The Disappeared: A Space Opera Adventure Series (The New Dawn Book 1) Read online

  2

  Three weeks later…

  Illuminated by the Geodome Lumination Operator, or GLO, the Main City plaza was abuzz with morning activity—citizens queuing up for a chance to purchase what limited household goods and supplies were available. The lines spanned and looped the hundred-yard long plaza, which was coated with grass that, despite a myriad of genetic enhancements, still struggled to survive amidst the foot traffic. Cafeterias and government buildings lined the sides of the green, and the four major roads that crossed the Dome like a star met at the perimeter. The eight fruit trees that had been planted at the head of each street sagged under the weight of climbing berries. In the center of the Plaza were a recently revitalized garden and a few park benches. The Terranan flag was permanently affixed on a mast in the center of the Plaza, captured in its own spotlight, held outright by stiff wires to mimic the effect of wind. The flag was deep blue with silver threads woven in so that it looked like the ocean. Forest green stars with white centers formed a three-point star, representing the four Terranan Domes and the tunnel colonies they were built above. Despite the fact that the buildings had lost their Aquia-inspired colors during the Revolution, the flag remained the same.

  The governor’s office had a large window facing the Plaza and the Terranan flag, but Deivon Parker, the governor’s lieutenant, preferred to keep the curtain closed on that view. The office was a symphony of Aquian and Terranan opulence, mixing planet-based marble with moon-glass chandeliers. Parker’s desk was built from trees grown on Aquia, but carved with images of Terranan spirits. His chair was molded specifically to his body form from a moon-slate slab, cushioned with plush fibers from Terranan plants. Parker scrolled through the most recent flood of messages on his new, polished handheld virtual network projection device, or Virp. The obsidian-plated device was no larger than a button, but the projection hologram displayed his messages at any magnification he desired, invisible to others unless he opted to share the viewing angle.

  Parker fingered the device, admiring the beauty, ignoring the myriad of messages awaiting him. It always amazed him what his underlings considered important enough for his consideration. He was trying to run Terrana, for pity’s sake!

  “Sir.”

  General Miguel Santos, Parker’s right-hand man and Head of the Terranan Guard, interrupted his thoughts quietly, though not timidly. Santos was tall, thickly muscled, and the strongest native-born whom Parker had ever known. As soon as gravity therapies had become available on Terrana, Santos had jumped into training with the goal of standing firm against the most intimidating Aquia-borns who threatened their power.

  “Busy.” Parker flicked an imaginary scrap of lint off his tailored, black suit and resisted the urge to shrug off the jacket. He hated the long-sleeve, no-glove style, but he had the means to acquire new clothing, and he flaunted it.

  “That list you keep of the Disappeared,” Santos continued, unfazed by the dismissal. “I have an update, but I don’t have access to the file.”

  “Message me the name. I’ll update the list,” Parker sighed. Santos was nearly out the door before Parker realized what had transpired. “Someone new Disappeared? When? Did you witness this?”

  “Two nights ago, a Disappeared resurfaced,” Santos replied.

  Parker’s eyes widened. “But dead, correct?”

  “Not sure yet,” Santos replied, calling up an image of a bloody handprint smeared on the Dome wall and projecting it to Parker’s desk. “Forensics ran the prints through the database for all citizens living on Terrana. No match.”

  “Maybe someone born in the tunnels,” Parker surmised. His skin felt cold.

  “Until now, the girl had been presumed dead, but she’s also on your Disappeared list. Amanda Gray,” he said, switching the image to a different file, calling up an image of a girl in her late teens.

  “Who is she?” Parker asked. She seemed too young to offer more than tacit support to the Patriot agenda, but as an Aquia-born, she was more likely to side with that party. The Patriots had lost the Revolution from both ends: they wanted Terrana to remain a territory of Quin on Aquia, but Quin didn’t want the trouble.

  “A Patriot demonstration turned riot, a little over a decade ago. She was brought in with fifty others during a mass arrest. She probably would’ve gotten off, but for the bomb. One dead, seventeen injured, including General Solvere.”

  Parker cringed, remembering the blast, and the fear that had come with knowing his lover was at the center of it. “Diana—General Solvere was thrown clear of the blast. Barely had a bruise on her.”

  “But she was never the same after that. Mentally,” Santos allowed, dropping his voice and stepping closer to Parker’s desk.

  Parker shook his head. “Her hunt for the Disappeared began long before that.”

  “We all hunt. It was her obsession that became her undoing. It began that day—the day Gray Disappeared,” Santos pointed out.

  “Diana was always convinced she’d find a body,” Parker choked, setting down his Virp, unconsciously rolling up his long sleeves.

  “If I find a body, do I have permission to tell her?” Santos asked.

  “Parker!” Governor Cheoff hollered, entering the room abruptly, as was his habit. He’d already shed his formal jacket, and was wearing a sleeveless, gray shirt and gloves that barely reached his elbows. “Our sun is failing!”

  Parker gave Santos a quick wave of dismissal, then fixed his jacket sleeves and donned a mask of professionalism. Cheoff circled behind his desk and pulling back the curtains to let in the day-GLO. Parker squinted and turned his eyes away from the Terranan flag.

  “Bad crops. Bad crops everywhere!” Cheoff ranted. He was a short, stocky man with tiny gray eyes that he blinked far too often. His skin was pale, like all the native-born, and had a reddish tint to it. “It’s bad enough that we import water and air, but now we can’t even grow food.”

  “GLO has been setting twenty minutes early for over a month, and they think the UV light is damaged,” Parker explained. He’d skimmed the message from GLO Control, and decided to let the technicians handle it. “We can live on half of what we produce.”

  “And we export the other half. We trade it for air!” Cheoff harrumphed, plopping into his chair, activating five different viewers, calling up statistics, schedules, and specifications. “Given the current state of the crops, they’ve been on narrowband for weeks,” Cheoff read. GLO normally operated on wavelengths from infrared to ultraviolet, for the sake of plant life.

  “Exports will pick up, once we perfect manufacturing of gravity sources,” Parker tried.

  “Commodities,” Cheoff barked. “We’re exchanging commodities for necessities.”

  “Self-sufficiency does not mean the end of trade,” Parker lectured, circling behind Cheoff, turning his chair to face his precious flag. “It means the right and freedom to govern our world without Aquia’s interference.”

  “Elysians have learned the art of self-sufficiency.” Cheoff muttered. “They don’t take our food or water, and yet they live under the surface. It is only a matter before we access the resources that keep them alive.”

  “Elysians are a myth, sir. They are self-sufficient because they aren’t human,” Parker laughed, reaching past Cheoff, closing one document after the other until the tension behind Cheoff’s eyes lessened.

  “That’s the myth. The notion that humans have interbred with aliens. Elysians are just humans who were afraid to come to the surface,” Cheoff laughed, scratching his head. “You need to go to the Agriculture Center and figure out how much we’ve lost.”

  “I have a meeting first,” Parker began, his eyes narrowing. “Won’t be twenty minutes.”

  “We need a committee,” Cheoff said, his voice muffled when he buried his face in his hands. “A brain trust that can figure out our economic future.”

  “You said that last week,” Parker said, slipping his Virp into his breast pocket. “And so I formed a committee. They’re meeting tomorrow afternoon. It’s on your calendar.”

  “Do I need to attend?” Cheoff asked.

  “They have your directive.”

  “This moon would fall apart without you, Deivon,” Cheoff sighed. “You shouldn’t have turned down the nomination for governor.”

  “I didn’t want ‘avoid assassination’ to become part of my daily routine,” Parker smirked.

  “It’s tapered off a lot,” Cheoff smiled, calling up a new batch of messages. He was a terrible leader, but he was a perfect figure-head, caught in the delusion that he, not Parker, ran the moon. But if the Disappeared returned, even one, then Parker’s plans to maintain power would unravel.

  Diana Solvere, the former Head of the Terranan Guard, reclined on her couch and stared at the virtual tapestry on the wall behind her. It was a Terranan relic, almost as old as the colony, depicting the lore of the lunar settlement, the discovery of the moon-slate alloy, and the rising of the Domes. Terrana was a captured moon, its minerals not found anywhere else in the solar system.

  “How long since you’ve left the house?” Yiska Zehavi asked. She was a bubbly, young psychiatry student, on a mission of salvation. The only thing keeping Diana from throttling the girl was threat of the 5—Terrana’s prison colony.

  “Why do I need to leave?” Diana murmured, raising a hand to stop the motion of the tapestry. She liked watching the lunar surface explode as the machines stripped off the top layer of sediment to expose the moon-slate.

  “As a condition of your release,” Yiska reminded her sagely, clasping her hands behind her back to keep from fidgeting with her wavy, black hair. “You show up to therapy, or you go to prison for illegally using government resources to hunt the Disappeared.”

  “Then why are you here a
nd not the Guard?” Diana sneered.

  “We’ve made so much progress the last few sessions. I wanted to check on you before I dismissed that,” Yiska insisted, sitting on the edge of the red couch by Diana’s feet. “Are you afraid to leave the house?”

  The front door chimed, saving Diana from mustering an answer. “It’s early for food service,” she commented.

  “Food service is for the elderly!” Yiska preached, hands flying to her hips.

  “And infirmed,” Diana commented, opening the door, slouching in disappointment when she saw General Miguel Santos standing on the other side without so much as a pastry to offer her. She hated that he came to visit her. Hated that he still considered her a mentor. He did not have the hard edge needed to crush the spirits of men, and he had proven that to the worlds the day his son was born. “What do you want?”

  “General Santos!” Yiska exclaimed. “The Colonel and I moved our session here. She has met conditions of her release—”

  “At ease, doctor,” Santos said, smiling congenially. He knew full well the girl wasn’t a doctor, but referring to her by that title won him her trust. “I’m only here to speak to the Colonel.”

  “Don’t call me Colonel,” Diana spat, slamming the door in his face. She was humiliated by the demotion, even more than the forced retirement and mandatory therapy.

  “Solvere!” Santos called, catching the door, forcing his way in. His bark was backed up by an equally vicious bite; she knew from experience. It had once been her bark and her bite. Santos was her protégé, and he’d replaced her when her usefulness to Parker had worn out.

  “Perhaps this isn’t the time for guests, General,” Yiska suggested.

  “Shoes,” Diana ordered, turning her nose up.

  Santos hit the release and stepped out of his boots, despite the fact that it violated military protocol, only further confirming that he viewed this visit as social. He alternated between clasping his hands behind his back, crossing them across his chest, and pinching his lips between his fingernails (his way of biting his nails without biting them). The last ten years had aged him twenty—either from work or child-rearing. His silver-streaked, black hair was neatly combed to one side, curling just slightly over his ear.

  “Colonel—um, General—is there a place we could speak privately?” he stammered.

  Diana smirked, looking the younger man up and down. “Yiska, look out!”

  The girl crouched, covering her head, and when nothing happened, she looked back at Diana, confused. Diana grabbed Santos’ sidearm and shot her. She checked the setting on the stunner, not surprised to find it on the lowest level.

  “You have three minutes,” she said, handing the curved, silver stunner back to Santos. “Go.”

  Santos frowned, snatching his weapon, keeping the finger-sized device in his hand and stepping out of her reach. “We could have stepped outside,” he groused. “She could have—”

  “Two minutes, fifty,” Diana warned. Yiska was already moaning, fighting her way back to awareness.

  “Amanda Gray. Does the name sound familiar?” Santos asked, his haughty look saying the trigger was intentional.

  Diana’s blood ran cold. She opened her mouth to speak, but there was no air in her lungs, and any witty retort was drowned in the anger that name stirred.

  “We found evidence that the girl is still alive,” Santos continued, raising his Virp, calling up a picture of a bloodied handprint. “I thought I should warn you. We don’t know why she’s resurfaced. She may come after you.”

  “You came because you know I will find her, I will kill her, and you don’t want to get your hands dirty,” Diana growled, transferring the forensic file to her own device.

  There was the flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Don’t kill,” he begged. “She belongs in the 5. Just find her.”

  3

  Diana left her house in the 2, going into the world for the third day running. Her therapist would have been proud, although now she was more often petrified during their sessions. After Santos’ tease, she couldn’t resist. She started noticing the blood on the walls, new handprints appearing at twilight. Diana waited on the rooftop, scanning the border where Aquia was most prominent on the horizon. She let out a breath of relief as the day-GLO dimmed, and when she inhaled again, she smelled the fresh blood.

  “There you are,” she whispered, her gloat fading when she saw a diseased guttersnipe press her bloodied hand to the Dome wall. No strength. No fight. Growling in disdain, Diana hopped down to street level, using the railings of balconies to slow her fall. In the lunar gravity, the residential row houses were the limit of what could be easily scaled by a native. Hurrying to intercept, Diana grabbed the frail woman’s arm, wincing at the feel of bone beneath the skin.

  “Is this message for me,” Diana seethed, spinning the woman around to get a look at her face. The woman’s skin was spotted with infection, shriveled and hanging from the skull. She smelled like she had crawled from the grave just to taunt Diana.

  “I know your face,” she said. Her voice was raspy, her words slurred.

  “I know yours.” Diana’s breath hitched. Her hand fumbled for her stunner, her mind spinning at the thought of a decade-long search ending so abruptly.

  “Friendly?” the woman asked. Her breath reeked of cheap wine.

  “No.”

  The woman wriggled free of Diana’s slack grip and scampered away. Stunned, Diana looked at her hand, as though the limb had betrayed her. Diana followed the woman at a distance, but her prey ducked into a fenced garden and disappeared. Diana searched around the tree that the fence protected, and she looked up to the branches, but there was no sign of the girl. There was a window open on the first floor, and a smear of blood on the sill. She had the woman. The face. And the handprint.

  She called Santos. “General, I’ve found you a body.”

  Amanda slithered across the roof-top, too weak to walk, but too agitated to lie still. She smacked her stolen fruit with a rock, softening it so that she could eat with her rotted teeth. It was getting harder to remember anything besides the overwhelming pangs of hunger.

  Her right hand was scabbed over, and she couldn’t remember why. The edge of the scab was green and black and it hurt to close her fingers around the rock. She drank wine to dull the pain, but after so many days, the wine started to taste and smell like vinegar. Ever since she’d come to the surface, the people she encountered floated past like ghosts, but today, someone spoke to her. Someone had triggered a memory. The person was not warm like she remembered people being.

  The air shifted and warmed and the rock disappeared.

  “Galen?” Amanda called, expecting the golden caverns of Elysia. The ground softened beneath her, and her mother tucked a pillow under her head. “Mom,” she smiled.

  “I wish you would stop cutting yourself,” her mother nagged. She had a thick Lanvarian accent. Both she and Amanda’s father were from Aquia. They had those stocky builds and compacted frames that came from heavy gravity. Amanda’s mother took her hand and ran a knitter over the cut, sealing the wound. She was a nurse. Amanda wanted to see her face, but she couldn’t remember what it looked like yet.

  “It was the only way to find you,” Amanda panted. The stolen wine bottles were made of moon-spun glass that was so strong, it had taken Amanda days to break. She’d used the jagged edge to slice her hand and summon Galen—the keeper of the Disappeared.

  “I’m not the only one who has found you,” her mother warned, lifting Amanda’s chin, healing as much damage as she could.

  “Is dad here? Did we make it to Aquia?” Amanda asked. Her body felt heavy and the light changed again, the golden glow of sunshine coming through a window, warming her bed.

  “We can be.”

  “Galen—”

  “Don’t say his name.” She pressed her warm, soft fingers to Amanda’s lips, and Amanda wilted in relief. There was no pain in her jaw, and for a moment, she considered staying in Galen’s dream forever. Galen was supposed to come for her when she was hurt, and this was the form he chose.

  “The others let me bring you to the surface to find help, but I’m not supposed to be here,” Galen continued in her mother’s voice, tucking a blanket around Amanda’s shoulders.