by Harp Truman
Space Armada
Mission Origin
Harp Truman
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
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One
Imagine Hell.
Now double it.
You’re picturing Io, one of Jupiter’s seventy-nine moons.
Its volcanoes shoot plumes of molten rock so high, they escape the moon’s thin atmosphere and enter space. The enormous seismic pressure, generated by Jupiter’s massive gravity, makes the moon one of the most active volcanic landscapes in the solar system.
A man can be seen carefully navigating this landscape, his high tech suit protecting him from the atmosphere, his back loaded with gear, his arms carrying something heavy.
The load in his arms glowed green. Around him was what appeared to be a colonial mining facility.
The man carefully stepped into a small spaceship and a robotic voice said, “atmospheric stabilization initiated.”
The ship’s doors closed as he took one last look at the godforsaken land. There was an odd beauty to it, an irony, the fact that a place so hideous and hostile to human life could provide something so valuable, something so vital it might contain the key to the future of human civilization. At least that’s what they told them. They had to tell you something to get you to spend your entire life mining the radioactive material used to fuel the armada’s ion cores.
And where would we all be without the almighty armada?
Where would the solar system be?
The empire?
In chaos, that’s where.
The armada was the sole source of order in the empire. The far flung mining colonies and trading outposts across the solar system would be completely lawless without it. At least, that was the official line.
In other circles, the armada was the source of all evil in the solar system. It was the military power used to keep the colonies in line and deprive them of the freedoms they would otherwise enjoy.
Huck still wasn’t sure which side of the line he fell on. He knew firsthand the injustices of the empire, the hopelessness of being sentenced to spend your entire life on a radioactive mining colony, your organs slowly being poisoned, your family dying well before old age, just so a group of imperial elites could live like gods back on the home planet.
But on the other hand, people were assholes. If you let the people he knew rule themselves, the entire colony would be running out of oxygen in a matter of weeks.
People were selfish.
They stole.
They lied.
They shirked their duties.
You let them rule themselves and before long, chaos would ensue.
Huck understood that.
He wasn’t one of the blind fanatics who believed every bad thing anyone ever said about the empire. He was a realist. He understood his place in the world. He understood human nature.
Assholes by design.
Civilized by discipline.
The robotic voice sounded again.
“Atmosphere stabilized. Proceed.”
Huck took off his helmet. A mop of unkempt hair fell over his face. He wiped it away to reveal bright, intelligent eyes.
He flicked some buttons, readying the ship for take off. He was tired, eager to get back to Io Station. The engines vibrated with a ferocious rumble, like a jet engine on steroids. They were more powerful than the thrusters you’d find on other colonies. Io’s atmosphere was a dense fog, the gravity heavily influenced by Jupiter’s mass, and traveling through it was like flying a gauntlet. Eruptions could jet out of the moon’s surface in any place, at any moment. It was widely regarded as one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, places to fly in the solar system. And as Huck was more than aware, all of the armada’s best fighter pilots had grown up on the moon, cutting their teeth doing exactly what he did, day in and day out.
He grabbed the flight stick and began the treacherous climb to full velocity. He steered with great concentration, sweat appearing on his brow as a large plume of smoke jetted out of the moon’s surface and was then sucked instantly back into the chasm it had come from.
Though he admired the moon’s power, there was no doubt in his mind that at any moment it could bring down his ship and end him. He’d seen it happen too many times, to too many brave pilots, to delude himself. This moon wanted you dead. Everything about it was custom made to kill the pilots who braved its surface. A single moment of lapsed concentration, a single second of carelessness, and it was game over.
He brushed the fear away with a grimace that was almost a smile. Try as he would, he could never truly hate this place. He was an orphan. And as every orphan in the solar system knew, there was no place like home. There was nothing that could ever take the place of the people you risked your life with, and shared your joys and fears with.
You never took anyone, not anyone, for granted.
Huck docked at Io Station, his engines rumbling aggressively as magnetic arms locked on the chassis of the ship and pulled him in through the service bay’s blast doors.
Home sweet home.
Io Station was home to about thirty thousand colonial workers, unofficially called off-worlders. It was a place none of them had chosen. The empire sent a steady stream of convicts, dropouts, and degenerates to its far flung outposts.
That said, it wasn’t the worst place to live.
At least it had clean water, cleanish air, and lead walls two feet thick to protect its inhabitants from the barrage of radioactivity that rippled across the moon’s surface like sand whipping across a desert.
Few of its inhabitants, other than the overseers, ever set foot on earth. Most of them knew they never would.
It wasn’t that earth was off limits, it was just that you needed an impossible amount of credits to pay for passage.
The overseers were all earthborn, earth-educated, and were doing their time, counting down the days left on their tours of duty before they got to go home to their pristine planet where everyone was rich and everyone was beautiful. They knew what they were doing. Huck could admit that much. Earth turned out the best engineers, scientists, and policy experts you could hope to find anywhere. And they worked hard too. The empire was largely a meritocracy, at least for the earthborn, and they took their colonial tours of duty seriously. Huck just wished people like him had a chance to play the game.
No matter how good he got at his job, no matter how many extra shifts he pulled, or how much fuel he found for the armada’s precious ion cores, he’d never know anything but the corridors of Io Station, the dangerous skies overhead, and the hostile surface that did everything in its power to kill whoever was unlucky enough to be walking on it.
He pulled himself out of the ship with a wince. His job was hard. It was dangerous. The hours were long. Even for a young guy in his prime, it took a toll on the body.
He went through the decontamination routine, finishing with a shower that he lingered in a little longer than the regulation three minutes.
When he was done, he went straight for the bar. There wasn’t much else to do on Io after a long mission.
This was his life. He woke up. He worked his ass off. If he was lucky, he came home and headed to the bar where he could count on a few bee
rs, a few laughs, a few friendly faces.
As he walked down the corridor he was surprised to see children coming the other way. It was late. They weren’t usually running around the station at this time of evening.
Then he remembered. It was a special day. An armada frigate had docked in the main hangar, fresh from the massive shipbuilding foundry orbiting earth. It was one of the biggest ships ever to be seen at Io Station, a capital ship built for the convoy, the greatest and most ambitious space mission ever undertaken.
A visit from a ship like that was a pretty big deal.
But Huck didn’t turn around. There was a time he would have given his right arm to see a ship like that.
But not anymore.
There was a beer with his name on it at the bar and that was something he could rely on.
Two
Huck walked into the bar and took it all in. One thing you could say for it, it never changed. Dimly lit with satisfactory decor, it had a general sense of despair as people drowned their sorrows. Like everything else on the station, it was big and communal like a cafeteria. It had large faux-wood tables around a central bar. The staff made an effort to make it feel rustic and cozy, trying to give it the air of an old pub on earth, but there was no hiding the fact they were on a space station. It didn’t help that no one working there had ever been to an old pub on earth.
Huck nodded at the familiar faces as he made his way through the throng. He worked maintenance, which meant he knew people from many different departments, and he was well liked. He was friendly, he was flirtatious with the ladies, he was good looking. He wasn’t an asshole like some of the other maintenance guys.
He nodded at the engineers in their short-sleeved overalls, their tablets and virtual clipboards on the table in front of them. He smiled at the administratives, mostly women older than him who all thought he was the cutest thing ever to grace Jupiter’s orbit. He looked away shyly from the socials and societals, all younger women charged with monitoring social conditions and community development on the station. He looked longingly at the fighter pilots, trained on earth, with their cool as hell, specially designed jackets and classic sunglasses. You didn’t need sunglasses on Io but they made a point of wearing them as often as humanly possible. They made a big deal of pointing out that it was a habit they’d picked up on earth, as if that made it sacrosanct.
He found his crew in their usual spot next to the dartboard and sidled in next to them.
There was Bee, the small, fiery girl with piercings and a tattoo on her neck that said, ‘blow me.’ She was edgy and smart, and proof that sometimes, big things come in small packages.
Next to her, with a pint glass in each hand, was the huge, barrel-chested, giant, Gentle Ace. What he lacked in smarts, he made up for in sheer size and strength. There was a rumor going through the station that he’d single-handedly lifted a rumblebug, the powerful, though decidedly unsexy ships that he and Huck and the rest of the maintenance pilots flew.
The rumor was actually started by Huck. They’d been fixing a sensor in Delta sector when the ground beneath them suddenly gave way. They just about made it back to the ship, but one of the legs gave way and the whole ship listed to one side. Ace caught the ship before it unbalanced and righted it with what appeared to Huck to be impossible strength. Technically, he hadn’t lifted the ship, but being able to do what he’d done was insane. A rumblebug easily weighed a few tons. In Huck’s opinion, it more than justified the rumor.
Huck nodded to them.
“What did I miss?”
Bee looked at him with a grin.
“Ace here thinks the frigate’s full of fresh supplies. He’s hoping for a new geiger vest.”
Ace finished one of his pints and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I’m just saying, it’d be nice to have something new is all”.
“Oh yeah? So it’s not to impress a certain somebody?” Bee said.
Huck laughed.
“What’s this?” he said. “I’m gone for one mission and I’m already out of the loop?”
Ace glared at them both.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he said.
Bee wiped a strand of yellow hair from her eyes.
“So you’re telling me you don’t know anything about Estel, who works in social engineering?”
Just the mention of the name had Ace blushing. He looked away from them both.
“I mean, yeah, she’s cool,” he said.
Bee and Huck exchanged grins that said they weren’t going to let this go. Huck leaned in for dramatic effect.
“Oh, I know Estel. The one with the braids. She actually asked me a question the other day,” Huck said.
Ace turned immediately toward him.
“What, um, what did she say?” he stammered.
Huck leaned in closer and dropped his voice to a low whisper.
“She said, you know that big guy, Ace? Is it, you know, true what they say about him?”
Ace looked like he was going to explode from the tension.
“What did you say?”
“I just nodded, Ace. I nodded and I winked.”
“You nodded and you winked? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever she wants it to mean?” Huck said.
“True what they say about me?” Ace said to himself. “I wonder what they say about me?”
Huck gave Bee a look and got to his feet.
“My round,” he said.
He ambled up to the bar. There was a long line in front of him but he didn’t mind. It gave him more time to watch Fern. She was a waitress at the bar and he’d known her his entire life. They’d grown up together in the hub, the area outside the station where those not lucky enough to be given official quarters had built up a shanty town of sorts.
Having come from the same place, it was understood that they always had each other’s backs. The hub was harsh. The lead barriers didn’t protect you from the radiation the way the station did. People didn’t last long out there. But they were loyal to each other in a way someone from the station would never really understand. They were connected by a bond thicker than blood.
Huck hadn’t always thought this, but lately he’d realized something new about Fern. She wasn’t just clever, funny, good at making conversation, and a good friend. She was utterly stunning. She was the kind of girl that could walk into a room and make conversation stop. She was the kind of girl that everyone noticed and wanted to talk to, even the earthborn overseers who usually didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone from the hub.
Huck was falling for her. For Fern. His Fern. From the old neighborhood.
And he wasn’t just falling for her.
He was falling head-over-heels for her.
She glanced up at him, mid-pour, catching him in the gaze of her mesmerizing purple eyes.
To some people, her eyes were shocking. To others, they were alluring.
They hadn’t always been purple. They’d turned that way after a toxic waste accident in the hub that almost killed her. It had been Huck who’d pulled her from the accident and saved her life. They were just kids. She’d been lucky. In the hub, fatal accidents involving industrial waste were a normal part of life, an everyday occurrence that killed kids just as often as they killed the workers who were forced to handle dangerous materials with inadequate protection. The purple eyes were the only mark the accident had left.
Sometimes she joked that the accident had given her special powers, like the power to see through Huck’s clothing. Lately, he’d spent more and more time wondering what she looked like beneath her own.
Finally, Huck got to the front of the line. For once, he was lost for words. He looked at Fern and his mind went blank.
“Oh my god, this total creep was just staring at me while I was pouring other people’s drinks,” she said.
Huck looked around before realizing she was making a joke about him.
Why did he feel like
such an imbecile around her lately?
“Oh, haha, good thing I got here,” he said. “You remember what he looked like?”
Fern shrugged.
“Handsome as hell, I’m sure,” Huck said.
Fern shook her head. “Far from it. It looked to me like someone had been smashing his face with an ugly stick since birth. I legit almost vomited.”
Huck laughed.
“Geez,” he sounds horrible.
“He was hideous, and he just kept staring like a complete stalker.”
Fern looked at him triumphantly but as she did, she knocked over the beer she’d just poured and it spilled all over the bar.
“Maybe he was surprised by how clumsy you are,” Huck said.
Fern grinned. “Maybe he was staring at my new nail polish,” she said.
She lifted her middle finger and held it up to him.
“What do you think?”
Huck laughed.
“Pink,” he said. “Well it’s nice you never let your inner princess grow up.”
Fern laughed too. Neither of them wanted to let the other go, but the line behind Huck was impatient for their drinks.
“Anyway, what are you having, sir?” Fern said.
“Same as always,” he said.
Fern grinned and began making some sort of cocktail. It was rare for a bartender to mix a drink by hand when the generators could do everything faster and cheaper, but she poured some electric blue liquor into a tall glass with ice, topped it with a cherry and umbrella, and slid it across the bar to him.
“What the fuck is this?” Huck said.
Fern looked behind him at a group of particularly masculine fighter pilots. She knew they were the guys Huck spent his life trying to impress.
“Nice drink, sweetheart,” one of the pilots said.
“This?” Huck said, looking at the glass, horrified.