The Contested Planet (The Broken Earth Saga Book 2) Read online

  THE BROKEN EARTH SAGA

  DESTROY THE PLANET

  THE DEAD PLANET

  THE CONTESTED PLANET

  THE BROKEN EARTH SAGA

  BOOK 2

  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

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TJ RYAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The constant hum. That was what Tara Royce finally decided was keeping her from sleeping.

  Overwatch, the defense base constructed on the “dark side” of the moon, was powered by a solar generator far more advanced than the ones she was used to back in the human colonies. Living among aliens as Tara had for the first twenty-six years of her life, she had grown accustomed to alien power sources. Transient passive energy conductors. Biogenetic organisms grown specifically to be living batteries. Things like that. Being here now, orbiting homeworld in her room in Overwatch, she was still acclimating herself to the cruder ways of human beings.

  Tara scoffed, pushing her hands back through her honey-blonde hair the way she did whenever she was nervous or frustrated. She’d let it grow out in the six weeks she’d been restrained here in Overwatch. Now it reached her shoulders. There wasn’t much more to do here in this room than grow her hair and work out to maintain her strong, lithe figure. Because this wasn’t just a room. This was her prison cell.

  Oh, General Ashton hadn’t said as much, and he probably never would because that wouldn’t play well in the official record. Still, they weren’t going to give a medal to someone who had gotten her defense pod destroyed in her first few days of being a Defense Engineer, and who then broke the quarantine around Earth.

  She wished her room had a window. She hadn’t gotten a glimpse at the broken planet since she’d been dumped here. Not that there would be much to see. For one, the planet was shrouded in the waste-cloud dust spawned by a destructive war with a conquering alien species centuries ago. Nothing to see that way. Then there was the problem of being on the dark side of the moon, facing away from the Earth.

  Odd, she thought, how that name had stuck even after all this time. She knew her history. This side was always facing away from the Earth. It was never seen, so they called it the dark side even though it faced the sun more often than not. History was a favorite subject of hers, back at the Academy. She knew all sorts of little tidbits like that. Like how the Earth wouldn’t be livable again for centuries.

  From the left hip pocket of her gray jumpsuit, Tara took out the little clear container. She shook it and listened to the single small object inside rattle around before putting it away again. Keeping this secret from the security soldiers here at Overwatch had not been easy. Maybe someday she’d tell someone how she hid it… but for right now, she shivered to remember it.

  This had to be kept secret. If the administrators of Overwatch knew what she’d found, they’d take it from her and bury it—literally—to keep anyone else from finding it. Then they would bury her to keep her from talking—also literally. If they knew she had found a seed among the debris in the probe she has collected from Earth, a real living seed, the fight for planet Earth would rage even stronger. There would be war.

  Some secrets were worth killing for.

  Tara threw herself back down on her cot in the corner of the room. This was not how she expected it to be when she joined the Defense Engineers. She was supposed to be defending the homeworld from invading alien species who wanted to claim the potential resources the dead planet represented. Humanity wanted to keep Earth for themselves. They were looking forward to the moment when it would be able to support life again, and fought hard to keep it safe from alien attack.

  Well, safe maybe wasn’t the right word.

  She patted the side pocket of her jumpsuit again. Maybe that day was closer than anyone realized.

  The white ceramic walls of her room curved up to the sloping ceiling. The plain sameness of the place was beginning to get on her nerves. It was like a sensory deprivation chamber. They allowed her to go out for two hours each day, by herself with no one else around, to stretch her legs in the recreation area. The base had artificial gravity, of course, but without regular exercise in an environment like this, a human body would soon begin to lose muscle mass. Even if she was a prisoner, she was still a Defense Engineer. They wouldn’t want to waste the substantial investment that they’d put into training her. Eventually, they would put her back in a Defense Pod and get her back to defending the Earth.

  At least, that was what she kept telling herself. With each day that passed, she believed it a little less.

  She thought about the Defense Engineers, particularly Engineer Tyrese, every day since she arrived. Their trial had been scheduled for the day after their arrival, but for Tara that day never came. She hoped Tyrese’s trial went well. It had to have gone well. He did nothing wrong.

  She did nothing wrong, for that matter. She was just following orders.

  The color of the walls transitioned into a muted blue color. That was her signal that it was time for her next meal. The food was the only way that she could keep track of time in her confinement, because it was always the same thing. Breakfast was food substitute cubes and strips of something that had been flavored to resemble thin strips of meat although she doubted that it was ever really meat. Lunch was cubes of hydroponically grown fruit and something that was close enough to bread that she didn’t think too much about how they wouldn’t have real grains to make flour here at Overwatch. Dinner was more cubes that tasted like pasta in a cream sauce. Once a week they spoiled her by bringing her a plate of actual pasta, probably imported from the colonies on a regular supply run.

  It’s funny how certain aspects of cultures long past survived. Food was one thing humanity cherished, and while the ancient races of Earth have long past, their foods and a few other odd things survived. Tara’s stomach grumbled at the thought of her favorite dishes.

  Each of the meals came at the same time of day. This one was lunch. That made it one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Tara pushed herself up from the bed, stretching and wondering if this would be another day when the only face she saw was her own in the mirror. On her way to the door of her room she put her hand to a recessed panel. Everything in the room was operated by a hand panel. This one activated the table and chair. They slid out from the wall, a narrow rectangle for the table, and a low square block for the chair. Not exactly fine dining, but at least they weren’t making her eat off the floor.

  It’s a good thing they’re letting her eat at all, really. She pushed that thought from her mind as her stomach grumbled again, distractin
g her from her thoughts.

  The door locked from the outside. That was one of the ways she knew she was an inmate in prison instead of a guest of Overwatch. If she was a guest they would have let her leave whenever she wanted.

  Her meals were slid in on their covered tray through an opening at the bottom of the door. She was supposed to stand back until the tray was in the room, and then when she was done eating she was supposed to return the tray to the spot on the floor where it would be collected through the door, and then she would be alone again until the next meal time…

  Only this time, the door opened.

  Tara was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to do at first. There was someone here. She recognized him right away but it still took her brain a few minutes to kick her body into forward momentum. When it did, she stood at attention in front of the man, bringing her hand up to touch her forehead with her first two fingers and her pinky out straight, the ring finger curled back in. The Defense Engineer’s salute.

  “I see you remember your protocol,” Lieutenant Danvers said, one eyebrow arched in an amused expression. “You aren’t expecting me to salute back, are you?”

  Actually, yes. She had been. Danvers wasn’t a tall man, barely an inch or two over Tara’s own average height, but he was as solidly built as a thruster engine and could roar just as loudly. And although she’d only seen him here at Overwatch a few times when she was first brought into the station along with Tyrese Gypsum, she knew he was a career military man. Being second in command to General Ashton, she would have expected him to insist on proper protocol.

  She let her hand drop back to her side, shifting on her feet and finally settling for clasping her hands together behind her back in a sort of parade rest stance.

  He scoffed like he was amused at her uneasiness. Tara could not decide if she hated this man, or if she understood him. He had the most piercing pair of blue eyes she had ever seen and a jaw that could have broken stone and probably had broken several men’s fists. He was strong and masculine and aloof and completely, utterly, unapproachable by someone in her position.

  So, yeah. She was pretty much attracted to him. Not that she would ever let him know that.

  “Wondering why I’m here?” he asked, as he stepped out of the doorway and into her simple room. He scanned every bit of it and even though the table and the commode and even her comms panel was recessed back into the wall where they belonged, Tara felt like her austere living quarters were below his standards.

  “Actually, sir,” she said. “I was expecting my lunch.”

  He turned back to her from the middle of her room, that same arched expression on her face. “Well, then. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. Come with me.”

  “Sir?”

  That condescending smirk crossed his face again. “You do want to eat, don’t you?”

  She suddenly wanted to tell him no, that no matter how much she had wanted to get out of this room just a few minutes ago, right now she would rather stay here for the next solar month rather than go somewhere with the man who was second in command of Overwatch with no explanation and no reason to believe she’d come back from wherever he took her.

  Now he squared his shoulders and leaned in closer. “It wasn’t really a request, Engineer Royce.”

  She swallowed, suddenly more nervous than she had a right to be. The worst that the Overwatch brass could do to her would be keep her locked in this room for the rest of her time stationed here at Earth. Or, even worse than that, send her packing back to the colonies stripped of her rank and position.

  At least, according to the rules, that’s the worst they could do. Somehow she had a feeling that after they saw what she brought back from Earth, they had thrown out the rule book. This was unfamiliar territory for everyone.

  And Tara was caught in the middle of it.

  Her traitorous stomach growled at that moment, and it was obvious she wasn’t going to be able to tell him that she wasn’t hungry. “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, I’d like to get my lunch.”

  Holding out his hand to the still open door of her room, his smile softened, if that was possible. “Then right this way, Engineer Royce.”

  She stepped out of her room and into the hallway that led from this section of Overwatch to… well, everywhere else. Her room, her prison cell, was at the far end of the complex. This was the path they took her when she went to do her recreation hours. She’d seen more of the complex when Tyrese and she had done their emergency landing two weeks back. Crash landing was more like it. Tyrese’s defense pod had taken a few bad hits fending off an alien attack that happened right after she’d collected something off the surface of the Earth. Intake. Processing. Medical bay. She hadn’t seen that part of the station since.

  There had been so much happening in that one day that it was almost impossible for her to separate out the different events. She hadn’t seen Tyrese since. She hadn’t seen anyone since that moment, actually. The grunt soldiers who brought her to and from rec wore their helmets with the shield down the whole time. Lieutenant Danvers here was the first human face she’d seen in weeks.

  Where her route that she would have normally taken to the rec room went left, Danvers took her right. The hall was narrow, and there was still that constant hum of energy powering the artificial gravity and the oxygen reclamation systems, as well as everything else here at Overwatch. Their boots echoed with each step. Otherwise there was no sound.

  No sound, and no people.

  He directed her at each intersection until they came to a part of the complex that was definitely residential. The crew had their quarters here. Door after door lined both sides of the corridor. The bigger ones were at the end, where the doors were spaced further apart. She imagined that General Ashton had private quarters in another part of the building, away from everyone else, so that he could keep his privacy.

  That was the thing that bothered her here. The privacy. There was no one else around. There should be people moving back and forth everywhere. Instead, they had obviously cleared the whole section so Danvers could bring her here. To his quarters. Alone.

  Well, she supposed if she was going to be killed there were worse ways to go.

  She figured it had come to that. They’d gotten all the information they could out of her data files and the interviews they did with her and, presumably, Tyrese. She may never have been summoned for her trial, but she was sure as hell that Tyrese must have been. There was no way Overwatch would have just let the events of their meeting as Defense Engineers go uninvestigated. She swallowed hard as the gravity of her situation weighed down on her.

  Now that they had everything they needed they had no more use for her. She’d actually been expecting a firing squad. A last meal with a guy who wasn’t all that hard to look at? She supposed this was better.

  Placing his hand to the scanner pad outside of his door, Danvers waited for the light to turn from red to green, and the door to slide open on its tracks.

  “Welcome back, Lieutenant Danvers,” a soft female voice said from hidden speakers in the room’s ceiling.

  Tara cringed. Danvers smiled at her discomfort, not even trying to hide his amusement. “That’s Elaine, the Overwatch AI.”

  “I know,” she answered. Of course Overwatch would have its own AI system. Confined to her little room, Tara hadn’t had to interact with Elaine much, and that was just the way she liked it.

  “Don’t like AIs much,” Danvers said to her, “do you?”

  “Not since one tried to rape me, no.”

  He snorted his thought on that. “I won’t be needing you for the next few hours, Elaine.” He directed his comment to the empty air around them. “You can disengage from my quarters for that time.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Danvers.”

  There was this definite sense of something withdrawing from around them, and Tara breathed a little easier. Then Danvers motioned her inside, and she didn’t have a lot of choice but to accept.

  It was
like stepping into a different world. The walls were painted a cool color of blue and adorned with reproductions of paintings from Earth’s history. There were flowers in a vase sitting on a corner table that were probably fake as well, but that looked so real Tara expected to smell their perfume. In the center of the room she had just entered, a real wooden table dominated the floor space. She’d never seen real wood furniture before.

  Off to the sides, doors closed off other parts of the Lieutenant’s living quarters. She didn’t care about the rest of his rooms. She only cared about what was sitting on that table.

  There were plates on either end, piled with chunks of brown meat in a browner sauce mixed together with long, wide noodles. The food was still steaming. The aroma was enticing. The sight of real food, when all she’d been eating was recycled sustenance cubes and fake bread, made her mouth water.

  But it was the object in the middle of the table that caught her attention.

  A silver orb, about the size of her two fists put together, with black insignia lines circling the top that spelled out the purpose and handling of the device. There was a corporate insignia there, too, from a company that hadn’t existed for a thousand years. Not since the Earth had been destroyed by flame and fire.

  This device had been part of that. A power cell for a fission detonation device. Perhaps the only one left in creation. The techniques for building such a thing had been lost when the Earth had been burnt to save the human race. Her secret mission from the Academy had brought this one up from the surface of the planet and into the light of day again. She even had the damned thing in her defense pod. If she’d ignored orders, this thing would have stayed buried on the uninhabitable surface of the Earth. Her career would have been over, of course, but she wouldn’t have resurrected the most destructive force known to mankind.

  “What’s the matter?” Lieutenant Danvers asked her in a falsely sweet voice. “Aren’t you hungry?”