Battle Luna

by Travis S. Taylor

  “No, you stupid bitch. The convoy was supposed to be in the airlock when it blew! No one would have been hurt if they’d gone on time. But you had to hold the whole thing up flirting with the director. Those dead people are on your head. Not mine!” He reared up, pressing down hard enough that she saw stars. At the edge of her hearing, she started to hear a rushing, roaring sound. The need to breathe was a physical pressure, making her mouth gape, her eyes bulge. Blackness closed in from the edges of her vision. The roaring got louder and louder . . .

  A missile of fur and teeth hit Hollis from the side, knocking him off of her. The roaring sound of her own blood faded, replaced by Ryu’s snarling and growling as he bowled Hollis over onto his back. Unlike his handler, Ryu was well versed in grappling with someone bigger and larger than himself and completely comfortable in lunar gravity. Leiko blinked away the last of the stars and found herself watching with a peculiar detachment as her partner used his great length to reach up and clamp his jaws around Hollis’s throat.

  “Soloway,” Hollis called out, panic soaking his voice. “Call him off!”

  “Do it yourself,” she whispered, her voice failing her after being strangled. “Oh wait, you can’t, can you? Ryu doesn’t trust you enough to follow your commands. Huh. I wonder why.”

  She pushed herself up to a seated position and fumbled at her duty belt for the restraints she kept there. With a steady, grinding stream of growls, Ryu held Hollis perfectly still while she cuffed him at hand and foot. She’d just clicked the last binder shut over Hollis’s ankle by the time the doors burst open again and the medical team spilled in, followed closely by her boss, the Chief of Rinehart Dome Security.

  “Soloway! Hollis! What the hell?” the Chief asked. Hollis opened his mouth to talk, but Ryu gave a warning growl and the former deputy chief remained silent.

  “He’s a Uey plant, sir,” Leiko whispered. “He’s the one who caused the demo cab to blow up this afternoon. He assaulted the doc and strangled me. And if you test the contents of that syringe, you’ll see that he was attempting to murder K-9 Ryu.”

  “What? Impossible!” the Chief said. On the floor, Hollis’s breathing accelerated.

  “Ryu, release,” Leiko said, projecting as much as she was able. Her partner obediently opened his mouth and backed away from Hollis, though the low, warning growl never ceased. “It’s true, Chief. Check his message logs and interview the doc. Hell, check the security footage here. It sounds crazy, but it all checks out. I’ll bet the Ueys just sent a message offering ‘assistance’ after the explosion today, didn’t they?”

  The Chief blinked, startled. “How did you know that?”

  Leiko gave a tiny smile and pushed up to her feet. “Gut feeling. Check the logs, chief. Interview the doc. I’ve got to go take care of my dog.”

  “So the Chief told them to fuck off?” Leiko asked, her voice still a ragged whisper. Despite the lingering pain in her throat, she smiled as she threaded her fingers through the velvety soft fur between Ryu’s ears. The dog thumped his tail once on the hospital bed mattress in response. He laid his head down on Leiko’s chest, moving gently enough that he didn’t disturb her healing contusions.

  “Pretty much,” Ryder said, with a small smile of his own. “He told them that we could do very well without any more of their assistance. They, of course, protested that they knew nothing of Hollis’s claims, but they’d almost have to say that, wouldn’t they?”

  “Diplomatic bullshit.” Leiko nodded. “So what happens next?”

  “Well,” Ryder said. “Talks are continuing. I think they’ll keep trying to negotiate a way into our dome to look for this thing that they want. None of us know what the hell it is, and if it had come through Rinehart, the distribution center would know about it. Honestly, if they’d just asked, we probably would have let them in to look at whatever they want. But now it’s trickier for them, and they know it.”

  “Think it will come to an open war?”

  “Maybe,” Ryder said, his voice sobering, his grin disappearing. “It has at other domes. And if it does, I don’t know how long we can hold against them. Rinehart’s not really a fortified location, not for military purposes.”

  “No,” Leiko said, stroking Ryu’s ears. “But it is our home.”

  “It is. So if the Ueys want to fight, I guess we’ll fight. But not today. Today, my good friend Ryu is going to make sure you stay in your bed and rest as you should.”

  Ryu thumped his tail again, and Leiko snorted a laugh.

  “We need you, Leiko. You and Ryu. So rest up, because this might be just the beginning.”

  The Mimic

  by Travis S. Taylor

  “. . . and in other news the Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth Council encouraged the nations of the planet to pass the System Revenues Act, describing it as a small price to pay for the infrastructure Earth governments are supplying to the Lunar, Belt, and Mars businesses and citizens. She stated plainly that, quote, ‘it is expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this planet’s governments and it is just and necessary that a revenue should be raised for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same so that our extraplanetary citizens’ needs are provided for.

  “In response to Secretary General Carlize’s speech Mayor Hamilton of the far side Lunar Colony Aldrinville posted a vlog stating that his citizens would not be taxed without due representation and direct infrastructure funding for his constituents . . .”

  “Hey, Jimmy, turn that to the match, will ya? Nobody here wants to hear the Earthers justifying raising our taxes again,” a lady sitting near the muffin counter looking over her touchpad said gruffly.

  “Hear, hear.” David raised his coffee cup and nodded in agreement along with most of the patrons of the coffee shop. David would rather see the soccer match between Luna 11 and Swigert Dome than listen to Earthers excitedly raising taxes on Loonies they’d never met and whom they’d never asked. The teenage barista behind the counter just shrugged and changed the screen.

  David Sandeep had been on the Moon for at least two decades now—a citizen of Aldrinville. If he were still on Earth, he would be considered an old man, but as far as lunar geriatrics were concerned, seventy-seven years old was just on the other side of midlife. The lower gravity seemed to take much less toll on your body parts, and it didn’t cause wrinkling near as bad as Earth gravity did. He had hoped to live out a long, peaceful life at Luna City in the Luna Village Dome but the rent there had continued to go up and up and finally about five years ago had reached a point that was higher than he had planned on and hadn’t fit in his retirement budget. Hence, Aldrinville it was.

  Aldrinville was the fifth “official” colony that had been built on the Moon and it had more or less grown out of necessity as a home for the radio astronomers, physicists, and engineers that made pilgrimage to the lunar crater turned giant radio telescope some kids had built as a reality television project about a decade back. The original colony was nothing more than an inflatable hotel and some buried habitat canisters, but over time the nearby volcanic dome of the Compton-Belkovich region just around the limb on the far side and a bit to the north had been excavated and turned into a habitat dome.

  David had always had an interest in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or SETI as it was often referred to, because of his expertise in language interpretation. He had been a multilinguistic translator for various companies over the years and he had a keen interest in ancient languages. So he had moved to the farthest and most isolated colony on the Moon not only because of the low rent, but because of the people there. Aldrinville was, indeed, the most out of the way, isolated, and least thought about of the present day thirteen lunar colonies. It was on the far side of the Moon like the more recent colonies Luna 11 and Luna 12. It wasn’t a mining effort like Luna 11 and Luna 12, so it was both out of sight and out of mind for the people from Earth not interest
ed in the big radio telescope. That’s not to say that there was no mining that took place at Aldrinville, especially in the dome excavation efforts, but the main industry and purpose of Aldrinville was the dish.

  Before leaving Earth David had hopes of retiring and sitting in coffee shops chatting about life, taxes in New Delhi, politics, and so on. But after a heart murmur had given him a scare during his daily walk along the banks of the Yamuna River it was time for seriously rethinking his life. The doctors wanted him to have some sort of robot heart surgery—every single one of them except for one: a friend of his brother’s who was a geriatrics research physician for the Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO. After having a short glass of wine—that had turned into a tall one—with him at one of his brother’s many social gatherings, David was bitten by the “Moonbug.”

  The research physician had convinced David that, provided he could survive the trip to the Moon, once he got there his heart murmur would no longer be an issue due to the lower gravity and less stress on the body. David hadn’t cared for heart surgery, so he decided that if he were going to die it would be on a rocket lunar bound.

  That had been almost twenty years ago. At first David had hoped to retire in Luna City spending his time on the Moon sitting in coffee shops chatting about life, taxes on waste product disposal and air scrubbing, lunar colonial politics, and so on all the while he watched the Earth below going on about its Earthly business. After the population and business boom in the Luna Village Dome his plans had been shifted, once again, to sitting in coffee shops of Aldrinville—there were two—and chatting about how one might go about detecting and interpreting some alien signal if one was ever received by the giant crater-sized radio telescope. Such a retirement, David had incorrectly thought, would be uneventful, relaxing, fun, and most importantly free of stress as far as he or his heart were concerned. He might miss seeing the Earth below, but the view of the stars from the far side was unbelievable. He might even consider his coffee shop exolinguistics as a “second career” someday. A second career that was pretty much apropos of nothing and of little interest to most, which was exactly how he wanted it.

  He did somewhat miss the walks along the toxic-foam-covered banks of the Yamuna, and watching birds fly about, but he didn’t miss the sweltering summers or the threat of dying from heart failure or a stroke. The temperature in the Aldrinville domes was always a perfect twenty-two degrees Celsius and there were the occasional cargo and passenger spaceships flying over to the port near the North Dome that were way more interesting to watch than any birds. For all intents and purposes his retirement was good.

  Then, his “retirement” had come to an abrupt halt—an unexpected very sudden abrupt halt. And his second career had suddenly become immediately apropos and highly stressing. David had been sitting in the usual coffee shop discussing the finer points of ancient glyphs and modern computer algorithms with one of the “usuals,” Carla Pruitt, a post-doc mathematician from Tycho State, when a team of miners had come in from the west volcanic dome excavation project. David had seen them in the shop before and sort of knew them—mostly he knew their faces. They usually had talked about finding riches like diamonds or obsidian or in one case thorium and uranium ores on their various excursions across the volcanic expanse, but not this time. This time it was something else, something that had them spooked.

  “Hey, fellas.” David nodded over his coffee cup. “Find anything new today?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if we told ya,” one of them replied. David recognized the man as one of the newer shift workers who had just come in from Luna 8 down near the South Pole Dome.

  “Shut up, Thomas! We ain’t s’posed to be talking about that,” his older companion and most likely his crew chief scolded him. David knew the man. He’d been in and out of the coffee shop for about as long as David had, and he always went to the counter when they called the name “Jerry.” The workers from the construction and excavation crews always stood out in their light gray coveralls that had retroreflective orange stripes between the ankles and knees on both legs and from wrist to elbow on both arms.

  “Seriously, Jerry? Who would believe us anyway?” the new recruit scoffed at his boss in return. “I’ll talk about whatever the Hell I want to talk about.”

  “We signed nondisclosures, idiot, and there are a lot of ears and eyes in here,” Jerry continued. “You want to keep your job and keep gettin’ paid you’ll shut your trap.”

  And that was the end of it as far as David knew. The foreman Jerry had shut his man up and that was that. David respected nondisclosure agreements and getting paid. In his former life as a translator he often had signed nondisclosures and had heard and said things he could never repeat without heavy financial, and sometimes criminal, penalties. On the other hand, it did leave David very curious as to what was going on, but it also sounded like added stress that had little to do with a relaxing retirement plan of drinking coffee, looking at the stars, and chatting up new, attractive even, post-docs. David finished his conversation and his cup of coffee and returned to his quarters. There was an encrypted video email waiting for him.

  “Hello, Dr. Sandeep. I am Aldrinville Dome Mayor Alton Hamilton. Approximately seventy-two hours ago a mining and construction crew on the west excavation project discovered . . .”

  “As you may or may not know, Dr. Sandeep . . .” The LoonieCart II driver, Ken, according to the name on his coveralls, was talking like a tour guide nodding and waving his arms about. The bright orange retroreflective stripes on his yellow hard hat and gray sleeves fluoresced as they drove past the LED work lights placed along the excavation road every twenty or so meters.

  “The volcanic dome on the west side of the caldera of what must have been, according to lunar geologists, a volcano a billion years ago has to be at least over a kilometer across and made this natural giant cavern we call West Aldrinville now. All the natural domes around the caldera you already know as North Aldrinville and East Aldrinville. There have been no attempt as of yet to excavate anything on the south side.”

  David just nodded knowingly as he white-knuckled the “oh-shit handle” over the passenger-side bubble door as the gray lunar tunnel walls zipped by only a couple meters to his right. The gravel made a continuous crunching noise that was the perfect base tone for the oscillating high pitch whine of the electric wheel motors and the thump-thumping sound coming from his heart beating out of his chest. The driver must have been down that particular path so many times that driving it was second nature to him. At what David was certain was top speed for the LoonieCart II they approached what looked like a sheer lunar volcanic obsidian wall in front of them when suddenly, and unannounced, the driver pulled the rear brake handle and put power to the front right wheel. Gray dust sprayed about as the buggy slid into almost a perfect ninety-degree turn.

  “Some of it was filled in over the eons and some not,” Ken continued his tour-guiding, barely looking at the road. David continued to hang on so tightly that he thought he’d lose feeling in his fingers. “But as you can see from all the work we’ve done here as the excavation and repurposing of the natural volcanic dome has continued over the years more and more of the structure we are exposing—well, it just doesn’t look natural, does it? Almost as if it had been previously excavated and maybe even structurally shored up in places—see over there?” He pointed at the very high ceiling of the cavern they were entering. “We didn’t do that.”

  “Uh-huh.” David only nodded, not about to loosen his grip on the handle. “Really, if we didn’t do it . . .”

  “Yeah, that long lunar obsidian beam. That thing’s got to be thirty meters long, several meters thick on each side and must weigh millions of kilograms! It is one big, long beam that looks to have been cut, poured, or who in the Hell knows how it was built, but no geologist has been able to explain it away by a natural process.”

  “Fascinating,” David muttered through his gritted teeth.

  “Yeah, and t
hen there’s this . . .”

  Ken whipped the buggy around a spoils pile to the left of the path, almost bringing it up on two wheels, and then slid to a halt. The buggy rocked forward and back several times as the springy suspension damped the momentum of the abrupt stop. Lunar regolith and dust glittered like fireflies all about them in the light as it settled slowly in the low gravity. The driver was looking at David and then back in the direction of the headlights and then back at David with a big smile on his face.

  It took a second for David’s eyes to adjust to the lighting. When they did, he could see a giant megalithic archway that David thought was most certainly made of the same lunar volcanic obsidian–type material that was so black it was almost blue. The arch was at least ten meters wide and twice that tall. David’s jaw dropped. There were strange, ancient glyph markings all around the entrance, and as his eyes continued to adjust to the scale of the opening he could see a tunnel leading inward and downward at what looked to be a shallow angle of about ten degrees.

  “What the bloody Hell?”

  “My sentiments exactly, Doc.”

  “Why’d we stop? Do we walk from here?”

  “Ha-ha! Walk? Nope, we’re a good half a kilometer out. I just wanted you to be able to take all this in before we venture down to ‘the belly of the beast,’ as they say.”

  “Wait, a half a kilometer? The dome is only about a kilometer across.” David was confused. “Come on, Ken, it can’t be that big. We have to be at the west edge of the dome by now already.”

  “We’re not going farther out, Doc. We’re going downward at this point. The tunnel here sort of corkscrews down a bit and then turns back south in sort of a dogleg. You’ll see. Hang on, though, ’cause it is a little bit bumpy from here.”

  The ride down the tunnel was anything but “a little bumpy.” The excavation machines had left huge tracks pressed into the regolith and there were rocks from cave-ins eons old that had been crushed up by tunnel borers and left as detritus strewn about. The walls of the tunnel appeared in most places to have been cut out of the Moon with precision, but in others there seemed to be natural caverns that opened up around them that whoever had built the place had made use of. It was along these more natural spaces where the cave-ins and stray materials were scattered. After about seven complete loops on the corkscrew they turned out of the descent like exiting a parking garage right onto a turnpike within a passageway that made the Chunnel on Earth look like a toy train’s tunnel. Finally, the tunnel stopped at what appeared to be a solid wall ahead of them a good fifty meters.