Pride x Familiar
Authors: Albert Ruckholdt
Tags: #romance, #adventure, #science fiction, #teen, #high school
By Albert Ruckholdt
Copyright 2014 Albert Ruckholdt
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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the hard work of this author.
This is dedicated to my family and friends
who supported me on this venture when it first began a few years
ago when writing a novel became an undeniable dream.
A special thanks to:
Audrey, who read my early works no matter how
dismal they were, and lied to me out of the goodness of her
heart.
Emma, who with her teenage outlook on life
gave me the confidence to continue on the path I’d chosen.
Shani, who edited and critiqued my work with
a sharp tongue, keen eye, and a woman’s touch.
My sister and her fiancé, whose quiet support
I greatly appreciate.
And my mother, a precious, patient sounding
board to the litany of complaints and self-doubt I expressed while
writing this novel and its previous incarnations.
Table of Contents
Chapter 14 – Crime and
Punishment
To this day, nobody knows what triggered the
Cataclysm.
That’s what it came to be known, a word
synonymous with both the massive trans-space shockwave, and the
wholesale destruction that it caused.
That shockwave hit the mass shadows of planets,
stars, and a host of other celestial bodies.
Anything with a substantial mass shadow that
dimpled into the realm of trans-space was smashed to pieces.
If you were on a planet, there was nowhere to
run.
The shockwave would shatter the world like a
ball made of soft earth.
Even large starships weren’t spared.
Many of the super-liners and super-sized
military fortresses perished when the trans-light shockwave struck
their presence within trans-space.
Racing out from an epicenter near the center of
humanity’s galactic civilization, the shockwave wiped out billions
in the span of a day. Millions more died in the days that followed,
as the intersystem civilization was brought to an end.
The Cataclysm brought a finale to humanity’s
First Golden Age.
It set the stage for the survivors to lay the
foundations for the Second Golden Age.
And the remains of those scores of shattered
worlds, moons and stars became the material that fueled the
expansion of the Hurakan Nebula.
Nobody noticed when the Aventis appeared.
By the time they did, it was already too
late.
They were everywhere and anywhere.
From the very beginning they had infiltrated the
newly founded United Systems Alliance and the neighboring Coalition
of System States.
The problem was that the Aventis looked just
like us.
That’s because they were us.
They were human, but they were also something
more.
They were hosts to the Symbiote.
It was the Symbiote that made the Aventis
strong, fast, and hard to kill.
Despite their lack of numbers, they quickly
overwhelmed humanity, or should I say, the Regulars.
So, after a few years of struggling against the
Aventis – who fell into eight distinct clans known as Prides –
humanity gave up and raised the white flag.
At least, that’s what history tells us. That’s
what we’re taught in school. That’s what dramatic holovid
re-enactments portray.
The truth is a little different.
The War of Supremacy wasn’t over in a flash. It
lasted seven years and took place over hundreds of thousands of
cubic light-years.
It was fought inch by inch, light-year by
light-year, and the tide of battle only turned in favor of the
Aventis late in the war.
The Alliance and Coalition united to form the
Human Territories which subsequently became the Human Empire ruled
by an empress with a heart of ice.
The Aventis fought under a single banner,
preferring not to make claims of territory as the war dragged
on.
That was two centuries ago.
It’s a history that’s a little different from
what people know today.
I guess it can’t be helped. As the saying goes,
history is decided by the victors – the Aventis.
Why they chose to rewrite history, is a mystery
to me. Even knowing what I know today, I can’t fathom their
reasons. But in saying that, I still have a long road of discovery
ahead of me.
So it was that more than two centuries after the
Cataclysm, people had all but forgotten the point of going to war
against these ‘superior’ humans. And the truth was, the Prides only
went to war to ensure their own survival, but afterwards they
managed – dare I say ‘ruled’ – humanity pretty well.
No wars. No conflicts. On the whole, a fairly
stable economic and political environment.
Of course, the Aventis remained at the top of
the food chain, and Regulars remained one step below. They had
preferential treatment in business, education, sports, and pretty
much everything else.
But it wasn’t all bad for the rest of
humanity.
Just not as good as it was for those that
belonged to the Prides.
However, the door to joining a Pride wasn’t
closed.
During their teenage years, a Regular human was
tested for compatibility with one of the eight strains of Symbiote
that uniquely characterized the eight Prides.
Haruka was tested when she turned sixteen, and
her body had a high compatibility with the Avenir Pride.
I was tested too and my results showed negative
– I’m talking less than zero – compatibility with all of the eight
strains of the Symbiote.
It’s like the damn things hated me as much as I
hated them.
I had my reasons for hating them; reasons for
resenting them.
In truth, I was happy to be left out.
I just never figured I would fall into a
third
camp.
You see, one day I found out I wasn’t as Regular
as I thought I was.
I was actually more like an aberration.
An anomaly of great value to the Prides.
But I wasn’t the only anomaly around.
There were hundreds like me in the colony
alone.
Nonetheless, that did
not
make me feel
any better about the situation I landed in.
(Caprice)
I was surprised by how quickly she brought us to
a stop.
She hit the van I was travelling in with her
Fragment, partially crushing the driver’s cabin, forcing the
vehicle off the street and onto the sidewalk.
It was a stroke of good fortune the sidewalk was
empty of pedestrians at the time.
My Fragment reacted automatically, and the
Valkyrie Armor manifested in heartbeats, protecting me as I sat in
the passenger cabin.
The crippled van crashed into the corner of a
building and came to a stop.
As it did, I kicked out the cabin door with my
armored legs, sending it flying into the wide alley between the
building and its neighbor.
I leapt out expecting to be challenged and I
wasn’t disappointed.
The wrecked van rocked as our assailant leapt
onto the rooftop.
Even though she was wearing a helmet, I could
tell I was facing a girl.
Then she leapt toward me.
And she was fast.
I realized in a heartbeat the lev-bike riding
suit she wore was a skinsuit in disguise. It amplified her speed
and strength beyond human limits.