Free Extinction by Jay Korza Page A

bodies before they died and
the others must have pulled them into the shelter.
    “All of them were in uniforms and had
weapons with them. The bunker they were in did a good job of mummifying the
remains, so it’s not difficult to tell that the wounds they suffered were from
a battle. One of the corpses had a small communications device with him. When
it was hooked up to a power source, it sent out the same signal as the terminal
found almost five years ago. That’s why we think that it was a distress signal
of some sort.
    “We also believe that the outpost on
07-0198 had been an expeditionary force, one of hundreds in that region of
space. And for whatever reason, when they were destroyed, no one came looking
for or even cared that they were never heard from again. Until now.”
    “So now,” Seth interjected, “we awakened
their distress call and alerted their descendants to their destruction that took
place close to a thousand years ago. And let me guess, they are mad as hell.
Right?”
    “Exactly.” Surgeon continued, “Whatever
caused them to forget about this sector a thousand years ago is no longer an
issue to them. They’ve decided that they want to move back into this space and
they didn’t even call ahead for reservations. Twenty of our outermost
expeditionary colonies have been lost. They weren’t just destroyed—they were
completely obliterated. Scans of those outposts reveal no debris from enemy
craft, so we’re assuming our people either didn’t have enough time to respond
to an attack or their response didn’t even damage the attacking force.”
    “So why haven’t we alerted all our
forces and built up our military? And for that matter, where do I, we, fit into
this?” Seth just couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
    “To answer your first question, we
didn’t want to send a widespread panic through the Coalition. We haven’t yet
met an enemy we can’t beat and that’s why planets join our little group. We
can’t have them lose faith in us and pull their fleets out of any upcoming
battles just to try to save their own hides. And as for us,” Surgeon let the
words linger for a moment before continuing, “we just might be the Coalition’s
last hope.”

Chapter
5
    Dig Site One - On the
Outer Rim
     
     
    Daria had awakened from her cryosleep
journey to this planet two months ago. “This planet” is all it could be called
because it hadn’t even received a number designation yet. And worst of all,
Daria and Davies were in a platoon that had a lab geek for a CO. Even though
she was a nice geek, Daria still didn’t like it.
    Her name was Emily. It almost hurt her
to say it. No officers were called by their first name but this one wouldn’t
have it any other way. Officially, she was First Lieutenant Riley and Daria
really didn’t like anything less formal. But orders were orders and after
finding out that Emily’s brother had been a marine and killed during training,
she had a bit more respect for Emily’s desire to not be called by her rank.
    Emily was a xenobiologist and
specialized in creating profiles of races by their artifacts. Daria had noticed
something about their little group of scientists and marines: everyone was not
only good at their job but REALLY good. Some, like Emily, were even acclaimed
to be the best in their field.
    There really wasn’t much to do so Daria
had read some of Emily’s articles. Daria found that Emily’s work was actually
very fascinating.
    Just by examining some artifacts at a
site near the core worlds, Emily had deduced that the species had only two
fingers on each of its three arms, stood about two point five meters tall, and
each member of the species was the same sex and used a type of internal cloning
to create offspring. She could probably even tell you how much change the alien
had in its pocket when it made the artifact you were looking at.
    After burial sites had been discovered,
it was found that Emily had made mistakes on only a few