The Simulation

Read Hunter? This one’s for you – the missing piece before book one, Hero.

The Simulation

A sequel to the prequel

‘Rider Venere, report your position.’

She pushed aside a branch with the point of her pistol, careful to keep her gaze steady on the deeper patch of shadow under the old overpass.

‘Rider Venere, report—’

A thought disconnected the comms and the dispatcher at the other end.

Sweat trickled down her spine, the enviros in the old sections of the city were down again. In the arcade squeezed between two skytowers, conduits and outlets were choked with garbage as much as old exoskeletons and roach leavings. Hard, oblong pellets were mounded in the corners of the arcade, most old and hard enough they scattered across the ground, but some… It wasn’t her first time down in the lower city and it wouldn’t be her last, but she’d never get used to the smell, or the squish.

The shops in this particular section were long since abandoned, the storefronts lost in the overgrown green. Vines and shrubs burst from the old garden beds running either side of the cracked plascrete tiles to climb window arches and curved doorframes and each other. Ancient purple trumpet vines had even taken over the translucent shell of a mammoth roach.

The massive beast had long been removed from the inch-long insect of its Old Terran roots, because its exoskeleton was big enough to form an arch in the middle of the mall. She pushed aside another vine – lime-green heart-shaped leaves thin and curling at the tip, clustered together on thinner stems. Almost pretty, what with the way the veins in them glowed in the dim light. 

The HUD catalogued it, gave a name—genius and species—and moved on. Just like she moved on, toward the overpass and the shadow.

The pistol was steady, a grey crosshair tracking her aim on the HUD. Not live, not yet, not until the sensors in her helmet and clothes tagged the target.

The target itself rotated in the HUD’s lower right corner, not a large beast – a slice of the night, two meters and lithe. Lithe enough to slip its dexterous, long-toed paws between the bars of its nanite-reinforced cage and tap in the unlock code. Smart enough to evade lab security and the patrols, vicious enough to attack a sterdane three-hundred times its size, and dangerous enough to put three scientists in intensive care. 

Cautions scrolled over the image; if she focused on them they’d flash front and centre – Caution: venomous. Caution: rabid. Caution: highly contagious. And over them all: kill warrant issued.

Adrenalin tingled under her skin.

Kill warrant issued.

Whatever had happened to incite Erebero’s rage, she’d find out. But she had to find him first, before another hunter beat her to the punch. Again.

Her fingers tightened around the pistol’s compact black grip.

Not this time.

She was ready this time.

The last vine trailed over her shoulder. Leaves fluttered around her boots, a sneaky breeze blowing stray hair across her mouth even as it picked at the hem of her jacket. She didn’t take her attention from the HUD, the sensors struggling to pierce the dark clinging to the overpass’s pipes and pitted steelcrete.

One hundred metres between her and it.

Static in her comm.  ‘…Venere… report…’ 

She stumbled, concentration broken for a second before she got it back.

Distraction was what got her last time. She wouldn’t let it now. Ereberos was too important. She’d find him this time.

She would—

‘Subria!’ Her mentor’s voice rang through her skull just as a deeper shadow fluttered under the overpass.

She almost missed it, almost didn’t catch the fist-sized triangular head lifting from the pipes, but the HUD caught it. Target lines snapping red, kill warrant activated, the pistol coming to life—

‘Subria.’ A face took over the HUD – pale bronze and lined; dark brown hair threaded with grey.

She shoved the face aside, focused on the shadow, the target-lock gone now, the little head disappeared back amongst the ancient power conduits and cables snaking under the walkway between the massive skytowers.

‘Don’t do this,’ her mentor said.

‘I have to,’ she whispered back.

Dried roach shit skittered away from her boots.

Twenty-three meters between her and the bridge, and the sensors in her visor were working harder, outlining water pipes, matching maintenance requests to the emergency glows clinging to the walls, detecting a heat signature—

‘You’re throwing away your career.’

‘I know,’ was all she said before she ripped the visor off, letting it fall amongst the trash.

Tracking lines and sensors went with it, the pistol dying, a useless lump of nano-plastics without the HUD, but she didn’t need it.

She let it drop too and drew the unregistered weapon from the holster tucked against her ribs.

She didn’t speak. Ereberos wouldn’t believe a word she said.

Two meters, and this close the stench from the garbage and shit piled under the overpass was a wall, decay hitting her in the nose, thick enough to taste. And then she was under it, the walkway cutting the light from the towers and cars flying above, leaving her in the dark with the small serpentine flyer and his wicked claws.

The first stirring of doubt tingled across her back, but she had to trust and she had to focus.

The flyer was up there, she felt him. A warm, familiar presence. 

Something warm and sweet wound through the overpass’s stench, butter and caramel, slipping a soft, gooey finger under the rotten leaf litter and mouldering trash. It tickled the back of her brain, distracting her from the cables.

Cake, a little rumble reminded her.

Why did she smell cake?

She rubbed her nose, accidentally dislodging her glasses, and the world jumped. The old underpass fracturing, sunlight backlighting a hulking tawny mass—

And then it was back and in that moment, everything had changed, the underpass flooded with light, with voices. A Hunter bursting from the vines behind her, deadly egg-shaped drones buzzing before him.

And from the shadows, Ereberos, a slice of the night leaping at her face.

There was barely time to raise the pistol, the static crawling across her vision making it impossible to aim, but she didn’t need to because Ereberos was coming at her and the stun—

The simulation shredded, taking Subria Venere with it; the tall, black-haired Rider in her heavy boots and sleek nano-weave uniform replaced with Hero Regan. Short and square-faced, shoulder-length brown hair pushed off her face with impatient fingers, and just now, her brown-eyed glare shooting past the tawny snout an inch from her face to the black gaze beyond.

She scowled and stamped her bare foot. It thudded satisfactorily on the marble-wood floor.

‘Fiiiink!’

Several hundred kilograms of six-legged, genetically-engineered killing machine hunched his fore-shoulders, half-moon ears disappearing in his ruff, looked away. In the back of her skull, the ruc-pard’s pink mawberry-flavoured thoughts—bright and sweet—fizzed along with his mental grumble.

Hero stamped her other foot. ‘I was gonna save Ereberos this time!’

It’d only taken her a week to get through the training portion of the sim—the test at the Farm, the Academy, the probationary mission—and on to the real story and now… Three days she’d been trying, and failing, to complete the mission to save Ereberos. 

The real Rider Venere had done it, why couldn’t she?

Hero glared at Fink.

Another mental grumble, a little louder, and he looked at her from under fluffy brows. 

But he had cake, he said and shoved an image into her mind, complete with the warm, buttery smell that had distracted her in the simulation.

A trio of perfect golden cupcakes sat on a little spotted plate in the sun.

Hero’s stomach rumbled. ‘Chef’s caramel cupcakes?’ Almost as good as his triple chocolate ones.

Fink’s ear’s popped out of his ruff, his head—the size of her torso—almost knocking her over as he nodded.

There was one left, he thought at her.

‘One—’ Hero’s hands found her hips. There’d been three cupcakes in the vision. Now, as she took a better look at the pointed muzzle with its black nose, she noticed pale gold crumbs in the fine red-brown hairs.

Hero stamped both feet.

‘Fiiink!’

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