The Cold Dead Earth (The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Book 3) Read online

  “The only place we could manufacture an old kinetic weapon would be in the core, and then it would take months to equip the marines,” said Kray.

  Merthon stood. “I made those creatures, God help us. And I agree with Captain Vargas, the Fed needs to fight the synthetic army with kinetic weapons.”

  “There are none left,” said someone from the crowd.

  “How about the the manufacturing plant in Harlus 3?” said one of the older captains.

  “Harlus is under BG control and even then, they haven’t made a kinetic weapon there for 200 years,” said Kray.

  “I know where there may be sizable caches of projectile weapons, though it’s a bit of a stretch,” said one junior engineer standing in the back.

  “Where?”

  “My mother used to tell me stories of the old worlds, passed down to her from her grandmother and to her from many generations before, from the days before jump technology and the expansion.”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Kray.

  “Where, Boy?” said Marco.

  “Earth,” said the young engineer. The room erupted in laughter.

  Jolo looked at Marco. “Any truth to this?”

  “Maybe, but those who’ve tried to return to Earth have never returned.”

  “Everyone knows you can’t go to Earth,” said Kray. “Ships don’t return from there. There are rumors of foul things on that dead planet.”

  More laughter from the officers. “The Earth is a wasteland,” said one of the older freighter captains. “Ever since we lost the Arcadia there’s been something bad going on there. Something that ain’t entirely natural, if you get my meaning.” More snickering and head shaking from the crowd.

  “You want to go to Earth?” Jolo whispered to Katy.

  “Let’s find out what Marco and Merthon have to say.”

  Jolo looked at Greeley and he was grinning. “I’m in,” he said.

  Jolo stood up. “Admiral, if you send a ship to Earth to hunt for weapons to kill the synths, the Argossy will go.”

  “No. We will fight them with our weapons. That is final. And we will take Sarus,” yelled Kray.

  “Then you will all die!” said Jolo. And the room went silent.

  “So you’d rather turn tail and run, Pirate Vargas?” said Kray.

  “If it means living another day, then, yes. All of you should hide until we figure out how to defeat the synths. None of you have fought them.”

  “NO!” yelled Kray, pointing a finger at Jolo. “A Federation man ain’t afraid to die!” He quoted an old song and the officers cheered. “We are no pirates who run at the first hint of a challenge. We will meet the BG head on out here in the fringe. And your little band of pirate boats are going to fight right beside us to the bloody end.”

  The officers cheered again. And Jolo sat down. Nothing good ever happened in the Great Hall of the Federation Defender Persephony.

  No One Returns

  The old dock master nearly tackled Jolo as soon as he stepped into the cavernous level three docking bay the day after Kray’s big announcement. “Captain Vargas, do you have an authorization chit?” he said, running up in an official rush and blocking Jolo’s path.

  Jolo paused, fought back a strong urge to pull out the Colt, or to just push him out of the way, maybe tie him up and hide him in the shiny gunboat they were standing next to.

  “No, sir. I ordered my crew to do a full diagnostic on the old boat there,” he motioned towards the Argossy, “to get ready for the big offensive.” Jolo smiled as the white-haired Fed man considered Jolo’s ship. It was round where the Fed gunboats were sharp, dirty where the Fed boats were clean, and generally ugly and unimpressive. “I see,” he said, his voice suddenly full of concern. “Well, I guess I could make an exception and file a backlogged auth chit on your behalf.”

  “Thank you. She needs all the help she can get.”

  Jolo was the first on board and went right to the mess hall and sat down. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The bot brought his coffee without even asking. It was almost like being home. Soon the rest of the crew arrived, all except Greeley.

  “Does Kray have a chance against the BG in Sarus?” said Jolo.

  “From what I can tell, Sarus is very lightly defended, so yes, he could take it,” said Marco.

  “The problem is once you do that, you announce your location,” said Jolo.

  “And then they come for you,” said Barth. “And I worry about the civilians.”

  “Kray’s moving all non-military and the Duvalites to the big freighter Sugoka,” said Katy. “At least he’s only fool enough to risk the military and not the remainder of humanity. I’ll kill him myself if anything happens to Bertha and the kids.”

  “We don’t know if the core has been taken,” said George. “The Duvalites may not comprise the remainder of humanity.”

  “From all we’ve seen so far, and all we know about the BG, I can’t help but think the core is seriously farked. But something was off about Kray’s vid,” said Jolo. “Merthon, did that look like your girls?”

  “They are not my girls. But the synthetic girls do not usually stay down. They were made to absorb a shot from an energy rifle.”

  “You any closer to unlocking the secret to killing them?” said Jolo.

  Merthon sighed. “I thought the facility we’d created on Duval was the worst I’d ever been in. No offense to your efforts,” the tall green humanoid said, nodding towards Marco. “But the little bathroom they’ve given me here is nothing more than a hindrance.”

  “The key is beating the synths. If we were just dealing with the worms, then we’d have a chance. Add in the Jaylens, and we’re screwed. Merthon, how close are you to finding out how to kill the Jaylens? If you think you can do it then we stay put, play Kray’s little game and wait for our chance to leave.”

  Merthon stared at the dark metal floor of the mess hall. “Jamis left us a way. I’m sure of it. But I am no closer right now than when Duval fell. In fact, if anything, I’m further away.” Everyone was quiet for a moment.

  “So are we nuts for even considering Earth?” said Jolo.

  “An army of humans with kinetic weapons could stand against the mechs and the synth girls on the ground,” said George.

  “Computer, what do we have on Earth,” said Jolo.

  The vid screen on the wall turned on and showed an image of a blue-green ball. The computer spit out everything in the database concerning humanity’s ancient home planet.

  It was a sobering tale. The Final War in 2156 destroyed the planet’s fragile ecosystem. Nuclear fallout blotted out the sun and the people not killed in the war died of famine and drought soon after. Most scientists believe that it was not one single catastrophe but a cascade of events starting long before the war. Overpopulation had stretched resources to the breaking limit years before the first missiles were launched. Global warming had ravaged the bio-diversity. In the end wildlife amounted to nothing more than a few species of pine trees, small rodents, and tiny fish that no one could identify. It got harder and harder to grow vegetables, corn being the exception. The delicate balance of life on Earth: air, water, sun—teetered on the brink. The nuclear bombs just pushed a bad situation to worse. It took the better part of a hundred years after the war to completely kill the Earth, but by 2250, all life, even the small pockets of resilient humans still clinging to a meager existence, were gone. The sky was black and so was the earth. Nothing could grow there.

  “The choices just keep getting better: the BG or a dead planet,” said Katy. She waved off the mess hall bot, went to the kitchen and refilled her cup of coffee by herself.

  “The choice is simple,” said Jolo. “We choose the best way we can to fight.”

  “Can we breathe the air there?” said Katy.

  “We don’t know,” said George. “But there is hope that 200 years after the devastation, the air quality is better.”

  “So we get there somehow, find the w
eapons, and come home.”

  “Listen to all of you,” said Hurley. “None of y’all got sense God gave a crag squealer. Least they know enough to git out when death comes around. And ain’t none of them gone be on Earth. You cain’t go to that dead, God-forsaken rock.” Hurley was standing, waving around his empty cup for emphasis.

  “No one really knows what awaits us there,” said George, standing still as stone.

  “I do.”

  “You’ve been to Earth?” said Katy.

  “60 some-odd years ago. Aboard the Federation Explorer Arcadia.”

  “The Arcadia,” said Barthelme, suddenly sitting upright, his brow furrowed. “That was the ship that…”

  “Yeah,” said Hurley. “The ship that went in search of the Exeter.”

  “That ain’t what I was going to say, but…”

  And Hurley continued with his story. “This was before the BG came, back when the core was still trying to figure things out. Back when they still cared if a ship got lost.” Hurley waved the bot over and got a refill. “One of the first long-range hauler companies, Falstaff Corp on Lareter, launched a brand new ship called the Exeter, that could, in its day, carry more core world supplies to the outer realms than anything. It was a fine boat made by shipwrights who took pride in their work. Not today’s shite, tin-can boats the Fed pass off as military grade. Naw, these men had old-world skills and I ain’t seen a ship as fine and well-made since the day Marco showed me this one.” Katy choked on her coffee and George started patting her on the back. “Yeah,” said Hurley, “this boat ain’t much to look at from the outside, but she’s got improvements and small refinements the builders learned making the Exeter.

  I was a boy and had heard tales of the Exeter, how it had made it out to the far reaches to deliver food and supplies to the green planets. Back then the core worlds launched exploration after exploration to the bloody edge and beyond in search of oxygen rich planets, metal, minerals and anything else it needed.

  Which brings us to the shite part of the tale.

  Right around that time some of the outer planets started finding alacyte. And the first big strike was on Canasus VI. There was a small colony there that had hit a deep vein and the core pushed them to stay and get all they could. But they were running out of food and water. They were near a huge salt water lake but the desalination equipment broke down and both engineers had died in the mines. They didn’t have as many listening posts as we do now so the communication was spotty and every time the core got a message it was worse than the last: children dying of thirst, fights to the death over sembei crumbs, and there were even whispers of people eatin’ people.

  The Exeter had saved countless rim colonies in just this sort of mess. That big ship would come in and moments after it landed would be passing out big chunks of Fed green and water bottles to hungry, desperate people. The captain was named Johnny Yanagawa and as the Exeter’s fame grew so did his view of himself. Remember, the Exeter weren’t no military ship, and old Johnny had taken to wearing fancy leather boots and funny pants for horse ridin’. He even had a horse on board that he rode around the lower levels called Trigger.

  The Exeter was docked in Lareter getting some refits when word came in to make a run for Carnasus. They were about a week out when the message from the core came that things were worse than ever. So Johnny and his navigators decided they could cut it down to three days if they went through jump point one.”

  “What’s jump point one?” said Koba.

  “That’s the one you don’t go through any more.”

  “Earth,” said Katy.

  “Yep,” said Hurley. “Now even then, stories of bad juju on Earth had been going round and round. Boats getting lost. Weird shit. Monsters. But no real captain worried about fairy tales. Especially not Johnny Tanaka.

  The last message the core got from the Exeter was to say they were cutting time by jumping through Earth. The Fed braintrust waited for a few days and never heard another word from Johnny Tanaka and the big boat.”

  “What about the people on Carnasus?” said Katy.

  “The Fed sent a rescue ship a few days later that routed around jump point one, but it was too late. All dead. The whole colony. Hard to live with no water.”

  “Now Falstaff Corp was down their best boat and pushed the Fed to send someone after the Exeter. There was only one ship that could make the trip. The Arcadia. It was a brand new boat, not quite finished or they might’a sent it after the folks on Carnasus. It was the pride of the Federation Military. They called it an explorer class ship and some people joked they should’a called it the Exeter II, because she had all the Exeter upgrades and ten years’ of data from the Exeter engineers weighing in. Little mistakes in the design on the Exeter were corrected in the Arcadia.

  The Arcadia’s maiden voyage was a rescue mission to Earth. They were gonna find the Exeter. The captain of the Arcadia was Evinrude Trant.”

  “That Trant?” said Katy.

  “Yep. The Trant locked up in the brig in the bowels of this ship is his grandson.” Hurley took another sip of coffee. “Trant was confident he’d find the Exeter and prove all of the stories about Earth false. He figured there was some problem with the jump point so he brought some of the brightest minds from the core just in case they needed to recalculate the jump out. He figured he’d jump into the sector and find a bunch of dead, cold boats, stuck there, unable to jump out. It seemed logical.

  But he wasn’t dumb. He didn’t jump the Fed’s biggest, newest ship right into to Earth. He sent an unmanned shuttle in first. It was supposed to jump in, take some readings, sniff around a bit, then jump back and let all the smart dudes check the data.

  But the shuttle never came back.

  Trant waited about 24 hours, then sent another.

  And it never came back.

  Then two of the scientists snuck out on a shuttle, jumped to Earth, and guess what? They didn’t come back either.

  Now Trant was getting pissed. He figured there were pirates taking ships there and his ship, unlike the Exeter, had enough guns to destroy any pirate force around.

  So Trant jumps into Earth guns hot. He’s got four gunboats with him and he’s going to kick some ass. Orders to kill any boat that don’t show up blue on the screen.

  So he jumps in and the sector is clear. They came in pissed off wanting to hit something. But there was nothing. But you could see the Earth from our initial position: a black ball. That blue and green image the computer pulls up is old.

  So the scans pick up a Fed distress beacon coming from the planet’s surface. Trant goes for it and we were fine for awhile. But the moment we got close, that’s about when all hell broke loose. We ain’t even down into what’s left of the atmosphere and all five boats start getting pulled down. Controls don’t work. Couldn’t pull back out.”

  “That’s called gravity,” said Koba.

  “Nope. It was more than that. We felt the pull before we dove down into the atmosphere. Trant wanted a scout boat to go down first, but all the boats started getting sucked down. Trant ordered them back up but even a full burn wouldn’t gain us altitude. All we could do was sink down into the blackness of the dead planet.

  I heard the Arcadia was in communication with at least one of the scout boats, but no one knows what was said. Trant got desperate and launched the escape pods, thinking they might be too small to get pulled down. They launched 20 pods. I was in one with an engineer name Jasper Henry. He worked in the bottom of that big boat making sure made the water purifiers operated smoothly. He snuck me on the pod with him. And all the pods but ours along with the Arcadia and the four gunboats got sucked down.”

  “How’d you escape?” said Jolo.

  “Don’t know. There was an electrical storm in the upper atmosphere unlike anything I’d ever seen. Bolts of lightening where hitting the surface of the planet. One hit us and blew out the nav and everything else and we were just floating. The old pods were made to survive a large-bore
ion cannon blast so Henry and me were still in one piece but I was crying my eyes out ‘cause I knew we was dead, but then Henry got all excited. He said we weren’t being pulled down anymore. Pretty soon he figured out a way to get the nav going and jump us out. We got picked up by a parts hauler a few days later, hungry and dry-mouthed.”

  “How come this ain’t in the archives?” said Katy.

  “Well, Henry owed a considerable sum of money on the core and figured his best move was to change his name and start over. He made me swear to keep the story quiet, but he died awhile back anyhow so I figure I kin tell y’all.” Hurley took a deep breath, sat down in his chair and reached for his cup.

  “Wait,” said Jolo. “You ain’t no Fed man. How’d you get on the Arcadia?”

  Hurley gave them all a brown and yellow toothed grin. “My diddy worked on the docks in Marlin and when the Arcadia dropped by for supplies, he was the man that loaded the food crates on board. One of them boxes had a 16 year old kid inside sucking on freeze-dried curry sticks and synth meat balls.”

  “Did your father know?” said Katy.

  “I left him a note and he kept quiet.”

  “So what’s pulling the ships down?” said Merthon.

  “Gotta be a power generator on the surface then,” said Barth, rubbing his chin.

  “Fairly large to generate field of that magnitude,” said George.

  “One more thing,” said Hurley. “Before we got hit and the comms went dead, we could hear Trant. He kept yelling for them to ‘fire on the source’. So maybe he was thinking the same thing.”

  “Did anyone make it to the surface?” said Jolo.

  “I believe so. Pretty sure the Arcadia was in contact with the Exeter. And we could hear Trant yelling at the gunboats and ordering the marine teams out.” Hurley paused. “I heard screaming. Like a war zone.”

  Jolo sighed, his plan seemed doomed from the start. “Are we nuts for thinking about this?”