War-Dancer (Tales of the Commonwealth Book 4) by Tom Noel-Morgan Read Free Book Online

 

    Prologue
     
    Five-hundred years since the Mars Riots and the institution of the Commonwealth of Planets, the Sedition Wars were but painful pages in the annals of History. The Bioroid Nation was no more and the fate of mankind belonged once again to Man. In the entire known galaxy, one place alone still served as a reminder of the struggle between Man and their creation: Libertatia!
     
    Among the tall mooring spires of Libertatia, under the eternal crimson twilight of its artificial skies, there are horrors the likes of which no man can imagine. Evil lurks in dusk, and shadows loom in the pale wounded light of a realm created by creatures born on Earth, but completely devoid of humanity. Hungry for blood, they stalk the unwitting with greedy intent.
     
    There, in the labyrinth of their own creation, the infamous have instituted the black pearl of a democracy of decay. It is a place ruled by the merciless and inhabited by the spiteful, the wicked and the pragmatic. Godless and heartless, the denizens of Libertatia are the by-product of the atom and the children of genetic engineering. They are the rightful heirs to a twisted and decayed culture that they hated. They are the shadows and ghosts of the creation of an empire of hedonism bent on self destruction. They are the scions of a crumbling era of intemperance and of violence. They are the echoes of a society vanquished by virtue ages past.
     
    Once upon ancient times, the synthetic bioroid species were serfs and slaves created to toil for their harsh human masters. Those were the days of space exploration and the colonisation of the Solar System. They were bred and grown in laboratories and orbiting nurseries to serve mankind in the expansion of Man’s stellar empire. The robust bioroid race toiled endlessly in the name of Man. They raised cities in faraway planets and established the foundations for great terraforming plants that would render the colonies habitable over time.
     
    They were also misused by their masters, for mankind was inebriated by its own power. In its complacency, Man had forgotten that for every abuse there’s a price-tag. In due course, the Bioroid Nation rebelled and conquered its freedom by force of arms, only to become the very thing that they had once opposed.
     
    Cruelty as tangible as flesh. Rage without regret. Such were the wanton ways of the desperate, the lost and the damned that rose against the rule of Man. Yet by law of nature, no violence happens without equivalent opposition. Their subversion culminated with the creation of the Commonwealth Legion, a military treaty under which the clans of Man had agreed to protect one another against the common threat of the bioroid revolts, destroy them, and then pursue a purer path.
     
    This was the time of the Sedition Wars, when the children of genetics fought against their creators for supremacy, and then for the simple right to exist. Alas the bioroids that had been created to serve Man were created sterile creatures, and in their limited numbers they dwindled at each engagement, so that Man ultimately prevailed, never to allow another slave race to be mass-produced.
     
    Mankind had learned with its mistakes, but in their wake were the bioroids of Libertatia, who had taken upon themselves to steal the secrets of genomics and biorobotics, so that they could remake their race after their own ambitions. As other bioroid strains were subdued, reintegrated or vanquished by Man, the rebels of Libertatia reinvented themselves as pirates and marauders and endured. They had recreated their genetic code in the image of their genitors. They had given themselves the ability to breed.
     
    These grey-skinned creatures of rugged weathered looks, with embossed features, deep eyes and hides as thick and rough as a rhino’s were not quite as strong or tall as their cousins on Mars, Terra Nova and the other human colonies, but they were cleverer. Still, feeble as they were compared to other