The Dragons of Jupiter Read online

  The Dragons of Jupiter

  Jacob Holo

  .

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 Jacob Holo

  License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To Dad. Memory eternal.

  Prologue

  Of the seven thousand coalition soldiers attacking Bunker Zero, only two penetrated the upper defenses. Kaneda and Ryu Kusanagi sprinted down the narrow steel corridor. Sonic cancellers in their boots turned booming metallic footfalls into whispers. Form-fitting smartskin shrouded their bodies in active camouflage. Not even shadows marked their passing.

  Kaneda glanced at the utility trench underneath the grated floor. He followed three thick liquid nitrogen lines and a cluster of purple ultrahigh voltage cables. Whatever they fed took a lot of juice and needed constant cooling. It had to be their target.

  “There’s a four way junction ahead!” Ryu said over his comm-collar. Low-power laser receptors and emitters lined both their necks, allowing secure tight-beam communication as long as they shared line-of-sight contact.

  “The lines go to the right,” Kaneda said.

  “They’re gaining on us!”

  “I know. Stay focused.”

  Kaneda planted his feet in the junction and turned sharply. His suit’s smartskin struggled to keep up, revealing him with a brief, slender outline. He dashed down the right hand corridor.

  Ryu crouched as soon as he rounded the corner. He pulled a grenade out of his bandolier, armed its micromind for proximity detonation, and forced it through the floor’s grating. It landed on top of the liquid nitrogen lines. The grenade’s smartskin activated, obscuring it from view. Ryu stood and ran after Kaneda.

  “Security door,” Kaneda said, stopping a hundred meters after the junction. He placed his hand on the door. Passive contact scanners in his glove evaluated the obstacle. “Reinforced diamoplast half a meter thick.”

  Ryu stopped next to him. “There’s the security terminal. I’ve got this one!”

  “Covering.” Kaneda turned, snapped up his JD-50 assault rifle and dropped to a crouch. He mentally keyed the rifle to full auto.

  Ryu placed his hand on the security terminal. Microscopic filaments extruded from his hacking glove and penetrated the terminal’s casing. The filaments uncoiled into the terminal, expanding and exploring at Ryu’s command, looking for ways to bypass its protocols through direct intervention.

  A distant clicking noise echoed down the corridor, exactly the kind of sound a hundred narrow metal legs would make.

  Kaneda placed a hand against the cold steel wall. He felt the subsonic vibrations of explosive ordnance, maybe fifty levels above them. Help isn’t close, he thought. We’re all alone down here.

  The rapid clicking grew louder.

  “They’re close,” Kaneda said, gripping his rifle with both hands.

  “Just a few more seconds!”

  The rapid clicking thundered in his ears.

  “Almost there!” Ryu said.

  “We don’t have much time,” Kaneda said, speaking softly despite the on-edge pounding in his chest. A quick glance at his biometrics showed a heart rate of 312 pulses per minute, and that was without a fresh shot of adrenalmax.

  The proximity grenade at the junction detonated in a flash of light and shrapnel. Two nitrogen lines ruptured, spewing jets of cryogenic fluid into the corridor. The liquid nitrogen expanded into gas with explosive force.

  A concussion wave shot down the corridor. The wave threw Kaneda and Ryu into the security door. Kaneda slammed his head against the door, but the thin layer of impact gel in his helmet absorbed most of the shock.

  “Damn it!” Ryu shouted.

  Stars danced across Kaneda’s vision. He shook his head and brought his rifle back up.

  “You okay?” Ryu asked.

  “Just get the door open.”

  “Right. Almost there.”

  Kaneda toggled through his visor’s tracking modes, overlaying thermal atop the visual spectrum. The corridor was a black, billowing cloud.

  “Almost!” Ryu said.

  Two six-legged outlines came into view, one on the wall, the other on the ceiling. They stood half as tall as a man with internal power plants glowing rusty red despite the rapid cooling.

  Gun-spiders.

  Kaneda fired. Forty diamond-tipped shatterbacks spewed out of his rifle in two seconds. The synthetic, shatterproof diamonds tore through gun-spider armor like paper. Once inside, the explosive shatterbacks blew them apart. Shots that missed tore chunks out of the walls and ceiling. Lights in the corridor flickered and died. Detonations ripped steel panels off. A secondary blast boomed from an unseen enemy in the junction, splattering the walls and floor with what his visor identified as napalm. The thick gel burned and fought the leaking jets of nitrogen in a swirling thermal dance.

  Kaneda ejected the spent clip and slapped in a fresh one.

  “Got it!” Ryu said.

  The security door slid open. Ryu rushed through and placed his hacking glove against the terminal on the far side.

  Kaneda backpedaled through the door in a low crouch. He mentally keyed two grenades in his JD-50’s underslung launcher for timed detonations and fired both into the corridor. The security door slid shut after he cleared it. Two more explosions echoed through the bunker.

  “Now,” Kaneda said, standing and turning. “Where are we?”

  The wide room stood two stories tall. Harsh overhead lighting washed out most color. The white tiled walls and floors added a sense of sterility. Pods filled the room in neat rows like an artificial forest, each with a man or woman lying inside.

  “This doesn’t look like it,” Ryu said.

  “The lines lead here,” Kaneda said. “How long will the door hold?”

  “Ten to fifteen minutes. More if we’re lucky. I fried the controls pretty good. They’ll have to burn their way through.”

  Kaneda walked to the closest pod and looked at the woman inside.

  “Careful,” Ryu said. “These people could be implanted with chest-devils.”

  “Nothing is showing up on my tracker,” Kaneda said.

  He looked inside the pod. The woman’s head was recently shaven, leaving a brunette fringe. Kaneda could make out tight circular scars along her scalp. Her chest rose and fell with slow breaths. Bones stood out at her neck and joints, and her cheeks were horribly sunken.

  A tremor ran through her body. She opened her eyes and looked around the room with a vacuous gaze. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Saliva trickled from the edge.

  “What is Caesar doing with these people?” Ryu asked. “Is this where he makes his thralls?”

  “We should keep movi
ng,” Kaneda said. “This isn’t it.”

  “All right, but where do we go from here?”

  Kaneda looked around. “The power lines are probably routed deeper. There, to the left. That looks like a power distribution panel. Most of the cables coming out of it go down.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “We’ll head down. There’s a flight of stairs on the far side.”

  Kaneda detected a heat spike from a holographic emitter on the ceiling. A pillar of light coalesced into a tall, fit man with a buzz of white hair. He straightened his crisp black suit and adjusted a blood red tie before walking towards them. The man stood a head shorter than Ryu and Kaneda, the simulation of his former body compressed by Earth’s heavy gravity.

  “Caesar,” Kaneda breathed.

  “Well, isn’t this the absolute opposite of a surprise,” Caesar said. “Kaneda and Ryu Kusanagi. It would have to be you two freaks that breached my defenses. I certainly never expected the regular Federacy fodder to make it this far.”

  “He can’t see us, can he?” Ryu asked. “I mean, he’s walking right towards us.”

  “Keep moving,” Kaneda said. “He’s trying to distract us. Head for the next level.”

  Caesar walked past them and stopped at the security door. “Now I know you gentlemen just arrived, but I have to break some bad news to you. My quantum core is not here. You took a wrong turn. The power lines you were following are for a little experiment I’ve been playing with. So sorry, but it just has to be said.”

  “Kaneda?”

  “Don’t let him get to you.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Kaneda said. “We have a job to do.”

  “In fact, it’s even worse than that,” Caesar said. “There’s only one way out of these sublevels. Back the way you came. You both expended a lot of ammo getting here. Right now, I have over fifty robots amassing on the other side. I’ve even arranged for a few prototypes to join them. It’ll be fun to see how long you last.”

  Kaneda and Ryu reached the stairs. Caesar’s hologram flashed into existence on the landing halfway down the steps. He didn’t make eye contact.

  “I know this may sound a little odd given our current situation,” Caesar said. “But when my robots reach you, I would appreciate it if you kept the collateral damage to a minimum. Some of these fine Federacy citizens were very hard to obtain, and I have not finished even a quarter of their neural extractions and persona-intrusions.”

  Kaneda stepped off the stairs into a room identical to the one above and found the power distribution panel for the second level. Most of the cables disappeared through the floor.

  “Keep heading down,” Kaneda said.

  “I don’t think it’s here.”

  “He’s lying. He’s trying to trick us.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Caesar’s hologram appeared in the center of the room. Kaneda and Ryu ran past it.

  A deep subsonic boom reverberated through the bunker.

  Caesar looked up. “My, they are getting rowdy up there. It’s amazing this coalition has lasted this long. Soldiers from Earth and Luna and Mars and Jupiter all walking to their deaths in lockstep. Very stirring. I suppose they hate me more than each other. By the way, how is your ice ball of a home? After this is over, I’m going to send a fleet to Jupiter and rain about a thousand nukes down on that frozen moon. It’ll be like the fireworks on Federacy Day, only hotter. What do you think of that?”

  Kaneda entered the third identical level. Rows of interrogation pods stretched out before him.

  “How many people are in here?” Ryu asked.

  “About two hundred so far,” Kaneda said, running for the next set of stairs.

  Caesar materialized ahead of them. “You know, while you’ve been meandering about, I’ve subverted the weapon systems of a Martian cruiser in geosynchronous orbit. Firewalls, ha! It was like punching through wet paper.” He smiled and looked up. “Three ... two ... one ...”

  A massive shockwave rocked the bunker. The lights flickered. Kaneda lowered his stance and put a hand against an interrogation pod to steady himself.

  Caesar clasped his hands together. “Well, that is that. The surface has been reduced to a glowing sheet of glass along with all the Federacy troops still up there. Shame about New Shanghai. I was rather fond of the city.”

  “Damn it!” Ryu said. “What now?”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Kaneda, we’re going to die down here if we don’t find it soon!”

  “I know. Keep moving.”

  Caesar materialized by the stairs to the fourth level. He picked at some imaginary lint on his sleeve.

  “Now that I have you thoroughly trapped, I’d like to note something,” Caesar said. “As one of only two quantum minds in existence, I’m a little offended Matriarch sent you to kill me. I’m sure the irony of this situation is not lost on you. Two people, designed and created, manufactured if you will by one quantum mind, sent to kill the other quantum mind. It really is quite offensive. And I promise you, I will punish her for this insult.”

  They entered the fourth interrogation level. Caesar was already standing at the foot of the stairs to greet them. Kaneda ran past him, but stopped halfway to the next set of stairs.

  “What is it?” Ryu asked.

  “Something’s not right with this level.”

  Ryu looked around. “It is? It’s the same as the ... wait, what the hell? That wall is closer than on the other levels.”

  “Exactly. This level has smaller dimensions. Shouldn’t it be the same?”

  Kaneda and Ryu ran to the wall and stopped in front of it.

  “It looks ... new,” Ryu said.

  “And rushed. The welds where the wall meets the floor and ceiling are sloppy.”

  “Back up,” Ryu said. He raised his rifle. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”

  Kaneda backed out of the blast radius.

  Ryu fired a grenade from his rifle’s launcher. The explosion cracked the air and sent twisted, glowing-edged metal flying into the obscured room. Dust exhaled from the opening and spread into a low-hanging cloud at their ankles.

  “That was my last grenade,” Ryu said. “You?”

  “Only two left,” Kaneda said.

  “We’ll have to make them count.”

  Ryu put one leg through the glowing oval, swept his aim over the interior, and stepped in.

  “There’s some kind of machinery in here. Take a look.”

  Kaneda overlaid his visor’s visuals with Ryu’s viewpoint. A bank of electrical panels radiated intense heat on the far wall. Thick cables ran between the machines and a cluster of twelve interrogation pods in the center of the room. The pods sat in supportive cradles and looked removable.

  “Is this it?” Ryu asked.

  “No. Matriarch was very specific about what the quantum core looks like.”

  “Hold on. There’s a concealed hatch behind the pods.”

  Kaneda turned around. Nothing moved amongst the forest of interrogation pods. Smoke from the explosion settled into a thin cloud at his feet.

  “What is it?” Ryu asked.

  “I’m picking up some weird subsonics above and below us,” Kaneda said. “I’m not sure what they are. Also, Caesar is gone.”

  “Good riddance,” Ryu said. He slung his rifle and crouched down. “I think we might be on to something. The hatch is shielded. Dual diamoplast layers with thermal and radar masking sandwiched in between. I can’t see what’s on the other side.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Can you get it open?”

  “I think so. I don’t see any terminals, but this isn’t a security door. The hatch is tough but the floor around it isn’t. We can probably rip it out.”

  Ryu drew his ultrasonic knife and stabbed it into the floor panel next to the hatch. He used the knife’s handle for leverage and peeled the panel up until he got his fingers underneath the edge. Wi
th a short grunt, he ripped the panel free and flung it aside. He stabbed his knife into a second panel on the opposite side of the hatch and repeated the process.

  Ryu sheathed his knife and placed his fingertips underneath the newly-exposed lip on the hatch’s sides. He planted his feet and lifted.

  “Come on, Kaneda! This thing’s got to weigh half a ton in this damn gravity!”

  “Right.” Kaneda slung his rifle and stepped in. He grabbed the hatch from the other side.

  “And LIFT!”

  Kaneda’s adrenal implant pumped hot, scalding fluid through his body. His muscles tightened and burned with exertion. His heart pounded furiously. He gritted his teeth and lifted.

  “Gah! Earth’s gravity sucks!” Ryu said.

  Kaneda felt the enhanced muscles in his arms strain to their breaking point, ready to tear free of his diamoplast-reinforced bones.

  “Now slide it to the left!” Ryu shout. “Come on!”

  Kaneda lifted and pulled until a corner of the hatch slid across the floor. He let out a long, slow sigh.

  “Okay! Just hold it there!” Ryu said. He craned his neck to the side and looked past the hatch.

  Twenty needle grenades underneath the hatch detonated. A solid shower of diamond splinters blossomed towards Ryu’s face. He pushed back from the hatch, blurring with speed.

  Five needles struck his right hand where the ballistic armor was thinnest. Three shot through his flesh and sent small streamers of blood and gore upward. Two impacted against his bones and ricocheted off.

  Confused patterns of crimson and flesh-tone danced up Ryu’s arm before his smartskin’s micromind crashed. His form-fitting suit reverted to a pattern of small, black hexagons edged in silver. He pushed away from the hatch, cradling his injured hand.

  “Fuck!” Ryu shouted.

  Through their shared network, Kaneda triggered a localized painkiller injection from Ryu’s smartsuit. Ryu’s blood congealed almost instantly over the wounds, so Kaneda didn’t have to activate the tourniquet at the wrist.

  Caesar materialized outside the hidden room. “My my. Quite impressive. No normal human would have reacted that fast. Bravo!”