Survival (From Beyond Book 3), page 1
Survival
Jasper T. Scott and Nathan Hystad
Copyright © 2022 Jasper T Scott and Nathan Hystad
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Art by Jake Caleb
https://www.jcalebdesign.com/
Edited by: Scarlett R. Algee
& Christen Hystad
ONE
Lennon
The Labrador Sea
The water was choppy and unforgiving, mimicking Lennon’s own mood. She’d hoped for more of a break after losing the one person in the world she cared about, but Dark Leader had other plans.
“Baxter, you there?”
She glanced at her counterpart, hulking in the seat next to hers. She preferred the tandem cockpit of Booth’s newest invention. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Dark Four smirked and unclasped his face mask, letting it dangle. “I remember your first mission.”
Lennon scowled, preferring not to rehash the past with the retired operative. “And I recall saving your ass in Venezuela.”
“I had them where I wanted—”
“Sure.” Lennon flipped a switch on the dash, depressurizing the cabin.
“ETA seven minutes,” Dark Four said.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“You actually don’t know?” His left eye sported a glowing monocle, and she’d heard it functioned as a personal heads-up display. She couldn’t remember what mission he’d lost it on, and wasn’t about to ask.
She shook her head, checking their altitude. “Nope.”
“It’s Vance Tomlin.”
“Vance,” she repeated. “No wonder you didn’t share that bit of information.”
“Is that so, Lennon?” He drew out her name, still grinning.
Lennon spotted Greenland in the distance and cringed. Preliminary intel had detected thousands of Crawlers beneath the surface, as well as the round-bodied freaks she’d encountered on the Interloper. Nothing would give her more pleasure than decimating their entire colony. The Dark Teams had contained most of the giant Stalkers, but they hadn’t been expecting their population to be infected by the spider-like creatures.
Even though they’d succeeded in obtaining the Signal, there was so much work remaining. The cleanup after a disaster of this magnitude could take years. Time she didn’t want to spend hunting down aliens in dark corners.
Lennon considered the mission David Bryce was heading off on, and wished like hell she was on the team. She’d already failed to destroy one Interloper, and she wondered if that misfire was the reason Dark Leader hadn’t selected her for the operation.
“They’re going to be fine. He’s sending a qualified team,” Dark Four said, his voice grim.
“How do you know that?” she muttered. “Does that eye allow you to read minds too?”
“No, but we’re cut from the same cloth, Baxter. In more ways than you’d care to admit,” he responded. “We’ll succeed. You think Booth’s wasting our time on a simple mission? This is important.”
Clearing their planet of a swarm of alien creatures was imperative, but there was a nagging suspicion in her mind that she’d been relegated to the B team. The mere presence of this hero beside her should have been enough to rid her of that worry, only it didn’t. Maybe he’d been sent to ensure she didn’t screw up, like Rutger in the aftermath of the crash. His loss washed over her with renewed fury.
“It should have been me,” she whispered.
“That’s crap, Dark Three.” Finally, he used her call sign, and she took pride in it for some reason. “We understand the dangers of doing this job. I spent twenty years risking my hide, and you don’t think I saw some friends die along the way?”
Lennon blinked, watching the map of Greenland grow larger on the HUD. “How do you keep going?”
“One day at a time.” He reattached his mask and reached for the control stick. “Almost there. ETA sixty seconds.”
Lennon inhaled, and let the breath fill her lungs for a moment before pushing the stale air out. The jet was seamless, a more advanced version of the unit she’d flown from Puerto Rico to the Amazon. After learning that Booth had a Stalker engineer on his team, his technological advances made sense.
“How many people are within range?” she asked.
“Just a few hundred,” Dark Four said.
Two hundred innocent civilians living in small snow-covered villages, unnecessary casualties in the wake of this destruction. She knew there was no time to evacuate them, but the thought of causing their deaths almost made her turn around.
“Dark Leader said they’re all infected.”
“But he has a cure,” she countered.
Dark Four shrugged. “Who’s to say? Since when do we make the rules? We get an order and follow it. It’s not our job to question why–or have things changed since my retirement?”
Lennon gritted her teeth. “In position.”
She decelerated, watching the landscape through her cockpit window. A barren white canvas. Dark Four held the stick, his finger rubbing against the bomb release.
Lennon grabbed the scanner, confirming her coordinates. From here, she saw a single green marker, and it disappeared. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She guided the jet toward the hollow black opening of the subterranean nest. A large hole had been carved in the ice. Lennon watched as Dark Four aimed at it, releasing the first of several bunker-buster bombs. Instead of plunging into the hole and erupting moments after tunneling through the ice, the detonation happened fifty yards above as the bomb exploded over an invisible barrier. A dome of crisscrossing yellow lights blasted outwards, rendering their attack useless.
“Was that an energy shield?” she whispered.
“Switching to machine guns.” Dark Four continued his assault, but the high-caliber rounds skipped off the imperceptible surface.
“Damn it!” Vance shouted, slamming his palm on the dash. “We should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.”
Lennon pushed the thrusters, shooting the jet higher. Despite the botched assault, she was feeling optimistic.
“What are you smiling for?” Vance asked.
She squinted at him while speeding toward the eastern seaboard. “Now I get to see the legendary Dark Four in action. We’re going to wipe out their nest, but we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Boots on the ground,” he said.
“Precisely.” Lennon hurried, as time was of the essence.
A second Interloper was headed for Earth.
***
Dark Leader
USS John F. Kennedy
“Show me again,” Alan Booth said.
Dr. Victoria Marcus sighed and pulled out her tablet. “The pills are working, but with a slightly lower success rate.”
“And by that you mean…”
“Fatalities. Seven percent.”
“Not acceptable,” he told her, but it was obviously a fact she was well aware of. The truth was, if they could remove the infections from the entire population with only that small percentage of mortality, he would sign off on it, but there were other options in the making. “What else?”
Dr. Marcus gestured to a glass of water. “This is the key to our success.”
“Hydration? I hardly think…”
Dr. Marcus went to the door and knocked on it. The guards escorted a young woman inside, her clothing reminding Booth of an orange prison jumpsuit. Perhaps it was.
“This is Test Subject Ninety-Four.” Dr. Marcus was growing as callous as himself. Booth didn’t want that. His lead researcher needed to be both pragmatic and caring, because at the end of the day, the survival of the species was at stake. He didn’t comment, opting for a more suitable time.
“Drink.” The first soldier handed her the glass, and the subject attempted to throw it. He caught her arm, spilling some of the contents.
“You cannot defeat us. We’ve already won,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
“Force her,” Dr. Marcus said, and the second soldier grabbed the woman’s head, tilting it back. They poured water between her lips, and she spat it out. Eventually, she coughed, and Booth saw the moment she ingested a mouthful.
She calmed, her eyes coming into focus. The test subject stopped struggling, and downed the rest of the water as if suddenly thirsty. The cup slipped from her hand, clattering to the floor. Good thing they’d used plastic. After an incident with broken glass in one of the earlier tests, they’d made the switch.
“Where am I?” the woman asked.
“That depends. Who are you?” Booth narrowed his gaze. Could it really have flipped the switch in her mind so quickly? He’d expected more of a delay.
“Becky Sommers, fifth grade teacher,” she said. Her hair was greasy, her face lined and swollen. She glanced at her uniform and paled. “Am I incarcerated?”
“No. Nothing of the sort. What do you remember?” Booth asked, noticing that the soldiers were still in position.
“I was heading to class at Staten Island Elementary. I saw a…” Her hand flew to the back of her neck. Booth saw the three puncture marks where a Crawler had attached itself.
“You’re going to be fine, Ms. Sommers. Please go with the soldiers. They’ll help clean you up and find something to eat.”
“I need to go home. My husband…”
“That will all be seen to,” he promised, and the bewildered woman left with a pair of escorts.
“That was good. How effective?” he dared to inquire.
“One hundred percent.” Dr. Marcus looked proud of herself. It was evident she’d been waiting to reveal this for a while. “But there is a catch.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t work if the Crawler is still attached,” she said, showing him a video of an unsuccessful experiment.
“I see.”
Alan Booth now had been pondering the issue for a long time. Even if they found an effective way to treat the infection, which they had, how would they stop people from getting reinfected? They needed to attack the problem at its source. Kill the Crawlers. Lennon was working on part of the solution, but there had to be thousands, if not millions, of them already in the USA. Where were they hiding? He had a bad feeling Greenland wasn’t their only nest.
“This bodes well,” he told Dr. Marcus. “We’ll start production in large quantities. We must begin treating infected populations ASAP.”
“But we can’t know if it will prevent reinfection.”
So she had been thinking about the same problem as him. Booth considered poor Becky Sommers, and lowered his gaze. “We have a subject. Find out.”
Dr. Marcus pursed her lips but didn’t argue. “Yes, sir.”
She left abruptly, and Booth went to his cabinet, pouring himself a liberal dose of Scotch. He sent a message with his tablet and waited, sipping the liquor.
A few minutes later, someone knocked on the door, and he called them in.
“What a nice surprise,” he said. “Dark Seven. Mr. Donovan. I have a mission for you two.”
Atlas looked much healthier than he had in the jungle, but Booth could hardly blame the guy. He’d been shot, eaten by insects, and physically assaulted by Crawlers and Stalkers. He’d seen better days. “I thought my service was over. You wanted the ship, I found it. Then the Signal. Well, I did that too.”
Booth assessed him, finding a stronger man than he’d first thought. “You remind me of myself, Atlas.”
“I never knew I was an asshole,” Atlas muttered.
James shot him a look, but Booth just smiled at the comment. “If I wasn’t, do you think we’d still be alive?”
“Probably not,” Atlas said. “What’s the job?”
“Dr. Marcus has discovered the least invasive way to cure infected hosts. It’s a simple toxin, harmless to us, but lethal to the parasites.”
Both of their eyes lit up. “Seriously?”
“We managed to do the same with ultrasonic waves and radiation bombs, but as you can imagine, neither of those is ideal for treating a widespread infection.”
“What’s the delivery medium?” James asked.
“Water,” Booth explained.
James nodded slowly. “So that’s the mission.”
Atlas glanced around. “What did I miss?”
“You’re going to travel to the most infected sites and spike their municipal water supplies. Reservoirs. Treatment plants. It’s not going to be easy, and it certainly won’t reach everyone, but it’s a start,” Booth told them.
“Will any of this matter if that second Interloper gets here?” Atlas frowned and crossed the room, filling another tumbler without asking. He brought James one, and the three of them sat holding their Scotches.
“Atlas, I have to believe in our success. Lennon will destroy the nest in Greenland. Bryce and his team can stop the second Stalker starship from arriving, and you can save our population from the more immediate threat. Without additional alien threats, we can focus on dealing with the infected over the next couple of months. Then, hopefully, things can return to normal.” Booth raised his glass, and the others did the same. “To our survival.”
“To survival,” James and Atlas echoed, clinking cups.
Before Booth could take a drink, his Holo beeped, stealing his attention. It was Lennon Baxter.
He answered it, seeing her face on the screen. His stomach sank. “Dark Leader, we couldn’t do it. The nest is still intact.”
“Come back. I have another idea.”
She actually smiled, and he knew he’d made the right decision with Dark Three. He ended the connection.
“It doesn’t bode well if your first mission flops, does it?” Atlas raised an eyebrow as he chugged his Scotch.
“No, Mr. Donovan, it doesn’t. But you’ve never worked with Vance Tomlin. He was born for his next task.” Booth excused himself and started down the stairs leading to the lower deck.
TWO
David
Southern Texas
David sipped a steaming cup of coffee on the tarmac, watching the sun splash the sky with fire above shivering fields of golden-brown grass.
It was hard to believe that somewhere beyond the horizon were millions of innocent people, all under the influence of insidious alien parasites. Infested by Crawlers: giant black alien spiders with far too many legs.
David shivered, remembering how one of them had infected his son Mark. Thankfully, his family was safe aboard the USS John F. Kennedy.
The so-called Stalkers had practically conquered Earth with a single ship, and they’d crash-landed in the ocean. What could they do if they arrived with a second Interloper? And this time, fully operational.
Another was on its way, having been alerted to Earth’s location via a message sent from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
No one knew how long they had before it arrived, but the enigmatic leader of the Association didn’t think it would be long. The Stalkers had FTL technology, and traveling faster than the speed of light, David could only imagine how quickly they would reach Earth from the edge of interstellar space. But so far, the blip on the Scanner showed them moving at a cautious pace, implying their reaction to the test communication was more inquisitive than threatening.
David and his team’s mission was to intercept them before it was too late.
The air shivered with by-now familiar vibrations, and David slowly turned to see a tall alien with shiny dark skin and two sets of large eyes flanking a vertical, Venetian-fly-trap mouth. It curved into the shape of a C, this alien’s parody of a human smile.
Blunt, translucent teeth appeared as the Grazer spoke in a rasping voice. “You are afraid,” Chris said, making a visible effort to speak in English.
David accepted that with a nod. “Maybe I am.”
“Good,” Chris added. “You should be.”
Footsteps approached from the open door of an old, dilapidated hangar. A familiar human figure crossed the tarmac to join them.
“What are you two doing out here?” Carter asked.
“Watching the sunrise,” David replied.
The linguist stopped beside him and admired the sight while stroking his scraggly gray beard in silent contemplation. They hadn’t had a chance to pack their bags, let alone shower or shave, before Dark Leader had dragged them away from the aircraft carrier to join this desperate intercept mission. Two civilian astronauts, a team of four Dark operatives, a Grazer, and the most shocking addition of all: a Stalker nicknamed Einstein, who’d been secretly helping humanity to develop alien technology behind the scenes.
“You think this might be our last?” Carter asked.
“Our last what?” David countered. “Mission or sunrise?”
“Both.”
David drained his mug and shook his head, grimacing from the bitter brew. “We don’t have the luxury of failure. If we can’t pull this off, that will be it for Earth.”
Carter nodded gravely, his usual light-hearted self buried below a layer of self-doubt David knew too well. “Six humans and two aliens departing from Earth at the last possible minute in a prototype spaceship designed by an alien defector to blow up one of his own people’s warships. What could possibly go wrong?”
