The Dead Planet (The Broken Earth Saga Book 1) Read online

  THE BROKEN EARTH SAGA

  DESTROY THE PLANET

  THE DEAD PLANET

  THE CONTESTED PLANET

  THE DEAD PLANET

  THE BROKEN EARTH SAGA

  BOOK 1

  TJ RYAN

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

  Published by Dungeon Media Corp.

  www.dungeon.media

  Copyright © 2016 Dungeon Media

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TJ RYAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Her ears popped.

  Tara Royce had been warned, back at the Academy during her training, that the physical pressures on a body when coming out of strata were intense. Strata—or substrate space travel—had allowed the human race to expand out through the stars. Faster than light travel was the only way to get from one place to another inside the vast empty dark of space.

  Especially when your home planet was an uninhabitable rock spinning through space.

  After a thousand years the home planet was still lifeless. If they ever wanted to live there again, it was a lifeless rock they needed to protect.

  Which was where Tara and the other Defense Engineers came in.

  Leaving strata for real space, her Pod seemed to come to a sudden, lurching halt even as it continued forward at normal speeds. For a moment she was seeing stars that weren’t really there as the pressure in the command room built up to three atmospheres and then settled back down to one. Her bulky transit suit helped ease the pain a bit but the simulators really didn’t prepare you for the real thing. When she felt like she could take a breath again, she opened her eyes.

  There it was. The blackened, dark sphere that was Earth. She couldn’t see the planet itself, of course. Roiling masses of dust particle clouds filled the atmosphere. After several attempts to clean the air had failed miserably, it had been decided that nature would do over time what humans could not do with technology. Which was all well and good, except that nature was a patient woman. Tara…not so much. She wanted to know what was down there right now. She knew she would never get the chance, but that didn’t keep her from dreaming.

  The smaller white circle of the moon was a stark contrast against both the black of space and the ruined Earth, especially from this distance, but the lights of Overwatch burned brightly on the lunar surface. Around the Earth, the network of Defense Pods orbiting the planet blinked in syncopated rhythm as well. Earth might be dead, but there was still life all around her.

  Tara gratefully unlatched the suit’s oversized gloves from their wrist couplings and let them drop to the white matte surface of the floor. With her fingers free she could unbuckle herself, and then strip out of the rest of the transit suit and let it drop in a heap as well. The catheter tube was a little tricky to slide out but she wasn’t going to be sorry to see that go. Regular trips to the vaculet for this girl from now on!

  And, seriously…five million credbits to design a transit suit that made her feel like an inflatable blimp for the entire seven days of the trip? It must have been designed by a man. She was so, so, so glad to be stripped down to her gray, one-piece underclothes. Cut high at her hips and low at her breasts it didn’t cover much. Not that it mattered. Just like leaving her suit on the floor didn’t matter.

  When you were the only person in the entire Defense Pod, you could be as much of a slob as you wanted to. Right now all she wanted was to stand up, stretch her legs, and watch Earth approach through the front viewport.

  A smooth, deep voice nagged at her. “I do not recommend leaving your chair until we have taken Earth orbit, Engineer Royce.”

  She stuck out her tongue at the voice. Alone was a relative term, she had to admit. Aiden had been with her since the start of her mission, making a nuisance of himself, and keeping her sane. It was lonely out here with no one else to talk to. The Artificial Intelligence and Diagnostic Network—AIDN—was the closest thing she had to real company.

  “I’m fine,” she promised him. There was no reason to look at any particular part of the ship when she talked to Aiden. He was everywhere. “I’m just getting a better view.”

  “Earth is still four hundred thousand, three hundred and six kilometers away,” he advised her. “The view will not be improved by you getting out of your chair to stand in front of the viewport.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  That one took him a moment. AI’s might have triple the computing capacity of the human brain but they still couldn’t seem to grasp human sarcasm.

  The front viewport was a rectangle of carbon fiber-reinforced glass two feet thick, and not much longer than she was tall. At five-seven, that might not be saying much, but the view was still everything she could have hoped for. Tara stood there, watching the dark orb get closer. She knew from her training that the dark color was created by a thick layer of microdust particle clouds covering the entire globe but that was just the science. It was starkly beautiful, and she couldn’t believe her luck in landing one of the precious few assignments as a Defense Engineer.

  She ran her hands back through her short, honey-blonde hair, and stretched. Her bare feet felt the cold of the floor. Her skin itched from being inside the transit suit for days. She needed a good sonic cleansing, that was for sure, and she needed to do her daily hour of fitness training down in the rec room to keep her muscle tone, but right now all she could think about was getting her Pod to its post and meeting the other Engineers. She was too excited to relax, too keyed up to take a soothing shower. This was it. At twenty-six years of age, this was going to be the best thing she had ever done in her entire life.

  The console next to her beeped. The command room wasn’t big. Nothing in the Pods had much space, for that matter. In fact the chair she had just been sitting in took up most of the space with its bulky stasis cushions and the three-tiered console of controls and monitors on both the left and the right of it. Still, some clever person had decided to make room to put redundant controls near the viewport. She looked down at the flashing light now, and blinked.

  That was an incoming message. Oh! She was within Comm range now of the other Defense Engineers. One of them must be trying to raise her to say hi, and welcome her to the neighborhood. Stellar.

  She bent down to press her thumb on the button that received the call, grinning like a little girl on Christmas. “This is Defense Pod Alpha Victor 2-7-7. Glad to be joining you here at—”

  “Don’t just sit there, 2-7-7,” a man’s voice snapped back at her. “Get your ass down here and help!”

  Tara stared blankly at the Comm panel. What the hell kind of greeting was that?

  “My long-range sensors are confirming the other Defense Pods are active,” Aiden told her in that same calm voice. “It appears they are under attack.”

  Swearing under her breath—bagging hell—Tara raced back for her command chair, wishing now that she was in something other than her underwear. She locked the consoles into battle mode and pulled up the tactical screens. “Aiden, how long before we ca
n engage with the enemy?”

  “Seven minutes.”

  She flipped a few switches, running pre-checks on all systems from maneuvering thrusters to weapons. “Any way we can cut that time down?”

  “It will require extreme acceleration, Engineer Royce.” She wanted to scream at him to stop sounding so calm when she was a bundle of nerves. “I do not recommend that course of action based on the human body’s ability to withstand only a given amount of g-force in any—”

  “Aiden, shut up and engage main engines.”

  “As you wish, Engineer Royce. Might I suggest hanging onto something?”

  “You mean like the soft core of your cerebral processor?” she snarled, wrapping her hands tight around the sides of the chair’s armrests.

  She heard the rumbling whine of the main engines coming online. Particle thrust required an enormous energy draw but when it kicked in—

  It.

  Was.

  Pure.

  Speed.

  The transit suit would have cushioned her body from the forces of acceleration better, but the command chair let her sink into its soft protection and except for the fact that she couldn’t pull in a breath for five seconds or better, it didn’t hurt. Much.

  Then they were stopped, here in the middle of Hell.

  What Tara couldn’t see from further back in space she saw all too clearly now. The blinking blue lights on the Defense Pods were actually flashes of concentrated solar radiation. Flash lasers. Nasty at close range, they could slice through metal like it was butter, and through any other kind of material like it didn’t even exist. They dispersed their energy quickly though, and after one kilometer they were nothing but light particles again. Great for close combat. Less chance of lancing through another Engineer’s pod that way.

  Defense Pods spun through high orbit in all directions. Tara ground her teeth together and worked the angles into her controls. Aiden could fly the Pod if she gave him control but he wouldn’t know where she wanted him to go at any given second.

  Right now, she didn’t know where she wanted to go either.

  Black starships twice the length of the Pods were everywhere. She counted six, seven, eight of them in one looping sweep, as she avoided flash lasers and more conventional ballistic energy bolts and combatting ships. She felt her Pod tremble with the impact of something and the internal sensor went crazy. She was fighting to control her flight path and shoot at anything that moved and wasn’t human.

  “Aiden!” she screamed. “Raise viewport shield. Ionize the hull!”

  “Of course.”

  The material the Pods were made of could be energized so that most laser-based weapon fire would be absorbed and harmlessly filtered away into space again, like lightning soaked into the ground by a lightning rod. Aiden activated the ionization field just in time. The instruments registered several more strikes from the enemy ships but nothing that affected her Pod.

  “Targeting on,” Aiden advised her.

  Several red reticles appeared on the instrument displays. They followed the holographic images of the blocky enemy ships, tracing each of them as they swooped and curved and streaked, raining death down on the Engineers. She made several shots. All of them missed.

  Her Comm panel buzzed at her. The same voice from before. “Try hitting some of the targets, 2-7-7.”

  “Right back at you,” she barked, banking up sharply to avoid both an enemy ship and a Pod trailing after. “How many alien ships?”

  “We count fifty-six.”

  That many? “Are we bringing in Pods from the other side of the Earth?”

  “Wow you are new. We never bring in the entire defense net. We can’t leave any part of the Earth undefended.”

  Right, right. She remembered now, from the sims. Sometimes alien races would launch an attack on one side hoping for the entire defense net to swoop in and leave a gap somewhere they could exploit.

  Worse than that, Overwatch was stuck on the moon and out of position to do more than take potshots at the invaders.

  “So,” Tara started to ask, then paused to take aim and strike a single hit against a fighter before it could shoot her. “How many Pods do we have engaged in this encounter?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “That’s it?” She felt like her heart had stopped.

  “Welcome to Earth, 2-7-7. I’m Tyrese, by the way.”

  “Tara,” she told him. “Coming up on your left.”

  She fired at the same time that Tyrese’s Pod did, four streaks of blue flash lasers aimed at the same enemy fighter, and she had the satisfaction of seeing her first kill. The alien ship crumpled inward as their flash lasers punched holes through its outer hull, imploding like a wad of paper until their engines exploded in a silent cloud of gas and debris.

  The fight continued for longer than Tara was able to keep track of. Voices came and went over her Comm, and Aiden gave her helpful suggestions when he felt like it, and she practically drained her power reserves from the repeated blasts of her flash lasers. Every Pod had four installed, two forward and two rear-facing mounts. They could all be adjusted back to front, and Tara’s were being overused. The simulations were never like this. The reality of her first battle encounter was one of chaos, confusion, and stark fear.

  Ships exploded all around her. Debris bounced off the hull. Enemy laser fire flashed in arcing lights as the ionized hull diverted their energy away. She heard herself screaming at one point as she fired multiple shots into an enemy fighter that had nearly rammed her straight on. The ship exploded in front of her Pod, and she cheered as she came out the other side of the remains.

  Then, just like that, the encounter was over. Earth’s sky was clear of any ships but the Defense Pods. Chatter filled the Comm lines. Engineers were asking for assistance, or calling to certain other Engineers to ask if they were still alive, and generally congratulated each other on a job well done. They had saved the Earth.

  The dead, dark planet was still theirs.

  “Hey, 2-7-7,” said that familiar voice from her Comm panel. “Tara? You still with us?”

  “Alive to tell the tale,” she told him. “That was intense. Is it always like that?”

  She heard Tyrese chuckling. “No way. Sometimes the enemy brings more ships.”

  Great, she thought to herself, leaning back in her command chair. She really needed to soak in that sonic cleansing now, and let the audio vibrations numb her brain.

  What in God’s name did she get herself into?

  CHAPTER TWO

  More than a thousand years ago, the war began.

  This was stuff that every little schoolchild on any of the colony worlds knew. How one day, without provocation, ships appeared in the sky and began raining death from above in the form of particle beam weapons—technology that humans had never seen before. These were pyramid-shaped vessels with articulated red hex-shell exteriors that were impervious to anything short of a land-to-air based fission missile.

  Thus began the first and only war between humans and the Krii Zalite. From the beginning it was a war of scorched earth, one that the humans didn’t plan to win so much as survive. The Zalite had come looking to claim Earth’s resources for their own. This included the living inhabitants for food, medical resources, and energy. Humanity would never allow it.

  So they scorched the red pyramids right out of the sky. In the process, the fission warheads made the Earth uninhabitable for the next five thousand years or more.

  Now the best they could do was guard their homeplanet until it showed signs of coming back to life. Until she could be a home for its displaced population once more.

  This was not the first alien race humanity had come in contact with, of course. The Greeberu, the Ascheloo, and others all had set trade contracts with the Earth. It was a time of prosperity. A time when humans had reached out to the stars and held them in cupped hands like precious gems. A golden era.

  All destroyed in a moment by an attack so devastating th
at the human race nearly ceased to exist.

  If not for the blazing foresight of a scientist ten years before the arrival of the Krii Zalite, it very well might have been the end. Their attack nearly cracked the Earth in two. The counterattack that drove them away left the planet uninhabitable. One scientist, Viktor Oolatheil, saw the need for world-wide evacuations long before, and the planet had been rigged with escape pods. Only a fraction of the population was saved, but that fraction spread out through the stars, and prospered.

  It was years before humans turned their eyes back toward their home planet. By then, alien species were already starting to encroach. A dead world, abandoned by its inhabitants, was fair game for anyone to claim possession of. If humans were going to save the planet for themselves, they would have to maintain a presence, and maintain their claim, and more than that. They would have to fight to keep what was there.

  Thus, the Defense Engineers were created. Tara Royce was the newest in a long line of proud individuals defending the homeworld from attack, looking forward to a day when they could return to the soil below.

  The Zalite were gone, but there were still plenty of other bastards out there in the universe who wanted to get their claws—hooks, tentacles, whatever—in the Earth. Why they wanted it so badly Tara never understood. It was enough that other species wanted it, and humans didn’t want to give it up.

  What would they find there, she wondered. Standing in her own quarters, her small bedroom with its padded walls and recessed utilities, Tara flipped through the reports that had been downloaded to her data pad.

  She had dressed for the day in one of several identical jumpsuits, all white except for the black vertical stripes at each shoulder that marked her rank of Engineer. It was a little snug, and she might be embarrassed at the way it cupped and accentuated her chest if she wasn’t alone on the ship with an androgynous AI. Even if that AI had the most silky smooth voice she’d ever heard, he wasn’t a real man. Engineers lived their careers alone by necessity. They had to be always at their post, which meant in their Defense Pod. They could never once take a break to go visiting with the other Engineers. If any of them let their guard down, even once, it could create a hole in the defense screen that an attack could punch through.