Variant: A science fiction thriller (The Predictive: Deep Space Fringe Wars Book 2)

by L. V. Lane

  Then Landon entered.

  “What are you doing here?” Landon’s brows drew together.

  My eyes shifted from one man to the other. I wished the battle taking place in my skull would reach its climax, so I could process what was going on.

  Eric raised both hands. “Hey, I’m not the one keeping secrets from a predictive.”

  Secrets! “Medic!” The post-stasis shakes chose that moment to hit me hard. I needed to know what was going on. I had no time to be feeble.

  “Stop provoking her.” Landon glared at Eric, while Brent materialized from wherever he’d been hiding to administer me with much needed drugs. “How can you two be related?”

  His question was a pertinent one. I had whiled away many an hour trying to figure out a plausible explanation for how the same gene pool could yield such wildly different results as Eric and me.

  “I ask myself the same question every day,” Eric said earnestly.

  At least we agreed on something.

  “Me being so popular and Eva being so—” Eric gestured in my general direction, “Not.”

  An inelegant snort escaped me, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances.

  “Back to the briefing,” Landon snapped. “We need contingency plans in place ASAP.”

  Contingency plans? The drugs began doing whatever magic they did. The roiling in my stomach settled while the pounding in my head reduced to a dull ache.

  Landon returned his focus to me. “And I need to update Eva.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Landon

  VULNERABILITY RADIATED FROM her pale face, which wasn’t a word one associated with a predictive of any kind, but especially not Eva, who was a particularly egotistical example.

  That was unfair of me. It was more… misguided enthusiasm.

  After leaving Nammu, one might have been forgiven for thinking things had changed between us. But the month long lead up to stasis had been chaotic at best, and I’d barely seen her. I still thought about fucking her over a desk.

  I still wanted to do it again.

  I also recognized that she was a predictive, and therefore, not entirely normal. I wasn’t exactly normal either, and neither of us had taken the time to discuss what we might want from a relationship going forward. In the back of my mind, I figured we’d have plenty of time to work things out once we arrived.

  Now here we were, once more facing a new, unknown situation that had all the hallmarks of disaster.

  Everything in the room was white, and Eva was also wearing white, which had the effect of adding to her pallor. Her freckles stood out stark on her face and her hair was mussed up from sleep. She radiated an adorable kind of grumpiness. It was clear she needed to lie back and rest. Everyone had taken the full twenty hours to work through the after effects. Except for Eric, but that wasn’t by choice. I couldn’t think of a single person, myself included, who had sat up after five minutes.

  I waved the remaining medic out of the room. “I’ll call you if I need you,” I said.

  Brent didn’t hesitate to vacate the space, despite it breaking protocol.

  “How are you feeling?” It seemed a safe opening line, but the look she leveled at me dredged up a sigh and set expectations as to how this conversation would go. “I know, that was a dumb question. And you hate dumb questions or small talk. So, let’s skip the pleasantries, and progress straight on to the part where you vent about whatever is bothering you.”

  Sex had a mysterious softening impact on her abrasive personality. If she didn’t look so deathly ill, I might have considered fucking her over the side of the medical pod, as awkward as it might be.

  Her lips compressed into a line. “I don’t have time to vent. Tell me what has happened.”

  I thought she wasn’t long enough out of stasis for this kind of conversation, but short of denying her request, which would only increase her angst, I was out of options. “When I exited stasis, our monitoring systems alerted me to some unexpected readings at Coulter-416.”

  She gestured impatiently at a fluid cup with the straw sitting on the medical console. “Elaborate.”

  Her shaking fingers clutched the vessel as she drank. If she were anyone else, I might have offered to help.

  “There were life readings. A lot of life readings. Off the charts amounts of life readings.”

  Her head lifted. “Human?”

  “No, not that we can detect from here. Plant, animal—” I shrugged. “But who knows until we can launch a probe.”

  “Do we know how this happened?”

  “No,” I said, and never had that word left such an inadequate taste in my mouth. Her eyes narrowed on me, and her head tilted ever so slightly to the side in a silent request for me to continue. “There’s a city. High tech. Off the charts high tech.”

  Her brows drew together. “A city without people? That makes no sense. Are they dead?”

  “We don’t think so. It appears to be abandoned. It’s the only place on the damn planet without a single life reading.” Silence settled, and I could feel the weight of her absolute interest. “Perhaps not abandoned, or at least not in the usual sense… The city has no more than a dozen detectable structures, and there’s evidence of further construction underway. Riley thinks it’s the final stage of establishing the planet ready to receive its new inhabitants.”

  Her eyes shifted down to the cup in her hand. “Then they will return.”

  I drew a ragged breath in. I hadn’t needed her to tell me this. It was obvious that whoever had created the city would be coming back for it, but there was something about having a predictive state it in that unequivocal voice that cast the speculation into fact. “When?”

  She let out a huff that managed to express perfectly what she thought of the question.

  “Yes, I know you want more information. We don’t have a lot, but I’ll get someone to bring you a viewer with what we do have to review. You need to wait the standard twenty hours before you can have your communicator bud replaced. Don’t try to intimidate the medic into hooking you up early. There will be serious repercussions if you breach protocol.”

  “Not Eric.”

  I never doubted she loved her brother after the wild extremes she went to on Nammu. She didn’t want him dead, but she didn’t want him too close, either. I smiled. “No, not Eric. If I can trust you not to exhaust yourself, I’ll have Riley come over, and you can discuss it with her.”

  Eva had spent a great deal of time with Riley, or so I had heard, during the run up to the launch. I’d had grave doubts when I found out Eric had rescued a former Federation slave class. But I trusted Eva implicitly, and she had vetted Riley.

  Eva’s nod was efficient, but her tone was accusing when she said, “You should have awoken me straight away. You should have been here waiting when I got up.”

  I lifted my hand to cut her off. “I wasn’t expecting you to be demanding answers within seconds. No matter how you’re feeling now, you’re going to crash in about five minutes. Everyone does. Our active personnel are pulling insane shifts trying to revive key people and gather what early intel they can. We can only do what we can do. I don’t want you to burn yourself out.” Or to burn the team out, like you did before.

  “I will cope.” She took another sip of her drink. Her voice was colored with her confidence, but it was hard to tell if she was being predictive or whether her innate self-belief was getting in the way.

  “Perhaps you will,” I said.

  We had met on a few occasions over the years prior to that last fateful operation. Crossing paths in the command centers of the Aterran Empire, where I’d received little more than a cool nod of acknowledgement as she passed, surrounded by towering guards that I imagined bench pressing transports for fun. I had come to know her considerably better during the chaos that followed Edson-46. I was still undecided whether her decision to grace the colony with her presence was the blessing Victor Loire believed it to be.

  Events on Na
mmu played back like they had happened a month ago instead of a hundred years. We were just that though, a strange blip, and after, an odd awkwardness had colored our brief interactions as we prepared for the launch.

  No one knew about what had happened between us. They knew she had been with Jax. If speculation was to be believed, she was with Jax in the time leading up to the launch.

  “You still intend to colonize?” she asked, dragging me from my introspection.

  She was watching me and had doubtlessly been assessing every nuance of my body language along with the other subtle cues predictives could read so well.

  “Maybe,” I said. “We’re here now. But I’m not in a rush. The ship can stabilize in orbit for another ten years. We don’t have a huge number of options, but we should explore them. Sending probes to search close planets and systems makes sense.”

  Nodding, she drained the last of her drink and held the empty container out to me. “I’ll rest now and speak to Riley when I wake up.”

  I wanted to be pissed at her. I’d spent a great deal of time pissed at her for one reason or another. But as she lay back and closed her eyes as her body gave into the exhaustion her mind wanted to fight, I smiled.

  I put the drink container on the console behind her. For a person so intense when awake, she appeared unexpectedly serene in repose. “Finding Serenity,” I said softly.

  But I was no longer thinking about Eva. I was recalling the image of the planet whose orbit we had entered not so long ago. The swirling mass of green, blue, and white was a vision too beautiful to be anything but an impossible dream.

  Like Eva, was that idyllic planet a pretty facade to a slumbering demon?

  It would stroke her already considerable ego, me officially naming the planet after a vision of her sleeping. Nevertheless, the name fit.

  I left the white recovery cell, calling Brent, who assured me Eva’s readings were stable and that this was normal. After, I headed over to the operations room for a debriefing from Eric and the Technologist, Riley.

  “What do you have for me?” I asked as I entered the room. The standard black attire of command and royal blue of the technical team was easy on the eyes after the starkness of the recovery cell. Besides Eric and Riley, there were three other technical experts present. By Aterran standards, they would have been considered the superstars of their field. Compared to Riley, they were closer to educational dropouts. They managed well enough, and Riley allocated them what she referred to as the ‘simple tasks’.

  “The satellites appear to be monitoring the planet, rather than for threats from space,” Riley stated. Her style of address never shifted from calm and was reflective of her disposition. She was a tiny woman with soft gray eyes. I still couldn’t work out how Eric had ever believed she was a he. Even Marik, who was the least observant person, thought it was obvious.

  “That’s good news.” I took a seat at the table where a holographic image displayed Coulter-416. An impressive collection of satellites circled the planet. It was these satellites that had first triggered the system warning when the external monitoring came online after we dropped into orbit.

  “Maybe,” Riley hedged. “The technology is unique, and they may well have monitoring methods we know nothing about. We have made no hostile move, and neither have they. That could change if we tried to land.”

  “We don’t have many options,” I said. “We have finite energy for another trip, which limits our scope for other locations.”

  “We should send a drone down,” Cathy, another technical expert, offered.

  Riley lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  “I mean, how else will we know if there’s anyone down there?” Cathy continued.

  “She has a valid point,” I said. “I need every option on the table, no matter how risky or foolish it might seem at first.”

  “Yes, a drone would provide definitive answers, but we will need more data before we can make a call,” Riley said. “We expected a barren planet: soil, water, and at best, microbe level life. Instead, we’ve found a verdant world full of diverse life and a city beyond my personal experience, be it Aterran or Federation. Caution is prudent at this time.” As if sensing the negative mood, she continued straight on, “Is Eva awake?”

  Two of the technical experts fidgeted in their seats.

  “Yes, and demanding what information we have. I left her resting, but I’m confident I’ll get a call from the medic as soon as she wakes again. We’ll need to bring her up to speed.”

  “She’s just come out of stasis.” There was a note of genuine concern in Riley’s voice. Riley was the only person on the ship Eva deemed close to her intellectual equal and the two of them had struck an immediate rapport.

  “And already aware of the issues we face. Much as I’d like to put the medic in the brig for letting it slip, we both know Eva is too astute to hide anything from. Even without his clumsy handling, she would have been demanding information. I told her about the settlement, and that the planet is home to a plethora of non-human life.”

  “We’ll need her insights,” Riley stated simply.

  “I know, but we don’t have much information, and a predictive with limited information is the Wrath of God,” I stated dryly.

  Eric chuckled, and the technical expert sitting to his right swallowed audibly.

  “She doesn’t mean to be difficult.” There was a hint of defensiveness in Riley’s tone. “She wants to save everyone, and it destroys her when she can’t.”

  “Oh, I think she does.” Eric rolled his eyes. “I’m amazed I turned into the balanced individual I am given the many years of trauma I suffered growing up.”

  I raised my hand. Much as I agreed with Eric’s sentiments, we didn’t have time to get into an Eva bashing session. And despite Eric’s admission to the contrary, I was confident he carried more than a few mental scars.

  “What do you recommend our next steps are?” I asked Riley.

  “We should search for alternative planets anyway. It’s a long shot, but we may only have long shots left. Sometimes interplanetary probes can send back a bounty. Or we could die of old age before they return a single potential. We can’t go down there yet, but barring a hostile act from whatever defense might be in place, going down there is still our best hope. Who knows, perhaps we’re dealing with sentient machines—I always believed it was inevitable. Eva said as much.”

  A cold shiver ran the length of my spine. “What use would machines have with a planet?”

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “A challenge, a sense of wonder… to be Gods.” She indicated the holographic image. “They were creating art when I left, pondering philosophy, and the most prolific innovators and inventors of modern history. Nurturing life on a distant planet does not seem so wild a stretch of the imagination. If there are sentient machines down there, then I believe it might be an unexpected boon.”

  Eric leaned back in his chair making it creak. “You’re going to need to explain why that’s good in real simple terms.”

  “Life is their great obsession. They value all its manifestations, even humans. They wouldn’t harm us, I’m confident of that. They might restrict us, but not harm us.”

  “Restrict? Just one tiny bundle of joyful insights there, Riley.” I was surprised to see affection in Eric’s face as he glanced down at Riley. They had been prisoners together for many days during that debacle on Nammu, and Eric, for all his gruff exterior, had developed a soft spot for the technologist.

  The ensuing conversation passed me by. My hand went subconsciously to the data tag around my neck where Gordon’s sentience still existed. Victor had been reluctant to allow androids into the new world. While Gordon existed on a data tag, he wasn’t yet dead. He wasn’t alive either. I’d thought about seeking a sleeve for him before we left, but somehow, abandoning him to a collapsing empire hadn’t sat right. I was working on hope that Victor would eventually soften toward the idea of Gordon’s revival.

  It was a
long shot. We seemed to be suffering from long shots all round.

  A call from the medical team interrupted my thoughts and I raised a hand to halt further conversation. Brent’s unhappy face came into view. “Eva is asking for Riley.”

  I checked the time. Thirty minutes since I left her to sleep.

  “Let’s adjourn there. Riley, take what you have and get Eva up to speed. Send the medic out while you’re talking. This stays confidential for now. The rest of you can get started on manufacturing the planetary search probes. I’ll make an official announcement to the ship tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Definition: Trigger, Event of predictive note.

  Eva

  I GULPED DOWN the hideous sugary concoction the medic, who went by the name of Brent, insisted I should drink. Given I had fallen asleep, I conceded he might know what was best for me.

  Riley wasn’t here yet and I waved the medic over. “Call the Commander and tell him I require Riley.”

  He didn’t argue with my request this time, and immediately made the call.

  “She’s on her way.” Returning to my side, Brent took the empty straw-tipped vessel from my hands and checked my readings. “You might tire again in an hour or so. It tends to come in cycles of between one to two hours.”

  His earlier smiles were absent, but he had been unguarded with information. I didn’t need to be predictive to know that Landon would have had words.

  My brief conversation with Landon rested heavy on my mind. Coulter-416 has life and a city. Someone has been, or was still here. Our future had always been uncertain, but now it was even more so. I am trapped here, we all are, on a titaliua shell designed for transportation, not a home. I was certain the basic nature of the ship facilities was a ‘design’ feature intended to encourage our swift transfer planet side. Landon had said we could stay in orbit for another ten years. Even when there was an expected end date in mind, I hated space travel. The prospect of this indefinite incarceration, so close to our destination, was equally intolerable.