Lunara: The Original Trilogy

by Wyatt Davenport

  "Thanks." He slumped in his chair. "We may have won this round, but I have to come up with an entirely new plan for the Solarspot."

  "Yes…they will be ready for us."

  Chapter 21

  Before the dawn of the next day, Parker’s journey to Pollux was complete. The rugged terrain and unforgiving cold of the Martian surface lay behind him. Darkened by the night’s sky, the silhouette of the cliffs loomed in a threatening manner over the colony.

  Across the edge, where the valley of Pollux met the cliffs, a rampart of Martian stone sturdily rested together. In the middle, an iron gate held out intruders, and on top of it, where the guard towers once rested, only fired out holes remained. A signal that the MSA had purged the colony of its civility.

  Pollux was once considered the greatest nonaligned colony. Now, it was little more than a stopping point for the lowliest members of the Martian population, and even they didn’t stay long, considering the random MSA bombing runs that still hammered the terrain.

  For Parker, it offered the one place where the people accepted Alliance activity without the threat of a prison cell. Everyone here hated the MSA.

  He gazed at the gate and the wall with apprehension. Even from this close, he saw in the dim light the movement of Raiders about the town. They were night stalkers, preying on the weak, or ganging up on the individual. He looked at the chronopad on his jacket. It was an hour before dawn, and there was no time to waste. Sarah was in trouble. He reached into his long tunic, put his hand around the handle of his pistol, and walked toward the colony.

  His steps thumped heavily as he walked down the main street. The colony had no point anymore. The buildings were ragged with bomb blasts, and dust piled along the sides of the ruins, with no one bothering to shovel it away. The merchants had disappeared, no longer able to keep their trade. This was decimation.

  Worst of all, no sign of leadership existed in the colony. Normally delegates or security greeted a newcomer to a nonaligned colony. Hannah Rohen, the person he came to Pollux to find, had not sent anyone to meet him. Is she here anymore? he wondered.

  Hannah Rohen was a young, delicate woman, if Parker’s memory served him correctly. Sarah had shown him her profile while they were setting up the Alliance. She had negotiated the pact with the Aethpisians for the twin colonies of Castor and Pollux. Now she would have to help him locate the fleet. If she was as loyal to Castor and Pollux as Sarah had insisted, nothing short of death would make her leave her beloved colony.

  In a blink of an eye, what looked like a Raider—a horror of the past in the flesh—swept across the street a hundred paces from him. Parker immediately scanned the area. No sounds, no movement. He continued on, hoping to spy someone who would speak to him.

  "Parker," a voice called from behind him. He spun around but saw no one. He walked to where the voice had come from. The side street closest to him was empty. Was it his imagination?

  He turned around again, and with a step back, three guns surprised him—two rifles from the bigger men moving to his side and extended from the arm of the leader, and a sonic pistol, less than a meter away.

  You fool, he thought, chiding himself for being so dumb.

  He glanced around and eyed with apprehension the hoods covering their faces. The three wore long tunics, thick and warm, an outfit for outdoor survival. Heavy boots rounded out their attire.

  "Parker McCloud," the person in front of him said. The voice was female, and she stood about his height, with locks of blond hair visible below the sides of her hood.

  Parker addressed her, trying to pretend the pistol wasn’t aimed at him. "Yes, I’m looking for Hannah Rohen. Do any of you know her?"

  "She died," the woman said in a flat tone. "The MSA destroyed everyone in this colony when the war ended."

  "You’re here. Someone survived."

  "We’re Raiders. We have no home."

  Parker laughed. "You’re not Raiders. They’re long dead. I’m looking for someone with connections to the Alliance. Do you know anyone sympathetic to their cause?"

  "The Alliance is dead. It hasn’t been spoken of on Mars for two years."

  "The Alliance lives. Barely, but it lives. It has carried on in the farthest reaches of the solar system. On Saturn, on Jupiter, on Lunara." Parker looked at the two men who stood on each side of him. "Come now, someone here must know of the Alliance."

  The woman jabbed her gun at him. "And you need to find the Alliance members because you want to arrest them. I should shoot you where you stand. MSA swine."

  Parker raised both his hands in surrender. "No, I don’t. I’m looking for the Alliance fleet. My wife is in danger."

  "An Alliance fleet? Surely you’re joking. They’re a pathetic army."

  "Many from Pollux remain within the Alliance. Maybe you know of Allison Hargrowth. She is from my squadron."

  The woman’s tone turned soft. "Allison. Is she still alive?"

  "Very much so," Parker said. "At least, she was six hours ago."

  The woman removed her hood and looked at Parker with her big blue eyes. Sarah wasn’t wrong about Hannah Rohen. She was a young woman, and looked about eighteen years old. However, he knew from her file she was born at least twenty-five years ago. Her thick blond hair draped without style to the small of her back framed the softness in her face. "Hannah Rohen. You look good for a dead person."

  "I age well." Her coy smile searched him for more.

  He smirked back. "You know Allison?"

  "Yes, of course. She is my sister."

  "Your sister," Parker said, nodding. "I guess it makes sense. Both of you are full-figured, fair-skinned, and pleasant to look at." Hannah’s face went stiff. "And with one look, definitely not someone you want to mess with."

  "Thank you," she said, nodding. "We’re only half sisters, though. She was born to an outsider."

  "An outsider?"

  "Yes, you will notice we have blond hair. The colony of Castor and Pollux has always been this way."

  "Okay. I want to find the Alliance fleet, and as much as you denied it before, I know your colony is friendly with them. Can you help me?"

  "Come inside," she said, waving her hand for him to follow. "We’re too exposed here."

  Parker nodded and followed them into a long tunnel. It ran perhaps two hundred feet into the side of the eastern cliff and down several sets of staircases into the ground. They came to an open room—walls carved from the Martian rock—where they stopped.

  Silence lingered for a moment until Hannah spoke again. "My sister, she is helping you."

  "Yes, Quartz, her code name…she is one of my Asterfighters. She is part of a task force ready to strike against the MSA’s metalor shipment coming in."

  Hannah looked past him toward the staircase. "We left on difficult terms."

  "I don’t think I blame her. You say she is an outsider. Not a label easily accepted."

  Hannah waved her hand at him. "Enough of this trivial stuff. She is no longer a part of our colony. A shipment of metalor is coming to Mars, and I assume it is big enough to be worth risking ourselves for."

  "It is the first shipment from Lunara since the war started."

  Vehemently, knowing he was wrong, Hannah shook her head. "They receive shipments regularly from Lunara—"

  "Not metalor. They want you to think that, but it isn’t the case. The meteor cluster is diminishing, and they haven’t been able to mine it. Their processors took a year to come back into full production after the terrible battles during the war. Ty Falloom, a good friend of mine and someone who hates the MSA, has given his life to tell us this information."

  Hannah rubbed her chin between her forefinger and thumb. The dim light, coming from a solitary light panel on the far side of the room, cast a shadowing mask over her face. "And this shipment, when is it to arrive?"

  "Tonight, about sixteen hours from now."

  "Then we don’t have much time. The fleet is seven hours from here."

  Parker w
ondered why Hannah had lied about her knowledge of the Alliance. Was it another safeguard against MSA infiltrators? Or perhaps something more existed than he knew. "You know where the Alliance is?"

  She nodded. "I’m a part of it. I was testing you. Members of the MSA have been crawling around Castor lately, asking questions about Eamonn Dalton, Sarah McCloud, and yourself. Lots of credits are being bantered around."

  He grinned. "So you decided to test the person they are looking for?"

  "Who better? The MSA have employed several tricks to get us talking. Forcing you isn’t a stretch."

  "I guess not. But I’m not here in any capacity to help the MSA. Captain Terry has gone mad. I have a bad feeling he is going to execute my wife. I want to get to the fleet—and quietly."

  "Do you want me to take you?"

  "No, I can get there myself. I don’t want you to get in trouble."

  "Don’t worry about me," she said, and her narrow eyes widened.

  Parker sensed something more than she was saying. "Do you want to turn me in?"

  She shook her head and moved to the other side of the room, facing away from him. "I want that metalor shipment. The Alliance owes it to us."

  "You can have it. I don’t care. I must get to the Alliance fleet to save my wife."

  Hannah raised her index finger into the air. "The Alliance fleet will come to you when they discover the truth about the metalor shipment."

  "I’m certain of that, too," Parker replied. "My wife was taking that information to them. They won’t believe her, or they will believe her and not trust her further. They think she is a traitor—"

  "I heard the rumor about you," she said. "I’m unconvinced as to why you came to Pollux knowing I was within the Alliance. The Alliance considers you a traitor; same with her."

  Parker straightened his back, sensing danger. He balled his fists.

  "Stand down," she replied. "I’m not going to arrest you. I could have done that outside. Terry has gone mad, as if he believes everyone is against him. He has cut most of his ties with the twin colonies." Then she laughed. "The ghosts of the war are haunting him. I can’t say I blame him. I, too, have become weary and tired of the precautions we must endure to remain alive."

  "If you know about Terry, then we must take control of the fleet, or it will destroy the Alliance for good. The MSA will win."

  "Haven’t they already?"

  Parker shook his head. "If they have won, why do you continue to fight? At least save Sarah; she can convince the fleet Terry is wrong. He needs to be stopped."

  "I’m convinced," Hannah replied. She took several slow steps across the room; then she paused, placing her chin against her thumb and forefinger. "I have no means of doing anything."

  "Lead me to the fleet. I’ll do something. If I can get to Sarah, she’ll surely convince them the metalor shipment is vital. We can overthrow Terry and recapture our Alliance. Castor and Pollux can thrive again."

  Hannah remained silent for a long minute. Parker stared back at her, wondering what she was thinking. Was this a trap? She could be an MSA operative, trying to find out more information from him, but he didn’t think so. It was something in her eyes. The lost gaze everyone who had struggled against the MSA had. His squad had it. So did Eamonn and Shannon. Hannah had been in pain for a long time, wishing for the peace that had existed before the war. Parker longed for that time.

  "Okay, I’ll take you," she said. Her hand flicked to the side, signaling someone from behind him. "But I must make sure you don’t know where we are going."

  A shadow pressed toward him.

  Before Parker turned, the shadow behind him pricked his neck with a needle. And then the ground rushed toward him, and as he hit it, his world went dark.

  Chapter 22

  Beyond the ice caps covering the terrain, the south pole of Mars beckoned. During most of the year, a clear and crisp view was possible in the region, but during the spring, the ice sublimated into a gas and clouded the atmosphere. The exception lay in front of the Protector.

  As the ship entered, a dense fog surrounded it, blinding their view of any oncoming MSA patrols, although the MSA would be blind as well. A justification Chloe felt less and less secure about as they entered farther into the denser, more opaque fog. She expected the sheer face of a polar cap to jut out in front of them at any moment, ending them for good. She throttled the ship back to a creep through the sky.

  On the bridge, the alerts chirping from her control panel didn’t comfort her uneasiness. Eamonn had instructed her to ignore them. The thick gaseous atmosphere set them off, but she heard only a constant reminder of the danger of flying blind. He told her to pretend this atmospheric density was Earth to ease her fears. Although she didn’t know if she wanted it to be Earth, the paradise that once consumed her thoughts seemed a long way away, especially with humanity’s new home in turmoil. She silenced the alerts, shutting down the proximity alert screen for the remainder of the voyage.

  As if the thick atmosphere around the poles wasn’t enough to prey upon her nerves, Eamonn warned her about the unstable ice sheets they were going to have to land on. It was now the end of spring, when the region was at its warmest in months, and the ice sheets were extremely susceptible to sudden weight shifts, causing massive avalanches of water ice and carbon dioxide ice.

  During her childhood, her parents had taught her—and Eamonn spoke of it quite often when he recollected tales from his past—that the relationship between the carbon and the water ice was a tenuous and unstable one. If she recalled correctly, the mixture of water ice and carbon ice was similar to moving around on a comet as it was approaching the sun. When the gases trapped in the ice warmed, it exploded out of fissures, pluming gas for kilometers; on a comet, a radiant gaseous tail formed, but on Mars, it created one of the most unstable surfaces on the planet. This was why the atmosphere was so thick that Chloe could see no more than twenty meters through.

  Every Alliance base shunned safety in favor of hiding from the MSA. The ice miners had migrated northward for its colder season. Only fools or the desperate remained, and no one was foolish or desperate enough to come here this time of year, except members of the rogue Alliance.

  "Come about to coordinates eight-five, forty-five. We should see Shannon’s signal flare any time now," Eamonn said from his captain’s chair.

  "I don’t know how we’ll see anything in this mess," Chloe said, adjusting the tint on the screen from dark to light and then from light to dark, trying to find the right brightness against the glare of the fog in front of them. She ended up turning it back on auto when she found her efforts were ineffective.

  "Where are we now?" Eamonn said.

  "In a hover above the coordinates you specified. I think we are a few hundred meters above the ground, but I can’t tell with the ice melting. These readings aren’t up to date. The fog has masked this region for ninety days."

  "Understood," Eamonn said. "Don’t worry about it. We’ll be okay. The flare can give us some guidance."

  "Some," she muttered. It wasn’t reassuring that Eamonn couldn’t tell how far they were above the ground.

  "It will be far easier than our escape from the MSA fleet."

  "Yeah, we got lucky, considering Samantha was going to destroy us."

  "I don’t know how much weight that statement held. She wouldn’t destroy the Protector, you, and me without the wrath of Gwen coming down on her."

  "She seemed serious."

  "Samantha Burns wants to seem like many things. She is intimidating, but she is also prudent. She ordered the fleet to capture us without destruction. It is the only way we escaped."

  Chloe eyed the viewscreen. "And here I thought my flying was superb."

  Eamonn laughed. "Don’t discount your abilities. You were the reason we escaped beyond anything else."

  A bright green spot flickered in front of them and then dissipated. It was so fast, Chloe barely saw it. Did she imagine it? "Did you see it?" she asked.
<
br />   "Yes," he said. "Head toward it. There should be a pentagon shape on the ground. Five flares on the outside, with a sixth in the center."

  Chloe guided the Protector down, slowly at first, not wanting to find the ground too quickly. Ultimately, once she broke the upper layer of fog and went into the more transparent region underneath, she spotted it.

  This area, approximately fifty meters thick from the tips of the ice caps, and up to a kilometer thick in the shallow regions, consisted of the denser manufactured air from the algae farms. The oxygen-rich layers concentrated in the poles and leaked away from the bulging middle of the planet. Chloe saw that just by looking out of the window at the bluish-white hues of the landscape and swirling winds. Chloe thought the fog caused it, creating a blanket over the entire region. She wasn’t sure, however. Unlike many other Martians, the atmosphere had never held any fascination for her.

  "A paradise," Eamonn muttered behind her.

  "Excuse me?" Chloe replied.

  "Uhm," he said. Apparently he had not intended her to hear his words. "The sensors say the oxygen is ten percent down there."

  "Is that why it is so clear?"

  "Yes and no. It is clear because the carbon dioxide concentration is barely registering. I don’t get it."

  "It’s perfectly understandable," she said.

  "How so?" He was skeptical. The quickness of his reply told her everything.

  "Mars is coming alive." She grinned. "The poles are where the first changes are seen on a planet when it terraforms. After the meteors, when the Earth was dying, the poles were the first to feel the effects. It started the great floods."

  "Great flood? You know Earth history?"

  She was about to reply but realized she didn’t remember. "I have always known it. I guess my parents taught it to me."

  "Look," he said, pointing toward the viewscreen.

  The pentagon of green lights clearly marked their landing zone, between a large cropping of water ice pillars and the rippling lowlands of folded ice sheets. The center flare looked to be on a flat and clean pad of ice. From their vantage point, no cracks or splinters stretched along the ice surface, as good a sign as any to Chloe.