Earth Arrested (Earth Quarantined ): An alien occupation dystopian story by D.L. Richardson ➱ Book Tour with Giveaway
Extract 1
Damn world peace. It wasn’t worth her happiness.
Kethryn Miller drained the last of her wine before turning her scornful gaze to the shimmering lights below. City Prime was beautiful at night, yet the millions of lights, in every imaginable color, did little to stop the loneliness settling in.
Far below, lights blinked like neon lovers communicating in code. At least until midnight. After midnight, the power conserves came into effect, and buildings disappeared from the skyline as holo-advertisements and electricity mains shut down. Complete darkness lasted no more than the blink of a neon light; like children afraid of the dark, buildings flickered into life as insomniacs reclaimed the night.
As Kethryn watched over the world from the balcony of the forty-second floor, she wondered what kept her fellow insomniacs awake. She would swap her troubles for theirs any day.
A Criterion ship popped into view. Reflexively, Kethryn took a step back. The Divinity was gold and elliptical with sensor arrays that resembled incandescent roots reaching for the ground. One of a hundred border patrol ships, one for each Earth state, this alien hawk followed a pre-plotted course around the ten cities of State Seven. A citizen could tell time by the patrols. Each noon and midnight, the Divinity floated over City Prime. Each night when it hovered by, Kethryn sensed the co-operatives inside – humans who worked security detail for the Criterions – watching her watching them.
She reached for the bottle of wine on the table and the movement activated the Visual Imaging Device – VID – pulling her attention to the image projected onto the screen. It showed an invitation for the presidential inauguration in two weeks, one she couldn’t avoid since this was her inauguration. Spending her adult life dodging the inevitable now seemed like a waste.
She shifted her gaze from the lights to the full moon that sat to the right of the border ship. Long ago that moon had lured man to reach it. And they had. They lived in permanent habitats in self-imposed seclusion for three months at a time. It granted them little contact with family or friends, and when they returned to Earth they complained of the noise and begged to go back. Their bodies slowly decayed from constantly applying aluminum gel as protection against radiation. Their flesh festered from bedsores that never healed because of the implanted mood-gauging sensors that monitored their vital signs and mental stability. Mooners were a weird lot, and yet she envied them.
She took a sip of wine. Too sweet. It belied her current mood. The quarantine of Earth, placed by the Criterion three centuries ago, should have been lifted by now and the technology to launch a spaceship beyond the end of the Solar System granted. And yet it hadn’t. Why were humans still on Earth? Why had the Criterion not gone home after ridding the planet of the deadly virus? Why did nobody care that mankind’s peace and freedom came with chains?
These were questions to ask a Criterion advocate, and a wry smile tugged at her cheeks that she’d get her chance in two weeks.
Earth Quarantined – Book 1
Extract 1
The thud of her boots and the hum of overhead pipes clogged her head. Too loud in her ears, rude for the sound to be there but it had no other place to go.
Neah gulped in a lungful of air and for a split second obliterated time and space. Visualize the power to do whatever you want. Intense.
When she held her breath she could master the quiet. But her twenty-four-year-old lungs needed air the way the underground bunker needed to thump and hum and give off the stench of burning oil. At last she exhaled, though it came out as a heavy sigh. Somewhere in the distance a machine groaned. Life inside this station was like that heavy sigh. Intense.
Pressing a hand against the concrete wall, she tried to detect motion. Legend said the old power station housed their souls, and Neah’s daughter, Becka – four years old at the time – had held her ear against the wall beside her bed, claiming to hear the beating heart of the station. If the station and its inhabitants existed as one, then if Neah detected the heart of the station, she could detect the same of Becka.
She pressed a fist against her chest.
“Always remember,” she whispered.
A bang came from her left. The metal door to the guardhouse command room swung open and a sentinel stepped out, yawning and stretching. Neah whipped her hand away from the wall and brushed past the guard muttering her usual greeting.
“Get out of my way, dipshit.”
It was six a.m., August 17 of the year 197 ATW (After The War), and Neah was about to clock on to start a normal day in an abnormal world. She’d rather have been anywhere else on Earth. The problem was finding anywhere livable.
Gazing up at the duty roster brought a snarl to her lips. The board contained the running tab on which sentinel would die first from a routine check of the station for a contamination breach. The tab beat the boredom out of having nothing to do other than pursue young kids who spat from the top of the gangways and old folks who forgot to wear pants. Someone had crossed out the hundred-to-one odds against Neah’s name and written TODAY.
“Freaking scumbag,” she said.
In two strides she stood at the board and scrubbed out the word TODAY, and upped the odds to two hundred. While it was considered it bad form to complain about the pranks the other guards pulled, she wasn’t in the mood for jokes today. Not today, not this week, not this month.
Evin, a tall guy with meaty arms who was her boss and also her roommate, walked into the room. He stood in the middle like a towering black stone.
Evin flicked his chin at the board. “Wasn’t like that when I signed on.”
“Probably that shithead, Gus.” Neah clenched her hands into fists. “Always messing about with the board. I ought to skin him alive.”
Augustine – Gus – was the seventeen-year-old son of the High Council Leader, Lucias. The smartest person in the station, also the weirdest, and definitely the biggest thorn in Neah’s side. She’d deal with Gus later.
“I’m finishing up,” said Evin. “Hitting the shower then crashing. You better have told Wes that if he plays his video games too loud, I’ll break his neck.”
If anyone else had threatened Neah’s kid brother she’d have lunged at them with her stun stick and burned them a new breathing hole. But Evin treated Wes like his own, sometimes too much like his own. Maybe if Neah didn’t neglect the kid so much the big guy wouldn’t have to look after him. But they did things like that down here.
Evin placed his radio on the bench. Unhooked his belt. Rolled his neck. Obviously not in a hurry to leave.
“Do you need to brief me on anything?” Neah asked him.
“Actually, yeah. Chelsea called. She hasn’t seen Jurden for twelve hours.”
Earth Arrested – Book 2
Extract 1
“Are you awake?” Kethryn asked, nudging her mother and not believing that she was sleeping at all. “Are you hungry?”
Angela grunted; her eyes still closed. “You sound like one of the nurses.”
“You should be so lucky. I won’t be making your bed or bringing you food on a tray.”
Her mother shrugged but she didn’t open her eyes. The silence in the transport was disturbed by the gentle melody coming from the front. The driver was humming a tune.
At last, Angela sat up and rubbed at her eyes. The day had clearly exhausted her.
“I dislike holographic drivers,” she said. “And I dislike it more when they try to sing. Can we turn him off?”
“That depends. Are you going to talk to me? I brought him along for the company in case...”
Kethryn let the words trail off.
Her mother glanced down at her hands. “In case I returned to my shell. Things are different now, Kethryn. I can’t hide myself away anymore. I’ve known this time was coming. I could feel it in my bones. Even before your father came to warn me about it. Everything is changing. Everything eventually does.”
“You talk as if you can predict the future. I suppose you can. Your bags were packed as if you were expecting me.”
“Your father’s visit confirmed my suspicions. He told me about—” Her mother’s voice choked. Her hands twitched. Her lips formed words, but no sound came out. “About...” she said again, almost choking on the effort.
“It’s okay, you can say her name.” Kethryn reached out a hand, then quickly pulled away. Years of dealing with her mother’s aversion to physical contact made this hesitation an automatic response. Yet, when her mother responded by reaching for Kethryn’s hand, the flood of emotions gushed as fast as the river rapids her mother had tried to drown herself in.
Kethryn squeezed the hands entwined with hers. “You can talk about Neah. She is my sister, your daughter, and she exists.”
Her mother nodded. “Your father told me that Neah made it to the city. I didn’t know she was alive, Kethryn. I swear to you, if I’d known.”
Earth Arrested – Book 2
Extract 2
Neah stopped at the entrance to the prison cells, the dank air filling her nostrils and making her sneeze. She would send the sanitation crew down here to spruce this place up. Everything in the station had a function, and empty cells served no function.
Four sentinels were already waiting for her in the cell block where a cache of weapons had been found a week ago. Real weapons. Not the stun guns and clubs she and the other sentinels used to break up fights. These were rifles, pistols, automatic weapons, laser weapons, blasters, and things she had no idea about the damage they could cause. She had spent a few minutes on her way to the cell block this morning mentally preparing for the discussion with Lucias, one of the High Council Leaders, about turning the entertainment quarters into a shooting range. It wouldn’t take a string of cleverly worded phrases to convince him, just a simple ‘people are coming to kill us’.
The radio on her jacket buzzed. Lucias, as if responding to her innermost thoughts, was shouting down the radio. “Neah. Return to the command room immediately.”
She ignored him. Since she was the other High Council Leader, he didn’t outrank her.
When she got to the cell where Evin stood, a Senior Officer of the station’s security, he had a lazy grin spread over his dark-skinned face. “Isn’t disobeying a direct order considered an act of treason?”
Neah grinned back. “Nah. More like a hostile takeover.”
“Return at once,” Lucias shouted down the radio. “I know what you’re planning and I forbid it. We will not take up arms against—”
She lifted the radio to her lips. “Don’t I get a say in how we run security?”
“All decisions must be agreed upon by both leaders. I have not agreed to you arming the sentinels and planning for a battle.”
She winked at Evin and made a motion with her fingers like a duck quacking and mouthed the words blah, blah, blah. Then her face and tone turned serious. “Hopes and prayers can’t stop what’s coming, Lucias. We need to be armed and ready.”
An alarm sounded, echoing down the corridor from outside.
“A sentencing,” Evin said. “Now?”
“It’s a diversion. He’s trying to get us to leave the cell blocks, then he’ll probably come down here and seal it up while we’re getting everyone assembled.”
She spoke into the radio again. “Lucias. Call off the alarm. Call off the sentencing. We will conduct proper investigations and hold proper trials from now on. No more indwellers will be sacrificed so that the outdwellers may live peaceful lives. You hear me?”
It felt good to yell at someone. The other sentinels flicked gazes between each other as if they expected her to yell at them if they took one step in the opposite direction to where they were headed. Only Evin stood there with a grin on his face.
“Ignore the alarm,” she told the others. “We have work to do.”
She switched off the radio. The alarm that called all the indwellers to the assembly room to witness someone be accused of a crime and sentenced to death was still chiming around the metal walls by the time they lifted the tops off the crates of weapons. She still had no idea how long they’d been down here, or who had stashed them, or who had supplied them. She also didn’t care. A thirsty animal did not ask who put the watering hole in the ground.
Nearby, a door slammed and Neah jumped.
Evin laughed. “What’s got you spooked?”
Neah scowled at him as she thrust an assault rifle at his chest. “I keep waiting for them to attack us. Why haven’t they attacked us yet?”
“Hey. Nobody likes a fight more than me. But the key to winning a fight is being ready. And we’re not ready yet. We’ve had less than a week’s notice.”
“We will be ready for them. We have no choice. They will come.”
They had to. Because if they didn’t, then the indwellers would be forgotten about. Disregarded. Overlooked. Nobodies. They would fade away and nobody who mattered would understand what the indwellers had lost. And Neah wasn’t talking about their rightful place topside. That was a given. She meant the memories of the two hundred indwellers who had been led outside to safety by her twin sister, Kethryn Miller, and whose memories of that glorious day had been wiped by the Ray Bay machines.
D L Richardson
Earth Arrested book tour April 13 to May 13
Guest post for Silver Dagger Tours host
Why I love twists
I was probably ten years old the first time that I watched Planet of The Apes. I immediately fell in love with twist at the end. Even today when I watch it, I know the twist is coming but I still love getting to that point where the astronaut George Taylor falls to the sand in disappointment. (Apparently this twist isn’t in the book, and I haven’t read the books to confirm this or not, but it was this twist that set the course for my fiction writing.)
Another movie I watched on TV when I was a kid was Logan’s Run. The twist is revealed early on, and then it becomes a game of hide and seek. I love this twist because it is revealed when the character, Logan 5, is sent to destroy those who threaten their perfect world, and he uncovers the lies behind their perfect world. This ‘sacrifice for the greater good’ theme is strong within my Earth Quarantined series. How much is peace worth?
So why do I love the twist? For me, the twist provides a sense of triumph or justice or comeuppance. In the case of the Planet of the Apes, the twist provided me a sense of ‘just desserts’. Humans destroyed the planet, and we could agree that ‘we got what we deserved’. In the case of Logan’s Run, the twist provided me with a sense of ‘justice against oppression’. Humans were sacrificed for a perfect world, and those who orchestrated this were exposed and ‘they got what they deserved’. It’s interesting that these two twists have conflicting outcomes depending on which side we are rooting for.
I don’t think I consciously meant to write books with twists, but it seems that my love of them continues to shape my writing. They feature in most of my books, from my young adult paranormal tales to my sci-fi thrillers or my murder mysteries.
Earth Quarantined has a twist that no-one saw coming, not even me until I wrote it at the end. There is a different twist in the second book, Earth Arrested. But wait for book 3, Earth Reclaimed, where the biggest twist of all will be revealed. I hope you can come along for the ride.
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