Ghost of Jupiter (Jade Saito - Action Sci-Fi Series Book 1)

by Tom Jordan

  Stormwulf’s field winked out as Jade’s particle fire drained the rest of its power. Jade released the trigger, her final particle rounds leaving glowing scorch marks across Stormwulf’s naked hull.

  She distantly heard Tommy ask for a status update, but couldn’t concentrate on a reply. She had to focus her full attention on the engagement.

  Jade pressed her secondary trigger and fired her rail guns. Her flight seat and the ship pulsed with a deep boom as the guns discharged. She expected to see some kind of projectile but instead saw tiny bits of debris, like sparkles of silver, shoot from Stormwulf’s underside as the rail-gun rounds punctured its hull. She squinted to keep track of the hole she’d just put in the other ship and squeezed the trigger twice more, with a deep boom thrumming through Ghost of Jupiter each time.

  Two more impact cavities appeared as the superaccelerated projectiles punched through her target’s hull like combat lasers through paper. The holes were grouped within two meters, and one seemed to be leaking something—fluid that stuck together and trailed out in globs.

  SURRENDER, read a new message from the other ship.

  “Cease fire!” Jade said. “He’s surrendering.”

  “Woohoo!” Tommy cheered in her ear.

  “Nice shooting,” Marco said. He heaved an audible sigh. “Okay. Tell him to decelerate. We’ll get in close and wait for our backup. Not taking any more chances.”

  “I’m still six minutes out,” Henning said. “Tommy’ll be a few minutes after that.”

  Jade sent another transmission acknowledging the surrender, and instructed the pilot to fire retro thrusters and stand down. Her readings of Stormwulf’s velocity told her the pilot was complying. The vessel decelerated until it drifted through space at an exponentially slower velocity, and Jade and Marco followed suit. They circled their prey, keeping a safe distance.

  “Jade, keep an eye out in case he tries anything.” Marco’s voice turned cheerful and casual, as it had been in their discussions on Gibson City Station. “That was outstanding shooting. I knew I made the right call on you.” It was like he changed personas with the flip of a switch. Did it even bother him that he had just been fired on with lethal intentions?

  “Thanks.” Jade released her controls and slumped back in her seat with a sigh. The encounter had been exhausting despite its brevity. She wiped a trembling hand across her forehead, noticing the sheen of perspiration covering her glove despite the coolness of the cockpit interior.

  She spared a moment to rub her eyes. Marco’s ship sailed slowly between Ghost of Jupiter and Stormwulf. Tommy’s voice filled the radio silence. “We’ll be there as soon as we ca—”

  Tommy cut out as a blinding explosion of white light filled Jade’s cockpit. Her ears were assaulted by the blaring of warning alarms. She threw her hands in front of her eyes, then blinked, seeing only hazy afterimages ghosting across her field of view. It was like staring at the sun, and it wouldn’t go away.

  Jade, acting on instinct, pulled her throttle back to zero. She felt the ship—via the reengaged flight compensator—attempting to react to her sudden, unexpected deceleration.

  “What the fuck was that sound?” Henning said.

  Jade’s vision began to return after a moment. She bent at the waist and squinted through the haze to see one blip moving away from the center of her map, then pieced together what had happened.

  Stormwulf was getting away.

  Jade’s throat tightened as she remembered Marco’s ship had been directly between her and the blast. “Marco! Are you there? Are you okay? What’s your status?” She began leveling her ship and looking for his.

  “What happened?” Tommy asked. “We heard some kind of audio distortion. Damn, I wish we had a data connection and not just voice. Are you guys alright?”

  “I don’t know,” Jade said. “I don’t know what that was. It’s hard to see anything. Did you guys hear from Marco?” She dug the nails of one hand into the side of her seat. The other hand pressed her earpiece farther in. She squinted, attempting to recover her vision and concentrate through the distortion still coming through her earpiece. “Marco, come in! Marco, are—”

  “I—it—hit,” Marco said.

  “Marco? Marco! Are you okay?”

  Marco continued speaking, but static and audio drops butchered his communications. “I’m—power down.”

  “This piece of shit is mine,” Henning said.

  “I’m recovering here,” Jade said. “Marco, if you can hear me, I’m alright. I think you shielded me.”

  “I’ll—offline—canopy.”

  “Oh, man,” Tommy said. “Did he say his canopy is hit?”

  “Hold on…let me check,” Jade replied. She tried to grasp the small thread of calm left in her mind. It required all the emotional control she could muster. Having been in potentially fatal situations in flight school—as well as countless hours of simulator training in her system failures and recoveries courses—she had some experiences that prepared her to deal with this.

  Let the emotions pass by, she told herself on a loop. Her logic told her to check the problems one at a time in priority order, but she couldn’t shake the intensity of her panic over Marco. Technical failures were one thing, and could be dealt with logically, but she didn’t know how to process fear for Marco’s safety. She felt like she couldn’t get a full breath.

  Jade throttled to a crawl and tapped her thrusters, edging closer to circle her ship around Rebel Star. The bright flash had disrupted her eyesight enough that she had to keep blinking and looking through her peripheral vision, and it was difficult to focus. Her gaze flicked over Rebel Star’s curves, looking for any breaches or damage to the hull, but she found nothing. Marco’s canopy looked intact—no cracks or breaks.

  She tapped her maneuvering thrusters to angle her ship toward Marco’s, orienting Ghost to face Rebel Star cockpit to cockpit. She blinked away some blurriness and saw that Marco was faintly lit. He wore a helmet, which gave her some comfort. He tapped the helmet—indicating his communications were down—and gave Jade a thumbs-up. Relief splashed over her and she let out a full breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “I can see Marco,” Jade said. “I think he’s okay.” Marco circled his finger around in a big loop, over and over. “What? Oh. I think he’s powering back up.”

  “Were you guys hit with an EMP?” Tommy asked, his voice rising in pitch. “Power loss, flash, audio distortion…yeah, you must have been. Wow. But that’s military-grade tech. It’s totally outlawed. And why was Marco hit and you aren’t affected?”

  “He was in between me and Stormwulf,” Jade said, examining Marco’s ship while it drifted in a haphazard corkscrew.

  “He must have shielded you,” Tommy said. She thought for a moment and tapped her flight stick, still blinking and seeing a color-inverted afterimage of Marco’s ship. With a start, she remembered Stormwulf.

  “Crap, the other ship! Should I stay with Marco while he powers back up? What’s the plan, guys?”

  “We can’t let this piece of shit get away now,” Henning said. “I’m going after him.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Tommy said, “but I should monitor Marco. I have the diagnostic gear, and it’s kinda my area. I don’t want to put you in danger, Jade, but I think Marco would want you to go with Henning.”

  She took a long inhale and let it out slowly. “Okay.”

  Tommy paused for a moment. “Just do me a favor, okay? Let Henning take point and back him up?”

  Despite the adrenaline and fatigue of the encounter, Jade smiled. Tommy’s concern for her was ever present. “No problem,” she said.

  Tommy’s ship drew closer to Jade’s position. She looked over at Marco sitting in his dim cockpit, and she pointed to herself. She followed with her best guess at a gesture that said I’m going that way. Marco gave her another thumbs-up, appearing to understand. She cut away from him and throttled up to intercept Henning and Stormwulf.

 
“I’m en route to you, Henning.”

  “Right,” he said.

  Jade watched her timers count down as her ship pushed across space. Stormwulf had a large lead, but Henning was gaining since he’d already been traveling at high speed. Judging by the map, his blip was outpacing Stormwulf’s acceleration.

  “Henning,” she said, frowning at her holograms. “I can’t catch up to Stormwulf.”

  “No worries, mate. I’ll keep him busy. You’ll catch up.”

  Henning was true to his word. After a few minutes her map showed his blip merge with Stormwulf’s. Her time-to-intercept counter dropped exponentially as Henning engaged, forcing Stormwulf to react to his presence rather than continue to accelerate away.

  “Eat this!” Henning said. Having been plunged into combat and beset by worry after Marco took the hit from the EMP, Jade wondered how a person could do anything other than fight panic and anxiety in these kinds of situations. She felt drained, both from the intense focus required for piloting as well as dealing with the stress of a life-or-death situation. Apparently, that wasn’t the case with Henning, who merely sounded determined.

  “I’m back up,” Marco said. Static plagued his comms, but she was able to understand his words. “I have propulsion, but some of my systems are down from that blast. Tommy, you go ahead. I’ll be fine. Be there in a few minutes.”

  “You got it,” Tommy said.

  Jade focused on the battle in front of her. “Henning, Jade here.” Part of her mind realized that she didn’t need to identify herself since she was the only female of the group. “I’m going to fly a pass and see if I can get a hit, or distract him.”

  “I could use that,” Henning said, his voice strained. “Hard to line him up. This son of a bitch can turn!”

  Jade checked her numbers and throttled back so that she’d pass the pair of ships at a slower velocity—rather than zip by at extreme speed—and have enough time to line up a few shots. Stormwulf and Audacity were small in the distance but grew rapidly larger. They turned in a tangle, with energy weapons throwing flashes of light onto their hulls.

  Jade cut through the middle of the melee between Henning and Stormwulf, painting a rippling haze across the latter ship’s deflection field with her micro-rails on her way through.

  Jade growled. “How is his d-field back up already?”

  “Backup capacitor,” Tommy said. “Must be. We have to watch out. This guy’s geared for combat.”

  Suddenly, her radar showed Stormwulf breaking away from Henning.

  “He’s running again. I’m on him,” Henning said.

  The other two combatants blasted away and left Jade’s view. She pulled back on the stick to pitch a tight turn and give chase. She had to crane her neck to look up through the canopy roof, then used her map to locate the other ships when they left her field of view. Ghost of Jupiter was a multipurpose civilian ship, so a cockpit intended for combat visibility wasn’t a part of its design.

  Jade hurried to line up Stormwulf, grimacing as she urged her ship to turn faster, until she finally came out of the turn and pursued at full throttle.

  Henning unleashed intense weapons fire in the distance. The continuous beams of his particle cannons as well as bursts of flaring energy weapons were absorbed by Stormwulf’s deflection field.

  A part of Jade’s mind reflected on how well Ghost of Jupiter was performing. She was used to flying in long, straight lines between SFM relays and stations, or carefully navigating hangar tunnels and touching down with precision on landing pads. These demanding combat maneuvers were totally different than anything she’d done in Ghost so far, and he was handling admirably. It was strange and exhilarating to fly him like this, like there was another ship hiding within the one she knew.

  “Thirty percent on his field. I’m—” Henning’s voice cut out as a multitude of flickering white lights surrounded both ships, “—of a bitch, who is this guy?”

  “What’s happening?” Jade asked. Her voice sounded tight in her ears. She tried to relax and present herself as cool and collected as Marco did. Getting lost in emotion wouldn’t do anything good for her, or for the team.

  “ECMs,” Henning said. Jade had no idea what that meant. “It’s fucking with my sensors and I can’t autolock him. Have to line him up manually. Get up here so we can melt this bitch!”

  Jade was nearly in range. “Almost there. Can you drop his field? I’ll lock on with my—”

  Henning cut her off. “I’m seeing a buildup here. He’s spooling for a jump. That’s it!”

  Jade watched, eyes wide and mouth hanging, as Henning unleashed his assault. Solid, thick beams of energy burned lines across her vision. Plasma rounds spat out in long chains. A rotating launcher deployed missiles. It seemed Henning was unloading everything he had.

  Explosions flared and energy rounds lanced into Stormwulf’s deflection field. It flashed with brilliant radiance, and Henning’s fire ceased.

  “He’s down! Jade, prep a shrap. Set it to disable him. We need him alive.”

  “Shrap? Oh, shrapnel missile, Right. Okay, okay…” Jade hurriedly tried to remember how to set the missile to disable the other ship, instead of obliterating it.

  “Do it, Jade. We need him cut off. This guy’s dangerous.”

  “Working on it,” was her clipped reply. She exhaled through her nose, then flinched as some of the fluid Stormwulf was leaking splattered across the front of her canopy. Jade toggled the missile-control setting to Shrapnel from Impact, hoping she wasn’t about to blow her target into parts.

  “Locking,” she said, though the holoreticle turned green before she was even finished saying the word. Jade pressed the red firing trigger Tommy’d told her about.

  “It’s away!” she shouted before realizing how intense she’d become. She noticed the threads of distortion beginning to build up around Stormwulf’s nose. The SFM jump to its destination, wherever that was, was imminent. She urged her missile to go faster, to reach the target before he got away.

  “Go go go go go…” she whispered, clenching her fists on the controls.

  “Come on, baby!” Henning shouted.

  The missile streaked across the distance and exploded in a violent conflagration that produced a visible shock wave, distorting the pinpoint stars behind it. Missile casing and glittering fragments spun away from the blast’s origin. Jade breathed heavily as she looked everywhere on her holographic displays, trying to find any sign of the target—energy readings, hull fragments, a map contact, anything. Her mood wilted.

  “No contact. No debris. Only missile casing.” She sighed. “He got away.”

  Henning made an extended growl that ended with a shout. “Fuck!”

  “Tommy,” Marco said.

  “Already on it,” Tommy said.

  “What?” Jade asked.

  “I’m calculating his destination based on his heading and the system map. He was running somewhere. There’s a good chance we can find out where and reacquire him.”

  “Can’t you check for the distortion his SFM drive produces?” she asked. The jump would only have an in-system range since it had been made without an SFM relay, like the one at Evick’s Gate.

  “We can follow that for a bit at his exit point, which will confirm we found him. All it will tell us here is that he jumped, which we already know.”

  “Oh.” Her gaze sank to her floating holo-model of Ghost hovering near her lap. She thumbed the switch to retract her weapons, then watched the transparent green miniature of her ship as the weapon mounts pulled the guns back into her hull. “I’m sorry, guys. I did what I could.”

  “No, Jade,” Henning said. “Your flying was flat out.” She assumed that was some kind of slang intended as a compliment. “This pilot is way above the losers we normally pick up.”

  “You got a hell of an initiation,” Tommy said.

  “Come on, Tommy. Anything?” Marco asked.

  “Yeah…there’s something along his heading here. Balenos
A. Eight hundred seventy million kilometers closer to the system’s star.”

  Marco cut across the channel decisively. “Then it’s time for a jump. Prepare for a surprise on entry and be ready to track him when we get there.”

  The rest of the team acknowledged Marco’s instruction and spent a few minutes preparing to move. Jade looked out the canopy in fascination—as she always did before a jump—as Ghost became encased in waves of distortion. The SFM tore apart space, warping her view and shredding light itself. The effects compounded as the drive charged, until the ship was in a cocoon of warped space and light. She knew the same effect would be happening to the others’ ships as well, though she couldn’t see them due to the visual distortion.

  Her preparations complete, Ghost of Jupiter leapt toward Balenos A through a tunnel of stretched light.

  Chapter 8

  “Splinter Wing, come in. This is Charlie,” Bakhti said.

  No reply.

  “Anyone reading me?” She tightened her hold on the flight stick. “Splinter Wing, I’ve been followed. Acknowledge.”

  She pushed the engines as she flew Stormwulf through Balenos A’s atmosphere, which was a thick, congested shroud. It’d been blocking her comms, but she hoped this time the message would get through. The others needed to know.

  No response. She swapped to another of her team’s agreed-upon channels and activated her comm encryption so her pursuers couldn’t eavesdrop.

  “This is Bakhti. I’m being followed. Anyone copy? Over.”

  Static cut across the channel, and then a familiar, gravelly voice came through. “Pyzik. This is Brand. Talk to me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bakhti said. Did she even need to sir him anymore, now that they’d all gone rogue? He was still in charge of their operation.

  Whatever.

  “I’ve been tagged. Trailing coolant. I was intercepted by a four-ship element.”

  “God damnit, Pyzik,” Nolan said.

  “Shut your mouth, dickhead.” Bakhti ground her teeth. She had enough adrenaline in her that she had a short fuse for Nolan’s bullshit.