Ceres

By Allen Stroud

Second episode in the Fractal mini-series, building on the heavily-praised worlds of Fearless and Resilient set in 2118AD, now accompanied by an awesome soundtrack.

A strange anomalous object is discovered in a mine shaft. Hours later, an intruder has broken into Guiseppe Bas, murdered Doctor Mattias Stavinson, and stolen the find. Mine Team Supervisor Jakob Tremayne blasts off in pursuit. Can he stop the murderous thief before he escapes.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Flame Tree Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781787588257

Allen Stroud

Allen Stroud (Ph.D) is a university lecturer and Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror writer, best known for his work on the computer games Elite Dangerous by Frontier Developments and Phoenix Point by Snapshot Games. He was the 2017 and 2018 chair of Fantasycon, the annual convention of the British Fantasy Society, which hosts the British Fantasy Awards. He is he current Chair of the British Science Fiction Association. His SF novels, Fearless, and Resilient and titles in The Fractal Series are published by Flame Tree Press.

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ALLEN STROUD

Ceres

THE FRACTAL SERIES

2 of 6

flametreepress.com

FLAME TREE PRESS

London & New York

Prologue

The boy is eight years old when he first learns to be truly frightened.

The night is warm in the barren land where his family lives. He sweats as he sleeps and is easily disturbed on nights like this.

He hears movement and voices. At first, he believes they are echoes from a dream, but then the words begin to register, and he opens his eyes.

He sits up and looks out of the window next to his bed. Moonlight illuminates the open ground in front of the house.

There are people running across the yard. He sees them carry barrels and cans. They are shouting, flinging liquid onto the vehicles in the equipment paddock.

Then suddenly, there is fire.

Flames erupt from the compound. Figures are dark silhouettes against the spiralling blaze. Thick smoke billows into the air, across the ground, towards the house. There are loud bangs, and the fire climbs, building into an inferno.

The boy shrinks from the window. He is out of the bed, backing away to the far wall. The air in the room begins to darken, there is a thick acrid taste to it. He begins to cough.

People are shouting, running around. The boy moves to the door, grabbing the handle, but he does not go out. His hands shake violently as he stands there. He cannot stop coughing. His legs shake; he slips to the floor.

In that moment, the boy closes his eyes and accepts fate as his family’s life burns to ash.

24th of November, 2117

Chapter One: Tremayne

(0100 hours Earth Standard)

I am staring down into darkness.

Far beneath a surface of cold rock, a world where humans are not meant to tread. Machines have bored away the stone, extracting material unseen by anyone since cataclysmic forces pulverised it into this hidden place.

And yet, the darkness beneath me is not as it appears to be. It is not a void, empty. Instead, it is a lightless object, entombed beyond scrutiny for centuries, millennia and more.

Until now.

I am lying on a scraped stone floor in an inspection chamber, one of many, carved out at intervals as our mining drill descends into the core of Ceres, one of a dozen tiny planetoids of the asteroid belt.

All around me is stone, illuminated only by the lights on my suit. The chamber is a kilometre beneath the surface. Around me are a variety of automated machines, designed to extract any gases or liquids that we might find.

I raise the digital scanner. The device is designed to analyse the composition of any material, its program tailored towards minerals and ore. It should tell me what I’m looking at.

The display cycles through the EM spectrum of light, translating infrared, ultraviolet and more. Usually that would reveal something in the darkness, an element that I might not see with my own eyes.

Nothing.

Absolute blackness. An absolute nothing that sucks in all light around it.

Tremayne, to Control.

Receiving, Tremayne. Aki here. What’s up?

I’m at the drill site and have eyes on the object. Mass readings indicate it’s just over eight kilograms, but it just looks like a hole. That’s what appears to have fouled up our instruments.

Understood, Tremayne. I’m looking at it through your camera feed.

I like Aki. At twenty-five, he’s half my age, but I don’t notice that so much when I’m with him. He takes his time with things; tries to learn from what he’s doing. He trained on loaders at Tanegashima Space Centre before buying a ticket to come out here. Yeah, I like him. I like working with him and spending time with him.

If we can bring up a grapple rover, I think we can pull it out of the way of the drill, I say. Then I’d suggest sending it back to Guiseppe Base. The geologists can deal with it up there.

You want to remote pilot the grapple, Jakob?

Yeah, that works.

I step away from the hole and move back, past the raised drill. Forty-five minutes ago, we paused drilling and pulled the machine back to investigate a change in the material being brought out. I volunteered to come down and take a look.

Now I’ve looked, and what I’ve seen is weird.

Autonomous grapple is six minutes out.

Acknowledged.

Mining. This is my life. It was my father’s life before me. Dimitri Tremayne ran the last working coal mine at the Bowen Basin in Australia. Our family, sixth generation Polish Cornish immigrants who arrived in Canberra in the 1980s, started at the coalface and worked their way up. When all the mines were closed down for good in the 2090s, there wasn’t much left for us. My father retired, my brothers kept trying to fight and reopen. I left and diversified. I tried ore mining, water pump installation, anything that involved drilling and detection.

When the Tưởng Corporation were looking for off-world mining specialists, I got out from the shadow of defeat and took the opportunity to leave. I figured one piece of rock would be just like another.

Until now. I’ve never seen a piece of rock like this.

Out here, no-one cares about environmental protection – other than making sure we can all breathe. There’s no fragile ecosystem to preserve beyond the specific needs for human survival. This little world is cold and dead. The only life here is the life we bring with us.

The grapple arrives. It’s a motorised vehicle, moving towards me on tracks under its own electrical charge. Spikes and hooks anchor the machine to the ground, supplementing the planetoid’s weak gravity. Two arms reach out from the anchored base, hydraulic tendons and joints allowing the arms to extend, with small claw fingers and retractable barbs that can be deployed to get a better grip on something if needed.

Aki, this is Tremayne. Confirm arrival of the grapple rover. I am activating the remote pilot on my screen.

Understood. All yours, Jakob.

I pull out the rugged device. For anything to work in a dusty environment like this, it has to have chunky controls. There’s a little control stick on the base of the display. A quick instruction to link up with the rover receiver and we’re away. I’m driving the machine to the edge of the borehole.

Okay, let’s see if we can extract.

A single arm reaches forwards. The limb extends. There’s a camera on the end with a light attached. I can see the feed on my screen. It gives me an idea of how far to go, with light reflecting off the