Jitterbug, p.1
Jitterbug, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue Justice Brown
Part One The Handiwork of Gods
Chapter One Copernicus Brown
Chapter Two Jitterbug
Chapter Three Copernicus Brown
Chapter Four Jitterbug
Chapter Five Copernicus Brown
Chapter Six Jitterbug
Chapter Seven Copernicus Brown
Chapter Eight Amber Roth
Chapter Nine Copernicus Brown
Chapter Ten Copernicus Brown
Chapter Eleven Amber Roth
Chapter Twelve Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Thirteen Copernicus Brown
Chapter Fourteen Amber Roth
Chapter Fifteen Jitterbug
Chapter Sixteen Copernicus Brown
Chapter Seventeen Amber Roth
Chapter Eighteen Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Nineteen Copernicus Brown
Chapter Twenty Jitterbug
Chapter Twenty-One Amber Roth
Chapter Twenty-Two Copernicus Brown
Chapter Twenty-Three Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Twenty-Four Copernicus Brown
Chapter Twenty-Five Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Twenty-Six Copernicus Brown
Part Two The Unknown, Remembered Gate
Chapter Twenty-Seven Amber Roth
Chapter Twenty-Eight Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Twenty-Nine Copernicus Brown
Chapter Thirty Jitterbug
Chapter Thirty-One Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Thirty-Two Copernicus Brown
Chapter Thirty-Three Jitterbug
Chapter Thirty-Four Amber Roth
Chapter Thirty-Five Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Thirty-Six Copernicus Brown
Chapter Thirty-Seven Jitterbug
Chapter Thirty-Eight Copernicus Brown
Chapter Thirty-Nine Amber Roth
Chapter Forty Copernicus Brown
Chapter Forty-One Amber Roth
Chapter Forty-Two Jitterbug
Chapter Forty-Three Danielle Lanzo
Chapter Forty-Four Copernicus Brown
Chapter Forty-Five Jitterbug
Chapter Forty-Six Copernicus Brown
Epilogue I Justice Brown
Epilogue II Copernicus Brown
About the Author
Jitterbug is a thrilling journey filled with witty banter, unlikely allies and friendships, secrets and sacrifices, and found family, exploring the cyclical nature of both history and the future, and the way our fates are often shaped not just by choice but also by luck and coincidence.”
AI JIANG, author of A Palace Near the Wind
“Jitterbug is a haunting, propulsive odyssey across the ruins of our solar system—where justice, grief, and the ghosts of creation itself collide. Gareth L. Powell writes with both fire and tenderness, crafting a space opera that pulses with human ache amid cosmic wonder. It’s poetic, cinematic, and deeply humane—science fiction with a beating heart and a reckoning soul.”
CYNTHIA PELAYO, Bram Stoker Award®–winning author of Children of Chicago and The Shoemaker’s Magician
“Imagine the solar system as a mighty ocean full of pirates and you have the beating heart of Jitterbug – a roaring whirlwind of a novel, full of adventure, emotion, wit and great characters.”
DAVID QUANTICK, author of All My Colours
“Every time I thought I had the flight path of Jitterbug all figured out, Gareth L. Powell banked a hard left in the most delightful way. From space pirate brawls to bounty hunter chases and political machinations, Powell pairs thrills with richly imagined characters that pulse with life. I don’t think I’ve ever rooted so hard for a shipboard AI. Bold and cinematic, Jitterbug proves that Powell is a master of scale—balancing galaxy-spanning stakes with moments of vibrant, intimate heart.”
NATHAN TAVARES, author of A Fractured Infinity
JITTERBUG
Also by Gareth L. Powell
and available from Titan Books
Future’s Edge
Who Will You Save?
THE CONTINUANCE SERIES
Stars and Bones
Descendant Machine
THE EMBERS OF WAR TRILOGY
Embers of War
Fleet of Knives
Light of Impossible Stars
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Jitterbug
Paperback edition ISBN: 9781835414514
E-book edition ISBN: 9781835415504
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: March 2026
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Gareth L. Powell 2026. All rights reserved.
Gareth L. Powell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Edith, Rose, and Robin
PROLOGUE
JUSTICE BROWN
Come sit here by me, Copernicus. Listen to your grandmother. I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you how it all began…
It was a hot night in South London, back on Earth. This was many years ago, when your father was just a baby. It was the kind of night you have all the windows open, and it doesn’t make a lick of difference, except you can hear the traffic and the sirens in the streets nine floors below.
I’d just got the baby down when Leon called and told me to come up to the roof.
“Why the hell am I coming up to the roof?” I asked him.
He laughed, but I could hear he was scared. “It’s Saturn, Justice.”
“What about Saturn?”
“It’s started.”
“But Malcolm—”
“Bring Malcolm. This is historic.”
“I only just got him to sleep.”
“Juss, I got the telescope set up. The neighbours are all here. Just come on up.”
So, I grumbled to myself, and I pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, and I carried baby Malcolm, your father, up four flights of stairs to the roof.
As residents, we weren’t supposed to have access to the roof of the tower block, but the maintenance door had been broken for as long as anyone could remember, and no one seemed in a hurry to get it fixed.
Up on the roof, I could hear the cars and the drunks down in the streets. Leon was waiting for me. He had a beer bottle in one hand and his eyes were wild.
“You gotta see this, Justice.”
The lights of a police helicopter blinked high above Clapham Common. I saw people on other roofs. Some of them also had telescopes or binoculars. Others just seemed to be partying, enjoying the vibe. I smelled barbeque. I’d already had dinner, but the smoky jerk chicken spices and charred sweetcorn ribs set my stomach rumbling something fierce, which did nothing to improve my mood.
“Is this like that Uranus thing?”
“Yes, and Neptune before that.”
I sighed. “You brought me and the baby up here for lights in the sky?”
“Juss, it’s so much more than that.”
“You said that last time, and it was just a little star turning into a bright smudge.”
Leon took a slug of beer. He seemed wired. “First off, Uranus wasn’t a star, it was a planet. And secondly, it didn’t turn into a smudge, it disintegrated.”
“Like the other one, a few years ago.”
“Like Neptune, yes.”
I raised my eyes to the light-choked sky. Only a handful of the brightest stars could penetrate the city’s glow. “And you dragged me out to see the same thing, a third time?”
He looked crestfallen. “But, Justice, this is Saturn. It’s historic.”
“And I got work tomorrow.”
He shrugged, and I think if I’d walked away then, he’d have let me go. We had a funny sort of relationship. He was more than a best friend. More like a brother, I suppose. And he loved baby Malcolm, your father. And because he cared for Malcolm as if he was his own son, I let him. He took care of me, too, and he never asked for anything in return.
An yhow, as I was saying, I’d made my mind up to go back downstairs and put the baby back in his crib. But before I could move, we heard cries from the folk clustered around the scope. Shouts from other rooftops. Stupidly, I looked up, but I didn’t know where to look, and even if I did, there was nothing visible to the human eye.
Leon took my free wrist and pulled me across to the telescope. As it was his, people made way for him, and he took a quick look, bending his face to the viewer. He whistled in appreciation, and then bade me look.
Bending over was awkward with Malcolm on my shoulder, but I didn’t want to hand him off to anyone else in the crowd.
What I saw chilled me to the bone.
I’d seen pictures of Saturn at school. It was the one with the rings around it. Only now, there was something up with the rings. Gradually, almost too slowly for the human eye to register the movement, they had begun to unravel, unmoored fountains of ice spinning free like the sparks of a pinwheel firework. My entire body went cold. The idiots on the other roofs were whooping it up, but I knew right there and then, that I had just looked into the eye of death. I hadn’t really paid attention when the other two, Neptune and Uranus, had fallen apart, spreading their gases like a slick along the paths of their orbits. But Saturn was iconic. It was the one with the rings. Now that those rings were coming apart, it felt like someone had bulldozed the Pyramids, filled in the Grand Canyon, or toppled the Eiffel Tower. I stood up and stared out across the city. I felt the warmth of my son, your father, asleep on my shoulder, and wanted to scream.
Leon said, “Juss, are you all right?”
“Of course, I’m not fucking all right.”
Malcolm stirred and I patted his back, trying to soothe him.
“What is it?” Leon asked.
“It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots,” I told him. “First, Neptune. Then, Uranus. Now, Saturn. Whatever’s doing this is getting closer. It’s moving inwards.”
He grew serious. “Yeah, I know.”
“So, what happens when it reaches Earth?”
I watched the gears of his mind crunch as he tried to decide how to respond. His brow creased, then his mouth opened. He put the beer bottle down and rubbed his chin. The neighbours clustered on the roof around us had fallen silent, watching us with the uncertainty of teenagers caught whistling at a funeral.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said quietly.
I gave a snort. “And how can you possibly know that?”
He put a fist to his mouth. “I just… do.”
The other roof parties were falling silent as people turned to the news updates on their phones. We hadn’t got good pictures of the other gas giants falling apart, but Saturn was that much closer. Any fool with a backyard telescope could see her plain as day, so you can imagine the detail they were getting from the big observatories.
Saturn, a planet many times larger than the Earth, was being unstoppably ripped apart. The rings were going, but so were the gases that made up its body. Ten-thousand-mile-wide storms whirled around its equator as the atmosphere sprayed into space like blood from a dozen gunshot wounds. Lightning sparked and flickered in the tortured clouds, and aurora raged at both poles.
What had started as another astronomical curiosity had suddenly revealed itself for the urgent, existential threat we’d been pretending it wasn’t.
Leon shook his head. “Trust me.” He held out a hand. “It’s going to be all right for you, and little Malcolm. You’re going to be safe.”
“What?”
He held up a hand, as if to ward me away. “It’s going to be okay.”
I wasn’t convinced. “I just saw the same shit you did. And the way I see it, what’s happening to Saturn is gonna happen here, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it.”
“It won’t, trust me.”
“Trust you? We’re all going to die, and you want me to take the word of your ignorant ass that it’s all gonna be just peachy?”
“I don’t want to say any more.”
“Leon, what the fuck are you talking about? You don’t want to say any more? Are you trippin’?”
“Justice, please…”
Even as he said it, even as he backed away, I could see he was frightened.
He kept retreating, waving his hands in denial. I said, “Leon—”
“No, don’t ask me.”
“Leon, look out!”
The backs of his legs hit the low wall at the edge of the roof, and he lost his footing. For an instant, he teetered there, eyes wide, arms windmilling as he tried to regain his balance. If I hadn’t been cradling Malcolm, perhaps I could have saved him somehow—but before I could do anything, he fell. His backside hit the top of the wall, and he rolled backwards like a scuba diver flipping out of a boat. One instant he was there; the next, he was gone.
I turned away, but even thirteen floors above the pavement, I heard the noise he made when he hit.
PART ONE
THE HANDIWORK OF GODS
CHAPTER ONE
COPERNICUS BROWN
I trudged through the foot-churned mud at the side of the road, walking with my head down and my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket, avoiding eye contact. One hand gripped a hidden pistol, the other a concealed knife. I wasn’t looking for trouble but in my line of work, and especially in this part of town, you didn’t grow old by attracting attention or being unprepared.
Grant’s Landing was a typical Swirl settlement. It had grown outwards from an improvised and ragged kernel, with each new wave of refugees and immigrants accreting like rings around a tree stump. On the outskirts of this newest ring, the store owners had constructed their frontages from cannibalised packing materials, with hand-painted signs above their doors. Here on the edge of town, and the edge of the shattered solar system, there hadn’t yet been time to erect anything more permanent.
My grandmother had been in her late thirties when the Swirl started to coalesce from the wreckage of the gas giants; my father, Malcolm, had been among the first generation to move out to the territories that had been created from their material; and now here I was, hunting criminals through this new frontier—neither a part of these streets nor entirely apart from them.
I knew the rest of my crew awaited me back on the Jitterbug. With luck, they would have completed the repairs and maintenance that the old ship so desperately needed if she were to fly again. I hunched my shoulders against the thin wind. As soon as I had my target secured, I’d be able to join them; and if this bounty paid out, I’d be able to fuel the Jitterbug, fill the kitchen with enough ramen to keep us all fed for a month, and perhaps even get those janky landing motors overhauled when we got back to Luna. Our three-week enforced layover on this backwater dump would be at an end and we could spiral inwards, to warmer climes.
That’s if we didn’t kill each other first.
As you’d expect, since we’d run out of fuel, tensions had been running high. Boredom and poverty can be a combustible mixture.
I put a call through to the ship.
Hey, I thought, how are we doing?
The ship’s personality stirred at the back of my mind.
>Things have been better.
In my head, her voice was that of a particularly eloquent parrot, the sentences punctuated by clicks and whistles. I even ‘heard’ the occasional clack of her beak.
How are the crew?
>Restless. How goes the hunt?
I’m close.
>Take care. This one’s a real piece of work. Four counts of conspiracy to commit piracy. Two of being an accessory to murder. Seven of fencing stolen goods…
I tightened my grip on my weapons. I’ll be fine.
>Make sure you are. Ulf’s very hungover, and Kiki’s needling him about it. It’s going to end in a fight, and McKenzie can’t keep them apart forever.
Tell them I want them all alert, sober, and ready to fuel up and clear atmo’ the moment I get back.
>Roger that.
Ahead, sepia tavern lights spilled out onto the dirty sidewalk. Mutters of conversation. Jagged laughter. I was close now. If my information was correct, my target used this place to sell stolen property. I drew myself up, and pushed my way through the door.
Inside, the place reeked of sour beer and stale sweat. Eyes turned towards me. I hesitated for a second, then squared my shoulders and strode up to the counter.
