by J. J. Green
“No, I don’t want any breakfast,” Jas said as she went into the shower room.
“You’ve got to eat, Jas. You’re wasting away to nothing.”
“I’m fine,” Jas said as she closed the door.
When she came out and started to get her things ready, Tamara asked, “You’re going to class?”
“Yes, I’ve gotten really behind. How much have I missed? I don’t know. It’s been weeks.”
“Jas, you don’t have to. The college said you can repeat this semester on health grounds.” She looked alarmed as she watched Jas push her interface into a bag along with her sports clothes. When she didn’t stop, Tamara went over to her friend.
“Jas,” she said, gently taking her bag from her. “Honestly, you don’t have to go to class. It’s okay.”
Jas took her bag back. “I do have to go to class. I do.”
She finished packing her bag. Then she put on her coat and hat and went out. She walked quickly, so that she was almost running. Something was inside her—something that squirmed like damned soul trying to escape hell. If she could keep moving, if she could maintain focus, maybe she could prevent it from emerging and overwhelming her.
Eyes were upon her at her first class, but she barely noticed. Being a poor Martian and dealing with the attention it conveyed was nothing compared to what she now carried around inside her and would forever. She listened carefully and made extensive notes. A test was coming up next week. The final for that class. Had that much time passed? She could hardly believe it. She would have to catch up on the work. It would be hard, but she could do it. The same with the other subjects. She wouldn’t skip the semester. She would graduate on schedule, and then she would leave on the first starship that would take her. If she left Antarctica far behind, maybe that would quiet the thing that writhed.
The morning flew by. Over lunch, Jas was fixated on her interface, hungrily devouring the information, but not her food. In the afternoon, she was a silent member of survival training while the rest of the class were discussing gathering water from the air in a desert.
Then came hand-to-hand combat. As usual, she stood at the back of the class, but Jas was the tallest person in the group. There was no way that Trankle could fail to notice her return. The first thing he said when he came into the training room was, “So Ms. Martian’s here. Welcome back. Glad you’re over your illness. Feeling better, are you?”
Jas didn’t answer. She fixed her gaze on the man.
He lifted his lip scornfully, turned to the other students and clapped his hands. “Last session of the year. Most of you have done pretty well. Some not so well. Today, we sort the wheat from the chaff. You know the drill. Five minutes per pair, on the mat, anything legal goes. Got it? Right. Who’s first?”
Two students went to the mat. Trankle took out an interface and stood to the side. He nodded, and the students began to fight. Jas followed their motions, their blows and holds. They were pretty evenly matched. Had Trankle paired them up himself according to their fitness and ability? Who was her partner?
Trankle blew a whistle. The five minutes were up. He waved the students off the mat and made notes on his interface. Another pair took their place and a moment later they too began to fight. A third pair replaced them, and a fourth. The process was efficient. Trankle gave no indication whether a student had passed or failed.
Finally, all the students had fought. Only Jas was left, and as the class was an odd number, there was no one to partner her. The students were standing around, waiting to be dismissed. The final pair to fight were panting and sweating.
Trankle completed his notes, smiled to himself, closed the interface, and put it down in a corner of the room. He returned to the center, folded his arms, and rocked on his heels, a small smile still playing around his lips.
“Looks like there’s no one left to fight with our Martian. Shame, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ve missed so many classes, Harrington, you’ve already failed.”
“Huh?” Jas said. “No. I just have to pass the test. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve missed. I have a health exemption.”
Trankle shook his head. “My class, my rules. And I don’t accept health exemptions.”
He was lying. She knew it. “I want to fight.”
“I’ve just told you, you can’t. The course is over. Class dismissed.”
Jas didn’t move. “I want to fight.”
“Give her a chance,” a male student said. “I’ll fight again. I’ll fight you, Jas.”
“Yeah, give her a chance,” a few more students echoed.
Trankle snorted. “You just don’t know when to give up, do you?” he said to Jas. “Right. So you want to fight? You can fight me. Come on. Let’s do it.” He backed up until he was on the training mat.
Jas didn’t hesitate. The thing inside drove her. She ran at her tormentor, taking him by surprise. At the last second, she jumped and kicked him in the stomach. Trankle tried to block her foot, but she was too fast for him. Her heel sank into his abdomen, and if the man hadn’t been well-muscled, that would have been the end of the fight.
He doubled over and staggered back, his face red and contorted. Jas raised her foot again to deliver a kick to his head, but Trankle just managed to catch her calf before the blow connected. They struggled for a moment, Trankle still bent over, one arm over his stomach and the other hand gripping Jas’ leg. She hopped and tugged, trying to free her foot.
The instructor regained a little breath and immediately expended it in a cry of rage. This seemed to galvanize Jas, and instead of trying to get away from Trankle, she hopped closer and brought down a fist on the back of his head. The man fell forward. His grip on Jas’ ankle broke. He hadn’t even reached the mat before she kicked his head, snapping it to the side. With a dull thunk and a loud exhale, he hit the floor.
Jas drew back her leg kick him again, but hands were restraining her, pulling her away. When she stopped struggling, the hands let go. She was vaguely aware of pain radiating from her foot. She stared at the unconscious Trankle, hardly knowing what she’d done.
For that moment at least, the thing inside was quiet.
***
The year was over. Tamara was packing, getting ready to catch the autobus that would take her to the spaceport.
“Jas, my offer still stands. Why won’t you come home with me for the long vacation? My dad really won’t mind.”
Jas shook her head. “I’ll miss your cooking, but I’ll be fine right here. I found a place in town to stay while I catch up on my studies.”
“But you passed everything. Why do you need to study?”
“I scraped all my passes. If I don’t catch up on what I missed, I’m only going to find everything harder next year.”
“But what if you run out of creds? Are you sure you have enough?”
“I’ll find a job. It’s tourist season. There has to be some casual work around. I’ll be okay.”
“But...” Tamara sighed. “I’m not going to persuade you, am I?”
“Sorry. But I’m really going to be fine. I promise. Now that I don’t have that inquiry into my fight with Trankle hanging over me, I just want to get my head down and work.”
“Yeah, that was sweet how all the students said it was a fair fight, wasn’t it?”
Jas chuckled. “I bet he’ll wear his safety gear next time he decides to do some sparring.”
“Huh, yeah. Well, keep in touch, right?” She zipped up her case and went to give Jas a hug.
When Tamara had gone, Jas started her own packing. She didn’t have many things, so it didn’t take her long. When she’d finished, she took a final look at the room. She recalled Aggy’s sullen face as she’d talked with her boyfriend on her interface, and Becca, who Jas hadn’t gotten to know very well. Last, she remembered kind, loyal Tamara, who had cared for her when she was at her lowest.
Someone else had also spent many nights in that room with her, but she skirted around the memory. S
he wasn’t ready to go there yet.
In another two years, she would be saying goodbye to the McMurdo Sound Training Institute for the last time. At that thought, she climbed onto her bare mattress so that she could look out of the window and into the sky. A whole galaxy was open to her. She wondered where she would go, and what she would find there.
The story continues...
Starbound is the prequel to the 10-book space opera serial, Shadows of the Void. Jas Harrington is the main character of the serial, and Starbound tells the story of why she is how she is. If you’d like to read Shadows of the Void, download the first book, Generation. Alternatively, download the first omnibus, The Galathea Chronicles, which includes Shadows of the Void books 1 – 3.
Scroll ahead for a sneak preview of Generation.
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ALSO BY J.J. GREEN
MISSION IMPROBABLE
Carrie Hatchett, Space Adventurer #1
THERE COMES A TIME
A SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
DAWN FALCON
LOST TO TOMORROW
GENERATION
SHADOWS OF THE VOID BOOK 1
Chapter One
Jas Harrington snapped her visor in place and took a deep breath of the purified, cooled air that flowed into her combat suit. For the last fifteen minutes she’d been ignoring the prickles that ran down her spine as she prepared her team for the routine LIV—Locate, Investigate, Vacate. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling any longer.
“AX7,” she said as she entered the shuttle airlock with the fifteen burly, androgynous defense units under her command. The door to the passenger cabin slid closed behind them, and a hiss permeated the enclosed space as the planet’s atmosphere entered through newly opened valves, equalizing the air pressure differential.
“C.S.O. Harrington,” the unit replied.
“Station yourself at the rear.”
“Affirmative, C.S.O. Harrington.”
AX7 had been injured in a skirmish with a hostile species a few planets back, and though the unit had self-repaired as programmed, it wasn’t factory-perfect like the others were, and those prickles were telling her to expect an attack.
The part-organic, part-robotic Polestar Corp androids shuffled aside in the narrow airlock to allow AX7 through. Jas’ excessively long childhood on Mars had resulted in a height of just over two meters, but at two meters thirty the defense units dwarfed her. As usual at close quarters, she was acutely conscious of the difference. The units resembled linebackers padded up, except they had no padding. Thin armored material that was highly resistant to penetration and extreme temperatures coated their large forms.
If the defense units short-circuited and turned on her, well...Jas pushed memories of incidents involving prototypes to the back of her mind. These were the latest, state-of-the-art models, though she wasn’t naive enough to imagine Polestar supplied them to protect the crew. No, in the event of an emergency, she was sure the units’ first move would be to save precious resource samples.
AX7’s face expressed no emotion as it moved to the back of the group, though it had the intellectual capacity to understand why Jas had put it there. Despite her extensive experience working with the units, she hadn’t figured out if they genuinely had no feelings at all, or if they weren’t able to express them.
“What’s the weather like out there, Lingiari?” she asked the shuttle pilot through her radio.
“A little precipitation. Temperature just below zero.”
A spark of nostalgia flickered through Jas’ sense of foreboding. “Snow? It’s snowing?” She hadn’t seen snow since attending training college in Antarctica, the last place on Earth it had snowed in twenty years.
“Sure looks like it,” the pilot replied.
Jas’ brief moment of pleasure was swamped by the realization that snow meant reduced visibility. The prickles down her spine grew so strong she itched to rub her back, impossible though that was in her suit. “Still no bio readings?”
“Nothing bigger than a rat’s dick.”
Jas rolled her eyes and thumbed a switch on her weapon, changing the setting to flamethrower. Not many life forms could withstand fire. She didn’t instruct her defense units on their weaponry. They would compute the optimum response according to the situation, probably better and faster than her. The smartest command strategy was to leave them the hell alone to do their job, unless she knew something they didn’t, but as in most LIV assignments, she was the blind leading the blind.
A light flashed above the airlock’s outer door. Ten flashes and it would open. The shuttle computer was simultaneously relaying the countdown to the units electronically, but their eyes were also on the light. Defense unit behavior was disarmingly human at times.
The door opened, and the airlock flooded with light and swirling flakes of snow. Jas’ visor instantly dimmed, shadowing her view of the terrain outside. A flat, plain landscape stretched to the horizon, lightly powdered with snow and peppered with tough scrub. Except for the low, dull vegetation, the area seemed empty of life. A dark gray structure made up of overlapping hexagonal boxes two or three meters tall dominated the view, against a pale gray, cloudy sky. It wasn’t the most inviting planet Jas had visited.
She gave the order to disembark. Moving as one, the defense units set off down the ramp. She followed and took her place at their side. The one point two Earth gravity made moving a little more effort than usual, but it was manageable. Her boots broke through the thin layer of snow, and the familiar thrill of being the first human being to set foot on a new planet surged through her, despite her trepidation.
“No Class P life forms within one K,” came Lingiari’s voice through her radio. His close-range scanners were telling him the same as the starship’s less sensitive long-distance surveillance equipment had indicated before they set out—nothing to worry about, supposedly. Jas’s grip tightened on her weapon as she accompanied the units toward the matte gray structure.
“Your scanners are penetrating that rock construction, right?” she asked Lingiari.
“Yeah, as far as I can tell, but they aren’t picking up anything. Seems to be empty. But it isn’t rock. It’s a crystal-metal amalgam. And another material the scanners can’t identify.”
“Artificial?”
“I think you might be confusing me with a scientist. I’m forwarding the results to the ship.”
“Sorry. Thanks for the info,” Jas replied. Of course the pilot didn’t have the knowledge or authority to interpret the data. What was she thinking? She deliberately tensed and then relaxed her muscles. An officer aboard the Galathea would update her on anything they thought important. At that moment, no one was saying anything.
She’d reached a hole in the wall of the structure. The defense units were waiting in formation. The hole was hexagonal, mirroring the shape of the structure’s blocks. Inside, all was dark.
“C.S.O. Harrington, permission to enter and search,” AX5 said.
“Permission granted. AX12, you too.”
The two units stepped over a low wall at the base of the hole and dipped their heads as they went inside. Motionless, the other units waited, snowflakes settling on their wide shoulders. A few minutes later, AX5’s calm voice came through Jas’ radio. “All clear.”
She released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Follow on,” she instructed the rest.
As Jas went in, her dimmed visor cleared, and a light beamed out from her helmet, slicing through the dar
kness. She was in an empty room just large enough to hold her and thirteen units comfortably. AX5 and 12 were investigating a neighboring chamber. The floor was the same crystal-metal amalgam as the walls and ceiling, and it sloped gradually downward toward several hexagonal holes at the far end. A few steps inside, and Jas could raise her head.
AX12 and 5 appeared at a hole—or doorway?—on the far side. The place was still and silent. The scanner reports seemed accurate. It looked empty, totally devoid of life or artifacts. She divided the units into groups and sent them to investigate deeper inside, accompanying one of the groups herself.
The next room looked the same as the first. No sign of life nor signs that anything had ever lived there. The only break in the monotonous walls was more holes, leading to identical rooms and heading downward, underground and deeper into the structure. From Jas’ position as she peered through a hole, the rooms seemed endless.
An hour passed, then two. Jas and the units penetrated deep into the labyrinthine construction. She had to activate her suit’s pathfinder function to avoid getting lost. By the time she surfaced, she’d found nothing different from the empty room at the entrance.
Jas had conducted LIVs on many planets. According to strict regulations, they had to vacate immediately at the first sign of intelligence. If there was no intelligent life, the planet’s resources were up for grabs to the first corporation that claimed them.
In Jas’ experience the evidence of high-level, sentient species was usually clear. Whatever the form of intelligence, evolution always seemed to favor certain expressions of it: the use of tools, modifying the natural environment, storage of resources, training of offspring, and the systemization of food gathering or production and distribution. On K.67092d, the evidence was not clear. The regular, straight lines of the structure indicated artificial construction, but there seemed to be no other evidence of intelligence. If sentient life forms had built the place, where were they? Why had they left, leaving nothing behind?