Chapter 1
Chapter one
Earth: Sector Three
New Asia Continent
The unforgiving sun beat upon her back, relentless, lethal on this dead world.
Wynn sank her glove into the tilled earth and pulled, creating a hand-shaped valley for her seeds.
She reached into the bag at her hip, grabbed a fistful, and plopped them into the groove a centimeter apart. Gently, she covered them with soil.
These suckers are going to live.
She wouldn’t fail. Not this time. Couldn’t afford to. Her days at this outpost were numbered. Either they would replace her with two other scientists, or they would give her a new partner and she’d be forced to quit.
She wouldn’t be able to handle working with someone else after everything.
The sound of her exhales echoed loudly within the helmet of her UV-suit.
Sweat trickled down her spine to settle in the groove of her ass.
Taking the pulse rifle at her hip with her, she shuffled back a pace, and scored another valley into the fertilized soil with her hand.
Her seeds fell silently into place before she covered them.
Again and again she repeated the process, moving centimeters backward at a time, making room for more seeds. More potential.
A crick in her neck throbbed, and Wynn straightened, rolling her shoulders to get rid of the ache.
The landscape spread endlessly before her.
Beyond her cultivated fields, dry cracks in the earth reached elongated fingers westward.
The wind turbine atop her outpost, the size of her fingernail at this distance, remained motionless, no breeze for relief as she toiled through the dirt.
Farther out, the thin line of the supply tether shot through the stratosphere, equipping Research Station 214 twenty kilometers away.
And to the south of that, moody clouds formed in shades of purple and black.
She squinted. The bulbous shapes looked bloated with rain. How much acid would they contain this time?
Sun glinted off the solar panels atop the greenhouse connected to her outpost—her favorite place on the planet.
Inside, rows of seeds, sprouts, and saplings lived protected from Earth’s toxic conditions.
With every crop, they’d been making them stronger, more resilient to withstand radiation and acid rain. And one day they would see results.
They.
Her breath hitched, and she swallowed down the lump in her throat.
It wasn’t “they” anymore. Just her.
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t shed another tear, that she needed to remember the good times with Foster instead of what happened. The memories of death and gore had taken over her nightmares. She didn’t need them to take over her waking hours too.
Exhaling a slow breath, Wynn froze when a slice of movement caught her eye. She lifted her hand to block out the sun’s glare.
Far above, an object hurtled its way across the sky toward the surface, a white vapor trail blooming in its wake.
Space junk or a meteor, probably. Down and down it fell, closer to the horizon.
Wynn followed it until it disappeared from sight.
The streak of white contrasted against the storm brewing so far away, an inescapable scar, straight and thick—so similar to the ones on her arm.
Bang. The thunderous sound reverberated across the barren terrain when it landed kilometers away. The vibration hit Wynn low in the stomach. She grabbed the pulse rifle beside her, heart racing. The butt of the long-distance weapon in her hand calmed her as she inhaled a deep breath.
It’s nothing. Just space garbage.
Then how come she hadn’t received an alert? If she could see the vapor trail, then it was close enough for a warning.
Glancing down at the control panel on the arm of her UV-suit, she expelled a defeated sigh.
She’d forgotten she deactivated her PALM, her Personal Automated Link to Media, this morning, turning off all communications.
Not even the live spaceball game had kept her attention.
It had been a relief to disconnect her ocular implant from the grid.
An ache always formed behind her eyes after a while.
And listening to the newsreels was definitely out of the question. They were nothing but doomsday predictions of Tellusian strikes, waxing poetic about the proposed genocide of the entire Calypson nebula, and then her.
Her image everywhere, and Foster’s too. Reporters spouting facts that weren’t quite right, conjecture that didn’t ring true, and images of the beasts.
Wynn swallowed against the sudden welling in her throat and set the rifle aside. Turning off her PALM had been about keeping her mind from horrific memories, not a means to stir it all up. She shook her head and got back to work, scoring the earth, then dropping seeds.
Foster had wanted it that way, everything planted by hand. Old school, he’d said.
But her mind wouldn’t settle, and the day he’d died took up the forefront of her thoughts. So similar to today, the heat of the sun, the dryness in the air…
And so much blood.
Stomach rolling, she arrived at the end of her row, turned, and started down the last section.
Her pulse rifle remained ever-present at her hip—an unnecessary precaution, but one she couldn’t seem to leave in the storage shed.
It was idiotic to think the beasts would appear out of thin air.
Academy scientists had promised her they’d been corralled for study far, far away.
Even so, having the weapon at her hip eased some of her anxiety.
Wynn inched along, plopping seeds in their new home, covering them softly, then shuffling backward.
As she neared the end of her last row, a shadow crossed her path. Heart in her throat, she jerked straight, and reached for the rifle.
But her gaze caught on the barren landscape before she grabbed hold.
“Holy shit,” she murmured.
It was the clouds that blocked the sun. The purple-black swirl now stretched across the horizon without an end in sight. They darkened the sky into twilight, though it was the middle of the day, and swallowed the vapor trail from earlier.
Wynn slapped the panel of her UV-suit, and her PALM reconnected with the grid. Notifications spread across her visor’s screen, the first one with an alert about the incoming meteor and its projected impact location. Next was a weather report. Storm imminent.
It headed straight for her.
Wynn jumped to her feet, swiped the pulse rifle out of the dirt, and jogged between rows of freshly planted seeds toward her hovercart.
More reports filled her visor, weather advisories, prediction models that covered most of the continent, then disappeared a moment later to be replaced by new ones.
This is so bad. She’d just planted a new field of precious seeds, and they were about to be destroyed by acid and wind. Picking up her speed as best she could in her UV-suit, she swallowed the half-sob that wanted to escape. Not going to happen.
As soon as she arrived at the hovercart, she tossed the rifle in the back bed and hopped behind the controls. Heart racing, she pressed the start button.
The engine sputtered, then came to life.
She removed the brake and pushed on the throttle, accelerating down the middle pathway toward her fields’ central control hub.
Brown rows of soil sped by. The silver cylinder towered ahead of her, pointed near the top.
She slowed, then jerked to a stop as the first fat drops of rain splattered the ground.
No. She jumped out and ran to the control panel to swipe her PALM.
It lit up, a cascade of options falling into sight.
She turned off the weather reports clogging her visor’s interface to concentrate, then accessed the enviro-net controls.
Slapping the screen with a little too much force, she activated the net.
The shielding rippled blue and green around her, stretching upward to protect all four fields like a tent.
Wynn double checked the settings. Set to maximum, it would keep every drop of rain from damaging the seeds.
Hopefully those first few drops hadn’t harmed them.
She let out a long breath, her limbs trembling after the burst of adrenaline.
The world around her continued to darken under the approaching storm, then lightning flashed, rippling below the clouds like breaking glass.
Thunder cracked a moment later. The sound punched her eardrums. She leaned back, the control hub pressing into her spine, and tipped her head to the sky.
Mesmerized, she watched as a wall of rain rolled straight toward her.
The shields sizzled blue and green when the moisture hit, then the swirling clouds took over, darkening the day to night. She squinted toward Research Station 214, and couldn’t see the tether through the thickness of the clouds and incoming rain.
But something moved on the horizon below, about to be swallowed by the storm, a dark shape against brown terrain—something that shouldn’t be there.
Wynn’s chest seized with panic. She reached for the pulse rifle and grabbed nothing but air, remembering too late she’d left it in the hovercart meters away. The urge to run nearly overwhelmed her, but her feet remained planted.
Heart in her throat. She swiped her PALM against the UV-suit’s control panel, activating her visor’s interface.
Category five storm. Take cover.
The message repeated itself across her vision, but nothing told her what marred the horizon.
Had someone from Research Station 214 decided to check on her when her comms were down? She shook off the idea. They would have driven a hover vehicle, not walked.
A spike of lightning lit up everything around her. Wynn refocused on the thing in the distance in the wake of its brightness. It looked about the same size as a person.
Or an animal.
Thunder cracked louder than the last one, making her jump.