by Patty Jansen
“So you were that one man, never mentioned by name in any of the stories about Mars,” Thalia said. “You said nothing about this when we first met you.”
“That was because I remembered nothing. And I’m not sure I did do anything to justify praise.”
“Yes, you did. You saved lots of lives.”
Fabio shuddered, remembering the feel of a weapon discharging, remembering the sprays of blood, remembering the long boring periods of lying on his stomach in a medical treatment room, remembering the fear of waking up and not being able to move.
“I don’t know. Memories are coming back, but I’m not sure of their correct order. Whatever I did, I’ve spent the past few years paying for it.”
Something clanged hard against the outside of the truck.
Thalia took in a sharp breath.
Sol said, “It’s all right, the weapons can’t reach us up here. I think we’re being taken into a hold.”
“It’s not that. It’s . . . what sort of ship is this? It creeps me out. Like my memories aren’t my own. I’m feeling things. . . .”
Katarina turned around. “Yes.” Her voice was full of agreement.
Paul stared from one to the other, then turned to Fabio. “Yes, since you know so much, tell us. What sort of ship is this?”
“Nothing to do with me, I assure you. I guess we’ll soon find out.”
The fact that there was a lot of sound outside had to mean that they were inside the ship and pressure had returned.
Voices. One male, one female.
The airlock alarm started blaring.
Katarina turned it off. A moment later, the outer door opened and then the inner door.
A woman came in. She was slender, rather flat-chested, dark-skinned with long glossy black hair. Her eyes were Asian but her nose and full lips were African. Her skin was perfect and unblemished.
Both Thalia and Katarina gasped.
“I’ve seen you before,” Thalia said.
The woman smiled, reached out and touched Thalia’s forehead, and then Katarina’s.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Because the price on my head is higher than any reward ever offered.”
She came to Fabio, reaching out to him. Her touch made him shiver. “Do you have it?”
He nodded, too embarrassed to say that the capsule was somewhere in his digestive tract and had so far refused to come out.
She smiled. “Give it to the crew on the main ship.”
And then she simply vanished into thin air.
“What the hell. . . ?” Paul said.
“Who was that gorgeous creature?” Sol said.
“What was she talking about to you?” Paul met Fabio’s eyes. “Do you have what?”
“The Allion people I rescued gave me something to carry to their comrades in the Outer System.”
“So, you’re an Allion spy?” Sol said.
“No, but I come up for people who are treated unfairly.”
“As I remember, that was the main failure of the chameleon program,” Katarina said. “They were honest, painfully so. They said things that people didn’t appreciate hearing at times that they didn’t appreciate hearing them. They could not be cajoled into the obedient mould of the military.”
A man now came in. His skin was ink-black, with a greenish sheen. He looked human enough, but Fabio knew this was an aggregate.
He clamped a hand around Fabio’s upper arm and pulled him up from his seat. Except “up” was a strange concept, because gravity had begun to decline. They went outside the truck and into a narrow docking bay, where the truck looked strange next to two slender single-pilot craft.
Were they for fighting?
Clearly, they were now in a much bigger ship.
The man took him to a tiny room where he ran a scanner over Fabio’s body. An image came onto the screen with a spot in his belly clearly marked.
He gave Fabio a cup of water with a strange metallic taste. He was only satisfied after Fabio had drunk all of it, and afterwards he told Fabio to undress and strapped him in a soft padded couch.
“The ship needs to move. This will be uncomfortable, but it’s safe.”
He tied the straps, tied an oxygen mask over Fabio’s face and tied him to other equipment.
Fabio wasn’t sure which was more uncomfortable: the fact that the ship pulled serious Gs or that everything in his bowels streamed out. He guessed that was the point of drinking the fluid, but his skin was getting sore from sitting in his own waste while he drifted in and out of consciousness.
It was not for nothing. When the ship finally slowed and the man came back to help Fabio out, the thin-as-water shit had mostly been absorbed by the liner of the chair, except for the little capsule.
The man used a steam nozzle to wash him. He was given clean clothing: a loose pair of trousers and a red shirt with a shape more suitable for women than men.
The man took him back to the others, who were staring at a projection screen of a giant space station floating above the clouds. It was a circular structure, with a “wheel” made up of transparent bubbles and interconnecting tubes. Long flexible ropes dangled off the side of the revolving structure, disappearing into the distance.
The ship matched speed with the outside of the station, and connected to a mooring tube A voice said, “Welcome to Juno Station. You are the first outside visitors in the history of the station. Please remember that the station and the ship is the property of Allion Aerospace. You are welcome to speak to any of our workers.”
“Holy crap,” Paul said.
Katarina nodded. “Does anyone know that this amazing thing is here?”
Holy crap indeed.
When the doors opened, an arrival committee waited at the entrance to the ship and this included the gorgeous woman that he had seen in the earlier projection.
She hugged Thalia and Katarina, both looking bewildered. She used the word mindshards, the meaning of which, he guessed, would be explained soon.
“Come,” she said to Fabio. “My name is Vega Antares and I am the current executive director of Allion Aerospace.”
She took him to a room filled with natural light filtered from the clouds below. The room was empty and the floor oddly soft and bouncy. Light nozzles in the ceiling projected a holographic image of the legendary Allion logo in the middle of the room.
Fabio still could barely believe that all of this existed. This was supposed to be a dead community.
“This is what you brought,” Vega said.
A picture sprang into the air showing a—what was that giant thing that almost didn’t fit into the room?
“This is the starship Forthright. A number of years before the Mars debacle, it left the solar system because we developed a way to surf space-waves created by travelling at near lightspeed. When a ship surfs a wave, it travels faster than light. It also moves out of our communication range, for obvious reasons. That alien ship coming in our direction? That’s the Forthright coming back. These are the ship’s plans with details about the electronics and navigation that we can use to communicate with them while letting them know that we have the right code for them to start talking to us. Problem is: they’re set to go to Mars and we need them to slow down before they get to that stage. Mars is no longer our main base and if they insert into orbit there, it will certainly lead to trouble.”
“You have a contingent of ISF waiting for you here,” Fabio said.
“I’ve got another mindshard who has just dealt with that.”
Jaykadia
* * *
“THIS IS ASTONISHING,” Governor of the Council Of Four, Anise-Leontine Law, said, looking at the screen.
Jaykadia was still a bit flustered from having travelled all the way from the mining settlement to Galileo City. She had received the anonymous letter this morning. She thought she knew where it came from and understood quite well that this had the potential to do a lot of damage, so she had elected to see her aunt in person.
&n
bsp; Her aunt read on.
“It says that Preston is directly responsible for killing thousands of people on Mars. The asteroid was diverted under his orders while he knew, or would soon be aware, where it was going. He knew that there were talks scheduled in that area. He never did anything about the threat to civilians. And after the impact, did his best to cover up his actions when it became clear that people had survived, people who could not be gagged and silenced about what they had seen.”
“It is quite something, isn’t it?” Jaykadia said. “I just didn’t know what to do with this and I value your opinion.”
“Oh, this absolutely should come before the assembly. Preston has deceived us even more than we thought. This is no longer a political game. It should become a court case. I will send a copy of this to Admiral Sanchez.”
“So, do you still want me to bend over backwards to the military ‘exercise’ in my maintenance sheds?”
“Absolutely not. Tell them that they can pack up. Tell whoever sent this message that any Allion refugees can freely visit the civilian settlements without fear for their lives. This is ridiculous.”
Jaykadia nodded. She had no problem working with or for the military, but the way in which Preston had sought to control everybody in the system for the sake of eradicating competition was ridiculous.
There would be a lot of fallout from this, including what Allion doctors were doing in public hospitals applying secret technology, but she felt smug about this little corner of victory. The workers in the suiting room would be happy when they could go back to work.
Her aunt said, “I will mention the details of this incoming ship to the assembly.”
“No,” Jaykadia said. “I think that should stay between us. We don’t know who else is trying to get their hands on it. We want them to arrive safely, without risk to them or us. If some idiot tries to blow a ship with antimatter engines, there’s no telling what sort of debris or flares could result. I don’t think I want to find out the danger an explosion like that would pose to us here.”
“True. Safety comes first.”
“Safety, and then trade. If the technology is for sale, then I’m interested.”
“I’m sure you are, like a good child of your father’s.”
*
Both Thalia and Kat returned to Galileo City a few weeks later. It was strange to see Kat out of her uniform, but she declared that she had turned her back on the military forever.
Jaykadia didn’t believe her, because Kat never left the military. Jokes went that she had been born with a gun in her hand. She did, however, give a long and detailed account of the ISF’s activities in the asteroid belt before the COF assembly.
Apparently, a few weeks after that, Sanchez contacted her with the offer of a significant promotion and pay raise, so that was the end of her not being in the military. She was going to work at Sarajevo, so Paul could go home and continue to be cranky and be in love with her.
Thalia had a much different story. She spoke of an amazing modern space station in the clouds of Jupiter called Juno Station. She spoke of having travelled on the legendary wellship Thor IV, one of the few ships able to escape Jupiter’s enormous gravity well, and of the spacey, light-filled rooms, all populated by women from poor countries on Earth and men with greenish-black skin who did not need space suits to step into a hard vacuum.
There had been a man with the group called Fabio Velazquez, and he had elected to stay with Allion. They had promised to record and then destroy all his anguished, jumbled-up memories, and replace them with pleasant ones. They were hugely interested in his genetic material, being a chameleon.
Why was the ship coming back? No one knew until they could communicate.
What would the small Allion community do? No one said anything about it.
It would be interesting, but for now, it was much less likely that they’d end up being blown to bits or taken prisoner.
That suited the Council Of Four fine.
Because it was always better to go into trade with another party than to declare war on them.
Thanks for Reading
Thank you for reading Juno Rising. This book is part of the ISF-Allion series, a set of loosely-connected novellas and novels set in this world. Find out more about the series here.
About The Author
* * *
PATTY JANSEN lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.
She has written over thirty novels in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, including the Ambassador series and the Icefire Trilogy and Moonfire Trilogy. Her books are available on all ebook outlets as well as in print.
Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/.
More By This Author
* * *
Quick link to all Patty Jansen’s books
In the Earth-Gamra space-opera universe
RETURN OF THE AGHYRIANS
Watcher’s Web
Trader’s Honour
Soldier’s Duty
Heir’s Revenge
The Return of the Aghyrians Omnibus
The Far Horizon (For younger readers) AMBASSADOR
Seeing Red
The Sahara Conspiracy
Raising Hell
Changing Fate
Coming Home
Blue Diamond Sky
The Enemy Within
The Last Frontier
The Alabaster Army
Hard Science Fiction
ISF-ALLION
Shifting Reality
Shifting Infinity
Charlotte’s Army
Juno Rising
SPACE AGENT JONATHAN BARTELL
Contamination
Observation
Extermination
Epic Fantasy
GHOSTSPEAKER CHRONICLES
(Formerly For Queen and Country)
Innocence Lost
Willow Witch
The Idiot King
Fire Wizard
The Dragon Prince
The Necromancer’s Daughter
Ghostspeaker Chronicles (Books 1–3)
Epic, Post-apocalyptic Fantasy
ICEFIRE TRILOGY
Fire & Ice
Dust & Rain
Blood & Tears
The Icefire Trilogy Omnibus
MOONFIRE TRILOGY
Sand & Storm
Sea & Sky
Moon & Earth
Short story collections
Out Of Here
New Horizons
Non-Fiction
SELF PUBLISHING
Self-publishing Unboxed
Mailing Lists Unboxed
Going Wide Unboxed
Visit the author’s website at http://pattyjansen.com and register for a newsletter to keep up-to-date with new releases.