Resistance (Nomad Book 3)

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  Author Matthew Mather

  Prologue

  Mars First Mission

  Deep Interplanetary Space

  November 29th

  A keening siren bled into the hibernation chamber.

  At first the siren echoed only in the distant void of his subconscious, but when Commander Rankin’s mind focused on it, when its urgency came to him, it brought with it a terrifying understanding. No gentle drift from slumber. No soft halo of growing light. No whisper from systems that seeped away cold before they fed in comforting heat.

  Instead…

  A heavy hiss as the last vestiges of the chamber’s gases shot away. The front of the compartment lifted, and Rankin stumbled forward and fell. Dropped to the floor and retched something cold and opaque that congealed with the viscous fluids discharged with him.

  Pain lanced through his knees and elbows on impact with the metal deck. Cold stinging bites as intravenous lines tore away from his arms and neck. Eyes shut tight against blinding light. The screech of the siren, louder now, drilled through his temples. His stomach muscles tightened and he dry-heaved, his neck tendons flaring.

  “Mars First, this is Rankin,” the Commander croaked between stomach spasms, his voice hoarse. “What’s going on?’

  The only reply was the shrieking alarm.

  He spat out a mouthful of yellow phlegm, fought back a gag reflex, and gasped: “Mars First, report!”

  No answer.

  The pain in his knees faded, replaced with an ache that shot into his feet and fingertips. He opened his eyes a crack. The emergency floodlights seared through his optic nerves and dove deep into his brain. More blazing pain. His heart pounded high in his throat, his mouth pasted together around a swollen tongue that tasted metal. The urge to retch competed with the need to breathe.

  Rankin’s mind raced. Decompression? Why were the cabin lights on full?

  Hair prickled on his arms. Teeth clenched. Hard to breathe. His skin was clammy and cold, even though he knew the temperature and humidity were probably regulated high and dry. He dragged himself to his feet and lurched for the nearest terminal. Rankin had awoken from chemically-induced hibernation enough times to know the effects of Rapid Emergency Animation Procedure. The grim REAP’er was an exercise every new recruit had to go through. Years of drill training took over and he pushed down the fear.

  The blaze of light subsided. The echoing pain eased.

  Commander Rankin blinked and wiped away the sticky residue on his face. Steadied himself and stood up straight. On the other side of the twenty-foot circular hibernation suite, Elin Cuijpers, the team’s Dutch communication specialist, had been regurgitated onto the metal floor from her hibernation pod. Her face was slick with sweat, her short-cropped blond hair matted, her blue eyes unfocused as she gasped for air. The three other hibernation pods were still closed; their occupants still blissfully unconscious.

  “Mars First, report,” Rankin repeated, his voice calmer.

  Still nothing.

  The computer terminal before him remained stubbornly dormant, its screen blank, but the LED mission clock above it glowed bright: seventy-eight days, sixteen hours and twelve minutes since launch. He was supposed to be revived on Day One Hundred for his physical and some exercise, but not REAP’ed like this. Something had set off an alarm, something urgent enough to risk the bright lights and alarms and violent awakening he’d just endured.

  Seventy-eight days.

  Rankin attempted a quick mental calculation. His neurons were like molasses inside his skull.

  Mars First was on a ballistic capture orbit, forgoing the usual Hohman trajectory of Mars missions. Their total transit time was three hundred and two days. At seventy-eight sols, they should be about thirteen million kilometers radially outward from Earth’s orbit, but their solar-orbital velocity had been matched for Mars’s for the ballistic capture, a slow burn deceleration resulting in a differential of about twenty thousand kilometers an hour. So in the past seventy-plus days, Earth had sped ahead of them by maybe thirty-five million kilometers. He’d been the last crewmember to go into hibernation sleep on Mission Day Four, just after they’d passed the moon’s orbit and celebrated being the first humans to venture beyond it.

  So Earth had to be more than forty million kilometers away.

  The Dutchwoman had pulled herself to her feet, her body shaking, but her eyes were on Rankin now.

  “Cuijpers, are you okay? Can you understand me?”

  “What in the world is going on?”

  “Don’t know yet. Mars First is down. Can you get a system diagnostic up?”

  The Dutchwoman stared into space for a moment, her mind still fighting its way out of the hibernation fog. She physically shook herself awake, walked over to Rankin and pulled open a wall panel. She clicked switches and a second later, lights flickered across the terminal.

  Rankin backed up to give her space. “Anything?”

  “One section of the hull lost pressure and was closed off automatically.” Her fingers scrolled across the screen. “Some physical damage. Guidance is down, but communications are still up.”

  “What about power?” Rankin said.

  “Rerouting now. Hydrogen cells are offline.” Cuijpers studied the display. “Electronics fried all across the ship. Maybe a solar flare? Explains why Mars First is offline. The main power grid—” Her eyes widened. “Ben je helemaal besodemieterd!”

  “English please?”

  “The radiation readings are...I’ve never…” Cuijpers' voice trailed off.

  “Just your best guess.”

  “Thirty-thousand nanoTeslas. That was the field induced by a radiation blast.”

  Rankin blinked as his sluggish mind tried to absorb and find context. “That can’t be right. Must be a sensor malfunction.”

  Cuijpers' fingers swept across the control surface, checking and re-checking. “Sensors are fine.” A frown erupted between her fine blond eyebrows. “We were sheltered from the worst of the radiation storm by the hab shielding. Telemetry and guidance are offline.”

  Rankin rubbed his throbbing head with one hand. A massive solar flare might explain the electronics, but not the loss of pressure. Or maybe it could? Mars First was heavily shielded—well beyond specifications even—but no amount of preparation could have anticipated that degree of exposure.

  The Dutch communications specialist held Rankin’s gaze.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Do you know what a radiation blast like that would do down there…?” Cuijpers pointed at her feet, but Rankin knew what she meant.

  “You mean Earth?”

  “The biggest geomagnetic superstorms induce maybe three hundred nanoTeslas, and those can knock out national power grids. This was two orders of magnitude higher…”

  She hesitated again.

  “And?”

  “It would send everything back to the Stone Age.”

  “But flares are directional, right? Earth must be forty million kilometers away. If it hit us, then I doubt it hit them.” It was hopeful rather than analytical, but probably true. Rankin strode around the room to look at the other hibernation pods. “You said comms were up. Orally relay me all the messages from Command.”

  “Nothing in a month.”

  “Pardon?”

  “We
haven’t had any comms from Earth in four weeks. Just regular chatter before that.”

  “No warning message? No data on what hit us?”

  “Nothing at all. Not even system pings.” The expression on Cuijpers' face changed from puzzlement to slack-faced blankness.

  “Check the communication arrays again,” Rankin ordered. No messages from Earth at all in four weeks was impossible.

  “I already checked,” Cuijpers said. “It’s not us. It’s dead.”

  “The comm systems aren’t working?”

  “I mean the comm arrays are working.”

  By her expression, his face must have looked as baffled as his muddled brain felt. Maybe oxygen wasn’t getting into his bloodstream. He put out one hand to steady himself.

  “What I mean,” Cuijpers added slowly, “is that all our communication gear is working perfectly. Has been working perfectly the whole mission clock.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. We were just hit by this massive radiation blast. That’s what you said.”

  “I said we were hit, but I didn’t say when.” She glanced at her display. “My best guess is it happened on October 24th, over a month ago.”

  “The radiation blast?” That was almost half the mission clock. “That long ago?”

  The Dutchwoman nodded.

  “So what’s dead, then, if not our comms gear?”

  Cuijpers' knuckles went white as she gripped the edges of the terminal screen.

  “The Earth. It’s the Earth that’s dead.”

  RESISTANCE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Sanctuary Europe

  There was no cold. No howling wind or cloying reek of sulfur. Instead, Jessica Rollins felt a comfortable, perfumed warmth surrounding her. The next thing she noticed: no pain. In her balled fists now, just soft cotton bedding, and a thick pillow beneath her head. The acrid air of the past nightmarish weeks was replaced instead by something clean and pure.

  For a moment the sensations surprised her and, in that instant, as she opened her eyes to the gentle light, she couldn’t remember where she was. She didn’t recognize the room. Its smooth surfaces and pastel shades. Unfamiliar artwork hung on the walls. None of it belonged to her, none of it was chosen by her. The lines of the room were manufactured and regular. Reminded her of a submarine she’d once toured.

  This room was not hers.

  With the confusion came fear—a subtle, subconscious vigilance born in the United States Marine Corps and molded so it never paralyzed her, but instead energized and protected her. Then came the realization: Sanctuary.

  She was in Sanctuary.

  In lock step, she remembered Dr. Müller.

  The man who killed her family—and worse, implicated them in the unimaginable destruction of the planet by Nomad, the rampaging black hole pair that had barreled through the center of the solar system and ripped it apart.

  Her fear mutated and sharpened.

  Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of people had died, starting with an intense barrage of radiation as the sun almost shredded apart. The Earth’s crust ripped apart in the enormous gravitational waves as Nomad passed, igniting hundreds of simultaneous volcanic eruptions and churning up apocalyptic tsunamis. Jess had been underground, reunited with her mother and father just before they’d died trying to save her father’s data. It was evidence of Nomad from more than thirty years before, even though her father hadn’t known what it was back then.

  But somebody had known.

  Müller.

  Dr. Müller had been her father’s PhD professor, had understood what the images of Nomad were thirty years ago. He’d used the information to start a secretive network of massive underground bunkers—the Sanctuaries. One here in Europe and another in China. Was there one in America? Jess didn’t know. America had been destroyed by the explosion of the Yellowstone supervolcano. All that was heard from the once-great nation were scraps of communications from ragged bands of survivors.

  She did know that Müller had used her father as a scapegoat, and even worse, tried to kill her entire family. Had killed them. Jessica had uncovered the truth, and made Müller pay for his crimes, including the deaths of her mother and father. At least, she hoped he would pay for his crimes. Müller was here, in Sanctuary Europe, underground with her—but while she was in a warm, safe bed, he was in jail, awaiting punishment.

  She threw off the covers and levered herself up. Bolts of pain shot through her ribs, legs, and arms, disturbing her numb bliss. Not healed yet from her injuries, despite Ufuk Erdogmus’s doctors' ceaseless attention. The exhaustion didn’t seem to fade, either—or perhaps it was something else. The haze over her senses evaporated. She winced and tried not to think about Müller.

  But that wasn’t possible.

  The door to her room opened a crack, then slowly swung open. Giovanni appeared, the scar above his left eye twitching in amusement, his thick black hair groomed. He looked rested, but still gaunt.

  “Good morning,” he said as he gave her a warm smile.

  “You should have woken me earlier.”

  The clock said it was just past ten a.m., but buried thousands of feet below a granite mountain, it could just have easily been ten p.m. She was dressed in pink flannel pajamas, which felt vaguely embarrassing despite—or perhaps as a result of—the intensely close and personal experiences she’d shared with this man waiting at her door. He knew enough to divert his eyes as she reached for the plastic prosthetic next to the bed and slipped it over her stump, just below the knee where her left leg ended.

  “I called Ufuk and told him you were sleeping,” Giovanni said. “He can wait. I’ve made breakfast.”

  Outside her bedroom, Hector sat at the small dining table and waved to her as she limped—still not used to this new leg—into the small living area. The kid had weathered the beating they'd taken better than the adults. He had the same shock of black hair and lopsided grin as his uncle Giovanni.

  The smell of real eggs and fresh bread coaxed her to the table. It seemed almost impossible in contrast to the desperate scrabble for life in the dark and ice outside just days ago.

  “You think he can really do it?”

  She sat down and reached for the pot of coffee, at the same time gently pushing aside the stack of yellowing paper that was Giovanni’s record of conversations with survivor groups. Ballie Booker and his crew on the British Coastguard ship had recovered it at the same time as they had rescued Giovanni and Hector, and the brothers Lucca and Raffa, from the ice floe in the middle of the Mediterranean. A miracle in the middle of this madness.

  “You’re the one who said Ufuk Erdogmus was a genius,” Giovanni said. “Cybernetics was the focus of one of his tech companies, whatever that means.”

  Hector leaned over to hug Jess. She felt the boy’s warmth and squeezed back.

  “A new robotic leg,” she said. “It seems unreal.”

  “No crazy stunts until you learn how to use it properly.” Giovanni spooned some eggs onto a plate and set it down in front of her.

  She smiled despite herself.

  Crazy stunts.

  The idea came from a different world, a distant memory of a place that no longer existed. Sanctuary Europe—shortened to San EU by the thousands who lived here—was an extension of the deep tunnel systems bored into the alpine mountains of Switzerland. Those systems had provided road and rail routes through the Alps for decades, perhaps longer, and still stretched for hundreds of kilometers underground. San EU had been built to take advantage of them, using technology that had created the sixty-kilometer-long Gotthard Base Tunnel only a handful of years earlier.

  Above her, right now, were the mountains she had grown to love. Slopes she had skied, rock and ice she had climbed. She wondered what remained. Since she’d been rescued, she and Giovanni hadn’t been back outside. The Sanctuary Administrative Council forbade contact with the world outside for the year they would remain underground, but of course, the SAC fi
ltered what they knew—or what they wanted people to know—to those inside. A gilded cage.

  Before Nomad, she had fed herself adrenaline until it became almost an addiction. Since then, the will to survive had bred something else inside her, something that made the thrill seeking she had once engaged in feel at once both frivolous and bland. She had been given something to focus on, something that carried an importance she had been missing since her Marine Corps service.

  Being here now, underground and surrounded by a facsimile of Earth’s past beauty, she found herself desperate to be outside. There were others scratching in the snow and ash for food, and here she was eating eggs, and sleeping on soft cotton. Too often she stared at the ceiling, carried away by dreams of being somewhere else. Too often she woke to the vision of her mother and father in their frozen graves.

  Giovanni’s voice pushed her thoughts aside. “There’s something else.”

  She frowned at his hesitation.

  “The Office of Judicial Affairs has formally invited your attendance to give a statement to the Examining Justice. The prosecutor leading the investigation into Müller’s actions is named Michel Durand. He would like to see you.”

  “What do they need a statement for? There were surveillance cameras in Vivas. You told me everyone inside here saw the video.” She stabbed her fork into the eggs. “I should have just killed him when I had the chance.”

  “Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you.”

  Her faced reddened as she stole a quick look at Hector. She poured more coffee. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, and that’s what frightens me.” Giovanni rested a hand on her shoulder. “You need to take it easy. You almost died.”

  “So did you. Millions are dead, and more are dying as we speak. Maybe some because of me.” She pushed her food away, trying to also push away the image of her mother and father crushed and frozen under the walls of Castello Ruspoli. She could have saved them.