Masada's Gate Read online

  Masada’s Gate

  The SynCorp Saga • Empire Earth

  Book 2

  by

  David Bruns and Chris Pourteau

  Copyright Notice and Acknowledgments

  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. We’re particularly grateful to Jon for his guidance related to Judaism. Dr. Yvonne Baum, MD, helped Isaac Brackin diagnose Tony’s condition. E.E. Giorgi, Nick McLarty, and Bill Patterson each provided insights on specific technical topics. Input from all these folks helped make Masada’s 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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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Love Masada’s Gate?

  A Free Stacks Fischer Story Awaits…

  Discover How the Syndicate Corporation Began…

  About the Authors

  Chapter 1

  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. Strunk’s 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 Strunk’s 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 he’d perfected as the shuttle’s engines had spat and sputtered on the flight from Mars to Earth. The little ship’s 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 hand—those seemed to need personal reassurance. The soft touch of a friend.

  “Talking to it ain’t gonna help,” Strunk said. Somewhere in his voice, the natural confidence of a man who’d 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 Strunk’s drawling baritone, “And it ain’t gonna hurt.”

  The trick this far out wasn’t 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, they’d be fine. That meant avoiding the Moon’s 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.

  “We’re fine,” Ruben said anyway. “The ship’s adjusting to lunar gravity. And we’re getting some wave interference from the artificial gravity generators in Darkside. Old ships like this one don’t have—”

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

  “How much longer?” he asked.

  “Just a few minutes.” Ruben’s answer was instinctive, distracted. He was having trouble locating the old drill sites. The latticework of lunar caves was still there, but the Roadrunner’s sensors, like everything else on the ship, seemed sleepy with age. “I’m coordinating the old maps in the ship’s 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, I’m gonna make sure you do too. Slowly.”

  Ruben rolled his eyes. Wouldn’t 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 wasn’t wrong. They’d staunched the flow of blood from the knife wound in Tony Taulke’s 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 they’d 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 ship’s 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 Moon’s 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 City—later renamed Darkside’s End by the Company and now simply called Darkside—stood over Point Charlie, a testament to man’s 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?” Str
unk asked.

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

  “What the hell is that?” Strunk demanded.

  “We’ve lost the forward portside thruster,” Ruben explained, mostly to himself. “We’re dipping.”

  “Fuck that!”

  Strunk’s voice seemed to demand either the ship right itself, or he’d 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 Strunk’s outburst. He’d 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 Ruben’s 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 weren’t working. And he didn’t have time to sweet-talk the old lady. They were starting to spin. Darkside’s 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 shuttle’s spin accelerated.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Strunk said, swallowing with a clucking sound. “I’m gonna…”

  “Don’t!” Ruben shouted. The last thing they needed was Strunk’s vomit spinning around the cabin in zero-g. A quick notion drove Ruben’s fingers before his brain could countermand it. He cut the remaining thrusters, waiting for the ship’s momentum to circle them around until Darkside’s docks circled back into view. It happened so fast, he almost missed them. The Roadrunner had spun nose down on its z-axis, forcing Ruben to squint through the pilot’s canopy to find the docks. The shuttle’s trajectory had skewed radically. The lunar surface reached upward.

  They’d closed half the distance to the docking freighter. Then it spun over and behind the shuttle, beyond Ruben’s view. Through the overhead canopy, the stars of deep space streaked by.

  Strunk was retching behind him. Ruben ignored it. He reengaged the aft thrusters, and the ship began to move upward in a broad arc. Still listing, still perversely angled, but now directed again. Ruben’s stomach turned somersaults in solidarity with Strunk’s.

  He didn’t bother to orient himself to the landing pad or the freighter attempting to dock there. Either the semi-thrust maneuver would work or it wouldn’t. Hell, they might have already strayed far enough into the approach lanes to trip Darkside’s emergency encroachment alarms.

  All in all, that seemed like an acceptable problem at the moment.

  “What the fuck!” Strunk pleaded through a wet mouth. “What the fuck!”

  Ruben felt it in his calming innards before he saw it through the forward window. They were leveling out. The aft thrusters had finally begun to overcome the spinning force of their unbalanced momentum. The shuttle flew cockeyed still, so Ruben set aside what his eyes saw through the window and focused on aiming for a makeshift landing spot outside what the computer claimed was the entrance to Point Bravo. He even had to tap the still-working forward thruster to correct their course.

  They were heading in.

  Hot.

  “What the hell is happening?” Strunk demanded. “Where the hell are we going?”

  “The crash site,” Ruben answered with dark humor. As proximity alarms blared, he cut power to the aft thrusters and fired the landing rockets. “Hold on!”

  The Roadrunner hit the lunar surface hard. Despite the cushioning foam of his seat, it felt like Ruben’s tailbone had fractured. The metal hull groaned so loudly, only the volume of Strunk’s terror dominated it. A plume of gray dust enveloped the plastisteel windows. The shuttle skipped and lifted, then hit again, less violently. It arced over a dune, then hit the surface again and slowed faster with the impact. All motion abruptly ceased, and the old shuttle settled on the lunar surface.

  A wet, smacking sound splashed the cabin floor.

  Red and amber lights blinked everywhere. One entire control panel had turned into flashing crimson warning lights. The grating sound of multiple alarms competed for human attention. Gas was escaping from somewhere.

  Ruben glanced over the structural integrity readouts. The ship’s hull was solid. No breaches. Then he checked in with himself—the piercing ache in his ass confirmed he was still alive. The foam of the pilot’s seat had saved him a broken tailbone after all. But the bruise would be there a while. Still—no breaches for him, either.

  He unbuckled his harness and slowly, achingly, lifted himself out of the pilot’s seat. The light lunar gravity helped. Turning, he found Strunk, folded as far back in the protective foam of his seat as he could squeeze his massive frame. Through the frozen look on Strunk’s face, Ruben thought he could see the boy the assassin had once been. He doubted Strunk had ever been a fan of carnival rides as a kid.

  Ruben glanced down to the deck and found the chunky evidence of Strunk’s fear. The rank, sour smell crawled into his nose.

  “Anything broken?” he asked.

  Strunk inhaled, as if he’d just remembered that breathing was a necessary thing. Then, he did it again.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Ruben said, moving to check on Tony. He pressed on the older man’s extremities in various places. Nothing seemed broken here either. Being stoned and unconscious during the crash had probably worked to Tony’s benefit, kept him from tensing up. With a nod to himself, Ruben returned to the forward console.

  “If you say anything, anything at all,” Strunk said, his voice somehow embarrassed yet threatening at the same time, “I’ll fold your head through your legs and shove it up your ass.”

  “Say anything about what?” Ruben said, trying to reconcile the still-working tactical display of their location with the gray-fogged landscape outside the forward window. When Strunk wasn’t forthcoming, Ruben turned and looked expectantly at him. “What?”

  Strunk was hunched over Tony, giving him a second once-over. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “Right.” Ruben returned to assessing their position and, after a moment or two of verifying what he thought he knew, sighed heavily. “Well, the good news is this: we’re within walking distance of Point Bravo. We’ll wait there for Fischer.”

  Strunk grunted. “Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the bad news?”

  Ruben regarded him. “The Roadrunner’s run her last road.”

  “Good!”

  “I don’t think you understand, Dick,” Ruben said. He relished, just a little bit, the excuse for calling Strunk by his nickname. “We’re marooned here. And the Kisaans will be looking for us. For him.” He nodded toward the sleeping Tony. He was an exile now, a Napoleon on the run. And Ruben Qinlao and Richard Strunk were fugitives right along with him.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Strunk said. “But we’re alive. Against … all … odds.” He glared around him at the Roadrunner’s wrecked interior. Then, to Ruben: “One thing you learn in my line of work—as long as you’re alive, you’re one step ahead of where you could be.”

  “Good point,” Ruben allowed.

  “How far is this walking distance?”

  “About a kilometer.”

  “Okay. We got vac-suits, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Strunk nodded, then began loosening Tony’s crash harness. The older man was sweating. Not a good sign since the Roadrunner’s life-support system had begun to fail. That was the flashing red light on the support systems console.

  They needed to get moving. And he needed to find the Darkside doctor Fischer had recommended. Brackin.

  “I’ll help you suit him up,” Ruben said. “I can get us through the hatch and into Bravo. There might still be a seal there. And atmosphere.”

  “Might?”

  Ruben shrugged. “It’s been thirty years since I was down there. It might be nothing but vacuum and cob
webs.”

  “No cobwebs on the Moon, dumbass,” Strunk said, seemingly proud of himself for the knowledge.

  “Right.” Ruben looked up through the plastisteel of the shuttle’s canopy. The dust was clearing, an infinite canvas of stars becoming visible again. He had no idea if they’d tripped Darkside’s traffic sensors when the Roadrunner spun off course. He had no idea if they’d been tracked the whole way from SynCorp HQ. Maybe Kisaan’s forces, having secured the station, were already sweeping the system for them. Maybe they were inside Point Bravo right now, anticipating the capture like hunters in a blind waiting for their targets to walk into their crosshairs.

  “You gonna help or not?” Strunk asked.

  “Yeah,” Ruben said. No use obsessing over the what-could-be’s. Strunk was right. As long as they were alive, things could always be worse. “Let’s get Tony suited up.”

  Chapter 2

  Stacks Fischer • Approaching the Belt

  I’d had some time to think since Callisto. I usually love being alone inside my best girlfriend. Not so much this time.

  I’d spent two days in the close quiet of the Hearse heading back to the inner system, speculating ad nauseum on how everything had so completely gone to shit. If all the king’s horses and all the king’s men ever put the Company together again, there’d be some serious after-game quarterbacking to find out who fucked up where. And then there’d be some open positions to fill…

  Who the hell were these Soldiers of the Solar Revolution? More than pirates skimming in the Belt, that’s for damned sure. They’d had starships going toe-to-toe with the corporate fleet at Pallas. This wasn’t some reinvigorated Resistance movement gen’d up in the past few months on promises of mankind’s potential. Events had been carefully orchestrated to topple the Five Factions of the Syndicate Corporation in one fell swoop. Tony Taulke: chased out of his own station. Ruben Qinlao: no longer controlling Mars. Only Adriana Rabh and Gregor Erkennen, safe through distance in the outer system, were still in power … for now, at least. And Erkennen had gone dark, severed from CorpNet. That could be a strategy or a silent tombstone—maybe a separate SSR force had already taken Titan?