Who will be first to contact the aliens—humanity or the dinosaur companions we made?
Centuries ago, humans engineered deinonychus dinosaurs and endowed them with intelligence. Ever since, the Human—Saurian Polity Alliance has been spreading into a galaxy seemingly devoid of sapient life.
But on the distant world of Halcyon, that is all about to change.
Polity liaison Adara Lynx is used to remote postings. She built a career helping farflung colonies thrive. The mission to Halcyon seems routine until her boss reveals the truth: an alien artifact has made landfall on Halcyon and she’s being sent to make contact.
One problem: Halcyon has banned humans from entry except in special circumstances. To get in she’ll have to partner with Chirp, a brilliant, prickly saurian intelligence agent.
Chirp knows firsthand the risks of venturing into separatist territory. For years she’s tracked a violent terrorist group that may have made Halcyon its base. Adara thinks she’s jumping at shadows—until a terrifying encounter confirms the worst: the terrorists have made Adara and Chirp their next targets.
Surrounded by uncertain allies, the two of them must learn to work together to elude the terrorist forces. And they’ll have to learn fast: a figure from Chirp’s past is stalking them, someone who will stop at nothing to make sure neither of them reaches the artifact alive…
Halcyon is a sweeping science fiction adventure with themes of genetic engineering and alien contact perfect for fans of Jurassic Park and David Brin’s Uplift Series.
Haclyon releases August 2024. Read an excerpt below!
* * *
The image of Halcyon jumped into grainy movement, rotating on its axis in stop-motion starts. The feed from the polity’s stealth satellite in orbit. The camera view zoomed in on the equator. Something bright twinkled there—another satellite? A separatist ship?
As the details resolved, Adara realized it wasn’t either. It was something she had never seen before. An iridescent sphere like an opaque soap bubble floated in the camera’s view. Its scale was impossible to grasp even as it breached the atmosphere. A measurement overlaid on the video frame put it at a quarter-kilometer in diameter. Same as the asteroid—no, this thing was the “asteroid”. Except it was clearly no lump of rock. As it continued to sink lower into the atmosphere, friction licking redly at its sides, she understood it was moving under power.
“Is that a spacecraft?” she asked softly. She was afraid to put too much force behind the question. It clearly wasn’t a natural phenomenon, and yet… “I don’t see any engines. How is it moving?”
Her boss twiddled one whisker. “Our analysts’ best guess is that it’s moving space around itself to generate propulsion. Like a jump drive, but one that can be fine-tuned for much shorter distances.”
The feathers along Chirp’s spine were puffed out with excitement or alarm, making her appear twice her size. “No one has tech like that,” she said. “Not the polity or the separatists.”
“Correct,” Sam said. “Which is why we believe this thing came from somewhere else.”
He froze the iridescent bubble in the projection. Beneath the swirls of color, its surface looked black; Adara wondered if it was truly opaque, or if she was seeing through it to the black space beyond.
“Halcyon may be the site of first contact with an alien civilization,” Sam said. “I want to send you two there to find out.”
* * *
“But…” She tried too late to swallow the word. Both Sam and Chirp were looking at her. “But there aren’t any aliens.” Adara winced internally. Brilliant contribution.
“That we know of.” Her coordinator gestured at the soap bubble. It might appear light and airy, but anything that could withstand the friction of atmospheric entry was tougher than it looked. “This has had entire branches of polity analysts buzzing. We’ve advanced and discarded several possibilities as to what it could be.” He sat back and shrugged. “Parsimony says when you’ve eliminated every idea but one, that idea, no matter how outlandish, is probably the truth.”
Aliens. The great absence the Human-Saurian Alliance had been skirting for the centuries of its existence. In all that time, and for all the hundreds of Earthlike or terraformable worlds they’d settled, no one had encountered a trace of an extraterrestrial civilization. Not even ruins or abandoned tech. Dozens of worlds harbored living organisms, but none of the species had been found to possess the traits of sapience, despite a concerted search for alien intelligence on every new world the polity discovered.
Until now, the futile search had simply been part of history. Some historians called it the Great Disappointment: proof of a kind more definitive than ever that Earthlings were alone in the universe. Yet it was a disappointment tinged with relief for many. With every new world found to be empty of intelligent life, Earthling-kind deferred the perils of first contact and all the things that could go wrong. With every affirmation that humans and saurians were each other’s only companions in the long night, the two species strengthened their commitment to work together to solve the world’s hard problems and celebrate its triumphs.
Indeed, accepting the non-existence of aliens had been easy for Adara when she’d studied the topic in school. Every time an adult said humans were likely alone in the universe, she would silently add, But not really. They hadn’t been alone since they made the saurians; the two species would always have each other, despite what fanatics at the margins liked to spout.
But now that tiny, fragile bubble threatened to overturn the foundation of what everyone knew.
“You aren’t sure,” Chirp interjected.
“How could we be?” Sam spread his furred hands. “A few photographs from a satellite that isn’t supposed to exist isn’t enough to be sure. Which is where you two come in. Please open your visas.”
Inside the plastic envelope the agent had given her was a document with her liaison credentials listed beside her picture, followed by a field that described the purpose of her visit as Disaster Assessment.
Chirp had bent her head to read the details of her own packet; then she jerked her head up. “You’re sending me there as a cultural liaison?”
Sam nodded at her outburst. “We can’t very well send you there as a counterterrorism agent, can we?” He leaned back in his chair, slightly spoiling the illusion of presence when it clipped through his torso.
“I pulled strings to arrange a planetary landing site, so you won’t have to waste time going through customs in orbit,” Sam went on. “We’ve been in contact with Halcyon officials groundside. By now they know we saw something, so we’re sticking to the same story I told you: the station observed an asteroid strike and we’re sending liaisons—with their permission—to assess the damage and make recommendations for aid.”
The tingling along Adara’s spine lessened as Sam laid out the operational details. On the surface it didn’t sound so different from a regular liaison posting, except for the wrinkle that the locals didn’t necessarily want her there.
“Will they believe your rationale for sending us there?” Chirp asked. “Halcyon must be able to mobilize its own disaster relief. A team of two polity agents won’t be able to offer much additional help.”
Sam nodded. “We’re embedding you with one of their relief teams. You’ll be there primarily in a consulting capacity, to recommend which extraplanetary resources are needed to mitigate the disaster and how they should be used. With Adara’s track record, it should scan to the officials.”
He drew a circle above the table, as though sketching out a map. “Groundside, you’ll be met by a rescue team who know the terrain around Freehaven. That’s the settlement closest to the impact site. You’ll both make regular ansible reports to me about anything you see along the way that seems relevant, and of course, whatever you find at Freehaven. Any questions so far?”
Adara raised her hand. “There’s one thing I’m not clear on,” she said. “If the—object—already made contact with the saurians at Freehaven, why didn’t they report it to Halcyon’s government? Why are they still treating it like an asteroid strike?”
Chirp turned to look at her open-mouthed. “Halcyon already knows what they have in their possession,” the saurian signed slowly, as though to a child. “They know and are hiding it from the polity.”