No longer is he Major Alexander Khan of the galactic-arm-ranging Internal Movement Control; now he is Alexander Khan, criminal. Banished to Prison Planet in 2442 by Earth Central Government-the ECG-he has been dumped naked in a blizzard to die, a punishment for, among other things, distribution of contraband technology, conspiracy to destroy harmony, failure to condemn wrong views, and failure to initiate positive statements. Officially a secret, Prison Planet persists in whispers. Earth-like, it harbors three million transportees, tech-suppression satellites, and a surface that ECG hasn't checked in three hundred years. Khan's survival skills and training kick in as he takes advantage of the natural elements the planet provides. He must find a way back to Earth to avenge his father's death; overturn the ECG; and take down Nathan Fox, the ECG operative who ordered his father's murder. Khan meets the four groups that have developed on Prison Planet, and help in attaining his goal comes from some unexpected sources. He frees a fief's slaves from its lords, escapes Maneaters, and transforms the world of the Techs on the journey to his ultimate mission of bringing freedom to his people. Khan understands that the price of failure is the death of those he loves.
EARTH 2.0: PRISON PLANET
By William Crow JohnsoniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 William Brian Johnson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-4018-3 Chapter One
September, 2442 Transported
Alexander Khan came aware in a howling blizzard. Driving snow billowed before him like the veils of a dream. Bitter wind lashed his skin, and he realized he was standing naked in thigh-deep snow. He did not know how he had suddenly come to be here. He shook his head to remember, but it wouldn't come.
Commando training kicked in. He turned his back to the wind and cupped his hands between his legs for warmth while he surveyed his environment. Blinding snow stretched away in front to a far suggestion of mountains. A kilometer or two to the right loomed a tree line. To the left and behind, the horizon fell away. No trace remained in the snow of how he had arrived. The overcast sky had a pinkish tinge, suggesting a red-giant sun. Or a large, Martian-like iron-oxide desert somewhere on the planet.
The planet. Yes. It was coming back. The trial. The sentence.
Too numb to be sure, he pulled a foot out of the snow and checked. No boots. No clothes, and no knife strapped to his waist. Urban myth was wrong. Nothing. He permitted himself one sardonic smile. Transported. Earth Central Government had replaced execution three hundred years ago with the more humane banishment to Prison Planet. In practice, lower-level bureaucrats had dumped him naked in a blizzard to die.
In the cold gale, he had thirty to forty minutes before he froze. And it seemed to be getting darker by the second. He shook his head again to clear the cobwebs and took an experimental step. The snow was uniformly deep. It wasn't going to get easier the farther he went. But at least there was grass under the snow instead of rocks. And the snow was dry powder. Could have been worse.
He made for the tree line. There was a chance there of finding or building shelter. He strode quickly, rhythmically, almost a run, counting on his body generating heat from fighting the deep snow to counterbalance the cold. He did not run for fear of damaging his numb feet on sharp rocks under the snow. Even with the strenuous activity, the wind sucked the warmth out of him fast.
The tree line turned out to be 1232 strides away. Roughly a kilometer. It guarded a declivity sixty or seventy meters deep and was mainly leafless deciduous trees. But usefully, there were some firs similar to white pine, with long, soft needles.
He was sweating slightly under the arms from the exercise, but the rest of his body was growing numb. He could not decrease his activity level or he would freeze. He immediately began stripping off small pine boughs, shaking off the snow, and piling them up under a large pine with a bed of pine straw beneath it. The tree itself was heavy with snow but bare beneath.
When he had a pile roughly waist high, he took a couple of deadfall branches and plunged back into the snow. He used the branches to uncover the heavy grass beneath, a patch roughly four meters square. Then he began pulling large tufts, shaking them free of snow, and piling them beside his pile of pine boughs. After a couple more such squares, he had a pile of dry grass roughly half a meter deep and a meter and a half wide.
He was starting to shake uncontrollably. Without further delay, and with only an occasional wary glance down into the cut to look for predators, he made a bed against the trunk of the pine tree. First he heaped up pine needles fifteen or twenty centimeters deep. Then he laid pine boughs over them to keep them in place, followed by dried grass to lie on. Finally, he lay down on this bed and covered himself first with dried grass. Then as a last step, he pulled the rest of the pine boughs over him to hold the grass in place and to insulate himself from the cold air.
It wasn't comfortable, but within ten or fifteen minutes he was much warmer. He wouldn't freeze to death for at least the next few hours, and he would have time to think. And now that he was warmer, his brain was on fire.
No longer was he Major Alexander Khan of the galactic-arm-ranging Internal Movement Control, but Alexander Khan, criminal. No longer Alexander Khan, scion and board member of Khan International, mission-driven developer of freedom technology, but Alexander Khan, pauper. And no longer son of a vital, living Lucian Khan, but son of a man brutally murdered by an ECG operative.
The memory wipe started immediately after the sentence – Prison Planet – so he couldn't remember how he had been brought here. But he did remember the courtroom reading of his crimes: Distribution of Contraband Technology, Conspiracy to Destroy Harmony, Failure to Condemn Wrong Views, Failure to Initiate Positive Statements, etc., etc. And of course, there was that other charge that would have put him here by itself alone.
ECG controlled and tracked all interstellar missions, and had kept Prison Planet's location secret for 300 years. Even he as an officer in Internal Movement Control hadn't known where it was, or whether it truly existed. But people had always whispered of it, and urban myth provided details: 10,000 transported per year, tech development prevented by laser satellites, ECG operatives never went to the surface of the planet, just dumped prisoners, and no one knew if transportees survived or not. And here he was.
So the goals of his life – fully avenge his father's death, and set the people of Earth free from its bonds – no longer looked reachable. Even survival looked uncertain. But in his mind he heard the voice of Pierre, his childhood tutor in all things from Latin to martial arts: "Every environment has in it the tools for survival. You just have to recognize them." He would have to recognize them on his own, though, because there was no UAI on this planet. The dead link to his implant was like a black hole in his brain.
Warmer now and tired from his efforts, he grew drowsy. His mind began to run down. He resisted awhile, then gave in to sleep. He hoped it wasn't the deceptive warmth and inviting sleep of those who are freezing to death.
* * *
He awoke to a terrifying roar. Surrounded by darkness, he took a moment to realize where he was. – In survival mode, he remembered quickly. And his feet were freezing because in his sleep he had thrust them out of his carefully arranged cover. But the rest of him was warm and almost certainly generating scent. Whatever had roared sounded big enough to consider him food.
A twig snapped maybe twenty meters below in the cut. Then silence. The wind had subsided, but there was no starlight. His eyes had not yet adjusted. He could barely see.
He didn't even have a sharp stick. Suddenly he could hear quiet breathing no more than five meters away, slightly downslope. He strained to see. A massive dark shape crouched up toward him along the slope. It was two meters long and massed at least three hundred kilos. No physical details were visible, but he didn't need any. It clearly intended him as dinner. Soon. There was no reason for stealth and no more time.
Reaching down through the pine needles, he grabbed the hard object that had been sticking him in the back. It was a limestone shard twice the length of his fist. He pulled it from the soil and found one end sharper than the other. Better than nothing.
He slipped into the genetically enhanced intuitive zone he always entered when his life was in danger. His heart sped up. Time slowed to a standstill. He rose from his warm bed and faced the beast. The tree trunk was on his right, his bed to...
