Mercury's Bane: Book One of the Earth Dawning Series

by Nick Webb

  It was hard to argue with that. The tech for those estates was Telestine through and through, and only the richest of humanity had been able to settle on Venus. The tycoons, the upper echelons of the UN—hell, even the pope. Supplied by the cargo guild and waited on by servants, the rich on Venus seemed a universe away from the rest of humanity. Walker had mentioned that some of them served in the Rebellion, but Pike wondered if that was only wishful thinking.

  This whole mission was wishful thinking. Pike edged his way along a narrow ledge toward the resting spot their guides had chosen. His breath was coming short. Between acclimation and growing exhaustion, it was difficult to tell if his situation was getting better or worse. Even the fact that he was keeping up seemed like a mixed blessing. He didn’t understand why he was here, lugging a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his back. He’d been working his way to a good life of honest commerce and mostly-honest smuggling on the Aggy with his fellow crew mates, and he’d thrown it all away for this?

  Mountains and trees. Remember Pike, mountains and trees.

  “Rest up.” Eva handed him a mostly empty water skin. When he looked at her with a wordless question, she jerked her head toward the laboratory. “We’re almost to the shuttles.”

  It would be awhile longer until they actually entered its shadow, but the floating lab already seemed to draw all of the light to it. It sat heavy in the air above the next peak. Then Eva’s eyes fixed on something out on the plains and he turned to look.

  Holsteins. When the Telestines first arrived and the human solar diaspora started, Pike’s father said, they set all of the food animals loose. They wanted herds out roaming the land, like nature intended, only they hadn’t quite realized that the animals they found in the warehouses weren’t the same as the animals that had freely roamed—so for a few years, all they got to watch were majestic herds of chickens wander back and forth. Whenever he told those stories, Pike’s father had laughed until he cried, gesturing with his elbows and neck in a wild imitation of a chicken strut.

  The chickens had mostly died off over time, but some of the cows and pigs survived. Many of those were surreptitiously tended to by humans now.

  Eva’s voice called him back to the present.

  “We’re close enough now that we’re probably going to trigger their defensive systems soon.” She grimaced. “We made better time than I expected. I thought we’d be able to get the fighters and get up there from outside its defensive range.”

  Pike only nodded. He went to return the water skin to her, but drew his hand back as he caught sight of Charlie standing alone at the edge of the camp. The man had been silent on the climb, and Pike had rarely seen him either sleep or eat. He carried the water skin over now and held it out.

  Charlie hesitated before accepting. He had spoken little to Pike since their first meeting near the camp, when Pike had guessed at the other man’s true motivations for participating in the raid. But in the end, he couldn’t blame the man. Family first. Blood first.

  “Thanks.” He drained the last of the water and held the empty skin back out. “There’s a creek ahead, we’ll be able to refill there.”

  Pike nodded. His eyes followed Charlie’s to the laboratory. He had not wanted to ask, but he supposed he should know what he was in for before they got to the ship. “You think they’re up there?”

  Charlie looked at him wordlessly.

  “Your family,” Pike clarified.

  “I know what you meant.” Charlie’s gaze clicked over Pike’s face, calculating. “Why?”

  “You never told me about them.”

  “Wasn’t much point, was there? You think they’re dead.” The man’s mouth twisted. “You’re not going to get me to give up on them, though.”

  “I know.” Pike set the RPG launcher down at last. “So? You think they’re there?”

  “To be honest ... I don’t know what I think.” Charlie’s voice held an ache. “I don’t know where they were taken. I don’t even know who took them. We were hunting one day and when we came back, they were all gone.”

  “We?”

  Charlie looked back at the group of soldiers and pointed to his chest, then to two others. “Me. Hank. Eva. We all joined up after that. We’d said we wouldn’t bring any harm to our families by taking risks, but once we didn’t have our families anymore—” He caught sight of the look on Pike’s face. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Pike crossed his arms. He felt the other man’s gaze linger on his face. “My father didn’t take your precautions. Brought the Telestines down on us.”

  Charlie was silent for a moment. “I didn’t take risks,” he said finally. “Didn’t bring the Telestines down on us. But it didn’t matter in the end. Sometimes fate frowns equally on the wise and the stupid.”

  Pike turned back to the camp. He refused to listen to this again—it might as well be his father standing there, reminding him that humanity was dying. Pike hadn’t listened to the man’s entreaties then, and he wouldn’t listen now.

  Charlie’s voice stopped him in his tracks, though.

  “Diana was three days old when they got taken.”

  Pike looked over his shoulder. Charlie was staring at him.

  “Three days. And Tara couldn’t even walk yet. It was a hard delivery, but we thought they were going to pull through. I left her at the camp with Samantha, Hank’s wife. Hank was a doctor, a real one. We thought they were safe. We were too far away when we saw the ships leaving. We thought they’d just been shot, and in the end we went back to bury them—wondered what we had to lose now that they were dead. And their bodies weren’t even there. They’d just been taken. When I joined the Rebellion, that’s when I found out about the labs.”

  “They might have been taken for the disassembly.”

  “Who takes a baby for that? And Hank’s wife was pregnant, too.”

  Pike rubbed at his head. “I’m sorry. But—”

  “Do you have a kid?” Charlie challenged him. “D’you have a wife waiting for you in the Rebellion?”

  “No.” There was only one woman he’d ever thought he might be able to love, and her only love was the Rebellion. It was just as well, really.

  “I’m doing right by my family,” Charlie said fiercely. “That’s all. That’s all this is. Look down on it if you want, but I’m trying to get them free. If you can’t understand someone doing that, why are you here?”

  I wanted to come home. Mountains and trees. But that was an insult to the rest of them here. He couldn’t say it. Pike met Charlie Boyd’s eyes, and for the first time since he left Earth, he began to wonder if something had been missing from his life all these years. He wondered, finally, what would have happened if the Telestines had never come for them all those years ago. Would he have ended up joining the Rebellion? Would he be fighting for a daughter and a wife taken to the labs?

  He didn’t have time to wonder for long. The ground next to him exploded, and the hiss-crack of Telestine guns reached them a second and a half later. Blown sideways and nearly off his feet, the side of his face blistering, Pike grabbed the RPG launcher and ran for the outcropping of rock nearby. The Rebellion soldiers were yelling to one another, but he didn’t hear screams.

  Hopefully that meant no one was injured, not that people were dead.

  A hand reached out and grabbed at his through the flying dust and rock, and Charlie hauled him to safety. He was bleeding, but there was an incongruous grin on the man’s dirty face.

  “It’s finally starting.” He hauled the launcher out of Pike’s hands and began loading it. “Thank god. I hate the waiting.”

  For the first time since he’d been back, Pike laughed. He actually laughed. His hands fumbled with the launcher.

  “Me, too. Let’s get up there and finish it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Earth

  Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent

  The bullets were coming fast enough now that the echoing reports overlapped. The sou
nd was deafening. The ground nearby tossed up burning chips of rock, and he couldn’t even spare the time to hope he’d still have hair on his arms by the end of this.

  “It’s loaded!” Charlie yelled, over the noise. “Brace me!” He took aim, Pike’s hands on his shoulders, and the RPG hurtled away with a jolt that sent them both stumbling backward.

  Another hollow boom sounded behind them and Pike ducked instinctively as a grenade shot overhead. His head whipped around to follow it, and his mouth dropped open as it spun toward a Telestine fighter. Closer, closer, and the ship swerved at the last second.

  It didn’t swerve quite enough. The grenade caught it on one wing and sent it spinning down into the foothills, black smoke trailing behind it. There was a ragged cheer behind him, but a distracted one; the soldiers were already loading the grenade launcher again.

  They fired, and fired, over and over, until Pike was fairly certain he was never going to be able to hear anything ever again, and he was keeping himself going almost entirely with the thought that every grenade he shot at the Telestines was a grenade he didn’t have to carry for another day’s worth of hiking.

  “Keep going!” he heard dimly. “They’re launching more feathers! Our ships won’t be here for a few minutes, keep going!”

  “Did she say feathers?” Pike yelled.

  Charlie shot again before answering, and grimaced. The launcher was ensuring he would have bruises tomorrow. He turned his head back to nod as they loaded the launcher again. “Yeah, like the ones that shot you down. Feathers, because of the pattern on the outside. The other ones—the black ones—don’t look like that.”

  “Other ones?”

  “Yeah, they have different kinds. Maybe they do different things, I don’t know.” He shot again, and took the last grenade from Pike. “All right, brace and—”

  One of the fighters buzzed low over them, out of nowhere, and Charlie’s shot went wild. He tumbled, taking Pike down with him, and both of them looked up to watch the grenade streak away into the sky. A fighter—feather, Pike reminded himself—had just dropped from the belly of the floating lab and was still apparently finding its bearings. It swerved desperately to get away from the grenade.

  It swerved up, and every one of the humans on the ground winced as the feather sliced directly into the hull of the lab. A few moments later, the sound of tearing metal reached their ears.

  “Holy shit,” Charlie muttered. “I wonder if it—”

  He didn’t get any farther than that. With an agonized groan, the airship tilted. It hung askew, and the sounds of desperate clanking carried on the wind.

  The bullets ceased.

  Silence. Pike looked around himself, certain for a moment that he had finally gone deaf, but there were no explosions—nothing remained but the now-silent airship and the smoke beginning to trail from the open gash in the underside of the hull.

  “Run.” Eva was behind him, her hand on his arm. “Run.”

  “What?”

  “Leave the launcher! Run!” She took off down the hill. “The shuttles! Go!”

  It took a moment for him to make out a path, and he still wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to follow her. “Why are we still going up there?”

  “Because it’s going to crash.” She tossed a look over her shoulder.

  “I know, that’s why I’m asking!”

  “The Dawning is still on there. And … just come on!” She hurdled a bush and stumbled a bit on the landing before hauling herself up with a wince. “Now!”

  “Right.” And the humans, of course, the ones being experimented on. Wanting to leave was a cowardly impulse at best, but he couldn’t shake the thought that none of them wanted to see what was up there. None of them were going to be able to forget it.

  “Wait.” Eva skidded to a halt. The others streamed past them and she turned to watch them, distracted. Her hand was on his arm, her eyes distant. “What if....”

  “What?” He saw the others hauling tarps off two small shuttles. “What is it?”

  “The Dawning. If it’s a key to all of the defense network, what if that means it keeps the network up?” Her face twisted. “What if we let that thing crash?”

  He looked up at it. Was it dropping in altitude?

  It was.

  “We can’t take that chance,” he said finally. “We have to go. If it can take down the networks, we can’t take the chance that destroying it will do that.”

  Her hands clenched.

  “What?” he pressed her.

  “I don’t want to lose my team for a mission we can’t complete. We’re not dying for nothing.”

  She was picking a hell of a time to bring that up. He shook his head. “No time for that. We have to move. Come on.” He saw her waver, and lifted his shoulders. “At least three of your team think their family might be up there. There’s no way you’re not losing at least them, and a shuttle.”

  “Dammit.” She blew out her breath. “You’re right. Come on. Just between us, though?” She gave him a sideways look as she jogged down the hill. “I kinda thought you’d take any opportunity to be out of here. To go make your cabin in the mountains and have your life on Earth like you always wanted.”

  “Yeah. So did I.” He’d never been good at lying, even when he really should.

  “Why didn’t you just head out then?”

  He thought about it, silent as they tried to move as quickly as possible without slipping on the shale, but he didn’t have an answer. He shook his head. “I ... don’t know.”

  “You’d better figure it out,” she advised him.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I care,” she said grimly, “because a lot of people join up, and then there are bullets coming at them and they don’t think it’s a good bet anymore, and they leave other people in the lurch. Maybe it’s the first battle, maybe it’s the fourth, but they go, and we’re always the ones who die for it. And you may be the one the almighty Rebellion sent to help us out, but I’m not risking my team for you, and I’m not risking my home for you. We’re the ones who have to live with the consequences. You got that?”

  “Yeah.” He was oddly comforted. “And ... thanks for not making it about honor and duty, huh?”

  “Not exactly a different speech, but sure.” Her shoulders shrugged and she held out a hand to haul him into one of the shuttles, hidden by brush under an outcropping of rock. “There, that’s your seat, strap yourself in and put in your earpiece. We’ll need a way to communicate while we’re up there.”

  “Right.” He settled into the seat with a jerk as the shuttle took off and plugged the earpiece in. He turned it on with a button press, and a moment later, a man’s voice crackled in his ear.

  “Hello Mr. Pike.”

  “Hello? Who’s this?” He assumed it was one of the other fighters in another shuttle, about to give him instructions.

  But the buzz—the background noise of the transmission was … off.

  “That’s not important right now. You’re the only one that can hear me, so listen carefully.” The voice paused, as if waiting for him to speak. “Mr. Pike, I’m going to help you find the Dawning—without my help you surely will not find it. And in return ... I hope you will consider bringing it directly to me once you have it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Earth

  Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent

  “Who are you?” Pike repeated. His voice was trembling with anger.

  “Pike?” Eva frowned over at him. “Are you getting interference?”

  “Mr. Pike, I have my reasons when I suggest that you don’t tell her what you’re hearing.”

  Pike hesitated. He didn’t have to do what the voice said, he reminded himself. It was human, it knew about the Dawning, and it was offering to help. He’d cut off the call when he had what he needed—until then, he’d work at finding out just why this person wanted him to betray Walker. He nodded at Eva. “Some interference, but it’s fine.”

&
nbsp; The voice paused. He could almost imagine its owner smiling. Could he sense what Pike was thinking? “Thank you. Judging by what I know of you, you’re going to want answers as to why I’m doing this, and why I’m requesting what I am. Unfortunately, I can’t give them to you just yet.”

  Judging by what the voice knew of him? That meant he had to be somewhere in the Rebellion, didn’t it? Only Rychenkov and the Rebellion knew he was here, and Rychenkov would never tell. He might disapprove of Pike’s current activities, but the man was as loyal as they came.

  “Mr. Pike?”

  “That sounds like your problem,” Pike said simply. He pitched his voice low. “Last I checked, you were the one who needed me.”

  “And we’re operating over a line that could be tapped at any time.” The voice seemed neither surprised nor perturbed by Pike’s sentiments. “I can offer you two assurances: first, that you will come to no harm if you bring the Dawning to me; and second, that I have humanity’s best interests at heart.”

  Pike considered this, and the shuttle gave an unpleasant sideways lurch.

  “I can’t get the doors open!” The pilot twisted to look at Eva. “They’re not responding to the codes.”

  “Tell him to try reversing the code and re-entering it.”

  Pike closed his eyes for a moment. He had the feeling that this was only going to lead further down the rabbit hole. “Try reversing the code,” he called up the front.

  “Uh ... sure. One second.” The pilot punched in the numbers, and a screech of metal rewarded them. “That worked. How’d you know to do that?”

  “Recent Rebellion intelligence.”

  He hated this. “Recent Rebellion intelligence.” The words were grudging, and he dropped his voice again; it didn’t take much not to be heard, what with the shuttle bay doors opening so loudly nearby. “It’s not really Rebellion intelligence, is it?”

  “I think you know the answer to that. Now, Mr. Pike, do we have a deal?”

  “Maybe.”