The Jovian Theory

[Leon Loire]

Well, I've been attempting to work on this piece for a while now, and it's evaded me for at least a month, if not much more. Originally, I wasn't sure how long it'd be, but my aspirations have a novel basis in mind. Still, I'm trying to work chapter by chapter, and all I have complete so far is the prologue, and even that could likely do with some touch-ups.

But I decided it was a good way to sate everyone's interest. My hope with such a prologue is to perk people's interest in the setting of the story, so hopefully it'll succeed.

But to finally move on, please enjoy the prologue to what I hope will be my first successful project: "The Jovian Theory."

The Jovian Theory

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Prologue

The living room was dark yesterday. I think it’s because mom and dad were too busy to even notice. When I was at school, the teachers were all really quiet, and I didn’t know why. Then I came home from the tram, and mom and dad and sis were all in front of our holoceptor¹, just watching in the dark. I put down my laptop and walked over to my big sis, sat down on the couch next to her. I looked at her face for a minute, noticed that her lips were shaking, and then I looked at the receptor. Why was she so scared? All I saw was a grey room with plain walls, an old wooden table, and a flag pole at the back with the American flag waving at the top. The national anthem was playing, too, but that was all, no people. I wanted to ask mom what was wrong, since she looked scared too, but I didn’t want to get yelled at. Whenever I ask dad what is bothering him, he gets mad at me. He apologizes later, but I never like it. He’s been scared about something a lot more lately, so I never ask.

A few minutes later, men in splotchy armor and carrying guns began to walk around the box, talking to each other in whispers, and a few sending glances to us. One of them asked if it was working, and then they looked at each other. Then, the room shook, and the soldiers get scared, looking in all directions. One of the men, an older one, started yelling things to the other soldiers, and everybody ran away. Doors must have been opened and closed, because I could hear them. I had seen that, when the room shook, mom shook a bit too. I guess that only made her more scared. Dad didn’t look too scared anymore, though. It just made him madder.

I wondered if what we were watching had to do with that war that was going on down at the Capital, the one that got me out of school for a few days. I live in Nevada, so there were no explosions and fighting like there were in the Capital. The only difference was that the Police were wearing purple armor instead of their blue uniforms. People said that the President was changing the country. I wonder if that was a good thing or not, since there were people at the Capital and across some parts of the country that were fighting him. But when we started going back to school, our teachers told us that the war would be over soon. After that, we started class, since we didn’t need to do the pledge thing anymore.

Mom started to shake more, and sis looked at me for a second with a sad frown. I looked back at her, asked what was wrong, and she put on a fake smile and rubbed her hand through my hair, I guess to comfort me. Or maybe it was to comfort her. She was still shaking a bit, even when she was talking to me. Then she went over to mom and hugged her, sat down next to her, and they held each other. Mom kept murmuring about a mistake or something, and sis said that she understood. I still don’t get what was wrong. I think dad understood more than any of us, though, because he was starting to look really mad. He was shaking, but not in the way mom was. He looked like he was about to break something. I thought I would be scared if I ever saw dad that mad, but for some reason, I guess I understood too. Dad was just mad that he made a mistake. But what kind of mistake was so big that it scared them all this much?

No more soldiers came for a few minutes, but something kept making the room shake, and little bits of dust were falling off the walls. There were quiet yells somewhere, and little rings and whistles and clicks were hitting doors and walls and metal chairs somewhere nearby. Mom and sis seemed to hold onto each other more tightly, and dad just froze, watching as if something was about to jump out in front of us. More yells, more clicks and whistles, and after a while, a door crashed open somewhere, and a few of the men in splotched armor ran in front of us. But they looked different. Some of them were covered in sweat and dirt, and others had dark blemishes across their armor, like blood. One man was being carried away, and a lot of blood was on his head, and he was screaming. I felt cold from seeing that, and mom started to cry with sis.

When the soldiers got away from the box, more clicks sounded somewhere nearby, and more screams came. Then, one of the splotchy armored soldiers ran back in front of us from the right, his gun in his hands, a bit of blood smeared on the left side of his face. There were more clicks from outside the room, and the soldier seemed to notice, looking towards the noises. But he didn’t look scared. He didn’t even flinch. It looked like he just wanted to talk to us, one last time.

“The President has betrayed you!” the soldier yelled, pointing his gun somewhere, but looking straight at me, “He’s changed the government, taken away your freedoms, and plans to sell them off like some kind of commodity! Everything you know will be gone, and replaced with nothing more than currency!”

The soldier kept talking for a few seconds more, but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. There was a lot of noise around him, like someone pounding on his door, and he used a lot of big words. Mom and dad were still frozen, but sis seemed to understand. I’m not sure, though; all she did was shake more.

Then, there was a loud crash somewhere near the soldier, and he aimed his gun towards the sound. Flashes and bolts of blue came from his gun, and he started to step away from view. Men in purple armor – like the ones the Police wore now – jumped into the screen and shot back with an orange lightning, and soon there was this sound of people fighting and people getting hit. Metal seemed to hit the ground, and then the soldiers in purple settled down. They must have beaten the talking soldier, but he was still out of sight. He started yelling, still fighting them, before a loud bang made him stop. The soldiers started to shift around, and then a few of them moved over to the flag in the back. Two of them grabbed the flag and tore it down, letting the fabric fall on the dirty floor. A second later, two other soldiers brought over a new flag, and threw up this cloth of a pretty purple with a grey star in the center and diagonal white stripes.

When the bang sounded, mom and sis started sobbing loudly, talking about something. Dad just sat there, like me, watching for as long as he could. Then, without even seeing who was speaking, a quiet voice started to talk at us, as if he had always been there: “The United States has been reborn. Welcome, America, to the Prime Conglomerate.”


Footnotes

¹ Holoceptor – Short for “holographic receptor device”, a holoceptor is a technological device used by individuals as visual entertainment, and is the successor of the “television” from the 20th and early 21st century. Instead of a “tube” submitting signals of light onto a two dimensional screen to create a sequence of visual images, a holoceptor sends signals of light and sound across a three dimensional plane created by a thin set of metal poles that connect together to create a rectangular box. Through these poles, a viewer is able to watch a program in three dimensions and in high definition quality, and with extendable sizes, a home entertainment system could be massive in size whenever desired.

[Leon Loire]

Damn, I posted the original prologue copy a year ago. Amazing how bad my laziness can be. Still, I got the first portion of the first chapter finished AT LAST, so I thought I'd post this up here, since I owned the board that much, considering my recent disappearance from the living world.

Chapter One / Part One

Precious Cargo

Thought Record: 18 March 2343 A.D. (Earth Date), 15:53 (Earth PM Time); orbit of Jupiter IV, Callisto Colony


For a simple operation, my squad was too quiet.

Corporal Mendoza, our usual loud-mouth, sat in the distant corner of the aged fishing vessel’s hangar, leaning into the wall-mounted bench and staring into blank space. The others weren’t any better; half of the squad was near the pilot’s ramp, kneeling in a circle over old paper cards and gambling protein credits from Europa. Bellary, Dawson and Glenn were handling their equipment, each little object requiring different tweaks, and Sergeant Thompson was apparently reading a letter from his fiancé in a closed circuit visual.

On riskier missions, I’d known my soldiers to crack jokes and casually chat about our next meal, so why were they so silent now?

Could be they’re all just soft from our vacation. We received the orders two days ago during our leave at Ganymede. Sent through an encrypted channel, the message was pretty vague:

Sub: Routine Report
To: Lt. Shiva Razavi
From: LCC Command Post

We’ve been receiving some Intel about a canister of interesting materials in a warehouse on Callisto. There’s a vessel waiting for you and the team at the usual port on Ganymede. Make sure to reach the pilot by 14:00 hours >Ganymede Time< and to bring the precious cargo back in one piece.

- Exo. Dawson

If it was read in a literal sense, then the mission sounded insulting, a small fraction of the unit’s abilities. I knew better; command liked to use program coding as a figurative veil, which hid the facts from all but the keenest of hackers. Once I decompressed the message’s data and scanned the document for markers, I found the hidden briefing file without a sweat.

Of course, the real mission was a bit nerve-wracking. Apparently, this “warehouse” was fortified from some unidentified group– definitely not the local “Callistian” military – and sat on the outskirts of Zekphen, a developing suburb to the local city, bordering on the Mekkanee Forest. There was no Intel on their firepower, potential reinforcements, or even legality; I didn’t even know what to look for: no definition of the cargo, what it looked like, or where it was held. Worst of all, it turned out my squad wasn’t even spearheading the operation; we were acting as support for a Shaper. That wasn’t good news; in operations, they usually ran solo, so unit cohesion didn’t even register in their big heads. None of my troops trusted them, for the simple fact that they could do whatever they wanted – quite literally. They were undisciplined, unreliable, and completely unpredictable, and now we had to guard one in an enclosed complex full of hostiles.

I’ll be blunt: ‘pissed off’ can not accurately describe my mood at that point.

To summarize the situation, I was about to lead eleven men and women into a small warehouse to try and retrieve an unknown canister of “precious cargo” while watching over an annoying agent and fighting off a unit of troops without details on their strength, with the complete possibility of local authorities tossing us in jail.

It was already looking to be a hell of a trip.

I had been leaning against the curving bronze wall of the ship’s hangar while I read the briefing, about ten or twelve meters from the poker circle by the pilot’s ramp. Now stricken by an insatiable anxiety, I began to mindlessly glance around the vessel’s interior, noticing details I’d otherwise not give a damn about.

The air inside the ship nipped at my bare skin, forming clusters of olive-tinted goosebumps. Near where I stood sat several steel gray crates, stacked in loose divisions around the hangar, which had to be at least seventy-five meters wide and a bit larger in length. The engine compartment was one level above, beyond the brick-red ceiling, and other essentials of the ship lined across the bow section. Silver-lit lockers lined against the hangar wall, with all of our equipment stashed accordingly. At last, I glanced down at the black jumpsuit that felt like a second skin, though a flash of harsh golden lighting from the hangar’s ceiling caught me off guard and forced me to look back at the squad with a slightly irritated scowl.

As I shut my eyes to try and blink away the glare, an audio clip from the pilot jumped into my personal datanet, telling me that the ship would enter the Callistian stratosphere in about two minutes. He didn’t care to include a visual projection of himself, but his voice was clearer than if he spoke into my ear; a lovely perk of neutral lace implantation.

Once I heard the notice, I carefully pushed off from the wall and strolled to the center of the hangar. As the pilot skimmed the ship into Callisto’s atmosphere, he would bring its belly towards the beast, causing the gravity to dramatically shift. A simple slip on the hangar floor could break bones or hurdle bodies. I waved for everyone to join me, and after some tedious walking on their part, all twelve of them made a loose circle around me.

“I just love space flight,” Tenji Sims, one of my CQC experts, commented wryly, “nothing beats the chance of a fiery death.”

I smirked, crossing my arms as my eyes fell on him, “I’ll remember that when we have to cremate you Sims, now,” a brief snicker broke through the ranks before I continued, “you’ll find the briefing file in my public network – as usual. Open your side and we’ll get started.”

Just then, a filmy sage display materialized “over” my peripheral vision, picting my neural network and the briefing file. A moment later, the file began to flash white, indicating that the squad was connected. I commanded the briefing to open, and another moment later, a series of new displays popped up, the nanobots swimming across my eyes accurately screening a map of the operation in the top-right corner of my view. I slid the map to the center, widened its resolution size, and shared the change with the squad.

The three dimensional image was a computer generated mapping of the operation zone. The maximum magnification picted the entire neighborhood of Zekphen, its sparkling silver structures peaking at only fourteen stories, yet with an effective magnetic highway and a large span of solar plants, the region was surprisingly modern for its modest layout. Drawing inward to the targeted warehouse, The Mekkanee Forest could be seen swarming the east and south, with cityscape edging on the northern corners, and the small industrial district fading into the west. Directly in the center lay the mysterious complex, its beige-gray exterior five stories at its tallest, with the blue-green canopies of local trees enveloping the flat rooftops and twinkling inner lights.

I heard a muffled laugh from someone on my right, and after minimizing the visual mapping, realized that it came from Mendoza. His body didn’t’ move, save for his dark-skinned face, with his large lips still grinning, and his mahogany eyes glinting from the microscopic light of the visual mapping. Realizing that I heard him, he spoke out rather joyously, “You were scared over this, Shiva? It’s not even a blue milk run; it’s an errand call!”

Corporal Jonnie Glenn, eyes hidden behind her cropped brunette bangs, quipped back, her salmon lips hiding a faint scowl, “Anton, since when has the Commune been easy on us?”

Antonio Mendoza glanced over towards Jonnie, grin still smeared across his face as he shrugged, “You’re right Glenn, but how bad could it be? Command’s put us through a lot.”

A wave of nods and murmured agreement spilled from the rest of the squad. I was frowning; I knew I’d have to drop the news on them, and I knew the response. A moment later, I opened the file and publicized the mission’s priority objectives. Within seconds, the group of twelve surrounding me changed their moods completely, and shoved the rising noise of atmospheric entry into the back of their minds.

“A Shaper? Jesus LT, you’re saying we’re stuck playing babysitter?” Sergeant Will Thompson scoffed, his dark lips releasing an annoyed grumble as his thick arms shifted anxiously.



“Or target practice,” Private Wasi Rasheed added in a whisper, slipping his crescent amulet over his skull and quickly speaking a prayer to God in Arabic.

I shrugged, merely accepting their frustrations, “Listen guys, as much as you don’t like it, we’re gonna need that Shaper. Intel’s dropped the ball, so we’re about to run blind, and the sorcerer will be our eyes.”

James Bellary, my other CQC expert, stiffened in place, hazel eyes glazing, “Then that means the Cosplet’s here to get the canister of… whatever it is.”

I furrowed my eyebrows, realizing that Bellary had a point, “If Command can only trust a Cosplet to find the objective, than the cargo must be high priority. And whoever’s guarding it must be ready for us…”

The entire squad was silent again; the fear was sinking back in. We now had to expect the worst out of an already bad situation. Frozen in apathy for a few seconds, unsure of what to do next, I decided to pass out their next orders to pass the time, “Grab your gear; we’re dropping on the southern flank of the target in five minutes.”

We broke ranks, each trotting to their lockers for the stashed equipment. My own cache lay in a cluster of small crates some twenty meters down the starboard wall. Reaching the container, I clipped off the hatch and lifted away the assorted gear. Slipping on the beige boots, leggings, gloves and belt, the consecutive pieces linked together, using the jumpsuit as a foundation. Syncing the royal-blue chest plate and gauntlets to mesh, I planted the silver pauldrons to my shoulders and tugged the steel-gray helmet over my hair, the cerulean visor sliding down in front of my eyes. When the sleek alloy locked in place, its heads-up display lit up, with data on my body’s status and the armor’s protective condition blinking in the bottom left corner.

With my armor equipped, I went on to my weaponry. Altogether, I had a medgel pack, a pair of radius grenades, a beam slicer, a slip tube of nanobots for recon, two blocks of kinetic rifle ammo, and my last resort: the Foreblade. While most of the gear was latched to my utility belt, this thin trapezoid device was different. As I installed the blade to a slot on the wide edge of my left forearm’s armored shell, the two surfaces clicked into place, and a ring of wires uploaded into the blade’s sheathe. The union complete, I smiled, before drawing my attention to the final item of keen interest: my Grimmwald MR 275.

One of the favored carbines of my fellow Commune Marines, the kinetic rifle carried a considerable barrel length and was built from lightweight materials, with a diagonal grip that pressed into the user’s palm and linked to the hair trigger with a small looped opening, a smooth rectangular body that ran across the barrel, with its rear section making an adequate computer screen for weapon’s data, a stout shoulder stock with a crescent opening, and the ammo feeder running inside of the stock to sit directly behind the barrel. Deactivating the safety and uploading the I.D. confirmation procedures – since my rifle would only fire if in my hands, or a confirmed ally – I pulled out a single block of kinetic ammunition, barely more than a cube of sheer metal, and fed it into the weapon. Hearing the long blink, the Grimmwald was finally ready for use, and I hooked its body across my back as its safety mechanism reactivated and compressed the rifle’s shape.

In the time that I was suiting up, the old makeshift transport was whimpering from the heat of atmospheric entry. The power of Callisto’s dense skin was so that even when in the heart of a sizable craft with several meters of armor plating between us, I could hear the wash of ions as we sunk deeper into the world below, and when we reached the troposphere, the turbulence worsened before it would finally reach a steady calm, as the vessel’s underside encountered the moon’s wind current. Yet, regardless of the quake, every canister and object in the cargo bay hadn’t budged from its place, and the ship remained in one piece. It was no surprise; sifting into a world was common for the average citizen, let alone a group of mercenaries.

A few minutes of idle chatter later, and the pilot found us above the skies of our landing zone. The squad collected together by the bay’s center, near a fold-out blast door built into the belly of the transport. Twelve lines of tightly strung rope were sprawled and tied into hooks that lined the perimeter of the hatch, and each of us stood above one. The three cadets that had been assigned to my unit for their first operation glanced at one another with wide-eyed anticipation. They certainly weren’t green or young – the one nearest me, Private Jennifer Manning, served in the U.N. Peace Corp for twenty years before her invitation into the Commune – but they weren’t used to covert operations. This was a new world to them, and dropping in hot with just some fat thread and a few strange faces was definitely not comforting, to say the least.

And the others just loved to make it worse. “Hey Benton, I heard your ratio in the shooting range was ten to one.” Mendoza was fully stocked in a thicker variant of Commune light armor, his hair and face completely adorned in a heavy weapons helmet and fitted with the unit’s service pack on his back in case we needed to use some serious fireworks. His teeth were grinning so wide that I could see the indentation he earned on an op two years ago when some pirate knocked him straight in the face, and his mahogany eyes glared at the new recruit with years of experience in the art of “asshole.”

Private James Benton was the youngest of the three newbies, but a bit of a prodigal marksman. Not to say that he was cocky necessarily – but he did tend to gloat a bit about his skill, especially when it was brought up. And that was exactly what Anton wanted.

The private had been double checking his gear and attaching the other end of the rope to his suit when he heard Mendoza, and the glance back was casual, yet vulnerable, “Yeah, and that was with a fully automatic GMR 350. Those muthas love to blaze a big cone of fire, but I kept it tight.”

Anton’s smile seemed to grow somehow at Benton’s words as he reacted, “Well hell Jimmy, you better keep your tongue behind your teeth when you’re firing today, or you might kill your score. You forget: you’ll be shooting real bad guys today who’d just love to know your mama, so don’t go and loosening that cone to hit all of us, right?”

It wasn’t the worse Mendoza had done, but it was enough. Benton’s face cooled, and he just nodded, but in admittance and a bit of concern. Unlike Manning and Dobbs – our third recruit – he had never seen real combat before.

A few seconds later, a wire from the pilot reached my Net, telling me with his professional tone that we were just one hundred meters from the surface, with the Zekphen forest below. Speaking back with my internal voice that connected through my Neuralnet, I gave a simple acknowledgment, ‘Good to hear. Be back when I send you the signal; never can tell when these ops go bad.’

The pilot confirmed, and a moment later, began the sequence to open the hatch. Alert lights began to signal throughout the cargo bay, and visible bouts of air screamed between the outside world and the belly of the ship as its pressure stabilized and matched with that of Callisto. Gazing down, I could see the dark, sharp outline of the world’s blue-green pines, their limbs flying in a wild dance from the weight of the transport’s hover engines. The ground below was hard to see thanks to the darkness, but a clearing was evident. Grabbing onto my own rope and clinging tightly, I nodded to the squad to follow my lead.

“We land quiet, we stay quiet. Let’s slip in and slip out. Nothing fancy unless I give you the order to. Now let’s hit it!”

At that moment, I kicked myself across the edge and let the lively moon’s gravity do the work for me. Its own pull wasn’t strong enough to compare with Earth, but it was still enough to make a girl’s heart jump a few too many beats when the adrenaline starts pumping. I felt the patterns of the contoured rope pass over my gloved fingers with rapid succession, but thanks to the gauntlet’s thick mesh and its heat resistors, I felt no burn. A few seconds later, my boots touched ground, and I let myself go, collecting myself to be sure that none of my equipment had fallen off before trotting a bit to a better position to reorganize the unit.

Looking back, I watched as my veteran soldiers kicked away from their own ropes and followed my lead, with the three recruits briskly landing without issue. I let myself sigh a bit of relief; I was worried that I’d have to hold their hand, but it seemed that they could handle themselves - with some bloody rope, anyway.

‘Good landing ladies and gents, makin’ me proud.’ Sergeant Thompson spoke across the FMI comm channel, his bright brown eyes grinning behind the sage visor of his helmet.

“Yeah well, fuckin’ Tenji practically shoved me. What gives man?”

“You dead Dobbs?”

“No –“

“Then shut the hell up.”

I kept my lips pressed as I listened in to the chatter, but bemused myself with Simms’ antics. I probably would have given Dobbs some hell myself, if I hadn’t noticed a hostile looking shadow just a few meters from Rasheed.

“Frakkin’ hell; you, identify yourself, now!”

I dropped my right hand to the kinetic pistol at my hip and pulled it up against the target, a faint green light blinking across the left side of its barrel, signaling to my HUD that it recognized me, and telling me that it had a solid twenty seven shots before it would need to slice a new line of bullets on the block and cool down its consummate heat. As I leveled the pistol on the shade, the rest of my squad instantly reacted, their hands reached out for their primary weapons – rifles, shotguns, and Rasheed, being so near the target, activated his Foreblade, the curving metal bayonet arcing from his right arm. They each formed an irregular semicircle around the target, and I was standing just a few meters to the target’s left.

And then the bastard Shaper surprised us. It was him.

“Do you always welcome my kind with such…” The shadow-robed figure hesitated for a moment to contemplate his conclusion, clearly presenting a level of contempt, “Ah, yes, despise?”

‘Son of a bitch, it’s the Shaper.’

‘What? You’re shitting me, right?’

‘Nope, it’s him,’ I said wryly over the Neuralnet, ‘It’s him.’

All twelve of us lowered our weapons on instinct, with heavy sighs of surprise to boot, but I knew for a fact that Thompson and Mendoza were scowling, and Gerri Dawson wasn’t too happy either. In this line of business, everyone hated surprises. Especially when it involved the Shapers.

Holstering my pistol, I strolled over to the agent and gave him a crisp salute, the kind you give strangers, not friends, “Lieutenant Shiva Razavi sir, under your orders. You’re Pillar, correct?”

“Ivory Pillar, to be exact.” The man responded with a cold, modulated tone, the hood of his black robe continuing to cover his earthy skin and face, “But yes. Now, it’s good to have you all here. I arrived some time ago, and took the liberty of investigating the target. From what I sensed –“

“Sensed? What do you… oh, right, you Shapers can do that.”

“Yes, we most certainly can. Now lieutenant, it seems we have hostiles in the complex.”

When I heard Pillar mention that, I immediately felt my eyes widen; this was supposed to be a simple recruit’s run, and as much as I had come to realize that it was more than that, I had been sincerely hoping my intuition had been wrong. Clearly it wasn’t.

I hesitated for a few seconds, but responded with a quiet voice, “Did you expect this sir?”

Pillar stared back in silence for a moment, and then nodded, “No, our Intel told us that we were unexpected. The target was supposed to be left alone… curious, that it is not.”

Talk of the “precious cargo” reminded me of the most significant predicament for me in that situation, “Yes, and sir, our Intel was hazy about details on the item itself. Could you tell me what we’re looking for, so we can help in the search?”

Pillar seemed to contemplate this as well, but instead of concern, he faintly smiled, something that made my skin crawl with anger, “You don’t worry about that. I was assigned to this mission to find the target. I need you and your team to distract the hostiles as I do so. That is all.”

I glared back, but knew there was no point in defiance. As much as I hated being left in the dark, secrecy was often part of the work. And since I was employed by such a shady, undercover order, it came with the line of duty every single day. So, I simply accepted the answer, “Yes sir.”

“Please proceed to enter the installation, lieutenant,” Pillar continued, watching me carefully with his burning eyes, “I will follow your squad and make my own way towards the target. Just find those hostiles.”