Chapter One
DFY1360 was a C class planet revolving around a D class sun with nine—count them nine!—brothers and sisters, three quarters of which were rocky planets just waiting to be raped of their precious resources.
“The colonists that end up here are going to cream themselves,” Annika muttered to herself as she studied the maps the probes had provided from their surveys and worked on matching areas of high interest—mineral and ore deposits—to the landscape below them.
It wasn’t just the bountiful, virgin nature of the mineral deposits, either, although that was pretty mindboggling. The planet itself was an Earth-C—which meant conditions were twice as nice as the mother world—a hundred years ago—when the environment was ten times better.
Hell! It was the mother lode of all mother lodes! She was in love and she hadn’t even properly met the lady yet!
Apparently, she’d muttered a lot louder than she’d thought.
Phillips, the navigator, snickered and sent his companion, Captain Mark Stoddard, a provocative look. “I think Annika’s been in space way too long to get that excited about dirt and rocks! What do you think, Marky?”
Mark sent him a censorious look. “Captain,” he reminded his boyfriend censoriously.
Phillips rolled his eyes.
“And I see her point, actually. It might be a diamond in the rough, but it’s unquestionably a diamond. And the conditions—from what I can see this place—will be a cakewalk compared to the last dozen we mapped. To say nothing of the fact that the shares for the mining operation will be through the roof if the quality matches the quantity of the deposits here or even comes close. They’ll have their relocation indentures paid off in no time and be racking up luxury/retirement credits. Yeah, I can see it, alright.”
Phillips batted his eyelashes at the captain. “Ooh, sweety! You sound like you’re pretty worked up over this place yourself. Just hold that thought till we set down and me and you can discuss it while Annika takes a walk to look around.”
Annika felt her face redden in spite of all she could do.
It wasn’t that she had a problem with gay couples. She had a problem with couples of any gender being so openly suggestive … or demonstrative. She wasn’t ‘in’ to watching others and she hated it when she was made to feel like a voyeur by exhibitionists.
“Now what, I wonder, has the science geek blushing?” Phillips cooed maliciously. “Thinking about having a virtual session with your pretend boyfriend?”
“Cut it out and get your mind on your job,” the captain snapped irritably.
Phillips narrowed his eyes at his companion, his own color rising, but it would’ve been hard to say whether it was from anger or discomfort.
The captain was ambi-sexual—a player who was as open about his interest in either sex as Phillips was about the direction of his sexuality.
Annika was fairly certain it was jealousy that had made Phillips blush …. Just like it had been jealousy that had prompted his nasty innuendos.
Not that he had any reason to be jealous. She had no more interest in a man that went both ways than she had in men who preferred men.
But when was jealousy ever rational?
“Not that it’s any of your business, Phillips,” Annika retorted coolly, “but Jared isn’t a sim. He’s real-live flesh and blood.”
Phillips sent her a smirk that made her long to slap him, but she was more irritated with herself for letting him get under her skin enough to prompt a defensive response.
She had no need, or reason, to defend herself. Virtual sex wasn’t the most ideal way to carry on a relationship, but it beat the hell out of nothing for months on end and, unfortunately, although her job paid well, it kept her on the road—so to speak. And since she wasn’t fortunate enough to have a relationship with a man that traveled with her—unlike some people—it was virtual or nothing a good bit of the time.
She supposed she wouldn’t have felt as defensive about it if she wasn’t worried that it wasn’t enough for Jared, that he was taking full advantage of her frequent absences to fool around with women closer to hand—maybe even men, although he’d sworn to her he was straight up opie.
It sucked that 99% of the men were ambi—or just straight up samsie like Phillips.
If she could just find a man that was totally in to women! It would be nice to only have to worry about half the human race wanting to get into his pants, or vice versa!
Shaking her thoughts, she focused on her screen again, but she was almost immediately distracted by a blinding glare of light. She tried to shield her eyes, but finally glanced toward the annoyance.
The sun was rising, she discovered. They’d dropped low enough planet-ward to catch the alien dawn—an event she wasn’t ordinarily all that fond of.
She sucked in her breath in rapturous awe as the orange/golden glow spilled across the black and gray landscape and transformed it from monochrome into brilliant color. “Oh my god!” she breathed in reverence. “Look at that waterfall!”
She could’ve been in the cockpit alone for all she noticed of her companions. They faded into the background as she stared, wonderstruck, through the forward portal, taking in the brilliant colors streaked across the bowl of sky before she scanned the beauty of the landscape below it. It took her a few moments to realize that the regular holes dotting the sheer cliff wall where the river spilled over weren’t caves. “My god! It’s a … it looks like it must have been a … uh …community. I didn’t expect to find signs of intelligent life—not immediately. It is abandoned, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know that we can tell from here, but I was about to do a second go-around for a closer look. We can see if the sensors pick anything up.”
“Honestly!” Phillips muttered. “You’d think she’d never seen an alien planet!”
Irritation flickered through Annika, but before she could comment, the captain did.
“We don’t see many that look like this—in fact I haven’t seen one since I left Earth.” He hesitated. “And there aren’t many places back home anymore that would compare to this.”
Annika’s gaze was drawn by movement below them as the captain circled and dropped lower. Squinting, she managed to make out a strange creature racing toward the trees on the plateaux above the waterfall that had taken her breath.
She discovered there were actually three of them—whatever they were—strung out by their best speeds in racing away to hide among the trees.
They appeared to have six appendages—four legs, two arms. The one nearest the trees skidded to a stop and turned to look up at them. Pulling something from his back, he used it to launch a projectile in their direction.
“And the natives appear to be somewhat hostile,” Captain Stoddard murmured, then added dismissively, “Primitives—nothing that could disqualify the find.”
“I expect the ship scared the crap out of them,” Phillips pointed out. “You know … They remind me of …. Something. I can’t quite ….”
“Centaurs!” Annika gasped. “At least from here. Probably wouldn’t look much like those mythological beings up close.”
“Well get some damn video!” Captain Stoddard snapped. “Quick! Before they disappear. That’s a need to know—we aren’t just tourists.”
Annika gaped at him in dismay for a second before she scrambled to comply. “I thought it was auto-recording everything.”
“It doesn’t record in space,” the captain said dryly. “What would be the point of that?”
Exactly.
And she should have thought of that—would have if she hadn’t been so stunned by the beauty of the place.
She was going to get fired if she didn’t get something for proof!
Annika struggled with her embarrassment and her irritation with herself that she’d been so busy gawking like an amateur she’d missed an opportunity to get a good look at the natives and, more importantly, to record it. “I might have caught a little footage before they managed to get into the woods. I’ll do a playback later and examine it. Could you get a little closer to the cliffs so we can get a look at those dwellings? Or do we have a probe we can launch?”
The captain shook his head. “We only have a handful of drone probes left. I don’t think this warrants the use. It looks ancient. Just note it on the map for the science geeks. They can check it out when they get here.”
Annika was disappointed, but he was right. It did look old and long since abandoned and it wasn’t her job to do more than catalogue such sites for specialists in the field to study.
Her actual job was landscape engineer. She was a trained geologist but her expertise was targeted toward finding suitable colony sites. They’d sent probes, of course, to discover mineral deposits and so forth, but it took a human to examine potential settlement sites since humans would live there. A successful colony was dependent on more than basic essentials. It needed to be as ascetically pleasing as possible to support a healthy morale. Someone needed to assess any and all threats within a given locale—as in was it as healthy an area as could be found? Or were there features that could make the colonists prone to sickness? Was there any kind of geological death traps close enough to be an issue? Were there plants, animals, or beings that were hostile or poisonous in the immediate vicinity?
Planets that were habitable were generally inhabited—occasionally by higher intellect beings, but always by something and many of those creatures, and plants, were deadly.
And then there were the geological threats.
And weather patterns.
It was far more than a matter of whether or not a colony could survive without ‘podding’—building a self-contained human environment on a hostile world—which was a damned expensive and time consuming enterprise and something the company liked to avoid whenever possible.
They also wanted to be as certain as they could be that they’d built as far from natural disasters as they could for economic reasons.
Building a colony, complete with processing plants, was a damned expensive gamble. They liked to hedge their bets as much as possible that the investment would pay off—not be swallowed up in a fissure, or blown away by a volcano, or swept away by a flood.
Fortunately for their plans, the geology as well as previous occupancy suggested this could be a place with a lot of potential for a colony—and it was beautiful enough to have people fighting over a spot—icing when one considered it was well within walking distance of a huge gold deposit and only a few clicks from other ore and mineral deposits of interest.
“I’m going to drop a marker,” she muttered a little absently as she programmed a beacon and launched it toward the center point of the site she’d chosen. “It isn’t likely we’re going to find a better place for a colony this close to one of the target deposits.”
She watched her instrument panel until she got a confirmation that it had planted and the beacon began broadcasting its signal. She was so focused on making notes and adjusting the camera for pictures that she didn’t see what hit them.
All she knew was that something struck the ship. The next thing she knew all hell broke loose. There was an explosion that made the entire ship buck and shudder and then every alarm on the ship went off seemingly at once.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is Scout 2-5-Niner. Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck. Catastrophic damage to main engine. Our location DFY1-3-6-zero. Coordinates ….”
Annika managed to twist around to look at Phillips.
Had he lost his mind? They weren’t down, damn it! The captain could regain control ….
But when she glanced at the captain, she saw that he was either unconscious or dead, clearly in no condition to use his many years of experience to save them, to land the ship, or at least control the crash.
Phillips was trying to set the ship down.
They were so fucked!
It was the last thought that crossed her mind before her senses exploded with input that they shouldn’t have and couldn’t process—air they hadn’t brought with them, grinding tears along the sides of the craft, leaves, branches, meta-glass, metal and bolts flying all around.
Screams.
Then blackness.
She didn’t think she’d been unconscious more than a handful of seconds—maybe not even totally unconscious at all but rather stunned—in shock. Her mind seemed to be all out of whack—running at super speed then half speed as she tried to survey and assess her surroundings/danger using only her animal instincts.
Those told her the presence of smoke and dust and other unidentifiable particles were a serious and imminent threat and she began clawing mindlessly at her safety harness. It was purely by accident/desperation that she managed to free herself, not by intelligent design since she wasn’t currently capable of reasoning through her problem. She fell out of her topsy-turvy seat when she’d managed to release the grip of her harness and then scrambled mindlessly around the jumble of debris until she basically fell out of a hole ripped along the side.
Her stomach went weightless when she didn’t immediately connect with ground. She screamed, flailing the air ineffectually in search of something to grab.
Instead, after what seemed an interminable time falling, something grabbed her.
She screamed again, this time with a mixture of terror and instinctual animalistic challenge, flailing her arms and legs and trying to find some sort of flesh to rend with her fingernails and teeth in what her animal mind perceived as a fight for survival.
She managed to fight her way free only to discover she was in freefall again. The second time the ‘something’ hit her from behind and grabbed a tight hold, she passed out.