Quantum

by Jess Anastasi

  He abandoned the shielding as a lost cause. The only play they had left was to disconnect the autopilot, which was taking them higher into the ether. Another few moments before they left the stratosphere altogether. Without the shielding, the craft would burn and implode almost in the same instant.

  His breath came too short, chest too tight as the same error message kept blinking at him, telling him autopilot could not be disengaged. Frecking christ, the higher they got, the harder it would be coming down. And he had no doubt they were going down. Whether or not they got destroyed in the planet’s atmosphere before they crashed was still up for contention.

  Swiveling the chair away from the all-but-useless control panel, he ducked down and pulled a section off the bottom of the console.

  “What are you doing?” Petros demanded as he wrenched out a whole bunch of wiring.

  “Manually disengaging autopilot. Until that’s offline, we’ve got no hope of doing anything.” He skipped through several wires until he found the one he needed and yanked it clean out of the micro-crystal panel.

  A new warning siren joined the dozen others already wailing, and the ship dropped sharply to the right, on the verge of going into an uncontrolled spiral. Zander’s stomach flipped up into his chest, and he grabbed hold of the chair’s armrest.

  Petros pulled the physical flight control from out of its recess and jerked them to the left to counteract the ship’s listing. The angle of their hard descent lessened, but they were still going down on a bad, barely-in-control trajectory. Her face twisted into a grimace as she fought for control of the vessel, yet the shuttle hardly responded. They were beyond hope. There was only one way this crisis was going to end.

  He tightened his harness and glanced over his shoulder to where his three crew were holding onto their seats in much the same way he had been. “We’re going down and it’s not going to be a soft landing. Brace for impact.”

  They might have responded, but he couldn’t hear them over the cacophony created by the warning systems. With a muttered curse, he leaned to the side and took another look at the wiring spilling out of the console, jerking out a few more cables until everything fell silent.

  Petros flashed him a grim smile as he straightened. “Thanks. The sirens were really starting to get on my nerves.”

  “Design fault, if you ask me. Surely if you’re about to crash, the last thing you need is all that noise hailing your imminent demise.” His voice came out a bit uneven, and he swallowed, his gaze riveting on the sight of the ground rushing toward them.

  “I like that you’re able to make a joke at a time like this, sir,” Petros puffed out, still straining against the controls, struggling to keep the ship upright and mostly straight.

  “In the last moments before impact you can at least call me Zander.”

  She glanced over at him, emotion flashing in her gaze. “Mae. And can I just say, this is the first time for me.”

  “You’ve never crashed a ship before? Glad I could be your first.”

  The shuttle quaked more violently around them, and a long crack darted across the viewport. The ground got closer, details of the forested patch of land below getting clearer as they hurtled downward. On the bright side, at least they weren’t crashing into the ocean—he’d never been the best swimmer.

  His heart palpitated, and he tightened his grip on the armrests, bracing himself back against the seat.

  Christ, save me.

  Chapter Two

  Consciousness hit her, and Mae came around, gasping. The slicing breath of air, laced with acidic smoke, scraped her throat and sent her into a coughing fit. For a second, as she took in her surroundings, her mind scrambled to make sense of what she saw, thinking she was back in some waystation bar where she’d had a few too many drinks with Rian Sherron after agreeing to investigate and possibly shanghai Captain Admiral Zander Graydon. But that had happened two weeks ago, hadn’t it?

  As she brought her aching head up, the too-bright shaft of light blurring her vision jarred her brain back into working order.

  Oh god. Oh holy frecking hell.

  The shuttle. They’d crashed. Her brain told her she was still strapped into her seat, but nothing around her looked like a ship anymore. It was all just flickering lights, twisted metal, and broken things she couldn’t identify.

  A rasping string of curses caught her attention, and she looked over to see the captain admiral raising a hand to his head, where blood streamed down the side of his face from a nasty-looking gash. Thank god he was alive. Getting Graydon killed had not been on Rian’s to-do list. At least not yet, anyway.

  She reached down to unclip the harness, but her hands were shaking, the left one slick with blood. After three tries at the buckle, she paused to clench her fists and force a calming breath on herself. Yeah, they’d crashed, but she was alive, and she needed to concentrate on getting herself and the captain admiral out of the destroyed craft.

  Graydon—and that promise to Rian—were her only priority.

  As she reached for the buckle again, the admiral appeared beside her and crouched, putting them at eye level. It was the first time she’d really let herself look at him since their meeting at the coffee kiosk. She’d seen pictures of Zander Graydon on news reels and media vids—who hadn’t, the guy was one of the most recognizable IPC officers.

  However, getting an up-close-and-personal shot of the man was completely different from those tame pictures. His thick brown hair, while cut short, was just a touch longer than military standard, allowing for a kind of scruffy spike in the strands. His light brown eyes, almost a toffee color, should have been a boring contrast of brown on brown, but instead the two tones worked perfectly together. Add in the masculine, angular perfections of his jaw and cheekbones…the man was a package worth getting giddy over. If she were the type of girl to ever get giddy over someone.

  But the real problem behind the captain admiral’s ridiculous good looks? He might not even be human.

  “Here, let me get that.” He set her hands aside and had the harness undone in a second flat.

  As she stood, he took her arm, helping her around the twisted remains of the control console.

  In the back of the ship, one of the young officers was conscious and didn’t look to have any obvious injuries, though he appeared frozen in his seat. Sergeant Nazari had freed herself and was checking the other officer.

  “He didn’t make it,” Nazari reported in a shaking voice, then turned to the conscious officer. She touched his shoulder, but he didn’t respond.

  Graydon stepped forward and leaned down over the young man. “Officer Jaren Sulaiman, on your feet now.”

  The officer jumped and then scrambled to get his harness unclipped. In a matter of moments, the four of them had climbed out through a gaping hole torn in the side of the shuttle.

  Sunlight blinded Mae for a moment, and she squinted, waiting for her watering eyes to adjust. To the right, the shuttle had left a long gouge in the earth and beyond that had taken down a wide path of towering trees. Those trees had probably saved their lives by slowing the speed of the shuttle before they’d hit dirt. All around them, deep forest stretched toward the Tocarra sky, the bottoms of the trunks surrounded by thick underbrush. The air was mild but not overly warm, and the musky smell of wet forest was sweet against the back of her throat.

  The admiral led them away from the shuttle and stopped by one of the fallen trees, comm in hand and attention on the screen.

  Nazari was walking with a pronounced limp, while the dazed officer cradled his left arm against his chest. For her own part, each breath Mae took ached in her chest, and a lancing pain radiated through her left side. Even without some sort of medical scan, she guessed she might have cracked a rib. No doubt the harness would leave some colorful bruises across her torso. Of course, she could have been much worse off.

  “I’m not getting any satellite signal.” The admiral slipped his comm away, expression creasing as he glanced up at the
sky, like he should have been able to see said satellite and the reason why the planet-wide signal from orbit wasn’t working down here.

  Reaching into her own pocket, she pulled out her comm, frowning at the cracked screen. But a tap brought it to life, only to tell her the same thing—she didn’t have a signal, either. What in the heck could be causing that?

  The admiral took the officer’s arm and led him over to one of the felled trees, helping him down to recline against the trunk. The younger man slouched, like he was about to pass out. The captain admiral hauled him upright and gave him a gentle shake. “I’m going to the shuttle for supplies. Stay awake until I get back, okay, Jaren?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him, sir.” Nazari dropped down to sit with her back against the horizontal trunk, but Mae stayed standing as she focused on the mangled chunk of metal that had been their ship. Frecking hell, they’d just gotten out, and now she had to go back in. Was it even safe? Either way, they needed the emergency packs with medical supplies, at least.

  Her heart skipped a few beats as the admiral started toward the shuttle, and she forced her stone-like, reluctant legs to follow him.

  Graydon glanced over his shoulder at her as he crossed the churned-up ground. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?”

  She swallowed, hoping her voice wouldn’t give away how much she didn’t want to be doing this. “Helping you get the supplies, sir.”

  He gave a single nod, then ducked his head and climbed through the breached section of hull.

  Taking a deep breath of the clean air, she fortified her mental defenses and followed him into the shadowy cave of twisted metal. Two steps in, and the whole damn thing shifted beneath her feet. She froze, grabbing onto a section of what once might have been overhead storage and waiting for the shuttle to quit groaning.

  “It’s just settling,” the captain admiral called out from deeper in the wreck. “It shouldn’t move far.”

  Through the flickering lights, she spotted the admiral on the opposite side of the destroyed interior, yanking at the panel enclosing the storage locker with the emergency supplies.

  “Damn thing is jammed.” He scanned the area and then bent down to retrieve a jagged length of metal.

  Mae navigated over with wary steps, avoiding debris and not allowing herself to glance at the dead officer still in his chair. The recovery team would take care of him when they arrived. She’d witnessed more than her fair share of casualties during the war. But this hadn’t been a battle, and no matter how many dead bodies she saw, there was something about the utter emptiness of death that left her unsettled.

  After Graydon wedged his makeshift lever into the minute crack between the panel and the bulkhead, she stepped up beside him and put all of her weight into shoving the bar forward.

  The panel whined, which turned into the groan of straining metal, until the sectioned popped free. She fell forward as the bar gave way, landing against the bulkhead and jarring her aching ribs. Stifling a cry, she made herself straighten as the admiral scrutinized her.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and pushed back a strand of hair that’d come loose from her tie. Now that she stood so close to him, in the periodically flashing light she could see trickles of blood still welling from the gash in his head.

  “Your injury needs medical attention, sir.” She reached up to touch him but stopped herself halfway, the sharp reminder that Rian suspected him of being a shape-shifting alien disguised as the captain admiral making her reluctant to touch him.

  Graydon didn’t notice, too busy leaning into the locker. “Yeah? Well, so does your arm. And Nazari’s leg, and Jaren, so let’s get these supplies and get outside.”

  He pulled out several packs of different sizes and shapes, handing a couple over to her then slinging the others over his shoulders and holding another two in his hands. The shuttle shifted again, more sharply this time, making what was left of the deck beneath their feet slope at a sharper angle and her breath catch in the back of her throat.

  “Still settling?” She widened her feet, snatching a glance at Graydon, who stopped in a similar wide-legged stance.

  “Let’s get out of here before we find out otherwise.”

  Leaving with their burden made things more awkward. Mae nearly stumbled over a torn-up section of flooring near the access hole in her haste to get outside to safety, but the admiral was right behind her every step of the way, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder or guiding her with a firm grip on her elbow.

  Outside, it was easier to breathe, and relief at being out of the wreck drained some of the tension from her tight muscles. Some, but not all. They were still a long way from being safe, her mind speeding ahead to calculate how long it would take a rescue party to find them out here and what medical issues might need to be dealt with in the meantime. Half an hour ago, her biggest concern had been pulling off this almost moronic con job before anyone worked out she wasn’t really IPC.

  It wasn’t screwed up enough that just over a month ago, she’d discovered the UAFA agent in charge of her team had really been a shape-shifting alien known as the Reidar.

  No, it had gotten even more messed up when she’d met Rian—one of her oldest friends—at some out-of-civilized-space waystation bar. He’d convinced her to take the position as Graydon’s admiral’s assistant in order to trap or trick the captain admiral into Rian’s custody, so he could ascertain whether or not the Reidar had replaced his oldest friend. There were too many reasons why finding out if one of the IPC’s most respected captain admirals was really an alien—much more important than whether or not she’d get busted for infiltrating the IPC under false orders.

  If Rian’s suspicions turned out to be right, it would be the confirmation they didn’t want to get—that the Reidar were already well into their plans to invade by replacing government and military officials with alien body doubles.

  Not like she had the entire fate of the universe sitting on her shoulders or anything…but if it turned out Zander wasn’t himself any longer and the Reidar had already infiltrated the IPC, then the human race were facing a horror the likes of which had never been contemplated except in books and movies.

  Yep, the problems just kept stacking up. Not only were her IPC orders and clearances entirely forged and fabricated by a couple of Rian’s crew, technically she was on extended leave from the Universal Armed Forces Agency. If they found out about this little off-the-books assignment, her life and career would be screwed sideways.

  Though none of that mattered right at this moment, when all she could worry about was whether this planet had any top-order predators that ate humans. With the comms not working and the shuttle having gone down without time for them to send an emergency transmission, there was a good possibility the authorities and Swift Brion crew had no idea they’d crashed. She hoped a recovery ship was already en route, but there was every likelihood they could be in for a long wait to be rescued.

  Her head spun, and she blew out a long breath as she reached the log near Nazari and the officer.

  One thing at a time, Mae. If she tried to think of everything all at once, she wasn’t going to be able to continue hanging on to her calm so successfully.

  While the captain admiral went to check on the young officer again, she set the packs on the ground and crouched to take inventory. A shuttle like those used by the Swift Brion should have everything they’d need to stay alive until a rescue team arrived.

  The first pack held survival gear. Yeah, they needed that, but it wasn’t her initial priority. Medical supplies were the most important thing. Luckily, the next two packs had two different sets of med items. She dug for a scanner, because they couldn’t start fixing anyone until they assessed the extent of injuries.

  “Lieutenant, what kind of packs do you have?” the admiral asked, leaning over to look into the first bag she’d opened.

  “Survival and two medical. I don’t know what the others are—I didn’t get that far.” />
  Graydon crouched down next to her, his shoulder brushing hers as he pulled the unopened bags closer to rummage through them with increasingly rough, jerking movements.

  “Damn it to hell, where’s the goddamn emergency transponders?” He threw the pack down and seized another.

  “There should be one in every single bag,” she murmured distractedly. In case people got separated after surviving the crash, the rescue party would be able to account for everyone—IPC standard kit and procedure.

  She tugged a few things from the top of the medical pack so she could search more easily in the bottom. Where was the med scanner? If she’d packed this bag, she would have put it right on top.

  “Yeah, there should be, but there’s not.” He tossed the bag away and scrubbed a hand over his hair. “I don’t understand. I have the shuttles and onboard provisions checked weekly. How could all those critical systems have failed on the shuttle, for a start, and how in the fiery pits of Erebus can there not be a single emergency transponder in any of these bags?”

  A shaft of ice cut deep through Mae, and she tore her eyes away from the admiral to concentrate on finding the medical scanner. There hadn’t been much time to think since they’d launched, but with the number of things that had gone wrong on the shuttle, it didn’t take a genius to work out the craft had been tampered with. Someone had wanted them to crash. No emergency transponders? Those same people didn’t want them to be found if they survived impact.

  What the hell did that mean? It would be easy to assume Captain Admiral Graydon had been the intended target. But nothing was what it seemed any longer.

  According to Rian, everything wrong in his life, and pretty much everything wrong with the universe, could be traced to the Reidar. Only a handful of people knew the Reidar existed. Most who learned the truth ended up dead, with Rian being the exception. However, it was more luck and divine providence that Rian was still alive—he’d nearly been killed more times than any person she knew. Which was why—despite the risk to her own career—she hadn’t been able to tell him no to this little arrangement. Truthfully, she’d been seriously considering it time to cut out of UAFA once she’d discovered the agent in charge of her division had actually been an alien body double.