Free DUALITY: The World of Lies by Paul Barufaldi Page B

head out of your
ass for that alert. Whatever else you may decide you want or don't
want out of this mission, when it's done, you're getting everything
you could ever want out of me .”
    “I might just take you up on that.” He
considered taking her now, but then thought better of the notion.
“System, pod,” he ordered.
    A relaxation pod glided across the floor to
his position. He dropped back and nestled into it as Mei again
donned her halo to commune with System for another long session of
vector plotting.
    “Get some downtime yourself when that's done,”
he suggested. “System, if anything else demands my attention, shoot
me up with whatever serums are required to get me lucid and
functional.”
    “Aye Captain,” confirmed System.
    He sank deeper and deeper into the warm quiet
comfort of the pod. His mind instinctively started into race with
thoughts of the mission at hand but slumber quickly won out in
spite of it.

A Fallacious Middle
Ground

    S itting in
a cell in the Tulan jail was not someplace Gahre had ever imagined
he would find himself, and it irked him to no end to be treated
like a criminal in his own hometown, to have his movement unjustly
restricted, to be caged like a feral animal too dangerous to be
loosed. The guards here were his peers and they looked after him as
best they could. They brought him books, which he read intently for
lack of any more productive activity to fill his time. He read
Azweel's Treatise on Wild Botanicals for the second time. He hoped
to get it entirely committed to memory as it was one of the most
useful texts he'd ever encountered, spelling out how to forage
herbs for poultices and other medicinals in the southern wilds.
They also brought him a copy Savery's “Corruption of Karnica” a
firsthand account of the origin of the cult takeover of the Far
West with all the vices and horrors it summoned there that remain
to this day. It was quite germane to the present situation as these
bandits had fled from that same nation.
    The younger bandit he had apprehended was
being held in the cell beside him. At first Gahre refused to even
acknowledge the boy, but the boy persisted in recounting his tale
to him. He hailed from, of all places, Karnica in the Wicked West.
The older man was his uncle and brother-in-law to the dread and
sinister Har Darox. He described a violent world of gambling dens
and cathouses, brutal torture and gang-rule. Har Darox was the most
infamous of bandits and had last year made the mistake of turning
his robbing efforts on the caravan of a powerful slave lord and
making off with a sizable piece of his ill-gained
fortune.
    The slave lord had tasked all his men and a
small army of paid mercenaries to track down and kill not only the
bandit Har Darox but all of his kin. The boy described the bloody
raids that had taken nearly his entire clan to their graves. Har
Darox had come to the rescue of the boy and his uncle and insisted
they must flee together to the east. For lack of other options, the
boy followed him. Under the cover of night and foul weather, they
crossed through the southern pass into the eastern world two months
ago. They raided two wagons on their way, the first assault
resulting in the death of a merchant. The boy however swore that no
blood had ever been drawn by his hand, and that he had only stayed
in the company of Har Darox and his uncle because they told him he
was now an outlaw by way his association with them, and they were
his kin looking out for him in a foreign land.
    Sympathetic to the boy’s story, Gahre felt
compelled to write a statement to the courts outlining the case
that the boy was unduly influenced beyond his control and urged
leniency in his sentence. For his own legal troubles, however,
Gahre gruffly refused to talk to anyone in the system, not the
sheriff and not the investigators who already had his statements,
not even his own appointed barrister. He felt the very system was
corrupt and that he should do nothing to