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

  The ship gradually picked up speed. Devin carried the tray to the back window where the diamond stood. The Kernel had long disappeared from the sight, but he knew, somewhere among the mist and clouds floated a castle with another life form. A civilization invisible to the naked eyes, but nonetheless capable of playing a role in this physical world, including offering unreserved help to their neighbor.

  “They told us to travel inside the clouds for a couple of hours before leaving the atmosphere,” Mina said, “so that we wouldn’t give away their location … Exactly what’s that diamond thing, do you know? They said in a few years our solar system …”

  Mina’s words faded away as Devin’s attention was drawn to a blurry light in the haze outside. The ship was running at full speed, but the light didn’t diminish. In fact, it seemed to grow brighter with every passing moment.

  “We’re being followed!” he called out.

  As if sensing being discovered, the beam abruptly intensified. “Back to your station, Devin!” he heard Thurman yelling at him in the midst of blaring sirens. “Damn it! We should’ve taken a warship!”

  Knowing he should do what Thurman had told him to, Devin was unwilling to move his legs. The Lorpherinese! They had been lurking outside the Kernel, trying in vain to get the diamond from Lionel.

  A giant shadow emerged behind the light and quickly closed in. Within seconds the diamond was approached by a robotic arm and snatched away, with its chain still attached to Devin’s ship.

  “Turn off the engine!” Devin shouted, dashing toward his chair. It was too late. As the ship jerked backward, he crashed onto the row of tool cabinets alongside the stairway. He heard Thurman and Mina yelling at each other, but the pain in his face and legs overwhelmed other sensations.

  “You alright?” Thurman dragged him to a chair. “We’ve told base to send reinforcement. What else shall we do?”

  “Shut down the engine,” Devin said the words through clenched teeth.

  The enemy ship was dragging them backward. If the chain broke, they might lose the diamond forever.

  Thurman relayed his request to Mina.

  “And I’ll bring it back.” Devin gathered his strength and stood up. The laser saw should be contained in one of the tool cabinets. “Keep tracking the signals from my spacesuit. If the chain breaks before I finish, don’t lag too far behind.”

  After he fetched the saw, Devin stepped into the nearby dressing booth. He browsed through several spacesuits and picked one that had a parachute and a manipulating unit on the back. The diamond might be heavy. Once he retrieved it, hopefully the gears could offer him enough support.

  Mina was saying something but he could no longer hear it with the helmet on. He headed to an exit and caught a glimpse of Thurman searching in the tool cabinets. Good, if the young man could help him. The claw holding the diamond had two “fingers”. Would be faster if they worked together.

  * * *

  Devin wasn’t prepared to see a blue sky when the outer hatch lifted. Even though this wasn’t the right time for sightseeing, he couldn’t help marveling at the surrounding “geography”. Who said Jupiter had no land? The land existed in the sky. Look at the marble mountains with highways winding through them. The cascades of stones in harmonically-mixed colors—amber, almond, chestnut, carmine. The mysterious fountain that kept spraying and glittering under the sun. Life’s everywhere. Didn’t Lionel say so? Maybe various creatures also resided among the clouds, but somehow eluded the human eyes.

  He almost got blown away by the gale when he climbed onto Epianna’s hull. He moved clumsily with two electronic suction cups tied to his waist serving as his “feet”, constantly detaching and reattaching one of them. The enemy ship ahead looked like a sunflower seed with a pointed bow and a wide stern. Twice as big as Epianna, it moved swiftly through the clouds. When he arrived at the chain connecting the two ships, he glanced back and saw Thurman crawling on the surface at a much faster speed.

  Military training is paying off, Devin thought with a grin. But as soon as he reached the enemy ship and attached himself to the hull beside the diamond, the ship made a sharp turn. It looked like the two ships were going to collide into each other at the point where Thurman was located.

  “Jump off, Thurman!” Devin shouted.

  “What’s going on?” Mina’s voice came through the intercom.

  The collision almost shook Devin off. As the ships parted again, Thurman was no longer on the surface. Hopefully he got away in time.

  “Mina, detach the chain and go get Thurman!” It would take a while for Devin to free the diamond.

  “Don’t worry. I have his signal,” Mina said. “I’ll be right back.”

  The chain was released from Epianna, which immediately disappeared downward. Devin took the laser saw out of his belt bag and began cutting on one of the claw fingers. The progress was slow, but he was getting there. Ten minutes later, he was almost done with the finger …

  Another claw protruded out from the hull and clutched around Devin’s chest. He almost dropped the saw under the sudden pain. The spacesuit he was wearing featured a new stretchable design, which provided him with more agility but little protection in a situation like this. He could hardly breathe, but finishing off the first finger brought him encouragement. Meanwhile, he saw a few familiar planes zooming by and plunging into a large cloud where flare and smoke broke out subsequently.

  Hold on for another ten minutes, Devin told himself, biting his lips as sweats dripped down the face. I’m going to make it! My body will be crushed into pieces but I’m going to cut this damn thing and my fellows will find a way to live through a disaster that no other civilization has managed to survive …

  A searing pain accompanying a strange movement occurred inside his chest. The world in his eyes was replaced by flashing colors and lights. Then everything went away, including the pain. He gathered his last strength to hold the saw but in vain. It slipped out of his hand and fell to the ocean thousands of kilos below.

  Then his body relaxed and his head drooped, like two thousand years ago the crucified Jesus Christ.

  * * *

  Far out in the starry field,

  Lies home, the place I will go,

  When the chain has been broken, the dream stolen,

  Lost heart awaken,

  Wind, I need no heaven.

  * * *

  First, there came the images: a stripe curtain hung from the ceiling, numbers flipping on a few medical devices alongside the bed, a nurse writing on a clipboard. Then the sound of a man and a woman chatting somewhere in the room. Despite the sensations, Devin no longer seemed to have a body. Just a mind floating in a patient room, free of pain, but somehow tied to the bed.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Lee?” the nurse said with a smile. “You broke two ribs.”

  Now Devin had regained some senses of his body, along with the languor and tranquility typically generated by pain medication.

  “Where am I?” he heard himself asking.

  “We’re back to Cassiopeia.” Mina and Thurman appeared at bedside. “The base is heading home. There’s nothing we can do for the moment.”

  Seeing the young officers’ faces, the last memory before Devin passed out surfed in his mind. “The diamond …” He looked at them almost pleadingly.

  “I’m sorry, Devin.” Mina lowered her gaze. “They took it. When I came back with Thurman, they had just released you.”

  “They actually had four ships,” Thurman said. “One was brought down by Cassiopeia’s cannon. One by our planes. The third was damaged but ran away, together with the one carrying the diamond. They were extremely fast, but didn’t fight back.”

  “Not ever species is as addicted to weapons as we are,” Mina said meaningfully.

  Devin looked away from the two. “I’d like to be alone for a while.”

  “I know you’ve done your best!” Mina raised her voice. “You think you are going to save the world all by yourself, Super
hero? Now that we’ve confirmed the bad news, we’ll all work together to find a solution—”

  “Could you just leave me alone?” Devin yelled.

  Once the others had left, he wanted to sit up and tear the probes away from his body. What was the point? They were all going to die in a few years. And he once had the solution in his hands … not a solution but something to get them started. Now he lost it, as well as the mind-transferring technique that could at least save a few humans’ souls. He lost their only hope all because his body had failed the challenge. To protect itself from suffering the pain, it quit functioning. It shut down his sensation and turned off his mind, regardless of his will.

  Regardless of the outcome!

  He made a few attempts to sit up. Once again, his body refused to cooperate. What Lionel had said about physical bodies! Are we the masters, or the slaves?

  * * *

  Finally, Devin was too exhausted to keep accusing himself and his hopeless partner. He wanted to look at Jupiter one more time when they were still at a close distance, before he fell into sleep—or better yet, something deeper and mightier than that. The window at his bedside was covered by a cellular shade. He searched the buttons on the armrests and located the right symbol.

  Jupiter was now the size of a moon. Sorry, Lionel! You’ve tried to help. And Melissa … He remembered the poem. Didn’t she ask him to recite it?

  “Far out in the starry field …”

  It was no louder than a whisper, yet when he finished the last word, heaven, a piece of information was unraveled in this mind. How strange! He was sure he had never been exposed to the knowledge before, but it didn’t feel new. The whole process was like retrieving a long-lost memory. Yes, Melissa indeed gave him a gift, and the poem was the password necessary for establishing the link to where the information had been stored.

  He pushed the CALL button on the armrests. He pushed it again and again until the nurse broke into the room and half-screamed at him, “Is something wrong, Mr. Lee?”

  “I need to talk to Lieutenant Commander Cheung, and uh … Thurman.” He was too agitated to remember Thurman’s last name. “And Admiral Crawford. I want everybody here!”

  The nurse dropped her clipboard and ran out of the room. Two minutes later, a group of officers squeezed into the room. They looked at Devin with severity and sadness as if he were about to announce his will.

  “The thing they took away is fake! It is … it’s just the metal case without anything inside. The Jupiter Lord knew the Lorpherinese were watching. While we were drawing away the enemy’s attention, they had secretly sent out a ship and delivered the diamond to Earth.”

  Devin looked around earnestly but met with suspicious gazes from his audience.

  “How did you know that?” Mina asked.

  “I got a mind gift … well, it doesn’t matter! I know the exact longitude and latitude of the place.” He said two numbers.

  “I believe you,” said Admiral Crawford. The yellow and red stains on his beard were perhaps mustard and ketchup. “This is the location of one of our secret military bases, which shouldn’t be known to someone like you.” Then he added in a lower voice, “What else do they know?”

  Mina sighed with relief. “We’ll find out soon. No matter what, Devin, you need to recover first.”

  Devin indulged himself in the ecstasy for a long time after everyone had left. He didn’t remember being so happy and silly in his entire adulthood. Then drowsiness struck back with vengeance and he could no longer stay awake. Before he lowered the bed, he took one last glance through the window at the gas giant. Eighteen thousand years! That was way past the memory of modern human beings, but for a planet born several billion years ago, it was at most a blink.

  “Hey, big guy,” he said to the newcomer as he yielded to the demand of his body. “Welcome to the family.”

  (End of Book 3; Next, Chapter 1 of the next book in the series)

  Books by Fiona Rawsontile

  Science-fiction novel: The Starlight Fortress (Aug 2013)

  Science-fiction story series: Maura’s Gate

  1. Clam (Jul 2014)

  2. Rosetta (Nov 2014)

  3. The Lost Jupiter (Mar 2015)

  4. Strands (Aug 2015)

  Fiona Rawsontile graduated from Syracuse University with a Ph.D. in Bioengineering. She currently works as a neuroscientist in Missouri.

  (Next, Chapter 1 of the next book in the series)

  Chapter 1 of STRANDS The Admission

  “May I say congratulations?”

  Korina took over the letter from her sister and unfolded it, a letter from “gods”. Congratulations! That was indeed the first line. So gods existed, and they understood English, apparently. Why didn’t they simply show up and talk to us?

  Having no interest to read the rest, she gave the letter back to her sister, who ran upstairs to spread the good news. Starting from the previous year, the best high-school senior in the community would be admitted to colleges located in gods’ world, a place said to be safer and grander even than where she was born. It was a lot of work, gods had said, to provide accommodations for each human being, but they made the offer since no higher education was available on Planet Oasis.

  Liars! Korina cursed as she sat in a sofa and waited for lunchtime, occasionally putting up with a vehement hug from one of her siblings. Those were not gods, Grandpa had told her. They were aliens. Last year they took Philip away, and since then his mother had been counting the days toward his summer vacation. Poor woman. She would never see her son again after they had forced him through those cruel experiments as the first human subject.

  And Korina would be the second.

  * * *

  Lunch was improvised for a celebration by adding canned beef and clam chowder to their regular garden vegetable. Restaurant-Style Beef Stew. Normally it appeared on their table only during Christmas, although she felt miserable every time she saw the label. If her family hadn’t decided to move here, she could be eating in a real restaurant on a not-so-desolate planet. Fine, let them take her! Life was suffer either way.

  “I’m going to Grandpa’s place,” she said to her mother when they carried the empty dishes to the kitchen, trying not to draw attention from her sisters who had switched their subject to the routine after-meal debate on fashion, which was mostly groundless speculation of what was popular in New York this year.

  “Now?” Her mother turned to look at her, alerted. “Korina, is everything all right?”

  “I’ll be back before dinner.” Pretending not to have heard the question, she grabbed her backpack and rushed out of the house.

  Albeit being hot, early afternoons were the best time to travel on Planet Oasis, since the air was almost still. Otherwise, one needed to wear a mask and goggles. Due to its light weight and remarkably fine grains, the sand drifted everywhere, swiftly passing through clumps of brown and purple plants, claiming the boundless land as its territory with layers of pearly veins, flooding and receding, not a moment staying put.

  She headed toward a small hill for a while and, once again, had the feeling that she was being followed by something invisible and weightless. She paused, turned around, and sneered. “Why not go ahead and kill me? Think I’m scared?” As usual, after she had said the words and resumed walking, the creepiness seemed to be left behind. Soon she was drenched in sweat and couldn’t wait to get to the cool side of the hill. Grandpa said air temperature on Earth didn’t differ much between light and shadow, day and night, because of the thicker air. She was six when they left, and didn’t quite remember how it felt. But 78% nitrogen, and only 24 hours a day? Imagine that!

  She stopped on top of the hill and surveyed the sky. Connecting the frontal horizon with the back, the planet’s rings were a bluish white consisting of numerous thin lines in parallel, so many that the center appeared to be one solid structure. She used to picture herself running and sliding on the “bridge”. Even now she could hardly associate something so pre
tty with a cluster of irregular stones.

  She shook her head and looked at the valley ahead. As usual, the sight of the white cottage surrounded by purple gardens lessened the fatigue. Her siblings called her “Grandpa’s girl”, not only because she had inherited his straight brown hair and bony cheeks—the rest of the family were on the curly and chubby side—but also due to the fact that she and the old man never ran out of topics together, while, in separation, they were generally taciturn.

  Grandpa wouldn’t let them take her away. She was certain on that. She fetched out her water bottle, took a sip, and sped up toward his house.

  * * *

  “How’s going?”

  Hearing the question, Devin threw a glance at the entrance. Having woken up in the midst of a night, Matt appeared a little pale and feeble. But unlike Devin, who was tired inside out, the young man was a volcano in hibernation, heat and energy stirring beneath. Devin first met him on their comet mission, and had since then enjoyed the friendship—or worship, he might say, judging by the fact that Matt recently cut his neck-length hair short, to “imitate his role model”. What a good young lad! The thought somehow tormented Devin as he remembered other young people in the world, who had been working hard for a future that no longer existed.

  He checked a monitor on the navigation panel. Their ship, named Bigleaf, was represented as a moving dot, beside which a vertical line ran across the screen. STR-OX102. That was the “strand” they had been tracing all the way here. A structure that presumably extended over thousands of light years. Invisible, but real.

  “We just came out of the twenty-fifth jump.” Devin rose from the chair and stretched himself. “Still no sight of the other one, but I wouldn’t make another jump until tomorrow evening.”

  He exited the bridge and proceeded downstairs. Almost 3:00 in the morning. He was yawning and tearing, but a part of him demanded a drink. He entered the kitchen, grabbed a can of beer from a cooler, and sat at the table. How was Kenton doing at home? The old supervisor was for sure in trouble, enduring all the shit that was meant for Devin and Matt, when he should have been getting ready for retirement. Now it had been ten years since Devin started teaming with him, and Devin’s opinion of this said-arrogant colleague was changing. Kenton wasn’t someone you’d call collegial or open-minded. He rarely considered others’ feelings. But at a critical moment like this, he proved to be a man of value and probity.