The Shadow Sovereign: Level Up from the Dirt

The Blood Premium

The heavy barrel of the plasma rifle came down within two inches of my nose.

"Step into the testing lane, Director Julius," the lead guard said, his voice flat through his helmet speaker. He waved a silver device shaped like a fat needle toward a small metal chair. "The chairman's orders are absolute. Nobody boards the Sovereign's Pride without matching their genetic code against the central registry. If your blood does not match your VIP pass, you go into the holding cells."

"The system is down for maintenance," Kemi said immediately. She stepped right between me and the guard, her small hand tapping the guard's stolen wrist pad against her thigh to hide the screen. "We just left the harbor office. Vice-Chairman Kola gave us these physical passes specifically because the central database is updating its firewalls for the next twenty minutes. If you try to run a full genetic scan right now, you will crash the primary sector grid."

The guard paused, his gloved thumb hovering over the activation switch on his rifle. He looked down at Kemi, his helmet tilting slightly to the side. "The office didn't log any system downtime."

"Because Kola didn't want a panic on the docks," Kemi answered back, her tone sharp and perfectly annoyed. She looked like a wealthy upper-city tech worker who was sick of dealing with low-level employees. "Check your internal network traffic if you don't believe me. Look at the data packages coming from Sector Two."

The guard shifted his weight, his eyes clearly looking at the heads-up display inside his visor. Kemi was not lying about the data traffic. She had spent the last twenty minutes using the stolen codes to flood the local harbor routers with fake maintenance reports. She was forcing the system to slow down, creating a technical bottleneck out of nothing.

"The line is slow," the guard admitted, his rifle lowering just an inch. "But I still have to take the sample. The machine saves the blood data locally and uploads it later. Sit in the chair."

My hand slipped down toward my pocket, my fingers touching the cold metal handle of my gun. If that needle touched my skin, the local scanner would know within two seconds that my blood did not belong to a director named Julius. It would show the Balogun family signature, and the alarms would lock down the entire dock. I looked at Tariq. The old hunter shifted his feet, his large boots gripping the metal floor plate, ready to dive forward the moment I drew my weapon.

"Zane, don't," Kemi thought, her red eyes shifting toward me for a split second. She gave a tiny, nearly invisible shake of her head.

Instead of drawing a weapon, Kemi walked straight up to the testing machine. She reached out and grabbed the silver needle device directly from the guard's hand before he could stop her.

"Hey! Drop that!" the guard said, his hand flying back to his rifle.

"If you want a sample, take mine first," Kemi said, her voice rising so the other passengers in line could hear her. She didn't look scared; she looked furious. "But you better write down the asset number correctly. I am the lead technician for the vice chairman's private laboratory. If you contaminate my line with your dirty gloves, Kola will have your squad reassigned to the waste dumps by morning."

She slammed her index finger into the testing slot. The machine hissed, a tiny steel needle piercing her skin to draw a drop of dark blood.

The device flickered. A yellow light spun around the base of the needle as it processed her DNA.

I held my breath, my chest tightening until it hurt. Kemi didn't have a fake identity registered in the harbor database like we did. Even worse, her body was currently running on a temporary mana cycle because Femi had stolen her original core. If the machine read her blood, it would find a total biological mess.

"Processing," the mechanical voice of the machine stated.

Kemi kept her eyes locked on the guard's visor. Beneath the edge of her jacket, her left hand was still tapping the stolen wrist pad. She wasn't just standing there; she was using Kola’s admin access to intercept the local machine's outgoing signal before it could write the data to the hard drive.

The yellow light turned a solid green.

"Scan approved," the machine announced. "Asset clearance confirmed. Sector Two laboratory group."

The guard stared at the green light, then looked back at Kemi. Her performance was perfect. Her arrogant attitude and the green light on the machine completely broke his suspicion. He pulled the needle device back, shaking his head.

"Fine," the guard said, stepping away from the boarding ramp. "The rest of your team can pass. Move along. We have a hundreds of passengers to check before launch."

"Thank you for doing your job," Kemi said, her tone dripping with fake politeness.

We walked past the guard post and hurried up the enclosed metal ramp leading into the side of the massive ship. The moment the heavy outer door shut behind us, cutting off the view of the guards, Kemi stumbled. Her knees buckled completely, and she would have hit the floor if I hadn't caught her under her arms.

Her skin felt like ice now, contradicting the extreme heat from before. The small wrist-pad in her hand was completely dead, its battery fried from the high-speed data hack.

"I blocked the local log," Kemi whispered, her breathing coming in ragged gasps against my chest. "But it will only last for fifteen minutes. Once the harbor router resets, the system will realize my blood signature doesn't exist on the laboratory roster. They will know we are on board."

"Fifteen minutes is all we need," I said, lifting her up and looking at Tariq. "Where is the cargo deck?"

Tariq pointed down a long, white corridor lined with locked silver doors. "The high-value assets are kept in the lower vault, right above the main engine room. But Zane, look at the security monitors on the wall."

I looked up at a small black screen near the ceiling. A live video feed showed the lower cargo deck. Two heavily armed hunters were standing right outside a massive steel vault door.

Between the two guards, floating in a glass tube filled with glowing blue liquid, was our mother. Her eyes were closed, and dozens of thick black wires were attached to her temples, draining the ancient core energy straight out of her veins into the ship's power grid.