Frontier (Colonists of Kannan Book 1) (PREORDER)

In the quarters of a dying ship—the Nostroma, that had not flown in over a week—on a planet ten thousand years of travel away from Earth—Kannan—forty-three-year-old Amanda Vryce dreamed.


But despite her current physical safety from what she could only pray was the worst of Kannan, she did not dream peacefully.


Amanda dreamed of monsters of her childhood imagination, archetypes of fantastical beasts from her home world’s culture such as dragons, serpents, and hydras. Such enormous creatures ruled this new world, picking off humans as if in some sick survival game. But the demonic beasts never came for her, preferring to let her watch as her husband and other colonists all died.


“Order conquers,” a voice hissed over her shoulder. “Order always wins.”


Amanda fought to move forward from her spot just underneath her ship, but in her dream, every time she moved forward, her legs buckled out from underneath her, as if she was too weak to run. She heard her colonists’ screams, fought to push past the fatigue and the pain, but it did no good.


“World conquers us,” the same voiced hissed again. “Rest leave. Last one.”


Amanda knew how this dream would end.


Her husband, dead.


Her colonists, dead.


Her, dead inside, a hollow body experiencing pain so traumatic that she would never feel again.


And then the newest addition to her nightmares circled her and stood before her.


Black- and smooth-skinned, with narrow red eyes, sharp pincers for hands, a long, barbed tail, and a sleek, elongated torso like a snake might have, she and her husband had called this monstrosity simply “the creature” or “the alien” when it had hunted them on their arrival. An ugly being once assumed to be simply the planet’s apex predator had proved so much more, understanding and manipulating their technology against them.


“Weak,” it said. “Should never have come!”


In real life, the creature had seemingly defied known physics. It spoke telepathically. Bullets bounced off its body, leaving nothing, not even a scar or a bruise. When it died, it happened because Amanda somehow found a surge of… something from the planet.


In transforming from a battle of intelligent species to something deeper, something inexplicable, something almost magical, Amanda had made the monster greater than it already was in her psyche, a manifestation which could only be defeated through miracles and magic. 


That was impossible.


She had felt euphoric the first night and even the first day after their actual triumph, but as the emotions subsided, Amanda examined what had happened more rationally. It could not have been magic. Magic was the stuff of books, movies, and simulations on Earth. Magic was not a real phenomena in this universe. Magic was nothing more than what humans could not understand, a concept that grew smaller and smaller every century.


There was no doubt that what she called magic had saved her life that night. But as someone married to a military scientist and with an omnipresent shadow over her mind, Amanda refused to accept magic as an explanation. It was no different than the weather to Ancient Greeks and Romans, a phenomena attributed to the gods that simply needed further study from humans to understand.


All of that, though, was moot when staring at this creature in her dream.


“Should never have come,” the creature said, “Amanda Vryce.”


Hearing her name was the only signal this was a nightmare. Everything else, she had actually “heard” from the creature in their final battle.


Then it bared its teeth, like that of a shark’s, and she screamed. The creature lunged for her.


And Amanda woke in the sterile, cold quarters of the Nostroma.


Alone.


Isolation!


Then she calmed herself, reminding herself that she and her husband, Damian Aran, had agreed to sleep in separate bedrooms when the nightmares became more recurring. They had rekindled their affection for each other through their alien ordeal; this was purely a practical move, not in any way representative of a decaying marriage.


Yet, Amanda was envious of Damian, who did not vividly dream the way she did. He might wake up feeling anxious, but never because of something resembling a movie. She was the one suffering from a constant looping of the battle; he was the one who just shrugged it off, at least to the outside observer.


At times, her envy got away from her, and a part of her spiraled into thinking if Damian cared as much as she did. He never showed seriousness in the same way as her, which was both sweet and excruciating depending on the circumstances. He might have deeply cared about the two hundred new colonizers, but he would do so through terrible jokes and naive optimism.


The soldier in Amanda struggled to understand that.


The wife in Amanda calmed herself down. Not only was it good that Damian was different, it was necessary; some colonists would gravitate to her, some to him. They would disagree on certain details, but on the whole, they shared the same overarching goal: keep humanity prospering one way or another.


Calmed by the reminder of their marriage and mutual aim, Amanda rose out of bed. She considered going to Damian’s, but wanting to let him sleep on this day as much as he could, she instead made her way to the cockpit of the ship. It was still about forty minutes from sunrise; the sky had begun to grow a brighter blue, though it was very much still on the darker side of blue. No new dangers from the night had yet emerged, but Amanda’s militaristic mind understood the absence of evidence did not indicate the evidence of absence.


The doors behind her opened, and Amanda turned her head. There, looking like he was still waking up but with a delightfully sheepish grin on his face, was Damian. A six-foot, shaved-head, blue-eyed, grizzled-bearded soldier, Damian was about a year-and-a-half younger than Amanda. Yet as the more light-hearted of the two, he sometimes acted fifteen years his junior.


Today, that youthful demeanor induced the rarest of Amanda’s feelings—a willingness to not only indulge, but to participate.


“Good morning,” he said. “My Vryce is Right.”


“Hi, My Main Damian” she said warmly. “You are up early.”


“Well, it’s a big day today,” Damian said, “and I wanted to make sure I am ready for it whenever it happens.”


“And that is?” Amanda said, though she was well aware of what today marked.


“The new two hundred colonists are set to come into this world now. They’ll be the equivalent of twenty-five-year olds; old enough to be in their physical prime, with just now fully developed brains, yet young enough to still have the boldness to dare to do new things.”


“And to make questionable decisions,” Amanda said, but she did so with a smile; cryosleep threw off her actual age, but subjectively, she would turn only forty-four this year. Whatever a “year” is on this planet.


“And to make questionable decisions,” Damian repeated. 
He chuckled.
“I suppose in the scientific spirit of measure twice, cut once, I should ask one more time. We are sure we want to use the ship’s power to wake everyone up? Because once we do that, there’s no turning back. We make do on Kannan one way or another.”


Amanda nodded. Of all the things to loop about, this was not one of them.


“I would never forgive myself if I let those two hundred colonists never get a shot at this new world,” she said. “And besides, do you want to spend the rest of your life drifting in space? You’ll never get sunrises like this out there.”


“Very true,” Damian chuckled.
Then his smile vanished. 
“Do you think we’re ready for this?”


Amanda did not nod. She had a bad habit of becoming stiff, unresponsive, and avoiding eye contact when faced with stressful questions or situations. Outside of more aliens appearing, this was the most stressful question of all.


“I don’t think anyone is ever ready for something like this,” Amanda said quietly. “I think we’ve done all that we can to be ready. But past that?”


Amanda shrugged. Damian again simply nodded, his blank expression saying so much with its absence of more. She only noticed it out of the periphery of her vision.


“I know today is a day of celebration, as it should be,” Damian said. “But we do have to face some hard questions.”


“Like what?” Amanda asked, but she again knew full well what those were; she’d just ignored them, giving herself a mental break after the alien’s attack.


“One, they’re going to be born with artificial memories. They’re going to believe things that are outright lies. I know what the hypotheses were about coming in with implanted memories aligned with the challenges we’d face, but we know the truth. And the truth has a nasty way of exhuming itself sooner rather than later. So, do we tell them now, or do we wait until they start to piece everything together?”


Amanda nodded. 


“Second, while we may not know the mechanism, you and I agree that this planet feeds off our emotional states. The more volatile and anxious we become, the more powerful and frequent the manifestations of those fears. Is that something we make them aware of? Or do we not tell them, hoping that they remain grateful and excited for the chance to prolong humanity?”


Again, Amanda nodded. Again, she kept her gaze straight ahead, out to the rising sun.


“Finally, do we tell them there may be dangerous alien life here? We’ve only seen one, and it did say it was the last one. But presumably, there had to have been more. Which means there may still be more. And that doesn’t even begin to deal with how we handle infighting. So…”


Damian’s voice trailed off. Even he was reaching the limits of what he could present as meaningful but “not a big deal.”


“It’s a question of how rapidly do we reveal hard truths,” Amanda said, shaking her head.
One way or another, either she and Damian would start as liars, or she’d have to explain to two hundred humans why a good portion of what they thought they knew was a lie within the first hour of their lives. 


No easy task either way.


Getting to Kannan, it seemed, was the easy part. Lean on her experience as a pilot, go into cyrosleep for ten thousand years, and dispatch one alien. Guiding two hundred colonists who awoke on the planet with false memories and a blank slate about Kannan?


That seemed like an impossible hypothetical a psychologist might have created for a classroom debate, not a real-life scenario Amanda and Damian would have to live.


She sighed. Lean into him. You became stronger together. It was what allowed you to survive everything.


With some effort, Amanda turned to Damian. Her body shook, but she forced herself to keep eye contact. She went over to her husband and put a hand on his arm.
“

Why don’t we go wait in the lab?” she said. “We ought to see them when they’re freed. And we can finalize our decision before they speak to us.”


Damian nodded. He offered out his hand, which Amanda accepted.


“This is the right choice, Amanda,” Damian said. “But I suppose the reward for making the right choice is a continuous sequence of even harder choices.”


Amanda nodded and smiled.


“At least we’ll do it together,” she said. “We may bicker, but we’ll have each other.”


She felt so grateful in that moment, as if having Damian fully on her side would mean life would finally work out on this new world. 


She was sure the very distant, almost eagle-like shriek she heard in the distance was just a product of her nightmares.


505 pages

Ten thousand years ago, the Earth died.

In a last, desperate attempt to prolong humanity, humanity dispatched various ships to the stars. One of them, led by the Apocalypse Squad, landed on Kannan. From afar, it seemed like the perfect match, the closest thing to a new Earth.

But all is not as it seems.

And as the days, weeks, and months go by, the Apocalypse Squad discovers that the frontiers of Kannan are nothing like anything they could have prepared for.

Mysterious.

Magical.

Deadly.

Only by bonding together and embracing the truth of Kannan can they have any hope of surviving the hell the Apocalypse Squad has found itself in.