A fantastical sci-fi action adventure that bends The Hero’s Journey’s tropes and is a stand-alone book in a planned series for fans of renegade heroines, engaging family dynamics, and diversity.
As a devastated world recovers from war and plight, an unlikely heroine emerges to rescue distressed rebels from the government’s corruption controlling the rationed food supply and a rogue general trying to steal the only known honeybees. And the earth itself fights back.
A fantastical sci-fi action adventure that bends The Hero’s Journey’s tropes and is a stand-alone book in a planned series for fans of renegade heroines, engaging family dynamics, and diversity.
As a devastated world recovers from war and plight, an unlikely heroine emerges to rescue distressed rebels from the government’s corruption controlling the rationed food supply and a rogue general trying to steal the only known honeybees. And the earth itself fights back.
Through the frigid night’s parting fog, General Speer exited the beaten chopper, ready to take his camp back. The three-day hunt for the rebel hideout had been a fruitless enterprise, and returning to see his Authority camp under siege grated on his nerves. Never had this district been ambushed. Certainly, the numbskull grand regional governor overseeing their camp would cast out blame to the generals, declass them as trench monkeys. Perhaps by quelling the uprising, he would cease to be a trench monkey.
The chopper’s engine coughed and died as Speer marched up the scree embankment. He led with a gait of dismissiveness and dread as a tight belt held his protruding belly in place. Fanning loose balls of canvas ambled up the hill ahead toward the main complex like tumbleweeds, bouncing over motionless rebels who could attack and steal no longer. He grimaced as the apprehended rebels crouched on their knees, their eyes downcast in shame, submitting to Authority officers both human and machine. The rebels failed again but had caused irreparable damage this time.
Nearby, low-ranked officers loaded munitions the rebels had poached back onto hovering jeep pods, lobbing them into unstable stacks. Several black-helmeted troopers advanced with a tall, handcuffed prisoner. Speer straightened as he welcomed their approach. Beside him, a gigantic robotic-armed sentry trudged mammoth steel legs forward with profound grace, as if sensitive to its boorish intrusion. All eyes tracked the barbarian robotic soldier’s calculated steps, its three-meter height bringing apprehension to everyone except for the slight general. Its titanium-chromed skull resembled a human’s in shape and design only, with soft-brained programming dedicated to Authority orders. Dozens of armed sentries peppered the Authority ranks, bias and aspiration among none.
He appreciated the imposing machines despite their technical imperfections, such as their literal communications. Unlike the rank and file, sentries were consistent, precise, and loyal, something humans sorely lacked.
“The highest ranking rebel we could find, General,” an adjoining officer said.
“Highest ranking,” Speer repeated, inspecting the prisoner. He wore frayed, ragged garments. Another sign of desperation in the rebel ranks. Menacing Authority troopers flanked him, sheathed in armored allegiance, grasping the prisoner tight. Black armor covered the troopers from top to bottom, and their ominous bucket helmets dismissed any remaining humanity underneath.
“Lead commander,” the officer amended.
Speer squinted as he searched the dejected raider’s face for weakness or other maddening shortcomings. “Explain why you think you can break into my camp, empty our cloud, and wipe our systems clean.”
The rebel fidgeted, his eyes hidden behind long strands of hair and avoiding the hard-lined sentry’s stone glare. His breath came shallow and fast. “We’re scavengers trying to protect ourselves and find refuge.”
“Scavengers.” Speer studied the disheveled rebel leader: his greasy appearance, gaunt and lanky. A commander who had allowed his rebel comrades to be caught and killed, and still he would lie. How this unorganized pack of dissidents had eluded his forces dumbfounded him. His blood pressure rose. “You think stealing back our intelligence prevents us from finding your headquarters? You stole information you shouldn’t have. I’ve lost many assets to reacquire it.” Authority decoders had not had time to decrypt and comb through the data, unable to determine the rebels’ location—a regrettable miss. “You have left me a mess to clean up.”
“We’re starving.”
Speer raised his eyebrows and smiled, his temper on a short fuse.
“And we need medicine,” the rebel continued, struggling in vain to free himself from the troopers’ tight grip.
“Your name,” Speer demanded.
“Jameson, sir,” the first officer offered. “His people turned him over when they were captured while trying to steal food provisions.”
Speer’s patience had been tested by the rebels many times, but he cared most about one thing. “Jameson. You have stolen information I want back.”
“We’re just scavengers trying to—”
“You’re rebel thieves, and now, many dead rebel thieves,” Speer interrupted. He calmed himself, if only to get his words out. “I wanted your bees and food stock, but hand over the download.”
Jameson somehow quickly maneuvered out of the troopers’ clutches, snatched a pistol from one of their holsters, and fired on himself, doubling over. The armed sentry fixed its weapon on the prisoner swaying on his feet. After interpreting its life reading scan, the machine lowered its imposing steel arm, its beady red eyes turning down as it accepted his self-inflicted demise.
“Another lost asset,” Speer said, mostly to himself. “Such impertinence.”
It had become common practice, uprisings and pillaging of Authority resources across the region’s other forty-three districts, but tonight, Speer’s camp had evidently been the weak link. No more would he be the fool. He composed himself to stop his shaking, an erupting rage simmering to a boil. As Jameson groaned at his feet, Speer swift-kicked the dying rebel writhing in the dirt like a defenseless snake.
As if realizing his misstep, the trooper retrieved his loose firearm off the ground in haste.
“Give me that,” Speer said, snatching the trooper’s pistol. He fired it and the trooper fell, curling in pain as nearby troopers and officers dutifully froze. There was no room for failure. He fired again, the dull blast echoing across the camp as the attempted coup’s liveliness died down. Order was restoring, and the rebel gave his last breath. Alarms hushed and spotlights fixed still, as if predawn itself had died. The sentry stood tall and silent and guarded, doing nothing more until it received a new order or, worse, sensed an infraction to act upon on its own.
***
She had always been the faster runner. Faster at everything. It was one of the many things she had on him, confounding her because Y was a half meter taller. A whole half meter.
They raced through what had once been a fertile corn field, where overfarming, the war, and then over the years, negligence and waste, had destroyed whole environments. Failed carbon sequestration laced the dead soil. Desperate honeybees had deserted the pesticide-laden and poisoned farmlands long ago, seeking safer habitats. Districts without pollinating bees saw their crops disappear, crops X had only seen in digital images. Apples and almonds were extinct. No one had seen cucumbers, grapefruit, or oranges either. Also, peaches and lemons and limes, bananas and melons and mangoes. Broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. Coffee, gone, plus apricots and plums and avocados and pumpkins. Grapes gone, and the wine with them, along with blueberries, strawberries. All berries.
Honey, gone.
She had learned from her elders that human populations first surviving the war and then the radiating aftermath later struggled with infertility and weakened immune systems. Then came starvation and dependence on the Authority for bland but dependable ration deliveries. The honeybees, having been the natural remedy for a dying Earth, and normally responsible for fertilizing the world, had forsaken the sick to protect themselves from ubiquitous poisonous threats and disappeared altogether. All the while, the Authority hunted for them.
“Hurry,” she whispered. The rising sun glinted on the dry, furrowed, and contaminated soil crumbling underneath her feet, the dirt clogs crunching apart like crusty sandcastles. In other parts, the rock-hard dirt painted the landscape like cracked concrete.
Y panted, looking like he would vomit any moment, as she monitored the open fields behind them to ensure they were not being followed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small tracker spy drone and released it into the distance, hoping to discover a nearbyfriendly, someone who could help them reunite with the rebels. With the quickness of a small hummingbird in the dawn, the spy drone buzzed away, appearing as a small red dot on her handheld sensor. “If our leadership is caught or killed, we were told to get to main camp ourselves. Maybe someone can help us.”
“Somehow I don’t remember that.”
“Maybe because you slept through our Instruction prep sessions,” X said, taking one of her insulin-regulating pills out of her small pack, noting she only had a few left: an auto-reg smart med. They couldn’t be out on their own for too long or she’d have problems.
“I only slept through the boring ones,” Y said before vomiting into the dirt.
“Maybe you need to read other things.” She tried not to laugh, for it would agitate him more, and he was in no form to withstand much more agitation. Letting loose his guts, and any spirit or enthusiasm with it, would continue to slow them down. No way could she carry him all the way back to home base, nor abandon him to succumb to element or adversary.
She frowned as the spy drone disappeared from the grid and wiped the pesky bangs from her eyes as she peered out after the spy drone’s release. The sunrise promised another hot day, blistering, and her hope that the drone would find help dissipated. Rise of the Authority, the new power structure emerging after the war, had segmented populations across the Third Continent into districts during the Dark Era decades before. When it had all started. Greedy political forces confiscated rights and property while feeding dependent populations poisoned foods (regulated foods, really). Armed citizens and factions had had enough, and through a proliferation of mass-scale armaments, chaos ensued, resulting in the annihilation of billions. She tried to shut out the graphic violence she created in her mind: unsuspecting families buried in routine and chores, then, disintegrating skin. Silent screams and haunting images oozed into her dreams.
As she had been told, the new dominant government across the hemisphere disarmed and controlled people in specific, controllable camps housing hundreds, sometimes thousands. Great metropolises, the epicenters of the revolts, particularly during the Great Uprising of the Millennium, were destroyed. Any hope of flourishing or survival, flattened. Elusive rebellious clans grew out of the rubble rather than accepting predetermined, calorie-controlled rations. With impassioned resilience, the kids’ clan back home flourished with population growth and expanding hidden farmlands as they grew their own food (and started to outgrow their resources) to fight off the Authority’s tyranny.
Y folded his torso over his legs and swayed side to side like a pendulum. His face turned white, or was it green? She heaved a sigh at the misfortune of having teamed up with him. “Great job in losing our backpack, Y,” she said, unable to help herself. “Those supplies would have helped us if we’re stuck on our own for days.”
“You told me to leave it,” he said, his face devilishly pale.
“Because I didn’t want us to die. It’s called a backpack. You don’t drop what’s on your back.”
“I told you before we left I didn’t want to be responsible for carrying all our stuff. I barely even got the data chip. You had to be the last one out of there planting the detonators.”
Her mouth agape, X said, “Even with the first unit depending on us, you were late.
You just couldn’t miss a chance to see the ravaging boll weevils, could you? Remember what happened last time? I keep saving your hide from Sangeeosay.”
“You’re so good to me,” Y said dryly, and he hurled again.
She felt bad for the boy who’d constantly been blamed for slowing down the mission, poked fun at by other rebel scouts. Being an elevated scout leader required more than a fascination with obscure facts about nature and weaponry, the subjects at which he excelled. They had been required to fulfill Instruction’s requirements of knowledge in geography, war history, physical endurance, physical limitations, and leadership, all which he disregarded as uninteresting and useless academics and effort. We can’t be seen outside where Authority drones can discover us, so why should we bother running for exercise? he had asked frustrated instructors. So she had been assigned him as the stronger partner.
Her heart pattered as she noticed a flickering searchlight in the distance—a hazy ball of light, coming and going as if both kind and insolent, unable to make up its mind. Is it coming closer? She tried to determine its direction, its will, and dried her straining eyes as they started to tear. In an instant the light disappeared, fading into the desert wilderness and wastelands. Staring did not return its fickle, distant glow. Perhaps the brightening dawn no longer required the searchlight, or she was seeing things.
The spy drone’s sensor showed something. Bug-light indicators said dozens of somethings were coming their way. She shuddered. They could not let the Authority recover the data and penetrate its encryption; the hidden rebel camp and all its resources were at risk. The prospect of future generations roaming an unpoisoned Earth would be dead. The sacrifice of a hundred rebels and several supply-stuffed runners would have all been for nothing, and there wasn’t enough of either to spare.
“I hope you’re done over there, sicky,” X said. “We need to move.”
***
General Speer toured the Authority camp’s main control room, wringing his hands in angst and wanting to strangle someone. His central command was in shambles, and he hated a mess. Firearm blasts had destroyed the mainframe computer, the entire installation’s brains. Walls were painted black with smoke, and the control panel’s video monitors, metal levers, and plastic knobs congealed into stinking wreckage, incinerated. Surveying the damage, his anger grew. He imagined his private files within the cloud being discovered. Exposed. A dead computer technician lay collapsed in her chair, burnt and singed in a smoldering blanket of fumes. They all should have seen this coming.
“General, no prints,” an approaching officer said. “The camera system was disabled, and there is no document of who came in and left Control. We are questioning all prisoners for information about the download.”
“No document?” Speer huffed, waving the officer away. “You mean the rebels did not sign in? How uncourteous. Out of my sight.”
“I have something, sir.”
Speer turned toward the entry, where Major General Leroi stood at attention, her small frame barely raised by her alert posture, elevated by what he thought to be unhealthy doses of aspiration. The sapphire-colored pin holding her hair up was against uniform code, the least of her transgressions. Only in her early twenties, Speer had decades more experience on her, and her last mistake had proven to him what experience was worth.
“What do you have, Major General Leroi?” Speer asked, studying her for weakness: the soft lines of her face and abysmally dark, assassin’s eyes that could mock him without a blink. “Tell me you didn’t lose more food and armaments to these rebel amateurs.”
“No, sir,” she said, staying on point. Her stiff, dull, tonal inflections reminded him of stone. In time, she would break. He would see to it. “We secured it all.”
“That’s refreshing,” Speer said, “considering this camp’s responsibility in the district. We’d have a mutiny on our hands if we couldn’t feed our camp. What else?”
“While questioning the troops, we discovered two children escaped the camp soon after its recovery, sir.”
“Children?” The rebels were inventive thieves, indeed.
“Probably twelve or fourteen years old.”
“That’s young for scouts.”
“That’s the point, sir. Unexpected and fearless.” Leroi pulled up the battered backpack at her side, opening its zippered mouth wide. From across the control room, Speer observed with interest. Of everyone reporting to him, Leroi currently annoyed him the least. She held up a beat-up, boxy device. “A trooper reported they left this behind. It uses obsolete GPS.”
“Old technology,” a nearby officer interjected unnecessarily, making Speer wince.
“They probably hoped it would work on Authority base, which of course it does not,” Leroi added as she rummaged through the backpack. “They had ice sheets to aid screening. But what’s most interesting is this.” She pulled out a small, amber vial with a stout cork. Loose honeycomb bits. “Honey.”
Speer’s mouth froze agape. The rumors were true. Clenching his teeth, his chest heaved. Here the rebels were with a stock of bees and stealing armaments from Authority camps across the badlands and wastes. The sole honeybees in the hemisphere, destabilizing everything.
Leroi pulled out a few paper-wrapped packages. “Probably makes anything taste better than the bland rations we provide civilian populations.”
The general studied Leroi for impertinence. Her tone, dry like bone, often held a thread of disrespect, fueling his distrust. He stepped over another dead officer. “The children must have the stolen download from our cloud. Send the trackers.”
“The soldier who let them pass has been detained, sir. He said he believed they were Loners, which is why he let them go.”
“Loners?” Speer scoffed. “Is he blind? Those bloodless freaks don’t invade government camps.” He grabbed a data entry log reader and, after determining it broken and useless, lobbed it across the room. “Terminate that officer. Useless fool.”
“A search team will be assembled,” she said, stoic.
“Immediately,” Speer added as he approached her, the angry veins popping out of his neck like wormy snakes. He would steal his information back and finally possess those invaluable bees. The more resources in his hands, the more Authority rank and control he could marshal. He stared into her eyes fixed with misplaced optimism and unfortunate naiveté. A downfall he could foresee, a premonition. “I cannot have a repeat of the Mines of Gurth.”
Satisfied with her subtle recoil, he could focus on his next move. Speer and his officers started to leave, one of them shamelessly inspecting Leroi up and down as he moved past. Officer Tippler had always had a thing for the major general, regularly toying with her without saying a word. As dashing and strapping as a corpse flower, his dark-buttoned eyes drew too close to his nose, as if pulled together by a drawstring.
Suddenly, Speer popped his head back in, laying out his final words on a platter. “If you want to be a leader in my force, Leroi, get this right. The Authority can’t afford to let you fail again.”
As a reader that's easily drawn in by a lovely book cover, I must say that I'm really glad the artwork of this particular book grabbed my attention.
In a dystopian world ravaged by environmental crises, a ragtag group of heroes race to escape the controlling, tyrannical hand of The Authority while having some rather important - and stolen - data on their hands. At the helm of the chase is The Authority's General Speer, a man as obsessed with obtaining more power as he is crooked.
Terrence King's Critical Habitat takes us across the desolate, and oftentimes dangerous, landscapes of a place where food and honeybees are intricately linked to power and control.
With the Authority hot on their heels, Rebels X and Y must brave quite a few obstacles to make it back to their base. Joining them along the way are an eclectic rolodex of characters who we gradually get to know a bit better thanks to multiple shifts in point of view.
Critical Habitat is a dystopian tale that incorporates elements which, considering the current trajectory of the world, occasionally feel very much grounded in reality at times.
Though I don't normally read this genre of Science Fiction, I'm really glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and read Critical Habitat. It was a well-paced, immersive, and definitely intriguing journey written in a style that made it a fun and easy read.
I enjoyed reading King's work and I would definitely read other publications of his. I especially loved how he expertly weaves together various genres to create a story that feels refreshingly inventive while still utilizing familiar tropes. Drama, dystopia, action, adventure, thrills, and even the occasional chills combine to create an impressive first entry of what will hopefully be a just as impressive series.