Variant: A science fiction thriller (The Predictive: Deep Space Fringe Wars Book 2)

by L. V. Lane

  “Stay here,” I said softly to Riley before setting a brisk pace for the door.

  Outside, I found a cluster of security personnel.

  “In the research center—”

  “I’m on it,” I cut the man off. “Send a message through. I want a lock down on the room. No one goes in or out until I get there.”

  “A medical team has gone in, sir.”

  “What!” I stopped dead. “Which—” I caught myself from exploding at the man who was only doing his job. “No one leaves the room.”

  I took off on a run. It wasn’t far to the research center, and by the time I arrived, more security personnel had gathered outside.

  Inside I was greeted by a chaotic jabber of voices, waving hands, and frayed tempers.

  I swore under my breath, drew a measured breath, and dragged forth the calm that was normally so easy. My gaze swept over the room where the occupants had frozen on noticing me. “Report.”

  Lai was kneeling protectively over Eva, one of Eva’s hands clutched in hers.

  Eva was out cold.

  “I… I sedated her,” Brent stammered. There was a medical scanner in his hand, his face was flushed, and his clothing disheveled. From his position on the floor, and the red stain on his right cheek, I suspected Eric might have punched him. The other occupants, except for Lai, had shrunk back to the edges of the room. “It was an accident. There is something wrong with the scanner!”

  There was something wrong with the whole fucking ship. “Check her vitals. Everyone else, out.” I kept my voice soft, but the room emptied promptly. “You can stay, Eric.”

  I was confident nothing I said would get Eric to leave. Trying to make him stand down would only lead to the kind of confrontation I was seeking to avoid. Lai released Eva’s hand slowly and followed the others without protest.

  Brent cut a wary look Eric’s way as he scurried over to check Eva. Eric had crossed his arms and radiated ‘protective brother about to have a meltdown’.

  “Her vitals are fine… We should move her to medical where I can properly assess her.” Brent sent a questioning look between us.

  “If you weren’t the best doctor on this ship, you’d be sitting in the brig right now,” I said.

  Brent blanched.

  “You don’t sedate a predictive—ever.”

  Brent began to stammer, “But—”

  “It fucks up predictions. So, you better pray she wakes up in full possession of her wits or you will be the first person to see the other side of the airlock without a suit.”

  Brent clamped his mouth shut, eyes downcast. He was our chief stasis and medical officer. As such, he would have been fully across the nuances of handling a predictive.

  Eric’s lips had formed a flat line. Still, it was that serious, and whatever Brent thought he was doing with the scanner could have cost us an important prediction.

  “But you read up on them, right?” Eric said with a sneer.

  Brent’s fingers trembled around the medical scanner. “I know you don’t sedate predictives.” He sent a glare Eric’s way. “I was taking a reading. I don’t understand how it even dispensed something. I don’t know what happened!”

  “Are you really expecting me to believe it just sedated her without authorization?” The ship was ropy, but malfunctioning scanners was a whole other game. I was actively hoping Brent had fucked up as ridiculous as that might be because it was preferable to malfunctioning medical scanners.

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Brent said adamantly.

  I looked on. “I’ll have Riley examine the scanner.”

  “The Federation deserter? Ha!” Brent said bitterly.

  He did have a point. I shared a look with Eric, who maintained his stony glare. Was Brent making excuses? I was inclined to believe he was telling the truth. Brent was hardworking, diligent, and borderline irritating in his willingness to be helpful. Dispensing medication of any kind required thumb print authorization. It wasn’t something easy to do by mistake, which led me to conclusions I was loath to make.

  “Did you hit him?” I asked Eric, deciding I may as well address that concern.

  Eric returned an indignant glare. “No, I dragged the idiot off before he did anything else.” Eric met my eyes boldly as he spoke, which didn’t mean anything. I had experienced Eric’s poker-faced lies on occasion. Admittedly, the situation had never been this serious… And he’d matured since then.

  The surveillance would reveal the truth. At the very least, Eric had used more force than was necessary in the act of dragging Brent away.

  My eyes lowered to Eva’s prone form on the floor. “Get her to medical. As soon as she wakes, I want a debrief.” I held out my hand, and a reluctant Brent handed over the scanner.

  The medical team were allowed in, and Eva was transported out, leaving Eric and me alone.

  “I’m going with them,” Eric said in a tone that challenged me to deny him. “I don’t trust the imbecile.”

  I nodded in acceptance. “We need to be wary if equipment is failing now as well.”

  “You don’t think he fucked up?”

  “Do you?”

  Eric ran his hand over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “I know you’re upset. I’m livid we lost a prediction.” The image of Eva out cold was enough on its own to stoke my temper. “But we need to reserve judgement until someone can look at the scanner.”

  “Are you going to let Riley look at it?” Eric asked, a note of challenge in his tone that I didn’t like one fucking bit.

  The sudden blare of the ship’s alarm reverberated through the room.

  Eric’s face scrunched up. “What now?”

  Riley’s frantic call came through my earbud. “We’ve got system shut-downs across the board. Widespread failures. We’re losing life support functions!”

  I lifted his hand to halt Eric’s departure.

  “How long will this take to resolve? What do you need?” I asked Riley.

  “No, you’re not understanding. This isn’t resolvable,” Riley replied.

  I shared a look with Eric as I asked Riley, “At all?”

  Silence stretched. The blaring alarm continued.

  “No, not quickly or easily. There is too much risk. There is no easy way to say this. We have to get out now.”

  “Out? You mean abandon the ship?” I was talking to Riley, but my focus was on Eric, whose face had morphed into a stony mask.

  “Yes, we need to abandon the ship,” Riley said, a tremble in her voice.

  “How much time do we have?”

  Eric gave the tiniest shake of his head, eyes softening in dread.

  “Hours,” Riley said. The Technologist was close to tears. “Twenty-three is the present system prediction, but that could change.”

  I closed my eyes, allowing myself a moment and only a moment.

  When I opened them again, Eric was staring at me. “How much time do we have?” he asked.

  “Very little,” I replied. Then I opened the ship-wide communication channel. “Critical personnel to the operations room. This is not a drill. Repeat, critical personnel to the operations room, immediately.”

  I turned to Eric. “Start preparing for the evacuation. You have twenty hours to get everyone off this ship.”

  Eric’s jaw tightened. He didn’t question, he didn’t ask why or how, he simply said, “I’ll get it done.”

  We both exited the room, Eric going one direction, and me in the other.

  In the operations room, pale, shaken faces greeted me.

  “Can we turn the alarm off in this room?” I had made hard and fast decisions while my head was ringing from the cacophony of a war zone. The nearby pounding of explosions, flying shrapnel, and roar of incoming and outgoing fire had become a familiarity during some operations. But most of the occupants of the room had never experienced frontline warfare and the cyclical drone of the alarm was doing what alarms were supposed to do—instilling a sense of i
mminent and impending danger, and poking the fight or flight center of the brain with a great big stick.

  Riley’s fingers flew in a series of gestures—damn, the lack of voice commands was an additional burden we could do without. Seconds later, an eerie silence descended. The team had clustered before the viewer, a stream of data on display most of which was beyond my understanding. The summary was clear enough. The list of ship sections becoming uninhabitable was climbing while the countdown blinked in the top right like a hammer smashing the message home.

  “Riley, status report,” I said. I wished Eva had a better claim on her faith in Riley, but I needed to work with what I had.

  Riley drew a deep breath, and her hands, clasped before her, were shaking. The few other faces around the room were equally sobered by the situation. “Catastrophic failures, multiple failures—a domino trick unraveling one system at a time. I broke the knock-on effect, but not quickly enough. We have a stable orbit, but this ship will be uninhabitable in exactly twenty-seven hours and eight minutes. After that, we lose artificial gravity and internal atmosphere.”

  “Anything to do with our drone launch?” It turned my gut over thinking that we might have provoked this.

  “No, I don’t believe so,” Riley replied.

  “It’s sabotage,” Cathy interjected, her eyes on Riley.

  “Now is not the time, Cathy,” I cut her off and fixed her with a cool stare. “We have 10,000 people to evacuate to a planet we know nothing about. Simply evacuating so many within the timeframes will be our greatest challenge. Mathematics was never my strongest subject, but I do know we don’t have enough transports for everyone at once. Each journey to the planet will take time. Assuming we don’t get shot down by an unknown planetary defense. And assuming we can safely land somewhere that isn’t being savaged by a storm. We can worry about who or what might have brought about our trying predicament later.”

  Cathy’s face flushed crimson and she returned a stiff nod.

  I turned back to Riley. “Can we evacuate everyone?”

  “Yes, assuming nothing else occurs. It comes down to the speed with which we can get the first transports outbound. The system analysis states we have a twenty percent margin.”

  “Twenty percent isn’t a great margin,” I replied. “Something could easily go wrong.”

  Riley nodded. “Given the planet’s climatic situation and the lack of viable landing sites, it will be tight.”

  “Well, I gave Eric twenty hours,” I said. “I know that was unrealistic, but Eric works better under pressure. If he can claw something back logistics wise, he will… What are our options for a landing location?” I looked between Lai, our climatologist who had a sub-specialization in meteorology, and Arden, our geographer whose expertise was physical geography.

  “We haven’t had time to assess landing sites,” Lai said. “There are so few options, and we didn’t get time—”

  “Make an educated guess,” I interrupted, sensing a rambling foray into pessimism.

  Her eyes turned to Arden.

  “If you don’t make a call, I will,” I said. “Your worst guess will be better than mine. No one is going to hold you accountable. Give me some options. It will be my decision which one is picked.”

  Lai swallowed; her lips were trembling. She was likely still reeling from the Eva incident. I couldn’t spare a thought to worry about how the predictive was faring. I guessed her meltdown might have had something to do with our current predicament. If Eva had predicted this then that meant it was people based, and people based would suggest sabotage.

  Her prediction was now lost, and I needed to make judgments without it.

  “We identified three viable landing locations,” Lai said. She gestured and a rotating image of the planet displayed on the viewer. She gestured again and it froze to show the side with the main land mass. “The city.” She highlighted the location on the eastern side. “The plains.” She highlighted the second location to the north. “And the forest.” She highlighted the final region dead center of the landmass. “The city has the most stable climate, and a preferable landing site, but well, it’s the city.”

  “Not the city,” Riley said.

  “I agree.” I had concerns about landing anywhere on the planet. Given we had no alternative to certain death if we remained on the ship, we had to land somewhere. Picking the least provocative location was sensible. “Explain the other options.”

  “The northern plains have the safest landing location in terms of geography,” Arden said. “It’s flat and there are less trees. The weather is hot, but slightly more predictable. And within human tolerance.”

  “But the storms there are horrific,” Lai added. “Sand storms sweep regularly over the whole region.”

  “The last location?” I asked, feeling a sickness roiling in my gut.

  “Torrential rains and storm-force winds that come in unpredictable waves,” Arden said. “It’s abundant with life and fresh water. And heavily forested everywhere but here.” He zoomed the image in on a vast chasm that sliced the main landmass in two. “Flooding from the rains has eroded this in a geographically short period of time. The trees don’t grow close to the edge. It looks narrow, but it’s wide enough for a transport. We were going to recommend it for the first manned expedition. A single transport timed between the weather would work.”

  “We have twenty transports to land, unload, and take off in quick succession,” I pointed out.

  “They would fit,” Arden replied. “It’s wider than it looks.”

  “With rough, unpredictable weather, that’s going to get messy,” I said.

  “Of the three, the forest is our only viable option,” Riley said softly.

  Cathy sent Riley a censorious glare. Silence settled.

  “We don’t have time for supplies, not enough of them, anyway,” Riley said. “If one more failure hits us, perhaps none. Essentials are all we can afford to take, nothing more. Once everyone is safely on the ground, we can return to the ship for supplies in a controlled manner with a team wearing atmospheric suits.”

  “She’s right,” Arden said. “Landing will be challenging in either the northern plains or the forest chasm. When we say the plain is within human tolerance, we are talking for a short period of time. The extreme conditions need supplies and shelters. Water is the biggest issue there given the extreme heat… It’s not as if you could walk to shelter or water… We are talking thousands of miles. The dust storms appear to be near constant.”

  Eric’s communication came via earbud. “We have the first ten transports ready to go,” he said. “I need a location.”

  “Launch; I will send the coordinates,” I replied.

  I turned to the climatologist. “Lai?”

  She sighed, her eyes darting toward Arden. “Without supplies, the forest is our best shot,” she said quietly. “But the storms are so unpredictable, I don’t like our chances.”

  “What are the current weather conditions?”

  “Light drizzle. Moderate gusts up to forty miles per hour.”

  “That’s not what I would call moderate,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s moderate for Serenity.”

  “The forest chasm it is.” I couldn’t allow myself to wallow in possibilities. The clock was ticking and we needed to act now. “Give Eric the coordinates and debrief him on what to expect. You know the drill. You’re essential personnel and a team is waiting to escort you to the next wave of transports.”

  The team began filling out the door, but Lai hung back.

  “I need to monitor the weather conditions, until everyone has landed,” she said. “And you tricked me into making a decision.”

  I smiled. “I believe you tricked yourself. Although, our brief discussion yielded only one viable option, after all,” I said. “And you’re not staying behind to watch the weather.”

  “It would be better if I could remain until the last transport.” She faltered when I raised an eyebrow. �
��I could collect a mobile monitoring station. It’s not going to be as good as the system we have here, but it wouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to gather what I need.”

  I urged her out of the room, finding four military personnel waiting outside. “Lai needs some equipment. You have ten minutes to get what she needs, and then I want her taken to the transport deck.”

  “What about Eva?” she asked, turning to me.

  “I’ll check,” I promised.

  She headed one way down the corridor, and with the remaining two Marines, I headed the opposite way.

  Hitting the open channel to Eric, I said, “Eric, give me a status update.”

  “What moron decided to name this godforsaken planet Serenity?” Eric demanded.

  I laughed. My escorts gave me a curious look.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eva

  THEY WERE ARGUING. Who they were, I had no idea, but there were voices, at least two, and they were definitely arguing.

  Had I been in stasis?

  There was an alarm going off, somewhere… My thoughts were fluffy and out of reach, but it didn’t feel like a stasis awakening.

  “What is she still doing here?”

  That was Landon. It was his calm voice. It could mean he was genuinely calm. It could also mean the complete opposite.

  Forcing my eyes open proved a challenge, but if I could see who he was talking to and their collective body language, it would help me to figure it out.

  “I explained why. It’s not safe to transport her.”

  That was Brent, I was sure. Even without the visual, I could tell he was experiencing a high degree of stress.

  The alarm sounded nearer, or louder, or perhaps I was merely becoming more alert.

  “It’s not safe not to transport her.” Both the words and Landon’s tone set my heart thudding. My mouth opened… and slurred gibberish came out. “What sedative was she given?”

  Landon’s voice drew closer, and cool fingers brushed against my forehead. I tried to speak again, but it made no more sense than my first attempt. It felt like I was trapped in a most peculiar dream. No, a nightmare. My wild thoughts began to tumble. I must get out!