Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. Read online

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire

  Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier

  An Anthology

  by

  Doug Dandridge

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to all those who push back the frontiers, who fight the darkness of superstition and ignorance. Scientists, explorers, teachers, engineers and technicians. All do their part to advance our civilization.

  Contact me at [email protected]

  Follow my Blog at http://dougdandridge.com

  Follow me at @BrotherofCats

  Copyright © 2016 Doug Dandridge

  Goliath: Copyright © 2014 Doug Dandridge

  All rights reserved.

  Please respect the hard work of this author. If you found this book for free on a pirate site, please visit Amazon and buy a copy of your own. I feel that I charge a reasonable price for this work.

  For more information on my work, including the Deep Dark Well and the Exodus Universe, visit http://dougdandridge.net for maps, sketches and other details.

  Acknowledgements: I would like to thank all of my fans. Your kind words gave me the impetus to continue through the not so kind words left in some reviews.

  Books by Doug Dandridge

  Doug Dandridge’s Author Page at Amazon

  Science Fiction

  The Exodus Series

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 4: the Long Fall.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 5: Ranger

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 6: The Day of Battle

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike:

  Exodus: Empires at War Book 8: Soldiers

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front.

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Exploration Command:

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 1: Supernova.

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 2: Bolthole.

  The Deep Dark Well Series

  The Deep Dark Well

  To Well and Back

  Deeper and Darker

  Theocracy

  Others

  The Shadows of the Multiverse

  Diamonds in the Sand

  The Scorpion

  Afterlife

  We Are Death, Come for You

  Five By Five 3: Target Zone:

  Fantasy

  The Refuge Series

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 1

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 2

  Refuge: Book 3: The Legions

  Refuge: Book 4: Kurt’s Quest:

  Doppelganger: A Novel of Refuge

  Others

  The Hunger

  Daemon

  Aura

  Marathon

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  Contents

  Contents

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire

  Dedication

  Forward

  The Mountains

  The Hunted

  What's Eating You

  A New Life

  Goliath

  The Deep

  About the Author

  Books by Doug Dandridge

  Forward

  Back in 2013 I was invited by Kevin J Anderson to submit a fifteen thousand word novellette for the next edition of his military anthology series, Five by Five. I submitted Retribution, one of the novellettes included in Tales of the Empire book 1. Kevin the editor had some problems with Retribution, and asked for some changes. Since I now had a good idea of what he was looking for, I decided to instead write another story, titled Goliath. Which left Retribution without a home. That was when I decided to experiment a bit, and wrote two more novellettes staring Exploration Command, the science and exploration branch of the Fleet. This was released as Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Exploration Command. The anthology did quite well, and received as good of ratings on Amazon and Goodreads as the main storyline books of the Exodus series.

  Five by Five Three: Target Zone did not do as well as hoped. I’m not really sure why, since all of the authors involved were good at their craft. I was probably the least known of those authors, and I had expected Goliath to at least draw in the majority of my fans, as well as gain some exposure with the fan bases of the other authors. Didn’t happen, and since I recently got the rights back to Goliath, I decided to put it in this anthology, the second of the Tales of the Empire series. The anthologies, and the stand alone novels I also have planned for the series, give me the chance to expand my Universe while exploring some ideas that really don’t fit into the Empires at War or Machine War storylines.

  Volume 1 of the series, as said before, had three novellettes, all around fifteen thousand words, for a total word count of forty-five thousand. Volume 2 contains three novellettes, two well above the fifteen thousand word limit of Goliath, along with three short stories. Total word count is over seventy-seven thousand words, almost the length of some novels.

  I am hoping that this series will go on for some time, at least ten volumes. And one day I may be able to entice some other authors into playing in my Universe. Until that day, I hope that you enjoy these little tales I have come up with.

  The Mountains

  The frontiers of the Empire can be deadly places. Many haven’t grown in population to the point where the technological benefits of human civilization have encompassed the planet. And many have evolved plants and animals which are the supreme predators of their worlds. Humans who intrude upon their environments do so at their own risk. Often trespassing on their territory carries a death sentence. Still, the riches of many of these worlds are enough to bring the explorers. Or sometimes, even the rumors of riches.

  The first Dang knew that the snow bear was near was it erupting from the snow from meters away and heading for him. He yelled for his partner as he tried to bring his rifle onto the charging target. The bear didn’t give him the time, knocking the weapon out of his hand with the swipe of a paw, then bringing the other across to strike the explorer in the head. Dang went down into the snow, his head ringing, the bear grabbing onto his backpack and biting deep, then shaking the man like a rodent.

  The bear was a strange looking animal, not really a bear at all, but with enough resemblance to get the name attached. It massed well over a ton in a standard gravity field. In the one point three gees of Everest it weighed a bit more, and it was as strong as any Earth ursid of similar mass. Where it differed from an ursid was the overall flat front to back plan that allowed it to burrow into the snow and wait for its prey.

  The bear continued to hammer and bite, ripping through Dang’s insulated clothing, tearing his levitation harness and its attached equipment to shreds. Another buffet to his head sent him reeling, and he was sure that he was dead. The bear flipped him over and started a lunge that would end with its teeth buried in Dang’s throat.

  The mouth opened even wider, if that was possible, and a shrieking roar came out. The odor of burning flesh assaulted Dang’s nostrils. The bear jerked and screamed, trying to turn and face its new tormentor. The angry insect sound of a particle beam could just be heard over the roars of the animal it was striking. The animal it was killing. The bear rose to its full height, then plopped down on the snow, muscles quivering.

  Dang rolled over, his blurred vision picking out the form of his partner, Dallas, her rifle still trained on the dead snow bear. Dang tried to cry out a warning to her, but only a croak came out of his mouth. The snow bear’
s mate came before the warning, rocketing out of the covering snow and clamping its jaws over the woman’s head. With a bite and a twist it took her life, shaking her in the air to make sure. It dropped Dallas’ body onto the red stained snow and shuffled over to the form of its mate, snuffling, then crying with a piteous sound.

  The human knew he had to get out of here, before the snow bear attacked him as well. He could play dead, but the bear had keen senses, and he doubted he could fool it for very long. Dang wasn’t sure he could outrun one of the predators if he was in full health. The pain through his body was flooding his central nervous system, making it hard to think, hard to localize the damage. The damage had to be significant. He wouldn’t know how much until he tried to move, and then he was afraid he would find out, just before he was killed.

  I probably won’t bleed out, he thought. His nanites would take care of that. Given enough time they would heal all of his wounds. All except for broken bones, if any. They would cement the sides of the break together, but they couldn’t set the bone beforehand. And the nanites wouldn’t keep him from being eaten.

  The bear was snuffling at his feet, and he was sure it wouldn’t be long before he felt the pain of a heavy bite. If he was lucky, it would kill him, If he wasn’t? Well, he would learn what it felt like to be eaten alive.

  I have one chance, I think. He reached for the control panel on the strap of his levitation harness. The rig was made to reduce the weight of the wearer so they wouldn’t sink into the snow while walking. It could be used for limited flight, but that ate up the battery power much faster than its primary purpose. The first bear had ripped into the rig, and he had no way of knowing if it would even work, or if it would send him in the air only to fall to his death.

  Here goes nothing, he thought as the bear started to use its paws to turn him over. He pulled the rheostat as far as he could to the right. The unit pulled tightly into his body for a moment, then raised him into the air. The bear swiped at him and missed. It stood up on its haunches and tried to pull Dang down, but in moments the man was out of reach. Snow bears were not leapers. They were runners and diggers.

  Dang looked down on the scene below as the wind that was constantly whistling through the mountains grabbed him. The female bear continued to snuffle at the body of her mate, as if she didn’t believe he was dead. Dallas’ broken body lay fifty meters to the west, her blood staining the snow. From here it looked like the fight had been even, both sides losing one of their members. He didn’t feel that way. Dallas had been more than a partner on an exploration mission. She had been a friend and a lover, and now she was only so much bear food.

  The man cleared his head and tried to contact the com net through the communicator built into his rig, and met only silence. He thought his implant was still functioning; the bear would have had to split his skull open to get at it. Unfortunately, the planet didn’t have a global net at this time. It was said the satellites would be in orbit in another couple of months, which would probably be two months too late.

  Without warning tears started to roll down Dang’s cheeks as he thought about his dead partner. They had come into the mountains of Everest, the tallest in the know Galaxy, in search of ruins of the ancients that were rumored to be among the continent spanning peaks. Many had sought them, but none had found them, or had they? One old man swore he had seen something that looked like ancient tech in the mountains, and provided the explorers with a map and drawings that showed where he had thought that something was. Many had not returned from searching this area. Dang now knew why, and he didn’t have to invoke any traps at an ancient facility to reconcile the disappearances.

  Or was the old man on that core world just selling fake maps to all comers, hoping to make a little extra cash off the greed of others? If so, he was responsible for a lot of death, adding to that total today.

  Dang shivered. The clothing he was wearing had been guaranteed to keep him comfortable no matter the weather conditions in the mountains. Of course that guarantee had assumed said clothing would remain intact. His was ripped to shreds by the teeth and claws of the snow bear. Even the undergarment skinsuit was compromised. And now the freezing temperatures of the high altitude, augmented by the wind chill, was sucking the heat from his body.

  I’ve got to get down, he thought, looking at the mountainside below, checking it for predators. I need to set up some kind of camp and get warm. It was also just a good idea to get out of the air, since the lift belt could fail at any moment and drop him like a rock. At his altitude, even landing in a deep snow bank wouldn’t save him. He tried to reach for the control and found that his arm was not responding like it should. When he finally forced it into position, he found that his fingers didn’t want to work either. With a curse he kept trying, fighting the sense of fatigue that was flowing through his body. With a last effort he was able to put his fingers around the control, just before his eyes closed and he faded into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  “It’s beautiful,” said Dallas, looking at the view screen that showed the planet their liner had assumed orbit around.

  “Uh huh,” said Dang, looking over at his partner and thinking the same of her. Dallas had a perfect honey brown complexion, frizzy hair, and ice blue eyes. He had met her while he was in the Imperial Marines, and she a petty officer in the Fleet. They had been equal rank, and not in the same chain of command, though serving aboard the same ship. They had become friends, confidants, then lovers. Since their enlistments were both up within a month of each other, they continued on as civilians. Since both had adventurous spirits, they had fallen into the role of artifact hunters.

  “Is that all you can think of?” she asked, looking into his eyes, a smile on her face. “You need to pay attention to the job at hand.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, clicking his heels together, then turning to look at the viewer.

  Everest was a most unusual world. Seventy-five percent water, it was tectonically active, as indicated by the numerous chains of volcanic islands scattered about the oceans. At one time it had boasted two continents, about fifteen million square kilometers total. Several million years ago the powerful plates had slammed the two continents together, resulting in the one major landmass, known as Himalaya. About half of the continent, the east, was a combination of rolling hills and well-watered plains. The west, from the center of the continent to the coast, was range after range of mountains. The central range was the home to the mountain named Everest, towering over twenty-one thousand meters above the level of the ocean. Essentially, it and the other tall mountains in the central range reached almost out of the atmosphere. Fortunately, according to their map, they would not be going that high, or they would have had to bring along spacesuits.

  Most of the mountains in the central ranges were covered with snow, with the exception of the tallest peaks that thrust bare rock to the heavens. The snow was thick on the mountains, a snowfall that never melted, but fell and flowed and avalanched down into the deeper valleys, where it repeated the process, moving the snow downward until it reached an altitude where melting could occur, feeding the rivers that flowed out to both coasts.

  “You know this isn’t going to be easy. Or safe,” he told Dallas.

  “But if we find ancient tech, we’re set for life,” she said, her eyes sparkling with the excitement of the coming adventure. “And we’re heroes.”

  Dang nodded. That was true. The Empire was always hungry for new tech, and the ancients were thousands of years ahead of the technology base currently in use by humans. Even if it no longer worked it could in some cases be reversed engineered, or at least give the current crop of engineers' ideas and a direction to work in. But it was thought that the still extant ruins of the ancients had mostly been found. There were still some out there, or so it was thought. They were, of course, getting harder and harder to find.

  Dang shivered a moment as he looked down on all that snow.

  “What’s wrong?” asked D
allas, putting an arm around his shoulders.

  “Where I grew up it never got cold. In fact, sometimes it got so hot it was impossible to do a day’s work without environmental containment. And here I am, about to go into one of the coldest places known.”

  “It’s colder in space,” replied Dallas.

  “Different kind of cold. In space you’re either in a controlled environment, or you’re dead. In snow you can feel the cold seeping into your bones.”

  “How do you know that? I thought you grew up in a hot climate.”

  “The Marines had us go through mountain and arctic training. Enough for me to know.”

  * * *

  Dang groaned as he opened his eyes, his mind taking a moment to figure out where he was. Several hard objects pressed against his body. His groan turned into a cry of pain as he tried to move, feeling a stab of intense agony through his ribs. He knew he had a decision to make here. If he stayed still, he wouldn’t exacerbate his injuries, but wherever he was, he still wasn’t under cover. But if he moved the pain might become too much for him. It wasn’t a hard decision to make, since staying where he was would mean his death.

  With a command to his implant the nanites in his nervous system erected a pain block, enough where he was no longer in agony. Enough where he could move around a bit and determine just where he was. His gloved hand ran over a rough material that reminded him of fur, and he almost panicked at the thought that he was lying on some animal. He focused his eyes and the panic abated. He was lying on several interlinked branches of one of the local trees. Instead of bark it had a fibrous coating like fur, retaining the heat of the exothermic plant. It was such a good insulator that very little of its internal heat was coming through to him.

  Shifting himself a bit, grunting from a new pain, he got into a sitting position and looked out over the forest. He was near the top of one of the taller needle leaf trees that made up this forest, sitting in one of the high valleys, about twelve thousand meters up. He wondered if he had fallen here, then rejected that hypothesis. The only one that made sense was that his lift harness had run out of power slowly, and he had floated down. And now here he was, thirty meters off the ground in the cold, his insulated clothing in shreds. At least I can breathe, he thought, taking a deep breath from his respirator mask. The oxygen system ran off a device that pulled O2 from the atmosphere, as scarce as it might be, and compressed and stored it. If he didn’t have any more battery power, the unit would stop operation, and he would only have what was in the tank, along with the twelve hour reserve given him by the emergency nanobubbles in his blood stream. He tried to link in to the rig’s computer with his implant and hit a blank wall. The computer was down, which wasn’t surprising if the batteries were dead.