Ganymede City, Jove Junction, Sol, 5353.11.28-12.01 CE

26.3-26.7 megaseconds since the catastrophe

Important note on dates: I did some math recently and realized I was significantly off in my dating of events taking place in Sol relative to the Gregorian (CE) calendar. Like, more than millennium off. I also was putting the day-of-month number in the middle, which is silly in this format. The month should go in the middle. This chapter corrects both of these problems, but I have not, at this writing, updated the old chapters to match.

So, to be clear, this chapter opens on 28 November 5353 CE, all the other Sol-based chapters to date have taken place in the year 5353 CE, and there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Her name was Sara Najarian, and she was in deep trouble.

She'd been on duty in Ganymede City Tower when three barges had docked on the cargo level, perfectly routine. Everything at Jove Junction was routine, really. The Cities of Jupiter had been orbiting the Galilean moons since time immemorial, sending various raw materials upwell and outsystem, getting other raw materials and finished goods in return, all passing through the Neptune Anchorage. Najarian had sometimes wondered why they bothered. The Cities were largely self-sufficient, as was Neptune Anchorage. They didn't really need anything from the up-and-out. Still, the trade went on, keeping them connected to the wider bubble of human settlement away from Sol.

So when the barges' airlocks opened not on rowdy cargo hands looking for shore leave, but on strangely uniformed men and women who began pointing gun-like weapons at anyone they saw and burning holes through them, nobody was really ready for it.

There was no real police force, let alone military force, on any of the Junction Cities. Port Security's job was mainly acting as bouncers when said cargo-ship crews got out of hand on their leaves. They were utterly unprepared for a boarding action. Even if they had somehow suspected these barges—and nobody had—of having nefarious purposes, they would have had no defense against whatever those weapons were.

Watching on the security cameras until they started to go out, Najarian's superiors were as paralyzed as anyone else. By the time it occurred to anyone to try using emergency releases to cut the ships off their moorings and vent that part of the docks to space, the necessary systems had been overridden. Somehow, these invaders knew the systems and anticipated the only defensive reaction anyone could think of.

They had also already disabled the communications array. Three and a half hours later, Neptune might notice that the steady stream of comms traffic from Jove was no longer flowing, but this would not immediately trigger any alarm. Outages happened. Everything was routine. There were no emergencies so insane as a boarding action by murdering hostiles.

It would probably be days, Najarian thought, before Neptune even really gave it any thought.

The Director had thought so, too. "Who here knows how to pilot anything?" he had asked.

Najarian was the only one to raise her hand. She'd done two turns as a barge pilot, herself, up to Neptune and back.

Her boss had nodded and yanked a data cube out of its socket, practically shoving it in one of her pockets himself. "Find your way through the maintenance tunnels to the shuttle docks. These fuckers seem to know our systems, but I'm doubting they have enough to have them posted in all the crawlways. Get to a shuttle, drug up, burn hard. Set the system to start beaming this data up to Neptune after you're...I dunno, a light-minute out of Jove's influence. Do that before you blast out—even with the drugs you might pass out."

Najarian knew that better than he did, of course. More, she knew what he wasn't saying—a hard burn could kill her.

Still, she had to do something, and not just because he was ordering it. She did not think of herself as particularly brave, but she'd just watched these strange people burn through the dockworkers and anyone else they came upon without so much as a thought. They were certainly heading here for the Tower.

She did what she was told.

It had taken her days of careful movement. She needed to get out, but she didn't dare do anything that might draw attention to someone moving around in the tunnels. Even if she hadn't needed to move slowly, the truth was that she didn't actually know the tunnel map particularly well. She'd gotten lost down dead ends three times.

She knew she was not being especially stealthy, really. If anyone actually thought to start looking for her, heat sensors would find her. For that matter, so would a sensitive nose. Bodily functions did not care if exercising them might leave evidence behind.

She had time to review the data cube on her hand-term a couple of times—audio muted, of course. The...troops, she guessed was the right word...were odd. Their officers looked ordinary enough, if maybe a bit squatter than the Jovian norm. They had a bounce in their step she associated with people from higher-gravity stations, like Newer York. The Jovian cities all tended to spin around 0.6G at their heaviest—a fact she knew from school without ever having really questioned it or put it into context.

The actual soldiers, however, the ones with the guns, were odder. Their skin, where she could see it, was a sickly sort of grey. There was an odd sameness to their features. They weren't identical, exactly, but they all looked like they were siblings. She'd had a friend who hailed from Revi'i once, so she knew some of the diaspora had turned to cloning. But Rob had looked...normal. They'd also been a bit squatter than a Jovian, since Revi'i was closer to 0.8G, but their skin had been a natural shade for a descendant of Dream of Spring, the lighter side of brown. Not this odd, hairless grey.

Finally, she made it to the shuttle docks, and carefully cracked a maintenance hatch...only to see, back turned toward her, the bald, grey head of one of the invaders, gun in hand.

But only one of them. And a shuttle lock showing the green of a docked craft ready to go not much further away.

Quietly, she shut the hatch again, wincing at a click that was probably lost in the usual noise of station ambiance, but sounded painfully loud to her in her current highly strung state. That done, she went looking for a tool locker. Finding one, she grabbed the largest wrench she could, took a couple of careful test swings with it to make sure she could both heft it and deliver the blow she needed, and headed back to the hatch.

Neptune Anchorage, Sol, 5353.12.04 CE

27 megaseconds since the catastrophe

The ongoing silence from Jove Junction was unnerving. It was not unknown for one or more of the mid-well cities to have communications problems. Jupiter's radiation was an unpredictable thing, with surges and flares as volatile as any star.

But it had now been several days since any of the Junction cities had been heard from. There had been a brief, glitchy signal from that direction with a timestamp that suggested a few days after Ganymede City had gone dark, and then nothing more.

Captain Susic was pacing the deck behind his desk, probably not improving the mood of any of the rest of his Tower personnel. Downwell barges were starting to wonder if they shouldn't turn around, unable to raise any of the Junction towers. There were no new upwell barges en route, at least, not that had bothered to report.

He'd raised the alarm, passing the word through the time-compression relay to David's Star. In theory, Neptune Anchorage was an independent polity. In practice, it had close ties to Newer York, and had since the earliest days of the Skip, when it was realized that travel time to David's Star was shorter by far than the normal-space passage to Jove, let alone Old Earth.

The message back from Admiral Erasmus had been...not dismissive, by any means, but it had made it clear that there was a lot going on right now. The news he'd sent back included the invocation of the Diaspora Treaty, so Erasmus promised to relay the report to this Admiral Karenski who had been tapped to coordinate the response to the broader events.

He was brooding on all the ways routine had been disrupted when Lieutenant Blake announced, "Signal, sir."

"From Jove?"

"Not...quite, sir. The vector matches a ship coming upwell, and the timestamp suggests something with slightly less light-delay."

There was something else about Blake's face. It was...bleak. Something in the signal had disturbed the woman, and she was trying to maintain her professional demeanor. He considered waiting to see if she would just tell him what was wrong, but decided he was too itchy for information to play games with his exec right now. "Let's hear it, Lieutenant."

His screen came alight a moment later. There was a very haggard-looking woman in a typical flight suit. No, not just haggard. Exhausted, and unless he missed his guess, starving.

"This is Ganymede Heavy Shuttle 832 to Neptune Anchorage. Do not respond. On 28 November, Ganymede Orbital City was overrun by a force of unknown origin or strength, who proceeded to slaughter most of the station personnel. I managed, under orders, to reach this shuttle, only to find they had anticipated me and disabled its comms. I believe I have them repaired—at any rate, the auto-systems report a comms lock on the Neptune beacon and tell me the transmitter is working. If they're mistaken, I'll probably never know it. I'm about to initiate a second hard burn in Neptune's direction, but it will be weeks before I get there and I won't last weeks. There are no rations aboard, either. I'm not sure why they didn't disable the flight controls, too, but I'm not going to argue.

"If you manage to recover this shuttle, you will find, in an argon-filled storage container, the unfortunate guard who stood between me and this shuttle. There's something very odd about him and the other soldiers who took the Junction, but I have no way to analyze it, even if I knew what to do.

"I'm betting they can count, so even if they somehow missed my burn away from Ganymede City, they will have figured out there's a missing shuttle and a missing guard. As long as they have no idea that I've fixed the comms, they'll have every reason to believe I'm dead, or near as dammit, without having gotten a signal out. That's why it's vital you do not reply, even with a directional beam. Any signal sent on this vector might still be heard by them.

"I will transmit the contents of the data cube I have three times before I burn again. Use it as best you can.

"Sara Najarian, Ganymede Heavy 832, clear."

In fact, while there had been some packet drop-out from each of the three repeats, the final composite was complete enough to chill Susic to the bone. Not for the first time, he cursed the depth of Sol's well. Even from Neptune Anchorage, the light-lag to the relay was several hours, and then there would be the delay as Erasmus digested the information and relayed it on to this Karenski character—

"Sir!" Blake again.

"What is it?"

"Telemetry shows three barges coming upwell from the Junction. They're burning harder than usual, but I still wouldn't expect them for a few weeks."

A few weeks, a few days, a decade, it made no difference. Neptune had no meaningful defenses. It had never needed them. The very best they could hope to do would be to deny docking and hope that whoever this was didn't have some way to force a boarding action without it.

Blake knew it, too. She'd seen the whole signal from Najarian.

Susic realized he'd been staring into the distance when Blake prodded him, saying, "Sir?"

He shook himself, then answered, "Pass the word to David's Star: Red Three. Inform them we'll have a more complete packet shortly."

He heard, rather than saw, Blake swallow hard before she said, "Yes, sir." Then she turned and headed to her station to take care of it.