Explorer E-Book

Robin Brande

• Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

X-Files meets X-Men in this extraordinary series by award-winning author Robin Brande.

ONCE YOU LEAVE EARTH, GET READY FOR THE RULES TO CHANGE.

A standalone collection in the Dove Season Universe.

Sharman Hix leads her first exploratory team out to unknown and uncharted planets filled with creatures no one has ever seen. Every new step forward is a risk. And those risks are more dangerous than any of them imagined.

Biologist and alien hunter Julie Trident wants to help rather than harm. But her sympathetic heart exposes all of them to disaster.

Hotshot pilot Arnie Camper never turns down the chance to test some new experimental aircraft. But flying on other planets is a whole other game.

Kirsten Simmens can hear alien voices. What she hears this time leads her to dark places where no one else can follow.

Pilot Frieda Wiles depends on her orderly, rational mind. But faced with the dangers of a bizarre new planet, is it time to rely on intuition instead?

The universe is full of secrets. Only the explorers will discover what they are.

Don’t miss the other books in the Dove Season Universe:
Dove Season
Finder
Seeker
Believer
Maker

Leseprobe

EXPLORER

DOVE SEASON

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

EXPLORER

(Dove Season)

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

Copyright 2025 by Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

Cover art by Alex Golke/Deposit Photos

Cover design by Ryer Publishing

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN: 978-1-952383-47-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-952383-46-5

* * *

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Dove Season Universe

The Winds of a Yellow Planet

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

On the Shore of a Lunar Sea

On the Shore of a Lunar Sea

The Canyons of a Red Desert Plain

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

The Sounds of a Crystal Planet

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Glass Mountains of an Ice Planet

The Glass Mountains of an Ice Planet

The Grasslands of Planet Onyx Green

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

More in the Dove Season Universe

About the Author

More from Robin Brande

Show Your Book-Loving Style!

A Mind for Mysteries

The Miraculous Unknown

Mountain Tough

Parallelogram Quartet

Also by Robin Brande

DOVE SEASON UNIVERSE

RECOMMENDED READING ORDER

Dove Season

Finder

Seeker

Believer

Maker

Explorer

EXPLORER

THE WINDS OF A YELLOW PLANET

1

Sharman Hix still wasn’t sure about this. The fact that she had kept it secret from everybody else at the Factory had to be a sign. There was no question that technically she had sneaked the old man out.

But Major Fritz Zimholt had come willingly. Enthusiastically. Maybe even, Sharman was sorry to see, with a feeble kind of desperation.

She only hoped this journey wouldn’t end in disappointment. Or worse, disaster.

She loved Fritz Zimholt. Loved him like a father. Over the fifteen years she had worked for him, piloting his experimental aircraft and training other pilots to fly, Sharman had come to think of Fritz as more than a boss, more even than a friend and mentor. He had replaced her family. Father, mother, and brother. Grandparents. The truth was, Fritz had been raising Sharman since she was eighteen. Whoever and whatever she was now, at thirty-three, she had Fritz to thank.

Sharman was already a pilot in high school. She had learned to fly through a program at her elementary school, back when she was only eleven. It was like putting on shoes that were perfectly and especially made for her. All of her flight instructors told Sharman she was a natural. But no one needed to tell her that. Sharman could already feel it from her very first flight. Like she had finally woken up in her right life.

She had her plan. College, advanced science degrees, Air Force, NASA. All on a path to become an astronaut.

Then Major Fritz Zimholt called her just a few days after she graduated from high school, and made her a better offer. A way to reach the stars much faster if she came to live at the Factory, Fritz’s hidden facility in the mountains of Utah, to be a test pilot for him.

Best decision of Sharman’s life. She couldn’t even imagine what the past fifteen years would have been like outside in the regular world. She still missed her family at times—something she never admitted to a soul—but other than that, Sharman was exactly where she wanted to be.

But not if she was going to lose Fritz. Not this soon. He was only eighty-three. People were living past a hundred routinely now, weren’t they? Why should Fritz be any different? Sharman still had so much to learn from him about so many things. It was all happening too fast. She wasn’t ready.

Until just a few months ago, Sharman wouldn’t have thought of Fritz as old. Mature, yes. Wise and experienced. But still hardy, still tall and imposing, still in command of his body and his mind.

Not anymore. His mind still seemed as sharp as ever—during the fewer and fewer hours he could stay awake—but Fritz’s body was a mess. He wouldn’t say what it was, but anyone with eyes could see. The dramatic weight loss, leaving his skin bagging on his arms and face. The strange chalky look of his skin. His sunken eyes. His halting gait. Loss of what remained of his white hair.

There were other signs, too, and they all added up. Fritz was dying. And maybe there was nothing anyone else could do.

But Sharman could do something. Maybe. How could she be sure? It was only an idea, a theory. Born of a wild and maybe irrational hope. But even though Fritz didn’t say it, Sharman could see it in his reaction: What did he have to lose? What other options did he have?

If she could save him…

But if it didn’t work, then he might die even sooner. Maybe even in the next hour.

Could Sharman stand to see that happen? To know that she was the one responsible?

But if she could save him…

Fritz dozed uneasily in the pilot’s chair beside her. Sharman had watched the seat mold itself carefully around Fritz, the way it did around any pilot who sat there, but she thought maybe the pod took a little more time than usual. Maybe it sensed the pain in Fritz’s bones. Sharman sent her pod a warm thought of gratitude. Good boy.

Sharman’s relationship with her pod—her connection to it—had evolved over the past several years. She had always known it was alive and sentient, but she no longer thought of it as a temperamental horse she was learning to ride.

Now she knew it was part of her. An extension of her own body and mind. The man who had originally helped design the pods, Reggie Swan, taught Sharman to think of them as another layer of her own skin.

Sharman no longer needed the lighted circlet she used to wear around her head to communicate with her pod. She could do it easily now, just by tuning in to what she thought of as her pod’s particular wavelength.

Once she saw that Fritz looked comfortably settled in the single seat, Sharman asked her pod to make more room and to create a seat for her. The pod smoothly expanded from its single-seater, spherical shape, into a double-wide with a second chair for Sharman. It also raised the dome above them to accommodate Fritz’s height. Sharman and Fritz used to think the only people who could pilot the craft had to be small. Under about five foot-seven. But now they understood that the pods would adjust themselves to suit their favorite pilots and passengers. That included Fritz.

No matter what size the pod was, single or double or occasionally even larger, the inside of it was always cozy and sparse. There were no controls. No buttons to press. No levers to push or pull. The lower half of the pod looked gray from the outside, and the top half was a clear dome. The material it was made of rendered it invisible as it flew. Only Sharman’s fellow pilots, wearing flight suits made of that same material, could recognize other pods in the air.

Sharman was wearing one of the special flight suits now, in her preferred color of matte gray. It was a nice muted color against her dark skin. She had never dressed for attention, not even when she was younger. She just wanted to study and learn and fly. Then and now.

Fritz wore a black flight suit that made him look like a scuba diver. He had the hood pulled up over his bald head and he wore the pliable black boots that were a standard part of the kit. Both of their flight suits fit them like a comfortable second skin and kept their bodies at a perfect temperature. And the material made the two of them as invisible as the ship. It was some kind of alien tech. Fritz had never told her more about it than that.

Sharman pulled up the thin hood of her suit and snugged it around her face. She tucked away the few stray curls of her short black hair. She reached down and removed her pliable black boots and stowed them at the side of the footwell. Then she settled into her seat.

As the chair began its process of molding around her, fitting her perfectly underneath her bent arms and around her torso and legs, Sharman spread her bare toes against the raised platform that angled toward her at the base of her feet. She liked to feel the pod, skin to skin. She always thought it made a better connection.

Sharman spoke inside her mind and gave her pod the coordinates of where she wanted to go. Then she added the step Reggie Swan had taught her when he came to visit several years ago. It was an advanced mental maneuver. Something Reggie said he learned from three extraterrestrial friends of his. He called it mental physics. A way that Sharman could tune her mind and heart into a kind of universal time map, to direct the craft straight where she wanted it to go without having to traverse any distance in space. They would arrive in an instant, like the snap of a rubber band.

Even though she knew the exact coordinates of the spot where she wanted to take Fritz on the yellow planet, she wanted to let him see the whole planet first, from a distance, to take it all in.

Sharman knew Fritz was like her, always wanting to savor the wonder of a new experience. Fritz had a scientific, mechanical mind, but he was also a lover of beauty and the mysteries of the universe. She wouldn’t cheat him of this.

“Fritz,” she said gently. “Fritz. We’re here.”

The old man roused himself. He blinked a few times, trying to focus.

Then he pushed himself upright in his seat. A smile broke across his face. Sharman smiled just to see it.

Overall, the planet in front of them was a strange mustard yellow. It had darker patches in certain areas, dark brown, some of them black where a lava-like layer extended beneath some of the many dead volcanoes Sharman and her five-person crew had found here on their first visit just two days ago.

The planet had enough of an atmosphere that Sharman could see a thin film of cloud or mist in a section over to her right. Although considering the high winds on the planet surface, it could just as easily been pockets of dust storms or even tornadoes stirring up the powdery yellow dirt.

From here it was hard to see how rugged the surface of the planet was. A mixture of hard-packed dirt and rock, with a thick layer of loose, fine dust coating everything. The constant heavy winds kept the dust swirling and churning, reducing visibility to just a few feet in any direction.

Rising from the yellow, dusty plains were thousands of bare, rocky mountains. Interspersed among them were an equal number of dead volcanoes, some of which had once spewed their black lava across the plains and down into the valleys. If it had ever been habitable or hospitable, it certainly wasn’t now. It was a dead planet covered with dead volcanoes.

A dead planet except for the one spot where Sharman was taking Fritz now.

Let him see for himself. Let him decide for himself. Sharman couldn’t make that decision for him. Her whole plan involved a terrible level of risk. There was no guarantee it would work. No guarantee at all. In fact, there was probably only the slimmest chance that she could pull it off.

But they had come this far. She should at least show Fritz the place. If they turned around after that and went back to the Factory, no harm, no foul.

But if she lost her nerve now, she’d never forgive herself. Fritz should be the one to decide.

He stared out through the dome of the pod, surveying with apparent delight the mustard-colored planet before him. “What did you call it?” he asked.

The question surprised her. It wasn’t Sharman’s place to name the planets. That was for people on the science team. And as far as she knew, they were still calling it by a collection of letters and numbers. C5V-46. The plan was to come back here and map it, explore further over a series of more visits. But Sharman didn’t want to wait for that. She saw what she saw. And immediately thought of Fritz.

“Why don’t you name it?” she said. It seemed right that he should.

“I’ll think of something,” Fritz said. His eyelids made the kind of slow blink that signaled he might be falling asleep again. Sharman hated to see it. This vigorous man, so changed.

She needed to hurry up while he still had any energy to bring to the effort. Sharman couldn’t see from here the place where she wanted to take him. And she didn’t want to risk flying the pod through whatever that atmosphere below was made of. But she didn’t have to. There was an easier way to do it.

Sharman knew the coordinates. She told her pod. It snapped them to the planet’s surface.

The pod landed on a hard, flat plain where the yellow dust swarmed. The ferocious wind blew horizontally in this section and pelted the fine sand against the clear dome at the top of the pod. Sharman could feel the high winds rocking her craft. For the moment she stayed where she was.

Fritz had fallen asleep again, just in the silent space of the past few minutes. She felt reluctant to wake him. Fritz’s forehead was creased in a frown. Was he in pain? Having a nightmare? He moaned. That was enough. Sharman covered the top of his vein-lined hand with her own.

“Fritz?” she said softly. “We’re here. Let’s suit up and go out.”

2

Their head gear was a strange piece designed by Reggie Swan. When Sharman first met Reggie, nine years ago, all she saw was a fit old black man, maybe in his seventies or so, with skin as dark as hers and a mass of hair threaded through with lots of gray. She had no idea at the time what a brilliant mind lay beneath those gray hairs.

Reggie brought a friend with him that first day.

Commander Sharman Hix. An older Sharman. Some future Sharman. Twenty-four-year-old Sharman got to meet her future self.

Older Sharman couldn’t stay long, she had spaceship commanding to do—a fact that current Sharman still clung to and reminded herself of only about twenty times a day.

But Reggie Swan stayed on. He had a lot to discuss with Fritz. And in the almost year that he stayed, he taught Sharman a lot about the pods he had designed for Fritz back in the day.

Reggie also made some new equipment for the future work he knew Fritz and Sharman and others at the Factory would be doing one day.

And that equipment included the head gear Sharman helped Fritz put on and activate while they were still safely inside the pod.

Like the pods, the head gear was alive. Alive and thinking for itself.

It was made of the same clear material that formed the upper domes of the pods. It was transparent, light weight, unscratchable, unbreakable.

It took Sharman a while to understand that Reggie wasn’t building with that material, wasn’t constructing a piece of gear, he was growing it. Like cells in a Petri dish. Like the kind of spare body parts that can now be grown in laboratories just from the smallest sample of human tissue.

Reggie talked to his growing head gear. He talked through what exactly he wanted to accomplish. Something light weight, indestructible, and something that would mold itself to each individual wearer, the same way the pods’ seats molded to the shape of their pilots.

It had to preserve life. It should maintain the perfect atmosphere inside the clear dome so that the person wearing it could breathe as easily as standing at sea level on Earth.

It had to keep out whatever noxious gases or choking atmosphere might surround the person on another planet, outside the pod, wherever they happened to be.

It had to provide superb visibility. In darkness, it lit up. In direct light, it darkened to protect the eyes.

In pelting dust storms, like this one, or in snow storms or rain or whatever might obscure the wearer’s sight, the head gear shed the particles before they could accumulate.

Visibility might still be limited, like it was on the surface of the yellow planet, but only because the dust filled the air so thickly it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. But it wasn’t the head gear’s fault. Sharman never had to wipe her hand over it or shake the powdery dust off. Almost as soon as the dust touched the head gear, the material cleared it away.

And last, the head gear had to fit as comfortably as the flight suits. It had to fit slimly to the head—not a big bubble, like a helmet—so that the wearer could climb, run, even swim without ever having to worry about the head gear getting in the way or in any way holding them back.

And so what Sharman pressed against Fritz’s forehead now was a simple gelatinous sheet of the thin, raw material. Like putting on a sticky note that covered the length of his face.

“Breathe,” Sharman reminded him. “One breath in and out.”

It was the out breath that mattered. The material took information from both the wearers’ skin and from their exhalation. Fritz drew in a shallow breath and overemphasized the exhale. It made him start to cough. But the head gear didn’t mind that. It was busy doing its work.

In half a minute it had constructed a protective sheath around Fritz’s head. It was shaped to his individual features and sat just beyond the surface of his skin. Whatever filtering system Reggie had created, Sharman still didn’t understand. All she knew was that there was plenty of room to breathe easily and she never felt like she was suffocating or overheating.

She applied one of the short ends of a second gelatinous sheet to her own forehead. She kept the hood of her flight suit in place, covering the back of her head and the edges of her face up to where the outside edges of her eyebrows began.

Sharman took a breath in and blew it out. The head gear grew into its finished form. Sharman took another few breaths, just to test it, although she knew by now that she could trust it. For all the head gear she had tested over the past several years, not a single one of them had failed.

Granted, most of the tests had been done while she was still flying in the Wasatch Mountain Range outside Salt Lake City. But she had tested it through wind and rain and snow, tested it at night and in bright sunlight. The head gear did what Reggie said it would do. Sharman had faith in the designer and in what he grew.

Sharman pulled her boots back on. Then she turned to Fritz and placed her hands on his shoulders. She looked him in the eyes.

“It’s awful out there,” she said. “The wind’s going to knock you down. It almost carried me away.”

Fritz smiled at that. Sharman was as petite as a pixie. But Fritz didn’t say that a puff of air could carry her away.

Instead he nodded. He understood. He was letting her call the shots. It made Sharman feel strange. Strange and sad. Fritz should be in charge. But he couldn’t be. Not the way he was now.

Maybe on the return trip. She hoped it with all of her heart.

“You hold my hand, understand? Never let go.”

Fritz nodded. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked tired. Tired and sick and worried. But also ready. Determined. He was with her. He wasn’t backing down.

“Okay,” Sharman said, “here we go.”

The lid of the pod slicked back into the lower edge of the frame. Dust came storming into the craft.

“Make it fast!” Sharman shouted to be heard above the wind. She helped Fritz climb out. He wasn’t steady. She had to do a lot of the lifting.

She told the pod to close up, quickly. It slicked its dome lid up and over again. Sharman stood outside the pod gripping Fritz’s hand tightly, holding him close against her side.

His grip was weak in return. His legs looked shaky. She had brought the pod as close to the phenomenon as she dared. She didn’t want to risk landing on top of it.

One step, two, three, she had already paced it out a few days ago. Just ten steps. The wind beat against her body and her head. It wanted to get into her flight suit, into her eyes and mouth, but everything she wore held tight and kept the dust and pelting sand away.

There was no point in asking Fritz if he was doing all right. She would have had to shout it, and what if the answer was no? She was still going to keep dragging him forward, leaning into the ferocious wind. There was no going back. Not yet. Just a few more steps⁠—

And then they entered the wind break that Sharman had found two days ago. Like pushing through a curtain hanging over a door to a place where suddenly everything was quiet and still.