Invasion- Pluto Read online

  “Or it might have been a way to make sure that he had a stranglehold on Earth when the time came…” Solomon said.

  Who else had access to thermonuclear devices?

  “Tell me, Max… Do you know anything of a company on Luna called Taranis? Taranis Industries?” Solomon suddenly thought.

  “Taranis? Ha!” Max laughed and clapped his hands. “That was one of the first companies to be given one of the storage bubbles!”

  Solomon shared a dark look with the ambassador. General Asquew had been right. There had been a conspiracy at the heart of the Confederacy, and someone was working with both NeuroTech and Taranis to start a very lucrative war between Earth and the rest of the colonies.

  Only it turned out that conspiracy was General Hausman of the Near-Earth fleet himself. “And in the process of making the corporates a whole heap of money, they must have promised Hausman that he would get to rule the Confederacy. He would get to rule Earth,” Solomon said in horror.

  11

  New Arrivals

  1 hour: 13 mins: 28 seconds, the first, more optimistic timer read.

  -16 mins: 44 seconds, the despairing one read. At least the second one was quite obviously, glaringly wrong, Sergeant Wen thought.

  Jezzy had both timers direct-fed into her power armor telemetries, so that both countdowns flashed slowly just to the right of her eyes as she looked out at the mess that was Pluto.

  The Last Call’s administrator had taken her sweet time, as far as Jezzy was concerned, in telling the cruise ships to disembark, and even now she could still see them in the distance, heading out like a pod of gigantic space creatures away from the small planet.

  But there was still a lot to do.

  “Forward more!” Jezzy called out over her suit radio. She currently hung in space, feeling perfectly warm and comfortable inside her armor, even if she did still feel just a little bit nervous at not having any solid ground beneath her.

  In response to her command, the Plutonian tug rather sweetly named the Edith responded by firing its positioning rockets for two small burns, moving it about four hundred meters ahead.

  “Haven’t you got enough yet?” said the rather annoyed voice of Fatima Ahmadi over Jezzy’s suit radio. That was another thing that she’d asked to have patched into her suit telemetries—that all communication for this field operation be collated by the Oregon’s mainframe, and then sent out to her suit. Being the acting field commander kind of gave her those sorts of perks.

  Ahmadi herself was not on board the Edith, a friend of hers called Joe something-or-other was. Instead, Ahmadi was in the tug that hung above Jezzy and from which she was connected to by the thin lifeline of a poly-filament metal cord.

  “Believe me, Ahmadi, when this begins, you’re going to wish that we had more,” Jezzy promised her.

  Convincing Ahmadi that she needed to surrender all active duties and hand them over to the Marine Corps had been the easy part, as it happened. It was a marvel what having a colonel in the form of Faraday could do. Jezzy liked him. Faraday was a soldier’s sort of soldier, one who had campaigned for decades, the kind who had signed up as a grunt at the tender age of eighteen and kept plugging away at it until he was at his current high post, hovering somewhere around his early sixties.

  In fact, Jezzy thought that Faraday rather reminded her of some of her old Yakuza bosses—the old family, true Japanese ones who had managed to quell a room with a look, and who seemed to exude authority through their very pores. It hadn’t taken long for Faraday to convince Ahmadi that something very big and very terrible was coming their way, but that she could be a part of that glorious struggle.

  No, that wasn’t the hard part. What had been the hard part was telling Ahmadi just what it was that they were expecting.

  “I still don’t think they’re going to come,” Ahmadi muttered over her suit, as if to prove Jezzy’s reflections. “But, you know, I always had an inkling that one day something like this would come…”

  “Really?” Jezzy said distractedly as she made small movements with her hands, ‘swimming’ through the vacuum to turn around and look at what she had managed to create. A field of eight small Plutonian tugs, designed to help the jump-ships in maneuvering the larger ships that came out here, re-provisioning before they jumped further and deeper. Would it be enough? Jezzy thought.

  Absolutely not, she had to concede.

  “Oh yeah, you know, I started out as skeptical as everyone else. Why would there be aliens after all? Why hadn’t we ever heard from them?” Ahmadi said.

  But we did, didn’t we? Jezzy refrained from correcting her. She didn’t have time to disclose the full truth and deal with the emotional fallout. NeuroTech got the Message from the Ru’at first, somehow. They managed to translate it, turn it into useable technology. But still, she knew just what the station administrator meant. No obvious, friendly, deep-space signals like Morse code over the interstellar gulfs.

  “But you know, something starts to happen to you after a while of living out here…” the administrator confided. Fatima Ahmadi seemed to be one of those hard-working, mostly-sarcastic workers who didn’t have time for either fools or social niceties. She had clearly long since given up trying to pretend to be proper, or respectful to anyone other than herself.

  “I guess it’s living on the edge of the solar system. Every shift, every hour, you get to look out at all of that…space out there, just doing nothing. All of those stars, galaxies, planets… I think that most people on the Last Call think as I do. That it’d be an awful waste of space out there for there to just be us,” Ahmadi said.

  Jezzy was about to correct her that Proxima at least would have been a lot better off if the universe had stuck to its principle of cosmic loneliness, but she had to make sure that the eight tugs were in the right position, ready for the next stage of her defense plan.

  WHAP!

  Jezzy felt it before her human, primate eyes registered what had happened. A wave that rushed up through her body like a sensation of vertigo, spreading from her toes right up through her gut to the top of her head. It was a little like a sensation of nausea, but where had she felt that before?

  She remembered what it was in the moment that her eyes registered what had appeared, and for her suit chatter to explode.

  Jump Sickness.

  “Holy mother of—”

  “What is that? What IS that!?”

  “Administrator, come in! I got a new arrival! Three klicks dead ahead!”

  WHAP! WHAP!

  WHAP!

  More of the strange Ru’at ‘jump-ships,’ as she was coming to think of them, were appearing, and they did so with a small shimmer of light as they displaced ancient starlight as they traveled.

  But it wasn’t like the shimmering fractals and light-illusions created by a Barr-Hawking particle engine, Jezzy could see. These strange cylindrical ships with a pointed prow and with three rotating obsidian rings around their bodies had appeared with the least amount of fuss and light that Jezzy could even imagine.

  How many are there? Jezzy remembered to breathe and counted quickly. Ten, twelve, fourteen…

  How many had Asquew said there were supposed to be? She couldn’t remember. Her heart had stopped beating.

  Thud. Then it kicked back in, and with it, all of Jezzy’s instincts.

  “Tug team deploy! Deploy all vessels, and then get the hell out of here!” she shouted over the suit communicator, just as she felt the line attached to her suit pull taut.

  “And that’s my cue, lady,” Ahmadi’s voice sounded tight. “Whoever these newcomers are, I don’t think you’re going to like it if I drop a hundred tons of rubble on your head!”

  No, Jezzy wouldn’t, she thought as she accelerated to the open airlock, to be hauled into the cone of blackness and thumped to the floor just as the airlock door closed after her, hisses of pressurization steam filling the chamber. Come on, come on! Jezzy was already impatient and standing despite the waves of vertig
o and the sudden heaviness in her limbs. She had to get to the bridge of Ahmadi’s tug—the Gingko, strangely—and see if her plan was working.

  “The Mary-Lou released!”

  The urgent calls of the other Plutonian tug drivers sounded over Jezzy’s helmet as she climbed the short ladder to the cockpit of the Gingko, where Ahmadi was already pulling the levers to release her own lumpen cargo.

  Jezzy’s feet shifted as the entire tug shuddered, and she saw the green indicator diagram on Ahmadi’s desk screen—a tiny, stylized depiction of the Gingko itself—start to empty.

  Below their feet, the heavy lower hold doors of the Gingko and the other tugs were opening like the lower jaws of some draconian beast. They even spewed high-velocity gases as suddenly the traces of atmosphere inside the haulage holds normalized with that of the vacuum of space.

  And with the gases came dark shapes of all sorts of sizes—from as small as the severely-cut nails on Jezzy’s hand, to the size of the cockpit she was standing in.

  Pluto was a transport hub, essentially. Despite its growing eminence as a tourist attraction, its main purpose in the scheme of the Confederacy was the refitting, refueling, and repairing of the deep-field ships that stopped here before their long journeys to Proxima, Trappist, Barnard’s Star, and others.

  Which meant, in no uncertain terms, that Pluto had a lot of mechanical engineers at the Last Call, and wherever there are mechanics, there had to be engine parts.

  Each of the tugs stationed between the Last Call and the arriving Ru’at fleet spewed collections of metal that they had been transporting from one hulk to another, or else picked up from the various ‘holding zones’ where collections of scrap and reusable metal were kept, magnetized to stationary drone satellites. There were nuts and bolts, any of which could cause a catastrophic collapse if they hit the right ship in the perfectly wrong place.

  But that wasn’t all. There were also girders that had been shorn from their craft after failed the rigorous safety tests, or entire plate sections of outer hulls, as well as the omnipresent flexible steel and rubberized insulation that the Confederate starship engineers packed into the spaces between outer and inner hulls.

  The mass of detritus, powered by the differences in pressure, rolled and rotated outwards from each tug as they slowly rose out of the debris field and started to pull away.

  Is it going to work? It was a haphazard and a desperate plan, Jezzy knew. But then again, she also knew—as well as Colonel Faraday knew—that their job here was to launch a first ‘last’ stand. Faraday had seen the footage of the Ru’at jump-ships and the Ru’at mothership. They both knew just what was expected of them: to stand and fight for as long as they were capable, if the Ru’at showed the first sign of attack.

  “Fatima! Oh frack, I’ve got a problem… The bay doors won’t open!” Ahmadi’s console lit up with the incoming message. It was Joe, Fatima Ahmadi’s friend piloting the Esther, one of the furthest of the tug ships.

  “Oh crapsticks…” Fatima’s hand blurred as she selected the scanners to magnify the picture of her friend’s ship on the desk-screen.

  There was the Esther, still exuding gas and bits of scrap metal, but she was slowly starting to spin on her axis as her haulage hold doors had only opened a few meters—not the ten or so meters required for proper deployment. As Jezzy watched, she saw the Esther firing her positioning rockets to keep out of the enlarging debris field that they had created.

  All the other tugs had flown safely away from the mess that they had created. That had been the trickiest part of the whole procedure, Jezzy and Fatima knew. She had needed experienced tug pilots to be able to leave the manmade asteroid field as soon as they had created it and before the spiral dynamics of vacuum-objects saw the bits of metal colliding with their own ship!

  “Try the manual override!” Ahmadi was saying urgently as the Esther turned back the other way, narrowly avoiding being hit by a large shard of external ship plate.

  Behind them, the Ru’at jump-ships were remaining stubbornly inactive, as if they were amused by this palsied effort of humanity to stand in their way.

  Ahmadi zoomed in more, and the close-up image of the Esther’s partially-opened hold doors grew on the desk as Fatima fought to keep the cameras trained on the twisting tug ship.

  “Joe. You got a blockage. Starboard front corner. Something’s jammed against the door pistons!” Ahmadi was saying, and the image showed a chunk of scrap metal that hadn’t rushed out of the hold as it should have done but had somehow become wedged against the large pistons that opened and closed all hold doors.

  “What? I’ve still got a half-full hold. I can’t fly out of here like this— TZZRK!”

  Suddenly, the large image was knocked out of view, and Joe’s incoming message snarled into static.

  “Joe! Joe, come in! Repeat: Esther, respond to hail!” Ahmadi was shouting down the archaic microphone that these old tugs were equipped with. Jezzy looked out of the cockpit window to see that the Esther had slumped to the side, its front maw still losing debris at a slow rate, but there was now also a plume of gases from the far side, turning the tug over and over.

  “Joe!”

  “TZZZK” I’m okay, boss… I got hit by some of the debris. I’m losing atmosphere!” Joe’s shouted.

  Oh no, Jezzy thought. She had known that this might be a possibility, that the tug drivers themselves would be performing a very tricky and exacting maneuver. Fatima had assured her that her pilots were good enough.

  “Do they come equipped with escape pods?” Jezzy asked in horror, one eye still on the motionless ships. This was not how she wanted her first exercise in command to go, with the sudden and senseless death of a civilian.

  “Yes, but that would be a bad idea…” Fatima was already pulling levers and firing her own positional rockets to rise high above the debris field, arcing towards the front line. “As soon as Joe’s escape pod fires, it’s bound to hit some of that wreckage. It might survive, but those things don’t have any navigational abilities. They just automatically fly to the nearest safe harbor.”

  Which would be the Last Call, Jezzy saw—only now there was an ever-widening debris field between the two.

  “He’s going to be safer inside the Esther. These tugs can take a good deal of battering before they give up the ghost.”

  KER-THUNK! As if to prove her point, the Ginkgo shuddered as a piece of scrap metal ricocheted over its hull.

  “But leaving him out there would mean that he is the first in line when the Ru’at attack.”

  “I’ll go. Did I see a harness down there?” Jezzy was already moving back to the ladder, heading back to the long equipment room where a couple of the large, bulky belted backpacks had been hanging up. A harness was basically the same as a battle harness that the Marines wore, but they were external to whatever suit that the worker wore, clipping over their protective gear and strapping over their shoulders. From each backpack there extended tiny positioning rockets, and above the shoulders extended two long, spider-like legs with multiple joints, at the end of which were grabbing vices.

  Jezzy had never used one, but she had seen them being used. They couldn’t be that much different from the jump-packs that she had worn on Mars, could they? She knew that these harnesses were used the Confederacy over by starship engineers to perform exacting welds and work that required close, non-automated attention. The vice grabbers on the ends of the shoulders could hold tools or brace the flier against the vessel they were working on, and their positional rockets would make sure that they could travel to and from their mothership with ease.

  “Have you ever used one before!?” Ahmadi was shouting after her, even as Jezzy shrugged one over her own power armor. It barely fit, but when it did, at least her armor compensated for it easily.

  “No, but I don’t think we have much choice, Ahmadi. I need you in here flying the Gingko and ready to pick me up when I get back with Joe!”

  She heard a loud grumbling shout f
rom above her as she secured the final strap.

  “But the debris field— Any random piece could take the pair of you out just as easily as the escape pod!” Ahmadi argued.

  “It’s our best shot. I’ve got more chance of avoiding the wreckage like this and you know it.” Jezzy turned and hit the airlock decompression button before stepping in. As the door cycled to a close behind her, she stood in the dark and wondered if Ahmadi would okay the door release command at all if she disagreed so mightily, but there was a blink of orange and green lights and the outer door opened.

  WHOOSH! The residual atmosphere in the chamber forced Jezzy out at speed—straight towards a rising length of silver cable.

  Frack! She grabbed the belt controls and fired the tiny positioning rockets on the underside of the harness backpack, turning and spinning her body so that she swam past the steel cable before it could tangle with her.

  “You’re a fool, Lieutenant Wen,” she heard Ahmadi say over the suit telemetries.

  She’s probably right, Jezzy thought as she fired the rockets in tandem to swerve and loop around the next spinning piece of tubing, a bulkhead door, an unrecognizable piece of slag metal…

  But I can’t let this civilian die. I can’t let that be the hallmark of my command, Jezzy was thinking as she cast a look ahead of her. The Ru’at ships still hadn’t done anything yet and were just hanging there, motionless. She wondered if they were the ones waiting to be attacked.

  “Lieutenant Wen! This is Faraday. What’s happening out there?” burst in the angered tone of Colonel Faraday’s voice. Jezzy knew that he should still be standing on the bridge of the Oregon, where it was stationed between the debris field and the Last Call.

  “Mission of mercy, Colonel, sir!” Jezzy shouted back as she fired the right rocket to make her swerve past a spinning girder the thickness of her arm.

  “Mercy? Lieutenant? This is a time of war! I have mines loaded and ready to fire, but I can’t with you flying through the middle of the battlefield!” he responded, if not with outright anger, at least with obvious annoyance.