Marten clicked off the Praetor’s image. On the screen, he brought up Chief Controller Su-Shan. She’d spoken to Yakov, to the officers of the Descartes. Marten had learned that she was the ranking governor of the Guardian Fleet. She was presently in one of the laser-satellites of Callisto Orbital Defense.
Su-Shan had the same elfin quality as Tan. She wore a golden headband, had pale hair and strikingly green eyes. Surprisingly, she wore a sheer robe. Every time she’d moved, Marten had caught a glimpse of her perfect breasts or the slenderness of her waist.
Marten replayed her quiet voice. It was utterly devoid of emotion. She’d spoken with Yakov, demanding an audience with Strategist Tan. When Yakov had said that was impossible, Su-Shan had informed Yakov about armed uprisings on Ganymede and the detention of visiting dignitaries. She’d told him of his coming destruction and that of every terrorist. She said it in such inflectionless tones that Marten couldn’t decide if it was comical or chilling.
Marten froze her image. He’d listened to Yakov’s attempts to reason with her. She’d fallen silent then, as if waiting for Yakov to halt his flood of nonsense. When he’d stopped talking, she’d continued where she had left off, as if Yakov had never spoken.
Marten squeezed out of the module and moved to Yakov in his chair. The Force-Leader examined a holographic image. It hovered over a rectangular section of flooring before him. Yakov made adjustments with a control unit. The orbital paths of the four Galilean moons appeared as dotted lines around holographic Jupiter.
“Ours is a complicated system,” Yakov said.
Marten nodded.
Jupiter dominated everything with its size and its horrendous gravitational pull. It meant that moving here took much greater fuel as compared to other planetary systems. It also meant that maintaining a high orbit, the high ground, was even more advantageous here than elsewhere.
It would take eleven Earths placed side-by-side to stretch across Jupiter’s visible disk. More than one thousand Earths would be needed to fill Jupiter’s volume. Because Earth was denser than Jupiter, the Jovian planet only had three hundred times the Earth’s mass.
Yakov fiddled with the control unit. A sea of pale dots appeared. They were everywhere. Some circled the Galilean moons. Some traveled between them. Others boosted from Jupiter and headed to the Inner group moons. The majority of the dots were obviously civilian or corporation spaceships. Yakov adjusted the control, and orange dots appeared among them, a fraction of the number.
“Those are the known locations of Guardian Fleet warships,” Yakov said. “By their maneuverings, we should now be able to tell if they’re cyborg-controlled.” He pressed a button. Two of the orange dots turned green. “Those are under Secessionist control, those who have radioed us.”
“It doesn’t look as if any of those can help us against the Zeno,” Marten said.
“They cannot,” Yakov said.
After Jupiter, the biggest bodies were the four Galilean moons. The last two were larger than Mercury, while Io was larger than Luna of Earth. Io, the nearest to Jupiter, completed an orbital circuit every 1.77 days. According to Yakov, the mineral complexes on Io had light defensive equipment, enough to hurt orbital fighters, but negligible against even one meteor-ship.
“The cyborgs could easily cripple mining on Io,” Yakov said.
“How does any of this help us against the Zeno?” Marten asked.
“Patience,” Yakov said.
Europa was an ice-ball. The intense radiation from Jupiter and Io’s volcanoes made it a harsh place on the surface. Its ice provided most of the system’s water and protected the deep communities there.
A green dot orbited Europa.
Yakov indicated it. “We have a Secessionist dreadnaught and several patrol boats there. At the moment, it is our greatest concentration of strength.”
“This orange dot,” Marten said, pointing out a ship moving between Europa and Ganymede. “It’s not traveling in a direct route. Is there a reason for that?”
“Yes. The reason is the Laplace resonance.”
“Meaning what?”
Yakov began to explain.
The first three Galilean moons formed a pattern known as a Laplace resonance. For every four orbits Io made around Jupiter, Europa made a perfect two orbits and Ganymede made a perfect one. The resonance caused the gravitational effects that distorted the orbits into elliptical shapes. Each moon received an extra tug from its neighbors at the same point in every orbit. However, Jupiter’s strong tidal force helped to circularize the orbits and negate some of the elliptical shape. Those forces also affected ships traveling between the three moons.
Yakov clicked his control unit.
Three orange dots were highlighted as they moved into a low-Ganymede orbit. Those were clearly Guardian Fleet ships. Their commandant had threatened planetary bombardment if the surface fighting did not cease at once.
To try to stem the fighting between Secessionists and Guardians, Marten had recommended a doctored file. Too many Jovians still refused to believe that cyborgs had infiltrated the system. Therefore, Yakov recorded mock attack sequences by Osadar in the Descartes. These fabrications Yakov sent as beamed distress signals from several now-silent Guardian Fleet vessels—those warships they were certain were under cyborg control. The recording had helped convince some that the cyborgs had truly arrived.
Yakov changed the holographic image, showing Marten the entire Jovian System.
Counting the Galilean moons, there were sixty-three different bodies orbiting Jupiter. Most were asteroid-sized and contained less combined population than Ganymede, the second most populous moon. Four small moons known as the Inner group orbited Jupiter at less than 200,000 kilometers. In economic terms, they were important, as each was part of the automated, atmospheric system gathering helium-3. None had powerful military forces stationed on or near them, although there was civilian space-traffic there.
The rest of the Jovian bodies were far beyond the Galilean moons. The Himalia group were tightly clustered moons with orbits around eleven to twelve million kilometers from Jupiter.
There were three other groups. In order of distance, they were Ananke, Carme and the Pasiphae group. These asteroid-sized moons were far away from Jupiter and far from Athena Station, some over twenty-five million kilometers.
Marten frowned as he took in the immensity of the system. Jupiter was unlike any of the Inner Planets. There were vastly more moons here that were incredibly distant from each other. If they survived the Zeno, the coming fight would be unlike anything he’d known. Normally in a system, a single planetary body dominated strategic thought. Here, he hardly knew where to begin.
It brought him back to the Zeno. “What are we going to do about the drone?” he asked.
Yakov clicked the unit. It showed the Zeno heading for them. The Force-Leader rubbed his thumb along the control unit. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said.
Marten didn’t like the sound of that.
-3-
Far from Marten and his troubles was a small spec of a spacecraft. It was in the outer Jovian System and the craft contained one passenger. She presently lay on her bunk, staring at the bulkhead above. Her clothes had worn through in too many places, showing skin. It also showed that her muscles were firm and that she had lost weight. The lost weight heightened the shape of her breasts, and it had caused her butt to return to its shape she’d had at sixteen.
A lifetime ago, Nadia Pravda had slipped out of the Sun-Works Factory in a secret stealth-pod. She’d taken drugs for a time, before spacing them. To combat loneliness, she’d exercised endlessly, often to exhaustion. Despite the exercise, her new thinness had mainly come about because she was sick of the concentrates.