Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In) Read online

  Benjamin glanced at him. “Who’s your friend?”

  “That’s my husband, Alex,” Catalina replied.

  “Hi, Alex,” Benjamin said thrusting out his hand once more.

  Alexander smiled and shook hands with the boy. His mother looked on with amusement.

  “He thinks he’s going to get to know everyone on board,” she explained.

  “I have to. We’re all family now, and family should know each other. At least their names,” Benjamin explained.

  Alexander nodded. “It’s a big ship. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.”

  “I know. Ten sections with 7,344 people each. That’s 73,440 colonists.”

  The tram stopped and the doors swished open, but this time only on one side. “You’re very good at math,” Alexander said, waiting for Benajmin’s mother to leave the tram first. Benjamin craned his neck to continue the conversation as she pulled him along by his hand. “Want to know what else I’m good at?”

  “What’s that?” he asked as he and Catalina followed them out. They walked by one of the flight attendants at the shuttle exit. She smiled and nodded to them as they left the shuttle and started down a long, cylindrical boarding tunnel.

  “Recognizing faces,” Benjamin said. “I never forget a face. Yours looks familiar.”

  “Not likely. I’m from Earth, and I’ve been out of touch for a while. Maybe you met my clone.”

  “You have a clone?”

  Alexander’s lips twitched into a mischievous grin. “No, I was being facetious.”

  “Oh. So was I.”

  Catalina shot him a broody smile when Benjamin looked away. This was why they’d joined the Liberty—to have children of their own. Earth’s population controls made that prohibitively difficult. You had to win the monthly lottery to have kids, or wait your turn, which could be centuries. Not to mention any children they did have would have to compete with all the emancipated androids running around doing every job humans could do, but better and faster than humans could do it.

  They could have settled on Mars or one of the other Solarian colonies, but with an AI ruling Earth, and humans still firmly in command of the rest of the solar system, all-out war was just a matter of time. This was the only way to escape it all. Board the Liberty on a one way trip to Proxima Centauri with its human-only crew.

  They came to the end of the boarding tunnel and another pair of flight attendants greeted them there. “Please wait at the gate until all passengers and crew have finished debarking,” one of them said in a familiar voice. Alexander noted that her name badge read, Ana Urikov.

  The waiting area on the other side of the gate reminded him of the analogous version in an airport back on Earth. A wall of windows looked out into the hangar, and rows of seating furnished the room. Alexander took Catalina’s hand and walked up to the nearest window. Maintenance drones rolled to and from their shuttle using both the walls and floor with equal ease. Their shuttle was clamped to the wall to their right, hovering impossibly above the deck. Higher up, Alexander saw a second tunnel extending to offload their checked bags.

  “Feeling better now?” he asked Catalina.

  She nodded. “A bit, yeah.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Alexander saw another group of passengers spill out into the waiting area. He and Catalina turned from the windows and sat down along the nearest bank of seats to wait while the rest of the passengers filed out. Alexander spied Benjamin and his mother sitting along the row of seats opposite theirs. Benjamin spotted him and grinned; then his grin faded dramatically and his eyes went wide, as if he’d suddenly remembered something.

  “I know where I saw you!” Benjamin blurted out. “I read about you in history! You’re Captain Alexander de Leon, the Lion of Liberty. You made everyone stop fighting after The Last War.”

  Catalina turned to Alexander with eyebrows raised. “They put you in the history books?”

  “News to me.”

  “Are you the Lion of this Liberty?” Benjamin asked, looking awestruck.

  “No, I’m just along for the ride,” Alexander said, shaking his head.

  “Why do they call you a lion?”

  “Benjamin...” his mother said.

  “But Mom!”

  “That’s enough. Leave the poor man alone.”

  “Okay... sorry, Alex.”

  “That’s all right,” he said, smiling. “They called me that because my last name is de Leon. Leon means lion where I’m from.”

  “Oh. So you were born a lion.”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s so crimson!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You know, like spectral, or ace... or facetious!”

  Alexander smiled. “You might want to look up that last one.”

  “I can’t. Mom made me disable my ARC lenses AND my comm band when we boarded the shuttle.”

  “I think we can activate them al—” Alexander caught an urgent look from Benjamin’s mother. She placed a finger to her lips and shook her head. “—pretty soon,” he finished.

  “Hope so!” Benjamin said, looking away to watch as another group of passengers joined them in the gate room.

  Soon the waiting area was crowded with more than a hundred passengers and crew. Alexander looked out the windows into the hangar to watch as the boarding tunnel detached from their shuttle and folded away. Then a commanding voice echoed through the room, drawing his attention away from the windows.

  “Welcome aboard the Liberty. My name is Ling Chong, and I am the governor of the Liberty.” The governor wore a spotless white uniform with glowing white piping. Short, jet black hair contrasted sharply with both her uniform and her pale, porcelain skin. Her amber eyes roved through the room while she waited for everyone’s attention.

  She went on, “Whoever you are, wherever you came from, know this: the Liberty is an entity unto itself, a new territory with its own people, and its own culture. Yes, we answer to the authority of the Solarian Republic, but we are passengers and crew of the Liberty first and foremost, so leave all of your prejudices behind. From this moment on, it doesn’t matter whether you think of yourself as a Terran or a Solarian. What matters is where you are headed, and we are all headed in the same direction.”

  The governor turned to a man standing just behind her and to her right. He wore a deep maroon uniform with glowing red piping, gold buttons, and black epaulets with golden tassels. A single gold star glittered on each of his epaulets, marking him as an Admiral in the Solarian Navy. “This is Admiral Urikov,” Governor Chong said.

  Same name as that flight attendant on the shuttle, Alexander thought, wondering if they were related.

  The admiral stepped forward, and the governor continued: “Admiral, would you care to explain your role aboard this ship?”

  Admiral Urikov nodded. “Of course. The Navy is in charge of the external defense of the Liberty. In the unlikely event that we need to defend ourselves from an external threat, we have ten squadrons of manned fighters and thirty squadrons of drones. That’s one and three squadrons respectively for each section. Due to the fact that there are very few clear lines of sight between the ship’s stationary core and its rotating rings, nearly all of the Liberty’s defenses are deployable rather than attached to fixed hard-points, but we do have a significant forward-facing arsenal, and our sensors are state-of-the-art, so we should have plenty of time to deploy fighters and drones if need be. That being said, we don’t expect to run into any external threats.

  “For internal threats to security, we have the Marines. They will act as law enforcement aboard the Liberty. Rest assured, however, they will only carry non-lethal weapons while performing their police duties.”

  Alexander saw Catalina turn to him, her brown eyes wide. “The Marines are going to be our police force?” she whispered.

  “I guess they wouldn’t have much to do otherwise,” he whispered back.

  “Marines are trained to kill peopl
e, not arrest them.”

  “You heard the admiral—they won’t be carrying lethal weapons.”

  “There’s plenty of ways to kill someone without using a weapon.”

  Alexander frowned and looked away from his wife.

  The admiral finished speaking, and Alexander wondered what he’d missed.

  The governor addressed them once more: “Each of the Liberty’s ten sections is identical, except for Section One, which is where myself and Admiral Urikov reside along with the rest of the ship’s command staff and the majority of her crew. The other nine sections are primarily made up of colonists like you, and each section will have a councilor whom you will elect at the end of your initial six months training. That councilor will report directly to me. Until then, your acting councilor will be in charge. Likewise, there is a naval commander in each section that reports directly to Admiral Urikov. You can think of each of the ship’s sections like a city, with Section One as the capital.”

  Alexander nodded. They could easily carry that command structure forward with them into the new world.

  “I will now hand you over to your section leaders for a brief explanation of this ship’s facilities. We wish you all a pleasant and comfortable stay aboard the Liberty.” The governor cracked a tight smile and nodded to them. “May the Universal Architect be with us all.” With that, both she and Admiral Urikov vanished into thin air.

  Alexander blinked in shock. Holograms, he realized, now noticing the projection plates where they’d been standing. The speeches must have been pre-recorded. That made sense. With seven hundred and twenty shuttles on board, they couldn’t possibly be expected to welcome each group of colonists personally.

  The projection plates rolled away to their charging stations along the wall. Moments later a set of doors swished open in that wall, and in walked another man and a woman. Their uniforms were the same colors as their Section One counterparts—white with glowing white piping for government, and maroon with bright red piping for the Navy. This time their roles and genders were reversed—a female naval commander and a male councilor.

  “Hello, I am Mikail Markov acting councilor for Section Seven, and this is Commander Audrey Johnson. You’re lucky. Your shuttle is the last to arrive for this section, so you get to move around under a full Martian G rather than using magnetic boots.”

  The councilor was clearly of Russian descent, but Commander Johnson might have originally hailed from the Americas. Alexander caught himself there, the governor’s words echoing through his head, chiding him: leave all of your prejudices behind.

  Old wars and old enemies no longer mattered.

  “Please follow me,” Councilor Markov said.

  The flight attendants from the shuttle helped usher everyone out of their seats. Ana Urikov clapped her hands for attention and spoke in an amplified voice. “Let’s go. Everyone up! Baggage drones will take your checked bags to your quarters for you.”

  Alexander stood up and slung his carry-on over his shoulder once more. Turning to Catalina, he found her doing the same.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She nodded and grabbed his hand in an anxious grip. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 2

  On their way to the elevators, Councilor Markov painted a broad picture of the Liberty’s layout for them. The ship was divided into ten sections, each with two types of living areas—the stationary core for extended periods of acceleration and deceleration, and the rotating outer rings, where gravity could be simulated while cruising through interstellar space. The rings were relatively thin, putting vertical space at a premium, with just ten decks for each section, but each deck was massive, with a circumference of about 3700 meters by three hundred and twenty meters in width. The opposite was true for the stationary core where those three hundred and twenty meters became over sixty floors of vertical space.

  In both the core and the ring decks, the use of the space was the same: crew quarters, mess and recreation, agriculture, training, maintenance and manufacturing, command and administration, services, storage, medical and research, and of course, the all-important hangar bays. In the core, many of those decks were duplicated, while there was just one deck dedicated to each purpose in the rings.

  Alexander wondered what they’d use the core for after the initial six months of acceleration were over and they transferred everyone to the rings for the next eight years. Would all those duplicate decks and equipment just sit there collecting dust? For now they would stay aboard the rings, until all of the shuttles had arrived for the remaining sections.

  They reached the nearest bank of elevators—ten in a row. Alexander and Catalina ended up sharing an elevator with Councilor Markov and about twenty others. The councilor selected a button marked 5-DORM from the control panel. Ten decks, ten buttons.

  “Councilor, I have a question,” Alexander said.

  The man turned to him with his bushy black eyebrows raised as the elevator shot up to deck five. His expression never seemed to vary from a grumpy, no-nonsense frown. “Did you have to pay for passage aboard the Liberty?”

  “No, I was selected for my experience. All the ship’s crew and field specialists were. Otherwise you’d have a ship full of rich idiots living it up in anarchy with no idea of how to start an interstellar colony.”

  Alexander scowled at the indirect insult. The elevator arrived and the doors swished open on level five. The councilor’s open disdain for all the “rich idiots” on board irked him. He and Catalina had each paid five million Sols to get aboard the Liberty, but they’d also passed their entrance exams—meeting or surpassing the minimum requirements for intelligence, education, adaptability, mental stability, conscientiousness, and so on. As for the money that had gotten them aboard—Sols meant nothing now. No doubt a new currency would soon be established, but in a place where all the accommodations were equal and luxuries probably few, money was unlikely to mean very much. Knowledge, talent, and skill would be what set the passengers apart for the duration of their voyage—a true meritocracy if ever there was one.

  They filed out of the elevator and came face-to-face with a line of Marines wearing uniforms that were an even darker shade of crimson than the naval officers they’d met so far. Likewise, the piping on their jumpsuits glowed a dimmer shade of red than their Navy counterparts. A Latina woman with the three-stripe chevron of a sergeant stepped out of line and saluted Commander Johnson as she approached, whereupon the commander returned the salute and turned to face the colonists from the shuttle. “Sergeant Torres will give you your room assignments and shipboard uniforms, which you must wear from now on.”

  A few grumbles of discontent rose from the group, and Alexander smiled knowingly. He and Catalina hadn’t bothered to bring clothes with them, but no doubt others hadn’t read their orientation manuals as carefully.

  The commander silenced those grumbles with a wave of her hand. “The reason you can’t use regular clothing is that it cannot be pressurized with the simple addition of a helmet and gloves, and it won’t keep you warm if the heating fails. For safety reasons, we’re all restricted to the use of the ever-fashionable pressure-rated jumpsuits. They do come in different colors, but until you’ve finished training you’ll all be using off-duty blacks. After that, you’ll get a working uniform that’s color-coded to your chosen profession.

  “Now I’m afraid I must get back to my profession in the Command Information Center. If any of you have any security-related questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to speak with the nearest Marine. Are there any questions before I go?”

  Alexander thrust up his hand. A few others raised theirs, too, but the commander pointed to him first. “Yes, de Leon?”

  For a moment he was surprised that she knew his name, but then he remembered that their basic information was already registered and being automatically broadcast via their neural links. Everyone had to get a neural link before joining the mission so they could mentally interface with control systems on boa
rd the Liberty.

  “You mentioned we could choose our professions,” Alexander began. “Does that mean we can train for any job we like?”

  “You’ll go through various skill tests, aptitude tests, and a psych eval., all of which will be used to populate a list of possible professions. You’ll be asked to select three, and based on those preferences the human resources department will determine where you are most suited and most needed. After that you’ll go through six months training for your profession, and if need be, you’ll apprentice under someone. Any other questions?”

  Two more people had their hands raised, but one of them dropped his after hearing the answer to Alexander’s question.

  “Yes, Miss Adams?” the commander asked, pointing to the remaining person.

  “Will we be allowed to get pregnant during the trip?”

  “A very good question. I’m going to defer you to Acting Councilor Markov for the answer to that—councilor?”

  He cleared his throat and stepped forward to address the group. “Birth control implants will remain activated for the duration of the journey, and any attempt to remove or tamper with those implants will result in strict sanctions.”

  Alexander wondered what those sanctions might be as the news drew noisy grumbles of discontent from the group.

  The councilor had to raise his voice to be heard as he went on, “BUT ONCE WE ARRIVE at Proxima B, those implants will be deactivated.”

  More hands shot up to ask follow-up questions. The councilor pointed to one of them. “Last question—Mr. Humphrey.”

  “Why aren’t we traveling through the Looking Glass?”

  Alexander recognized the name of the wormhole that had mysteriously appeared in the Sol system more than a century ago. That phenomenon had sparked the Last War and nearly wiped out the human race in a nasty nuclear war. He remembered his virtual trip through the wormhole to an earth-type planet, code-named Wonderland. The mission had been nothing but a clever ploy by the Alliance. Like that, they’d tricked the Confederacy into throwing away the bulk of their fleet in their rush to be the first to colonize Wonderland.