Sinossi
The human race is engaged in a war with the Argoni, a ruthless alien war-species. On the outskirts of earth-owned territory, the colony planet Procyon One guards against an attack from the skies. However, the danger is closer than its inhabitants realize. Landry Stanton alone knows of the impending disaster, but he and his coworker Cait Underwood are stranded miles from the outpost. Pursued by the Argoni, they must traverse the unforgiving landscape of Procyon One to sound the warning in time. Desperate, they delve into the secrets of the Argoni, but this risks both Landry’s life and his humanity.Meanwhile, Marshall Evan Cole is blissfully unaware of the dire situation outside. He is called upon to lead a missing person case, but as the mystery is unraveled, Cole realizes that the outpost may be threatened by an enemy within.Can Landry get to the outpost in time to save it from the hostile Argoni? Can Cole keep the outpost together long enough for them to fight off the alien threat? Or will the Argoni gain the final victory?
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Informazioni sull'autore
Mark has been writing stories for as long as he can remember. In the early days he assembled his own illustrated books with accompanying stories and forced his parents to buy them. Unfortunately this model was not scalable, so in later years he has sought to promote his works to a wider audience.
Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.
Chapter 1
PSD 29-214: 0816 hours
Cait stomped on the pedal, and the mudhopper slid sideways as its tires fought to gain purchase on the steep dirt wall of the gully. She gritted her teeth and held the wheel firm, and after a moment the treads bit deep into the sand. The buggy lurched upward and out of the ditch, its front wheels spinning in the air, and for a moment there was nothing to see through the windshield but red sky. Then the mudhopper crashed back down and began to bump and thud its way across the rock-strewn terrain once more.Beside her, Landry’s unconscious body lolled in the passenger seat, scraping awkwardly against the doorframe. He still looked a mess, his skin pale and slick from fever, and the wound on his arm had opened up again. Blood covered the seat and the cabin floor, and the sight of it was enough to make Cait feel sick to her stomach.
She slammed on the brakes, and the mudhopper responded quickly, sliding to a halt and sending a plume of coppery dust scattering in the morning sunlight. She reached over and carefully pulled Landry upright again, securing him as best she could back under the seat harness.
As she stared at his gaunt face, she realized that she could no longer deny the truth.
Landry was dying right before her eyes.
He’s not going to make it back to the outpost, she thought. Not a chance.
She reached into the back seat and pulled out the first aid kit again, her mind whirring. The last fifteen minutes had been a blur, and she was still trying to make sense of everything that had happened. When she’d driven away from Proc-One’s outpost in the dim hours before dawn, she hadn’t expected to find much out at the array tower. It had been almost a day since Landry’s distress signal, and she’d figured that both he and his pilot would most likely be dead by the time she got there.
At most, she imagined that she might find them clinging to the wreck of their scout with an incredible story to tell.
Instead, she’d found Landry running across the sands of Proc-One’s wasteland—without an EVA suit, of all things—and with a mysterious black substance clinging to his body. By the time she’d pulled him inside, he’d been half dead.
Maybe a little more than half, come to think of it, she thought.
In the few moments he’d been conscious, he’d been babbling about an impending Argoni attack. Saying that the aliens were coming. That all of them were coming. In fact, he’d seemed scared out of his wits, pushing away her attempts to apply first aid, demanding that she simply drive, get the two of them out of there as quickly as possible.
Cait had to admit that his panic had infected her as well. Landry was generally a pretty calm and collected kind of guy, not the sort who would succumb to hysteria unnecessarily. Seeing the look on his face had frightened her in a way that talk of Argoni and invasions could not.
So she’d done as he’d asked. She’d stepped on the pedal and sent the mudhopper rolling across the planet’s surface, all too aware that danger to the outpost meant danger to Fraxa as well. The girl’s face loomed in Cait’s vision, urging her onward as she sped across the terrain. Although she had only known Fraxa for a day or two, she couldn’t deny that a bond had formed between the two of them.
She’s a fighter, just like me. But there’s no one else on her side.
Despite the urge to keep going, Cait had reached a point where she could no longer ignore what was happening to Landry. She was no Medic, but his plight was obvious nonetheless. She knew that she had to apply some basic first aid to stop the flow of blood, regardless of Fraxa, the Argoni, or anything else. Landry would surely slip away if Cait didn’t help him, and there was no way she was going to let the guy die right here in the mudhopper. Not after everything she’d gone through to rescue him.
She rummaged through the first aid kit and took out a container of hydrogen peroxide, then reached across Landry and gently drew his arm toward her. The fact that she was still inside her EVA suit made maneuvering inside the cabin difficult, and as she moved, the blanket with which she’d attempted to cover Landry slipped down. His torso was bare, and she winced as she noted the nicks and raw patches of skin that covered his body. There probably wasn’t a lot she could do with those, she figured. Not out here.
Just patch up the worst parts. Stop the bleeding.
She eased him forward and gave him a quick inspection. It became quickly apparent that the arm was the major concern. There were several open wounds between his elbow and wrist, oozing blood. If she could patch those up, he might have a chance of pulling through.
Dabbing away some of the blood, she irrigated the wounds with the peroxide as best she could. The damage seemed to have come from multiple sources. There were thin, stabbing-type punctures, as well as patches of disfigured flesh that almost looked like acid wounds. Cait remembered an occasion at the workshop last year when one of the other Optechs, Stillman, had gotten himself splashed with battery acid from a cracked transport assembly. The wounds had looked very similar to these.
Worst of all, there was a patch of blackened, necrotic skin on Landry’s wrist, its edges raised and mottled red. It almost looked like a wad of dead flesh that had been sewn onto his wrist. As she looked closer she could see that spidery black veins were emanating from the patch, creeping up his arm like tentacles.
Cait’s skin crawled just looking at it.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine what Landry had been up to out there before she’d found him.
What could possibly have caused something like this?
Trying to ignore the implications of that question, she concentrated on her work. She took a handful of adhesive strips from the first aid kit and began to pull them apart, then thought better of it. Instead, she dug through the mudhopper’s onboard tool kit and snatched out a tube of quick-seal glue—something she used on a daily basis in the workshop—and rested Landry’s injured arm on his chest. With her free hand, she pinched together the first cut on his forearm and applied the glue in one fluid motion.
Just like sealing a joint in a hydraulic hose, that’s all, she told herself, trying to ignore the squeamishness that was growing within her at the sight of so much blood.
She moved onto the next wound, and by that time Landry had begun to stir. He moaned and groggily moved his head as he tried to open his eyes.
“Landry, hold still,” she said. “I’m trying to patch you up here—”
He struggled and moaned some more, then cried out suddenly and tried to crawl away from her. “Please, stop!” he screamed. “No more!”
Cait held up her hands soothingly. “Landry! It’s me, Cait. You’re safe.”
His eyes focused on her then, and he blinked, still confused. His head jerked back and forth in alarm as he took in the mudhopper’s console, Cait’s EVA suit, and finally her face.
Their eyes met, and she saw the terror within him slowly begin to slip away. He visibly relaxed, letting out a shaky breath.
“Ugh,” he groaned, rubbing at his face with shaky fingers. “I thought I was there again . . . down there.”
“Down where?” she prompted.
He did not answer, instead leaning forward to stare up into the sky, blinking against the brightness.
“What are you looking for, Landry?”
His eyes lost focus and his voice dropped to a whisper. “The eclipse.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
He drew back and shuddered. “Ahh,” he groaned miserably. He glanced down at his arm. “This kills.” His eyes sharpened, the pain seeming to bring him back to reality.
“I know, I know. I’m trying to patch you up. It’s not like I have an Infirmary handy.”
“What is this?” he groaned, rubbing at the glue on his arm.
“Don’t touch that!” Cait said, pulling his hand away. “I used some adhesive on those gashes in your arm.”
“Adhesive? What am I, a model airplane?”
“Landry,” Cait said, leaning across to gain his attention, “tell me what happened to you.”
He coughed weakly. “Not now.”
“What about your pilot, Gus? Before you passed out you said he was dead.”
“He is dead.”
“What happened to him?”
“Toad got him. Ripped him apart.” Something seemed to occur to him, and he opened his eyes and peered out of the windshield again, where curls of dust still danced across the hood of the mudhopper. “Are we here? Did we make it to the outpost?”
“No, not yet—”
“Where are we?” he asked glancing through the side windows in agitation, suddenly as lucid as if he’d been slapped across the cheek. “I can’t see anything out there.”
“We’re a few minutes west of the position where I first found you.”
Landry stared at her, incredulous. “A few minutes? I told you to drive as fast as you could—”
“Listen to me, Landry. You’re dying,” Cait said vehemently. “Do you get that? You’re losing too much blood.”
“Fix me up at the outpost—”
“I don’t know if you’re even going to make it that far.” She placed a hand firmly on his chest. “Now, sit still and let me patch you up before you bleed out. After that, I’ll do my best to set a new speed record between here and the outpost. Deal?”
He looked as though he might argue the point, but a moment later he slumped backward. “Deal.”
Cait finished gluing the last of Landry’s cuts, then slipped a cartridge of antibiotics into the applicator and jabbed a clear patch of skin near the wound.
“So, are you going to tell me what happened now? What were you doing out here?”
Landry continued to stare out the window warily as she worked on him. “Gus and I took one of the scouts out here to bring back a storage module, if you can believe that.”
“A storage module?”
“Yeah. He thought he was going to lose his job because he left it out here. I figured I’d help him out.”
“And then what happened?”
“Something hit the scout as we went past the array tower. Turned out to be an Argoni dogfighter that we caught by surprise. The impact cracked the Seagull’s hull, broke her in half as she was falling out of the sky. I was knocked unconscious when we hit the dirt, and when I came to, Gus was dead. Looked like he’d been attacked by something after he crawled away from the crash.”
“Attacked by what?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Guess.”
Cait began to bandage Landry’s arm, watching him skeptically. “Argoni wandering around out here? How is that possible? There should be none left on this entire rock.”
He turned back to her. “That’s why I’m telling you we need to get out of here. They’ve been fooling us all these years, building right under our noses.”
“Building what?”
He shrugged. “Hives, I guess you’d call them. Structures that are invisible to ground penetrating radar.”
Cait regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether he had truly experienced something incredible, or if he had simply lost his mind. Could this really be true? Had Landry—a simple Optech—uncovered a secret that even the United Earth Marines didn’t know about?
Surely someone would have figured this out in the seventeen years since the war had begun, she thought.
“How do you know all of this?” Cait asked.
That look of hollowness she’d seen earlier settled deep within his eyes once more. “Because I was captured and taken down there.” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he’d been assaulted by a sudden headache, then began to push her away again. “That’s enough patching,” he gasped. “I’ll be okay. Right now, you need to drive. We need to get back before it’s too late.”
Cait couldn’t help but feel dubious about his story. Was it possible that Landry had been taken inside some sort of alien hive and lived to tell the tale? Was he right about a whole army of those things heading toward the outpost?
That raised another unsettling question in her mind. If this was true, and if the Argoni were mounting an assault, what was going to become of Fraxa? What was going to happen to the little girl who was, right now, sitting alone in the Infirmary with no one to look after her?
Cait had promised Fraxa that she would be there for her. But if the Argoni attacked the outpost before Cait could get back . . .
A horrible thought occurred to her.
When I left the outpost this morning, I had the choice of staying with Fraxa or coming out here into the wilderness to search for Landry.
Did I save the wrong person?
She tried to push that notion from her mind as she wrapped a bandage around Landry’s arm. This was no time to be second-guessing her decisions. She worked quickly, then gave the bandage a final inspection. She was still not satisfied that she had finished the job properly, but she figured that she had done enough for now. With the work she’d done, the blood loss would be kept to a minimum.
She started the mudhopper again and revved the engine.
She glanced at Landry, who had partially curled himself up in his seat, his skin pale and clammy. “Can you at least tell me what we’re running from?” she asked.
“I’ve seen things, okay?” he said sharply, his voice cracking from the effort. He was evidently growing tired of her questioning. “Things I shouldn’t have. I’m still trying to figure out what they mean—”
“What things?”
“All I know is that we need to warn the UEM before they leave tomorrow. We have to do something before the eclipse gets here.”
“You said something before about an ‘eclipse’? What eclipse? Why is it so important?”
Landry drew the blanket over his chest again and settled down into his seat as the mudhopper began to pick up speed. “I don’t know exactly, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in my head.”
“What happens when it comes?”
He craned his neck, wincing as he looked out through the windshield into the sky yet again.
“We all die.”
Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Risultati della ricerca per Eclipse of Procyon
Foto dell'editore
Eclipse of Procyon
Da: Revaluation Books, Exeter, Regno Unito
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
Paperback. Condizione: Brand New. 330 pages. 9.00x6.00x0.98 inches. In Stock. Codice articolo 1944452745
Compra nuovo
EUR 27,95
Spedizione EUR 11,68
Spedito da Regno Unito a U.S.A.
Spedito da Regno Unito a U.S.A.
Quantità: 1 disponibili