Zenith (ESS Space Marines Book 1)

by James David Victor

  “Agreed,” Roxanna said, eyes flickering side to side. “There was a race of beings that came from a planet in my own system that had evolved a defense to our empathic abilities,” she went on, thinking out loud. “But they had to be within visual range of us. They could only block us when they could see us. It was like a battle of wills. They rarely left the system, either, and I don’t recall any on this station. Or even in the ESS, as far as I know.”

  Andy nodded slowly. “We’ll rule them out for now.” She had to keep them both focused and on task. They couldn’t let themselves wander too far. “Let’s look at what else is going on, because it’s more than just us not picking up the life signs.”

  The Selerid nodded again, rapidly. “Yes!” she said, as if she had just remembered it. “There is obviously something affecting us, and it’s station-wide. It must be something in the air?”

  “It seems unlikely,” Andy countered. “There were no toxins in the air.”

  “But...” Roxanna seemed clearer with her focus, although the skin around her eyes and mouth were tight. She was struggling. “If we didn’t pick up on the life signs, then maybe we wouldn’t have picked that up on sensors either.”

  Andy tilted her head. She looked at Anallin, who was staring at Dan’s still unconscious form in a way that made her nervous. She kept on. “Fair point,” she agreed. “It seems unlikely that some sort of airborne toxin could also have been hidden from the scans that Anallin did, however. The scans didn’t find any abnormalities in the bodies and those three were human, so recognizing what was abnormal or not would have been straight forward.”

  “Fair point,” Roxanna echoed. She pressed her lips together again and looked on the verge of emotional collapse again. Andy put her hand on her shoulder and the Selerid snapped back to focus. “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Andy asked, blinking at the sudden change. Roxanna had gone from looking upset to looking inspired.

  “The Colirnoid,” Roxanna said, this time gripping Andy’s shoulders amid her flash of inspiration in a way that Andy knew she had never done before. The Selerid normally avoided physical contact, because it increased the intensity of her empathic senses and made it harder to “shield” herself from someone’s feelings.

  Andy stared back. ”The Colirnoid?” she repeated. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”

  Now Roxanna was talking fast again, but at least not too fast for her translator to keep up, which allowed Andy to follow her. “Almost no one has! It’s to the point where they are barely more than rumor, although my people have encountered them occasionally over the course of our history. It’s enough that we’re told of them, but they are almost never spoken of because they are almost never seen.”

  “They exist in a system far from here and even in the scattered stories of my people, I have never heard of them being this far out and yet... Yet they can do everything that we are talking about here! They feed off of chaos. It’s like...” She gasped softly. “It’s like a drug and they can’t get enough. Like an addict. But have only done so closer to their own system.”

  Andy nodded slowly. “If one of these Colirnoid have ended up this far from their home system, we need to know more. We have to know how to stop this sort of neurological trauma.” She wasn’t sure if ‘trauma’ was the right word, but it was the best she had.

  Roxanna nodded, and the fear was back in her eyes, but she was still focused. “It has to be a Colirnoid! They are telepathic, and with telepathic damage, it won’t show up on any scans until it’s been long-term, so nothing they’ve done will show up on our scans for months. Fear and anger and violence is the chaos they like best, which has made my people stay as far from their system as possible.”

  “Could they obscure sensors?” Andy asked.

  “Yes!” Roxanna cried, bringing her arms back to wrap around her waist. “Sort of. It’s part of their telepathy to have obscured my abilities. And a powerful enough telepath could obscure the minds of people reading the scans, so it’s not the sensors that are wrong but the brain of the person reading it.”

  So they were being driven mad by a rumor. Great. “Okay. So. We have a good theory. We need to know what to do about it now.”

  “The Colirnoid are a hive species, if I remember the stories correctly. A hive species, so each unit has...has one, you know, one at the top who links with the others. They would be driving the others. They would...” Her breathing grew rapid and her eyes began to lose focus again.

  “Roxanna!” Andy snapped. “If there is one leader with other...satellite aliens, then they are going to want to be somewhere where they can direct the others. The most central location of the station, the core.”

  The Selerid gasped for breath, but she nodded. “You humans have that phrase, you know, about cutting the head off a snake?” She paused, waiting for Andy to agree, and then went on, “It’s just like that. Kill the center and the rest will flee or die. They will lose their power.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Andy asked urgently.

  Selerid did not cry, but Roxanna had either been around humans too much or was feeding off Jade’s muted wailing because she looked like she was going to. “No, but it’s all I’ve got, Sergeant. Sorry.”

  Andy patted her on the shoulder. “You did well, Corporal. So, now we just have to figure out how to cut the head off the snake.”

  “Not ‘we,’ Sergeant,” Roxanna said. “You.”

  Chapter 12

  “Sergeant,” Roxanna said to Andy’s shocked expression. “You are the one who isn’t coming apart, can’t you see? There is something about you that is resisting their power.” Before Andy could say anything, Roxanna went on. “I don’t know what it is! I just know that it is so. There is only one of us that can do it and that’s you.”

  Andy wanted to argue, but she knew that she couldn’t. “Can you handle these three alone?” she did ask.

  Roxanna smiled weakly. “I don’t know, but there’s no choice. We’re all going to end up like them, or we’re going to die.”

  Again, she wanted to argue, but she couldn’t.

  “Do your best, Corporal.” There wasn’t anything else that needed to be said. Roxanna nodded and brought up her rifle. For the first time, her own eyes moved toward the three other members of the team in the room with her.

  Andy turned to survey the space around her and figure out how she was going to do this. She knew she couldn’t go through the door, they were still there. Her dark eyes swiftly surveyed the room and then lifted, spotting a panel near the ceiling.

  Air ducts.

  Damn.

  She slung her rifle to her back and hurried across the room, climbing on a table and just barely reaching the edge of the panel. She pulled a utility blade from her uniform holster and jammed it into the seam. If any engineer saw her, they would have a fit, but she couldn’t care about that just then.

  Wedging the panel up, she put away the blade and then dug her finger under it to pull it off and let it clatter to the floor. She glanced back quickly, but no one seemed to notice except Roxanna. All for the better, then. She curled her fingers around the newly found ledge, finding a groove where the pieces were welded together. With a grunt, she pulled herself up, finding other grooves to pull her frame up into the duct. Once inside, she started crawling forward.

  This was definitely not where she had expected this mission to end up, but when did things go as expected?

  She thought back to the schematic of the station that she’d read and tried to place the room where they had found themselves just now. The central most part of the station would be an engineering area called the core, and she knew that it was at least two decks down.

  There was no time to waste thinking about it so she pushed forward. The duct was barely large enough for her to crawl through. In some places it wasn’t even large enough for that. She ignored the way the hard floor felt against her hands and knees, the scrapes on her torso from where she pulled herself thro
ugh tight spaces. She ignored how worried she was about her team back in that room, her uncertainty about whether this was even the right course and whether she would actually be able to make any difference.

  She ignored the whispers at the edge of her thoughts telling her she would fail...

  All she could do was keep her head down and move forward. She almost crawled into the stations core before noticing the duct ended. A ladder extended in both directions as far as she could see.

  Andy climbed down until she reached the engineering level. Before going back into the ductwork, she checked the schematic on her scanner to see where she was. Then, she moved off again.

  The whispers grew louder as she got closer and she had to stop, squeezing her eyes shut against the mental intrusion. Andy breathed deeply, forcing the whispers away. She had to focus on the task at hand.

  Despite her best efforts, questions filled her mind. What was a Colirnoid? What sort of fight would she have before her? Could she win that fight?. And if she won that fight, what would happen then to the others? She was crawling through this duct based on rumors of the Selerid race, or at least one Selerid who might be crazy.

  Andy pushed through the doubts and kept going until she reached the panel that she knew would let her into the core. There could be no stealth and a very limited amount of guns blazing. She grunted as she twisted in the narrow duct and turned herself so her feet were toward the panel, then she kicked and followed through as fast as she could.

  She hit the deck and immediately rolled forward to avoid potential fire, but there wasn’t any. Rolling back up to her knees, she swung her rifle, searching for the enemy. No attack materialized.

  Instead, there was a single alien standing in front of a glowing, pale-blue column. It was over seven feet tall with glistening, smooth mottled skin. There was no nose or mouth that she could see and...three eyes. Some silly part of her brain wondered if that was where the “third eye” phrase came from. Had ancient humans met the Colirnoid?

  The three eyes, all pure silver without a pupil or separate iris, seemed to focus on her. If there was any emotion, Andy couldn’t read it. There was no weapon that Andy could see. The head rose and fell, like it was looking her up and down. The alien held up one of its hands.

  As she stared at it, she felt a wave of fear brush over her. Sweat broke out over her entire body and she began to tremble; her stomach clench with terror. Still kneeling, she bowed her head and inhaled slowly. It’s just their power. It’s not real. You have nothing to fear.

  The terror began to subside and she opened her eyes again, feeling anger take over, but this was her own. This creature had infected her team and made them nearly kill each other. Who knew how many of the detachment were still alive? And they had destroyed the people of this station!

  What gave them the right?

  Gritting her teeth, she rose to her feet and trained her rifle on the alien. It lifted its head and then stepped back, bumping into the railing around the core.

  A fresh wave of horror washed over her and she felt her knees weaken. The rifle began to lower. But then she focused on the anger. Used it to take back control. Andy lifted the rifle again.

  What are you?

  The words echoed in her mind and she knew that they were not her own. She felt fear, but it was not her own and it was not being projected at her.

  The alien was afraid. It didn’t understand why its overwhelming power wasn’t sending her to her knees or making her flee in terror. She now knew that it had no fight in it if its powers to sow fear and chaos had no effect. It had no defense...against her.

  “I am Sergeant Andrea Dolan and you messed with the wrong marine,” she whispered and squeezed the trigger.

  Andy only looked at the body once and knew that the alien was dead. She had felt a psychic wail fly through her brain as it died and knew that it had filled the whole station. Did the others die or flee, she didn’t know. She just knew that her job was done.

  She left the core through the door this time and walked through the corridors. Along the way, she saw people in station uniforms. They were either unconscious, maybe dead, or were waking up like from a bad dream. She stopped to explain what she could, but she needed to get back to her team.

  On the way, she heard from the other teams. Everyone was in the same state, but they all agreed: get back to the ship.

  When Andy finally got back to the room, she stood outside the door and pressed her earpiece to tell them she was outside. Moments later, a confused and embarrassed looking Dan along with a...Hanaran looking Anallin were opening the door with the furniture pushed to either side.

  “What happened?” Dan asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Andy said wearily.

  Epilogue

  An emergency medical team was dispatched to Starbase Zenith, while the marines returned home and were subjected to extensive medical texts. The doctor insisted on a thorough workup on all of them. The captain himself sought out Andy while she was waiting for her turn to be scanned, poked, and prodded.

  “Why didn’t you go crazy like the rest of them?” the captain asked, not accusatorily but earnestly perplexed.

  “Sir, if I knew, I would tell you,” she replied tiredly. “All tests have shown me as totally normal, but...I don’t know who my father is. My mother never would tell me, so who knows what might be going on?” The topic of her parents was normally exhausting on its own, and now, even more so.

  The captain nodded. “I’m just glad you’re okay, Sergeant,” he said sincerely. “And thank you for your hard work and getting this taken care of. We now know more about this race and what they can do. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  She sat up as straight as she could. “Thank you, sir.” She paused. “Sir? May I ask what happened to the other Colirnoid that were around the station?”

  “As far as we can tell, they fled when you killed the leader,” he replied. “Head off the snake and all that.”

  That brought a faint smile to Andy’s face.

  “That they were even here is worrisome, though. Who knows where else they may have been and the results blamed on other things? It will all be in my report up the chain, though, that we may have a new threat.”

  “Lucky us,” Andy said mirthlessly. Just then, she saw the doctor making a beeline for her and the captain nodded, heading off. The chief medical officer was the only one that could make the captain flee. As he left and she waited for the doctor, she looked toward the space station she had just liberated.

  In her heart, she knew this was just the beginning of something bigger.

  THANK YOU

  Thank you so much for reading Zenith, the first book in the ESS Space Marines series. I am so excited you took the chance to read it and I really hope you liked it. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.

  If you want to be the first to hear about new releases and special offers, be sure to sign up our Science Fiction Newsletter. We have several fun things planned that will only be available to newsletter subscribers and can’t wait to share those with you too. To start with, you will get a free short story from the Niakrim War series. It tells the story of Cyrus Jones, one of the main characters in the series, and how he came to be part cyborg. All the information is on the next page.

  I have also included a preview of Discovery which is the first book in the Niakrim War series. After you read the preview, you can download the book on Amazon.

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  Preview: Discovery

  Space is so boring!

  This was certainly not what V
iolet had expected space travel to be like. She had dreamed of this since the first time she looked up at the stars in the sky, but none of those dreams had included endless days of nothingness. The only excitement she had experienced during the first days of the journey was when an occasional piece of space debris penetrated the warp field forcing the pilot to take evasive action. Even those potentially deadly encounters were brushed aside, as if they were no more bothersome than a fly buzzing around the room, by the Krim Sprinter's legendary pilot, Cyrus Jones, who was as much machine as man.

  The captain had assured her that the Krim Sprinter was the fastest ship in the fleet, which made it the fastest ship in the known universe, when he reluctantly brought her on board the week before. The problem with space travel was the incomprehensible distances between planets. Even at three hundred times the speed of light, the travel time to Proxima was listed as seven days. The captain had assured her that they would be there in five. When she asked what they would do on the Proxima outpost for two days while they waited for the rest of the crew to arrive, Captain Mitch Cooper had just smiled and walked away.

  After four days of watching countless specks of light stream past in a blur, Violet wished her childhood dream had involved something less monotonous...like being an accountant. She was wondering if it was possible to actually die of boredom when the ship violently lurched, throwing her from her chair. She froze in the air momentarily as the warp drive was forcibly shut down, dropping the ship back into real time, before being slammed into the navigation console. Everything went black.

  When she came to, the ship’s bridge was in total chaos. Warning sirens were going off. Red lights were flashing. Captain Cooper was rushing from station to station, assessing damage and muttering to himself. She had a pretty good idea of what he was saying.