The Infinity Corps: Crisis on Thoraxus Prime: The Infinity Corps, #1

By Philip A. Lee

PREPARE FOR LAUNCH!

A worldwide tragedy that fell from the heavens gave rise to the Infinity Corps, the Earth Union Alliance's effort to defend Earth and indulge humankind's unquenchable desire to discover what wonders and dangers await beyond our solar system.

During the public unveiling of a galaxy-shattering secret, Lieutenant Jessica Justice discovers the root of a sinister conspiracy that could tear humanity apart and destroy the fledgling Infinity Corps. The mystery of a missing Exploration Division rocketship drags Lt. Justice into a crisis far larger than she could imagine, and it is up to her and her ragtag crew of humans, robots, and aliens to travel to a strange new world in search of clues and potential allies to fight the coming storm.

But unknown danger lurks in everyone who crosses their path. Enlisting the help of an academy friend with startling abilities, an accident-prone engineer, a trigger-happy infantry veteran, an obsolete mechanoid pilot, and an oft-distracted sci-bot, Lt. Justice must match wits with a devious threat capable of wearing anyone's face, including her own…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip A. Lee
• Release date: Sep 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223915959

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Proximity alarms blared throughout the ICS Wells’s interior loud enough that Ensign Lamar Brody figured single-celled organisms in primordial pools on planets several light years away could’ve heard it. And thank goodness too, for the clangor roused him from a drowsing stupor brought on by too long a turn at the helm. The sudden noise jolted him back to alertness. Both hands gripped the yoke, ready for anything.

Through the cockpit glass, he saw nothing but stars and nebular clusters amid the darkness. Whatever had tripped the sensor grid was dark—or perhaps invisible somehow.

He glanced over to the sensors technician, where the glass-bowl-headed mechanoid they called Guss—General-Purpose Unit 55—made calculations at its station. Talk to me, Guss. What am I looking at?

Lamar’s fingers absently tapped on the flight yoke. Anything but a debris field. Anything but that. He was a damn fine pilot—and he had the Procellarum Academy score to prove it—but even in simulated navigation, debris fields always wrecked his virtual ship. Always.

Please do not rush me, the mechanoid said, a ragged edge to its electronic voice. I’m trying to make heads or tails out of these readings. I’m not a sci-bot by trade.

Yeah, yeah. Budget cuts and all that, Lamar said. Just tell me what it is before I run smack dab into it, all right?

The glass bell of Guss’s brain case swiveled back to its instruments. I think that…

The bot fell silent. If Lamar didn’t know any better, he’d have guessed Guss had shut itself off.

Then the glass bell shifted again. Multicolored lights on the chest plate blinked in a disturbingly fast strobing pattern. Gussy Boy was chewing hard on something.

The robot said, "Oh. My."

Lamar flexed now-sweating fingers on the flight stick.

Guss, what’s wrong? said Lieutenant Harper MacElroy from her seat farther back in the rocketship’s cabin.

Guss’s head turned 180 degrees to face backward and regard MacElroy with its photoreceptors. "Captain, out here, I would expect to find two different kinds of sensor readings—energy and matter. What we’ve detected is matter. Organic matter."

Despite Lamar wearing a thin, temperature-controlled Infinity Corps uniform in navy blue with white piping, a chill shook his spine as though someone had poured liquid nitrogen down the back of his neck.

For all the years and manpower the Corps’s Exploration Division had pumped into space exploration, the only extraterrestrial organic matter ever encountered was the occasional bacterial soup on a primeval planet and a small colony of autotrophs on some backwater moon ExDiv had named Silence. What was organic matter doing out here in space?

I don’t care what it is, Lamar said. Just tell me where it is. I don’t see it on any of my scopes.

Guss’s glass globe rotated around to face forward. The lights flashed off and on faster than Lamar had ever seen them during the past six-month rotation.

It’s…

The mechanoid didn’t even need to finish. Through the forward porthole, Lamar saw it plain, with his own two eyes.

The stars moved.

No, his brain corrected, not stars…

Lights. Thousands upon thousands of pinprick lights on a black circle large enough to blot out their entire forward view was moving toward them—a target far too large to avoid. The Wells was but a tiny moon compared to a red giant, a gnat versus a volcano.

But even a gnat had a will to live.

Not waiting for orders from Lieutenant MacElroy, Lamar’s piloting instinct killed the Wells’s main engine, kicked the retrorockets on full blast, and banked hard to port. The flight yoke trembled in his hands. The Wells’s hull screamed at the stress of sudden course correction, and he screamed right along with her. He feared the stick would snap off in his hands any moment now, sealing their fate. But the swath of faux-stars slewed sideways until the rocket’s bullet-shaped nose pointed away from the false sky and toward real space.

Even with inertial dampeners on full blast, the sudden tug of radically altered trajectory pulled at Lamar’s brain and insides until he felt the need to will his body to hold itself together. He hadn’t pulled off a maneuver this tight or this close to a gravity well of any kind since the academy…

Mr. Brody… MacElroy grunted. Get us out of here!

Aye, ma’am, already on it! He flicked a few switches, moved some levers, and discovered he could squeeze an extra half-degree or so out of the flight yoke.

But it wasn’t enough.

The Wells was hurtling along in the object’s orbit—real starfield appearing through the port-side porthole; the odd planetoid shape through the starboard. The nose drifted away from space until it wiggled somewhere between space and planetoid, until it wandered just a few degrees toward the planetoid. The Wells was falling sideways out of orbit, toward this wandering planet that had seemingly come from nowhere. Lamar tried to rotate the craft so that if they crash landed, the ship would remain facing right-side up, but even riding those controls accomplished nothing.

Gravity’s too strong, ma’am, he said. It’s pulling us right in.

Do we have any recourse?

Sorry, ma’am. I’ve tried everything.

The rocketship sank like a stone in a bathtub.

Lamar shook his head. Crashing helpless onto a planet was not the romantic, heroic way he’d planned to die. None of the Infinity Corps’s recruitment films had mentioned so cruel a fate: at worst he’d expected to go out in a blaze of glory against some as-yet-undiscovered alien armada. But there were no aliens like the kind he’d read in stories growing up—just the uncaring vagaries of space travel.

Guss raised one of its hand clamps. I’m no sci-bot, but—

"Shut up!" Lamar and MacElroy shouted in unison.

The clamp lowered. "Well. I guess I’ll just keep my brilliant survival plan to myself."

Lamar ground his teeth while wrestling with the yokes. Despite the Wells’s nose now at a forty-three-degree angle toward the planetoid’s surface, he wasn’t about to give up just yet. Resignation was not in the Infinity Corps’s policy manual. "Fine. Spill it."

The robot did.

Lamar chuckled despite the strange, starry ground looming ever closer. Gallows optimism, perhaps? Gussie, you’re either mad or a genius. Or both. Skipper?

Do it, MacElroy ordered.

Lamar swallowed and tried to forget how swiftly the planetscape was rising to meet their sideways craft. Aye aye!

With both hands, he wrenched the yoke in the opposite direction—planetward.

Brace for impact! the skipper shouted. Collision in five, four, three, two…

Lamar closed his eyes and prayed Guss was right.

1

For reasons unknown, the ceremony at the Carcine Crater Memorial Peace Park was running behind schedule.

Standing at parade rest on the elevated stage beneath a gorgeous spring-afternoon sky, Junior Lieutenant Jessica Justice scanned the huge crowd arrayed on the greensward of the crater’s 2091 memorial and tried to suppress a smirk. With nearly the whole of Earth’s population watching, this would finally be her moment to shine, to stand as one of the representatives of the Infinity Corps during one of the most important unveilings in the organization’s history.

She wore the Corps’s Defense Division uniform with pride—dark blue with electric-green stripes down the sleeves and along the hip folds of her skirt. White, high-heeled boots, polished until she could see her own face in them, resisted the urge to tap while she waited for the proceedings to begin. At her left hip, an old-fashioned but dull-edged cavalry saber rested in a scabbard with a pleasant weight. Were this normal duty, she also would have holstered a fully charged neutron-disruptor pistol at her right hip. Alas, the Earth Union Alliance delegates frowned on weapons for this event. Even so, Director Armas had refused to cave on the saber. Tradition was tradition, after all, and a DefDiv dress-uniform saber could accomplish nothing worse than a bloodied nose.

In all truth, despite the face of confidence and bravado, Jess felt naked without her disruptor, like she’d forgotten something vital, something that could mean the difference between life and death.

As she surveyed the crowd arrayed before the stage at the edge of the city, she spotted delegates from many Earth-based nations, most of whose flags she recognized. A general static of clamor and distrust washed out over the assembly. This whole affair was to be for their collective benefit, yet no one save her and her fellow Corps members paid any attention to the ceremony about to begin. From her vantage alone, three different arguments had broken out, and none of the Corps members in attendance moved to break up these potentially explosive powder kegs. That wasn’t what they were here for.

The Infinity Corps had taken the stage before the Earth Union Alliance on this day, April sixteenth, the Year of Our Lord 2147, for one thing and one thing only: the solidarity of humankind in the face of potential threats from beyond the solar system.

Two upright rocketships balanced on their stabilizer fins on either side of the platform. Though the nearby skyscrapers dwarfed the sleek, silver hulls that reached the height of a five- or six-story building, Jess never failed to stand in awe of the sight. AstroDyne RX-37s, fresh off the assembly lines in lunar orbit, each one a magnificent specimen of spacefaring technology, each one theoretically capable of taking on an entire armada of alien ships. If the EUA delegates could not agree among themselves, perhaps they might respect a tangible show of strength, a firsthand look at what the Corps was trying to accomplish on humanity’s behalf.

Jess inhaled and puffed out her chest, holding it long enough to bask in the optimistic confidence that this whole endeavor might be enough to sway enough hearts and minds to make this all worth it. If only Herc could see her now…

Lieutenant Hercules Trevor had shown her the ropes back at the very beginning of her career, an ensign aboard an old clunker, the ICS Ptolemy, a now-decommissioned Stellaris RJ-6. Despite recommendations to not fraternize among the Corps, she and Herc had developed a strong rapport that budded into something more, something they never got a chance to define before the Ptolemy vanished, only to reappear a month later, abandoned out on a shipping lane, the whole crew MIA. He’d been missing for almost a year now, but the memory and the wonder of what could have been still stung.

Always knew you’d go far, kiddo, she imagined him saying. The thought brought enough comfort to turn her smirk into a fond yet melancholy smile.

From her right, also standing at parade rest close to the center of the stage, Infinity Corps Director Hernando Armas casually cleared his throat, leaned in a mere micron toward her, and flashed a mischievous grin. "At least look like you’re enjoying yourself, Lieutenant."

Sorry, sir, she ventriloquist-replied so the crowd wouldn’t see her break character on this most solemn occasion. What exactly are we waiting for? Why haven’t we started yet?

We’re waiting for our guest—ah, here they are.

Jess followed Director Armas’s eyes to the rear of the platform, from where a quartet of similarly uniformed Exploration Division personnel, with white piping instead of DefDiv’s green and no saber, escorted onto the stage a large, tarp-covered cube about three meters in size. The cube hovered to center stage on a whirring antigravity platform.

Armas, though relatively short in stature compared to Jess in her high-heeled boots, carried himself in public as though three times taller. Whatever he asked was done, no questions raised, out of equal parts respect and terror. Armas giveth and Armas taketh away, so the saying went. His reward was swift, his retribution even more so. But at the heart of it, no matter how terrible and fearsome his resolve, he always had humanity’s best interest in mind. She’d known him long enough and been through enough harrowing adventures to never question that.

The director approached center stage and raised both arms in greeting. Delegates and councilors of the Earth Union Alliance, his voice boomed through the public address across the open air, thank you for taking the time to join us on this wondrous and historic occasion.

A few still-standing delegates evil-eyed the stage in a "the audacity of that man, trying to interrupt me!" way and just went right on talking.

But Armas gave only a slight pause before continuing, for no one would derail him today. The best and brightest of the Infinity Corps’s Exploration and Defense Divisions stand with me to introduce you and humanity to the greater galactic community.

Still the side conversations continued, although a few representatives did deign to take their seats. Which meant it was time for revealing the hole card awaiting beneath the tarp…

With that said, Armas announced, sweeping his arm toward the cube with a flourish, I present to you the autotrophs of the Grímnir system!

The Corps members who escorted the cube whisked off the tarpaulin to reveal a clear lucite block, inside which lurked one of the most hideous things Jess had ever seen.

Like most of the Corps members, she had borne witness to a series of images sent by the young ExDiv officer who had surveyed the autotrophs’ moon, but those photos had not done the creatures justice. The mottled-gray life form had no discernible body, just a series of four legs arranged in a cross shape, each one ending in small claws that glinted in the afternoon light as though shaped from metal. At the very center, where all of the legs met, a single eye the color and sheen of pitch regarded all of the onlookers. Inside the block along with the creature: a glowing rod of neutronium, which the ’troph fed up toward its mouth, just beneath where its legs joined.

Based solely on the alien’s inhuman countenance, entertainment media would assume the ’troph would attack and kill on sight, that it would bash its entire body against its cage to escape and murder every living thing in sight. Not so, this one. The ’troph contented to focus on its radioactive meal in silence.

The entire congregation stilled to a deathly hush. Even delegates who were still conversing silenced, their mouths frozen in o’s of stunned horror.

Armas smirked. Now that I have your attention, I would like to introduce Ambassador Floort.

One of the handlers opened the front of the box, and the creature emerged, each leg moving in stilted, insectoid fashion.

Then, abrupt images intruded in Jess’s brain: people waving, handshakes, smiles all around. She’d read about such psychic projections from the ExDiv report, but nothing could have prepared her for the experience. The ’troph was speaking to her, to everyone within psychic range, by tapping into the part of the human cerebrum responsible for speech and visual communication. The ’troph was, in its unique way, attempting to say hello.

None of the civilians in the audience were prepared for the psychic onslaught.

As you can see, Director Armas continued, the autotrophs are a friendly folk. As we relocate the bulk of their population to their original home, they have agreed to an alliance with the Infinity Corps for mutual benefit. The first of these benefits is a startling breakthrough in the advancement of psychic research…

While the director extolled the virtues of psychic communication, Jess tuned out the speech and let her mind wander, as she already knew the details of his presentation. Her eyes played across the crowd, taking in all of the many delegates, adults of all ages and ethnicities. All of them spellbound by Ambassador Floort, whether in awe or fright, she couldn’t tell. Beyond the assembly, past the barricade roping off the proceedings, past the Infinity Corps members and EUA guards standing sentinel, the crowd of civilian spectators all marveled at the paired RX-37s, at the monstrous-looking alien thing standing before the lucite cage.

She couldn’t quite read individual faces from this distance but one of them, a ginger-haired man, caught her attention, dragging her gaze like a moth to candle flame. Oddly enough, he wore an Infinity Corps uniform—with the venomous green piping of Defense Division.

Something tugged at her insides, and she gasped purely by reflex.

Herc?

Her lost skipper stood out across the way, and she was stuck up here, unable to dash out to him—

But she blinked and the hopeful vision dispelled. A redheaded man indeed stood out in the civilian crowd, but it couldn’t be Hercules Trevor. Was this some sort of psychic resonance brought on by Floort’s presence? Were the ’troph’s powers subconsciously feeding into her own desires?

Her insides shifted uncomfortably.

As Armas continued, a Corps member from offstage scurried in to interrupt the director’s speech. Armas held up a hand to the crowd. Excuse me a moment… He muted the public address and said to the Corps member in subdued tones, This had better be an emergency, Lieutenant.

Jess was standing close enough to hear the reply:

"Sir, we’ve lost contact with the Wells."

She tried to school her features for the benefit of the audience but could not keep herself from blinking in surprise. The ICS Wells was one of ExDiv’s premier cosmography vessels. If something had happened to it…

What do you mean ‘lost contact’? the director demanded.

The junior lieutenant—a commo officer, according to his rate badging—visibly shrank a few centimeters against the director’s misplaced displeasure. Lieutenant MacElroy’s last transmission… it told of some huge, moving object… couldn’t escape its gravity… Sir, if there’s some sort of alien threat… if this could be connected with what caused the Carcine Crater…

Jess glanced toward the crater itself, the giant kilometer-wide wound in the ground caused by a meteorite from somewhere in the constellation of Cancer, and a shudder wracked her. A huge portion of this city, lost in an instant fifty-six years ago…

Before Armas could reply, a commotion among the civilian spectators caught Jess’s attention. The redheaded man, he was now holding a small object in both hands. The end of it glowed as a dot of vibrant, lasered crimson—

Which settled onto Ambassador Floort’s legged body.

Jess dove toward the ’troph with a determined scream and crashed into a tangle of gray limbs and the scent of damp rocks. Floort screamed psychically in response—a murdered woman in the starkness of night, a distressed babe shrieking red-faced for its mother… The ambassador’s high-pitched banshee screech pierced Jess’s eardrums; a flare of heat lashed above her back as she shielded Floort with her torso. The alien’s life was far too important, no matter what it looked like.

She sprang to her feet and whipped her head around just in time to catch the distant Hercules Trevor’s gaze. A ripple of heat haze poured from the concealed weapon in hand, and his eyes widened enough to reveal the whites, even from this distance. Then he turned and bolted into the crowd.

Jess set her jaw, pushed up from the stage, and took a running leap off the edge. Years of gymnastics training let her stick the landing—mostly—even in the dubious stability her high-heeled boots offered. Fists balled, she took off after him.

The Hercules Trevor she knew wouldn’t stoop to assassinating alien delegates. She refused to believe such nonsense. Whoever—whatever this was, she would have answers.

Only the bobbling of disturbed heads marked Herc’s passage through the multitude, and she dashed in his wake, the saber banging against her outer thigh with every step.

Out of the way! she shouted at the people ahead of her, which made them dart in her path out of confusion and panic. Coming through! She gave up on shouting. Instead she drew her ornamental saber and waved it around to ward off the human obstacles.

The throng parted just enough to reveal a brilliant shock of red-bronze hair just up ahead, too far away for throwing her saber to do any good. Ah, what she wouldn’t give for an honest-to-goodness neutron disruptor about then. She didn’t really want to shoot him, if it was indeed Herc under some sort of outside influence, but a warning shot would’ve given her quarry pause.

The would-be assassin careened out of sight behind a building, but Jess knew exactly where that cross street led. Instead of following, she peeled off down a side street, ducked into an alleyway, and awaited the pitter-pat of running feet…

Just as the redhead dashed past her hiding spot, Jess swung her dress saber hard enough to shatter it across his arm. He staggered sideways and slumped against the nearest building. His good arm raised the handheld weapon. The laser telltale ignited its readiness, but Jess lashed out and kicked it free from his hand. The device spun off into a trash heap with a clatter and rustle.

Jess discarded the broken sword with a grimace. This close, she could see her quarry was indeed Hercules Trevor—not wishful thinking, not psychic resonance. Why hadn’t he contacted her, told her he’d made his way back to civilization? More importantly, why had he tried to kill Ambassador Floort?

Hesitation arrested her defenses a second too late to block the assassin’s clenched fist. White pain blossomed across her stomach, and she doubled over while backpedaling to regain precarious balance on her high heels.

This was the last time she’d ever deign to wear heels in a dress uniform.

She whipped around and lashed out with a roundhouse kick. Her heel, dangerous as it was for standing or running, caught Herc full in the face and sprayed blood and spittle from his mouth. As he reeled from the blow, she pirouetted around for the follow-through and kicked his left knee out from beneath him.

Herc cried out in pain, and she wrestled him down to the concrete. He struggled beneath her, eyes clenched shut, mouth grimacing, cheeks red from the strain. She straddled his chest and held down his arms, wishing she had something besides her body to restrain him with. Alas, cuffs weren’t standard on dress uniforms either. So she sat on his chest and held down his wrists until the fight drained out of him. He tried to knee her in the spine, but she was sitting too far forward for him to meaningfully connect. He tried to throw her off, but despite her average stature, she had more muscle than the average civilian woman, and Herc had always been kind of a pushover to begin with.

Herc…

Something broke inside her at seeing him like this, after all this time. Why had he done