Free The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) by Chris Eisenlauer Page A

mechanized centaur rigs. There appeared to be about two thousand of them, on their way to relieve Holson’s skeletons. A jump ship would be coming for Kapler to fetch him to the Palace. If Barson’s troops were allowed to wipe out the perimeter camps surrounding Kapler’s Tower, it would be simple for Stoakes to slip in and do his work unseen and unknown amidst the butchery, but the Emperor had promised Kapler his choice of genetic samples to later use to repopulate the planet once his term of service was finished. No matter. Stoakes preferred it this way. In and out, unseen and unknown. No witnesses—left alive, anyway—local or alien. The challenge appealed to him.
    Once he was within sight of the Tower, he leapt high up into the air where he floated like a leaf, getting a clear perspective of the distribution of the locals and the skeletons. With enough wind, he could drift over the lines to the Tower itself, but he’d heard about the Lightning Gun and would make an easy target. He picked his entry point, and upon landing, he made for it, darting through the camp with its tents and its sentry giants, stirring only the wind. He passed through the skeletons and kept low to the charred ground, showing up against the Black Fields not at all.
    Stoakes arrived at the Tower’s base and made a complete circle around it, noting the main entrance and several service entrances at intervals. Any of these, locked or not, would allow him entry, but he wanted to wait until he could be sure that the Lightning Gun was deactivated. Barson’s troops were to occupy the Tower and keep the would-be revolutionaries in check—it wouldn’t do to have them accidentally set the Gun off, so Kapler would certainly disable it. Without the threat of the Gun, Stoakes would have a wider choice of exit routes.
    The metered stomp of the march started to sound across the Black Fields, and Stoakes could hear the whine of a jump ship approaching. He waited for Kapler to come out and greet the commander of Barson’s troops before slipping into the Tower through one of the service entrances. He figured he had some time—minutes at least—before the occupation of the Tower began and was complete.
    Inside, he paused for a moment in a dark corner, reached into a pocket, and produced the Yellow Diamond Spectacles. He examined them one last time before putting them on. They were so plain and the lenses so cloudy that he had trouble believing what the Emperor had said about them. Still, the Emperor didn’t make mistakes. He might bend, twist, or hide the truth, but he didn’t make mistakes, at least not in Stoakes’s experience.
    Stoakes pulled the lenses close to his eyes, hooking the wireframe ends over his ears. Instantly his eyes throbbed and his head hurt, bombarded by dynamic, intruding imagery, which his brain scrambled to process. The faults and cleave planes the Emperor had spoken of were everywhere, shifting softly like the in-and-out rhythm of respiration. Besides hurting his head, this movement seemed to reach into his stomach, take hold, and nauseate him.
    The walls of Kapler’s Tower meant nothing to the lenses. Beneath the cleave planes and beyond the walls were several discrete worlds of imagery attempting to break every restriction of order and discipline Stoakes had ever learned or come by naturally. He saw the blazing black light of the Root Palace and the Vine rising up interminably into the sky and out into space. He saw the intricate patterns of Kapler’s technology woven throughout the Tower. He saw the pale, waning light of the surrounding Sarsans and confirmed what he already knew, that they were a race essentially dead already. Only one thing competed with the layer of the cleave planes in brilliance and intensity, though. High up in the Tower, a blazing funnel of light was spiraling, growing by infinitesimal but consistent increments.
    He memorized the route and took off the glasses, the act of separating the lenses from his