Wrath and Retribution

Preface-1

Preface

This is book 3 of a complete Guardsman story. It is entirely too long and plot too complex to tell all at once so it is broken into three books. The intent of the first book is a first person perspective following two characters to introduce the world, their relationship, and parts of the past that placed them in the situation they find themselves in 'now'. The second book illustrates the past that lead to the current predicaments and the clash of wills as opposing powers meet.

The two main characters are introduced in the first book, Guardsman 1: Honor of the Fallen. They are Persephone and Samson. Persephone is heiress to the massive, respected and successful Chroynos Stellar Hegemony. Samson has fallen from his lofty position as Persephone's personal Guardsman. In an effort to protect her, he bears the brunt of a character assassination campaign that would destroy the heiress, because he loves her more than his own life.

In the first book someone is trying to destroy Persephone's family and destroy or kill her specifically. Two clues are presented in the first book. The first is an overt discrepancy between what two characters are saying. The second is thinly veiled. Samson misses both clues at the time and begins to unravel the enigma in this second book.

To start the first book Samson is disgraced and stripped of title, even stripped of his name and forced to carry the name of the empire's most condemned: 'John Smith'. He works for a private detective hunting criminals on the run and investigating frauds. Mario Tomposo is the licensed detective and small entrepreneur in the agency that employs the banished 'John Smith' to save credits. He is actually breaking the law by not shunning the outcast and by not allowing him to starve to death. To Mario, 'Smith' is a warm body and a capable investigator who is making Mario's agency money, in the form of difficult but completed assignments, untraceable gold coin and illegally cheap labor. While Samson, then 'John Smith', is investigating one of Mario's cases, Samson meets a retired Hegemony soldier turned entrepreneur, and sometimes pirate, hidden at the bottom of the mist shrouded lower and ground levels of the planet's megacity, named Vladimir Lee.

Persephone's mother and father, Celine and Phyllip Chroynos, have suffered the deaths of Persephone's four older siblings and are painfully aware, in their hearts that someone is trying to kill their last baby. Persephone's one time friend, personal confidant, and maid Angela turns on her, unleashing an extremely powerful, nanobot enhanced, horrifically armored and completely invisible sleeper agent. The threat within their protective citadel's supposedly unassailable walls causes her father to send her out into the world to make her a constantly moving young woman with a chance to survive, instead of a stationary target waiting to die, at the hands of an unknown number of invisible sleepers who have already slipped through security.

The second book, Blood Debts details the deaths of Persephone's siblings and other family members. The brutal past is explored and comes into direct conflict with Samson and Persephone as they are actively pursued and assaulted. Several final clues are added in Blood Debts that point to the conspiracy. By the end of Blood Debts, Samson and Persephone know the origins of the plot to destroy her.

Wrath and Retribution picks up the story the following morning in a different location.

The second book is called Blood Debts for a reason. The Chroynos family while successful in business, has been decimated by war with neighboring empires and treachery. Free standing numbers are the age of the family member relative Persephone. The number in ( - ) is Persephone's age when those family member's were killed. For clarity, non-blood relatives, and those not still living are excluded from the wireframe diagram of the family.

The Hegemony Military has a Ground Combat, Ground Support, and Naval component corporations that fight the wars and are controlled by the Chroynos family as majority shareholders ensuring the loyalty of the military corporations. They also use elite formations of 'Guardsmen' as quick reaction troops to support other units, but Guardsmen are all officers because of the decade and a half of training and schooling before their commission dates. General Officer ranks also carry leadership positions in the corporations. The Hegemony's 'Home Guard' troops are experienced soldiers who are on 'loan' from the ground forces to provide house security. The Guardsman maintain a small Naval battle group of their own and use Naval ranks when assigned to the Guardsman Naval component.

The four military organization's ranks follow:

68)

Kazimir Chroynos fiercely drove his hands through his hair yet again.

The interminable trip from the Cursed Citadel to his building had frayed his last nerve. Landing on the 'highest authorized pad' for the public cab had been infuriating. 'Walking' to the elevator had set his blood to boil. His barked rebuke to the assholes and dumb bitches, who had tried to join him in the car, was mildly satisfying.

The forty-five floors the infernal elevator car had to travel were bad enough, but the moron engineer who had crafted the car to travel slower with every floor needed to die screaming with his skin stripped off, and intestines pulled out slowly into a bucket while he watched. Maybe hung from the ceiling upside down for hours so he had to piss over his dangling guts and into his face and nose.

Kicking the frame of the elevator door while pushing his disheveled, ear length hair, back from his eyes again, then a second time, Kazimir fumed with inaction. The now greasy black mess held nothing of its perfect styling that his personal stylist had added at the beginning of the day. Now the oils and hair products 'what's-his-name' used every morning were white flakes of broken goo and sticky residue in Kazimir's fingernails. Smudging his filed nails, and marring their perfectly rounded shape.

Like a common peon, he was forced to use his 'building cash card' of all things! He had almost forgotten that he had that thing at all, let alone that he'd needed it for this menial transaction.

It only added to his frustration and rage that his own building was so primitive and inert that they didn't even have proper scanners to identify him and pass him without hassle as it should.

There was a reason he paid people to handle those transactions. Kazimir didn't need to be troubled; he had more important things to do.

Like ruling an Empire ... And not this! This absurdity! This ... usurpation of order!

Stepping back and slamming his foot into the elevator door, his right ankle and toes hurt fiercely. But he left a satisfying dent in the finely finished stainless steel door. The injustice after all the years of planning, patience, sacrifice, and work was ... somewhere light-years beyond frustrating.

The obnoxious ping jarred Kazimir out of his angry revelry. Not understanding what the "K C" meant instead of a floor number until the door started to slide open, and caught on the elevated sides of the crater his foot had made in the door. 'K C', the brand he had attached to every elevator in the building that reached his floor to let people know they were at the wrong floor and needed to find themselves removed from his presence. It chimed at his floor, the penthouse apartment of the one building on the whole planet with an unobstructed view of the Citadel with the sun setting behind it.

Fittingly, once upon a time he had publicly decided it would be a perfect residence for all the normal reason. It was also the one building in the universe that cast its shadow on that same Citadel every morning when he woke up. Per his request, some clever assistant had figured out how to program a morning alert system so that it would wake him fifteen minutes before the sun peaked over the horizon every morning. Just so he could be up and watch that day's 'motivational event', as he called it in the private confines of his head. The rising sun eclipsing the current dynasty while ushering in his own, had always been an inspiring vision.

East of the Citadel, across the three kilometer long plaza between rows of other buildings, established by great, great, great grandfather 'whoever' when he had decreed in his infinite wisdom and organization skills that there 'would never be a building taller' and that 'the cardinal directions would show from the point of the Citadel for three miles in all four points of the compass'. That ridiculous story had been handed down from generation to generation as 'family lore'. Required slop for every Chroynos brat and whelp that came along before him. Never mind that the truth of it was a little different and that they didn't really design the city. Chroynos only initiated a hostile takeover of the failing previous dynasty, supported by that dynasty's own unpaid military corporations that had slowly fallen under the ownership of that Chroynos generation. They offered amnesty and quiet retirement to the prior dynasty to stave off the military's planned blood bath for the Chroynos predecessors, in exchange for adoption into the family as sole heir to the empire. That move excluded the natural offspring from the line of inheritance who would have been killed in the planned military coup.

Chroynos saved their lives from the wrath of the military corporation that they had so angered, and left them a small fortune along with instructions to never raise their hands to challenge the new dynasty. They'd had plenty to keep wine in their cups had they been smart, but instead had squandered their fortunes, fallen to disgrace and for the most part completely out of memory. Occasionally, one of those sullen losers would appear on a late night talk show rattling about their stolen place. They'd be threatened with a Chroynos lawsuit and would crawl back down whatever stinking hole they'd emerged from before the interview.

There was no blood shared between the CEO of city's founder corporation, whose offspring incompetently managed their empire straight into Chroynos hands, and the current Chroynos Dynasty. It was all a paperwork shuffle and an illusion to keep the plebes in line, while wrapping their feeble minds in the warm blanket of the lie that there was continuity and stability in their lives.

Kazimir scoffed at the insipid legend and its accompanying deceptions.

Now that the doors were bent, he was forced to squeeze out of his own elevator, because the piece of s**t door was suck half way open, while its mate mirrored its position, half opened and stuck.

He was forced to turn sideways as grated his expensive suit along the door bumpers. The humiliation of touching something else that so many unwashed millions had undoubtedly touched before sent a wrinkle of disgust along his skin.

Once past the day's final barrier, he stormed silently through the apartments to his personal office's security door. He slammed his calm resolve over his rage and passed his security locks, and watched as it retracted its twin stun rods. He had wanted auto cannons guarding his office doors, but the b***h had vacillated and argued against them. 'Never know when some old friend might stop by and trip it accidentally', she had said in her cloyingly polite voice. It was a detail not worth thinking about at the time, so he had acquiesced and let it drop.

Thankfully there were no sycophants in his foyer at this hour. He had hardly finished his trip into work when he heard about the dreadfully moronically inspired news from the night before. It was on every file folder both digital and hardcopy record on his desk when he arrived that morning.

It had started as a typical, 'just another day of patiently waiting' until he read what his moronic father had done the night before. The vid had been 'charming'. There he was captured on vid, seen before the whole Empire! Sending his personal Guardsman to collect the head of that self-righteous b***h-w***e!