The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  The Furthest Planet

  Sol Space Book Three

  James Ross Wilks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover design by Christen Eure

  Copyright © 2019 James Ross Wilks

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13: 9781796940862

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to Steve, my brother from another mother.

  Prologue

  There was someone at the door, which was strange, because there was never anyone at the door.

  Billy Sinclair looked around at his fellow security guards in hopes that they would offer up an explanation, but none did. Drea Liu, Dillon Masters, and Al Lamont all reflected his blank stare back at him. Billy turned to the monitor to examine the figure standing in the receiving area.

  The man was tall, broad, heavy browed, and slick-bald. He wore standard EVA suit undergarments, which made sense, since the only way to get to the Artemis Mine was to walk or drive on the lunar surface. The mine, a scientific endeavor designed to reveal geological data about Earth’s original satellite, had fallen out of regular use nearly a decade ago, and now visits by scientists were few and far between. The facility remained as a line item on some governmental science budget, however, and so it was staffed by four security guards who were glad enough of the pay, mind-numbingly boring though the work might be.

  The idea of a visitor was certainly not impossible. Neither the front door nor the airlock’s entrance and exit were locked. Once a prospective visitor cycled through that airlock, they entered the receiving area and encountered their first true obstruction: a heavy metal door. That door let into the combination guardroom, receiving office, and records station that Billy and his fellow guards now occupied.

  The last visitors listed on the log were members of a geological team more than seven months prior, and they had done little more than conduct a tour for a few new team members. The Artemis Mine was currently on the demarcation between the light and dark sides of the moon and far off the beaten track; they simply did not get visitors. Billy hadn’t noticed the man on the cameras until he had literally pressed the doorbell.

  Billy quickly cycled through the camera feeds and saw the small rover parked a respectful distance outside the true front door, lunar dust already settling over the tires. He saw the man’s EVA suit hanging neatly on a hook in the airlock, though it nearly floated in gravity a scant sixth of Earth’s. Billy looked back at his fellow guards and realized that they were all expecting him to do something.

  “Anyone expecting company?” he asked, somewhat dumbfounded.

  They all replied that they were not.

  The man pressed the button again, and the doorbell chimed softly in the room.

  Billy shook himself and brought his training to mind.

  “Sir,” he said, pressing the intercom button, “you have entered a private research facility.”

  The man looked up at the camera as Billy spoke, and the effect was uncanny. Billy felt as though he were staring right into his eyes.

  Billy cleared his throat and continued. “I have no record of a scheduled visit by any authorized personnel. Please state your name and business.”

  The man smiled warmly in greeting. “William Grant. I’m afraid that I was out for a drive and strayed too far for too long. I’m out of water and food, and my rover is close to dead.”

  Billy cocked an inquiring eyebrow at the others in the room.

  “Out here?” Drea asked.

  “I wanted to cross the horizon,” the man explained, a sheepish grin on his face. “I thought it was closer than it was.”

  Drea shot Billy a look, and he cursed and took his finger off the intercom button. He hadn’t meant for the man to overhear her.

  “Look, if this place is top secret or something, I can just wait out here while you call someone to come get me,” the man offered. “I am really thirsty though. Any chance you have any water in there?”

  Some of his longer stints in an EVA suit came to mind, and Billy suddenly felt a great sympathy for the man. Many of the newer suits had water feeds, but there were plenty that didn’t. Any extended time in an EVA suit was generally miserable, and he knew well how thirsty and uncomfortable one could become.

  “Just a second,” Billy said before turning to the others. He took his finger off the intercom button and asked, “What do you think?”

  Dillon shrugged and cocked a thumb towards the kitchen. “Got plenty of water and food.”

  Drea sucked her teeth for a few seconds, then said, “It’s okay by me.”

  Al just grunted.

  Billy understood. It wasn’t as if they were guarding anything valuable. Besides the limited dorm rooms, the generator, the kitchen, a few restrooms, and the day-to-day files in the room around them, there was only the mine, and the mine was nothing but rock. There was nothing to steal. He had little doubt that four armed guards could handle one visitor fresh off what was likely an exhausting EVA drive. And they were bored. More than anything, Billy thought, that was a reason to help this man out. It was a change in routine, a story to tell, however small. They were six days into their two-week shift, and this was about as exciting as things were likely to get.

  “Did you check him for weapons?” Drea asked.

  Billy had almost forgotten. He ran the scan. Nothing.

  “He’s clean,” he reported.

  Drea and Dillon both stood gingerly in the light gravity. “Well, let him in, I guess,” she said.

  Billy crossed to the heavy door, threw back three bolts, and opened it. There the man stood, clad in white silk. He was taller than Billy had realized, about two meters, and now that he saw him up close, he noted that his head was not shaved. It simply grew no hair. He had no eyebrows either. Perhaps alopecia, Billy thought, or maybe the byproduct of radiation therapy.

  “Thanks,” the man said, and then he was gone. Billy felt a light breeze, and a second later he processed that the man had moved past him so quickly that he had not tracked the movement. He turned in time to see the stranger behind Al, who was still sitting in his chair. There was a sharp crack, and then Al’s neck was broken. His eyes were still open, and he looked at Billy imploringly.

  “What-?” Billy stammered as he reached for his gun.

  Drea had the same idea. She had her pistol free of its holster, but before she could aim it, the man had moved, impossibly fast, towards Dillon. He stuck Dillon in the center of his chest with the heel of his hand, and the blow sent the man flying three meters across the room and into a wall. The body collapsed limply and lightly to the ground, and Billy saw that the wall was dented.

  Drea had a bead on him now. In training, she had always been the best of them. She flicked off the safety and fired, but the man turned to the side and the bullet struck the wall behind him. She fired again, and this time he was below the shot. Before she could fire a third time, he crossed to her and grasped her gun. Rather than wrench it from her grip, he simply turned her gun and arm until they were facing her chest. He overpowered her as though she were a child.

  She looked at him, wide-eyed and frightened in that moment. The look was clear. She was no threat to him; he didn’t need to kill her. He smiled sympathetically and pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot echoed in the small room, and as his partner f
ell, Billy remembered that he had his own gun in hand. He pointed it at the man, the terrible visitor whom he felt sure had just killed his three co-workers. He held it more like a cross warding off a vampire than a weapon.

  The man regarded him silently, the sickening sympathetic smile still plastered on his face. A hundred movie standoffs flitted through Billy’s head, and he cursed and flicked off the safety on his pistol.

  Before he could fire, the man took two rapid steps forward and casually smacked the gun out of his grasp. The blow seemed offhand, as though the man were simply shooing a fly away, but Billy felt and heard bones in his hand break. The gun sailed behind a desk and bounced lightly a few times. Billy clutched his hand to his chest as pain welled up his arm. He gasped as the pain quickly turned to agony.

  Billy surveyed the room. Three dead security guards. One broken hand. Four desks with surfaces. Chairs, water bottles, instruments, a deck of cards. One superhuman psychopathic killer. His mind was taking inventory for him. A voice in his head screamed at him, shock! You’re in shock! He catalogued that too.

  The man regarded him slowly, still smiling, more in curiosity than sympathy now. “What’s your name?” he asked, as though they had just met at a cocktail party.

  “Billy,” he replied.

  “Really?!” the man said, seeming pleasantly surprised. “That’s my name too! Used to be, I mean.”

  “Used to be?” Billy asked. He looked around for his gun, more out of curiosity than anything else.

  “From when I was human,” the man said casually. “I was named after my father. My first father.”

  “Me too,” Billy offered.

  “Hum,” the man said, and put his hands on his hips. “I guess we have something in common. What are the odds?” he asked rhetorically.

  “I don’t know,” Billy said.

  The smile and conviviality disappeared from the other man’s face. He was cold and stern and his hairless brows came down to shade his eyes. Billy saw that he didn’t even have eyelashes.

  “Now listen to me very closely, Billy son of William. I want you to go out that door and into the airlock.” His voice was stern and grave, like a funeral director’s.

  Billy began to shake his head no. This man would very likely kill him, he knew, but the idea of stepping out onto the surface of the moon, gasping in naked space while his body bloated, his blood boiled, and his extremities froze was too horrible to face. He had no problem deciding that he would much rather die as the others had, shot or broken.

  “Relax,” the man said, “I’m not going to cycle it. I left something in there, and I need you to get it.”

  Billy did not entirely trust this stranger, but he did as he was asked. Still clutching his hand to his chest, he stumbled through the door into the receiving area, and from there to the airlock door. It was still pressurized from their visitor’s entrance, and so the door opened when he pulled. The man followed him.

  Inside he saw the man’s EVA suit that he had seen on the monitor as well as four others. He didn’t know if the suit was what he had been sent for, and so he looked around the room. That was when he noticed a black case, slightly smaller than a suitcase, tucked into a corner. He must have missed it in the camera feed.

  “That’s it,” the voice came from behind him. “Get it.”

  Still shaking, Billy crossed to it and picked it up by the slick black handle. It was heavy, probably over two hundred kilos on Earth. Lunar gravity rendered it a more manageable thirty-five kilos, but it was all Billy could do to lift it one-handed. He struggled and strained and finally managed to pull it out of the airlock and into the receiving room.

  The man shook his head as though in warm disbelief. “God, you’re weak.” The way he said it made Billy think that he was referring not specifically to him, but to humans as a whole. Suddenly Billy thought of the news story that had broken a month ago and dominated the newsfeeds ever since: secret warships constructed by the US to defend Sol space against an alien empire.

  He looked at the man with new fear and suspicion. “The way you move… you’re not-” he cleared his throat again. “You’re not human, are you?”

  The man shook his head. “No, Billy, I’m not. Now I want you to listen very carefully.”

  Billy nodded.

  “I can kill you anytime I like. Do you believe that?”

  Billy nodded again.

  “Good. I don’t want to do that because I need you to lead me into the mine. And because I like your name. I was going to have you carry this for me, but I really can’t stand to watch you huff and puff with it for the next twenty minutes. So I’ll make you a deal: you behave and don’t try to escape or call anyone, and I won’t kill you. How does that sound?”

  Billy swallowed. “Um, it sounds like a good deal.”

  The man smiled ironically. “Yes, it does.” He reached down and picked up the case by the handle, lifting it as though it were empty. “Take me to the mine,” he ordered, and Billy scrambled to fulfill his part of the bargain.

  The mine ran over a kilometer straight down into the lunar crust. Billy had only the dimmest idea of why it had been excavated; examination of substratum or something along those lines. The shaft, which was only ten meters around, was supported by girders on each side. An open-air elevator ran down the length of the shaft, and the entire thing was pressurized and filled with air. This had always struck Billy as wasteful, but then, so had his job. Before today, he couldn’t have imagined any reason to pay people to guard a hole in the ground. Despite the events of the previous ten minutes, he still couldn’t fathom what this man wanted or what he could possibly have to gain here.

  The elevator trundled downwards seemingly perpetually. It was interminably slow, and that filled Billy with an odd impatience, one that made little sense. He had the distinct feeling that this man would murder him when they reached the bottom, and yet the creaking elevator maddened him all the same.

  “What’s in the case?” he asked.

  The man turned to look at him, and as he did so, Billy thought he detected something inhuman in his movement even now. When he had been striking down his fellow guards, he had been faster than any person could be, almost faster than Billy could follow with his naked eye, but even at rest there was a preternatural quality about him. Something, Billy thought, alien.

  “Something alien,” the man replied, apparently reading his thoughts. He had blue eyes which scrutinized Billy as he spoke, taking in every reaction.

  “Why are you here?” Billy asked.

  “That’s a bit metaphysical for an elevator ride, don’t you think?” His reply was devoid of humor.

  “I mean why are you here? In this place.” Billy gestured at the rock walls that passed them as they descended.

  “Ah,” the man nodded. “It’s the deepest place on this moon. Best place,” he nodded down at the case, “for this.”

  The elevator stopped abruptly. There was little at the bottom of the kilometer-long shaft; just a few desks, chairs, several heaters, and some scientific equipment for taking readings that Billy couldn’t hope to identify.

  Billy took a breath, held it for a second, then asked, “Are you going to kill me?”

  The pseudo-sympathetic smile returned. “Yes, Billy, I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” the man said, looking him right in the eye, “the first reason is that you’ve seen me. I’ll be wiping all of the recordings on my way out, of course. The second reason is that you’ve seen this.” He gestured down at the case again. “The third reason, if you really need any more, is that I can’t have you telling anyone about this. It’ll take a few days for anyone to come out this way to check on you when you don’t report in, and I need that few days.”

  “But-” Billy tried to fight through the fear. There was a logical point he could seize on, he thought. “But, the deal. You said if I behaved you wouldn’t kill me.”

  “Well, I was really talking about for the next twenty minutes.�
� He seemed to think for a moment, examining his memories. “Maybe I made that clear, maybe I didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not a man of my word. I’m not even a man, really. And I don’t feel any worse about fooling you than you do about using treats to fool your cat into getting into a carrier before you take her to the vet. We’re just not-” he searched for the right words. “On the same level.”

  “But I don’t want to die.”

  The man nodded grimly as he advanced. “No one does. Sorry, Billy.”

  Chapter 1

  It was nearly time for dinner, and that made Amit Sadana nervous. He was alone in his cell, but he had no particular problem with that. Despite the swarms of people who had surrounded him as he grew up in Dharavi, he had always felt alone. The bare stone walls of the room he had occupied for the past month seemed more of an accurate reflection of his inner self than being surrounded by others ever had. There had been times, however, when he hadn’t been lonely.

  Those times were gone now. His faith hadn’t been shaken; it had been destroyed. The voice of God no longer spoke to him. When the Martian Separatists had taken charge of him from the crew of Gringolet, they had hacked his cranial implants and shut them down. He did not know if God had another way to talk to him. He hoped not. He did not want to hear from any deity who ordered him to kill children.

  The child. The memory of her still haunted Amit. The pale and dark-haired girl had wiped a tear from his cheek, then taken the gun from him. He had shot her father, killed him for all she knew, and still she had shown mercy to him. There was something of the divine in her in that moment, Amit thought. He did not know if the voice that had spoken to him had truly been the voice of God. He did not know now if there even was a God. He did know, however, that he could not kill a child, not again. Let God do with him as He would. Amit could not change what he was.

  These were the thoughts that dominated Amit’s mind while he was in the cell, and he had plenty of time for them. He had not been allowed books, outside information, due process, a call, a lawyer, or anything that indicated that his “arrest” was anything other than incarceration by people who cared nothing for the law. The guards were violent toward him, and sometimes a man named Bao came to ask him questions. He answered truthfully, but that did not make Bao any kinder.