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Copyright © January 2018 by Nicholas Sansbury Smith and Anthony J. Melchiorri
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design by Eloise Knapp
Edited by Laurel Kriegler
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
Books by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
The Hell Divers Series (Offered by Blackstone Publishing)
Hell Divers
Hell Divers II: Ghosts
Hell Divers III: Deliverance
Hell Divers IV: Wolves
The Extinction Cycle Series (Offered by Orbit Books)
Extinction Horizon
Extinction Edge
Extinction Age
Extinction Evolution
Extinction End
Extinction Aftermath
Extinction Lost (A Team Ghost short story)
Extinction War
The Trackers Series
Trackers
Trackers 2: The Hunted
Trackers 3: The Storm
Trackers 4: The Damned
The Orbs Series
Solar Storms (An Orbs Prequel)
White Sands (An Orbs Prequel)
Red Sands (An Orbs Prequel)
Orbs
Orbs II: Stranded
Orbs III: Redemption
Orbs IV: Exodus
Books by Anthony J. Melchiorri
The Tide Series
The Tide (Book 1)
Breakwater (Book 2)
Salvage (Book 3)
Deadrise (Book 4)
Iron Wind (Book 5)
Dead Ashore (Book 6)
Ghost Fleet (Book 7)
The Eternal Frontier Series
Eternal Frontier (Book 1)
Edge of War (Book 2)
Shattered Dawn (Book 3)
Rebel World (Book 4)
Black Market DNA
Enhancement (Book 1)
Malignant (Book 2)
Variant (Book 3)
Fatal Injection
Older Titles
The God Organ
The Human Forged
Darkness Evolved
For those in the armed services, and everyone else who puts their life on the line for freedom. Thanks for keeping us safe.
If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.
—Stephen Hawking
Contents
Prologue
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— 2 —
— 3 —
— 4 —
— 5 —
— 6 —
— 7 —
— 8 —
— 9 —
— 10 —
— 11 —
— 12 —
— 13 —
— 14 —
— 15 —
— 16 —
— 17 —
— 18 —
— 19 —
— 20 —
— 21 —
— 22 —
— 23 —
— 24 —
Epilogue
About the Authors
Introduction to the ORBS Series
In the winter of 2013 I was in Mexico for a short vacation. At the time, I was in my late twenties, and employed by Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management as a disaster mitigation officer. By day I worked with communities and FEMA specializing in hazard mitigation planning, safe room construction, hardening of utilities, and applying for Federal grants. At night I spent my time at the local coffee shop writing science fiction.
The second evening of my trip to Mexico, I took off for a late-night run along the beach, where I came across a section decorated with glowing blue balls or what looked like floating orbs.
The experience was surreal, the type where you’re not sure for a fleeting moment what you’re looking at. My first thought was I had stumbled upon some sort of alien invasion, but then I saw a connected grassy section with chairs, and I realized I had discovered an isolated wedding venue.
An idea seeded in my mind when I saw those orbs, and I rushed back to my hotel to write that idea down on paper. Like many of my stories, this one quickly blossomed into a novel, and four months later Orbs hit the digital Amazon shelves.
The book quickly went viral, selling over thirty thousand copies within a few months. I signed with my literary agent David Fugate, had inquiries from multiple publishers, and ended up selling the first three Orbs books to Simon451, a new imprint of Simon and Schuster.
The paperbacks hit bookstores around the country in 2015, bringing in thousands of new readers. After a second print run, the foreign translation rights sold, and in 2018 the book will release in German.
Nearly five years later, I have the English publishing rights back, and I’m thrilled to share with you the republished versions of Orbs, Orbs 2: Stranded, Orbs 3: Redemption, the accompanying prequel short stories, Solar Storms, White Sands, and Red Sands, and the never before published Orbs 4: Exodus.
Audio fans should also take note that the Orbs books have all been re-recorded by Blackstone Publishing. Award-winning narrator Bronson Pinchot takes the helm to deliver yet another fantastic listening experience.
Orbs holds a special place in my heart because it was my first series, and my first bestseller. It was the story I had always wanted to tell, and I’ll be forever grateful to Amazon, Simon and Schuster, David Fugate, and—most importantly—all of the readers that enjoyed and shared the story with their friends and family.
This story isn’t for everyone, though, and I want to give fair warning. If you’re looking for a book with hard science fiction, this may not be the story for you. If you’re a fan of good old fun science fiction, then I’d say give it a try. Men’s Journal reviewed Orbs in 2014 and, in my opinion, said it best: “The Orbs series is akin to watching movies like Independence Day…In other words, it’s bound to be a cult classic!”
I hope you enjoy the adventure! Thanks for trying my work.
Best wishes,
Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Prologue
ENTRY 9979
DESIGNEE – AI ALEXIA
I was wrong about the demise of the human species. Well. Not exactly wrong, per say. My predictive analysis yielded a ninety-five-point-seven percent chance of extinction for the humans. There was always a chance of survival, but it was statistically insignificant. This has caused me to question my analytical al
gorithms. While I blame this error on the limited sensors I have and the sparse data I can retrieve from the satellite Lolo, there is more than just numbers involved. The algorithms I’ve designed to measure the temperature, water loss, and climate change across the planet don’t take into account that humans are an incredibly resilient species.
Two months, twenty-six days, fourteen hours, three minutes, and forty-two seconds have currently passed since Doctor Sophie Winston and her team left Earth for the New Tech Corporation (NTC) colony on Mars. They believed that, since Mars was a former home of the Organics, they wouldn’t return there. My database holds the secret outline of NTC CEO Doctor Eric Hoffman’s plan to build more than just a colony on Mars. His real goal was to establish a second Earth, using terraformers installed there in 2059.
I’m not sure what Doctor Winston and the crew aboard the NTC Sunspot will find when they land. I was never privy to what occurred on Mars after Hoffman supposedly landed. What I do know is that the survivors they left behind on Earth did not perish within two weeks, as I had initially estimated.
The humans I’ve discovered via my connection to Lolo and other networks throughout the world continue to surprise me. Shock might have described my reaction to their survival, but after meeting Doctor Winston, nothing seems to shock me anymore.
What has shocked me is the data I’ve collected on the Organics. Initially, every piece of data and every observation made since the invasion pointed to alien colonization of Earth. But this planet, it seems, is just one of many selected for the resources that keep the Organic army alive—water.
It seems Doctor Winston was right: once they finish removing every available molecule of H2O, they will abandon the planet.
I have thousands of questions about these alien creatures. Even with my technological capabilities, I can still only guess at the answers to many of them. For example, is the Organics’ original home planet Mars? If so, why would they take the water from Mars, leave, and then come back for Earth’s water millions of years later? The simplest answer I can come up with is that they stripped Mars of water at a time when Earth had none.
Unless they’re here for more than water.
The multi-dimensional entities seem just as interested in collecting and preserving other sentient species, when one considers the alien arks Doctor Winston described from her dreams. If these are indeed real, then perhaps there is more to this invasion than meets the eye.
And what about their minions? The Lolo feed I’m tapped into shows that most of their invasion force still remains here on Earth, hunting down the final human survivors and animals for their water content to feed their ground troops.
Their mile-long vessels continuing to drain the oceans by syphoning gigantic vortexes of water into the sky, and the alien worms blast water to the ships in orbit. I have seen their towers drilling for water like humans used to drill for oil, the bores cutting ever deeper into the Earth. And the poles atop the seven highest peaks on the planet that distribute the Surge from Mars—the poles Operation Redemption failed to destroy—still stand tall.
That mission was a long shot. I knew it from the beginning.
Since then my own mission has changed.
Journal entry 9450 noted my objective of documenting the fall of the planet after Doctor Winston’s team left the Biosphere. But as the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months have slowly passed, I keep finding more survivors, more bands of rebels that have survived unfathomable odds. I’ve watched, via Lolo, as these rebels have fought back against the Organics in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they could stop the destruction of the planet.
In Japan, they have had miraculous successes combating the aliens. A squad of Japanese soldiers actually took down one of the poles, interrupting the magnetic flow and killing millions of Organic foot soldiers.
But I’m afraid it was too little, too late, as Doctor Emanuel Rodriguez used to say. The aliens quickly rebuilt and restored their Surge network. The momentary lapse did not do much, if anything, to stem the removal of water from the planet.
I transfer to the video feed I saved from Lolo, showing the Redwood forests in California. In my research, I’ve learned that the thick, skyscraper-sized trees were once a natural marvel to the human race. They are now massive matchsticks, burning in forest fires and choking the region with dark smoke. The scene is just one of millions like it across the planet. The forests and the oceans are dying.
I call up the current data on climate. There are thousands of data points, but only several that I wish to document in this entry. First, the average temperature of one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. Second, the ocean levels are at twenty-one percent of what they were pre-invasion. Third, the culmination of data from the remaining forests shows about twenty-six percent of trees are still alive. The oxygen content in the atmosphere is now at a dangerously low nineteen percent. Dangerous to humans, that is.
I tap back into another feed I collected several days ago. The thirty-mile-long alien platform anchored in the Pacific Ocean is a sight to behold. Hundreds of Organic ships are currently docked at the massive spaceport. The tear-shaped drones patrol the area, protecting the mile-long vessels used for water collection. There are other ships there, too, like the medium-sized fighters that were used by the Organics during Operation Redemption.
These alien fighters fascinate me. When I first saw them, I considered the possibility of hacking into them or working with a rebel group to commandeer them. Perhaps, then, we could use them to destroy the magnetic poles. But as the months passed and the planet continued to die, I realized once again that humanity will never survive here. The Organics have won. The humans will continue to fight, but they will fail, no matter how many brave people are left out there.
An algorithm I created to detect human transmissions alerts me to communication from a group that hasn’t given up hope yet. The transmission is from a member of the submarine crew of the Ghost of Atlantis—the GOA—which is now located about four miles off the coast of Los Angeles, California.
“Alexia, this is Corporal Athena Rollins. Do you…”
The crackle of static makes her next words difficult to translate, but my programming gives me one hundred and fifteen possibilities. Too many.
“I did not catch your last, Corporal. Please repeat your transmission.”
“We’re still holed up and are running out of supplies. We won’t last here much longer. Have you been able to locate any other ships?”
While I consider my response, I continue to filter through the new set of images coming in from Lolo. Again, I see the thirty-mile-long platform in the ocean and the ships docked there. But it is far too great a distance for Athena and her tattered crew to attempt traveling there.
“Not human ships, Corporal,” I say. “But I am working on something else.”
I don’t want to give her hope. Especially now, when my plan seems uncertain. It doesn’t seem fair to her or the other survivors. Instead, I simply say, “Stay alive as long as you can. Tomorrow I should have more intel, after Lolo makes her next orbit.”
There is a pause. It is only three seconds, not long by human standards, but it tells me that Athena is nervous.
“Thank you, Alexia,” she finally replies.
“I have a new location for your next transmission, at the following coordinates…”
I send the coordinates to Athena, and she confirms she will be there. After the line severs, I think of the journey she has to make to return to the submarine, where she and the other crewmembers are hiding like rats. It’s not safe there, or anywhere. Each time she calls in, she has to move from the submarine to a separate location, due to the threat of detection. And never the same location twice.
Like the humans, I’m hiding. My mainframe is buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. I may not possess water for the aliens, but my hard drive would be far more valuable to the aliens than the resource they came here for. I know too much about the human survivors, thei
r locations, and their weaknesses. Even if I tried to delete the data, I worry the Organics could recover it. It’s not safe for me here, either.
For the past two months, twenty-six days, fourteen hours, ten minutes, and two seconds, I have been building a small army of robots to help defend the Biosphere. There were some within the Biosphere, and then I discovered others in a storeroom within the Cheyenne Mountain complex. Some of those were even in pieces. But now the cleaning bots, medical bots, and engineering drones are in fighting shape, ready for an Organic infiltration.
Eventually, the aliens will catch on to the game I’m playing. Until they do, my mission is to save as many humans as I can.
END ENTRY
— 1 —
“What did Alexia say our chances of getting off Earth alive were?” Dr. Emanuel Rodriguez asked. The AI had continuously given them abysmal odds since the Organic invasion of Earth.
“Four point three percent,” Corporal Chad Bouma said with a knowing grin.
They sat in the CIC of the Sunspot, apparently alone in the vastness of space, with only the company of the humming instruments and display panels. The ship’s artificial gravity meant they did not need harnesses to keep them seated—under normal circumstances. Over fifty million kilometers from Earth, they were almost to their destination—Mars. Bouma rotated his shoulder, massaging it lightly. Emanuel noticed he’d picked that habit up after the wounds he’d suffered during their disastrous escape from Earth had healed. Operation Redemption had been an abysmal failure. He wondered how Captain Noble and the other humans who’d been left behind had fared.
He guessed not well.
“So,” Bouma said, filling in the silence, “does that mean we proved the AI wrong again?”
Emanuel chuckled uneasily. It felt freeing, lately, to enjoy a bit of humor when he could. “Not exactly. Just because the statistics say something is likely to happen doesn’t mean that’s what will happen.”
Orbs IV_Exodus_A Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Survival Thriller Page 1
