Nathan Hystad - The Survivors - Books 1-3

“Oh, I don’t control much, but I facilitate our leaders, and it’s been working well so far. Please, come in.” She had a slight accent; probably grew up in a South African private school.

The building was squat and square, most likely built just for this type of off-the-radar clandestine meeting. The inside was plain, a large room with what appeared to be a couple of offices and bunk rooms at the far end, washrooms to the right.

“Can we get you anything?” she asked, glancing at Mary’s ears.

I pointed up. “Chen took good care of us up there.”

“Of course. General Chen is nothing but the best we have. He takes great pride in that station, and I don’t blame him.” She stood straight, poised.

“You wanted to see us?” Mary asked.

“Yes. You’re heroes, and Heart sent you away on some mission seven years ago. Everyone on this planet wanted to know what happened to you, and here you are. It’s a miracle.”

“Look, if you need us to do a press conference or something, I think we’re done with that sort of thing,” I said.

She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Don’t be silly. We just want to know what happened to you.”

“Apparently, flying through wormholes that take you thousands of light years away causes some time loss. Who’d have known?” I tried to laugh it off, but her face took a serious tone. “All this time, and no word from these Bhlat, huh? Thank God, because they look like some bad dudes.”

This got her attention. “Look?”

“Yeah, they’re huge. Big square ships, thick body armor.” I puffed up my chest in a display of size, and Slate grinned at me.

Her eyes moved to my chest. “No, we haven’t had word from them.”

“Really? That’s not what Chen tells me.”

She gave it away right then. My instincts paid off. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If they’ve contacted us, I know nothing of it.”

But guards were already coming into the room, pulse rifles held up to their chests.

“Don’t make a deal with them. They’re not friendly. We have a drive with information from an outpost database. They’ve mined over one hundred planets, on sixty-three of which they either enslaved or killed entire races. The Kraski were one of the smarter ones, and they got away before the big fight.” We’d learned a lot, since we’d told Chen a mostly made-up story of our trip.

“Never mind. Give me the drive, and give me that,” she said, pointing to my pocket. If she knew what it was, she had been speaking to them for sure, but how had that information made its way to her already? Unless they had some schematics of a similar weapon on one of the few Deltra ships, or from a turned hybrid. In my mind’s eye, I saw someone with Bob’s face hanging from chains on a wall as the details were ripped from him at the same time as his skin.

The guards were getting closer, and we backed away. “We aren’t here to cause any trouble. Just hear us out. You can’t negotiate with them. The facts are there.”

“Do you think I got to be the president of Earth by being stupid? I’ll make the decision that is best for myself, and for humanity, and if that means cutting a deal with an alien race, then so be it.”

“Fine, here it is.” I tossed the device at her, and she let it slip from her fingers, the metal circle clanging to the floor.

I tapped my earpiece as the guards raised their rifles. “Clare, now!” I called, and the building shook as our ship hovered over it. Green beams entered the building, lifting the five guards and Naidoo. As Clare flew the ship away, they lifted in the beam, and I saw the guard in the tower looking on in confusion as we ran outside. He didn’t know what to do and knew his firing at the ship would be fruitless.

“Dropping them,” Clare said in my earpiece. Half a mile away, we saw the beam turn off, and the ship rushed back to us. The ramp was lowering even before the ship stopped, and we jumped the three feet up onto the metal grate, letting it shut once all four of us were inside.

“What a rush!” Nick said.

“I would have preferred to overthrow that woman,” Slate said matter-of-factly.

“This isn’t our world any longer,” I said, feeling it through and through.

“Were they going to kill us?” Nick asked.

I didn’t know, but the chances were high. Naidoo might have even used us as bargaining chips in her negotiation.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, guys, but we can’t stay here.” Mary walked the closed ramp, and into the storage area.

We made our way to the bridge, where Clare greeted us with a big smile. “Oh my God, that was exciting!”

“More like terrifying. We could have died. It was awesome.” Nick was turning into a regular adrenaline junkie.

I flipped the viewscreen to show behind us as we raced away through the atmosphere and kept going. No ships followed us that we could see, and I flipped on the cloaking from the console. “Slate, thank God you knew about that jamming signal unit in our supplies.” I checked and found the real Deltra device where I’d left it on the bridge. The one I’d left down there was comprised of spare parts from the engineering room,

“Yeah, should be a while before they realize why their radio communication isn’t working,” he laughed.

We bristled with hope and energy, but quickly grew sober at the ramifications. Earth housed just under two billion people, and they were all under a direct threat now.

“What are we going to do?” Clare asked, the jovial moment over.

“We go home,” Mary said, holding my hand, “to our new world.”

“Set course for New Spero,” I said. We’d survived another day.

Copyright © 2018 Nathan Hystad

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover art: Tom Edwards Design

Edited by: Scarlett R Algee

Proofed and Formatted by: BZ Hercules

T he familiar hum of the FTL drive stopped as Mary pulled us out of hyperdrive. I was mentally prepared, but after traveling across our system toward Proxima for the last two months, the smallest noise difference caught me off-guard.

“Scan the area,” I said, and Slate went to work on his console, looking for anything that would show up on our sensors. We’d elected to pull up short of the colony planet, in case there were any surprises waiting for us. If the Bhlat were there, or some other complication cropped up, we wanted to be aware of it before we were detected. “Stay cloaked.”

We were at least six hours away, at our in-system speed: a stroll into our new home to get our bearings of the area.

“Slate, you’re telling us that all the press about Proxima b being inhabitable was a lie?” Clare asked once again.

The big man nodded. “General Heart said it was a backup plan. We had probes sent to all the corners of space we could.”