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

by Nick Webb

  He looked over and saw the girl watching him. Her eyes were sad.

  “I left them to die,” he told her.

  She didn’t look away. Her head tipped up in a wordless question.

  “The rest of my team. On the Telestine ship. There were ten of us. You heard me call for them, but they didn’t answer. I left them there to die,” he repeated, almost defiantly.

  He expected an automatic protest, the words etiquette demanded. She would tell him that they had already been dead. Or she would tell him that he would only have gotten himself killed too if he’d gone after them. Those were familiar words by now; his fingers clenched.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t even know why I’m here,” Pike told her. “I wanted to see home, but that seems stupid now. I lived without it all these years. Space wasn’t as bad as my father said it would be.”

  While his father sickened and died on Johnson Station, Pike had joined the half-feral gangs of children who played “Hide and Retake Earth” in the labyrinthine corridors, holding mock airship battles in the low gravity rooms and debating the futures they could have: trader, cargo pilot, vacuum welder, exterior mechanic. Everyone wanted to be an exterior mechanic, clambering around on the outside of the station to fix solar panels and hull dents.

  His planned future: farmer.

  The other kids laughed cruelly.

  She still hadn’t said anything, and he felt obliged to fill the silence. It felt strange. He was normally the one who didn’t talk.

  “I was born on Earth,” he explained. “Not far from here. Maybe a few miles north. We’re close. I don’t think the camp exists anymore—it got hit by the Telestines.” He saw a question in her eyes. “My father was working with the Rebellion. The day they came to get information from us, the Telestines came too. The Rebellion soldiers took as many of us as they could on the shuttle. My mother and sister ... they didn’t make it.”

  She curled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Her black eyes were steady.

  “I didn’t want to be part of the Rebellion after that,” Pike admitted. It felt good to say it. In the past few weeks, it had been manifestly clear how unwelcome that admission would be to his compatriots. It was a lie of omission, but still a lie, and it ate at him.

  The girl didn’t recoil. She gave a minute nod instead, one that said she had heard him and she was considering things.

  It was enough. “I still don’t want to be, actually. Or ... I didn’t.” After today, things seemed more jumbled than before. “It seemed like too big a risk. We have a life out there, and we don’t really have enough ships for a rebellion. When Walker told me about the plan, I didn’t even listen. I just wanted to come back and see the planet, to see mountains and trees again, and I felt like ... I’m human, right? When the head of the Rebellion says they need you and you could save everyone’s life, you can’t say no, can you? I just didn’t know that what we were trying to do was even possible, that’s all.” His lips curled with irony. “And it wasn’t. We couldn’t even get one piece of tech out of a lab.” He glanced sideways to look at her. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t even know we could still get at it. Do you know what it looks like? The Dawning? Were they developing it there?”

  A pause, and she nodded.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head. Finally, she shrugged.

  “I’m hardly going to tell anyone,” he pointed out. “And it’s not like I shouldn’t know, in any case. I did come here for it.”

  She gave the ghost of a smile at that, but another Telestine plane shot overhead with a flash of light in the cockpit and they both instinctively stilled.

  It was reassuring when she did things like that, Pike decided. It reminded him that she was human, which seemed an odd thing for him to keep forgetting.

  He tried to be fair about her reticence. She didn’t know him from Adam, and he had shown up with the group of people who crashed the ship she was on and delivered her to a very dubious safety.

  He let his eyes drift closed; he was getting tired again.

  “I’ve missed Earth,” he told her. It seemed like the most honest thing he’d said in years. “I liked running cargo ships. I liked seeing Jupiter. Didn’t like Mars. Venus was weird. Never been to Saturn or Neptune. But Jupiter....”

  The sight of Jupiter, blocking out half of the black, always sucked the air right out of his lungs. “I liked seeing Jupiter every time. It’s basically humanity’s home now. The stations and the Snowballs—Callisto, Europa, Ganymede. Cargo was a good trade. Smuggling even more. Everyone needs things. We brought water from Europa sometimes—they hauled it up to the ship and crated it there, these huge blocks of ice on a chain.”

  She was watching him, swaying slightly side to side. He could see her trying to picture it. She seemed like she might smile at any moment.

  “Maybe I’m supposed to feel like we’re going to die if we don’t get Earth back,” Pike admitted. “I’m not sure I do. I’ve never just believed that. My dad used to talk about NASA and America and McDonalds and aircraft carriers and … those were just words to me. I don’t like them being here, though. I don’t like them having our planet and just running us off. And....”

  The truth seemed too deep to admit, but she was waiting for it silently, black eyes expectant.

  “I don’t think I can leave again,” Pike admitted, “and know I can never come back. This was supposed to be my home. I was going to get Walker the Dawning, she’d do her Fleet thing, and then after all the Telestines were dead, I’d come back. And then I’d farm. I’d farm.”

  He didn’t understand until that moment. All these years, he’d known the Rebellion as rage: his father’s twisted grief, a shell of the strident anger he’d carried with him on Earth; Walker’s cold, calculating fury; the traitorous whispers he heard on every long pass between Jupiter and Mars—the aeons of black there seemed to drag confessions out of anyone.

  His Rebellion wasn’t about anger. All those years he’d spent shoving the Rebellion away, too weary to let that ceaseless rage eat him up with the rest of them, he’d forgotten the only thing that mattered: Earth. He wanted Earth back so badly he ached with it.

  “The Dawning....” His voice trailed off in a croak. “The Dawning was supposed to help us get Earth back. A stupid computer chip.” He eyed her carefully. “It’s not … inside you, is it?”

  She shook her head violently. Ok then, he thought, standing up and offering her a hand.

  “Come on. We’ve sat long enough. If we don’t move, they’ll find us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1 million kilometers sunward of L1 Lagrange point, Earth

  Deck 5 hallway, EFS Intrepid

  Commander King was waiting for him in the shadows of the hallway outside the landing bay. She waited, composed, as the medics came and examined his head and made him count backward and say how many fingers they were holding up. They asked him what he remembered, and he said nothing, because he knew the truth would frighten her: the Intrepid, impossibly small against a darkening sky, too far away to reach as the satellites came online nearby and he thought he might as well have gone out in a blaze of glory with Fisheye, or stuck around to help the pilot of the shuttle. How he’d gotten back to the ship he didn’t know, and he didn’t care much, either. All he remembered was the hollow feeling of following the command to return, wondering why it even mattered when a life could get snuffed out that easily.

  Then the medics were gone and it was just him on the floor, still in his flight suit, and her waiting silently.

  She knelt at his side after a moment.

  “She held the ship for you,” she said finally. “The admiral.”

  He opened his mouth to ask her why she was telling him that, and realized that she didn’t know what to say right now, either. He looked up at her familiar face with its faint dusting of freckles over the bridge of the nose and reached out to pull her close. His arms were too tight aro
und her, he knew, but she was squeezing him back just as hard. After a moment, her torso shook and he felt tears on his neck.

  “I made it back,” he said irrelevantly.

  Irrelevant, because they both knew, now, that he was never going to make it. How could he possibly survive, when the Telestines could take out fighters so readily? If he didn’t die in the next mission, he’d die in the one after that.

  She pulled away and ducked her head as she wiped her cheeks. When she looked up, her face was absolutely composed. She took a moment before she spoke. “I’ll follow you.”

  He didn’t understand for a moment, and then it hit him in the gut. If he died, in whatever battle, she intended to go, too.

  “No.” His head was moving of its own accord. “Baby, no.”

  “Did you just call me baby?” She gave something that might have been a laugh.

  He laughed, too. Sort of. “It felt like that kind of moment.”

  She reached out to press her fingers over his. “I’m not afraid.”

  “You’re not a fighter pilot, either.” He met her eyes. “You’ll be in command of a battleship.”

  “You think all of our ships are going to make it?” She gave a rueful smile. “There are going to be some who shield the flagship in the final battle. Some who shield the Dawni—” She broke off. “I’m not afraid,” she said again.

  “I am.” He shook his head. “I am. Ari—sweetie—don’t do this. When I go—” He broke off when she put her hand over her mouth. “It’s going to be okay,” he tried to tell her in spite of the hand. He hadn’t realized before today how sure it was that he’d die here, like this, but with that knowledge had come some measure of acceptance. “You’re going to be okay, Ari. You’re going to find some nice guy and—”

  “Don’t.” She shook her head fiercely. “If....” Her voice trailed off and she looked over her shoulder. A single set of footsteps was approaching.

  They both knew who that was. The quick, measured footsteps were like a unique fingerprint. He squeezed her fingers. “Go. I’ll catch up with you later.” His voice was low, and he watched as she hurried out of sight around a corner.

  When he looked back, the admiral was there. Her hands were clasped behind her back, the way she always stood. He wondered if she ever relaxed, and decided she probably didn’t. Her eyes were cool on his.

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  He went cold. How she’d guessed, how she’d known about him and King, he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. “No, ma’am.”

  “Good.” She seemed to take the words at face value, and she came to help him up from the floor. “The medics tell me you have a minor concussion. You’ll need to rest for about forty-eight hours, but after that you’ll be good to go.”

  “Do we have forty-eight hours?” He reached up to scratch at his head and winced when his fingers touched the bruise.

  She considered, and then lifted her shoulders. “No way to know.”

  “Any word on the pilot of the shuttle?”

  Her face went still, and he knew he’d made a mistake of some sort.

  “No,” she said simply.

  “Ma’am, are we allowed to know what we were doing there?”

  It was way out of line, but she nodded. “You’ve more than earned that, I think. You have a right to know what you put your life on the line for. On that shuttle….” She considered. “No, in the lab—we’ll start there—was something called the Dawning.”

  The word King had almost uttered. He waited for more.

  “It may be the key to undermining the entire Telestine defense grid. We have reason to believe that it—or a crucial component of it—made it onto that shuttle.”

  His jaw had dropped open. He had not doubted that there was a reason for him to be out there, but he would never have guessed that it would be something like this. “That would put us close to—”

  “Yes.” She cut him off with a nod. “If we can retrieve it.”

  “Get me back out there.”

  “You’re injured, McAllister. Rest.”

  “I.…” He didn’t want to rest. He didn’t want to think. If he stayed in a hospital bed, he was going to be thinking of Fisheye.

  Fisheye, who had died without ever knowing any of this. He’d sacrificed blindly.

  She saw his face. “That wasn’t why I came. I came to say—I’m sorry about Hernandez. I know the two of you were close.”

  There was a lump in his throat. He nodded jerkily. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I want you to remember why he died.” She spoke quietly.

  “To save me.” And he was never, ever going to be able to make up for that.

  “No.” Her eyes were like chips of stone. “He died because the Telestines have enslaved us. He died for humanity.”

  He could not look at her. He drew himself up, trying to use etiquette to keep from breaking down.

  “We have no time for guilt, McAllister.” Her voice seemed to come from far away.

  He nodded silently.

  “Avenge him.”

  “I will.” He swallowed. “Ma’am. I’ll get Earth back for him.”

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. “When every fighter of theirs is out of the sky, and every carrier is downed, he will be avenged. Remember that they did this to him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Earth

  Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent

  It took Pike most of the next morning to realize they were going in the wrong direction.

  Everything had started out well enough. At some point in the night, the patrols seemed to have ceased and it was safe to be outside again. They watched the smoking wreck of the airship on the mountain below while they ate an uncooked food cube from the shuttle’s emergency bag. The girl gave him a look that said she was trusting him that this was safe to eat, and he’d better not be messing with her. She appeared manifestly unimpressed when he pointed out that with the airship so close, everything was going to taste like smoke, anyway.

  The Telestines hadn’t, apparently, stopped to take care of anyone in the airship, or even bother putting out the fire. Why would they? The thought was bitter. It wasn’t their planet after all. What did they care? They only would have bothered if it marred the perfect view from Occupied Denver.

  He was limping, and she strapped the emergency pack to herself before they set off, holding out a hand to help him over a rock and onto a makeshift path. That, he realized later, was where he went wrong. She chose the path, and he followed.

  It wasn’t like he didn’t have clues, of course. He knew the demolished laboratory was to the south of them, and it took them a good hour to get past it. He didn’t put the pieces together, however, until about an hour after they’d stopped to take shelter from the sun. Without a chance to fill up the water skins, they couldn’t risk direct midday exposure—something the girl already seemed to know. She led them down the slope to a promising-looking partial cave surrounded by withered trees and a dry creek bed.

  They didn’t talk. She, apparently, couldn’t talk—or so he was coming to believe—and he was too tired to do anything but watch the thin, scraggly shadows make their way across the ground. At one point, he craned his neck to see the distant bulk of the ship. He supposed he should tell the nearby Rebellion cell about the thing, on the off-chance that they could salvage some of the tech. He’d heard about the interface problems, but surely they’d figure it out sometime soon. He tried to mark where it was in his head. Fifteen kilometers north? Eighteen, perhaps? They’d be able to see it, anyway. It wasn’t exactly small or hidden, and the smoke was kind of a dead giveaway.

  The girl had shoved herself up and wandered up the hill somewhat. He didn’t look, trying to give her privacy, and was surprised when she came back with berries. She held them out with a smile.

  “You can’t eat those.” He shook his head. “They’re poison.”

  She looked at the berries, then back at him, su
rprised. She disappeared again in a little puff of dust, and was back a few minutes later, with what looked like a collection of every plant she could find. She spread them out and pointed to them one by one as he searched his memory.

  “That’s edible. So’s that, but there’s nothing to it but to fill up your stomach, and only if you boil it. Not that one.” He saw her mark the shape of the leaves carefully, and approved of that. She could learn. “That one makes a tea you can use when your stomach is upset. That one’s poison. That one’s not poison, but you don’t want to use it too much. And dogs can’t eat it.”

  She frowned at the mention of dogs.

  “Four legs, furry.” He shook his head at her wide-eyed expression. “Not bears. Dogs aren’t big. Maybe half your size.” Few places had them anymore, though. No good way to breed hunting dogs in space, his father had said, and if a dog didn’t hunt, it was just another mouth to feed. Probably had them on Venus, though. They have everything on Venus.

  Pike watched as she leaned forward to study the plants again. He wondered if she’d been marking the shape of the mountains as they came south. Probably.

  South. His head whipped around to look at the smoldering airship wreck, and he swore with all the inventiveness of a lifelong cargo hauler. When he looked back, the girl was watching him warily.

  “We’ve been going south?”

  She nodded.

  He felt his anger start to rise. She must have been waiting all morning for him to figure it out. “You knew? You knew I wanted to go north.”

  She nodded again. Her fingers played nervously with the leaves.

  “You took me south on purpose, knowing I wanted to go north.”

  A nod. She didn’t seem particularly sorry, which only made him angrier.

  “Without discussing it at all.”

  Yet another nod.

  “I suppose you had your reasons.”

  His tone was like acid, but she smiled when she nodded this time. She settled back against the rocks, seeming pleased that he’d figured it out. The smile, he thought, was entirely too smug.