Rebels of Jupiter

by Russell Beideman

  “Anything else Chief?”

  “No, keep me updated personally. Don’t tell anyone else damn it. We need to keep this underneath most of the other’s attention.”

  Exsid’s brow scrunched down in a moment of confusion. “Sir, what are you not telling us?”

  The Chief stared Exsid straight in the eyes. “Let me worry about who needs to know. Dismissed.”

  ***

  Al Chipman sat down into a plush chair in front of the tactical display. Deep inside of Callisto the new government was being formed. Old hands were stripped down and new ones called in. Figures were being toppled or hidden away for interrogation. The nanofactories hidden under the crust were hard at work using the spare metal from the drone operated secret mines. So much set into place yet a few more pieces needed to be moved.

  “Where do we stand?” Al asked his commanders and assistants.

  “Space forces are almost fully mobilized,” a military commander said.

  Al’s head assistant Charlie glanced down at this tablet. “Civilians are being brought back to normalcy. Police are doing their best but Ring Three was only supposed to have one explosion. We are not sure who is responsible for the other two. We are still investigating the incident at Ring Two.”

  “Any news over that man Joseph?”

  “We have only been able to link him to the group called the Silver Hearts.”

  “Them again?”

  “Yes sir. They seemed to have gained some more support but we are not sure how. They also seem to know about our plans before they are carried out. We are investigating a serious leak with the military.”

  Al looked at his military commander Koe Jae. “Any news?”

  “None yet, sir. Will keep you updated if anything comes to light,” Koe said curtly.

  “Find him, and send me a file of the history of the Silver Hearts for review. In the meantime, initiate the next phase. We need more time.” Al said this but did not elaborate. He got the update from the RI drone in charge of the nanofactories hidden deep underneath the other side of Callisto. He needed more time for the RI to complete its job.

  ***

  With the fake evidence planted by Trev at the request of Al Chipman and the reports to his aides doctored to reflect a bias to blaming the Silver Hearts, Trev could not help but wonder what Al was up to. But his curiosity only extended as far as to the over-reaching goal.

  Trev stood off to the side of a hanger just below the crust of Callisto. Waiting for his ship to complete its preflight checklist, his data scavengers netted him a video of Al and his assistants talking to him in a conference. Trev logged the video and stored it in the ship’s secondary memory mainframe and locked it down to manual retrieval only to prevent any RIs from trying to peer into its contents. Withdrawing back his data scavenger RI, a gift from a certain man, he could only think of the extra pay this little bit of video would get him. He looked at the picture that was on the tactical screen in front of Al Chipman. At least there would be some fireworks to enjoy later.

  ***

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “I miss my car,” Darvin said back to Exsid as they walked down the street. They both looked to each side as they went. It was the main street that ran the length of the Ring. Some of the buildings here stretched up the whole mile height to the ceiling. Although most of the windows were blast out, the structure of the buildings looked sound. The buildings not only stretched up but they also stretched partly down into the Ring themselves, their structure mixed in with the superstructure of the Ring. It was an everyday sight for them before the rebel attack. Nobody really paid attention to the scale of engineering required to build the Rings anymore. Yet Exsid couldn’t help but to feel a little prideful and a sense of awe every time he imagined those roots digging down into the Ring. Darvin checked the time in his Exovision. Just slightly past three in the afternoon.

  “You never told me what happened to it, now that you mention it.”

  “It got blown up,” Darvin said, stifling back fake tears.

  “You see who did it?”

  “We got up close and personal.”

  “You killed him?”

  “No.”

  “You feeling ok?” Exsid asked Darvin as he took a glance at him.

  “Yeah, why?” Darvin replied in turn while still looking forward.

  “You just seem… different.”

  “Getting shot at can do that to you, especially when you have the front of your cruiser blown up as you are driving it.”

  “I honestly think it’s something else.”

  “It’s not,” Darvin replied sternly and Exsid knew to drop it right there.

  Exsid thought about that for a second. Even though there were a few civilian bodies here and there, there really were no rebels lying dead in the streets. Exsid looked down an alleyway, seeing a few black pieces of broken armor. Darvin saw Exsid staring intently down the alley and looked as well. “You think that’s what I think it is?” Exsid asked.

  “I bet it is,” Darvin replied as they walked off the street and down into the alley to check it out.

  They walked down the alleyway until they came where a small explosion took place. “Seems someone else got up close and personal,” Exsid said as he picked up one of the pieces. “Looks like interweaved nanocarbon. My Biocomp’s scanner is telling me it’s got some inlaid circuitry, crystalline in fact.”

  “When the hell did you get a scanner?”

  “They give it to you after fifty years on the job.”

  “Oh, well forty more to go for me.” Darvin looked around a bit. “I wonder if I can get a beer somewhere,” he whispered.

  “Did you just ask for a beer in all of this mess while being on the clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Darvin, just how many did you have at Daniel’s?”

  “I think six.”

  “You think? Darvin! For the void, I need to get you to the Unity Church. I can’t deal with you like this.”

  “Oh shut up, and besides you are missing something about that armor piece.”

  “Oh yeah? And what the hell am I missing Darvin?” Exsid spat out.

  “The arm it is supposed to go in.”

  Exsid thought about that for a moment. Whoever these guys were, they got in and out fairly quickly and easily without alerting any of the resident RI’s looking for intrusions. That would mean they had resources and connections with someone fairly high up. It wasn’t looking good. No one left state of the art equipment lying around as well. Some things were just not adding up. He had to get to the second Headquarters and see if they can find anything about the missing Chief and General.

  “Well lookie here,” Darvin said with bland excitement in his voice.

  “What you got?” Exsid asked without taking his eyes off the multi-layered armor, even though he noticed that Darvin went through the blast hole in the wall.

  “It’s a nice place. I like it.”

  “Oh yeah? And why is that?”

  “It’s a backup Armory.”

  ***

  Several thousand feet below the water of Earth lay the Nazca Plate, right off the coast of what used to be Peru and Ecuador. Noticeable from the coast itself, the PanAm Stalk was visible like a small tower reaching into the heavens. The space elevator used the igneous ultramafic basaltic rock of the Nazca Plate as its anchor. Rock so dense that even the silica rich rock of the continental plates floats on top of it. A few kilometers deep into the ocean the Stalk went down. Yet it went up nearly 36,000 kilometers into space. Anchored by an asteroid up in geosynchronous orbit, the PanAm Stalk served as the major freight and personnel carrier from surface to space.

  Clean and efficient, the PanAm Stalk housed its own fusion generators that used the seawater around it for some of its fuel, a left over process before the mining of helium-3 on the moon became viable. The majority of the fuel it used to come from mining on the surface of the moon, but now came from the mining of the clouds of Jupiter
. The elevator cars themselves were continually pulled and pushed up along the sides of the Stalk using momentary magnetic fields. These fields would turn on right above the car while the car itself had an opposite charge. This caused the vehicle to be pulled up. On the bottom of the car, the magnetic field switched polarities and caused the car to be pushed up. The magnetic fields would flip off wherever the car was, only being activated slightly above it and slightly below it. This design is similar to the Gauss rifles used in the modern armies of the Commonwealth, but on a much larger scale.

  Another old design still used transported people and freight to and from the continents was the Vacuum MagLev Train System. First developed as a railway between North America and Europe, the system was later expanded to include most of the major ports. By creating a vacuum inside the tubes the trains met almost no friction on top of its magnetic levitation rails. This created a railway that allowed passengers to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in little over an hour. The tubes themselves were laid deep under the ocean surface and anchored to the ocean’s floor using nanocarbon fibers. Just like the twentieth century subway systems under the major cities, the VML trains allowed quick transportation to and from major ports. Later, the tubes were connected to the five Stalks that surrounded the equator.

  With the Earth’s population spiking in the middle of the twenty first century, the carrying capacity of the surface could no longer support the current population. Following the Great Collapse of the 2040s and the end of World War III in the 2076 the newly formed Earth Commonwealth started the construction of the Stalks in 2077. The Stalks were eventually completed in 2089. The Stalks were designed to connect to the many hydroponics farming units that were being built from two of the three remaining governments that held onto space power. Three hundred years later, the farming units, habitation hubs, and various industrial facilities were beginning to be connected to form Earth’s Ring, spanning out from the stalks to surround the globe above the equator. Currently about eighty percent of the Earth Ring was constructed, with only small gaps left between the Stalks.

  ***

  Shome walked through the small territory he controlled. It was a cement and steel forest, filled with millions upon millions of life forms. Sealed against the harsh elements and weather outside caused by the early industrialization of mankind, the Los Angeles Arcology offered life in the middle of a desert next to the green ocean. The Arcology was several domes connected to each other, reinforced against the strong winds caused by the continental storms that roiled around the world. In the upper parts of the Arcology the rich lived, but underground the gangs ruled. Territories were struck out and few ventured to them when they were not invited.

  However, Shome was never satisfied with his satanic life. It was when he met his mentor that he knew he would be part of more. He always cursed himself for being born into the lower depths of the slime riddled Arcology. His pale skin and blonde hair always seemed to make him stand out from the rest of the crowd. He remembered the first time someone decided to toss him a joke about it. They never found his body.

  It was when he saw the news of the Fargo Fusion disaster on his Flex that he knew the plan was in motion. Down in the depths of the Arcology, no one could afford the implants of those above. Instead, they used the cheap computerized Flex paper. However, his mentor supplied him with some special implants that he was not allowed to let anyone around him see. It was only during the private sacrifices of captured rival gang members that he let them out. He still used the Flex to make everyone else assume he had no implants at all.

  He walked over to the mass shuttle, skipping the trains, at the edge of the dome where the central spire was located, paying the costly fee to travel to the surface. The Arcology in its depths was domes on top of domes stretching down into the earth. Each dome had a plasma coil at its three hundred meter apex that provided the night and day light settings to help its inhabitants psychologically. Early efforts of skyscrapers digging deep into the ground caused a tremendous increase in suicides and murders. Doctors and psychologists agreed that the close roof of those early Arcologies caused this increase by affecting the human psyche. Shome stared out of the elevators screen windows at the unmoving cities that the domes contained. Other workers stood beside him. They were the meaningless workers for those above. They cleaned the streets above while the streets below were filled with bags of garbage from the industries. It was like night and day to Shome, and it filled every fiber of his being with hatred. He made a mental note to conduct another raid for nanomeds after he was done with this job.

  After traveling for nearly two vertical kilometers Shome got off at his stop, the surface level. It was here that among the throng of people and businesses he found the Maglev trains. Shome bought his ticket with the few Energens he had, thinking of what he would have after he got paid his cut for this gig. He took a window seat, staring out across the landscape as the others bustled around him.

  Empty lifeless desert surrounded the Los Angeles Arcology, a testament to the destruction of the ecologies early industrialization caused. Even with nanotechnology, climate control was still out of the reach of humanity for the time being. An hour later the landscape was suddenly filled with the territory called the Evergreen Conservation as the train traveled north into what used to be the states of Oregon and Washington. Genetically engineered Evergreens were making a comeback after years of extinction as part of the global terraforming taking place to reclaim the Earth. The train whistled by the trees, leaving him wondering what life he was missing by living deep underground. But living out here cost money, money only few held in hand. It was money for equipment to live out here in the strong winds and the armada storms, only which were now beginning to finally die down after nearly five centuries. It was money to live where the sky was in sight and where freedom was prevalent.

  The train turned west and slowed to a stop at the Evergreen Vacuum Station. It was here that the train moved into a sealed compartment where the atmosphere was sucked out before it moved into the underwater vacuum tubes, very similar to the lock mechanisms that made up the old Panama Canal when it was still in service hundreds of years ago. For a second Shome caught sight of the green ocean. Some people used to say centuries ago the oceans were blue. But now algae covered its surface. Eating up the sun’s rays and reproducing itself, ships traveled back and forth scooping up the mix like the giant whales of the past eating plankton. And just like how plankton was nourishment for the whales the algae and the food from the hydroponics facilities in space were nourishment for the twenty billion on Earth. But the plankton of the past was dead, along with nearly every single other organism of the sea. The seas were just one of the many areas humanity exploited and destroyed in its quest to artificially raise the carrying capacity of the land.

  The train slipped into the vacuum tubes where the atmosphere no longer kept the train’s speed in check by the force of friction and started traveling south. The train, powered by its own fusion reactor, floated on the repulsion of magnetic fields between itself and the track. No whistling sound could be heard since there was no air outside the train for the sound to travel through as a medium. No light could be seen except for the light inside the train itself. Soon the little windows on the side of the train darkened and holograms of different landscapes were played across of it. The images were made to calm the mind when traveling through the dark expanse of the tunnels. To Shome though, it sickened him and further drove his anger of the outside privileged world.

  Shome got up and moved out of his seat, making a show of stretching himself after the few hours journey. He moved to the private restrooms located at the end of his train car. As he stepped inside one of them and locked the door, he stared at himself in the mirror. He hated himself and everyone around him. His mentor showed him the life he would be leading after this job. He would no longer need to steal the electronics he wanted. He would be able to buy the expensive ones he always dreamed about instead of satisfying himsel
f with models over a hundred years old. He would be able to move out of the dank deep expanse he lived in and move off world. He would be able get those implants and finally see Exovision.

  His left forearm in front of him, Shome willed the hidden compartment to open. His flesh parted as the implant opened up. He took out one of the three small cylinders inside the hidden compartment. He brought it up in front of him, looking at it and wondering just how it could be as powerful as his mentor said it would be. In his gang they only had the old fashion gunpowder based firearms while the police had the new nanotech armor suits and electric gauss rifles. But the police never traveled down into the depths of the Arcologies, they preferred to patrol the upper levels.

  Shome willed the implant in his right forearm to come out of its recesses. His flesh parted to allow a small long cylinder object to project itself outside his body. Only a couple inches long, the laser was powered by his own body and was attached to a metal mount that grew itself into the bones of his forearm. Shome moved over to the sink and cut a small hole into the underside of the locked cabinet that was right under the sink. He placed the small cylinder inside of the cabinet and walked away. He repeated this two more times in other parts of the train, just as he was instructed to do years ago.

  Hours later the train stopped at the PanAm Station. Shome melted into the crowd as best he could and got off. As he stepped into the main lobby of the station he was taken by its expanse. The main lobby was a large open area the shape of a donut and completely surrounded the Stalk. It could easily fit a hundred thousand people and to Shome it seemed it already did. He walked out of the immediate area of the train and stood by the edge of the lobby, still unsure of going up the Stalk and to his future where he heard that everyone had an Implant and that everyone had Exovision.

  All of a sudden Shome felt a sharp pain right in his back followed by a feeling as if his insides exploded in itself. He crumpled to the ground, looking up at a blonde lady standing right above him. “Actor’s down,” Shome heard her say.