Jupiter's Sword Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Front Matter

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Backmatter

  Jupiter’s Sword

  Book 2

  of

  The Earth Dawning Series

  For Jenny, L., and C.

  Would you like a free copy of another bestselling space opera novel?

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  www.smarturl.it/freetg

  Other books by Nick Webb

  The Legacy Fleet Series:

  Constitution

  Warrior

  Victory

  Independence

  Defiance

  Liberty (coming fall 2017)

  In addition, there are Legacy Fleet novels written by other authors (with Mr. Webb’s permission):

  smarturl.it/legacyfleet

  The Pax Humana Saga:

  1: The Terran Gambit

  2: Chains of Destiny

  3: Into the Void

  Prologue

  Jupiter

  Io Base

  Shuttle Solara

  “Shuttle Solara, this is Io base.” The voice came across the speakers with a burst of static. “Your arrival is not scheduled. Please halt your approach and state your business.”

  Inside the tiny cockpit of the cargo hauler, Sam Thorne jolted to wakefulness. The edges of the metal pilot’s seat were digging into his back. He dropped his feet down from the control panel with a thud, resting his arms on his knees and rubbing at his face with a groan.

  “Shuttle Solara, this is Io base—”

  “Io Base, this is Sam Thorne of the Harrick Corporation. I’m here….” Sam’s brow furrowed. He sorted through his memories. He got confused sometimes. Before he woke, he’d been thinking of endless towers of glass and steel, huge fields of waving grass. Another life. “The UN chartered my ship to bring food and water to the outer colonies.” He spoke the words by rote before he even remembered the reason for being here, but as soon as he had said it aloud, everything fell into place in his head. Food aid from the Telestine missionary groups. The aid that filled the gap between humanity’s first, fumbling attempts at farming in space, and the desperate needs of its people.

  He turned a data key over and over in his fingers as he waited for their response. He remembered that there was a purpose to the key, but he could not remember what that was. So many keys, so many secrets.

  A month. An entire month he’d spent in this hold, alone and shrouded in near darkness. No one to talk to, though that was fine by him—Sam never had much to talk about. There was so much of his mind that was closed off to him.

  Not much to do on the ship, either. The hauler was simple by design, simple being one of the best protections against mechanical failures, and it devoted the bulk of its space to the massive cargo hold. The crew quarters were small, nominally big enough for three, and made of a lifeless grey metal grating that never quite seemed to purge heat the way it should. The ceilings were almost, but not quite, tall enough for him to stand up straight.

  Seemed like he hadn’t stood up straight in years.

  There was a metaphor for humanity’s current condition in there somewhere.

  He looked up wearily. No windows here—a structural weakness, another thing to go wrong—and so, instead of a tiny shape silhouetted against Jupiter’s bands, Io and its base were only visible as the green indicator light showing an open comm channel.

  “Shuttle Solara, do you have any credentials?” The man who spoke was trying to be measured, but Sam knew the sound in that voice. A shipment of food and water, sent as aid—free. Nothing meant as much to the people of the outer colonies as water. “We have no word of an impending shipment.”

  “Emergency shipment.” Sam’s voice was level; it always was. “They’re afraid supply routes might get cut off by the Telestines after the attack on Mercury.” For a moment, he thought he felt a spike of emotion; rare for him. It was gone quickly.

  There was a long pause.

  “We’re sending you instructions to dock at the base. Standby.”

  Sam nodded to no one and sat back in his chair. He rubbed the stubble on his face, absently stretching his cheeks down towards his jaw. He’d gotten used to shaving in the past few years, but he hadn’t had the water to do that regularly in the past few weeks. Before that….

  That was one of the things he couldn’t remember.

  He guided the shuttle down until the landing systems took hold, and then he got ready. His boots went back on. The disk went into a backpack, along with a heavy box.

  The box. The box was another key.

  He had his ID chip in case anyone needed to check: Sam Thorne, mechanic, thoroughly unremarkable in every way. He was waiting at the door when it opened.

  “Mr. Thorne?” A man came up the gangway to offer a hand. “Daniel Strait. Boy, are we glad to see you!”

  Sam forced a smile. “I take it stores are running dry?”

  “Friend, you may be a Martian, but around here, for the next few hours, you’re a goddamn celebrity. Come on.”

  A Martian. The other man assumed incorrectly. Sam looked over at him as they stepped down into the gloom of the colony. Strait’s joviality was uncomfortable, forced. They were famously reclusive, these settlers—it took a special type of person to survive here. Jupiter’s radiation lashed Io relentlessly, and the few hundred settlers lived in sweltering darkness below heavy radiation shields on the spaceward side of the moon. As with the outer colonies near Saturn and Pluto, most of the people here had pasts they were running from. They didn’t like outsiders … unless, of course, those outsiders came with shipments of food.

  Strait parted a path for them through the steady stream of settlers coming to unpack the cargo hauler.

  “I’m gonna go help.” He jerked his head back towards the way they’d co
me. “Living quarters are that way, though, case you wanna rest up before you go back out. Take any berth, anything you need.”

  It was the most generous offer Sam had ever received. He had memories of sleeping on the floor of a cargo hauler, a few years back. Your kind sleep where they’re told. Beds’re for humans. Now, he bobbed his head. They wouldn’t notice his reticence, he was fairly sure. “Thanks,” he muttered.

  Strait was already on his way back, but he turned to call back down the passage. “No news?” He paused. “Attacks?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Did you see the Secretary General before you headed out?”

  Sam shook his head. “Picked this up at one of the freighters ‘round Vesta.”

  Shame. “S’pose the Old Man wouldn’t talk to pilots. If you do, though….” The man’s face split into a grin. “Tell him the surrender was shit.”

  “Will do.”

  Sam walked away as the man’s rough chuckle echoed behind him. He wasn’t used to having opinions on people, but he liked the ones out here. They weren’t ones to start a fight, but they didn’t back down if someone else started one either. That suited him.

  His feet carried him to the living quarters and beyond, the backpack dragging down against one shoulder, the box inside like a lead weight. The cramped corridors grew quieter as he walked. A schedule on the wall told him he was four hours from a shift change.

  It should be enough time.

  It wasn’t hard to find the garage. He’d grown up with open space all around him, but he liked tiny settlements. There was a logic to them: no space without a purpose, and every space in a pattern. He looked around for cameras and people, but there were none of either. That was good. He wasn’t sure why he was looking, or why there shouldn’t be anyone here, but he knew it was good that he was alone.

  The surface garage bay held all sorts of mining equipment he passed as he crossed towards one of the ground crawlers. The ceiling was higher here, to accommodate the massive vehicles, each one heavy with radiation shielding. He paused by a rack of radiation suits, warring with himself. The same surety that had carried him through the rest of this told him that he didn’t need one, but shouldn’t he?

  His feet were already taking him away. He shrugged off the backpack and knelt to take out the heavy box. A single vial went into a large, bullet-shaped metal canister. He turned it over in his hands. Had he seen it before? He wasn’t entirely sure how he knew how to work it, but he was accustomed to knowing things that way—knowledge born of instinct. He loaded it into the mechanical arm of the ground crawler—another piece of equipment he couldn’t remember learning about—and hauled himself into the seat, closing the heavy door behind him.

  The data disk fit right into the comm panel and the crawler shuddered as it started up. The crawler rolled to the big doors, out into the first radiation-shielded airlock, into the second—outer settlers were a big fan of multiple backups—and out onto the sickly yellow-green plains of Io. In the distance, the nearest volcano was belching fire and raining hell onto the plains around it.

  Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to go that far.

  He wished, vaguely, that he could see Jupiter. The black above him, shimmering with stars, was big, but there was no way to tell how big. If he was on the planet side of Io though he could have seen all of it, seen how massive Jupiter was—and how vast space was to dwarf even the planet. Yes, he would have liked that.

  He wasn’t sure how long it took him to get where he was going. He often didn’t seem to be aware of the passage of time though, and he didn’t particularly mind waiting. When the ground crawler crested a hill to the dig site, he leaned forward in his chair to look.

  It was time to start the broadcast. He pressed a button on the comm panel and guided the ground crawler down along the rim of the bowl. A massive structure loomed above, heat- and magnetic field-powered gears spinning endlessly. A new project. A secret project.

  The UN thought no one knew. The Secretary General thought he could order a surrender and still keep his pet projects and no one would hear about it. The Old Man was delusional. Sam felt a moment of pure disgust, and knew somehow that it was not his own emotion—it was far more intense than what Sam felt, ever.

  Alarms were going off nearby. He was not supposed to be here. He didn’t pay attention to them; they weren’t important. The ground crawlers were not fast, and the others could not reach him in time. In time for what, he was not entirely sure. But it was going to be amazing. Somehow, he was sure of that.

  He pressed the button to extend the robotic arm and guided the ground crawler to one of the massive drills that hung waiting, off to the side of the open lava fields. The payload was inserted and he moved the drill over to attach it to the structure. It was easy. It had to be, without the ability to face the radiation.

  He wasn’t feeling very good. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and tried to focus—maybe he should have donned a rad suit? The drill was going down, beginning to spin. It broke through the crust of the lava field and drove down still farther. Tiny jets of lava spat glowing molten rock into the air and the drill sank slowly until the lava closed over the top of it. Down, the shaft went, and further down.

  Down was good. He was pretty sure of that.

  The broadcast was almost over. Sam waited, loosely cradling a tiny mechanical box in his hands. He wondered what was coming next.

  He would never know. The broadcast clicked to a stop, and his fingers moved of their own volition, pressing down on the button at the top of the box. The blast tore up and out, shooting through Io’s crust in a sudden burst of energy, throwing magma into space and taking half of the moon’s surface with it. There was a flare of light, brighter than anything Sam Thorne had ever seen, but he was already incinerated by the time the light died and left the erupting ruins of what had once been one of Jupiter’s largest moons drifting in cold space.

  Chapter One

  Ganymede

  Perseverance Station

  Haven’s Bar

  Pike had forgotten how loud space stations were. Ships were loud enough—every creak of machinery carrying through the framework along with the endless vibrations of footsteps and murmurs—and that was just the small ships he was used to. He’d spent most of the past few years on the Aggy, rarely venturing into the stations they docked at. He had forgotten, entirely, about the unrelenting noise.

  It was even worse in the bar. There was no escaping the scent of the alcohol and sweat. Bodies and stench and loud, pulsing music.

  The girl, Dawn, raised in the sterile confines of the laboratory and set loose first into the wilds of the Rockies, wrinkled her nose. Her gaze was pained.

  “Do you want to go back?” Pike asked her in a low undertone.

  She shook her head.

  He was not surprised. She had not been shackled to her bed in the med bay of the Intrepid, but she might as well have been a prisoner for all she’d been able to leave. Walker had insisted that the locked door—and the guards—were as much for the girl’s protection as anything else, but Pike saw the fear in her eyes every time she looked at the girl. Later, the isolation was replaced with slave labor, as Walker required Dawn to sift through Telestine data streams for her. There were no bars on her door, and she was given the same meals as anyone else aboard the fleet—indeed, with her own room, she might have been called pampered. But prison was prison.

  “For God’s sake, she’s on our side,” he’d hissed at Walker a few days ago.

  Walker had paused before speaking, uncharacteristically hesitant. “She’s done things that benefit us,” she said carefully. “In the short run.”

  “You didn’t see her face when she killed Charlie.”

  She had given him the look. “Do you really think bringing up a murder she committed will make me feel better?”

  “He was a traitor! He betrayed us all for a promise of his wife and child, and she was furious. Say what you want—she didn’t know Tel’rabim wa
s following us. She didn’t want to go back.” He knew his voice was shaking. “I don’t think she ever expected to wake up again. If she was a plant, she didn’t go along with it.”

  And there had been no answer to that. Though the fear lingered in Walker’s eyes—and though there were two guards leaning not so subtly against the doorway of the bar—she had let the girl out of the med bay at last.

  Pike would take it.

  “Pike!” Rychenkov’s roar parted the crowd between them. The blond man slammed a hand down on the table by an empty chair. “Come drink!”

  Pike’s face split into a grin. Rychenkov might still be limping, one arm in a sling and his usual energy halved, but he was alive. As the man hauled himself to his feet, Pike shook his head. “Don’t get up. You’re hurt.”

  “You don’t….” Rychenkov steadied himself with his good arm. “You don’t know many Russians, do you? C’mere, you bastard.” The rough hug was enough to make Pike’s ribs creak. “And you!” Rychenkov clapped the girl on the shoulder. “Problem solver, this one. Think you’d make a good pilot, Lapushka. You looking for a job?” He jerked his head towards the table. “Take a seat.”

  Pike grinned as the girl sat, still on the receiving end of Rychenkov’s job pitch. Her eyes went wide as he set a glass down in front of her.

  “Go on.” Rychenkov downed his own in a gulp. “Put some hair on your chest.”

  “I’ll take that.” Pike grabbed the glass as he sat, tossing it back and giving a hoarse wheeze. “Good god, what was that?”

  The girl gave him a grateful look.

  “No idea.” Rychenkov poured him another. He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So. I wasn’t kidding, you know.”

  “About which part?” Pike’s voice was still hoarse. He looked down at the glass with newfound respect.

  “She’d make a good pilot.” Rychenkov nodded at the girl. “And … well, we need a crew.”