Jupiter's Halo: Unbroken

by A P Heath

  Two minutes later the door to Cammie Li’An’s quarters opened to admit a tall, dark man carrying a small case. He let the door close behind him without a glance back. In his case the ident card he carried showed the name Terrick Carey.

  Terrick walked away from the abandoned quarters and made his way to the docks. He had an appointment on Ceres and he couldn’t be late.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Comms Officer Emelia Green opened her eyes and instantly regretted it. Her head hurt, her back and arms ached and one of her legs felt like it had gone to sleep. She was facing directly up, the bright lights running up the walls and across the distant ceiling filling her eyes with pain and forcing her to screw them shut.

  Something soft and warm cushioned her head. Her thoughts were muzzy, as if her skull was filled with clouds, but after a moment she realised it was someone’s lap. She was being held off the cold floor by another body. Green craned her neck, her eyes still squinting against the brightness. Above her, staring straight ahead was the worried young face of her fellow comms officer; Oliver Juno.

  Oliver was similar in age to her, but tall where she was petite and confident where she was shy. He was funny, easy to like and handsome with his long dark hair and strong jaw.

  Not long after they’d first met, over a year ago now, she had asked him why he’d chosen a comms officer role instead of going into the army or even trying for the marines. He certainly had the physique for it.

  He’d told her he was a pacifist, more interested in the work he could do to bring humanity together than finding new ways to tear it apart. He hated wars and often they’d talked of their dreams for the universe and mankind’s place within it.

  Oliver dreamed of searching the stars for other kinds of life and had been talking a lot of late about trying to join a research expedition to Ganymede to study the emerging sea life of the great moon.

  This station was just a stepping stone, he’d said. The way for him to gather the clearances and credits he’d need to make his way to Jupiter’s Halo; the God’s Belt and petition to join the Ministry’s scientific division.

  Like her Oliver had started life on the dark and poorer side of Luna.

  He was perfect material for the Deorum army, young, strong and short on prospects. Oliver Juno had made other plans

  though.

  What set him apart from the millions he grew up around was his mind. He could turn his hand to any skill almost immediately. He had taught himself to speak a dozen languages, seeking out new dialects and vocabularies from the melting pot of old Earth races that made up the Deorum society.

  He was gifted, but driven too. He knew how he wanted his life to be shaped, what he would contribute to humanity’s future and had set out from a young age to build himself into the person he needed to be to accomplish those goals.

  He was an idealist and Emelia had been hopelessly in love with him from the first moment she’d looked into his dark brown eyes.

  She’d never said anything about her feelings. For Emelia such talk was an alien and difficult subject to brooch. How could she tell him? He had his plans, his dreams and ambitions. She was just another girl from Luna; small, plain, quiet and with no further dreams for herself than to return to Luna and her family.

  Oliver had volunteered for this posting, she’d been sent here simply because she was too timid to raise an objection when the posting docket was dropped onto her desk.

  No one wanted to be stuck on a near empty station for a two year rotation, especially one so close to the poisonous empty planet the human race had fled from more than two-hundred years ago.

  The assignment was not originally meant for her, but it had been passed around the members of her comms team until the general consensus was that dumping it on her would not meet with any resistance.

  They’d been right. She’d worked hard to reach her station in the comms bureau of Central Command, but when that role, that opportunity she’d studied so diligently to obtain, was snatched away from her, she accepted it with her customary meekness.

  Just a week later she had stepped onto the cold metal deck plates of GS-114.66.1-Delta to take on her lonely role of comms

  monitoring. Another week had passed before Oliver had joined her and his easy charm and casual confidence brought a light into her dreary surroundings. He was everything she wished she could be and knew she never would.

  Now he was cradling her head in his lap.

  In his lap!

  If it weren’t for the pain throbbing throughout her body and the imminent threat of death, this would be a perfect moment.

  He looked down at her, seeing she was awake.

  “Emelia, are you okay?” He asked quietly.

  She loved hearing him say her name. She’d day dreamed of how it would feel to hear him say he loved her so many times. There was concern in his voice, in his eyes.

  He cares.

  She felt her heart skip at the realisation. Her voice fled her so all she could manage was a nod as she felt the tell-tale blush he caused in her start to creep across her cheeks.

  His concern seemed to lessen.

  “At least you’re getting some colour back.” He whispered.

  “Do you want to try sitting up?”

  She didn’t, she really didn’t.

  Emelia would have been happy to lie there and stare into his eyes for the rest of eternity. She still struggled to speak and tried to shake her head. He was already moving though.

  She groaned inwardly, again wishing she had the courage to say what she wanted for once. Just once would be enough, then he’d know.

  Oliver pulled her gently into a sitting position, his strong arms under her shoulders, supporting her as she struggled to pull her legs up with her.

  The effort made her head swim and she fell against him. He steadied her, moving his hand to grip her shoulder. His smell enveloped her, the deep intoxicating aroma of him that made her head feel light.

  Now she was sitting she could see clearly they were huddled behind stacked crates in one of the loading bays. There were others with them; the science staff, she guessed, but not all of

  them.

  She’d seen some of them around the station during her rest cycles, but outside of the med-techs she didn’t know any by name.

  There was a large woman sat watching the soldiers over by the bulkhead, a haughty expression on her lined face.

  Next to her was an older looking man, pale and thin with an augmented optical attachment over his left eye. It was similar in design to those worn by Oliver and herself, albeit the old doctor’s clearly allowed increased spectrum range while the one above her left ear was filled with tightly packed memory coils to contain sensitive data that needed transporting. Right now hers were filled with the databank downloads.

  She was carrying precious cargo, although she had no idea of the exact content.

  Next in their little circle was the man she saw more often than the others. He was middling in age, she guessed around thirty-five Martian years.

  He was the only member of the scientific team who’d engaged her in any type of conversation during their time together on the station. His face was mostly smooth, but his age showed in the lines at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. His name was something like Bramley or Brambon.

  He’d introduced himself once but she couldn’t remember it clearly now. He was a doctor of sorts. Not medical, like Masj, but still a doctor.

  He smiled as he saw her looking and she quickly switched her attention to the med-techs she knew.

  Senior Med-tech Masj was a dark skinned man with close eyes and a thick black beard. She had to see him once a month for routine fitness and medical assessments.

  Emelia didn’t like him much, he was always abrupt in the way he spoke and rushed her for the answers to his questions whenever she hesitated. Beside him was the last of their little band of survivors.

  Franklyn was a med-tech under Masj’s supervision. He was young, younger
even than Emelia, but he seemed to stroll through life with an air of carelessness that enthralled her and

  at the same time irritated Masj tremendously.

  She’d often watched as he harangued the young med-tech, berating him for the sloppiness of his appearance or the plodding manner in which he completed tasks.

  It brought a smile to her face to watch Franklyn carry on regardless of the tirade, as if it were directed at someone other than him. Masj said he was lazy and ungrateful, but Emelia suspected that he just didn’t care.

  Between Franklyn and her sat her dream. Oliver Juno, eyes fixed on the bodies of the strange soldiers that had been assigned to guard them while they undertook their duties on GS-114.

  Two were stood in the opening onto the main station corridor, their weapons raised and their eyes scanning the approaches to the loading bay. The other four were huddled close inside the door, their tight black body suits revealing the stress in their body language plainly.

  They were talking quickly in hushed tones, occasionally a word or two would be spoken louder and one of them would throw a glance over their shoulder to the circle of civilians, before turning back. Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t look like it boded well for any of them.

  She recognised the form of Hornwood. She realised she didn’t know his first name, he’d never told her.

  He had been her companion on shifts on the bridge for months, but his presence there had done little to reassure her.

  More often than not he’d simply made her feel uncomfortable. He often tried to start conversations, asking about her life on Luna, her family and friends. She didn’t like to talk about them in general and the way he asked always made her feel uneasy.

  She’d seen him looking at her too. Not at her face, but at her body.

  The fatigues she wore were loose on her thin frame, not revealing or enticing in any way, yet she’d seen the hunger in his eyes, the calculating stare as if he was imagining her dressed differently, or not at all.

  If Hornwood wanted something like that from her she was not interested. He scared her with his habits of cleaning and

  toying with his weapons while she monitored comms.

  He had told her of other operations, missions he’d been a part of. He skipped a lot of detail, she guessed there was a lot he was forbidden from sharing, but he never left out anything when it came to telling her of the combat.

  He talked about his actions, deaths of his enemies and squad mates alike. Men and women he’d killed or seen killed and exactly how they met their ends. He told her everything. Maybe he thought she’d be impressed by it. She wasn’t.

  Violence scared her more than the prospect of sharing her feelings for Oliver did. She didn’t want someone like him, like Hornwood.

  She wanted someone gentle, tender, caring. Someone like her father had been before his mind left him.

  She looked at Oliver again. Nudged him for his attention.

  He turned to face her distractedly, his main focus still on the military personnel.

  “What’s happening?” She whispered.

  “I don’t know.” He said slowly, “They said we were going to evacuate on the Peregrine back to Luna, but we’ve been here for ten minutes and they haven’t gone near it since you and the others came in.” He turned his eyes on her, the look of concern returning.

  “The one that brought you in, Hornwood, he said you took a bad fall. I was worried you weren’t going to wake up.”

  Emelia dropped her head to hide the blush that sprang into her face at his words.

  He was worried. Not ‘they’, but ‘he’.

  “No, I’m…I’m fine.” She said out loud, still not meeting his gaze.

  “Good,” he said, “It’d be a really bad day if we lost you too.”

  She smiled, then his words kicked in her mind.

  “Too?” She asked him.

  “Yeah, a researcher called Axton was killed on one of the upper levels and some of the agents have gone missing too.”

  Emelia remembered the flashing beacons on her display screen.

  “They were on level four.” She said almost to herself.

  “Well, wherever they were, it doesn’t look like they’re joining us any time soon.”

  Something occurred to him and he took her arm in his hand.

  “You were on the bridge, do you know what happened? Have we been attacked? Who is it?”

  His words were urgent and the pressure on her arm was uncomfortable. She pulled away, seeing the others around them had taken an interest in their exchange.

  “I…I don’t know.” She stuttered under their gazes, “Maybe.”

  The fat woman leaned forward, her face set in a stern expression.

  “Nonsense!” She barked, “Of course you know. Now stop being a silly girl and just tell us what’s going on!”

  Emelia recoiled at her tone, pulling her arm from Oliver’s grip and rubbing where he’d held her.

  “Honestly, I don’t know!” She blurted.

  “There was something coming towards the station and he, he asked me about the S.E.P. and then there was an explosion and I was here.” She was panicked and the words spilled from her.

  “He didn’t say anything more?” Oliver pressed her, “We all heard their leader over the comms, someone attacked us. Who was it?”

  His eyes were staring at her, burrowing into her.

  “I don’t know!” She almost yelled at them.

  “He was using his internal link the whole time.”

  She held her hands out in an effort to show she wasn’t hiding anything.

  “He barely spoke to me and then it was all black and then I woke up here.”

  She panted, fighting to hold back the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes. “Please, I don’t know anything.”

  The fat woman sat back, sighing in disgust.

  “No bloody use at all.” She muttered.

  Bramley looked at her more sympathetically. He leaned forward, moving onto his knees to reach out a steadying hand

  to her. She leaned away from it.

  “It’s okay,” He said soothingly. “You’re okay now.”

  They were interrupted by a shout from across the loading bay.

  “We are not fucking going there!”

  It looked like the conversation amongst their protectors had become a heated argument. One man was leaning angrily towards Hornwood, pointing a quivering finger as another held him across the chest, restraining him.

  Hornwood was stock still. His face a mask, but the fourth in their group, a woman who faced directly towards where Emelia and the others sat, was not so good at hiding her thoughts. Her eyes were wide, her face displaying clearly her shock at whatever Hornwood had just said. He spoke again now.

  “There isn’t another choice.” He said, loudly enough for her to hear the words. “We go or we die.”

  The other man seemed unimpressed.

  “We go and we die you mean!” He threw back, pushing the restraining arm down and stepping away.

  He whirled back again before Hornwood could speak further.

  “It’s a fucking death sentence and you know it! If we’re going to die we should go down fighting.”

  He raised his fist, shaking it. The man who’d held him back was nodding, but the woman seemed less swayed by his words.

  “And them?” Hornwood asked, gesturing with his left hand to the group of civilians.

  The man muttered something inaudible but his body language was clear. Fuck them.

  Emelia was shocked. These soldiers, they were special.

  They carried no sign of rank or insignia but from the stories Hornwood had told her, they were some sort of covert team.

  And they were here to protect the station and its civilians. He’d told her that too.

  All of them had heard the exchange. The fat woman got slowly to her feet, grunting with the effort of raising her large frame.

  “Lieutenant Hornwood,”
She called out, “May I have a word with you?”

  Hornwood turned from his team to face her. He did not look pleased at her interruption, but he began to walk over all the same.

  As she stepped to meet him Bramley reached up and caught her by the arm.

  “You can’t!” He hissed.

  She shook him off.

  “I will do what I have to.” She replied brusquely.

  “You might be happy to sit here until whoever it is comes to finish us off, but I have other plans.” She carried on her steps towards Hornwood, who had stopped in the no-man’s-land between the two groups.

  Bramley’s gaze followed her. “Don’t!” He hissed again. She didn’t respond.

  The other doctor, the old one seemed upset but he did nothing to stop her walking away. He simply sat there, his eyes staring intently at the polished metal decking beneath him.

  Bramley wiped his face with a hand, clearly agitated. He looked at Emelia, Oliver, the med-techs and then back to where Hornwood and the fat woman talked quietly as they walked away.

  Emelia couldn’t make out the whispered words, but whatever she was saying had Hornwood’s attention.

  After a couple of minutes bent in conversation they broke apart. For a moment their eyes were fixed on each other before Hornwood gave a slight nod and turned back to the waiting members of his unit.

  The fat woman sauntered back to the civilian circle, looking smug.

  “You’d all better get up,” She said as she stood over them. “We’ll be leaving in a moment.”

  The relief among the group was palpable. Bramley was looking at her with a shrewd look on his face, but the older doctor was almost hugging her wide legs, thanking her profusely. She gave him an irritated look and shook him off.

  Oliver smiled as he looked at Emelia.

  “I guess we’re off to Luna then.” He said.

  Hornwood strolled over to their group. He was carrying his sword, casually held low and his pistol was holstered at his right hip.

  “Listen up civilians.” He said commandingly.

  “We’re evacuating the station so I need you on your feet and ready to go in one minute.” He looked directly at Emelia, “Are you alright to walk?”