Leviathan (Asher in Ordered Space Book 2)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CTA

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Back Matter

  Copyright

  Published by Ordered Space Press

  Copyright © 2015 by John M. D. Hooper

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ordered Space Press.

  This is the Amazon Kindle edition

  This ebook is a work of fiction. All characters, places, names, and events described herein are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locations is coincidental.

  Click here to visit John M. D. Hooper’s website. You can download a free story and sign up to receive news and special offers.

  Acknowledgments

  Since this is my second novel, It will be for my brother.

  I’d also like to thank my furry assistants, Spike and Spooky.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lutetia was a planet of enormous stony deserts where corporations maintained small mining concerns, defended to the teeth against roving bandit gangs. It was officially part of Ordered Space, but clearly no Class I corp had ever been near the place. There was nothing much there that was worth having. Pitchblende deposits with high concentrations of technetium and other rare fission products were the main attraction. Two minor corps periodically quarreled over the mines.

  Asher turned away from the display. “So what’s there for us? Hokozana isn’t really in the mining business. Are we expanding or something?”

  “No, Donnie.” Drienner Marcolis steepled his fingers under his chin and gave Asher a wan smile. “It’s a chance for you to redeem yourself. The miners think they’ve found a new species and they can’t decide if it’s sentient. The Meridian Company contracted an Exobio team from Research to make an assessment. Your father recommended you be attached to the team.”

  “He did?” That didn’t exactly sound like something Maxim Asher would do. Asher had barely heard from his father in the year since the Cythran incident, and he assumed the old man was still angry over that. After Asher and his friend Kaz had helped the last few Cythrans escape the destruction of their planet, Maxim and everyone else in the Exobiology Sector of Hokozana’s Research Division had expected that the remnant of the species would be turned over to them for study. When Asher and Kaz had let the Cythrans leave and make their own way in Ordered Space, the Research people had been among the more vocal proponents of stripping the two Security operatives of their rank or even throwing them out of Hokozana entirely. It was a close run thing that had seen the two of them demoted back to One-Bars, the lowest operative rank, but in the end, their contracts were not terminated.

  Since his demotion, Asher had been assigned a lot of routine work, the kind of thing that would usually be undertaken by a Security operative just out of training. For most of that time he had been working off-shift station security on the Namib Orbital in the Kensit system. The orbital was a manufacturing center in a core system where most processes were automated and the few ops who were occasionally required to be physically present commuted from nearby residential stations, so Asher's new post amounted to little more than acting as night watchman. Several times over the past few months, he had seriously considered quitting Hokozana and looking for work with one of the minor corps, where perhaps his experience would be enough to afford him something interesting to do.

  Now, tonight, Marcolis was back, offering the kind of mission Asher loved. He would be going to a remote, wild planet with a small team. He would be carrying his real weapons, rather than the non-lethal neural interrupter he was given on Namib. It seemed almost too good to be true. Asher made a mental note to thank his father for the recommendation. They had drifted even further apart over the past year, but maybe a polite response to Maxim’s gesture of confidence could go some way to repairing the breech. “I’ll take the assignment,” Asher said.

  Marcolis blinked. “Just like that? You don’t want to hear the details?”

  “It gets me off this floating tomb, right? Just let me know where to be and when to get there.”

  “Very well, Donnie. I am uploading the data now. There is a full briefing packet as well. Good luck. Marcolis out.”

  “Asher out.” The subnet link remained alive for a moment while Asher’s neural net downloaded the mission briefing Marcolis had provided, then it went dead, taking the image of Marcolis with it and leaving Asher all alone on the Namib orbital with half his shift still to go.

  ***

  Asher spent the time going through the mission packet and making sure he understood his instructions. It seemed a straightforward assignment. He was to watch over a team of Research operatives and make sure that they got back to the Hokozana core systems in one piece. Lutetia was a crazy place full of non-corp bandits and sketchy small corps that likely were no better than smugglers. Fortunately, the mines were well fortified and rigorously defended, so the trip should be uneventful as long as they didn’t have to venture into the open deserts.

  There were few details about the new candidate sentient species. It appeared that the Meridian Company, which owned the mine where the aliens had been discovered, was keeping a tight lid on things. Perhaps the Cythran incident had been a wakeup call to corps that discovered new species. Maybe Meridian was not quite as eager to broadcast its discovery to all of Ordered Space the way the Zvezda Company had done in Bright-Dim. The corp war between Hokozana and DiJeRiCo that had been touched off by the auction of the Bright-Dim star system had not quite reached the major involvement levels that had been predicted, probably thanks to the destruction of Cierren Cythra and the removal of the Cythrans and their potential from the equation. Even so, conflict still smoldered at some contested jump-gates and the situation had not yet reached the point where a cease-fire contract was possible. Many corps had been affected, and the Zvezda Company had been entirely destroyed in the early stages of the war.

  The Ferethers, the alien species that had bombed Cierren Cythra into oblivion, had retreated into the background. Asher tried his best to keep tabs on them through news feeds and rumor pages, but the pickings were slim. When it came to the First Cythran Spacelift Corporation he had heard nothing, which was reassuring. Qwadaleemia and her creche-mates, the few Cythrans Asher and Kaz had managed to save from the destruction of their homeworld, appeared to have fallen off the grid entirely. If they had taken his advice, they were somewhere out in Disordered Space working with non-corps, possibly even with pirates. The Cythrans’ technical ingenuity and impressive learning abilities would stand them in good stead in the rough-and-ready underbelly of the Human Zone.

  The team he would accompany to Lutetia included a second Security operative. Asher had hoped he would be teamed up with Kaz again, but instead he was to meet a woman named Niara Chukwudi, a recently-minted One-Bar straight out of the academy on Lindisfarne. He was surp
rised that such a young operative was being sent out on a potentially dangerous mission to a frontier planet like Lutetia. Asher had come into the job with a lot of experience on wild planets, a product of a childhood spent attached to his father’s various scientific missions. Despite this experience, his early assignments had been routine work on Fleet ships and in the core systems. He had been with Hokozana for three years before being tapped by Marcolis to be one of his “fixers,” as the old man called the operatives he used in potentially chaotic situations on undeveloped worlds. This Chukwudi must be a real prodigy, to be getting such an assignment straight out of the Academy.

  There was a Research team going out to Lutetia as well, of course, but apparently the final assignment of operatives had not yet been determined. Asher scanned the long list of potential names, but none really caught his eye. He had hoped that Lorien Worthy, his casual girlfriend from the Lang and Cult desk in Research, might be in the mix, but she wasn’t on the list. In fact, there was no one from Lang and Cult at all, only exobiologists and programmers versed in modeling and analysis. Whatever this new species was, if its sentience or lack thereof could only be determined by statistics and computer modeling, it would likely be something bizarre and non-humanoid. Most sentient species were so different from humans that their intelligence could only be grasped in an abstract way, as variations in patterns of behavior that meant next to nothing to the average human mind. Asher had seen some of these strange beings first hand, and found them interesting, but not terribly compelling. Minds made of energy pulsing through fog banks or sessile creatures vibrating in tune with one another were not something the average person could relate to very easily.

  Among the more interesting notes about Lutetia was one calling attention to the presence of several Greater Kind among the mining corps there. Kind were one of the few known sentients that were functionally enough like humans to become a Participant Species. Quite a few of them were apparently employed in the Meridian Company, which was more or less a Human-Kind joint venture. There were no Kind in Hokozana, so Asher’s experience with them was limited, at best.

  The end of Asher’s final shift on the Namib Orbital couldn’t come soon enough. In the morning, he was to report to the Bubacar Dawood, an inter-system freighter that was taking on cargo at Miranda, the main Hokozana spacedock in this sector of the Kensit system. From there, there was a complicated and contingent schedule of jumps and connections with other ships that would get him, after about three days, to the Gia Venturi system and the Hokozana cruiser Dalian. In a week he would be in Archibald, the star system of which Lutetia formed a part.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Bubacar Dawood was an old, slow-moving vessel with mechanical issues. Asher ended up spending an extra day on the Bubi drifting around the Hufnagel system while the crew scrambled to repair the fusion torch. In the end, Asher was toward the late end of his allotted arrival window when he finally reached the Gia Venturi system and rendezvoused with Dalian. He was the last of the mission team to arrive. Almost as soon as he was aboard, the cruiser picked up its escort vessels, the destroyers Memnon and Fire-and-Forget, and headed for the first of several jumps that would take them to Lutetia.

  Asher was a little surprised to find that he was a minor celebrity of sorts in Research. All of the scientists on the mission team knew him by reputation, partly due to his father’s position, but mainly because of his role in the Cythran incident. The geosci operative and mission commander, a One-Star Scientist III named Amina Popescu, seemed to see some sort of odd humor in Asher’s decision to let the Cythrans escape Hokozana’s clutches. The Exobio operatives, Four-Bar Scientist I Nelson Chaffee and his trainee, Two-Bar Researcher II Tal Ben Aron, did not see anything amusing in the incident. Asher assumed that they had been part of the faction in Research that had been vocal in calling for his dismissal. The mathematician and programmer, Four-Bar Engineer I Leah Minter, was indifferent to the whole thing. She seemed concerned with nothing other than the proper packing and stowage of the uplink receiver and rover computer she planned on taking down to the surface of Lutetia.

  The final member of the team was the second Security operative, One-Bar Junior Op Niara Chukwudi. Asher had introduced himself to her almost right away after his arrival on Dalian. She had immediately struck him a shy and socially awkward kid.“Call me Chuck,” she said, but that was about all he could get out of her. Working with her promised to be quite a change from his usual partnership with the bluff and hearty Kaz.

  ***

  Over the weeks in transit to the Archibald system, Asher trained with Chuck and some of Dalian’s own Security complement once or twice a day in a sparring room on one of the outer decks where the gravity was a bit higher than one g. They tried everything from basic holds and throws to full-contact force-on-force exercises and various scenarios in a training simulator. Chuck was tall and lean, and could more than hold her own in the hand-to-hand stuff. Frequently, Asher found himself on the wrong end of her long reach, and she would lock him down with an an arm bar or strong choke. She was competent in the simulations as well, although, like all raw kids, she had a hard time coping with complex scenarios that Asher knew were beyond the scope of ordinary academy training. In the force-on-force actions she often fared poorly. She was unwilling or unable to give verbal checks and commands, often leading to the other team getting the upper hand over her and Asher.

  “You’ve got to give me a signal there, Chuck,” Asher told her after being blind-sided by a determined but unimaginative young operative named Gabbai. “If you see him get the drop on me like that, you need to give me a shout. Even if we’re working on operational silence, you need to break it if the alternative is me getting iced.”

  Chuck stared down at Asher’s feet. “Sorry, Sir. I didn’t really see him. It all happened before it registered.”

  “Now I know that’s not true. Also, you really don’t need to call me ‘Sir.’ We’re the same rank, after all.” Asher had looked up her scores from the academy, which were intimidating. She had tested exceptionally well in reaction times, decision-making, and environment-awareness. He was certain that she had seen Gabbai’s move on him. For some reason, she was just unable to vocalize when she had to. He was aware of social anxiety and similar personality disorders, and he wondered if Marcolis could let him in on her psych results. She must have been evaluated—all recruits were. Whatever it was she had going on, Hokozana was surely aware of it. Maybe that was the point of assigning her to this mission. Maybe the psychologists thought some real-world action might force her to cope with the issue. Asher could see the promise in her; he didn’t need to know her extraordinary test scores to see that she had excellent combat skills and was whip-smart. There was potential, but he was afraid that her inhibitions were going to get her, or someone else, killed. Marcolis was taking a chance assigning her to this mission.

  ***

  Because of the ongoing conflict with DiJeRiCo, Dalian had to take an indirect path from Gia Venturi to Archibald. Several jumpgates on the more direct routes were controlled by DiJeRiCo allies and subsidiaries. On their way out of the core systems, they were delayed a few times by heavy traffic through the congested gates. After a few jumps, though, they found that they were almost the lone inter-system ship in each new star system they passed through. They were well on their way to the frontiers of Ordered Space, and the megacorp presence in the more distant systems was negligible. They docked at a small orbital in the Wiglaf system and were refueled by what was obviously a single family of the scruffiest, most inbred non-corps Asher had ever seen. “We’re in the boonies, now,” he said to Chuck.

  “Boonies, Sir?” The younger operative looked at him quizzically.

  “You know, the back of beyond. The backwoods. The ass-end of Ordered Space. We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “Kansas?”

  Asher opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Actually, I don’t know what that one means, either. Just something my dad used to
say.” He looked up at the tall young operative. “You ever been this far out from the core before?”

  “No,” she said. “I was born…I am from Anubis. Both my parents were Hokozana operatives. My mother is CivAdmin for Venezia.”

  Asher whistled. Venezia was a Hokozana proprietary planet and the main production center for the Consumer Products division. It was one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced places in the entire Human Zone. The Civil Administrator of a place like that, in charge of corp-public relations and governance, was sure to be a high-level Admin executive. “If your mother has that kind of clout, what are you doing in Security? The ceiling here is pretty low. I’d think you’d be in Admin, or Marketing and Acquisition, or even Intel. Somewhere with real promotion potential.”

  Chuck arched an eyebrow at him. “Aren’t you the son of Maxim Asher?”

  “Touché,” said Asher.

  “I suppose we are all destined to disappoint our parents,” said Chuck. With that, she turned away from the viewscreen where they had been watching the refueling process and headed for the exit that led to the crew bunks. Asher realized that that was by far the longest conversation he had had with her so far.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lutetia was a brown planet, with a scarred surface characteristic of a heavily-bombarded world on the edge of the habitable zone. Its star, Archibald, was small and yellowish-white. There were three other planets in the system, but only Lutetia orbited anywhere near the habitable zone. Its sisters were two gas giants in distant orbits and a ball of rock and ice that patrolled the edge of the system. There were many asteroids near the star and in a band just beyond Lutetia’s orbit, possibly indicating other planets that had been destroyed by tidal forces, or sectors of the accretion disk that had never coalesced into planetoids.