Red Survivor Mission Chronicles Box Set 2 Read online

  He then approached the rodent, stooping until he was just above it, completely ignoring the fake man.

  “You will agree to peace with us and allow the colony to remain,” Captain Marchant paused, “or you are going to die here and now.”

  “We do not agree to these terms,” the man said.

  Cara came out of nowhere and jabbed a needle into the leg of the rodent, pushing down on the syringe. At the same moment, Marchant secured the creature and kept it from biting her.

  “Did we get the dosage right?” Marchant asked, stepping back after the rodent had gone limp.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “What was that?” I asked, wondering if they had killed the fuzzy little alien.

  “A sedative,” Cara said. “Judging by the creature’s size and weight—assuming that wasn’t an illusion as well—it should be out for twenty-four hours.”

  “That is just long enough for us to get into port,” Marchant said. “I don’t care if this is a sentient creature or not, we’re gonna study this thing. The ramifications of its abilities are endless.”

  Marchant left while I too thought about the possible applications. My first thought was military. Which I was sure was also the captain’s first inclination as well.

  “Keep this thing under lock and key, make sure it stays alive,” I said to Cara and then looked at Watts. “I want two men posted outside the door at all times. One inside too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if anything strange happens—”

  “I’ll make sure they call you first,” Watts said.

  I stared at him, wondering if I should say something about how he had not believed me before. He glanced away, his cheeks turning pink.

  I said nothing, walking out the door instead.

  THE AMBUSH ON KURAL 2

  1

  Doctor Cara Cleverly looked up when I walked into the infirmary, grimaced, and then looked back down. Things had been awkward after the incident where the rodent from the McClellan Colony had duped us all into believing that the Plethki were attacking.

  Rodent? I thought. I doubt they call themselves that. One bad apple gives the rest a bad name.

  I had tried to understand the reason for her discomfort but had not been able to figure it out. Rather than worry about it, I had just focused on making sure that the rodent remained sedated. I had stopped by every couple of hours just to check on it.

  “Doctor Cleverly, do you have a minute?” I asked as I approached and looked inside the plastic container where the sedated rodent had been placed.

  Tubes were attached to the plastic box that created an environment close to its homeworld, which had a slightly higher oxygen content than people from Earth were accustomed to. “You need to give this little guy another round of sedation. We have been ordered out on a rescue mission before we can turn it over to FEDE researchers like we had planned.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, Commander.” Cara frowned. “I don’t like what we’ve done to him. He seems harmless enough.”

  I took a moment to formulate my response.

  She had developed an attachment to this creature, but we needed to keep it sedated, which meant she needed to buy into the plan.

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” I said carefully.

  “This goes against everything we believe as members of the FEDE.”

  I understood her objection without her needing to explain it.

  “What else would you suggest?” I asked.

  This is why she’s been so uncomfortable with me.

  She hesitated. “I think we should let him wake up so we can chat with him before we sedate him again. It has been almost twenty hours, surely he has come to his senses by now.”

  “How about you take that to the captain yourself? I don’t mind if you go directly to him.”

  My response took the wind out of her sails. She knew precisely how Captain Marchant was going to respond to her request.

  “I don’t know about this, Nick.” It was unusual for her to use my first name. “This goes against everything we’ve been trained to do. It goes against everything we believe and what the FEDE stands for. We have a sentient creature on board our ship, and nobody’s trying to understand it. And instead of trying to make contact to acquaint ourselves with its reasoning and motives, we have sedated it and kept it under quarantine.”

  “You saw what it could do, Cara,” I interjected, “it’s not safe, and it’s unstable. Trust me, I tried to reason with it. I tried to convince it to act reasonably when we first discovered it back down on the planet. You even saw me try to reason with it up here. It wasn’t going well.”

  I shook my head and laughed ruefully.

  “There are some creatures that just want to see the universe burn. Now I don’t think his whole race is like this, I think we’re dealing with a unique individual, but at the same time, would it be wise for us to put the ship at risk? Think of all the crewmembers we have on board. There’s even a few families. You know about the Suarez family, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I delivered the baby.”

  I had thought this would be a point that would make her reconsider what she was proposing, but apparently, she was so conflicted that even the presence of a newborn baby on our ship—a very unusual occurrence—didn’t make her bat an eye at what she was thinking of doing.

  I shrugged. “I can’t conscientiously take that sort of risk when we have so many other people who weigh in the balance.”

  “I understand, it is just difficult.”

  Her eyes told me she did not understand at all and wanted to run the risk. Unless I was misreading things, she might just run that risk without permission.

  “Think of this rodent as a member of our society that has proven he is not able to function.”

  “You mean like a thief or a murderer?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re gonna say that we send those people the jail, aren’t you?”

  “We override their freedom because—”

  “Spare me the civics lesson. This is nothing like that. We don’t keep them under sedation.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but saw that she had a point, so I decided to take a different tact instead.

  “Agreed. When we weigh this guy’s life against all the lives of everybody else on the ship, I’m sorry, the calculation is simple.”

  “What if I could block his abilities?”

  “I think you’re gonna have a hard time convincing the captain to give it a go, but I would like to see you succeed.” I said this more to satiate her, not because I thought it was a good idea.

  “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “In the meantime, make sure he stays sedated.”

  She nodded.

  “And don’t try anything without the captain’s permission.”

  2

  “Ensign Redding,” Captain Marchant said from where he was seated in his captain’s chair, “put us in orbit around Kural 2.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ensign Redding said.

  I watched with interest as we approached Kural 2. Unlike the last time we had responded to an emergency cry for help, this time, we knew what we were dealing with and had remained in contact with the colonists who had been attacked by a rogue Plethki ship. Most had been killed, only a few survivors remained.

  When Captain Marchant looked at me, I wasn’t surprised. It seemed like a simple enough mission.

  “Commander, take a team to retrieve the survivors. Bring them back.”

  “Yes, sir.” I looked at Watts and hesitated for the barest fraction of a second before inviting him to come with me.

  Things had been a little uncomfortable with Watts since the incident with the rodent, but I was confident that with time things would get back to normal.

  When I glanced back at Marchant, his face was unreadable.

  The captain had backed off me a little bit. While I would not describe him as kind, he had not been as hostile as he had been before. I believed this was because of his daughter.

  Tonya Marchant was being nice to me.

  Perhaps I had won some points with her when I had kept the ship safe by piercing through the rodent’s illusions.

  “Ensign Marchant?” I said. “Would you care to join us?”

  Captain Marchant looked over at me and acted as if he was going to say something, but stopped when he noticed an admonishing look from his daughter.

  “Yes, Commander,” she said.

  The look of consternation on the captain’s face alone was worth the hassle of bringing along his daughter.

  As I got into the lift Ensign Redding glanced towards me and smiled, she held my eyes for a moment before looking away. We had plans for dinner later that evening.

  Something to look forward to, I thought as the lift door shut and we descended.

  3

  “Have you ever seen a planet with so much water?” I asked the others as we came through the atmosphere and were greeted by a vast ocean. From outer space the planet looked completely blue; it wasn’t until we were on top of it that the strange landmasses became visible.

  The landmass crisscrossed the planet like a network of thin wires. It did not have continents, at least as we thought of them. Instead, it was more like a planet full of connected islands.

  Very strange,” Watts muttered.

  Several minutes later we approached the Jameson Colony.

  The location was the most logical place for a colony on the planet as it was the largest piece of land at more than ten miles across and thirty miles wide.

  “I don’t think I could live here,” Ensign Tonya Marchant said, “too much water. I’m more of a desert girl.”

  “The Plethki attacked approximately four days ago,” I said, “and the survivors have been hiding in a bunker.”

  “What happened to the Plethki?” Watts asked.

  “We don’t know for sure. Our scans turned nothing up, but we should remain open to the possibility the Plethki might still be here.”

  We landed outside the colony several minutes later and disembarked from the ship.

  4

  The Jameson colony was smaller than the McClellan colony. We didn’t have a full count on the survivors, but we had been assured by the survivors that a single transport shuttle was adequate to take everybody back.

  I assumed this meant there were less than twenty.

  “Ensign Marchant, would you mind reaching out to the survivors?” I asked, surveying the surrounding area while looking off in the distance at the dark horizon. It looked like a storm was headed our way, so I wanted to make sure we did this as quick as we could.

  “Commander,” Marchant said a moment later, “they saw us land and are already headed towards us. They should be here any minute.”

  “Perfect.”

  As we waited, I began to get antsy, though I could not pinpoint the reason for the anxiety. The only problem was the approaching storm on the horizon, and we had plenty of time before that would get in the way. Even if it did, our ship was well equipped to handle planetary storms, so we should be back on the Red Survivor in no time.

  “Commander,” Watts said, pointing off in the other direction. “What’s that over there?”

  I pulled my field glasses out of my bag.

  “We have a problem,” I said. “Those are Plethki vessels.”

  5

  “Ensign Marchant,” I said calmly to hide my stormy interior, “please let Captain know that two Plethki ships are headed directly towards us.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Tonya looked scared, but I was happy she was here, if for no other reason than that her presence guaranteed that Captain Marchant would be interested in retrieving of us.

  “Commander,” Watts said, looking over at me as he swung his rifle down from his shoulder. “How do we want to handle this?” The gun wouldn’t do him any good, not against a Plethki ship.

  I brought up my tablet and pressed the communicator button, “Emergency transmission to all colonists, we don’t have long, hurry!”

  “They just fired missiles,” Ensign Marchant said, panic showing in her voice.

  “What the krack is going on here?” I muttered, looking back at our ship and wondering if we had time enough to get inside and engage the ship’s countermeasures.

  I shook my head.

  People first.

  “Our chances are better if we are not on the ship. Head to the colony!”

  There was little else we could do as we watched the missiles come toward us.

  6

  We were almost to the colony wall when something was fired from within, taking down the first missile.

  Another missile was fired from the colony at the second Plethki missile, taking it down far easier than I expected

  “That was close,” I said, bringing up my handheld tablet and pressing the communicator button again. “Get everybody out here now! The ship is gonna leave ASAP. It won’t be long before the Plethki are here.”

  I stared at the oncoming Plethki vessels, trying to gauge how long we had. The missiles traveled faster than the ships. I guessed we had two minutes at the most.

  “Where is everybody?” I demanded, looking around but not seeing them.

  “We are here, Commander,” said a man running up from behind a building with others behind him. “The Plethki tried to smoke us out before, we had to be sure you were human.”

  “Is this all of you?” I asked as we dashed towards the transport ship. There were just five colonists. “I expected more.”

  “We’re all that’s left.”

  “Back on board the ship now, we can outrun the Plethki if we hurry!”

  A missile we hadn’t seen exploded between us and the ship.

  7

  I ducked behind a rock and glanced over at the others to make sure everybody was okay before I focused on the leader of the colony. He was a short man with dark hair and a pale complexion, though I could not peg him for one particular race or another.

  “Do you have any more of those surface-to-air missiles?” I asked him.

  The leader unslung his rifle and pointed it at me before turning into a Plethki right before my eyes. The other survivors did as well.

  “Lay down your weapons,” said a disembodied voice from a box that hung from the Plethki officer’s neck.

  8

  I had seen the Plethki use voiceboxes before, but they had always worked as a translator. The Plethki would say something, and the voicebox would translate.

  I wondered why it wasn’t working that way now, but figured that maybe a hidden Plethki soldier was doing the talking because the translation would have otherwise given them away.

  “Where are our people?” I demanded of the Plethki officer.

  The Plethki spoke, and a moment later the translation came through the voice box.

  “They are safe.”

  “How many did you take captive?”

  “Enough.”

  I studied the Plethki, trying to understand what was going on here.

  The last missile had narrowly missed the ship.

  That could not have been an accident.

  They want to take our ship back to commandeer the Red Survivor.

  “Plethki officer,” I said, looking at Watts and giving him a small nod, “by order of the FEDE, I order you to surrender. If you do, you will be taken into custody and treated with all deference.”

  I grabbed my sidearm and jumped on the alien closest to me while the Plethki officer was trying to understand my words. We grappled until I was pulled off of him by two other Plethki soldiers. I was unable to get a shot off because the Plethki soldier was stronger than I anticipated. Watts had tried to help me, but he had been kept back by a sizeable knife that one of the Plethki wielded.

  The Plethki officer laughed while looking at me. They took away my sidearm and Watts’ rifle. Ensign Marchant was unarmed.

  “I think you are mistaken,” he said, his voice box translating, “it is you who will surrender to us. We have no less than ten snipers pointing our weapons at you now. The moment you do anything rash, you will be dead.”

  The Plethki officer looked at Watts and then at me as he said this.

  Why didn’t they shoot us when I attacked?

  There were no hidden snipers.

  I fiddled with something in my pocket, drawing a look from the Plethki.

  “Hands where I can see them!”

  I had not had much interaction with the Plethki since the war had started, but before everything had fallen apart, I had spent some time on their homeworld when stationed at a FEDE embassy.

  “Your people are fighting a war of aggression they cannot win,” I said to the Plethki officer, “it is going badly, and we will be victorious. I recommend you surrender now to save your life.”

  The Plethki laughed and looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “I don’t think you understand,” the Plethki officer said to me. “Things are not what you think they are. You will communicate to your ship that you will shortly return with the survivors. If you refuse, we kill a survivor. If you continue to refuse, we will kill another. We are prepared to kill everybody, Commander.”

  I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.

  “How about a little demonstration. Two of the Plethki took hold of Tonya while another put a weapon to her head. “I will execute her to show you that I am serious.”

  “Wait!” I stepped forward, ripping her away from them while bringing up a fist and nearly assaulting the man. The last thing I needed was for her to die while on my watch.

  Captain Marchant would murder me in my sleep.

  “We will do as you ask.” I looked at Ensign Marchant. “Please communicate to the captain that everything is fine here and that we will return shortly.”