NetherBound: You Only Die Once

NETHERBOUND

You Only Die Once

Ryan S. Fortney

Smashwords Edition

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Ryan S. Fortney at Smashwords

PaxCorpus, Escape Velocity, NetherBound, The Pax Series

Copyright © 2005-2017

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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Table of Contents

The Story So Far

Chapter 1 – The End of Everything

Chapter 2 – There But For the Grace of God

Chapter 3 – Transmission from Hell

Chapter 4 – The Darkest Hour

Chapter 5 – Jack of Spades

Chapter 6 – Bloodlust

Chapter 7 – Synthetic Babylon

Chapter 8 – Scrape the Bullets from My Eyes

Chapter 9 – Sleepless

Chapter 10 – Breathing the Pulse

Chapter 11 – The Reaver Rises

Chapter 12 – Return From Darkness

Chapter 13 – Voyagers in the Night

Chapter 14 – Drifters in the Void

Chapter 15 – When the Going Gets Rough

Chapter 16 – The Dream

Chapter 17 – The Final Approach

Chapter 18 – Flight of the Osiris

Chapter 19 – Shit Out of Luck

Chapter 20 – Daedalus Station Epsilon Six

Chapter 21 – What Happened On Planet Zeta

Chapter 22 – What Was Once Called Home

Chapter 23 – Pandora’s Box

Chapter 24 – Paradox Valley

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The Story So Far

In the beginning, Dante Marcellus was no more than an NYPD cop whose life consisted of guzzling beers and passive aggressively not caring much about the world around him. With his mother long gone, his father mysteriously vanished years before (1999 to be precise), the only family he had left was his brother Jack, his partner in New York’s Emergency Response Unit. This was, seemingly, the only person he could count on.

That was the reality, at least, until the day the world changed.

It began with an outbreak, with the dead coming back to claim the living, and a terrorist cell now only known as ZeroFactor—Hell-bent on assuring the destruction of ninety percent of mankind and building a superior race of only the strongest and smartest of the population.

It began when Dante himself accidentally tore a hole through the space-time continuum and let loose a terrible wave of ravenous creatures from some other world upon the remaining population of Earth.

Dante’s story begins with a memory of something from 2013, the middle of Manhattan, an evacuation attempt—the beginning of the end of the world. These memories he’d lost, all being progressively pieced together from the present, in the year 2020, as he slowly discovers the apparent betrayal from his own flesh and blood, Jack.

Like some apocalyptic style Memento.

In his memories, Dante, a green NYPD beat-cop named Meryl, a man named Rob and another named Ed trudge through the devastated remains of the city they’d once loved. Step-by-step, it’s revealed that ZeroFactor is much more sinister than Dante could have even imagined, and the destruction that lay before him was only the beginning, some small piece of a greater puzzle.

In the present, Dante leads the charge of a freedom fighter group he dubbed himself, PaxCorpus, in the name of protecting what remains of humanity. Through rough translation of Latin, PaxCorpus literally means Peace Body. Although, it’s thought that Dante’s intention was more a non-literal sense, something metaphorical, if you will.

But it doesn’t take long before he’s forced to watch as the shallow semblance of society he’d fought to rebuild is torn down all around him, only to discover the very reason he’d even lost his memories is due to one woman.

Julianna Moretti, a woman who spent the better part of six years posing as Dante’s pseudo-wife, turns out to be the actual leader of ZeroFactor itself, and not only did she aid in the destruction of the Harrisburg safe-zone, but she’s also the one who shot him in the head. This, in-turn, erased most of his past for a temporary amount of time, even if that amount of time was years apart.

Julianna, an experiment from a top secret moon base, a metal amalgamation of cybernetic parts that, among many things, allow her to change her very appearance—which proves to be increasingly problematic as time progresses forward.

Dante’s old team from ground zero (Manhattan), Meryl, Ed and Rob, re-emerge in Harrisburg just as Julianna plummets from the top of a thirty story building at the end of a final confrontation. Just before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor melts down in a planned demolition.

With no time to spare, Dante flees the city with his friends and leaves behind a metaphoric mountain of lost innocence and lost hope.

Believing they’re safe, after reaching the fallout limit, they stop to rest at an old abandoned motel somewhere in the outskirts of Allentown. But the next morning they’re jarred back to life through the assault of a wandering horde of deaders.

Racing against time once again, they shoot for a car and speed off out of Pennsylvania for good, and with time, they find a new home in Salem, New Jersey.

Nearly one year later things are even more dire, though, even if their underground shelter isn’t being actively assaulted. They’re out food, they’re out of water and nearly everything in the local and greater state of Jersey has been scavenged multiple times over.

Following an unexpected attack from a small group of ZeroFactor insurgents, Dante, Meryl and ten others are forced to hit the road and head for the heart of the terrorist cell’s home base, ground zero, Manhattan.

But if you thought that the most bad had already happened, you’d be totally dead wrong.

On their journey, members of the team are picked off one by one until the group is finally split in two, leaving Meryl and Dante to themselves. Only then do you discover the truth behind Meryl’s disappearance (which coincided with the rest of his old team) and the loss of one of her eyes—how Dante losing his left hand to a deader bite isn’t all that bad.

At this point, with all of the time they’ve spent together, Meryl and Dante become heavily involved with each other in a romantic sense and it is this one thing that fuels them further, to keep going.

Once they’ve reached the city limits and find themselves reunited with the rest of their team at a rundown Walmart, they head off into the strangely illuminated Brooklyn streets. But then, as Dante and Meryl come into the very alive and very active city, someone who’d been following them all along reveals herself in the backseat of their Charger—gun pressed against the back of Dante’s head.

Julianna Moretti returns.

Luckily enough, they manage to ditch her for a short period of time as they find the rest of their team (once again) and come closer to the ZF base, the home of the micro-wormhole now named the Rift of Manhattan.

Assaulted by sniper fire, all who remain begin to drop like flies as they come closer to Times Square.

A bomb goes off, a building collapses, the streets split from seismic shifts and a starship converges through the clouds, pulsing green plasma in every random direction for miles, as far as the eye can see. In a four person stand-off, Dante once again meets his brother Jack, who’d been working hand-in-hand with Julianna all this time.

Meryl, held hostage by the anti-human cybernetic monster, and Dante with his weapon trained on the center mass of Jack’s chest, an altercation ensues.

Two gunshots go off.

Jack hits the ground, stunned and Meryl cries out, her final moments, the last thing she sees—the broken expression of Dante as he collapses to his knees.

Being the only person left, emotionally distraught, torn by grief and paralyzed by shock, Dante is captured, lugged into a helicopter and hauled off to Antarctica—a previously revealed top secret military base commanded by the old ZeroFactor organization (the one in which he’d learned his own father, Vincent Marcellus, had worked for just before his disappearance) where they’d previously unearthed all sorts of alien technology, including a ship, a few dozen shuttles and cryogenic technology.

With all hope lost once more, Dante offers very little resistance to Julianna as he’s shoved into one of the shuttles, a life-boat of sorts belonging to an absent ship labeled the Osiris-9, and he’s strapped into a cryostasis pod.

Only minutes later is he shot directly into space, and as he watches the Earth vanish amid the bleak black cover of the universe, his story ends.

Now, two hundred thirty some-odd years later, it continues.

They say that all manner of reality is distorted if you happen to find yourself drifting over the event horizon of a black hole.

*****

"The only ethical response to fascism is immediate destruction."

*****

Chapter 1

The End of Everything

Derelict and empty, vast and hollow: This is my reflection, a metaphor, the truth, and this is what holds me—what binds me to my fate. Retribution, the answer to a question long-dead, a desire, a figment of something I can’t piece together. Just a fleeting spark of an idea lost somewhere in time.

The porthole of the starboard observation deck, above the pile of filth where I rest slumped in clutter, is all black velvet ink and empty nothing that shines no light, no fire to illuminate the way.

Emergency beacons flicker all around and die in random intensity and the biggest screen, the command station with tearing lines, reads, ERROR in big, bold red.

A robotic, feminine voice pierces through the empty silence; it jitters like a broken record and repeats the same information previously gathered from a quick scan of the command console: "Error. No destination. Error. Support beacons unreachable. Error. Uncharted space."

Climbing to my feet haphazardly, awoken from a sleep that lasted I’m not even fuckin’ sure how long, I rub a palm against the sweat-matted hair draped across my forehead. My boots slip against something slick, my clothing torn and covered in a sticky red and my voice cracks weary, You wanna tell me something I don’t know?

The computer responds after a lapse of time, "Approximately forty eight hours ago the crew of the Tredecim was slain. Approximately twenty seven hours ago the ship’s computer was sabotaged and set for a jump into hyperspace."

Still sapped and befuddled, I kick broken metal and a used paper cup out of my path, pressing both hands against the chair in front of the station, Hyperspace?

And the voice continues, "Approximately twenty two hours ago all subsystems except vital life support were shutdown in order to conserve power. Approximately fifteen hours ago, by my calculations, it was determined that the Tredecim will be unable to finish its jump through hyperspace, therefore suspending the ship in a dimension outside of time and space itself."

Squeezing my eyes together hard trying to at least sorta feel awake, not fully grasping what led to this situation and the gravity of it, Who am I? I ask, looking over myself. The shape of a woman battered by combat, hands burned charcoal.

There’s a loud pop, a short burst of a klaxon and the screen flashes red again, "Error, Morgan Seline Karga. Medical records nonexistent. Vital statistics unreachable. Please enter the command passphrase."

I drop myself into the chair, fingers gliding over the system control board and close my eyes again but I can’t muster any memory of myself. The ship, my past and any such passphrase is absolutely out of reach. Fuck.

"Incorrect. Please enter the command passphrase to continue."

Shaking my head, I slap the panel, I don’t know any goddamn passphrase, lady! Watching as it waits for a correct response, my blood starts to boil in a growing anxious fit, "Is there anything I can do without a passphrase?"

"You can open and close the shutters, Ms. Karga. Please, call me J.E.N.N.I.F.E.R."

Checking my pockets for anything important I might’ve missed, I find nothing more than a cigarette lighter, which raises a few questions in itself. At the computer’s response, I say, Okay, Jennifer, close the shutters.

"May I ask why?" She inquires of me, as if confused.

My eyes move back to the windows again, It’s hard to explain to a computer, I dunno, there’s something incredibly ominous and suffocating about a void of nothing just staring at you. I toss the lighter off to the side. Please close them.

"As you wish."

And the metal slides over the glass in a clank, leaving me here in this badly lit darkness of a dead ship. Climbing back to my feet, bones popping, I shuffle over to the door at the other end of the starboard deck and notice that it’s slightly ajar from the bottom.

Can you open this door? Leaning over slightly, I try to get a glimpse of whatever’s on the other side and then I’m hit with a stench of permeating meat, or dead flesh. Oh, oh shit… Hands against my knees, I’m gonna fucking vomit.

"I can give it a shot, but I should warn you… The door begins to grind as it slowly shifts upward, There are no other life signs coming from anywhere on deck a, b or c."

It’s a hallway; blood spatters the wall in a forensic scientist’s nightmare, or wet dream depending on their outlook of things. A pair of legs and a decapitated head, a pair of broken glasses—Someone’s arms hang from a vent in the ceiling and all the other doors are jammed shut, just like the previous.

Jennifer. Frozen in bewildered shock, Can you tell me what happened here? What the fuck happened to the crew?

There’s a moment of white noise, static and then her voice returns, "I cannot. My surveillance footage has all been erased. Furthermore, the vacuum in this pocket of space is distorting reality quite drastically."

I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a creeping sense of dread. I’m alone in God knows where and for all I know the laws of physics no longer apply, time no longer ticks, everyone is dead and my only connection to reality is a goddamn computer system that’s got about as much amnesia as I do.

I may as well be sitting inside of a black hole.

I have to get out of here, Jennifer. The shaking in my voice grows and I turn from the carnage, back against the wall.

"I’m sensing that you’ve become afraid. Need I remind you that all of the major ship systems are offline, and will require a restart using a passphrase that you, the only living being aboard this ship, must recite."

A set of emergency lights flash on down the corridor and around both corners at the end.

"You’re going to need to find out what happened here on your own, and you’re going to need to remember that phrase. Even then, there is no guaranteed chance that I can pull the ship out of where we are."

Explain to me again why we’re stuck here? Cold sweat trickling down my spine, I demand an explanation that makes sense.

"The warp systems were damaged and destroyed just after the ship broke through extra-dimensional space in FTL. Additionally, no ship, or living being is designed to withstand more than a few seconds of suspended hyperspace. The fact that you are still alive and the Tredecim are still here spells something important, but I am unable to compile any reasons as to why we haven’t dissolved into fragments of twisted matter."

Well… I turn around on a heel, This all sounds real promising. There’s a locker with its contents spilled on the floor—a flashlight, a gun and a headset. What was the name of whoever was second in command?

"Robert Reynolds. She places a photo of a man across all of the starboard monitors. He was a close friend of the commanding officer, Dante Marcellus."

The man’s face across the screens looks familiar in a way, like a feeling of longing nostalgia, which makes no sense to me, whatsoever, all things considered. Dante Marcellus? That name, a prickling in the back of my head, He was the commanding officer? So I can assume his body is among the dead?

"Logically speaking, yes. It is safe to say that everyone but you is among the dead."

I check the gun and strap the headset around my hair, clipped to an ear. Logically speaking?

"Yes. What I can see from vantage points around the ship suggests brutal murder, and I can identify most of them. Dante, however, is unidentifiable among the bodies, but it would be illogical to assume he’s alive somewhere aboard the Tredecim."

The light at the end of the barrel of the pistol switches on and I wave it around down the hallway and then something scuttles by the edge of the illuminated area. What the fuck? Moving the light back and forth again, nothing but death, no movement at all reveals itself in even the most remote sense. Jennifer, did you see that just now?

"I did not. What did you see?"

Pushing my back to the side of one of the hallway doors, metal a biting cold, silence deafening. Maybe it was nothing. I try to calm my chest, level out my breathing. So, find the passphrase, or who had it. Figure out what happened. But, what if this was me?

"What if you were the killer?"

"Yeah, what if the reason I’m alive is because I did all of this?" With caution, I step a foot forward and broken glass crunches underneath the sole of my boot. A green scanning field