Gunpowder Moon Read online

  “That’s what you all are worried about?” Thatch finally asked. His teeth were clenched together so tightly it was a surprise he could speak. “Those sons of bitches killed Cole. I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll be happy to pull the trigger if we get the say-so. They won’t have to pay me a fucking dollar to do it.”

  Dechert nodded at Thatch, but didn’t speak. The big man ran a thick hand through his curly hair and exhaled. He hadn’t shaved, but that wasn’t unusual. His eyes were still red-rimmed with fatigue, and his heavysuit looked a size too tight. An old forty-niner who came up to the Moon to hit the big lode and lost his partner to a bomb on the lunar mare. I can’t blame him for wanting a reckoning, Dechert thought.

  Lane patted Thatch’s wide knee. Her eyes had been creased in thought since the meeting began, and when she spoke, it was in a low, calming voice.

  “We’re all pissed about Cole, and I’ll be just as happy as you to kill the bastards who did it, but let’s make sure we’re not punching the innocent kid standing next to the bully.” She looked around the room at each of them. “Does anyone here really think the Chinese did this? It doesn’t make any sense; they’re running at full capacity and they haven’t tapped a fraction of their He-3 deposits. They could stay west of the Apennines and have enough dirt to mine for the next fifteen years.”

  She turned to Dechert. “And even if their government did go insane, what business do we have being in the middle of this? I did read my Guild contract. It said we could be deputized in the case of a mining emergency or a natural disaster. It didn’t say anything about fighting a war.”

  “I’m sure the SMA lawyers have found a way to parse that,” Dechert said. “It wouldn’t be the first time civilians got caught in the cross fire, Lane, and according to our pay stubs, we are technically an extended arm of the government.”

  “Fuck the technicalities.”

  “I wish we could. But I don’t think we’re going to get out of this. And at least from a tactical standpoint, I can see where Standard is coming from in wanting to keep the mining operations up and running. We shut things down and bug out and the Chinese will know about it in six hours.”

  He sat with his legs crossed and his fingers tucked into the neckline of his heavysuit, scratching his jaw with a free index finger.

  “I feel almost as bad for our friends at NB-2 as I do for us, and I’ll make every argument I can to get out of this, but we can’t lose focus. We have some serious problems to address, right here and now. Nothing’s going to be off-limits if this thing spins out of control, and our first concern has to be station security. We need to assess our vulnerabilities.”

  “Our vulnerabilities?” Quarles asked. “How about ‘we’re on the freakin’ Moon?’ Jesus, if someone started shooting at us, we’d be like a baby on a mountaintop. We have trouble enough dealing with solar flares. If someone shot a focused EMP our way, I couldn’t microwave you a pizza after it hit. It would fry everything we got. Coms. Life support. Transport. Everything.”

  “The kid’s right,” Vernon said. “Our shielding is designed for naturally occurring radiation bursts. There aren’t supposed to be any damned weapons on the Moon. A strong enough EMP would probably take down the reactor, even if it’s encased in its second shield. And a missile or laser shot would do worse. They could kill us a dozen different ways.”

  Dechert tried a grim smile. “I’m sure the marines are working all this out for us. They’ll probably be bringing some kind of perimeter defenses over with them from Peary Crater, but I doubt their idea of acceptable losses will mesh with ours. So let’s hear some options.”

  They all shifted in their seats. “We need an evacuation plan, obviously,” Lane said. “No more than five minutes from warning to bugout, and it would have to be in a MOHAB. We can’t walk out of here.”

  “But what if they hit us with an EMP from low orbit?” Thatch asked. “There’s no warning for that. It would knock out all of our transport capability for at least a day, maybe longer, and we might not even last that long. All the CORE’s autonomics would go down, including life support.”

  Dechert nodded, thinking it through. Thatch was probably right. Even if the fusion reactor did somehow survive the pulse and stay online, it would be a heart pumping blood to a dead body. All the circuits in the station would be blown. They might not even be able to open a sealed hatch without one hell of an effort. And that was if the Chinese hit them with just an EMP. If it was a missile or laser strike, this was all probably moot.

  “All right,” he said, looking up at them, “how about this? We move the Aerosmith down the Menelaus Road tomorrow, somewhere inside the impact basin, to serve as a lifeboat. She’ll need an overhaul, but it looks like we won’t have to use her as a mining platform anytime soon. The crater should protect her from an electromagnetic pulse or anything else flying this way from the Mare Imbrium or the South Pole. I’m sure I can get Hale to convince Standard it’s the smart play. He’ll like the redundancy.”

  The Aerosmith, like the Molly Hatchet, had been named by Quarles, who swore that no music made after 2020 was worth listening to. The Administration had grudgingly accepted the breach of naming protocol for its mining crawlers as a minor annoyance, but those were happier days—and the Aerosmith was in much better shape back then. She hadn’t been out on the lunar surface for more than six months, and Dechert could see that that scared all of them. God only knows how much moondust had crept into her innards or how the extended hibernation in the cold soak of the Bullpen had brittled everything from her wiring to her half-tracks. Dormant machinery doesn’t do well on the Moon.

  Lane must have been thinking the same thing. “Even if we can get the Aerosmith running and down into Menelaus—and that’s a big if,” she said, glaring at Quarles to express her doubt in his ability to pull off such a feat, “how are we going to get to her if there’s an attack? The rovers would probably be down, and an EMP would fry the walk-profile computers in the suits.”

  “Can’t we run a bypass on the WPCs, so the suits can be run manually if need be?” Dechert asked. “I’m talking twentieth-century stuff here—just set them up for basic life support with no auto-regs or navigation. It’s a four-hour walk, but it’s doable with a map and a compass.”

  Quarles thought for a few seconds. “I could rig the suits so the rebreathers are manually controlled, I guess, but we’d have to be careful about the gas mixes. We’d also need to keep an eye on one another while we’re out there.” He looked over at Lane. “And I can’t promise that her suit will work if she keeps denigrating my skills. It ruins my concentration.”

  “All right, let’s get it done,” Dechert said, brushing past the two before they could begin to snipe again. “Lane, you work out an evacuation plan. Quarles will handle the suits and help Vernon with refitting the Aerosmith. Thatch, get to work on a run into Menelaus. Pull the maps and figure out a safe place to stash her, and check the latest low-orbit shots to make sure the road hasn’t been compromised. I’ll find out from Standard and Hale what kind of defensive countermeasures the marines have planned in case things get worse than they already are.”

  “They’ll probably just sing ‘God Bless America’ as the freakin’ missiles fall,” Thatch said. He liked bureaucrats and soldiers even less than Lane did, and it had taken him more than a year to warm to Dechert once he realized his boss had been in the service. Something about a bar brawl in Portland a long time ago that had landed him in jail for the weekend. Thatch shifted his large bulk, and it seemed the chair he was in might remain glued to his thighs when he stood up. “How much warning would we have if they did launch on us?”

  “You mean missiles?” Waters asked. “Figure seven thousand kilometers an hour from a range of six hundred klicks . . . maybe four minutes once we catch sight of them. Just enough time to shit our pants but not enough to clean up. I don’t know if we’ll be able to bug out. We might get our suits on, but getting clear of the station is another thing.” He smile
d his big Vernon Waters smile. “I think I’ll just head down to Jonathan’s office in the Hole, for a last-second toke of his hydro-mania.”

  “I’ll have the vape packed and hot, my brother,” Quarles said. “We’ll die high, and live on with the gods.”

  Dechert grimaced. “That’s deep, Jonathan. Did you get it from Led Zeppelin?”

  They all joined in laughter, but it sounded hollow in the cavernous room, unlike the real laughs they had shared together in the past.

  “Okay—let’s just focus on an evacuation plan and make sure we have it dialed in tight,” Dechert said. “Vernon, run the numbers and figure out our margin for error, down to plus or minus ten seconds. I want this thing locked down.”

  Dechert stood up and turned to Thatch. “You’re also going to have to rig one of the rovers with a plow for the descent into Menelaus, and bring some Cynex and blasting caps. We’ll need you and Vernon riding shotgun out in front of the Aerosmith.”

  He looked at his team and nodded his head. They acknowledged him but none of them spoke. Waters slapped Thatch on the back and the two turned to leave.

  “Lane, Jonathan—hang around for a minute,” Dechert said. “I want coms in the Aerosmith to be off-line from the Peary communications hub, and I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to throw by you.”

  He waited until the three of them were alone and then signaled Briggs and Quarles to follow him. It was an uneasy gesture, and not just because of its conspiratorial nature. Dechert had made tough decisions before. He had lost four men trying to save one soldier who was bleeding out in a bomb-gutted shack in Aanjar during the worst of the Lebanese insurrection, but he kept ordering them back in because you didn’t leave a guy behind. He had ignored orders that didn’t make sense, or at least pretended not to receive them until they became irrelevant. But the responsibility for those decisions always fell on him. This time, he couldn’t do what was needed alone. At the very least, he needed Lane and Jonathan to help him, and the cost would have to be dealt with later, even if it was too high.

  He took them to the quarantine module, where infected plants were separated from the rest of the greenhouse. They squeezed inside the white sphere and closed the hatch. There was barely enough room for all of them to stand without touching one another in the smooth-walled pod. A nectarine tree with citrus canker on its trunk poked at Lane’s leg and they all leaned forward to avoid the sloping walls overhead.

  “This is nice,” Quarles said. “Lane, maybe we should try this sometime when the commander’s not around.”

  Lane smirked but didn’t say anything. She looked at Dechert in anticipation, as though she had hoped this conversation would happen but didn’t want to initiate it. Dechert had always rebuffed her wild theories about the government and its Machiavellian plottings. Now he had them clustered in a plant hibernator so their SMA and federal minders couldn’t hear them talk. He clenched his teeth and began.

  “I’m not going to try and sweeten this up, so I’ll give it to you straight. We’re going to lose the Moon if things keep going down this path.” He paused and looked both of them in the eyes. “If that happens, I want you to think about the consequences. They’re more important than our little station out here on the Serenitatis.”

  He breathed in, keeping his head down. Giving speeches had never been his thing; he used to let the sergeants do it for him back in the Bake.

  “Do you follow me? Colonizing the Moon has been one of the few real achievements our back-assed species has been able to pull off in the last thirty years. And it’s been done the right way. It might not be perfect up here, but it’s remained a common cause for the most part. If we let this thing happen, if we start arming the forts and the Chinese do the same, the Moon and everything else from the Asteroid Belt out to Europa will become just like Earth.

  “The war-gamers back home won’t just be drawing up plans for a Hong Kong Variant or a European Heavy anymore. The next battles will be fought in space. The one place where every other consideration has been superseded by the right to survive since the days of Mercury and Vostok will be gone. A hundred years of peace in space—gone. And it will never come back.”

  They both stared at him, too surprised to say anything. Dechert had shown passion before, about blasting for ice in the Moon’s subterranean lava pipes or flying a shuttle on the deck in a tight-walled rille, but he had never expressed any emotion other than dull cynicism about the state of the human condition, and he had never discussed politics. They respected him for that, had accepted the fact that he was diligent to the extreme about his command but detached and apolitical about most everything else. And now he was talking like a twentieth-century peace activist in the longest-winded speech he had ever given in their presence.

  “It might be too late to do anything,” he concluded, embarrassed by the fact that he was still the only one speaking. “Hell, it might have been too late when they declared the Moon a commercial zone in 2051, before the Max. And Standard could be right as well, that the Chinese are starting something that can’t be stopped, but I need to know for sure if that’s the case. If we’re going to go the way of Earth, I want to know why the hell it’s happening, and who the hell is doing it.”

  “So what do you want us to do, boss?” Quarles asked. He looked over at Lane, his eyebrows raised. “I mean I’m with you, you know, but it’s not like we can take a shuttle down to the Mining Guild and ask them to open an independent investigation.”

  Dechert straightened his back, watching the ceiling so he wouldn’t bang his head. “No . . . I want to open one myself. We need information and we can’t get it through the conventional channels. I need both of you for that—but I want you to realize that if you help me, you’re jeopardizing your careers at the very least, and maybe a lot more. It’s probably in your best interest to say no, and I won’t hold it against you if you do.”

  “You already know where I stand,” Lane said. “I don’t care whether their dumb-ass bureaucrats or our dumb-ass bureaucrats are picking this fight; I just want to stop it. I didn’t come up here so I could hang out with a bunch of unshaven men for three years. It was supposed to mean something.”

  Dechert looked at her and nodded, a small smile on his lips. He wanted to squeeze her arm but resisted, looking instead at Quarles. “Jonathan? You can bail out now, and no hard feelings.”

  Quarles looked at Lane and then Dechert. He plucked a leaf off the nectarine tree and began folding it into careful halves and then quarters, his eyes lowered in concentration. “Well, I’m all about self-preservation, but I can’t stand the thought of those assholes frying all my toys up here so they can turn a quicker dollar. I’ve got patents to consider.” He tossed the folded leaf into the planter, keeping his eyes down. “I hate the Earth anyway, minus a few of its bacchanalian pleasures.”

  Dechert nodded. Quarles rarely spoke about his life back on Terra. His family had died in a flu pandemic after the Thermal Maximum, and Dechert had always sensed a seething anger that lay hidden under his juvenile demeanor. He blamed Earth for what it had done to him, and the people on it for being too stupid and shortsighted to prevent it. For Quarles, ignorance was the deadliest sin.

  “For God’s sake, Jonathan, is that a yes or a no?” Lane asked.

  He looked up at her and smiled. “It’s a yes, my quick-tempered Artemis. I’ll risk premature death if it means I get to bask in the warm glow of your presence for a few more weeks.”

  Dechert crossed his arms, still unsure of himself, and then nodded his head.

  “All right. What I need is a way to communicate outside of the pipe, totally clear of any spies at Peary Crater or Las Cruces. And I need some intelligence from Earth, from within the Administration. We have to find out everything they know about the Molly Hatchet, and if they’ve gathered any additional intelligence on the sabotage of DS-7 that Standard isn’t sharing with us.”

  Jonathan calculated for a moment. Nobody on Earth or the Moon knew the stream better than he.
“If you’re talking about using the stream, I’ve got an idea. I could run a piggyback program and have a message dispatched to a DRP on Earth, but I’d need a little time and a lot of privacy.”

  Lane closed her eyes and set her jaw. “Put that in English, please.”

  “A piggyback’s a kind of worm that lets you insert and retrieve data streams in a private pouch at the tail end of open i-mail or message threads, without having to implant an executable file. Like a secret compartment in a briefcase. Once the briefcase hits the flash-servers on Earth, the piggyback links itself to a dynamic routing program—a DRP. You could send encrypted messages to whomever you wanted, and no one would even know that they came from the Moon. You could even run some basic queries and pull data directly off the stream. Problem is, you can only communicate with the servers when legitimate messages are coming up and down the pipe. In other words, you wouldn’t get your responses until a real message came back from a different, legitimate source.”

  “But it would be completely untraceable?” Lane asked. “Even if someone was looking?”

  “Yeah, it should be. I’m a bit out-of-date on the government’s tracking spiders, but the last time I checked, they were two years behind the curve. NSA’s snoops all got wait-listed by MIT.” He smiled. “You know the government techies—they’re the second string.”

  Dechert thought about that. He didn’t like the idea of bouncing stream messages off an unknown cloud server on Earth, but the risk would have to be taken. “All right, but can the messages be routed down to Terra and then back up to the Moon, to another station?”