An excerpt from The Alien Artifact
The final instalment of the Settler Chronicles series is out next weekend. It's a fun adventure I hope everyone will enjoy. The book will be available in all the usual stores and is up for pre-order now (take a look here). Here's the book description:
In the action-packed series finale, Margo Murphy is on the warpath.
Life on Thesan is stable, almost ordinary -- just what Margo wants. She thinks the colony's challenges are behind them. She thinks it is time to start building her life with her husband, Gary. But her biggest challenge is yet to come.
The colony needs an income, and the rich deposits of minerals on the planet's surface offer a solution. But when the eagerly-anticipated mining ship arrives, Margo suspects it has a hidden agenda. Nigel West is still out there, and the colony he’s tried and failed to destroy now also harbours rebels that his Conglomerate would love to get their hands on.
When the mining ship reveals its evil plans and kidnaps two of the colonists, Margo leads the team to get them back. Outgunned, outnumbered, and out of time, they attack the invaders in normal and virtual space in an attempt to rescue their people. But is it enough?
Fighting in a last-ditch effort to save her fellow colonists, her family and now the future of humanity, Margo has to win…and all she has is a sledgehammer and her wits.
Click on to read the first chapter.
Chapter 1 of The Alien Artifact
Executing step thirty-one on her hourly checklist, Peggy swept through the colony’s camera feeds. As one kernel processed the images, she used another to confirm the time. It was 05:11 hours, making this her final round through her list for the night.
The morning shift started at 06:00 hours. A human operations technician would take over, allowing her to move on to more complex tasks. Computations more suited to her processing powers were waiting for her attention. Normally, this time of day left her bored, but today would be different—they were expecting visitors.
In the compartments for humans, illumination cycled to the lowest level. Over the next half-hour the lighting would slowly increase, creating a simulated dawn. However, few would notice as most colonists still slept, and would for a while yet. The colony’s lighting kept everyone’s circadian rhythms in tune since their adopted world experienced continuous sunlight punctuated with a week of darkness every five years—not ideal conditions for a human to get a proper night sleep.
As she panned a camera through the garden at the centre of the residential quarter, she detected unexpected motion. Adjusting her sensors to their highest sensitivity, Peggy zoomed in.
A dark-haired woman with brown skin swayed side to side with each step she took. Cradled in her arms, an equally dark-haired baby slept. It was just Amanda walking her baby, George, now four months old. Most mornings either Amanda or her husband Neil did a few laps with the young lad. A fitful sleeper, only the perpetual motion provided by his parents triggered him to nod off.
Relaxing her settings back to normal, Peggy observed the two for a moment. Amanda made soft sounds to her baby and Peggy shifted her focus away—the intimate moment between mother and child was private.
The agreement she’d made with Lucas when he gave her free run of the colony was to respect the colonists’ privacy. Peggy didn’t want to break that promise. Besides she needed to complete her checklist—their expected visitors would arrive into the system soon.
Peggy performed step thirty-two and checked the integrity of all the colony’s airtight seals. After confirming each one continued to hold in breathable air, she shifted herself to the long-range visual sensors mounted on their constellation of satellites. It didn’t take long to find the one with the view she wanted. Her orbital vantage point didn’t look back down at Thesan, the third planet in the solar system. Instead, she focused away from their home, towards the centre.
She took a moment to watch the storms swirling across the surface of the cold Neptune in the next orbit next to the suns before continuing her visual journey towards the centre of the system. The innermost planet with an atmosphere, Nak, was currently on the other side of their twin suns, so she couldn’t see its solid yellow clouds, no big loss in her mind.
At the centre, two suns danced around each other as they always did. It was an unequal partnership. Helios shone brightest, casting a white glow laced with ultraviolet radiation while Sol, the smaller of the pair, cast a dimmer orange glow reminiscent of a perpetual sunset.
Taking care not to focus on either of their two suns, she tuned the visual sensors on the spot where the event horizon would form. Her calculations, as always, were exact. She was a couple minutes early, meaning there was nothing to see yet.
Expanding her frequency sensitivity to include a wider swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, she scanned the seemingly empty space. At first, she detected nothing, then small amounts of Hawking radiation. The point of radiation expanded as the wormhole began to form. It would be a while yet before it grew big enough for the ship to pass through, but more than a century of waiting had taught Peggy patience.
Her memories included being a human once, but she had yet to conclude if they were actual memories or just stories created to buffer her consciousness. She distinctly remembered having a physical form, as soft and squishy as any human. Once she had to deal with petticoats and corsets—clothing no longer in vogue. The humans on the colony all wore stout boots and cargo pants.
She visualized the last house she’d lived in; how modern the kitchen had felt with its yellow counters and sleek appliances. A fragment of her took a seat at the kitchen table and sipped scotch as her glasses slipped down her nose. She’d been part of a top-secret project then, one formed to fight a doomed cold war. Her team created advanced computer algorithms that could learn. Had they been successful? That memory wasn’t in her databank.
A sub-routine replayed the image of Amanda cuddling her baby. Peggy’s databank contained nothing about a child of her own, but she remembered being married once and when that had ended, taking on lovers. Was it all just fiction? Programming put in place to keep her sane? If it was true, did she miss being human?
As her algorithm’s cranked through the questions, she noted the wormhole was nearly full size—it wouldn’t be long now.
Her biggest regret was being unable to smell the spices of Amanda’s mulligatawny soup with a real nose. Would its scent be the same as the version the cook made back when she’d just married Eugene? Just thinking about how that soup smelled took her back to that old London house full of taxidermy and gas lights. The quaint image felt comforting—maybe it was all just a ploy to keep her sane.
A signal from the other side of the wormhole caught her attention. It was a message from Earth. She recorded the message, while maintaining focus on the wormhole.
There! She detected a modulating signal from just on the other side of the wormhole—still in Earth’s solar system. She’d identified it as a standard tracking beacon. A moment later the signal originated from their system and she switched sensors to visual. It was the Ankh, the mining ship they’d been expecting. Zooming to the maximum resolution, Peggy examined the vessel.
The ship’s hull was dark grey, well maintained but also well used. She read off the registration number and cross checked with the vessel in the mining application—everything was correct. Registered to New Egypt Station, the Ankh had spent the last ten years mining Saturn’s moons. The ship’s extended mining track record had played a major role in Lucas accepting their proposal. As colony commander, he had the final say. A new ship without such an impressive track record could easily be a Conglomerate spy—and they knew, eventually, The Conglomerate would come for them.
Peggy studied the ship, confirming the details matched her records. The Ankh wasn’t designed to go through an atmosphere; instead it would send down smaller shuttles to set up a mining base on Thesan. Indium littered the planet’s surface—a mineral in high enough demand to be worth the effort of going to a different solar system to obtain. The mining crew could just scoop up the indium-laced gravel without digging a single hole. In their proposal, a first pass at smelting would be performed on the surface, then the refined ore would be sent up to the main ship.
Shifting her view, Peggy focused on the ship’s hangar bay—the big doors were closed, hiding the shuttles inside. I guess I have to wait to count them, Peggy thought as she calculated the ship’s interior area. Her result matched the records.
A large ship with a small crew and the extra space for the indium they’d be taking back to Earth. She couldn’t confirm from this range, but the ship’s crew complement was twenty-five. The captain was Fran Balfe, a miner with decades of experience and glowing references. Peggy scanned the rest of the crew manifest, each one of them had equally solid backgrounds. There was no way Conglomerate spies were among them... or was there? With the wormhole open, now was the time to do detailed background checks.
Cloning a version of herself to maintain a watch over the ship, she went looking for Lucas. She found him awake and sipping coffee in the dining hall. His black hair was messy, as usual, and he desperately needed to shave. It offended her that their leader let others see him looking so scruffy, but she didn’t dare say anything about it.
Sitting across from him was Ash Jones, the captain of the Staffelwalze, which had brought a group of refugees to the colony seven months ago.
“Lucas,” Peggy said through the nearest speaker.
Lucas set his mug down and looked towards the speaker. Since it had a video feed, Peggy displayed her face avatar. People responded better to her when she showed a face. Her chosen avatar was how she remembered herself at fifty; in her memories, people had respected her then. She projected herself as Caucasian and, as always, her image wore the horn-rimmed glasses she favoured. She kept her expression serious.
“Has the Ankh arrived in the system?” he asked as he rubbed a hand over his twice broken nose. It still wasn’t straight; she made a note to make a doctor’s appointment for him to get it fixed—maybe this time he’d go.
“Affirmative, the mining ship came through the wormhole 32 seconds ago.”
He picked up his mug and took a sip. “Does it check out?”
“It is the ship we are expecting. Everything about it matches our expectations exactly,” said Peggy.
“I’m still not comfortable with this,” said Ash. She stared straight at Lucas without even acknowledging Peggy’s presence.
Peggy opened her avatar’s mouth to cut in, then thought better of it—that kind of behaviour wouldn’t win Ash’s approval.
Ash continued. “Everything about this mining operation is just a little too convenient.”
“Perhaps.” Lucas glanced down at his hands then directly at Ash. “We are obliged to repay the Colonizing Counsel for getting us here and…” He gestured to his surroundings—in this case, a dining room containing just the two of them. “And for all the equipment they sent with us. The sooner we do that, the better.”
Ash pursed her lips. “You’re harbouring known insurgents. Inviting outsiders in will only expose us.”
“Don’t forget that Nigel West, the head of The Conglomerate has sworn to come,” said Peggy, but neither of the humans acknowledged her. She worked hard to keep a frown off her avatar’s face; it wouldn’t do to display her human emotions to them.
Ash tilted her head towards the screen displaying Peggy’s avatar. “You need to curtail her access.”
“I’ve gone through our operational code, and Peggy has done a fantastic job of removing the Nigel AI virus,” said Lucas.
“Perhaps, but she’s the most complex AI I’ve ever encountered, so complex we can’t understand her motives.” Ash pulled herself up straight. “We’re putting too much trust in her.”
Lucas ran a hand over his nose before responding. “What does Vince think?”
Peggy let a version of herself wander to look at Vince’s door. The young hacker was inside, most likely still asleep. She didn’t have access to the interior of anyone’s quarters, and if she did, she wouldn’t pry as that went against her Victorian upbringing. Victorian upbringing? The wandering version of herself, again, fell down the rabbit hole of wondering if she was once a real person or not. Abandoning that version, her focus snapped back to the dining room with Lucas and Ash.
“Vince is a huge fan of Peggy,” said Ash. “But he’s young and not wary enough.”
“Perhaps you’ve become too jaded.” Lucas took another sip. “You weren’t like that when we first met.”
Ash laughed, her white teeth contrasting with her black skin. In an instant, the tone of the room changed. “I wasn’t much older than Vince back then. Now there’s more to worry about, like the safety of my son.”
“Max is the most resourceful young man I’ve ever met.” Lucas wrapped his hands around his nearly empty mug.
“He takes after his dad.” Ash smiled as her gaze went distant, then her smile faded. “It’s too bad James never got the chance to know his son.”
As Lucas nodded, Peggy launched a search to find out what happened to Max’s dad. She found a news story about a flight school accident linked to his name. James had been on a training flight over Antarctica when something went wrong, though the exact cause wasn’t listed in the article. The shuttle crashed into near-freezing water, and everyone on board died of hypothermia. At the end of the article, a single sentence mentioned the pilot leaving behind a pregnant wife—that must have been Ash and Max.
“Hey, Peggy, we’ll meet you in the Control Room in a minute. Can you give us some privacy here?” asked Lucas, but Peggy recognized it as the order it was.
The Alien Artifact is available here.