The Furnace Read online

  The Furnace

  By Timothy S. Johnston

  Dead Space, 2401 AD

  Kyle Tanner is about to die. Alone, floating in a vacsuit only a few million kilometers from a massive, uncaring sun, he has barely enough time or juice to get out a distress signal before either his oxygen runs out or he succumbs to the radiation.

  When the CCF sent investigator Kyle Tanner to SOLEX One, a solar energy harvester past Mercury, he thought it would be an open-and-shut murder case. A crew member was found dead, minus his head and hands. Not the worst Tanner has ever seen, but the deeper he delves, the more nightmarish it becomes. A shadowy figure, bleeding from his hands, assaults Tanner in his quarters. Then two more turn up dead, missing their heads and hands as well.

  With no one to trust and everyone a suspect—even the intriguing chief engineer, Shaheen—Tanner must navigate a crew on the brink of madness to uncover a conspiracy that could threaten the whole of the human race. Even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice...

  115,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  It’s unbelievable to me that the holiday season is here already. I feel as though I was just stuffing myself full of holiday cookies, spiced wine and all of the wonderful chocolates sent to me during the holidays. But here we are again in what some call the season of joy, while others call it “the season where I avoid all shopping malls for at least two months.” If you’re one of those avoiding all of the seemingly endless holiday tasks, preparations and shopping, let us help you procrastinate with another fantastic lineup of books. If you’re one who revels in the season of joy, not to worry, these books will only add to your enjoyment of the season.

  This month, we have so many returning authors who are fan favorites, I’m not sure where to start. So instead, I’ll start with those who are new, either to readers, to Carina Press, or both. Beginning with debut author Michele Mannon, whose book first came to my attention two years ago during a cold-reads session at a meeting of New Jersey Romance Writers. During that session, I gave Michele some suggestions for strengthening her opening and she worked on it for several months before going on to win a few contests and eventually pitching it to me, at which point I acquired it with great enthusiasm. I hope you’ll check out her fantastic love story of a former ballerina turned ring girl and a brooding, sexy fighter in Knock Out, book one of the Worth the Fight trilogy. And don’t mind me while I claim partial credit for the opening line...

  Joining Michele with a debut book is Timothy S. Johnston and his science-fiction thriller. It’s Agatha Christie meets Michael Crichton in The Furnace as homicide investigator Kyle Tanner travels to a remote space station to solve a mysterious death that may have enormous consequences for the human race.

  Our third debut author makes her appearance in one of my annual holiday collections. These have become a tradition at Carina Press, and one that I love, since I get a chance to work with a new variety of authors every year. This year, we have four collections. Last month saw the release of two of them: Gift of Honor, a military holiday collection, and Season of Seduction, an erotic holiday collection.

  This month we release the two contemporary holiday collections, and it’s in For My Own that Shari Mikels makes her writing debut with her novella Christmas Curveball. Joining her in this contemporary romance collection are new-to-Carina author Kinley Cade with her novella Kissing Her Scrooge, and fan-favorite Alison Packard with A Christmas for Carrie.

  In the second contemporary romance holiday collection, returning authors Christi Barth, Brighton Walsh and Kat Latham join together to offer some holiday love and forgiveness in All I’m Asking For with their novellas Tinsel My Heart, Season of Second Chances and Mine Under the Mistletoe.

  Also new to Carina Press this month are authors Keri Ford, Ann DeFee, T.C. Mill and Daryl Anderson, each offering up something different for reader entertainment. Keri Ford brings us a fun contemporary romance in Never Stopped Loving You, in which the heroine has to remind herself: don’t date your friends—and definitely don’t ever date your friend’s brother. Ann DeFee’s Beyond Texas is a fast-paced contemporary romance of mystical lights that dance across the desert as the hero and heroine, Cole Claiborne and Twinkie Sue Carmichael, discover love while thwarting an evil cult, giving new meaning to the old saying “Don’t Mess with a Texan.”

  In T.C. Mill’s male/male fantasy novella, Gardens Where No One Will See, Nemaran’s gentle attentions inspire Renad to go beyond the boundaries he’s set for himself for so long—but can they help him break free of even crueler bondage?

  And last in the new-to-Carina category, Daryl Anderson is on the scene in Murder in Mystic Cove. In this new mystery, a former Baltimore homicide detective thought she’d put murder cases behind her—until she discovered a resident in her father’s retirement community shot dead in his golf cart.

  Returning to Carina Press with contemporary romance Love Me Not, Reese Ryan introduces us to struggling artist Jamie Charles, who finds refuge from the painful secrets of her past in her art and prefers living on the edge—without the complications of love—until she encounters charming ad exec Miles Copeland, who is harboring his own dark past and is determined to have her heart.

  Fantasy romance author Shawna Thomas has the third installment in her Triune Stones series, Journey of Wisdom. It’s not too late to catch up before the series wraps up with the last book, Journey of the Wanderer, in February 2014.

  If you’re looking to spice up your holidays with a BDSM erotic romance, The Dom Project by Heloise Belleau and Solace Ames will keep you warm, even when it’s cold outside. When buttoned-up university archivist Robin Lessing agrees to spend one month submitting to a sexy, tattooed colleague, she presents her new Dom with a firm set of rules. But once they begin their stimulating sessions, it’s not long before she’s ready to beg him for more—much more.

  Also this month, we have three powerhouse fan favorites with new books. Shannon Stacey returns to the Kowalskis with the much-anticipated Love a Little Sideways. When Drew Miller had a casual rebound fling with his best friend’s sister, he thought she’d go back to New Mexico and stay there, but now Liz Kowalski has come home to stay, and Drew’s feelings for her might not be as casual as he thought.

  After a two-year wait, Lauren Dane is back with Blade to the Keep, the follow-up to Goddess with a Blade. Rowan Summerwaite is no ordinary woman. With the power of an ancient goddess in her belly, she’s the perfect candidate to re-negotiate the fragile Treaty keeping the peace between the Vampire Nation and the last line of defense for humanity, The Hunter Corporation. And she’s got to do it as she attempts to manage a politically awkward romance during a trip back to a place she escaped nearly fifteen years before. No pressure.

  Wrapping up this month is The Principle of Desire, the final book in the Science of Temptation trilogy from Delphine Dryden. 1 Sexy Switch + 1 Nerdy Newbie = A Master Class in Seduction.

  Last, no matter what your religion, or what you celebrate, books are a common bond, so from all of us at Carina Press, we wish you a wonderful season of reading. May there be incredible books, stories and characters on your ereaders all year long!

  We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to [email protected]. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

  www.facebook.com/carinapress

  Contents

  Epigra
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  2401 AD

  Part One

  Investigator’s Log

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Investigator’s Log

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Investigator’s Log

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Four

  Investigator’s Log

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Five

  Investigator’s Log

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  A Note to the Reader

  About the Author

  Copyright

  We are lost! They have thrown us into the furnace, without rations, almost without ammunition. We were the last resources; they have sacrificed us... Our sacrifice will be in vain.

  —Sergeant Paul Dubrulle, Verdun, 1916

  2401 AD

  Part One: Orders

  Investigator’s Log: Lieutenant Kyle Tanner,

  Security Division, Homicide Section, CCF

  Certain death approached.

  It had stalked me for days, always just a step behind, but I had thwarted its every attempt. Skill, foreknowledge and perhaps even luck had aided in my escape. Unfortunately, even the best investigator couldn’t have avoided events on that damned station once they’d been set in motion, and it had taken me too long to discover the truth. SOLEX was now gone—destroyed in the final carnage—but hopefully I had eliminated the danger within.

  Now a new threat rose on the horizon.

  Alone in space, my body spun like a rag doll, limbs nearly sheared at the torso. It took ten minutes for consciousness to return, and when it finally did, I longed for the darkness to take me again. My head ached and my body felt like it had been through a twelve-round prizefight. The acceleration had been brutal, but I had made it. My neck hadn’t snapped, my brain hadn’t turned to jelly and my lungs hadn’t collapsed. I had withstood g-forces that would have killed most people.

  But I’d had no choice. I’d had to run.

  I shook the cobwebs from my head and winced in pain as I did so. The status display inside my helmet indicated nominal function across the board—yet another surprise. The temperature was in the high-normal range, but that was expected at this distance from Sol.

  I craned my neck to look toward the sun, but could no longer make out SOLEX’s debris, orbiting at just five million kilometers. The separated station components now drifted on unplanned and unknown trajectories, their interiors baked into oblivion, the dreadful cargo they carried cleansed forever. Now, hurtling through space in a vacsuit taxed well beyond safe limits, I knew I was in grave danger. I had only a weak comm, and transmitting amid the radiation emitted from the sun was like shouting into a hurricane. No one would ever hear, especially Mercury, still sixty million kilometers away.

  Dammit! I had survived this far, I told myself. I couldn’t let it end this way.

  I swallowed nervously and licked my cracked lips. The mass driver had done its job well, but my velocity was only three kilometers per second. My oxygen readout indicated that only three hours remained in my current supply. The extra bottles I had thrown into the driver with me each held four, which gave a grand total of fifteen hours. I groaned as I did the simple math in my head; I’d only get 162,000 kilometers before my air ran out.

  My throat was sandpaper, my tongue swollen against clenched teeth. I had long since depleted my water supplies, but in the grand scheme of things, their importance was negligible. The poor radio, the lack of water, the diminishing oxygen—none of these held a candle to the true danger:

  The radiation.

  My exposure was rising fast. Alarmingly so. At this distance from Sol, I could only withstand it for a few hours. I had now been out in empty space, the sun’s massive fury blazing at me unblinkingly, for a quarter of an hour. Even though I was moving away from the star, the punishment my suit had to deal with was just too much. My speed wasn’t nearly enough to save me.

  Not by a factor of a thousand.

  Unfortunately, I had sabotaged my own ship and all the escape pods as well. I had only hours—maybe minutes—to say my prayers, call for help and record what had happened to me on SOLEX One. I had to let the authorities know who had killed all those people—myself included.

  I thumbed the button on my wrist and began to record my story.

  Chapter One

  I filed the capture warrant at 1300 hours. Fifteen minutes later, I marched from the hotel that had been my home for the past four months. The guy behind the counter scowled at me as I pushed through the lobby and stepped out into the tunnels of the city. It was a typical reaction; people didn’t much like the military in this district. A scowl was the least I would get today. Mostly I heard muttered comments, and sometimes, if the guy was brave enough to take me on and receive a beating, he’d spit. I was used to it. I could even understand, to a point. A lot of officers in the CCF were cold and heartless. They didn’t give much thought to people’s feelings, and if anyone got in their way, look out.

  I’m a little different, though. I’m in the military, sure, but a homicide investigator sees a lot of death, gore and pain, and as a result we can sometimes grow more sensitive to what people are going through these days. I’ve seen some of the worst crime scenes imaginable: corpses skinned, decapitated and hanging upside down, limbs and eyes and a variety of other parts missing. There’s a lot of fluid in the human body. I’ve waded through feces and blood and urine, ankle deep, and examined the crime scene while taking notes like it was an ordinary day. I’ve faced the victim’s family afterward and attempted to explain what happened. Doing so has taught me to be sympathetic, and without that, this job would have killed me years ago. That’s why, even though I’m in the Confederate Combined Forces, I don’t really deserve the rap that others in the Terran Confederacy’s military get.

  In the tunnel outside the hotel, deep beneath the surface of Mercury, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with the surging masses making their way to work, play or wherever people went on this godforsaken planet. I threw a glance at the rock ceiling a few meters above my head. Who the hell could live underground like this for more than a few days? It boggled the mind. Already it was beginning to wear at my patience—and I knew I wouldn’t be here forever.

  I garnered a few more dirty looks on my way to the Gates of Hell, but I had long ago learned to ignore them. Checking my datachip reader, I studied the map of Mercury’s underground warrens. Off in a distant corner, pretty much as deep as you can get, was the place I wanted. A dusty, grimy little tavern—a shit hole, from what Flemming had told me. Full of shady figures, criminals and kingpins, it was the last place a respectable person would be found. If it hadn’t been for Quint Sirius, I’d already be on a different mission.

  I scowled
. Quint Sirius. He had killed the best—and only—friend I’d ever had.

  Michael Flemming had also been a homicide investigator. There aren’t many of us, compared to the population in the system. As a result, we’re forced to work alone, traveling from job to job, planet to planet and station to station as needed. We never partner up; there’s just too much damn work and not enough people who can see through the lies and deceptions. When the opportunity presented itself, however, Flemming and I had sometimes conferred with each other on our cases, providing helpful advice and opinions.

  Flemming had asked for my help on his most recent case. Someone had raped and murdered a young woman named Tara Silvers. After questioning everyone related to the crime, he hadn’t been close to pinning it on anyone.

  So I took his files, read his notes, looked at the facts objectively and finally determined that the killer he was after wasn’t there. Flemming simply hadn’t found him yet.

  That was sometimes the case in our line of work. Usually the killer was one of the first people you looked at. Someone in the immediate family. The closest “friend.” The guy who found the body. The neighbor. But on occasion he was so far removed, so distantly related, that it just took longer to get to him through the usual methods. I had once spent a month looking for the killer of an elderly woman on Mars and had grown exasperated after the long and fruitless search. And then, purely by chance, I stumbled upon something in the lady’s personal belongings that directed me toward an old acquaintance—an enemy who had let his anger simmer for two decades before he finally acted.

  The recruiters in Security Division had said they saw something in me. Intuition. Luck. Hunches. Perhaps all that played a role. Who knows?

  I had studied Flemming’s investigation reports and skimmed right over Quint Sirius. He hadn’t stood out at the time, but two days later I’d realized he was the one. Unfortunately, by the time I told my friend, it was too late. Sirius had either killed him or put out the hit.