Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 1
EXODUS EARTH:
THE COMPLETE SERIES
©2021-2022 ANDREW BEERY
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CONTENTS
Survey Ship
1. Sagia III
2. President in Exile
3. Edmund Fitzgerald
4. Into the Maelstrom
5. Bumpy Road
6. Dead in the Water
7. Frog Soup and Toasted Bread
8. Crazy is as Crazy Does
9. Babilu Station
10. Trident
11. Journey to Nowhere
12. Visitors
13. Avatar
14. Discovery
15. Goldilocks
16. To Hell and Back
17. Point the Way
18. Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
19. Cuneiforms
20. Option Three
21. Love-Hate Relationships
22. Midway Station
23. QV Tel
24. Survey One
25. Frying Pan
26. Recall
27. Why Are We Here?
28. High Powered Walnuts
29. First Fiddle
30. An Enemy Unknown
31. An Enemy Known
32. To Boldly Go… Somewhere
33. Harbingers of Things to Come
Epilogue
Lost Ship
1. Define Strange
2. Burning the Fields
3. Contact
4. Star-One!
5. Dome City
6. TMS Confident
7. City of Forever
8. Monolith
9. Begging the Question
10. Future’s Past
11. Buoy
12. Culpable Entity
13. Not Up For Debate
14. Uninvited Guests
15. Cold Fury
16. Mark in the Morning
17. Oblivion
18. Plan B
19. Arequot
20. Hope in Strange Places
21. Sneeze
22. Rubicon
23. Proto-Jabesh
24. Admiral Dare
25. Olja
26. Quantum Superposition
27. E=mc^2
28. Gatekeeper
Epilogue
Battleship
1. Contagion
2. Heur-what?
3. Without
4. Within
5. An Unexpected Friend
6. The Plan
7. Pin Drop
8. TMS Vengeance
9. They Don’t Like Me Over Here
10. Battleship
11. Crichton
12. Visiting Team
13. Wild Ride
14. Fight Fair
15. Halo Jump
16. Flyfishing
17. Adapt and Overcome
18. Bug City
19. Felix
20. Aggressors
21. Shelice
22. Welcome to the Neighborhood
23. Lost in the Dark
24. Illuminating
25. Mahanaim
26. Bridge
27. Cruiser 113
28. Incoming
29. Fully Committed
30. Dare Virus
Epilogue
Thank you for reading Exodus Earth
SURVEY SHIP
1
SAGIA III
I’ve had better nights. Hell, I’ve had better nightmares. The smell was beyond atrocious. If somebody ever tries to tell you that Sagia III is a dream vacation destination, just shoot them… or shoot yourself. Either way, don’t believe them.
The only reason I was tromping through the underbrush of this hellhole, in the middle of the night, was because as bad as it was at night… it was worse during the day. If Mother Nature had an ugly stepsister with bad hygiene habits and smelly armpits… that would be Sagia III.
The only thing that could possibly make this situation worse would be to “hypothetically” spend every last credit I had to my name on a rickety, decrepit, dilapidated… you pick the adjective… piece of crap flitter that decided to start pushing up daisies in the middle of a smelly bug-and-snake-infested swamp.
Oh, wait… I did that. My bad.
“Ah… Admiral, I think my boot is stuck again,” my companion complained.
The man doing the whining was my mark. Not as in Mark, the guy’s name, but as in “mark,” the guy I was attempting to divest of certain historical and rare items. Items I felt others could and would be better stewards of for posterity.
Ok, don’t get me wrong. The guy was handsome enough—or, at least, would have been if his face hadn’t been on the wrong side of too many bar fights—but good heavens was he a whiner. Despite his muscular physique, which was likely the result of genetic enhancements, he carried himself like someone who hadn’t worked a day in his life.
My name is Deborah Allen Riker. Most people call me Admiral Dare… or just plain Dare… or just plain Admiral. There is a debate as to whether the Dare comes from my initials, D A R, or my propensity to take extreme risks. The jury is still out on that one. As for the admiral thing… it’s not a rank. It’s just an unfortunate nickname I’ve been unable to shake. Let me explain.
I had some famous ancestors in the past… I guess that’s why they call them ancestors… I had some famous ancestors who were admirals. Some idiots in high school found out and thought it would be cute to start calling me “Admiral.” Teasing me has never been a safe pastime, and those young men lost some teeth for their efforts, but the cat was out of the bag and the nickname stuck. I had tried for years to shed it, but like fleas on a dog, it just wouldn’t go away. Even people I had never met called me “Admiral Dare.” Eventually, I just gave up and let it be.
Over the years, the name took on a life of its own. I’d like to think the name Admiral Dare was destined to become the stuff of legend. I knew it wouldn’t, but hey… it’s nice to dream.
For the moment, I was just an archaeological grifter with a worthless Ph.D. and a Navy pension I couldn’t touch for another thirty years. I was knee deep in slimy mud. There were flies everywhere, and I was with a rube in tow that likely couldn’t tell a snake from a stick… a rube depending on me to keep him alive … or so I thought. As I said, I’ve had better nights.
* * *
Five hours, and an untold number of blisters later, I was back in my hotel room… showered, bandaged, and hungry.
The mark was gone. I counted myself lucky. He had agreed not to sue me for breach of contract. He’d made this decision after I had explained that hiring an unlicensed archaeologist… an archaeologist that was not part of the state-approved archaeological guild was, in fact, a crime punishable by five years’ hard labor in some of Sagia’s finest swamps.
We agreed to part ways and forget what the other looked like. I was more than willing to forget my klutzy friend, but I would not forget the junk dealer who’d sold me that death trap of a flitter. He and I were going to have a heart-to-heart discussion about the matter.
I grabbed a protein biscuit from the hotel’s breakfast bar on the way out the door. For those who are curious, the cuisine on Sagia III is every bit as enticing as its ambiance… clear down to the smell. I’m told it has something to do with a high concentration of sulfur in the microflora. All I know is, if you’re a fan of the smell of a large chicken farm or hardboiled eggs, you’ll be right at home.
It took me about forty minutes to walk to Micky’s Used Treasures Emporium. The blisters on my feet because of my wet boots reminded me, every step of the way, of the pleasant evening I’d had the day before. The trip would have only taken five minutes if I had engaged one of the automated taxis swarming the city this time of day. The problem was, such conveyances required credits, and I had been cleaned out of credits by the joker I was going to visit.
I stepped through the door of Micky’s place. I had to push through a curtain of hanging beads to do so. I knew, from past experience, that the beads were infused with nano-probes that were used to deliver microscopic surveillance bots. Knowing the proprietor, the nanites were more likely used to capture vids of their victims in the shower—more for sale on the black market than for monitoring clandestine activities.
I say this, because my mark and I had walked through those same curtains yesterday. The mark was an older gentleman in his early fifties. He was… how shall I say it… not pinup material. He was one of those men who’d put on some extra weight around his belly and hadn’t bothered to have his metabolism artificially adjusted to compensate.
I, on the other hand, am a fit, somewhat well-equipped woman with raven hair who had just turned forty. Can you guess which one of us had twenty of the little buggers on them and who had none? I’ll give you a clue. It was the one wearing the underwire bra.
Fortunately, the spy bots were easy enough to detect and disable… if you knew they were there. I’d dealt with the ones I’d encountered the other day with the directional EMP emitter I always kept in my pocket.
Today, I fried every last one of them as I walked into Micky’s. They weren’t all that cheap, so my little extracurricular activity was going to cost Micky a pretty penny. Oh well. For whatever reason, I wasn’t in a forgiving a mood today. I don’t know. Maybe it was the wet boots.
“Ah, Mistress Riker! What a pleasure to see you again.” Micky was standing behind the counter at the back of his shop. “How can I delight you today?”
I had to give him props. He had the whole, slimy used-car-salesmen thing down pat. I felt like washing my hands, and I hadn’t even touched him… yet. That last was fix’n to change very shortly.
I smiled. I had been told my smile could stop a three-horned Trigon boar in its tracks. I used that to full advantage now.
“Mister Micky,” I cooed sweetly as I approached the aforementioned counter. “About that flitter you sold me yesterday…”
He must have known it was a lemon, because he started to reach under the counter. I presume it was for a shotgun or some such similar device. What Micky failed to appreciate was that I had grown up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the known universe—what was left of Earth.
Roughly thirty years ago, humanity’s sun had been infected by alien spores. Those spores literally digested solar masses as part of their reproductive process. Our sun had aged a billion years in the span of a decade.
The spores had ultimately been destroyed, but not before Sol was irreparably damaged. The Earth was now a frozen wasteland. Eleven billion people had lost their lives or been forced to flee.
Those of us who were left behind led very hard lives. Lives that taught us how to survive. I had been fighting for survival since the moment I took my first step. The New Federation Marines had nothing on me when it came to self-defense.
I rushed forward and used a stiff right arm planted on the countertop to vault over the counter. As my right leg cleared the surface, I used the heel of my boot to clip Micky’s chin. He dropped like a sack of potatoes… stun rifle in hand. The fact that it was a stun rifle and not something that would have caused serious damage probably saved him the continued use of all of his limbs. I don’t take kindly to serious threats. It’s a failing, I know, but I’ve learned to live with it.
As I secured the proprietor of Micky’s Used Treasures Emporium to a chair with self-tightening zip ties, he began to wake up.
“You’ve been a very bad boy, Micky.”
He shook his head to clear it as I finished securing the last of his legs. Judging from the wince he made, I’m guessing he’d decided against additional sudden movements. Getting a boot to the chin, even if it is just a size 8, had been known to loosen a few teeth and strain a few ligaments in the jaw.
“I’m a businessman. It was a business transaction,” he mumbled.
I pointed to the rifle. “Why the artillery?”
Micky shrugged. “Sometimes I get disgruntled customers returning with unreasonable demands.”
“Really?” my voice dripping with sarcasm, “I can’t imagine that happening.”
“I know. I’m just a little guy trying to make—”
He must have seen the look I was giving him. He paused.
“Wait… you weren’t being serious.”
“Got it in one,” I answered. “You sold me a piece of junk, knowing it was junk.”
“I can’t be responsible for secondhand equipment failures.”
“You sold it to me claiming it had been fully reconditioned and certified.”
Micky sat up a little taller in the chair I had lashed him to.
“It had. I only sell the finest—” he began. Again, I believe it was my look that stopped him from continuing.
“It had sawdust in the transmission to smooth out the ride.”
I pulled a set of fine leather gloves out of the vest pocket of my tunic.
“And it was smooth, wasn’t it?” he protested as he watched the gloves,
“For about a hundred klicks,” I agreed in a silky voice. “Before the trany seized… in the middle of a swamp.”
Micky winched. “Owww, that was bad timing. Still, the sign on the door clearly says, ‘All sales final.’”
“I think you fail to appreciate the gravity of the situation.” I placed a gloved finger on his nose and began to slowly push.
His chair began to tilt backwards, and his eyes got that same panicked look a dog gets when you say the words “vet” and “neuter.”
“Wait! Wait! I’m sure we can come to some type of arrangement!” He screamed.
I released the pressure.
“I want my money back. All of it.”
“I can’t.”
I put my finger back on his nose.
“I don’t have it. Really, I don’t,” he sobbed. “I have debts to pay. Some of my more aggressive lenders insisted on payment yesterday.”
The thing is, at that moment, I hated Micky more than ever. I hated him because I believed him. He very likely didn’t have my money.
I looked around the shop. If I couldn’t get cash, then I’d need to get something that I could barter with. My ship was accruing storage and docking fees every day I stayed on this God-forsaken hellhole of a planet. In addition, I had a hotel bill I couldn’t settle until I had some credits in my pocket.
For the immediate future, I had given up trying to locate a working Jabesh power node on Sagia III. All my careful, exhaustive research pointed toward an area north of the very swamp in which I had spent some quality time last night.
The problem was that excavating archaeological sites took money. Doing it off-books took even more money. Earthers, even those with doctorates in xenoarchaeology, typically didn’t have money. That meant we needed investors and patrons.
The mark I had been working with was a greedy bugger. I had convinced him to fund the expedition in exchange for a sizable cut of the action… once we located and sold the exceedingly rare Jabesh power node.
