Contents
Title
Copyright ©
Books by Nathan Hystad
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Old Secrets (The Survivors Book Thirteen)
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Copyright © 2020 Nathan Hystad
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover art: Tom Edwards Design
Edited by: Scarlett R Algee
Proofed and Formatted by: BZ Hercules
Books By Nathan Hystad
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Nathan’s books are also available on Audible!
Lights Over Cloud Lake
The Manuscript
Red Creek
Return to Red Creek
Baldwin’s Legacy
Confrontation
Unification
Culmination
Hierarchy
The Survivors Series
The Event
New Threat
New World
The Ancients
The Theos
Old Enemy
New Alliance
The Gatekeepers
New Horizon
The Academy
Old World
New Discovery
Old Secrets
The Resistance Series
Rift
Revenge
Return
One
The rain was relentless as they sprinted through the valley. It turned the soft dirt into a sloppy mess, causing each footstep to feel like ten. Jules’ legs burned with the effort, and twice she had to slow to tug Dean along behind her. His hair was plastered over his eyes, and she’d never seen him so miserable.
“How much farther?” he bellowed, and she hardly heard him as the wind carried his voice away from them.
“It’s close!” she called, stopping to pull her tablet from her jacket. A bright red dot blinked half a mile or so from their position, but when she glanced up, there was a high hillside between them and the target.
Dean was beside her, his face close to hers. “We have to go… up there?”
Jules took a deep breath and wiped water from her brow before nodding. “It appears so.”
“This isn’t fair. We should be enjoying our last week at the Academy, not trudging across a muddy backwater planet in search of an old building,” Dean said, just loud enough for Jules to discern his words.
“Life isn’t fair.” She patted Dean on the shoulder, and he rolled his eyes.
“Fine. Lead the way, Ju.”
She grinned, shifting the soaked pack on her shoulders before lifting a foot from the squishy ground. It made a sucking noise as it pulled free, and she was thankful the boots were strapped on tightly, or she guessed she’d be running around barefoot at this point.
The landscape was bleak here: the trees bereft of leaves, the ground usually hard and dry. The rainstorm seemed to be an anomaly, and Jules almost laughed at the coincidence. Their mission would be over by now if not for the storm. Wasn’t that always the way?
The two of them crossed the last section of flat ground in another ten minutes; the only sounds were the wind and an occasional grunt from Dean. Jules stopped as they neared the hill’s edge, the ground slick and mucky here too. She took one tentative step onto the incline, and slid down. Dean tried, making it three steps before ending up on his back beside her in the mud.
“This won’t do.” Jules stuck her hand out, helping the boy to his feet. Dean was fuming, his adolescent temper getting the best of him. The older student wasn’t used to grappling with anything. He was always the first to complete tasks, had the second-best grades in class, and won every sporting event he participated in. Jules thought it might be good for him to struggle on occasion. Papa would say it built character.
Jules stared at Dean, seeing her glowing green eyes reflected from the whites of his. “I have an idea.”
He grinned, wiping his hair from his face. “Finally. No one said you couldn’t use them.”
Jules had hoped to avoid using her powers, but they were part of her, and even her parents seemed to understand. With the knowledge that there were others like her in existence, and that the abilities weren’t actually related to the evil Iskios but to something older, they’d accepted it more openly.
She closed her eyes, and for a moment, everything ceased to exist around her. The rain continued to drip onto her head, but she didn’t feel it. The gusting wind was nothing more than a gentle blowing breeze, and she smiled as the power filled her. Her thoughts drifted from the day-to-day of a fifteen-year-old girl, and she became someone else, but still herself.
A bubble extruded from her, enveloping them both, and when her eyelids opened again, they were hovering in the glowing energy sphere.
“You could have saved us a lot of time, you know,” Dean told her.
“Then I wouldn’t get to see you all frustrated like you are,” Jules replied, and the young man laughed. It was a pleasant sound.
She lifted them from the ground, and the sphere gave them reprieve from the turbulent weather outside. The wind jostled the ball slightly as she moved them up the hillside toward their destination.
This leg of the trip was fast, and Jules spotted the building a couple minutes later. It was smaller than she’d expected, a tower rising from the center of the square structure. There was a flashing red bulb on the tip of the antenna, signaling this was their ending point.
The sphere lowered near the building’s entrance, and the two-story structure blocked the wind and rain as she dropped the energy field around them. Her gloved hand ran over the stone wall, feeling the rough grooves in the blocks, and she glanced over her shoulder to where they’d originated from. The valley was long and deep, and she could almost see the spot where they’d been dropped off two days ago.
Dean didn’t seem interested in where they’d departed, only in where they were going. “Let’s move inside.”
Jules followed Dean as he used a manual lever to press the entrance door open. The room was dark inside, and Jules had no clue what to expect to find. Her hand sought a light switch near the doors but came up empty, so she pulled a drone from her pack, setting the bag on the ground.
Dean was far more cautious than she was. His first move was to have his pulse rifle up, ready for anything nefarious.
Jules activated the light drone, and it cast a wide beam over them. The building was one large room, and in the center was a hunk of metal, perhaps intended for space travel, yet visibly constructed in a crude fashion
.
“What is this?” Dean asked, stepping toward the vessel. He circled around it, checking the room for inhabitants before finally lowering the weapon.
He was his father’s son. Jules liked that thought, because she was proud to be Dean and Mary’s daughter, and hoped to take on each of their best qualities, maybe even a few of their bad ones.
The alien craft wasn’t pretty; it was almost like the drawings Hugo made when he was a little kid, wishing he was a space pilot of an alien fighter craft.
“What do you suppose we should do?” Dean asked.
Jules was confident of what needed to happen. “We fix this ship.”
Dean knocked on the hull with his knuckles; the sound was dull in the open room. “I can’t even find an entrance.”
It was true. While it presented like a spaceship, there was no visible opening; it was identical on both ends, an elongated shape of symmetry. “There’ll be one. We only need to find it.” She moved the light drone to her shoulder and aimed the beam at the ship. Dean and the drone stayed near her as she walked around the vessel, searching for a clue.
Dean was the one to spot it, and the competitive side of her bristled at that. “There’s an opening underneath.” The monstrosity was propped on four legs. “I bet the landing gear is made so tall because of the soft ground. They wouldn’t sink too deep if they landed it down there.”
Jules nodded at his sound observation. “Can you enter it?”
Dean was prying at the hatch, and when he’d all but given up on accessing it, Jules walked under the craft and raised a glowing hand. Tendrils of green energy coursed out, rushing along the ship’s hull, a few entering the lines of the doorway. She tugged at them, and something audibly clicked before it slid to the side like a pocket door.
Dean smiled, hugging her close at the victory. Jules tried to stay calm, in case any sudden movements caused Dean to break the embrace. He smelled like mud and rain and a mixture of sulfur, like everything on this alien world, and she never wanted him to leave.
He let go before clambering inside the ship by pulling himself up. Of course Dean didn’t think of her that way. She had just turned fifteen, and he was a man by all accounts, eighteen and about to graduate the Academy. Although she was finishing school too, and girls did mature faster than boys…
“Jules, you have that look again. Everything okay?” Dean asked, his head poked through the ship’s entrance. The vessel was small, only built for a couple of bodies at best, and when he offered his arm to help her in, she took it.
Once inside, she brought the drone with her, and it cast light over the strange interior. She dropped her jacket, feeling too hot in here, the space cramped.
“Talk about alien,” Dean whispered.
There was a single seat near one end of the vessel, which Jules judged to be the front now, and they walked over to it, careful not to hit their heads on the low ceiling. It was immaculately clean, the floor a shiny polished metal, the walls curved and sleek. The entire fabrication seemed molded from metal, and everything, including the chair and the tiny dash in front of it, protruded from the floor as if one lone piece of material.
“How do we…” Dean touched the metal-framed screen near the chair, and the entire ship shook to life. Jules almost lost her footing but managed to stay upright as the dash lit up. A series of embedded bulbs illuminated along the outer walls, and she turned the drone off, stowing it in a pocket.
“Looks like it’s been waiting for us,” Jules said quietly, seeing her green eyes reflecting back at her from the polished surfaces.
A beep emanated from near the entrance, and she tried to determine what it was.
“That’s the tablet.” Dean rushed to her jacket, which sat in a pile near the exit, and pulled the device out. “There’s a message from Slate.”
“Play it!” Jules said. They weren’t supposed to have contact from their instructors during the final exam, so she assumed something was wrong.
Dean pressed an icon, and Slate’s voice carried through the tiny speakers. “This is Zeke Campbell for Dean and Jules. There’s been a breach, and we’re afraid that a group of Carpavian Harvesters have made it past our defenses in the outer ring. We’re going to head after them, but they appear to have an unfamiliar cloaking technology. We only just realized they’d made it through the system. We think there are three Harvester ships. Be careful and stay hidden for the time being.”
The message ended, and they stared at each other for a moment. “Harvesters?” Jules asked.
“I heard my dad talking about them once. Bad news. Think pirates, but… they eat the flesh of their victims.” Dean’s face was pale, and Jules imagined hers was as well.
“We have to stop them. Canni and Extel Four are here,” she said.
Dean nodded, contradicting himself with his words. “But Slate told us to hide.”
Jules let out a guffaw. “You think Slate would remain here? Or our parents? We’re about to be Gatekeepers, Dean. We don’t stay hidden. We help our people.”
Dean gave her a grim smile, pointing to the dash. “Do you see any controls on this thing?”
____________
An hour later, they were in the air, passing through the open ceiling of the building atop the hill. Dean sat in the pilot’s seat, his hands maneuvering the alien controls. Once they’d figured out the layout, it had been easier than they’d expected. It was a good thing they’d just finished an entire course on alien spacecraft history and composition.
They’d determined that the beings who’d created this vessel were short, maybe four feet tall, with three digits on each of their two hands. Dean duplicated their finger pattern and used the glowing dials and throttles on the metallic screen. He was better at this kind of thing than Jules, and she was glad to let him take the reins.
She held the tablet, seeing Canni and Extel’s location blinking some distance from them. The viewscreen was open now, and she was amazed at the level of expertise in this vessel. The solid wall had dissolved, leaving a clear screen in front of them, and Jules glanced up to see purple lightning forking through the sky as they slowly maneuvered the craft up and over the valleys below.
“I found them.” She pointed at the viewscreen, and Dean tilted the ship, sending her sprawling to the side. She pushed out with her powers at the last minute, preventing herself from being harmed.
“Sorry!” Dean called, and she scrambled over, gripping the chair’s short headrest.
“I don’t remember seeing purple skies before,” Jules told him.
“I don’t think they’re natural.”
Dean was right. Jules noticed the vessels descending on the spot where Canni was supposed to be. Their mission had seemed simple a few days ago. Slate had said they would be dropped off on a barren world: no portals, only the necessities. It was a classic Gatekeepers mission. They were to pretend their spacecraft was damaged, and they needed to find another way to either contact the outside world, or leave the surface and return to the waiting starship some distance away in-system.
The entire time, they were required to explore, record, and stay safe. It had started out fine, with a strange blue sunlight, crisp air, and dry ground. After their first night of camping out, the rain had begun, and that was when things had gone south.
Watching the Harvesters’ looming attack over her counterparts in the valley beyond, her anger simmered, threatening to boil over. They were about to graduate, and nothing was going to stop her and Dean from finishing this mission. And there was no way Jules was going to allow some flesh-eating monsters the chance at Canni or his Inlorian partner.
“Hurry, Dean. We don’t have much time,” she said, eyes ablaze, heart pumping quickly.
“I’m taking this thing as fast as I can,” he told her.
They crested a hill, and the valley spread out below them, filling the viewscreen. The ships were moving closer to the edge of the expansive vale, and Canni’s icon showed they were still halfway up a slope. Jules
had been lucky to have a way to avoid climbing the slippery and muddy incline, but Canni, the huge Keppe student, would be struggling as they traversed the mess.
“I can see them,” Dean said, lowering toward their destination. Jules could too. The bright purple flashes illuminated the hill in the darkening evening sky, and there they were. Canni was in the lead, a rope tied around his waist, and Extel Four clung to it as he tugged her behind him.
Jules saw the incoming Harvester vessels, lavender energy arcing over their hulls as they descended toward her friends. “Stop the ship above them!” Jules shouted, racing to the floor hatch. She used her tendrils again, sending the sliding door open, and saw nothing but the dark mucky hill before Dean slowed and hovered directly over the other students.
Canni’s gun was aimed directly at her, and his eyes went wide in surprise. “Jules?” She didn’t hear the word, just read his lips, and Extel was already shouting out something about the incoming vessels.
They were too high over the others to usher them inside, and Jules grabbed a rope from her pack, searching for somewhere to anchor it. Finding nothing, she hurried to Dean’s chair, looping the rope around its base before tying it off. “Dean, when I say the word, you lift off, okay?”
He agreed, and she rushed at the exit, trying not to fall out as the craft angled slightly. She dropped the rope, and Canni lifted Extel up. The Inlorians had four arms, and Extel held her pack with two of her hands and used the top two to climb toward Jules.
“Who are they?” Extel asked, and Jules shook her head.
“Slate said they were Harvesters. We need to…”
The ship shook, which meant the incoming enemy had fired at them. Time was running out.
Extel’s legs came up, and she rolled to the side, leaving the hatch empty once more. Canni was on the rope now, right behind her, and the ship rose slightly away from the ground. “Lower us!” Jules called, and his stress was evident in his reply.
“They’re almost here. How can we defend ourselves?” Dean shouted, and she realized she hadn’t considered that part yet. Rescuing her friends was plan A, but as a Gatekeeper, you always needed a plan B, or at least to think a few steps ahead.
The Survivors (Book 12): New Discovery Page 1