Free The Jupiter Pirates by Jason Fry

but it was good thinking.”
    Mavry turned his attention to Carlo.
    â€œYou lasted for four and a half minutes,” he said. “Strategy?”
    â€œThere was a gap between the center of the Earth formation and the right flank, covered only by one damaged destroyer,” Carlo said. “I angled the keel to put as much armor as I could between me and them and tried to shoot the gap.”
    â€œAnd what happened?” Diocletia asked.
    â€œThe Earth commander sniffed it out and was able to plug the hole before I could get through,” Carlo said. “But I almost made it.”
    â€œAlmost,” Mavry said.
    â€œAlmost isn’t bad in an unfair test,” Carlo said.
    Diocletia’s eyebrows leaped upward.
    â€œAnd why was it an unfair test?” she asked.
    â€œThere was no way to win,” Carlo said.
    â€œAnd that can’t happen in real life?” Diocletia asked, holding her son’s gaze until he looked away. Then she turned to Yana.
    â€œYana, you lasted—”
    â€œNinety-eight seconds,” Yana said, arms folded.
    â€œAnd your strategy?” Diocletia asked.
    â€œAimed all guns forward and headed full throttle into the center of Byson’s line,” Yana said.
    â€œWhere you were destroyed,” Diocletia said.
    â€œI destroyed two enemy warships,” Yana said. “Neither Tycho nor Carlo had even one kill.”
    â€œYou destroyed two enemies, yes—but at the cost of your life and your ship,” Diocletia said.
    Yana shrugged. “Sometimes you’re gonna die.”

8
DARKLANDS
    T ycho didn’t figure out what was bothering him until two days after the Comet returned to Callisto: his old room didn’t feel like his anymore, just like the Hashoone complex no longer felt like home. It was just a place—familiar, but not special beyond that.
    Tycho was lying in his old bed, having given up on homework for the moment. The ceiling showed a view from a camera outside—a black sky littered with stars. Callisto didn’t rotate—one side of the moon always pointed at Jupiter, while the other faced away from the planet. The Hashoones and all the other Callistan settlers lived on the dark side, using the moon as a shield against the radiation generated by Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
    Tycho reached over to his nightstand and flipped a control, changing the ceiling to the bright blue sky of a sunny day on Earth. He’d never seen Earth’s skies, but the light and the colors comforted him anyway. Humans had evolved in those conditions, and a few hundred years of living under very different skies weren’t enough to change what felt natural.
    But today, the blue sky just made him more aware of the illusion, reminding him that he was looking at an image projected on a stone ceiling, above which were twenty meters of rock and dirt and then the hostile, frozen surface of the moon.
    Tycho decided that looking at the ceiling was a waste of time, so he heaved himself off the bed and left his room, leaning against the railing to stare down into the well of the Hashoones’ home. Known as Darklands, it had been built around a mine shaft drilled more than four centuries ago, when the family first came to Callisto as settlers from Earth. The mine had once been rich, yielding enough minerals and pockets of frozen gases to make the Hashoones wealthy, so they could afford a homestead of their own instead of living in the crowded squalor of a settlement like Port Town.
    Tycho walked down the ramp that corkscrewed around the outer wall of the old mineshaft, connecting old equipment lockers and storerooms that had been converted long ago to bedrooms and offices. Slabs of rock sealed off the old tunnels. Tycho let his hand trail along the rough rock wall, listening to the echo of his footsteps. He tried to imagine what it had been like in Gregorius Hashoone’s day, when the shaft had been filled with the hammering of