The Quantum Enigma: Set in The Human Chronicles Universe (The Adam Cain Saga Book 8) Read online

  The Quantum Enigma

  The Adam Cain Saga Book 8

  T.R. Harris

  Set in The Human Chronicles Universe

  THC

  Tom Harris Creations

  Copyright 2020

  by Tom Harris Creations, LLC

  All rights reserved.**

  3 Free Books

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  Novels by T.R. Harris

  The Adam Cain Saga

  The Dead Worlds

  Empires

  Battle Plan

  Galactic Vortex

  Dark Energy

  Universal Law

  The Formation Code

  The Quantum Enigma

  Children of the Aris

  The Human Chronicles

  The Fringe Worlds

  Alien Assassin

  The War of Pawns

  The Tactics of Revenge

  The Legend of Earth

  Cain’s Crusaders

  The Apex Predator

  A Galaxy to Conquer

  The Masters of War

  Prelude to War

  The Unreachable Stars

  When Earth Reigned Supreme

  A Clash of Aliens

  Battlelines

  The Copernicus Deception

  Scorched Earth

  Alien Games

  The Cain Legacy

  The Andromeda Mission

  Last Species Standing

  Invasion Force

  Force of Gravity

  Mission Critical

  The Lost Universe

  The Immortal War

  Destroyer of Worlds

  Phantoms

  Terminus Rising

  The Last Aris

  The Human Chronicles Box Set Series

  Box Set #1 – Books 1-5 in the series

  Box Set #2 – Books 6-10 in the series

  Box Set #3 – Books 11-15 in the series

  Box Set #4 – Books 16-20 in the series

  Box Set #5—Books 21-25 in the series

  REV Warriors Series

  Rev

  REV: Renegades

  REV: Rebirth

  REV: Revolution

  REV: Retribution

  REV: Revelations (coming soon)

  REV Warriors Box Set #1 – Books 1-3 in the series

  Jason King – Agent to the Stars Series

  The Enclaves of Sylox

  Treasure of the Galactic Lights

  The Drone Wars Series

  Day of the Drone

  In collaboration with Co-Author George Wier…

  The Liberation Series

  Captains Malicious

  Available exclusively on Amazon.com and FREE to members of Kindle Unlimited.

  Contents

  The alien with an attitude is back!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Children of the Aris

  Author Notes

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  Novels by T.R. Harris

  The alien with an attitude is back!

  The Adam Cain Saga Continues

  Adam Cain and friends are back!

  Let the adventure begin!

  Chapter 1

  Adam Cain sat in the passenger seat of the armored personnel carrier as welcoming heat blasted from vents in the dashboard. The terrain outside looked like the worst version of Hell, a frozen wasteland of mushy tundra and bitter, wind-swept cold on a planet already classified as a Dead World. Adam was often amazed at what some people fought and died over. Granted, the rest of the planet wasn’t as bad as this—not much. However, Korash-Nor would never be confused for paradise. But for some, it was home; for others, their last stop. And that was the reason for the one-sided battle taking place in the valley below.

  Fortunately for Adam, the APC was buttoned up, toasty and warm, segregated from the reality of the carnage taking place a few miles away. The vehicle was painted in the bright blue of the Enforcer Corp, with a stylized logo emblazoned on the roof. Adam and his organization had yet to pick sides in the conflict, so for now, his two-vehicle convoy was a neutral third party, only observers, with no dog in the race.

  He lifted the binoculars again and scanned the battlefield. It wasn’t going well for the natives. It wasn’t a large unit; only about thirty or so, escorting cargo of some kind in a six-truck caravan. The mercenaries caught them by surprise in the lowland, coming in from the south with troops and half a dozen hovercraft gunships. The force sent against the natives was overwhelming; the battle a foregone conclusion.

  The reality of the situation made him feel guilty, sitting here while not lifting a hand to help the over-matched natives. But he was here to observe, not to take part in the fighting. But considering the level of brutality he saw being committed by the former MK-employees, Adam thought it was about time for a change to his neutrality position.

  But that wasn’t the only reason Adam was on the planet. He was also here for his mental health. Through the haze of explosions and the steady beat of faraway bolt launchers, even the proximity of action beat shuffling reports across his desk on Navarus, which was what Adam did most of the time these days. For a person such as him, that was a fate worse than death. And although he was far from the shit downrange, the atmosphere of battle was better than nothing at all.

  The pressure of his job as the Top Cop in the Dead Zone—and now the head of the default paramilitary force across a hundred worlds—was more than he’d bargained for. He wasn’t built for management. He was a soldier at heart, a fighter rather than a strategist or politician. Besides that, he was having withdrawals. Two years had passed since Adam last killed an alien. In fact, the last person he killed wasn’t even an alien. It was another Human: Wolfgang Stimmel, the former Regional Director for the gigantic Maris-Kliss organization.

  Adam smiled. He’d never seen a person consumed by a miniature blackhole before. It was impressive, both in its effect and its finality. There was no coming back from that. And what made it even more satisfying was the fact that Stimmel suffered his fate because he’d stolen Adam’s hybrid Artificial Telepathy Device—his ATD—and installed it into his body. The Formilians built the device not only to interact with Adam’s brainwaves but also to absorb a limited number of energy bolts, venting the power through a microscopic blackhole deep within its circuits. Stimmel didn’t know the absorption rate was limited, thinking he was immune to flash weapons. He found out the hard way that that wasn’t the case.

  Better him than me, Adam thought.

  And now another two years had gone by since that fateful day at the ancient Aris base. And what a two years it had been.

  First of all, politics in the Dead Zone
had shifted dramatically. After Stimmel’s death, the true extent of his plans for galactic domination using the stolen Dark Matter Collectors came to light, causing the huge MK conglomerate to distance itself even farther from both the Director and the Zone. Although Stimmel’s two DMCs hadn’t been found yet, his organization was no longer considered a threat. That left the twenty-six worlds he quasi owned in the Zone without status, stranding the three million employees and nine hundred thousand mercenaries on these planets without his protection. The workers and security troops had spent the prior three years striving to bring the infrastructure on the worlds up to code, and now their efforts were in vain.

  The situation grew worse for the former MK employees when officials in the Zone passed a decree giving legal ownership of the Dead Worlds back to the natives. The order applied to Stimmel’s planets, as well. But in a strange twist of fate, the powers-that-be allowed the MK personnel to remain, giving them the status as Provisional Citizens, or PCs. That didn’t make the situation better, only worse.

  When the millions of refugees flowed back to their homeworlds, Stimmel’s worlds were already occupied by a determined and highly-skilled population who felt entitled to their piece of the pie. And rather than join together for the common good, natives and PCs immediately faced off for domination of the planets.

  The PCs felt they had too much time and labor invested in the rebuilding of the worlds to let the returning natives push them aside. They also had a highly-trained security force for protection, which also had a vested interest in keeping what they now considered to be theirs.

  The refugees, on the other hand, were far less skilled and with fewer resources. After Kracion’s pass through the region over ten years before, most of the wealthy, privileged and skilled took what they could and disappeared into the vastness of the Expansion, and to a lesser degree, the Orion-Cygnus Union. And although these natives now had official ownership of their homeworlds, few were willing to give up their comfortable lives of wealth and privilege on the more sophisticated worlds in the galaxy to return to the barely habitable planets of their birth. The Dead Worlds were still decades away from returning to any semblance of normalcy. Although the air was clear of radiation, the land was still recovering, as were the oceans and waterways. Entire ecosystems had to be rebuilt, including insects for pollination and bacteria for nutrient recovery, along with all the other varieties of life that depended on one another for food.

  Besides, most anything of value in the major cities had already been stripped away by salvagers, leaving critical infrastructure beyond repair and requiring a complete overhaul. Entire industries had to be rebuilt or reintroduced, which required money and skill that the returning refugees lacked. That was what the PCs had been working on for the past three years.

  The natives, on the other hand, had been the common laborers, the stewards, the minor merchants, and ship’s crews who were off-planet at the time of Kracion’s attack. Their hearts were in the right place, but not the means to revive their ravaged worlds. Yet still they came, simply because they had nowhere else to go.

  The situation was bad enough on the majority of worlds that hadn’t been under Stimmel’s control; there wasn’t a resident population that had to be either accommodated or evicted. It was infinitely worse on the former MK worlds.

  Although the returning refugees had the law on their side—and they outnumbered the MK personnel ten to one—they were no match for the expertise of the MK technicians or the power of the mercenaries. The PCs were well entrenched, and having been abandoned by MK and their supporters, these castoffs had nowhere else to go. And they weren’t about to leave without a fight.

  And that’s where Adam Cain came in.

  He sighed deeply as the thoughts passed through his mind. His life had changed considerably in the past two years, and none of it to his liking.

  After the Stimmel debacle, both the Union and the Expansion backed off from attempting overt control of the Dead Zone. Instead, they proposed that Adam’s Enforcer Corps become the new military in the region. For his part, Adam had very little say in the decision making. With both empires unified in this cause, there was nothing he could do to stop it. And with new wars starting almost monthly, something had to be done.

  The Enforcers took over Camp Forrester south of Balamar and expanded it ten-fold. Then with military recruiters and trainers from across the galaxy, thousands of personnel flooded onto Navarus to become part of the new paramilitary force. Soon Adam’s small, mostly planetary police force numbered sixty thousand, and to support such a population, both the Expansion and Union donated the equipment and material required to operate such a large organization. The Enforcers wanted for nothing; everything was provided. The logic was simple: The empires would let the Enforcers do the fighting until the Zone was pacified. And then the chits would be called in.

  Adam remained at the top of the Enforcer hierarchy, but instead of referring to him as Marshal Cain, his Human buddies began facetiously calling him Field Marshal Cain. He didn’t think it was funny, and if it weren’t for the fact that the governments were throwing so much money at him to remain the head of the Enforcers, he would have quit long ago.

  The mission of his Enforcers was also convoluted. They were tasked with maintaining peace in the Dead Zone, but what exactly did that mean? At present, major wars were taking place on nineteen worlds, with another thirty-two enmeshed in deadly terrorist conflicts and mass murder on a horrendous scale. And never was there a clear enemy. Adam couldn’t very well send in his troops to smash one side of the conflict when both sides had standing. His Enforcers ended up being more referee than a participant in the wars. That did neither party any good, resulting in wholesale slaughter and tens of thousands of deaths. And the Dead Worlds didn’t have the population to spare. Each person who died in a battle was an essential cog in the wheel, vital to the eventual recovery of the planets.

  That didn’t matter. No one was thinking rationally nor compassionately.

  A particularly powerful rocket landed a mile or so from the APC, shaking Adam from his reverie. The valley below was shrouded in a thick blanket of black smoke, held down by the cold, dense air of the frozen wasteland.

  Is this place really worth dying for? Adam thought for the hundredth time.

  None of the Dead Worlds had populations larger than two million, including natives and PCs. That meant that each person could, for all practical purposes, claim a city, town or hamlet for their own, with plenty left over. There was no need to fight over what other people had. But that wasn’t the case. Everyone seemed to gravitate to the five or six major cities on each of the planets, the ones that MK and Stimmel had made the most progress in reclaiming. It made sense, Adam snorted. But by the time the battles were over, most of the cherished communities would be nothing but burned out wastelands, worse that any of the thousands of surrounding communities. It didn’t make sense that the warring parties would waste so many lives fighting over a tiny fraction of the planets they both called home. There was plenty of room for everyone.

  The driver’s side door to the APC suddenly flew open, letting out a fair amount of the precious heat while sending in a wave of frigid air into the cab. Adam wasn’t wearing a coat or even a thicker version of his Enforcer uniform. He’d been either in a shuttle or a heated APC all day and hadn’t seen the need to get bundled up.

  “Dammit, Peanut, you’re letting all the heat out.”

  Gill “Peanut” Norris was being consumed by a bulky overcoat with a fur collar. Even still, he looked to be half-frozen.

  “Sorry, boss, but we got problems.”

  Peanut was a former Navy SEAL from Adam’s old Team back on Earth. He now carried the rank of Colonel in the Enforcers, one of Adam’s command staff officers.

  “The natives have surrendered,” Peanut continued.

  “That was expected. Why is that a problem?”

  “The PCs ordered them to drop their weapons, and then promptly opened up on th
em. They’re slaughtering them in cold blood.”

  “Shit!”

  Adam leaned forward and snatched the comm unit from its holder on the dashboard. “Get me the PC commander on a link.” He activated a datapad, which would give him video conferencing. A moment later, a grey-skinned alien came on the screen.

  “This is Adam Cain, head of the Enforcers. We’re at an observation post north of your engagement area. I have reports that you’re slaughtering native prisoners of war. Is this correct? If so, then you are to cease such action immediately!”

  The alien blinked several times, overwhelmed by the intensity of Adam’s demands. Then the creature looked off to the side, to someone who was speaking to him. The alien nodded and then stepped aside. Another person took his place. To Adam’s shock, it was a Human. The middle-aged man with a buzzcut haircut and longish red beard had a sly grin on his tanned face along with laughing brown eyes that seemed out of place under the current situation.

  “Who are you?” Adam demanded.

  “I’m John Graham, the acting commander of the PC security force. And you are the famous Adam Cain.” The man had a distinctive Scottish accent.