Horizon Alpha: Transport Seventeen

by D.W. Vogel

Genres: YA Steampunk

Synopsis

“Horizon Alpha is a melting pot of all my favorite things: far-out sci-fi, gripping survival horror, and best of all, friggin' dinosaurs!" 
—Tony Moore, Artist of The Walking Dead, Fear Agent & Deadpool

There’s someone alive out there.

After three perilous years on a planet full of dinosaurs, Caleb and his colony have finally found safety. The ‘saurs are kept at bay, the crops are growing, and for the first time in centuries humanity might have a future. 

But a single voice changes everything. The colony receives a call for help from a girl they haven’t seen since the crash and realize that they are not the only humans still alive. On an empty beach at the far edge of the continent, the survivors of Transport Seventeen have huddled in terror for three long years. Now they’re out of food and out of time.

Caleb and his friends must leave the safety of their home to rescue the survivors. As they travel into the unexplored depths of the jungle, they face danger from above, from the darkness, and from the water. And soon they discover there are new ‘saurs out there, ones that would scare even a T-rex.

“A rollicking adventure for sci-fi and dinosaur fans.” —Mike Fredericks, Editor, The Prehistoric Times

Release date: June 20, 2017

Publisher: Future House Publishing

Print pages: 260

Sample

Before Ceti

Ryenne’s Diary: Year 1, Day 1

The day we’ve waited two hundred years for is finally here!

Well, no one person has actually waited two hundred years. The originals, the ones who left Earth in this ship all those years ago, they’re long gone. We’ve been generations in space traveling where the Earth scientists pointed us, but last week we entered a new solar system and today we’ll be in orbit around our new home.

Tau Ceti e. It just sounds so nice.

Maybe today, or tomorrow at the latest, some of us will do what no humans have done for centuries. We’ll walk on an actual planet. Breathe fresh new air. Feel the heat of a real sun.

I got this diary for my eleventh birthday, which was three months ago, Earth time. But Earth time doesn’t matter any more. It’s Ceti time now and forever! This was the coolest gift because paper is really valuable, and blank paper is hard to come by. I don’t want to know what Mom had to trade to get this. My brother Rogan got a book for our birthday, too, but his isn’t blank. It’s some kind of science book, meant for adults, not kids. He was thrilled, so that’s good. But I saved this diary to start today because it’s the beginning of all new time.

It’s day one of the year one, Ceti time. Perfect day to start writing things down.

Someday in the distant future, fifty or a hundred years from now, kids will want to read this. They’ll want to know what it was like, and how it felt to be born and live eleven years on a space ship, and then learn how to live on a planet. We have everything we need to set up a town, and things will be different, so I’m keeping the official record. It’s important.

So . . . to the future citizens of Tau Ceti e, hello from the past! Maybe I’m an old grandma by the time you read this, or maybe I’m dead, but I’m going to tell you everything I’m thinking so you can know how things really happened.

Let’s start with the facts.

My name is Ryenne Childs.

I was born on Horizon Alpha, a spaceship built by the people of Earth to carry humans to another planet. They built four Horizons, but we’re the first one to reach a planet, which is why it’s so lucky I’m on the Alpha. People on the Beta and Delta won’t reach their planets for hundreds more years. And the Gamma didn’t make it.

Earth didn’t make it either. It blew up long before I was born.

So we’re it. The last people ever. And we’re just hours away from Tau Ceti e, which will be our new home forever.

Captain Wilde already announced some of the first reports. The planet has everything we need. Air and trees and mountains, oceans and rivers. Everybody is calling the new planet “Eden.” He said it’s mostly a great big jungle, and there are animals there already but we don’t know what kind. Maybe some kind of space horses we can ride.

Back to me. I have a twin brother, Rogan. Mom didn’t have any more kids after us because they said Rogan is “special.” That means he’s really super smart about some things, but other stuff he just doesn’t get at all. So I take care of him. Our dad already died of cancer, which is what almost everybody dies of on Horizon. Mom says I won’t get cancer because I’ll live on a planet, not a nuclear spaceship, which is great.

In just a couple of hours they’re going to launch the first satellites. Then they’ll send the Alpha-One Team down in a shuttle to see what the planet is like. They’ll come back up here and we’ll all start getting on the transports. By tomorrow morning, I’ll be standing in the sunshine, the first in my family for two hundred years.

Rogan wants to go up to the main deck now and look out the windows. There’s a little place right behind the door to the bridge where we can sneak through and sit by a little window where nobody else will be. He wants to be the first to see the planet when we get close enough.

I’ve already got my backpack ready. It’s the same as every other pack on the ship but I drew a fairy and a dragon on it so I know it’s mine. For now, farewell diary, farewell future humans. I’m going up to get my first look at the best planet in the whole universe.

Chapter 1

My fingers ached, covered in blisters from twisting thick rope.

“Just another five thousand kilometers and we’ll have enough.” My brother Josh sat next to me in the shade of a tree, braiding the long grasses we cut from around the lake. “Then we get to dig the holes.”

Carthage Valley’s agricultural endeavors hadn’t started out well. When we first arrived here we had been thrilled to find a lush green valley, safe from the huge ‘saurs that hunted the jungle surrounding our mountain haven. We hunted the little ‘saurs that hopped around the cliffsides and the small herds of chest-high grazers that lived in the valley, but there were a lot of us to feed. Rows of fruit trees helped, but we needed to plant.

We cut sheet metal from one of our shuttles and made farm equipment. We staked off our fields and planted the first of our seeds brought here from long-dead Earth. After three years of scuttling around an electric-fenced settlement in the dark of night we were thrilled to finally walk safely outside in the light of day.

We forgot about the pterosaurs.

They sailed over the mountains, so high in the clouds that we couldn’t see a thing. A silent dive with the blinding sun behind them, they were invisible until it was too late. The biggest ones could take a full grown man. After the first time, we kept the children in the caves until long after dark.

So we strung the nets. We twisted the grasses into thick ropes, knotting them into netting, which we hung from tall posts dug into the ground all around our small fields. The first net was hung three days ago, and we hadn’t seen any fliers since then to test them out.

“Worth it to be outside, though,” I said, and Josh nodded.

The caves were our home now, and many of our people never left them. All of us were born on Horizon Alpha, our spacegoing ark, and the older folks had lived too long in the confines of the ship. Open skies frightened them, and with good reason. But I loved it. The caves felt stifling to me with the still, quiet air and no sunlight. I never would have believed I would miss the night sounds of the jungle, but the echoing silence of the caves felt unnatural.

“Dive! Dive!” The shout went up from the field and I jumped to my feet, pressing my back against the trunk of the huge tree. My hands leaped to my belt for a pistol, but I was unarmed. Not on guard duty today.

Gunfire cracked through the valley.

The pterosaur made no sound as it dove headfirst toward a man running for cover down the row of lettuce he had been tending. He’s not going to make it. My pulse pounded in my throat as I watched the scene, powerless to do anything.

It was a smaller ‘saur, maybe twenty feet across from wingtip to wingtip, and it didn’t see the net in time. Its wings snapped open from the dive, buffeting the air as it tried to pull up. The claws on the end of one wing snagged in the net, spinning the ‘saur around.

The armed guards unloaded their guns into the struggling creature. It pitched around the field, ripping the net to shreds as it struggled to free itself. Great clods of dirt flew from its talons and the posts supporting the net groaned and toppled into the field.

Weapons cracked, filling the air with the hot smell of gunpowder.

Finally the ‘saur lay still. A cheer went up from the guards.

“We got one!” I yelled. “It’s meat for dinner tonight!”

Josh shook his head. “Yeah, and that’s a good thing. Look at the field.”

The pterosaur had destroyed most of the crop. Baby lettuces were flung everywhere, the orderly rows exploded into a trampled, muddy mess.

I threw down the rope I was knotting. “Well, I don’t like lettuce anyway.”

Josh laughed. “Yeah. Me neither.”

We pulled out our nets and joined the other men cutting at the netting wound around the dead pterosaur. The man who had been its target sighed and started gathering up his ruined crops.

No matter how we tried, there was no getting away from the ‘saurs of Tau Ceti e.






Chapter 2

I stood in the narrow cave mouth looking out over the tree canopy below, peaceful in the pale light of dawn. We had come out the “front door” of the cave system, the south-facing entrance that led down the mountain. Our valley home lay out the “back door,” safe behind high cliff walls. The few low passes that had led into our valley had fallen to our grenades, filling them with rocks from above. Nothing climbed in or out, including us. This tunnel entrance was our only connection with the rest of Tau Ceti e.

“You got everything?” Staci stepped out of the shadows behind me. She was seventeen, two years older than me, and Carthage Valley’s second best climber.

“I think so.”

The heavy pack on my back contained a small satellite receiver and a hundred meters of wire. Our mission today was to climb as high as we could and find a safe place to mount the receiver on the south facing cliff wall that protected our valley home. The satellite transmitters couldn’t connect inside the caves, and the valley that opened inside the protected ring of mountains was out of range of our few orbiting satellites most of the time. General Enrico and Mr. Borin argued about it last night. The nearly hundred people who survived the first three years on Tau Ceti e in the dinosaur jungle were safe in our cave and valley home. We were planning our first official elections in a few days, but it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Borin would be elected mayor. He had argued that we didn’t need sat reception since there was no one else on the planet to talk to, and the orbiting hulk of Horizon Alpha, the ark that brought us here, was long dead and silent. But General Enrico convinced him that a satellite receiver was valuable for weather forecasting, if nothing else. So today Staci and I climbed.

It should have been Shiro. Before his injury he was a better climber than me. But the Shiro we brought home from the riverbank wasn’t the same guy we left on a fallen tree in the jungle months ago. That Shiro would have climbed with me, even if his leg made every step agony.

“Let’s do this.”

I looked up the mountainside, searching for a good route. The higher we got, the better reception we’d get. A little ‘saur skittered over the rocks above my head, showering pebbles into my hair. The ‘saurs that hopped among the high cliffs and basked in the hot sun were sure-footed, better climbers than even me. I grabbed hold of the ledge and followed its path up the cliff.

It was hot going. Even in the early morning the sun beat down on the bare rock face. We checked every handhold before grabbing on, alert for any of the million different poisonous insects or wicked-thorned plants that thrived in the cracks. The rough-scaled snakes wouldn’t be active yet, but I didn’t want to grab one.

“Staci, hold up,” I called from below her. She wasn’t carrying a pack, and I had gotten held up on a small ledge.

“Look to your right,” she called back. “Shuffle over and there’s a good foothold there.”

She hauled up on my pack when I got in arm’s length. “Think this is high enough?”

I looked down to where General Enrico had come out of the cave mouth to watch our progress. “No way. We need to go up at least twice this far.”

My eyes roved out from the ledge, toward the forest floor below. Our single working shuttle was parked far below at the edge of the jungle, just under the slim entrance to the little cave where my brother Josh had hidden for two months after losing his squad in the forest. The second shuttle had been salvaged for parts to keep the first one going. We wanted to fly it into the protected valley, but Ceti’s strong gravity prevented it from getting over the high mountains. The atmosphere here got thinner as we gained altitude, and we couldn’t find a low enough pass to risk it. The remaining charge in our one precious power core was idling inside it, powering the cold embryo storage units that were humanity’s potential future here. Horizon’s shuttle was just a freezer now. Our tank was parked next to it but the transmission had gone out a few weeks before and we didn’t have the parts to fix it.

The sweaty pack on my back was a grim memory of the time I’d spent in the jungle carrying the power core back from a disastrous mission. My shoulders remembered the drag and even though I was far too high for any land-bound ‘saur, I kept glancing over my shoulder at the forest below. I knew what was out there.

We climbed for another twenty minutes with the sun beating down on our necks.

My foot slipped on the rocks and I grabbed the wall, digging my fingernails in as my body swayed out over the drop.

“Caleb, watch out!” Staci called.

My boot found purchase and I clung to the wall, panting. “I’m good. You okay?”

“Yeah. But I think we’re high enough.”

I looked over the rocks around us. We needed a protected crevice to wedge the dish receiver since there was no real way to attach it. A few meters to my right I spied a flat outcropping that looked promising.

“Let’s get over there and see what we can get.”

I shuffled across the narrow ledge and found an indentation where larger rocks had fallen away, leaving a meter-wide shelf over the drop off. Easing the pack off my shoulders, I pressed it against the wall and crouched down to open it.

Staci hung on the ledge I had just come from. “Is there room for me?”

“Come on over.”

She lunged across and I scooted out of her way, grabbing her arm to steady her landing. After she got her footing, she looked down at my hand on her arm, a tiny smile on her lips. I dropped my hand, glad for the hot sun to disguise the blush creeping up my neck.

She turned and looked out over the treetops. “Scats, we’re really high. I’ve never been this far up.”

I handed her the wire and pulled the dish out of the pack. “Hope we’re high enough. Try your trans and see what you get.”

She fiddled with her trans while I pulled a pack of epoxy out of the bag. If this turned out to be a decent spot, we’d attach the dish directly to the rock. It wouldn’t last forever, but at least for a while we’d be able to update our trans and see when the heavy spring storms were on the way to our valley.

“Got a decent signal,” Staci said. “But who knows how often the satellite’s overhead?”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be that often. Anything’s better than what we have now.”

The epoxy was a two part resin and I mixed it in my hands, sticking it to the back of the dish. We wedged it into a crack in the rocks and filled around it with epoxy. I wiped my hands on the legs of my cargo pants, leaving sticky brown smears.

“My fingers are stuck. Can you do the wiring?”

Staci connected one end of the wire to the dish while I spat on my hands to rid them of the residue. I pulled my palm-sized trans out of my pocket and checked the signal. Broken sounds crackled from my trans, automatic transmissions from Horizon. A voice was audible for a few seconds, half-heard words cracked with dead air.

“Anybody . . . hear . . . there . . .”

I spoke into the unit. “Carthage Valley? It’s Caleb Wilde. I hear you.”

Silence on the line. Then a distant echo, a female voice that sounded maddeningly familiar. “Caleb?” Then silence.

I stared at the trans. “Who’s got a trans in the valley?”

Staci handed me the coil of wire, one end spliced onto the dish. “Lots of people. Why, who was talking?”

The voice rattled around in my brain. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t. Not after all this time. The heat and altitude must be messing with my head. “I don’t know. Probably just the busted up reception. And wishful thinking. Because for a minute there, I swear it sounded like my cousin Ryenne.”





Chapter 3

Ryenne’s Diary: Year 1, Day 3

Well, that didn’t go like we thought.

I’ve been on Tau Ceti e for two days now and future humans, be glad you weren. . .