The Terran Cycle Boxset Read online

  The Terran Cycle Box Set

  Philip Quaintrell

  Contents

  Also by Philip Quaintrell

  Volume 1

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Volume 2

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Volume 3

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Volume 4

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Also by Philip Quaintrell

  THE ECHOES SAGA:

  Echoes of Fate

  1. Rise of the Ranger

  2. Empire of Dirt

  3. Relic of the Gods

  Echoes of the Lost

  1. The Fall of Neverdark

  2. Kingdom of Bones

  3. Age of the King

  THE TERRAN CYCLE:

  1. Intrinsic

  2. Tempest

  3. Heretic

  4. Legacy

  Volume One

  “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

  William Shakespeare

  Prologue

  Keep running. It was the only thought Savrick had anymore. If he ever stopped running they would find Esabelle and take her from him. The Terran would most certainly kill him for breaking the law and having a child in the first place, but he wouldn’t let them take his daughter. Esabelle was all he had left of his wife and, with only three standard years of life, Esabelle’s blue eyes already reflected her mother’s.

  Keep running!

  “He went this way!” a deep Terran voice echoed through the cave.

  Savrick tried to ignore the pain in his lungs and push on. He had to put as much distance between them and Esabelle as possible. Just thinking of the toddler, hidden away in their makeshift home of a cave, renewed Savrick’s efforts to keep running. The torches mounted on his chest strap struggled to highlight the safest path through the tunnels as he sprinted through the dark.

  The pitch-black was momentarily illuminated with a crack of lightning when a ball of organic plasma shot through the cave and exploded against the stone wall. The super-heated energy skimmed Savrick’s shoulder, scorching his flesh down to the muscle. His scream of pain couldn’t be helped. His pain receptors begged him to stop running and nurse the burn, but the Terran were faster and stronger than him; he couldn't afford to stop. Savrick had always known that death was coming for him; it became a certainty the moment he was detected outside the mountain.

  The gleaming city of Kaldor lay several kilometres away from the base of the mountain, the only city on the relatively uninhabited planet. The Terran had settled here mostly out of curiosity for the ancient warships that littered the surface of this world like a graveyard, the remnants of their ancestors. Savrick had only survived this long by salvaging parts. He was good with his hands, resourceful his wife had always said.

  Esabelle… Keep running you fool!

  Hunger had a way of driving people to be reckless. Hunting the Rorstack outside the protective walls of the mountain had been his mistake, one that would now cost him his life and probably that of his daughter. Kaldor’s sensor sweep had only required seconds to detect his presence and alert the inhabitants of the fugitive. It had taken many months to smuggle both Esabelle and he onto the deserted planet, away from the empire’s capital world, Albadar. Savrick had underestimated Kaldor’s growing population and how quickly Terran would flock to the dead planet.

  Running footsteps gained on him. The Terran had no need for torches or scanning equipment to find him. Their higher state of evolution made them perfect hunters in the dark, able to feel his very existence emanating in the soup of the universe. Every movement he made exerted pressure on the molecules in the atmosphere around him, and those molecules, in turn, vibrated all the way back to the Terran’s heightened senses, giving away his exact location. Even if he stayed perfectly still, they would smell his pheromones in the air or hear his heart pounding in his chest.

  Savrick was forced to elicit another yelp of pain when he miscalculated the size of a rock on the ground and tripped. The spiky rock cut his knees and hands, spreading more pain throughout his body. Exhaustion was becoming harder to fight off in the damp cave; he only made it a few more metres before his next mistake proved to be his last. Running as fast as he could, the torches failed to reveal the abyss-like hole before him. A sharp scream was all Savrick gave until he continued to fall in silence. It was a short drop with a sudden stop that left him reeling in more pain, face down in a shallow stream.

  The thought of what they would do if they found Esabelle was the only thing that gave him strength. Savrick pushed himself up, blinking the ice-cold water from his eyes, and tried to stand. His left leg buckled under the pain in his ankle, causing him to instantly collapse back into the stream. Muffled voices and heavy footsteps could be heard through the small opening in the roof of the cave.

  They had found him.

  Savrick gripped his spear tightly. The crude weapon had been made from old piping salvaged from one of the buried ships, entombed within the mountain. Had he used any kin
d of energy weapon, the Terran would have discovered them sooner.

  If they were going to kill him he wouldn’t go out without a fight. They all deserved to die anyway for what they had done to his wife. He only wished he could make them suffer as she had.

  On his hands and one good knee, Savrick dragged his body through the stream. Looking around the small cave, he realised there was nowhere to escape; the stream entered and left the cave via a small tunnel that he couldn’t fit through. Three heavy thuds and a splash of water was all that preceded the Terran.

  Savrick slowly turned around, his pain forgotten in the final moments of his life. The dark plated armour allowed the Terran to blend into the inky shadows of the cave, Savrick’s torchlight the only source of illumination. The central Terran stepped forward as a small light appeared on his waistline, creating a holographic image of an old man. Savrick knew who he was of course; there was only one old-looking man amongst the immortal Terran.

  “Hello, Savrick.” The hologram greeted him as an old friend, long missed.

  “ALF...” Savrick hated the artificial life form. Everything that had happened to him could be laid at the AI’s feet.

  “It’s time to stop running,” ALF continued.

  “I’ll never give her to you!” Savrick knew what ALF really wanted.

  “She was never meant to exist, Savrick. There’s a reason I created that law, and it wasn’t out of malice. Many Terran have died because of her.”

  “And that’s all you care about, isn’t it? The precious Terran! What about us? What about the Gomar? Aren’t we your children as well?” Savrick could see that he wasn’t going to change the AI’s mind. But when it came to his daughter, he would do anything, even beg. “Please, ALF... she’s just a child.”

  “Esabelle is dangerous and-” ALF’s image flickered before going out completely.

  What was happening? Savrick had never seen an image of ALF be disrupted before. Had the Terran ended the communication to get straight to killing him? He angled the spear towards them, prepared to die fighting if that was the way it had to be. There was no movement from his three would-be-killers in the dark. What were they waiting for? He would beg for Esabelle’s life but not his own.

  Savrick adjusted his position on the floor and directed his torches at the Terran. All of them were frozen in agony, silently screaming, with what appeared to be black liquid sinking into every orifice of their faces. Almost as one, they dropped to their knees clutching at their throats, desperate to breathe. As suddenly as their agony started, it stopped. The Terran dropped face-first into the hard ground, as lifeless as the rock around them. In the torchlight, Savrick watched in horror as the black liquid wormed out of their bodies and returned to the source, behind him.

  With an abundance of splashing, Savrick rolled over in the stream and used his elbows to get as far away from the cave wall as possible. In his desperate thrashing, torchlight flashed across something metallic and shiny embedded in the wall. Uttering a deep grunt of pain, Savrick stood on one leg and slowly hopped towards the mysterious object. He moved his hand across the jagged, slippery surface, unsure of what he was feeling. Some of the outcrops were coated in dense rock while other sections of the shiny metal were visible in between. Had he not reached out and touched the object, it would have been impossible to distinguish its smooth surface from the surrounding rock.

  “What are you?” Savrick stood back, taking it all in.

  He could see the rough outline of the embedded object and decided it was one side of a cube, at least six-feet wide. Wielding the tip of his spear as if it were a knife, he began to prise the sharp rock away from the flat surface. Wiping away the mud and sludge revealed strange markings and engravings on the cube. To be so deep within the cavern the object must be ancient. This was the sort of find the Terran were searching for, a relic of the old wars. Like all recorded history of that time, Savrick’s knowledge was sketchy; so much had been lost in those violent times. He knew a great battle had been fought in this system, but he couldn’t remember over what or exactly when.

  Savrick took a moment to look over the hieroglyphs and symbols that ran in interlacing circles across the cube. The writing was unrecognisable - if it was indeed writing - but it could have been a pre-Criterion text. He suddenly withdrew his hand as he cut the pad of his thumb and index finger on the razor edge of a rock. Savrick grimaced at the blood he saw dripping down between the circling hieroglyphs. There were other predators inside the mountain that would be drawn to that smell. He moved to wipe it away when the surrounding rock cracked from an unseen pressure.

  Instinctively, Savrick jumped back and landed in the stream again, gripping his spear with white knuckles. Fissures split the wall, causing a waterfall effect as rocks crumbled across the smooth surface. The cube came to life when openings appeared along the edges and the circled markings began to rotate like the cogs in a clock. Savrick held his breath somewhere between curiosity and fear. All at once the activity stopped, leaving a hand-sized hole just above the centre. There was nothing but darkness inside.

  Savrick rose from the wet ground and tentatively approached the cube. He may have been labelled a Gomar but he was Terran in nature. His species had advanced so far because of their curiosity and exploration of the unknown after all.

  Hesitantly, Savrick placed his hand inside... and felt only pain.

  1

  200,000 years later

  Kalian woke up to the sound of the mag-train gliding past his apartment. It took him a moment to shake off the after-effects of sleep, and realise he was supposed to be walking out the door when the 08:30 train passed by. He shot out of bed with the kind of start someone only late for work could have. Checking his wrist for the time proved fruitless, as the emitters inside his skin had frozen the holographic time at 03:10. Frustrated, Kalian tapped his arm until the time flickered and disappeared completely. Groaning, he wondered why he even bothered having it implanted in the first place; technology always disagreed with him.

  He checked his hair quickly in the mirror, thankful there was still some of yesterday’s gel in it to keep it fairly styled. He threw on the first items of clothing the wardrobe presented him with, hoping the dark blue shirt would match his cargo trousers. The open-plan living space made it easy to run around collecting everything he needed while shoving a toothbrush in his mouth and wishing it would do the work for him. Kalian hopped into the kitchen space with one trouser leg refusing to cooperate while ignoring the odd socks.

  That was when he stopped in the most unorthodox position.

  His apartment was a mess, but it hadn’t been when he fell asleep last night. It had been a part of his routine to tidy his home every Sunday night before the start of a new week. The first thing he noticed was his cream coloured toaster stuck unnaturally halfway up the kitchen wall. He tapped it lightly on the side and the machine crashed back onto the counter. Almost every cupboard was open, exposing the disorganised contents within. The chopping board was stood on one of its corners, slowly turning by itself at an impossible angle. His favourite spotted teacups had been removed from their rack and were each stuck at a different angle to the underside of the cupboard above.

  Looking around the apartment it was clear to see the same had happened everywhere. The bedside table was standing on only one leg, though somehow the contents had failed to slide off, leaving the lamp lopsided. The central rug had simply turned upside down hiding the pattern from view. Kalian verbally commanded the TV, embedded in the wall, to switch on but received nothing but silence.

  “Not again...” The words were garbled by the imposing toothbrush.

  He pulled it out and saw that he had forgotten to put any paste on it. Groaning again, he threw the toothbrush into the bathroom, the only other room in the apartment. Kalian finally adjusted his trousers and rolled his Datapad up, shoving it into his satchel for work; he didn't have time to deal with yet another unexplainable event. If he didn’t leave now he would be unforgiva
bly late, and he didn’t want to set a precedent with the freshers.

  He took one last look out, of the window which made up one of his four walls, and narrowed his vision between the buildings. Kalian could just make out the sun rising steadily over the San Francisco horizon, its light bringing life to the city.

  The walk to the university was long, or at least it felt that way in the summer heat the Weather-Net had created. Kalian was thankful for the towering height of the surrounding skyscrapers - they provided much-needed shade. It was easy to feel small living amongst such colossal structures; he admired the height of them though, with the central buildings able to touch the cloud bank most days. The majority had been built centuries ago for housing purposes, and as a history lecturer, Kalian was well aware of the population crisis before the construction of habitats on the Moon and the mega structures built on Mars. Earth had been running out of land at the time and there was only one way to build - up.