Escape (Project Vetus Book 1)

by Emmy Chandler

  “Okay. There’s nothing up here that could be used for a weapon, probably for the same reason.” In fact, other than the two light-weight rolling desk chairs, everything in the building is bolted to the floor or the wall. All the lab equipment is made of shatterproof polymer. “So let’s do what they designed us to do.”

  I flip a mental switch, and my spikes, spires, and bones blades shoot through seams in my skin. A glance around shows that my men are all similarly equipped.

  “I doubt anyone’s down there,” Lilli says, gaping at the lot of us. “Surely Justin wouldn’t have gone that way, if there were potential witnesses.”

  “You’re probably right,” I tell her. “But just in case. Coleman, you’re on point.” Because his skin is like lightweight armor. Zamora, you bring up the rear. And you—” I turn to Lilli, “—stay close behind me.”

  She nods, and her pulse begins to race. Coleman opens the door, and Lilli falls in behind me while we pass into a small vestibule holding a freight elevator and a set of concrete stairs. We take the stairs, silent on bare feet, and Coleman pauses to glance back at us from the lower landing, signaling that he’s going to open the door.

  I nod.

  The door—another heavy-duty sheet of steel—squeals as he pushes it open.

  Jamison and Dreyer follow him into the lower level, but I put out a hand to stop Lilli when she tries to move forward. I press one finger to my lips, warning her to be quiet.

  She rolls her eyes at me, and I give her a smile.

  A couple of minutes later, Dreyer pops back into the stairwell to wave us forward, and I repeat the “shhhh” gesture to Lilli. In case she mistook “proceed with caution” for “all clear.”

  We head through the doorway, and despite my warning, Lilli gasps.

  I can hardly blame her.

  The stairwell empties into a long room built of concrete walls painted dark blue and sealed with a finish that reflects nearly a dozen dropped panels of lighting. The floors are also concrete, stained a darker color, but I can’t tell what the ceilings are made of because they’re above the light source, which casts them in deep shadow.

  But that’s not what made Lilli gasp. What has frozen the rest of us in stunned silence.

  Positioned around the room are a series of transparent rectangular boxes on shiny steel stands. They look for all the world like glass coffins, and the contents are lit from within by a glowing blue light source.

  “Oh my god,” Lilli whispers, and I force myself to look away from the grotesque displays to make sure we’re all alone. And we are, at least in this…vestibule? There are two doors, one on either end of the long room, and they’re both closed. Neither has a knob or lever, or any obvious method of opening them.

  I wave Coleman toward one door and Lawrence toward the other, giving them the “stand guard” signal. Then I follow Lilli toward the nearest…spectacle.

  “Holy shit…” she breathes as we stare down at what can only accurately be described as a mistake—a specimen preserved and suspended in some kind of clear fluid. Or…gel?

  “Early attempts,” Dreyer whispers from her other side.

  The creature staring sightlessly up at us through two sets of milky eyes has a monstrous blend of human and alien features, including bone blades nearly identical to mine and bizarrely clawed hands and feet. His facial bones are distended in an exaggeration of the thickening of my own features, when the beast takes over, and every square inch of the poor man’s skin—all exposed by his nudity—is thick and textured with bumpy callouses.

  “They’re all variations of the same theme,” Lilli whispers, and I look up to discover that she’s two displays down, flanked by Zamora and Jamison.

  “This is what came before us,” Dreyer whispers from my right, horror echoing in her voice. “This is what we could have been.”

  I want to reassure her that that was never possible. But I can’t.

  “They’re on display,” Lilli says. “As if they’re expected to be seen, and not just by us. This almost looks like it’s for…investors.”

  “She’s right.” Dreyer lifts one brow at me. “And they certainly weren’t bringing investors through the upstairs lab. Which means there’s an exit. That’s how Justin got here, and it’s probably where our shuttle is.”

  I spread both arms to take in the entire lower level, including both doors. “Take your pick.”

  She lifts Justin’s com device, which has found its new home on her left forearm, and after a few taps, the door to our left clicks. Then it swings open.

  Coleman moves through the opening carefully, but as soon as he crosses the threshold, the room beyond lights up so brightly—triggered by motion sensors—that my eyes burn. “Um…guys.” Coleman blinks into the bright room. “You have to see this.”

  I wave Lilli behind me while we approach, giving Lawrence a signal to maintain his post at the other door. Dreyer, Zamora, and Jamison all precede me into the room, and I can tell based on their silence that the room is unoccupied. And by their tense stances that something is…strange.

  I follow them inside. And suddenly I know exactly where we are.

  “What is this place?” Lilli whispers, stepping around me to take in all the tables. All the equipment. The drains built into the floor.

  Coleman clears his throat. “This is where we were reborn. Where they made us.”

  “Where they un-made us,” Jamison insists. And he’s not wrong.

  “Let’s go.” Dreyer edges back toward the door. “This isn’t the way out.” And she clearly doesn’t want to go in any further. “It looks like the lockdown has ended,” she adds, reading something on the com device. “They’ll cut off my access as soon as they realize what Justin did. And if they figure out he had help, we’ll never make it through the pyro-shield.”

  She’s right. “Move out,” I order softly, and almost as one, my men pivot toward the door. Which Lilli watches with a quiet awe that makes me smile.

  I escort her through the vestibule with one arm around her waist, and we’re just yards from the door Lawrence is still guarding when Zamora stops short. “Mother fuckers,” he whispers, his voice so low-pitched and furious I’m not sure Lilli can even hear him.

  I turn to see what he’s looking at, and my blood runs cold.

  There’s another display case, but this one’s standing upright, against the wall, farther into the room than we ventured before. It’s lit from below, casting deep hollows on the occupant’s features.

  “Carson?” Lilli clutches my arm, and that’s when I realize I’m growling. And that the others are all making similar rage-fueled sounds.

  “I’ll fucking kill them all,” Dreyer snarls.

  “What is it?” Lilli asks.

  “Not what,” Lawrence tells her. “Who. It’s Daire Hardesty.”

  When Lilli aims a sympathetic glance at Dreyer, I realize someone’s told her about Hardesty.

  “He was one of us,” Zamora says. “But he couldn’t take what they did to him. So he ended it.”

  And Brennan and her team preserved him and put him on display, right alongside their mistakes. As if they weren’t all people once.

  “I’ll kill them…” Dreyer repeats.

  “On my honor,” I tell her. The others all echo the oath, while Lilli stares at us in solemn bewilderment.

  “Never leave a man behind,” I explain. “In spirit, at the very least.”

  “Guys,” Jamison says. “We really need to go.”

  Dreyer clenches her jaw and finally turns away from her lover’s corpse to tap on the com device again. The door Jamison is guarding clicks once, then twice. Then it swings open.

  Fresh air flows into the stale room, bringing with it the scent of wild grass and the chirruping of hundreds—thousands?—of nocturnal insects.

  “We’re out!” Jamison whispers.

  “Almost.” We follow him onto a broad concrete landing pad, where Justin’s shuttle is waiting for us, with the ramp already low
ered. Ready for a quick getaway.

  Works for me.

  “If the controls are fingerprint protected, we’re screwed,” Dreyer says. “I don’t have remote access to this ship.”

  “That’s because it’s not UA’s.” Lilli points to the side of the shuttle, where the official UA symbol is noticeably missing. “Which makes sense. They could track him, if he took one of their ships.”

  That’s good news for another reason: most personal ships don’t require authorization to operate.

  We file on board, and Jamison takes the helm, while Zamora settles in as his copilot, and the assumption of old roles feels so familiar that for a moment, it’s hard to believe it’s been two years since we functioned as anything more than prisoners.

  Though Hardesty’s absence makes that impossible to forget.

  “Buckle in.” I point Lilli toward an empty seat while Zamora raises the ramp and Jamison goes through a quick checklist, familiarizing himself briefly with unfamiliar controls.

  “This thing is fast,” he says. “And it’s medium range. It might not be very comfortable, but we’ve got enough fuel to get us a pretty good way from Rhodon.”

  I look around as the shuttle buzzes to life around us. There’s a small galley at the rear and several bunks built into the back wall. A narrow, closed door between the two domestic areas can only be a bathroom. “Is this thing armed?” I’m not familiar with the model.

  “No,” Jamison says. “But it’ll spin on a dime. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He takes the controls, and the ship rises gently into the air.

  Lilli twists to watch through one of the portholes as the lab shrinks behind us, and her bittersweet expression, as well as the sad ribbon swelling through her scent, tells me that she’s thinking about the friends she’s leaving behind.

  I wish I could fix that for her. I wish I could rescue all of her people. But we don’t have room for them, and we’d never make it off the planet if we detoured to zone three.

  All I can do is offer her my people. Make her a part of my family. And give her a family of her own.

  Knowing that our family is already on the way, I can only look forward as the translucent glimmer of the pyro-shield approaches. Beyond that barrier is Station Delta, and beyond that is a lot of empty space. Plenty of room to lose—

  “And…there’s the cavalry.” Zamora points out the broad windshield at the lights of several shuttles heading quickly toward the lab we’ve just left. “They’re pinging us.”

  “Ignore,” I order. “We have clearance for the shield?”

  “So far…” Jamison says.

  “Then step on it.”

  The hatch in the shield appears as we approach it—a rectangle of light that shimmers for a second, then disappears. We fly through the hatch just as the shuttles turn to come after us.

  “They’re scrambling more units.” Zamora points at Station Delta as it grows in the windshield, then begins to shrink as we leave it behind. “But I don’t think they can catch us.”

  “Prove it,” Lilli says, her voice a frightened whisper. I lean over to take her hand.

  “We’re going to be fine,” I promise her. “We’re going to be together. And we’re going to be anything else you want. Anywhere you want.”

  She gives me a nervous smile, and I turn to our pilot. “Jamison, get us out of here.”

  “Full speed ahead!” he announces. And with that, we leave the prison planet behind…

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for reading Escape, the first Project Vetus book!

  With the Prison Planet series, I always knew, I’d eventually want to get some of the prisoners off the planet. I just didn’t realize at first that I’d have to start a new series to make that happen. But now that Zeta 8 has escaped, they’re free to wander the galaxy, space pirate style, and during their long-term mission to bring Universal Authority to its knees, the other members of Sotelo’s team might just find loves of their own!

  If you liked the story, I hope you’ll decide to review it, wherever you review books. And if you want more, let me know! Whose story would you like to read next?

  If you’d like more information about me or my books, you can find me on my FB group, my Facebook page, Goodreads, BookBub, and at www.emmychandler.com. For alerts about new releases, please sign up for my newsletter!

  Emmy

  The Prison Planet Series

  By Emmy Chandler

  Guardian

  Hunter

  Champion

  Dirty Lies

  Hostage

  Traitor

  The Project Vetus Series

  By Emmy Chandler

  ESCAPE

  About Emmy

  Emmy Chandler likes tee-shirts and lattes. She firmly believes every woman deserves an armchair in front of the window, near an outlet close enough to charge an e-reader and power a mug warmer. Her perfect afternoon includes cold weather, thick blankets, warm soup, and a good book.

  Emmy has another career under another name.

  This is not her first book.

  For more information about Emmy Chandler’s books…

  www.EmmyChandler.com