From The Ashes

By Marie Brown

After the destruction of billions of humans and hundreds of colony worlds by an unknown aggressive force, Lieutenant Wallace K. Williams must overcome his personal devastating losses and rise to the challenge of leading the few thousand survivors into a new future. Along the way, he encounters aliens, hope, despair, and the chance for an unexpected love. But will he lose everything all over again, just when things begin to go right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marie Brown
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311655349

Marie Brown

"Marie Brown has lived in many locations across the United States, but spends most of her time exploring the realms of imagination. Currently located in Colorado, her brief moments of free time are spent in front of her computer, frequently covered in cats."Blah.Yeah, okay, that's all true. But I'm tired of hiding behind a bland, third-person pseudo-bio, utterly lacking in personality.Hi! I'm Marie Brown, and I write a lot. I self-publish through Smashwords and Amazon because I got tired of getting "well-written, but not our thing" rejection letters. Because, you see, most of my fiction tends to include characters that are either bi or just plain homosexual, and despite increasing acceptance of human sexuality and its many variations across the world, heroes and heroines are still supposed to be straight.Well, mine aren't. So if you're brave, and you don't mind that the main character of a story either isn't interested in sex at all, or is quite likely to hop in bed with someone of the same gender, then give my writings a chance. Come explore my fantasy worlds, or my science fiction worlds, or even spend some time with an occasional random love story set on Earth.And by the way, just this once, I wrote this entire blurb without a cat on my keyboard.

Book preview

From The Ashes

Marie Brown

Smashwords Edition

©2014

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Day 0: Destruction

Day 2

Day 3

Day 5

Day 6

Day 9

Day 12

Day 13

Day 14

Day 15

Day 16

Day 19

Day 20

Day 22

Day 23

Day 24

Day 30

Day 36: Rebirth

*shameless self-promotion*

Day 0: Destruction

The bomb came out of nowhere.

One minute, Wallace laughed, feeling downright silly and boyish, pushing his pregnant wife on a large wooden swing hung from an ancient oak tree. She laughed too, urging him to push higher, faster. Seconds later, the world exploded in a roar.

Wallace flew through the air, eyes blinded by flame and ears ringing from a blast that had rattled his insides. He hit the ground on his side and skidded a horrible, grass-ripping skid that felt like it ripped all the skin from his right side.

Then his training kicked in and Wallace launched to his feet, shaking his head to clear disorientation. Pain bloomed throughout his body. He ignored it. Ahead of him, his plantation house burned, only a few of the strongest structural elements left standing. And the majestic old oak, planted by his pioneering ancestor hundreds of years ago, covered the ground in a vast circle of shattered wood fragments.

Mel! he shrieked, or tried to. The effort of getting a sound out of his throat left him staggering with pain. He directed the stagger towards the flaming tree bits. Mel!

The hoarse croak faded into the flames.

Then he saw his wife.

She lay on her back, pierced by so many bits of tree, house, and who knew what else, that he knew she must be dead. He checked anyway, because she was his wife, his beautiful, pregnant wife, with a belly full of dreams and twin daughters. Nothing. No hint of pulse flickered under his fingers. And the bloody ruin that used to be her belly contained no squirming motes of life. At five months, the little ones hadn't stood a chance.

Some of her hair came away in his hand, red-gold and lovely where unmarred by blood. He clenched his fist around it.

Heat penetrated his horror before he'd even begun to mourn. Fire danced and roared around him. He coughed, harsh, tearing croaks of coughs, that threatened to turn his lungs inside out. He focused on the smell of burning, and realized his clothing was smoldering.

Must get away, she hates it when I get all dirty. . .

The vague, incongruous thought motivated him. Somehow. He tucked the strands of Mel's hair into his pocket and picked his way through the flames, the splinters, the pieces of fallen giant and shattered home. He got free of the terrible heat and took a breath of cooler air. His feet began moving him, steadily, slowly, in a perimeter sweep of his home. His eyes began looking for facts, for data, for anything to explain why he was no longer pushing his wife in her swing on a perfect late summer day.

A buzzing whistle passed overhead, followed moments later by an explosion, both sounds barely audible through the strangeness in his ears.

Bomb, his implant said.

Wallace felt his consciousness threaten to splinter, and allowed it. His personality, his inner self, his horror and love and confusion, all broke apart and sunk into a deep, dark corner of his soul. His intellect came to the forefront. His training, his skills, his knowledge, all took control.

Information began trickling into his implant and brain, brought by reeling senses. Wallace stopped his shambling walk for a moment, wiped his stinging eyes. His hand came away bloody. Injured. Why didn't he feel the injury? He remembered pain at first, but it all vanished into the horror that had been his wife's body. Mentally, he shooed away the implant's health report. He didn't really want to know. He blinked and rubbed, clearing some of the blur from his vision. He tried to hear something. His ears rang viciously, only allowing a tiny amount of fire crackling sound through the internal noise. Smell? His nose worked just fine, reminding him of his smoldering state. He dropped to the hard packed earth, rolled mechanically several times. He rose, covered in dust and a faint, distant pain.

He moved again.

The plantation house, built by his ancestors and home to generations of Williamses, no longer existed. A few main supports reared against the smoke-filled sky, burning. The rest lay in shattered fragments, also burning. Burning.

Burning.

Nothing to do here. Move on.

Wallace turned and walked away.

His home, his family, his life. All burned behind him.

His fields spread around him, burning. Not the same fire as the one engulfing his life. No, this one burned in assorted little patches, a million little strong-smelling fires eating their ways towards each other.

Incendiary cluster bomb, his implant suggested. But who would bomb him? Or anyone? There hadn't been any kind of war in hundreds of years. Even that last battle had been only a half-hearted, nearly non-violent conflict. What reason to fight, when anyone could break off and settle a new world and fill it with their own beliefs, ideals, and practices? Terraforming offered amazing control over environmental factors. Anyone willing to dome it for a decade or two could even watch the process of their world being grown to order. No need to fight. You want a tropical paradise world, when all that's available is a barren wasteland? So design your own paradise and wait a few years. No problem. No reason for conflict.

No need for bombs.

His plodding, halting gait brought Wallace to a rise on the edge of his property. He paused and looked towards town.

The spaceship hovering above the smoke cloud was the biggest thing he'd ever seen.

It looked like a honeycomb. That detail filtered through his shock at seeing the thing in the first place. It hung there, a big fat orb covered in hexagonal depressions, like a honeycomb from hell.

The surface shone with a dull bronze gleam. It had no running lights. And little ships darted in and out of some of the hexagonal dimples.

Shit.

Wallace rarely swore. Foul language just didn't fit in modern, civilized company. Children used the words to be naughty, and adults used the words when they were the wrong sort for gentlemen to be around. But proper, civilized folk didn't swear.

Until a mammoth alien menace appeared from nowhere and devastated everything they knew.

More information.

Wallace stuffed more of his personal reactions, shock disgust horror fear, into that place with his other self. Information. Supplies. Search for survivors. Plan. Arms.

Big, deadly arms. And armor. And. . .

Wallace's head swiveled towards the distant hills. A plume of smoke rose obediently above the local anti-piracy emplacement. Of course, whatever alien would target innocent civilians would first take out their military capabilities. But what the aliens didn't know could kill them.

Certain paranoid elements of the military, one of Wallace's ancestors among them, had insisted upon creating secret bunkers near every significant human settlement during the last conflict. His eyes skimmed over the signs of destruction and found a particular hill, unfortunately on the far side of both town and spaceship, but not smoking. There. Go there.

Wallace learned a little about his adversaries on the journey. They flew in groups, always in rigid formation, and maneuvered with perfect precision. Each dimple on the giant honeycomb appeared to be a launch bay. Little ships went in and out of the dimples singly. On launch, every seventh little ship flew to a precise distance from the honeycomb and hovered until six more ships joined it. Then each wing of little ships flew off.

Fighters. That offered the only reasonable explanation for the little ships. Fighters, bombers, recon. With the big mother to take on any big targets.

But there were no big targets.

Humanity had settled down over the last several hundred years. Who needed to fight? Sure, there were still little fights, between people. Every once in a while a crazy would slip through psych maintenance and murder someone. But truly, no real reason for conflict existed in modern, near-utopian society. Political ideals? If you disagreed with the local government, a new one waited only a planet-hop away. Desire for wealth? One thing people had agreed on near the beginning of the space age was that socialism wasn't stupid. Even on the oddest of the odd worlds, where people worshiped god-kings and did all sorts of peculiar things, they agreed that sharing basic resources so no one did without was a good idea. Probably mankind wouldn't have ever reached beyond its home solar system if the ancients hadn't finally learned to share.They'd woven the concept right into the Cluster-wide Charter. True, there were a few truly bizarre worlds that hadn't signed on to the Charter, but nobody had anything to do with them.

With no real need or desire to fight, more and more energy channeled into exploration, research, the arts. . . and, of course, sports. Entire planets and cultures revolved around various sporting arenas. Civilization hadn't managed to eradicate humanity's competitive drive. Or curiosity.

Or will to survive.

Wallace reached the hills at length, feeling the first twinges of embryonic plans forming in his brain. Everything depended on what survived under the earth. Behind him, the town still burned, and the giant honeycomb still hovered, and the little fighters still launched and docked with mechanical precision. Ahead and to his left, the anti-piracy command post sent roiling clouds of black smoke into a sky thoroughly hazed from countless fires. Inside his heart had clenched, writhed, and finally hardened into a position of firm resolve.

The aliens had to pay.

And directly in front of him now, two hills east of the command post, a hill stood intact. No smoke. No fire. No gaping craters or pits from bombs.

He approached the hill warily. Many invader patrols overflew this area, and the hills offered very little cover. Grass grew well on this world. Left unattended, it grew to a good three or four feet in height. This late in the year, the grass covering the hills waved tall and amber, bobbing seed heads full of next year's life. But the stuff came a good two feet short of providing enough cover for Wallace to walk properly. So he crouched, head below the top level of the vegetation, and moved carefully. He didn't want to lead the aliens right to the hidden bunker. Fanned lasers stabbed out from the ships like searchlights. More than one passed over him, through him, but nothing came of the contact.

There. Right there in the grass, a cement door sat embedded in the hillside.

Wallace wished he believed in a god so he could pray.

He found the numpad. He didn't think. He entered his emergency code.

Nothing happened.

Wallace groaned and raised his eyes heavenward. A flight of aliens passed by. Wallace hit the clear key and entered his code again, this time remembering to tack on the plus three designation that signified his wife and the two babies they were expecting. Tears quivered behind his eyelids as he did so. He'd only gotten the code changed a few weeks ago, from plus one to plus three, and now. . .

Emotion shunted back to the walled-off place inside him as the numpad bleeped and machinery whirred.

The door in the hillside opened barely enough to let a single person through, a foresight which Wallace appreciated as yet another patrol flew overhead. He slipped inside and his eyes blanked out.

Wallace shook his head, rubbed his eyes, blinked rapidly. Lights flickered and danced across his eyeballs as his eyes tried to cope with the dramatic shift from light to no-light. Then he caught the faint green glow of the safety led and touched it. Instantly, his eyes burned, stung, and watered as they had to adjust to the abrupt return of light.

A corridor stretched into the hillside, lit with a strip of bright, steady leds. The ancient technology served well here, with its minuscule power requirements, long lifespan, and intense light. Wallace felt a distant sort of regret that the lights hadn't been on already and moved forward down the corridor. No hope that other survivors had reached the site already, otherwise the lights would have been on.

Wallace emerged from the corridor into a tiny yet complete underground command center. Here he had full technical capabilities. He flipped switches, starting with the camo web. It hiccuped into life and Wallace powered up systems, secure in the knowledge that the camo web would diffuse, scramble, and otherwise conceal all signs of heat, light, life, and energy production that might be detectable from this base.

Biolights sprang to life, dimming the little led strip into insignificance. Outdated computer systems wheezed to full power from standby and sent out preliminary connective pulses to others in their respective networks. Monitors activated, some showing static, some showing devastation, others showing neatly arrayed ranks of equipment and supplies. The corners of his mouth twitched in a parody of a smile, and Lieutenant Wallace K. Williams, Corinthian Planetary Defense Reserve, reported for duty.

* * * *

Wallace stretched, suddenly achingly aware that he'd been sitting for over an hour, more than long enough for his adrenaline to ebb and awareness of pain to creep in. Dozens of sources of pain screamed at him from all over his body. He finally accessed his implant health subroutine and rocked back in his chair, shocked by the device's report. How had he gotten so wounded? And more, how had he not noticed? His mind flashed an image of his dead wife. Wallace swallowed hard against the looming grief and stood, staggering slightly, aiming for the compact living quarters of the bunker. His knee threatened to buckle.

He thought about his discoveries as he cleaned himself up. Thoughts of the destruction of cities mingled seamlessly with seeking out splinters of oak tree, house, and other unidentifiable shrapnel. His implant's assessment of the near destruction of his ears dovetailed with the destruction of all ground-based infrastructure. The satellites still worked, providing relay service between planet and SubRealityNet, the intra-cluster communications device that no one away from the world SubReality knew anything about. Want to be an interstellar phone operator? Better be born on SubReality. . .

Wallace decided to shower. He refused to think about how his wife's body must have shielded him from the worst of the explosion, instead focusing on his next step.

Medicate wounds. Tweak implant to compensate for some of the hearing damage. Take massive dose of stimulant.

Find other survivors.

A calm automaton, Wallace washed, rinsed, found several more splinters. He didn't wonder how much of the blood swirling down the drain came from his wife or if any of it had once been in his unborn daughters. He dressed, a utilitarian jumpsuit taken from a storage locker. Emotionless, numb, he transferred the strands of Mel's hair from his ruined shirt to the jumpsuit. These bunkers had been designed for survivors of a devastating surprise attack back in less peaceful days. What foresight.

Clean and somewhat mended, Wallace dosed himself with painkillers and more stimulants. He paused for a moment, counting down seconds as the drugs took effect, then found the admin office and pulled rank insignia out of the storage bin.

Of all the amazingly bizarre events of the day, Wallace found it the strangest of all that he, a military man bred from a military tradition utterly out of step with the rest of society, survived.

The military he served was much diminished in defense capabilities, though. None of this equipment, carefully maintained as it was, had been updated in roughly five hundred years. Back then, there'd been a real reason to have a military, because there were hostile aliens intent on taking a bite out of humanity's expansion efforts. But the Orvonne race were now staunch human allies, based on the shocking discovery (shocking to them, anyway) that there really wasn't any reason to fight. Orvonne adored conditions that would send the hardiest of humans running for safety. Why fight? Humans were perfectly willing to give Orvonne the worlds that were too extreme for terraforming. Orvonne had no desire to set tentacle on the insipid, boring, middle of the road worlds humans preferred. So the conflict melted into a firm alliance. Odd, but good. So the military shifted into its current incarnation, mainly pirate patrol and escort service. Many of the worlds in the Cluster didn't even have a planetary reserve, but those were mainly safely in the central worlds. Some aliens, and a few extremely rare humans, still preferred to take what they wanted from others. And a slim chance always existed that one of the exploration and evaluation vessels, affectionately known as Eevs, would run across a hostile civilization out in the depths of space.

Wallace happened to know, because he'd listened in history class, that the last armed human conflict of any great significance had occurred nearly a hundred and fifty years before humanity's leap into space. The War had stretched over decades, taking such a high toll in human lives that population pressures on Earth didn't exist anymore. Every country on every continent, even the Antarcticans in their experimental biodomes, fought until they'd virtually annihilated each other. Not much survived. But out of the ashes rose peace. People laid down their weapons and joined together with their former enemies to form an entire new world, one based on equality and fairness instead of greed and misery. No one really mentioned the War anymore, because its horrors ended nearly a thousand years ago.

Wallace quit thinking about ancient history and got back to work. Find survivors. Organize. Assess the situation and determine what, if anything, to do next. Dust off the