Exiles of Earth: Rebellion Read online

  REBELLION

  Exiles of Earth: Book 1

  Richard Tongue

  EXILES OF EARTH 1: REBELLION

  Copyright © 2018 by Richard Tongue, All Rights Reserved

  First Kindle Edition: August 2018

  Cover by Keith Draws

  With thanks to Ellen Clarke

  All characters and events portrayed within this eBook are fictitious; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  The transit car shuddered to a stop, almost throwing Catherine Thiou from her feet, her hand clutching the overhead rail. As the doors slid open, she stepped out onto the street, almost falling over the drunkard slumped next to the station exit, a bottle clutched in his hand. She looked down at him for a moment, shook her head, and reached into her pocket for a credit chit, carefully placing the coin into his pocket. A graduate student’s stipend wasn’t much, but it was a lot more than the man on the street had, and nobody with the tattoo of the Interplanetary Guard on his wrist should have to live like that.

  She walked down the street, bathed in flickering neon lights from the shops and bars, fighting the overhead gloom, and glanced up at the endless dome overhead, dust whispering outside in light torrents. Cydonia City was the oldest off-Earth settlement in the Solar System, and tonight, it more than showed its age. The Government Dome was different, new and bright, clean and safe. The rest of the settlement was being left to wither and die, the ruling Fifty Families showing increasingly less interest in those they purported to rule. In the distance, she could hear chanting, protests outside one of the few Ministries still out here, outside the secured areas. Another demonstration.

  Turning down a side street, she caught a glimpse of a red-uniformed Watchman, nodding as she past, resplendent in his uniform, a stark contrast to the gaggle of teenagers he was supervising, scrubbing graffiti from the sidewalk. Giving the group a wide berth, she continued towards her destination, the Colonial Archives, a towering structure that had once sat inside the Terran Memorial Park, long-since paved over and replaced with the ubiquitous prefabricated buildings that most Martians called home, towering concrete tenements that would not have looked out of place in the slum megacities of Earth before the Fall.

  There was a foul tang in the stale air, that combination of chemical odors that warned that the local life support systems were badly in need of maintenance. Sometimes they failed, hundreds dying before the emergency response teams could fix them, the cost of paying off the relatives less than the cost of a planetwide repair program. The protestors had reasons to complain about their lot, though she’d never dare admit it, not if she wanted to hold onto her position at the University of Syrtis. Only three people were accepted to her course every year, less than thirty of them still studying, scattered all over the planet and beyond. The money, such as it was, went to the practical sciences. Not to those that gave a civilization its soul.

  She paused at a plaque, one of the few remaining relics of that time, a list of twenty-two names that every schoolchild on Mars knew by heart, names that had been gifted to streets, schools and towns scattered across the surface. The First Expedition, twenty-two men and women who had left Earth against the wishes of their government, making the first landing on a new planet, daring to seek a better future for mankind. A few miles away, over the hills, the wreck of their ship remained, a monument to their courage and dedication. None of them had survived to walk on the world they had helped conquer, but that hardly seemed to matter.

  Growing up, she’d bathed in the tales of those pioneering times, walked in spirit with Armstrong, Hiroshi, Volkov as they raced across the Solar System, taking first steps on Luna, Mars, Callisto. She’d spent an hour of precious VR time standing next to Commander Murdock as he made the first landing on Pluto, completing the first wave of interplanetary exploration. That was when she’d decided to dedicate herself to the study of those times, to keep the memory of those pioneers alive.

  And that was what had brought her here, every night for the last three years. For a time, she’d managed to scrape together sufficient money to study full-time, but now her stipend was augmented with whatever work she could find, just enough to keep her in a rat-hole of an apartment and provide three meals a day, the green-grey slime that most of the population lived on. Perfectly nutritionally balanced, so she was told, but tasteless at best. The idea of real food was a luxury she could barely remember, but her struggles kept her going, kept her on track.

  As she approached the monumental building, the towering edifice that preserved the records of those pioneering days, she fumbled in her pocket for her ID, sliding it through the security system. After a second’s hesitation, the doors cracked open, and she stepped inside, the portly guard rising from his chair, walking over to the drinks dispenser on the wall.

  “Evening,” he said with a toothless smile. “Coffee?”

  “Thanks, Corporal,” she replied, as he worked the recalcitrant mechanism.

  “Hitting the books again?”

  “That’s the idea,” she said, taking the steaming cup from him, taking an experimental sip. Hot and strong, just the way she needed it. Four hours of research after an eight-hour day was barely practical with caffeine fueling her system. She didn’t want to imagine what it would be like without it.

  “You’ve got company again,” the guard replied. “Olson’s up there.” Frowning, he added, “You want me to head up later, give him a scare? If he causes you trouble…”

  “I can handle it, Leon, but thanks,” she said, flashing him a smile.

  “If you’re sure,” he said. “We don’t get many visitors around here.” Looking around the hall, he added, “I can remember when we had a faculty, a hundred students every day. It was so damned alive back then. Now nobody gives a damn. Except old fools like me.” He lumbered over to his desk, reaching for a datacard. “I found this for you. You wanted something on the sleeper ships. It’s an old holovid of the launch, some schlock documentary, but there’s a lot of raw data in the appendixes. Couldn’t find it anywhere else in the system.”

  Taking the card, she looked up at him, and said, “Thanks. This is going to help a lot.”

  With a shrug, Leon replied, “Didn’t have anything else to do. I suppose I can’t complain that this is an easy enough job these days.” Shaking his head, he said, “My boy’s out at the Ministry of Supply. It’s getting bad over there. A thousand people and change. They’ve got every Watchman in the dome tracking the crowd. Lots of dissidents. Make sure you keep clear.”

  “Will do,” she said, taking another sip of her coffee. “See you later.” As Leon returned to his seat, a bank of blank monitors before him, she stepped into the elevator, tapping for the first level, the mechanism slowly grinding away as it transported her to the archives, the door opening again on countless shelves of dusty datacards, all filed away for posterity, millions upon millions of them. Some of them had been brought on the colony ships from Earth itself, while others were relics of the early days of Colonization. An untouched history of humanity, dating back through endless centuries.

  At the far end of the room, a row of terminals sat, chairs scattered around, two of them activated, one next to the other. It took special equipment to read all the wildly different file types in the Archives, and even with the systems they had, a significant fraction could no longer be read, documents that would maintain their secrets unless some researcher decided that decoding them was a worthy investment of his time.

  “Hi!” a too-chirpy voice said, Sergei Olson walking towards him, a bag swinging in each hand, spewing a spicy smell into the air. “I brought dinner.”

  “Where the hell…,” she repli
ed, as he set them on the counter.

  He shrugged, and replied, “Leftovers. The Minister of Space had a big party last night, and I was on the clean-up crew. My boss let us take whatever we wanted. Better than just throwing it in the recycler. You don’t mind Mexican, right?”

  “Hell, I’ll eat anything,” she said, peering into the bag. As much as her stomach ached for the food, a voice in her head was reminding her that there were people out on the streets who had never even seen anything like it, while the Families were throwing it away, uneaten. Stuffing her moral principles to one side, she pulled out a taco and took a bite, her taste buds screaming in joy at the prospect of real food to eat.

  “Looks like someone’s happy,” he said with a smile, taking a seat. “I’m going to be pulling an all-nighter, I guess. Got some big files to work on, demographic data for the last century or so. It’ll take hours for the systems here to unscramble them.” Gesturing at the datacard, he said, “What have you got?”

  “More stuff on the sleeper ships,” she replied.

  “You’ve been on that wild goose chase for ages,” he said. “I thought you’d moved over to the Collapse and Fall of the Lunar Republic.”

  “Yeah, but only because I thought all the material had been locked up. Leon found me something new.” She smiled, took another bite, and said, “I haven’t officially changed my thesis yet. This could be a big deal, Sergei.”

  “Right up there with the Lost Dutchman’s Starship and the Sargasso Asteroid,” he replied with a cheeky grin. “You just want an excuse to go prospecting, put together some sort of archaeological dig.”

  “Hell yes!” she said. “It’s important. Four ships went out, and the three we found were half-wrecked. Nothing on them we could really get our teeth into. If we could find an intact database, we could answer damn near all our questions about the first half of the twenty-first century. The Cyber Wars didn’t leave us with much to go on, and the Last World War wiped out the rest.”

  Shaking his head, he replied, “You really need to find something easier to work on, Cat. You ever read the Adventures of Don Quixote?”

  “Yeah, and he had a lot of fun tilting at windmills. Beats the hell out of working in an office.” She slid the datacard into position, and the terminal immediately flickered into life, the documentary starting automatically with films of the launch of a sleeper ship from its orbital cradle.

  “Big bastard,” Sergei said, shaking his head.

  “The biggest starships ever built, and they damn near bankrupt the countries that launched them,” she replied. “That’s the last one. Challenger. Launched by the United States in 2049. Destination unknown.” A voiceover chattered away in Russian, the translator struggling to provide a transcript. “Fifteen hundred people, most of them asleep, on a four-year trip.”

  “Four years, on that?” He paused, then said, “How come nobody knows where it went?”

  “Secret enough not to get into the news media, and I guess everyone back home who knew died in the War. That’s what I mean. We lost so damned much of our history back then. You realize that we know more about the 19th Century than the 21st? Nobody seems to care…” She paused, tapped through the file list, and said, “Wait a minute.”

  “You’ve found something?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she replied. “Maybe.” She skimmed the screen, and said, “This hasn’t been accessed for a hundred years. God knows where Leon found it. I’m not an expert, but this looks like astrographic data.” Her eyes widened as she opened the file, and she said, “I think we’ve got something.”

  “I thought it was a secret. How could a documentary…”

  “This was produced by the Siberian Confederation,” she replied. “They didn’t give a damn about American security, and they tracked the ship as it left the Solar System, at least until it flew out of range. I think I can project a course plot.” Reaching into her stuffed pocket, she slid in a second datacard, and said, “Hyperspace path calculator.”

  “Where did you get one of those?”

  “Ex-boyfriend in the Merchant Academy.” Running through the figures, she said, “Epsilon Indi.”

  “No good,” he replied. “That system’s explored. The Consortium has an outpost there.”

  “At the primary. I think this is the companion star.” Frowning, she added, “Why would they go out there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sergei said, “but there’s only one way to find out.” He reached into his pocket, pulling out a stubby revolver, and continued, “You’re coming with me.”

  “What the hell do you think you are doing?”

  “Completing my mission,” he replied. “There’s a shuttle with your name on it waiting close by. I’d prefer to take you alive, but if I must shoot you, I will. Be certain of that. The information you’ve got will be extremely useful to certain people.” He grimaced, and added, “Three years of monitoring Archive access, and it’s about time I got some payback.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “Me, myself and I,” he said. “Take the bag. You’re going to need something to eat. It’s a long trip.” He paused, then added, “If you behave, then you have my word that no harm will come to you. In the long run, you’ll probably be a lot better off for this, if you choose to be sensible. If you don’t, well, there are a lot of places out there to dump a corpse. Places the Watchmen will never find you.”

  Rising to her feet, she pulled out the datacard, and said, “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “No choice at all. Now, let’s go to the nearest airlock. Nice and slow.”

  She walked ahead of him, back down the stacks, heading for the elevator beyond. He kept close behind her, and she could almost sense the barrel of the gun pointed at her back, knew that he was waiting for her to make a move. Any good researcher could complete the analysis of the information she’d discovered, now that she’d found it. He didn’t need her alive, and they both knew it.

  The elevator jerked into life again, juddering as it slid down to the hall, and Sergei moved to her side, locking her arm in his, keeping the pistol pressed against her back. She looked up at him, looked into his iron eyes, and fear trembled through her. Realistically, she was as good as dead. Getting one person secretly off-world would be a lot easier than getting two away, especially if one didn’t want to leave. She could almost see her body lying on the sands of Mars, slowly covered by the dust, perhaps to be found by some archaeologist in a thousand years from now.

  Loud music played through the hall as the doors opened, Leon watching recordings of a music festival, tapping his foot to the beat. He looked up as they walked past him, and for the briefest second, she locked eyes with him, allowing the fear she felt inside to show for a heartbeat.

  “Freeze,” Leon said, drawing his pistol with surprising speed. Sergei was faster, first turning Catherine to block any shot, then aiming his own revolver. Trying to time her attack, Catherine jabbed her elbow into Sergei’s chest, sending him back a pace and giving her room to wriggle from his clutches. A shot fired, echoing around the ancient hall, and she turned to see Leon stumbling to the floor, blood gushing from a would on his chest, seeping onto the carpet.

  “Run,” Leon said, spending his last breath. “Run, damn it! Now!”

  She needed no further encouragement, sprinting for the exit, sliding through the doors just as the emergency systems engaged. She paused for a moment, trying to collect herself, knowing that her pursuer would soon be able to override the locks. Sergei knew where she lived, where she worked. She had to find a Watchman, and quickly, or she was dead.

  Then the sound of the protests came to her, once more, and she set off towards the noise, making the fastest pace she could. Perhaps there would be safety in numbers. Even if that meant running into a riot.

  Chapter 2

  “More Watchmen,” Dayani DeSilva warned, walking over to Lloyd Harrison, the organizer of today’s protest. “We might want to think about pulling out a few of the s
peakers. Hardesty would be arrested as soon as they saw him, and I have a feeling they’d try and grab Wagner as well.”

  Shaking his head, Harrison replied, “We can’t let fear dictate our actions.” He looked at her expression, then said, “We try Wagner, and we see the mood. Damn it, girl, five thousand people have come here today. We don’t get turnouts like this very often, and we’ve got to put on a show.”

  “If the Watchmen get involved, you’ll get fireworks, Lloyd. And body bags. I’ve seen it.”

  Glaring at her, he said, “Feel free to go home at any time.”

  “This is my protest every bit as much as it is yours, damn it.” Gesturing at the crowd, chanting protests, screaming insults at Minister Novak, hidden away inside his building, she said, “These are my people. I know their first names. I’ve met their children. You came here to cause trouble, and for today, our interests coincide, but you do not give the orders around here!”

  With a sigh, Harrison raised a hand, and said, “Fine, have it your way. You’d better go out and speak to them, get them warmed up a bit for the speeches.” Looking around, he added, “Get ready to run for it, though. Just in case someone decides to cause trouble. On either side. I’ve got people waiting at the airlocks, fliers outside. We can get you into the Underground if we must.” Before she could protest, he added, “What you said is true, and that’s why we need you free, not rotting away at the Mercury Mines.”

  “Just keep your people calm,” DeSilva replied. “They’re the ones I’m worried about.” She walked away from the professional activist, pushing through the crowd, some familiar faces clapping her on the back, offering brief words of encouragement. All the time, the eyes of a dozen Watchmen were focused on her. They knew who she was, had full files on her and her activities. So far, she’d been careful to stay within the bounds of the law, but all of that could easily change tonight.

  Celia Larson, her assistant, walked up to her with a microphone, and said, “All set. How’s the anarchist?”