The Roke Discovery Read online

  The Roke Discovery

  Book 1: The Roke Series

  JP Waters

  Hidden Key Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Hidden Key Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  THE ROKE DISCOVERY is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the creator’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Thank you

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Olie was fine tuning the droid’s config system when it happened. Someone next to her made a crude joke and the whole tech line laughed. One moment, Olie was gazing down at the droid at her station and chuckling along with her coworkers. The next, her ears perked up at what sounded like a faint train whistle.

  Olie looked up through the clear ceiling and saw a fireball and a plume of thick, black smoke rise over the desalination line’s reserve tank. The flames traveled almost a hundred yards into the air, but it was the sound of the blast that struck Olie most. A faint, incoming whistle grew and grew until Olie heard a violent crack. A booming explosion then hit the building so hard that Olie fell to the ground.

  She had encountered plenty of chemical grenades during her time fighting the Russian-Chinese conflict on Mars, but the vacuum of space muted the sounds of violence and destruction. This was something entirely different. The explosion immediately kicked her heart into overdrive. Olie ducked involuntarily with each aftershock, and when she finally turned in the direction of the blasts, she saw other technicians fleeing the fire. The building was growing hotter and filling with more smoke by the minute. Olie’s head roared with screams, blasts, and the building heat. It sounded as if more explosions were coming out of other warehouses. Perhaps against her better judgement, Olie found herself running out of her building and directly toward the spreading flames of the neighboring warehouse.

  It wasn’t long before she’d reached the first of the wounded—a worker severely burned and bleeding profusely from his neck. His leg was bent backwards after being thrown violently by the blast. He wheezed as Olie knelt by his side.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Olie said, but she could already tell it was a lie. Even if he pulled through, he’d never be the same again.

  Olie winced as another explosion ripped through the roof of a nearby building. Employees in gray overalls with the company logo—aqua waves crashing over SeaCrest in bold white—were running past her in both directions. She pulled a dirty rag from her uniform pocket and held it to the dying man’s neck where a piece of glass had punctured his carotid artery. Swirling around her was the smell of burning metal, sirens whirring to life as she began to sweat through her overalls.

  “Help! Help! Please!” Being careful not to remove the pressure from the man’s neck, Olie tried to lift one arm in the air to get the attention of passerby. The black smoke was too thick, though, and she worried they’d be missed entirely.

  As the fire raged in the reserve fuel tank and spread to the nearby warehouses, an acidic odor started to spread throughout the SeaCrest structures. In an instant, small, tandem-rotor drones were overhead, swinging low over the expansive facility and dumping their payloads over the fire. A second wave arrived moments later, dumping their retardant on the flame, nearly extinguishing it.

  Tightly stanching the man’s wounds with the rag, Olie peered around the SeaCrest campus, eyes wide, scanning for the potential of a medical assistant droid. She knew there had to be one somewhere. After years of minor incidents involving staff members, the employee union had demanded onsite medical assistance. Quick to avoid the threat of a lawsuit, SeaCrest begrudgingly obliged. While Olie typically didn’t see many of the medidroids in her department, she was sure they’d be close to the onslaught of chaos that was unfolding at the plant.

  “Help us, please!” Olie pleaded, still waving one arm in the air as the smoke enveloped her. She fought back tears as the smog burned her eyes. Where were those damn medidroids?

  After minutes of calling for help, another SeaCrest technician saw Olie in the smoke and ran over to help carry the man into the company’s onsite infirmary. Olie found herself carrying the feet of the wounded employee while her coworker had his arms around the man’s chest. She felt responsible for this injured man, even though she had never seen him before in her life.

  As they carried him away from the flames, it was a short walk to the other side of the plant where the infirmary sat squat against the taller desalination buildings. Olie could smell the flames in the air and saw several warehouses being destroyed by the fire. The scene inside the infirmary was like nothing she had ever seen before. The small infirmary had probably never seen more than a handful of injuries at a time, but there were dozens upon dozens of wounded. Employees were screaming in pain and shoving each other to get access to the medidroids. Quickly, fighting back against her coworkers to enter the building, Olie followed the wounded man as he was rushed directly to a cot. The infirmary’s pristine white walls were quickly changing color by the number of injured, burnt employees leaning against it.

  A tall silver medidroid calmly strode over to Olie and the man, scanning the situation. Olie noticed that this particular droid wore a uniform, unlike others she had seen in the building. Its metal frame was clothed in what appeared to be medical scrubs. The droid’s sensors scanned the body of the blast victim before turning its focus to Olie.

  “Employee Olivia Jane Manning, you are unharmed.”

  Olie stared at the medidroid. “Yes, I’m fine.” She gestured to the injured man. “Will he be okay?”

  Before the droid could answer, the wounded, dark-haired man violently coughed and sputtered, seemingly attempting to speak. Blood was seeping out of his wound onto the stark white cot sheets.

  “Shhhh… it’s okay,” Olie whispered as calmly as she could manage. “Rest. Just stay with us.”

  As the medidroid administered some intravenous medicine to the man, he winced, swallowed, and mumbled something unintelligible. Olie raised her eyebrows at the medidroid and leaned down to the man’s ear.

  “What?”

  “An… animal,” he said.

  “An animal?”

  He
slowly nodded, seeming to melt back into the cot as the medication entered his bloodstream.

  “What about an animal?”

  But the man was out again. Was it a hallucination? A warning? Or just some floating memory jarred by the day’s trauma?

  Olie looked at the droid.

  “Do you know what he’s talking about? Has SeaCrest made a report?”

  The droid leaned forward, checking the man’s vitals before adjusting the flow of drugs into the man’s system.

  “Is he going to—”

  “Ms. Manning, please remain calm,” the droid interrupted in a soothing voice. “I need to check on the other patients. This medication will help him.”

  Olie stared down at the man as he appeared to fade in and out of consciousness. She hadn’t seen much death when she’d been on Mars. She’d been close to conflict zones, but in interplanetary conflict the dead—or, more accurately, pieces of the dead—are most often sent catapulting through space in an infinite spiral. Being with someone as they slipped away from life was terrifyingly real.

  After several minutes of watching the injured man, Olie finally stood up from the bedside and walked out of the infirmary to find out what was going on.

  Outside, it appeared that the flames were under control. The air was still filled with smoke, but it was clearing. It seemed nearly the entire plant had emptied out except for the emergency response team. Olie ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. Olie had thought she’d escaped all this after putting in her years in the Martian Air Force - the inevitable news of death had been a part of her daily life up there. Being a droid technician was supposed to be a change of pace. Now the kind of carnage that had erupted on the red planet was back on her doorstep.

  Olie turned to walk away from the infirmary but stopped when she noticed Dimitri Reardon, another coworker and friend. He was sitting just past the infirmary entrance, a stunned look on his face.

  “Dim!” Olie squatted next to the paunchy bald man with a reddish beard.

  Appearing slightly sedated, Dim smiled and leaned his head against the wall before responding in his deep, gravelly voice.

  “Olie? What are you doing here? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine. What happened to you?”

  “Just a little shrapnel, I think.” He lifted his pant leg to show a sterilization device placed over a droid’s suture. It must have hurt like hell.

  “What happened?” Olie asked. “I was working down on line 7 when I heard the explosion.”

  Dim shrugged. “I don’t know, but there’s going to be hell to pay for this. The union is going to be on SeaCrest’s ass.”

  “They were already on their ass,” Olie smiled. Same old Dim. At least around him she felt safe.

  “Well now they’ll have public support. This is going to be all over the adnews.”

  “I thought there were measures to prevent fires. We literally make water.”

  “That was before they started running the lines around the clock,” Dim grumbled. “I’m not sure if I believe it, but the hypercells could have overheated.”

  “But that’s not possible.”

  Dim laughed. “Anything’s possible, Olie. And it’ll only get worse if we keep letting them push us around like this.”

  “Did the med team say you’d be okay?”

  “Sure. Once they cut it off.”

  Olie grew pale. “Dim!”

  “I’m kidding,” said Dim. “Lighten up, huh?”

  “Don’t joke about that, Dim. Someone nearly died.” Olie looked back towards the building’s entrance. “I think he still could.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never seen him before. His badge said Newton.”

  “Newton? Who’s Newton?”

  “I’d hoped you’d know. You’re the union rep, not me.”

  Dim sighed and reached down to touch his leg. Olie could see how inflamed the wound was as Dim’s hot pink skin stretched against the tight suture work. It was bad. She knew Dim could take his pain and this wasn’t the first time she had seen him injured, but he had a tough recovery ahead. If anyone could do it, though, it was him. The true leader of SeaCrest’s employees, Dim was a fighter.

  Dim grimaced and shut his eyes in pain.

  “Well whoever Newton is, the union will fight for him, too. There’s gonna be hell to pay for this. Mark my words.”

  Chapter Two

  Hours later, Olie pulled her motorcycle into the parking deck of her apartment building. The sun was just beginning to set as Oliee dismounted the bike. The horrors of the day briefly faded as she looked over the beautiful machine. The bike was matte black and shaped like an infinity symbol with oversized wheels; a treat she had allowed herself to purchase after returning planetside. Olie was still testing the limits of the bike’s speed along the winding roads skirting the Pacific Ocean—roads that had once been lined by a flourishing forest. Now the surrounding woodlands, if you could call them that, were a shadow of what they’d once been.

  Olie tucked her helmet under her arm and walked up to the nine-story concrete structure where she lived. Fires were still ravaging much of the state when it was built so every precaution was taken to keep it standing—often at the cost of modern decor. Many more modern buildings had been built since the fires were put out, but Olie liked the stark nature of her home. It reminded her of the public units on Mars. Not many of her neighbors agreed, though, and with hardly any forests left to burn, architecture was swinging back from cautious to cool.

  The thick sliding glass doors opened, an Olie stepped into the lobby and then immediately into a lift. She rode up to the fifth floor. There was a squat maintenance droid in the hallway to her apartment, but it ignored Olie, quietly humming past her. It should have welcomed her, but Olie didn’t mind the malfunction. Today was already too much in so many other ways, and she was too tired to look at it anyway. She needed a break.

  A door swung opened at the end of her hallway and a young girl bounded Olie’s way.

  “Hey Olie!” cried the girl, rushing toward Olie with one arm extended. “Look! I got a new band!” Raquel showed Olie the new all-in-one device on her wrist. A thick, red graphene band was wrapped tightly around the entire lower half of Raquel’s forearm. “It hooks right into NOVA,” she said. “Mom said I’m old enough now.”

  Olie smiled and glanced up at the girl’s mother, Lane, who mouthed an apology. Lane was a short woman with olive skin and dark brown hair cropped close to the scalp, and her daughter Raquel wore hers the same way. They were the closest things to friends Olie had found in the complex.

  “What can you do with it?” Olie asked. As tired as she was, Raquel’s enthusiasm was infectious.

  “Well,” said Raquel, holding up her finger as if she was about to give an important lecture, “I’ve been researching the Bigleaf Maple. It was a tree and we used to have a lot of them here in Washington. And did you know that Washington used to have a lot of apple trees? Mom says she’s actually eaten an apple, a real one!”

  Olie nodded and smiled. “Actually, I know someone who’s working on trying to bring those trees back. What do you think about that?”

  Raquel’s jaw dropped, and her air of authority with it. She reverted straight back to 9-year-old girl mode. “That sounds hyper-real! Mom, did you hear that?”

  “I heard,” she said, pushing her child along. “But we’ve got to get going.”

  Raquel scrunched her face in disapproval at her mother and pointed at Olie’s arm. “I like your band, Olie!”

  “Thanks,” said Olie. Olie’s band was jet black and spanned the length of her forearm from her wrist to just under her elbow. She tapped it a few times and it glowed white, and then rapidly worked through all the colors of the rainbow in a few seconds. Raquel squealed in delight and beamed at Olie.

  “You can go ahead to the lift, Raquel,” Lane said as she gently guided Raquel towards the lift.

  “Can I ride it by myself?”

 
; “No, hold the door for me.”

  Sulking, Raquel said, “Okay,” but then just as abruptly began running down the hallway.

  Lane smiled. “She’s really excited about her new band.”

  “I can tell,” said Olie.

  “So, any luck getting back… y’know… out there?” Lane pointed to the sky as she said it.

  “No, not yet.”

  Last week Olie had confided in Lane that she was applying to be a colonist on the Moon. There hadn’t been many skirmishes there since the war ended and most of the valuable minerals had already been fully exploited. Populations were on the rise again, and Earth was hardly keeping up. Most colonist applications were still being rejected, but Olie kept applying each cycle.

  “Mom!” cried Raquel from around the corner.

  “Don’t give up,” Lane said, beginning to move away. “I know there’s at least one person very close by who believes in you. Make that two.”

  Olie smiled at the sentiment, but exhaustion took back over once Raquel and Lane disappeared into the lift. Her front door opened with a retinal scan, and as she walked inside, a litany of automated devices welcomed her. The telesphere began to spin, welcoming her home. Overhead lights came on as she passed through the small living space. A cube-shaped droid on the kitchen counter briefly illuminated to alert her that she had messages waiting.