Launch Sequence (Genesis Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Launch Sequence I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Launch Sequence II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Cast of Characters

  Afterword

  Shameless Self-Promotion

  LAUNCH SEQUENCE I

  By Travis Hill

  Copyright 2017

  Covert art by: Jeff Brown

  http://www.jeffbrowngraphics.com

  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  This story will make far more sense if you’ve read “End of the Line” first!

  Genesis series:

  End of the Line (2015)

  Launch Sequence (May 2017)

  Genesis-6 (Fall/Winter 2017)

  Killswitch (short/novella, TBA/2018)

  Rebirth (TBA/2018)

  ONE

  My mother held my hand so tight it began to hurt. She kept her expression neutral, but I could see the fear in her eyes. I didn’t understand all that was happening, but I knew enough to understand why the adults were scared. Every loud noise the technicians and loaders made as they carried out their work a few meters away caused Mom to twitch involuntarily, and each time she would squeeze my hand even tighter.

  “Mom, you’re hurting me,” I said after another powerful thump made the floor vibrate.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she replied, relaxing her grip. She wiped a few stray crumbs of chocolate cake from my face, then gave me a quick hug while forcing herself to smile. “I’m just nervous.”

  As we grew closer to the airlock, the partial outline of a Marine in a CR-31 combat suit caught my attention. I craned my neck around the person in front of me to get a better view. The sight of humanity’s deadliest infantry unit made me shiver.

  —|—

  A week ago, I was playing in the park, beating my friends at video games, and practicing with my school’s basketball team. At twelve years old, I didn’t pay much attention to adult stuff like the news unless my father left the tablet screen open to the cartoons, though some of the cartoons made no sense. Chancellor Ryley was a woman who looked almost like my mother, and I didn’t understand why some cartoons showed her as a donkey, or why our alien enemies stuffed apple pies into her exaggeratedly large mouth.

  Sometimes I liked to read the sports section. Earth was two hundred light-years away, but they had all of the best sports leagues, as some sports couldn’t be played on colony worlds if the gravity or atmosphere wasn’t right. Once in a while my own name was in the local sports section, along with those of my teammates. Sometimes we got our pictures in the news as well. My father framed a hardcopy of the time I made the news by scoring the winning basket in the championship game when I was eight.

  It was a distraction from the hushed whispering—sometimes shouting and shoving—the adults did over what was happening in the Coalition. All of us kids were told not to worry about any of that, only to focus on the next game, the next day, the next homework assignment. It was easy for me, though it made me uncomfortable around certain adults, as they sometimes forgot to stop worrying and focus on the next game, day, or work assignment.

  Thirteen hours earlier, Mom woke me up when it was still dark outside and instructed me to pack a couple of changes of clothing, a couple of books or comics, my comm unit, and a toothbrush. I could immediately tell something was wrong, but Mom wouldn’t talk about why we were in a hurry to leave. I refused to move at first, demanding to know what was going on. All I could think about was how we must be in trouble with the police and had to run, but that was secondary to the worry I wouldn’t see any of my friends or teammates again.

  Mom lost her temper when I sat on the floor and wouldn’t budge. My mother never lost her temper. I was a trembling statue when she hugged me with tears in her eyes, nearly bursting into tears myself as she apologized for blowing up. She gently pushed me away and told me I needed to hurry, she would explain when we arrived at wherever she was taking us.

  Once we were packed, she hustled me into the car and drove toward The Ring, the beltway surrounding Daedalus Prime, the capital city of the Daedalus solar system. I had a million questions but I didn’t want her to scream at me again, not while the tears were still drying on her cheeks. I had never seen my mother so scared or angry.

  We left the city after merging from The Ring onto the Western Tollway, the highway my parents took to work. It was slow going for a while, and I felt terrible that my mother seemed to cry for most of the drive, though she did her best to hide it from me. Tears regularly streaked down her face, but she remained silent, the rasp of her coat sleeve as she dragged it across her cheeks every few minutes the only sound other than the muted world beyond the car.

  By the time we hit the cutoff and began the slow climb into the Spineback Mountains, her right sleeve was soaked like a dishrag. She glanced over at me every so often, but she didn’t say a word until we turned down a road and came to a stop at a roadblock with a giant iron gate behind it. Four very alert soldiers stood around a tiny shack near the gate, all armed with shiny plasma rifles and intense stares.

  “Keep your hands where the soldiers can see them,” Mom instructed me before rolling down her window as the soldiers fanned out. One of them approached our car.

  “This is a restricted area, ma’am,” the soldier said, his tone all-business.

  He leaned down and glanced across her to me, no doubt seeing the obvious signs that both of us had been crying as if we’d just watched a sad movie, then back to Mom. The soldier’s eyes softened the otherwise hard look all soldiers are supposed to show potential enemies. Mom reached into her coat pocket, which caused the soldier to take one hand off his rifle and put his arm out to his side, his fist raised in a ninety-degree angle.

  The other three soldiers immediately turned their full attention on our vehicle. They didn’t raise their rifles, but they were definitely on high alert. I was sure they could easily fill our car with plasma in an instant. Mom pulled out a plastic ID card and handed it to the soldier next to her window. He removed a comm unit from a leg pocket and slid the card through the device’s slot then asked her to press her thumb on the unit’s sensor. We waited in silence for a few seconds until the comm chimed. The soldier handed the ID card back to Mom.

  “Please drive forward to the officer’s parking area then approach the main doors on foot, Captain Shaw,” the solder said.

  He gave her a snappy salute before walking back to the shack where the others stood, rifles still pointed halfway between the ground and our car. Mom didn’t say anything, but she returned the salute after rolling up the window, then drove slowly through the retracting gate. I was so full of questions, even more than before, but I still didn’t want to risk another outburst of anger from her. I especially didn’t want to make her cry again.

  We drove along the paved road for ten minutes before coming to another gate. The soldiers on either side didn’t try to stop us, only saluted Mom as we drove past. The soldier on my side gave me a wink and a smile as we passed. I saluted him back, mostly as reflex since I was a “military brat” (according to every adult I’d ever met). I didn’t smile though. Mom saw my salute and reached over to ruffle my hair. She tried to smile but gave up af
ter seeing the confused, frightened look on my face.

  “I’m sorry, Denny. I didn’t mean to yell at you earlier.”

  She began to cry again. I couldn’t stop my own tears after seeing hers. We held hands for the rest of the ride to the parking area, neither of us saying anything. A soldier directed us to a parking spot when we pulled up to another gate, this one a simple steel barrier that could be swung to the side. Mom shut off the engine and we sat in silence for a while. I almost started in with my questions until she turned to me, letting go of my hand to grab my shoulder.

  “Denny, listen to me. I’ll answer as much as I can as soon as I can, but for right now, I need you to be a big boy—”

  “—Mom,” I interrupted. I hated it when she tried the “big boy” thing on me. I’d outgrown it by the time I was seven, feeling that I was smart and mature enough to already be a young man. Now that I was only a few months from my thirteenth birthday, it was an insult, a biting reminder that I was still a child. She knew I hated it and hadn’t said such a thing to me in forever.

  “Dennis, listen to me. Don’t interrupt.” Her tone edged back into a growl, the same as it had been before losing her temper earlier. “I’m sorry about asking you to be a big boy, but this is important. I need you to walk with me into the complex, and I need you to not say a word and keep your hands to your sides. The people here are very serious, and while they understand kids will be kids, they won’t understand if you decide to wander off or touch anything until we get to where we are going. I can’t emphasize how serious these people are, Denny. I don’t think they would shoot a child, but right now… It’s best you do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I said in a small voice.

  “I mean it. Just follow me. Someone will come for your bag. You can take a book or a comic, but you have to leave everything else in the car for now.”

  “Why?” I asked, already irritated that I wouldn’t be able to keep myself entertained with my comm while adults talked about boring things.

  “Denny…” She looked like she was about to get angry, then said, “They have to scan everything that comes into the complex to make sure you aren’t bringing a gun or a bomb in, or worse, a computer virus.”

  With that, she pulled the door handle and got out of the car. I did the same, then walked around to her side and grabbed her hand. I thought she might tell me to keep my hand to myself, but she just looked down, gave me another smile, and began walking toward the two huge doors set into the side of the mountain.

  At the doors, another soldier swiped her card then instructed us to follow the yellow line on the floor. It took almost two full minutes for the doors to open, but they were eerily silent. In all of the movies I had watched, giant doors like these were always clanging and banging and squealing as they opened or shut. The only sound I heard was the hiss of escaping air.

  The temperature dropped enough to make me shiver when we stepped inside, and the air smelled funny. Not bad, just different. It reminded me of what a hospital smelled like, which brought back a terrible memory of my grandmother lying in a hospital bed connected to tubes and machines that seemed to take up the entire room. I was scared enough already and that memory only made me more frightened about what was happening and where we were going.

  A big yellow line led us down a series of corridors. I was fascinated by the line, as it seemed to change depending on where we were supposed to go. It looked like it was painted on the floor, but no paint I could think of was able to simply disappear or change directions like this one did. I almost broke my silence to ask about it, but I was a big boy, and I could follow directions. We didn’t see a single person until we finally arrived at another set of doors. They were larger than a normal door, but nowhere near as humongous as the main door into the mountain. This time there was no soldier standing guard, only a small slot for Mom to slide her card through.

  It turned out to be an elevator. I had always loved elevators. I loved the funny feeling in my stomach as the car lurched and began its descent. My friend Erin Bagosian once told me that if the magnetic brakes failed and the car plummeted down the shaft, all someone had to do was jump in the air just as the car hit the bottom and they would be safe. I was so sure this was true—based on Erin’s serious, matter-of-fact tone—that I announced it one night at the dinner table.

  Mom just laughed, but Dad gave me a queer look and said that Erin was so full of shit her eyes were brown before taking another bite of his mashed potatoes. I giggled because my dad rarely cursed around me, but Erin didn’t giggle at all when I told her what he said. In fact, she didn’t talk to me for almost three weeks.

  I didn’t know how far underground we were going, but the ride seemed to take forever. I started shuffling my feet, becoming antsy and bored until Mom put her arm around me, which calmed me down. I still didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was, I knew it must be more than serious. I tried to imagine what it could be. Were the aliens invading? I discarded that, as last I’d heard, the Kai were two hundred light-years away, getting their behinds kicked out of Korvali by Coalition Marines and the Navy.

  I wracked my brain to come up with another answer, but it always came back to the aliens. I’d seen videos of them for as long as I could remember, though my parents never let me watch any of the war footage that was popular all over the Wire. I began to imagine that Mom really was an alien in human form, and I had passed all of her tests and was found worthy to take an interstellar voyage to her home planet. From there, it branched into imagining that she had already eaten my father and was waiting until we returned to her place of birth, showing me off to her kin before serving me as the main course at the Emperor’s galactic dinner party.

  I decided I would never be eaten by a bunch of slimy, toothy, scaly aliens. I was halfway through plotting how I would bonk Mom over the head, steal her plasma rifle, shoot my way out of whatever castle or mansion the dinner party was being held at, hijack a ship and fly back to Earth to warn everyone, when the elevator car shuddered to a halt. A chime dinged above us and the doors opened.

  I nearly had an accident in my pants when I saw what was on the other side of the elevator doors. It was almost prophetic, and I wanted to scream in fright. Instead, I jerked away from my mother and gave her an accusatory look. I didn’t really think she was an evil alien intent on eating me on her home planet, but I suddenly wasn’t so sure anymore. Mom looked surprised at my refusal to budge from the elevator.

  “Denny, what’s wrong, honey?” she asked.

  “Are you going to take me somewhere to eat me?” I asked in return, shying away from her.

  Mom just laughed as if it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard come out of my mouth. She reached out for me, and for a moment I imagined a greasy, clawed alien hand trying to grab me. But it was just my mother, and I let her give me another hug before stepping out into the massive room.

  TWO

  The elevator opened up into a cavern so large I couldn’t see the far wall. A large part of what blocked my view of the other wall was a starship. I didn’t know how I could know that based on the limited section of it that I could see, but inside, I knew. There was an army of men and women in white lab coats scurrying around the ship like ants around their queen. I looked up toward the ceiling, but there didn’t seem to be one. The walls rose straight up until the darkness swallowed everything. The ship didn’t look like any ship I had ever seen before. It wasn’t that it was so alien that I couldn’t have imagined it, but it was just so… different.

  I loved science fiction, both books and movies, though I hadn’t been allowed to see any of the scarier adult versions. I thought I had an idea of what every ship ever conceived of would or could look like. This one didn’t resemble a rocket, the old NASA space shuttles, nor even the modern Terran Coalition Naval Forces’ almost uncountable variations in ships. It didn’t look like any of the Kai ships I had seen on the news and in documentaries.

  As I
walked along the new yellow line in the floor that began to glow once we stepped out of the elevator, I tried to figure out where the cockpit was, where the engines were, and where the airlock for letting crew members in and out could possibly be on the massive vessel before me. The ship looked like a giant, slightly flattened egg with a polished silver outer hull that returned weird images of us as we walked by it. The reflective surface made me think of a funhouse mirror in the way that it distorted every shape it captured. Twice as we continued toward wherever Mom and the yellow line led us, I noticed that some of the reflections would simply wink out, almost as if we had become vampires for a few seconds.

  The lights in the underground hangar were incredibly bright, but the ship’s surface seemed to soak up most of it. The contradiction made my brain hurt, as if the ship somehow ate the light, yet it returned enough for me to giggle at the weird reflections (and a couple of faces I made until Mom cleared her throat). By the time we reached a corridor that led away from the hangar, my neck ached from craning to stare at the strange spacecraft. Most of the ache was from me trying to look up (and down—the other end of the ship also disappeared into lower reaches of the mountain) hoping not only to see the nose of the ship, but to see a single blemish, a single seam anywhere along its lines.

  The more I thought about it, I doubted it had even been a ship. None of the workers in lab coats acknowledged our presence when we passed through the hangar, but I was sure if I hadn’t talked myself out of running over to the edge and touching the smooth, silvery hull, they would have sounded a deafening alarm that brought dozens of soldiers running with their plasma rifles pointed at me.

  We arrived at another door a few minutes later, one that was a normal size and made out of wood. It looked out of place in this concrete and steel underground base, or hangar, or wherever we were. Mom slid her card into the slot next to the door. The red glow from the slot turned green and the door opened. I nervously peeked inside, suddenly afraid of what might be waiting, possibly hiding behind the door. Mom laughed and tugged on my hand. I immediately chided myself for being a scared little baby.