Crash Landing: Survival in a Dystopian World (BONES BOOK ONE 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Dear Reader…

  Bones Book One

  A Message to you from the Author

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Map of Bones

  BONES BOOK ONE

  Crash Landing

  by Jim Rudnick

  This is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book may not be re-sold or given away without permission in writing from the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means past, present or future.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-988144-12-2

  Copyright © 2016

  Jim Rudnick

  All rights reserved.

  For my Susan…

  Dear Reader…

  Thank you for reading this ebook.

  If you have borrowed this book through the Kindle Unlimited subscription program, I kindly ask that —

  — you click through to the last page of this book when you are finished reading and exit the book!

  This will ensure that the author is properly credited for the book borrow…

  Thank you…

  Jim Rudnick

  Bones Book One: Crash Landing…

  "As the first wisps of atmosphere touched the badly damaged explorer ship, the craft was on it’s own AI–the pilot and nine of the ten occupants were already dead.

  The only alive human lay in the robo-doc tank in the rear of the ship where he’d been for almost a full week. He had been injured during an asteroid incursion and had been placed in the robo-doc then. Now he lay half awake, half in a stupor, not knowing that the rest of the Drake’s crew were probably dead.

  Boathi sphere ships had come upon the Drake twenty light years out-wards, and had so severely damaged the ship, that even as the pilot lay dying and he kicked it into AI and called on full FTL, their fate looked sealed…

  Inside the robo-doc tank, the surviving human lay in the liquid bath surrounding him, and he was still in that stupor of drugged medical aid. While he couldn’t read it, on the interior visor, lay the dashboard with information for the patient—and it appeared he had still another two and a half days in here.

  Alone...

  Defenseless and in a sealed tank, as the AI would try to keep the robo-doc up and running to enable his recovery…at least that was it’s next task…”

  A Message to you from the Author…

  I just wanted to say thanks so so much for reading Book one of the Bones Series…

  As my Amazon bio says, being a youngster in the 1950's meant that I was a voracious reader in what has been called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. That meant that for me, my heroes were not on the hockey rink or gridiron - but instead in my local Library where at 12 I had a full Adult card (thanks Dad!) and took out more than 5 books a week.

  Everyone from Heinlein, Norton, Leiber, Pohl, Anderson, Simak, Asimov, Brackett, Gunn, Van Vogt and more....I fell in love with and eventually owned Ace Doubles of my own. And while I never knew who wrote the Tom Corbett - Space Cadet series, I fell in love with them and they had a place of honor on my own bookcase too!

  With that kind of an introduction to Science Fiction, it's no wonder that when I got my writing work done, I turned my own fictional side of my brain to writing same. It's one thing I know how to write - and a totally different matter to release same to the world - something that I've just started to work on....

  Suffice it to say my own works are rooted in that Golden Age and it's that era that I'd like to one day be known as a teensy contributor to in some small way...

  So once again, thanks for beginning my Bones series and wait'll you learn about the world that our hero lands on…

  Enjoy and remember, in a series, characters develop and mature not the way we sometimes want…instead, it's like they have a life of their own!

  Prologue ~

  When the first wisps of atmosphere touched the badly damaged explorer ship and the craft was on its own AI, the pilot and nine of the ten occupants were already dead.

  The only living human lay in the robo-doc tank in the rear of the ship where he’d been for almost a full week. He had been placed in the robo-doc after he was injured during an asteroid incursion. Now he lay half-awake, half in a stupor, knowing that the rest of the Drake’s crew was probably dead.

  Boathi sphere ships had come upon the Drake twenty light years outward and had severely damaged the ship. Even as the pilot lay dying, kicked the ship into AI, and called on full FTL, their fate looked sealed.

  Now, those twenty lights gone, the AI had found a planet capable of life around a G-class star and was trying to get the Drake down in one piece. While the AI knew no one was left alive on the ship—except for the barely conscious human locked up in the robo-doc—the algorithms it ran on ignored that knowledge and focused on landing..

  As the AI had been under full battle stations settings when they were attacked, those settings were not ignored. The Drake came straight down at more than Mach3—screams of wind pierced the interior as the Boathi attack had punctured the ship’s hull. At less than a thousand feet, the AI tried to pull the Drake out of the dive and was only marginally successful as she plowed through a mile of tree foliage as the ship came level.

  The AI was also set to find civilization, and as it scanned the large forest ahead, it detected a small set of foothills and some kind of infrastructure on the other side. Buildings, roads, and highways appeared to lie there, and the ship rose to soar above those hills. On a rough bank on the other side, AI cut power to the rear thrusters and tried to land on its tripod landing gear.

  The fact that all of that was missing, as was most of the lower exterior of the hull itself, meant the ship simply fell the last twenty feet and lay canted off to one side but safely aground.

  AI chimed and waited for a human to acknowledge the landing. AI chimed again. And again, but no one answered the chime.

  The corpses of the pilot and co-pilot lay in their seats, and the chairs of the five scientists and two marines held corpses as well. All had been killed by the Boathi sphere ship as it had caught them coming up from a planet they’d just explored for the Empire. Nothing to report on that one, one marine had said just as the Boathi appeared off to port and the strafing projectile weapons riddled the Drake with holes. Not a big ship, the Explorer-class ship held fewer than a dozen crewmembers and had small sections devoted to labs and cargo space.. The robo-doc lay in the rear, however, out of the normal ebb and flow of the ship’s traffic.

  Inside the tank, the surviving human lay in the liquid bath surrounding him, and he was still in that stupor of drugged medical aid. While he couldn’t read it, the dashboard on the interior visor showed patient information—and he had another two and a half days in the robo-doc.

  Alone.

  Defenseless and in a sealed tank, he lay, as the AI would try to keep the robo-doc up and running to enable his recovery…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Inside the robo-doc, the human dreamed. At least that’s what everyone said—when you were under the robot
’s medical aid, time outside went on normally, but inside that tank and in one’s brain, time was different. And dreams were common.

  Javor dreamed. He dreamed of what it had felt like to cross the finish line in his first school race. To have beaten the other boys who had talked a good race, but who had never been out on the practice track like he had been. Rain, shine, and even hail once had not kept him from running those fifteen hundred meters over and over. Long strides. Pumping arms. Sweat running off his brow so thick that his shirt tails were soaked. But he ran. And on race day, he’d won. By quite a stretch, his coach had said, and in his dreams, he was now running once more in that same fifteen-hundred-meter race, but he was losing.

  Someone was ahead of him by about a dozen yards as he realized this was the fourth lap of the track and the finish line was just ahead. He’d been tired from the one-hundred-ten-meter hurdles he’d finished just an hour ago. He’d thumped his knee on one of those wooden hurdles, and while it went down, he’d struggled to keep up and had come in second. So far today, he had a few firsts in the field events—javelin and discus, of course, and even a surprising long jump and the shot put too. He'd taken second in the hurdles and pole vault and third in the high jump, four-hundred-meter dash, and one-hundred-meter dash. It all came down to the fifteen hundred meters. If he could win it, he’d be the new decathlon champion of the planet, which would get him into the Empire games in a few months. In the Empire games, he would be able to challenge the best athlete from each of the one thousand planets that made up the Human Empire.

  He half-smiled as he pumped his arms just a bit more, asked his thighs to loosen up a bit more, and asked his calves to tighten up a bit more on his strides. He closed on the man ahead of him.

  Ten yards short.

  Seven yards short.

  Three yards short.

  Veer outside just a little as the turn ended and the final straight lined up to the finish line.

  One yard short.

  Still one yard short, and his thighs started to scream at him.

  Still one yard short, and his calves began to spasm at the end of each stride.

  He knew he still had his kick, so with fifty yards left, he went into what little overdrive he still had.

  Even.

  He was even with his final competitor, and with every pounding step, he moved an inch ahead.

  One inch.

  Two inches.

  Three inches.

  And there was the tape … and … and he won!

  He almost collapsed immediately and turned outward toward the massive stands full of screaming National Championship fans, and while he didn’t go down, his calves were cramped up. He hobbled as others came up to congratulate him and tell him job well done.

  He smiled in the tank. It was one of his biggest victories, and it floated above him like a cloud in a blue sky.

  Yet somehow, he was no longer there at the big stadium but hovering above the asteroid that was the reason he was in the robo-doc. The Drake had received some scans that showed there was a deposit of Lawrencium close to the edge of the deep asteroid belt. She went in, and with the best pilot in the Empire Exploration section, he dodged and ducked and soared over asteroids that were as small as a flyer and as big as a lake.

  The Drake was not what one would call an agile ship at two hundred feet long and bullet-shaped with arrays on the top and bottom sections of the hull. However, with a skilled pilot, she could be as agile as the pilot could be. The Drake had worked her way inward from the edge as the bridge view-screen scanners kept them aimed at the target asteroid.

  It had been no one’s mistake, Javor thought. At the same time as the Drake worked its way inward, something was hunting it from deeper within the asteroid belt. That something was a Boathi sphere ship, which jumped out from behind an exceptionally large asteroid and fired its projectile cannons full tilt into the Drake. This weapon sent out small, round drilling bullets like bearings that tore through the hull of any ship by the thousands. It made trying to seal hull breaches impossible due to the vast number of holes, and it used the vacuum of space to finish off anyone who’d been missed by the drilling bearings.

  The Drake was no different. She was pierced almost a thousand times as her klaxons went off. Eight of the ten crewmembers died from those bearings or shrapnel pieces of the hull. The pilot had about a minute to turn on the AI and set a course for anywhere twenty lights out, and as he hit the go button, he died of exposure to the vacuum.

  Only one crewman was left—Javor, who’d been in the robo-doc now for a few days. It was trying to mend his broken arm and elbow and the abrasions on his left side he’d incurred on a fruitless away team mission on an asteroid just a few days back. Since he was in the robo-doc tank, submerged in the medical liquids, he’d missed the Boathi attack, and as none of those bearings had pierced the tank, he was still asleep.

  And dreaming. And remembering.

  Thoughts of the war that had lasted for more than one hundred years between the thousand-planets-strong Human Empire and the invading Boathi race, a race of reptilian aliens with a homeothermic metabolism and avian features, drifted through his mind. Like humans, they could easily adapt to almost any climate, which meant they could settle on all the worlds humans had settled on. The Boathi showed up with more than two hundred ships, without warning, at the edge of the Human Empire. They picked some planets to invade and sent down troops after seeding the planet with an airborne virus that killed 99.9 percent of the humans first.

  A simple war, the humans had thought, for worlds.

  Something they could deal with.

  But talks had always failed.

  The Boathi continued to take world after world. The ones they did not want were bombed with the airborne virus, and power generators, dams, nuclear facilities—anything humans used to generate power for their civilizations—were destroyed.

  And they moved on. In those one hundred years, they’d taken at least two hundred Empire planets. While humans geared up for more and better ships to fight the Boathi, it had taken almost seventy years to get on an even footing, and the war was slowly now swinging in the humans’ favor. The virus wasn’t yet understood as the infected planets were now in Boathi territory.

  A few Explorer ships had been selected to go back to the first fifty planets the Boathi had bombed and not bothered to invade or colonize. The mission was to check on them, find the virus, bring samples back to the Empire, and determine if the humans could recolonize them.

  The Drake had been assigned to that mission. Their first stop was the virus-bombed planet Artus4, off a sun about twenty lights farther into the Empire. The Lawrencium alerts had come from that system and its asteroid belt, and it had been luck alone that the pilot had lived long enough to engage the AI that had brought the Drake to this planet, wherever and whatever it was …

  #####

  The Drake lay like a prize, its hull speckled with small holes. In the bright sunlight, it was beginning to smell with the noxious odor of decaying flesh and rotting bodies. That odor was like a magnet here as most food sources were few, and flesh was flesh to all scavengers. The river ahead of the Drake, on the other side of the road down at the bottom of the ridge, carried some of the smell away with its current and winds but not much.

  Down under the Drake, as she sat listed to one side, small animals tried to climb up the narrow tree and shrub limbs to get to that smell. Most failed but some like smaller rats and a snake-like reptile were able to find purchase and get up and near the small holes in the hull. Some entered and slowly made their way to a corpse and began to eat. It was nature at its most basic tenets—what died became food for others.

  The day after the crash-landing, more than a hundred of these scavengers got into the Drake; others, bigger and less able to gain entrance, prowled outside. They watched each other as they hunted for access and often one fell to a larger predator.

  Near dusk, a small group of humans appeared. They were aware of the sh
ip because she lay in the bright sunshine high on the ridge above their town. They also could smell the stench of the corpses, and they were careful around the group of animals that such an odor attracted too.

  One human put an arrow into a larger cat-like spotted hunter that sat in a tree above them, and as the body fell, it was pounced on by other smaller packs of animals. Large winged birds stood off to the side, watching and waiting to gain access to what was left.

  But the humans stood still.

  “It’s a ship, all right,” one said.

  “A ship that looks like a human ship,” another answered.

  “But it’s crashed. Surely no one could survive that as she plowed into the other side of the ridge first then ended up here,” another said.

  All nodded at that.

  One human circled around and got beneath the rear cargo door, but it was too high.

  “Can’t get up there to try my handprint on the door lock,” he said and shook his head.

  Without recognizing who was at the door, all ships—this one most likely too—would refuse to open up a door to allow entry.

  “Whomever sent this ship or what it means—‘til we gain entry, it’s all a mystery,” the man with the bow said, and that got some nods of agreement, and he added, “We’ll need some help here.”

  They left, going down the ridge quickly and back toward the town in the valley below by crossing the bridge a few hundred yards to the west.