Juno Rising (ISF-Allion)

by Patty Jansen

  He checked all his gear. A small suit malfunction out there and you were dead.

  At the depot, Katarina had come out of the blocky building carrying a huge gun on a stand, which she proceeded to set up within the shelter of the building.

  The airlock opened. Fabio jumped into the dust.

  He remembered jumping out of the truck at Johnson, and landing in a thick layer of fluffy snow. He’d sunk in to over his knees.

  The dust on Io was a bit more solid. Now that he was down here, there was less light to see the footsteps of the others ahead of him.

  More disturbingly, there was no sound, so no way of knowing if he was being used for target practice. It was nice of the group to suggest that ISF wanted him alive, but he wasn’t so convinced.

  He ran, bent over so that he didn’t present too much of a target.

  Something hit the rock close to him. The blast sent shockwaves through the ground and threw up dust. Fabio ducked behind a rock spike, although he had no idea where the fire was coming from. There were jagged rock spikes all around him, blocking his view.

  He remembered hiding in the ruined dome at Johnson, with dust-coloured snow falling down around him. There were dead bodies on the ground, now being covered in snow. He had no idea who was shooting or why or who they were aiming for.

  Priya leaned into him. He knew she had been injured, but hadn’t realised how badly until it was too late. He was still on a high, because he’d enabled so many people to get to safety, and during the boring ride Priya had spoken of some of the fabled Allion technology that ISF could only dream of.

  “The antimatter engine,” she said. “ISF has offered us any amount of money for one of the two prototypes. Think of it, they could get from here to Earth in two weeks if they had this engine.”

  “But you’re not selling?” Fabio guessed.

  “We will sell, but not yet. It’s not commercially viable.”

  Those mundane, yet optimistic words kept repeating in Fabio’s mind after she had slipped from his grip in the corridors of Johnson. When removing her suit, he found it was soaked with blood. A projectile had hit her in the side.

  Staring in shock at her lifeless eyes, Fabio had lost all semblance of self-control.

  He’d grabbed a nearby dead soldier’s gun and gone on a rampage. Who had he killed? He didn’t even want to think of it. All he could feel was the discharge of the heavy-duty gun, all he could see were sprays of blood dripping down the walls. The conference at Johnson had hosted a number of semi-important ISF officers, who had come here to fake interest in a peaceful agreement. It was all a ruse. They were only at the base to watch Allion get wiped out. Fabio had killed many before he was captured.

  A traitor? No, because Sanchez had been livid when hearing this story.

  “I will do anything I can to cut this cancer from our force. Preston will hear from me, and hell, he won’t like it.”

  Mars was why ISF had split into Inner and Outer System divisions. Mars was why he had spent years in detention being shuttled from facility to facility. And all of a sudden, Fabio knew what he was doing here: he had to expose Preston, and ISF didn’t want to kill him, because he had something they wanted. Priya’s capsule. And in a roundabout way, she had already told him what was in it: information that led to the technology to produce an antimatter engine.

  But now he was stuck here in between a couple of jagged rocks on Io, with no weapon and no way of getting out safely. He crawled through the dust, which was loose in parts and caked into a crust in others. Sometimes, his foot or knee would sink through.

  He couldn’t hear any shooting. His helmet feed appeared to be out of order. The display was on, but all he could hear was weird static, and his calls for the others were met with silence.

  The wall of the depot shelter was now in view, but in order to get to it, he would have to cross the bare concreted space. The truck still stood on the road behind him. He couldn’t see Katarina, but he presumed she had gone inside the building or stood in the shadow, waiting to fire.

  He could try to risk it and run. But no. A glimmer of movement behind him revealed Thalia and Paul. Sol and Jun were hiding behind the truck. What were they doing back there?

  Trucks were closing in all around the bunker. He could see at least three. The whole escape attempt was futile.

  A woman said in his helmet comm, “Get back into the truck.”

  Fabio didn’t recognise the voice, but something about the accent jigged his memory. He wondered if Thalia and Paul had heard it, too. He wondered if this was why Jun and Sol were back at the truck.

  “Get into the truck,” the voice said again. “Hurry up, because I don’t know how long I can keep this channel open.”

  Fabio gestured to Thalia and Paul, and he ran. The dust was quite deep in places, and several times, he tripped and fell. He had no idea if anyone was aiming at him, and no idea where the others were, though he thought the others might have passed him.

  The truck came into view just as Katarina was climbing into the airlock. She carried the big gun on her shoulder as if it was a mailing cylinder.

  She gestured at him, go, go, go! and closed the airlock.

  Fabio reached the truck as the airlock opened again, with no idea where they were going in the hopelessly bogged vehicle. There was no time to ask.

  He was the last in. Paul was just removing his helmet, and let loose a string of swear words.

  Katarina jumped into the driver’s seat.

  Outside, at least five trucks had stopped around the depot. Men in suits were now coming out. The low sunlight glinted on the barrels of their guns.

  It was too late. Fabio had not regained enough of his memory to be of any help. He’d be captured, put in prison and he would die there, probably as early as today.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said.

  “Why?” Thalia said.

  “Because it’s me they want, and I think I know why, but there is a piece missing that connects it all together so that it makes sense. I have information that they want. It belonged to Allion and is about how to produce antimatter engines. They must be detailed plans or something.”

  But Kat clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “What is it?” Paul asked, and he asked it again, because she didn’t reply.

  “Antimatter engines,” she said. “The approaching object.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen that. What is it?”

  “It puts out light in the visible spectrum, and many very knowledgeable people pored over it and concluded that it could only be an artificial construction. It’s going too fast and in the wrong direction to be anything else. It’s a ship.”

  “No,” Fabio said. “It’s not just a ship. It belongs to Allion. Priya said they had two prototypes. Well, ISF has combed the system extensively. Where are they?”

  “Destroyed?” Thalia said.

  “No. They’ve done what antimatter ships are designed to do: they left the solar system.”

  “Interstellar travel,” Jun said. “The stuff of theories.”

  “No,” Kat said. “Allion was always the stuff of theory, daring to do things that most companies and institutions from Earth never dared try. Sometimes their work blew up in their faces—spectacularly so—but when they succeeded, they took themselves another twenty, fifty, a hundred years ahead on the technology curve. It’s a ship, and they’re coming back.”

  Before anyone could suggest that if this was true, those people wouldn’t like what they saw, Paul called out, “Look!”

  They looked where he pointed.

  Two of the trucks were moving away from the bunker at great speed. One of them appeared to be firing into the sky.

  “What’s going on?” Sol asked.

  Katarina said, “It seems we are getting help from above—crap!”

  A flash tore over the landscape throwing up a cloud of dust. One of the trucks had fallen onto its side, the other had been blown into bits.

  The remaining three truck
s now also started moving.

  Katarina pointed the camera up, but the sky was dark and revealed none of its secrets.

  Then something came from above, thud, onto the roof of the truck and then onto the ground.

  It looked like—

  Somebody walked across the roof of the truck, jumped onto the engine panel and into the dust. He carried a large gun across his back. Fabio didn’t recognise the make or model.

  He casually picked up the gun stand that Katarina had left outside the door of the truck.

  “He’s not wearing a suit!” Jun said.

  “Damn, that’s an aggregate,” Thalia said. Half-human, half-machine.

  The man set up the stand, leaned his own weapon on the stand and fired.

  The rocket hit the closest of the trucks, shattering the front left corner of the cabin. The pressure blew out in a puff of air and flying debris. At least some of the troops inside had been wearing suits because they ran out and around the vehicle.

  The drivers of the other trucks reversed away, but this fighter did not miss.

  “Holy shit,” Paul said. “He’s doing that all by himself.”

  But the man decided it was enough and jumped back on the truck.

  A couple of the other trucks exploded.

  Then a big clunk made the truck shudder, and the next moment they were lifted right off the ground. The last thing Fabio saw of the surface was the aggregate man jumping onto the outside of the vehicle and riding on the roof like a trapeze artist.

  Holy crap.

  The ship that had to be up there and that reeled them in moved at a steady pace. It was hard to see in the top viewscreen, because most of it was dark as space itself. Fabio guessed that it was of similar size as an ISF cargo vessel, but the bits he could see didn’t look like a clunky transport ship. Streamlined. It moved with grace. The cargo bay had doors in the bottom, which was a strange place for doors to be in a space-faring vessel, where side-couplings were a lot more common.

  They were being winched up into the hold.

  The Watcher

  * * *

  THE IMAGE FROM THE TINY camera was grainy.

  It was bad luck that the rescue was happening just as Io moved through Jupiter’s shadow and the light was too low to get a decent picture.

  The butterfly satellite that the ship had released before going further down to the surface should have had a good view of the area, but the picture quality was rubbish.

  The two moth fighters released from the wellship Thor IV were clearly visible, because their beacons showed up as dots of light in the projection. They flew over the landscape below, in which Vega could make out a blocky building and a number of ground vehicles approaching the blocky building.

  “I’m going down at the next pass,” Olek said.

  Vega couldn’t see him, but likely he’d be hanging onto the outside of one of the moths, wearing a harness with a magnetic clip and a retractable tether.

  He was their secret weapon, not to be noticed until he was already too close.

  Vega sometimes joked that they should produce female aggregates, but the male ones were good to look at, and they impressed and intimidated even the ISF soldiers.

  How great would it be to be able to go out in space without having to wear so much cumbersome gear?

  The moths turned around and came back in the direction of the blocky building. One of the ground vehicles had become stuck in the sand, and a person had run to a flat area next to the building.

  “Someone’s going inside,” Taura said, standing next to Vega.

  “It’s one of the mindshards. I can feel it. She’s scared, she has defected. The ISF soldiers are after her, and when they catch her, they are likely to kill her.”

  “Where is the prisoner?”

  “In the vehicle.”

  Yes, she should absolutely concentrate on him, even if it was easy to get distracted with all the directions her mindshards were pulling her. Because another mindshard was also in the vehicle, and the one who still remained on Ganymede had just challenged the very person responsible for the deaths on Mars.

  Vega couldn’t know what Jaykadia had done or said, but she had sure spied on some snippy conversation between ISF officers about that pretty young thing who led Ganymede Mining and who now, apparently, refused to cooperate.

  A couple of other vehicles had pulled up at the blocky building. All occupants had now left the stranded vehicle, and were making their way in the direction of the building. This was good. They were all wearing suits.

  One of the pursuing vehicles fired at the abandoned truck. The impact made the vehicle shudder, which was visible even in the poor image. There was no visible damage to the truck, but it might not work anymore.

  The moths were on their way back and had almost reached the building again.

  But, no, one of the pursuing vehicles had noticed the craft flying over. It reversed and fired into the sky.

  The other vehicles were too close and too heavily armed for the moths to land, unless—

  She asked the pilot of one of the moths, “Have you got a channel to their suit cams?”

  “I can try,” the voice came back, crackling with static. And then, “Yes, I do. Go ahead.”

  “Get back into the truck,” Vega said, and she repeated that until the figures turned around and went back to the stricken vehicle.

  “Go, quickly,” she said to the team. “Take the whole vehicle.”

  Olek jumped from the moth’s side. He had switched on his camera, and Vega could see the tether unrolling as he fell. And then a shudder when he landed—on the roof of the vehicle.

  The other vehicles were coming closer, and Olek jumped off the vehicle, grabbed something out of the dust—which turned out to be a stand—and used it to balance his weapon. In short order, he despatched the first of the oncoming trucks. The others backed away, but now they needed to be quick.

  “Request backup,” he said.

  But the two moths had moved on and needed to turn around before they could come back again. Olek jumped back onto the truck. A rim ran along the side of the roof of the truck. He tested its strength, pulling hard on the metal edge. It didn’t budge.

  He wormed a pad from his belt and attached it to the vehicle, under the rim, and did the same on the other side. Then he jumped off into the sand.

  But Vega couldn’t see what he did next, because a flash went off nearby. One of the attacking vehicles exploded.

  Olek remained down in the sand. He was all right, wasn’t he? She couldn’t see him anymore.

  Another flash. A second vehicle exploded.

  Olek clambered onto the roof from the other side of the vehicle. He had crawled underneath and was pulling up one end of a transport harness.

  He looped the rope on the harness around the pads on both sides.

  Both moths had passed the area and needed to turn around again. There was another aggregate—possibly Kimley—on top of one of the moths, firing at the trucks.

  Olek aimed his harpoon and fired.

  His tether unreeled as the hook flew up and up—and grappled onto one of the moths. The tether drew taut.

  The truck left the ground, seemingly floating over the jagged landscape, although Olek’s cam showed that he was working hard to stabilise the vehicle so it didn’t rotate or sway.

  “We’ve got them,” Olek said through the comm. “It was dicey and we had to destroy five vehicles, but we got him.”

  Vega blew out the breath she didn’t realise she was holding. She turned to Taura. “Prepare part two of the plan.”

  Taura nodded and left the room to do all the technical things that now needed to be done, all those things that were Taura’s expertise.

  Vega was so relieved, because frankly, she’d started to doubt that the mindshard technology would deliver. Empathy was all very well, but it was not as clear as directions. A person could take several routes to act on their empathy. To guess that four people would all be motivated t
o choose the side of the oppressed was a huge gamble, but it was not detectable through spy monitoring, even if the nanometrics required were. That was the weak spot that had almost been her undoing. ISF had discovered the nanometrics, even if they had no idea what their function was. To them, nanometrics meant spies and data, but the four people had only been agents without their knowledge. ISF had almost destroyed the man who carried the most important data.

  But now it was over.

  “Put me onto the prisoner as soon as you can,” she said to the pilot of the moth.

  While she waited, she told the projector to find a soothing image of some starfield or of the swirling clouds of Jupiter. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed and her eyes closed.

  Fifteen thousand people on Juno Station would be safe now. They would have somewhere to go.

  Not long after, Olek’s voice came over the comm. “I’m here with him now.”

  An image sprang into the air of a thin, pale-skinned man with dishevelled dark hair.

  That was the man they’d all been looking for, the one Priya had chosen? He really did not look like much.

  She said, “You don’t know me, but I have heard about you. My name is Vega Antares and Priya Anyanda was my soul sister.”

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  THE TRUCK WENT HIGHER and higher into space.

  Fabio couldn’t even see the surface anymore, because the giant crescent of Jupiter dominated the view.

  “Where are we going?” Paul asked. “Where the fuck are we going? There is a man on the roof, not wearing a suit. That is fucking Jupiter out there, he should have been dead ages ago. Why is he alive? What sort of robot is it?”

  “He’s an aggregate,” Fabio said.

  “What the fuck are you? Some kind of spy?”

  “I’m Fabio Velazquez. I am the last survivor of the chameleon program, which was ISF’s answer to the aggregate program. I am still a Lieutenant in ISF, although I don’t know how long that will last. I worked in mining astronomy, Research Division. At Mars, I rescued a community of people from certain death when I found out that an asteroid was on course to collide with the area where they lived. I went against the orders of my superior and went to warn the communities down there. As it turned out, they were Allion communities. As it also turned out, the asteroid strike was meant to look like an accident and no one was meant to survive. As a result of my actions, the perpetrators of the planning—who are in ISF but do not speak for the whole organisation—had to go into Johnson and damage the dome to make sure there were as few witnesses as possible. Because people were coming in from outside knowing what had happened and that it was not an accident. Some of these people were killed, but some made it out.”