The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [0]
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POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.
This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.
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ISBN: 0-7434-8485-1
First Pocket Books hardcover edition October 2003
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This book is dedicated to Margaret Clark,
editor extraordinaire and all-round good soul.
Contents
Prologue
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
About the Author
About the e-Book
Prologue
On the day the world she knew was destroyed, Liz Tucker was content.
It started as a good day, a happy day. She’d returned home a week earlier from what she and other locals referred to as The Big City—which meant any metropolitan area outside the Florida Keys. Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles—all of them were alike, all crammed with people and homogenized high-tech corporate office buildings, the unimaginative streets filled with ground-car traffic, the skies with skimmers.
It was Liz’s job—as she saw it, anyway—to make those cities a little less homogenized, to give the buildings some character, some uniqueness, a design and style that broke with the ubiquitous sleek high-rises that made every city look the same. Boxes, Liz called them. No matter how slender and sleek they became, no matter how far they rose into the clouds or how brightly they gleamed—with their solar silver surfaces, reflecting heat in summer, collecting it in winter—they were still boxes, and people should not have to live or work or eat or love in boxes.
Businesses and personal clients soon learned to call on Elizabeth Tucker, AIA, only if they wanted something new, something different. Not a high-rise surrounded by a green grass lawn and moving sidewalks.
Which was one reason Liz was happy at the moment: she’d received news less than an hour before that her design, one of several bids, had just been accepted by Wel-Tech, one of the hemisphere’s largest health firms. It was a major assignment: a trinity of office buildings connected by a landscaped park. Liz had convinced them to go with strictly indigenous plants and to add a small lake, which would attract native waterfowl. She would be able, finally, to help Chicago look more like Chicago, instead of every other city in the world. There would be ducks, swans, geese.
She was happy, too, simply to be home. Before work commenced on the project, she had a few days to herself to relax.
Which meant that she was currently thirty feet below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface with her scuba gear. Just the basics: no need for a wetsuit here. The turquoise water was tepid against her skin. Warm as bathwater, amazed tourists always said.
There was no place in the world like the Keys; she was proud to be a local, a Conch. Fifty years ago, it had become a total tourist trap: fast food joints, strip shopping malls, wall-to-wall cheesy hotels lining the fragile, narrow coastline, hiding any view of the gulf. The place had been filled with people who wanted