A chill raced through Beckham at the sound of applause from the guests, who all rose from their seats. Apollo barked and whipped his tail against Fitz’s carbon-fiber blades.
Ringgold’s words were kind, but they weren’t correct, and part of him protested. He was only here because of the sacrifices of so many of his friends. He blinked his eyes, his vision blurred by tears and the lingering damage of the juvenile’s acid spray. He could almost see their faces among the guests—Meg and Riley, Lieutenant Colonel Jensen, Captain Davis.
Kate squeezed Beckham’s hand, anchoring him to the world of the living once more, and he squeezed back. He wasn’t sure what the future held for them, but he was eternally grateful for a chance to find out.
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Acknowledgments
It’s always hard for me to write this section for fear of leaving someone out. My books would not be worth reading if I didn’t have the overwhelming support of family, friends, and readers.
Before I thank those people, I wanted to give a bit of background about how the Extinction Cycle was conceived and the journey it has been on since I began writing. The story began over three years ago at a time when the genre was saturated with zombie books. I wanted to write something unique and different, a story that explained scientifically how a virus could turn men into monsters. At this time, the Ebola virus was raging through western Africa, and several cases showed up in the continental United States for the first time.
After talking with my biomedical-engineer friend, Tony Melchiorri, an idea formed about the risk the virus posed. That idea blossomed after I started researching chemical and biological weapons dating back to the Cold War. In March of 2014, I sat down to pen the first pages of Extinction Horizon, the first book in what would become the Extinction Cycle. Using real science and the terrifying premise of a government-made bioweapon I set out to tell the story I always wanted to tell.
The book quickly found an audience and readers devoured the first three novels that came out in rapid succession and seemed to spark life back into the zombie craze. The audiobook, narrated by the award-winning Bronson Pinchot, climbed the charts, hitting the top spot on Audible.
After I released book four, Tony and I visited Rome, Italy, for a writing project. It was a year later that I decided to use my experiences and notes from that trip to create a new plotline in the Extinction Cycle. Books six and now seven follow Italian Sergeant Piero Angaran and his pet mouse on their journey through Rome. I’ve had such a great time writing their story, and I hope you all enjoy the setting in Italy.
With the launch of books four and five, more readers discovered the Extinction Cycle—over three hundred thousand to date. The German translation launched in November 2016, and Amazon’s Kindle Worlds opened the story to other authors.
Even more exciting, two years after I published Extinction Horizon, Orbit decided to purchase and rerelease the series. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I want to thank everyone that helped me create the Extinction Cycle.
I couldn’t have done it without the help of a small army of editors, beta readers, and the support of my family and friends. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to my initial editors Aaron Sikes and Erin Elizabeth Long as well as my good author-friend Tony Melchiorri. The trio spent countless hours on the Extinction Cycle books. Without them these stories would not be what they are. Erin also helped edit Orbs and Hell Divers. She’s been with me pretty much since day one, and I appreciate her more than she knows. So thanks, Erin, Tony, and Aaron.
A special thanks goes to David Fugate, my agent, who provided valuable feedback on the early version of Extinction Horizon and the entire Extinction Cycle series. I’m grateful for his support and guidance.
Another special thanks goes to Blackstone Audio for their support of the audio version. Narrator Bronson Pinchot also played, and continues to play, a vital role in bringing the story to life.
They say a person is only as good as those they surround themselves with. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with talented people much smarter than myself. I’ve also had the support from excellent publishers like Blackstone and Orbit.
Thank you to Orbit for bringing this story to mass market. It’s been amazing seeing the books reach an entirely new audience outside of the digital world.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank the people for whom I write: the readers. I’ve been blessed to have my work read in countries around the world by wonderful people. If you are reading this, know that I truly appreciate you for trying my stories.
To my family, friends and everyone else that has supported me on this journey, I thank you.
extras
meet the author
Photo Credit: Maria Diaz
NICHOLAS SANSBURY SMITH is the USA Today bestselling author of Hell Divers, the Orbs trilogy, and the Extinction Cycle. He worked for Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management in disaster mitigation before switching careers to focus on his one true passion: writing. When he isn’t writing or daydreaming about the apocalypse, he enjoys running, biking, spending time with his family, and traveling the world. He is an Ironman triathlete and lives in Iowa with his fiancée, their dogs, and a houseful of books.
If you enjoyed
EXTINCTION WAR
look out for
THE WAR DOGS TRILOGY
by
Greg Bear
The Gurus made their presence on Earth known thirteen years ago. Providing technology and scientific insights far beyond what mankind was capable of, they became indispensable advisors and promised even more gifts that we just couldn’t pass up.
But they were followed by mortal enemies—the Antagonists—from sun to sun, planet to planet, and now the Gurus are stretched thin—and they need humanity’s help.
Our first bill has come due.
Skyrines like Michael Venn have been volunteered to pay the price. They face insidious enemies who were already inside the solar system, establishing a beachhead on Mars.
Venn and his comrades will be lucky to make it out alive—let alone preserve the future of all of mankind.
DOWN TO EARTH
I’m trying to go home. As the poet said, if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. Home is where you go to get all that sorted out.
Hoofing it outside Skybase Lewis-McChord, I’m pretty sure this is Washington State, I’m pretty sure I’m walking along Pacific Highway, and this is the twenty-first century and not some fidging movie—
But then a whining roar grinds the air and a broad shadow sweeps the road, eclipsing cafés and pawnshops and loan joints—followed seconds later by an eye-stinging haze of rocket fuel. I swivel on aching feet and look up to see a double-egg-and-hawksbill burn down from the sky, leaving a rainbow trail over McChord field …
And I have to wonder.
I just flew in on one of those after eight months in the vac, four going out, three back. Seven blissful months in timeout, stuffed in a dark tube and soaked in Cosmoline.
All for three weeks in the shit. Rough, confusing weeks.
I feel dizzy. I look down, blink out the sting, and keep walking. Cosmoline still fidges with my senses.
Here on Earth, we don’t say fuck anymore, the Gurus don’t like it, so we say fidge instead. Part of the price of freedom. Out on the Red, we say fuck as much as we like. The angels edit our words so the Gurus won’t have to hear.
SNKRAZ.
Joe has a funny story about fuck. I’ll
tell you later, but right now, I’m not too happy with Joe. We came back in separate ships, he did not show up at the mob center, and my Cougar is still parked outside Skyport Virginia. I could grab a shuttle into town, but Joe told me to lie low. Besides, I badly want time alone—time to stretch my legs, put down one foot after another. There’s the joy of blue sky, if I can look up without keeling over, and open air without a helm—and minus the rocket smell—is a newness in the nose and a beauty in the lungs. In a couple of klicks, though, my insteps pinch and my calves knot. Earth tugs harsh after so long away. I want to heave. I straighten and look real serious, clamp my jaws, shake my head—barely manage to keep it down.
Suddenly, I don’t feel the need to walk all the way to Seattle. I have my thumb and a decently goofy smile, but after half an hour and no joy, I’m making up my mind whether to try my luck at a minimall Starbucks when a little blue electric job creeps up behind me, quiet as a bad fart. Quiet is not good.
I spin and try to stop shivering as the window rolls down. The driver is in her fifties, reddish hair rooted gray. For a queasy moment, I think she might be MHAT sent from Madigan. Joe warned me, “For Christ’s sake, after all that’s happened, stay away from the doctors.” MHAT is short for Military Health Advisory Team. But the driver is not from Madigan. She asks where I’m going. I say downtown Seattle. Climb in, she says. She’s a colonel’s secretary at Lewis, a pretty ordinary grandma, but she has these strange gray eyes that let me see all the way back to when her scorn shaped men’s lives.
I ask if she can take me to Pike Place Market. She’s good with that. I climb in. After a while, she tells me she had a son just like me. He became a hero on Titan, she says—but she can’t really know that, because we aren’t on Titan yet, are we?
I say to her, “Sorry for your loss.” I don’t say, Glad it wasn’t me.
“How’s the war out there?” she asks.
“Can’t tell, ma’am. Just back and still groggy.”
They don’t let us know all we want to know, barely tell us all we need to know, because we might start speculating and lose focus.
She and I don’t talk much after that. Fidging Titan. Sounds old and cold. What kind of suits would we wear? Would everything freeze solid? Mars is bad enough. We’re almost used to the Red. Stay sharp on the dust and rocks. That’s where our shit is at. Leave the rest to the generals and the Gurus.
All part of the deal. A really big deal.
Titan. Jesus.
Grandma in the too-quiet electric drives me north to Spring Street, then west to Pike and First, where she drops me off with a crinkle-eyed smile and a warm, sad finger-squeeze. The instant I turn and see the market, she pips from my thoughts. Nothing has changed since vac training at SBLM, when we tired of the local bars and drove north, looking for trouble but ending up right here. We liked the market. The big neon sign. The big round clock. Tourists and merchants and more tourists, and that ageless bronze pig out in front.
A little girl in a pink frock sits astride the pig, grinning and slapping its polished flank. What we fight for.
I’m in civvies but Cosmoline gives your skin a tinge that lasts for days, until you piss it out, so most everyone can tell I’ve been in timeout. Civilians are not supposed to ask probing questions, but they still smile like knowing sheep. Hey, spaceman, welcome back! Tell me true, how’s the vac?
I get it.
A nice Laotian lady and her sons and daughter sell fruit and veggies and flowers. Their booth is a cascade of big and little peppers and hot and sweet peppers and yellow and green and red peppers, Walla Walla sweets and good strong brown and fresh green onions, red and gold and blue and russet potatoes, yams and sweet potatoes, pole beans green and yellow and purple and speckled, beets baby and adult, turnips open boxed in bulk and attached to sprays of crisp green leaf. Around the corner of the booth I see every kind of mushroom but the screwy kind. All that roughage dazzles. I’m accustomed to browns and pinks, dark blue, star-powdered black.
A salient of kale and cabbage stretches before me. I seriously consider kicking off and swimming up the counter, chewing through the thick leaves, inhaling the color, spouting purple and green. Instead, I buy a bunch of celery and move out of the tourist flow. Leaning against a corrugated metal door, I shift from foot to cramping foot, until finally I just hunker against the cool ribbed steel and rabbit down the celery leaves, dirt and all, down to the dense, crisp core. Love it. Good for timeout tummy.
Now that I’ve had my celery, I’m better. Time to move on. A mile to go before I sleep.
I doubt I’ll sleep much.
Skyrines share flophouses, safe houses—refuges—around the major spaceports. My favorite is a really nice apartment in Virginia Beach. I could be heading there now, driving my Cougar across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, top down, sucking in the warm sea breeze, but thanks to all that’s happened—and thanks to Joe—I’m not. Not this time. Maybe never again.
I rise and edge through the crowds, but my knees are still shaky, I might not make it, so I flag a cab. The cabby is white and middle aged, from Texas. Most of the fellows who used to cab here, Lebanese and Ethiopians and Sikhs, the younger ones at least, are gone to war now. They do well in timeout, better than white Texans. Brown people rule the vac, some say. There’s a lot of brown and black and beige out there: east and west Indians, immigrant Kenyans and Nigerians and Somalis, Mexicans, Filipinos and Malaysians, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans, all varieties of Asian—flung out in space frames, sticks clumped up in fasces—and then they all fly loose, shoot out puff, and drop to the Red. Maybe less dangerous than driving a hack, and certainly pays better.
I’m not the least bit brown. I don’t even tan. I’m a white boy from Moscow, Idaho, a blue-collar IT wizard who got tired of working in cubicles, tired of working around shitheads like myself. I enlisted in the Skyrines (that’s pronounced SKY-reen), went through all the tests and boot and desert training, survived first orbital, survived first drop on the Red—came home alive and relatively sane—and now I make good money. Flight pay and combat pay—they call it engagement bonus—and Cosmoline comp.
Some say the whole deal of cellular suspension we call timeout shortens your life, along with solar flares and gamma rays. Others say no. The military docs say no but scandal painted a lot of them before my last deployment. Whole bunch at Madigan got augured for neglecting our spacemen. Their docs tend to regard spacemen, especially Skyrines, as slackers and complainers. Another reason to avoid MHAT. We make more than they do and still we complain. They hate us. Give them ground pounders any day.
“How many drops?” the Texan cabby asks.
“Too many,” I say. I’ve been at it for six years.
He looks back at me in the mirror. The cab drives itself; he’s in the seat for show. “Ever wonder why?” he asks. “Ever wonder what you’re giving up to them? They ain’t even human.” Some think we shouldn’t be out there at all; maybe he’s one of them.
“Ever wonder?” he asks.
“All the time,” I say.
He looks miffed and faces forward.
The cab takes me into Belltown and lets me out on a semicircular drive, in the shadow of the high-rise called Sky Tower One. I pay in cash. The cabby rewards me with a sour look, even though I give him a decent tip. He, too, pips from my mind as soon as I get out. Bastard.
The tower’s elevator has a glass wall to show off the view before you arrive. The curved hall on my floor is lined with alcoves, quiet and deserted this time of day. I key in the number code, the door clicks open, and the apartment greets me with a cheery pluck of ascending chords. Extreme retro, traditional Seattle, none of it Guru tech; it’s from before I was born.
Lie low. Don’t attract attention.
Christ. No way am I used to being a spook.
The place is just as I remember it—nice and cool, walls gray, carpet and furniture gray and cloudy-day blue, stainless steel fixtures with touches of wood and white enamel. The couch and chairs and tables
are mid-century modern. Last year’s Christmas tree is still up, the water down to scum and the branches naked, but Roomba has sucked up all the needles. Love Roomba. Also pre-Guru, it rolls out of its stair slot and checks me out, nuzzling my toes like a happy gray trilobite.
I finish my tour—checking every room twice, ingrained caution, nobody home—then pull an Eames chair up in front of the broad floor-to-ceiling window and flop back to stare out over the Sound. The big sky still makes me dizzy, so I try to focus lower down, on the green and white ferries coming and going, and then on the nearly continuous lines of tankers and big cargo ships. Good to know Hanjin and Maersk are still packing blue and orange and brown steel containers along with Hogmaw or Haugley or what the hell. Each container is about a seventh the size of your standard space frame. No doubt filled with clever goods made using Guru secrets, juicing our economy like a snuck of meth.
And for that, too—for them—we fight.
If you enjoyed
EXTINCTION WAR
look out for
OUTER EARTH
by
Rob Boffard
In space, every second counts.
Outer Earth is a massive space station that orbits three hundred miles above the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It’s broken, rusted, and falling apart. The world below is dead, wrecked by climate change and nuclear war. Now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that’s dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable.
The population has reached one million. Double what the station was designed to hold. Food is short, crime is rampant, and the ecosystem is nearing its breaking point.
What’s more, there’s a madman hiding on the station who is about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there’ll be nowhere left to run.
Extinction War Page 38
