Survival Machines Read online

  About the Author

  Ste Sharp studied Evolutionary Biology at Sheffield University and is the lead singer/guitarist of indie band Atlas, so considers himself a rock-’n’-roll scientist at heart. When he’s not writing fantastical adventures, Ste wrestles computers and lives in Suffolk with his wife and two sons.

  Survival Machines

  Ste Sharp

  This edition first published in 2021

  Unbound

  TC Group, Level 1, Devonshire House, One Mayfair Place, London, W1J 8AJ

  www.unbound.com

  All rights reserved

  © Ste Sharp, 2021

  The right of Ste Sharp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-78965-128-7

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-78965-127-0

  Cover design by Mecob

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  For Mum. Thank you for sharing your love of reading and for your support.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Super Patrons

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Extract from Origin Wars

  Acknowledgements

  Patrons

  Super Patrons

  Diane Adams

  Lynette Allison

  Martin Banham

  Tracy Banham

  Nick Breeze

  Tom Chapman

  Jamie Chipperfield

  Joanne Colman-Bown

  Dave Cottrell

  Simon Dell

  Luke Gormley (Jeez)

  Abigail Gormley (Monkey)

  John Greene

  Mike Griffiths

  Matt Holmes

  Alison Hunt

  Michael Hunt

  Chris, Natasha & Libby Knowles

  David & Chris Knowles

  Rob MacAndrew

  Joy May

  Tim May

  Olivia and Zac O’Leary

  Sheryll Osbiston

  Casey Pearce

  Paul Riley

  Cath Sharp

  Harry Sharp

  Oscar Sharp

  Roger Sidwell

  Andrew Smith

  Annette Smith

  Steve Smith

  Daniel Spencer

  Rupal Sumaria

  Danny Ward

  Jay Ward

  Vanessa Ward

  Mark Winborn

  Mandy Wultsch

  Chapter 1

  John Greene stared at the pitch-black sky and realised how much he’d missed the stars.

  Thousands of brilliant pinpricks dotted the sky in constellations he didn’t recognise, a cascade of diamonds, sparkling yellow and white. He didn’t get to see them often when he was home in Whitechapel but, out in the trenches, in the middle of what had been a French field, John had spent many a night staring up in wonder.

  John looked around him. As soon as the sun had disappeared behind the horizon, the eclectic group of soldiers had set up camp not far from the silver gates. Peronicus-Rax had told them it got far colder out here than in the dome, and John felt bone-weary after their day of battle, yet the sights of this new world kept him and his compatriots awake. John listened to the crackling campfires burning what firewood they’d carried with them, and to his friends’ conversations.

  ‘The large ones have to be planets,’ Crossley said, lying with his head resting on a bag.

  ‘Or small moons?’ someone replied.

  ‘Look at that one,’ Althorn said, pointing to a speeding star which crossed their view in seconds.

  ‘Make a wish,’ Crossley replied.

  John thought about Joe and Rosie, but Delta-Six spoke, cutting his reverie short.

  ‘That was no shooting star.’

  ‘What are they then?’ Crossley asked, without his usual tone of sarcasm.

  ‘Satellites, most likely,’ Delta-Six replied.

  ‘Or interstellar craft,’ came the deep voice of a Lutamek.

  John turned as a huge silhouette moved close, glinting in the firelight. He recognised Ten-ten, the Lutamek science officer.

  ‘We are triangulating our position using known star points,’ it said to Delta-Six, who nodded. ‘We were given information from the human soldier, Li, but require any further information you hold.’

  ‘Of course,’ Delta-Six replied and walked off with Ten-ten. ‘I have detail on our home star and the nearest stars. Are you using pulsars to fix points of reference?’

  ‘Still sounds crazy to me,’ Crossley said and coughed twice before shaking his head. ‘We could be anywhere.’

  ‘Who knows what we have yet to discover?’ Althorn added.

  John returned his gaze to the sky and let the conversations flow over him again. Some of the speeding stars were moving across the heavens in a bizarre way: some zigzagged; others zipped and paused. Beyond lay a blurred swathe of tiny, distant stars, and John couldn’t help but wonder about the theories he’d heard as to where this land actually was. Were they still on Earth, in some distant future perhaps? Or were they on another planet? Was it a planet in their system or somewhere much further away? And if the latter was the case, which star out there was their Sun? Their home star, with planet Earth circling it, still covered with the scars of war.

  The thought would have been enough to unsettle the old John, but he’d seen a lot in the last few weeks that had hardened his thoughts. He’d witnessed enough to turn a man insane, he thought. It was a surprise none of the other soldiers here had become crazed; back in the trenches it had seemed someone went doolally every week.

  Maybe it was just a matter of time?

  The flashbacks were coming less often now, but echoes of John’s Great War still came back to him. The war to end all wars. John huffed and remembered what Li had said about his son, Joe. He’d gone on to fight too, in Crossley’s war.

  But Joe was dead and there was no way back home.

  John pushed the thought away and focussed on the men, women and alien soldiers surrounding him, most of whom he was proud to call his friends. Althorn looked wiser with his eyepatch and deep hood. Lavalle was with Euryleia. Samas and several Lutamek stood with Jakan-tar, the leader of the cat-like Sorean. And in the distance he could just make out the silhouettes of the equine tocka and Gal-qadan’s cavalrymen.

  ‘That reminds me,’ John leaned up and said to Althorn.

  ‘What is it?’ The Celt looked over.

  John pulled the straps tight across his chest, fixing his gun-arm in place, and stood up. ‘I need to see how Mata is.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Crossley replied. ‘Tell him to wake up soon or we’ll turn him to firewo
od.’

  John smiled and beelined for the huge tub the Lutamek had created for Mata. Back in the dome, they’d filled the barrel with precious drinking water, scooped up his dry, broken body and plunged him in. On the battlefield he’d been second to none so nobody was going to complain.

  John took the last few steps tentatively, as though creeping up on a sleeping child, and peered into the still water. A soft orange light emanated from within, giving shape to what John recognised as the gnarled bulk of bark, thorn and twisted vine: all that remained of the immense plant-creature Mata had become. It was still twice the size of John though.

  ‘Heal soon, Mata,’ he said, tapping the barrel’s side and wishing he knew some of the Maori’s true words. ‘You’ll be amazed when you see this place.’

  John looked out across the dark plain which sloped away from their vantage point near the dome and tried to remember what detail he’d seen before the sun had gone down. There were scores of domes, identical to theirs, way off in the distance, each emitting a faint green light. The ground between the domes was dusty, like the battle plain they had crossed, but there were no obelisks like the ones that had greeted them at every stage inside the dome.

  One object held John’s attention though. He hadn’t seen it when they had first left the dome, but its silhouette stood tall and clear behind the many domes and seemed to be lit up from below: a tall, pointed tower.

  ‘John.’ Lavalle’s voice pulled John out of his thoughts. ‘John, come over.’ The knight beckoned him back to the fires.

  ‘See you in the morning.’ John patted Mata’s barrel and strode to where the whole army of nearly 200 soldiers were convening.

  ‘Okay,’ Delta-Six started, ‘so we’ve pooled our data and we have found our location.’

  A murmur ran round the crowd, a mix of hopeful cheers and mumbled questions.

  ‘Where are we then?’ Crossley shouted out.

  Delta-Six held a hand up. ‘I’ll get to that… because although it’s important to know where… we have also worked out when we are.’

  Looking around at the human faces, which all stared at Delta-Six with a mixture of hope and worry, John had the tingling feeling they were about to have their dreams dashed. Just as his own dreams had been destroyed when Li had told him that his son, Joe, had died in old age, in what was now distant history.

  ‘So what year is it then?’ Crossley asked.

  ‘One step at a time,’ Delta-Six said. ‘Many of us come from different time periods, so I don’t want the reality of our situation to come as a shock.’ He paused and stared from soldier to soldier. ‘Look, I’m probably the last human taken from Earth, and I’m finding it hard to accept the calculated date, so…’

  Samas stepped forward and spoke. ‘Li explained how much time had passed between my life and hers. The cities I lived in had turned to dust by her time. Our songs had been forgotten, and our treasured gifts to loved ones were either buried under sand or hidden in museum boxes. My time has passed. How many years is irrelevant.’

  A few murmurs backed Samas up, and John saw their leader was growing into his new role.

  A silence fell and the red-striped Lutamek leader, Nine-five, stepped forward and projected a laser image hovering above their heads. All eyes rose to the swirling mass of what looked to John like smoke, with drifts reaching out in curved arms, a flat, spinning mass of dust with a bulge at its centre.

  ‘This is our galaxy,’ Delta-Six said, walking around the image as he spoke. ‘Immense regions of dust, gas and over 200 billion stars spiralling around the galactic centre, which is most likely home to a supermassive black hole.’

  ‘Scientific studies,’ Nine-five cut in, ‘indicate there is a 97.8 per cent chance of the central mass and associated gravitational pull belonging to a black-hole phenomenon.’

  Delta-Six raised an eyebrow as he waited for the behemoth robot to finish before continuing. ‘We believe we are currently here.’

  One of the tiny stars towards the centre of the swirling mass grew brighter and turned orange.

  ‘Which is approximately 13,000 light years from the galactic centre.’ Delta-Six looked around. ‘The human home planet, Earth, is positioned here, 25,000 light years from the centre.’

  A second star, closer to the outer edge, lit up and glowed blue.

  ‘So the humans among us have been brought roughly halfway towards the centre of the galaxy.’

  John breathed in deeply and heard similar gasps around him. Some soldiers sat down and others walked away.

  They were on a different world alright. John had assumed so, but there had always been a flicker of hope that they were at least close to home.

  Nine-five added, ‘The Lutamek home system is located here.’ A star relatively close to Earth lit up green. ‘And the Sorean home world is located here.’ Another star turned yellow.

  John looked to Jakan-tar, standing at the front of the huddle of warriors, and felt like he saw the Sorean in its true alien form for the first time.

  ‘They’re not far apart,’ Althorn said.

  ‘Yeah, we’re practically neighbours,’ Delta-Six replied, ‘but each star is over 200 light years apart.’

  John frowned, trying to work out what that meant. He looked to Crossley, but the American looked equally confused, so he had to ask, ‘So… it would take 200 years to travel from Earth to the Sorean world?’

  ‘Yes,’ Delta-Six replied, ‘if you were able to travel at the speed of light, which is impossible.’

  ‘So, say you could travel at half that speed,’ Crossley looked at John as he explained, ‘it would take twice as long, right?’

  John nodded. That was several lifetimes.

  ‘Four hundred years,’ Euryleia said. ‘But how is such a thing possible? How could we survive for that long?’

  ‘It’s irrelevant,’ Nine-five said. ‘What matters is how long it took to get here. To this world.’

  ‘The distance from our home stars to here is approximately 12,000 light years,’ Delta-Six said.

  The whole group seemed to shrink under the weight of the number.

  ‘So at half the speed of light – if that’s even possible – it would have taken 24,000 years for us to get here.’

  ‘That can’t be right,’ Lavalle said, shaking his head.

  ‘So, let me get this right,’ Crossley said with his hands on his hips. ‘We’re in the year 24,000?’

  ‘No,’ John said and felt his head start to spin.

  When he’d seen the Roman wall in London as a boy, and read about the Roman Empire, John had struggled to accept the number of centuries which had passed between its construction and his time. After talking to Li, he’d accepted that London must have changed since his parents and Joe lived there. A few hundred years would mean some changes, obviously, but John knew there would be buildings he would recognise and the curve of the river… but after thousands of years, what would have become of the city John had grown up in?

  ‘This is irrelevant,’ Ten-ten spoke. ‘We shall accurately quantify our current date by correlating current star ages against our historical records.’

  ‘I agree,’ Delta-Six replied. ‘But the laws of physics can’t be bent.’

  ‘But what if there was another way to get here?’ Crossley asked. ‘A quicker route?’

  ‘Like a tunnel cuts through a mountain,’ Althorn added and Crossley nodded.

  ‘There’s nothing to show anything like that exists,’ said Delta-Six.

  John watched Jakan-tar step forward to study the galactic map.

  ‘Many generations ago, a mechanical life form found a path to our world which was on no map,’ the Sorean leader said. ‘When we defeated them, information from their craft showed they came from here.’ Jakan-tar pointed a furred claw at a star system four times further away from his home world than the Lutamek or human stars. ‘We used their technology, and revenge missions were sent to find their home world and destroy it, but none returned.’

 
; ‘So we could have travelled faster,’ Samas said.

  ‘Technology may exist to reach nearer to light speed, but the rules of physics are fixed,’ Delta-Six replied, clearly getting flustered.

  ‘There is some speculation on spatial anomalies,’ Ten-ten said, ‘which are capable of connecting distant regions of the galaxy.’

  ‘Speculation. And, if they exist, I presume you must travel to these anomalies,’ Delta-Six replied.

  ‘Agreed,’ Ten-ten replied. ‘None have been located near known star systems.’

  ‘Which means,’ Delta-Six replied, ‘even at light speed, with the time to accelerate and decelerate, it would still take years to travel to these anomalies and then travel here.’ Delta-Six looked around the group. ‘The point is we aren’t going home.’

  John felt his shoulders drop and tightened his gun-arm.

  It took a few silent moments before Jakan-tar spoke. ‘What about the other species we met in the dome? Where are they from?’

  Delta-Six shrugged. ‘To work out where each one comes from, we need detailed information on the stars visible from their home world, and we don’t have that.’

  ‘The Lutamek might have it,’ John said.

  ‘We have added all relevant information from our databanks,’ Nine-five replied.

  ‘Well, what about him then,’ Crossley pointed to Peronicus-Rax, who stood at the back of the crowd near Gal-qadan and his crew, ‘and the giant armadillos, do you know where they come from?’

  ‘The location of Peronicus-Rax’s home world has been narrowed down to one of these five,’ Nine-five replied, and five stars in the vicinity of the other highlighted stars pulsed twice. ‘The brothers, Das and Pod, do not possess that level of data. But,’ the Lutamek leader raised a hand to stop any further questions, ‘we theorise that all species passing through our dome are from the same region.’