He meets her down there right after she finishes with Hunter.
She rests on the edge of Hunter’s tank. When she hears him coming, she pivots to face him, squinting slightly.
“How’s it going?” he says.
“They’re all set. Down for a long nap.
“I think they’ve earned it.”
“Me too.”
“It’s just us now,” Jack says.
“Yes.”
She has regained partial vision in her left eye. Enough to register light and murky shapes when they’re close. When they get to civilization, she’ll buy an implant that should bring her sight back to 20/20. The scarring can be dealt with in a number of ways, but there will always be remnants of the damage. The eye itself has gone a cloudy white. The skin from the corner of her lips to her hairline appears smooth as wax. He can tell by the way she holds herself that she thinks she’s ugly now, but she’s wrong. She is still Lana, and that’s all that matters.
“The other tanks?” Jack says.
“They seem fine, but I want to comb through them one more time.”
She’s been borderline paranoid about the grav tanks, but with good reason. They escaped Bel’s jump by the skin of their ass. People have reported odd things occurring in close proximity to grav fields like that. Objects going missing. Screws unwinding themselves. Wires crossing or corroding in no time at all. And the occasional hallucination.
No one else saw the shapes the hydra made, but they were real. Clear as anything. The first night afterward, Lana assured him that it absorbed its victims’ physical forms, nothing else. They’d seen it take other odd shapes. The way it chased them down the hall on all fours. Just imitations, she said. She was trying to comfort him, but there’s no real proof either way. He isn’t sure if he believes in souls, but that doesn’t assuage the fear. After what they’ve been through, anything seems possible.
“Let’s wait on the tank inspection,” Jack says.
The Homunculus is too damaged to make a grav jump. The hull sustained serious damage from the cannon, and they are one airlock door away from depressurization. The stress from a jump could rip the hull wide open. Grav tanks are versatile, but they won’t work at absolute zero. It’s not a risk worth taking. At their maximum speed, it will take a little over 14 months to reach the nearest outpost, which means it will be close to 16 months before Jack sees Kip again. Not that it’ll matter to the boy. If he’s anything like his father, he’ll weather whatever this life throws at him. But if Jack can manage it, he’d like to be there to help out when he can. If he can.
So Jack and Lana have two options. They can go down for a year long nap like the others and let the ship wake them when they reach the target outpost, or they can spend those months together, uninterrupted. It would be time enough to catch up on important things. And there’s plenty to share. Not to mention all they should prepare for ahead. Technically, they did steal a piece of alien technology, along with the alien inside. Then there’s whatever else Dandy framed them for. Any records he forged will be airtight.
Yet as dangerous as these things may be, Jack is not afraid of the future.
“I think we should stay up for a while,” Jack says.
“You do?”
“Yeah. I think I’d like that.”
Lana stands and cocks one hip. “Gee,” she says. “However will we pass the time?”
They go to each other. She wraps her arms around his waist. He holds her to his chest. He missed her terribly. He can admit that now. Funny how we bury so much inside, attempting to spare ourselves pain. It always erupts.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Severed Press for bringing my debut novel to the world, and for involving me in the cover design and editing process. This is the book I wanted to write and the book I wanted to share.
Many thanks to the array of teachers who have challenged and sculpted my writing over the years. At SUNY Oswego, Leigh Wilson, Brad Korbesmeyer, Donna Steiner, Robert O’Connor, and Chris Motto all offered much needed early guidance. These days, I’m honored to call them colleagues. At MNSU Mankato, the entire Creative Writing Department helped me develop the skills and discipline needed to complete novel-length projects. I’m especially grateful to Diana Joseph, Geoff Herbach, and Roger Sheffer for their tastes and talent.
Much gratitude to my friends who provided feedback on early drafts: Ben Wheeler-Floyd, Ashley McNamara Fritz, and Sam Hastings. You guys rock. I hope you’re up for reading many more drafts in the future!
The following people influenced the direction and completion of this project from a distance: Hugh Howey, thank you for your relentlessly sunny disposition, your generous advice to strangers, and your reader-first attitude. I read Wool during a creative slump. It knocked something loose and made writing (and reading) fun again. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. Jeremy Robert Johnson, thank you for your killer prose and your words of encouragement. Michael J. Seidlinger, King of Social Media, I don’t know how you do everything you do, but it’s inspiring as hell. Joshua Cohen, thanks for your willingness to chat, for offering advice where you could, and just being genuinely brilliant. The members of Rammstein, thank you for providing an unofficial soundtrack to this novel. All those who run, work for, publish with, or buy books from indie presses, thank you for being ravenous. You are the future of publishing.
And finally, endless love and gratitude to the person who keeps me from coming apart at the seams, the only one I can talk to about works-in-progress, my best friend, my hero, my wife, Carey Feagan-Allocco. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
About the Author
Benjamin Allocco lives in Syracuse, New York, where he’s writing his second novel. You can keep up with his writing at www.benjaminallocco.com.
Read on for a free sample of Taskforce: The Bugwars.
Marcus Page yawned, reclining in his chair at the long-range sensor station. Normally, he loved the night shift. This evening though, he was having trouble staying awake. Two cups of coffee had helped, but they weren’t fully doing the job. His third sat on the console of his station, half drained. There was never that much traffic around Cerebus VI anyway, and at night, the entire system was usually a dead zone.
Cerebus VI was on the very edge of Solar Federation space. Its colony was a small one by Solar Federation standards. The total population of Cerebus VI was a mere three hundred million people. Most of them were farmers or miners by trade. Cerebus VI only had two commodities that made it of value to the Solar Federation: its exported crops and its orbital shipyards. Three years ago, the planet’s conservative party had come to power politically and cut a deal with Earth Gov. that made Cerebus VI one of the Solar Federation’s most up-and-coming builders of ships. The planet’s vast resources in terms of subsurface metals, and its location at the edge of Solar Federation space, had given it an edge in landing the deal to become one of the top producers of explorer class vessels. Marcus had voted more on the liberal side but in the end had been glad that the conservatives had won. Cerebus VI was booming in terms of industry now compared to where it had been as solely a food-producing world back then.
He had graduated from a two-year course at the new space academy and had been able to escape what otherwise would have been his inevitable fate in becoming a farmer like his dad. Instead of breaking his back tending fields, he got to sit in a comfy chair, drinking coffee, and monitoring the in-and-out going ship traffic of the Cerebus system. For the most part, the job was easy and sometimes even fun. Only two times a year did it get harrowing. That was when the fleet of completed vessels were being crewed and dispatched into the great void of space beyond the Solar Federation’s borders and when the harvests came in. Harvest time was the worst. Dozens of ships a day would come into the system to pick up their hauls, and an almost equal number of small-time dealers would launch their own freighters from the planet’s spaceports packed hull to hull with carrots, potatoes, etc. Old Earth foods truly flourished in the soil of Cerebus IV, and the demand for them was always high; the Earth herself was the center of power for the Solar Federation now and the bulk of her surface was either industrialized or used for defensive military purposes.