Mission Critical Read online

  Mission Critical

  An Adam Cain Adventure

  T.R. Harris

  The Human Chronicles Saga - Continuum - Book 1

  Contents

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  Novels by T.R. Harris

  Author Notes

  Adam Cain…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  More Adam Cain adventures to come.

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  Novels by T.R. Harris

  Copyright 2018 by T.R. Harris

  All rights reserved, without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanically, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Website: bytrharris.com

  Novels by T.R. Harris

  The Human Chronicles Saga – Continuum

  Mission Critical (An Adam Cain Adventure)

  The Human Chronicles Saga (original series)

  The Fringe Worlds

  Alien Assassin

  The War of Pawns

  The Tactics of Revenge

  The Legend of Earth

  Cain’s Crusaders

  The Apex Predator

  A Galaxy to Conquer

  The Masters of War

  Prelude to War

  The Unreachable Stars

  When Earth Reigned Supreme

  A Clash of Aliens

  Battlelines

  The Copernicus Deception

  Scorched Earth

  Alien Games

  The Cain Legacy

  The Andromeda Mission

  Last Species Standing

  Invasion Force

  Force of Gravity

  REV Warriors Series

  REV

  Jason King – Agent to the Stars Series

  The Enclaves of Sylox

  Treasure of the Galactic Lights

  The Drone Wars Series

  Day of the Drone

  In collaboration with George Wier…

  The Liberation Series

  Captains Malicious

  Available exclusively on Amazon.com and Kindle Unlimited.

  Author Notes

  Welcome to the wild world of Adam Cain…

  The alien with an attitude.

  I want to welcome both old and new readers of The Human Chronicles Saga and hope you enjoy this latest edition of the adventures of Adam Cain and his friends.

  Some of you may be wondering about the whole Continuum thing, and whether or not this is the same series that’s been a perennial favorite on Amazon since 2011?

  It is!

  Yet you’ll find in Mission Critical that our hero—Adam Cain—is able to wrap up an entire adventure in one book. To help that along, there’s a little more background information throughout so new readers can get their bearings and not be lost—which makes for a precarious balancing act for the author. It’s a fine mix between including too much information that will bore the long-term fan, yet not enough that leaves new readers twondering what’s going on. I hope I’ve provided the right mix in Mission Critical.

  Yet for new readers, let me assure you there’s a large catalog of other Adam Cain books available if you like this one, books that will help flesh out the entire series.

  And on a personal note, I want to say how I marvel at how vast and wondrous the whole Human Chronicles Saga universe has become. It’s amazing—especially when I didn’t start the series with any grand plan for how it would evolve. It just…became. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, a universe had been created. And twenty-three books later, it’s still growing.

  It’s been a great journey and I owe it all to my loyal fans. I write these stories for you (and a little for me), shocked and humbled by the response I’ve received over the years.

  Just think, one day you sit down at a computer to write a story and you need a name for your main character. “Cain…Adam Cain,” you say. “Yeah, that works.” Then six years and twenty-three books later, the series that was spawned that day has evolved from The Humans Chronicles Saga to An Adam Cain Adventure. That’s because for the fans of the alien with an attitude, Adam Cain is just as real to you as he is to me.

  And our hero will live on—despite all the evil alien efforts to stop him!

  As I’ve said before, if you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.

  Thanks, again.

  T.R. Harris

  Adam Cain…

  is an alien with an attitude.

  His story continues…

  1

  Adam Cain: Destroyer of Worlds.

  No, that’s too dark.

  Adam Cain: Protector of the Innocent.

  Nah, that sounds like some Boy Scout superhero.

  Adam Cain: Broke and Desperate.

  Well, at least that’s the most-honest, but how would it look on a business card?

  Unfortunately, Adam had more urgent matters to tend to than coming up with a slogan for his new bounty hunting business. The giant Balmornac quadra-ped had just crashed through the wall of the room where he was hiding, and survival was now his top priority.

  The huge tiger-on-steroids swayed its massive head back and forth, displaying a pair of two-foot-long horns at the Human, while snarling through a mouth lined with three-inch long fangs. Adam stood behind a wooden table, gripping the edge, grimacing with pain from the wound in his left side. He was waiting for the moment…and it came in a flash as the giant cat jumped. Adam lifted the table and flipped it toward his attacker. The beast’s spear-like horns penetrated the wood, slipping by Adam’s head and missing his flesh by only a fraction of an inch on each side.

  He pressed forward with all his Human strength while twisting the table, using its length for leverage. The head of the giant cat spun, taking the rest of the body with it. The beast was on its back when Adam slammed a booted foot down on the thick neck, just missing the taming collar it wore.

  His advantage only lasted a second. The cat was much stronger than he was and flicked him away as it would a fly. But the animal was hurt. When the next mighty roar came from its injured throat, it sounded more like a kitten than a six-foot-tall-at-the-shoulders savage beast.

  Adam backed away until he was standing in front of the room’s only window, his left hand on the puncture wound to his side. The cat was shaking off its own pain and preparing to attack.

  The animal wasn’t the only one g
etting ready to jump. With his enhanced leg muscles, Adam pushed off, reaching for the bare conduit lines in the ceiling twelve feet above. He pulled up his legs just as the huge tiger streaked by beneath him.

  The window shattered and the animal fell eighteen stories to the ground below. Adam dropped to the floor and looked out the shattered portal. The quadra-ped was on the ground, lifeless, while curious bystanders cautiously approached. Then it moved. The huge cat staggered to its feet, sending the panicked crowd running for their lives.

  One of its horns was broken in half, and the it limped from an injured front leg. But still it hobbled back into the building.

  Adam didn’t have much time. The cat’s keen sense of smell was how it found him the first time. He thought he was being clever when he entered an elevator on the fifteenth floor a few minutes earlier, knowing that the cat couldn’t conceive of nor operate the control buttons. But then the beast took the stairwell up three flights, following his distinctive Human scent.

  With its hurt leg, it would take the animal longer this time to climb the stairs, but it would track him relentlessly as long as he was in the building.

  Adam rushed from the room and to another bank of elevators. The building was tall and the elevators only went fifteen floors at a time before requiring a transfer. He had to reach the forty-eighth floor.

  After three transfers he eventually reached his destination, and as the door slid open, he took a level-two flash bolt to his chest. He barely reacted, more pissed than hurt. He looked at the stunned native guard and wondered what the hell was he doing? He should know by now that all a level-two flash bolt did to a Human was make him mad. And with Adam’s special abilities, it would take a number of even level-one bolts to kill him….

  He ran to the stunned guard and slapped the bolt launcher from his gun hand before he could make the intensity adjustment on the weapon. Impatient, pissed off and hurt, Adam planted an elbow into the guard’s chin. It only took one hit. He’d already taken out nine other guards when he first entered the building; he knew what it took to lay them out. But then the giant cats had been sicced on him. He’d killed one already, although it came at the cost of a deep puncture wound to his left side. The bleeding had stopped—thanks to his rapid healing ability—but the pain was still there. He wasn’t looking forward to another encounter with the giant tigers.

  Earlier, Adam had sent a mosquito drone into the building to locate the fugitive. He was on the forty-eighth floor, just down the hall from where Adam now stood. He reached the door and crashed through it without even trying the handle.

  Adors Gin was cowering behind his desk, an MK-17 flash weapon in his hand, waiting for the targeting computer to lock on. Adam was on him before it could, knocking the annoying weapon away before grabbing the alien by the front of his clothing and lifting him over the desk.

  Adors was a gunrunner who had been selling weapons to the rebels on Solon-Manoc. He had been captured, but escaped with the help of the rebels. He fled the planet, and a few weeks later, Adam and his team found him hiding here on Cranis, surrounded by a small army of native guards and his two wild cats. He controlled the animals with neurological taming collars, making them do his bidding. Adam was pretty sure Adors didn’t have the animals in the building exclusively to protect against him. That was just an unfortunate coincidence.

  Adors blinked several times as his mouth fell open, staring at Adam.

  “You are…you are Adam Cain,” the alien gasped.

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to take you back to Solon-Manoc.”

  “You are a reward hunter?”

  Adam shrugged.

  “But you…you killed the Sol-Kor queen. You destroyed the homeworld of the Nuoreans. And you eliminated the last of the Klin from the galaxy. Surely you can’t be here for the reward?”

  “Hey, everyone has to make a living.”

  The greenish-blue face of the alien became more animated. “I understand there is a forty thousand Juirean credit reward for my return. I will offer you fifty thousand if you let me go.”

  Adam stared into the green eyes of the fugitive. Forty thousand credits—the bounty on Adors—would keep the Klin Colony Ship he lived in running for a month; fifty thousand, not much longer. No, it wasn’t enough to risk his business and his reputation.

  When Adam hesitated, Adors upped the bribe to one hundred thousand.

  “Do you have it with you?” Adam asked.

  “I, eh, well, no,” Adors stammered. “But I can get it.”

  Adam winced and shook his head. “Sorry, Adors, but I can’t risk it, not even for a hundred. You’re going back to Solon-Manoc and I’ll be content with the forty-k.”

  “Forty kay?”

  “Forty thousand.”

  As Adam guided the alien toward the shattered door, Adors took him by the arm. “A favor, Adam Cain?”

  “What?”

  “Will you look into the security camera in the corner?” Adors pointed toward the ceiling. “I want a record that I met you.”

  Adors huddled in close and smiled for the camera. Although the alien faced a possible death sentence back on Solon-Manoc, he was beaming with excitement as Adam took him into custody.

  At least now he had a selfie with him and the famous Adam Cain.

  Adam got Adors out of the building and back to his ship, where his alien friend Kaylor was waiting. Four days later the pair left Solon-Manoc with a stack of Juirean blue chips and returned to the huge Colony Ship/space station in orbit around the gas giant Andos within the Formilian star system. The forty thousand credits would help, but it wouldn’t make a dent in his current financial woes; however, it was more than he had a week ago. That was progress.

  The twenty-mile-in-diameter starship he called home had seventy landing bays of various sizes, but only one was active. Kaylor expertly slipped the small Klin saucer into the bay, closed the outer doors and then filled the chamber with atmosphere. Adam grimaced. Just that sequence alone cost about seven hundred credits.

  The pair made their way through a long passageway with dimmed lighting and into the section of the station where Adam, Kaylor and Jym lived. It was less than ten percent of the volume of the huge ship, leaving the other ninety-plus percent dark, cold and powerless.

  The station had once been home to twenty thousand Klin, and was capable of supporting the colony for an indefinite period. But something that big took a lot of, well everything, to run. Adam didn’t have that kind of money. Hell, he couldn’t even afford to move the damn thing

  His friend Arieel Bol—the Speaker of the Formilian People—had fought tooth and nail with her governing council to get the funding to bring the ship from Vesper to its present location. After that, the powers-that-be said no more, not even enough to keep the station powered.

  Arieel didn’t have the clout she once had on her homeworld. Her title was more ceremonial than official now, not after it was revealed that her so-called supernatural ability to control electricity and commune with their gods came from a brain-interface device and not by divine intervention. If it wasn’t for the two-thousand year history of the Bol females leading the planet, she wouldn’t even have the title.

  Adam was grateful nonetheless. It got him closer to the power center of the Expansion and closer to Arieel. When he first arrived nine months ago, they saw each other often, but now, not so much. Since he’d started his bounty hunting business, he was gone most of the time, working his butt off just to keep the lights on in the small section of the Colony Ship he called home.

  Jym was in the central meeting area near the bridge of the Klin starship when Kaylor and Adam entered. The lighting here was brighter, at least while the room was in use. Jym was munching on a piece of Filiean bark held in one tiny paw, while tapping on a datapad with the other.

  “With the forty thousand, we now have ninety-eight in total,” he said without greeting, as if his two associates hadn’t
been gone for the past nine days. “I have ordered a fresh supply of standard food stocks, and we should be looking soon for a new power module for the Davion.”

  The Davion was the only small craft left aboard the Colony Ship when Adam took it over; all the hundreds of others were on Vesper when the Nuoreans destroyed the planet. That was a shame. Normally, a station this large carried an entire fleet of smaller vessels, ships Adam could have sold to cure his current financial crisis. But the Klin were in the process of moving their operations to land bases at the time and had stripped the Colony Ship of all but one lone starship, used to shuttle the skeleton maintenance crew back and forth to Vesper.

  Now Adam and Kaylor used the Davion for their bounty hunting excursions. Davion was an alien name Jym assigned the ship, which meant…well Adam never understood the meaning. But it was small and fast, with an effective range of about ten thousand light-years on a single power mod. Jym was right; it would need a new energy supply module pretty soon. And that would cost even more money.