The Healer (The Order of Intergalactic Peace #1) - Kelly Lucille

Chapter One

The emaciated streets of Freefall echoed with emptiness this late at night. Built as it had been over the top of a once great city, it was easy to forget in the light of day and in the better parts of town, what had once been. Here, past even the outer ring of rickety houses and dimly lit patched and worn streets you could not escape that Freefall was essentially built on the bones of the dead.

The ancient rubble might have been long since paved over around the pristine and military precise space port found at the north side of town, or at the fancy two story houses of Government Square but in the outer rim, not even ten miles south of the city center, you could find the truth easily enough. Like all the big cities and most small towns the wars and the millennia since had left deep scars.

Walking silently through the dubious streets of the outer rim where the past had been crushed down and trodden over, shoved to the side like tombstones along a forgotten road, no one could mistake it for anything but what it really was. A graveyard.

Tonight even the ghosts that haunted the place seemed to be absent.

No surprise there, Serenity thought looking up at the black splotch among the lighter moon kissed skies, not with a Fleet Destroyer in the sky.

Not that it would exactly bustle in a few hours when the sun rose, not with the OIP hovering above for who knew what reason. The people of Freefall might know that the OIP controlled their lives since it was the military and their appointed government that supplied the jobs and food supplies that kept the town alive, but that didn’t mean they liked reminders.

What the Order of Intergalactic Peace could possibly find on Earth to warrant one of their deadliest beasts of war after all this time Serenity could not begin to guess at, but it did not bode well for the survivors eking out their existence here on the ground.

Earth had been the first planet in the Commonwealth to be culled for a reason. Of the hundreds of planets discovered in the last thousand years, it was on the origin planet where the genetic anomalies had shown up first, and in the highest numbers. The Order had accepted any and all volunteers from Earth no matter their power designation (or lack of) since the beginning and went on to conscript everyone else they could find.

The fleet foot soldiers were said to be predominantly Earthers who showed no signs of the gifts. Cannon fodder no one would miss, encouraged to mate and breed by edict of OIP command in hopes of sparking mutations in the next generation.

They said it was to repopulate the worlds that had survived the great war, and that was probably truth, Serenity mused. But not the only one.

The children that were born from the OIP armies were sent away to academy if they showed the least bit of power, propaganda said to learn to use that power responsibly. The rest were left with their parents to learn the ways of the warrior class and join the ranks of the military at the lowest tier. They received an indoctrination of another kind.

Cannon fodder and breeders, like their parents before them. Besides dying in battles to snuff out the small rebellions that kept cropping up across the galaxy, they managed to live well enough. If the stories were true they were well fed and housed, with clean clothes, food, and the chance to send their children to the military schools set up for the indoctrination of their class. They certainly had it better than anyone left behind on Earth.

Most were generations into the cycle of life and death that soldiers and their families faced and didn’t seem to expect anything else. Or mind the idea that breeding was mandatory and could result in the loss of your child, in battle training, war, or to the special schools if they showed initiative or power.

Serenity had heard of more than one person who had deemed the loss of freedom and low life expectancy to be small prices to pay for comfort, even among those that had not grown up in the system. She had even understood. When everyday was a battle for survival anyway, you might as well get a hot meal and a warm place to sleep for your troubles.

Not to mention at least the military had an understood command