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  PLANTATION ORIGINS

  Book 6 of The Plantation Series

  By

  Stella Samiotou Fitzsimons

  ©2018 by Stella Samiotou Fitzsimons

  Facebook: Stella Samiotou Fitzsimons

  Twitter: @plantationworld

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic, mechanical or other means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Table of 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

  Author Note

  Books in the PLANTATION Series

  CHAPTER 1

  ORIGINS

  I saw it all coming. I just didn’t know how to stop it. The end. I saw the skies growing dark with the heavy smoke of drone engines. I saw the red lines on the black monitors devouring the code that could have kept the systems online. I saw the light of the world becoming extinct. Even my father was unable to stop the inevitable—the gleaming buildings transformed into lifeless monoliths consumed by the forked tongues of hellfire.

  As my dark sister reveled inside the sulfur discharges, I stared deep into the roaring flames and forged a new determination.

  This end would be my beginning.

  I didn’t know why I felt that way. I didn’t know anything about my lineage, my origins or my true identity. I didn’t know who the enemy was or the why of anything. I would find out soon enough, but at the time all I knew was that I was unlike everyone else within the blazing plantation—different than the mutant guards, different than the Lagerian masters and different than the human children.

  I was like no one else in all the worlds, and that was an unforgivable sin to the dark overlords of doom partnered with my sister in her fight against my father. The victor would control the plantations as well as the interplanetary empire. Also unknown to me was the fact that I was to die if they won.

  My half-sister, Eldaria, had won the war on Plantation-15 even before the attack started. She had won the very moment Nalok, our biological father and ruler of the New Empire, took the vote to the council. He intended to allow humans on Exodus L21 to return to Earth and resume a peaceful coexistence with Lagerians and Sliman, forging a truce that would lead to a possible long-lasting alliance, thus clearing the way for a new era for both Lagerians and the citizens of Earth.

  Eldaria instantly saw her opening. She convinced the council that Nalok was turning weak and lacked both vision and determination. That was when the end of all I knew truly began.

  So there I was, twelve years old, watching the fury of the flames rise and annihilate life as I had known it since I was five. Before then, my memories were sparse and undefined.

  That’s when Sliman hands grabbed me from behind. We rushed through crumbling buildings and narrow alleys to the headquarters. Nalok was there, destroying the data storage systems. I had never seen my father so desperate. I was quickly pulled outside and dragged behind the armory, where my father’s army prepared to make its last stand against the much larger forces under Eldaria’s command—the same forces that had already hijacked the massive weapons and missile system structures.

  When the armory exploded, it wasn’t fear or anger or any other predictable feeling that overtook me. It was curiosity and a distorted sense of exhilaration. Everything was gone and my life was in immediate danger, but I was already savoring my first taste of freedom.

  Hands kept prodding me forward. I saw long lines of human children ushered through ruins leveled by the flames.

  Two Sliman guards left their regiment to lead me on foot outside the plantation, all the way to an armored vehicle inside a man-made cave. I had not seen such a cave before. I didn’t know they existed, its mouth sealed so cleverly it was imperceptible to an untrained eye. While the Sliman inspected the vehicle’s weaponized capabilities, I moved towards the entrance to look outside.

  The entire plantation was crackling now. The heat was so intense, even where I was standing, that I could feel my skin burn. I saw him then, only yards away, tall and menacing as always, his features illuminated by the fire.

  Nalok was staring at the scene that marked the end of his reign as if finally discovering the error of his ways—eyes sullen, cheeks gaunt, a terrible, unbecoming grin on his face as he licked his lips. He didn’t know I was watching. He didn’t know I was fascinated by his altered demeanor. I may not have known yet who he was, but I knew he was the master of my fate.

  The guards forced me into the vehicle. As Plantation-15 became a speck of red smoke, the question finally dawned on me. Why were such pains taken to ensure my safety when so many more vital than me were left to perish?

  CHAPTER 2

  ERIC

  Sometimes we are blind to what’s coming. Sometimes we can clearly see and yet know not that our vision deceives.

  The decades old message from Nalok had been pounded into Eric’s frontal lobe with the persistence of a distress signal, reminding him that he had ignored the truth of both his past and his future.

  Eric looked up from the buzzing touchpad in his hand. He wasn’t sure which part of Nalok’s statement was worse—not to see or to see the wrong thing. What he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt was that he was in no condition to answer Freya’s call.

  The ruined plantation offered the same unsavory impact as usual—nothing but rubble and bad memories. It would be the same tomorrow and the day after and on and on until the day after eternity. Any return to this place would be identical to the last and the first and all future returns.

  Despite this pointless certainty, he didn’t leave—not yet. Ashes to ashes and plantations to dust. That was what the abominable network of juvenile incarceration had become: ashes and dust, much like the frailty of his own existence, but so much more menacing and formidable.

  He glanced down at his left arm. A small trickle of blood spurted from the deep cut that ran across the front of his wrist. He pressed his right palm against the wound he had somehow forgotten. A blur of white light sizzled under his hand and then stopped as he turned off the restorative energy field.

  The devouring powers Eric had initially feared were now completely synced to his every intention. He could use them to heal, ignite generators, anticipate attacks and restore lost memories. This did not mean he would ever completely control the powers or that they could not still turn against him. He no longer allowed himself such hopeful delusions.

  He let his hands drop. He decided against healing himself. That would violate his plan to start acting like a human even when no one was watching.

  It was not part of a plan to gash his flesh when his hand struck the sharp edges of a bent steel pole. His anger had overpowered the rational part of his brain, turning him savage which he knew could happen at the snap of a finger.

  Lashing out had become one of his defining characteristics. Eric did in fact enjoy the chaos in his soul, the vast exuberance nesting in his genes; there was a certain amount of animal elegance in the recklessness with which he performed the instinctive ritual of not giving a shit.

  The sunlight reflected off the cracked d
orm windows. He grabbed his injured wrist, squeezing his wound. He avoided thinking about what he had discovered rummaging through the layered maze beneath Plantation-15.

  No matter how much he wanted to delude himself into believing Eldaria’s prediction about Freya was somehow mistaken, he could not.

  Though only a half-sister, he could feel Eldaria’s methodic cruelty in his bones. She would not risk leaving behind a human with such devastating powers—an earthling capable of ruling the world. She would have an ironclad solution in place, even in the event she perished and Freya survived.

  Eric inhaled the late morning scent of human victory and persistence which emanated from the ruins of the Lagerian construction. One small human girl had triggered the fall of a galactic empire. His awe at what he had witnessed lingered. Freya took his breath away when they met and now she had lit up the skies above and the skies beyond. She tamed Sliman beasts, inspired hope in a world without hope—and she had done all of this despite the genetic curse racing through her veins.

  He’d call it magic if he did not carry a kindred mutation. Freya had used her mutation on a grander scale, to challenge all reasoning on Earth.

  The rustle of fast-approaching feet interrupted Eric’s thoughts. The heat of midday sweltered, yet Eric felt a shiver zip down his spine as Rabbit slid to a sudden halt before him.

  Rabbit’s chest rose and fell with his rapid breathing. The boy’s urgency brought Eric back to his senses. There was still so much to do.

  “It’s not the same,” Rabbit said through gasps of air.

  “It never is,” Eric replied, sensing the weight of Rabbit’s words.

  “The rush running gave me when we were slaves, I don’t get it anymore.”

  Eric chuckled. “Freedom’s not all it’s cracked up to be, huh?”

  “It is better than slavery and death, I suppose.” Rabbit sorely missed the drama and the adrenaline. There was hardly even a reason to rush. Epic speed had quickly lost its currency in this peaceful world.

  “It’s time,” Eric said. “We need to get back. If I get there first, cheetah boy, maybe you’ll learn a little humility.”

  “You think you can outrun me?” Rabbit said, both amused and dismissive.

  “All things are possible,” Eric replied, tiring of the banter.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “It was a long shot,” Eric said, checking on the folded paper in his pocket. “Maybe it’s better this way. Time to move on.” Lying can be a very tidy thing.

  “That sounds like a No,” Rabbit surmised. “What was it anyway?”

  “No human would ever understand.”

  “If you say so. Tell you what, mountain man. I’d rather race you back to the transport than listen to any more of this. Though it will hardly be a race.”

  When Rabbit asked to join him on this excursion, Eric agreed so he would not disappoint the boy. He now realized he had lied to himself. The real reason he let Rabbit come was to avoid being alone with his ominous thoughts.

  Rabbit raced off. Eric let his mind ramble a little longer.

  He crumpled up the piece of paper in his hand on which he had just written a coding sequence. He had, after all, found what he had come to find, the codes on Eldaria’s touchpad which had been safely tucked away inside an indestructible Lagerian black box.

  The coding proved that Eldaria’s pronouncement about the genetic time bomb was more than a threat. Freya’s lifespan would last no longer than a quarter of an Earth century. That left little time to solve the problem.

  Stuffing the paper back in his pocket, he trudged forward to meet up with Rabbit by the transport. The quickest Savior had insisted on parking it at a distance and hiking the rest of the way. Eric knew he might be able to outrun the boy, but he remembered his decision to act more humanlike.

  Stepping through the fencing wall, he felt a sudden breath of wind. The touch of the breeze was light but carried with it an unusual warmth. Then he heard a long subterranean moan.

  He imagined a demon caught in a wolf trap deep in the Earth’s core. He glanced back. Something was off. He felt the terror he could not name, the one he had always known, that had kept him awake a thousand nights. He knew the specter from his nightmares had to be more than a sinister figment of his fractured mind. The terror was in everything all around.

  “It’s finally here,” Eric whispered. “It watches. It won’t stop. It will keep coming. Always and ever. Unless I kill it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ERIC

  Dark Legion guards watched over Spring Town while it slept. Eric slid through the door of the Administration building and climbed the stairs to the library.

  A year had passed since an unlikely rebellion broke out in the territory once known as California which proved to be a victory that reverberated across the globe. It spread like wild fire. Regions liberated themselves far and wide. Alien conquerors fell or ran. Eric himself was chosen to oversee a new alliance of mutants, both human and Sliman, despite his alien bloodline.

  The irony didn’t escape him.

  He walked through the expansive open-room library stacked with tattered books stuffed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves. On the far end, a terrace overlooked the green fields and valleys beyond Spring Town.

  It was Freya’s idea to transport every book from the Lost Town library as well as every other text scrounged up in the district and house them in the space that once served as the officers’ lounge for Exodus L-21.

  Several key tech officers still manned the space station in order to monitor and ward off any would-be invaders. Lainey, the space station’s coordinator, was among those who stayed on board Exodus, but she did return to Earth every chance she had to do research in this very library.

  Eric sensed a monumental struggle going on inside Lainey’s head ever since Commander Eldritch died at Plantation-15. His heightened emotional receptors had locked onto Lainey’s inability to accept the details of her lover’s death. She was certain there was more to the story.

  He squatted behind the circulation desk and conjured a silver thread of energy to unlock a small drawer. Eric lifted out a small, square box and examined two cryo-bonded seals. When he swiped his right palm across them, they instantly gleamed before popping open.

  He let his mind stray, wondering if Freya had yet mastered the subtle art of unsealing cryogenic locks without exploding the contents.

  Eric’s fingers felt for the silver microchip inside the box. He had avoided the temptation to go through the Lagerian archives since he recovered them from Plantation-15 HQ only moments before the grounds were set aflame.

  The last thing he wanted was to go looking for more trouble, but it was past time to face whatever sordid truths the archives held. His own needs ceased to matter.

  He placed the microchip in the touchpad. The feed came up on the glass screen on the desk. Centuries-old Lagerian code sequences flowed across the screen, forming patterned clusters only a trained eye could begin to fathom.

  Eric moved his hand across the glass, closing windows and clicking icons, searching for answers to unknown questions. He would pick through every bit of code eventually, but for now he had only one thing on his mind.

  His eyes darted everywhere at once as data and images flashed by on the screen. When recognition hit, he stopped his hand to freeze frame the screen.

  He took out the scrap of paper from his pocket that he had brought back from the plantation to authenticate what he had scribbled against the Lagerian sequencing on the screen.

  Eric’s dark eyes completely focused on the code. A sigh escaped his lips, a guttural, almost inhuman sound. His worst fears had been confirmed.

  ***

  There was only one option available. Eric hurried past the dorms to the edge of town where the river now flowed freely and effortlessly.

  Damian’s tall, muscled figure stood out clearly against the first light of the sunrise. His deep inner solace broke as he heard Eric’s appr
oach. The leader of the Saviors, that band of youngsters who destroyed the plantations, hurried to meet Eric by an unoccupied guard tent.

  “Why such an early hour? What are we hiding?” Damian said.

  “I’ll be brief,” Eric started. The faster he got this out, the better. “Freya has been programmed to expire.”

  “Haven’t all of us?”

  Eric studied Damian’s puzzled face. “I’m not talking about our general mortality. Freya has been programmed to expire before she turns twenty-five.”

  “Bullshit. You’re not making sense,” Damian said, his resolve weakening.

  “Before the Empress was killed, she told us that Freya’s energy sources would run out and she would die.”

  “That old witch would say anything. It was an idle threat. She created Freya to save her species. It makes no sense. She was toying with you.”

  Eric grew impatient. “I have evidence. If you don’t tell Freya, I will.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I’m here as a friend, Damian. I thought you’d want to be the one to tell her, you two being so close, but she will find out today, one way or another.”

  Damian’s features hardened. “Freya is not your concern.”

  The hostility in his voice bugged Eric. “It’s not a time to be territorial.”

  “Stay clear of her,” Damian growled. “I will not have her dragged into this madness.”

  Damian walked away. Eric hung his head as he started back to town. The nagging thought that he could have handled things better was weak but not negligible. In the end, the only thing that mattered was Freya. He would not let her down.