Lord of the Inferno - Chapter Twenty Seven

This week’s episode features a chapter from Lord of the Inferno, Volume Two of War of the Fathers. War of the Fathers is available as a free ebook if you sign up for the Dan Decker Newsletter. Here is an excerpt from the show:

Adar rolled to his feet and kicked away the turncoat’s blaster from where the man’s body had fallen. It skidded across the floor until it came to a stop.

Why had the weapon worked for the turncoat but not for him?

Adar had pulled the trigger and felt it stop at the point where it should have fired, yet nothing had happened.

It had to be the armor, somehow the weapon was reloaded or reactivated when the turncoat had picked it up. The last moments before Adar had killed the turncoat played again in his mind, his heart still pounding in his chest as he thought it through. The turncoat hadn’t done anything special. All he’d done was pick up the blaster, point, and shoot.

Adar thought of the flash of light he’d seen yesterday when a turncoat had picked up a blaster.

The same thing might have occurred here, but Adar had been too busy to notice it. The turncoat had even had a smirk on his face as if he knew something Adar didn’t.

That was true, Adar thought. I’m sure he knew a lot of things that I don’t. He winced, trying to ignore the searing pain on the back of his head from the shot that had almost killed him earlier. He touched it and wasn’t surprised to discover that most of his hair back there was gone. He had never thought of himself as handsome, so if it never grew back, he would survive.

Adar examined the turncoat’s wound as he knelt beside the body with his own smaller blaster pointed at the turncoat’s head just in case.

Just like the Hunwei corpse he’d looked at earlier, there was a ring of the silver metal around the outside of the wound. It had not moved to cover it up.

When he touched the metal, he was surprised it was cool to the touch. That was strange, he would have expected it to at least be warm as it was right up against the body of the man that had just died.