Alien Genesis (Eden's Angels Book 1)

Book summary

In "Alien Genesis," Ensign James Cortell's awakening from a coma in 1954 reveals memories of an ancient alien visitation that reshaped human evolution. Decades later, a galactic slave trade emerges, exploiting these genetic modifications. Amidst a brewing conflict between Earth's rulers, Dr. Kadeya and her grandson, Ramuell, confront an unexpected mutation causing gigantism. Their journey reveals hidden forces shaping the destiny of both human and alien races, culminating in a pivotal change for Earth's future.

Excerpt from Alien Genesis (Eden's Angels Book 1)

The air itself caught fire.

Ramuell didn’t know how long he’d been lying on the cave floor. He felt hollow, his chest ached, and he was unable or unwilling to move. Slowly he became aware of quiet rustling in other parts of the cave. He was not the only survivor. He lapsed into a fitful sleep, haunted by the horrors the people of Domhan-Siol had visited on the planet Ghrain-3.

***

A blinding flash and deafening roar had shattered the early dawn. Everything lying loose on the canyon floor was sucked violently into the air. Choking clouds of dirt, stones and ash boiled skyward. The portal canopies in front of each inhabited cave were ripped from their anchors. Instantly the pilings were shattered as they swirled up toward the canyon rim. The flying debris spontaneously combusted as it crested the ridges.

People and animals outside the caves were likewise drawn into the maelstrom. Every crow roosting in the nearby trees simply disappeared. Small children were vacuumed out of caves as if by a tornadic wind. People with enough strength anchored themselves inside by clinging to rocks, roots, or log structures wedged into wall cracks.

After those first few seconds, Ramuell’s gasps couldn’t fill his lungs. He realized that oxygen was being burned so rapidly several hundred metres overhead that he was suffocating. This understanding intensified his terror, and that fear turned to dread as the last image he saw before losing consciousness was Dahl staggering about the cave—blood oozing from his ears.

The next time Ramuell stirred, someone offered him water from a gut bota. His eyes were crusted with mucus and ash. He pried his eyelids open with his fingers and became aware of a yellowish light filtering in from the cave’s mouth. He crawled to the entrance and saw the thousands of trees on the canyon floor were nought but smoldering stumps. Falling ash shrouded everything with several centimetres of grey death. He dropped his head and retched.

He could hear moans and voices from nearby caves. When a woman called out, Ramuell heard people scrambling to the front of their dwellings. He hollered, “Stay in your caves—until the sky stops falling.” He knew breathing much of the ash would almost certainly cause illness or worse, it could be radioactive.

Standing just inside the cave’s mouth, Shiya began a roll call of the Crow Clan’s people: who was hurt, how severe were the injuries, and who was unhurt. Through the process of elimination she reckoned who among the Clan were missing, dead, or perhaps still unconscious. She also asked about food and water stores. By the time she completed the inventory, Ramuell had managed to prop himself into a sitting position with his back against a boulder.

The toddler Busasta startled Ramuell by climbing onto his lap. He grabbed the little boy into his arms and began to weep. Busasta wasn’t Ramuell’s son or grandson, but he loved this child beyond all reason. Domhanian travelers had long since realized that their feelings for the planet’s indigenes were, in fact, a phenomenon outside of reason, that those feelings were the product of a mysterious kind of extrasensory experience.

Shiya sat down beside Ramuell. “Dahl is dead,” she said as she played handclap with Busasta who had wriggled into a sitting position on Ramuell’s lap. Shiya began a meticulous recitation of the roll call information. Fourteen clanspeople had not responded to her calls. Three of the caves did not have any drinking water. It was impossible to know about adequate food stores, given that it wasn’t known how long their sequestration might last – how long the ash would fall.

Having gathered his wits, Ramuell rose and went to his hollow in the back of the cave. He dug up a waterproof footlocker. The people of the Clan knew of the trunk buried beneath his sleeping furs. It was the subject of superstitious fear, which Ramuell did nothing to dispel. For the first time in over a decade, he removed the flight suit woven of metallic fibers. While not as safe as a hazardous materials suit, it would be better than only wearing the sapiens’ leather clothing in the falling ash. He also had goggles and a breather.

Realizing this attire would frighten the already traumatized clanspeople, Ramuell wore the form-fitting flight suit under his leather clothes. He would remove the headgear immediately upon entering each cave.

Each cavern provided shelter for three to nine people depending on size, accessibility, and features. Ramuell had been sharing a cave with the Clan elder Dahl, Sinepo, her man Maponus, and their son Busasta. Shiya, the orphan who had grown up to become the Clan’s alpha female, also lived in the shared cave.

Fortunately, Shiya and Ramuell had restocked their group’s water supply the previous afternoon. They had three buffalo stomachs full as well as four botas that held about three litres each.

Taking the bota bags, Ramuell dashed from cave to cave to provide water and to further assess the situation. He didn’t know what to expect and was unprepared for what he found.

Three bodies lay in front of one cave. They must have panicked and run out into the intense heat seconds after the explosion. Their fingertips and toes had ignited with fire spreading up their arms and legs. A pinkish liquid oozed from the scorched extremities and pooled on the ground. Ramuell was horrified and could only hope they’d lost consciousness immediately; it was likely at least a half-hour passed before death laid its final claim.

Inside Ramuell found six more people. Two were unconscious. Extreme heat had scorched their bodies. Blisters had burst and skin hung from their faces, chests, and legs like moss clinging to trees. These two had only hours to live. The other four people did not have physical injuries but were so traumatized they were unresponsive.

In the last cave Ramuell found Anbron holding her daughter on her lap. Sheets of skin were peeling off the infant’s body. Anbron had been knocked unconscious and upon awakening realized the baby was missing. Panicked, she rushed barefooted from the cave and found her child’s broken and burned body at the foot of the rock ledge, some four metres below.

Ramuell could see that the child had been dead for several hours. He cautiously took Anbron’s hand and touched it to her baby’s carotid artery. As tears rolled out of Anbron’s eyes she exhaled a moan of hopeless despair. She handed over the dead body. Ramuell took the mutilated infant to the crypt cavern. He returned and carried Anbron, whose feet were burned, to her sister’s cave.

Upon returning to his own cave, he shed the loose-fitting clan clothing easily enough, but as he tried to peel off the flight suit his hands trembled so badly he could not grip the zipper pull. There were certain conventions about watching a person in their “private” quarters within a shared cave. Nevertheless, out of concern, Shiya was watching Ramuell’s efforts. Though she had never seen a zipper and could not have imagined such a device, she walked over and after only a brief moment’s inspection took hold of the pull tab and unzipped the suit from collar to crotch. When Ramuell looked at her with astonishment, he saw that she was not looking at the zipper. Shiya was staring directly into his eyes. She took his hand and gently pressed it against her gestating belly.

She held it there as Ramuell described what he’d found within the caves. He believed most of the injured clanspeople would likely survive, for a while at least. Of course, he had no way to explain that if the falling ash was radioactive none of them would be alive in a month. Madam Curie was yet tens of thousands of years in Shiya’s future.

***

Ramuell had taken up residence with the sapiens of the Crow Clan following his expulsion from the Ghrain-3 Expeditionary Mission. The Clan inhabited a cluster of caves tucked into limestone cliffs near the bottom of a deep canyon. A dependable river ran almost due east through this section of the canyon. The clanspeople gathered fruit, nuts, roots and legumes that grew near the river’s edge. They hunted and scavenged most of the meat they consumed and supplemented their protein intake with fish, insects, grubs and worms.

The Clan’s canyon home was breathtakingly beautiful. It had been a good home, though the clanspeople lacked many things. Thousands of years would pass before the people of this planet would even contemplate what those things might be. They lacked any knowledge of germ theory. They had yet to conceptualize the tools necessary for agriculture. Medicine was a marriage between superstition and herbal remedies. Early death was a fact of life that the people simply accepted. They knew no better. Life was difficult, but it was the only life the Clan knew or could comprehend.

Ramuell had been the leader of a group of twelve Domhanian scientists assigned to study the sapien species. Anticipating their exile by Grandmaster Elyon, the group had “liberated” and divvied up a cache of equipment, weapons, and supplies from the orbiting station. Ramuell had buried his share of the materiel in waterproof boxes under enormous boulders in a side canyon a few kilometres downriver from the cliff dwellings.

As he lay on his bed of furs, with images of his horribly burned friends playing back-and-forth in his mind’s eye, he contemplated the next move. If the fallout was from a thermonuclear device, retrieving his Radiation Particle Detector would be a death march. However, in his tour of the caves he had seen no symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. Perhaps a journey to the trove of supplies would be safe.

If either the Serefim Presidium or the Beag-Liath had detonated a device with low yields of radioactivity, the sooner the clan departed the greater their chances of survival. Even if there was no radioactive debris in the fallout, the tremendous volume of ash was contaminating the river, killing the fish, and poisoning the soil. Given the amount of heat they had experienced on the canyon floor, there was no doubt that the forest had been decimated on the plateaus above the canyon rims. There would be no wood for cook fires, and flash floods would roar across the ash-covered ground and through the canyon when the early summer warmth melted the winter snow.

As Ramuell drifted into a tormented sleep, his last thought was that either by death or by banishment, their paradise was lost.