New Frontiers- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  Krsh—boom!

  The blast picked her up and threw her off her feet. She landed with a thud and lay there stunned. She tried to scramble to her feet, but found she couldn’t breathe. Alarms blared inside her helmet and readouts flashed on her HUD indicating all of the damage taken. Shock wore off, and a sharp pain erupted in her abdomen. She saw blood trickling out.

  Pling. The Grays loomed over her on all sides, dozens of them, aiming their dish-barreled guns. It reminded her of waking up in that dazzlingly bright operating room aboard the harvester.

  The Grays had her surrounded, but they didn’t shoot her. Instead, one of them said something in that stilting language of theirs, and then they all stepped away, giving her a chance to get up. She took the opportunity to do exactly that, wondering what they were after. They still had their guns aimed at her, but the message was clear: they wanted to take her alive.

  The Grays chattered at her in their language some more, and then one of them tried wrapping its tongue around English.

  “W-hair is t-ee c-oor?”

  Catalina didn’t understand the question, but she didn’t care to, either. She’d already made up her mind. Aiming at the center of the group, she fired another rocket. Krsshhh! It exploded with a blinding flash of light, and she felt herself flying backward once more.

  This time she woke up seeing stars. Blood bubbled from another wound, this time in her leg. A sharp throbbing pain erupted there, and her head swam. The Grays clustered around her once more, aiming their guns. One of them crouched down beside her, examining her wounds. It gestured urgently to the others, waving some kind of wand over her, and she felt her body growing warm and pleasantly numb. Her vision narrowed to slits, then to nothing at all, and she felt herself float away on a sea of darkness.

  * * *

  Ben’s heart beat double-time in his chest. He heard the explosions come echoing up through the duct, and he grimaced. Catalina must have found a way to fire her rockets.

  The Grays weren’t far behind them. It wouldn’t be long before the Entity noticed they were missing and spotted the open vent where they’d escaped. Ben pushed out against the sides of the duct with his arms and legs, struggling to climb even in the low gravity.

  His hands slipped and he slid down a foot, fetching up against Jessica. She screamed and fell back down with a loud thump!

  “Ow...” she moaned.

  “Are you okay?” He twisted around to peer down at her.

  She gazed up at him, her face pinched with pain. “You go on ahead.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said.

  “I’m not. I’ll go another way. If we split up, we’ll have a better chance. Only one of us needs to survive, remember?”

  Ben considered that for a moment, and then he nodded. “All right. Be careful!”

  With that, he went on struggling up the duct. Legs braced, right arm up; arms braced, left foot up; legs braced, left arm up...

  It was slow going, and by the time he reached the top of the duct, his muscles were trembling from the strain.

  As he pulled himself up into a horizontal stretch, Ben heard a distant scream. He froze, his head cocked and listening. Another scream.

  Jessica!

  Silence.

  His heart pounding, Ben wondered what to do. By now they’d detected him, and it wouldn’t matter how still and quiet he was.

  He scrambled on, crawling down the duct as fast as he could, heedless of the hollow thumping noises he was making as the ducting bubbled under his weight. He heard another noise join the racket he was making and glanced over his shoulder to see one of the Grays crawling after him, not even bothering to cloak.

  “Ha-la!” it said.

  Ben ignored it, barreling on in a panicky rush. It was over. He knew it was over, but he kept on going, desperate to escape. Hands closed around his ankles like vice grips, forcing him to stop.

  “Let me go!” Ben screamed, aiming kicks at the alien’s face.

  It held on with one hand and reached for a new type of weapon with the other—gray and wand-shaped. The alien aimed the wand at him, and he felt suddenly dizzy with exhaustion, like he hadn’t slept in days. His mind grew fuzzy, and he felt his eyes closing. He tried to fight it, but what was the point? It was over. There was nothing left to fight for.

  The Entity had won.

  PART 4 - FOUNDATION

  “Endings are the foundation of new beginnings.”

  —Anonymous

  CHAPTER 33

  Catalina’s eyes flew open, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. All of her muscles tensed at once and she gasped, her arms and legs flailing. One of the Grays stepped away from her, holding that wand she’d seen when she’d lost consciousness. The alien went to stand on one side of the bridge, joining at least a dozen others standing there. The Grays had cut her out of her exosuit—it lay on the deck in pieces around her. They’d also tended to her injuries. She was no longer bleeding from her stomach, and the pain was gone. She poked her fingers through the ragged cuts in her jumpsuit to find not bandages but fresh, pink skin.

  Catalina marveled at that. She heard familiar voices, and turned around to see Ben and Jessica.

  The doors swished open, and a man walked in—short, slight of build, with dark hair and blue eyes. No one she recognized. “Where is the cure?” he asked.

  Catalina eyed the man. “Who are you?”

  “Does it matter? You’re all the same to me,” he replied, and Catalina realized she was speaking with the Entity again. Now that Esther was gone, it had found another mouthpiece. The man’s gaze slid away from her and settled on Ben.

  “Well?” the Entity demanded.

  Ben thrust out his chin. “You can go ahead and kill me. I’m not going to help you.”

  “I’ll kill the others first. Then I’ll kill you.”

  An uncertain look crossed Ben’s face.

  “Don’t do it,” Jessica said.

  Catalina didn’t see the point of resistance. “What’s it matter anymore?” she asked. “Give it the cure and maybe it will leave us alone.”

  The Entity favored her with a smile. “You should listen to this one. What do you have to lose?”

  “Our lives,” Ben suggested.

  “If you give me the cure, I promise to leave you alone. You can go on to your rendezvous, and I won’t try to stop you.”

  Ben appeared to consider that. “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “You’re the one who broke our arrangement, not me.”

  “Fine.”

  “Ben!” Jessica objected, her face aghast.

  Catalina listened while Ben explained how to get to Bio-safety Three, where the Entity would find the cure in vials, disguised as Ebola III.

  “You have been most helpful, Benjamin. Thank you. I will go make sure that you are telling the truth,” it said.

  Catalina watched the Entity leave, walking out the doors and straight through a portal on the other side. The Grays remained behind to watch them. Their gazes and expressions were inscrutable, their giant black eyes glinting like daggers.

  Catalina looked away from them and stared at the deck. Pointless, she thought. It’s all pointless.

  Even if the Entity let them go, their lives were meaningless now. The human race was extinct—enslaved might be a better term, but now that the Entity had the cure, it would soon find a way to defend itself, and that meant they no longer had any hope.

  She looked up to find Ben watching her. To her surprise, he didn’t look as defeated as she felt. Defiance still burned in his blue eyes.

  Because it’s not his species that’s been wiped out, she realized. Benevolence and the androids had cut a deal with the Entity to surrender the human race and save their own skins. They’re probably throwing a party on Earth at this very moment.

  The bridge doors swished open once more and in came the man she’d seen earlier. “It appears you were telling the truth,” he said, holding up one of the vials of nani
tes. “Thank you, Ben. To prove that I am also a reasonable being, I will keep my promise and leave you three in peace.” He fixed each of them with a broad smile and nodded to one of the Grays. Catalina watched a black sphere float out from one of their palms. There came a bright flash, and a shimmering portal appeared. The Entity walked through with another flash of light, followed by the Grays. Catalina watched, and the portal flashed like a strobe light with their exits. As soon as they were all gone, the portal disappeared with a loud crack!

  “I’m surprised it kept its word,” Jessica whispered.

  Catalina smiled miserably. “It left us alive because it knew that would be the greater torment. What is life without hope? Without anyone or anything that you care about?”

  Ben regarded her solemnly, looking as though he wanted to say something to that, but there was nothing he could say. No words to make this better. He must have realized that, too, because he got up quietly and went over to the command control station where he’d been sitting earlier. She watched him flipping through various holo displays. Jessica walked up behind him and peered over his shoulder. He pointed to one of the screens.

  “They’re coming back through,” he said.

  Jessica snorted. “So much for the Entity’s promise.”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t think it’s the Entity. Radiation levels bleeding through the hole in the harvester’s hull have dropped below safe limits. We’re not inside the wormhole anymore.”

  “What?” Jessica shook her head.

  “We made it,” Ben replied.

  “If you’d waited just five more minutes!”

  “Relax. I sent the Entity to Bio-safety Three. The cure was in Bio-safety Four. It ran off with the actual Ebola Virus.”

  “It didn’t check the sample?”

  Ben shrugged. “It probably did, but Ebola III is weaponized, and it uses nanites as a delivery mechanism. It’s hard to tell one nanite from another.”

  Jessica grinned.

  Maybe there was still some hope. At least they still had a way to fight back. Humanity would live on if they could save enough people to start over on another planet, somewhere far from the Entity’s Federation.

  “Shuttles are docking,” Ben announced.

  “Cutting more holes in our hull,” Jessica muttered.

  “No,” Ben replied. “Looks like they found the ones the Entity cut with its shuttles.”

  Ten minutes later another shimmering portal appeared on the bridge, and the Grays came waltzing through.

  Ben stood up to address them. “Welcome aboard the Liberty,” he said, obviously assuming these aliens were from the resistance.

  One of the Grays approached, and stopped a few feet in front of him. “H-ave y-oo g-ot t-ee c-oor?”

  “Are we safe?” Ben asked.

  “T-ee Ent-ity is re-treat-ing.”

  “Good.”

  “Y-oo h-ave t-ee d-ata?”

  “Yes. Your plan worked. We were able to save more than ninety percent of the human race.”

  The Gray nodded. “G-ood. Our pre-par-ashons w-err suc-cess-f-ool.”

  Catalina gaped at them, not understanding what was going on. “What do you mean you saved more than ninety percent of the human race?”

  Ben turned to her with a smile. “Exactly what I said, Catalina. Benevolence didn’t surrender the human race without a fight. He evacuated them.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “How is that possible?” Catalina asked.

  “I didn’t want to tell you before—not until I could be sure that we would escape,” Ben explained.

  “Tell me what?”

  “You remember what I told you about Nano Nova and Sure Life Insurance? About bringing people back from the dead using digital copies of their minds and synthetic copies of their bodies?”

  Catalina nodded slowly.

  “Well, the truth is, that program was a lot more advanced than I led you to believe. You were the very first test of the technology. After that, with the Grays’ help, Benevolence spent the past year making digital copies of everyone in a supercomputer that we later donated to the Liberty’s mission through a Martian company. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to save everyone, and as it was, the Entity surprised us by arriving early, so it’s a good thing we didn’t try.”

  Catalina was speechless.

  “Benevolence stored all the androids aboard the Avilon and evacuated them, too.”

  “But... what about all the people the Entity infected? And the androids you left behind?”

  Ben shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do for them. There’s too many to physically save them all, and we’d have to defeat the Entity in order to do it. Like this, all we have to do is grow new synthetic bodies for everyone, bringing them back at our own pace. We can send them out to colonize parts of the galaxy that the Entity hasn’t reached yet, and one day when we’re strong enough, we’ll return to Earth and take back our home.”

  “So you’re just going to write them all off as dead?”

  “When the Entity infects people, it puts them into a coma. They don’t wake up from that. The Entity does. Why do you think none of the ones we cured remembered anything from the time they were infected?”

  “But we brought them back!” Catalina insisted. “That means they’re still in there. Comatose or not, they’re there—alive! All we have to do is wake them up!”

  “You could say the same thing about the copies we stored aboard the Liberty and the Avilon. Unless of course you’re trying to suggest that there’s something intangible about a person’s consciousness—something that we can’t actually copy, like a soul. But if that’s the case, then how do you explain your own existence? The real Catalina de Leon is somewhere back on Earth—by now enslaved to the Entity. A backup of her mind and yours is also stored aboard this ship. So which Catalina is the real one? The one the Entity now controls; you, the synthetic copy; or one of the two digital copies?”

  Catalina shook her head, unable to wrap her mind around the idea of so many different instances of herself in the universe.

  “They’re all real,” Ben said. “Each of them slightly different from the next, and all equally deserving of life—the problem is we can’t save all of you. We can only save the digital copies, and you.”

  “Can you bring Alexander back?” she asked, sudden hope soaring in her chest, making it hard to breathe.

  “Yes, right down to the birth mark on the back of his neck. The only notable difference will be in his memories, since his most recent data is five months old.”

  A case of permanent amnesia spanning the last five months—it seemed like a small price to pay to have her husband back.

  “How are you going to create a new body for him?”

  Ben turned to the alien standing beside him.

  “C-ome a-nd s-ee,” it said, gesturing to the shimmering portal on the bridge.

  Catalina approached the portal cautiously, wondering if any of this could possibly be true. Bringing people back from the dead seemed like a fantasy, not something that could actually be possible. Store a map of someone’s brain in a computer, transfer the data to a brand new synthetic brain and body, and bingo!—a feat that would have made Doctor Frankenstein jealous.

  Catalina walked through the portal, eliciting a bright flash of light that dazzled her eyes. This is the part where I wake up....

  * * *

  The alien led them to a large, echoing chamber at least ten floors high, stacked wall-to-wall with liquid-filled tanks. Some of the ones closest to the door on the lowest level contained what looked like alien fetuses, but all of the others were empty. There had to be thousands of tanks in the chamber, and based on the slight curvature of the deck, walls, and ceiling, Catalina realized the chamber must run all the way around the circumference of the harvester.

  “Each of the harvesters has a clone room like this one,” Ben explained.

  “Why?” she wondered aloud. The Grays couldn’t have possi
bly known far enough in advance that they’d need to clone the entire human race.

  “The Grays no longer possess the ability to reproduce naturally. This is their breeding room. I’m told it can easily be adapted to fit human needs. The tanks were designed to be large enough for their experiments with human hybrids.

  Catalina’s stomach twisted at the thought. “Why would they help us?”

  This time the Gray who’d led them to the chamber replied. “Be-caws it is w-hat Eth-err-us w-ants.”

  “Etherus?” Catalina struggled to repeat the unfamiliar word. She turned to Ben, her eyebrows raised in question. “Who’s that? Their leader?”

  Ben smiled. “You could say that. The Grays are theists. Their religion is remarkably similar to some of ours, but with a few key differences. They call their God Etherus.”

  The Gray standing there with them nodded, and Catalina frowned. A species as advanced as the Grays should have long ago grown out of their need for a god to explain all of the unexplained phenomena in their universe. Their belief altered her perception of them, and suddenly she saw them as childish and naive.

  But expressing that sentiment to them might not be the wisest move given that she and the rest of humanity were currently at their mercy. Turning back to Ben, she asked, “How long will it take to bring Alexander back?”

  “A week.”

  “That fast?”

  Ben nodded, and Catalina grew suspicious. “Wait—he’s not going to be... a baby, is he?”

  Jessica burst out laughing, and the sound echoed loudly in the vast chamber. Their alien guide stared wordlessly at the girl, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Catalina hoped Jessica’s laughter wasn’t at her expense. The thought of raising her own husband from a baby, of changing his diapers, and dealing with his adolescent tantrums was enough to douse all of her romantic feelings.

  Ben smiled and shook his head. “No, he’ll be grown to adulthood. His brain wouldn’t be able to handle the memory transfer otherwise.”