.” He grunted, accent slipping into the outer Halow dialect. “Who sent it?” he asked.

  “The sender is anonymous,” I drawled. Most secure messages were sent anonymously, a safeguard against the messenger getting picked up by the marshals and snitching on the senders. My messages had never been intercepted.

  He snorted. “Do you know who I am?”

  I considered reciting the information I had in his sizeable file, just to irk him, but the onlookers were losing the humor in their glares. I did know of his reputation. He spearheaded the mineworkers’ union on a lovely backwater rock near Calicto’s domes. He might have started out honorable, but word in the sinks was that he and his men were itching for a fight with the Halow government.

  The mineworkers’ creed and their arguments were none of my concern. I’d done my job, delivered the message. It was time to leave. “The contents of a message, the sender, and the recipient are none of my concern,” I repeated in a monotone. “I’m just the messenger. Acknowledge receipt and I’ll be on my way. A thumbprint will do.”

  If he didn’t acknowledge receipt, I didn’t get my cut, which would mean another week of tasteless rations and no water. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tasted real water—the wet kind, not the synthetic syrup.

  He picked up the signature strip, pinched it between his chunky fingers, and regarded it with a sneer. “I’ve got a
message for you to send back.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. “Do you know what anonymous means, Mister Crater? It means put your fucking mark on the signature strip and acknowledge receipt before we have ourselves a disagreement.” I peeled back my long coat, revealing the coiled metal-linked whip and holstered pistol. Neither weapon was common Halow tek and both would like to rip strips off Crater.

  To his credit, the surprise on his face was genuine, if diluted by years of lines and fractures. His cracked lips quivered. Right now, he would be wondering how a girl like me—armed to the collar of my long coat—had walked through the restaurant’s security sweeps without setting off a single alarm. Few people took the time to really consider the secure part in Secure Messenger, and fewer knew how it was done. I had just shot up in his estimations. Unfortunately, that new respect also meant the death threat suddenly had teeth.

  Crater shot to his feet, bumping the table and knocking over his cleaning fluid. I snatched for my whip. Someone nearby let out a bark of alarm. Weapons rattled. Crater opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to yell never left his lips. A precision blast tore off his lower jaw and ripped out much of his cheek. Half his face vanished in a splash of blood and bone, and the big man dropped like a sack of machine parts, dead before he hit the ground.

  I blinked, clearing a red blur from my right eye. Shock sank its claws into time, slowing everything around me to a crawl.

  Sniper.

  The open hatch leading out onto the public catwalk was the only line of sight into the restaurant. Through the hatch, I saw people streaming back and forth, sliding in and out of view. But across the walkway, over the cavernous proportions of the central plaza, a flash of light glinted off a lens. My ocular readout measured the distance as 650 yards over a crowd and through cycling air currents—an impossible shot, even with guided ballistics.

  Time slammed back into motion. Crater’s associates exploded from their tables. A pistol blast singed my hair. I whirled and ran for the exit. Another shot splattered a burning ball of sparks against the wall. I veered left, darting into the security sweeps. The system let me pass on through without so much as a blip, but when Crater’s people rushed inside, guns hot, alarms shrilled and bars slammed down, sealing them inside with their howled curses.

  I dashed out of the restaurant and into the milling crowd.

  My hand instinctively rested on my whip. Magic buzzed up my arm, eager to be unleashed. A glance back through the crowd and it appeared clear. Crater’s people weren’t following, but they would as soon as they hacked their own security.

  I strode on, keeping my head down. I’d threatened Crater, twice including the original message, and I had been two feet away when his brain matter blew out the side of his face. It would be difficult to argue I wasn’t the one who’d killed him. This was bad, but not over yet.

  “Sota, what’s the quickest route to the source of that shot?”

  My drone wouldn’t have missed the shot or its source. He captured and recorded everything.

  “The quickest route to getting dead, Kesh?” he replied, voice back to his normal, virtually human drawl and dripping with sarcasm. He hovered behind my shoulder, staying low to keep our pursuers from spotting him. “There’s a tram arriving in three minutes,” he added, unprompted. “If we hurry, we can board, and we’ll be back at your container in approximately twenty minutes.”

  Sota’s plan was entirely too predictable and typical of the drone, who rarely thought much beyond his own self-preservation. “Sota, show me the route to where the shooter was holed up. Now.”

  An arrow blinked in my vision, pointing the way over catwalks, across the plaza and into what looked like a block of habitat containers still under construction. Sota whispered smoothly, “Take the drone home. Spend the night in—”

  “Shh. They won’t follow us.” We crossed the plaza. So far, so good. “They’ll think I ran for the trams.”

  “Oh. Fine,” Sota huffed.

  A smile lifted my lips. For an ex-military drone, he had a coward’s protocols. That’s what happened when you spliced the artificial intelligence of a personal assistant with an attack drone’s processors. It made for some interesting late-night conversations.

  Sota hovered closer to my shoulder, stirring my hair. “Did you see what happened to his face?” he mock-whispered. “I don’t want that to happen to my face.”

  “You don’t have a face.”

  I veered off, out of the crowd, toward the massive stacks of residential containers. Digital security threw a laser net across the site’s entrance. Teasing a few magical threads, I sent out a mental push. The laser-like mesh peeled open, inviting me inside. I stepped through, and Sota buzzed in low behind me. The lasers zipped closed behind us.

  Sota scanned the yard. With space inside Calicto’s environmental domes at a premium, the site entrance immediately funneled into a narrow security scanner. Sota’s single large lens of an eye screwed down, reducing its “pupil” to a red dot. That intense red dot of the SOTA drones was often the last thing many soldiers saw right before they had their bones flash-incinerated. But Sota wouldn’t—couldn’t hurt me.

  “Down, boy. I’ll protect you.” I flashed Sota a grin and plucked my whip free. Its crackling magic-charged length uncoiled, spilling blue sparks across the floor and over my boots. “Stay close.”

  He tucked in close, static energy tickling my neck. Just like at the restaurant security, we walked through the scanners, barely stirring more than a fine layer of dust. As far as the tek was concerned, we didn’t exist.

  “You are creepy,” Sota reported, the words all the more amusing when coming from a tactical drone.

  Around us, the habitat containers had been slotted into place, each potential new home stacked on top of another, climbing twenty stories high.

  I entered the nearest container and peered out through an open window. Someday soon, it would be someone’s single window overlooking the plaza outside. At ground level, we were too low for the shooter to get a clear shot. He or she had to be several levels above.

  My boots left shallow impressions in a layer of metal shaving dust as I walked down the single main corridor toward the stairs module. The air tasted metallic and tinged with something organic that tugged on my memory. Something sweet and tempting.

  I shook my head, shrugging off the familiar sensation. “Any movement ahead of us?”

  “Nothing on this level.”

  “Anything above?”

  His motors whirred. “Maybe.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Can you be more specific?”

  “No, something is blocking my sensors beyond twenty meters.”

  That was unusual. Sota’s sensors were some of the most advanced available. If they were blocked, someone was deliberately hiding something—or themselves—from scanners.

  “Activate stealth,” I ordered.

  “Really?” His motors whined.

  “Do we have to go through this every time?”

  “It’s a terrible drain on my batteri—”

  Sota received the look I reserved for assholes and disobedient drones everywhere.

  His background buzzing ceased. His matte black, chunky outer shell cracked open and reformed into a conical shape. His coating rippled, turning him almost entirely transparent except for a slight reflective dissonance with his surroundings. He couldn’t activate his weapons while stealthed, but he made a great scout.

  I nodded at my drone and tracked his rippling distortion in the air until he disappeared up the stairs. A small box in the corner of my vision relayed Sota’s point of view. I watched from the bottom of the stairs as he drifted down a corridor exactly like the others in this block. Vacant doorways gaped left and right.

  “Stop,” I whispered. “Look down.” He focused on the gray patches tracking down the corridor. Footprints. Large, with deep treads, likely male and probably from the mines. Factory workers weren’t equipped with heavy work boots.
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  “Careful,” I warned Sota.

  He focused his lens down the corridor.

  “I don’t see anything else…”

  He couldn’t reply, not while stealthed. Something I’d promised I would rectify once I had the right equipment for his next upgrade.

  I climbed the stairs and saw the boot prints leading away. They originated in the first right-hand container. A quick glance inside revealed a gap in the wall where it hadn’t yet been sealed to its neighbor. A plastic sheet flapped in the wind. And outside, a crane’s boom rested a few meters from the edge. That had been our suspect’s point of entry. Whoever he was, he must have had balls the size of boulders to climb that crane. This had been planned, just like the message. You have eighteen seconds to live. Whoever orchestrated this had lain in wait, knowing I would arrive with that message. Eighteen seconds. Long enough to line up the target in their crosshairs. That didn’t account for the impossible shot through various air currents and a busy crowd. Something more did that.

  Sota’s outline wobbled with dissent. He didn’t want to do this. But when I salvaged him, this had been part of the deal. I fixed him, and he worked for me. Besides, leaving wasn’t an option. Crater’s crew wouldn’t forget I’d apparently assassinated their leader right in front of them, unless I found evidence that I hadn’t fired the shot. Sota would have recorded the scene, but it wouldn’t be enough. Images could be doctored. Plus, Crater’s kind were the kill first, ask questions later type. Oh, they may eventually realize I hadn’t actually taken my pistol out and a point-blank pistol shot couldn’t have made the bloody mess that had been Crater’s face, right after tossing my remains into the Calicto wind. What was another dead messenger to them? I’d already lost my commission. But my reputation was still salvageable if I caught the real killer.