Alone (ARK Book 2), page 1
Alone
Ark: Book 2
Joshua James
Daniel Young
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
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Prologue
Gideon Patel stared into the Emerger portal that had opened over the English Channel. All he could see was blackness. Not darkness, but total blackness: a deep nothingness.
Even though he’d seen hundreds of the alien portals at this point, their size was never easy to judge, because their relative height in the atmosphere seemed to always be shifting. But he was sure this was the largest he’d ever seen.
Something was different about this one. It sent shivers down his spine. He knew what was coming, but if this portal was as massive as he thought, what would emerge out of it would be enormous.
A planet killer. The last straw.
The end.
He looked down again at the hundreds of boats in the channel, all there to beg for a seat on the Gaea Ark.
Most didn’t want a seat for themselves. They wanted it for their loved ones. Everyone knew this day was coming. They’d all seen the meteorites getting bigger and bigger. Even if they had no idea, like Gideon, that the source was the Emergers, they instinctively knew whatever was behind this would finish the job.
None of them, including Gideon, thought that day was today.
Then again, what had his brother said?
We should be fine if you hurry.
Did Reggie know something? Did he know the end was coming today? But that was absurd, nobody could know that.
“Sir?”
One of the guards that had been shooting down at the boats a moment earlier now grabbed Gideon by the arm. His fellow guard had already disappeared into the open hatch that led down the short tunnel to the transport waiting to take them up to the Ark, high above in geosynchronous orbit.
There was a seat for Gideon. But could he take it? Could he really walk away from what he and Aion had wrought here, what they’d brought down on Earth? Perhaps it wasn’t their fault, but they’d been the ones to start it. They’d grabbed the Emergers’ attention with their Chronos project.
No, not they. Him. He’d been the one that aliens had followed back here. And nothing he could say to himself could change that.
Then he felt in his pocket for the tiny metallic data bar that his father had given him. As soon as he had it in his hand, he felt stronger. He remembered that he had a purpose, a mission, one that his father had entrusted only to him.
The guard was now barking right in Gideon’s ear. “Sir, we need to get you inside!”
Gideon nodded and started to turn when a shadow fell across the landing. He and the guard turned their faces simultaneously upward.
Gideon watched in silence as a gargantuan asteroid began to emerge from the portal.
The planet killer was here at last.
The guard’s arm went slack. He must have been as stunned as Gideon. Then he felt a wet mist on the side of his face and turned to find that the guard had all but exploded from a meteorite impact.
Gideon spun around and made a mad dash towards the hatch entrance to the Ark facilities. As he got there, he took one last glance upward.
The asteroid was all the way out of the portal. And it was close. Impossibly large and impossibly close.
Not exactly the qualities you like to see in rocks hurtling toward your planet.
Gideon felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Was it his imagination, or was there a palpable sense of static in the air, like a tiny electric current was flowing around him?
The scene in the Channel had turned even more chaotic, if that was possible. The waves were churning wildly, like the planet itself knew what was coming, and the water was rising impossibly fast.
The sky was darkening. It would all be over soon.
Gideon rushed into the tunnel entrance as the big hatch closed behind him. Would it really matter? No hatch was holding back an entire ocean of water.
All he could do was run as fast as he could.
He’d run fifty yards down the tunnel, and knew he had that distance again to get to the inner hatch, when he heard metal stressing and breaking and looked over his shoulder to see water rushing into the tunnel behind him.
His legs had never moved so quickly in his entire life. Soon, he felt water splashing up on his legs.
Behind him, the water swallowed up the lights that hung along the walls. The ground shook. The water roared behind him like a monster—intimidating, cold, and unforgiving.
Up ahead, Gideon saw two more guards urging him on to the inner hatch.
He thought he was going to make it when he was a dozen steps away and the water was only at his ankles. Then a wave rushed into him from behind. It felt like he was hit in the back with a dozen baseball bats. Suddenly he was lifted off his feet by the salty, frigid water, and was sent tumbling towards the hatch. Everything went topsy-turvy. He couldn’t tell what was up, down, left, or right. Not until he was dumped unceremoniously on the concrete floor of the gigantic hollowed-out space that had once housed the fleet of transports that made regular trips up to the Ark in space.
Many wrongly assumed that the Ark was being constructed here, directly below the space elevator that linked to the Tellford space station in geosynchronous orbit.
But few understood the scale of what was being built. The Ark had to be built in space. In fact, what the huge underground facility that people assumed held the under-construction-Ark actually held were enormous cryofreeze labs. Most people were put in cryo on Earth, then taken up to orbit via the space elevator. Now, though, they were all empty. The transports were all gone, and the cavernous space stood completely vacant.
Save for one small ship.
The hatch behind Gideon was slammed shut by the combined effort of the two guards.
Gideon stayed on his hands and knees, coughing up water, for several seconds before one of the guards helped him to his feet.
“Mr. Patel! We need to hurry!” he yelled as he pulled Gideon’s arm over his shoulder.
“They’re activating the outer shields!” yelled the other guard.
Even a space as big as this would fill up with water fast, Gideon knew. And he didn’t bet for a second that the inner hatch would hold long.
He staggered forward toward the transport that was now spooled up, seeming like it wanted to practically leap off the smooth concrete surface. The guard with him let his arm drop when it was clear that Gideon could run faster on his own.
His lungs and throat burned from all the salt water he’d ingested. His whole body ached from being flung around like a cork. But he ran.
Behind him, he once again heard metal being stressed beyond the breaking point. The hatch had failed.
Gideon could feel the cold water hit his feet as the chamber started to fill.
Ahead of him, a ramp hung down from the bottom of the transport. It was rattling against the ground as the ship hovered a few feet off the concrete.
“Go!” screamed the guard next to Gideon, as if he needed to hear it. He raced onto the ramp ahead of him, just leaping high enough to clear the lip, which was now a couple of feet off the ground.
Adrenaline carried Gideon through as he reached the ramp a moment later. He bellyflopped onto the ramp, which was now nearly waist high to stay above the rapidly rising water.
The guard grabbed him by the back of his jacket to yank him up. Gideon took one last look back before boarding.
The second guard must have stopped to secure the hatch. He was a good twenty yards away, and now swimming in the water instead of running.
“We have to swing over to get him!” Gideon screamed over the roar of the transport engines. It was already beginning to ascend.
“He’s gone,” the first guard said.
“No, we can still—”
The guard slammed the bulkhead, and the ramp began retracting into the ship. “He’s gone,” he screamed again.
The ramp completed its retraction, and a trio of lights switched from red to green around the lip. Gideon felt as much as heard the seal close.
Compared to the roaring sounds in the cavernous hanger, the silence inside the transport was shocking.
“We’re clear,” the guard said as he stood up. “Locked and pressurized.”
Gideon stayed on his hands and knees on the portion of the deck that had been the hatch. A colorful sticker informed him that nothing should be stowed here, which he took to mean that he probably shouldn’t be sitting there either.
But there was a porthole on either side of the ramp access. Through it, he could see the cavernous space they were ascending through.
And he could see the desperate guard, who’d stopped swimming and was now just staring and watching as the transport left him to die.
“Good of you to join us, Mr. Patel,” said a frosty voice behind. Gideon turned to see Reggie’s personal assistant, Maddox, standing with her arms crossed. She wore a one-piece flight suit with the old Aion Sciences logo on it, similar to the one Reggie wore.
“There was still a man down there,” Gideon said as he stood. He was soaked to the bone and shivering.
“There are a lot of men down there,” M
The transport shuddered, and Gideon turned to look back down the porthole. Rocks were knocked loose from the ceiling of the underground chamber and were splashing into the water below. The ground was fast receding.
Soon, the transport cleared the top of the hangar. Through the porthole, Gideon could see the top of the hillside where he’d just been standing a minute ago. Then, as he watched, it disappeared under waves of water. Knowing how high the cliffside was there, the waves must have been higher than city skyscrapers. The ships in the water looked like toys.
Everything began to shrink faster and faster, but perspective was impossible to determine because all he could see was water.
The asteroid must have impacted by now. The tidal waves were enormous, and they were just getting started.
“We’re going to want to get to the bridge soon,” Maddox was saying. “We’ll need to strap in before we make the push into orbit.”
Gideon just stared downward. This would be his last chance to see Earth, he realized. He was watching his world drown.
Even though he couldn’t see it, he could imagine entire cities were being swallowed up by this cosmic disaster. No one in human history had ever witnessed this. The devastation was impossible to comprehend.
“Did you hear me? Reggie wants to see—”
“It’s all gone,” Gideon blurted out.
Maddox rolled her eyes. A subordinate whispered something in her ear. She nodded and turned to go. “The atmosphere is going to hell fast,” she said over her shoulder. “You’re one lucky bastard, you know that? It’s time to ditch this dead rock.”
1
28 Day to New Earth
In the last 48 hours, Gideon had witnessed a massacre in the Slums, a riot in Founders Park, and a full-blown attack from the Emergers.
Yet none of that rattled him as much as what he was hearing now.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?”
Gideon stood in the Aion Sciences labs and refused to believe what he was hearing.
“Sorry. I don’t know what to tell you Mr. Patel. She just got up and left,” explained the nervous Aion Labs secretary who’d met him at the lab entrance.
“She was dead. Hell, she was deformed. There’s no way she got up and went anywhere. That’s just ludicrous.”
Gideon couldn’t believe he was having this discussion. Somehow, he was supposed to believe that the deformed corpse that had been found outside the engine rooms just a day earlier—a deformed corpse that he’d seen personally—had apparently gotten up and left the lab nearly twelve hours ago. This was news he’d just learned ten minutes ago.
“I’m sorry—”
“And how is it I’m just finding out about this now?”
“We’re looking into that.”
Gideon was almost speechless. A dead body came back to life and moseyed out of an autopsy room in a lab that was staffed around-the-clock, and nobody noticed a damn thing for half a day?
“Anybody got a guess on where the hell it went?”
The secretary led Gideon through room after room of scientists testing chemicals, building machines, demoing tech, and diligently researching floating holographic hard-light scientific company archives. It was an impressive sight, or would have been if he wasn’t dealing with an impossible situation.
“Again, I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t know. The autopsy labs are right down here.” The secretary escorted Gideon down a wide but empty hall. It was where the surgery and implant suites were. At the end of it was the ship’s morgue, their destination.
“Mr. Patel, this is Dr. Delgado. Doctor, this is Gideon Patel, head of the Aion Security Forces.” The secretary made the introduction and then high-tailed it out of the lab, eager to be out of the spotlight.
“What happened here?” Gideon demanded.
“It might be best to show you.” Delgado rolled up her lab coat sleeves, exposing her DD. Gideon, recognizing that she wanted to share a file, did the same. A buzz confirmed the transfer.
“Bella, play uploaded file,” Gideon told his AIA.
A video file with footage captured from the autopsy lab’s security cameras began to play.
“As you can see, the video I gave you starts at the end of the last attempt we made to perform an autopsy on the Jane Doe,” explained Dr. Delgado.
“You weren’t able to identify her?”
“No, sir. We scanned for a DD and came up with nothing. We tried to take bone marrow to identify her by DNA. That didn’t work either.”
Gideon watched the footage closely. He noticed something weird. The scientists, doctors, there looked like they were trying to cut into the twisted corpse, but it seemed as if they were having far too much difficulty with the saw. So they switched to a laser, with similarly unfruitful results.
“You think the DD was removed?” Gideon had seen that sort of thing done in the Lottery levels.
“We saw no indications that she ever had one. No scars. Nothing.”
“How’s that possible? Everyone on board has a disc display.”
“Well, it doesn’t—"
“Did the bone structure suggest a spacer? Was she a stowaway?” It had been space-born terrorists that had attacked the Slums. Gideon was still trying to figure out where that incursion had originated.
Delgado shook her head. “No. Nor a hidden native birth, nor whatever else you’re thinking.”
Gideon frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“Are you looking at the footage?” Delgado looked at Gideon’s eyes. They were lit up by the holographically displayed video emanating from his DD. “Do you notice what’s happening?”
“That you can’t seem to cut into her. Why?”
“We’re not convinced that she was human,” answered Delgado.
Gideon knew how unsecure the vast majority of the Gaea Ark was. Maddox and her special services had every room of every residence on the ship bugged. He also knew that she had a habit of making people who could have knowledge that made them a problem for the company simply disappear. She’d put a bullet in the head of the last man to cough up interesting information. And he wanted answers this time.
“Not another word,” Gideon mouthed, just loud enough for Delgado to hear him. He glanced around at the half-dozen Aion employees in the room. “Out, all of you. Now.”
Seeing that he was far up the list of high-level company personnel, the others did as Gideon ordered and left the room. “Bella, activate local security protocol.”
“Done.”
That would allow his AIA to gain access to the local network. “Bella, scan for ears in the room.”
“The room’s clear, Gideon,” answered Bella after a few seconds.
“Good. Bella, turn off cameras in…” Gideon realized he didn't know what number the autopsy lab was. He turned to Delgado. “What lab number is this?”
“AU-12,” answered Delgado, a bit confused and concerned.
Gideon suspected that she was ready to cooperate and tell the head of company security what happened, but she didn't understand the need for such privacy. In other words, she didn’t know about Reggie Jr.’s bloody right hand, Maddox.
“Thank you, Doctor. Bella, turn off cameras in AU-12, cut live feeds as well.”
“Cameras off, feeds cut, Gideon.”
“Okay. Sorry about this, but sometimes, these things, sometimes erring on the side of privacy is the way to go. I’m sure you understand.”
Gideon could practically hear the questions going through her mind. Trapped in a room alone with the head of security and no cameras.
“Sure. Of course,” said Delgado as she looked around.
“Now you were saying that the body, the Jane Doe...wasn’t human?”
“We don’t believe so, at least not strictly human. All attempts that we made to insert any needles, cut into her, were actively resisted by her skin.”
“Actively resisted?” Gideon squinted as he tried to understand what he was being told.
“Enhance the video, zoom in on where we’re trying to cut.”
Gideon used his fingers to zoom in on the video, exactly where Dr. Delgado told him. He saw something odd. It looked as if the laser cutting tool the doctors were using did break the surface of the skin at first, but then it almost looked like nanites or tiny machines worked together to instantly patch up the cut. Clear as day, he could see them bouncing up and off, then covering the wound.
