Striking Mars (The Saving Mars Series-5)

by Cidney Swanson

  Book Five in the Saving Mars Series

  Cidney Swanson

  For Rachael

  Copyright © 2013 by Cidney Swanson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © by Stephanie Mooney. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978–1–939543–12–7

  1

  Tranquility Base, the Terran Moon

  The Ghost walked the length of the small, ill-lit tunnel connecting his lunar sleeping quarters and his work quarters. For several weeks, he’d spent all of his time, apart from one rescue, here on the Moon. He turned and retraced his steps, going the opposite direction. Upon reaching the end of the passageway, he turned once more, continuing to pace, back and forth, along the dim tunnel.

  He had a problem and could not, for the life of him, think of a solution that pleased him. It was not, of course, his problem alone. Everyone on Earth had the same problem; although most of them were not sufficiently aware of their dependence upon deep-space workers to know that when spacers had a problem, Earth dwellers had a problem.

  He’d warned his sister. Sister had ignored him. She wouldn’t care until the citizens of Earth began to notice their sat-comm dependent systems were malfunctioning. And that wouldn’t happen until a day after the Spacing Guild went on strike. Meanwhile, the residents of Earth were blissfully unaware they had a problem.

  For now.

  Soon they would know, though. Station 92-AE, the Ghost’s preferred dwelling, had been damaged, and the damage had affected the station’s ability to relay data and entertainment. He assumed Jumble’s friends were to blame for the damage to the station. But any friend of Jumble’s was a friend of his.… The Ghost sighed and turned, measuring the length of the passageway once more. In a few hours, the feed downloads that yesterday’s trash-harvesting crew had snatched from 92-AE would all have been played, watched, listened to, or otherwise experienced.

  Spacers had a lot of time on their hands; they couldn’t amuse themselves by taking a stroll into town. There weren’t any towns in space. The Ghost had tried to explain to Sister that spacers would be happier with village-sized stations where more than half a dozen could congregate, but Sister ignored the suggestion.

  The lack of villages didn’t trouble the Ghost, so he hadn’t pressed his point. He liked the solitary life. As did many a spacer, for that matter, so long as they had ready access to feeds, forums, and entertainment.

  The Ghost turned and walked along the tunnel a nine hundred and sixty-fifth time. He’d given himself one thousand turns to work out a solution for making the necessary repairs to 92-AE. He didn’t like the only solution he’d come up with thus far, which involved his leaving the lunar base unsupervised in the hands of the friends of Jumble. The same crew who had somehow blown the docking ring of 92-AE to bits and damaged the station’s ability to transmit properly. What would they do to Tranquility Base?

  But if he had doubts about leaving the base in the care of Jumble’s friends, he had even more concerns about allowing anyone besides himself to complete the repairs on station 92-AE. He doubted Sister could find anyone competent, in any case.

  The Ghost sighed. He hated leaving Tranquility in the care of the careless. But there was no help for it. He could ask them to be careful. But that would mean introducing himself. And he really didn’t want to do that.

  Nine hundred eighty-two.

  There was no other solution. He would have to go. He completed his thousand turns up and down the tunnel — the Ghost liked closure — and proceeded to don his cumbersome space suit before heading out to one of the vehicles he maintained for personal use. He would wait until his four guests were asleep. They had given up the habit of sleeping in shifts. Very bad, that, he thought with disapproval. But it was good for the Ghost. It meant he could keep his presence from their notice. He could continue his solitary existence.

  For a while, anyway.

  2

  Tranquility Base, the Terran Moon

  Jessamyn Jaarda rolled over in her bunk. She had expected sleeping with gravity once more to come as a relief. But here on the Moon, her knees, elbows, and shoulders seemed to press heavily on the unyielding surface of the mattress. How long did it take to adjust to having body weight again, anyway? Intellectually, she knew she weighed only a fraction of what she would weigh on Mars; a mere nothing compared to what she would weigh on Earth. But her limbs seemed to be made of stone tonight. Or what passed for night here at Tranquility Base. With fourteen solid days in sunlight followed by fourteen solid days without sun, it was confusing to track days and nights.

  They had a schedule, of course, based on the Terran twenty-four hour day. Thus far, all four of the refugees from 92-AE kept to the same timetable. Jessamyn didn’t approve of all four of the team sleeping at the same time, and there had been conversations about setting up staggered shifts, but there wasn’t enough to do at the Lunar Base to make staggered shifts a priority. Well, she could make a start tonight, couldn’t she?

  “It’s not like I’m enjoying quality slumber at the moment,” she murmured to herself before sitting upright.

  She stared at the grey forms snoozing in the bunk room: her brother, Ethan, curled into a tight ball; Zussman, lying flat on his back, a pencil of a man, snoring elegantly; Pavel, stretched on his belly, limbs sprawled as though he meant to keep hold of each of the four corners of his bunk lest the mattress should escape.

  Jessamyn smiled. If she switched her sleep schedule, there would be one other crew member who would switch his as well; they could function like a proper crew once more.

  Pavel was breathing peacefully tonight, for a change; she wouldn’t wake him now. He’d been losing sleep to nightmares. She suspected he was reliving the days following his parents’ deaths aboard a station very like the one the team had just fled.

  Pavel would be thinking about his parents more than ever right now. She wondered what it had been like for him, witnessing the explosion of the docking portion of the space station. That alone would be enough to dredge up the old, sad memories, as the bad dreams attested. But when she’d asked, Pavel had said he didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet.

  Sighing, Jess rose and exited the bunk room joining one of the base’s interminable passageways. She remembered how spacious everything had felt when they first arrived from the compact space station. Now, the tunnel walls and even the rooms felt small and oppressive.

  For the first several days, she’d explored kilometers of tunnels leading to dead ends. But in the end, the group had settled into three rooms: a bunk room, a room for working, and a room for eating. There was an additional room with a very high ceiling and, inexplicably, a worn leather couch. Pavel and Jessamyn met there so often that the others thought of it as their private space and tended not to visit.

  Jessamyn bounced along the corridor to their work station. She didn’t mean to bounce, and she tried to move with less spring to her step, but really it was impossible in such low gravity. She and the others were stuck bouncing for the foreseeable future: it wasn’t like they had a ship they could fly back to Earth. The heat shield panels on the Star Shark were irreparably damaged. They were stuck on the Moon. She’d better get used to bouncing with as much dignity as she could muster.

  She bounded toward the small work station the crew had cobbled together by hauling disused equipment from other parts of Tran
quility Base into a cozy room where all could work together on the problem that faced them: how to comm Mars Colonial. The need to communicate had first driven them to Space Station 92-AE, where communication with MCC had been easy. But from the Moon, they had virtually no means of communication with the red planet.

  Comms would be possible, Ethan said, once per lunar month, when the Moon, Earth, and Mars stood in a straight line. Communication on the Moon had been designed to reach Earth and not Mars, so everything up here was aimed straight at Earth. For the most of the month, Mars was simply in the wrong position to receive transmissions from Tranquility Base. Ethan was working on a solution, but for now, comms to Mars would be limited to once a month.

  Jess ached for news. What had happened on her planet since the destruction of the satellites? None of the Raiders knew how much damage had been inflicted by the Terran lasers before her brother’s unorthodox strategies had destroyed the deadly satellites.

  Ill visions paraded themselves before her eyes: the Crystal Pavilion in ruins, her parents dead. She shuddered.

  “It’s just the cold,” she murmured to herself, furiously rubbing her hands along her upper arms.

  It was currently freezing inside the moon base. The chill set into your bones, more than it did back home. She’d never thought twice about temperature growing up on Mars. But now, following the short-sleeve weeks aboard the space station, she couldn’t seem to lose the chill no matter how active she tried to be. Well, the sun would be back soon, and then they’d all be complaining about the heat for two weeks.

  Settling into her station, Jess thought she felt an unusual vibration pulsing through the habitat. The walls rumbled with a sound that reminded her of the arrival or departure of a small ship.

  What on Ares was that? Her instruments detected nothing. Not that any of them were reliable. She shook her head at the unimpressive equipment surrounding her.

  The rumbling sensation was not repeated, and Jessamyn concluded she’d imagined it.

  “Hoping for a little company, are we?” she asked herself in a low murmur.

  Jess had fantasies in which Lucca Brezhnaya showed up on the Moon, and she took the Terran Chancellor down. A wave of anger pulsed through Jess every time she thought about Lucca’s attempt to destroy all life on the red planet.

  “You won’t have a second chance to do that, though, will you?” she said softly, smiling to herself. With the satellites gone, Lucca’s ability to harm Mars Colonial was gone as well.

  Jessamyn set to work on a program Ethan had created to enable the team to comm Madeira with greater ease and frequency. Lady Cameron Wallace still harbored Harpreet and Kipper. Dr. Kazuko Zaifa remained sequestered on Madeira as well.

  Jess found herself wondering, for the millionth time, if the Terran satellites girdling Mars had really, truly been destroyed. Zussman, in contact with trusted associates from his time as Lucca’s personal butler, had not heard anything to the contrary. The satellites, it would appear for now, were gone. Of course, Jess reminded herself, they had no way of being certain until next week’s long-awaited comm to Mars.

  Next week. Next week! The crew of fugitives had passed nearly three long weeks waiting for this window to open for communication.

  Jessamyn smiled.

  She’d been smiling quite a lot, lately, unable to shake the constant quirk of her mouth into an upward curve, despite the many reasons she had for being unhappy.

  “You do realize you’re stuck on the Moon?” she asked herself, watching her brother’s program humming along.

  As far as Jess could see, they had no hope of transport, ever, off the Moon. But even if they had a ship, where would they go? Danger lurked at every scan-chip swipe back on Earth.

  And then there was the food situation, which ought to have depressed anyone accustomed to Earth-fare: the only thing a thorough search of Tranquility Base had turned up was a seemingly limitless supply of ration bars. But really, if there was one thing a child raised under Mars Colonial Command knew how to appreciate, it was the nutritionally concentrated food source known as dry rations.

  This was a good life, all in all. Especially in that it included Pavel. Jess felt the smile returning. She should wake Pavel. Warm, drowsy Pavel, whose lips she particularly enjoyed when he was in that netherworld between sleep and waking.

  A soft flush spread across her skin, shaking the chill. Yet another thing to be happy about: warmth. She needed someone to share the cheerfulness which was burbling inside of her, threatening to break out into indecorous giggles.

  Giggling.

  Bouncing.

  Jessamyn shook her head at herself, imagining what Crusty would say if he could see her now.

  “Aphrodite’s flowered nightie, Pilot Jaarda,” he would say. “Pull yourself together!”

  Perhaps it was just as well folks back home couldn’t see her more than once a month. No one at the Academy would believe this bouncing, giggling girl wasn’t some Terran re-body who’d stolen the body of the real Jessamyn.

  Grinning, she left the work station to wake Pavel.

  3

  Budapest, Earth

  As if I don’t have enough to worry about already, thought the Terran Chancellor, Lucca Brezhnaya. Not only had Vladim Wu’s team failed in a simple mission to annihilate Jessamyn Jaarda and her brother aboard a space station, Wu’s own nephew Benjamin had failed to stop hackers from destroying the Mars Containment Satellites. To have such a perfect victory over the troublesome inhabitants of Mars plucked from her grasp — she could not bear to think about it. Not if she valued her sanity.

  And Lucca Brezhnaya definitely valued her sanity.

  She needed it for crises like this latest one with the Spacing Guild. The complaints regarding a halt to streamed entertainment had begun two days ago. No one had reported anything to Lucca until yesterday. Which was well and good, she reminded herself. She had trained her underlings to manage affairs without bringing every minor problem to her as though it were an important matter of state.

  But miners and harvesters and goodness knew who else without ready access to a stream of feeds and entertainment? It was rapidly becoming a matter of state. She scowled, remembering the strike of eighty-three years ago. Without the constant satellite maintenance provided by the Guild, Earth’s communications would quickly devolve into a soupy mess. And the Guild was threatening to strike if station 92-AE was not returned to full functionality within forty-eight hours.

  The miners held too much power. They had to be dealt with, as this situation highlighted.

  The Chancellor’s hands tightened into fists. She never should have allowed this state of affairs to arise. Firing upon Station 92-AE had been a mistake. She’d been so preoccupied with striking Mars that she hadn’t ascertained the designation of the space station before giving Wu permission to fire upon it. She ought to have asked Wu more questions. She was better than this.

  Lucca pounded a fist on the tempered glass surface of her desk.

  She had to be better than this. The world depended on her. Perhaps this whole muddle was a reminder that she was pushing herself too hard. Yes, she decided, it had been over a year since she’d had so much as a single weekend to herself. And while Lucca Brezhnaya was an extraordinary woman indwelling a healthy threebody, that didn’t make her invincible. Or infallible.

  As demonstrated by this latest debacle.

  Well, she would sort out Station 92-AE and then take a few days off before delving into her next offensive, her strike against the red planet. There could be no errors, no miscalculations, no oversights the next time she moved against Mars. A holiday, then: just a short one, and straight back to work.

  But first (assuming the Guild hadn’t “accidentally” rendered inoperative her outbound lines to space), Lucca needed to make one simple comm to get the entertainment mess sorted out. She preferred not to call the individual in question unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “Which it clearly is,” she said, her voice a wh
isper in the spacious office of glass and steel. Perhaps, she thought, this same individual could give her some help in locating the fugitives from Station 92-AE. Her own efforts had been fruitless so far.

  But first: put the satellite workers back into good humor with their dose of bread and circuses. With that danger averted, she could attend to other matters: a holiday; Mars; the red-haired Marsian and her brother.

  Lucca glowered at the three-dimensional image of the red planet hovering to one side of her desk.

  “There is more than one way to extinguish a planet,” she said softly before striking a panel that caused Mars’s image to flicker and disappear.

  4

  New Houston, Mars

  There was no use trying to hide from the truth: Mars was in trouble.

  Despite this, Mei Lo, recently reconfirmed Secretary General and CEO of Mars Colonial, felt invigorated. This was quite the opposite of how she would have expected she would feel under such circumstances. If someone had walked into her office two weeks ago and told her that MCC was about to be attacked, resulting in the complete destruction of vital facilities in New Houston and New Tokyo, she would have thought panic a more likely response than this cool clear-headedness which had taken possession of her following the laser attacks.

  Disaster, she decided, cleared the mind wonderfully.

  In and of itself, the destruction of the New Houston Water Treatment Facility would have been enough to create mayhem. But there were other critical facilities that had suffered damage.

  In the first few days following the attacks, New Tokyo and New Houston had engaged in a sort of war of complaints, each claiming their citizens required the more urgent assistance. Mei Lo had settled things, acknowledging that her own home town wasn’t as hard hit. On Mars, water was lower on the hierarchy of needs than breathable air. New Tokyo — city, suburbs, and all — relied on a single utility cooperative to keep hab air systems operational, and that utility had been hit hard.