Guardians of Jupiter (Void Dragon Hunters Book 1) by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction space dragons mil-sf space opera
Publisher: Knights Hill Publshing
Published: 2018-03-09T22:00:00+00:00

4

They do not.

I throw up four times in the first 24 hours. I knew this was going to happen, because I puked on the voyage out to Leda, too. They say it’s something to do with adapting to different gravitational forces—1 G on Earth, 0.5 Gs of artificial gravity on your typical spaceship, the transition messes you up—but I was fine on the surface of Leda, when we were trekking back and forth between 0.7 Gs in the test facility and micro-gravity outside.

I think it’s just that I don’t get along with spaceships.

This one, the minesweeper Tancred, doesn’t even have artificial gravity except on the bridge and in the berths. I lurk in my berth, which I share with Milosz, for our first week out, because it’s easier to clean up puke from the floor than when it’s floating in the air. Milosz is really nice about it, and brings me microwaved foilpacks of bouillon.

When I finally venture forward, we’re three million klicks from Leda, burning through the Jovian Belt.

Jupiter hasn’t always had an asteroid belt of its own. It had seventy-ish small moons in addition to the Big Four, but now it has millions of satellites, ranging from the size of a teacup to 624 Hektor, which is 400 kilometers long. When the Void Dragon ate the sun, it consumed 68 percent of its mass. Everything spiraled further out as the sun’s gravitational field weakened. Imagine our solar system expanding like a balloon being inflated. The relative locations of solar system bodies would have stayed the same. But in the midst of this, we dragged Earth out to Jupiter, and because Earth is a massive body in its own right, and it was preceded by an artificial gravity point, it dragged some of the asteroid belt along with it.

On top of that, the artificial gravity point we cast into Jupiter’s core increased the size of its Hill sphere—the region where its gravity rules supreme—from 0.36 AUs to 0.71 AUs. As a result, it captured a bunch of its former trojans, plus more asteroids whose orbits had been perturbed by Earth’s transit.

What this means for the minesweeper Tancred, and me, is that there are thousands of places out here for the Offense to hide.

I visit the bridge and watch asteroids with numbers but no names float across the big screen in front of the pilot.

“It’s not to scale,” the pilot says. “These rocks are millions of klicks away.”

I appreciate the reassurance, although I’m not sure that’s how he means it. “Can we see Beachy Head yet?”

Beachy Head: the name given by the squad to Jovian Satellite 38759, our destination, a 2-klick radius rock where the Navy wants to set up a surveillance outpost. The squaddies take it in turns to name “their” rocks. This was Paul’s pick. Apparently, Beachy Head is where he comes from on Earth.

The pilot laughs at me, not unkindly. “Another week.”

It’s very quiet on the bridge. The pilot must get bored. The Tancred has only two crewpersons: the pilot and co-pilot, who alternate 12-hour shifts.

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