Frontier's Reach: A Space Opera Adventure (Frontiers Book 1) by Robert James (beach read TXT) 📗

Kevin stared at the scanners. “A blip.” He checked again. “It’s gone.”

“A blip? Where?” Jason stood and peered over Kevin’s shoulder.

“Let’s see.” Kevin replayed the scans.

“There!” Jason pointed.

Kevin froze the image. “Whatever it is, it appeared from the dark side of the moon, before slinking back behind it.”

“The Seekers. That would explain why we haven’t seen them since being spat out of the other side of the trans-space corridor. They’ve been hiding.”

“Hiding? From us?”

“Unlikely. But they’re obviously here for a reason.” Jason began to ponder.

Kevin narrowed his eyes. “I’ve seen that look before. What are you planning?”

Jason smirked.

“You’re not seriously considering going out there, are you?”

“It’s worth checking out. I’ll take the Julieanne,” Jason said, speaking of the Argo’s second pod.

“I would much rather you didn’t. You don’t need to piss off your brother any more at the moment.”

“Tyler’s already pissed with me. This won’t make it any worse.”

“It won’t make it any better either.”

“Nash’s still out there. If there’s any chance—”

“What do you plan on doing?”

Jason shrugged. “I’ll figure that as I go along.”

Kevin shook his head. He didn’t want to see Jason get himself killed. “I don’t like this. We were lucky to get away with our lives at Orion V. I can’t see the Seekers taking too kindly to people snooping around into their business.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Kevin relented. He’d learned it wasn’t possible to talk him out of anything. “You better be. If you don’t come back alive, I’ll kill you myself.”

Jason slapped Kevin on the back before heading toward the hatchway. “Don’t wait up.”

Twenty-Nine

Psi-Aion

The tall, lush trees towered a hundred meters above Nicolas’s head. He wondered if Earth’s large rainforests were like them before they’d been devastated by the hand of man. Usually new worlds of the commonwealth would either be terraformed to near-Earth conditions or have their settlements constructed under massive domes to keep out harsh environments. But Psi-Aion was something else. It felt almost like home.

He pondered whether the commonwealth should have sent expeditions past Frontier’s Reach all along. The vast distances from Earth would pose problems, but if this was anything to go by, there might be more similar worlds out there. Beside him, the others were equally in awe of the environment.

“This is amazing!” Tyler said.

“And that smell,” Susan added.

Nicolas put his nose to the sky. Rain was coming. But so was something else. He spun his head to a buzzing beyond their position, getting ever closer. In the distance a large insect, the size of a dog, hopped between the trees.

Corporal Higgs raised his rifle, as did the other Marines. The insect took no notice and disappeared farther into the forest.

“Watch out, Susan,” Nicolas said, “you don’t want to get bitten.”

“Or eaten.” Her eyes darted around warily.

“How far away are we?”

Tyler waved about his handheld tracker and pointed slightly to the west. “Eight hundred meters in that direction.”

Nicolas had been impressed with Tyler Cassidy’s piloting. The cargo captain had found a small patch in the tree line where he’d squeezed the old-style pod through and landed it within two kilometers of the beacon. He may not have had the reputation of his brother, but Nicolas assumed jockeying must run in the Cassidy blood.

He turned to his ex-wife to say something, but she wasn’t there. She’d stopped meters behind. “Susan?”

She put up a finger to shush him. “Can you hear that?”

Nicolas tilted his head upward and around. “I think you’re imagining things. Maybe you—”

Susan raised her hand again. “Listen.”

She was right. It was faint rustling. But then as quickly as Nicolas heard it, it vanished. “Might be just those insects.”

Susan didn’t seem so sure.

“The signal’s over this rise.” Tyler read from his tracker.

The rest of them caught up with the cargo captain and stopped at the top of the small hill. Above their heads, wreckage hung from some lower-lying branches of the trees. Below a field of gray-colored alloys had been scattered over two hundred meters in diameter.

Tyler led the way. His tracker beeped at increasing intervals as they marched closer. Nicolas kneeled and picked up a large chunk of the debris. “It’s definitely one of ours,” he said, rolling the sheet of metal alloy over. The letter C was painted on it in the same bold font marked on the outside of all CDF vessels.

“Over here!” Higgs called out.

Nicolas, Susan, and Tyler caught up to Higgs who stood over something yellow, sticking out of the ground.

Tyler pointed his tracker at it. “We’ve found our beacon.”

Nicolas kneeled again and dug with his hands through the muddy soil. With some help from Higgs and Tyler, he pulled at the object. It was a yellow cylinder, measuring half a meter. They heaved until they yanked it from the muck.

“A flight recorder.” Nicolas brushed the mud from one side and read the faded lettering from its casing. “UECS Raptor. Pod Three.”

“Nash’s pod?” Susan said.

Nicolas nodded. “Seems so.”

Tyler switched his tracker off. “How could debris from his pod have traveled all the way here? From what Jason told us, they found his wreckage in the nebula.”

“Some. Not necessarily all.” Nicolas added up all the clues in his head. “With what we now know, a Seeker ship was in Nebula TPA-338 that day. They destroyed Nash’s pod and abducted him in the process. We know they generated a trans-space corridor to leave the nebula.”

Susan nodded, seeming to be on the same page. “They came to the Psi-Aion system.”

“Yes, and if that’s the case, some debris from his pod may have got caught in the vortex’s wake, pulling it through the trans-space corridor until it came out the other side. Psi-Aion’s gravitational field would’ve drawn it into orbit, until it finally landed on the planet’s surface.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Tyler said. “The bigger question is, what exactly is in the Psi-Aion system?”

Higgs raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if the Seeker ship came here four years ago after looking for Benjamin Tyrell, what are they doing back here? What’s so special about the Psi-Aion system?”

A