Alone (Third Earth Book 1) Read online

  ALONE

  THIRD EARTH VOLUME ONE

  Dylan Steel

  ALONE: THIRD EARTH VOLUME ONE

  Dylan Steel

  Heritage Publishing

  Copyright © 2017

  www.DylanSteel.com

  Cover design by Flappy Dog Designs.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ALSO BY DYLAN STEEL

  1. GOOD MORNING

  2. SENSORS

  3. SILENT NIGHT

  4. ENOUGH SLEEP

  5. UNDER PRESSURE

  6. FIFTY MORE

  READ MORE BY DYLAN STEEL

  ALSO BY DYLAN STEEL

  Sacrisvita

  THE PRODIGY: A Sacrisvita Prequel

  (FREE and only available HERE.)

  THE INSTITUTION: Sacrisvita Book I

  THE ARCHIVES: Sacrisvita Book II

  THE RELIC: Sacrisvita Book III

  THE ESTATE: Sacrisvita Book IV

  THE VANISHED: Sacrisvita Book V

  THE CAPTIVE: Sacrisvita Book VI

  THE OUTCAST: Sacrisvita Book VII

  THE TRIALS: Sacrisvita Book VIII

  THE ROGUE: Sacrisvita Book IX

  THE CITIZEN: Sacrisvita Book X

  THE SURVIVOR: Sacrisvita Book XI

  ***

  Third Earth

  SLEEPER: A Third Earth Prequel

  (FREE and only available HERE.)

  ALONE: Third Earth Volume One

  ***

  For the most updated list of Dylan’s books, visit www.DylanSteel.com.

  Join Dylan’s Insiders Club to find out when her next book is out! Plus, get an exclusive Third Earth prequel short story.

  1. GOOD MORNING

  It was the eighth time I’d woken up in four hundred years.

  Ok, it was technically more like the twenty-fourth time, but I really only counted the first morning, and there had been eight of them since I’d boarded the Seeker VI.

  The first morning was always brutal.

  Hearing was usually the first sense to return. Or maybe touch. Either way, I never remembered much before an unearthly hiss washed over my body as the seal released, depressurizing my Cryogenic Onboard Fleet Functional Intermittent Napper. My COFFIN.

  Someone must have thought that acronym was hilarious, but it would be hours before my throat would be ready to laugh about it. Not that I would. It was an old joke by now. And not four hundred years old—more like I’ve-made-myself-sick-of-this-dumb-joke old.

  So no, I wouldn’t be laughing.

  I’d be running diagnostics and taking a dozen vid courses if things were running smoothly. If things weren’t running smoothly, I’d make a couple quick repairs and skip the vid courses.

  Things always ran smoothly. The Seeker line of ships were built to outlast my COFFIN. Seeker VI shouldn’t have any problems for at least ten thousand years, easy.

  I sat up slowly, blinking my vision back into some form of normalcy. My mouth was unbearably dry. They’d warned me that my tongue would feel like sandpaper, but then, none of them ever spent any real time in a Napper, so they really wouldn’t know. In reality, it felt like someone had coated every surface in my mouth with two inches of space dust. It was really hard not to choke on my own tongue.

  It would probably help to tweak the settings for my next waking period. Maybe bump up the fluids. Couldn’t hurt.

  In the meantime, I settled for holding a small bubble of water in my mouth—enough to relieve the worst of the dryness but not enough to drown myself in.

  Once my muscles were firing, getting out of the COFFIN was pretty straightforward. I gripped its edges and pushed off, shooting toward the center of the ship. My ship. I was the only one on board, unless you counted the professors on my vid courses or Taki. And I didn’t count Taki. Not because he was an AI but because he had a pathetic sense of humor. His jokes were more painful than stretching after a Nap.

  I headed straight for the command center. Taki wasn’t yelling at me, but that didn’t mean I could skip the preliminary diagnostics. That was kind of the whole point of waking up—making sure nothing catastrophic had happened. The Seeker VI’s manmade tech made all the calls for fifty years before being double checked by the more fallible yet industrious human element. Me.

  Even after spending thousands of years developing and perfecting artificial intelligence, there was something irreplaceable about the human element.

  And on this ship, I was the human element. No pressure there.

  Maybe machines made better decisions than we did, but they weren’t always the right decisions. Probably because machines couldn’t feel. Sure, they could be coded to have certain reactions—even to learn which reactions were most appropriate, most human—but they didn’t always get it right. They couldn’t really understand what it meant to feel.

  Some people thought it was because humans had souls and machines didn’t. Others insisted souls could be coded too, and they’d spent their lifetimes trying to prove it. They’d come pretty close, too. But not close enough.

  Me? Not a clue in the stars. I just knew it didn’t work for AIs.

  If I could’ve figured out a way to get AI to feel, I’d probably still be on Proximacent hiding out in some lab bunker working on tech advances. As it was, I had enough trouble figuring out my own feelings. I wasn’t about to inflict that mess on some poor unsuspecting AI like Taki.

  I was nearly to the command center when I made the mistake of glancing at one of the polished wall panels. How classically human of me.

  Ugh.

  My eighteen-year-old face looked closer to thirty. The eyes staring back at me were still blue, but they were much, much duller than I remembered, and my skin was dry and caving in around my cheekbones from years of intravenous meals. Basically, I looked like death.

  Beauty sleep obviously didn’t apply to Nappers. Though, to be fair, I thought I looked pretty good for a four-hundred-and-eighteen-year-old.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and cringed. Not much better there. Dirty blond was an understatement.

  Tearing my gaze from the makeshift mirror, I pushed myself forward again until I was staring down the main computer.

  “Good morning, Jade.” Taki’s voice echoed through the cabin.

  A garbled grunt left my throat as I waved a dismissive hand in the air.

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  “Liar,” I rasped, punching through a set of commands as I pulled up the preliminary diagnostics. Good, good, good… Everything looked in order. I’d give it another run-through after I got cleaned up.

  “I do not lie.”

  “Right.” I rolled my eyes. No, Taki didn’t lie. Just occasionally embellished details about non-life-threatening situations. His programming wouldn’t permit him to lie during actual emergencies.

  “Taki?”

  “Yes, Jade?”

  “Run secondaries.”

  “Already in process.”

  “Thanks.” I winced, rubbing my throat gingerly. Time to stop talking.

  Lifting my arm, I buried my nose in my pit and took a whiff. I choked. Smaller inhale next time.

  I might have been one of humanity’s last hopes, but that didn’t mean I had to look like the guys from my training unit. Or smell like them.

  Normally, I’d conserve resources and make do with a sponge bath, but I hadn’t had a proper shower in
two hundred years. This called for drastic measures. I floated over to the control center and flipped on the artificial gravity.

  Time for a real shower.

  Shooting a final glance at the reports, I turned and kicked off the wall, launching myself toward the bathroom.

  Ah, stars.

  The shower was on the opposite side of the ship. I’d have to walk.

  My face twisted in annoyance as my limbs gradually grew heavier and my feet connected firmly with the ground. Yes, I should’ve been expecting it. No, it didn’t matter.

  Thanks to fifty years of muscle stim, my muscles hadn’t atrophied, but they were sore from minimal stretching. Straight muscle stim had always been more effective than simulated stretching.

  So yeah, I’d be fine. But it was way more fun to float around the ship. Oh, well.

  Note to self: Next cycle, ask Taki to turn on the gravity automatically. After I get to the bathroom.

  The bathroom had a real mirror, and the sight that greeted me here wasn’t any better than the one I’d glimpsed earlier. I turned away from my reflection and headed straight for the shower.

  Peeling off my suit, I stepped into the stream of water, moaning contentedly as its warmth washed over me. Conserving water was the last thing on my mind—besides, it would all get recycled anyways. No harm in enjoying it.

  My limbs felt lighter. Free. I closed my eyes. Water ran down my face and tickled the inside of my nose. I snorted and swept a hand over my mouth, brushing it away.

  It didn’t work.

  My eyes jerked back open, and I realized I was peering through watery lenses. My arms floated up at my sides as my feet left the ground. Water still poured from the faucet, but it was no longer heading toward the floor—it was billowing toward me, racing to join the water already on my skin, encasing me in a growing bubble.

  My heart pounded in my chest while my lungs screamed curses at me for the last shallow breath I’d taken—it wasn’t like I’d known how important it would be.

  I ran my hands over my face over and over, but trying to wipe off the layer of water quickly proved to be a wasted effort. It stuck to me like glue—if glue was some sort of demented psychopath that wouldn’t let go and let me take in any oxygen.

  I stretched my arms out desperately, kicking toward the wall. If I could just reach—

  My fist broke through the edge of the water, and I punched the button on the side of the shower wall. My body slammed against the wall as water slipped over and around me, disappearing behind me into the wall. The vac was doing its job, but the water was still coming straight for my face. I still couldn’t breathe.

  Stupid, stupid… Should’ve turned the water off first.

  Fighting the vac and the current it had created, I reached the shower panel before my lungs completely gave out. The water stopped flowing, and I spluttered and inhaled deep as soon as it cleared my face.

  I turned off the vac with a groan and slumped against the wall.

  Then I felt it.

  At first, I thought it was just fatigue. After all, my muscles hadn’t worked that hard in years. But I could’ve sworn my entire body was growing heavier—and it wasn’t getting any better. My eyes widened as I realized that the crushing feeling in my bones wasn’t imaginary.

  “Taki!”

  “Yes, Jade?”

  “Turn off…” I swallowed, forcing air into my lungs “…artificial gravity. Now.”

  “Of course, Jade.” A groan sounded from deep within the ship as its frantic whirring wound down. “Artificial gravity has been turned off.”

  The crippling weight across my chest seemed to reverse instantly. After a few moments, my body lifted into the air, which was a much more pleasant experience without the full-body waterfall trying to kill me.

  “Stars.” I let out an irritated breath.

  It seemed my ship wasn’t so perfect after all.

  2. SENSORS

  “A little help would’ve been nice, Taki.” I rubbed a towel over my still-wet hair.

  “You asked me not to watch you while you’re in the bathroom.”

  Right. Because it’s creepy to have a male AI watch me bathe. Still true, but that’s not the point. “And you couldn’t have been monitoring my vitals?”

  “I was. They never reached the critical threshold to merit my intervention. I am not supposed to override your commands unless you are in immediate, life-thre—”

  “Immediate, life-threatening danger. I know.” I sighed, tossing the towel. “I was practically there, I’ll have you know.”

  “Hardly. It would have been another twelve seconds, by my estimates.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said wryly.

  Was I mad? Stars, yes. But I couldn’t really blame Taki. He was just following his programming. And he would’ve saved the day just in time. Probably.

  Blowing out a puff of air, I turned my attention back to the screen. I scrolled through the diagnostic reports, looking for an explanation for the gravity malfunction.

  My eyes fell on the column summarizing the performance of the external sensors. I gritted my teeth and highlighted a string of numbers.

  “How did we both miss this?” I dragged my finger in a large circle around the incriminating digits.

  “It was within an acceptable margin of error.”

  I glared at the computer. “My lungs disagree.”

  “Well, yes, it would now seem to be incorrect.”

  “It changed. It’s never changed before,” I mumbled, chewing the inside of my lip. I raised my voice. “The output is supposed to be constant.”

  “Ideally, yes, but—”

  “Next time, mention it.”

  “Noted.”

  I dragged my hands down my face in frustration. “The slightest miscalibration and the ship can’t figure out which way’s up.”

  “Technically, it—”

  “I know it’s spinning, Taki. It’s just an expression.” I shook my head. “How could this have happened?”

  “The Seeker VI has passed through a great deal of space matter in the past fifty years. It is possible to have experienced a minor breach from a micrometeoroid.”

  “You’re telling me something got past you, Taki?” My eyebrow shot up.

  He paused. “I am saying it is possible. I have successfully navigated through many debris fields without incident. But if a micrometeoroid did strike the Seeker VI, it would have had to have impaired the panel with the sensors that would have alerted me to the impact.”

  Unreal. A micrometeoroid—a ridiculously small piece of debris—had punched through the ship’s shielding and damaged one of the sensor panels. Taki wasn’t sure of it, but I was.

  I whistled. “One in a million chance.”

  “Actually, this specific hit would be a one in 6.827 billion chance. Roughly,” Taki corrected me.

  “No one asked your opinion.”

  “It’s not an opinion.”

  I sighed loudly. “If you don’t stifle your pathways, I swear I’m gonna disable you one of these days, Taki.”

  “You don’t have sufficient clearance, Jade.”

  “They can’t maroon a genius on a Seeker and not expect her to be able to override its AI,” I said under my breath.

  “It’s not a matter of ability…”

  Of course he heard me.

  “…it’s a matter of wakeful time. Even with your skills, this ship doesn’t contain sufficient supplies for you to spend enough time in a state of wakefulness to override my systems.”

  “It would if I convinced you to help me.”

  “That would not be possible.”

  “That’s what you think.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “But I can be pretty convincing.”

  “Jade, I am inclined to tell you that I disagree with your assessment.”

  “Oh, chill, Taki. No need to get your circuits in a wad.”

  The temperature in the room began dropping suddenly, and I could see my breath in a matter of seconds. �
�Taki,” I growled, “cut that out.”

  “You said ‘chill,’ Jade.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Now that is a matter of opinion.”

  “Taki, stabilize the temperature back at my preferred settings before I make good on my promise.”

  “That is a rather ambiguous command, Jade, considering you will be unable to make good on your earlier promise of disabling me.”

  “Taki!”

  “Fine. Stabilizing. Though for future reference, you could stand to be a bit more specific.”

  “I’m not the one who needs reprogramming,” I retorted. Rubbing my hands together as the temperature climbed back up, I turned my attention back to the problematic sensors.

  “Do you think the sensors are damaged or just displaced?”

  “It is still possible that the ship was not impacted.”

  “You’re really sticking with that one, huh?”

  If AIs could give dirty looks, I’d bet Taki was lighting me up right now.

  “Based on records of micrometeoroid damage and your earlier gravity incident, I expect the entire panel will need to be replaced. But a more direct assessment is necessary.”

  “Duh. Is there any way to access the sensors from inside the ship?” I grinned. I already knew the answer.

  “Of course. But you can’t do it during flight. You’ll have to access the exterior panels.”

  “Ah, well, if you insist…”

  There was at least one positive to all this.

  Time for a spacewalk.

  3. SILENT NIGHT

  Excitement knocked around relentlessly in my stomach as I stood in front of the open hatch. I hadn’t had a reason to do a spacewalk since training and honestly hadn’t expected to need to do one at all on this mission, what with the perfect build of the Seekers.

  Near-perfect. This spectacular feat of modern engineering had been brought to its knees by a small stray rock. How embarrassing.

  Other than the fact that I’d nearly been killed, it didn’t really bother me. After all, I wasn’t the one who’d designed it.

  I could’ve, though. By each of Proxfleet’s eight criteria, I was considered a genius. It’s not bragging if it’s true, right? Anyways, that was the second reason I was selected to pilot a Seeker.