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

by L. V. Lane

  While I was confident hunger would sort out their aversions over time, we couldn’t afford for seventeen percent of our population to be out-of-action, taking from our stocks without putting back.

  “I still think your idea to jettison him out the airlock was a sound one,” I muttered as soon as we were alone.

  Landon’s eyes were distant as he stared in the general direction of the exit ramp. He appeared to not have heard my comment. “I want you to watch him during the journey.” His focus shifted back to me.

  “Watch Brent, why? You think he fucked something else up?”

  “Shenson has been discussing Eva with him, although she’s very cagey when I ask for updates. Brent is a bit scared of you since… and if there is any positive news, I’m confident he will be all too happy to share if you hang around him looking pissed.”

  I laughed. “Not a problem. I can do that.” By unspoken cue, we started walking back down the ramp.

  “And have a chat with the technical team, see what equipment they have that might be useful to Brent.”

  “Sure.” Great! Now we were carving up our limited tech supplies.

  “I have concerns about Riley,” Landon said.

  I stopped dead. Noticing my absence, Landon also stopped and turned back.

  “What about Riley?” I demanded. “Riley has to be the least concerning person in the colony.”

  “She’s been circumspect with information,” Landon said at length. “She told me the communications are being blocked.”

  “Blocked by who? Is it the city?” No wonder she was looking so drained.

  “That’s just it, she doesn’t know. She’s able to connect to the satellites; Lai has been able to monitor the weather for a while now. Our communication appears to be purposely blocked and that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You think she’s lying?”

  “It’s not as if we have the skills to know.” Landon’s expression turned guarded. “Cathy visited me. She expressed suspicions, said Riley had been working on her own a lot, and late into the night. That she was withholding information from me about the ship failures. I called Riley in to see me, and she pretty much admitted to everything Cathy had suspected.”

  “We knew the ship failure was suspicious and there are plenty of reasons why Riley might be disinclined to discuss it.” I didn’t feel particularly warm and fuzzy toward Cathy. She had a black and white mindset that was a little too rigid for my liking. “If you ask me, she feels responsible by association because she’s a Technologist. Eva trusts her, why would you suddenly distrust Riley now?”

  “Eva had a prediction that we will never know because she happened to be sedated with a scanner that Brent claimed was faulty. I’ve never heard of a faulty scanner, ever. Then there’s the ship, which was sabotaged by someone with Technologist-like skills.”

  “You think the scanner was tampered with? Did you tell Eva?”

  “I believed it unhelpful to share the news with Eva given she’s not predicting.” Landon started to walk again, and I fell in step beside him.

  “Eva trusted Riley,” I repeated, but I wondered if I was clinging to a lie. “She still trusts her,” I added quietly.

  Landon’s face hardened. “Cathy can be a prize bitch at times, but she was right to come to me. Riley was withholding. Her response when I questioned her sounded plausible, but I’m no predictive, Eric. I don’t have an innate sense of truth or lie. All I have is facts and a gut feeling, neither of which are favoring Riley’s case.”

  I swallowed back a sick feeling, and when I glanced across at Landon, the sensation increased. “You’re not telling me something?”

  Landon remained tight-lipped as we hit the tree line.

  “If this is to do with Eva, you better not keep me in the fucking dark.”

  “It’s not Eva, not directly anyway. It’s Riley. I always assumed Eva’s faith in the Technologist was due to a prediction. Just before we left the ship, Eva admitted it was not.”

  “What the fuck is it based on, then?”

  “The absence of a negative prediction,” Landon said.

  “That’s not a good enough reason. Not after Edson-46.” Was I reading Riley wrong? Was my judgement clouded?

  “I agree,” Landon said.

  “We should talk to Eva. I’ve not had any time lately. She might have recovered.”

  Landon shook his head, smile sad. “We both know she would have told us if that were the case. I have her sorting stocks. It must be the worst job you could think of for someone with her agile mind… barring possibly food preparation. Eva harbors a strong aversion to native food according to Doctor Sull. Do you seriously think Eva would be managing stocks without a word of complaint if she were predicting? Not a single demand has been made. Not an imperious request since we left the ship.”

  “Shit.” I ran tense fingers through my hair. “I can’t even think about that possibility, I just can’t.”

  “It might be a blessing,” Landon said softly. “This way, whoever is pulling the strings in the camp won’t see Eva as a target now.”

  “You know how wrong that sounds.” That possibility disturbed me. During my younger life, Eva had driven me to the point of despair with her predictions, her manipulations, and her ability to spot my adolescent lies. Yet now, the thought of Eva not predicting damn near broke my heart.

  “The team I sent to reconnoiter the city have failed to return,” Landon said. “Marik confirmed they are dead. I can no longer claim to wholeheartedly trust Riley, and trouble is brewing in more ways than one. Eva is still alive, Eric.” Landon’s voice turned unexpectedly cold. “If the sedation hadn’t worked, and she could still predict, then that might not be the case.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Landon

  “LET’S GO OVER why this is a good idea.” I leaned back into my pilot chair and crossed my booted feet over the severed hunk of the transport nose at a convenient height for a footstool. Unconvinced about the merits of sending a drone over the city, I thought getting comfortable was a good start.

  Riley sat opposite in the navigator chair, and to my left, using an empty container as a seat, was Cathy. From the glum expression on her face, she wasn’t impressed with her seat.

  “The city is there. Sooner or later, we need to investigate it.” Riley spoke in her usual measured tone. Despite the underlying unease within the main camp, and the obvious strain of knowing she was under suspicion, she had applied herself diligently to her work.

  I understood we needed to investigate the city at some point. But did it need to be now? Could we wait until the second ship arrived? The key to possibilities was in my hand. If I opened the door, it might ease our troubles.

  It might equally make them worse… And after Marik’s earlier report, I thought this idea was a particularly bad one.

  “The drone is a safe option,” Cathy said. “The city aided your transport during the storm. I cannot see why a drone would be seen as hostile.”

  Her enthusiasm took me by surprise since she generally wore a scowl around Riley. And I could think of one very good reason—namely the lost reconnaissance team—but neither Riley nor Cathy knew about that. “How many drones do we have?”

  “One,” Riley said. “This one.”

  I raised a questioning eyebrow. Sending our only drone miles away to view the city didn’t sound like a good idea at all.

  “We made it,” Riley elaborated.

  As I cast a concerned look around my near derelict ‘office’, I wondered how much of it was now in this cobbled together drone. Every time I walked back in here, something was missing or moved. The ever-changing environment was starting to mess with me. The battered transport was hanging on by a thread as it was. The door to my converted bedroom opened sporadically at best. Two days ago, my room had suddenly turned into a fridge. I’d been trapped in there for an hour because some idiot had removed my prying tool. I suspected Marik, and although he denied any such theft, the tool had
mysteriously reappeared later.

  I had never seen anyone in here but had a mental image of the technical team lying in wait for me to leave. “How often do you come here?”

  Riley looked shifty. “Most days.”

  “Did you take anything vital in your foraging?”

  Cathy’s face flushed.

  Riley fidgeted in the seat. “We put it straight back!”

  “Yeah, I loved freezing my ass off.”

  Riley grimaced. “We couldn’t get a panel off and Marik said he knew where there was a tool we could use for leverage.”

  I would be having words with Marik about that later.

  “Then we found a part we could use on the drone, and we got distracted…” Cathy’s stuttered interjection trailed off under my censorious glare and she finally clamped her mouth shut.

  “We found another source of parts,” Riley said.

  That admission did not provide any comfort. I mentally cringed and wondered what else they had ripped apart and would imminently cease working.

  “The drone is working perfectly now. We’ve done several test flights.”

  I resisted the urge to make a derogatory comment about seeking my permission, and instead asked, “And if something happens to it?”

  “We could make another one,” Riley said. “Not easily, but we could.”

  I was reluctant to take any risks, but there were a myriad of positive impacts such an investigation might have. Morale was at an all-time low. The colonists had realized something was amiss when there were no trips back to the abandoned ship for supplies. In the interests of not facilitating rumors, I’d revealed that the ship had been destroyed. Food supplies had stabilized at borderline starvation levels—we weren’t exactly hunter-gatherer equipped.

  Then there was the looming possibility that there might not be a second ship. A detail I did not intend to reveal yet. During the earliest days of colonization, I’d used its planned arrival as a distraction. But we’d never received the expected communication from the sponsor when we exited interplanetary speed, and that worried me a great deal. Now, with the communications still ‘blocked’ and no known way around it, we would first learn of the second ship if and when it arrived.

  What we had now might be all we ever had. Other rumors were spreading, and I didn’t need Eva to predict trouble was brewing.

  Time was closing in on the anticipated arrival of the next ship. Our footprint was expanding with forty-eight satellite camps, including Base-44 which had become a secondary hub of sorts. The colonists were occupied for the time being, but the expansion phase was almost over.

  I couldn’t distract the population permanently. It was morally ambiguous that I did so now. But I also didn’t like the thought of people going on a rampage if I shattered their last hopes. We were isolated. Far from the laws and constraints that kept a civilization civilized. I was doing what I thought best, distracting them long enough for what we had here to become a new normal.

  Until then, the possibility of exploring the city might be another useful kind of distraction.

  “How long will it take you to prep?” I asked.

  Riley fidgeted in the navigator chair. “It’s ready now. And the weather appears favorable.”

  I raised both eyebrows. “You popped over on the off chance, hmm?”

  “You’re generally quite decisive,” Riley said.

  Cathy beamed like the drone launch was a done deal, which I thought a little premature. But really, what were my options here? Wait until the ship was due? That would reek even worse of a distraction. “Now is as good a time as any. Are you monitoring from the ops transport?”

  “Yes. I’ll check in with Lai before launch for the latest weather, but otherwise, we are ready to proceed. We will track its progress from the operations transport but won’t have any pictures until it returns. The tech controlling the cameras is intelligent and will focus on structures and movement. We trialed it on Base-44 since its location is partially exposed being next to the lake.”

  “Okay, you have approval. I’ll be over later.”

  They both jumped from their seats and exited in an enthusiastic rush. I watched them before scrubbing at my tired eyes. Cathy appeared to be working with Riley well enough, although her prior comments about the Technologist left me troubled. The sponsors had been clear. I had orders to kill Riley at the first hint of trouble. I thought I had enough reasons already. Yet I still held back.

  I wondered if this made me negligent. Riley had skills that were incredibly useful. Killing her unnecessarily, even from a purely clinical point of view, would be a loss. Niggling doubts remained due to Eva’s lack of prediction, a prediction that could have further supported Riley’s innocence or exposed her as a threat.

  The drone launch was important for the colony morale, but after, and in the absence of insights from Eva, I thought the Technologist’s time might be drawing to an end.

  Resigned to this hard path, I rose from my seat. Donning shell armor, I headed out the transport. It was bright outside, the sunlight dappled through the huge trees as I made my way toward the chasm along the wooden path. It had been raining less frequently of late. I could only hope that was a good sign and not a prelude to it becoming even worse.

  Planked walkways joined most of the central buildings and transports. A few had even begun to lead out into the extended area. But a lot of pathways remained bare dirt, and while usually muddy, after a period of several days without rain the ground had dried into a hard crust. The warmth had brought an influx of birds, and a medley of screeching and yakking was interspersed by the occasional extended bong. I had no idea what was making the bong, but it had rapidly become a source of irritation.

  I checked in on Lai and Arden, then met with Reeve and her team to get an update on the morning’s patrol. The rain set in while I spoke to her under the shelter of an awning. By the time we were done, the sky had turned dark and murky, and the ground to either side of the walkway was reduced to mud.

  Eric and Brent had returned earlier, and I was keen to find out if there had been any headway regarding the illness that still troubled some of the colonists. I splashed my way along the walkways to the medical transport where I found Brent pouring over data at his viewer. Unclipping my helmet, I drew it from my head.

  Brent looked up as I approached. “Landon!”

  Brent’s enthusiastic greeting was disconcerting considering I’d given serious thought to ending him back on the ship.

  “Any updates on the illness our colonists are suffering from?”

  “I don’t have a solution. Not yet,” Brent said. The sudden roar of rain hitting the transport roof gave him pause, and he lifted his voice to compete. “But I’ve been working toward one and I’m confident I can create a vaccine with more time.”

  “That sounds a little old fashioned.” The Empire hadn’t used a vaccine in a millennium, or longer. The only knowledge I had of vaccines came from history lessons.

  “It’s a valid approach in our situation. We have adapted to live in sterile environments, and a new colony would usually be contained. Also, this planet’s biodiversity is unique.”

  I thought some of the environments I’d experienced were a long way off ‘sterile’ but perhaps the doctor had led a more sheltered life. “Have you spoken to Rachel?”

  “No, I don’t believe the geneticist can help with this.” Brent’s eyes skittered away. “A vaccine is a good option with our limited capability here.”

  I was about to insist Brent discuss it with Rachel, when Marik burst into the transport, dripping and splattering water in his wake. “You’re needed urgently at the operations transport.”

  Nodding, I left Brent with the promise I would be back, and then followed Marik out of the medical transport.

  “It’s the drone,” Marik said the moment we were alone. “We’ve lost the signature. They think it’s been destroyed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Eva

  I M
ADE MY way through the camp for my second meeting of the day with the psychologist. Many days of such meetings had brought little in the way of resolution, nor any indication the requirement for them might cease soon.

  I had come to loathe the self-analysis sessions with a passion.

  A fellow colonist called out a greeting as I passed, and I returned a suitable reply. I’d always avoided social interactions before the ‘Brent’ incident, but for some inexplicable reason, people now felt the right to interrupt me with their pleasantries.

  The giant trees provided shelter from the worsening weather, but the combination of heat and rain made for an unpleasant experience. The shell armor, which Landon in one of our brief meetings insisted I wear, did not help either. I hated it almost as much as I hated my therapy sessions.

  As I reached the transport, which had been my home for three days post arrival, I suffered a sense of acute depression. The act of entering the dull interior brought a sensation of claustrophobia even before I met the smiling doctor’s face.

  “Eva, come on in,” Shenson said, indicating the seat for me to take. “Please, tell me about your day.”

  That was precisely what I did, filling the therapy time with succinct mechanical details of where I went and what I did, and not a single genuine detail of how I really felt.

  The psychologist’s daily intrusion was one of many adjustments I’d endured since that infamous day when Brent administered me with a sedative. The same questions were repeated every day. In the morning, I was questioned about my sleep, the hours of rest, any troubling thoughts or dreams, and how I was feeling. In the evening, details about my day… every single detail. It seemed the doctor wished to know every nuance of my boring life from the moment I awoke to the moment I went to sleep, and what I dreamed about!