by Erik Wecks
GRAVLANDER
PAX IMPERIUM WARS 2
Erik Wecks
First Published in The United States of America
Copyright © 2017
Erik R. Wecks
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be circulated in writing of any publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Thank you to Crystal Pikko Watanabe, my editor, and my copy editor Jonathan Liu. You both helped me remove many unnecessary words, and provided invaluable feedback. Thanks for making me look good.
Thank you also to Tom Edwards for a great cover and design for the Pax Imperium books. No matter what anyone says, people definitely choose books by their cover. Yours are the best.
Thanks also to James T. Wood and Jason Campbell who put up with far more poor drafts of Jo than any critique group ought to. Thank you also to Andy Sherwood, Jessie Kwak, and Ronda Simmons. You made this book significantly better. Thank you specifically for picking on my portrayal of Jo. We finally created a character you can trust.
Thank you to my family, particularly to my wife Jaylene, who loves to tell me that everything I write is good. It may irritate me at times, but it’s so vital to have you in my corner. Thank you so much.
Finally, thank you to my readers, who have patiently waited for this book. I’m glad to put it in your hands at last.
To the survivors.
To those who won’t quit.
To those who live in wise mind.
;
Gravlander
Prologue
Jo hadn’t heard her father laugh since the men came and took them from their home. In fact, four-year-old Josephine couldn’t remember anyone laughing in the makeshift re-education camp on the icy moon Aetna, and that was a shame, because her heart’s joy came from listening to her father burble when something amused him. She could picture how his sides would shake just so, his joy rippling through his excess weight. She loved the large man with the round head and wisps of blond hair with all of her might, often standing on her tiptoes to hug his soft waist.
But right now she stood behind her mother, clinging to the leg of her jumpsuit, forced to witness the punishment of a prisoner with all the rest of those who had been rounded up in the purge of their hometown, Utopia—a town Jo’s father had once managed for the Unity Corporation. Jo had been proud when people had called her father Mayor, but no one did that anymore.
Jo watched with mingled interest and horror as the blood ran from the prisoner’s cheek, where the guard was punching him repeatedly. She was so fascinated by the steady disintegration of the man’s face that her father’s voice startled her.
“That’s enough! We’re all still citizens here, and I outrank you.”
Jo felt her father brush past her as he stepped forward and grabbed the guard by his thick arm.
The guard didn’t hesitate. He turned with his weapon already drawn and shot her father right in the chest. For a moment he stood there, looking down at the now spreading red, gasping for a breath that would not come, and then he collapsed.
Jo felt her mother jump at the sound of the weapon. As her father collapsed, she screamed and momentarily lost her grip on Jo’s twin brothers. Momentarily set free, the two eight-year-olds rushed toward her father while Jo twisted the fabric in her hands as tightly as possible.
The guard didn’t hesitate. After he shot them, the two boys fell to the ground next to her father. Her mother was hysterical now, wailing. Jo buried her head in the blue leg of her suit, hiding her face in its familiar smell.
The safety only lasted a heartbeat before strong arms ripped her away, pulling her from her mother’s grasp. Josephine screamed and received a fist to the side of her head for her efforts. Jo’s thoughts drifted, and the roar of the world faded to red and then silence.
Fifteen Years later….
1
The Anvil
The spacer held onto life by the thinnest of strands. His burned skin lay in blackened sheets, while the sinew and muscle below wept. To fight his wounds, he had so many emergency medical nanites in his blood that his stool would be an odd shade of gray for a month. Yet it wasn’t the external injuries that threatened to kill him. His lungs had been so badly burned, they had swollen to uselessness.
Lieutenant Josephine Lutnear stared at the display projected by the screen of the heads-up device dropped down in front of her right eye. Her hands shook as they manipulated the swarm of nanites in the patient’s body. Don’t you fucking let him die, Jo. Don’t you dare be a shit doctor today. You fucking figure this out.
Jo was working on her fourth patient without a break. She’d panicked when they wheeled in a second before the first had even left the operating suite. She was used to doing one surgery at a time.
Sixteen hours had passed since the first patient arrived on the hospital ship Gallant, twenty-two since the catastrophic meltdown and explosion on the advanced refueler Regal. Jo hadn’t taken the time to find out how many casualties there were. Her ship had a capacity of nearly six thousand patients, and while they were nowhere near full, it was a measure of how bad the situation must be that her spacer was only now getting his first treatment from an attending surgeon. Most of their incoming had burns and radiation poisoning, while a few others were dealing with decompression-related issues and blunt-force injuries.
The Ghost Fleet contained just over nine hundred warships, including six such hospital ships designed to serve the one point two million spacers. Jo guessed that other hospital ships must have it much worse. The Gallant had been on the far side of the fleet when the reports started to arrive. Even now Jo could feel that they were maneuvering to get closer to the disaster.
Glancing up from her work, she frowned. Her heart beat faster. Speaking to one of the four nurses scattered around the table, she said, “Nora, watch that saturation level! Give him a bit more of the oxytrine. He’s got enough troubles as it is; we don’t need him hypoxic.”
Nora spoke up, forehead beaded and lined. “He’s not due for another five minutes. If I go now, we risk a heart problem. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to—”
Jo’s cheeks flushed. “Just do it! I’ll worry about his heart. He can’t stay alive long enough to have a heart problem if he doesn’t have any oxygen.”
At nineteen, Jo was about to become the youngest general surgeon in the history of the fleet, and one of the youngest living surgeons in the galaxy. Her treatment record? Nearly spotless. In meatspace, she’d only lost two patients, and in both cases someone else had been the attending physician. She had merely assisted. In the immersive simulations of intraspace, she was 642 and 12—a fleet record for any trainee since the advent of intraspace medical training. She was good at her job, and she hadn’t come this far by letting anyone question her judgment.
The nurse answered with evident disdain. “Yes, sir.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Jo’s conscience twinged. She could have stated that a little less harshly, but she didn’t have time. Right now she was the surgeon in the room. It was her responsibility to make the hard calls, not the nurse’s. No one dies on my watch.
Still, she didn’t like pissing people off. Without pausing to look up, Jo tried to temper the woman’s anger a little. She softened her tone. “He’ll be all right once Dr. Evans gets back to us with a stasis chamber. Then the nanites can take care of anything we do to his heart.”
Jo squinted in concentration behind her copper-threaded mask. Keeping her
attention focused on the heads-up, she spoke to the nurse standing to her right. “Speaking of, it’s been twenty minutes. Have we heard back from Evans?”
Jo could feel her hesitation. “Dr. Evans is in surgery,” said the nurse. “I’ve tried to contact him, but I haven’t heard back yet.”
It had been many hours since she’d had a break, and perhaps it was the lingering anger at being questioned about the oxytrine, but whatever the reason, Jo felt herself go from relatively calm to instantly ready to scream in a flash.
Instead of yelling, she became still and gave the nurse a look as sharp as a scalpel. Controlling herself as best she could, her voice came out as a deadly snarl. “Then go down there and ask him directly! This patient will die without a chamber.”
To be fair, the nurse had been working as many hours as she had, but to Jo, that was no excuse to become complacent when it came to the life of the patient.
Twenty minutes later, Jo pressed her mouth into a thin line as she watched over the heads-up display as Evans slowly scrolled through her patient’s chart on a datapad. When she sent her nurse, he had refused to give her the chamber, instead wasting precious seconds by consulting with Jo. She had her doubts that he would have done this with any other doctor in the fleet.
When he spoke, Evans didn’t look up from the pad. “Give the guy a skin tank with a forty percent hydrocolloid solution and double-strength dermagen, and give him a sedative for at least the next seventy-two hours. Under the circumstances, it’s all we can do.”
Jo hesitated. She held the rank of a lieutenant, finishing her internist’s year before being granted a captaincy and the full title of general surgeon in the Ghost Fleet’s medical core. Her junior position gave her no room to question a flight surgeon like Captain Evans. All she could really say was “yes, sir” and let it be, and in a situation where seconds mattered, that would probably have been the smart play, but it didn’t help that Captain Evans was the one doctor who always used a condescending tone of voice when talking to her.
Jo’s palms dampened. At first, her voice caught, and then, remembering the patient’s life was at stake, became firm. “Dr. Evans, I’m not sure he would handle the intubation for the tank. His lungs are pretty fragile as it is. If we could slow his metabolism down to give the nanites time to work—”
The senior doctor looked up, his smile forced. “Don’t question my orders, Lieutenant. I don’t have time or the inclination to explain them. Get the patient ready for a skin tank. I will send an orderly in fifteen minutes to transport him.”
Jo’s hands clenched. She tried to match Evans’ calm, but failed. “But, sir, without a stasis tube, he’ll drown in his own fluids! His lungs won’t handle it.”
This time, the senior officer’s manicured exterior fractured. Jo could see his eyes harden. “I’m not going to argue with you, Lutnear. You will obey my orders without question. Now do as I said or be relieved.”
Realizing she had crossed a line, Jo’s exhausted gut tightened further. She answered sheepishly, her face beet red. “Yes, sir.”
Evans’s voice continued to move from cold to deadly. “When I finally go off duty and have slept for a year, I will be writing you up for insubordination.”
Without waiting for her reply, the senior doctor ended the transmission.
Jo’s shoulders slumped as she stared at her patient’s chart on the datapad in her hand. Only when one of the nurses dared to touch her arm did she realize that she couldn’t remember anything the device had told her.
Toward the end of her shift, Jo held her patient’s hand while he died. She was more conscious of his death than he was. Alone, sitting in tainted scrubs, wearing bright blue gloves, Jo pushed down hard on tears that she had no use for. All the fleet surgeons knew that sometimes patients got inside a doctor’s walls, but they never talked about it.
The nurses let her be. On Gallant there was an unspoken rule that you dealt with your emotions on your own. Emotions could be intrusive and contagious. They were bad for morale. You didn’t share them, lest you damage someone else’s performance.
Jo felt angry, though furious might have been a better word. I could have saved this one, she thought. I should have saved him. He deserved to live, and I fucked it up by blowing my cool with Evans. God, Evans is such an egomaniac. Maybe I could have talked with him, but that doesn’t matter. I have to keep my cool. I can’t let assholes ruffle me.
When she was finally relieved, Jo fled to one of the quieter reading lounges on the ship and pulled out her heads-up. For the moment, she wanted nothing to do with the world of medicine or anyone on her stupid ship. The tears that she had suppressed now felt as if they had congealed in her throat. She needed a distraction, and she didn’t want to be alone.
If she could have, she would have contacted her only remaining family member, her oldest brother, Teddy, but he was somewhere in the territory of Rhinegau studying physics, or at least that’s what he was doing two years ago when she was last able to smuggle a message to him. The fleet Jo lived on couldn’t stay hidden if the troops were always calling home, so talking with her brother was out of the question.
After her parents had been killed, Jo and Teddy had escaped the Unity with the help of Jack Halloway, a smuggler who had made a promise to their dying mother. Jo, Teddy, Jack, and his girlfriend, Anna, had become refugees in the galactic capital, Apollos. To the best of his ability, Halloway had made good on his promise, but he wasn’t much of a parent. Jo and Teddy had been mostly left to raise themselves. That is, until Jack and Anna had been targeted for assassination by the Unity government. Their crime? Knowing the truth about what happened on Aetna.
When the people had tired of their lousy treatment at the hands of the new administrator, they had dared to rebel. For their efforts, the Unity had pushed an asteroid into their moon, murdering everyone on the surface.
After the attempt on their lives, Jack and Anna, and by extension, Jo and Teddy, had become a cause célèbre for those states that opposed the Unity Corporation in the Empire. The four of them had found shelter in the palace of the King of Athena, a place where Jo had been the happiest she had been since her parents had died.
But it was all for nothing. Having secretly prepared for war, the Unity launched its assault on the Empire when she was twelve, only a few weeks after Teddy had left to study in neutral Rhinegau. Two years later, Jo, along with Jack and Anna, fled the final defeat of Athena in the Ghost Fleet. The ships had been her home for the last six years, and as far as Jo could see, they would be her home until the Unity destroyed them, they fell apart, or she died. It was not a prospect she looked at with any joy.
Jo put her heads-up back on, flipped the small screen down over her right eye, and pinged the man who had raised her, Jack, now a rear admiral. His aide-de-camp answered in a voice so dripping with sugar, it sounded like the way you might speak to a toddler. It instantly put Jo on edge.
“Josephine, sweetie? How are you? Is everything okay?”
Most of the time, Jo could shrug it off—most of the time. It wasn’t as if that kind of behavior didn’t happen all the time. When you come on board as the only fourteen-year-old in a fleet that lost the war but escaped to fight another day, you become a kind of mascot, with all the impotence that goes with the position. Jo couldn’t count the number of times that she had been referred to as a “symbol of hope” and a “reminder of home.” That might have felt nice at fourteen, but now, as a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, Jo wanted to be treated like an adult. The problem was, for every year she aged, everyone else aged a year as well. She’d always be at least four years younger than any of the other sailors and most were much older.
Jo held down the lump in her throat. Despite wanting to bite Marla’s smarmy head off, she kept her tone amiable. “I’m fine, Marla. Is Jack around?”
The aide hesitated, and Jo could see the lie in her eyes. She tried to sound unsure. “Well, honey, he’s in a meeting. Is everything all right?”
&
nbsp; Bullshit, he’s in a meeting. You let me talk to him, cow. It’s not like I call often. The last time she talked to Jack at work was probably over a month ago. Jo felt the knot in her chest expand. Her voice sounded shakier than she would have liked. “It’s all right. I’ll try again later.”
She was about to disconnect when the aide caught her and said in her most condescending tone, “Wait a sec, honey. Don’t go. Let me check with him first.”
You could have done that to start, bitch, thought Jo.
There was a pause, and Jack’s image followed. Jo could feel him leaning toward her even through the simulated display from his device. “Jo? Everything okay? Marla said it sounded like you were crying.”
Jo felt the heaviness of her own disappointment descend on her. Jack really was busy; she could tell by his tone and the way he sat. She hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. She held up her hands and forced herself to sound almost chipper. “I’m fine, Jack. I’m sorry to bother you. It wasn’t really necessary.”
Jack’s eyebrows lowered. Jo had the distinct impression that he hadn’t bought it. “Okay. You sure? I’m about ready to head into a meeting with Jonas and the fleet commanders. After that, it might get a little crazy, so this is the only time I’ll have for a while.”
Jo sat up a little straighter. Until she entered medical school at age sixteen, Jo had grown up on the flagship of the fleet, the HMS Ares. Some part of her missed being close to the hustle and hearing all that was happening with the fleet. It made her feel even more isolated than normal to realize that things were going on without her knowledge. She leaned forward as she spoke. “So what’s up?” The secure nature of the entangled particles used by the heads-up gave her no hesitation to talk about sensitive matters over the fleet comms.