The Calypsis Project Boxed Set (Books 1-2 - The Echo-Alpha Duology)

by Brittany M. Willows

  Every surface was coated in an icy sheen. Frozen particles danced through the frigid air. Emergency lights embedded in the floor panels gave a brief impression of warmth, but that illusion quickly dissolved when Kenon noticed the frost hugging his entire body from head to toe.

  He growled in frustration, unable to recall how he came to be here. That memory was resting on the edge of his consciousness, teetering just beyond his reach. He reached down and fiddled with the straps around his waist. The silver buckle came free and he drifted away from the bulkhead in zero-g, coming to a stop in front of the command console.

  Save for a few small monitors that displayed standby messages, it was totally inactive. In fact, as far as he could tell, everything was offline. Even his suit’s systems had fallen victim to whatever knocked out the shuttle’s power. Every element of his heads-up display had gone dark, and it seemed his shields were failing to recharge as well.

  Kenon lowered himself to the floor and gripped the back of the command chair to keep from floating away. Cracks permeated a thin layer of ice coating the headrest as the leather scrunched beneath his palm, and he leaned forward to clear the frost from the forward viewscreen.

  A seemingly infinite sea of black stretched out before him, completely devoid of life and lit only by a handful of faraway stars. As if sparked by the winking lights, his memory returned.

  “I won’t say good-bye,” a woman’s voice rang in the young warrior’s skull—the voice of his human companion, Alana Carmen. “No, please! Lance!” Her desperate screams bursting over the speakers as Pioneer entered the Nepheran portal were the last thing he could remember prior to waking here.

  At the sound of movement behind him, Kenon cast a glance over his shoulder. Dr. Chambers and Lieutenant Knoble were beginning to stir. Their frost-encrusted bodies were strapped securely into the bulkhead seats just as his had been.

  Knoble slowly lifted his head. He pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned, “Goddamn . . . What the hell happened?”

  Dr. Chambers opened her mouth to respond, but broke into a coughing fit instead and gave the Lieutenant a dismissive wave when he shot a concerned look in her direction. Once she’d recovered, she released her own buckle and drifted over to Kenon.

  “Where are we?” she asked no one in particular. Until they could bring Pioneer’s systems online, there was no way to determine their location.

  Joining the two of them by the window, Knoble sank into the command chair and inspected the monitors. He started to play with the controls, flipping switches and pushing buttons in the hope that it would generate some kind of response from Pioneer.

  Nothing changed.

  “This doesn’t add up . . .” Chambers mused, staring out the window. “We should be dead.”

  “Obviously someone made a miscalculation,” Knoble muttered without taking his focus off the console. Mere minutes after waking and he was already testing the scientist’s patience—a quality she seemed to be in no great supply of to begin with.

  She crossed her arms in a huff. “Orion is the single most intelligent AI known to man. There’s no way he could have mistaken the portal’s coordinates.”

  “I think you might be giving your creation a little too much credit, Doc. He’s an unusually clever computer program with a god complex, not the all-seeing master you make him out to be.”

  “This is no time to argue!” Kenon snapped. He had no desire to listen to these two bicker while there were more important things to be done. “We need to figure out where we are so we can reunite with the others. If they truly believed the portal would lead into a sun, they must also believe we died the moment we passed through it.” Then, in an attempt to appeal to the man’s softer side, he added, “Lieutenant, your stepdaughter must be in distress. Think of her now.”

  Knoble shook his head slightly. “You’re right,” he said, obviously recalling the pain of his and Alana’s final exchange. Though he’d put on a brave face, it was no secret that he had been close to tears himself. “Damn it, you’re right. So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “First things first, we have to reboot Pioneer’s systems.” Dr. Chambers tugged her jacket closed, struggling to maintain her body temperature in the frigid cabin. “Orion, status report!” she called out for the construct. When he did not respond, she drifted away from the console in search of the AI.

  Kenon and Knoble followed her into the aft cabin, where her Leh’kin test subject was floating peacefully in the containment tank. The warrior was totally unaware of the situation, still under the influence of heavy sedatives. Condensation trickled down his tank as the air around it began to warm, and Kenon wondered if the cold could have harmed him at all.

  But the Doctor was focused on something else.

  A set of blue lights positioned above a heavy door to the right. One by one, they began to light up. And when the last one illuminated, every last bit of color drained from her already pale features.

  Chambers dragged herself over to the door and punched a passcode into the control panel. Two musical pings rang out, and the words ACCESS GRANTED scrolled across the screen. The door’s locking mechanism released and it promptly slid open, revealing a narrow passage that couldn’t have been more than seven feet tall.

  Kenon looked to Lieutenant Knoble for an explanation as the Doctor carried on ahead, but he just shrugged and moved on. Neither of them could guess what had caused her uneasiness. Ducking into the passage, the young warrior trailed behind his human companions.

  At the other end of the passageway, Dr. Chambers was struggling to get another gateway open. She palmed the glass panel on the wall repeatedly, a look of panic plastered on her face. Each attempt was met with a loud buzz and a bold string of letters that read: ACCESS DENIED.

  A cyclone of holographic feathers erupted from a pedestal beside her as Orion’s avatar flickered into being. “I apologize for any inconvenience my absence may have caused.” He stretched his ruffled wings as though he had just awoken. “It appears my core unit has been busy. Unfortunately, since my fragment became active here, I have been unable to communicate with it. As a result, my functions are limited. But rest assured, I am doing everything in my power to bring the shuttle’s systems back online.”

  “Keep at it or we’re going to have a major problem on our hands,” Chambers said, trying once more to gain access to whatever lay beyond the gate. Again it denied her request. “And would you please, for the love of god, get this damn door open!”

  “Right away.” Orion sank back into the shuttle’s mainframe.

  The gate slid open and a whirring sound howled through Pioneer’s metal skeleton, announcing the return of the artificial gravity generator.

  ————

  Dr. Charlotte Chambers marched into the storage compartment. The circular room was bathed in the cool blue glow of power coils protruding from the walls. These coils fed numerous wires and coolant tubes under the elevated floor panels, all of which led to the same place.

  A ring of frosted bulbs running the outer edge of the ceiling flared to life with a hollow clang.

  In the center of the room, nested within a nexus of converging conduits, stood a cryogenic sleep capsule. Its convex hatch sat ajar. Thin tendrils of mist seeped out through the crack, spilling over the floor. Then the ice-encrusted hatch began to rise, and the streamers became clouds.

  Chambers raised her hand in an unspoken order for Knoble and Kenon to stay put while she continued into the mist. Every step felt heavy, encumbered—almost like she had weights chained to her ankles. When the air cleared, those weights became boulders.

  Inside the capsule lay a young man whose gaunt face looked almost like that of a corpse. He was ghastly pale, with dark circles hanging below sunken eyes. The lower halves of his limbs were black—ridged like tree bark. Some of these contractures had even spread to his cheekbones. And with each shallow breath he drew, Chambers could see the veins pulse beneath his translucent skin.

  “Doc
?” Knoble took a step toward her. “What’s going on?”

  Chambers thrust her hand out again. “Go back to the cabin,” she said. When neither he nor the Drahkori made a move to leave, she turned and repeated herself more firmly.

  Still they stood, looking between her and the cryo capsule. It was clear her behavior had worried them, and rightly so. But if they stayed here any longer, they would only be putting their own lives at risk.

  “Look, I promise I will explain everything later. But unless you want to leave this shuttle in a body bag, you need to leave right now,” she insisted.

  Without further ado, Knoble led Kenon out of the room.

  As the door slid shut behind them, Dr. Chambers moved to the capsule and leant over the frame. She pressed her fingers to the side of the sleeping man’s neck to check his pulse.

  His eyelids fluttered open at her touch, revealing the haze that shrouded his irises. The grayish swirls lapped at the edges of his pupils, threatening to steal his vision entirely. Squinting through the fog, he studied the woman looming over him.

  “Charlotte?” he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  Her lips curved slightly as the tears began to flow. Even after all these years, past the wrinkles and graying hair, he still recognized her. “Hi, Desmond.”

  Desmond Pérez, the love of her life.

  They met under the most improbable circumstances in a world suffocated by hatred and disease. If someone had told her she would tie the knot with a man like him, she would have laughed.

  They were total opposites. She was a cynic, and he was an optimist. Yet, somehow, this clumsy son of a bitch had found a way around her walls and eventually won her heart with patience and devotion.

  He reached up to her face and paused, perhaps wondering if she was truly here or if this was some dream—some vivid hallucination conjured by his dwindling sanity. Then she took his hand, pressed his palm against her freckled cheek, and his uncertainty turned to joy.

  He threw his arms around her. “It’s you! Oh, it’s really you,” he cried, clutching her lab coat as if he were holding on for dear life. After a moment, he withdrew and met her tearful gaze with a glimmer of hope. “Charlotte, does this . . . does this mean you found it? You found a cure?”

  Chambers opened her mouth to reply, but no sound came out. She couldn’t find the right words to tell him, so she simply clamped her jaws shut again and shook her head. Although Desmond nodded in understanding, his disappointment was clear.

  It was a hard reality to face.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why you’re awake,” she admitted. “I can only assume the capsule malfunctioned or opened in response to the shuttle’s emergency protocols. It’s all just speculation at this point.”

  “Wait, what emergency protocols? What happened?”

  As if the questions had summoned him, Orion coalesced above the pedestal on the opposite side of the capsule. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but—” He paused when he noticed the young man gaping at him, then cocked his brow at Dr. Chambers.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “I didn’t do this.”

  Orion returned his focus to Desmond, who was still ogling his holographic avatar. “Am I familiar to you?”

  “You look almost exactly like me.”

  “If you add thirty-odd years and ignore some of the more . . . obvious differences, yes,” Orion said with a flourish of his wings and a nod to the inky marks that covered his human counterpart’s skin. “Think of me as a long-lost brother.”

  “Why base your image off mine?” Desmond asked.

  “Upon my activation, I wanted to learn everything there was to know about my creator. I scanned her files. Every last thing from medical history to journal entries went through my processors that night. When I discovered what happened to you, how important you were to her, I fashioned this image. I was asked to remove it initially, but . . . she grew to appreciate it.”

  Chambers loudly cleared her throat to interrupt their chat, hoping Orion would steer the conversation back on track. Her skin prickled, heat rising under the collar of her sweater. She would have preferred to explain the AI’s avatar in her own words, rather than have him ramble on about it like some sappy love story.

  Orion fixed her with a quizzical look.

  Had he forgotten what he came here for? That shouldn’t have been possible—not unless his core unit had suffered considerable trauma. His memory was usually flawless.

  She stared at him. “You were saying . . .?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I have run Cy Diagnostics. The results are far from satisfactory. While I have restored the systems necessary to keep us alive, it appears the connection to the engines has been severed. It’s likely they were crushed when the portal closed. So, in short: we’re stranded.”

  “W-what portal? What’s going on?” Desmond turned to Chambers for an answer. It was then that she realized they had a lot of catching up to do, and she wasn’t entirely sure he could handle it.

  When Desmond entered cryo sleep, the only thing humanity had had to worry about was the rebels’ fight for dominance in the galaxy. The plague hadn’t spread beyond Earth, so the chance of another outbreak was slim. And as far as the general public was concerned, the existence of intelligent alien life was nothing more than a theory.

  “Orion, could you excuse us for a moment?” Chambers asked.

  The AI dipped his head and vanished from the pedestal.

  She called out one last command, knowing he would still be able to hear her over the comm. “And lock this compartment down on your way out!”

  The doors emitted a jarring buzz in response.

  Dr. Chambers returned her attention to Desmond. “Let’s get you out of there.” She helped him out of the capsule, placing a hand on his back to hold him steady. A pang of sadness shot through her at how thin—how sickly—he had become. She could count the vertebrae of his spine, feel every rib beneath his skin . . .

  Another thought dawned on her.

  I’m going to lose him again.

  There wasn’t even time to tell him about everything that had happened over the past three decades—not the good, the bad, or the ugly. Outside of cryo, Desmond could not survive. When she placed him in that capsule, he’d only had an hour to live.

  I’m going to lose him, and this time it’s going to be permanent. I have no cure, I can’t put him back to sleep.

  I’m out of options.

  There is nothing I can do.

  Chapter

  ———SIX———

  BSI Shuttle Pioneer, Unidentified Location

  A lonesome ping resonated from the console, increasing in speed and pitch as Knoble honed in on a radio frequency. After sifting through signals for an hour, this was the first to show any signs of activity. Now he had to hope it would connect him to someone who could get them out of this mess.

  “This is Lieutenant Lance Knoble of the UNPD. Can anyone hear me? Over,” he said, the words almost alien to him after repeating them so many times. Heavy static followed his call, crackling over the speakers. The sound was beginning to grate on his nerves.

  Trust me to have shit luck with radios, he thought grimly.

  With a huff, he repeated the message one last time. “Mayday, mayday. This is Lieutenant Lance Knoble of the UNPD’s Alpha Team. We are stranded in unknown space with minimal supplies and limited power. If anybody out there can hear this, then please, respond!”

  A beep announced that the connection had been lost.

  Knoble whipped his headset off and struck the console out of sheer frustration. There was food and water in the cargo hold fir five days—or a week if they starved themselves—but the shuttle’s oxygen wouldn’t even last for three.

  We’re going to die out here . . .

  “Have patience, Lieutenant.” Kenon spoke up from behind him. “Someone will find us eventually.”

  “Eventually,” Knoble echoed with an incredul
ous grunt, swiveling to face the Drahkori. The warrior was inspecting his weapons, which were laid out on a fold-out countertop in front of him. Wisps of steam spilled over a collection of crytal capsules he had set aside. “What part of ‘stranded in unknown space’ didn’t you understand?”

  “We cannot give up. Not yet.”

  “I’m not giving up. I’m being realistic. We have no idea where that portal sent us. For all we know, we could be in another galaxy! Ergo, our chances of rescue are slim to none.”

  Before Kenon could say anything more, the door to the aft compartment slid open. Dr. Chambers strode out across the rubberized deck, lips pressed together in a firm line. It was clear something had upset her, and Knoble was willing to bet that whatever she’d found in that cryo capsule was responsible.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  Chambers leveled a hard stare at him. “No one is to enter the storage compartment under any circumstances,” she said sternly. “If either of you disobey this order, I will personally tie you up in the cargo hold.”

  “Okay.” Knoble stared, waiting for her to continue, but she did not. “Would you mind telling us why?”

  She pointed to the silver band on her ring finger. “I was engaged,” she said with a slight crack in her voice. “The day the colony ships came to take us to Calypsis, my fiancé scanned positive for the Metamorphosis plague. To halt the progression of the virus, I admitted him to cryo sleep—where he was supposed to stay until I could develop a cure.” She paused, staring at the sapphires fragments embedded in the small trinket. “That capsule had a forty-year life time lock on it. However, something has caused it to open several years ahead of schedule.”

  That set off every alarm bell in Knoble’s head. “Wait, are you saying your fiancé is awake?” He had learned at an early age how deadly the plague was, how quickly it could spread. If it did not kill its victims in the process, it would transform them into nightmarish creatures—the kind of monsters people expected only to see in movies. The very thought of their twisted figures made his skin crawl.