Chris Pourteau - Masada’s Gate

The SynCorp Saga Empire Earth

Book 2

by

David Bruns and Chris Pourteau

First Kindle Edition: May 2019

This e-book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

Copyright 2019 by David Bruns and Chris Pourteau.

All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of Hip Phoenix Publishing, LLC.

Cover design 2019 by Tom Edwards. http://tomedwardsdesign.com/. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Cover lettering by Steve Beaulieu.

Editing by Michelle Benoit.

Formatting by Polgarus Studios. http://polgarusstudios.com.

Many thanks to our beta readers Jon Frater and Alison Pourteau. Were particularly grateful to Jon for his guidance related to Judaism. Dr. Yvonne Baum, MD, helped Isaac Brackin diagnose Tonys condition. E.E. Giorgi, Nick McLarty, and Bill Patterson each provided insights on specific technical topics. Input from all these folks helped make Masadas Gate a better novel for you. A special thank you to Nicholas Sansbury Smith, whose wisdom and guidance helped us launch this second SynCorp series.

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Ruben Qinlao Approaching Darkside, the Moon

The Roadrunner shuddered.

Ruben Qinlao flinched. Not from fear the ship might disintegrate around them, but from knowing what would follow the turbulence.

This fucking thing is gonna shake apart, Richard Strunk said.

And there it was, the fear voiced out loud. Strunks bulk, lumpy with muscles, loomed in the passenger seat behind him. It struck Ruben in that moment how closet-like the Roadrunner had become in the mad-dash escape from SynCorp HQ. And how Strunks oppressive presence only added to the stress of the situation. In a way, Tony Taulke was lucky he was unconscious.

Enough of that, Ruben thought. Not helping.

Pushing off the paranoia, he reached forward and patted the console, muttering words of encouragement under his breath. It was the ritual hed perfected as the shuttles engines had spat and sputtered on the flight from Mars to Earth. The little ships stealth design, obsolete though it might be, and lack of transponder had kept them invisible from tracking via the corporate network. Only sensors targeted right at them or a human eye watching them fly past would see them. The engines, on the other handthose seemed to need personal reassurance. The soft touch of a friend.

Talking to it aint gonna help, Strunk said. Somewhere in his voice, the natural confidence of a man whod relied on his size all his life tried to see beyond the fear of a man strapped into circumstances beyond his control.

Her, Ruben found himself saying for no reason. Not it. Then, in a mimic of Strunks drawling baritone, And it aint gonna hurt.

The trick this far out wasnt staying invisible. That was the easy part, if you flew low enough. Without the help of automated guidance, though, the trick out here was to avoid crashing.

By staying below official flight paths trafficked daily by freighters and transports, theyd be fine. That meant avoiding the Moons overlapping sensor webs used to prevent ships from crashing into one another by slaving their nav systems to control their approaches with algorithm-perfect accuracy. The sensor webs were narrow for efficiency and to avoid signal dispersion, which promoted sensor ghosts. It was easy enough to land undetected if you did it far enough out from the main docks of Darkside proper, away from civilization.

The Roadrunner shook again. Strunk, for once, held his tongue.

Were fine, Ruben said anyway. The ships adjusting to lunar gravity. And were getting some wave interference from the artificial gravity generators in Darkside. Old ships like this one dont have

Strunk made an obnoxious snoring sound, like a pig trying to breathe in vacuum.

How much longer? he asked.

Just a few minutes. Rubens answer was instinctive, distracted. He was having trouble locating the old drill sites. The latticework of lunar caves was still there, but the Roadrunners sensors, like everything else on the ship, seemed sleepy with age. Im coordinating the old maps in the ships databank with what I can find on CorpNet to

The space pig made his air-sucking sound again.

Tony needs help, Strunk said. If he dies, Im gonna make sure you do too. Slowly.

Ruben rolled his eyes. Wouldnt want to kill your meal ticket, now would we?

Sometimes, he swore, Strunk had no brains at all. Just more muscle, pressing on the inside of his skull.

But Strunk wasnt wrong. Theyd staunched the flow of blood from the knife wound in Tony Taulkes chest, not an easy thing to do in zero-g. Keeping him unconscious, aided by a shot of painkillers, had helped keep the wound from opening back up. But Ruben had no idea if theyd merely restricted the bleeding to internal. Clotting was a notorious problem in space. You could bleed out from a paper cut under the right circumstances. And Tony was almost sixty. The wound was close to his heart. He needed more than the minimally outfitted medkit in the Roadrunner to survive. But first they needed to land safely.

Imaging from the ships sensors overlaid the old maps stored in her databanks. Ruben was looking for something very specific: two vertical shafts and one thin, horizontal tunnel connecting them.

When the United Nations had first mapped potential sites for their new lunar colony, the UN engineers had dug five tunnels straight down into the Moons surface around the Albategnius Crater. Named Alpha through Echo, four were abandoned relatively quickly when Point Charlie was chosen as the perfect colony site: stable rock foundation, nearby minerals, and enough sublunar ice to create a small ocean. LUNa Citylater renamed Darksides End by the Company and now simply called Darksidestood over Point Charlie, a testament to mans engineering ingenuity. But connected to it by a long tunnel was one of the rejected sites: Point Bravo. Ruben hoped it, abandoned like the others, would also remain forgotten.

And there it is, he muttered. Grateful they no longer needed them, he cut the minimal thrust of the unreliable main engines and cut in the parking thrusters to slow their descent. Their momentum should get them to Point Bravo.

There what is? Strunk asked.

Before Ruben could answer, an alarm sounded. A red console light flashed.

What the hell is that? Strunk demanded.

Weve lost the forward portside thruster, Ruben explained, mostly to himself. Were dipping.

Fuck that!

Strunks voice seemed to demand either the ship right itself, or hed kick its ass.

Stay calm, please, Ruben said, his fingers pushing buttons. One screaming baby at a time. He was tempted to apologize to the Roadrunner for Strunks outburst. Hed become just that superstitious.

The small ship listed to port and forward, angled by its three active thrusters in the direction of the one that had failed. The idea of cutting back in the main engines flashed briefly through Rubens mind, but that would simply cause them to overshoot their destination. And the engines were so unreliable, reigniting them could make things worse.

Repeated attempts to reengage the dead thruster werent working. And he didnt have time to sweet-talk the old lady. They were starting to spin. Darksides arching dome loomed on the lunar horizon. Ruben could see a freighter being drawn in by SynCorp Central Control toward the colony docks. Then it was gone, swept beyond his view through the forward window as the shuttles spin accelerated.