“I was just wondering how many Earthers hate us,” KC Devereux repeated.
“Odd question,” Pappy said, peering across the rocky ground. KC had always liked rolling verbal grenades into the middle of conversations. But this was hardly the time or place for such antics.
Still, from what he could see of KC’s expression through his helmet faceplate, that didn’t seem to have been the big French Canadian’s goal anyway. “Any reason in particular you’re bringing that up right now?”
“I saw a new CNN poll this morning,” KC said meditatively. His eyes, Pappy saw, were fixed on the hovering half-Earth. “It said eighty percent thought the Moon wasn’t worth the time and money United Earth is pouring into us. Eighty percent comes to about five and a half billion. That’s an awful lot of hate.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Pappy soothed. “CNN likes to claim they speak for the whole world, but no one believes that, not even them. It’s probably only a couple hundred million who hate us. The rest don’t even know we exist. Or care.”
“Thanks, Pappy,” KC said drily. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“They’ll know soon enough,” Morgan Lee murmured from the foxhole twenty meters to Pappy’s right. Her voice was thoughtful and a bit distant. Inscrutable, Pappy might have characterized it if that term wasn’t pompously frowned upon by Earthers in regards to Asians like Morgan. “They’ll care, too. Eventually.”
“Right,” KC said. “The shot heard ’round the world. The high drama of the century.”
“Pun intended?” Pappy asked.
“Pun intended,” KC confirmed. “Heard ’round their world, of course, not ours. Can’t hear anything in a vacuum.”
“It’s supposed to be metaphorical,” Morgan said. “I wouldn’t worry about the poll, either. If you know how to tweak the questions, you can make a poll give whatever answers you want.”
“They’re fattening us up for the slaughter,” Pappy added. “The minute that first shot is fired—by either side—we’re the ones who’ll get blamed for starting the war.”
“With seriously edited recordings, no doubt,” KC said darkly. “Pretty hard to blame us when the Ueys are blowing up domes and slaughtering people.”
“Hey, if we weren’t so damn stubborn about paying our fair share of the taxes that keep us going they wouldn’t have to teach us a lesson,” Pappy said. “See? See how easy it is? Even easier than writing slanted polls.”
“They’re not going to blow up any domes,” Morgan said.
“And what share of taxes are they talking about?” KC retorted. “The tariffs—the prices they’re paying for our metals—hey, we’re the ones getting robbed, not them.”
“And when you’re in charge of CNN and the rest of the media, you can explain that to the world,” Pappy said. “Good luck. Even just speaking the word economics is usually enough to make people’s eyes glaze over.”
“Yeah,” KC growled. “Too bad economics is what drives everything else. Suppose I’m preaching to the choir, though.”
“Well, that is what accountants do,” Pappy agreed.
“Understand economics?” KC asked. “Or glaze over people’s eyes?”
“Both,” Pappy said, trying to put a little lightness in his tone. Neither of his two companions had ever been in combat before, and he could feel their tension and bubbling fears.
Not that Pappy himself was exactly immune from that. In the fifteen years he’d been with the British SAS, until the leg injury that had ultimately turned him into a Luna Colonies accountant, he’d seen action on three different continents. He was well aware of the role adrenaline and fear played in combat readiness, and how to find that fine line where they stopped being assets and became liabilities.
But that had been a long time ago, and under vastly different circumstances. On Earth he’d had his mates at his sides, and even when the plan went sideways—and plans always went at least a little sideways—he knew what he was doing and how his weapons and gear functioned.
But no one had ever fought a war on the Moon.
The reports from Tranquility said the Ueys had brought rifles with them. That was fine, as far as it went. Modern cartridges had enough oxygen mixed in with the propellant to make them function in vacuum.
But did the soldiers know how to use them? The reports had suggested that the invasion force had landed, unloaded their improvised tanks from the transports and loaded up the troops, and headed immediately toward the various domes. Certainly there’d been no indication of the soldiers being put through any target practice.
Charging in without proper training was typical of Uey forces, of course. They were cocky S.O.B.s at the best of times. More importantly, if the rumors were to be believed, the United Earth leadership had leaped into this whole thing way faster than they should have.
The rumors.
Mentally, Pappy shook his head. As former military he knew a lot about rumors. They were like motor oil: a lubricant for social interactions that could spill out into the air at the slightest opportunity, and typically got pretty much everywhere. Their reliability, according to his own private tally, ran to maybe sixty percent with at least a whiff or two of truth, twenty percent with enough truth to make them worth listening to, and less than one percent that were spot on.
By all logic, the Mimic rumors he’d been hearing for the past month should be well within the forty percent that were a hundred percent make-believe. But at the same time, the United Earth response was far out of proportion to the Lunar Colonies’ threats to withhold metal shipments until a more equable profit-sharing scheme could be worked out. Someone down there apparently believed in the Mimic, and that someone had troops, transports, and firepower at his disposal.
And the Loonies had nothing.
They had no soldiers. No weapons. No fighting vehicles. No experience. The shot heard ’round the world metaphor might be the current darling of the fringe news media, but at least the American Colonies had had muskets and had known how to use them.
They’d had allies, too, eventually. Sadly, Lafayette and his buddies wouldn’t be coming this time around. France was as much a part of United Earth as everyone else.
It was going to be a slaughter. Everyone knew it. Or rather, it would be as much of a slaughter as Earth decided to make it. Morgan’s rose-eyed trust in Uey restraint notwithstanding, there was no reason they couldn’t blow one of Luna’s colony domes just to prove they were serious.
Certainly the mass drivers the Council had scrambled to set up as anti-spacecraft weapons weren’t much of a counterthreat. They were designed to throw metal canisters across large distances as an aid to ore transport, and no matter how much jury-rigging the techs did to the programming they were always going to be slow and ponderous and utterly incapable of targeting something moving past at even a moderate rate of speed.
Granted, if a Uey attacker insisted on flying straight at its target dome before unloading his bomb, a mass driver might have a chance of taking it down. But any pilot who did something that stupid deserved to be shot down anyway.
But then, the Ueys didn’t have to take even that small risk. The mountains and ridges around most of the domes meant their mass-driver defenses couldn’t throw at anything running at ground level. With troops and tanks, the Ueys could simply roll up to the colonies’ front doors.
Which led to Pappy and his companions.
Pappy turned to look behind them. The Freeway, the people of Hadley Dome called it: the doglegged, more or less level approach to the dome wending its way through the jagged ridges of the Rima Fresnel, the fields of scree, and other hazards to ground transportation. It was the only lane big enough for the Ueys’ tanks, at least according to Tranquility’s description, so if they decided to hit Hadley, this was the route they would have to take.
He grimaced. If, hell. When. There was no point in bringing all these men to Luna and not making as much noise and fury as possible. Even if they decided to start with some
of the other domes, sooner or later they would come to Hadley.
“Is that dust?” KC asked suddenly. “Pappy, is that dust over there?”
Sooner or later; and apparently, sooner. “Where?”
“Just past the end of the Cross-eye,” KC said. “Morgan, you might not be able to see it from your angle.”
“Wait a second,” Pappy said, frowning out into the distance. He’d never heard of any formation near Hadley called the Cross-eye. “Past the end of the what?”
“Sorry—the end of Waffle Ridge,” KC said. “Cross-eye’s what miners call that kind of formation.”
“No, I can see it,” Morgan said, bending over her compact rangefinder scope. It was the best scope in Hadley, and given that geosurveyers used that kind of gear all the time, it made sense that it had been assigned to her.
Still, it made Pappy’s fingers itch that it was on the edge of her foxhole and not attached to his rifle.
His rifle.
Stooping down, Pappy picked it up by its long barrel from where it rested against the rough wall of his hastily excavated foxhole. His rifle. The Ueys would have semis and full-autos, maybe even small cannon or rockets. Real military weapons.
He and the other Loonies had paintball guns.
They were very good paintball guns, of course. Unlike their Earth-bound toy brethren, these were tools, with the range and accuracy to mark potential mining targets people like Morgan found, sometimes from as far as a kilometer away. She and KC were supposedly two of Hadley’s best shots, but there hadn’t been time for Pappy to give them a full field test before they’d been hustled out here to stand between the dome and the Uey advance.
“It’s dust, all right,” Morgan confirmed. “About three hundred forty meters out. Doesn’t look like a meteor strike. I guess they’re here.”
Pappy hissed out a silent sigh. Apparently, his team’s field test was starting now. “Okay,” he said as calmly as he could. “KC, give Hadley a heads-up. Morgan, any idea what size party they’re bringing?”
“Not really,” Morgan said. “But I know that particular dust pool. Give them another fifty meters, and I should be able to tell if it’s one tank or more.”
One tank or more. Terrific. “Keep watching,” Pappy ordered. “KC, keep Hadley updated.”
“Right.” Across to Pappy’s left, KC unplugged their local comm cable from his suit’s junction box and plugged in the one that slithered down the ground behind him and disappeared into the dogleg that led back to Hadley Dome. Radio communications on Luna were encrypted for privacy, but no one seriously believed the Ueys couldn’t decrypt them if they wanted to badly enough. Wired communications were awkward and fragile, but it was the only way to maintain at least a modicum of secrecy.
Pappy lowered his eyes to the meager collection of equipment in his foxhole. He had his paintball gun, complete with an improvised and highly inadequate scope, and two spare canisters of ammo. At the back of the teardrop-shaped hole was his catapult, also hastily constructed, with a cylinder a shade smaller than a standard oxy tank that was filled with a combination of propellant and vacuum cement. Beside the catapult was a suit repair kit and two spare oxygen tanks, plus some replacement struts and a small welding torch in case the catapult broke while there was still time to repair it.
And propped up against the side wall was a coil of monofilament line, two hundred meters long and half a ton test.
He eyed the monofil with a mixture of frustration and regret. There were so many things a clever soldier could do with high-stress thread. So many things he’d wanted to do with it. But the Ueys had moved faster than anyone had expected, and he’d hadn’t had time to rig even half the traps and snares he’d hoped to create before he and the others had been ordered back to their foxholes.
He’d argued about it at the time, but Hadley had insisted. In hindsight, given that the Ueys were apparently here, it was probably just as well they’d pulled back.
He gave his equipment one last scan, reflexively memorizing positions in case he had to grab for something without looking, then turned back to the front. Hadley was supposedly throwing together more equipment for the upcoming battle, but it wasn’t going to get here before the Ueys did. He could only hope that the haste of the Ueys’ advance meant they were just as ill equipped as the Loonies.
To his left, KC again swapped out his comm cables. “Okay, Hadley’s cranking up the mass drivers in case they try a sky assault,” he said. “Spotters aren’t showing anything flying in the area, but that could change at any minute.”
“Did they say anything about our Uey tanks?” Pappy asked.
“I asked, but they can’t see anything out here,” KC said. “Too much stuff in the way.”
“Anything from the rest of the perimeter?”
“Nothing they thought worth telling us.”
“There won’t be,” Morgan said.
“Won’t be what?” Pappy asked. “Sky assaults or other perimeter movement?”
“Neither,” Morgan said. “They’re not going to try walking soldiers over the ranges until they try the tanks first, and this is the only route wide enough.”
“Unless they drop something into the dome first,” KC said. “Even if they don’t want to start off with mass slaughter, they could drop a javelin or something into the entry foyer. That probably wouldn’t hurt anyone, but would prove they could do it.”
“They won’t,” Morgan said. “They can’t risk damaging Hadley or any of the other domes.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Pappy commented, eyeing her. “Seems to me that KC’s got a point. Bombing an enemy’s capital is a traditional way to prove it’s not invulnerable. And a javelin or a few rounds of small-gauge cannon fire would seal so fast that we wouldn’t even lose much air.”
“It’s—” Morgan broke off. “I just don’t think they want the bad publicity, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” KC said knowingly. “With eighty percent of the public already on the Ueys’ side? Come on, Morgan. You know something, don’t you?”
There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I can’t talk about it.”
“You can’t talk about the Mimic?” Pappy suggested.
She shot him a hooded look. “I said I can’t talk about it.”
“Come on, Morgan,” Pappy cajoled. “We’ve all heard the rumors. Hell, we’ve all heard the name. If we’re going to die out here, I’d like to know it’s not just because United Earth is stiffing us on chromium prices.”
“You’ll know when everyone else does,” Morgan said firmly, turning back to her scope. “All right. I’m calling it a single tank. Could be something smaller leading it, though. Maybe a runabout?”
Pappy turned back to his own scope. To him, the dust looked exactly the way it had before, with no reason to call it a single tank or a pair of them. Or a herd of elephants, for that matter.
But Morgan was the expert. “So a tank, plus an outrider,” he said.
“Or no outrider, but a couple of soldiers,” KC put in. “There they are, just coming around Waffle.”
Pappy shifted the direction of his scope. All he could see from his angle was the ridge itself. But if the Ueys were coming in from the right, as the dust cloud suggested, then KC would see them first. “You say there are two of them?”
“Two in front,” KC said. “Might be more behind them. They’ve got some kind of—I don’t know. Long sticks or something. Don’t look like rifles.”
And then, coming around the ridge, there they were.
There were two of them, just as KC had said, dressed in some strange hybrid of Uey spacesuit and Uey body armor. The spacesuit was the base garment, the same type the United Earth administrators used at their bases at Tranquility and Hippalus. The same type, moreover, that the Loonies themselves had originally been saddled with before they’d made some sorely needed improvements. On top of the suits each of the two soldiers was wearing a heavy-looking torso vest
, a slightly cheaper-looking version of the kind of armor Pappy had worn in the SAS. They had long-barreled machine pistols belted at their hips, probably modified MP5s or some knockoff.
Mentally, Pappy shook his head. Body armor was all well and good; but with a helmet faceplate the size of a serving platter as an alternative target, all a torso vest really accomplished was to add weight, throw off balance, and encourage headshots.
Which could be a serious problem for the soldier inside. Modern spacesuits were self-sealing, and depending on how sophisticated a biomed kit you put in was, even chest wounds were reasonably survivable if the victim could be moved into a pressurized facility fast enough. But a round through the faceplate and anywhere into the skull was a probable lights-out. The Ueys were just damn lucky that the Loonies didn’t have any real guns.
And as for the long sticks they were carrying . . .
“You’re right, those aren’t rifles,” he told KC. “They’re mine detectors.”
KC made a long, rude noise. “Mine detectors? On the Moon? Oh, that’s just too funny.”
“No argument here,” Pappy agreed with the first breath of humor he’d felt all day. Between the micrometeors, the condensate needles, and the various mascons, the Moon was riddled with bits of relatively pure metal. If the detectors were set at a high enough sensitivity level, the soldiers could be out there for hours.
The real irony being that the meager weaponry Pappy and the others had available contained virtually no metal at all.
“And look how they’re walking,” KC said. “See that? They’re just walking.”
“I see it,” Pappy said. Walking—one foot in front of the other—instead of doing the little kangaroo hops that every Loonie quickly learned was the best way to get around.
Battle Luna Page 2