PART ONE
DISRUPTION
Chapter 1
Zach Croft: 2054
“We’ve been expecting you.”
The woman’s words hit Zach in the gut like a piledriver.
He wanted to reply, but his mind was empty, as if he had lost all capacity for speech. His lips and tongue felt paralyzed. He tried to draw a breath, but his lungs weren’t working either. Even if he could speak, though, what was he supposed to say to this person that shouldn’t—couldn’t possibly—exist?
It was only through a series of disasters, tragedies, heroics, and miracles that Zach and his crew of weary survivors had managed to make it to Alpha Cen, to be the first humans to set foot on an alien planet in a different solar system. The idea that other people may have preceded them was so far-fetched, so ludicrous, so absurd…
It was impossible.
Zach stared wordlessly at the woman, his mouth agape. The others on the dropship behind him were dumbstruck, too. A breeze whispered through the tall red grass, making the awkward silence all the more apparent.
Finally, the woman in the flower dress spoke again. “We’re glad you’re finally here.” A welcoming smile graced her lips and lit up her face. She offered her hand. “I’m Agnes Crow.”
Zach stared at her hand, with its slender fingers and well-manicured nails. She was human—that part was certain. Or, at least she seemed to be. She was quite tall, but wasn’t outside the normal range for a woman. Maybe five-ten, or six feet at most.
The soldiers behind her looked human, too, although their hand-hewn armor and six-foot spears appeared to be relics of an earlier time. The Roman Empire, perhaps. Or Ancient Greece. Which made no sense at all.
None of it did.
They couldn’t be humans, but they were—not just humans, but English-speaking humans, wearing distinctly Earthlike garb, regardless of era.
For a moment, it occurred to Zach that Alpha Cen might be home to a species of shapeshifters. Maybe they extracted images from humans’ minds and used them to morph themselves into harmless-looking forms that people would recognize. They could be using a sophisticated form of camouflage, like an octopus pretending to be an innocuous piece of coral to conceal itself from its intended prey. It was a crazy thought, but was it any crazier than the idea that people were already living on Alpha Cen?
Zach looked past the woman at the planet’s alien landscape, his eyes scanning the crimson grass and turquoise sky. He marveled at the trees’ prismatic leaves, how they shifted colors as they waved in the wind. The sensory effect was mind-blowing, almost psychedelic. Perhaps the planet’s atmosphere was laced with hallucinogenic compounds that caused his mind to imagine things that weren’t there. For all he knew, he could be passed out face-down on the dropship’s ramp, dreaming this whole experience.
He wished he were, but deep down, he knew he wasn’t.
He was awake.
It was real.
A jumble of words finally spilled from Zach’s lips. “How do you… How… You can’t…” he stammered. He backed up a few steps, the heel of his boots knocking against the edge of the ramp with a dull thud.
Agnes lowered her hand and cocked her head like a dog being asked a math question. “Have you no manners?”
Manners? How could she possibly expect Zach to shake her hand? She acted like it was a business lunch instead of an encounter with an alien life form. Or a drug-fueled fever dream. Whatever she—or it—was, she wasn’t supposed to be there. Nobody was. Alpha Cen was supposed to be a habitable planet, not an inhabited one.
Zach took a deep breath, finally regaining his composure enough to form a coherent sentence. “How do you know who we are?”
“You’re Phase Two,” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Fifty years late, I might add. But we’ve managed reasonably well in your absence.” She laughed with a sound that reminded Zach of butterflies.
Fifty years? That would mean these people had been on Alpha Cen since the early 2000s. That was inconceivable—they didn’t even have smartphones back then, let alone the capability for interstellar space travel. How were they supposed to radio back to Earth? With a flip phone?
“Phase Two of what?” Zach asked.
Agnes looked past Zach at the dropship, focusing on the logo emblazoned on the side. “This is an OSE vessel, is it not?”
Zach’s mind reeled. The logo was just an illustration—the letters OSE didn’t appear anywhere on the dropship. “You’ve heard of OSE?”
Agnes’ smile faltered. “Of course I have,” she replied, her voice beginning to show signs of frustration. “Maybe I should speak to the Mission Commander.”
“We don’t have one.”
“Okay,” Agnes said warily, “then who is in charge?”
“I am,” Zach answered.
That wasn’t entirely true. It’s not like anyone officially appointed Zach as their leader, and he certainly didn’t apply for the job. He just kind of ended up there after the first guy turned out to be a sociopath who killed a few hundred people on his path to power.
“Excellent. Well, I assume OSE has sent new instructions with you. And a new warp core, I hope.” She laughed her butterfly laugh again.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Agnes’ long eyelashes blinked rapidly as she tried to process Zach’s words. “Then, why are you here?”
“We—” Zach cut himself off. There was no point trying to explain. “It’s complicated.”
“Well, please clarify, because I’d love to understand how you ended up on our planet. And what took you so long.” She stepped forward and peered at the insignia on Zach’s shirt. “Prescott Colony. Is that where you’re from?”
Another question with an answer too convoluted to explain. “No, we’re from Earth. Prescott was a mining colony on Mars.”
“Mars?”
“Yeah, Mars,” Zach said, puzzled at why Agnes seemed confused. “The planet…?” Then, he realized: she’s never heard of it. Why would she? He wouldn’t have known the names of the other planets in Alpha Cen’s solar system if it hadn’t been his job to know such things. “We were mining irogen to power a mission to… here.”
“Ah!” Agnes exclaimed. “I see. And it took longer than expected, I imagine. Hence the delay.”
“There was no delay!” Zach’s voice rose as his exasperation began to boil over. “We’re not supposed to be here! And neither are you!”
Agnes took a step back. Her expression turned cold. “Quite presumptuous of you to come into someone’s home and call them a trespasser.” She glared at Zach with icy disdain. “And without even telling me your name.”
Zach took a moment to calm himself, lowering his voice and saying, “I’m sorry. This is just… It’s been a long day. A long week, actually.” He extended his hand. “I’m Zach. Zach Croft.”
Agnes regarded his hand for a moment, then shook it. Her skin was soft and cool, but her grip was firm. “Well, Zach… if you’re not Phase Two, and you weren’t sent here by OSE, then who are you?”
Zach considered how to answer the question. On Earth, they had been engineers and executives, security guards and scientists, astronomers and administrators. But none of that mattered anymore. That’s who they were then. Now, they were forever tied together by one common bond, one shared story. There was only one word to describe them all.
“Survivors.”
Zach was in a beehive.
It sounded that way at least, with the buzzing of a thousand questions and conversations happening simultaneously. The hum of panic, speculation, and anticipation echoed in the cramped quarters of the dropship, amplifying the cacophony even more. It drowned out Zach’s thoughts and impeded his ability to think clearly and rationally about what was happening.
What the hell was happening?
Zach watched the woman called Agnes through the dropship window as she paced amongst her men with a walkie-talkie up to her mouth. Whether she intended it or not, it prevented Zach from trying to read her lips. Occasionally, her eyes darted to the dropship while she spoke. It was unlikely that she could see Zach through the window, but it felt like she was looking directly at him.
Agnes was clearly talking to her people, but that thought alone introduced a slew of questions. Who were her people? How many were there? Where did they live?
And could they be trusted?
Agnes was just as confused and uncertain as Zach. When he told her about the solar flares and Earth’s fate, the color in her face drained away instantly. That was when she made her proposal.
“You can’t possibly be considering it,” Erik said. “How do we know she’s telling the truth?”
Zach knew it seemed crazy to believe Agnes, but she had mentioned things that nobody could have known about OSE unless they had insider information. Plus, her walkie-talkie was obviously Earth-made, albeit an older model that looked like a brick compared to more modern radios. Unless another species had miraculously evolved to be identical to humans, developed the same technology, and somehow knew everything that a mission from OSE would know, there had to be some truth to what Agnes said.
If her people did come from Earth—and if OSE had sent them long before Prescott—Zach couldn’t help but wonder if his father knew about them. Was that why Quinton had agreed to go to Mars? Did he already know that there were people on Alpha Cen?
In hindsight, Zach should have questioned how OSE knew what they knew about Alpha Cen. Despite advocating for years that humans abandon Earth via the Exodus program, Zach never fully considered how OSE had confirmed that Alpha Cen was habitable. It was common knowledge, established well before Zach joined the agency—he took it for granted that OSE had done whatever work was necessary to confirm their assessment. But he never expected that the assessment would involve sending actual people there. It was unthinkable.
“We didn’t know you were telling the truth either,” Zach reminded Erik, “when we found you on the Gateway.”
“Yeah, but that was different. There were supposed to be people on the Gateway. Just not locked away under the floor for twenty-some years.”
“From what Agnes said, they had instructions to receive the next group from OSE when they landed—”
“The next colonist group, Zach,” Cora reminded him. “That’s not us.”
“They’re willing to help—”
“But at what cost?” asked Mabel. “What do they want from us in return? You think they’re going to help us out of the kindness of their hearts?”
Zach paused. He hadn’t considered that Agnes had any ulterior motives. Why would she? It wasn’t every day that a dropship full of humans showed up on Alpha Cen. It would be like a van full of long-lost relatives showing up at his house—his first thought wouldn’t be how to take advantage of them, especially if they were refugees whose homes had been destroyed. He’d welcome them, maybe make them some sandwiches. He wouldn’t expect anything in return.
“I agree,” Cora said. “I say we fend for ourselves.”
Zach felt his jaw drop a little. He couldn’t believe that even Cora was questioning his judgment. “We don’t know the first thing about what it takes to survive on this planet. They do.”
“We should just stick with our plan,” Erik said. “Find water, build shelter, and survive.” He looked to Mabel for support. She nodded in agreement.
Zach breathed a smile. “That was the plan when we didn’t have any other options. Now we do. Agnes’ people are offering to take us in and are asking for nothing in return—”
“Yet,” Mabel mumbled.
“Maybe you’re right,” Zach acknowledged. “Maybe they have some devious master plan, and we’ll regret it later. But I’m not going to worry about that until it happens.” He locked eyes with Cora. “That’s what you’d tell me, right?”
Cora nodded reluctantly. “Right.”
“Okay. So, I say we take whatever help we can get while we can get it, and we’ll figure out the rest if and when we need to.”
“You won’t need to,” Carver called from behind Cora and Mabel, where he was bound to a seat with duct tape woven around his ankles and the chair frame. He scratched his nose with bound hands. “They’re telling the truth.”
“How do you know?” Zach asked.
“Gee, I wonder,” Carver mocked. “Maybe the head of OSE knows about things like this.”
“You never told me anything about it.”
“You didn’t have clearance. Nobody did, except for me. Anyway, as far as anyone knew, they were dead. There was no communication and, we assumed, no survivors.”
“But you were wrong.”
“Correction: OSE was wrong. I was three years old. By the time I learned about it, it was old news.”
“So, you just left them out here to die?” Cora asked with disdain.
“Again, not me. Baby Nicolas didn’t have much input on the decision. But it seems that someone back then made a bad call.”
“A bad call?” Cora took an angry step toward Carver. “OSE abandoned god-knows-how-many people to die trillions of miles from home, and to you it’s just a bad call?”
Mabel’s eyes glistened. “And they didn’t even know. All this time, they thought that help was on the way.”
Zach put a hand on Cora’s shoulder to calm her down. “Okay, enough,” he said. “We’ll deal with Carver later. Right now, we need to get off this ship.”
“Plus one on that,” the pilot, McCall, said from the command module. “The sooner we power this thing down, the better.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” Zach asked.
“We sustained significant damage on the descent. I’ve got warning lights lit up like a Christmas tree here.”
Cora lowered her voice so only Zach could hear. “Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Zach answered. “But we don’t have many options. And the more time we waste, the longer it is before we can look for the others.”
“What others?”
“The other dropship. Ryker’s. There could still be survivors.”
Cora gave Zach a pitying frown. “Zach…”
“I know it’s a long shot, but look,” he gestured out the window at Agnes and her soldiers, “they survived. Maybe Ryker did, too. And her people know the land. They can help us look.”
“She’s coming back,” Mabel said.
Zach peered out the window. Outside, Agnes strode through the red grass toward the dropship.
Mainly talking to himself, Zach mumbled, “Okay, let’s do this.” He breathed out his nostrils to steel himself, exited the dropship, and headed down the ramp to meet Agnes.
She met him halfway. “Is everything in order?”
“We’re ready,” Zach replied. “What’s next?”
“A transport caravan is on its way. In the meantime, I’d advise keeping your people inside the ship. My soldiers will monitor the perimeter.”
“For what?”
Agnes’ demeanor turned serious. “Let me put it this way: you’re lucky that we’re the ones who found you.”
Zach Croft: 2055
The creature lunged at Zach, covering the last twenty feet in a single bound. Zach dodged sideways, narrowly escaping the beast’s snapping jaws. The monster landed with a thunderous crash that shook the ground, causing the rubble to shift under Zach’s feet. He teetered sideways toward the beast’s face, so close that he could feel the heat from its broken mouth. For a brief second, he stared into the monster’s damaged eye, a yellow-white orb with a pupil the size of a beach ball.
Then, before the thing could attack again, he thrust the grenade-loaded jar of irogen into its gaping mouth.
The monster straightened up, seemingly surprised to feel a foreign object on its tongue. At the same time, Zach leaped from the pile of rubble and scrambled to take cover behind the remnants of a broken stone wall. He pressed his back against the uneven bricks, covered his head with his hands, and waited for the end to come.
The shockwave sent flaming debris rocketing past Zach, but the wall absorbed the brunt of the explosion, protecting him from serious physical injury. Yellow clots of flesh fell from the sky around him in a series of wet thumps. Droplets of strange liquid pelted his upturned face, first warming it, then burning it. Was it acid? He’d seen things like that in the old alien movies his dad had watched when Zach was a kid.
Not wanting to take any chances, he located a part of his shirt that wasn’t already soaked with some kind of noxious fluid and frantically wiped the gore from his cheeks and forehead. His heart was a battering ram in his chest; his throat closed to the size of a pinhole. Stars erupted before his eyes as the edges of his vision darkened.
In his delirium, his mind flashed back to the mornings when he raced Cora in the park near their office. He felt now like he sometimes felt back then, when running in the Pasadena heat almost caused him to lose consciousness. It seemed like a memory from a thousand years ago, even though it was only two years since their last run—a year if he took into account his time in cryosleep. Then, Ryker’s dropship descended from the sky, the solar flares hit, and now here Zach was, on an alien planet, covered in the guts of god-knows-what.
Something about the absurdity of the thought seemed to rescue Zach from oblivion. His head cleared, and his throat opened, allowing him to draw a deep breath. Smoke filled his lungs. Coughing painfully, he rolled onto his side and peered around the edge of the wall that had saved his life. His jaw dropped.
The creature was still standing.
Its arms hung loosely by its sides, its hooked toes dug firmly into the dirt. Spouts of yellow blood rose in fountains from its ruined neck, pouring from the space where its head used to be. It took a shaky step backward, then dropped to its knees and fell chest-first onto the road with a ground-shaking thud. Choking gray dust billowed up from the road and swirled around Zach.
Zach rolled onto his back and stared at the sky. It was still dark enough for him to see the stars. He gazed at Ryker’s Ring for a while, letting his mind go blank as he waited for his breathing and heart rate to return to normal. The world suddenly seemed so peaceful. So quiet. So utterly silent.
I’m deaf, Zach realized. The explosion had blown out his eardrums. He was sure of it. The thought should have bothered him, but he felt irrationally calm. He was just glad to be alive.
“Shit,” a voice said from somewhere in the darkness. “He’s dead.”
Footsteps crunched to the right of Zach’s head. Something cold and hard poked his shoulder. A gun barrel.
He grunted in pain. “Mmmph,” he croaked. He extended his hand in the direction of the footsteps. “Water.”
The sound of a canteen unscrewing made Zach realize that he was not, in fact, deaf. Or dead. Cool water seeped between his lips and dribbled down his cheeks. He swallowed with relief, then pushed the canteen away from his face. “Thanks.” He rose on his elbows and looked up at the figure kneeling beside him. It was Halsy.
“I’m fine,” he said again, more clearly this time.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Halsy replied. “You look like shit.”
Zach started to laugh, then winced at a pain in his ribs.
Nearby, a soldier reached out to touch the fallen monster’s armored hide. “Hey!” Halsy shouted. “Back off!” She stood, dusted the dirt from her knees, and addressed the soldiers gathering around the carcass. “Nobody touches it until I say so, understand?”
The soldiers mumbled variations of “Yes, ma’am,” then dispersed to tend to their injured and fallen comrades.
“Come on,” Halsy said, offering Zach a hand and pulling him to his feet. “Up and at ’em.”
Zach stood slowly, braced himself against the wall, then looked at the corpse of the thing he had just killed. Even lying flat on the ground, it was taller than he was. By a lot.
“Anything hurt?” Halsy asked.
Zach coughed and winced again. “No. I’m okay.”
Halsy delicately rolled up one of Zach’s shredded sleeves. The skin underneath was red and blistering—at least a second-degree burn. The rest of his olive skin stung almost as much.
“That doesn’t look okay.” Halsy unclipped a walkie-talkie from her belt, pressed the button on the side, and raised it to her lips. “This is Halsy. Get a doctor over here.” She paused, then pressed the button again. “If there are any still alive.”
It took Mabel almost an hour to get to Zach.
There were simply too many injuries and not enough uninjured doctors. For a while, Zach watched as she went from body to body, briefly checking for a pulse before moving on to the next one. Mabel was bleeding, too, but she didn’t seem to notice. With each person she confirmed dead, her expression hardened further and further, to the point where she barely reacted to the proliferation of severed limbs and crushed skulls. Sure, she’d gone to medical school, but she wasn’t a trauma surgeon—she was a bacteriologist. A scientist. A researcher. But she was also strong.
When she eventually reached Zach, he asked her, “How many?”
“Dead? A hundred. Maybe more.”
“Jesus. Of ours…?”
“Probably thirty, at least. Including Townsend… Delgado… McCall.”
Zach recognized the first two names but couldn’t recall the last. His expression must have given him away because Mabel interjected to clarify.
“The pilot.”
Zach’s stomach dropped. He couldn’t help it—the word “pilot” conjured images of Mars. The Gateway. Ryker.
Ryker’s dropship.
Exploding.
But, no. Mabel meant the pilot of their dropship, the one that got them safely to Alpha Cen despite the global electrical storm that destroyed the other two ships. Zach and Mabel wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for McCall. And now he was dead.
Mabel reached for Zach’s injured arm. “Here,” she said as she gently lifted his torn sleeve. “Let me take a look.” After a brief inspection, she reached into her satchel and withdrew a small jar of numbing antiseptic salve made from an obscure Alpha Cen plant that the Edish had discovered decades before. “Doesn’t look too bad, but it’ll sting for a bit. This should help.” She began rubbing the ointment over Zach’s wound.
“This is unbelievable,” Zach sighed. He wasn’t sure how much more death and destruction he could take. He had seen enough for a thousand lifetimes. Maybe a million.
“My mom used to say, ‘This too shall pass,'” Mabel said. She began wrapping his arm with a roll of handmade gauze from her bag. “At least Cora’s safe, right?”
Zach nodded, thankful for once that Cora was at Foxhold. He worried about her being out there—it wasn’t safe, not with the Roaches roaming around—but anywhere was better than Eden at the moment.
“That’ll do for now,” Mabel said. She cut the gauze and tucked it into itself. “On to the next one.”
As Mabel sped off to tend to another injured person, Zach wondered how they would rebuild in the face of such destruction. It wasn’t like on Earth, where construction crews were ready to start working at any given moment. Eden had a surprising amount of manufacturing and construction capability under the circumstances—the ACI crew had been equipped to colonize a planet, after all—but it was still a fraction of what they would need for a timely recovery. It would take months to get back to normal.
Zach heard Cora’s voice in his head, reciting the old saying she had been repeating to him since they were kids.
Don’t pre-worry.
In most cases, the advice made sense. It meant that a person shouldn’t waste energy worrying about a potential future that may never come—you deal with it if and when it happens, not a minute sooner. But Zach felt he deserved an exception for this one.
Fires raged all across the town. It seemed like half of the buildings were damaged or destroyed. Scores of dead bodies littered the ground, with at least as many people injured, some of them gravely.
A few feet away, smoke rose from a charred hunk of the creature’s decimated head. The rest of the monster’s body remained intact, sprawled beside Zach. In death, the lighter-colored seams between its scales formed a misshapen grid of impenetrable hexagonal plates. Bony protuberances jutted from its battle-scarred hide. The lemon-colored puddle of blood under the corpse commingled with the blood of a fallen soldier, swirling into a macabre form of abstract art that glimmered in the moonlight.
Next to the creature, Halsy shouted at a grizzled Edish officer, her face twisted in anger. “Your men are supposed to be patrolling the walls day and night!”
“They were,” he insisted.
“Then, why was there no alarm? No warning? Did this thing,” she kicked the creature’s hide, “just magically fall from the sky? Or were your sentries sleeping on the job again?” The red streaks of blood staining Halsy’s face had dried, but the gash on her forehead continued to glisten in the torchlight. The injury would need stitches for sure. Halsy paced in a circle around the man, the flaky red wound making her prominent brow stand out. “The wall’s ten feet thick and made of pure granite. Ten feet thick!”
“It— It happened so fast—” the man stammered.
“But not so fast that you couldn’t get yourself to safety, though, am I right?” She looked the man up and down. There wasn’t a drop of blood or dirt on him. “Am I?”
“No, ma’am—”
“Don’t ‘no, ma’am,’ me,” she growled. She pointed at a cluster of leveled buildings. “You see that? Our storm monitoring station? Gone. Our food stores? Ruined. And right in the middle of winter.” She kicked the beast’s side again. “Goddamnit!” She whirled back around and stepped within inches of the man’s face. “You’re dismissed.”
At the mention of winter, Zach suddenly noticed the chill in the night air. He shivered. He didn’t know how bad the cold season would be, but the last few weeks had been bone-chilling. It reminded him of the freezing nights in Big Bear with his dad when the steam from their breath froze into jagged crystals on their woolen scarves.
Behind Zach, a group of soldiers passed.
“That’s definitely a scalemonger,” one insisted.
Another scoffed. “No such thing.”
“My uncle saw one during the war. It looked just like that.”
“Did he see Santa Claus, too?”
The other soldiers laughed.
“Laugh all you want, but I’m telling you. That’s a scalemonger.”
One of the soldiers lunged at his friend from behind, grabbing his shoulders and roaring in his ear. The man flinched, then turned and punched his friend in the chest. “Very funny, dick.”
The soldiers rounded the corner of the irogen lab building out of earshot. Halsy approached Zach and stood next to him. They lingered silently, staring at the felled creature before them.
“What do we do with it?” Zach asked.
“Well, we’re not moving it, that’s for sure.”
Zach nodded. Halsy was right. It was bigger than a tank and probably weighed as much. “Cut it up?” he suggested.
“How? You saw how strong it was. We barely made a scratch.”
Zach approached the carcass and pointed at the seams between the scales. “Through here, maybe? We can get some hand saws—”
“We?” Halsy asked, incredulous.
“Well, who do you suggest?”
She thrust her chin at a squat stone building now visible behind the charred rubble of a destroyed warehouse. The jailhouse. It looked undamaged.
“Let them do it,” Halsy said.
Zach eyed the building skeptically. “You think that’s a good idea?”
“You have any better ones?”
Zach pondered the alternatives, but he didn’t have a better recommendation. “What about guards?”
“That can be arranged.”
“Commander!” a dust-streaked soldier waved to Halsy from down the street. “You better check this out!”
Halsy raised her finger to signal she would be there in a minute, then said to Zach, “You’ll handle this?”
Zach looked at the barred windows of the jailhouse. He knew who was inside, and he didn’t like it. But he didn’t have much choice. “I’m on it.”
Cora Keaton: 2054
Even at its best, Earth was nothing compared to Alpha Cen.
Cora’s eyes darted from one side of the wooded road to the other, trying to take in the splendor of the planet’s flora and fauna. The forest was a kaleidoscope of green, pink, blue, and orange, a candy-colored mosaic that glinted in the sunlight streaming through the foliage. The trees stretched hundreds of feet into the air, their branches intertwining as if embracing. Their towering height made Cora feel like an ant in a corn maze.
Winged, furry creatures buzzed back and forth across the road, their hind legs dangling behind them as they zipped by. Cora took a mental note of those, logging them with the kangaroo-like animal that had pranced alongside the caravan a few minutes ago, chirping curiously while examining the humans with its round green eyes. Oh, and the birds that called in a rough, throaty language as they whooshed mere inches above Cora’s head, so close that the little vortexes of air they generated blew Cora’s hair into her eyes.
Cora looked over her shoulder, her eyes landing on the muscled, black-furred creatures that pulled the wagons behind the trucks. They were more terrifying than beautiful—basically wolf-horse hybrids, with the equine strength of Clydesdales horses fronted by snarling canine muzzles—but they were magical nonetheless. So were the small, lizard-like creatures that ran up and down the nearby trees with sticky feet. Those looked the most like the ‘aliens’ Cora remembered from the sci-fi books of her younger years. They were mostly green, excluding their orange feet, with flat heads that splayed out in six spikes on their crowns. At their rear, they bore pinchers that looked like scythes. Cora watched as one of the creatures attacked a beetle, driving its pincher into the smaller animal’s back.
Then, something else caught Cora’s eye, and she nudged Zach. “Look at that one!” She pointed at an insect with a bright shell and jointed legs the length of pencils. “It’s on stilts!”
Zach’s eyes blinked as if waking from a trance. “Sorry, what?”
Cora deflated. “Never mind. You missed it.” Zach seemed to be the only one who wasn’t transfixed by their new world. Of the three-hundred-odd people split into dozens of carriages trailing the front five trucks, virtually everyone else’s head was on the same swivel as Cora’s, moving from side to side whenever an extraordinary new animal or plant caught their attention.
She thought of Carver and Rhea in the prisoner carriage, looking at the same beautiful world as her. It felt unfair that they could experience the wonders of Alpha Cen when so many more deserving people had been left behind. Jason Greene’s face flashed in her mind; he would have loved it here. For the briefest moment, she felt a dark energy wash over her, a potent mixture of anger and pure disgust. She forced herself to swallow the feeling and focused on Zach.
“Are you alright?” Cora followed Zach’s gaze to a smear of smoke drifting high in the sky over the trees. It had begun to disperse into the atmosphere, leaving its original pillar thin and misshapen. Somewhere out there, the remains of Ryker’s crashed dropship were still smoldering. “We’ll get there as soon as everyone here is safe,” she assured him.
“Mm-hmm,” Zach nodded, still lost in thought.
Cora wasn’t sure she believed what she said, but Zach needed to hear it. Watching Ryker’s dropship get blown out of the sky sickened her—she couldn’t imagine what Zach must be going through. He had barely been reunited with Ryker before losing him again. Cora knew Zach blamed himself for letting Ryker pilot the dropship through the storm, but it wasn’t his fault. Ryker knew what he was getting into, and he volunteered anyway. It was his decision.
In the truck ahead of Cora’s, Agnes sat with a younger woman. They bore a passing resemblance, though Agnes’ skin was much paler. The biggest difference was their demeanor. Agnes’ expression remained serene while the other woman’s brow was pinched in perpetual concern.
Seeming to sense Cora’s gaze, Agnes looked over her shoulder at Cora. A hint of a smile passed between them.
Cora still couldn’t believe there were people already on Alpha Cen. How was it possible? At the time the colonists had allegedly arrived, people on Earth were still listening to CDs and looking up their friends in phonebooks. They were riding bikes and using landlines, not building continuum drives.
Far off, a high-pitched shriek sent an explosion of flapping wings from the treetops. A glimmer of red rushed through a thicket about a hundred and fifty feet away from the caravan. Cora couldn’t see if it was fur, feathers, scales, or something with no precedent on Earth. But it was bound to be beautiful, based on the color.
The red appeared again, closer this time, and coupled with labored breathing.
“Halt!” the driver of the front truck yelled over his shoulder. The command echoed down the line of carriages as the other drivers passed the message along. Cora’s vehicle slowed to a stop, as did the string of carriages behind her.
There! The red was almost to the road.
But when it emerged from the forest, Cora realized it wasn’t an animal. It was a man. And the red didn’t come from fur. Or feathers. Or scales.
It came from blood.
Immediately, the man collapsed beside Cora’s truck, his fingers clamping over the truck’s sidewall. He wheezed and choked. The rubber soles of his shoes had partially peeled away, exposing the dirty socks inside.
“Stay here,” the stern-looking woman said from beside Agnes as she hopped out of her truck. She turned for her compound bow but stopped at the sight of something on the man’s sleeve—an insignia reading ACI. Leaving her weapon behind, she raised both hands in a pacifying gesture and approached. “What’s going on, buddy?”
The wounded Edishman peered at her through swollen eyelids. “Halsy…. Hel—Hel—Help.”
“First things first. What’s your name?”
As Halsy reached for him, the man let go of the truck and fell backward. He propelled himself back with his heels, leaving long troughs in the dirt. “Nan—Nando.”
Beside Cora, Mabel stood and called to Halsy. “I can help.”
“Hang on,” Erik said. He reached up and grabbed her arm. “He could be dangerous.”
“He’s hurt.” Mabel pulled away from Erik, swung her legs over the edge of the vehicle, and dropped to the ground. “I’m a doctor,” she told Halsy. Then, she squatted next to Nando. “My name’s Mabel. You want to tell me what happened?”
“Ro—Roaches.”
“Bugs did this?” Mabel asked, perplexed. Cora shuddered to think how big a cockroach had to be to bloody a man as much as Nando was bloodied.
Halsy pivoted in a circle, scanning the woods for any indications of danger. “He’s not talking about bugs, lady.” She shouted to the soldiers in the caravan. “Roaches! Form a perimeter!”
On Halsy’s command, the soldiers jumped from the carriages and lined up along the forest’s edge, their weapons ready.
“What’s the problem?” Zach asked.
Halsy shot him a stern look. “Quiet!” she hissed. She looked down at Nando and tried to meet his eyes. “Where are they? How far?”
Mabel applied pressure to a cut on Nando’s forehead with her shirt. “Give him a minute,” Mabel advised. “He’s confused.”
“Better confused than dead,” Halsy snapped. She returned her attention to Nando. “Answer me.”
“Supp—supply run. To Foxhold. Roaches pinned us.” Nando flinched away from Mabel’s prodding fingers.
“That didn’t answer either of my questions. Where are the others?”
“Dead. But I f-fought ’em off. And I g-got one.”
“You killed one?”
“No. C-captured. He’s in the t-transport—”
“Okay, five on me!” Halsy declared, pulling herself back to her feet. A cluster of soldiers formed around her. “Where do we have to go?”
Nando raised a finger. “Th-that way. About a half m-mile.”
Halsy ran back to her truck and grabbed her bow. Then, she addressed Agnes’ attendant. “Make room in the prisoner car.”
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