What was a Calypson doing on Earth?
Why hadn’t they warned him? He would have come more prepared—with a pulse cannon and laser saw.
Why Wynn Lambdin? What did she have to do with anything? Why did the Calypson have an interest in her?
And what the fuck were those beasts? He’d seen reports of them, but up close? They shouldn’t exist. The mere sight of them made his skin crawl withwrongness.
And the fucking Calypson had controlled them somehow.
Carver shouldn’t be asking these sorts of questions. They would get him terminated, but there was far too much shit he didn’t know.
He turned slightly and stared at the doctor’s slumped form. She herself was an oddity—the fact that she’d been in the news recently, then apparently worked alone at that same outpost. Then she’d tried to defend the fucker.
And she shouldn’t be able to shake off a stun that fast. Not just once, but twice.
His eyes narrowed. There was one way to keep her down.
Turning, he knelt next to his go-bag, and opened it up with his bio-signature. There was a lot more space inside since he’d abandoned his big gun. Carver gritted his teeth. Hisfavorite. That fucker had crushed it with his bare hands.
Carver pushed his smaller weapons aside to pull out a compact med kit. He popped the lid open, revealing rows of medical nodes and dermal syringes. He swiped the node at the back, clicked the case closed, and locked everything else inside.
Straightening, he strode toward his charge, then knelt beside her. With a touch to her UV-suit, he forced her helmet to disengage.
Her eyes fluttered, and he slapped the node onto her throat. She twitched, then jerked forward, her fingers shaped like claws. Carver tapped his PALM, dosing her. She slumped down, still as death except for the rise and fall of chest. He waited for a beat, then two, making sure the sedative kept hold.
When she didn’t move, he stood and accessed the massive amount of data his superiors had sent him. It was becoming clear that he should have read more of it before arriving—not that they’d given him enough time to do so.
Maybe that was the point.
File names materialized on his visor’s interface, and he had the urge to shake his head at the sheer volume of it. There was no way he could have gone through all of this before arriving, especially with the termination time limit they’d given him.
Maybe they had set him up to fail.
But there had to be something in there that shed light on what the fuck he’d encountered on the planet.
Where to start?Carver strode to the bench seating along the bulkhead and sat sideways, so his legs stretched over three of the butt-shaped impressions, and his back leaned against the bulkhead.
Still off grid, this was the first time he’d looked at these files where he didn’t feel like the CORE peered over his shoulder, watching what data he accessed.
He tapped his PALM, accessing the oldest files, the interactions the CORE government had with theCalypsoduring its journey. Routine updates, personal letters to friends and family, astrometric data—none of it would help with his current circumstance.
Carver skipped ahead to the files that correlated with theCalypso’sreturn to their solar system. Again, there was so much data as to be debilitating in volume: every communication fromOmega Stationbefore it went dark, recordings of conversations between generals, and all the data from ships in the area during that time.
He’d learned most of this at school.
Carver jumped ahead again, scanning file names and searching for something he could use, or what parameters he should narrow down. A familiar name caught his eye. His chest squeezed tight:Captain Milo Archibald.
An image materialized in his mind’s eye of what that man looked like only days ago: bloody wrists, defeated expression, glazed eyes.
Shaking off the agitated feeling that ran up his arms, Carver clicked on the folder. The top file on the mountain of data consisted of compiled recordings. He selected the first one with a touch to his PALM, initiating playback.
The line of data scrolling across the bottom of the feed identified it as the ocular recording of Captain Archibald in Sector Five, aboard a civilian cargo vessel twenty-seven years in the past.
Carver was about to see what the captain had all those years ago and went oddly breathless.
It started with a view of an airlock, nothing unusual about it, its circular construction similar to any of the cargo vessels Carver had traveled on.
Archibald turned his head, revealing a man and a woman on the left. The woman looked older, and the recording identified her as Miranda Archibald, then listed a bunch of useless data below her image: age, place of birth, permanent residence, known affiliations. It did the same for the man, Toro Valcon. Nothing in his information stood out either.
