Chapter Twenty

Adam Larkin was, in general, a rather laid back sort. He had a good job piloting a supply freighter between mining camps and the colony ships, a comfy couch, and season passes to the Miners' Guild Zero-G Football Stadium: pre-season, home games and practices. He even had a girlfriend.

Well, a friend who was a girl.

A very close friend who spent her days mining ore and her nights sharing her dreams with him over the freighter's clapped out old vid-speaker.

A woman so beautiful, her grubby uniform and dinged-up mining helmet only enhanced her smiling eyes. Even with his freighter's crap reception and cramped, fuzzy screen, her eyes shimmered like topaz under torchlight, her teeth were like gleaming quartz, her skin seemed smoother than polished obsidian, and her hair…

All right. Fair to say, the two of them were more than friends.

Amy Cunningham was the reason laid-back Adam had started working overtime. Signing up for longer pick-up and delivery runs, volunteering for riskier assignments.

Which, in turn, was why he'd finally accepted the vitamin regime the Space Corps had been offering colony ship residents free of charge. A regime of health-and-energy-boosting pills and injections nearly all the sun-starved miners and civilian pilots he knew had already been taking for months.

All so he could pile up enough savings to take her on her dream trip to Earth. To see a place so rich with fresh water that the precious stuff literally poured over cliff sides in roaring torrents. To taste a fruit that had never been freeze-dried. Soft and luscious and dripping with juice…

He even had his eye on a ring. Carved from a single piece of real Earth rosewood, with a glistening bead of purest water preserved in a hollowed-out diamond.

Nothing made Adam happier on his long delivery flights than imagining her face when he presented her with that ring…anticipating her calls every evening…seeing her face, hearing the warm smile in her voice…

And then, without warning, her vid-calls stopped.

It wasn't like she hadn't had time to make the calls, or was too busy to pick up. With their odd hours and rough schedules, that happened often enough on both their ends. They just made up the chat time when they could.

This was different. Her comm unit had gone completely dead. Her entire social media presence…

Just…gone.

After five days of silence, Adam broke his route and made a bee-line for the last outpost she'd been assigned to.

The camp stood abandoned, the mining equipment eerily still. All the miners' stuff was still there: rumpled cots and magazines, unwashed mugs and plates...

But, no people.

No one at all...

For weeks, Adam scoured the news stations, prodded the Miners' Guild, begging for any information…her status…her whereabouts… Had there been an explosion? A cave-in?

The more his questions were ignored or rebuffed, the deeper and more wide-ranging he took his search, greasing the way with the dollar-pounds he'd so carefully stowed until a vague tip brought him to an aging, remarkably buxom, bartender serving out drinks on Colony Ship 6. For a few hundred, cash, she steered Adam toward a young Space Corps scout pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Grimmel who, for the past fortnight or so, seemed to have set up permanent camp at the back of her bar.

The pilot seemed dead-set on drinking himself into oblivion, but laid-back Adam could be as patient and persistent as an encroaching glacier when the mood took him. Nothing could turn him from his quest for answers.

And in the end, the troubled officer cracked wide open.

The truth about the vitamin regime came gushing out of him, along with a several pints of drunken tears. Keeping the Space Corps' secret had been tearing the young man's soul to tatters, and breaking his oath to his superiors nearly broke him as well.

But, for all the man's alcohol-soured sobbing, Adam could tell that, in Grant, he had gained an ally. As Grant spoke, Adam saw a fiercely burning anger rise in his eyes. A fire he knew the young officer saw mirrored in his own.

Grant told him of a small, secret branch of the Space Corps. A privately funded offshoot of Special Services R&D that had targeted the Kuiper Belt mining colonies under false pretenses. Used them as guinea pigs to test their Super Soldier serum.

The testing had started months ago, he said, under the guise of a health-boosting vitamin regimen.

And now, colonists were changing. Their physical bodies warping, stretching, their genetic codes corrupted by a distant, uncaring hierarchy of privileged, Outer Rim investors who openly portrayed the miners, not as the resourceful pioneers they were, but as sub-human Morlocks. Test animals to be exploited then discarded with no regard for their humanity or outward-moving culture.

The young officer had seen it happen, witnessed the miners' agonized screams as their bones and muscles lengthened, their skulls distorted, their bodies sprouted thick mats of wiry fur…

It had happened to Amy, Grant said, and it would happen to Adam. The genetic damage had already been done. He warned that, within weeks, Adam would start feeling sharp pains in his joints, his muscles. In less than a month, he'd know firsthand the agony of the violent mutation ripping its way through mining camps and colony ships all across the Kuiper Belt...sending its shamed and angry victims into hiding...

There was nothing he could do, Grant said, no agency he could turn to. The general in charge of the program, Pauline Metzeler, had already started a spin campaign designed to place all blame on the miners themselves, charging radiation exposure, harsh living conditions, and loose immorality for the terrible mutations now afflicting them. And, she was backed in her efforts by the Genetically Engineered Super Soldier Project's chief investor, Admiral Rimmer, a long-outspoken eugenics advocate who had genetically engineered her four children…all of whom now served in the Space Corps.

To boil the whole thing down, Grant said, the GESS Project had failed, the duped colonists were now thoroughly screwed, and the high-ranking officials who had so maliciously defrauded and exploited them stood poised to walk away without so much as a fleck of dust on their ten-thousand dollar-pound suits.

All of which left Adam helpless. Isolated. Voiceless in the face of their protective vortex of money and power, slander and lies.

Unless...

To Be Continued...