by Adam Carter
JUPITER’S GLORY
BOOK 1:
THE DINOSAUR WORLD
Adam Carter
Copyright 2017, © Adam Carter. All rights reserved. No content may be reproduced without permission of the author.
CHAPTER ONE
“So help me, I swear I will shoot you.”
“Because that would solve all your problems, wouldn’t it?”
I could feel the barrel of a gun pressing into the back of my head, there were people in the sky shooting at me and there was a flashing light on my console calmly indicating that I was forcing my craft through the stratosphere at a dangerous speed. The worst part of my day, however, was the woman standing behind me and shouting. Women shouted at me a lot. My ex shrieked all through the divorce hearings, my boss yelled whenever I did the tiniest thing wrong, even my goldfish opened and closed its little mouth in a silent underwater scream. The thing about everyone from those examples? They were all female – at least I’m assuming the goldfish was female. For as long as I could recall, women have shouted at me, and that day, plunging headfirst into the upper reaches of an alien world, I decided I had suffered enough.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her gun wavering as I turned in my chair and folded my arms. “Turn around, get back to flying this thing.”
“No.” I regarded her then. Iris Arowana was named after a fish; and it was not good news for her that I had just decided I did not much care for fish. She was about five-seven, early thirties, with dark piercing eyes and a thin figure which spoke of too many salads. Her short hair was black, as were her clothes – the precision-cut uniform of a private security firm, complete with corporate logo sewn into the fabric on her shoulder and tattooed into her backside for all I knew. In fact, everything about Iris Arowana was dark, as though her greatest ambition was to blend in at a blackbird function.
At that moment Iris Arowana looked terrified, which made me more than a little happy. All those women had spent so much of my life shouting at me and it had never once occurred to me to just say no.
“Hawthorn, I mean it, turn around.”
“Make me. Better yet, you don’t like the way I’m flying? Fly the craft yourself.”
“Hawthorn, please!”
I folded my arms. God, that felt good.
Then the craft rocked as we hit turbulence and I glanced out the forward window to see we were breaking through to the troposphere. The craft shook like corn popping in a microwave oven and I leaped off my high horse, span back to the console and grabbed the controls. I refused to accept the possibility that the reason I should never say no to women is because they’re always right.
Jolting forward, we passed through the clouds to emerge in a vast blue and green utopia. We were still too far up to see many of the details, but a great mass of ocean lay directly beneath us, several miles down, while to the east lay a vast unspoiled region of dense forestland. It was no doubt breathtakingly beautiful, but I had greater concerns on my mind. Chief among them was Iris Arowana, who had insisted on standing behind me the whole way, under the belief that holding a leather strap attached to the ceiling was sufficient when plunging into a world at the speeds we were. Consequently she was half in my lap, half all over the console, and I had to shove her with one hand while fumbling with the controls with the other. Thankfully for both of us, I didn’t manage to get the purpose of my two hands mixed up.
“Sit down and strap in,” I barked, taking actual satisfaction from the fact that I never went anywhere in a spacecraft without being tightly buckled down. Arowana’s terrified look had not faltered and I tried not to feel sorry for her. I noted her hand was no longer holding the gun, which meant the firearm was rattling around the craft somewhere. If we survived the landing I would make it a point of finding it before she did.
Our craft jerked as something impacted with us from behind. I did not need to run any checks to know a warning barrage when I felt one and instantly my fingers flew across the control board as I turned on the automatic fire suppressors in that area. The irony was not lost on me that I had to turn on the automatic anything.
Our world turned momentarily black as something shot over us. The attacking vessel was small, sleek and one-manned. Our craft was none of those. A simple transport shuttle with only one large compartment, the craft we were in lacked any form of weapons. Nor was it especially manoeuvrable, or at least it was not meant to be. As I watched the sleek black fighter turn a long circle back towards us I decided to hell with design specs: this craft was going to have to fly like no one had ever flown it before.
“It’s coming back,” Arowana gasped.
“Yeah, I can see, thanks.”
“Do something.”
“Thought about getting us blown out the sky, actually.” My mind was so focused on what I was doing that I failed to notice Arowana had not been idle. I heard the click of a firearm and when I half-turned my head was not surprised to see a familiar gun pointed at me. “Lady, you’re nuts.”
“Just get us out of this.”
“And what?”
“And what?”
“That was my question, get your own.” I glanced out the large forward window to see we still had a few moments. “I save our backsides and you shoot me in the head? Not a good deal for me.”
“We’re doing this here?”
I had no time to answer because the fighter was upon us, so I put the craft into a dive which evaded any salvoes the fighter might have thrown at us. Being in a rubbishy shuttle, I had no idea whether it actually did fire.
Pulling up sharply, I was just congratulating myself on not being killed when I noticed two other fighters coming at us.
“Fine, what do you want?” Arowana asked.
I was so caught up with the possibility of being blown to Kingdom Come that I didn’t hear her for a few seconds. I only began to think about what I could possibly get out of the deal when the two fighters opened up on us and bullets strafed both sides of our shuttle, the two jets turning to the side to streak past us.
When my heart caught up to my body, my brain kicked in. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“The window’s not cracked.”
“What?”
“The forward window. Look at it. Look at how big it is. They missed it.”
“And that’s bad because?”
“It’s not. It’s great, it means we’re alive. But how could they miss a target that big? How can two expert pilots miss a …” Only they hadn’t missed. So far the three fighters had been harrowing us, but none of them had yet to even attempt a kill shot. They wanted us alive, which could have meant a number of things; they were afraid of damaging something on board; they wanted at least one of us alive; or they really disliked the paperwork it would create to kill us.
“Just get us down,” Arowana said urgently.
As I spied the first jet returning I decided that was a pretty good idea. In order to do that, however, I needed to know a few things. “Where are we?” I asked as I banked the shuttle in a turn sharp enough to make its hull groan.
“In the sky, you fool.”
“Funny. The world below us. What is it?”
She may have been strapped into her seat by this point, but the sudden turn had made her put away her gun so she could hold the console with both hands. I could see her knuckles already turning white. I finished the turn and moved the shuttle into an instant dive merely because I wanted to leave her stomach behind. By her expression, I doubted Arowana would have been able to lie to me even if she had one prepared. Unfortunately, I seemed to have terrified her into silence.
“Io?” I asked. “Ganymede
? Where?”
“It doesn’t matter where we are, just get us down in one piece.”
“Lady, I need to know whether there are military outposts down there we might want to avoid, or civilian populations we might annihilate by crashing on them. Important stuff like that.”
“Just get us down.”
The fighters buzzed us again. I had the distinct feeling they were having fun. I considered turning on the radio and asking them what world stretched beneath us, but I doubted they would have been up for a conversation. Even while I did my best to dodge their half-hearted attacks, I attempted to triangulate my position. The bright blue sky featured the great swirling red and orange mass of Jupiter, and judging by its size we could not have been on one of its outer moons. The thing about the solar system was that once Earth pioneers had settled and terraformed the various planets, each of those planets became their own individual system, with little contact between each one. The Jupiter system was the largest, mainly because the planet had so many natural satellites. The planet itself, of course, was uninhabitable, what with it being a gas giant and all, but there were billions of citizens spread across all its moons. Having so many moons, it made my job of determining our position that much more difficult.
The crackle of the radio disturbed my thoughts. The voice of a woman came over the speaker. It was just typical it was a woman trying to shoot me out of the sky.
“Private Arowana, this is Captain Erin Taylor. You will cease attempts at evasion and follow your escort down. Respond.”
I could see two of the jets take up position before us and to either side, forming that escort Captain Taylor had spoken of. I could not be sure, but I reasoned Captain Taylor was piloting that first fighter that had come after us.
“Respond.”
I reached for the radio and Arowana drew her gun again.
“Put that thing away,” I said and hit the radio. “Captain Taylor, this is Gordon Hawthorn. Engineering.”
“Mr Hawthorn, you will follow the escort down.”
“Would love to, sweetheart, but your Private Arowana’s holding a gun on me. Look, Captain, I just want to tell you I was busy repairing one of the C-47s when Arowana grabbed me and forced me to …”
“You can tell your sob story when you land, Mr Hawthorn. Follow the escort or I will shoot you down.”
“If you were going to shoot us down, Captain, you would have done it already.”
“Mr Hawthorn,” she said in the tone of a woman whose patience had been all but exhausted, “my orders are to retrieve the stolen tech intact if possible. I would like to do that by having you land and hand Private Arowana over to me. If you continue to refuse, be assured I will shoot you down and salvage what I can of the tech from the wreckage. Now, follow the escort down.”
I was under no illusions that she would give the order again.
Several things happened in the very next second; the shuttle’s cabin exploded in sudden sound; the console hissed and sparked; and I, if I’m honest, screamed like the proverbial girl I didn’t like shouting at me. It took my brain a moment to realise Arowana had fired a shot directly into the console.
“What did you do that for?”
“We are not surrendering,” Arowana said sternly.
“You could have just turned the radio off.”
“You were going to surrender.” She levelled the gun back to me. At least I was back on familiar ground. “I couldn’t have that.”
Captain Taylor’s voice came back. “Then you have my apologies, Mr Hawthorn.”
The two fighters ahead broke off and Arowana stared. “What? But I shot the radio.”
“Hell knows what you shot,” I said, flicking off the radio. “See how easy that was?” The flight controls were not responding quite so well, however. Arowana’s bullet had shorn through some important systems and I no longer had any idea whether I would even be able to get us down in one piece.
Something hammered into the hull of the shuttle and I realised Captain Taylor had had enough diplomacy for one day.
Arowana was still waving her gun around, although her expression told me she had gone into shock.
“Get that thing out of my face,” I said, “and hold on.”
I still had some steerage so pushed the shuttle into a dive again, if for no other reason than it had not worked out so bad the last time. We were still some way from the surface of the ocean, although I reasoned if I could keep us on the course I had in mind we might crash on the beach, which would probably be where Captain Taylor wanted us anyway. So long as Arowana stayed in a state of shock, Taylor could have her stolen technology back and I could return to working on that that C-47.
Then something shot in front of me and struck my windshield. My eyes widened as I stared at the dead thing plastered all across my forward window. The creature had a long furry-looking body, ending in scrawny hairless chicken legs. Its neck was pretty much like a swan’s, while its head was a massive spread of toothless beak out the front and bone out the back. Its eye stared at me in death through the glass; it was likely just as surprised at my appearance as I was of its. It was the wingspan which got me; the forward window in the shuttle was wide, and this creature’s wings disappeared over the edges. The thing was like a cross between a bat and a bird, yet even without the wings its body was easily taller than me.
“That’s … that’s a dinosaur.”
“No,” Arowana said, the collision somehow being enough to break her out of her shock.
“Don’t screw with me, Arowana. That – right there – is a dinosaur.”
“It’s a pteranodon.”
“A dinosaur.”
“Dinosaurs didn’t fly. It’s a common mistake.”
“We’re on Ceres. This isn’t Io or Ganymede or … This is Ceres. The dinosaur world. The artificial moon. The quarantined dinosaur world. Ceres.”
“All true.”
“Arowana, it’s illegal for us to even be here. It’s illegal for Captain Taylor to be here. It’s …” And then the horrible truth sank in. “She’ll kill us. She’ll kill us, get back whatever tech you stole and file a report saying she got to us before we broke the atmosphere.”
Arowana shrugged.
Suddenly my plan of crashing and surrendering to Captain Taylor did not sound so cosy. My eye was still on the beach – or at least what I could see with a massive freaking dinosaur on my windshield – only by then I was concentrating on the trees at the far end of that beach. If I could crash the shuttle in and skid along, we could perhaps leap out and run into the cover of the trees before Captain Taylor had the opportunity to catch us. Or I could surrender to Taylor and hope she trusted me to keep my mouth shut.
I figured if I was going to go with that option, it would have worked a lot in my favour had I not called her sweetheart over the radio.
“All right,” I said, my brain trying to work through the mess. “All right, we’re making a run for it. You see that beach down there?”
“Yes.”
“Glad one of us can. Guide me in.” With the pteranodon splattered all across the windshield I couldn’t see a thing.
Arowana went to say something insulting – I can tell when a woman’s about to do that – but instead of speaking she pressed a button. Two long metal poles moved up from their horizontal position at the bottom of the window, performed a quarter circle turn and returned to their original locations. The pteranodon was scraped off by the windshield wipers and went tumbling away. An unsightly smear was left on the window, but it afforded me more than enough of a visual on the beach.
Then the rear of the shuttle exploded as bullets raked the propulsion systems and Arowana and I pitched forward at the impact. Smoke poured into the cabin and it was obvious the craft was on its last legs.
“Get us down,” Arowana shrieked, because shouting always solved problems. Another burst of gunfire tore into the side of the shuttle and I saw a panel shear off and fall away towards the ocean. There were lights f
lashing all across the console before me but I had no idea what any of them meant.
By this point the smoke was so thick it was obscuring my sight and I reasoned Captain Taylor knew precisely what she was doing when she attacked a hostile. Her problem, however, was that the shuttle had been built to last. It was in essence an escape craft, and anyone who designed escape craft always made them as resilient as possible to gunfire. I could feel the shuttle coming apart around me, but the beach was speeding towards us and I knew all I had to do was keep us on a straight and steady course.
My eyes on the beach and trees, I had a sudden and terrible thought.
“Ceres,” I said. “The dinosaur world. That means there are dinosaurs down there. There could be dinosaurs on the beach. There could …”
“Pull up!”
Unable to see much of anything through the smoke, I instinctively trusted my companion and pulled up. A screech of unhappy metal tore through the base of the shuttle as no doubt it left a deep furrow in the sand. I could vaguely see some trees ahead and threw my arms before my face.
“Brace for impact!”
The twisted metal of the shuttle screamed once more as it hit something. We were pitched violently over as the entire craft lurched onto its side while continuing on its way. Pieces of wall fell all over us, equipment clattered about, loose wiring sparked in our faces. I felt the force of the forward window shatter and a rain of glass cascaded off my body. Instantly the smoke belched forth, free now to escape into the outside world. Finally the shuttle came to a grinding halt, and all was silent.
Fumbling with my seatbelt, I knew Taylor would be only moments behind. Undoing the strap, I fell sideways in the shuttle, forgetting the craft had overturned. Getting to my feet, I gripped the edge of the window frame and hauled myself over. Broken glass bit into skin blackened by the smoke, but I ignored the pain and the blood as I stumbled to freedom. Falling from the shuttle, I landed awkwardly on my shoulder and bit back a scream of pain.
Rising to my feet, I could see the devastation we had wrought. The shuttle had indeed torn a furrow through the sand, but had not stopped there. It had entered the edge of the forestland and had ripped its way through the soil, smashing through the weaker trees and toppling the larger ones. The metal hide of the shuttle was a ruin, pockmarked with bullets as it was and leaking fuel everywhere.
