Heretics path a science.., p.1
Heretic's Path: A Science Fiction Adventure (Shadow Host Book 3), page 1
HERETIC’S PATH
©2025 K. GORMAN
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ALSO BY K. GORMAN
Shadow Host
Tall Order
Blood Moon
Heretic’s Path
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Thank you for reading Heretic’s Path
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you so much for your support. I’m so happy I got to bring Soo-jin’s story to you, and I’m absolutely ecstatic that you all love it so much! Thank you for all the lovely compliments. I hope you enjoy the massive (mis)adventure she goes on in this book. You are all awesome.
Thanks go to Tami Veldura for their help in making Zan’s non-binary representation as authentic as possible.
And a big thank you to my editor, Zee Monodee, and the folks at Aethon for bringing this project to realization.
ONE
Huli Jing
(Somewhere Between Marduk and Belenus’ orbital paths)
Captain Soo-jin Dokgo felt like shit. Actual, dog-manged, colored-into-a-malnourished-greeny-yellow, sleep-deprived shit. Shit that should have been flushed long ago but had instead gone wafting from room to room, growing steadily more dehydrated and leaving an imprint of poop dust on everything it touched.
The past week had been a spectacular series of failures. She’d talked to more neurologists, nano scientists, and augmentation specialists than she’d even known existed. No specialist on Caorthannach would touch Baik’s case, and the ones on Belenus, Padrig, and Cunobeline had been similarly useless. Every single one of them had pointed her to Chamak and Tala, which of course, were on the other side of their fucking orbits.
And Marduk had been a complete waste of time, distance, and fuel. She’d paid a premium for an appointment with the station’s top nano doctor, hoping he might have some sort of solution—gods, anything, even a toxin to delay the device’s development…
All he’d done was half-listen to her explanation, spew some bullshit, and hand her a prescription for nano-fixative—a serum for reducing immune response, promoting nano activity, and stabilizing new augment insertions. AKA the exact fucking opposite of what she needed.
She’d almost crammed it down his stupid throat.
And SysOps—
They were the toilet bowl her little free-floating turd self was shunning. She’d had to warp those motherfuckers into the Shadow World before they’d give her the time of day. And when they’d bothered to look at their watches and hear her out, they’d put the terms ‘Commander Ji-hun Baik’ and ‘mind control unit’ together in a sentence and added them up to ‘security breach.’
They’d almost had to shoot their way out. And then, she’d almost shot the fuckers, anyway, for being actively fucking useless.
Fuck.
Soo-jin clenched her jaws together, her thoughts simmering over her recent history. She wanted to punch something. No, she wanted to strangle something—preferably someone, and even more preferably her own father, who was behind all this shit happening in the first place, though her brother was also an acceptable candidate.
At the same time, she also wanted to open Huli Jing’s airlock and scream all her rage into the Black. Or drink until her entire worldview became the Black. Or cry so hard, she couldn’t breathe anymore.
But she couldn’t. She had to cut the emotion—and the alcoholism—off at the knees. Bottle it up. Act like a functional human being. For once.
If she didn’t, Baik could die. Ji-hun…
On the plus side, she might actually get to punch someone today. Maybe even shoot them. Unless Zan did it first.
They were also very pissed off. Hells, ‘pissed off’ was pretty much the state of everyone on board Huli Jing these days. Including her brother.
Not that Zan was on Huli Jing right now. No, they and Lilah had transferred over to Hammerclaw earlier to prep for the current operation.
Huli Jing’s first official act of piracy. How exciting.
“So,” she said, activating her comms unit. “If I run into my dearest cousin, how many pieces do you want?”
“I want at least the head. Maybe an arm.” Zan’s response was immediate and deadpan. “We should save a leg for Tanner. Seems only fair.”
Considering her dearest cousin—and Almost-Sister-in-Law—Yeon-seo Kim was the cause of Tanner Ortell’s current need of a replacement limb…
“Should we frame it for him, or put a bow on it?” she asked.
“Bow. Much cuter.”
Troy, Hammerclaw’s pilot, cut in. “You guys are sick.”
“We can blame my family for that,” she said. “Their dedication to psychotic lunacy is truly inspiring.”
A hollow clunk sounded in the wall next to her head. The ship wiggled, gravity moving like a vessel being pulled into its mooring—an enervating tingle went through the still-healing flesh under the regen cast on her left arm, putting her further on edge—then the electronic hum and crank of Huli Jing’s automated systems suctioned its outer hatch into place and tested the seal.
Her eyes bored a hole into the airlock’s control panel, willing it to turn green.
The gods—or demons, she wasn’t picky—had thrown them a bone. A smuggling ship, Asa Roth, had been on their short list of crafts that had left Lough Dearg shortly before Yeon-seo had fucked off with a shipment of highly illegal mind control units she and the rest of her fucked up cultists were planning to forcibly stick into people’s heads. By Hammerclaw’s estimation, Roth had taken off, pretended to follow its official flight path to Enlil for about three-hundred kilometers, and had then mad
Hammerclaw had picked up the ship’s transponder signal on its way to Marduk, made arrangements to pluck it out of the Black, and invited Huli Jing to the party.
The plucking had happened five minutes ago. Hammerclaw had the ship neatly pinned, its grappling claws secured around Roth’s wings like a mechanical arm bar and its cannon-studded belly pressed flush against her topside.
Huli Jing had fluttered in after the fact, suctioning itself upside down to the underside airlock like a chunky, uninvited moth, with Soo-jin piloting the ship solo. She’d be the one breaching—at least at first. Her ability to access the Shadow World gave them a unique advantage. While Hammerclaw made a lot of noise and terrorized Asa Roth’s crew in Main Reality, she, Bob, and Ji-hun would sweep through Roth on the Shadow side, bypassing its security and searching the ship for mind control units. Only Nomiki would join them, with Bob fetching her once she and Ji-hun had made their breach.
By the time Hammerclaw’s Main Reality crew started its own two-pronged breach, she, Ji-hun, and Bob would already be aiming for Roth’s bridge.
Gods alive, she really wanted to shoot things.
She activated her comms again.
“Are you sure we can’t torture her, Captain?” she asked, directing the question to Hammerclaw’s captain, Marcel Nyland. “Just a little, itty bitty bit?”
“I’m sure,” came the response.
Damn him and his perfectly normal sense of morals. Weren’t these people supposed to be pirates?
“What about her leg?” Zan asked. “Can we have that?”
A long pause sauntered over the line.
“I might have a bow,” he said.
Soo-jin grinned.
Another clunk sounded in the wall, and the panel she was staring at turned green. A subsequent safety chime notified her of a confirmed seal and air pressure.
Good. She wouldn’t die in a horrific, unprotected vacuum today.
She waited a beat to see if the sensor alarm would tell her anything exciting, like if Roth’s crew were experimenting with spectacularly awful amounts of aerosolized cyanide or something. When it didn’t, she straightened from the wall and hit up the comms again.
“Hammerclaw, we have green over here. What’s your status?”
“Stand by, Magic Fox, stand by,” Nyland ordered. “Waiting on a seal.”
Looked like her antiquated drop ship had kicked his fancy gunship’s ass in airlock speed. Huli Jing kicked its ass in relative speed, too. Mostly due to mass differential—Hammerclaw had a large amount of fun military toys weighing it down—but still.
A snatch of muttered conversation came over the line—Nomiki’s voice, it seemed. One of a pair of genetically-engineered supersoldiers she counted as friends. Jon, the other one, had stayed behind on Caorthannach, playing superpowered bodyguard to Tanner Ortell, the merc who’d had his leg violently amputated due to a psychotic drone her cousin had set loose in his underground headquarters.
Gods, she hoped she got to shoot someone today. Especially if that person had anything to do with her family’s evil plans.
A cold, wet nose touched the underside of her left hand. Soo-jin jumped in shock, then aimed a smile down at the newest addition to her crew.
“You are a giant, sneaky bitch, aren’t you?”
The wolfdog grinned up at her, tail wagging. Then she nudged Soo-jin’s hand again, this time sticking her entire head under her palm and bumping into the cast in an incredibly unsubtle demand for love and attention.
Soo-jin obliged, giving her a much-appreciated ear scritch with her weak hand and feeling the tendons work for the movement.
What was good for Loki was also good for her rehabbing musculature.
Nyland’s voice came back over the line. “We have green. Magic Fox, you are go.”
Music to her fucking ears.
“Acknowledged.” She gave Loki one last pet, then twisted away from the wall. “Zan—”
“Bring me a head, Soo-jin. Or an arm. Any body part, really.”
“Yeah, yeah.” No need to remind them what to do, clearly. She needed to get on with the doing. Cutting her mic, she turned to the empty corridor away from the wolfdog. “Bob—”
The air fractured before she could finish the sentence, reality cracking like glass. She had a brief glimpse of Bob’s Shadow arms scooping her back—two limbs ending in ragged talons for fingers, pulsing with the power of the void—before the dimensional boundaries shattered, and darkness swallowed her up with a roar.
She staggered when she hit the Shadow World, one hand flailing blindly for the wall.
It took a few seconds for the spots to clear from her vision. When they did, Ji-hun was standing a couple meters away, mouth open in obvious concern.
She waved him off. “I’m fine.”
“Really.”
A statement, not a question. Bone-dry delivery accompanied by rather doubting arcs in his eyebrows.
You’d think he didn’t believe her or something.
But she was fine. Really. The staticky vision was just a result of tiredness, and totally not related to any random extracurricular activities she may or may not be doing with the Shadow network in her downtime that he didn’t know about.
“Oh, yes,” she bullshitted, shaking off the remaining static in her brain—it didn’t work, mostly just sloshed about dizzyingly—then let gravity help her stagger toward the floor hatch. “Definitely fine. Absolutely, totally, completely fine. Fine and dandy and super ready to fuck up some pirates.”
“Smugglers,” he corrected. He also beat her to the hatch and blocked her attempt to access its lock by bending down and poking at it first.
She stuck her tongue out at his down-turned shoulders. “I mean—sure. Yes. Technically. But ‘pirates’ sounds way more exciting. Right, Bob?”
She waited a beat.
The Shadow didn’t answer. He was nowhere to be seen, either.
A quick check of her link found him ghosting along…elsewhere.
Probably playing with the dog again. In Main Reality.
The amount of times he switched back and forth between dimensions just to give Loki a pet was astounding. Not that she blamed him—the wolfdog was cute. But…right now? When she needed him for a mission?
She mentally sighed.
Way to leave me hanging there, bud.
Refocusing on her task, she gave Ji-hun’s bent form a token-appreciative assessment, then joined him on the floor. Together, they checked the seal—the Shadow World was usually good about mirroring ship movement without a time delay, but it had been real fucky lately—then leveraged the hatch open.
One meter down, their victim’s airlock hatch was a grungy, partially dented door with a comically large pair of breasts painted under its porthole.
“I’m detecting more perverts than pirates, actually.” Grunting from effort, she leaned forward and began lowering herself into the airlock. “Spot me, would ya?”
Ji-hun anchored her hips as she leaned deep into the hatch, reaching toward the tits. No hesitancy to his hold—the past few weeks had taken good care of that—but a little trill of alarm went through her nonetheless. Ignoring it, she pulled out a multi-tool to open the hatch access with—she didn’t feel like burning herself on space-cold metal today—input the override code, then wiggled her butt to signal Ji-hun to pull her out.
He did, then replaced her in the hole. Without additional hip support.
The man was tall enough she’d just interfere. Plus, he had two working arms to her one-and-a-half.
Still, opening a hatch while upside-down in an airlock was a pain in the ass.
After a few seconds and at least one claustrophobic grunt of effort, Roth’s hatch unsealed with a hiss and popped toward them. Ji-hun pulled it open with the tool, and nearly got beamed for his efforts when the sliding ladder built into Roth’s hatch attempted to slide into his head.
He caught it on his shoulder with another grunt, muscled his way around to give it space to extend fully, then used it to climb the rest of the way in, opened the second hatch, and entered Asa Roth’s corridor.
When his lower half got out of the way, she was peering down at a square-ish, Escher-esque view of Roth’s grime-encrusted ceiling.
Ji-hun’s face reappeared after a few seconds, peering back down at her.
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