Blood Enemies
TO END A GENOCIDAL MENACE, A RETIRED TORTURER MUST AGAIN TAKE UP HIS HATED TRADE
Andrej Koscuisko is a former Fleet Medical Officer for the enormous totalitarian star empire, the Jurisdiction. But when he served in the Fleet, Andrej’s real job was not medicine, at least not primarily medicine, but to act as a torturer of prisoners, whether they had information to give or not. To help him in his duties, Andrej was attended by “bond involuntaries”—slaves—men he’d come to look upon as friends and family. Finally, enough was enough. Andrej absconded with six of his Fleet-provided security slaves and sent them into the no-man’s land of Gonebeyond Space—beyond the reach of the Jurisdiction’s tyrannical Bench.
Now The Angel of Death, a savage terrorist organization from Andrej’s system of origin, means to make Gonebeyond its own. But its ancestral enemy – the secret service of the Dolgorukij church, the Malcontent – has planted a double agent on the inside of the Angel of Death. Finally this interstellar menace might be destroyed forever.
But there is trouble. Andrej Koscuisko wasn’t expected to escape from protective custody at Safehaven Medical Center and come looking for his freed bond involuntaries, and now the Malcontent faces Andrej’s unplanned intervention at the worst possible time. Now the only way to save the mission and bring down an organization that has slain whole systems of men, women, and children is for Andrej to embrace the savagery in his own heart and once again take on the role of Judicial torturer—a role that he had fought long and hard to escape. He must deploy every dirty trick and brutal stratagem he knows against the Malcontent agent whose secret he has unwittingly betrayed.
Cover Art by Kurt Miller
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Paperback
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
First printing, April 2017
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-8216-4 eISBN: 978-1-62579-572-4
Copyright 2017 Susan R. Matthews
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 https://www.baen.com
Electronic version by Baen Books https://www.baen.com
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