Jupiter's Sword

by Webb, Nick

  Well, she wasn’t.

  Walker pressed her lips together in a thin line as Sargent led her into his private laboratory and toward a dimly lit desk. A few other scientists looked up in vague interest, and then back to their desks with perfunctory smiles at Walker. None of them seemed to know or care who she was, as long as she was with Sargent.

  “This is one of our latest designs.” He pointed to a dusty server, chugging at high speed and throwing off incredible heat. “Running simulations on that. It looks promising, but again, it’s just incremental change. A few more kilotons at best.”

  Walker scanned the documents, and then hurried away to follow as Sargent led her across the room to a dry erase board. A button on one of the nearby desks raised the board to reveal a window into a room beyond, and Walker stepped forward with Sargent to look.

  He was correct that it would be nearly impossible to remove the refined uranium ore without anyone knowing. The chamber with the ore itself clearly displayed dangerous readings of radiation, and she picked out no less than five stages of checks in the outer chambers to move portions of the ore into a shielded container and out through multiple airlocks with their own radiation meters. Not only that, the current amount of ore—presently shown on a monitor to the right of the window—matched with her own calculations of their progress based on Sargent’s updates.

  Walker leaned on the windowsill and narrowed her eyes at the container.

  So the material for the bomb hadn’t come from this facility. And that was assuming the Io blast was nuclear, which … just didn’t seem right.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  Dr. Sargent sat down and kicked his feet up onto the desk. Scientists, she thought. So informal. No sense of military protocol.

  “Name it.”

  With a marker, she started drawing on the whiteboard. A circle. A moon. Io. She fashioned an explosion with a scribble of lines lancing out from the surface. “The official UN report claims this was a nuclear blast. That’s bullshit.”

  “Agreed.”

  She tapped the pen against the number written at the top of the whiteboard. Forty-two. “The best we’ve got is forty-two kilotons. The bomb that took out Io would have had to be, what … a hundred megatons?”

  “A gigaton. At least. Probably ten or a hundred gigs.” said Sargent.

  “Get me some answers. I want to know what could do that. Look at the blast profile. Look at everything. We need to know what the hell that was.”

  Sargent nodded. “I’m on it. I’ll pull my top scientists and have answers to you asap.”

  “Good.” She turned back to the board, eyeing her crude drawing of Io exploding. “If we fail, I’m afraid Io’s fate awaits us all.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Near Earth

  Aggy II

  They started their deceleration a day in advance, and so for nearly twenty four long hours, Pike fretted about the time they were losing and how much quicker they might have pushed the deceleration. Rychenkov remarked once on how ironic it was that they could be traveling so quickly, and yet have the chase move so slowly.

  Whatever he saw on Pike’s face, he didn’t repeat the comment.

  The girl was silent, as she always was, but also absent—which was new. She locked herself in her room and only emerged to take food and disappear again. When Pike went to speak to her, he found her hunched over a tablet, reading. She shielded the tablet from his eyes and waited for him to leave.

  "It's been a long time since she's been able to have her own thoughts," Rychenkov said, when Pike asked him about it. The Russian gave an eloquent shrug. "First in that lab, then Walker got her hands on the kid. Let her read dirty books if she wants."

  "It's not dirty books," Pike said, annoyed. "She's worried about something. I can tell."

  "Maybe she's worried about whether the guy gets the girl in the end."

  Pike threw up his hands and left.

  He steered clear of the cockpit as much as he could. The tracking program had some kind of bug, and couldn’t keep up with the engines Nhean had put on their ship, so the distance reading between them and their target flickered and jumped as the computer tried to make sense of things. Pike knew that staring at it would only make him go mad.

  Accordingly, he was sitting in the mess and trying to read when the proximity alerts sounded and a pleasant female voice announced, You are approaching: Earth.

  He got up so fast the chair tipped over. He didn’t stick around to pick it up, just pushed his long legs into a full-on sprint through the halls, ducking his tall frame under doorways and turning sideways to avoid crew members.

  He was laughing with what little breath he had left. Trust Nhean to flout conventions even with his proximity alerts. Telestine law mandated that every human cargo ship had a series of preprogrammed alerts, increasingly stern and threatening sanctions, set to go off as the ship came too close to Earth—and alert the Telestines as well. Pike had guessed that Nhean would disable any data sent to the Telestine satellites, but the proximity alert was unexpected, and almost jarringly pleasant.

  He found Rychenkov stabbing at the screen in frustration while the girl took the copilot’s seat. Her hands were splayed over the computers, as they so often were, and Pike had the unsettling feeling that she had learned to interface with human computers in almost the same way she could with Telestine machines. Her eyes were locked on the viewscreen, where Earth was suddenly, shockingly large. The arc of the planet was clear, and the blaze of blue and green could not be mistaken.

  “Son of a….”

  Pike turned. He had not realized that James had followed him. Now he saw his former crewmate stripped of his anger and resentment for the first time in weeks. James braced himself in the doorway, still unsteady on his bad leg, but Pike knew he wasn’t feeling the pain anymore. He was dumbstruck, jaw hanging open. There were tears in his eyes when he looked at Pike.

  “That’s what Earth looks like?” His voice shook.

  “Yes.” Pike heard his own voice broke on the word.

  “It’s so much more … green than I imagined.” James was shaking his head. He was trembling. “It’s so beautiful.”

  Pike stole a glance at him, digging his nails into his palm to keep back his own tears. He had grown up here, he knew this planet more intimately than any dreamer. He knew that the blue of the water was rare in the high desert near the Rockies. He knew that the big, stationary-looking swirls of clouds could be whistling in a gale over the land. He knew the flight of birds across the sky.

  He had forgotten to wonder what this homecoming might mean to someone who had never seen the planet. What was it, Pike wondered suddenly, to see the planet you were made for, for the first time? To return after years of exile, to a home you had never known? People asked him for stories sometimes, but he knew that no story he’d ever told could match this sight.

  James had dropped his face into his hands. His shoulders were shaking and he was rocking back and forth with silent tears.

  “You’re home,” Pike told him softly, and James gripped his hand.

  “I never thought I would see this.” His voice was broken. “I thought—we’re never going to get Earth back. I’ll never see it in my life.” He looked up again. “I never thought I would see this,” he whispered again.

  Pike caught sight of Rychenkov watching them. He knew Rychenkov had buzzed the proximity to Earth more than once. This sight wasn’t new to him. In the stories the captain told, he was just a dumb teenager trying to piss off the fuggers. Only now did it occur to Pike that Rychenkov had always been a bit of an idealist at heart—and a bit of a rebel. Even now, coming in hot on the trail of a suicide bomber, Rychenkov’s face softened as he watch James.

  He remembered their situation quickly enough, and jerked his head at Pike.

  “I’m trying to get a lock on him, but damned if I can. I can’t see where he is.”

  Pike felt his stomach drop strangely. “We’ll …
just keep trying.”

  “We should be able to spot him by now.” Rychenkov’s tone was grim. “We should be able to figure out his heading.”

  “Europe,” Pike said. “Focus the search there. What were the cities they actually settled over? Madrid, Paris, London—”

  “I don’t know! Tell her, have her see if she can get into the tracking systems.” He jabbed a finger at the girl.

  She nodded. For a moment she considered, and then she spread her hands again on the computer terminal and bowed her head. Her eyes drifted closed, but tension ran through every line of her body.

  Locked out of a world he could neither sense nor understand, Pike paced in the tiny space behind the chairs. What was she doing? Was she talking to the Telestine satellites? Did she have a receiver somewhere in her body to tune into the transmissions bouncing around the planet? He had thought of her as locked in her own head, unable to speak, unable to communicate with the outside world. Only now did he wonder how she saw him: human, a dumb animal, surrounded by technology he had learned to use like a monkey with a typewriter, but understanding none of the life that pulsed through the ship, seeing none of the commands that flowed from the computers.

  Her eyes snapped open and she began jabbing at the computer. The map came up, focused—

  “No,” Pike told her impatiently. “Europe. He’s going somewhere in Europe. Other continent.”

  Her head shook once, emphatically. She jabbed at the screen.

  And Pike’s heart sank.

  “Denver,” he said quietly.

  “Well, turn the ship!” Rychenkov had been pacing as well. Now he shoved Pike out of the way and checked the coordinates, plugging in the numbers on the other screen by rote. Denver, Pike realized, meant nothing to him. Even Europe meant nothing to him. They were places that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist in the captain’s world.

  The ship groaned as it righted itself and began to accelerate again. It was traveling lower, shuddering as gravity began to ramp up, and Pike could see the North American continent rising up in his view.

  The impact came without warning. No proximity alert sounded before whatever it was slammed into the side of the Aggy II and they tumbled with a shriek of agonized machinery. The artificial gravity kicked off, but not before Pike slammed into the side wall, James hitting him a moment later. The curve of the Earth spun dizzily on the viewscreen and Rychenkov was roaring commands as he slammed his hands down on the screens. Heavy thuds sounded as airlocks closed around the ship, the cockpit door slamming them into a tiny, claustrophobic space.

  “Hull breach in the galley!”

  “Gabriela!” James threw himself at the cockpit door.

  Pike caught him and dragged him back. His logical brain knew there was no way that James could pull the door open, but his animal mind was terrified of what would happen if he somehow succeeded. Sucked into the black, dying without air, tumbling and tumbling, never found—

  “There’s a patrol coming!” Rychenkov’s voice pulled them back to reality. He was shaking the girl’s shoulder, trying to break her trance. “Do something!”

  But there was no time to do anything. The second impact sent them spiraling twice over. They hovered, off their feet as the secondary systems turned off, and, in a burst of horror, Pike realized that they were tumbling toward Earth.

  “Pull up!” Someone screamed the words. Maybe him, maybe James.

  Whoever it was, their words didn’t come soon enough. Rychenkov hauled at the yoke, face white, and Pike lent his strength, but there was no coming out of their spin before the atmosphere began to buffet around the ship. They were in a dive, and they weren’t going to make it back up in time. Their only hope was to get out of their spin and decelerate enough to land without turning into a smear on the ground.

  Pike jerked his head up desperately, trying to make sense of the images before his eyes—and gave a savage laugh.

  “North! North-northeast! Go!”

  “What?” Rychenkov yelled back.

  “That’s the Grand Canyon, it means the Rockies are north of us!”

  “Why the hell are we trying to land in the Rockies!”

  Because it’s home. But a moment later, Pike had another thought. “There’s a crashed Telestine lab somewhere along the mountains, and human settlements. We might find scraps to repair the hull.”

  Rychenkov spared him one look. He was struggling to keep the craft steady as the wind whistled around them, tearing at the rippled hull over the galley. Is it even worth trying to survive this? his eyes asked.

  Pike looked at the girl, at James. He nodded. Always. He wouldn’t have said so a few short weeks past, but then, Rychenkov wouldn’t even have asked a few weeks ago. He would have accepted his fate stoically. Now he only nodded, took a deep breath, and began trying to land a ship that very much wanted to crash.

  The girl didn’t even seem to notice the wild shaking in the cabin, or the alarms. Her hands were locked down on the console as if they were glued in place, and her eyes were locked on the land ahead of them. Pike could almost feel her reaching out, trying desperately to influence the drone across thousands of miles. He saw her lips part and the half-smile as she made contact.

  And he saw her lose that contact. He saw the sudden flare of panic in her eyes….

  Mirrored by a sudden, blinding flash on the surface. Rychenkov yelled, shielding his eyes with one hand as the other tried to keep control of the yoke, and Pike felt the flash searing into his brain. He closed his eyes against the spike of pain in his skull and pressed the heels of his palms over his aching eyes.

  But even with his eyes closed, he could see the imprint behind the flash—the mushroom cloud rising over what had once been Denver, engulfing both the old city, and the sleek Telestine city floating above it.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Between Mars and Vesta

  Koh Rong

  Walker’s quarters

  “What is it?” Walker sat back with her arms over her chest, eyebrows raised at the image of Essa on her screen. Her rooms on the Koh Rong were small but comfortable and well-appointed, which was a good thing since she had been avoiding Nhean’s crew.

  It had been a long journey back. Nhean himself had sent a message announcing that he would rejoin Walker and the fleet in due course, and the Koh Rong could be used to bring her back. After checking—repeatedly—that he was not, in fact, abducted or dead, Walker had started back on her own.

  She was unsettled by his sudden absence, and more unsettled by the fact that she wasn’t sure exactly where he was going. Now, only a few hours out from the fleet, she was in no particular mood to indulge Essa’s need for a fight.

  “We need to discuss the protection of the human settlements.” In the video feed, Essa settled back in his chair. “Unless that’s too much of an inconvenience for you. Although, of course, it is your job.”

  “Defeating the Telestines is my job,” Walker said simply. She held up a hand when he opened his mouth to retort. “Don’t. We don’t have time. What do you want me to do with the fleet? Tell me that, and I’ll tell you if it’s possible.”

  Essa’s lips tightened. “We need protection at every settlement.”

  “Can’t be done,” Walker told him promptly. “As Nhean told you, it’s so impractical as to be useless.”

  “Why am I not surprised to hear you say that?”

  “Because you also know it’s a terrible plan, tactically speaking?” She lifted her shoulders. “We don’t even have as many ships as we have settlements, unless you would count a single fighter as protection enough.”

  “If that is what we have to do—”

  “No.” Something in her had changed at Vesta, she realized. She no longer felt any urge to rise to Essa’s bait. Things were at work under the surface, and she had no patience for old fights. “We determine which settlements we need, and position ourselves to defend any of them if need be.”

  “Determine which we need?” His
voice was rising. “We need all of them.”

  “We need to destroy the Telestines before we die,” Walker snapped back. She had the sudden thought that Nhean was undoubtedly watching this—or would, at some point—and felt a surge of anger. “We are dying out here. Every year we get weaker. We accept how things are a little more. We only survived in the first place because the Telestine aid groups and missionaries begged enough food for us, sent us enough material that darkness and cold and disease didn’t kill us before childbearing age. We do not have long before Tel’rabim convinces the rest of the Telestines that we are nothing more than a drain on resources, do you understand me? Because that is what we are to them. We are dangerous. We are costly. They should never have allowed us to live when they threw us off Earth, and we have to destroy them before they figure it out.”

  He said nothing, and she was so surprised that she faltered for a moment rather than pressing the attack. For the first time in their years as friends, as adversaries, as mortal enemies, she had never seen Essa struck dumb.

  But now, while he was off guard and unsure—now was the time to convince him. “They know that we want to save every human life,” she told him. “That is our weakness. Do you know what they used to say in the American army? That a dead soldier is better than a wounded one. A dead soldier can be left. A wounded soldier, though, will drag the whole unit down. They will go back to carry their friend, help them. Their resources are sapped, they are made vulnerable.”

  “Right now, every human settlement is a wounded comrade to us. Every instinct we have tells us to save them. We want to defy the odds. Tel’rabim knows that. Maybe Telestines are the same way, I don’t know, but he knows that the best way to force us to betray ourselves is by making us despair, making us run to save every settlement as he attacks it.”

  “There are settlements we need: settlements that produce food and ammunition. Repair depots. The rest….” She took a breath and spoke the words calmly. “The rest may be lost. Some of them will be. He will make us pay.”