The Seek

By Ros Baxter

From the talented and versatile Ros Baxter comes the first full–length, stand–alone novel in her sexy, engaging, groundbreaking SF Romance series.

When everything else is gone, all you have is hope.

The year is 2098, and the people of New Earth have been homeless for seventeen years. Ruled by a mysterious Council and adrift in a fleet of space stations, their sole mission is to survive long enough to find a new home. They call it The Seek.

Kyntura is the first and only female Avenger – one of the secret, separate elite who stand on the frontline between the refugees of Earth and a universe that would do them harm. For Kyn, fight and pain are the only things that drive out memories of the Apocalypse...and of the boy she left behind when she enlisted. But a young recruit called Mirren and a deadly mission will bring her face to face with all she has tried to forget.

As she leads a squad of Avengers in The Seek, Kyntura will have to face her demons – and the boy whose heart she broke a decade before – to confront the truth about New Earth and save the future of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857991942

Ros Baxter

Ros Baxter has been writing since she was eight and penned a whimsical series of short stories about a race of tiny people who lived on a rainbow. While a few things intervened - a career in social policy, four children - Ros started writing again in earnest three years ago. In that time, Ros secured a two-book deal with Harper Collins Australia, published Sister Pact (a romantic comedy co-written with her sister Ali), been a contributing author to the e-anthology URL Love, and finaled in the STALI competition. Ros writes transporting stories about love, family, friendship and women in all their glorious strength and contrariness. She loves to turn up the sizzle, throwing heroes and heroines into screwy and sometimes fantastical situations and watching how they take the heat. Ros lives in Brisbane's North with her husband Blair, four noisy children under eight, a neurotic dog and nine billion germs.

Book preview

Chapter One: The Hurting

‘Again.’ She hurled the word into the darkened room, where it stoned their screaming muscles.

Rebellion rose like steam from their bodies, but no-one said anything. And no-one moved.

‘I said: again.’ She stalked through them, kicking one vulnerable oblique with the hutanium toe of her boot, swift and vicious, driving the point into the soft apex. Then she reached forward with her prod and zapped three inert backs.

Curses broke the silence open. ‘Get up,’ she whispered to the twelve men lying panting on the cold floor, as she smelled burning flesh and fury. ‘And go again.’

One of them pirouetted to his feet, and the thought rose again: He was like a dancer, this man-child. Light, swift and graceful. No wonder they chose him.

She pressed her eyes shut for an instant, quieting her brain from the story it wanted to tell her about a little girl who had wanted to be a dancer, in a place, and at a time when humans still danced.

First position. Arabesque.

He landed on his toes in front of her, only a shade taller, and ten years younger, but with eyes that looked older.

He stepped closer, until his face was an inch from hers. ‘Why do we have to keep going? Why?’

She eyeballed him hard, willing him to back down.

But he didn’t flinch. ‘How much longer?’

Spittle sprayed her as she examined the bloody slash that cut open his pretty face. His eyes narrowed and his top lip folded into his teeth: a snarl.

Kyntura rolled her shoulders like she was starting a shrug, then stretched both hands high into the air before bringing them down hard on the shoulders of the dancer in front of her, right in the place where tender skin met tendon. His yelp almost undid her, but she followed through hard, kicking his legs from under him with one swift turn, and drawing back her boot to kick him in the stomach. He made to rise, his breath jagged and gurgly, but she bent down, picked up one hand and yanked it upwards behind his back, almost to his neck. ‘Move, and you’ll never use your arm again,’ she said, conscious that eleven sets of eyes were on her. ‘How much longer, Kendis? Like I said, until only one of you is standing. Now, are you gonna fight each other, or are you gonna come over here and fight me? ‘Cause they’re the only choices you have tonight.’

They started to move, but the voice that came from the direction of her feet wasn’t done. ‘We didn’t ask for this,’ it rasped, thready and low.

Kyntura felt the laugh rise, rich and bitter in her throat. ‘Boohoo,’ she spat. ‘I’d get you a handkerchief, but I left my last one back on Earth. Seventeen years ago.’

But the dancer wasn’t done. ‘You want us dead.’

‘We’re all dead,’ she said. ‘We’ve been dead for seventeen years.’ The words settled warm and ripe into the thick varnish of fear, sweat and blood that coated the atmosphere in the room. ‘Now get up and fight, you motherfuckers. Before I finish you all off myself.’

***

‘Will they be ready?’

Kyntura didn’t turn around as she heard him enter but continued her ritual, linking her fingers into a steeple in front of her, stretching her arms forward before raising them over her head, looking for the sorest places and extending the stretch into them, breathing deep into the rich purple agony.

Pietr had been right. There was no escaping pain. You could only face it down.

She turned mid-stretch and considered her interrogator. He was shorter than her but she’d learned from ten years on the battlefield that these things meant little. This one — this swift, deadly little rooster — was one guy you always wanted on your team. Preferably leading it.

She nodded. ‘I’ll get them ready.’ She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘I said I’d get them ready, and I’ll get them ready."

He laughed, and it sounded like a dog barking. Least, she was sure she could almost remember how that sounded. ‘Do they hate you yet?’

‘Not nearly enough, Jedro,’ she said. ‘But they will.’

She turned to face him, throwing him her towel as she stepped under the water. ‘Now will you kindly fuck off out of my shower room?’

He whistled appreciatively, his bright green eyes shining and the light bouncing off his smooth, bald head. ‘Do I gotta?’

Kyntura slid a long silver blade from where it rested next to her caddy. ‘Well,’ she said, head to the side, a parody of deliberation. ‘I dunno, do you gotta use your throat again any time soon?’

The older man barked again as he held his hands up in a calming gesture. ‘I was only joking, Captain,’ he said.

She stared hard into his face, resisting the urge to cover her body, and flicked the shower switch. Water streamed over her, cold and unforgiving. ‘You really gotta work on those punch lines, General.’

He turned to leave. ‘Just get them ready,’ he said. ‘Sector Five needs reinforcements. Those kids have been out there way too long for a second rotation.’

Something sharp and cold twisted in Kyn’s gut at the look on his face. ‘General,’ she called as he punched the pad and made to exit the communal bathroom. ‘Any news from today?’

Something about his shoulders from behind, before he turned — Kyn knew it was going to be bad. Just a second; just a beat before he turned. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to turn around, because he didn’t want to tell her.

But he turned. And nothing in his face gave anything away. ‘Three,’ he said.

She flicked the shower off, her stomach in free-fall. But if he wasn’t showing, neither was she. ‘How?’

‘Temerites.’

The water ran down her body, and Kyntura tried not to think about death by petrification. ‘Who’d we lose?’

Jedro held up a finger. ‘Yvo,’ he said.

Yvo. The joker. The one who could always make anyone laugh, even her. Blood heated up her skin as her fingers curled into a fist. ‘Stupid little prick,’ she bit. ‘He was always going to be the first to go.’

Jedro nodded.

‘Who else?’

He held up another finger. ‘Hendax.’

She closed her eyes. The big man with the gentle brown eyes. Poker and poetry. She breathed and unballed her fists.

Jedro turned to go, and when he spoke she knew he did it that way for her. So she wouldn’t have to watch him watching her as he said it. ‘And Tyven.’

Then he was gone.

She flicked the water back on and sank down onto the floor, trying to make the cold wash away the picture of a laughing boy. The one she had always been harder on than anyone else.

Because she had just wanted him to live.

***

The cold felt like it was coming from inside her, eating her up from within. It was vicious and alive, wanting to take her. Well it could get in line. Kyntura was pretty sure the twelve bodies shivering on the floor beside her would fight it for the privilege of taking her down.

‘Why the hell are we doing this?’

She was sitting as straight as she could, her back against the wall, focusing on each breath.

She turned to face him. Brave kid, after what she dealt out to him last night. She assessed him: those old eyes, that graceful body, naked bar his underwear, and trembling. But still with that defiant snarl.

She took a careful breath. ‘When you talk, when you get emotional, you feed it; the cold. How about you just shut up? If you want to live, that is.’

He glared back at her, dark green eyes brimming with unspoken insults. She could imagine those insults, almost see them dancing in those long-lashed eyes.

Bitch.

Sadist.

Whore.

The last made her chuckle, it was too funny, too ridiculous, but she knew as she watched his face that her laughter only added to the insults laying there.

Freak.

Nut job.

The ice-thin air of the little compartment thickened up as they stared each other down.

‘They won’t let us die, Kendis,’ another boy growled through chattering teeth. ‘They’re just testing us’.

Kyntura smacked her head against the smooth metal wall of the compartment. ‘Teaching, not testing,’ she corrected him. ‘I’ll do the best I can, and then you’re on your own. There’s no testing, because I don’t give a shit whether you’re ready or not. You’ll be dead, or you’ll go. Like we all go.’

The boy who’d spoken closed his eyes, as if he didn’t believe her lines. ‘And Pyten,’ she said, kicking his foot with her own. ‘I’ll let you die, alright. Better you die here, with your own, than have me send you out there, to the icelands of Tyver or Samseret to make a tasty frozen appetizer for some warlord. Trust me, you’d prefer it. From what I’ve seen, the things I’ve heard, there’s nothing worse than dying a million miles from home. Even if home is some motherfuckin’ space station in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere.’ She paused for effect. ‘The boys who die out there, cold and alone, they cry like babies.’

She stood among them, semi-naked and unashamed, the only one with the energy to do it.

‘At this temperature you make the choice, you soft babies. Switch it down, all of it. Your heart, your breath.’ She paused. ‘Your endless fuckin’ whining. Switch it down, or give in to it. Frostbite. Life or death. It’s your choice, not mine. I’ve taught you how to do it. Now do it. But know this.’ She pointed to the vacuum-sealed door. ‘No-one gets out of here until the time’s up.’

Twelve sets of eyes closed; twelve breaths slowed.

And Kyntura’s own breath finally returned to the still, careful place she had taken it before the interruption. She flicked a glance over all of them before she closed her own eyes again. Walking the brittle line between life and death.

She smiled.

Good, you’re actually learning something. You poor kids.

***

‘Is it true?’ The young Avenger working the control panel glanced up at her as the last trainee exited the chamber.

‘Huh?’ Kyntura’s brain was still slow from the effects of the cold. She needed to take it gently, come back slowly.

‘Would you really let them die in there?’

She studied him. His dirty blond hair was long, for an Avenger. Even sitting at the panel he was long and lean: latent sex folded into his loose frame. She folded her arms. ‘What was your Magister like?’

He grimaced. ‘Tough,’ he said.

‘Did he kill any of you?’

The boy grinned, and he reminded her of a surfer boy from the Old Days, cocky and loose. ‘How do you know it was a he?’

She smiled. Something about his crooked grin was infectious. ‘Because I’m the only woman here, genius.’

‘Oh yeah.’ He smiled again. ‘I clean forgot.’ He paused. ‘So why the hell did they let you in?’

Kyn breathed hard through the purple mist that clouded up her thoughts as he asked the question. ‘Things were different then,’ she said, turning to leave. ‘And…’ She thought better of saying it.

‘And?’

She turned back. She recognised him; he was nineteen or twenty, so he’d had at least a couple of years as an Avenger. Only eight or nine years younger than her, but in those years lay all the difference in the world. In the universe, she corrected herself. Because she’d had more Earth time. She remembered; he would never know.

She assessed him again: his face was so open, still so open, after all he must have seen. How the hell had he managed that? Something about him; she wanted to answer his question. ‘I had someone,’ she said. ‘Someone in my corner.’

‘He saw something in you?’ Why was the boy persisting?

‘He saw a fighter,’ she said, curling her lip.

He considered her answer, chewing on his lip, then nodded. ‘So no repopulating for you?’

‘No.’ She grinned. ‘Thank the Mothership for that, too. I saw someone give birth once.’ She motioned back to the Ice Chamber. ‘Makes that place look like fuckin’ Disneyland.’

He frowned at her. ‘What’s Disneyland?’

She shook her head. P.A. babies. So much they’d never know.

‘Some place that always sounded better than it was,’ she assured him. ‘Just like Earth.’

The standard line. The standard line of horseshit they fed the Post Apocalypse babies, lest they feel too sad, miss what they never had too much, feel too mistreated.

He shrugged broad, loose shoulders and returned to the control panel.

But then she remembered that he hadn’t answered her question. ‘So,’ she prompted him again. ‘Did he kill any of the virgins? Your Magister?’

The boy turned back to her, his face clouded. He had high cheekbones, and an angelic face. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said. ‘Enough died all on their own. On the first fuckin’ rotation.’

‘Yep,’ she agreed. But she remembered that grimace from the moment before. ‘You hate him?’

‘Nah,’ he said, smiling at her, sunny and open again. ‘I love that fuckin’ asshole. More than I love my own father.’

‘As you were, Lieutenant,’ she barked, poking the door button.

She waited til she was through to let the smile creep onto her face.

***

It was always the darkness that came first, in the dream. ‘Til the darkness comes, you don’t realise what it’s going to be like, because you’re always surrounded by light: overhead lights, lamps, candles, whatever.

But when they come, they shut it all down, like flicking a switch.

Kyn was standing on their little veranda, watching the street. The dark was unknown and delicious. If you stared long enough, you could make out trees and shapes: the odd bike or kids playhouse; the detritus of life on the farm. It may have been 2081, but in Sweetheart, Georgia, not that much had changed in three hundred years. Life ticked over; the daily routines were sluggishly predictable.

She was used to the isolation—they were the farthest from town. But tonight, with no light at all, it felt like she was the last person on Earth, except she could hear the voices, low and intense, from downstairs. He had said they were going a long way away, into the desert. Such a long way from Sweetheart. And they would move by night, so she would need to get used to this.

She stood and started the routine, watching the street, holding her head as high as she could, remembering Madame Roucheau’s words about posture and position. Stretching high, then coming down hard.

Ballet was solid and reliable. It was physicality and movement. There was nothing new or confusing about it: it had been danced for centuries. Maybe longer, she wasn’t sure.

Up again: en pointe. Now the arabesque, then flicking quickly through first, second, third. Then…

Then it changed. The softness of the darkness gave way to something else. Something high and hard. A noise that picked at her ears: a whine. And then, materialising from the darkness, light, so much light. She was frozen in third position on the veranda, watching as the thing landed, right in the middle of her mother’s orchard. And she knew it was bad. She knew they had been talking, planning. She was not some little girl. She was eleven. No fool. But it hadn’t seemed real; it had just seemed like any of the other remote and pointless things adults discussed, the economy, migration, the Ultimatum. Until now. The thing was low and silver and the whine built to a screaming zenith as it kissed the grass.

Kyn’s toes curled, grasping the solid decking of the veranda, feeling the warmth and realness of it under the calluses of her feet. The timber had retained the heat of the day and she wanted to stay there, feeling it under her skin, something familiar and beloved, because she knew everything was about to change.

And she was frozen, mesmerised by the blue orb of light, in all that darkness. Frozen in third position.

Until the hands grabbed her from behind, around the middle. And that voice, so familiar, like lullabies and laughter, whispered in her ear. ‘Hush Kyn, don’t make a sound, we’re going, now.’

She just nodded because she couldn’t have spoken, even if she had known what to say. She took one last look at the blackness before she was spirited through the house, but it didn’t seem friendly and secretive anymore. It seemed sinister and terrifying. How would they see without any light? How would they know where to go? What might be waiting for them in the darkness, in the desert?

She was lifted up and into her father’s arms, pressed against the sunlight smell of his shirt as they flew through the house, down the backstairs, through the old servants’ quarters, the ones they never used. It was dark, but she knew what these shapes meant. The old dresser, the one that had been in the house since forever, since it had belonged to the slavers; the square shapes on the walls that she knew were family photos; the hulking outline of the old fridge, the electric fridge her father cursed terribly but her mother refused to retire.

She wanted desperately to flick on a light, to make it be just some surprise party and to know that soon everyone would leap up, celebrating. And everything would be okay. But she was not a little girl. She was eleven; and she knew it was the beginning of the end.

And then a slightly lighter rectangle: the back door. The one to the side, leading out to the woods that had featured in her nightmares as a child.

New hands on her, soft and cool. Mama. ‘Thank God, thank God you have her.’

Her father grunted. ‘There’s no god in any of this.’

Her mother sighed and took her from him. Kyn wanted to tell them she was too old, too old to be carried like a baby, but the words wouldn’t come. And she didn’t want them to, not really. Her father had the twins in his arms now; she could hear their sleepy protestations and her father hushing them.

‘Now move.’ Her mother lurched forward towards the wood, and Kyn could smell lavender and hear her muttering under her breath, ‘The Lord is my shepherd…’

They were there, so close. Kyn felt, even in the dream, that she could reach out and touch the spiky edges of the tree she had climbed so many times, the one right at the edge of the wood, from where you could see all of it — the top of the trees, back to the house, across the farm.

And in her sleep, her heart rate started to climb.

***

Kyn woke up, clawing at the syntton bedding, the sounds of her heart booming in her ears. It was hot, so goddamned hot in this bay. She banged on the button near her head and the sidewall slid up, revealing the brown-blackness of her sleeping quarters, punctuated by red directional lights. Some of the Avengers complained that they couldn’t sleep with the red lights on. But not Kyn. Light was good. It was the darkness you needed to fear.

Kyn swung her legs over the edge of the bay, examining them as she waited for her heart rate to still. So pale. If she concentrated hard, she could remember a time when her legs had been brown from hours and hours on her bike and in the sun. Now they were all pale, all the refugees of Earth: vampires in the darkness of space. The thought mixed with the dream, and together they conspired to keep her heart rate elevated. Her head began to spin and she felt the prickles start across her palms.

Think about the mundane. Getting my dome serviced. New boots. Ranking Class 68, now that they are almost done.

But none of it helped. The thoughts started. They were all out here, in the dark, alone. The last of their kind, floating in a series of loosely connected space stations. They were homeless peddlers, trading for their lives, looking for a New Earth. And almost everything they encountered wanted to kill, eat or rob them.

Kyn shook her head; she knew she couldn’t afford this train of thought. The loneliness of it pressed in on her, and she shut her eyes against it. Getting my dome serviced. New boots. Ranking Class 68.

But oh, all that blackness, and so few of them left. The Avengers were the only thing standing between their lost people and the end. She tried not to picture it — their ships, circling and seeking, hoping for a new start, driven back from so many places, a hundred alien suns. She thought about them all, locked in their floating coffins, rattling around, trying to fake normal, and all in the blackness.

Kyn’s breath caught, and when she opened her eyes she saw spots through the brown-black and red. The terror rose in her throat, burning its way out. She was going to scream, or cry, and she wasn’t sure which was worse. Then the panic began, like rising blackness. Would she become part of the darkness, out here for so long, with no one to watch over her, no one who even knew who she was?

Enough. There was only one thing that would chase it away.

Kyn let her feet touch the floor, willing them forward through the bone-melting panic that gripped her. She approached the locker wall and pressed a palm against it. Her door buzzed open and she stepped in, looking for the things she needed in the dim light of the tiny room. As soon as her hand touched the stretchy black fabric, her heart began to settle ever so marginally.

Don’t think about the darkness; just think about this.

She slipped the thing on, tugging one long sleeve down over the telltale red scythe on the inside of her right forearm. Next came the long black wig, pulled tight down over her short blonde crop; then the mask. Finally, her training boots. Even playing this game, she needed the boots.

By the