The Preserve

By M.E. Owen

Forced to take a vacation, Zion Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia joins Skip and his Far Trails crew on what she thinks is a random cargo run. Grumpy and short-tempered on the second anniversary of Garcia's death, she just wants to be left alone. Instead, she finds herself on a ship full of idealistic hippies, who are traveling to a hidden ecological preserve planet.

 

But sabotage on the ship and a murder on the colony derail Jones's hope of an uneventful vacation. And as she's exploring the wonders of the preserve's domed ecosystems, she discovers that the entire colony is in peril.

 

Can Jones solve two crimes, prevent a catastrophe, and find her missing inner calm?

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Owen
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215740262

Book preview

The Preserve

THE PRESERVE

ZION STATION 09

M.E. OWEN

TOWHEE PUBLISHING

THE PRESERVE

A ZION STATION STORY

Three years before the AI purge

Hilda’s Preserve, now

We bounced through the desert in a heavy, open truck. Driver and two passengers in the windblown cab, eight more unfortunates in makeshift seats in the bed, trailer hitched behind piled high with cargo. I held onto the strap and prayed I wouldn’t be ejected through the open window. A second truck loaded with more fragile equipment followed somewhere behind us at a more sedate pace.

Back at the Far Trails, Captain Skip Thompson was overseeing the offloading of cargo and apprentice cooks.

Ever been planetside, Jones? Evelyn Bates asked, her voice clear through my comm’s earjack. She was in her 60’s, short like me, fit and deeply tanned with a fuzz of gray hair that stuck out everywhere when not contained under her cowl.

Sorry, she added, that was patronizing, wasn’t it?

That’s okay, I said. I’m sure it’s obvious.

I’d been planetside a few times as a kid, before my folks settled us onto Europa Station, but I’d never ridden across any sort of natural surface, and certainly not in an open truck.

I’d managed not to drop to my knees with the vertigo on exiting the Far Trails, but not by much. Apparently floating in open space, far enough away from Zion Station that it was just another bright star in the sky, with a gas giant below and the vast firmament of heaven everywhere else did not translate to standing on a planet and looking up at the open sky. At least not without one’s stomach turning over in protest.

Which is why I was riding in the semi-enclosed cab with the truck’s driver and Evelyn.

The fat tires kicked up plumes of fine red dust, which seemed to be the only thing between us and the horizon in all directions. Dust, and fist-sized rocks, and more dust, and smaller rocks, and more fine dust. The horizon was a dusty red haze in the far distance, a deeper less-dusty red as one looked up, which I didn’t.

It looked a lot like the vids I’d seen of Mars, pre-colonization.

But this wasn’t Mars. This was Hilda’s Preserve. Half again as large as Earth, 1.2 gravity. Atmosphere only slightly thinner than Earth’s, but unbreathable—mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

My spacesuit, which felt as natural as an extension of my own body when I was EVA, was apparently too bulky and awkward here, to say nothing of susceptible to damage from the fine dust that got in every exposed crevice. Instead, I wore a loaner bodex, which consisted of a thin, protective, temperature-regulating bodysuit worn under one’s coveralls, coupled with a lightweight air exchanger that fit tightly over the lower face.

Head cowl was optional. Goggles were not. I’d accepted both.

Thirty minutes into the trip to Home Dome and I still felt un-protected, un-regulated, and under-oxygenated. It was all in my mind