Jennifer Mancini - Annihilation’s Song
Unedited Sneak Peek - October 2021
Chapter One – Dead or Alive:
Cause I'm a cowboy.
On a steel horse I ride. I'm wanted...
WANTED! Dead or alive.
Aurora was dancing around the central hub, singing along at the top of her lungs with Jon and Richie when the proximity alarm started going off mid harmony. It was a god-awful noise that she was so unaccustomed to experiencing that after her initial gasp of shock at the sheer volume, Aurora had to search her mind for precisely what she was hearing. Even though she put herself through the emergency drills like clockwork once a week, without fail, this particular alarm was so obnoxious and grating that one hundred percent of the time Aurora hit the disarm key within milliseconds of the first wailing screech, the horrific blare, hands down, her least favorite noise on the entire station.
Which is precisely why she stood there for far too long trying to process why it was happening without any prompting from her end and what the hell she was going to do about it.
Seconds are precious, her father had drilled into her skull time and time again. Over thinking and hesitation can get you killed out here.
Attempting to tamp down on her reeling emotions and retain some semblance of calm, Aurora hurried over to the nearest control panel and punched in her code, her head already pounding with a powerful influx of adrenaline-laced fear. In all her years of living here on Bae the proximity alarm had never gone off on its own, not even by accident, and this realization hit Aurora like a terrifying ton of cement bricks.
Cutting off the now intrusive background music with an unsteady hand, Aurora sprinted over to the open door that led to the primary control center, her heart beating at what felt like about a million beats per minute. She was totally alone and as unprepared as a human being could be for whatever might be breeching the station’s security and, as she glanced between the perpetually gloomy landscape outside and the multitude of screens in front of her, she had no idea what to expect.
Still, once she managed to snap herself out of her initial shock, she realized that the emergency protocols were like second nature to her and her body was already reacting on autopilot, immediately scanning the master controls to try to identify any immediate threat. Then, and only then, would Aurora be able to consider her next move, a possible life and death decision that she wasn’t all that confident about making on her own. Either the alarm had been tripped by accident, or there was something out there lurking in the deep, dark, yawning abyss. Now, whether or not that unknown something was friend or foe was completely up to Aurora to decide – although precisely how she was going to do that in seconds flat, with absolutely no practical experience, and based on nothing but a grainy black and white image on a small and temperamental screen was beyond her immediate comprehension.
Slapping the side of the monitor with the flat of her palm in a somewhat futile attempt to clear away some of the ever-present static, Aurora silently wished for her shoddy attempts at troubleshooting the problem not to work since, in the back of her mind, she was quite sure that she didn’t want to know what was happening out there that was dangerous enough to trip the sensors in the first place.
Aurora had been just thirteen years old when her father had spirited her away from a planet Earth on the verge of apocalypse to reside on a small dwarf planet in the relatively uncharted Gloriana Galaxy. Jackson Minor Hawthorne III, or Hawk as everyone in the know referred to him, was already a billionaire several times over by the time Aurora was born and she’d grown up wanting for absolutely nothing. Old money he’d called it. An enormous family fortune that Hawk had been wise enough to save and invest in a way that would have them comfortably living in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives.
If they survived that is.
Aurora loved her father dearly and appreciated all the trappings that came with such unimaginable wealth in her own childish and inexperienced way. After all, money kept them safe, comfortable, and always well fed – if not slightly isolated. Even as a young girl, Aurora was peripherally aware that in a terrifying world on the precipice of collapsing, Hawk would always find a way for the Hawthorne name to endure, his sharp mind and iron will, coupled with a nearly unlimited cache of resources, the sure-fire path to survival.
Hawk had always been a force to be reckoned with; the living embodiment of a real-life superhero to Aurora – her brilliant, brawny, if not slightly eccentric protector. And at six-foot-five and two hundred and fifty plus pounds of solid, hard packed muscle, he looked every inch the part as well.
Her father was always more of a brash, bearded mountain man than a polished and poised billionaire and he had the gruff, rough around the edges, no-bullshit personality to match. He was an undisputed alpha of the highest order – a confident, smart, and self-assured leader of men. As a young man he’d even defied his parents and enlisted in the military instead of going off to the exclusive college of their choosing, arguing that he’d learn more about real life from one week in the military than he would in four years in any expensive elitist institution. Six years later he’d returned to civilian life as a decorated officer, choosing to marry the woman he loved, instead of settling for an arranged match, that would benefit the Hawthorne family.
In short, Jackson Hawthorne was Aurora’s idol.
It wasn't until her mother unexpectedly died of a brain aneurism that Aurora started to experience the little fissures of doubt in her father’s hero status, tiny cracks in the shiny façade, that had Aurora reeling from what felt like a double loss. She’d already lost her mother and her father seemed to be fraying under the pressure as well. Aurora may have been young, but she was also smart and keenly observant and the changes in Hawk grew more and more obvious every day.
The tragic circumstances would have been a lot for any one person to have to deal with, much less a privileged, pampered eleven-year-old child, who already had very little practical experience with life’s harsher realities as it was; realities that now included her father’s almost fanatical preoccupation with politics and the increasingly volatile state of the world. A preoccupation that would ultimately lead Aurora to the precise predicament she found herself in now – living in a fully operational, self-sustaining space station on the dwarf planet known as B2, or what she and her father affectionately referred to as simply Bae.
Bae was one of the hundreds of uninhabited planets owned by an extremely powerful organization called the World Space Exploration Organization, or WSEO for short, and had proven to be the perfect one percenter’s escape hatch. Aurora’s basic understanding was that the Hawthorne family had inherited the rights to B2 as part of the estate of some long dead relative who’d been a lead researcher at the organization back in the day. Apparently, the guy was one of the original team members working on the attempted colonization of Mars when he’d passed – the first of many ill-fated endeavors that all ultimately ended up failing in a spectacular fashion.
For nearly twelve long years Bea had been Aurora’s one and only home – the past nine months, two days, and roughly seven hours of that time entirely alone. Because, as it turned out, a shit load of money and an esteemed family name didn’t equate to immortality and one otherwise uneventful night the indomitable Jack Hawk went to sleep and never woke up, leaving his only daughter completely and utterly alone on an otherwise isolated dwarf planet in the far reaches of space.
A trickle of perspiration made its way down between Aurora’s breasts, the tickling bead of moisture distracting her momentarily from her panic. She’d outgrown anything even remotely resembling a support bra roughly a year into their stay on the station, her curvy, top-heavy figure an entirely unexpected development. In response, she’d taken to wearing several of the tightest ribbed tank tops she had on hand in an attempt to assert some small semblance of control over her burgeoning curves, oftentimes with a dark, boxy man’s t-shirt thrown over the top for decency’s sake. They were wildly uncomfortable and left unattractive divots in her soft, pale skin but she’d deduced rather early on that they were still better than even attempting to go without. Aurora would choose the stinging chokehold of the too-small fabric over her boobs swinging pell-mell all over the place any day, the constricting tops the lesser of two evils in her estimation. Besides, Bae was far from a trendsetting fashion zone, and ill-fitting, out of style clothes were usually the least of her problems.
Aurora had resigned herself to the mish mash, slap-dash wardrobe she was stuck with relatively early on, realizing that she was damn lucky to have anything even remotely acceptable for her to wear at this point. The best of which usually consisted of a pair of baggy gray drawstring cargo pants that were so long she had to roll them up at the cuffs, and an extremely unattractive pair of space station friendly white rubber soled sneakers that were currently her last surviving pair. Aurora had drawn on them with permanent marker one night out of sheer boredom, resulting in a collection of vibrant swirls and random doodles that she thought added a dose of much-needed color to her otherwise drab, boxy, and totally monochrome garb.
Desperately trying to keep her attention focused on the situation at hand and not her steadily escalating terror, Aurora planted her palms on the sleek, warm surface of the control board in front of her and leaned forward as far as her diminutive five-foot-four-inch frame would allow to try to inspect the grainy split screen images of the live security feeds of the only two doors that led to or from the surface of the planet. While she saw nothing with her naked eye that indicated that anyone or anything was out there in the dark, at either the main entrance or the much smaller east side cargo bay hatch, there was no mistaking the bright red flashing light on the panel of the depressurization tunnel by the main door that told her something or someone had recently activated it.
From the inside - to her absolute horror.
The call is coming from inside the house! Aurora’s half hysterical brain buzzed, an uncouth bark of laughter bursting from out of her quivering lips. To say that the solitude had made her quirky was an understatement, and her body shifting so abruptly into flight mode wasn’t helping matters.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, dammit, shit,” she grumbled under her breath as she belatedly flipped open the protective casing covering the emergency lockdown button, pressing on it with her entire palm and every available ounce of her body weight, as if hitting it harder might speed up the process and make the situation much less dire. Of course, she realized that if something had made it as far as the inside depressurization chamber she was already shit out of luck, especially with the mandatory ten second delay built in on the kill switch for false alarms or accidental tripping.
“Come on! Come on! Come on!” she screeched at the inanimate display, bouncing up and down in place as she watched the ten second countdown trickle towards zero at an infuriating painful snail’s pace. “Faster! Faster! Come on faster!”
Finally, after what seemed like a painful eternity of waiting, the countdown flashed on the blessed number two and she heard the sound of the heavy blast door mechanics whirring to life. However, just as Aurora was about to expel a tremendous sigh of relief, she both felt and saw a dark gloved hand blur past her, pressing down on the override button just as the readout was about to turn over to zero.
Aurora cursed and then immediately shrieked as a follow-up, pivoting around so fast that she temporarily lost her legs and stumbled back bodily into the panel behind her. Unfortunately, she found her field of vision filled with nothing but a broad chest plate of solid, unending black – what appeared to be some sort of thick, leathery armor that was arranged in a tightly packed configuration was a lot like scales at first, terrified glance.
Aurora opened her mouth as if to speak but nothing but an unintelligible whimper came out as her as her wide and wild eyes travelled up and up and up and then up some more until she was looking at the general area of what should have been a face. However, all she got was a giant eyeful of nothing but more blackness – the entire head of the massive alien invader in front of her covered completely with a smooth, shiny dark helmet complete with an opaque black visor.
The faceless intruder’s head moved slowly from side to side several times, the universally accepted gesture for “no” and the arm that had just zoomed passed her wagged a warning finger to go with it.
Annoyance surged in Aurora’s gut immediately in response, her instinctively unhappy reaction to being so easily schooled by some uninvited guest hiding behind a mask and sneaking up on her like some entirely unwelcome space ninja. But then the cloaked stranger reached down and placed that same hand they’d just been using to silently berate her with on the hilt of what appeared to be a huge, gleaming sword sheathed at the waist and Aurora’s brief annoyance was promptly replaced with a fresh surge of plain old terror.
What was she thinking even considering sassing back to this hulking alien thing standing in front of her? A thing that was armed with a giant sword almost as big as her entire body and who had just breached her station’s security like it was nothing more than child’s play? And, perhaps more importantly, why the hell hadn’t she been smart enough to grab her own emergency weapon? Evidently she’d been alone for so long she’d forgotten all her basic survival skills and had no functioning sense of self preservation left to speak of.
Honestly, could this day get any worse…?
Want to know what happens to Aurora and her uninvited space invader?
Chapter One continues in Annihilation’s Song
Coming Soon to an e-reader near you.