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

by Nick Webb

  “The reason I asked to speak with you alone is the same reason I scanned your shuttle on the ship—and the reason I overrode your guidance systems.” Nhean glanced at the far door and looked back to meet Pike’s eyes. “The girl you have with you has, to the best of my knowledge, been in those labs for many years—and she has always moved with the Dawning.”

  Pike considered this. “So?”

  “So she has something to do with an experimental Telestine system, and I don’t even know who built it. Why she’s involved is a complete mystery to me. She may be its operator, which begs the question of why. What capabilities do humans have that Telestines don’t? If Telestines are capable of working it, then why aren’t they doing so? Most importantly of all—what does she think about it?”

  “If she knows what it is, she might well be working for the Rebellion,” Pike said at once. “She could have earned their trust and—”

  “Mr.—” Nhean broke off, and breathed. “That is a pleasant dream, but let us look at the facts, please. The Rebellion is small. How many have found their way into its ranks—a few thousand? Ten thousand at most? And that’s people raised by humans, told by human parents and human friends that humanity is enslaved. People who see that every day.”

  “What’s your point?” Pike’s voice was harsh.

  “My point is that as far as I can tell, she may have been raised by the Telestines. Do you really want to place the hopes and dreams of humanity on her allegiance?”

  Pike went hot, and then cold. “She’s had plenty of chances to turn me in. She could have hurt me, she could have taken out a whole camp—the ones who got us that shuttle.”

  There was pity in the other man’s face. “With all respect ... you’re not the biggest prize she could take down. The Rebellion itself would make a better target, don’t you think?”

  Pike swallowed.

  “It’s one of the reasons I had you brought here rather than letting you go to them. This isn’t even my estate, and it’s still a risk.” Nhean’s eyes caught the flash in Pike’s face. “What is it?”

  “We passed Telestine fighters on the way out of atmo and they didn’t stop us.” The words were bitter. “They didn’t stop us. I should have known. I thought she cloaked us somehow, but....” He turned away.

  “What type of fighters? Out of curiosity.”

  “The black ones with the curved wings.”

  “Interesting.” Nhean looked down at the floor. “I think you understand my caution now, why I wanted to speak to you alone. I wanted to know what, if anything, she’d done to the shuttle.”

  “So she’s a Telestine spy.”

  “She might be. For all we know, there is some loyalty in her. For all we know, she’s lived a life of pain and she hates the Telestines as much as we do. The question is how much loyalty she has, and how far it will hold.”

  Pike looked out at the clouds. “So now what?”

  “We question her.”

  “She doesn’t talk.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk. But … she can be persuaded.” The words were said delicately, but the implication was clear. Nhean was not yet willing to trust a woman found in Telestine labs.

  “No.” Pike felt horror seize him. “If you ever want her to be loyal—”

  “We don’t have much time,” Nhean said quietly. “The fleet was there to help you at Earth because their location near Jupiter was compromised. They’ve already lost two carriers and many of their fighters, and they are on the run. If we don’t get the defensive grid down soon, we won’t have a fleet to capitalize on that. Give me a better option and I will use it.” His eyes seemed sad, but his jaw was set.

  Pike searched for an answer, but came up blank. And his last sentence reminded him of Laura. “There is only ever the best choice.”

  Nhean nodded as if in agreement. “But we may not have a better option. The Exile Fleet is already coming up on Earth.”

  “Walker’s going back to Earth?” Pike’s spine stiffened. “Why?”

  “Either to pick you up—they probably detected your shuttle leave—or….” A shadow passed over his face.

  “Or?”

  “Or she’s beginning her assault on Earth. Prematurely.”

  Pike shook his head. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”

  A raised eyebrow. “Wouldn’t she? You know her best, after all.”

  He forced his back to relax, but couldn’t dispel the ache in his stomach. “How long do you think they can hold out?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Earth, Low Orbit

  Bridge, EFS Intrepid

  The fleet decelerated hard, right to the edge Earth’s exosphere. Only the Oksana held back, her fighters out, bays open on the off chance that Pike’s shuttle was just hiding behind an orbiting asteroid or defunct human satellite, as the rest of the fleet made a diversion in the fore. Walker marked the progress of the fleet against that lone, tiny dot.

  Come on, Pike. The Intrepid lurched as the engines roared to life and Walker gripped the desk as the room rocked. The ship dropped altitude and she let out a sigh of relief when they came to a relative stop a moment later as the engines pushed them into orbit at the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  On the other side of the desk, Delaney looked like he might be sick. Telestine-made inertial dampeners helped with acceleration—or they tried to—but for some reason the stolen Telestine tech struggled to make deceleration comfortable. It felt like none of them had been able to take a full breath since Walker gave the order.

  And she couldn’t let them stop to enjoy the moment, either.

  “Larsen, give me news.”

  “Right.” Larsen’s fingers danced over the screens and his lips twitched. “Looks like we managed to get under the radar and—are you ready for some good news?—I think we took out a Telestine satellite on the way in. Without puncturing the hull,” he added.

  “I was going to say....” Walker allowed herself a small smile. She kind of wished she’d saved this maneuver for the final battle against the Telestines, but it was impossible to deny how satisfying it was to screech into the atmosphere of her home planet at full burn, and take out a few Telestines on the way. “Are they regrouping?”

  “Their units are all full of chatter, that’s for sure. Broadening the sensor sweep.” Larsen waited, jiggling his foot with impatience. Around the bridge, the rest of the crew was also adjusting to the lack of extra g’s, with excess energy made manifest in pen tapping, nervous smiles, and a great many people stretching hugely.

  All of the nervous activity stopped when the klaxons came on.

  “We’re detecting five fighter detachments, ma’am.” Larsen met her eyes. “And it looks like we might have a carrier coming as well.”

  “All right.” Walker laced her fingers behind her back and gave a silent prayer. “Let’s take out those detachments before the carrier arrives, and make a lot of fuss while the Oksana finds our payload. Fighters out, and dive.” It was time to see if McAllister had gotten his new trainees up to speed; she could only hope that he had.

  “Yes, ma’am. All fighters launch. Say again, all fighters launch.” Larsen held up one finger toward the Intrepid’s helmsman. His lips moved as he counted the fighters now streaming out into the holographic view. “Bays one through nine empty. Bay ten. Bay eleven. Valiant reporting all launched. Brama reporting all launched.” He looked up to meet the helmsman’s eyes. “Dive.”

  The Intrepid gave a groan ... and dropped.

  Delaney clutched the desk with both hands and started into a whispered Lord’s prayer, Larsen turned vaguely green, and King stared straight ahead as if she would only keep it together if she pretended all of this was normal.

  “Altitude three hundred kilometers and dropping,” Larsen reported a bit faintly. “Partial burn beginning....” His face split into a smile. “All Telestine formations scattering.”

  Walker fixed her eyes on the hologram and watched as the Telestines shot out of the way of the
falling carriers.

  “They’re regrouping behind us.”

  “Hard burn!” she called back. “Now!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Ensign Harris, their helmsman, slammed her hand down on the controls with evident pleasure. Landing, she had told Walker, was perfectly fine. Flying was perfectly fine. Dropping the carrier out of the sky and cranking the engines on the way down, however, was not her idea of a good time.

  “They’re coming for us,” Larsen called. On the screen, the Telestine fighter groups had reformed and they were making a slow arc to come down toward the carriers.

  “Well, let’s say hello.” Walker gave a small smile. “Start with the cannons.”

  “Cannons primed and ... firing.” Larsen tapped his screen, and lines appeared on the hologram, streaking away from the Intrepid and the Brama, too fast to track with unaided eyes.

  “All units repeat. Fighters stay out of the way. Pick ‘em off as they come out.” Walker watched the Telestine fighters scattering desperately as the cannon fire began. “You don’t like that, you bastards? Then get the hell off our damn planet.”

  Delaney grinned.

  “Seventeen enemy fighters down,” Larsen called. “Twenty-two. Twenty-nine. Thirty—ah, hell. The carrier’s here, and it is not happy to see us!”

  “Duly noted—Harris, take us up. Yes, right into the rest of the fighters, if you have to.” Hopefully they weren’t going fast enough for a hull puncture. Hopefully. “All fighters climb, you aren’t going to do anything against that thing.”

  Now they came to it. Delaney met her eyes across the desk and nodded.

  Walker swallowed. “Brama, do you read?”

  “We read, admiral,” said Captain Noringe.

  “Is the nuke primed?”

  She’d heard the stories of the terrifyingly powerful hydrogen-based thermonuclear weapons humanity had built before the Telestines had arrived. Tens of megatons each. But she didn’t have the luxury of fusion bombs, or plutonium, for that matter. Just simple gun-style uranium weapons at a few hundred kilotons each. Quick and dirty. Hopefully enough to both take out a Telestine cruiser, and, at this altitude, effect a halfway decent electromagnetic pulse to knock out electrical systems on the ground below.

  “Yes, ma’am. Ready for launch; we’re just out of range.”

  “Hang back. We’ll cover you. Shoot as soon as we swing wide. Jocasta, Andromache, hope you’re ready.”

  “We’re ready, admiral.” The voices were tight with anticipation.

  Walker watched the formation close around them on the screen. The Jocasta came to rest a scant distance above the Intrepid, with the Andromache below.

  “Broadside,” Walker called. The ships began to turn as they banked toward the carrier, all guns firing. The first round of Telestine missiles slammed into the ship and through the rumble she heard klaxons echoing on the Jocasta’s comm line. “We’re closing, keep firing, keep firing, keep—all right, move!”

  The ships pulled apart. The Jocasta was limping, but the captain had the ship at full burn. No one wanted to be around for what was coming.

  “The Brama reports the nuke has launched, ma’am.” Larsen’s voice was quiet.

  Whether the Telestines guessed what they were facing, Walker didn’t know. The ship began to slow, however, and turn.

  It wasn’t quick enough. With a boom they heard through the hull of the Intrepid, the carrier flashed out of being on the hologram. The computers flickered, the rudimentary EMP shield they’d devised taking the brunt, and Harris was already turning them to streak out of atmo.

  “Any more contacts?”

  “None yet.”

  “And the EMP?” It was the whole reason for that ill-advised maneuver in the first place, dropping down precipitously into the atmosphere to add more EM fuel to the nuclear fire, and possibly take out Telestine electrical systems on the surface.

  Larsen was shaking his head. “No effect that I can see, ma’am.”

  Damn. So there went one potential tactic. The Telestine EMP shielding tech was as good as their own, apparently. But she wasn’t surprised.

  Larsen looked pained. “News from the Oksana.”

  “Yes?”

  “They aren’t seeing that shuttlecraft anywhere. Either it’s hiding from us, it already left, or....”

  “Yes?”

  “Or it’s already been taken down.”

  Walker looked back at the screen. No one had turned the hologram off, and Earth was receding behind them. She narrowed her eyes and considered. Her lips moved in a silent litany: no despair, no hope. When the answer finally came to her, she almost did not believe it. Hope could kill a person, she’d always known that.

  But it made sense, it checked out.

  “I don’t think so,” she said aloud.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think the Telestines got to it. They didn’t have much notice that we were in the vicinity—how’d they get a carrier in position that quickly? No, I think they know someone was flying around here, maybe drifting with their engines quiet. I think the Telestines were waiting for them to run out of air and come down. The question is ... who was it?” She looked up to meet Larsen’s eyes. “And where in hell did they go?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Well, we’re going to find out somehow. Pike is alive. The Dawning isn’t lost to us yet.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Venus, 49 kilometers above surface

  Tang Estate, New Zurich

  “So.” Nhean sat behind his desk and inclined his head. “Let us speak about what you know of the Dawning.”

  The girl stared back at him warily, then looked toward the door.

  “Mr. Pike is not here.” Nor was the man aware of what was happening at present. Nhean had judged that to be the best option. The man was likely to be squeamish if this progressed beyond simple questions.

  Nhean, however, had long since accepted that possibility.

  “Tell me about the Dawning. We have reason to believe it wasn’t destroyed the way we thought it was. You always moved with it. Where did it go this time? Why were you there, where it should have been?”

  She crossed her arms and stared at him, and his irritation grew.

  “Do you understand why you are here?”

  Nothing.

  “You are here because you have a key to something that could save humanity. Do you understand? We have been given the keys to spread ourselves across the universe, and yet we are watched, we are limited, we are caged.”

  Still nothing.

  “Did you know that humanity has often had labs like the one you grew up in?”

  Her eyes grew wary.

  “We didn’t do the things like what were done to you.” He paused, his desire for accuracy at war with his best interests. “Usually,” he conceded. “We studied things like propulsion, agriculture, military development—anything and everything. Do you know what we study now?” He waited until she shook her head. “Nothing,” he told her flatly. “We study nothing. The Telestines believe that any innovation will lead us to war against them. It’s impossible to stop all of it, of course—there’s always a mechanic somewhere that can make a spaceship run better. And designing new rudimentary nuclear missiles has been a priority for Walker. But it’s better for them to feed us these things, to squash the universities and laboratories we build, than it is for them to deal with a populace that can think and invent for itself. Meanwhile, they keep inventing. Do you know all of the experiments they performed on humans in that lab, or just the ones they did on you?”

  She sat rigid. He knew he was giving her more information than Walker would have been comfortable with. But before information, came trust. And barring trust … enhanced questioning.

  “It occurs to me to wonder: do you know how they make human slaves? The ones some of us call Drones?”

  The wariness grew.

  “I don’t think you do. You’re clearly not one of those. So, let me tell y
ou. They’re bred in tanks. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course—just an old-fashioned revulsion. Humans can be quite primitive in some ways, wouldn’t you say?”

  She said nothing to that, and it occurred to him to wonder if tank breeding seemed normal to her. What would a person raised in that environment think of normal birth? The thought was intriguing.

  Not important.

  “But the humans made in those labs don’t come out like other humans. It’s hard to know what it is—genetic engineering, gene selection, drugs. It’s one of the things we could study if we had the facilities for it, but to be honest with you, I’m not sure I’d want us knowing. The how of it isn’t important, though. They’re ... docile. Very docile. Drugged after birth, at least, if not before. Even when they aren’t, they don’t do much of anything unless they’re told. They can’t fend for themselves—their will to survive, the same will that makes it possible for us to live on orbital stations and hostile planets, is practically non-existent. The first ones we rescued off of Earth were a tremendous failure. After the second group, we knew it hadn’t been a fluke. They’re all like that.”

  She looked away. Her lips were pressed together. He was getting under her skin at last.

  “You aren’t like that,” Nhean said.

  Her head jerked up.

  “Were you grown in their labs, or were you taken from human parents?”

  Nothing. She looked down at her hands.

  “You’ve been trained to use their technology, haven’t you?”

  Her head shook, but there was no truth there.

  “Why, exactly, don’t you trust me?”

  She only met his eyes briefly before looking away, but her gaze was defiant now.

  “You know what they did to you, don’t you? Even if you were asleep, the scars should tell you. You’re full of machinery.”

  She sat back, arms crossed.

  So she did know.

  “Although it appears to be inert,” Nhean observed. He tried to keep the irritation from his voice now. He had scanned her surreptitiously, pored over the data as many times as he could, and he still could not figure out what the Telestines had put in her. For all he could tell, it was simply an enhanced skeleton.