Read The Retreat (The After Trilogy Book 1) Online
Authors: Kelly St. Clare
The Retreat (The After Trilogy Book 1)
THE RETREAT
- The After Trilogy, Book I -
Kelly St. Clare
Copyright 2016 by Kelly St. Clare
First Published: 30th August 2016
Publisher: Kelly St. Clare
The right of Kelly St Clare to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
To following your dreams, even if they are a world away.
I slid my foot farther over the science fiction threshold for this novel, a little dubious about just how much research it was going to require. To my surprise, I’ve loved every second of it—learning about space, global warming, even the physics. My high-school teachers would fall down dead if they knew.
But my study could only take me so far before I required the help of people significantly more intelligent than myself. To Declan, who corrected my use of inertia, and to Bianca and Anna, my environmental scientists, a large high-five for the lot of you. Thank you for taking the time to give The Retreat a touch of authenticity. My beta readers: Barbara, Michelle, Hayley, and Kayla. You are all authors I respect, and it was an honour to have your feedback on this novel. I can assure you, the snakes are now venomous, not poisonous.
The polish-and-shine crew has been just as amazing in this series.
To Tracey at Soxsational Cover Art for the gorgeous cover. To Robin for her copy-editing skills. And to Melissa Scott, my content editor, who does a fabulous job taking out my italicised and capitalised words that I always try to sneak in.
I would like specifically mention my friends and family, who have accepted my absence from many social gatherings. For my readers who are familiar with The Tainted Accords, you’ll know I’ve written this book and the fourth in my other series at the same time. The support and understanding from you all during my Octopus Author phase was noted. And much appreciated. Pizza’s on me!
To my husband, Scott. I doubt anyone will ever know how much you ground me, providing the utmost support with your unwavering presence. We’ve been married for a year now and so far I haven’t regretted it.
My readers—you’re a gorgeous lot. The release of this book marks the two-year anniversary of the first moment I sat down to pen
Fantasy of Frost
. It amazes me that so much time has flown by. I can close my eyes and remember releasing my debut novel as though it were yesterday. Your messages never fail to put a big ol’ smile on my face. And I truly enjoy getting to know you through social media.
Happy reading,
Kelly St. Clare
Table of Contents
The first genetically enhanced humans were cultivated, and the original four thousand left Earth in the year 2050, in what is historically known as
The Retreat.
H
ad they really just been celebrating mere minutes ago? Romy heard the cries of her knot as they were battered relentlessly.
She was going to die. Her knot was going to die.
Metal screeched and the heat was intense as their craft continued to burn. She could feel the heat even through the padding of her suit. Romy pushed back, gripping her harness tightly as she turned her head away from the scorching fire outside.
The keening of buckling alloy was unbearable, overriding all except the peeling heat. Romy was going to melt alive. Eyes streaming, she squinted through the tiniest of gaps in the flames.
Earth.
Her breath caught as she saw it, truly saw it for the first time. How beautiful their world was. The swirl of blues and greens.
All of this could have been theirs, in time.
The battler let out a splintered scream and all the air was crushed from her as she was hurled to one side. A network of cracks splintered the visor of her helmet with the immense pressure. Her head throbbed, a sharpness stinging at her right temple.
Black edged her vision. Where were the others?
Romy was at the mercy of the descent with no idea of up or down. Her world was blistering pain; her orientation shredded, her calm obliterated. Tears streamed from her eyes until what remained of her sight was blurred beyond use.
Soon it would be over.
“
W
e’re on Debris.”
Romy looked up from her nano to meet the ever-cheerful face of Thrym, one of her knot mates. His finger was pointing, a bit unnecessarily, out the window, at outer space.
Unobtainable Earth was a bright beacon of blues and greens in the distance. That wasn’t what Thrym was talking about, however. He was referring to the debris littering the area where their space station coasted in Earth’s orbit.
“
Really
. Again? We were on it two days ago.” Elara threw herself back onto the narrow white bunk, one of five beds in the bare white unit.
Five bunks for the five members of their team. The room possessed all essentials, few inessentials, and was identical to the hundred other units on board which housed the other teams.
“Yes, really,” he replied. “Last night’s battle left a whole heap of junk. It’s clean or collide.”
Romy knew about the small skirmish with the Critamal that Thrym spoke of. Unfortunately, it only took one exploding spacecraft to provide Knot 27 with days of clean-up. And because all space stations sat right where the debris liked to gather, four hundred kilometres above Earth’s sea level, Thrym was right: it was clean or collide.
Elara sat up, slouching dramatically. Her brown hair was short and choppy, and a few adorable freckles dotted her nose. Soft hazel eyes blazed from her delicately featured face. “I know, but can’t someone else do it?” She snapped . . . the delicate part was misleading.
The pixie-like girl was the laziest person Romy knew. Elara must be what humans were like 150 years ago. Ironic, considering the space soldier’s genetic engineering was supposed to eliminate faults such as fear, idleness, and curiosity. Somehow the scientists must have screwed it up in Elara’s case because she possessed laziness in copious amounts.
Thrym glanced Romy’s way, his blue eyes dancing from beneath his professional mask. If Romy didn’t know to look, his amusement would’ve passed unseen.
“ETA for the first of it to arrive is thirty-four minutes. We need to move,” he said.
“I’ll alert Deimos and Phobos,” Romy replied.
She lifted her wristwatch and pushed the square button on the side three times. Scrolling through the locations stored on the device, Romy selected “Earth Dock” to send an urgent alert to the entire team to gather there. Elara and Thrym silenced their own beeping devices without looking.
Wordlessly, the three began preparations.
Romy tied back her chin-length white-blonde hair as best as she could—though it was almost certain the fine strands would escape within minutes. She reached for her spandex suit next. Each space soldier was trained to get the orange spandex ventilation garments on in sixty-five seconds. Elara took three minutes on average. According to Deimos, her fastest time was 153 seconds.
The entrance to their tight quarters swept upwards at their approach and the trio began to move at a fast clip down the clinical white, pressurised hallways of their home: Orbito One.
There were eight orbitos in total. Each identical. Each containing five hundred active life forms. And each equipped for efficient space survival. Clothing came vacuumed-sealed, the food dehydrated. You remained clean. You remained healthy. You did not waste resources.
Each orbito was a flawless operation at all times.
It was how things had to be.
Orbito One was the first of its kind, built onto the historical International Space Station left over from pre-global-warming. The ISS was the oldest reminder of what life had been in the past. Romy believed it was this relic—her closest link to the ground—that triggered her passion for Earth’s history. Sparked the uncontrollable urge to learn all she could about their lost home.
Romy, daydreaming just for a change, walked into Thrym, who’d stopped in front of her.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, earning a fleeting wink from the man and even a rare smile, which showed bright white against his black skin.
With Thrym, you usually had to watch his blue eyes for information. He didn’t show much. Perhaps it was due to being the most serious and focused of their group. Romy smiled; she could always rely on Thrym to have his dark hair shaved to regulation and his possessions neatly stored in his small personal compartments.
“Knot 27, reporting for Debris,” Elara stated as a red light scanned the trio.
“Wait!” A thin shout echoed behind them.
Romy grinned as Deimos and Phobos hurtled into sight. Running was strictly prohibited, everywhere, at all times—not that it ever stopped the twins.
They didn’t really look alike, aside from their startling green eyes, but everyone called them “the twins” because the pair was rarely apart. Their wavy, shoulder-length hair reminded Romy of pictures of the surfers she’d read about, from a time when humans would stand up on streamlined boards in the ocean for fun. Needless to say, the length of Deimos’s black hair and Phobos’s dark blond hair was in violation of the chin-length maximum—another rule they somehow evaded. All space soldiers were attractive, a vanity of the Orbitos’ creators, but the twins were drop-dead gorgeous. No doubt, this helped the pair escape punishment time and time again. Romy could attest to their effect, having been on the receiving end of their innocent green gaze on several occasions.
Their entire knot was scanned anew in front of the Earth Dock entrance.
A clinical voice replied, “Authorised.” The voice sounded like that no matter who replied from the control deck.
“Oh goody,” Deimos replied.
Phobos tied back his blond hair. “I keep hoping one day they’ll say ‘access denied’, but it never happens.”
Romy’s four knot mates were the closest thing to a family she’d ever had—or would have in this life cycle.
The term “knot” described five human-sized tanks, filled with amniotic gel, and gathered in a bunch. Each tank held one soldier. The other four pods you were grouped with, held your future team members. A jumble of tubes and cables connected each cluster of pods to various medi-tech at its centre. At the heart of each space station was a locked room dedicated to rows and rows of these developing knots.
Once harvested from these cultivation tanks at age twelve—which ensured mental and physical maturity—a knot trained together in space warfare as cadets, and then worked together until age thirty-five. Life in space was hard and it was thought that beyond thirty-five, the reflexes slowed and deteriorating general health impacted performance. This was the cycle of a genetically enhanced space soldier. If your knot was lucky, you were all recycled at your expiry date; if your knot was unlucky, you were all killed in battle and immediately replaced. It was important that the number of active soldiers remained constant. The total of 4000 was constantly replenished from the hundreds of knots cooking in the tanks at any one time.
She wondered if she’d been part of the same knot before, in another cycle. Their bond sure felt that way. But Romy knew the geneticists liked to try different personality combinations in order to find the ‘ultimate team’. She hoped Knot 27 would stay together until the return to Earth—though the wish was neither likely, nor in her control.
Thrym and Romy prepared two of the debris pods for launch while the twins changed from fatigues to orange spandex. The one thing Romy liked about debris clean-up was that the chore didn’t necessitate space suits. Sure, there were emergency suits in the pod—making the ventilation spandex space suit underclothes necessary—but no one ever had to actually use them.
Debris duty was the most menial task you could get in this life, the bottom of the heap. Just below kitchen duty. And high command didn’t take too kindly to the quirks of Romy’s team. Elara was lazy, the twins were trouble, and Romy had her head in the stars. Thrym was focused, but he still ranked fun alongside duty just like the rest of them. It was not an ideal quality in a space soldier. Seeing as knot demotion was the only real form of punishment aboard the orbitos, Knot 27 found themselves as the lowest of the low.
Not that it bothered Romy to be poorly ranked.
The small, circular pods sat half in and half out of the outer wall of the Earth dock. The dock was situated on the outer wall of the orbito, facing their ruined world. The white alloy exterior of the pods was completely smooth and round. Romy entered a quick code, hardly looking at the screen, and in response, the pod’s uninterrupted surface fractured with a hiss, retracting into a circular entrance.
“You coming with me?” Thrym asked her.
Romy glanced back. “I’d better go with Elara or nothing will get done. You take the twins.” She shot him an evil smile, leaning back to snatch up Elara’s arm.
Phobos was speaking as Romy sealed their pod behind Elara. “Thrym, poor dude, how do you always get stuck with us?”
The two girls giggled as they buckled themselves into their usual seats: Elara in the pilot’s seat, and Romy on docking controls. The interior was as white and bland as the exterior—even for a spaceship. Each pod was uniform, with four bucket seats, the minimum of pilot controls, docking controls—for catching the debris—and a compartment under their feet with emergency gear.
The girls had done this a hundred times over the twelve years they’d been alive. At twenty-four years old, Romy found it easy to slip into the task automatically, no matter who she worked with from their knot. The movements of the others were as familiar to her as her own.
“Pressurising pod.” Elara’s voice crackled through Romy’s headset. It was hard to hear out in space once the thrusters and stabilisers were going. Even with noise-cancelling tech.
Above Romy, rows of buttons and panels flickered to life, throwing neon blue light through the craft. Most of their two-year cadet training was spent learning what each of these did. Romy reached up for the left-most switch. “Shutting off vents. Initiating Terminal Launch sequence.”
She watched as Elara tested the thrusters. “Programmed manoeuvres clear,” Elara confirmed. “Open valve.”
Romy sighed, looking at her watch. She hoped they were back in time for the lecture this evening. It was one of her favourites. “Valve opened,” She called. The familiar sound of liquid hydrogen and oxygen flowing into the pumps gave a subtle hiss.
Romy smiled as Elara hissed along with the gases, for as long as her breath allowed. Every time.
Her friend reached overhead. “I’m sure we’ll be back in time for the lecture, Ro.”
Elara could read Romy like a nanopad.
“I know. It’s just it’s my favourite: the first introduction.”
A typical debris shift usually lasted two hours, but if the space junk concentration was at hazardous levels, the group stayed longer. At max, ten hours. Knot 27 had only had to do the ten-hour shift once, after a two-week battle with the Poachers when they were just fifteen. She
should
be back in time. But you never knew what you’d find out here.
Elara hid a small smile. “Launching in T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven—I don’t know why you go anyway; you probably have it memorised—three, two, one.”
They drifted away from Orbito One for fifty metres, entering space, their playground.
“All right, where’s the damn debris?” Elara grumbled.
The girls looked up at the circular screen in front of them. It provided a 360-degree view of the surrounding space. The pod system identified foreign objects approaching their station.
“Incoming,” Romy said, initiating the docks as she spoke. “Closest point of contact at Grid G90 in thirty seconds.”
“Jeez, a little notice would be nice.” Elara fired the right thrusters. The acceleration slammed the girls sideways in their harnesses. Romy winced as the strap pressed into her side. She shouldn’t celebrate not wearing space suits on debris duty; they provided more padding than the orange spandex.
“You wimps need to hurry up; we’ve already hooked five.” Deimos’s voice flooded their system.
“Poacher poop,” Elara swore.
Debris clean-up was a simple matter of approaching the debris and pulling it into the pod. Most of it was fleck-size, like dust, although some debris could be as large as a shoe. There had been a mass effort to clean Earth’s orbit before the launch of the orbitos in 2050. Debris the size of a pin could cause sizeable damage to the stations. Cracked windows had been a common occurrence in the first ten years of space life, though less common now—even with regular battles against the Critamal.
Sometimes Romy wondered if the Critamal’s plan was to kill them by littering their orbit. Errant debris wasn’t a problem the alien species had to contend with, since their position was farther away from Earth’s atmosphere.
Romy concentrated on operating the docking station as Elara came alongside the debris. Debris travelled at around 8.05 kilometres per second. They’d approach anything less than ten. The approach was a crucial step and not as easy as the other soldiers thought. If Elara and Romy tried to intercept the debris head on, it would simply tear through the craft, its force increased by the pod’s opposing force. When Thrym got down about Knot 27’s low status, she was quick to remind him of that fact.
The pod still jerked violently when it came into contact with the debris.
Elara held out her hand and Romy met it in a celebratory fist-pump.