A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2) Read online

  A MEMORY OF MANKIND

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious or fictitious versions of historical persons. All characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property Aethon Books.

  All rights reserved.

  Also by Paul Antony Jones

  Published by Aethon Books

  The Paths Between Worlds

  Published by 47North

  Extinction Point

  Extinction Point: Exodus

  Extinction Point: Revelations

  Extinction Point: Genesis

  Toward Yesterday

  Published by Good Dog Publishing

  Extinction Point: Kings

  Ancient Enemies (Dachau Sunset - short story)

  Contents

  ALEXANDER - INFINTY OF WORLDS

  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

  About the Author

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  For Molly. You got the thing!

  And for CoCo Mo

  ALEXANDER - INFINTY OF WORLDS

  Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus’ discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, “Is it not worthy of tears,” he said, “that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’

  One

  I swung my sword in a fast, wide arc, aiming for Weston Chou’s neck. Chou dodged my attack easily, stepping inside my guard while thrusting the knife she held in her right hand toward my heart. I twisted sideways, and the blade slid off my chainmail shirt. Then, I brought my sword hand up and tapped Chou on the side of her temple with the sword’s pommel, lightly enough that it wouldn’t hurt but hard enough to push her off balance. Chou toppled sideways, then rolled away. She forced herself to one knee and stared up at me, barely even breaking a sweat, while I was panting hard from the exertion of the past hour’s training.

  “Vell done, Meredith, you got her good that time,” Freuchen said. He was busy tending to the campfire. A brace of roasting birds that—with the help of Albert—he’d caught earlier that afternoon hung over it. I had a sneaking suspicion they might be dodos. Albert sat next to the big Danish man, and both the man and boy clapped enthusiastically at my victory.

  Silas stood in a patch of light, soaking up as much energy as his damaged batteries could hold as the afternoon sun edged toward the western horizon. His eye-bar followed Chou and my movements, but he said nothing.

  “You let me have that one, didn’t you?” I leaned in and offered Chou my hand, pulling her to her feet.

  “Perhaps,” Chou said, her face creased into a smile. “Either way, you are improving quickly.”

  I accepted the compliment, but I wasn’t under any illusion that Chou hadn’t been holding back. She had attenuated her attack to match the skill of an average human, so it would be a fair fight for me. And “average” wasn’t a word anyone who had encountered this woman from the future would use to describe her. Chou could’ve run rings around me if she’d wanted to. Instead, she’d devoted several hours a day since we’d left Avalon to teach me all that she knew of sword-fighting (of which she was frighteningly proficient).

  I’d managed to resist an overwhelming temptation for the first two lessons Chou had put me through. However, on day three, I’d finally cracked. Holding the curved scimitar I’d taken from the body of one of the men who’d tried to kill us that first day we’d arrived on Avalon, I said in my best Spanish accent: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

  Chou had looked at me oddly, then said. “I can assure you that I did no such thing.”

  I’d explained that it was just a quote from a movie, The Princess Bride, one of my favorites. “You know, the six-fingered man… never mind.” Chou had just shaken her head and proceeded with the lesson. I guess she was finally getting used to me.

  Six days had passed since we stepped off the Alexa Rae and begun our journey into the heart of this strange, unknown continent we referred to simply as the Mainland. I was still trying to wrap my mind around it all. Everyone in this world had been brought here at the point of death. Either by an entity we called the Architect, as my companions and I had, or by another, mysterious enemy we’d named the Adversary. The Architect had left a message in the care of Silas, the last of the robot caretakers assigned to help humanity through the shock of arriving here on this future Earth. I had to find Candidate One; she or he was the only person who could put right the damage that the Adversary had wrought on the Architect’s plan. The Adversary wanted me enough that it had sent a group of Nazi stormtroopers to try and catch me. Something that had cost the life of Benito, one of the Garrisonites, along with more Candidates from alternate dimensions than I cared to remember. Oh, and in case I ever thought that the limit on craziness was exhausted, in one of those other infinite copies of the universe, a version of me was the President of the United States. I know, crazy, right?

  In the six days we had been traveling together, I’d become a better fighter than I could ever have imagined, thanks to Chou’s tutelage. At least, in theory. We hadn’t seen another human being during the entire time we’d been walking through the thick forest that seemed to cover every square inch of Mainland. So, there was no way to know just how impressive I actually was.

  Albert had named the vast unending woodlands of firs, conifers, oaks, redwoods, and other trees none of us could identify as the Everwood. That’s what we called it now.

  We’d set our sights on reaching the Collector, the huge mega-structure that dominated the skyline that we believed gathered the energy from the Dyson Swarm surrounding the sun, then distributed it out each night in the form of the aurora that powered the healing nanites—or pixie dust as we liked to call them. That’s where we thought we would find Candidate One and, hopefully, the answers to the mystery of why we were all brought here.

  “Come and eat,” Freuchen said, lifting the roasted birds off the fire and placing them on a makeshift plate of large leaves he’d pulled from a nearby fern.

  We sat around the fire, eating silently, watching the forest vanish into the darkness. We were averaging about ten miles a day, depending on how dense the trees and undergrowth were. Mile after mile after mile of nothing but forest. It was exhausting, tedious, and sapped, not just the energy out us, but our emotion too. Even Albert, who had been so fasc
inated by the curious world around him, had fallen silent for most of the day.

  We chatted half-heartedly for a little while after dinner, sharing memories of our old worlds, our left-behind lives, before, one after the other, we said our goodnights. We turned in with little expectation that the following day would be anything different than this one.

  Two

  We broke camp just after dawn, but by late afternoon, the air had grown steadily heavier with moisture. I had a nagging headache over my right eye for the last hour or so from the air pressure as gray clouds filled in the open spaces of the Everwood’s canopy, and were gradually replaced by blacker, angrier versions.

  Distant thunder rumbled over the trees. Instinctively, I glanced up but saw nothing but bruised clouds through the thick, verdant canopy. A minute later, another crash of thunder rolled in. This time, it sounded closer. Much closer.

  “Storm is coming in fast,” Freuchen said. “Ve should think about finding cover and making camp early, just to be on the safe side before everything gets too vet.”

  Chou nodded her agreement.

  We quickly found a spot for the night in the twisted roots of an enormous oak, laid down our packs, and set about collecting dry wood for a fire. This part of the Everwood hadn’t seen any rain in quite a while judging by how brittle everything was. We quickly gathered a pile of tinder and fuel, and within a couple of minutes, Albert had a fire burning.

  The forest darkened as more clouds blotted out what little light remained. Not long after, the first flash of lightning illuminated the canopy, and thunder crashed across the heavens, loud enough to make us all flinch and silencing every other creature. The pitter-patter of the first raindrops hitting the leaves above us quickly turned into a hiss as the storm let loose its deluge.

  Freuchen flinched as a trickle of water dropped from above and down his neck with perfect precision. He cursed, smiled at us, and shifted a couple of feet to his right. Chou placed her canteen under the tiny waterfall and filled it. We all did likewise.

  “I think it best if I shut down early tonight and conserve energy,” Silas said, sitting cross-legged beneath the tree. Each night, the robot lost portions of his memory. Soon after we’d met him, he started jotting down the day’s activities in his digital language. He’d just updated the slate on which he’d written today’s log, and handed it to me. “If there’s nothing more, I wish you all a safe night.” His eye-bar dimmed and vanished.

  Lightning flashed every few seconds, briefly illuminating the forest around us. The thunder which followed pounded our senses and cowed the three of us into silence as the storm inched slowly over us. I remembered being told as a kid that you should never shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm, but we didn’t have much choice seeing as the Everwood was the only shelter for hundreds, if not thousands of miles around us.

  It lasted a little more than twenty minutes, finally moving away almost as quickly as it had arrived. By then, evening was fast approaching, and it would have been pointless to break camp.

  Slowly, the silence that had descended over the forest was replaced as, one by one, the hidden life within it found its voice again.

  We settled into our usual routine. After we’d eaten, we decided the order which we would stand watch, then chatted quietly amongst ourselves while we waited for the aurora. The day’s trek had been particularly hard on us. The ground we traveled over was covered in giant ferns and bracken, which had made walking twice as tricky. If you rubbed up against a leaf at just the right angle, those things could give you the equivalent of a nasty paper cut. Even after the enervating effects of the aurora healed the wounds and carried away the aches and pains of my body, my mind remained exhausted. After wishing everyone a peaceful night, I curled up next to the fire and fell asleep quickly and deeply.

  I was awakened by Chou, roughly shaking my shoulder.

  “Get up, Meredith,” she said, panic in her voice. “Everyone, wake up now.”

  My eyes opened. “What’s going on?” I mumbled as Chou moved from Albert to Freuchen, shaking them just as violently as she had me. Dawn illuminated the forest to the east, its orange glow flickering between the trees. But if it was morning, why did I still feel exhausted?

  “Why’d didn’t you wake me?” I asked, confused as to why Chou had let me sleep through my guard duty.

  “There’s still an hour or so until dawn,” Chou said, stopping to throw first my backpack to me, then Freuchen’s and Albert’s to them. “It’s a forest fire, and its heading our way.”

  Rubbing my eyes, I looked again to the east. The light I had mistaken for morning’s approach flickered and jumped. Chou was right, it was fire. And it was getting closer too; I was sure of it.

  “Shit!” I hissed.

  “It must have been the lightning,” Albert said.

  “Silas!” I yelled at the robot, still sitting cross-legged beneath the tree.

  He woke up. “Greetings children of Earth—“

  “Silas, stop! Read this.” I held the slate in front of his eyes, my other hand tapping impatiently against my thigh as every second seemed to stretch to minutes.

  “Thank you, Meredith.”

  “No time to fully explain,” I continued. “Listen, there’s a forest fire heading our way. We need to get out of here now.”

  Silas looked to where I pointed.

  “You are correct,” he said. “We should evacuate this area immediately.”

  Freuchen swept Albert up into his massive arms, and we took off as quickly as we could, which wasn’t anywhere near as fast as we needed to, given the terrain. But the last thing we needed now was for one of us to put our foot in a hole or a burrow hidden beneath the groundcover of ferns and break an ankle.

  “Our only hope is to outrun it,” Chou said, the same level of concern I had heard in her voice when she woke me still there, which made me even more nervous than I already was.

  From behind us, something crashed out of the undergrowth, and I had a second to yell a warning as three giant deer careened past us, narrowly missing Freuchen and Albert. Other animals followed behind them, their natural fear of us overtaken by the fire. In the high branches, I heard the panicked calls of birds and other canopy-dwellers taking flight as the first clouds of smoke moved through their home.

  Glowing embers floated, pushed along by a hot breeze that had sprung seemingly from out of nowhere. With it, came the pungent, acrid smell of fire, stinging the back of my throat with every breath I took. I looked back and immediately wished I hadn’t. The fire was much closer. Close enough that I could see its flames clawing at the trees. Between us and it, smaller fires were sprouting up, the wind-borne embers igniting the dry wood and dead leaves that covered the forest floor.

  “If we don’t pick up the pace, it’s going to catch up with us,” I said. “Come on!”

  “Follow the animals,” Albert yelled. “Follow them.”

  Freuchen said, “I think Albert is right. Look at the direction they are taking.”

  Rather than running directly away from the fire, the deer and other forest critters were taking an acute route. The kid was right. Maybe they knew something we didn’t. And perhaps that unknown could save us.

  With no other options available, we took off at a sprint, hoping luck would guide our footsteps away from any hazard obscured by the bracken. The sound of our steps and panting breath was blotted out by a growing crackling, hissing roar. I could feel the heat of the fire’s approach against the exposed skin of my neck.

  Burning leaves and ash floated all around us now in a mocking imitation of the lifesaving pixie dust. I batted at an ember that landed on my neck, scorching my skin.

  More deer exploded from the forest; their eyes wild with terror as they careened past us. Another followed behind, this one’s fur alight in multiple spots.

  A high-pitched squeal filled the air, unlike anything I had ever heard before, and I glanced behind me, expecting to see another burning animal. Instead, I saw a vort
ex of fire, fifty feet high—a mini-tornado of flame, whirling from side to side, igniting anything it touched. Behind it, the primary fire engulfed trees like the breath from some ancient dragon. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe, the intense heat and smoke choking the oxygen from the air.

  “Faster!” Chou urged.

  I tried, but my head was swimming; my eyes were filled with tears from the stinging smoke, and my legs felt like they had turned to jelly.

  “I’m not going to make it,” I said, my voice raspy and barely recognizable.

  Then Chou was beside me, her hand on my elbow, urging me forward. “Yes, you are!”

  “I... don’t... think... I... can,” I said.

  “You must,” Chou replied, her grip on my elbow tightening as she urged me forward. “The future of the world depends on you.”

  “Over there! I think there’s a clearing,” Freuchen yelled out, suddenly angling off to his right, unable to point as he still held Albert close to his chest with both hands. Freuchen’s bulk hid whatever he had seen from me, but Chou guided me stumbling after him, and ran right into Freuchen’s back as he came to an abrupt stop.

  Ahead of us, something huge and not natural to the forest rose up from a bed of crushed and broken trees. I could barely see through my watering eyes, but as we drew closer, I began to make out details. A wall of metal painted red and made up of panels held together by the largest rivets I’d ever seen. An enormous propeller, easily twice as tall as Silas, a second next to it, and then a third. It was the keel of a ship, my exhaustion-fogged mind realized, and a huge one at that. My eyes followed the curve of the hull up and up and up. The top disappeared in the smoke billowing around us like fog.