Earthfall Read online

  Earthfall

  Book One of Black Sand

  Joshua Guess

  ©2016 Joshua Guess

  Also by Joshua Guess

  Living With the Dead

  With Spring Comes The Fall

  The Bitter Seasons

  Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

  The Hungry Land

  The Wild Country

  This New Disease

  American Recovery

  Ever After

  The Fall

  Victim Zero

  Dead Will Rise

  War of the Living

  Genesis Game

  The Next Chronicle

  Next

  Damage

  Black Sand

  Earthfall

  Ran

  Apocalyptica (Serialized into multiple parts)

  Misc

  Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

  Soldier Lost (Short Story)

  Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

  With James Cook

  The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

  Catch me on Facebook at my page:

  Joshua Guess, Author

  One

  I have never seen the Earth. Not with my own eyes, at any rate.

  It’s a little strange to hear the people around me refer to it as the planet of their birth. Because of the strict—and necessary—population controls in place among the United Earth Exiles, there are proportionally few young people around. I don’t have much chance to meet anyone born in the last century, for that matter. Not many of them have the clearance to even look at me.

  Despite what people will tell you, I was born. It’s a common misconception. Designed humans—people call us Blues, as in blueprints—are carried and birthed by volunteer surrogates. Even though we reach maturity faster than unmodified children, we’re even raised. It’s an inside joke among Blues to track how many times someone has expressed surprise at how normal and well-adjusted we are. Usually they think it’s amazing because they knew we were raised by robots or something.

  Sorry to shatter illusions, but the brilliant scientific minds of the UEE had all of human history as a guide when they set out to grow pilots better physically suited to the demands of space combat. Pure clones were a bad idea, of course. The decades before the Exile taught that lesson. Cloning is good for a lot of things, from growing new organs to testing experimental medicines, but complex clones don’t hold up well.

  Genetically and physically they’re just fine. It’s the mental blow of finding out you’re a copy of someone else. The psychological backlash was pervasive enough among cloned subjects to make the practice essentially worthless.

  The same goes for all the other false stereotypes people have regarding Blues. We’re raised by people just like any other children, because other than our modified genes, we are like any other children. Yes, we grow faster. We learn faster. We’re stronger, more agile, and we have a nifty biological computer in our brains that grows along with us. These things are without intrinsic positive or negative value, any more than skin or eye color.

  We learn to read on the knees of our foster parents. We fall asleep in the crook of their arms. None of the eight Blues in my group home felt a lack of love. If anything it brought us closer together.

  If I’m being totally honest, I actually feel sad for my foster parents. I love them as any child does, and I know unless I die in combat, I’m likely to outlive them by centuries. The genetic modifications to retard aging work much more efficiently for Blues, since we’re literally made with those genes in place. The older gene therapies such as the procedure my parents had were performed just before the Exile. They aren’t as advanced as the techniques available now.

  I have often wondered what humanity would look like if the Exile hadn’t happened. I probably wouldn’t exist, there not being a pressing need for augmented pilots. Just thinking back over the lessons I learned during my education, and seeing what we’ve done in the hundred years since being forced from our home, makes me marvel at the tenacity of our species.

  Humanity was approaching something like a golden age. The twenty-first century was a bad one, if not as filled with bloody conflict as the one before it. Brilliant men and women had postulated that humanity had grown too large to have our population growth significantly affected by anything short of planetary annihilation. The papers and studies were in almost universal agreement that sheer volume protected us from the ravages of disease, war, or non-space-based natural disaster.

  They were spectacularly wrong.

  People died by the tens of millions during a decade of plague fueled by a runaway biological weapon. Virulent and airborne, the majority of people caught it. A quarter of survivors were rendered incapable of bearing children.

  There were many other cataclysms over the years of that century, but the painfully simple loss of reproductive capacity was the spark needed for the revolution in genetics that followed. Through the solar storms, earthquakes, meteor strikes, tidal waves, and myriad other forms of death, one woman led the charge to take the future by the neck and push it where she wanted it to go.

  Her work is the reason why the UEE is staffed largely by people in their thirteenth or fourteenth decade, but who look thirty. It’s the basis for my own existence. The fundamentals of gene surgery pioneered by Anita Flores are the foundation upon which all modern genetic modifications are built.

  Flores wasn’t a singular force during the fading years of the twenty-first century. Her remarkable solution to the infertility problem through selective genetic changes was simply the spark others needed. A population of eight and a half billion had been whittled down to half that within twenty years, and people felt the pressure. The need to do something spectacular that would change everything.

  Flores may have led the charge, but the world only changes if others follow.

  The Lofstrom Loop had long been a pipe dream in the eyes of space agencies around the world. The technical problems had all been solved, though power generation was still a concern. Money had been the primary barrier. Anita Flores sat with a group of a hundred astrophysicists, engineers, and other scientists with a love of the stars as they begged for funds to make their dream come true.

  Faced with the potential advancements that came with a cheap and reliable means of reaching orbit, several large governments agreed to finance the Loop. I’ve seen the recordings from that time, and while I admit to a relatively sheltered existence free of politicking, even I know the lofty speeches covered a predatory instinct to extract all the wealth from the venture as could be squeezed.

  Halfway through the construction of the Loop, everything changed. One breezy summer night in North America, a light appeared in the sky. The event was caught on video by hundreds of people, though only a handful managed to reach the crash site.

  The alien inside the ship was dead on arrival, but his technology was perfectly functional.

  ***

  Hallmarks of that alien technology are everywhere you look along the corridors of Ceres. The dwarf planet once yoked in gravitational symbiosis to the sun now served as the primary residence for the Exiles. Had you asked anyone on Earth at the end of the twenty-first century whether our species would even survive through the next hundred years, you would have heard a negative far more often than a positive. Ask them if they thought we would attain the level of advancement required to turn a rock the size of a small moon into an interstellar ship, and they’d have laughed at you.

  I ran along the metal hallways every morning at the same measured pace. It wasn’t to keep healthy in low gravity—the deck plates each contained small artificial gravity generators keeping Ceres at one gravity—but rather to keep myself at peak condition. M
y genetics being a matter of planning rather than a roll of nature’s often capricious dice, I didn’t need to work out. My metabolism is designed to keep me comfortably within optimal. My preference to stay as flexible, strong, and capable of sustained activity as possible comes mostly from the harsh reality that my day usually involves piloting a craft capable of moving at a decent percentage of the speed of light.

  A few techs and scientists waved or nodded to me as I jogged. Some were friends, others new acquaintances brought to the restricted section by the annual influx of graduate students. A lot of people in the UEE consider Blues standoffish because of our artificial nature, but that’s not true. We vary in that regard just as widely as anyone else. We’re just limited in who we’re allowed to meet. It’s one of several consequences of being an expensive and valuable resource.

  I was nearly finished with my morning 5K when a set of footfalls raced up behind me. The cadence of the beating plastic soles was familiar. I smiled.

  “Jordan, you’re early this morning,” I said without looking back. “I wasn’t expecting to see you until I got to Operations.”

  “Please stop running,” Jordan pleaded, huffing as he pulled close to me. I obliged, coming to a stop beneath one of the light fixtures adorning every other ceiling panel in the narrow hallway. Having never been on-planet, I don’t know what natural sunlight looks like in that context, but those fixtures are close. Or so I’m told. They’re another piece of reverse-engineered tech, panels that glow with even and warm light just from thermal interaction with air.

  “What’s up?” I asked as I took in my assistant. Something was off.

  Jordan was younger than me, which made him a rarity in the restricted section. Section, as it was usually called, housed three main categories of people. The older scientists, engineers, and command crew were the majority. The younger graduate students tended to come in waves and only stay for a few months to learn specific things from their elders. The Blues were by far the minority, all of us pilots and only thirty in number.

  Each pilot has an assistant. Jordan is mine, and at twenty-three he’s a couple decades younger than the youngest of his peers. Usually the kid is laid back, but as I looked at him gasping for breath in the corridor, I was taken aback. His black hair was sopping and disheveled, plastered across his forehead instead of carefully styled as usual. Sweat beaded on his dark skin and stained his uniform.

  “Damn, Jordan,” I said. “What the hell happened? Normally you look ready to go to a dance, and that’s before I’ve even had my coffee.”

  “Haven’t been to sleep,” Jordan said, beginning to get his breath back. “After you went to bed last night I was called to the Neruda.”

  I blinked. “And you were there all night?”

  Jordan nodded, glancing around to make sure no one was nearby. I briefly thought of mentioning the near-total saturation of audio and video coverage all over Section, but didn’t bother. The kid wasn’t stupid. He knew anything he said would eventually be heard by someone above his pay grade.

  “Let’s run back to your pod,” Jordan said. “We need to talk.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is it going to take long? We’re supposed to be in Ops in half an hour, and I need to clean up.” I left unsaid that he could do with a shower and change of clothes. Living in space meant close quarters, which wasn’t something any of us were able to forget. Going without a shower for a day was sometimes unavoidable and therefore understandable. Going for longer was apt to get you thrown into an airlock.

  Jordan shook his head. “You’re not going to Ops today. That’s why I was running. They sent me back with orders.”

  My heart began to beat a little harder. “From the Neruda?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer. Neruda was the flagship of our little fleet, one of three Lucas-class vessels that served as its core. Orders from her were one of only two real options and could mean almost anything. Usually my missions were boring enough not to rank direct orders. Operations generally passed them along in our morning briefings.

  Jordan shook his head. “No. From the Ronin.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Jordan grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re on the short list. Which is why we need to talk privately.”

  Two

  Jordan sat across from me in my pod, sipping on a cup of water. The space was small compared to the unimaginably large spaces I had seen from old movies of Earth, but for Ceres and the UEE in general my quarters were palatial.

  Being a science experiment did have some advantages, after all. Jordan liked to bitch about how he had to share quarters with a roommate in a space half the size of my pod, and I took great pleasure in lording my extra space over him. My bed was tiny and folded out from the wall of the re-purposed cargo container, but it was comfy. Even sitting on it as my assistant explained the overnight meeting was pleasant, the active gel perfectly contouring itself to the pressure needs of my ass. Something about that tickled me to no end; the idea that huge amounts of currency, manpower, and scientific effort had gone into making sure my bottom was expertly cradled.

  Jordan sat on the largest piece of furniture in the room, which was the seat in my personal simulator. The thing sat open like an enormous clam, the seat configured for upright use.

  “Basically, they asked me everything they could think of about you,” Jordan concluded after passing along every detail he could remember from his interrogation. “Weird shit, you know? Stuff that didn’t have anything to do with your skills.”

  I waved a hand. “They have terabytes of data for that,” I said dismissively. “Any Captain can pull up my statistics. If they’re really thinking of sending me on the Home Run, they’ll want to make sure there won’t be any surprises.”

  Which was completely reasonable. There had originally been forty Blue pilots. The Home Run, which only happened once a year, had claimed six of the ten who had died. Given Jordan’s instructions for me to report to the Ronin after lunch, I figured it was a good bet they were seriously considering me for the run. Neruda was our flagship, the shining beacon our people looked to for leadership and hope, but the Ronin was the brain which truly ran the body of the UEE. All intelligence missions originated from the spooks on that ship.

  Jordan cleared his throat, then swallowed. I suppressed a smile. In the year since he’d beaten out much older and more experienced applicants to become my assistant, I had come to know the kid pretty well.

  “You want to say something, just say it,” I said gently. “You know I don’t stand by any of that formality bullshit.”

  The younger man grimaced. “It’s not that,” he said. “You’ve told me a hundred times, ‘Pilots need information, not coddling.’”

  “That’s a terrible impression of me,” I observed. Jordan flipped me the bird.

  “I just don’t want you to get pissed,” Jordan said. “They asked me a lot of questions, some of it really personal. I figured it had something to do with you finally getting a shot at the Home Run, so…”

  “Ah,” I breathed, understanding. “They asked you about the fight, and you told them the truth.”

  Jordan nodded, a miserable expression on his face.

  “It’s okay,” I said, leaning forward to pat his shoulder. “It was bound to come up eventually.”

  It was okay, at least in the sense that I didn’t blame the kid. He had never been anything other than enthusiastic and supportive of me, even though that often meant performing menial tasks the vaunted Blue pilot he worked for couldn’t waste time on. On the other hand, Jordan had told the people in charge the reason I had come back from a tandem mission to a nearby star system and proceeded to beat the daylights out of my partner. Until now it had been left alone.

  “I’m sorry, Mars,” he said.

  “Like I said, don’t worry about it. I appreciate the heads-up. Now I know they’ll ask about it and I’ll tell them the truth.”

  I stood up and went over to the locker embedded in the wal
l, opening it with a swipe of my palm over the reader.

  “Marsellus Cori,” the computer chirped. “Identity confirmed.”

  Jordan snickered behind me. I shot him a glare. “You wouldn’t be laughing if the scientist who won the right to name you had an obsession with twentieth-century pop culture,” I said. Jordan knew better than to call me by my full first name, but that didn’t stop him from having a chuckle when he heard it.

  “At least you got a decent last name,” Jordan said. “Named after a Nobel prize winner.”

  “True,” I said. “Definitely better than some of my brothers and sisters. Poor Dan is walking around with Almendinger as his last name.”

  I pulled my daily wear out, which was essentially a thin coverall. Given our status as exiled Earth citizens who primarily lived in space, our fleet wasn’t stuck on formal uniforms or status symbols. They cared about results, not appearance.

  “I’m gonna hit the shower,” I said. “Do me a solid and get breakfast ready?”

  Jordan jumped up. “I’ll do you one better.” He fished around his own coveralls for a moment before pulling out a rare piece of currency. “I’ve been saving this for when you finally got your shot.”

  I hesitated, torn between the desire to look my best in front of the panel that would decide whether I was suitable for the most sought-after mission in the UEE, and the urge to snatch the small green chip Jordan held and caress it lovingly.

  “You smooth bastard,” I said. Jordan grinned.

  “Get clean,” Jordan said. “When you get out, I’ll be back here with real, actual food. Bacon, maybe.”

  I nearly broke my neck diving into the small shower.

  ***

  Jordan came through, as always. Though our usual fare was some variation on what could be grown in vats, this breakfast was different. In my decades of life, I had eaten what most people call ‘real’ food only a handful of times. Most of those occasions had come in the last five years, when the small farming settlement on Hera began producing substantial quantities of goods. The planet, named after a goddess, was itself a sort of godsend in that it was just capable of supporting life.