Gunpowder Moon Read online

  But if not the Chinese, who? He had to give Standard credit for one thing—no other theory made sense. The Russians had their patch of the Moon on the western rim of the Mare Orientale, and they hadn’t made any serious inroads on the near-side maria. They focused on ilmenite and ice mining and it was hard enough for those crazy bastards to survive over there, separated from the rest of the lunar colonies by thousands of kilometers, always facing away from the Earth and into the deep of the solar system. The Indian and Brazilian lunar programs were too nascent to even consider territorial expansion. Both nations’ diggers were living in temporary inflatable bubbles and mobile mining skiffs. Only the Chinese and Americans had major settlements on the near side; only they were in international court squabbling over central maria mineral rights. Only they had the terrestrial and orbital might to stand against each other if the litigation failed to come to a satisfying conclusion and a real fight broke out.

  Dechert thought of his friend, Lin Tzu, and wondered if he was now his enemy. He would need more convincing before he believed it. But he also couldn’t just discount it, either, and that made him uneasy.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Standard,” Lane said, breaking the silence that had hung over the table, “but that’s the biggest crock of Earth-shit I’ve heard since they started selling residential real estate near Tycho.” She leaned forward and stared the commissioner down. “We’ve been here a little longer than you, and we know the people over there. They’d launch a rescue mission for one of us just as quickly as they would for one of their own. I’d just as soon believe my mother blew up the Hatchet.”

  Standard looked straight back at Lane for the first time since he had arrived. She was finally treading on territory where he could gain a steady purchase—the twisted road of international politics. “Which people do you know over there, Officer Briggs? The astro-scientists and miners you trade gardening secrets and homemade hooch with? Do you think those are the people I’m talking about?”

  Lane and Dechert stole a quick glance at each other to make sure Standard’s words had sunk in: The Administration had been listening in on their personal communications.

  “I’m sure the miners at New Beijing 2 are a friendly bunch,” Standard went on, “but they aren’t in control of this situation any more than you or I, and they work for a government with less than benign intentions. You aren’t privy to the information I have, Officer Briggs, so I understand your skepticism. I can assure you, though, that the Chinese have both motive and intent in this matter.”

  He paused and lowered his voice. “I think you know things haven’t been neighborly between our two countries lately, but this crisis would make more sense if you understood the full scope of the political situation back on Earth. To say it isn’t good would be a gross understatement.”

  Dechert stared at the holographic image of the Molly Hatchet. His eyes focused on the blinking blue dot—the exact place where the air had rushed out of the crawler’s EVA module with explosive force, leaving Cole Benson to die in space. Dechert pictured Cole trying to expel the air from his lungs so they didn’t rupture as he crawled toward his helmet, desperately trying to stay conscious. He saw him pass out, his mouth and his eyes opened wide, the water in them quickly boiling in the vacuum. That was the part of this whole mess that wasn’t good.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Parrish broke in. “This man Serkasa—how is an arms merchant clumsy enough to leave behind records of his covert dealings with a state government, and how did we know the exact chemical components of this stolen batch of explosives?”

  Standard turned to Parrish with a puzzled look on his face, ready for the intelligence of his question, but perhaps unprepared for who had asked it.

  “Arms treaties, Mr. Parrish,” he said, with a wave of his fingers. “We have a joint agreement with the Russians to track all hyperdestructives. They provided us with the trace-element profile of the polymeric nitrogen as soon as it was stolen. As for Mr. Serkasa, I don’t have the inclination to delve into the mind of a man who profits on death, but I would venture to say that such people are anything but conscientious about their records.”

  Dechert shook his head. He had known men like Serkasa, and he couldn’t disagree more. They tend to be the most meticulous of people, because death always waits for their next mistake. He looked over at Hale and the two locked eyes for a second, and Dechert knew the captain was thinking the same thing.

  Which meant Standard had a poor understanding of the operational world, or he was lying. Dechert wasn’t sure which one it was yet.

  “Has the Chinese consulate been made aware of the fact that our government is implicating them in the explosion, Commissioner, or are the results of the investigation still a secret?” he asked.

  “Captain Hale’s team just finished their initial report, and we haven’t received information from Earth on how they’ll proceed with the diplomatic process,” Standard said. He sat down again and lowered his voice. “However, Joint Space Command has received orders from the president to put contingency plans in place immediately, and that is where all of us come in. I’m afraid that life is about to change up here, for you people, for the civilian teams at Peary Crater, for all of us. Until this crisis is resolved, all U.S. mining stations on the Moon are to be, at least for the time being, militarized.”

  Nobody spoke. Parrish looked up from his notes. Dechert looked at Lane and smiled, apologetic. The promise he had made to her when she first came to the Moon had been rendered obsolete by a man who spent most of his life in a corner office a quarter of a million miles away.

  “Captain Hale,” Standard said.

  Hale keyed the Touchpad again and a topographic hologram of the Moon hovered over the table. Dechert had forgotten how beautiful she looked from space, a silver and gunmetal gray marble—Earth’s naked shadow. The hologram marked the positions of every main base, substation, and mining operation on the lunar surface: U.S. in blue, Chinese in red, Russian in green, Brazilian in purple, and Indian in yellow. Serenity 1 appeared as an indigo speck on the northern margins of Menelaus, dwarfed by the crater’s thirty-kilometer impact basin. The southern ridgeline of the Montes Haemus rose just to the west, their humpbacked peaks climbing two kilometers above the Serenity plain. The U.S. main base at Peary Crater, near the North Pole, was well over a thousand kilometers away, the first truly permanent settlement on the Moon and one of the only places on its surface that enjoyed nearly perpetual sunlight because of Luna’s unique rotational axis. It had been a while since Dechert had looked at a lunar map of this scale. Damn, we are alone down here, he thought, stuck in the middle of two sparring giants with little more than ten feet of topsoil to protect us.

  Their closest neighbors were the Chinese. New Beijing 2 had been burrowed into the impact wall of Archimedes Crater in the Mare Imbrium, about six hundred kilometers to the west. What were they doing over there now? Dechert wondered. Were military commanders briefing a reluctant Lin Tzu on the distinct possibility of a war with the Americans? Had they already moved weapons into place, and were some of those weapons pointed at Sea of Serenity 1? The thought of an AI seeker missile or a focused electromagnetic pulse hitting the station chilled Dechert to his spine. There wouldn’t be enough time for a search-and-rescue mission from Peary Crater if Serenity were attacked. All they would find is bodies preserved by the vacuum of space. The station had no significant defense systems—she was built before governments saw enough strategic importance on the Moon to warrant fighting over it. Like so many things on this rock, that was probably shortsighted of the people on Earth.

  “A squad of Air & Space Marines will be arriving here tomorrow, at 0900,” Hale said. He looked almost apologetic, clasping his hands together and squeezing one thumb under the other, as if he were unsure of himself for the first time. “I want to stress that we are not cleared to take any offensive actions. We’re simply putting pawns on the front row in case the politicians back on Earth can’t sort this mess out.” />
  Dechert leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, a feeling of impatience welling through him with the power of a nicotine fit. He had to get his crew out of harm’s way, and he didn’t appreciate being told not to worry about a squad of marines arriving at his station. Or being called a “pawn.” No more deaths on my watch, he thought. I’m not going to lose control of this situation.

  “Please don’t comfort me with the possibility that the politicians are on top of things, Captain,” he said, and turned toward Standard. “So you’re telling us that the ROC Treaty is now null and void, that we are actually militarizing the Moon? Do you understand what that means, Commissioner?”

  Standard reddened. “I do, Commander, but I would point out that we aren’t the ones in violation of the ROC or ISA agreements. We’re the ones who got attacked, and under international law—whether it’s maritime, terrestrial, or lunar—we have a right to defend ourselves. And please don’t be naïve enough to think the Chinese aren’t doing exactly the same thing right now.”

  “Maybe they are, and maybe inner-system politics isn’t my specialty, but I know how these things tend to escalate,” Dechert replied. He stood up but kept his hands on the table’s edge. “Maybe the Chinese did do this, but I sure as hell haven’t seen any proof of that yet. The evidence you’ve presented has an air of one-sidedness.”

  He looked at Lane, slowing down when he saw the warning in her eyes, lowering his voice and changing tack. “I also have to remind you that we’re miners, Commissioner. Civilians. I don’t care whether the marines are coming here to prepare for an attack or to take a few days of R&R. But my team should be evacuated to Peary Crater or maybe even to Low Lunar 1. At the very least I can stay and run the systems. . . .”

  Standard started to say no, but Dechert cut him off with a raised hand.

  “You’re shaking your head because you’re thinking of what you want to happen, not what is possible. On a practical level alone, Serenity isn’t equipped to sustain the number of people you’re talking about. You want a platoon of marines to bunk here; you’re going to have to move some bodies around.”

  “We’re talking about a four-man reconnaissance squad, Commander, not a battalion,” Hale said. “I thought a Level-1 substation could accommodate up to fifteen souls.”

  “It can in a pinch, but it’s built to house five or six. We’d be pushing the biofilters and the reactor to their limits, and the basin is going dark for fourteen Earth days when the sun sets at 1630 tomorrow, so solar will be gone. We’d also have to hot-bunk. We’ve only got eight beds. But that’s not the real issue. My team . . .”

  “No,” Standard broke in, banging his fist on his leather valise, which dampened the effect. “Taking the mining operation off-line is out of the question. We must maintain a veneer of normalcy, Commander Dechert, for tactical reasons at least. And I’m afraid that, while your team is civilian, Article Four of your contract clearly states that it can be deputized and put under military leadership in a time of crisis. That’s why substation commanders like you always have military backgrounds. The Guild will back us on this.”

  “The hell they will,” Lane said.

  “Yes, Officer Briggs,” Standard said, “unfortunately for you, the hell they will. In fact, they already have.”

  He stood up and closed his leather folder, and the gesture reminded Dechert of Captain Bildad sealing the completed ledger for the Pequod’s final voyage.

  “We can argue about this all we want, but we will still end up coming back to the same place, with the same realities. We’re going to need an operational plan to quarter eleven souls . . . twelve if Mr. Parrish is asked to stay and see this story through.” He took a deep breath and leaned over the table again. “You can make your grievances later, but for now this is a time for personal courage, and for sacrifice. You know how things have been going on Earth. We can’t let the Moon fall to Chinese dominance if that is their ultimate intention, and we will not allow unprovoked aggression to stand, wherever it occurs.”

  The mess hall fell silent again and Dechert thought of Rome and Carthage and the endless Punic Wars. Which of the two are we? he wondered. He knew how much economic potency the United States had lost to China and India in the last fifteen years. While a wealthy minority prospered in the U.S., more than fifty million people faced a daily struggle to find enough bread for their tables. Of all the continents, North America and Europe had been hit the hardest by the Thermal Max, Earth’s punishment for their centuries of dominance, perhaps. Within a year of the methane eruptions, half of North America’s coastal cities were under water. The corn and wheat belts fell to drought. The manufacturing that had once been the backbone of these countries had fled decades before, leaving no infrastructure to rapidly rebuild. Pandemics and religious upheaval did the rest of the damage.

  Maybe now that the United States was regaining her footing—thanks in large part to helium-3 mining on the Moon—her leaders were ready to retake their rightful place in the world. At the very least, a war would give the masses something to cheer for, a distraction from their hunger and a villain to blame. It was good politics, if nothing else. And if the Chinese perceived such a growing threat, would they allow it to fester? Or worse yet, because such a fact would make the situation irreversible, were the Chinese the aggressors to begin with? And that’s what Dechert kept tripping over: that it had to be them. Who else could have sabotaged Drill Station 7?

  Who else could have killed Cole?

  Dechert looked over to Briggs. She opened her mouth, probably to question Standard’s definition of unprovoked aggression, but Dechert warned her off with a shake of his head. This wasn’t the time or place.

  “Good,” Standard said. “I guess that will do for now. I know we all have things to manage. Mr. Parrish, I expect you’ll have a story drafted in the near term? We’ve notified Specialist Benson’s next of kin on the circumstances of his death. We’re prepared to allow a controlled leak of our findings after certain diplomatic functions are completed. Probably in the next two days.”

  Parrish looked up from his notes and blew air from his lungs. He played with his goatee, stroking the whiskers in a downward motion. “I have about a hundred more questions, Commissioner, and I’m going to need to speak to my editors as soon as possible. This is historic stuff we’re talking about. Crazy, but epic.”

  “Of course. We’ll set up a secure channel for you once the embargo is cleared, and you and I can speak in private in the meantime to fill in any gaps.” Standard turned toward the hatch, and then realized he had no place to go.

  “Umm, Mr. Dechert, I’d like to meet with you privately to discuss the logistics of setting up an operations center in the station. Perhaps after you’ve arranged for our quarters?”

  “That may take a while. I’ve got a command meeting with my crew in an hour and I’m due for an on-site at Spiral 6, one of our near-station helium-3 sites, before the day is out. We can’t put it off. It’s a reactor and systems check.”

  Dechert looked at Standard’s angular frame in the hatchway. He had manicured nails, he noticed, and his hands were ivory white.

  “Maybe you’d like to take a ride on the Moon with me, Commissioner? I’ll need my crew to remain here to get things ready for the marines, and we require two men for all off-grid rover missions.”

  Standard was surprised by the invitation, and hesitant. He looked at Lane, maybe self-conscious about turning down a potentially dangerous mission in front of a woman, and then back at Dechert, finally nodding his head. “Yes, I’d like that, Commander. I’ve never seen the mining operations in person.”

  No, Dechert thought, I’m sure that you haven’t.

  10

  They met in the greenhouse. Dechert didn’t want the formality of the CORE, where they usually held command meetings, and he couldn’t take the chance that they would be overheard by anyone outside of the crew. This was as close to an off-site location as there was in the station. They sat in a small ci
rcle among perfectly manicured parallel rows of vegetables in the vibration pod, which served as a pollinator for the tomatoes, squash, and other heterosexual species that had a hard time procreating in microgravity. Quarles had turned down the light concentrators, and the low whir of the ventilators muffled their voices and gave the room a hypnotic buzz. Dechert wondered where Quarles had hidden his marijuana plants. They mysteriously disappeared from a corner of the greenhouse when Standard and his small team arrived, and Quarles looked distinctly unhappy, fidgeting with his fingers and tapping his feet on the floor as he sat on an upside-down planter.

  They all looked unhappy. Dechert had briefed Thatch, Waters, and Quarles on the meeting with Standard in the mess hall, and the implications of a murdered friend and a militarized Moon were beginning to sink in.

  “So much for the Sea of Serenity,” Quarles said. “Can we call it the Sea of Impending Doom now?”

  “No shit,” said Waters. “You sure we gotta accept this, boss? Nobody told us anything about fighting a damned war when we signed up to be diggers. I didn’t even read my Guild contract. Damned thing was longer than the Old Testament.”

  “Amen to that,” Quarles said.

  Thatch grunted. He slouched on a folding chair between two rows of germinating Hubbard squash, his meaty forearms resting on his knees. Droplets of water from a condensing filter above his head fell onto his shoulder. Dechert watched the beads of liquid bulge, reach their tipping point, and fall. Thatch didn’t move when they hit his heavysuit, which had a dark blue stain of wet that was expanding down toward the center of his chest. Out of the entire team, Dechert was most interested in his response to the news and his state of mind since their talk in the observatory. Thatch had moved silently through the station since then, almost unseen, but his body radiated a cold fury.