The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  I didn’t let my mind dwell on the logistics as screens showing code, binary, and schematics streamed past my eyes. The only sounds in the rusty cave of the landing pit were the soft sounds of my fingers on the control panel and Cast scuffling around in the cockpit behind me.

  I ignored everything as I pulled up blueprints of the skip. My fingers hovered over the keys that would disengage it from the main craft. All I needed was for Cast to—

  FOOOM.

  “Holy shit!” Cast whisper-yelled across the garage as light, heat, and sound practically exploded around us.

  Both of us had been expecting the stealth mode of the short-range skips that we’d practiced in at the Station, but this baby was old school. Twin thrusters burned blue fire and the engine inside of it grumbled and purred.

  I cursed and started engaging the code. I hoped to hell those landing doors were quick because we had definitely alerted somebody to our presence here.

  My fingers were just brushing the final keys when something hard and vicious tangled in my hair, yanking me unexpectedly backwards.

  I didn’t let myself get deterred as I held on to the control panel, finishing the last key swipes required to sever the short-range skip. There! Thank God. And now I could concentrate on this – I shifted and avoided another blow – the bald giant was trying to claw my eyes out.

  It was the girl from the dampening room.

  I easily ducked the blow she sent my way and landed a quick jab to her ribs. I was thrilled that my dead tech wasn’t hindering my ability to beat the hell out of this girl. It was frustrating enough that she’d been able to sneak up on me. If my tech had been functional, it would have warned me a hundred different ways that Baldie was on her way to try and tear my hair out. I dodged another blow from the girl and swept her feet out from under her, sending her plummeting to the ground just as I heard Cast engage the main thrusters on the skip. Good kid.

  All I needed to do was get into the skip and we’d be fine. There was no way for them to stop us if we were in the skip.

  I bolted toward Cast, but slipped when the bald chick grabbed the ankle of my bad leg. Pissed and frustrated, I kicked her in the face and she howled, rolling away. Problem solved. Now I just had to sprint the fifty feet across the landing pad and swing up to the cockpit.

  But I wasn’t more than two steps on toward the skip before another set of hands was grabbing me around the neck, slamming me to the floor.

  Quickly assessing my situation, I realized that there were two more Ferrymen bearing their weight down on me, as well as the bald chick moaning on the floor, and three more coming through the door. There were too many for me to fight on my own, and even if Cast came down to help us, our chances of getting away were narrowing by the minute.

  As far as I knew, they hadn’t even realized Cast was in the skip at all. The kid was so small, they probably couldn’t even see him over the dash. Go, Cast. Leave! I cursed myself as I tried to use my integrated tech to talk to his. How many times was I going to have to learn that it was off?

  I was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.

  Elbowing one of the dummies above me in the gut and slamming the other’s head into the ground, I jumped to my feet and screamed at the top of my lungs. “Go! Don’t hesitate! Go!”

  I saw Cast’s eyes and knew that he’d listen. There was a moment of fear. For me, I think. But I saw the second his training took over. The fate of the Datapoints, the fate of our program, was more important than my life. One of us needed to get away and back to the Station.

  My words must have made the other Ferrymen realize that there was actually a kid in the short-range skip, and they hauled ass toward Cast.

  Heck no. I heard the tell-tale sound of the cockpit clicking closed. Good kid.

  Launching myself after the three jerks trying to get to Cast, I scattered them like bowling pins. We were a kicking, rolling mess as I heard the bald chick scream out in rage. I caught a glimpse of her jamming her hands down over the control panel. She was probably just now realizing that the skip wasn’t going to listen to a damn thing she had to say.

  I couldn’t control the feral grin that ripped across my face as I head-locked one of the struggling Ferrymen below me.

  The landing door shot up from the floor of the garage, exhibiting itself as a surprisingly sleek collaboration of glass and steel. We were sealed off from Cast’s skip then, and I watched in suspended glee as the second set of doors spiraled open and the black of the sky dilated into view. Cast didn’t waste time as the skip took off from the pad, hovering unsteadily in the air for just a second.

  I held my breath and flipped a Ferryman off of my back, relishing his grunt of pain. Come on, Cast. Engage the thrusters. Get out of dodge.

  And just like that, the main thrusters burned from red into blue into light, electric purple. And the kid was gone. Into the asteroid field and searing toward safety.

  Chapter Four

  Dahn Enceladus swallowed fiercely against the tight feeling in his throat that had been overwhelming him for hours. It was annoying. He sat alone in one of the Station’s main control rooms, an echoing chamber filled with computers of all kinds. At any given moment during the day, it bustled with technicians who attended to all aspects of the Station’s operations. The defense shields were controlled here, but so were the bells that marked the end of class periods. Hell, the timers on the coffee machines were controlled from here.

  But that wasn’t why Dahn had chosen to come here. It was for the windows. The largest windows in all of the Station; they lined up along one exterior wall. He could see one arm of the asteroid belt on the left side and the whole yawning maw of the universe on the other side.

  It had been hours since the attack now – almost half a day later, and the Station had finally gone quiet. The technicians, the Datapoints, and everyone else had finally exhausted themselves.

  But not Dahn. Dahn couldn’t imagine sleeping right now. Not after what had happened. He shifted in the technician’s chair closest to the windows. He’d been among the first to realize that the attacker’s skip was docking. And he’d been the very first to understand why.

  He’d known that Glade was either going to be dead or captured in less than a minute, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Yeah. Sleep was non-existent since that realization had hit him.

  Not to mention the fact that he’d screamed in Jan Ernst Haven’s face not an hour after the three Datapoints had been taken.

  Dahn shifted in his chair again and let his forehead fall into his hands. God. It was like a knife of electricity through his chest when he thought of it. He’d stormed into Sir Haven’s quarters – without knocking – and demanded to be given a skip to follow the Ferrymen.

  Haven had calmly rejected the idea and attempted to send Dahn away.

  “Don’t you get it?” Dahn had screamed, an inch from Sir Haven’s face. “They’ll murder her!”

  The older man hadn’t even blinked. “No, boy. It’s you who doesn’t understand what will happen to her. And if you think I’m going to send a single Datapoint to further enrage her captors, then you don’t have the logical brain I always thought you had. Use your intellect, Dahn Enceladus! And go back to your quarters.”

  Dahn had never been so thoroughly dismissed from Sir Haven’s presence before, and the shame of it burned through his blood like the dark brown liquor that his father used to drink.

  Unable to look at the vast expanse that rolled out in front of him, Dahn swiveled in the technician’s chair and faced the screen again.

  The blackness on the screen was even worse.

  An hour and a half after the three Datapoints had been taken, three sensors had blinked on that screen. Their tech had been alive and pulsing, tracking. And then, one by one, the sensors had gone dark.

  Intellectually, Dahn knew that the sensors going black could mean any number of things. That the attacker’s skip had gone through an artificial black hole an
d ended up out of range. That the Datapoints’ tech had been dampened and immobilized.

  But he couldn’t stop the voice in his head from telling him it was because they were dead.

  A decade ago, Dahn had sat in a different control room, staring at a different screen, and had watched a different sensor blink out of existence. His father’s. He’d been eight years old when his father, also a Datapoint, had been captured and murdered by Ferrymen.

  Dahn knew he couldn’t blame himself completely for the emotional reaction he was currently trying to swallow down. The attack the Station had endured today was startlingly similar to the one that had ended in Dahn’s father’s death. And it was a known truth that even the most controlled and trained of Datapoints were often subject to the echoing emotions of their childhoods.

  But even knowing this, the intensity of his reaction embarrassed him. His throat burned, his heart raced, and he’d screamed in Sir Haven’s face.

  God. Years of careful training. Of never doing anything wrong. Of excelling in comparison to every single one of his peers. And he was pissing it all away.

  Dahn rose up from his tech’s chair. He shouldn’t be sulking in a technician’s chair, staring out at the sky. He should be resting so that he could be at the top of his game tomorrow. Either Sir Haven would decide on a plan of attack, and Dahn would do his part, or Sir Haven would decide that the lost Datapoints were collateral damage in the war against the Ferrymen. And Dahn would have to play the long game.

  He was going to become a member of the Authority. And it would be from that lofty position that he would make the Ferrymen pay. Dahn knew that then, and only then, would he be able to dismantle their skips, culling each and every one of them. Hell, he’d even bomb Charon into the next galaxy if he had to.

  But there was nothing else to be done tonight.

  He was already turning from his view out the windows when something caught his eye. A comet? A rogue asteroid?

  No.

  That was a skip. A short-range skip. And it was incoming. Dahn raced to the window and his tech tracked the skip at the same time as his eyes did. One life form aboard. Headed sixteen degrees sunwise toward the landing dock. The skip was ancient, but fast.

  There was no doubt in Dahn’s mind that it was a Ferryman’s skip.

  There was one thought in Dahn’s mind as he turned and sprinted, hopping clear over the technician’s chair he’d just been sitting in. No. It wasn’t a thought. It was a single word.

  Glade.

  Jan wasn’t disappointed, per se, when it was the boy Datapoint that tumbled out of the Ferrymen’s hijacked short-range skip. But he did allow himself one gem-bright moment of frustration.

  With Glade Io.

  He felt that he knew the story before the boy, Cast Europa, even told it.

  Jan, who’d been awoken by Dahn Enceladus’ incessant banging on the door of his chambers, had practically sprinted down to the landing dock to greet the skip.

  Dahn, the dear boy, had insisted on checking it out first, though. After all, the boy was a trained weapon, and Jan could admit that he’d be a sitting duck out there on the landing platform.

  But it wasn’t a renegade Ferryman springing out of the dumpy skip, guns blazing. And it wasn’t Glade Io, returning to the Station. To, as far as Jan Ernst Haven was concerned, her destiny.

  It was new trainee Cast Europa. And now, here he sat in Haven’s office, covered in the blanket Dahn had tossed over his shoulders and practically vibrating with nerves and leftover adrenaline. Jan cast an eye over the young boy. He made a mental note to check Cast Europa’s file the first chance he got. The boy was exhibiting high levels of excitement and emotion. He’d been admitted to the Datapoint program with flying colors, but mistakes were occasionally made. And, occasionally, it was hard to know a child’s true nature until they were exposed to the rigors and realities of the program.

  “She saw that we were still close enough to the Station to escape on a short-range skip. And she decided we were going to get out of there,” Cast explained, pulling the blanket around him even tighter.

  “Glade or Sullia?” Dahn cut in, but Jan already knew the answer.

  “Glade. Sullia didn’t want to get caught. She thought we’d get killed if we got caught.”

  Jan nodded and Cast continued.

  “It took a long time for us to get out of our handcuffs, but Glade figured out how and talked me through it. And then she used the pieces of her cuffs to pick the locks on our cells. And even then, Sullia still wanted to stay.”

  Jan couldn’t blame Sullia. The girl was extremely practical. She made decisions based on what was good for her and her alone. He didn’t trust her as a Datapoint, but he was able to anticipate her next move. Which made her strangely malleable, and which in turn made her very valuable.

  “We snuck through most of the skip,” Cast continued. “We were both really surprised because it’s big. Really big. But we didn’t run into anybody. Like, there weren’t very many Ferrymen aboard or something. And Glade couldn’t believe how old some of the tech on the skip was. She kept exclaiming and stopping to look and stuff. She said it was like they’d patched together ten different skips from ten different eras.”

  Jan watched as something soft came over Dahn Enceladus’ face at the boy’s words. He knew the boy had taken an interest in Glade. But that soft look was… surprising.

  “We made it all the way to the landing dock before we got attacked by a Ferryman. It was the girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “Oh, sorry. It was this tall, bald girl who put us through the dampener.” Cast gripped at the tech on his arm. “She attacked Glade. I was already in the skip, getting it turned on, but Glade was disconnecting it from the control panel. She and Glade fought hand to hand. And Glade was… really something. She’d have had the girl beat if more Ferrymen hadn’t shown up. By then I had the skip up and ready. I was going back for her when she told me to leave. She screamed at me to go.”

  Cast looked down at the dead tech on his arm and scratched at it absently. Jan knew that the boy was waiting for an indication from someone that he’d done the right thing in leaving Glade. And, in fact, according to his training, he’d done exactly the right thing. Datapoints were told over and over again that two Datapoints should never be sacrificed where just one could be. The future of the program was infinitely more important than any single Datapoint’s life.

  But Jan surveyed the shivering novice in front of him and he wished, unabashedly, that it had been Glade Io who had made it to the skip.

  Chapter Five

  The place was a dump. No question. Every ventilation grate I’d seen was rusted and ill-fitting. Every quadrant I’d been dragged through looked as if it had been bolted together with nothing more than a welding gun.

  It was fast, though.

  I had to admit that much. I hadn’t been even remotely prepared for the warp the skip had jumped into seconds after Cast had gotten away. It was more than light speed. More than a jump into an artificial black hole. No, this was a different kind of space travel that I’d never experienced before.

  And half a breath later, we were floating idly past a grouping of stars I didn’t even recognize. It didn’t take a genius to realize that we weren’t in the asteroid belt anymore. I’d only had time to hope that Cast had made it safely back to the Station before something very heavy landed on my head. I’m pretty sure it was the bald girl’s foot.

  When I’d woken up, my ankle had been chained to an armchair, here, in the main room of the Ferrymen’s skip, directly outside of the cockpit. It was definitely the most impressive room I’d been in yet. This section of the skip was obviously all part of one continuous design. It didn’t have the awkward, cobbled together look of the other parts of the skip that I’d seen. The room was tall and spacious, and there was a humongous window on one side that showed a breathtaking sweep of the sky all at once. I’d never seen such a large swath of space – almost 180 degrees. Most o
f the windows in the Station were port windows, smaller than my head and only allowing just a bite of the sky to be seen at once.

  I refrained from being impressed.

  I’d been left alone for hours and I’d been dozing, my stomach grumbling and my head aching. But now I heard footsteps coming down the hallway and immediately switched my position in the chair. I tried adjusting my ankle, but these shackles against the leg of the chair were considerably more substantial than the ones I’d wiggled my hands out of earlier. I shifted uncomfortably. It just had to be my bad leg that was smashed in this uncomfortable position. Of course.

  The lights flickered, the way they often did in this piece of crap skip, and when they came back on, the door slammed open.

  That’s when I first saw him. Caught in a flicker of light, halfway between shadow and light. He wore a pilot suit, rolled up at the elbows, tattoos showing at his wrists and one creeping up out of the collar of his jumpsuit. And, jeez. Was everybody around here bald? The expression on his face was hard to read, though. He studied me, but not in a wary way – in an almost fascinated way. Like I was a lost creature from Earth.

  I thought of the horse, channeled the energy, and tossed my black mane of hair back over my shoulder.

  He grabbed a folding chair from against the wall and dragged it over to the center of the room. He flipped it open and twirled it backwards, sitting in it with the practiced ease of someone who knew exactly how to get comfortable.

  It wasn’t until he was sitting three feet from me that I realized how young he actually was. God. He must have easily been under 20. I studied his face. It was sturdy and almost plain. A pronounced brow shadowed a nose that was just a touch too big, and there were deep lines on either side of his mouth – whether from smiling or frowning, I wasn't sure. His head was shaved and so was his jaw, but a shadow of new hair lined all of it. The only thing that was notable about this man's face were his eyes. They were the bright, startling blue of Earth’s sky. I'd only seen photos, of course, but the color wasn’t something you easily forgot.