Foxhound doesn’t care about the gaps in her memory. Being a Contractor keeps her occupied enough. Rather than dwelling, she rockets around the farthest reaches of the solar system, earning a steady paycheck hunting down ne’er-do-wells and enjoying a semblance of freedom most folks in the outer colonies can’t dream of.
So when she receives an urgent prisoner transfer request from a cult starship, she accepts the gig. She figures that transporting a bone marrow-eating serial killer from the cult’s colony back to Earth is just another well-paying job that’ll keep her mind off things. Upon discovering that the suspect in custody is an orphan girl—one that could pass for her much younger doppelgänger—she decides it’s time to get some answers.
But before she can piece together who the girl is, how their lives intertwine, and who orchestrated their implausible rendezvous, a group of violent prisoners aboard Foxhound’s starship breaks free. As the once-peaceful cultists take up arms in response, Foxhound teams up with her mechanized AI assistant and two of the cult’s wayward members to stop the barbaric escapees, elude the grasp of the cult’s radicalized leader, and protect and extract the mysterious, potentially dangerous girl.
Foxhound doesn’t care about the gaps in her memory. Being a Contractor keeps her occupied enough. Rather than dwelling, she rockets around the farthest reaches of the solar system, earning a steady paycheck hunting down ne’er-do-wells and enjoying a semblance of freedom most folks in the outer colonies can’t dream of.
So when she receives an urgent prisoner transfer request from a cult starship, she accepts the gig. She figures that transporting a bone marrow-eating serial killer from the cult’s colony back to Earth is just another well-paying job that’ll keep her mind off things. Upon discovering that the suspect in custody is an orphan girl—one that could pass for her much younger doppelgänger—she decides it’s time to get some answers.
But before she can piece together who the girl is, how their lives intertwine, and who orchestrated their implausible rendezvous, a group of violent prisoners aboard Foxhound’s starship breaks free. As the once-peaceful cultists take up arms in response, Foxhound teams up with her mechanized AI assistant and two of the cult’s wayward members to stop the barbaric escapees, elude the grasp of the cult’s radicalized leader, and protect and extract the mysterious, potentially dangerous girl.
Location: Unknown
Survive.
Move.
Survive.
Observe. Examine. Analyze. Extrapolate.
React. Retreat.
Survive.
Dodge. Guard. Protect.
Faster.
Advance. Attack. Annihilate.
Survive.
Slash. Maim. Rip. Crack. Devour.
Digest.
Satisfy. Nourish. Sustain.
Evacuate. Escape.
Survive.
♁
“Where the hell is everybody?” Corporal Vasquez, a senior Deadwood Mining Corporation Security officer, said aloud.
“How should I know?” replied his captive, a gaunt, worse-for-wear man known around the station only as “Fink.”
“Wasn’t talking to you.” Vasquez shoved Fink, sending the bald, slender man shoulder-first into one of the security substation walls. Fink tumbled to the ground.
In his four years working for DMC-Sec’s boots-on-the-ground District Management Team, Corporal Vasquez had never seen a security substation so empty. Even for Deadwood—one of the smallest backwater mining asteroids, floating around the Kuiper Belt so far beyond the reach of the sun’s rays—it seemed unusual, concerning even. There wasn’t even an officer stationed at the reception desk.
“Hey, watch it, man,” the prisoner whined, righting himself. He shook his wrists, jingling the cumbersome cuffs that kept his arms secured behind his back. “Kind of at a disadvantage here.”
In the short time Fink had been in his custody, Vasquez had already begun to understand why some of his fellow officers chose to use violence as a means of keeping the rabble around the station in check. It wasn’t his style. In fact, it was a point of pride to Vasquez that he never bent the rules when it came to enforcing what limited laws there were on Deadwood, but Fink had pushed him to his limits through sheer annoyance and indignation.
Vasquez had picked up Fink while undercover on a human trafficking sting. The skeletal man hadn’t been the target, and the corporal had blown his cover by bringing him in, but Vasquez simply couldn’t ignore the flagrance with which Fink had approached him. Worse, Fink was offering up children for sale. The conversation between them had lasted mere minutes before Fink was in cuffs and Vasquez was marching him back to the security substation for processing.
But now the pair stood in an empty lobby, and Vasquez was—for all his years of service—uncertain of how to proceed.
“Hello?” Vasquez called out, louder this time.
And then he heard the familiar sound of a heavy metal station door sliding open.
In unison, Vasquez and Fink turned to see a grubby man emerge from the rear of the substation, dressed in the drab, standard jumpsuit of a DMC-Sec officer. Except this one was covered in stains. He stopped in his tracks and stared at the pair of men standing in the lobby as he shoveled the last bite of the same fried junk food that already filled his cheeks into his mouth.
“My bad,” he mumbled, crumbs cascading from his lips down onto his uniform. “Bathroom break.”
“Officer Johnson,” Vasquez addressed his subordinate with a sigh.
Fink laughed.
“Hey, Vasquez. Who’s the perp?” Johnson continued, unconcerned with the dissatisfaction in Vasquez’s voice.
“Phineas Ames,” the corporal answered. “Goes by Fink. Tried to sell me some kids, so I booked him.”
“Weren’t you supposed to be undercover?” Johnson asked.
Vasquez nodded.
“Blew it all for this one guy, huh?”
“Say…” Vasquez ignored the jab. “Where is everyone?”
“Oh yeah.” Johnson perked up. “Some shit went down in the bowels of the station near the old refinery…number twelve, I think. I don’t have all the details, but I guess it’s a pretty big deal. Got a whole sector cordoned off. Everyone that’s not already on a job or doing rounds is down there…‘cept me. Said I should send anyone else that comes in, too. I guess that means you.”
“Comms?”
“Nah.” Johnson shrugged. “You know how it is down there, all that rock and metal makes shit go haywire. And the cams down there are all still out, too. You’re just gonna have to truck it thataway and see for yourself.”
“How long?”
“Uhh…” Johnson kept chewing.
“How long have they been down there?” Vasquez demanded.
“A few hours, maybe three?”
“You don’t know?”
“Been a little busy here all by myself,” Johnson scoffed.
“So it would seem,” Vasquez sighed. “Anyone report back?”
“Not yet.”
“And that doesn’t seem odd to you?”
Johnson shrugged.
“You call it in to the guys upstairs?” Vasquez pointed up, suggesting the direction of DMC-Sec’s orbital headquarters. “They know we’re short-staffed as it is. Maybe they can send some guys from another district.”
Johnson nodded, “Weir called it in before he left, but the request was…how did he put it? Promptly denied. You know how is with the fucking brass up there. We’re not exactly high on their list of priorities.”
Corporal Vasquez shook his head, took a deep breath, and shoved Fink forward. “Think you can handle this one?”
“I can put him in holding, sure,” Johnson replied, still chewing. “But I’m not doing your paperwork. You can take care of it when you come back up.”
“You’re a real pal,” the corporal retorted as he handed the man off to Officer Johnson.
Johnson tapped the panel on the wall and the door to the rear of the station slid open once more, locking into place with a loud thunk.
As Vasquez turned to leave, he glanced back over his shoulder one last time to see his prisoner, the man called Fink, give him a wry smile and a wink.
“Miss you already,” Fink sang before turning his attention to the other officer, his voice trailing off as the pair shuffled deeper into the security substation. “Officer Johnson, right? I think you and I are gonna be great friends. Got any more of those snacks?”
♁
Corporal Vasquez marched through the dimly lit depths of Deadwood Station with purpose, veering around piles of discarded refuse and scrap, staying tight around the station’s corners, and maneuvering through the labyrinthian corridors as only a true Deadwood resident could.
It wasn’t always this way. When he had first arrived on the asteroid, Vasquez was baffled by the station’s layout. As was often the case with colonies in the Kuiper Belt, Deadwood wasn’t built with people in mind. It had originated as a mining colony and, as such, the pathways carved through the cold, hard rock were determined by where the most valuable veins of ore were located. It was hardly a consideration whether that was done in a human-friendly manner or not.
Vasquez had always likened the station’s layout to the human circulatory system—the pathways seemed disorganized to the point of chaos when considered from up close, but a God’s-eye view elicited a different feeling in him. When looked at from afar—or through the lens of one of the station’s many holographic directories—there was an almost organic beauty and harmony to it. It was this perspective that had first started to chip away at the corporal’s distaste for Deadwood.
But falling in love with his new home had been slow going, as the rock’s strange allure was juxtaposed against its high rates of poverty and, therefore, crime. Even for an Outer Colony, Deadwood was particularly bad. And that wasn’t helped by the fact that Vasquez hadn’t even volunteered to transfer down to the station, so much as he was compelled to by a particularly corrupt former C.O. of his from back when he was on orbital duty.
Still, the corporal—a loyal member of DMC-Sec—had always been one to try to make the best of things. And in doing so he had come to see Deadwood as his home. Now, as he dragged his fingers over the jagged, exposed silicate, he felt connected to it. He could imagine the tangled web of corridors, from the vast and open ORC pod docking bay down to the most cramped service tunnels toward the core of the asteroid, as vividly as he could remember the flotilla of ships he grew up on.
The particular tunnel he now traveled down would take him on a relatively direct path to the station's innards, to where one of the rock’s refineries had once melted down Deadwood’s ores into purer, more easily transported forms. It was there he expected to meet the rest of his team, his fellow officers, and together they would investigate whatever it was that had transpired.
But that wasn’t what had happened. Not at all.
Instead, the closer he got to the refinery, the more he felt like something had gone terribly, horribly wrong. Only a few twists and turns away, he had anticipated running into one of the junior officers or even Miller, the greenest grunt on the squad. It was, after all, standard procedure to station officers outside active crime scenes in an effort to keep the lookie-loos and rubbernecks away. But when he rounded the final corner, just before the passageway opened up into the larger refinery, he found no one.
Corporal Vasquez stopped dead in his tracks, letting the last echoes of his heavy boots on the steel gangway fade. Instinctively, he hit his comms. “Corporal Vasquez reporting in, does anyone read me?”
Silence.
He continued, louder this time so that anyone in the neighboring corridors might hear him, “Corporal Vasquez here, can anyone hear me?”
More silence.
He continued forward, slowly this time, trying to make his footfalls as quiet as possible as he rounded the final corner into the larger refinery space. As odd as it was that none of his fellow officers were around, he was even more disturbed to realize that there didn’t seem to be any sounds of movement at all. All he could hear was the familiar and gentle hum the station always elicited, a product of shoddy electrics and the vibrations of far-off generators. But there should have been more. By now, he should be able to hear the voices of his comrades or at least the shuffle of bodies as they investigated. The sheer emptiness of it all made Vasquez all the more nervous.
The corporal carefully lowered his right hand down his side, reaching for his service pistol, only to remember that he was still dressed in plain clothes for his blown undercover job. He had no weapon, and it was too late to turn back. Besides, he thought, who am I going to go get to come and help…Johnson?
“If there’s anyone in here, come out now,” Vasquez announced. “You will not be harmed, I promise.”
But the only response he was met with was his own voice echoing through the refinery.
“Okay,” he continued, “I’m coming in.”
He cringed and shook his head at his own stupidity. Vasquez knew, whatever was going on down here, there wasn’t much a single, unarmed officer was going to be able to do. If there was someone—or worse, someones—waiting for him around one of these corners, they had the clear upper hand.
But Corporal Vasquez was a man of principle and, despite his apprehension and unpreparedness, some of his comrades-in-arms, the officers he had worked alongside these last four years might be down here and they might need his help. Sure, they weren’t all good people—some were nearly as corrupt as those he had left behind when he transferred—but they were still his people. And that was enough for him to keep going.
He moved deeper into the refinery, peeking into the spaces between dormant machinery, careful to check every corridor and corner as he slunk through. He moved forward, carefully and quietly, staying on guard.
As he crept, he picked up on the familiar scent of rust. Or maybe he had been smelling it all along. Except now it seemed…stronger, more pungent.
At first, he had chalked it up to all the old machines. While Deadwood, being an asteroid, didn’t have much in the way of atmosphere apart from what was recycled through the station’s array of life-support systems and their CO2 scrubbers, moisture still managed to collect here and there. That meant the old refinery had plenty of oxidized, corroded metal. But this was different.
There was only one other thing Corporal Vasquez could think of that smelled like this. Another familiar scent. One that sent chills up his spine. And then it hit him. Blood.
He was smelling blood.
♁
“Okay,” Corporal Vasquez muttered to himself, “you gotta move. One foot in front of the other…”
One foot in front of the other, his wife’s voice echoed in his head. It was a phrase she used often—a kind of meditation to remind him with each step that there were people depending on him. Jeanette, having grown up in a military family herself, had always known how hard it was for law enforcement in the Kuiper Belt. She had always supported him through the good days and the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. And she always knew what to say.
He took a step forward, just the slightest crack of a warm grin on his lips.
For Weir and his baby boy, Vasquez thought, remembering the silver chain Officer Weir always wore around his neck—a reminder of his son, Sterling.
Another step.
For Officer Starck and his new husband, Vasquez told himself, imagining the tungsten ring around his former partner’s finger—the corporal could never forget the smile on Starck’s face on his wedding day.
And another step.
For Officer Miller. Vasquez remembered the optical implant she had gotten after being assaulted by a dust junkie in one of the station’s lower dormitories only a few weeks after she landed the job. It wasn’t quite the right color, but she immediately loved it, said it gave her character and made her feel tough.
That’s why he needed to keep moving. For them.
Finally, Vasquez had shaken off his trepidation and continued forward, following the smell of blood as best he could. He knew he was close, he hadn’t rounded the last corner quite—
His foot kicked something and it went skittering across the metal gangway he walked down, a tinny sound echoing through the surrounding corridors. He froze once more, waiting for the sounds to die out and listening to see if anyone would come running at the jarring cacophony. But all he heard, still, was the same humming of the station.
Certain once more that he was still alone, Vasquez searched the walkway in front of him, looking for whatever it was he had bumped into. Only a few steps away, he found it lying before him: a combat boot, the same kind that DMC-Sec handed out to new recruits with their standard-issue jumpsuit.
Vasquez’s heart sank. But he kept moving, turning down one more corridor.
The room opened up before him into a larger area—what looked to have been a warehouse or staging area for the refinery’s end-product. The space was big. Bigger than perhaps the whole security substation. It was empty, too, with defunct flatbed haulers, the ride-on kind factory workers used to move product that was too heavy to carry from place to place, lined the walls. And the whole place was just as dimly lit as the rest of Deadwood, illuminated only by the same sparse lightbars that lined the rest of the station’s corridors.
What caught Vasquez’s eye, however, wasn’t the old machines or the high ceilings. Rather it was something at the center of the room, a dark heap that stood out as odd and out of place against the otherwise angular warehouse and its machines. But he couldn’t quite make out what it was in the faint light. So, he continued forward, step by step.
Carefully approaching, Vasquez squinted hard to force his eyes to finally adjust, but the smell filling the room had gotten so strong that the corporal began to gag and his eyes started to well up. Still, he was close enough for his brain to start making sense of the shapes before him.
Guns. There were service pistols—or at least parts of them—scattered around the center pile. And they looked…broken. Crushed? Some were in pieces. And there was more.
Cloth. The center of the mound was made up of drab fabric, which Vasquez recognized as clothing. It was an assortment of jumpsuits. The same ones worn by his fellow officers. He could even see the DMC-Sec logos emblazoned on some of them.
Vasquez blinked, clearing the tears from his eyes. Were they welling up from the smell, or was it fear?
He looked closer.
Not just jumpsuits. Protruding from the cloth, some at unnatural angles, the corporal could just make out the shapes of feet and hands, fingers and toes…even heads. But they looked wrong, incomplete.
Some were broken and wrenched apart. Others were ripped to shreds. A few of the limbs sticking out of the jumpsuits ended abruptly at bloodied stumps.
And the faces—what faces Vasquez could recognize—wore twisted expressions of sheer agony.
It wasn’t just his comrades’ clothing. It was their bodies. And among them, Vasquez recognized their personal effects.
Miller’s optical implant, what was left of it, dangled from her empty eye socket.
Starck’s tungsten ring was still wrapped around his broken and bloodied finger, his hand reaching out as if for help.
Weir’s sterling silver necklace, glinting in the low light, hung from a neck that no longer had a head attached to it.
All of them.
All the officers he had come to find.
They were all dead.
No, not dead. This was worse. Much worse.
Someone–no, something—had torn them apart, going so far as to crack their bones wide open.
It was a massacre.
Vasquez doubled over, slipping in the pooled blood at his feet before vomiting on the cold metallic floor below. Between heaves, he sobbed, unable to keep his sorrow contained.
“No, no, no, no,” he mumbled to himself, saliva dripping from his lips. He began to tremble, rocking himself back and forth, trying to make sense of the horror he had discovered.
But what could he do? Who could he call? Everyone he trusted was in pieces on the floor before him.
Then he heard it, a quiet, wet sound. Intermittent and too irregular to be the shifting of the old machines or the humming of the station.
Vasquez held his breath, trying to make it out. To him, it sounded familiar, almost human. And it seemed like it was coming from one of the dark corners of the warehouse.
Smacking. Slurping. Licking.
Whoever—whatever it was—was still in the room with Vasquez. And it was feeding.
The corporal rose to his feet, his eyes searching the darkness, sweat dripping down his face, and his heart beating through his chest.
And then he saw it, a shape crouched in the corner of the room, too dark to make out but for the glint of light reflecting off two big eyes.
Corporal Vasquez screamed.
♁
When Jeanette found her husband, he was unresponsive. Curled up in a ball on their bathroom floor, covered in blood, weeping and mumbling to himself, he didn’t seem to see or hear or feel her, no matter how loudly she shouted his name or shook him by the shoulders. Not even when she held his face up to her own.
She had never seen him in such a state, even after the hardest, most disturbing days on the job. Not after breaking human trafficking rings. Not after the drug raids. Not even after the worst murders he had investigated.
But now she couldn’t even get him to look her in the eye. He just stayed curled up on the floor, rocking back and forth, whispering incoherently.
For hours, he remained like that. Until finally, he began to calm down and come back to himself. He still didn’t talk to his wife or tell her what happened. But she pulled him to his feet and guided him into the shower.
She bathed him, washing the blood from his body and brushing the viscera out of his hair. And, as she cleaned him, he wept, sobbing deeply and heaving with his whole body.
Once the blood was rinsed down the drain, she climbed into the shower alongside him and held him in her arms, letting the warm water wash over both of them, holding him as close as she could.
Eventually, she helped him out of the shower, dried him off, and dressed him. He had ceased his incoherent mumbling but still would not speak to her. He could merely stare into her eyes with deep, profound sadness.
When she laid him in their bed and wrapped him in the sheets, he curled back into a ball, rolling to face the wall and remained that way for another hour or so while Jeanette gave the bathroom a thorough sterilization.
When she returned, her husband, Corporal Vasquez, a senior officer of Deadwood Mining Corporation Security, had finally fallen asleep. But she could tell the sleep was not restful. He moaned and sobbed and retched beneath the covers, unable to find solace even in dreams.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she placed a hand on his shoulder and, for a moment, he seemed calm, quiet, himself. But she knew, once he woke, whatever nightmare he had experienced would be far from over.
So, she rose to her feet and quietly tiptoed over to their dormitory’s integrated console, tapping the screen with a single finger to turn it on. Then, she clicked the little DMC-Sec icon on the desktop, opening a window to the security company’s intranet portal. She glanced into the upper corner of the screen to see that he was still logged into his account.
Thank goodness, she thought with a quiet sigh. She knew her husband wasn’t supposed to remain logged in on an unsecured network. He had made a bad habit of it in recent days. But to her, at this moment, it was a welcome one.
She tapped another icon on the screen that pulled up his district’s personnel communiqués and opened a new thread. A few more taps on the screen, after which she hit the submit button at the bottom.
Only a moment later, the console chimed.
New message, an alert showed on the screen. She opened it, breathing a sigh of relief.
Sick leave request approved, Corporal Vasquez, it read.
Home to notorious criminals fleeing justice, the asteroid Deadwood was never a safe place. But something far deadlier is lurking just under the surface of the mining colony. Something brutal and merciless, that leaves only death and gore in its wake. The Contractor Foxhound doesn't know that. She's only here to catch a human trafficker called Fink, and get back to Earth to collect the bounty on his head. Neither does Sister Penelope, a nurturing and peace-loving woman striving to protect the forgotten children of Deadwood. Foxhound's, Fink's, and Penelope's lives collide with devastating results, but the real danger is closer to them than they think.
Hounds of Gaia starts with a bang, steadily building up the horror of the tunnels underneath Deadwood. The action-packed prologue is sure to keep readers turning pages.
The worldbuilding is extremely detailed, which works well in the first few chapters of the book. It's interesting and immersive, and makes the reader more interested in the setting. Yet as the story unfolds, the exposition becomes clunky and often unnecessary. These information dumps bring the action of the story to a shrieking halt, and sometimes repeat information that the reader already knows. It also took away some of the mystery about Foxhound's identity. Most readers will be able to figure out where she comes from long before it's ever revealed.
The uninterrupted action sequences themselves are excellent. Thrilling chases through seedy neighborhoods, criminals hopped up on elicit drugs, futuristic weapons, and bouts with some truly evil villains will keep readers on the edge of their seats.
While the setting is given great depth, the heroes are not. The three protagonists - Foxhound, Penelope, and a girl with no name - all suffer from thin characterization. Foxhound is a tough woman with a job to do; Penelope is a kind woman who cares deeply about the children in her care; the girl is an innocent child. Those are their character traits, and not much else. As this is the start of a series, however, there is plenty of room for character growth and development in coming books.
On the antagonist side of things, Fink and his criminal associates are utter delights whenever they appear. They revel in their villainy, which is really fun to read. Like the other characters, they aren't fully fleshed out, but given their role in the story (and how fun they are), they don't need to be.
Overall, Hounds of Gaia has a lot of potential for a sci-fi series. Sci-fi fans who enjoy plot-driven stories and detailed worldbuilding will enjoy this book, and the ending will keep readers curious for the next volume.