Gunpowder Moon Read online

  It almost didn’t matter who killed Cole, Dechert decided. There were progressions falling into place now that seemed inevitable. He had seen them in action before in Lebanon, in the Bake back in the ’60s. One tribal killing, one soldier dropped by a sniper, one bomb landing on the wrong house, and the lid had blown off. He had seen it before.

  He didn’t want to see it again.

  7

  How to explain the Moon’s thunderous star field to the uninitiated? It would be like describing the yellows and reds of van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows to a blind man. Even an exile like Dechert tired of Luna’s gray sterility, but he never lost the wonder of her heavens. The crescent Earth was low over the Mons Argaeus and the sun still lingered in the sky on its western descent, but the observatory’s reverse apertures blocked their blinding effects on the star field above Serenity 1 as Dechert walked through the hatchway. The room’s nanoglass dome peered like a bulbous eye from under the blanket of regolith covering the rest of the base. It was lit by starlight; the Milky Way hung overhead like a vertical swarm of fireflies.

  Thatch and Lane were at the back of the room, sitting on the ends of two formfitting recliners. Thatch had Lane’s silver flask in his hand.

  Dechert walked over to them. “Bourbon, I hope?”

  Thatch handed it to him without looking up. Dechert took a drink and the whiskey hit his nose and throat with the punch of wood smoke. Memories of Earth flooded back to him: the old memories of camping in the White Mountains north of the Kancamagus Highway and fishing Sawyer Pond for brown trout, of sitting with his back to a fire under the stars and drinking away the troubles that lay to the south.

  “That’s the good stuff,” he said.

  “Booker’s,” Lane said. “Just came up.”

  Dechert took another swig before handing the flask to Lane. He leaned back against one of the dome’s metal reinforcing beams and looked down at them. Lane was tiny next to Thatch’s big frame. Neither of them returned his gaze. Thatch’s bushy brown hair was matted to his head and flecked with dust.

  “The SMA’s sending a team down from the North Pole. Should be here in a few hours.”

  They didn’t respond. Dechert uncrossed his feet and then crossed them the other way. He wished he had listened when the military tried to teach him about grief counseling during the desert wars. He always figured it didn’t really matter.

  He wasn’t sure his belief had changed, either.

  “Thatch, I know you already debriefed, but I’m guessing they’re going to want to go over everything again.”

  Thatch grunted. Lane handed him the flask and squeezed his shoulder.

  “Look, Thatch, take another hit on that bourbon and go get a shower and some sleep,” Dechert said. “I know you’re messed up, but I’m going to need you. We’re all going to need one another for the next couple of days.”

  Thatch looked up. His smallish eyes were red and swollen. He took another drink and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll square up.”

  He pushed himself from the chair and handed Lane the flask and shuffled his way to the door. He turned around before he got there.

  “You know it should have been me out there.”

  Dechert shook his head. “It could have been either of you, Thatch. It was just a short straw, long straw kind of thing. Believe me, I’ve been there before.”

  “No. It should have been me. I let Cole run the perimeter check and the first test strips when we got to Posidonius. It was my turn to EVA, but he was already suited up and he wanted to go back out, and I let him do it. I don’t know why I let him do it.”

  Lane started to protest but Dechert cut her off. “Cole ran the initial perimeter check?” Usually the senior miner did the first EVA on the Moon.

  “Yeah. He was all charged up and he wanted to get out there and it was the Posidonius overflow. Nice and safe, so I let him do it. But it was my turn to go out for the second walk, and I don’t know why I didn’t. I think maybe I was being lazy.”

  Dechert ran both his hands through his hair. “Thatch, you had nothing to do with Cole dying. You hear me? The kid wanted to do an extra EVA and you let him do an extra EVA. That’s it. I’m sure Vernon’s done the same thing a dozen times.”

  Thatch nodded but Dechert saw in his eyes that he would never accept the argument. “Okay. I just wish it had been me. Cole, he was . . .”

  He didn’t finish. He opened the hatchway and left the room, and Dechert sat down on one of the recliners and let out a deep breath.

  The stars cast a diamond-blue glow over the room. Dechert looked up at the spiral arm of the galaxy rotating over the Serenity basin’s ancient lava flows. A few billion years ago the entire mare had been a monstrous crater, gouged out of the Moon’s belly by a protoplanet collision of unfathomable magnitude. Now it was a dead pool of basalt, old and calm. The pure constancy of the plain made him anxious.

  “We’re going to need him, Lane. Can you get him back in shape?”

  Lane sighed and took another drink and lay down on the recliner next to him. “I think so—at least enough for him to function. I’ll keep an eye on him, and so will Vernon. We’ll make sure he stays busy, especially now that we’re getting visitors.”

  Dechert leaned back, and his eyes began to shift their focus into three dimensions as he stared at the heavens, until it seemed as if he could plot the relative distance of each star above him as they flew away from the Big Bang and into the void. The constellation Leo stood out to the northwest, Regulus gleaming blue-white in the foreground like the paw of a lion running straight toward him. Denebola seemed a thousand light-years behind, flickering a dim yellow in the curling tail of the beast.

  He looked over at Lane. She wasn’t wearing her heavysuit, and her slender body moved lightly in the low gravity as she sank into the chair.

  “You should be wearing your weights. Medical’s gonna give me hell the next time they run our Bios. All of you are gonna fail.”

  “Yeah, I know, but the damned thing pinches.”

  Dechert grunted. His head spun from the whiskey and he wished for a minute of quiet, but he knew Lane was going to speak before she opened her mouth.

  Sure enough, she said, “You want to fill me in on what the hell’s going on? Waters said Posidonius was no accident. What exactly does that mean?”

  “I can’t say, not yet. It’s special access and I’m getting paranoid about chain of command stuff right now. But I’m guessing you’re going to get an earful from whoever’s coming down from Peary Crater.”

  He ran an open hand back through his hair and scratched three days of growth on his jaw and wondered if the gray stubble mixed in with the black stood out in the starlight. The alcohol seeped from his chest down to his arms and legs, warming his blood. His body was still wired with more muscle than fat and his face still held its tight lines, but he felt faded lying next to Lane. An old barn jacket left outside for too long—still useful, maybe, but not to be worn in public.

  She got up on her elbows and Dechert watched the movement of her bare arms, which were lean and athletic but lacking in sharp lines. A tomboy’s arms, descending to smooth, symmetrical hands. Dechert noticed her fingernails, clipped short. Lane didn’t give much of a damn about her appearance, and he liked that about her. She bit a side of her lower lip.

  “Fine, but I can’t be a part of the solution if I don’t know the problem,” she said. “And I’ve got to tell you, Commander, I’m getting anxious about the coms coming up from New Mexico. Someone down there has a real hard-on for China, and it got a lot worse after Cole got killed. Have you been reading this stuff? They’re claiming that New Beijing 2 is infringing on our He-3 rights by expanding eastward onto the edge of the Imbrium, and you know that’s bullshit.” She paused and curled her fingers to look at her clipped nails, and Dechert wondered if she wanted to chew on them.

  Instead she asked, “How did we get primary mineral rights to the central maria, anyway? Because some thrill junkie from the Apollo days
was the first to stick our flag in the reg?”

  She glanced sideways to see his reaction, then pushed on when he didn’t budge.

  “I thought the politicians hashed all this out with the ISA Treaty. All of the Mare Imbrium was supposed to be fair game for the Chinese. We get primary rights to Tranquility and Serenity, the Chinese get the Sea of Islands and Sea of Showers, and the Russians and Indians get to split the Oceanus Procellarum. The far side’s open hunting ground for anyone crazy enough to claim it. Isn’t that the way it was supposed to work? And forgive me for waxing historic, but when a treaty gets torn up on Earth, doesn’t a war usually follow the falling paper?”

  Dechert took in the measure of her speech, closing his eyes and wondering just how intuitive Lane was. Since Cole’s death, the signals from Peary Crater and Las Cruces had gone from tense to downright belligerent. He knew Lin Tzu was facing a similarly bristling posture from his minders back in Shanghai. Things were tightening up, as if some unseen force was drawing a string around parchment to see how well it would roll up or if it would crumble. The level of message control coming out of the SMA’s political reengineering teams had ascended into the air of propaganda. A memorandum he had just read warned that the Chinese couldn’t be relied on if an emergency threatened any crew between Serenity 1 and Mare Imbrium, whether Chinese or American. The Chinese Navy had a long history of leaving crews abandoned at sea, the memo explained with a conspicuous lack of evidence, so all SAR operations should be launched with the presumption that there would be no help from New Beijing 1 or its sibling station, NB-2.

  Sweet Lord, Dechert had thought, that shows how well on-Earth administrators understand the Moon. Life is so tenuous on Luna’s desiccated expanse that staying alive is an endeavor practiced with almost religious fervor. No one ever deserts another man on the Moon. Race, creed, religion, flag—none of that crap matters. Dechert would risk his life for any Chinese digger in distress, as long as they were within range. And he knew they would do the same for him.

  At least until what happened to Cole.

  He shifted his weight on the recliner and stared at the stars again, knowing they had looked pretty much the same to men in his spot for thousands of years. Whenever the wheel-spinners want to pick a fight, they use the same playbook, written before bronze and iron gave way to steel. Ramp up the rhetoric, create a crisis, and start to put the pieces in place for military action. Dechert wondered if the growing legal debate over helium-3 rights and the sudden demand for increased production were Act Two, and Cole’s death was the beginning of Act Three.

  He remembered spearfishing long ago in Pensacola in the blue-water deeps under an oil rig. A bull shark had climbed up from the rig’s superstructure and circled him with unusual aggression in the naked expanse of midwater, agitated for some reason though the big bulls had always been calm before. The shark had literally bowed up—dorsal fin high, snout and tail low—and had swum erratically around Dechert like a gangster defending its corner of the street—a sign to be read by any creature with an understanding of the sea. I’m about to attack you, and I will kill you if I do. Is that what was happening now—and were he and Lane and the rest of the crew about to be caught in the middle?

  “What the hell do you want me to say, Lane?” he finally asked. “You know I avoid politics whenever I can.”

  “You avoid anything to do with Earth, whenever you can.”

  “Yeah, well, when was the last time you got something done by calling the home planet?” He looked at her. “Let’s focus on one thing at a time. I want to work on problems I know about, starting with Drill Station 7. Can you dig around the old manifests to see who had Groombridge boots requisitioned to them back in the day?”

  She looked at him incredulously. “You mean Chinese manifests? I doubt it.”

  Dechert didn’t look back at her. “I mean our manifests. Peary Crater, SOS-1. The other substations. SOT-1 while it was being built, and the Nubium.”

  Lane sat up. “Dechert, are you suggesting . . . ?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just checking and unchecking boxes. If I have to, I’ll ask Lin Tzu about DS-7 in a private conversation. But first I want to know where those boot prints didn’t come from.”

  “You think it’s connected to what happened to Cole?”

  “I think coincidence is for suckers. We have to start solving mysteries. Quietly.” He looked at her again. “I don’t know where to get straight answers, Lane. I’m thinking you and I are going to have to find them for ourselves.”

  She stood up, almost bouncing in the low gravity. “I’ll poke around. I’ve got access into Materials and Equipment as safety officer. But I’m telling you, Dechert, if what happened to Cole is what I think happened, I’m not going to stay quiet about it for long.”

  Dechert nodded. “Me, either. And believe me when I say it won’t just be fucking talk.”

  He had come to the Moon to leave that part of his life behind him, but now the old memories of war were bubbling up. The last memories. On a broiling afternoon in Lebanon seven years ago, he had stood over the body of a young Druze guerrilla he had just shot in the chest. He had watched as the kid’s blood turned from red to ochre in the orange sand. He stood there and waited for the boy to die, sweating under the desert sun as his men formed a perimeter around him. There were no words spoken and they had only briefly looked at each other, the living and the dying. He swore at that moment he would never kill another person as soon as he finished his hitch in the Corps. Not for someone else’s agenda. He swore he would climb off that wheel.

  The boy had an RPG in his hands when Dechert brought him down, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. His leather sandals lay on the ground where he had been blown out of them and he had the feet of a peasant. Thick, calloused heels. A farmer, maybe. Twelve months of kicking in doors and flex-cuffing angry young martyrs had led up to that moment and it had sucked the war-fighting out of Dechert with a sudden force. He had left for the Moon years later with most of his men dead behind him, and Luna had become his sterile asylum, a place where people looked out for one another because the enveloping vacuum could easily take them all. A place completely unlike Terra in the very best of ways, and the very worst of ways.

  Dechert looked at Lane now and held her gaze. His anger dissipated. Her face was blue with starlight, her eyes flecked with green. If I ever had a daughter, what color eyes would she have? he wondered.

  “I’ve got really bad vibes about this,” she said.

  “You’re a Thermal Max baby, Lane. You’ve known nothing but chaos, so that’s what you always expect.”

  “Well, call me Cassandra, but my worst expectations are met with a disturbing regularity. I was hoping you could talk me down.”

  Dechert got to his feet, trying to smile, feeling worn-out once again as the alcohol toyed with his balance and pulled the blood from his head.

  “Let’s stick together. That’s about the best I’ve got right now.”

  8

  J. Booth Standard walked out of quarantine and into the main hangar of Serenity 1 like a malarial Caesar landing in Britain. What did Conrad call the station manager in Heart of Darkness? A papier-mâché Mephistopheles? He must have had the Administration’s man in mind, Dechert thought. Standard’s face was the color of candle wax; his shoulders were narrow and sloped, but he had a look of preternatural intelligence about him. He moved with a sense of purpose that Dechert found disquieting—a certitude with no nuance. Nobody should believe in anything that much, Dechert thought, especially on the Moon. Belief gets you killed up here.

  Two men walked in a line behind Standard toward the hangar’s flying deck. One wore a Peary Crater heavysuit that was too bulky around the shoulders and too long on the arms. He had wide blue eyes and the gravity-shocked gait of a man who had just blasted off-Earth a few days ago and was still adjusting to the physical and mental duress. The other was obviously a soldier—with the look of
a man who’d left the regular service a long time ago to handle jobs that stay out of government paperwork. He had cropped black hair and moved with sinuous ease, a barely perceptible frown on his lips. He bore no indication of rank, only a small insignia on his shoulder depicting the solar system with a silver sword running through it. Air & Space Marines. Dechert knew him immediately. A killer.

  “Commander,” Standard said. He walked as casually as he could in the microgravity, coming up to Dechert and offering him a long-fingered hand. His grip was weak. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I offer my condolences on the loss of your man. We’re certain it was through no fault of your own.”

  He spoke with the warmth of a casket salesman, in a metered tone that was sympathetic and mildly condescending at the same time. Dechert wondered who constituted the we.

  “Thank you, Commissioner,” he said.

  Standard turned and saw Lane standing next to Dechert. He smiled unconsciously and cleared his throat and then turned his attention back to his colleagues. “This is Captain Hale of the Air & Space Corps, and . . . umm . . . Joshua Parrish, a reporter with Reuters whom we allowed to tag along—for a background briefing alone, of course.”

  A reporter. Lane and Dechert stole a glance at each other. Why the hell would the Administration bring a reporter here? Dechert assessed the young writer, who flinched every time the station made one of its respiratory belches and was too overwhelmed to give more than a mumbled hello. He had a small flash-recorder in his hand, and he clutched it as if it were the last flotation device on a doomed ship. For some reason, his nervousness—coupled with Standard’s hesitation at Parrish’s presence—made Dechert glad the reporter was here.