Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2) Read online

  Stasis

  The Ascendants: Book Two

  by V. M. Law

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 1

  The chatter of his coworkers bustling around him bore a hole directly into his brain, which filled up with all the number, figures, anecdotes, gossip and sternly barked orders that flew around the bridge floor of the Vulcan, where he had been working for only a few weeks. He had already succeeded in isolating himself from everyone in Bridge Command and guaranteeing his transfer to a deep space monitoring facility, where he would spend the rest of his career scanning the stars for any signs of life, any asteroids, or anything else that would allow for humanity to suffer a potential set back like the one suffered at the hands of the Grasshoppers.

  It never ended.

  He rubbed his brow with his thumb and forefinger, staring at the chart before him and contrasting it with the images flashing on his screen, but the more he looked into the symbolism and the more he thought he found patterns or began to crack the code, the more he felt as if the ship were flying itself, and that none of these apes possibly possessed the intelligence to make any sense of these readouts. But still, he persisted, with his frustration mounting. He breathed heavily through his nose and tried to focus on the sound of air rushing into his lungs and back out again, but he could not help but hear the conversation of the woman who sat across from him. She had her back to his, talking on a SatCom headset to someone on Earth and telling them that the only way for her to be home for the holiday was if she had her shift covered and time off in the next two days. The only way.

  In and out, and pretend it’s the sound of surf on a beach, Caspar Faulk thought to himself, and with every inhalation, he breathed louder and more deeply, until his respiration became an audible display of his anger.

  “You should try breathing through your mouth. It’s quieter.”

  He jumped, shocked by the proximity of the voice and its strange feminine familiarity, the sense he had of knowing who spoke to him without being able to remember how or why or where. He pivoted to face his addresser, expecting to find the angry face of a disgruntled superior staring down at him from above the fancy, iron-pressed collars of a stiff-necked uniform, and being surprised to find a woman smiling back, handing him a piece of paper with the official seal of the boss, Captain Cromwell, and his, Caspar Faulk’s, name and rank.

  Official orders from Cromwell. Great. He needed Cromwell on his ass like he needed a lobotomy. Nothing to do for it though. He smiled and accepted the orders, pressing his thumb to the sigil and feeling the warmth of energy it released as it sent out a transmission to his controlling officer.

  “Thumbprint won’t be enough,” said the woman from Communications and Transmissions. “Personal acceptance only.”

  The words rang in Caspar’s ears and sent his stomach turning. This must be important. How many times since he got here had he seen a Communications officer personally deliver orders from the bridge? None.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Caspar replied with his eyes shifting from the delivery to her face. His fingers ran over the file—a file that fit in the palm of his hand but possessed the weight of a satellite revolving around his brain as he pondered the contents of its circuitry—and he slipped it into his pocket, glad of the opportunity to leave his desk and escape the infernal conversing of his work neighbor, who still blabbered and ran her mouth about who would bring what dish to their holiday party. Time was running out, she claimed. Someone needed to bring the chocolate liqueur, not to mention the Simpl-X. Not a party without that stuff.

  Her conversation faded into the myriad as the doors of the lower bridge swooshed open and gave him entrance into the higher levels, the levels where decisions were made and where the richest and most prestigious captains and guests mingled with one another. It was as if they were floating through the solar system at a cocktail party, rather than on a freighter beyond the sphere of possible assistance in the event of a tragedy and in the process of carrying out sensitive business that affected the future of their company and their shareholders’ wealth.

  Curious, he thought, I would have imagined something more—spectacular. Around him, white lights hung in midair, halfway between the vaulted ceiling and the black, reflective floor that sent out the sounds of each individual footfall as if they were strikes against the head of a drum. Everyone who walked about did so with an air of importance and superiority, and he imagined the missions they were being sent on actually commanded the importance that their postures and gaits displayed. The uniforms were nicer, as were the smells—no one in these levels slept in cramped quarters or struggled with the laundry system. They had personal units, and large rooms.

  No one met his glance as he walked through the maze of desks and tables, trying not to stick out in the throng of officers, though obviously walking in all the wrong directions, down all the wrong makeshift corridors until even the newest member of the bridge command would have recognized him as a man out of place. He snaked his way through, apologizing constantly as he made his way through the bustling crowds, and eventually mounted the steps that led to Cromwell’s office and quarters.

  Been a long time, Cromwell, he thought, though he understood that Cromwell did not remember him from their previous encounter. All the better, in his mind. The door opened for him as his finger hovered an inch away from the call button. Someone was watching. Someone was eagerly awaiting his arrival. He stepped forward into the office.

  Chapter 2

  “You are one—Caspar Faulk? Correct? New bridge adjutant transferred over from the Jovian district, widely regarded, highly skilled? Computer guy?”

  The questions—all spoken in the form of terse declamations—came like water rushing over a boulder and Caspar Faulk sat there emulating a stone giant as he tried to figure out which one to answer first. He settled with a bland “yes,” and looked from the eyes of the person who fired off the questions, Captain Cromwell, to those of his two senior officers, flanking the squat and bloated captain and towering over him like escorts from the afterlife bringing him the chamb
ers of hell. They all stared down the bridges of their noses and they all clasped their hands tightly behind their backs. Their shoulders pushed back and their chests permanently inflated, the officers and captain had hidden questions concealed in their arched brows and the sharp intonation of their voices as they continued to fire off questions regarding Caspar Faulk’s knowledge and skill in matters related to signal distortion, encryption breaking, and location pin-pointing.

  He nodded affirmatively after each question, met every gaze. Something big, if they acted like this. They practically filled their boots with the sweat from their brows, and neither of them had stopped swaying since he sat before them. They must have something. He continued to look at them with wide eyes and answered their questions in a small voice. “Yes, I can locate a signal. Yes I can crack any encryption. I’ve written most of the them. Yes, I can be trusted. No I won’t tell a soul,” and the entire time, the eyes of Cromwell sized him up, peeled away the layers of his mental defenses until Faulk began to think that maybe the man had more in him than his dinner from the night before.

  “Good,” Cromwell responded. A brief silence fell, in which the three officers shared silent looks and congregated with their backs to Caspar, whispering behind their hands and shooting glances over their shoulders at him, as if he would sprint away from their grasp at the first moment he could. As if he had anywhere to run, anyway.

  “Corporal Caspar Faulk,” the captain began, “we are going to entrust to you a secret mission, a calling that is more important than any of your other duties and is entirely separate from said duties. A mission that is sensitive and requires secrecy, and is vital to the survival of MarsForm. Do you understand?”

  Pulling at his collar and pushing his knees together until he seemed as small as he possibly could, Caspar Faulk answered that, yes, he did understand.

  “We have located a signal in the Plutonian Gravity Field. It is not just any signal.”

  The words hung in the stillness and Caspar tried to resist scooting to the edge of his seat in anticipation of the news. The long awaited news. Could this be it?

  Cromwell continued. “The signal—we believe—is originating from an escape pod, and, secretly, is the reason for us being sent out this far. We are not here to monitor the movement of large objects in the Kuiper Belt, but to find this damned signal and recover whatever is sending it out. Do you understand?”

  Again, Caspar nodded in silence. Behind his stolid demeanor and his professionally disinterested gaze, his brain rushed from one possibility to another.

  “This signal, this escape pod. It’s very far from any of the nearest flight object’s recent trajectories, and its orbital pathways are inconsistent with any authorized flights. As such, we must investigate. And you must locate that signal.” Captain Cromwell placed both his hands on the table that Caspar Faulk sat at, and in the moment when he issued his final directive, his voice sank to a depth that belied his cunning, his mastery of war and the human psyche. He finished speaking, but held his head in the same place. Caspar affected a tremble, a minute flair of his nostrils and a waver of the his voice as he replied simply, “Yes, sir.”

  After a moment elapsed, stretching itself out in Caspar’s imagination until he felt as if he would never escape the captain’s dimly lit cabin, the spell broke and Captain Cromwell pulled away from Caspar’s face, dismissing the technician’s adjutant back to the floor of the bridge with a quiet reminder to remember his real mission, to remember his secrecy. Consequences for the crew’s morale could be dire if the situation were handled improperly.

  Chapter 3

  The only light reaching his eyes came from the computer screen he hung his face in front of. As the lines of coded information flashed through his brain and he continued to mark them, to catalog them, to run them through this program or that one in an attempt to decipher the meaning of the pixels he stared at for hours, he stifled a yawn and a thought about whether or not he would ever sleep again. Must continue. So close. Hours after the last coworker cleared out, and he had the location of the escape pod—exact coordinates, thank you very much. In short order he would figure out its origin. Just. One. More. Line.

  But his eyes felt like they were submerged in rubbing alcohol and his fingers ached with the tense pain of over-activity that bent his hands into hideous claws and sent the joints crackling every time he fully extended his fingers. His thoughts bounded from one subject to the next, returning to the same place after a few minutes. The martyr. The escape pod. The stories. He had been dispatched to the Vulcan with the charge of searching for the escape pod, and he scoffed at his orders, figured them to be nothing but ill-founded attempts to solidify the newly growing resistance. Secretly, he assumed his new mission had been assigned to him in retribution for some ill he caused to a fellow member, some long-forgotten feud that finally came back to affect him now, when he needed to be back on Earth more than ever.

  But what was he to do? Disobey? That was hardly an option. That left him with his only choice: obeying. Boarding the Vulcan. Going.

  And now he sat in the last hours of the night, when the sirens would be waking up the crew in short order, still working on a secret mission issued by his captain that might prove to be the key that his other bosses were searching for.

  And the answer lingered so close, just out of reach. One more line of coded information to process, but he could find no indication of what type of encryption concealed its meaning, nor the pathways that would allow him to side step that encryption in the first place. He was lost. Stumped.

  Throwing his back against the support of his chair and rolling into the open floor, he looked up at the ceiling of the bridge floor and groaned and ran his fingers through his hair, wishing for a few hours sleep and knowing that he would not receive it.

  A beeping tone—low in volume, high in pitch and frequency—reached his ears, and when he looked at the computer screen, he saw the program running at maximum capacity and he saw the flashing green button that appeared on his touch screen and reflected light off of his red and strained eyes.

  The last line. The piece of the puzzle that would give him the origin of the escape pod.

  He stared for a moment in disbelief at the screen, unable to fathom the completion of his work nor the information that would be revealed when he pressed his forefinger against the screen and opened the file that would have the identification number of the craft in it, the identification number that could be traced through the Terran Council’s database and the company’s register and the manifests of the smaller companies that first began reaching out their tendrils into the solar system and the galaxy beyond in the wake of the Fall of the Ides.

  Wide eyed and deliriously tired, he reached his finger out and paused for a moment before opening the file. This information could change everything. His days would immediately change and he would be torn between decisions that he hadn’t the time to make yet. He felt fear, more acutely than anything else.

  With a quick jabbing motion in the darkness of the empty bridge, he opened the file, wincing as he did so and slowly opening his eyes so that he would be able to read the code. When he did, he saw that the escape pod, the origin of the signal coming from the impassable regions of the Plutonian Gravity Field, was, undeniably, an escape pod of the Morrow.

  He knew this, because upon reading the code and tracing through his databases and files and manifests, he found nothing. A fake code, or an erased code, and in reality, they amounted to the same thing. An escape pod coming from the Plutonian Gravity Field with an unregistered identification code would only possibly come from one place, and one did not need to be a computer genius to figure out the mystery.

  He threw cautious and concerned glances over his shoulders, plying the room’s dark corners for a shadow, a silhouetted figure cloaked in obscurity and silence. He listened for the tell tale footfalls scurrying away that signal the presence of spies and his own personal doom.

  Alone, at least he thought. One
can never be too sure.

  He closed out his encryption programs and indexes and ledgers, leaving no visible trace behind that would allow an interloper to figure out what he worked in the darkness of night, in the solitude of an empty bridge. Leaving the bridge floor himself, he walked quietly from his desk and went to his quarters, his mind racing and his heart pounding in his chest as he sped past his door without stopping and walked on, trying not to betray his impatience, nor appear too giddy on the security monitors that would doubtlessly be recording his every movement, at every moment.

  Chapter 4

  His wandering feet brought him to the galley, on the lower decks, where janitors and kitchen staff and maintenance people drank their paychecks away and fought and frolicked and gambled. Where the stories of space-bound human appreciation for debauchery originated, and where every eye followed a technician—let alone a bridge adjutant—who strayed through the halls of the ship’s lowest decks with malice and ill design. He sat at a table alone, next to a panoramic window that gave diners a view of the solar system, black and vacuous.

  So far, he thought, so far we have come, to be still fighting over a hunk of meat. Though here I sit…

  Rummaging through his satchel, he recovered from the clutter of pens and pocket size mechanical tools a SatCom, old and broken, with a cracked screen and a bad picture, fuzzy quality and warbly noises that issued from its speaker when someone spoke too loudly.

  He pulled the antennae out from their holes within the mechanism, and began waving the device around in the air, searching for the signal power to transmit a short message to his handler almost a million miles away, in one of the Monoliths, the Jovian Monolith, that orbited the gas giant incessantly, like a planet itself. “Come on,” he thought, smacking the heel of his hand against the unit and shaking it in frustration as he found no signal at all. “Work, damn you.”