Expedition Read online

  Expedition

  Ralph Kern

  Published by Ralph Kern, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  EXPEDITION

  First edition. October 25, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Ralph Kern.

  Written by Ralph Kern.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Previously in the Locus Series

  Prologue

  Chapter One – The Past

  Chapter Two – The Present

  Chapter Three – The Past

  Chapter Four – The Present

  Chapter Five – The Past

  Chapter Six – The Present

  Chapter Seven – The Past

  Chapter Eight – The Present

  Chapter Nine – The Past

  Chapter Ten – The Present

  Chapter Eleven – The Past

  Chapter Twelve – The Present

  Chapter Thirteen – The Past

  Chapter Fourteen – The Present

  Chapter Fifteen – The Past

  Chapter Sixteen – The Present

  Chapter Seventeen – The Past

  Chapter Eighteen – The Present

  Chapter Nineteen – The Past

  Chapter Twenty – The Present

  Chapter Twenty-One – The Past

  Chapter Twenty-Two – The Present

  Chapter Twenty-Three – The Past

  Chapter Twenty-Four – The Present

  Chapter Twenty-Five – The Past

  Chapter Twenty-Six – The Present

  Chapter Twenty-Seven – The Past

  Chapter Twenty-Eight – The Present

  Chapter Twenty-Nine – The Past

  Chapter Thirty – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-One – The Past

  Chapter Thirty-Two – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Three – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Four – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Five – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Six – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Seven – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Eight – The Present

  Chapter Thirty-Nine – The Present

  Chapter Forty – The Present

  Chapter Forty-One – The Present

  Chapter Forty-Two – The Present

  Chapter Forty-Three – The Present

  Chapter Forty-Four – The Present

  Chapter Forty-Five – The Present

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  There are so many people to thank for supporting me in writing Expedition!

  First, Caroline, who has once again shown immense patience and understanding as I toiled away on this book.

  Shay, for her fantastic and diligent editing.

  Tom, for the beautiful cover art.

  Michael, for your amazing narration of this series.

  My ‘tribe’ - Nathan, Rob, Josh and Scott, for your moral support. For banding together to form Sci Fi Explorations, and for Keystroke Medium.

  Ryan, and the good folk of Audible Studios, for believing in this story, and Jacob for helping make it happen.

  For those who read this book and series,

  The crew of the USS Ignatius, and all those in the NATO armed forces - thank you for your service.

  To the crews on the cruise ships, who labor away to make our holidays great.

  And to those who quietly work, so we may sleep soundly in our beds.

  Please subscribe to my mailing list here:

  https://www.scifiexplorations.com

  Or email / add me to Facebook here:

  [email protected]

  Previously in the Locus Series

  The M/S Atlantica, the most advanced cruise ship in the world, is lost. Navigation and communication systems fail. Captain Solberg and his executive officer, Staff Captain Liam Kendricks, begin to realize what at first seems to be a simple equipment malfunction is something far more terrifying.

  As they strive to return home, they encounter a yacht containing Karl Grayson, who is suffering the same difficulties. Taking him aboard, Grayson ingratiates himself with the crew before secretly murdering an officer who is on the verge of discovering he is in league with a mysterious faction.

  Shortly after, the Atlantica comes under attack from a repurposed pirate ship led by Urbano Bautista. The crew and passengers, including a disabled Marine, Jack Cohen, fight off the assault with the aid of a Navy helicopter, flown by Grace “Mack” McNamara, which appears in time to save them.

  Enlisting the aid of other passengers, including former Royal Navy Admiral John Reynolds and his daughter, Laurie, the Atlantica rendezvous with the USS Paul Ignatius, commanded by Captain Heather Slater, and other refugee ships. They learn that vessels are finding themselves trapped in a region of the sea, out of contact with land or home. Whatever is causing them to become trapped has meant they were last in contact with land on the same date, but have been here for different lengths of times, and for some... years.

  Together, Atlantica and the Ignatius are able to refit one of the destroyer’s missiles to map the region. They see that America has changed almost beyond recognition. They surmise that they may have somehow traveled into the distant future. They discover a location which they name the Locus, which is at the center of the region.

  Bautista and the pirate leader, Eric Vaughan, along with Grayson recognize that in the resource-poor region, Atlantica is a massive trove of food and luxury and plan to take her by force. Grayson sabotages the Ignatius while Bautista leads a fleet to assault the ships. A fierce battle erupts. Atlantica escapes, but not before Jack and Laurie are captured by the pirates. Bautista’s ship is badly damaged, and his crew takes horrendous casualties.

  Jack and Laurie are tortured for information, and tell the pirates the location of the Locus. Atlantica and her fleet elect to push on to the Locus themselves. The two fleets meet and see a strange weather phenomenon in the form of a column cloud with a light emanating from it. Due to Captain Solberg’s increasingly erratic behavior, culminating in a breakdown, he is relieved by Staff Captain Kendricks. Meanwhile, Bautista is showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and is growing weary of battle.

  Laurie discovers that Grayson is working for the pirates and manages to signal this to Atlantica. Grayson narrowly escapes the ship.

  The two fleets are about to engage in battle when a superyacht, the Osiris, commanded by Conrad Wakefield, appears at the center of the Locus. His ship has been heavily modified with weaponry and forces a ceasefire.

  Wakefield reveals to Atlantica, Ignatius, and the pirates that they have been thrust ten million years into the future as part of a plan to save a portion of humanity from a massive comet strike which wiped out all life on Earth. He urges them to all cooperate in order to recolonize Earth. Vaughan refuses, and wants to leave with the only source of fuel in the area, the oil tanker, Titan.

  Slater and Kendricks insist on bringing Grayson into custody for murder and sabotage, but the pirates refuse to give him up.

  Grayson and Bautista decide that it is in the best interests of peace to assassinate Vaughan for leading them into war. This begins the process of reconciliation, but Grayson is not pardoned for his acts of murder and sabotage. It emerges that John Reynolds and Conrad Wakefield have been working together all along.

  The fleet decides to set course for the old American mainland to begin a fresh start. Grayson is revealed to be a CIA Special Operations Group officer who was tasked with investigating Reynolds and Wakefield.

  And he realizes his mission is still on.

>   Prologue

  The beautiful comet, Perses, loomed low over the twilight horizon, casting a faint illumination over the verdant grasslands of Yellowstone Park. The single bright star of the nucleus sprouted two misty blue tails, spreading an eerie V of gas across the heavens.

  “That beauty there is the ion tail.” Doctor Gordon Reeves pointed at the azure streak with a stick. He addressed the four undergraduate students from his astronomy course who had bothered to come view this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They’d long since doused the campfire but the lingering smell of wood and burnt sugar smoke hung in the air. He still felt a little queasy from the sickly toasted marshmallows they’d enjoyed. “It always points directly away from the sun, whereas the dust tail is simply a trail it leaves behind. Now Perses is a big ole comet, so it’s been spreading that one wide.”

  He loved it out here, in the backcountry, often spending his weekends hiking and camping the trails away from the noise and light pollution. He brought his little Dobsonian reflector telescope up here to see what splendors the universe had to offer... and what splendors they were.

  Of course, now that Perses had swung inside the orbit of the moon and was coming up for its closest approach, the universe was bringing its beauty to him.

  So near he could almost touch.

  He wanted to share that with the next generation of astronomers. Who knew what sights they would see in the heavens through their careers? With the renewed interest in space exploration after the Deluge of twenty years before, all kinds of investments were taking place. Big telescopes were going up. Hell, even the base on Mars was doing well.

  “I never thought I’d be able to actually see it move,” Luke Quinn whispered as he stood next to his girlfriend, Kayleigh Somers. It was no secret he originally only came because of her. Now he seemed to be the one who was most taken by the comet. He’d even stopped eying the chiller holding the stash of beers they’d brought along. “That’s awesome.”

  Reeves smiled as he checked the time on his glasses and set them to record what he was looking at. In the last few weeks, the comet had gone from a tiny smudge in the heavens to something which dominated the night sky.

  It was beautiful.

  Four minutes to closest approach. The comet was indeed moving slowly up into the sky. Its motion would only get faster as it raced toward perigee, the point it was closest to the Earth. Then it would silently retreat over the long years into the dark depths of the Oort cloud beyond Pluto. “Get your cameras ready, folks.”

  Perses climbed up till it hovered over the horizon and remained motionless, yet the point of light of the nucleus grew brighter.

  Hmmm, maybe that’s a trick of perspective.

  “It seems like it’s coming right for us!” Somers laughed nervously. “It’s not gonna hit, is it?”

  “No, no of course not,” Reeves said. For some reason, he felt less confident than he should be about that. After all, all the data, all the information said it would scrape by a few thousand miles above the surface.

  He’d seen the data himself. He, like every other astronomer on the planet, had been fixated on the approach of C/2012 E2—or Perses, as it had been named. As far as he was aware, no one but the craziest of conspiracy theorists seriously thought it would actually impact.

  But now the moment of closest approach was on them, he felt uneasy.

  The point of light at the head of the two tails grew in intensity. Surely it would be at Perigee by now.

  Everyone couldn’t have been wrong, could they?

  Reeves glanced at his students, Luke had wrapped an arm around Kayleigh, drawing her close to him. Their shadows lengthened behind them.

  He expected at any moment for the perspective to switch. To watch the comet sweep silently and harmlessly by the Earth.

  Swallowing, he took a step back. An instinctive reaction to perceiving something approaching. His brain interpreted it as if he were watching a train race inevitably toward him in a tunnel.

  Something which would hit them no matter what.

  Surely someone would have known if it was going to. Surely someone would have said something about an unstoppable ball of ice and rock silently thundering toward them.

  But what if they’d all been wrong?

  The light grew to an intensity which overwhelmed everything.

  Then there was nothing.

  Chapter One – The Past

  The crosshairs settled on the distant figure.

  That he was furious was beyond doubt. His arms were just visible, waving in apparent admonishment of an unseen person. He stalked back and forth within the bare room in a repetitive motion. Left, then right, his movements bordered by the frame of the blown-out balcony doors.

  However bad he thought his day was, Karl Grayson thought with grim bemusement, it was about to get a hell of a lot worse.

  “Target acquired.”

  Even those two words were enough to send his rifle’s crosshairs bobbing up and down, far more so than the gentle rhythmical sway his breathing caused. It would be the last time Grayson would speak until the job was done.

  For him, the world had reduced to a tunnel. The dark cylinder of the scope bordering the man he was focused on, so far in the distance.

  “Range: twelve hundred meters,” came the bass disembodied voice of his spotter. “Just finishing up the firing solution.”

  Grayson took a slow deep breath in, letting the bitter ash-filled air fill his lungs. The heat was scorching, causing sweat to trickle from his brow. Ignoring it, he flexed his index finger, loosening it, before resting it against the rifle’s trigger guard.

  For a shot at this range, everything had to be considered. The wind speed and direction, the drop of the bullet, the barometric pressure, the weight of the bullet, even the very rotation of the Earth as it rolled around its orbit. A miscalculation of any of those things could send his shot wild, and compensating for all of those factors pared down to two simple numbers.

  “Three up, four left.”

  Slowly, so as not to disturb his position, he moved his left arm. Without looking, his practiced fingertips sought the drums on the side of the scope. He rotated them, feeling three clicks, then four as he zeroed the sights.

  “Requesting final authority.”

  He heard two clicks as his partner pressed the talk button on his radio twice. There would be no voice communications which could be intercepted by listening ears on this mission.

  The moment stretched into infinity. He took stock of his position. His rifle, body, and legs were in perfect alignment on the debris-covered roof—a line pointed directly at his unknowing prey. He heard his partner rustle slightly, adjusting his position as they waited for the response.

  In the comfort of an office or meeting room thousands of miles away, their quarry’s fate would be decided.

  It didn’t take them long. Seconds later, three clicks came over his earpiece.

  Grayson didn’t respond, his next actions would be enough to acknowledge his orders.

  The figure paced left, then right, its arms still waving angrily. The motion of the man repetitive. Repetitive and predictable.

  Breathe in. The target was dead in his sights. Then it walked left, out of them revealing the cracked plaster wall behind.

  Hold breath in lungs. Grayson smoothly squeezed the trigger, taking up its slack and then...

  The rifle boomed.

  The 0.338 Lapua Magnum round exploded out of the barrel at 805 meters per second. It soared silently across the smashed ruins of the city, outpacing the sound of its own gunshot.

  Grayson watched as the figure walked back into his sights. As he reached the crosshairs, he dropped anticlimactically to the floor. The battered wall behind him now painted red.

  “Tango down,” Grayson murmured. He felt none of the thrill or regret of his first few kills. This was just how he served his country now, how he earned his wage, how he paid his mortgage—doing the work too dangerous or questionable for oth
ers.

  He pulled his cheek from the rifle. The rest of the world crashed into his awareness.

  He was lying prone on the shattered remains of a rooftop. His partner, Max Dillon next to him, looking through his own telescopic spotter scope, his teeth bared as sweat cut rivulets through the streaks of camouflage paint covering his face.

  Before them lay the ragged war-torn capital of a country which had come to be known as the Vortex. A confluence of four armies, each fighting vicious hot and cold wars to complete their own ephemeral objectives. Objectives which twisted and turned on the whims of distant masters.

  Once, this had been a thriving city. But that was a long, long time ago. The local population had been more than decimated. The smoldering carcasses of buildings were riddled by craters or stitched with the pockmarks of bullets. From all around came the staccato of machine guns and the thud of explosions.

  But there was still life here. Still people trying to eke out an existence in this shattered place.

  Grayson looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun as a pair of fighter-bombers streaked across the skyline. The rooftop shook from the furious power of their engines. It could be NATO forces, or it could be the Russians. Who knew anymore? The battle lines shifted far too quickly for anyone to keep up with.

  Dark specks dropped from under their wings. Moments later came the thump of detonations a couple of miles away. More people dying in this hellhole. The warplanes thundered away, leaving a cascade of twinkling flares as the white trails of surface-to-air missiles reached vainly into the sky after them.

  He blinked and reached into his thigh pocket for his aviators and slipped them on, easing the piercing sun on his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Dillon clucked to himself as he continued looking through the spotter scope, undisturbed by the bombing run. “I reckon we’ve got us one dead terrorist asshole here. A personal message signed, sealed, and delivered, and with no collateral. Just like the bosses wanted.”

  Grayson grinned in response as he pulled the blackened metal McMillon TAC-338 sniper rifle to his body and snapped the spindly bipod legs shut.