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

by L. V. Lane

  “I don’t know, you took the scanner!” Brent also sounded pissed now.

  “Take him to a transport.”

  There were mutters of protests, a scuffle, and then the hiss of the door. My pulse thudded in sickly time with the blaring alarm, and I finally forced my eyes open. Blinking brought a blurred face into view. My mouth opened to speak, but this time nothing came out.

  “Stop trying to talk,” Landon said. “You can’t yet, and it’s causing you more distress. The effects will wear off. I just don’t know exactly when.” His arm slipped under me.

  My whole body felt heavy in a way that was worse even than post stasis. “Can’t move.” My words were slurred, but closer to coherent.

  “Which part of ‘don’t talk’ did you not understand?”

  Fingers closed around my upper arm, pulling. The world tilted then swung around in a swift, dizzying motion. It took me several disorientated moments before I realized I was hanging upside down. And several more before I realized the pressure against my stomach meant Landon was carrying me.

  “Sir!” Another voice, urgent this time. “We need to leave.”

  “I know. Clear the last personnel,” Landon said. Out of my swaying, upside down view, I caught a glimpse of several dark military uniforms. “And then get yourselves to a transport.”

  Landon set a brisk pace, his footsteps a heavy thud against the corridor floor. All the while I hung limp and useless while the alarm tore strips from my nerves.

  “We have reports of another failure.” The voice, unknown to me, was anxious and out of breath. A whooshing noise followed us, getting louder. It instilled a sensation of being chased. I struggled weakly, wishing I were capable of running because I badly wanted to run.

  “The ship was supposed to bloody hold!” Landon no longer sounded calm and that frightened me more than the monstrous rushing of the beast that pursued us. Tears sprung to my eyes, and the sense of malaise was so great it choked me as it clawed its way up from a buried place in my psyche.

  There were other footsteps around us. Dark military suits flashed in and out of my blurred vision.

  Another whoosh—far louder.

  Barked commands I could not follow.

  A sudden patter of footsteps.

  The whoosh morphed into a roar.

  The world spun violently again before a firm surface hit my back. A seat? Dizzy, disorientated, and my body limp and beyond my control, I was anchored against the seat by a hand in the middle of my chest. Tears streamed down my face.

  “Start the sequence,” Landon said. His voice was close enough that I knew it was his hand pinning me to the seat. Blinking, I tried to focus. My limbs started working, but in a weak uncoordinated way that hampered Landon’s efforts to keep me upright.

  “You’re not secure, sir.”

  The clank of a harness and black straps shifted into view, stark against my white medical gown.

  “Start the bloody sequence!”

  A click came next followed by a sharp tug as he yanked the straps, tightening them until breathing became a challenge. “Too tight.” My head rolled back, and reality shifted into focus to reveal Landon’s face. The corridor-like personnel section held long rows of inward facing seats. Dull amber lighting was offset by the stark brightness of the flight deck emitted through the front windscreen of the transport to my right.

  “Tight enough so you don’t end up on the floor,” Landon countered.

  “Ten seconds!”

  Tension permeated the voice of the man I realized was the co-pilot. In a single stride, Landon hit the seat opposite. He dragged the harness on, snapped it closed, and tugged it tight.

  A great roaring noise rose, surrounding us, reaching a feverish, discordant pitch. It ceased abruptly as we hurtled down the launch tube and exited into space. Eerie quiet was broken only by the gentle, bouncing rumble of the transport.

  A patter, reminiscent of rain on those meta-plastic roofs they used on basic colony structures… Or that time when I was on a station and a small meteor shower hit…

  “Sir!”

  The imminent impact warning reverberated through the craft, beating at my already overwhelmed amygdala.

  “I know,” Landon said. “Stay on course.”

  A crash followed, so violent I felt it in my bones.

  My eyes stretched so wide they ached, and my temple throbbed to the beat of my overworked heart.

  “Status,” Landon shouted over the sudden tumult as further things peppered the transport.

  “Holding.”

  The transport juddered and shook as we hit the atmosphere. My jaw ached with the effort of stopping my teeth banging together in the bone-shaking onslaught. My eyes remained so painfully wide that I thought I might never blink again.

  “Most of it is burning up,” said the co-pilot at the front.

  The violent shaking eased to a bearable level. Brilliant blue sky and light bathed the inside of the craft. Through the front window, I could see Serenity, smothered under a thick swirling, white blanket.

  Someone swore. The pilot, I thought.

  “I can see,” Landon said. “Stay on course. The rodeo isn’t over yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Landon

  THE SHIP HAD exploded.

  I forced it from my mind and focused on the hellish descent we were facing into the mother of all storms. Outside the window, the sky might be a brilliant blue now, but far below, a deadly force of nature was lying in wait.

  A lump of the former ship, twice the size of the transport, rocketed past to our left. Some of the debris might have incinerated, but much of the Intrepid was heading planet bound, one deadly piece at a time.

  “Sir, should we seek a safer landing site?” the co-pilot called to me.

  We were the last transport to leave in what should have been a comfortable margin. It hadn’t manifested quite to plan, and a question to ponder when we were not dodging deadly missiles that had once constituted our former ship. “Do we have communication?”

  “No. It’s gone with the ship.” The co-pilot cut a glance over his shoulder. “We’re flying on basics here.”

  “Then no,” I replied. Given the pounding our transport had taken—was still taking—I thought it unlikely it would take-off again should we miraculously manage to land. It was possible our descent was being monitored from those on the ground, but unlikely given the last communication from Eric. The landing site was in turmoil and three transports lost that we knew of. Given the storm was expanding, trying to land at the target site was a risk. But landing anywhere else would only lead to a slow death.

  The second imminent impact warning blared, driving a spike of collective tension through the transport passengers and crew.

  A bright, blue light flashed to the right of the transport. The imminent impact warning ceased, and a peppering of debris followed.

  “Was that PB fire?” I asked, incredulous. I’d seen long range Pulse Beam before, but this was way beyond long range.

  Another flash. Another spray of debris. This time, a control alarm blared.

  A technician hit the override. “We lost a thruster,” she said.

  Only one, lucky us!

  “It’s coming from the east,” the pilot said. “It’s not shooting at us. It appears to be shooting at the ship debris. Some of the chunks are huge and it just took one out.”

  I dragged in a ragged breath, tried to wrap my head around that, and gave up. “If it’s not shooting at us then we’ll worry about it later.” I sent a swift glance Eva’s way. Her eyes were round, and her chest rose and fell in ragged pants under the tight straps. Perhaps I’d pulled them too tight, after all? Her fingers clutched the arms of the seat, which I thought was a good sign. She’d been as limp as a rag when I’d picked her up. What the hell had Brent been thinking by keeping Eva on the ship? What the hell was wrong with Eric letting Brent keep her on the ship?

  None of it made any sense. And now we had deadly PB blasts com
ing from the planet in what appeared to be a protective move. The worst part, the part I was trying to ignore, was that it was sheer luck a team doing a final sweep had happened on Brent in the medical bay where Eva lay recovering.

  Eva had almost been left behind.

  Eva had almost died.

  We all might still die.

  A barrage of system alarms lit up the control station to the front of the technician and her fingers flew over the controls.

  “That was the second thruster,” the technician said.

  “ETA?” I asked, seeking to keep them focused on the task, not what was going wrong.

  “Four minutes, thirty.”

  “Stay focused. No one’s firing on us, so every one of you has been through worse than this.”

  Then the rolling black and gray clouds swallowed us up. The transport bucked and my harness dug grooves in my flesh. Only the stark internal transport lighting kept the darkness at bay. Blood was trickling from Eva’s nose, but whether it was from the bone rattling descent or her recent sedation, I had no idea.

  To the front, rain lashed the windows with such rigor, the craft might have been submerged in a sea. A light show was taking place beyond: blue from the mighty PB cannon somewhere on Serenity, and the bright white of natural forces in the form of lightning. There was nothing else to see out the window except black clouds and rain.

  Gusts slammed the craft this way and that. Yet another alarm, this time the technician, co-pilot, and pilot were too occupied in controlling the flight to turn it off. Their focus was absolute. I had no more than basic skills flying a transport, the mandatory requirement for my former rank. But I’d flown through some testing operations, and I thought this ranked up with the worst of them.

  It might be the worst.

  “Five hundred,” the navigator said. As we came into land, the violent buffeting increased as crosswinds battered the transport.

  “Four hundred.”

  I checked Eva to find her glassy eyes locked on me. Blood was streaming now, covering her chin and splattering her white medical smock.

  “Three hundred.”

  The grinding of the landing gear coming down brought another kick to the craft.

  And then brilliant daylight and absolute calm.

  “Two hundred.”

  And then silence.

  Someone at the back swore into the unnatural quiet.

  I shared his sentiments—the last thruster had failed.

  Trees, land, a scattering of transports, people… and a seemingly bottomless chasm, were coming up at us fast.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d faced almost certain death. It surprised me, once again, how unexpectedly blank my mind was. No last moment regrets or latent desires popped forth, no flashes of my life. It was all very empty… and calm.

  “Brace!”

  I did think something then. I thought, this is going to hurt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Eric

  THE TEMPORARY BASE was a shambles, but we had made it down, mostly. I still had no idea where Eva was, and Landon was also missing in action.

  “What happened to the comms?” I shouted over the thunderous downpour. I stood huddled at the tree line, soaked to the skin, under the semi-protective branches of an abnormally sturdy tree.

  Marik made a slicing motion across his throat. “Dead,” he mouthed, water sluicing down his face and trickling from his nose and chin.

  Just one more fucking problem. Although earbuds were useless when you had to shout to make yourself heard. “How many more incoming?”

  “Two, I think,” Marik replied, his head in close to make himself heard. “We lost comms—all comms. That’s what I was coming to tell you.”

  My gut clenched, I’d been so busy dealing with the fallout, I hadn’t had time to do more than react. We had lost four transports. All of them crashed into the chasm in the rain as they tried to land. We’d lost contact with a fifth one not long after it left the ship. I presumed it had also crashed. The surviving colonists had scattered into the surrounding area in an attempt to escape the storm. There were widespread injuries—both the descent and landings were brutal—and then there was the insane weather.

  I’d never seen people flattened to the ground by rain before today. Unloading colonists so the transports could return to the ship for the next wave had been a challenge of heroic proportions.

  “Landon?” I half shouted, half mouthed, swiping a hand over my face. While the trees offered some shelter, the driving gusts that lashed us with horizontal rain, meant the protection was limited at best.

  Marik stabbed a finger up at the black sky. “On the last transport.”

  “Shit.” I blinked back the water and squinted toward the gorge. The nearest landed transport was no more than twenty paces away, but with such poor visibility, it could have slipped into the chasm, and we’d never know. If the transport comms were down, what else was down? “Did they confirm the launch?”

  “Yes. Lost contact immediately after.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  Marik lowered his head to study his wrist plate, scrubbing at the wet surface, and then held up six fingers. “Six minutes.”

  I peered out again, half expecting to hear the drone of approaching chaos.

  “That’s not all.” Marik leaned in close again, his voice still barely audible under the tumultuous deluge. “We found Brent in the last batch.”

  “Eva?”

  Marik shook his head. “Said the Commander sent him ahead.”

  I found marginal comfort in knowing that Landon wouldn’t leave Eva there. Further, he would take personal responsibility for seeing her to a transport, but not a great comfort given neither of them were yet here.

  I gritted my teeth. “Did Brent say why he’d countered my order?” I’d headed planet side with the second wave of transports once I realized the difficulties they were experiencing on the ground. Eva should have been in the third wave with Lai and the others considered to be key personnel. I’d left very clear instructions.

  Lai and the others had arrived. Eva had not.

  Marik shrugged and hollered, “Something about not being safe to transport her. The guy is fucking hapless,” he finished as if that were explanation enough.

  Brent wasn’t my favorite person. I didn’t trust myself to speak to the man without punching the dick in a way that would leave permanent damage.

  A mighty crash shook the ground. Our focus swung toward the chasm like the answer might be found there.

  “What the fuck was that?” Another boom, another tremble to the ground. This one was closer. The nearby colonists froze, eyes darting out into the storm or into the trees as they tried to pinpoint the source of danger. From the right, splashing and slipping through the muddy ground, arrived a military team with Riley in their midst.

  I swore under my breath. Being so tiny, she was likely to be crushed. What the fuck were they doing letting her out around?

  “We lost the ship,” Riley shouted through the downpour.

  Another explosive crash saw several of the nearby people duck.

  “What do you mean we lost the ship?” I hollered back. “I know we lost contact.”

  The sudden absence of rain shocked everyone into silence. Sunlight flooded the area, and then came the familiar drone of an approaching transport.

  Everyone’s faces turned skyward.

  “Fuck!” It was coming in fast. “It doesn’t sound right,” I muttered, my throat hoarse from spending endless hours shouting.

  “One thruster.” Marik confirmed my suspicion.

  “Clear the area!” My roared order sent the nearest colonists who had ventured out into the misty clearing, scrambling back for the tree line. Except Riley, who had frozen on the spot.

  Fisting her collar, I half carried her out of the way… which wasn’t difficult given she weighed next to nothing.

  The drone ceased. I glanced over my shoulder. Ignoring Riley’s attempts to di
slodge my fist. Those not yet running, ran, or tried to, hampered by the treacherous, muddy ground. Seconds later, a deafening cacophony accompanied a transport ploughing into the nearby trees. Trees, which took the word robust to a whole other level, and brought the transport to a swift and juddering halt.

  “Stop manhandling me!” Riley said, batting my hand away. No sooner did I release her then she took off for the crashed transport at a sprint.

  “Fuck!”

  “I’ll get medical,” Marik called.

  I followed hot on Riley’s heels. Ahead, smoke rose, and shattered branches and leaves rained down.

  “Is Eva in there?” Riley asked, skidding to a stop. She was surprisingly nimble on the muddy ground.

  Another crash rocked the forest in the distance. Riley’s earlier words brought a half-formed fear of what it was. “Yeah, we think so,” I replied. Ahead of us was the transport. The loading door had buckled, and it hissed and juddered as the mechanism tried and failed to open. A team was already working to force the door open manually.

  A series of dull thunks came from inside the transport giving an indication someone inside was alive. “Any injured by the crash?” I asked a nearby member of our military who was organizing the people outside.

  “No, trees stopped it dead,” he said, gesturing at the mist-enshrouded wreck.

  “She’s going to be alright,” Riley said quietly. She was wringing her hands.

  I wanted to hug her. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  “That’s unusually optimistic for you, Riley,” I said, feeling an unwitting smile find its way to my face.

  I felt fucking useless. The mobile medical team jogged over. They had worked tirelessly for many hours and their white medical attire was lost under layers of mud. I ran tense fingers through my hair, fighting the urge to go over and interfere. I didn’t have any special skill in popping a buckled door and I would only get in the way. Brute force wasn’t going to help, but if they didn’t open it soon, I was prepared to give it a go. She has to be alright.