Title: Essex Colony
Series: The Moon Mirror, Book One
Author: Lia Cooper
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: December 30, 2019
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 36600
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy, LGBT, mutations, scientists, space travel, moon colonists, AI, shifter, interspecies, alien influence
Synopsis
It’s been 227 days since Essex Colony’s
last transmission…
Dispatched to the surface of Essex Prime
and tasked with discovering what happened to the colony, Doctor Soran Ingram
discovers that most of the colonists are dead and the surviving Executive
Officer—Aline Aster—has turned into a ravening wolf-beast. The human survivors
claim the XO and her Lunaran fellows went mad and killed everyone, but Soran
has her doubts.
Following Aster’s testimony, as well as
clues left behind, Soran embarks on a fact-finding mission to retrace the
colony’s last steps before disaster struck.
She’ll soon discover more than
uncertainty lurks in the dark spaces of the world.
Excerpt
Essex Colony
Lia Cooper © 2019
All Rights Reserved
Federal Standard Days since Last Essex
Colony Transmission…227
Essex Colony, Location: Essex
Prime/Equatorial 10S, Greenwich Meridian
06:55 AM, Colony Time
Soran stood at the forward port viewing
station on board the starship Emery and watched Essex Prime spin slowly below
her, a bright blue and green marble hanging in the dark of space. Technically
speaking, the planet bore only a superficial resemblance to Earth, but she
could see the appeal it must have had for the Earther colonists who had signed
on to colonize it for the company. In her time working aboard the Emery, she
had learned the importance of superficiality for her Earther colleagues.
Something as simple as a color was often enough to evoke an emotional resonance
for them.
They had picked Essex Prime for
colonization because someone in the company had nicknamed it Earth 3—not to be
confused with Earth 2, a planet locally know as L’n’ze-q24—but Soran wondered
what they would find when they went down there now. Two hundred and
twenty-seven days since since the colony’s last official transmission plus no
sign of comms signals since the Emery crossed into local communication range
combined into an anxious loop in Soran’s lesser subroutines. Fear, she
realized, fear of what they would find.
Essex Prime wouldn’t be the first colony
lost to catastrophic failure, whether from some unforeseen natural disaster or
a breakdown in the colony’s equipment, or from a dangerous local agent that
went unnoticed in the initial planetary surveys. There were a hundred things
that could go wrong this far from galactic center.
The ship’s computer beeped at her
through the ship’s network to remind her she was expected on the airlock deck
in fifteen minutes.
She was dressed in her ground suit and
had her go bag packed at her feet—just the essentials. The ship’s sensors
hadn’t shown anything out of the ordinary, besides a lack of collected life
signs large enough to belong to the colonists. This trip was intended as a
brief scouting mission to ascertain the situation on the ground.
<<Contact. Doctor Ingram, did you
receive your departure reminder?
Soran shouldered her go bag and
acknowledged the computer’s check-in. Externally, she kept her expression blank
as she made her way down to the airlock. That fear feeling squeezed at her
regulatory system. If she were inclined to hope, she told herself, she’d hope
that the colony’s comms equipment had simply suffered a mechanical breakdown
and the colonists would greet them on the ground, all accounted for—all of
them, but especially one Lunaran in particular. But even as the idea flickered
through one of her lesser processes, another part of Soran wanted to shunt it
away where it couldn’t hurt her to be disappointed. If she could only match her
interior to the smooth expressionless surface of her exterior, then whatever
they found couldn’t make that fear feeling worse.
But her interior felt riotous, clenching
and twisting tight as her boots crossed the threshold, loud on the docking bay
floor. The transport ship awaited her along with the two dozen security and
medical personnel scheduled to fly down for the recon.
It had been nearly three years since
she’d last seen Aline Aster, but Soran’s memory banks were nearly perfect—far
superior to her Earther counterparts’—and she could recall with crisp clarity
the feel of the Lunaran’s skin under her cutaneous sensors, the taste of her
mouth, the sting of her teeth against Soran’s breasts, and the cadence of her
voice winding down as she fell asleep still murmuring the words of a bedtime
story from her homeworld. What would it feel like if Soran disembarked on Essex
Prime to…nothing. No signs of life, no colony, no Aster waiting with a sheepish
explanation for their silence?
But Security Chief Ryan was gesturing at
her impatiently to board the transport vessel and Soran did the only thing she
could do with this reductive thought string—she cut and pasted it into its own
file and then buried it deep below her internal checklist for the mission. They
were minutes away from an answer one way or another.
Or more precisely, fourteen hours later,
she’d be staring into the malformed face of an answer while that fear in her
chest crushed her heart into the sliver of a black hole.
Soran didn’t have a single word in her
mouth as she stood next to SC Ryan outside the detention cell, staring in at
what remained of XO Aster. Soran had to think of her—it like that or she was
afraid the anguish would overwhelm her. She’d never lost someone with a
personal—and emotional—connection to her before, and she wasn’t sure that her
software had been properly programmed to handle that sort of emotional
upheaval. The last thing she could afford to do would be to lose herself here
on the ground, especially in front of SC Ryan.
“They found…it lurking around the edge
of the forest. At the backside of the emergency compound,” SC Ryan said in a
deep, bland voice, his eyes heavy on XO Aster’s hunched form. “Took enough
electricity to stop an animal twice as big to subdue and facilitate capture.”
Soran swallowed around the bile in her
throat. “And you want me to…?”
Ryan glanced at her finally, with a
scowl, and said, “I don’t— Chelsea wants you to find out if it can talk. Find
out why it killed the settlers. If there are any other Lunarans running around
out there still. Probably a waste of time, but seeing as there’s nothing else
for you to do down here, I figure you can’t hurt anything. Maybe ask it if this
was their plan all along.”
“Who? The Lunarans? You don’t really
think this was intentional?” Soran angled her face so she could glimpse Ryan’s
expression without looking at him directly. She knew it unnerved the Earthers
when she stared at them too closely.
“From what the survivors have told us—”
he began.
“XO Aster is a survivor,” Soran
insisted, choosing to ignore that part where she showed little resemblance to
her former shape and sentience.
SC Ryan snorted and thrust a thick,
calloused finger at the barrier separating them from the detention cell.
“That’s a fucking monster,” he said.
“If that were true then what is the
point of me—”
“I’m getting tired of your attitude,
Ingram,” SC Ryan interrupted. He shot her a narrow-eyed look, a quick up and
down that took in her entire person and always made Soran feel like a bug under
a microscope—even if the Security Chief had probably never touched a microscope
before. “You’re the ship shrink. Ask your questions, see what information you
can get out of it, and report to Chelsea. Those are your orders. Don’t think
about it too much; that’s not what they pay you for. Just collect the fucking
data.”
Soran watched him leave, the door
shutting behind him with an ominous clang that seemed to resonate in her
perfectly shaped enamel plated teeth. She stared down at her boots, straight
and shoulder-width apart, holding her up while her processor counted the
individual beats of her circulatory system. A minute passed, or what more felt
like a quarter of an hour, before a hoarse voice scraped across the air between
her and the detention cell.
“S’not safe.”
A shiver raced down her spine. Soran
looked up and met Aster’s all too familiar eyes, her circulatory regulator
thumping painfully against the metal ribs of her geneered skeleton.
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Meet the Author
Lia Cooper is
a twenty-something native of the Pacific Northwest, voracious reader,
pop-culture addict, and writer. She cultivated an early interest in writing
through fandom and completed writing her first full length novel with the help
of NaNoWriMo.
In the years
since, she’s dabbled in catering, barista-ing, and working as a pastry chef
before finally returning full time to the thing she loves most: storytelling.
When she’s
not glued to Scrivener, Lia enjoys playing video games with friends and
reviewing books for her booktube channel.
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