The Dark Imbalance (Evergence Trilogy)

Renegade agent Morgan Roche has been charged by the High Humans to protect mankind from the threat of the clone warriors. Pursuing one such warrior, she hopes to learn the identity of the enemy, and how to defeat them. However, looking to her superiors, she still finds only strife and uncertainty.

Chapter One

COEA Lucence-2
955.1.29
1860

The feet of Morgan Roche's suit came away sticky as she stepped across the bridge of the Lucence-2 toward the commander's chair. She stopped a metre from it, staring with a mix of apprehension and disgust at the fist-sized object lying on the brown-spattered cushion. She didn't need to touch it to know that it was organic.

[It's a heart], said the Box through her implants.

She nodded mutely as her gaze panned around the bridge, the light from her suit's helmet cutting through the dark to reveal the carnage: here a dismembered body, there walls splashed with swathes of blood. She couldn't smell the blood through the triple thickness armour of her powered Dato suit, but she could imagine its stench.

"Commander Roche?" The voice of the Basigo First Officer crackled loudly in her ears, his accent as thick as that of a Hurn peasant, and not dissimilar. She didn't respond for almost thirty seconds; it took that long for her to find her voice -- and even then all she could manage was a grunt of acknowledgment.

"Commander?" the First Officer repeated.

"Forget the 'Commander'," she said. "I'd prefer you to just call me by my name."

"Whatever," the voice shot back impatiently. "Have you found what you were looking for?"

Her helmet light once again caught the organ in the commander's chair, and she winced. "Yes and no," she said, turning from the disturbing sight. "You say you intercepted this vessel on your last orbit?"

"We were in close to the primary when it intersected our orbit. We hailed it, but it didn't respond. We thought it was a derelict, so we boarded it." Looking for bounty, she didn't doubt.

"That's when we saw your name."

She nodded. She had seen it too, painted in blood on the wall in front of the main airlock, where no-one could miss it. That it was painted in letters two metres high had made certain of the fact.

"And its orbit was highly elliptical?" she said.

"Aye, that it was," he said. "Would've swung past us and headed way out-system if we hadn't slowed it down a touch during docking."

Headed right for us, she concluded, privately. The Box had superimposed trajectories before she had come aboard. Barely had they arrived at Sol System's anchor point when the ship they had been chasing had been hurled at the Ana Vereine like an insult, filled with the blood of its crew.

But even if the Basigo scout hadn't intercepted it, Kajic would have seen the ship approaching long before it became a serious threat, and avoided it with ease. Such a crude tactic would never have worked. Roche knew that it was never intended to.

"Repeating herself," Ameidio Haid had said upon the discovery. Jelena Heidik, the clone warrior who had hijacked the ship, had committed the same atrocity in Palasian System within days of her first awakening, that time to the crew of the Daybreak. "Honing her skills," he added sombrely.

Heidik had gone on to single-handedly kill more than five hundred thousand people in Palasian System before escaping. Roche shuddered to imagine what she could accomplish here, in Sol System.

"It might be a trap," said Uri Kajic from the Ana Vereine, on a channel the Basigo weren't listening to.

[I sense no life.] Maii's words came from the same source but by utterly different means. The reave's voice sounded like a whisper in Roche's skull, as though the very cells of her brain were listening. It came with an image of a bone picked clean by the elements. [But that means little. Cane is closed to me now -- even his senses -- and Heidik could be doing the same. If she were standing next to you, I might not know.]

Roche nodded, waiting to see if Cane himself would say anything, but he didn't. The clone warrior she had once been happy to call an ally -- who was at least distantly related to the woman Jelena Heidik -- had been reticent since his awakening from the coma in which he had been imprisoned by Linegar Rufo. Under the circumstances, she wasn't sure she blamed him.

Nevertheless, it still made her uneasy ...

"We've lost her, haven't we?" said Haid from elsewhere in the ship.

Roche glanced at the pools of blood around the bridge. "I think so," she said, unsure whether to feel relieved or piqued. The clone warrior presumably had more important things to worry about now she was in Sol System. And Roche would have no chance of finding her unless Heidik chose to attack -- a notion she didn't particularly like to entertain.

Switching back to the Basigo channel, Roche came to a decision. "We're going to disable all the drives bar attitude adjustment and program a warning beacon. This ship shouldn't be disturbed any more than it already has been.

Do you agree to that?"

"It's not my place to decide," said the First Officer with some relief.

"They're your bodies, not mine."

"My .. ?" she started, a sick feeling rising in her stomach.

"They were addressed to you," he said. "And that's good enough for me."