Children of the Divide

  Children of the Divide

  CHILDREN OF A DEAD EARTH BOOK III

  Patrick S. Tomlinson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to the rebel living inside all of us.

  The naive dreamer who risks all

  for a chance to build a better world.

  Find yours. Let them run.

  Long fight ahead.

  I’ve got your six.

  And I’m really fucking cranky.

  One

  “That’s not supposed to be there,” Jian Feng remarked as a small handheld fire extinguisher tumbled past his face and gently bounced off one of the shuttle’s cockpit windows.

  “Goddammit.” Jian checked the countdown timer. Eighty seconds to undock. He unlatched his restraints and grabbed the bright red cylinder out of the air. “I said secure the cabin!”

  “Sorry, commander,” one of the harvester techs said from the back of the split-level flight deck. “I think I bumped the latch with my foot.”

  Jian shook his head. He pushed off from his chair hard enough to float to the rear bulkhead, then reoriented and kicked off to where the offending tech sat strapped into her seat. He waved the bottle at her face.

  “Technician Madeja. Do you really want this banging around in here while we’re burning under six gees?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Do you want the top to snap off and send it flying around the cabin like a missile, striking control panels, breaking windows?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Jian put it in her hand. “Then you’re going to hold onto it.”

  “Sir? Shouldn’t I secure it in its cradle?”

  “You should have. But you didn’t, so now you’re going to hold it.”

  The tech swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Both hands, don’t let go until after we’re coasting again.” Under their six gee burn, the little red can of inert gas would go from three kilos to eighteen pushing down on the tech’s chest. Certainly not enough to keep her from breathing or crack any ribs, but heavy enough to make the next few minutes an uncomfortable and embarrassing lesson.

  Jian returned to his chair just as the thirty-second burn warning sounded.

  “A little hard on the tech, weren’t you?” his copilot, Kirkland, asked.

  “Not as hard as that canister would’ve hit me in the head if I hadn’t spotted it. Maybe next time she’ll remember to secure the bloody cabin.”

  Kirkland shrugged. “Your ship.” They’d gone through flight school together. He’d come in a few points behind her on the final tests, but he’d drawn the first command billet. Jian knew her well enough to know she was a little salty about it, but she was professional enough not to let it show.

  Jian was still fumbling with his straps when Flight Control’s voice burst through the cockpit speakers. “Fifteen seconds to burn, Atlantis. Board is green. You are cleared for departure.”

  “Roger that,” Jian said. He glanced at the red command stripe on his skinsuit’s shoulder. It was the first time he’d worn it. If this milk run of a mission went to plan, it wouldn’t be the last. “We’re buckled up and ready to transfer local control. Switching over… Now.” Jian pressed the button that flipped navigational control over to the shuttle from his console to the Ark’s traffic control computers, a necessity while they were still so close to the ship and its elevator ribbon. Any mistake this close had the potential to do tremendous damage and set back the Trident’s development plan by months, even years.

  “We have the ball. T-Minus five seconds to undock. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

  On the count of zero, the mechanical latches that held the shuttle Atlantis in place among the small forest of other shuttles released. Maneuvering thrusters gently pushed the shuttle away from its nest in the aviary on the outside of the Ark’s engineering module. They drifted away at less than a meter per second, slowly revealing the immense bulk of the first and only interstellar generation ship mankind had ever built. It was thirteen kilometers of aluminum, steel, and carbon composites, down from sixteen kilometers after its stardust shield had been ejected in preparation for insertion into Gaia orbit eighteen years ago. Behind them was the reactor bulb, which held a pair of fusion reactors whose size was matched only by their thirst.

  Which was why the harvester techs were hitching a ride on his boat. One of the Helium-3 harvesters had gotten stuck trolling through the regolith of Gaia’s small moon, Varr, and bent an axle. Which was a hard thing to do in three percent gravity, but that had just been their run of luck as of late.

  “Atlantis,” Flight Control said, “I have Ark Actual on the line.”

  Jian held back a sigh. He knew the pep-talk call from the captain was inevitable, he just wished it wasn’t also coming from his father.

  “Put him through,” Jian said.

  “Mission Commander Feng,” Captain Chao Feng said in a booming voice. “This is Ark Actual. On behalf of the crew, and everyone on both ends of the tether, I wish you good luck, and Godspeed.”

  “Thank you, captain. We won’t let you down.”

  “I know you won’t, son.”

  Oh lord, here it comes.

  Chao’s voice took on a softer, more nurturing tone. “Your mother would have been very proud of you, Jian.”

  I sure wish I could’ve heard it from her directly, Dad, is what Jian managed not to say, either aloud or into his plant. “Roger that, Actual. Atlantis out,” he said instead, in a curt, professional voice only a few degrees warmer than the empty space on the other side of the shuttle’s hull.

  By then, they’d drifted past the invisible line that marked the minimum safe maneuvering zone, where their thrusters and main rocket motors could operate at full power without worry about damage to the Ark’s hull. Thrusters at the shuttle’s nose and wingtips fired, spinning it around and away from the Ark, bringing the white, blue, and lavender jewel of Gaia herself into view. Sitting as they were in geosynchronous orbit, the planet could be viewed in its entirety. As consolation prizes went, it was pretty spectacular.

  In the eighteen years since mankind had put down stakes, they’d mapped the entire surface, from its low, rolling mountains and endless windblown plains, to its deep valleys and canyons, extending all the way down to the craggy sea beds of its oceans. Over sixty thousand species of plants and animals had already been described. And although the old biome wasn’t nearly as diverse as Earth at her end, it was expected that number would continue to grow for generations.

  Reaching out from the Ark, the gleaming carbon ribbon of the space elevator streaked all the way down to the planet’s surface like an impossibly long cat whisker. At its base, the bustling hub of human civilization, Shambhala, went about another day, the majority of its fifty thousand plus inhabitants
blissfully unaware of all of the work happening in orbit to keep them alive and in comfort, or the risks being endured on their behalf.

  Jian had been a young boy when the Ark made planetfall, just after his mother had been killed onboard the grand old ship. Jian still remembered how her hair smelled of apple blossoms. He’d been only five when she’d died. Asphyxiated, along with twenty thousand other people when a lunatic blew a hole in Shangri-La module’s hull and let all the air out. A terrorist attack that might have been discovered in time to save her had it not been for his father trying to save face. He’d spent a few years living on the surface in Shambhala until in a most unlikely turn of events, his disgraced dad had somehow weaseled his way into the captain’s chair of the Ark, a precarious position that he’d managed to hold onto for fifteen years and counting.

  But it was that moment as a boy, when he’d seen his mother and many of his childhood friends swept away by a single act of unfathomable malice that he’d decided to do whatever he could to protect people. Which had led him to be sitting in this chair today. Most people mistook his ambition as an attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps. It was an insulting thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, it was a useful illusion to maintain. Being the son of the captain had afforded him certain opportunities over the years, and in the end, pride had taken the copilot seat next to pragmatism.

  The slight vibration of the thrusters spiked as they froze the shuttle in space, then ceased entirely as the Atlantis lined up with its destination. Or, more precisely, with where its destination would be in thirty-one hours.

  The moon, Varr, hung in the sky to Jian’s left, just beyond the thin blue haze of Gaia’s atmosphere. The tiny satellite was nothing like Luna, Earth’s companion to the last. Varr was scarcely large enough for its meager gravity to collapse it into a rough spheroid. At only three and a half percent Earth standard gravity, escape velocity was only a kilometer per second, which made lifting huge loads of the precious Helium-3 fuel trapped in its surface dust a ridiculously easy prospect. There were plans to install a solar-powered railgun system on the surface to take pressure off the cargo drone fleet, but it kept getting pushed down the manufacturing priority queue.

  Varr’s orbit was wildly elliptical. At its perigee, Varr was scarcely further from Gaia as the Ark was, while at apogee, it was almost a million kilometers away and growing by a few centimeters with each passing year. The huge swing meant shuttle operations had to take place inside a relatively narrow, eleven-day window before the moon traveled too far away from Gaia and the Ark for the shuttle to make the return trip. Anyone caught out after this curfew would just have to settle in and wait for Varr to swing back around again on the return leg of its orbit.

  The shuttle Atlantis, named after an old NASA shuttle which had itself been named after a fictional continent, was now ironically the namesake of a very real continent some tens of thousands of kilometers below. The Atlantians were the native sapient species of Gaia. It was from their language and legends that their destination of Varr had been named. Varr was one of their triumvirate of Gods, their own version of the Holy Trinity. It was said that Varr was a cosmic protector, clashing every month with Cuut and zer explosive tantrums and harsh, asteroid-based justice.

  It was fitting, then, that the second half of their mission was meant to protect everyone in the system, whether they lived on the ground, in the sky above, or in the caves beneath.

  “Atlantis, we’re ready to transfer local control,” said Flight’s cool, practiced voice.

  “Copy, Flight. Atlantis is ready for the handoff.”

  “Transferring now.”

  A small red light flashed on his console as Jian took control of his boat for the first time. “Thank you, Flight. I have the ball. Main engine start.” The shuttle shuddered as the half-dozen shockwave spike engines at its tail rumbled to life. The shuttle lurched forward in response to the trickle of thrust coming from the motors. But they were merely pilot lights compared to the torrent that was about to hit.

  “Five seconds to throttle up. Everyone tighten your straps and hold onto your asses,” Jian announced to the crew. His crew. “Three. Two. One. Go!”

  On “Go,” Jian slid the holographic controls to one hundred percent. At the back of the shuttle, butterfly valves and turbo pumps opened wide, dumping thousands of liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen per second into the hellish maws of the rockets, converting the energy of the reaction into fire, steam, and punishing acceleration.

  The skin on Jian’s face pulled back and tried to settle into a new home somewhere behind his ears. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “The injectors on the number four motor are redlining,” Kirkland shouted, not out of fear, but merely to be heard over the roar of the engines. Jian tore his gaze away from the window and brought the diagnostic displays up on the augmented reality interface in his plant. Kirkland was right, the number four rocket motor was faltering. It had already dropped to eighty-seven percent thrust and falling. The turbo pump feeding it fuel was bad, probably the “frictionless” magnetic bearings throwing in the towel. At this point, they could probably still be rebuilt, but push them much further and they might not only burn out permanently, but disintegrate with enough force to crack the engine bell and maybe even damage one or both of the adjoining motors. The monkeys back in the maintenance hangar wouldn’t thank him for that.

  Jian cut the number four motor entirely to prevent catastrophic failure, then adjusted the flow to engines one through three to compensate for the uneven thrust and keep them from drifting off course. The weight pressing down on Jian’s chest eased fractionally as the shuttle lost one-sixth of its acceleration. Some quick calculations from the navigational computer determined that they’d need another thirty-seven seconds of burn at their reduced five gees to stay inside their flight profile, but they’d be well inside their fuel reserves on both the outbound and return legs of the trip.

  Just another one of the charms of commanding a two-hundred-and-fifty year-old boat through space.

  Jian keyed on his com back to the Ark. “Flight Control, Atlantis. Be advised. We’ve had to cut number four motor,” he paused to take a strained breath, “but we’ve adjusted our burn and are still well within our safety envelope. Mission remains a go.”

  “Roger that, Atlantis. Keep us apprised.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Jian relaxed and let the gees push him back into the contours of his chair. Now that he wasn’t trying to move his arms, the pressure wasn’t as exhausting, even though it was still a task to breathe. A few of the older members of the team weren’t having as easy a time of it, he knew. Three of them were original Ark crew members and had spent the majority of their lives in the micro grav of either the Command module, labs, or Engineering. Even with anti-atrophy drugs artificially bulking up their bone and muscle density, nothing beat the pull of gravity on body development, whether that gravity was real or spin. They wouldn’t be happy campers for the next few minutes.

  Jian let his breathing settle into the same rhythm he used to meditate, not that he was at any risk of slipping into that fuzzy, dreamlike state while his body was being pressed like a panini.

  The great weight pressing down on his chest vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Jian’s attentions snapped back to the present and checked the shuttle’s flight profile.

  “Flight, Atlantis. We’ve completed our burn. Profile is five-by-five. We’re on our way to Varr.”

  “Good work, Atlantis. Smooth sailing.”

  “Thank you, Flight. Atlantis out.”

  Kirkland let out a long breath, then allowed a small smirk to curl up her cheek. “Well, that was exciting.”

  Jian couldn’t help but agree. “Hell yeah it was.” Jian unbuckled from his seat and faced the rest of the team. “Spread your limbs and get comfortable, folks. We’ve got almost a day and a half to kill in this can.”

  They soon filtered out to fill not only the flight deck
, but the enormous passenger/cargo compartment beyond. The harvester techs passed their time going through and checking their inventory of tools in preparation to fix their wayward unit. Meanwhile, the rest of the team focused on set up for their half of the mission.

  On the “dark” side of Varr, final construction was underway on an enormous radio telescope. The telescope’s dish was built directly into an ancient impact crater on the moon’s surface. There had been plenty of craters to choose from. The Tau Ceti system had ten times the proto-planetary material of the Sol system, and therefore ten times the asteroid strikes. Finding one of the right diameter and depth facing away from interference from Gaia was easy. Finding one that wasn’t marred by secondary craters had actually been the hardest part.

  The telescope was anything but an idle pursuit. Instead, it was to be the crown jewel in an orbital Early Warning array of space-based telescopes scanning the entire EM spectrum, from IR, to visible light, all the way up to a gamma ray observatory set to launch from the Ark in two months.

  It was to be the Trident’s eyes, tirelessly scanning the skies for any trace of another attack from whomever had killed Earth.

  Because two hundred and fifty years later, they still didn’t know. Didn’t have the first clue. All anyone knew about the beings who’d murdered an entire solar system was they could control black holes, and a vague direction from which the killer singularity they’d named Nibiru had been thrown. Whoever had killed Earth were like the monsters drawn into the margins of ancient maps. Nothing more than placeholders, humanity’s abject ignorance given form to make it easier to digest.

  Jian tried not to think about it too hard. The attack that had killed his mother was bad enough, but those villains had faces, they had names. And most importantly, they were very, very, dead. That closure made coping a little easier. Besides – he’d never known Earth. The last person to have ever set foot on it died a century and a half before. His home was the Ark. He had many friends who lived on the surface in Shambhala, both human and even a few Atlantians. Chief among them was Benexx, an Atlantian adopted by humans as a larva. Jian couldn’t get angry over the death of a planet he’d never seen, but he would fight tooth and nail to protect his friends and everything they’d built together.