The likelihood of surviving that first gravity jump was one in three. The tanks had not been adjusted. Some leaked. For every prisoner that woke up on the other side, two had been liquefied. Those early dead would later be thought of as the lucky ones.
Well before the rebels deemed themselves The Free Republic of Outer Solar Territories and went on the offensive, they established their own mythos. They believed that all people from the inner territories—any systems within the orbit of Mars—were weaklings, crowded around Earth and the Sun because they couldn’t handle the bleakness of life beyond the snow line. This mindset had its roots in a philosophy known as New Darwinism, sometimes referred to as Supreme Selection, which stated not only that the strong overcome the weak, but it was the duty of a superior entity to dominate all inferiors. Any sane person would recognize this as bat-shit crazy, but politicians exploited it quite effectively. It became something of a rallying point, providing a deeper reason to deride the inner colonies. In time, it found its natural apex in the form of rebellion and war.
There were legitimate reasons the outer colonies were pissed off. High taxes and trade laws were created and maintained entirely by the inner systems. So, like most wars, the Great Solar War was about allocation of resources as much as it was about racial prejudice.
FROST was eager to put New Darwinism into action, enslaving and destroying anyone in their way. Because the life of a prisoner was deemed worthless, they tended not to care much about things like food, water, or sanitation in the camps. Prisoners became slaves forced to build new colonies for their masters. They died from malnutrition and dysentery and cultivated new diseases that no one had ever seen before—the most famous being a mutated form of herpes that began as an ulcer on the tongue and slowly ate the flesh of the mouth: gums, lips, cheeks, turning faces into skulls before the body gave out. Infected men might take weeks to die. Such hardships were less common than the daily beatings and public executions to keep prisoners fearful, as if they weren’t already on the verge of madness.
The war escalated while Jack wasted away in a prison camp on Ganymede. Some POWs made makeshift portables and hacked into FROST’s network, accessing news about the fighting, but by the time it diffused through the camp it was all rumors and hearsay. FROST had destroyed Earth. Or it was the Moon. Or it was Mars. The Alliance had won and the camps would be liberated in a week. Or two weeks. Or two days. Or FROST had won and they were all going to be executed. Or the Alliance was gaining, or the Alliance was falling back. On and on. Jack learned the truth later, by the time it was already considered history. As FROST gained territory near Earth, they spread themselves too thin and ultimately ran out of fighting forces, but not before they developed a new WMD—something called a grav bomb—which put the hydrogen bomb to shame. They detonated two on Earth, destroying most of Europe and Africa, and one on Mars. The Solar Alliance refused to surrender. Luckily, FROST had a limited supply of these bombs. And the Alliance had been making their own advancements, building faster ships and more accurate weapons. Their hardware outmaneuvered anything FROST produced. Once the Alliance had a stronghold on Jupiter, they pummeled FROST’s defenses until there was virtually nothing and nobody left. After the grav bombs, the Alliance had no interest in mercy, either.
All in all, it was a rehash of what homo sapiens had been doing for millennia, just on a much grander scale. Although there has never been an official death count since both sides were so shoddy at documenting their war crimes, estimates put the figures around 2.5 billion dead all told, civilians accounting for roughly 2 billion, soldiers 450 million, and POWs 150 million.
And yet, when peace came and the vets and survivors went home, the Great Solar War was treated like a minor pit stop on the road toward progress. The Alliance saw an opportunity to strengthen itself, shifted some resources around, and rechristened itself the Star Nation, a singular governing body to encompass the entire solar system. No more colonies. No more countries. Just states within the Nation. Some perpetrators of war crimes were executed or jailed, but most of FROST’s leaders—politicians and generals—were pardoned and made into trading partners. Within ten years, anyone jailed was released. All in the spirit of moving forward. They turned a blind eye to corruption. Made new laws. Invented fines. People like Jim Dandy rose to power by rigging elections and then shutting down the democratic process. And people like Jack found ways to get by. Tooth and nail.
He sometimes wonders if the outcome of the war proved FROST right. The Solar Alliance really had been unjust, greedy and imperialistic. The strong obliterating the weak. Just like in the camp.
Chapter 12
“Attention. Minimum safe distance has been reached. Jump drives may now be activated.”
“Shit.” Lana is crouched down by the last tank, wires dangling from a side panel. She flicks through them one at a time, rolls them in her fingers, checking for crimps or frays. She shines a flashlight in the panel to check for rust or residue, that blue shit that builds up around the plugs. She found and replaced three corroded lines on three different tanks. A few more jumps and bye-bye Dino, bye-bye Jack, bye-bye Hunter. Whoever they found to replace her was either a fraud or an idiot and deserves a good smacking around.
Jack’s voice is static in her portable: “You know what to do, people. Be at your tank in two minutes. Lana will assist.”
The tanks are arranged in a line, cordoned off by privacy stalls like in a public lavatory. There’s a scale just inside the main door. As the crew come in, she measures them and records everything in her portable. They’ve all changed into their grav suits except her. Form-fitting bodysuits that do nothing to flatter the average body type. As Stetson steps into the scale, he grabs his love handles and jiggles. “Don’t lie, girl,” he says. “You missed all this.”
She laughs.
She helps them down one at a time. Into the lukewarm gel of the tank, watching her with drowsy eyes as their masks feed them sedatives. Jack goes last. Something is wrong, but she knows better than to ask. His suit fits him a little too well. When he was shirtless in her clinic, she was too exhausted to care. Now in the claustrophobic grav tank stall, as he slips down to the neck in plasma, she remembers the desperate loneliness of these runs and the comfort of a warm body to curl against. She had her share of partners on Earth. One lasted two and a half years before she broke it off. Just a gut feeling. Nothing rational. Haunted, of course, by the memory of a man she had come to loathe. And for some reason she came back.
It was all a sham, of course. The whole romance-on-a-spaceship thing. A symptom of fear and isolation. She could just as easily have slept with Stetson if the timing had been different. Or Dino if he was straight. Infatuation, she always believed, is pure circumstance.
Probably.
“What is it?” Jack says.
“What’s what?”
“You’ve got a look.”
“I don’t know. This is just how I look.”
“Do I stink?”
“You do.”
“I got the puke out of my hair, at least.”
“I saw.”
“Seriously. Are you alright?”