Antidote (EBOOK)

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If I die now, everyone back home dies with me. I can’t die now.

“Oh, gods, I can’t die now.” The words were barely audible over the shriek of a space vessel pushed to its limit and beyond.

Skye Chantrell was not normally a religious woman, but there was something about the sight of a planet’s surface rushing far too quickly toward the cracked viewport of her stolen, rusted-out shuttle that brought the old superstitions flooding back.

Please, please, please, she prayed. Not now, not here, not like this!

When she’d fled the Regime’s complex at the border of the demilitarized zone, she’d barely managed to escape with her life. If the shuttle she’d taken hadn’t already been damaged and leaking fuel when she entered the wormhole gate at the edge of the system, her pursuers would have tracked her down and finished the job in no time at all. As it was, the craft’s malfunctioning engines had flung her randomly through the vortex before spitting her out here, in the gravitational well of an old, abandoned outpost on some unremarked, forgotten moon.

With no other options available, she ran through the emergency restart procedure one last time. Her breath locked in her throat as the aging thrusters coughed, sputtered, and fired weakly into life. She was thrown forward, hard, against her seat restraints as the engines tried to slow the descent, but she could tell it wasn’t… going… to be… enough…

Her father had entrusted her with the most important data file in the Seven Systems, at the cost of his own life. She hadn’t even had a chance to mourn him yet, and now she was going to join him.

She had failed, and that failure meant a death toll on a scale she could barely imagine. Her hands slid from the controls and fell to her sides.

“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” she whispered, as the ground raced up to meet her.

* * *

The alarm blared through the old lunar outpost, shrill and jarring. Hunter jerked his head up from the holographic star map he and Kade had been examining, meeting the other Vithii male’s cold gray eyes with a frown.

“Perimeter breach,” Kade said unnecessarily. The two of them moved toward the door as one, jogging side-by-side through a warren of dingy gray corridors toward the control room.

Hunter already had his comm unit out as they ran, and was barking into it. “Draven! What have we got?”

“Ilarian shuttle,” came the static-riddled reply. “Looks like Regime registration, but it’s outdated. They don’t use these codes anymore. It’s coming in hot—crash-landing trajectory. Engines are inactive.”

“Where?” Hunter snapped.

“About half a klick north of us,” Draven reported. “Just west of the big crater.”

They were nearly to the control room. “Right,” Hunter said. “Kade and I will be with you in a moment. Stand by.”

Kade’s voice was grim. “This could be bad.”

“Or it could be nothing,” Hunter countered. “It all depends on who else—if anyone—is following along behind our unlucky shuttle pilot.”

The only reply was a skeptical grunt.
Hunter slid to a stop in front of the heavy durasteel door and slapped his palm to the reader. The slab of metal screeched open on ancient tracks, exposing the simple control center beyond. Draven was alone, his massive, hard-muscled frame bent over the sensor interface. He glanced up as they entered, gold eyes glittering beneath his head of spiky copper-colored hair, then looked right back down again, intent on the screen before him.

“Kill that klaxon,” Hunter said. “I think we’ve all got the point by now. Is the shuttle down yet?”

Draven fumbled for the override without looking, and the shrieking alarm cut off. “Looks like the pilot managed to get the thrusters firing on emergency power. It’s veering southeast, closer to us.”

There was a low rumble, vibrating the deck plates under their boots. “That was it. It’s down,” Draven reported.
The door screeched open again, admitting Ryder and Pax. Pax immediately crossed to join Draven at the controls; his metallic facial implants glinting in the blue light of the readouts.

Ryder—a strongly built Vithii woman with a head full of spiky red hair—turned to Kade and Hunter instead. “What the fuck was that?” she asked. “Meteor strike?”

Kade snorted. “Yeah, right. We should be so lucky.”

Hunter—who preferred to leave most of the sarcasm to Kade, who had a flair for it—filled Ryder in quickly on what they knew.

She frowned. “I don’t much like the idea that someone could have just randomly crashed on our doorstep. There’s no sign of other vessels approaching?”

“Not so far,” Draven said. “Looks like your standard engine malfunction. Which is not to say that no one was after them. I don’t know about you, but when I see a rusted out piece of junk with bad ID codes, I think stolen.”

Kade raised a dark, sardonic brow. “Maybe they came to the right place after all, in that case. Assuming they’re not charred meat now, of course.”

Hunter brought his focus back to the matter at hand. “Life signs?”

“Weak,” Draven reported. “Human. Just one, looks like.”
Hunter’s brow furrowed. What was a human doing with a possibly stolen Regime shuttle, way out here in the badlands? “What’s the craft’s condition?”

Pax answered, the slight robotic rasp of his implants giving his voice a flat, mechanical dimension. “Engines are burned out. Life support fading quickly. Multiple cabin leaks. It’ll lose atmosphere before long.”

“Better decide what you want to do here, Hunter,” Ryder told him. “Or the problem’s going to be a self-limiting one.”