Extraits

Chapter one

KAIDAN

The memory played out in front of me, just as it always did. How many times had I watched this memory since I'd started this journey? Too many, that was for certain. It was really the only thing that took my mind off the cabin fever that threatened to consume me on this seemingly endless voyage through space.

I was spoiled with it now. I didn't have a sim chamber back home—those things were damn expensive—but they'd made sure to put one on the ship. They had to, or else they risked me going into rage. That was an ever-present risk with us these days, us manipulated bastards. The government had fucked us, experimented on our bodies and manipulated our genes to turn us into perfect soldiers: capable of going days without sleep, of being fully functional after only two hours of sleep if we even got that, able to punch through just about any metal, able to take bullets for days without slowing down… Yeah, they'd twisted and twisted until they got their perfect little minions to do whatever they wanted.

And they’d done it all without consent. At no point was the offer made to me to have my genes screwed around with, but that was life as a military grunt, and that counted three times over for a Raider. We didn't have rights, not like the rest of humanity, not anymore. Only the desperate joined the military these days, or the fools.

I was the latter category. I'd joined as soon as I was of age, wanting to get out of the hell hole I was living in, and I hadn't cared what would happen to me. If I could go back in time and beat some sense into my younger self, I'd do it in a heartbeat. That stupid kid had gotten me into this position, and there was no turning back from it. You don't leave the military; you die.

And they didn't just magnify my natural abilities, didn't just make me a super-soldier, although they didn't know that. No, once they’d opened up my genes to that kind of mutation, they’d just kept on going. I'd learned new things about myself, things I wished I didn't know.

Like how I could sprout five-inch claws from my knuckles, stronger than any metal I'd ever seen, capable of slicing through bone, I was pretty sure. I hadn't tested that out—I wasn't exactly itching to get put away for murder. But that wasn't all. I'd found that, when I felt like my life was in danger, my skin seemed to sprout scales all over, encasing my body with them. Scales that a bullet couldn't penetrate, that a knife couldn't cut through.

And believe me, that I tried.

Yeah, yeah, I know, you shouldn't put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, but I didn't have a hell of a lot left to live for these days. I didn't have family back on the old green and blue, and all I was was a military grunt. My life was following one set of orders after another, trudging along and doing as the government told me. Sure, I'd made it pretty far up in the ranks, but what did that matter? Just a different kind of orders, that's all.

I was a Raider, the elite of the elite.