Injection Burn Read online

  Praise for the works of Jason M. Hough

  Zero World

  “A science fiction [novel that] smashes The Bourne Identity together with The End of Eternity to create a thrilling action rampage that confirms [Jason] Hough as an important new voice in genre fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “An enjoyable read…expect minor whiplash from the frenetic pace.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Hough has combined all the ingredients of a first-rate sci-fi thriller.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One hell of an entertaining read. Hough continues to deliver white-knuckle books anchored by unusual and fascinating characters. Zero World is a giant cup of pure badassery that secures his place among the finest sci-fi action writers today.”

  —Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles

  “A high-octane blend of science fiction and mystery, Zero World is a thrill ride that shoots you out of a cannon and doesn’t let up until the very last page.”

  —Wesley Chu, author of the Tao series

  “Warning: Do not pick up this book if there is anything else you need to do. There is no safe place to rest inside these pages, no lag in the full-throttle action, no moment when you will think, ‘Okay, this is a good spot to take a break.’ Once you realize how much you don’t know—about this world, these characters, this inexplicable mission—the only way out is forward.”

  —Brian Staveley, author of The Emperor’s Blades

  The Darwin Elevator

  “A hell of a fun book.”

  —James S. A. Corey, New York Times bestselling author of Abaddon’s Gate

  “[Jason M.] Hough’s first novel combines the rapid-fire action and memorable characters associated with Joss Whedon’s short-lived Firefly TV series with the accessibility and scientific acumen of [James S. A.] Corey’s ‘Expanse’ series.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Claustrophobic, intense, and satisfying…I couldn’t put this book down. The Darwin Elevator depicts a terrifying world, suspends it from a delicate thread, and forces you to read with held breath as you anticipate the inevitable fall.”

  —Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

  “Newcomer Hough displays a talent for imaginative plotting and realistic dialogue, and the brisk pacing and cliffhanger ending will keep readers enthralled and eagerly awaiting the next installment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Jason M. Hough does a great job with this huge story, which unfolds with just the right balance of high adventure, espionage, humor, and emotional truth….As soon as you finish, you’ll want more.”

  —Analog

  “A debut novel unlike any other…This is something special. Something iconic. The Darwin Elevator is full of majesty and wonder, mystery and mayhem, colorful characters and insidious schemes.”

  —SF Signal

  “Fun, action-packed and entertaining…a sure contender for science fiction debut of the year!”

  —Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

  “A thrilling story right from the first page…This book plugs straight into the fight-or-flight part of your brain.”

  —Ted Kosmatka, author of The Games

  “If you enjoy high adventure with a kick-ass crew, I suggest you take Hough’s Darwin Elevator for a ride.”

  —Warren Hammond, author of KOP Killer

  Injection Burn is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jason Hough

  Excerpt from Escape Velocity by Jason M. Hough copyright © 2017 by Jason Hough

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Escape Velocity by Jason M. Hough. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  ISBN 9780553391312

  Ebook ISBN 9780553391305

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover illustration: © Larry Rostant

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  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

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Del Rey Books by Jason M. Hough

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Escape Velocity

  I couldn’t go. Couldn’t be boxed in a ship like that knowing Earth is free again. Everyone’s an immune now! That’s a party I couldn’t miss.

  —Skadz, 2285, overheard at Woon’s Tavern

  Darwin, Australia

  11.FEB.2331

  TO:

  FROM: [UNINTELLIGIBLE, KNOWN IN SITU AS EVE]

  CLASSIFICATION URGENT, FULL-SPECTRUM BROADCAST, MAXIMUM ENCRYPTION

  I BELIEVE OUR SEARCH IS FINALLY OVER.

  AT A PLANET KNOWN LOCALLY AS EARTH (RELEVANT DETAILS ATTACHED), A SPECIES CALLING ITSELF “HUMAN” HAS SUFFICIENTLY OVERCOME THE TESTS WE DEFINED (WITH REVISIONS BY MYSELF EN ROUTE, BASED ON LATEST GATHERED INTELLIGENCE AS OF 005505.332.14A AND SUBSEQUENT ADJUSTMENTS AGREED TO AND IMPLEMENTED BY FLEET MAJORITY).

  SOME OF YOU MAY BE ALLOWING A SMALL AMOUNT OF CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM AT THIS POINT. AFTER ALL, WE’VE COME THIS FAR THREE TIMES BEFORE AND YET MADE NO REAL PROGRESS IN FREEING OUR CREATORS.

  BUT THERE IS SOMETHING NEW HERE THAT CANNOT BE UNDERSTATED. AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY THAT I BELIEVE MERITS NOT JUST OPTIMISM BUT ALSO A DRASTIC CHANGE TO OUR PLAN.

  A SMALL PERCENTAGE OF THESE HUMANS ARE UNAFFECTED BY THE VIRAL ANALOG WE DEVISED.

  COMPLETELY IMMUNE, FOR REASONS I HAVE YET TO COMPREHEND (TESTS ARE UNDER WAY, DETAILS FORTHCOMING, ANALYSIS APPRECIATED). IN ALL THEIR NUMBER, ONLY A FEW APPEAR TO FEATURE THIS CHARACTERISTIC, AND YET THEY WERE LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR OVERCOMING OUR TEST REGIMEN. MOREOVER, MOST OF THEM HAVE AGREED TO HELP US, DESPITE RESERVATIONS ABOUT OUR METHODOLOGY IN DETERMINING THEIR SUITABILITY.

  THEY ARE WITHIN MY HULL EVEN NOW, DEVISING A COURSE OF ACTION THAT I FEEL IS PROMISING.

  HENCE MY OPTIMISM—NO, MY CERTAINTY—THAT IT IS TIME TO ALTER OUR OWN APPROACH TO ENDING THIS SIEGE. MY PLAN REQUIRES THE ASSISTANCE OF A MAJORITY OF YOU IF IT IS TO SUCCEED.

  I AM CURRENTLY EN ROUTE TO [UNINTELLIGIBLE, KNOWN AS KEPLER-22] AT MAXIMUM VELOCITY. I HOPE YOU WILL CONSIDER MY REQUEST AND LEND SUPPORT TO THIS EFFORT.

  EVE

  (VIA ARTIFICIAL LOW MIND TRANSFERENCE VESSEL, WHICH SENDS GREETINGS TO ITS KIN)

  Staging Area Sigma

  3.AUG.3911

 
THE TWO SPACECRAFT came to rest in a vast swath of nothingness deep in interstellar space. They were identical, perfect twins, spaced with nanometer precision exactly ten thousand kilometers apart. Both were pointed in the same direction: toward a star some three hundred light-years distant.

  Captain Gloria Tsandi let out a long breath. Her ship, the Wildflower, stood poised on the edge of history, and she found herself profoundly uncomfortable with that. The whole endeavor had been a series of small compromises and allowances that now, here at the brink, amounted to the sort of thing she’d never have agreed to if presented all at once. Dangerous, reckless, and hastily planned.

  Which were the exact same reasons the Lonesome had been lost in the first place. The reason this search and rescue mission, maybe the most critical in human history, was even necessary.

  She glanced to her right, where her co-pilot should be. No one sat there. There wasn’t even a chair anymore. The Wildflower had been stripped of all nonessential equipment, and then quite a lot of essential equipment, in order to make her ready for this scheme.

  “We’re in position,” came the voice of her counterpart. The mission lead, Captain Sutter of the Zephyr. He had the benefit of more experience with this sort of thing, not to mention a reputation for a crew that worshipped his every action. Perhaps that was why he seemed to have no real concern for what was about to happen: no one to question his orders.

  “Want me to answer him, boss?” Xavi asked.

  Her navigator, one deck below. Very much the sort who questioned orders. The only bit of normalcy on this entire mission. He’d been with her for going on six years, and she thought of him as her own little brother—a rebellious, often embarrassing little brother—despite the fact they looked nothing alike. He was a squat, wide, bulldog of a man who’d embraced his Australian heritage with absolute zeal, a persona that paired perfectly with his longish sandy-blond hair and perpetually sun-narrowed ice-blue eyes. Gloria was lithe, very dark, and kept her afro cut close to the scalp. When he stood beside her, it was as if someone had tried and succeeded at finding the two human beings most unlike each other.

  What they had in common was their age, twenty-seven, and this ship.

  The rest of her usual crew, six others, had been left behind, another compromise to reach the goal mass. Instead of a total of eight, she had a three-person crew now, and the third was a stranger. A wild card. Gloria shifted, uncomfortable in the extreme. “I’ll handle it, thank you. Just keep an eye on the position and let the computer do its thing.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Xavi said.

  Gloria puffed out her cheeks, let out the breath, and sent her reply to Sutter. “We’re in the green here, too. Ready when you are.”

  With that, she reached for the part of her interface that would signal her intent to proceed. Her finger hovered for an instant before she forced it down. The icon shifted from yellow to an all-too-pleasant green.

  “Prepare for fold maneuver,” a faintly accented calming voice said over the comm. “Synchro-protocol in effect. Initial burn will commence at the pleasure of…Sutter, Zephyr…stand by.”

  A minute passed before Sutter replied. “We have your helm. Ten minutes to burn.”

  “Understood,” Gloria sent back, glad for the additional time to prepare herself mentally. On the local comm she said, “Both of you meet me in the mess for one final review.”

  “Mmm,” Xavi acknowledged, followed by the sounds of his harness unbuckling. His couch was on the deck just below her own, the ship’s main body being oriented in a vertical stack of eight decks.

  The newcomer’s reply came next. “Okay,” was all she said, and Gloria had to remind herself that Beth Lee was unaccustomed to hierarchy, protocol. For that matter, unaccustomed to flying aboard the ships that utilized the technology she helped invent. The mousy engineer had flown before, sure, but according to her file it had always been as an observer, nothing more. A “subject matter expert.” Bringing her along for this mission had been the biggest and most difficult of the concessions Gloria had made, for it meant leaving her own trusted engineer behind. Not to mention her mechanic, her medic, both science officers, and her co-pilot. “Humans are heavy, and so is the food and water they require,” the OEA logistics officer had said with almost total indifference. And that was that.

  Out of her couch, Gloria rolled and oriented herself down, drifting along behind Xavi, using blue rungs that protruded from every available surface to guide herself down to the mess hall. The Wildflower had a hollow spine running from one end to the other, her decks stacked like a pile of donuts, only open toward the interior. The mess hall was one above the middle floor, which served as central airlock. It consisted of a small kitchen, food storage, and two booth-style tables and benches for use while under thrust or attached to a space elevator. Adrift as they were, Gloria shunned the seats in favor of simply floating within the hollow spine of the ship, both feet tucked under blue stabilization rungs to keep her in place. Xavi rummaged through one of the food bins, joining her a few seconds later with a fistful of nutrient bulbs. He floated one across to her, and she caught it deftly.

  Their companion drifted up from below. Beth Lee may not have many flight hours logged, but she knew her way around a zero-g environment, Gloria noted. The tiny woman had come up feetfirst, rotated, and positioned herself between her two crewmates with precise, economic movements. No grace to it, but the results were all that mattered.

  Gloria examined the label of the nutrient bulb, shrugged at what she saw there, and used two fingers to pinch some of the contents into her mouth, one “bite” at a time. She glanced at the selected dish—cherry smoothie—and suppressed a grin. Her favorite, as any of her regulars would know. Xavi winked when she glanced up at him before crushing his bulb with a meaty fist, inhaling the entire meal in one fell swoop.

  Gloria returned his thoughtfulness with a stern glare. To get too comfortable with her crew led to sloppiness, and worse, the intrusion of feelings when it came to making hard decisions. It hurt her to distance herself at a moment like this, but in the long run she knew it was for the best.

  The silent meal ended and Gloria waited while Xavi stowed the empty bulbs for future reuse. Finished, he returned to his chosen spot on the circle and waited.

  “A recap and status,” Gloria said, “so we’re all on the same page.” Neither companion said anything, so the captain went on. “Thanks to the modified imploder, we’re about to do something unprecedented. I know we’re running with the barest of bare-bones configurations here, and all three of us will be wearing multiple hats, but I still expect calm, levelheaded professionalism. Beth, you don’t know me that well, but my crew is and has always been my family. I won’t hesitate to cuff an unruly child. Am I clear?”

  “Of course, Gloria,” Beth said, in a way that made the captain wonder if she’d just reminded the poor girl of her actual mother.

  “It’s Captain Tsandi.”

  The woman gave a meek nod. “Sorry.”

  Xavi answered with a little half-salute, having heard this speech, or something like it, half a hundred times. His fingers tapped against the bulkhead with impatience, and probably a fair amount of nerves at the prospect of being a passive observer to the fold, something he usually ran himself.

  Gloria put on her most reassuring smile, and went on, keenly aware that this next part would strain the long-standing trust relationship she’d cultivated with her navigator. “We’re aligned with Zephyr, and our ships will fold in tandem. What I’ve kept from you until now,” she said, her gaze on Xavi’s sudden, dubious expression, “is our destination.”

  “Ah, shit, boss,” Xavi started.

  “I’ll have none of that,” she said quickly. “It wasn’t my choice to keep this part secret, believe me. But I understand why, and I think you will, too.”

  She had their undivided attention now. Beth’s gaze narrowed. Xavi’s fingers went still.

  “This is not a test run of the Mark 5 imploder.
The Alliance is done with tests. In fact, this technically isn’t even the first field use.”

  Xavi hung his head, shaking it back and forth in disbelief. Beth just stared, expressionless, and Gloria wondered how much of this she already knew. The Mark 5 was, after all, partly her creation. Surely she’d been in the loop during the test process, and the declaration of all clear.

  Seeing no alternative, Gloria soldiered on. “That honor went to Captain Dawson, and her ship, the Lonesome, two weeks ago.”

  “I thought Daw was pushing rock out at—”

  “That’s what everyone thought,” Gloria said.

  Xavi hissed through clenched teeth. “I’m liking this mission less and less, boss.”

  “I’m not exactly thrilled myself. But it’s a critically important one, Xavi.”

  “Sounds like a fucking yak shaving expedition,” he said, his Australian drawl coming through strong.

  “Noted. Now let me finish. We’re on a tight schedule that is out of our hands.”

  Xavi made a little “go on” gesture with his free hand. His frown hurt, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  “Dawson…well, Dawson screwed up. In the worst possible way. Some misguided desire to make history. It doesn’t matter. The point is, instead of conducting a trial run of the Mark 5 as directed, she altered the Lonesome’s course at the last minute and put us all at terrible risk.”

  “Kepler-22,” Beth Lee said. Not a question.

  “Kepler-22,” Gloria confirmed.

  “So what?” Xavi asked. “It’s restricted space, sure, but there have been plenty of other visits. And it’s not like anyone’s ever been past the blockade. Poked around a bit, granted. Been chased off every time, too. Nothing new about it.”