Bitter Memory

Sian Nicholas

Description

On Pygmalion 6, Scarlett Robins works with her husband, Caleb, and their team to ensure food security for the future of Earth. Scarlett is driven by the desire to end starvation on her home planet and to return to her two teenage daughters, Erica and Cally. But she is haunted by a nightmare and the belief that PlantGen, her employer, is withholding information from her and her team. Scarlett discovers that all she has taken for granted is an illusion and that she is not who she believes herself to be. Her life and the lives of her teammates are under threat, and she has to pit her wits against all those who seek them harm, which includes her genetic double.

Sujets

• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528956383
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Bitter Memory
Sian Nicholas
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-04-30
Bitter Memory About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright © Acknowledgement Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four
About the Author
Following her return from Afghanistan where she worked in Mental Health training and Disaster Management, Sian Nicholas studied and taught peacebuilding. She has now expanded her writing to a variety of genres, including non-fiction, humour and science fiction. She hopes to keep alpacas one day.
About the Book
On Pygmalion 6, Scarlett Robins works with her husband, Caleb, and their team to ensure food security for the future of Earth. Scarlett is driven by the desire to end starvation on her home planet and to return to her two teenage daughters, Erica and Cally. But she is haunted by a nightmare and the belief that PlantGen, her employer, is withholding information from her and her team.
Scarlett discovers that all she has taken for granted is an illusion and that she is not who she believes herself to be. Her life and the lives of her teammates are under threat, and she has to pit her wits against all those who seek them harm, which includes her genetic double.
Dedication
For Helen, Nicci, Sara and Tru
Copyright ©
Sian Nicholas (2019)
The right of Sian Nicholas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788789226 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781788789233 (Kindle e-book)
ISBN 9781528956383 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Elaine, Linda and Helen, who read the initial draft and encouraged me along the way.
Chapter One
I can feel the warmth of the fluid around me and feel the reassuring beat of my heart thudding gently in my ears. Through half open eyes, I see dim shapes and staccato movements but cannot move – tightly wound in an invisible embrace. No words are formed in my mouth but the one is repeated in my head and reverberates through my body: ‘Danger!’ My senses are flooded with adrenaline, and my heartbeat increases and pounds within my ears and at my temples. In this heightened state of anxiety, consciousness evades me once again and I return to a fitful and tension-filled sleep.
***
I awake with a start just before the gentle birdsong that is my alarm kicks in at dawn-break. Sitting bolt upright in my bunk, I can feel the sweat dripping from my face and body and my hair clings to the curves of my face. My heart is pounding and I can feel the fear responses coursing through my veins as the adrenaline pulses. The nightmarish images of my hands digging into the throat of a woman in a vice-like grip fill my head. I see vividly in my mind the moment as I turned my hands so that I could clasp her jaw firmly and twist sideways, and I could still feel her vertebrae snap with the crispness and clarity of breaking sticks in an autumn woodland. I recall the feeling of her body slump and fall slowly and inexorably to the floor as her last heartbeats faded and her final breath left her body. I gazed down on the face of my victim, her short close-cropped blond hair, her blue eyes, the freckles across the bridge of her nose and recognised my own lifeless face gazing back at me, and a look of surprised disbelief remained frozen upon her face. Fully awake and alert now, as the panic welling up in my throat slowly subsided, I assessed my situation. The pale purple sunlight filtered gently through the window in our room dancing on the small particles of dust that were yet to be removed by the air-filtration system humming innocuously in the background. I was in the double-bunk that I had slept in for the past 6 months on this planet. The walls remained the sterile off-white surfaces they had been when we arrived, apart from the door where we had hung a large holographic picture of green fields with their crops gently waving in an earthly breeze. Beside me on the table, stood the smaller hologram taken from the precious family photos of our last week on Earth. I was aware that my arms and body ached as if I had been fighting and I shifted uncomfortably in the bunk. My partner, Caleb, lay beside me stirring at the sound of my sudden movement; he smiled gently at me. The light sank into the dark recesses of his skin, but his eyes were bright and loving. He raised his eyebrows at me questioningly and said, “Hey Scarlett, bad night?”
His gentle presence beside me helped to calm my jangling nerves, and I was able to return his reassuring smile. “Just a bad dream honey, but I feel as if I’ve gone 10 rounds with a heavyweight boxer.”
He glanced at my arms, frowned and then joked, “You do look a little bruised, did you fall out of one of the travel-hopper yesterday when you were out in the field?” He gently rubbed the blue and black marks on the top of my arm.
“Not that I recall, but you know I’m a delicate creature, I bruise easily.” I pulled a face, looking at the bruises.
“Perhaps you should pop into the healthpod.” The tension within my body had begun to ease and the images were receding slowly from my memory. I gazed at his face and felt the warmth and love that welled up in my heart for him sooth my ragged emotions.
Caleb tugged at me playfully, his dark eyes twinkling cheekily and said, “I shall have to be very gentle with you in future.” He had pulled me into him for a cuddle and I had begun to relax once more in the comfort of his arms when we were disturbed by the sound of a greater-spotted woodpecker emanating from the alarm box, its call urgent and jagged, which urged us both up and into the waiting day. “Foiled again,” he joked, as I climbed out of bed and stood to examine my face in the wall-mounted mirror above the washbasin. My familiar face stared back at me, my short, blonde hair, my blue eyes and the arched eyebrows that framed them, the slightly squished nose and the small birthmark on my right cheek merging with my freckles. The image of my face, pale and washed out in newly acquired death flashed back into my memory, and closing my eyes, I shook my head and turned away trying to push the image out of my mind.
The weekly comms session with PlantGen was scheduled for this morning. The face of Roger Broomfield, head of the genetic testing section, appeared on the vid screen. A balding man in his mid-fifties, he wore an air of mild boredom as a cloak in our regular weekly catch-up sessions which stifled any warmth or camaraderie. He was my immediate line manager and responsible for overseeing our research activities on Pygmalion 6 and so these meetings were essential for our work. I felt though as if they were an encumbrance to him, despite the good results that our research had been demonstrating. He lifted an expressionless face to me and requested my identification codes. “Scarlett Robins – designate team leader, Gamma Project, code word: emancipate.” He winced slightly at my response, but nodded his head as he said, “Confirm date and time entry.”
“15-09-2210, 09.15 Planet time.”
“Thanks,” he said, “how are you?”
Taken aback by his uncharacteristic concern for my personal wellbeing, I replied, “Struggling to grasp why you’re checking out basic ID credentials.”
He sighed momentarily before responding, “Oh you know, new directive from the board,” and then he repeated again, “how are you?”
“I’m fine, had a bad dream last night, but you know: I’ll live.” He smiled wryly at me, letting out a little snort as he did so and then asked for the next month’s work plan and research targets. The vid-comms session continued in much the same vein as normal. It took place in the communications section of the Research facility on Pygmalion 6. An unappealing room with no more real character than the rest of the nondescript building, and was little more than a cupboard containing the broadband microwave emitting equipment and the video screen to enable discussion. The actual communication dish was located a short distance outside the building, which transmitted to a relay satellite 40 light years away, and where the signal vied with the many other interstellar communiques that were being transmitted from across the universe. Some daylight made its way onto the desk from a narrow slit near the roof but failed to penetrate the rest of the room, so that it was filled with the glow from the vid-screen giving the room a gentle, electric blue glow.
I gave a run-down of our data findings from the previous week in relation to the crop growth and interaction with other vegetation, invertebrate and vertebrate life that we had brought with us from Earth, as well as their interactions of these imported Earth species with the flora and fauna on the planet. All appeared to be on course and going well, our honeybee colonies were managing well, alongside the bumblebee species. Keeping artificially inseminated queen bees in stasis for the length of the journey from Earth had been a little problematic, but the invertebrate geneticists had managed to produce clone worker bees that