Paradise-1


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
 
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 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948345
 ISBNs: 9780316496742 (trade paperback), 9780316496889 (ebook)
 E3-20230315-JV-NF-ORI
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 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
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Chapter 33
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Chapter 38
 Chapter 39
 Chapter 40
 Chapter 41
 Chapter 42
 Chapter 43
 Chapter 44
 Chapter 45
 Chapter 46
 Chapter 47
 Chapter 48
 Chapter 49
 Chapter 50
 Chapter 51
 Chapter 52
 Chapter 53
 Chapter 54
 Chapter 55
 Chapter 56
 Chapter 57
 Chapter 58
 Chapter 59
 Chapter 60
 Chapter 61
 Chapter 62
 Chapter 63
 Chapter 64
 Chapter 65
 Chapter 66
 Chapter 67
 Chapter 68
 Chapter 69
 Chapter 70
 Chapter 71
 Chapter 72
 Chapter 73
 Chapter 74
 Chapter 75
 Chapter 76
 Chapter 77
 Chapter 78
 Chapter 79
 Chapter 80
 Chapter 81
 Chapter 82
 Chapter 83
 Chapter 84
 Chapter 85
 Chapter 86
 Chapter 87
 Chapter 88
 Chapter 89
 Chapter 90
 Chapter 91
 Chapter 92
 Chapter 93
 Chapter 94
 Chapter 95
 Chapter 96
 Chapter 97
 Chapter 98
 Chapter 99
 Chapter 100
 Chapter 101
 Chapter 102
 Chapter 103
 Chapter 104
 Chapter 105
 Chapter 106
 Chapter 107
 Chapter 108
 Chapter 109
 Chapter 110
 Chapter 111
 Chapter 112
 Chapter 113
 Chapter 114
 Chapter 115
 Chapter 116
 Chapter 117
 Chapter 118
 Chapter 119
 Chapter 120
 Chapter 121
 Chapter 122
 Chapter 123
 Chapter 124
 Chapter 125
 Chapter 126
 Chapter 127
 Chapter 128
 Chapter 129
 Chapter 130
 Chapter 131
 Chapter 132
 Chapter 133
 Chapter 134
 Chapter 135
 Chapter 136
 Chapter 137
 Chapter 138
 Chapter 139
 Chapter 140
 Chapter 141
 Chapter 142
 Chapter 143
 Chapter 144
 Chapter 145
 Chapter 146
 Chapter 147
 Chapter 148
 Chapter 149
 Chapter 150
 Chapter 151
 Chapter 152
 Chapter 153
 Chapter 154
 Chapter 155
 Chapter 156
 Chapter 157
 Chapter 158
 Chapter 159
 Chapter 160
 Chapter 161
 Chapter 162
 Chapter 163
 Chapter 164
 Chapter 165
 Chapter 166
 Chapter 167
 Chapter 168
 Chapter 169
 Chapter 170
 Acknowledgements
 Discover More
 Meet the Author
 
 
 AS DAVID WELLINGTON
 The Last Astronaut
 Paradise-1
 AS D. NOLAN CLARK
 Forsaken Skies
 Forgotten Worlds
 Forbidden Suns
 
 
 
 
 For you, the readers. In 2003 I began serializing my first novel. Twenty years and twenty-two books later, all I want to say is thank you to everyone who’s joined me along the way!
 
 
 
 
 1 
 Three days still before dawn on Ganymede, and the cold seeped right through her suit and into her bones. The only light came from what reflected off the crescent of Jupiter, a thin arc of brown and orange that hung forever motionless in the night sky. Occasionally a bolt of lightning would snap across the shadowed disk of the big planet, a bar of light big enough that even from a million kilometers away it blasted long black shadows across the charcoal ice of the moon.
 Alexandra Petrova rotated her shoulders. Rolled her feet back and forth in the powdery ice, just to get some blood moving through her legs. She’d been lying prone for nearly six hours, out on the edge of a ridgeline a long way from the warmth and the unrecycled air of the Selket Crater habitat. Maybe, though, her suffering was about to pay off.
 “Firewatch One-Four, I have visual confirmation,” she whispered, and her suit’s microphone picked up her words and beamed them up to a satellite, which blasted them back down to some operator in a control tower back in the crater, then transferred them over to the nice, cozy offices of Firewatch Division Fourteen. The central headquarters of the Military Police on Ganymede. “Subject is at a range of approximately three hundred meters, headed north-northwest.”
 She lay as still as possible, not wanting to give away the slightest sign of her location. Just below her on the ridge a man was carefully bounding his way downslope, hopping from boulder to boulder, headed into a maze of narrow little canyons. He was wearing a bright yellow spacesuit, skintight. No faceplate, just a pair of dark goggles. Half the workers on Ganymede wore suits like that