The Lost Jupiter (Maura's Gate Book 3) Read online

  Table of Content

  Table of Content

  The Lost Jupiter

  Chapter 1 The Message

  Chapter 2 The Storm King

  Chapter 3 The City

  Chapter 4 The Daddy

  Chapter 5 The Gift

  Books by Fiona Rawsontile

  Chapter 1 of STRANDS The Admission

  The Lost Jupiter

  Maura’s Gate, Book 3

  By

  Fiona Rawsontile

  Copyright © 2015 by Fiona Rawsontile

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Chapter 1 The Message

  “What?” Devin shouted, his voice immediately obliterated by the howling wind. “I can’t hear you!”

  The flickering shadow ahead of him waved frantically. It barely resembled a human form, but Devin knew it was Roland, a retired professor specialized in astrobiology. Roland was trying to tell him something. Devin couldn’t see his face, but he simply knew it.

  The storm had escalated into a hurricane. In fact, Devin was no longer on the ground. Wind carried him up and threw him in the midst of clouds, reddish-brown clouds the size of Earth. Now Roland was nowhere to be found. Devin was soaring in the sky at a high speed, turning and bouncing yet miraculously maintaining an upright posture with his body stiff and mouth dry …

  He opened his eyes and gasped for air. Wind lingered inside the sleep cabin for quite a while before it eventually dissolved into hush and darkness. It took him even longer to regain control of his limbs. He turned his head to read the clock on the bed stand. Only 3 am? Felt like he had slept for days. He pushed himself up from the trunk bed and sat on the stool next to a window no larger than a dinner plate. This was his first time to travel in a military spaceship, and he hated it. In his previous missions he always had spacious bedrooms with nice views.

  Lowering his head, he caught a glimpse of the gas giant as the ship made a turn. A familiar image to him, but never from such a close distance. Unlike the majority of his colleagues who were Mars’s fans, Devin had been enchanted by Jupiter since he was a child. The size twice as big as all the other planets combined. The heated ocean of metallic hydrogen. The fierce storm that had been raging for centuries …

  He frowned as he thought of the Great Red Spot. Lately NASA had held three emergency meetings, the contents of which were all classified. Rumor had it that Gary Kinley, the United States Secretary of Defense, had shown up at one of the meetings. Even now, on a trip to one of the worst places you’d ever want to visit in this solar system, Devin knew nothing about those meetings except that an electromagnetic signal from the Storm King had been received a few times since a month ago.

  An English sentence that read, “The day is coming.”

  * * *

  He tried to resume sleeping at dawn but was soon awaken up by heavy knocking on the door.

  “You have a phone call, Mr. Lee,” said Lieutenant Thurman Cooper.

  Devin smiled feebly. Despite all the efforts, he realized Thurman would never call him by his first name. The young officer had amber eyes with steady gazes, in which Devin saw both indifference and determination. How old was he? Thirty, thirty-five? Whatever. With no wrinkle showing on the tanned skin, he looked young to Devin, probably a combined result of incessant military training and personality.

  Devin wanted to ask who was on the phone, but the young man was already walking away. A minute later they arrived at a tiny room that barely fit a table and a chair inside. Devin sat down and found himself facing an old-fashioned LCD screen, which presented a typical remote-communication interface, except that the image window was marked N/A. That was okay. Good, actually. Since he had his fifty-fourth birthday two years ago, he had been unconsciously avoiding photography and videotaping. Besides, at the moment he probably had red eyes and sagging eyelids due to sleep deprivation.

  Before he touched the ACCEPT button on the screen, he heard Thurman saying at the door, “Boss asked me to remind you we are on a mission. Your conversation will be recorded and forwarded to Base and Headquarters when it’s done.”

  Am I an inmate? Devin sighed quietly as he accepted the incoming call, hoping this was his first and only time to travel on a military ship.

  His dismay vanished upon realizing who was calling.

  “Roland! Where are you?” Devin leaned over to the microphone, as if doing so reduced their distance. They had become good friends since the trip to Mullos 17, but the old professor was notorious for not replying emails.

  “I’m in Indonesia,” Roland said in a husky voice.

  No surprise. “Found a fossil of alien animals?”

  Chuckles came from the other end. “In the past two years, I was looking for evidence pointing toward a global earthquake that happened around twenty thousand years ago. A large number of animals and humans died. Recently I came across some cave paintings here, probably of the same age, which actually documented the earthquake.”

  “So?” Devin knew this wasn’t the full story, or Roland wouldn’t have called.

  “The strange part is, in some of the paintings, you can identify two moons in the sky. One the regular size of our moon, another about half in diameter.”

  Two moons? As an astronaut, Devin almost inquired about the color and brightness of the smaller moon, before he realized it was already a miracle for those cavemen to record it as a simple circle. “Are there similar pictures painted before the earthquake?”

  “I think I found one. It didn’t show the second moon, but could be a particular day.”

  Devin didn’t think so. He remembered his daughters’ artwork in elementary school. When they pictured things happening during the day, there was always a sun in the sky. At night, always a moon. That was kids’ logic. If a moon wasn’t represented, it most likely never existed. Of course, he couldn’t prove it to Roland.

  “What’s your theory?” Devin asked.

  “I’m not sure …” There was hesitation on the other side. “Another thing I’ve been thinking of a lot lately. You know, primates came into being a hundred million years ago, even before dinosaurs extinguished. Imagine that! Then half million years ago, we began to have modern humans, the Homo sapiens. Still, things were going rather slow. We didn’t start agriculture until twelve thousand years ago. Since then, it sped up exponentially. So I wonder: does evolution always stagnate in its early stage, or …”

  Roland paused. Devin waited for a while before he asked, “Or what?”

  “Maybe—I’m just guessing—maybe some prehistoric event has made our world a better place.”

  * * *

  Around dinnertime, the transport spaceship arrived at a temporary U.S. base orbiting Jupiter. Devin had heard about the so-called spacecarriers being constructed by a few countries, but he hadn’t been able to appreciate their mightiness until he saw one with his own eyes. The USS Cassiopeia was about the same size as a sea aircraft carrier, but its structure differed. No longer working against air or water when it traveled in space, Cassiopeia had abandoned the traditional streamline design. It looked quite childish, in fact, like a small disc sitting on top of a large one.

  “I know!” Thurman said with a broad smile—the first smile Devin had spotted on the face of the young officer since they met four days ago. “We call it the Toy. It spins. I mean, the top.”

  “And I assume it’s not for sightseeing?” Devin could see the tiny holes alongside the top disc.

  “Different types of weapons are mounted at the rim. During an ongoing battle we can quickly direct the right weapon to a particular directio
n. Ammunition is stored at the center.”

  The transport entered the lower disc through one of the sixteen entrances. Stepping out of the ship onto a mobile platform, Devin was appalled by the sheer size of the hanger desk and its automation. About a dozen ships occupied the space, but instead of being lined up on the ground, each ship was supported by a platform. The platform Devin and Thurman were standing on quickly moved to a designated spot inside a three-dimensional array. Meanwhile, a pliable arm approached them with a small booth at the front end. Within seconds they were transported through an exit to a security-check area.

  “That’s why they kept slashing NASA’s budgets,” Devin said when he and Thurman boarded a tram, similar to what was usually found in an airport people-mover system. “When was it commissioned?”

  “It hasn’t been yet.”

  They arrived at the meeting room twenty minutes later. The sophistication of the equipment would make NASA’s newly-renovated conference building an antique house. Chairs around the long table were made of cushioned materials, but not cloth-and-foam. After Devin sat down, he sensed a few gentle touches on his back followed by readjustments in the chair’s contour.

  “Boss should be here soon.” Thurman left and shut the door behind.

  At first, the room was remarkably quiet, probably a result of sound-proofing. Then a soft and soothing noise came from the distance, and Devin couldn’t help smiling and looking at the windows. It was raining! Outside or somewhere. Streams of water flew down the glass, shifting and wiggling as the wind blew. The humidity of the room also seemed to have increased. He knew it was a simulation, but so what? It felt no difference …

  “Good to see you, Devin!” A voice came from his back.

  Devin turned around to look at the woman standing at the door. The base was under the command of Vice Admiral Theo Crawford. On the trip here he learned there was also a mission commander in charge of this operation, possibly in the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and possibly the one being referred in Thurman’s “Boss said this, boss said that.” But he never thought it would be an old friend.

  Mina extended her right hand as she approached him. She hadn’t changed much since he first met her seven years ago. Neither the unblemished skin nor the limpid dark eyes. Trim as an officer should be. Slim like a teenage girl. But aside from the fact that she had abandoned the black-framed glasses, something else was different, like the way she walked, stood, and attended to others. In short, she had become one of those who would come to Devin’s mind when he heard the term “national security”. Yes, it was our fellow humans who were protecting us, not weapons.

  Devin shook her hand. Now he knew why he was chosen for this mission. It wasn’t about him being a Jupiter fan.

  Mina sat in the chair next to him and asked, “How’s Roland doing?”

  “You didn’t get a copy of our conversation?” Devin said ironically.

  She smiled. “I did, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

  As Devin recounted the story about the second moon, it occurred to him that Roland normally wasn’t a person short of speculations. Maybe he had some hypothesis in mind, but didn’t want to speak it out in a conversation deprived of privacy.

  Mina nodded without making comments. Then she sat straight and gave him a recap of the situation. The last time they received the message was two days before Cassiopeia arrived. Since then, they had set up a direction-finding system that should be able to locate the source of the signal with a resolution of three kilos on Jupiter’s cloud surface, which was roughly equivalent to 0.01% of the longitude of the Great Red Spot. But since then, the other side had remained silent. The all-wave search-and-track system had also failed to distinguish anything unusual inside the Storm King.

  “Who are they?” Mina asked, the question half directed to Devin and half to herself. “Aliens who understand English?”

  “Could it be a prank?” Devin asked, not that he believed it but he was hoping so. Say, a competitor who contrived to draw out the US’s most advanced warship before it was ready to be deployed.

  “The message was embedded in an image.” Mina tapped on the table in front of her, and a touch screen lit up beneath the table’s transparent coating. “Here it is.”

  Devin looked away from the table and studied the colorful image on the wall straight ahead. The sentence, the day is coming, was written in a simple black font similar to Arial. The background was a photograph of a pyramid being constructed in the distance—Devin knew it was half-built, not half-torn, because the stones scattering in front of it were shiny and freshly cut. Raggedly-dressed Egyptians stood in groups, mostly workers, with a few spectators who had kids sitting on their shoulders. Closer to where the camera should have been were two men dressed in shirts and pants, which somehow resembled the modern business-casual attire, though not identical.

  “Does this look like a Hollywood movie studio to you?” Mina asked.

  Devin shook his head. Intuition told him this was a real picture taken thousands of years ago. The worker who was sucking on his bleeding finger, the baby wrapped in his mother’s veil, one of the two outlanders turning and frowning in the camera’s direction … Truth has its power. There are things that simply can’t be replicated.

  “We’ve been sending all kinds of signals back, including the same image with our message. If whoever inside were trying to contact us, why are they silent now?”

  Because you got a hundred missiles aiming at them? Devin wanted to say.

  “Any suggestion?” Mina raised her long eyebrows.

  Devin hesitated. The best strategy was to send in a ship, preferably one that lacked the ability to offend, and pray that the initiator would reveal themselves. But if he brought it up, most likely he’d be the one to carry out the task. However enamored with Jupiter, he was not keen on taking a closer look.

  “Well, if you think of anything later …” Mina stood up, seemingly ready to leave.

  “I’ll go there,” Devin said with a sigh. Did he have a choice? This wasn’t for scientific discoveries any more. The day is coming. What day? In a message from someone who visited Earth at least four thousand years ago, it could not be a cheerful holiday.

  “How are you going to find them?”

  “I’m counting on them to find me. If not, I know my way out.”

  As he said the words, he remembered the dream last night and couldn’t help glancing at the windows. The simulated wind seemed to have intensified. The raindrops were not made of water but a mixture of helium and neon …

  “I’m going with you, then.” Mina’s voice left no room for objections.

  Chapter 2 The Storm King

  On the following morning, Devin and Mina boarded Epianna, a quad-wing transport ship designed for severe planetary weather. Normally the wings were furled and enclosed in cavities along the ship sides. When in need, they could spread out and turn the ship into a dragonfly.

  Before they left Cassiopeia, they had a brief meeting with Admiral Crawford. At first, Devin was quite disappointed with this legendary old man. There was nothing wrong with having a big belly, but he could have done a better job securing the shoulder strap. Though supportive of what they were going to do, the commander-in-chief did not seem to have a backup plan. And when he spoke face to face with Devin, the latter had to refrain from turning his head to avoid the smell of tobacco.

  Once inside Epianna, however, Devin became less certain about his judgment, reflecting on one of the Admiral’s earlier comments.

  “You think they are intimidated by us? Maybe we should be scared of them.”

  * * *

  However mentally prepared, on their way to the Great Red Spot, Devin was stunned by the incredible size of the monster planet. Every now and then he would think they were about to enter the atmosphere, but the surface kept expanding and flattening until half of the universe had become Jupiter, and the other half everything else.

  “This ship went through some flight test, didn’t it?
” Devin asked, watching Epianna unrolling its wings as it headed to the center of the Storm King. If Cassiopeia wasn’t ready to be commissioned, Epianna too might have been brought over in a rush.

  Hearing no response, he turned away from the window. Mina was sitting at her station and staring at the monitor in front of her, but Devin could tell her mind wasn’t there. Still mad at Thurman, he thought, holding back a grin as he relived the earlier episode.

  “I don’t need you for the trip, Lieutenant Commander Cooper,” Mina had said when she and Devin entered the ship and found the young officer waiting inside.

  “I know.” A brief answer, with no indication that the speaker was willing to leave.

  “Then why are you still here?” She raised her voice. “You know the consequence of defying an order from your superior?”

  “Yes, and I’m ready to take it.”

  Since the departure, Thurman had closed himself in a cabin as if he didn’t exist. Devin smiled and leaned to the window. Dark space was receding. A familiar feeling arose inside his chest as Epianna plunged into clear air and blue sky, occasionally blowing away stranded clouds that looked like cotton bolls or jellyfish. A scene he had gotten used to every time he came home from a mission. As he surveyed the cloud top, crazy questions popped up in his mind. Were there birds hovering beneath the clouds? Planes full of young passengers taking vacations during spring break? Traffic jams and car accidents on major highways? Planets! Devin loved planets. However fiery or desolate, their mere existence had brought miracles to the cosmos.

  “Pressure, ten fifty millibars. Temperature, one twenty K,” he heard Mina announcing. “We are about to enter the cloud layer.”

  Devin left the window and headed for his seat. Then he saw her standing up and glancing at the entrance. The irresolution had turned the navy officer back to a young woman.

  “Ur … Devin, would you mind asking that Dummyhead to come out? Get ready for the turbulence …”