The Argenis Solution

By William Lavell

They’ve escaped The Company’s sights, but not its reach. Now Ryan and his crew are on their toughest mission yet!

As the fourth chapter of the Vindicators series begins, life in the aftermath of the crew’s escape from Treos is more complicated than before.
After their desperate and brilliant deception at Treos, President Aarla and the newly-commissioned Admiral Straker are convinced that Jace Ryan and his friends are dead. This has bought them some much-needed breathing room. But no one’s breathing any easier. Ryan’s crew is fractured, and his sister Jade is lying in the infirmary, teetering on the brink of death from Samathine poisoning.
Dr. Pryce’s old associate Professor Cord is their only hope of saving her life. He worked with him on the Samathine Project, and he’s created the only known antitoxin. But the price for the cure will be high. Aarla wants Cord for the secret that he possesses, and sends Straker to retrieve it. If Ryan and his friends go to Argenis they risk Straker finding out that they’re still alive. And it also seems that the antitoxin for Samathine isn’t the only secret that Cord is keeping.
The hunt for the Samathine cure is on. Ryan and his crew are in a race against the clock, and Admiral Straker. They are about to go off on a quest that will bring up more ghosts from the past, and put them in more danger than ever. All to possess...
THE ARGENIS SOLUTION

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Lavell
• Release date: Feb 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781482573701

William Lavell

William Lavell was born and raised in Northern New Jersey. By "day", he works as a supervisor at a transportation company that he's been with for the last 20 years. He's been writing for just as long. He finally saw his first novel, The Augustine Agenda, published in 2010. It has received Honorable Mentions at the 2011 New England Book Festival and the 2012 London Book Festival. He has since followed it up with Escape From Argus, which was published in 2011. His latest novel, The Treos Dilemma, was published in February of 2012. He's currently hard at work on a fourth untitled book in the series, which he hopes to finish by the end of this year. He currently lives in Central New Jersey with his wife, Michele.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

WHERE THERE IS NO trust, there can be no treachery.

It was a simple old axiom from the planet Carthal that was turning in Raylen’s mind as he checked over his flight vectors for about the thousandth time. The freighter Bravado was two days out of port from Renata. But to Raylen, her pilot, it had felt like weeks instead of days, and there was still another day's travel before he reached his destination on Argenis. There, they would drop off their cargo, take on a new load, and then start on the three day trip back home. Truth be told, it was a total of six days longer than he wanted to be doing this.

For the last two days, he’d had nothing but time. And there had been nothing to fill that time with besides turning over old proverbs from home in his head. But Raylen thought that the saying about trust fit the current times better than any other.

As a rule, the people of Carthal didn’t mingle with outsiders. Instead, they kept to themselves and left all their off-planet dealings to the settlers who lived on the planet’s moons. While the settlers ran the trade route, the people on the planet preferred the peace and security that came with their isolation. They trusted no one, and the axiom held.

Then the war started, and everything changed.

It had been a fairly simple process for the Company, and an unpleasant one for the people of Carthal. One day, armored troops flashing guns showed up in the capital city, seemingly from out of nowhere. Their commander made a speech about terra-forming fifty-odd years before, and the Company having property rights to the planet. Before anyone knew what was happening, their leaders were imprisoned, and their home had been claimed as a Company world.

At first, the general public seemed to lack the inclination to put up any sort of organized resistance. Those who finally did stand against them proved to be too little, too late. First, Carthal lost all contact with the traders on its moons. Because unbeknownst to the people on the planet, The Company had taken over the moons first. Then the fighting started. The war, if it could be called a war, was a short one. But the costs were devastating. In the cities, Carthal’s sons and daughters were killed by the thousands. Hundreds of other citizens who spoke out against the Company were arrested in the middle of the night for various crimes and were never seen again. And when the fighting was finally over and Carthal was defeated, the very property that the Company men were so adamant about laying a claim to had been laid to waste.

Raylen had been a rescue pilot for the military then, and he got a firsthand look at the extent of the Company’s brutality. The dead bodies. The massive destruction. Hollowed out cinders left where great buildings had once stood. They were a thousand images that would stick in his memory until his dying day.

For the present, Raylen and his co-pilot, Valara, had been assigned by the High Council to take a load of cargo to a Company outpost on Argenis. In return for that cargo, the Company promised to give them a shipment of relief supplies, mostly medical in nature, which a suddenly and conveniently (at least for the Company) war-devastated Carthal desperately needed.

Relief supplies, he thought bitterly. They decimate our planet, and then they offer us ‘relief.’

All systems are still functioning normally. Reactor output is within tolerances, and our onboard computer is available in all flight modes. The sound of Valara’s voice stirred him from his contemplation.

Um... that’s fine, he grunted in response.

In all the time they’d been flying together, Valara had never seen Raylen quite as sullen as he was now, but she could understand his sentiment. She could also sympathize with it. In fact, she didn’t care for outsiders any more than he did.

You don’t like the idea of Carthal bargaining with these people, do you? She already knew what his answer would be. But after two days of near silence, even this conversation was better than none at all. But what choice is there?

None, I suppose. He chuckled, but there was no humor in his expression. What’s the going rate for people’s dignity and self-respect on the open market these days? Some protein bars? A box of bandages?

To serve the people. Her tone was as dry as she quoted the motto of the High Council of Carthal.

He gave her another mirthless chuckle. Yes. But the question is: which people are we serving now? Our own? Or theirs?

Before she could give him an answer, the ship’s proximity sensor went off. But it shouldn’t have. The course that they’d been assigned was well away from the established routes in this part of the galaxy. There shouldn’t have been another ship around for at least half a light year. They both checked the monitors in front of them to find out what was coming towards them.

A louder alarm sounded, and the lights in the cabin dimmed.

Incoming fire, Valara shouted.

Before he could react, the ship was rocked by weapons fire pounding against the hull. The room lit up in bursts of light as control panels on the walls overloaded in showers of sparks.

I’m tracking one hostile craft! She had to shout to make her voice heard above the crackling of burning circuitry. The design is not familiar. It appears to be bullet-shaped. A short-range fighter of some kind. Its speed is making it difficult to track, but it seems to be coming about for another pass.

Bravado shuddered violently under the force of another impact. The lights inside the cabin failed completely for a few moments, and were even dimmer when they finally came back on.

Raylen frowned. Probably pirates, he scoffed. Damage report?

They knew right where to hit us. Valara had to shout above the klaxon to be heard. We’re hit midway across the upper hull. Guidance is severely damaged, and propulsion is offline. They’re coming about again.

Raise our shields!

Valara did her best at the controls, but in the end, she looked at him and shook her head. There’s too much damage, Raylen. The controls are not responding.

Try to reroute the power, he told her. I’ll hold them off.

Valara leapt from her seat and rushed over to a computer console near the front of the control room. Her hands trembled as she tried to bring the shield controls on line, but to no avail. As fast as she could reroute functions from damaged circuits to working circuits, the working circuits would overload and fail. The harder she tried to make repairs, the more circuits failed. She was fighting a losing battle, but still she kept working.

It’s no use, she said finally. Deflector control is offline.

Raylen wasn't faring much better with the weapons. At least they were still working. He fired as quickly as he could, as many times as he could. He scored two direct hits on the other ship as it swooped towards them, but they didn't seem to have any effect. Not only was the other ship coming around to have at them again, but now it seemed to be coming in even faster than before. Bravado rocked violently as the other ship strafed it again, fore to aft.

Before he could warn her, the circuitry that Valara had been working on blew off the cabin wall in a burst of sparks and smoke. The explosion caught her full in the face and the upper part of her torso. She barely had time to cry out as the impact threw her roughly to the floor. She lay unmoving where she fell, her eyes fixed upon the ceiling. Raylen couldn’t tell for sure from across the room, but it didn’t look like she was breathing.

He called out her name frantically, but she still didn’t move. Emotion completely overruled conscious thought, and he sprang from his seat to tend to her. He hadn’t gone more than two steps before Bravado was struck yet again. The console separating his seat from Valara’s overloaded. It exploded in a shower of sparks as he was moving past it. He felt an impact that knocked the wind out of him, and then a searing pain across his chest. He felt the sensation of falling, which ended abruptly when his back slammed against the floor.

He sat up and tried to stand. His limbs moved slowly, as if he were moving under water. He looked down in front of him and saw a pool of blood on the floor between his legs. In his disoriented state, he wasn't sure where it had come from until he ran his hands up to his chest and felt the sticky moisture on his shirt as he ran his fingers through it. His hand finally came to rest on a fist-sized hunk of shrapnel that was sticking out of the middle of his chest. He gripped the metal shard and willed his arms to pull it out, but they didn’t have the strength to obey him. It was then that he realized just how badly he was hurt. It was getting harder and harder to breathe, and the effort to do it was causing him more and more pain. He was sure that the shrapnel had damaged at least one of his lungs, if not both of them.

His eyes began to close as his consciousness waned. He fixed his stare on Valara. It still didn’t look like she was moving, and Raylen sighed heavily as the reality set in that she was dead.

At least you won't die alone, he thought grimly. It looks like I'm going to be right behind you.

A new sound filled the room as he heard thudding across the floor. Before his eyes closed completely, he spotted the soldiers flooding into the room. They were covered in body armor, and carried heavy assault rifles in their hands. They fanned about the room in a search pattern. When they noticed him crumpled up on the floor, they stopped and examined him keenly. But when they saw the condition he was in, and that he was unarmed, they left him and turned their attentions elsewhere..

He counted five of them before the haze in his head stopped his count, but his ears told him that there were a lot more than that. More than enough to handle a dying pilot and his dead companion. He couldn’t see their faces through the visors on their helmets, but he could see their uniforms well enough. The men wore black fatigues, with polished black boots that shone even in the dim light of the control room. As dim as his vision had become, he could still see that these were the uniforms that the Company men wore. There was no doubt in his mind.

There was also no doubt in his mind that these were the men that had attacked the ship. They'd gotten here way too fast for it to be a coincidence. And they didn’t seem to care much about the two dying crewmen they stepped over as they searched about the room to be a rescue party.

These Company men are worse than pirates, he thought to himself. At least pirates attack head on, without any pretense. These people lured us here to take what we had by force. They take everything. And now they’ve taken us too.

That would be one of the last conscious thoughts that Raylen of Carthal would ever have.

ONE

EVEN ON A SHIP full of people, Jace Ryan felt alone.

Even more so now than while he was stuck in a spacesuit over Treos, he felt alone. He sat at his sister’s bedside in Vindicator’s infirmary, as he had every night for the past week, and witnessed… nothing.

Nothing was exactly what happened every night as Jade Ryan lay there in bed, her body paralyzing itself from the inside out, as Doctor Pryce had not-so delicately put it to him. If not for the makeshift ventilator that Traynor had rigged up out of parts that he had stripped out of Gods knew where, he was sure that she would have stopped breathing a long time ago. Sure, he’d found her on Treos. And with the help of his friends, he’d even rescued her. But the Samathine that the Company had dosed her with was inviting death’s slow crawl through her prone form. If those bastards had meant to torture the woman to death, Ryan reckoned that they were doing a hell of a job of it.

But as terrifying as Jade’s predicament was, hers hadn’t been the only torture to follow the experience on Treos. He’d been tortured as well. Apart from helplessly watching his sister’s silent agony, he was also trying to deal with the suffering that the trip had brought to the rest of his crew. Thanks to Tavion Karr, an unscrupulous but nevertheless useful business associate from his past, Ryan had learned that Doctor Pryce had in fact created Samathine as part of a Company research team. In all the time that James Pryce had traveled with them, Ryan and the others had no idea that an ex-Company man had been living on their ship. And in typical Tavion Karr fashion, he had handed Ryan an important piece of information, and then promptly tried to kill him.

Karr’s weapon of choice had been a hunter/killer missile. It was an old, obsolete weapon, even by the Company’s standards. They were made to lock onto an energy signature and never stop coming until they impacted their target. And Karr had sent one after them. Shooting a giant missile at them wasn’t even creative, but it was deadly and effective all the same.

In the end, Ryan’s only choice had been to shut down an already crippled Vindicator and draw the missile away with the shuttle. When it was all said and done, he’d destroyed the weapon and saved the ship. But in order to do it, he’d had to sacrifice their one and only shuttle, and had nearly gotten himself killed in the process.

Two of his shipmates, Marcus Briggs and Adam Traynor, had taken the whole episode in stride. In fact, Marcus had been strangely impressed by the whole thing.

You’re outta your damn mind, the big man had told him afterwards. But you pulled it off.

But not everyone had taken the episode that well. Vindicator’s pilot, Janice Wilkes, had been so angry with him for risking himself the way he had that she’d only just started speaking to him again a week later. And Mara… her reaction was proving to be the toughest on him of all.

She’d given him an earful when Jade was first brought in here. Pryce had figured out that Jade was suffering from Samathine poisoning. In typical Jace Ryan fashion, he blamed himself. He should’ve found her sooner. Protected her from Karr. Hell, he shouldn’t have even put her on that transport in the first place. But he had sent her away, and things had come to this.

But Mara had pointed out – very loudly, in fact – that he’d done all that he could to save her. They argued about it, and the argument had ended in the last way he could have imagined. Their voices fell silent, and they ended up in each other’s arms. Even under the circumstances it was the best he had felt in a long time.

But since that day, the silence had been all that was left between them. Mara only spoke to him when they were in the control room, and even then only when she had to. But beyond that, she’d given him nothing. He could feel her presence in his mind through the psychic bond they’d developed somehow on their adventure on Diablo. But after Treos, the sensation had changed. It was faint, as if she were miles away. Nothing he said or did seemed to be the right thing to bring her closer to him, in any sense of the word.

Ryan couldn’t hold his head up