Guardians

by Josi Russell

Genres: Colonization; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Life on Minea isn't all that the shiny brochures back on Earth promised the passengers of Ship 12-22. In order to survive, most of the population must slave away in the dark, unforgiving caverns of the Yyinum mines.



Ethan's position as governor proves to be less effective than he hoped as he clashes with the power-hungry companies that control the planet. While on a surveying ship, Ethan and the crew crash-land into the cavernous depths beneath the Karst Mountains, where a maze of tunnels and slew of fatal dangers block their journey home.



Above ground, a deadly epidemic sweeps the planet, and Ethan's wife, Aria, is torn between searching the mountains for him and finding a cure. When a mysterious craft appears in the sky, Kaia and her father, Admiral Phillip Reagan, must prepare for a battle with a species they know nothing about.



As their world descends into chaos, can these self-appointed guardians bring hope of survival to Minea?

Release date: February 4, 2016

Publisher: Future House Publishing

Print pages: 468

Sample

The bright disk of the planet Lucidus hung in the morning sky. Countless spires of striped karst limestone stretched away toward the horizon, standing like staggered rows of sentinels as far as Ethan could see through the low-lying morning mist.

It was the day of the twice-yearly Lucidus festival, when the planet rose like an open flower above the settlements on Minea. It marked the changing of seasons from rainy winter to flourishing spring, and then, when it returned, from verdant summer to mellow autumn.

To celebrate, Ethan Bryant and his family had come to the tranquil Tiger Mountain Park in the shadow of two striped towers. The park lay at the edge of the largely unexplored labyrinth of peaks known as the Karst Mountains, which stretched North and East of the city of Coriol, their home. Ethan and his wife Aria had brought their four-year-old daughter Polara and her baby brother Rigel to celebrate the coming of spring. The family’s walk through the park was made jovial by Polara’s running commentary and by Ethan’s spontaneous races with his little girl across the wide, grassy valley that lay at the foot of the peaks.

The park was enormous, with three lakes joined by a river strung like a bracelet across its center. Crowds from Coriol surged around Ethan’s family, looking for a spot to rest and wait for the perigee of Lucidus, the highlight of the celebration. Having so many people around brought Ethan some apprehension. He had acquired telepathic abilities through his experiences on a planet called Beta Alora, and he cringed at the proximity of all these people and the swirling mix of thoughts they carried with them.

Ethan’s telepathy hadn’t bothered him while he was in stasis on the way to Minea. In fact, it had probably made his trip less isolating because even in stasis he was connected with the minds of the nearly 4000 other sleeping passengers on his ship. But when he awoke and began his post-stasis life in the buzzing city of Coriol, he found thousands of thoughts invading his mind constantly. The fear, pain, anger, even the joy and contentment experienced by those around him had been overwhelming. Now, striding through the knee-high grass of the park, Ethan reached behind his ear to double-check the small rounded device that Kaia had created. She had been with him through the ordeal on Beta Alora and had gained similar telepathic abilities. She had invented the device—a thought blocker—to relieve the agony of having so many voices in their heads.

The small implant consisted of two parts: one inside and one outside the skull. The device inside the skull sent electrical impulses through the brain, quieting the incessant thoughts of others. The outside part was a small, rounded button that attached with a strong magnet and activated the thought blocker. Ethan took comfort in the thought blocker’s secure attachment. He felt Aria slip her hand into his and took comfort also in how she always seemed to sense when he was feeling anxious.

He looked around at the dusty Yynium miners and refinery workers, at the farm laborers, the colony officers, and the soldiers from Coriol Defense Headquarters. Their thoughts would be lighter on this day, with the festival in the air. On festival days, Minea almost felt like it had looked in the glossy brochures on Earth: a pristine new planet and an easy lifestyle awaiting them there.

But Ethan knew that most days, for most of the colonists, life was far from easy. He had heard their discouragement, their despair, and those were thoughts he would never forget.

“Hey! Caretaker!” Ethan heard the deep voice of Gil Walters, another passenger from his ship. Gil’s four children capered around him as he waded through the grass toward Ethan and Aria.

Gil was dressed in the red coveralls of the Saras Company. Judging by the dust on his face and clothes, he was coming from the mine or the refinery. Ethan grinned.

“Did you find some work with Saras?” he tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.

Coriol was a true company town, where the farms, the water plant, the power plant, the hospitals, and the schools were all set up and run by the Saras Company. They owned everything in Coriol except for the spaceport and the Colony Offices. If you wanted to work, you worked for Saras. Gil ducked his head and Ethan was sorry he had asked.

“Not permanent work. Rose is out there doing a day shift now. They need some help hauling explosives out to a new shaft.” He laughed. “It isn’t that different from waiting tables. The boss calls an order, I get the boxes from the truck and take them to the blasters, then I do it again.” Gil had been a professional waiter back on Earth, at one of the finest restaurants in the capitol.

Aria spoke. “I’ll bet you did a great job,” she said encouragingly, but Ethan saw her eyes linger for a moment on Gil’s scraped hands and arms.

“I was glad to go. The crew boss picked me up at the Saras Employment Office yesterday.” Gil skimmed his fingers across his scrapes absentmindedly. “I stand there just about every day, and there are a lot of days I go home without having worked a single hour.” He shook his head, then looked Ethan in the eye. “Do you know how many times I’ve wished that I had gotten into mining back on Earth? I made good money waiting tables back home, but every day at the Employment Office here I stand and listen to them call for blasters and pickmen and tram operators and all I can think about is the years I wasted carrying soup to people.”

There was bitterness in his voice, made sharper by the fact that Ethan knew Gil had loved waiting tables. He was a true server, attentive to people’s needs, joyous when he could anticipate and fill those needs.

“Waiting tables was important work, too.” Ethan tried to fill his voice with reassurance, and Gil shot him a grateful look.

The two families were at the edge of the first lake, and they stopped to look over its wide surface. It was the lowest of the three lakes, and there was a wide swath of marsh at one end. The smell of fish and thick aquatic vegetation made Polara wrinkle her nose and protest, which set off a chorus of exclamations from the Walters kids, too. Ethan gestured up the park, toward the next lake, and the group went on.

Gil had fallen into a thoughtful silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Don’t get me wrong. I know why Yynium production is so important.”

Ethan nodded and mentally counted the children, who had skipped ahead of them through the crowd.

Aria spoke up, and her voice was a bit wistful. “Rapid Space Travel for everyone would be an amazing thing. Can you imagine making the trip from Earth in five years instead of fifty?”

Ethan squeezed her hand, glancing down to catch her green eyes. “It’s hard to imagine going that fast. The Super-Luminal drives just can’t compare to the YEN drives.”

“And you’ve got to have Yynium to have YEN drives,” Gil said, his voice weary.

The Minean morning was warming considerably, and Ethan felt sticky in his jacket. He stopped to take it off.

“Hold up, kids!” Ethan called, and the children swung around and trotted back toward their parents.

Removing the jacket was a process, because first Ethan had to slip out of the backpack where Rigel was riding. Aria held it, kissing the baby loudly. Ethan stretched his shoulders, inhaling the sweet scent of aurelia flowers. He traded Aria the jacket for the baby and they started out again. As they waded through the deep grass, Ethan thought about YEN drives. He’d been in meetings at the Colony Offices last week where they had discussed the obstacles still impeding the completion of the RST ships. The main one was the lack of refined Yynium back on Earth.

“Did you see any of the loads going out, Gil? How much Yynium are they pulling out of those mines?” Ethan hadn’t been to the mines for a while.

“I don’t know. I know they’ve got three shifts going every day. It’s hard work down there, and at the refinery, too. This planet is full of Yynium, but getting it out is a big job.”

“Especially without all the new equipment they’ve developed back on Earth,” Ethan said. “In my meetings, I’ve seen some of the machines they’ve got, and they save a lot of time.”

“No good to us there, though, are they?” Gil laughed. “How is it, talking to people back on Earth in those meetings?”

Ethan thought about that. Because he had been voted into a Governor position in the Colony Offices of Coriol after he’d arrived, Real-Time Communications meetings were a pretty standard part of his life, but most people on Minea would never be in on one. They weren’t exciting meetings, mostly for reviewing Saras’ activities and coordinating Coriol’s interests with the United Earth Government back home.

“It’s . . . surreal, sometimes, when I think that these guys in the meeting who are about my age now were actually born almost half a century after me.”

Gil shook his head. “That is surreal. Do they think they’ll get those machines out here soon?”

“Not soon, but they’re working on it. It’s just the old trouble that the Yynium is here and the drives are on Earth. Get the two together, and we can start moving things much more quickly. We have all this Yynium here, but not enough RST ships to transport it all back to Earth so more RST ships can be built.”

“I think they should create a YEN drive plant here on Minea,” Gil said.

“That’s in the plans, too. Kaia says the drives are pretty complicated, and pretty delicate, so the plant has to be pretty sophisticated. We’re just not quite ready out here on the frontier.”

“Is our ship refitted yet?” Aria asked. The empty passenger ships were being rebuilt with the YEN drives that they’d brought along, and a few were even en route with loads of Yynium, but they were still a long way from their destination.

“Almost,” Ethan said. A shadow of uneasiness flitted through his mind when he remembered the long years they’d spent on Ship 12-22, and he was glad its return trip would be much quicker. “They have the SL drive replaced with the YEN drive, and they’re just finishing remaking the passenger holds into cargo holds.”

“Seems like Yynium’s the key to everything,” Gil said. “I can see why Saras is so crazy about getting it out of the ground.”

Ethan felt his jaw tighten. His theory was that Saras was so crazy about Yynium because Yynium meant money. Seven companies, including Saras, did the bulk of the mining on this planet. Each of them had sponsored a settlement, paying to set up city infrastructures and housing, and paying the passengers’ fare from Earth on the stasis ships in exchange for their work on Minea.

This was not the Minea that those passengers were promised. Many of them signed their debt papers back on Earth, confident that if they got their free houses, as Saras promised, they would be able to earn enough to pay off their debt to him for their passage quickly. They didn’t know how few scrip a day’s work in Coriol would pay, or how much the electricity, water, and food would cost. They didn’t know that Saras planned to make his scrip back and then some for every passage.

They were almost to the second lake, and Ethan watched Gil’s tired steps as he trudged through the grass.

Aria must have noticed, too. “Maybe we’ll stop up here,” she said.

Gil shot them a grateful look. “Sounds good to me. I just got off from the graveyard shift and thought I’d bring the kids out for the festival. But I’m beat, and I have swing shift later, after Rose gets back.”

Ethan cringed, thinking of all the Saras workers who didn’t get paid vacation like the Colony Officers did. Taking a day off from the Saras Company meant missing a day’s pay, and that wasn’t something most of them could afford.

Calling the children back, Ethan and Aria settled a few yards from the edge of the middle lake. Gil waved apologetically as his kids grabbed his hands and pulled him further up the park.

“Happy Lucidus Day!” he said as he looked back.

“You too,” Ethan said, hoping the kids would give his friend a chance to rest.

Aria wrapped up some of their picnic lunch and ran lightly after the Walters’, tucking the little bundle under Gil’s arm with a smile.

Ethan spread a blanket and set Rigel atop it, then he and Polara dug out the rest of the food from the basket. Ethan and Aria had packed all the children’s favorite foods: dark bread made from smooth-ground veam grain, sliced green lapin fruit, sweetbean cheese and chocolate, chei fruit candies that Aria made herself, and the special-occasion olona juice that stained their mouths blue.

Ethan handed Rigel a piece of the sweet, firm bread to gnaw on and made a sandwich for himself, slipping a few thin slices of lapin on to add sweetness for contrast with the savory bean cheese.

Polara guzzled her juice, then turned with a smile to her father. “Can we skip rocks, Dada?”

Aria was a few yards away, eating a chunk of chocolate absentmindedly and peering at the leaves on a bush.

“We’re going down near the water,” he called, and she glanced up and smiled.

Ethan stood and took Polara’s hand. She pulled him to the water’s edge and they began to hunt skipping stones. He liked the rounded, flat-bottomed pebbles the best, and he picked over the rocky shoreline carefully for the best ones. Polara’s priority was size. She grabbed the biggest rocks she could find and lobbed them into the water. She’d thrown five before he skipped his first one.

It was a good throw, though, and his stone sailed across the calm surface, bouncing and leaving behind widening circles wherever it hit. All in all, six skips. Not bad.

An unusual movement in the water caught Ethan’s attention. In the ripples left by the skipped stone, some small, smooth, glossy bodies were arcing.

Swimming lizards. Ethan would never get tired of seeing them. Called natare, they were curious and friendly, ranging in color from warm charcoal to pale lavender. The females were speckled, to help them blend into the dappled shadows under the foliage. The males had a ruff around their necks which streamed behind them as they swam after minnows to carry to their nesting mates.

Minean creatures were not the same as Earth’s creatures, but many, like the natare, were similar to the animals of Earth. Though some had been catalogued and named, many species were still being discovered. The colonists usually referred to the animals by the names of their closest Earth equivalents, sometimes with a specific quality of the Minean species, like swimming lizards. Even after four years here, the surprising differences in Minean creatures instilled Ethan with wonder.

The natare rode the ripples to the water’s edge, reaching their delicate feet forward and climbing out onto the bank. Their eyes were inquisitive, searching. Ethan held out his hand. Three of the little creatures came forward. They knew humans, knew that they liked the taste of the salt that humans carried on their skin.

Soon they were licking his fingers, and Ethan took his hand back and broke off a piece of the sandwich to offer them. The boldest, a dusty purple male, snatched it and raised his neck ruff toward the others. Ethan watched them back away from the challenge on their webbed feet. But they followed the purple natare. When he wasn’t looking, one grabbed a bit of the sandwich from his mouth and dived into the water, swimming rapidly for his mate on her nest a few yards away.

Polara’s voice surprised Ethan. “What about that one, Dada?” She said, pointing to the third natare. “He didn’t get any.”

Ethan offered her the last bite. “Here you go. Share this with him.”

The child brightened and took the sandwich. Ethan watched her careful steps as she crept along after the little lizard, calling, “Here swimmer, here swimmer. Come have a sandwich.” She was a bold child, a brave one, and he loved seeing her fascination with animals and people. Watching her embrace the world was one of the great joys of his life.

And Rigel—Rigel’s quiet thoughtfulness brought him insurmountable peace. Still not talking at almost two, and deeply empathetic, Ri spent most of his time watching others closely. He didn’t walk yet, didn’t seem to need to move around and explore like Polara always had. The pediatrician had been a little worried about Rigel’s lack of speech, but after tests on his ears and cognition, had sent them home telling them not to worry, he would soon be making a racket alongside his sister.

Ethan felt a familiar need to check on his son. Though he didn’t have the charge to look after 4000 sleeping passengers anymore, he still heavily felt the responsibility to protect the people he loved, and when he glanced toward the picnic blanket, he saw Rigel looking at him and reaching for his bread. The nearly-two-year-old had knocked it just beyond his own reach. Ethan rose and retrieved it for him.

It was in that second, that small moment when his back was turned, that Polara fell into the lake. He heard the splash, and turned to the spot he’d last seen her. But she was far beyond that. How had she moved so quickly? She was flailing now in the inlet where the tumbling river flowed into the lake. He ran.

Blindly, Ethan charged into the water, fighting its pull against his legs. The river rocks were slick and round, but he barely noticed as his ankles cracked into them. She was being swept by the current. He had to get to her. Suddenly, the bottom dropped away, and Ethan felt his head go under. He swam, hard, and broke the surface just in time to see Polara’s small hand reaching horribly toward the sky.

He lunged, grasping at whatever he could. He felt her jumpsuit, soaked and slick, and clenched it, hauling her toward him and up, up toward the air. He went under, but held her above him, relieved to feel her squirming and fighting in his arms. Kicking, he rose above the surface again and gasped, “Polara! It’s all right. I’ve got you. You’re all right.”

His girl was crying, gasping. He got her to the bank, where helpful hands of onlookers steadied him as he came out. He collapsed on the stones, cradling her in his arms, curling his body protectively around her, and speaking in a low, calming voice, though he didn’t feel calm himself.

Her hysterical crying continued. Suddenly, he found himself singing an old Earth lullaby, gentle and low, that had calmed them both during long nights and tense moments. Slowly, he felt his heart rate returning to normal and heard the child’s tears subside.

Aria was suddenly beside them, her arms encircling them both. She didn’t say anything, just held them, but he heard her fear in her ragged breathing.

Soaked, Ethan carried Polara back to the blanket. He tried to still the trembling in his arms. He had watched over his family across the stars, and even now his greatest fear was that something would happen to them, something he couldn’t stop.

Ethan pulled his eyes from Polara, who was now sipping olona juice, to catch Aria’s gaze. His wife was holding Rigel tightly. Her smile was shaky as she looked back at Ethan.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you were so fast.”

He nodded, trying to push away the growing dread that had been sparked by Polara’s near miss. He tightened his arm around her. She was strong and bright, but still so fragile. He was going to have to guard her more carefully.

Across the park, Ethan heard the chiming of bells. Lucidus was reaching its perigee, the moment when it was closest to Earth, and it hung bright and round in the sky above Tiger Mountain. He pointed it out to Polara as Aria retrieved from their basket the four silver hand bells they’d brought along. Polara, her fear forgotten, stood to ring hers with vigor. Its bright sound joined the others, echoing off the karst peaks as the crowd began to cheer. A few people set off bright fireworks which threw sparks of color into the air around them. Ethan smiled to see Polara, born here as a true Minean, embracing the tradition.

Ethan glanced up at the bright planet and his smile disappeared. A dark smudge appeared and traveled directly across the face of Lucidus. Others had seen it too. The crowd sunk into an uneasy stillness, choking the clamor of the Lucidus bells. Uneasy murmurs arose at the sight of the opaque spot streaking smoothly across the planet.

Ethan felt a surge of fear, an old apprehension.

“It’s just an orbital defense sphere,” someone said, as the spot dropped off the crisp edge of the planet and the bells began again.

It could be one of the orbital defense spheres. Ethan tried to let that make him feel better.

***

Admiral Phillip Reagan paced in his temporary office in Lumina. His windows were open and the office smelled of mud and greenery: spring. It was his fourth Minean spring since they had made him Admiral of the Minean fleet. He’d been promoted after he arrived, when news had broken that he had disagreed with selling Ship 12-22 to the Others of Beta Alora, and now he got to oversee the ships and command the fleet. Well, train the fleet. There hadn’t been much commanding necessary in the ever-peaceful skies of Minea.

But something troubling had been seen in those skies this morning. He shouldn’t even be here today; the day of the Lucidus festival was a UEG holiday. But something unusual had been spotted, and he wasn’t going back to the barracks until he got some answers.

Until then, he was listening to the guitar riffs of an old Earth band. He was glad that he’d had the Caretaker’s drive, full of old Earth music and movies, downloaded from the ship on which he’d arrived before it was scrubbed and repurposed. Now, the thumping bass rhythm provided just enough distraction to keep Reagan’s thoughts from running away with all the possibilities of what that spot in front of Lucidus could have been.

He had seen it, a shadow on the bright circle that was the planet, at the height of the Lucidus festival this morning. It showed up and moved across just as the bells rang in the city and the cally blossoms were released from the tops of the buildings. He had seen it just for a second, and had known it wasn’t the orbital defenses as others speculated. One thing that made him fit for admiralcy here on Minea was his impeccable eye for detail. The orbitals wouldn’t have been in the right place to transit Lucidus. The spot wasn’t the right shape or size. And he’d never seen anything pass in front of the planet at perigee.

“You seem cool,” Sergeant Frank Nile surprised him.

Reagan turned down the music. “Just waiting for the analysis team.”

Nile crossed to the window. “Exciting first day down here.”

Reagan’s laugh was a little bitter. “Yeah.”

“So what’s your itinerary, Admiral? How long will you be with us here in Lumina?”

Reagan breathed in the light spring air. Everything depended on what the analysis team found. “Well, the original plan was to do all the routine defense checks here in the next two weeks. Your reviews of personnel, equipment, and procedure haven’t been done in far too long. But with this new . . . development, I may be heading to Flynn. I’ve got to make sure we’re ready for whatever happens.”

Sergeant Nile gestured toward the map of the Minean settlements on the wall. “Maybe we’ll get to try out some of our strategies, huh?” His voice was light.

Reagan stood slowly and walked to the map, laying a hand on it. His voice was stern when he said, “Sergeant, I hope you understand that the best military strategy is the one you never have to use.”

Reagan ran his fingers across the eight cities spread almost in an X across this part of the planet. He felt the weight of every settlement, of every person in each one. He lingered for a moment on the city that lay at the northwestern corner of the settlements: Coriol, where he lived with his daughter, Kaia. Lumina, the city he was in now, was at the opposite edge of the settlements diagonally: the most southwestern of the cities. Between them lay the Azure Mountains, a range of folded mountain peaks that divided the continent almost in half.

Nile was at his shoulder, and Reagan saw the man glance from the map out the window, where the peaks of the Azures fringed the sky in the distance. Reagan felt a certain comfort in seeing the mountains. The Azure range was the larger of the two major mountain ranges near the settlements. Much like the Rocky Mountains back on Earth, they had been formed by folding and faulting and they rose from the plains on either side of them to elevations over 6000 meters. The other range was the Karst Mountains out near Coriol, past the Eastern Plains. It had been formed from the dissolution of Minean blue limestone into freestanding towers. It was as dramatic as it was remote and largely unexplored. Reagan had heard that a new vein of Yynium discovered underneath it was causing quite a stir among the companies. Both ranges offered a certain amount of protection to their neighboring cities.

Nile must have been thinking the same thing. “The mountain cities will have a bit more cover than we have out here.”

Reagan nodded. “Oculys and Kantara are in the foothills and they have our best surface-to-air missiles. Minville, Sato, and New Alliance are easily defensible from the ground because they’ve each got the Azures on two sides. But the plains here in Lumina leave us a little exposed.” He considered for a moment. “I don’t worry about Flynn. It has two advantages: being surrounded by the Azures and being in the center of the settlements.”

Both men glanced at Coriol. It was the outlier. To reach it you had to cross the Eastern Plains, and it lay at the edge of the Karst Mountains, which did not have the altitude of the folded mountains, but made up for it in the sheer grandeur of its towers. They would at least offer a place for people to flee if anything happened.

Reagan found himself growing increasingly tense. Coriol looked so isolated up on the corner of the map, so vulnerable. And Kaia was there now, in their blue cottage, alone. These days away from her were hard. Reagan missed her, and he worried about her. Even after four years on the planet with her, he had still not gotten used to the fact that she was older than he was now and that she was slowing down. Reagan feared the day when he would get a call that she’d fallen or that her heart, which had been beating so long now, had stopped doing its work.

These last few years had been like his first years as a new father, when he’d found himself worrying at odd times about the myriad dangers the world posed to his new daughter. Only this time, instead of becoming more able and more independent each day, she was moving in the opposite direction, and the end of his worrying now would be very different from end of his worrying then, when he’d dropped her off for her first day of school.

Reagan shifted, feeling the jagged weight that he’d carried in his chest since the day he’d left the Treaty Cabinet Meeting on Theta Tersica a lifetime ago. It was the weight of the knowledge that he should have stopped the sale of Ship 12-22. He had voted against the plan that had sold the ship to the Others of Beta Alora, and he planted information that he had hoped David McNeal, the original Caretaker of the ship, would find. But he hadn’t fought any harder. He had instead climbed on a stasis ship himself and had done no more to stop the atrocity.

He saw now—and had seen the moment he closed his eyes in stasis, and for the next fifty-three years as he slept—that he should have sabotaged the slave ship, should have taken a battleship up and placed it between the Others and the innocents. Should have made it public. Should have stood in front of a microphone and shamed the UEG for their decision. He should have—should have done something.

But he hadn’t.

He had consoled himself with the decision’s seeming necessity and gone to sleep, expecting to awaken with all of it behind him, a blip on the otherwise bright history of humanity’s colonization.

Only it wasn’t in the past. He lived with the effects of that decision every day as he saw his daughter lose words she had once known and people she had once loved. Kaia had forgotten her mother’s name just weeks ago, and her weeping at its loss had broken Reagan’s heart.

Reagan pulled his gaze from the window.

Nile fixed him with a piercing look, and Reagan realized he’d been silent a long time.

The sergeant spoke. “Like you say, sir, I hope we won’t have to worry about defenses. But just in case, I’ll have the troops ready to show you some maneuvers this afternoon if you’d like.”

Reagan nodded. “And pull your personnel files, Sergeant. I might as well start the reviews while I wait.”

“Yes, sir.” Nile crossed to the desk and punched in some codes before leaving the office with a sharp salute to the admiral.

Reagan put a hand impatiently to his head in response, scolding himself for getting distracted. This was not the time for parental regrets. He’d spoken to Kaia on the missive an hour ago, and she was fine today.

What wasn’t fine was the strange spot that had crossed Lucidus this morning. Reagan knew what it was, even before the Anomaly Analysis Team walked into his office moments after Nile had left.

“Sir.” The team leader, Lesharo, pushed a length of his black hair behind his ear and looked Reagan in the eye. “We’ve got some answers for you.”

Reagan watched