Augustine Ward, the sole survivor of a devastating alien battle, must lead a ragtag team on a desperate mission to stop humanity’s extinction in four months. With treacherous allies, Ward races against time to stop an alien signal that could destroy Earth. Can this broken soldier find redemption and save mankind from annihilation?
Chapter 1
Despite wearing the best space suit the Olympians had offered humanity, Callisto was still colder than a hag’s left tit. My fingers were popsicles inside my thick gloves, my nose was numb within my plexisteel helmet, and my balls had snuggled their way back into my pelvis. My heads-up display said all systems were normal, but without my nanos it was hard to be sure. Lots of tech had fallen into the shitter over the last five years. It could’ve also been in my head. Walking across a dirty glacier in vacuum with Jupiter filling the sky messes with your mind no matter how many times you’ve done it.
My name is Augustine Ward, and I find lost things, including people. My job ain’t legal in the Commonwealth, and they will shoot you on sight if they catch you in quarantine zones like Callisto. But it was a living at a time when not many were available.
The cold wasn’t even the worst part. Nah, the worst part was my dread over grabbing the girl, Betty Grable. I shit you not, that was her name. Her Pathist parents were the traditional types, I reckoned. They’d paid me handsomely to bring her home, and she was gonna be none too happy to see me. She’d likely sunk so deep into the Hedon cult that I was gonna have to either drag her back to my ship or splint her. I hated splinting. Always messy.
But hell, I’m an optimistic fellow. Things could turn around.
At least Jupiter was goddamed spectacular.
I finished planting my insurance in the Hedon shipyard and hightailed it to the old Callisto hydrogen factory’s airlock. That’s right, the Hedons parked their ships outside, suited up, and then walked to the airlock. My recon over the last two days told me they either didn’t have the know-how to hook the docking tubes to their ships, or the docking tubes just didn’t work anymore. Or the Hedons were so wasted out of their gourds they didn’t care to figure it out.
I tapped the airlock controls, and the door slid open with a slight rumble that I felt through my boots. I closed the door behind me and activated the atmospheric controls. Air hissed into the compartment. My suit told me it was breathable, though high in mold and God knows whatever the Hedons were smoking these days. Probably wouldn’t kill me. I didn’t plan on sticking around any longer than I had to, anyway.
“I’m inside, Arial,” I said into my helmet com. “Keep the home fires burning, would ya, doll?”
“If by ‘home fires’ you mean the ship’s engines,” my ship replied in a female voice, “then I have not turned them off since you left. If you are referring to the song written during World War I titled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning (‘Till the Boys Come Home)’, I have located a copy of that song which I can play for you now.”
“I meant the ship’s engines, doll, but thanks for the offer. I’ll contact you when I need a pickup. Ward out.”
“Be safe, Auggie.”
Arial’s helpful interpretations of my Georgia idioms—and her use of my nickname—would’ve been endearing if she weren’t the multi-dimensional hall monitor of the Olympian aliens who had pledged to kill all humans in four months. Tends to put a damper on a friendship. But more on that later.
I decided to trust my suit’s assessment of the air and unlocked the helm. The air smelled like I thought it would. Reminded me of the dive brothel me and some basic training comrades visited on Luna twenty years ago: funky tobacco, cheap perfume, and an overflowing commode.
I slapped the helmet on the magnets behind my head and opened the door to the factory proper. It slid open on squealy, un-greased wheels. I made sure my earbuds were secure and then entered the Hedon den of sin.
Lots of people think the Hedon’s are a death cult, especially all the good Pathists that make up most of humanity now. They say the Hedons would rather kill themselves than live through whatever extinction event the Olympians were gonna throw at us.
I didn’t think they worshiped death so much as they just didn’t give a shit anymore. Their security was a case in point. Nobody challenged me at the airlock or when I strode through the shadowy corridors. Where there were lights, they sputtered between glaring white and sickly green.
I’d studied the factory’s layout before arriving, so I knew where I was going. But even if I hadn’t, all I would’ve had to do was follow the loud music—with all its thumping and bumping and groaning vocals—that shook the whole moon. Took me less than a hundred paces to arrive at the dance party.
The former warehouse was mostly dark, but colored lights flashed in time to the music and illuminated the writhing bodies on the dance floor. I figured a couple hundred of them, men and women in various stages of dress and undress. They leaped around and rubbed against each other in ways that would’ve made an Quickened blush. The air temp and humidity were more oppressive than Savannah in August. A sheen of sweat broke on my forehead.
I scanned the crowd looking for Casper Bonny’s throne. The man was born and raised a pirate before the Virus, which meant he never had nanos and therefore had not gone batshit crazy when the Virus struck. My intel said he gave up piracy after the Virus and decided to splurge his ill-gotten-gains on sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs. Because, why not? The Virus destroyed humanity’s ability to wage war, therefore we couldn’t fulfill our promise to the Olympians and would thus go extinct. Hedon membership swelled with Pathists, ironically, who didn’t want to hunker down in their shelters, pray, and wait with stoic patience for the apocalypse like the rest of their brethren.
For me, I reckoned it was my work that kept my mind off those things.
Betty’s parents said she’d been kidnapped by the Hedons and forced to serve in Bonny’s harem. I highly doubted that she’d been kidnapped because that would’ve required initiative and planning by the Hedons. The girl had more likely joined the Pathist exodus to cults awaiting the end in their own ways. I figured mommy and daddy preferred to think someone had kidnapped their little girl rather than she had chosen to spend her last days grinding in a broken-down factory on a Jovian ice ball.
On the far side of the dance floor was a dais with an old, leather sectional couch. Over the couch hung a Hedon flag—black with a crude white circle and an equally crude “H” over the top. Casper Bonny sat in the middle of the couch surrounded by young, sycophantic women and men. He wore a dark red, satin bowling shirt with flared collars. His black hair was coifed into a pompadour, with large sideburns that had hints of gray. Despite the relative darkness of the place, he wore sunglasses that dipped down his nose so that he could look over the tops of the lenses at his followers. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth and his tattooed arms hung around two young women on either side.
The girl on his right was Betty Grable. She’d dyed her natural black hair all white, and she wore a tight black tank-top and matching leather shorts. Her bare left leg was covered in ivy tattoos. She looked quite different from the photo her parents gave me of a smiling 16-year-old in her Sunday’s best, but the upturned nose and triangular face were the same.
I pushed my way through the crowd toward the asshole king.
This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress sci-fi novel, The Arena (also a work-in-progress title). If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!