by Bobby Adair
“That’s what I sensed when we did our moon surveys,” says Phil, talking about the concentration of Grays he told us about when we were gathering intel a few months back.
“I’ve never heard of these,” I tell him.
“No reason you should have,” says Frank. “Working in this section of the moon base was a one-way ticket, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” I say, “I don’t know what you mean. Did they kill the workers after a time?”
“No,” says Frank. “People up here died the same as everybody else. Just, once you were assigned here, you never got reassigned. Here was here. This was it, until you died.”
“And your families?” I ask.
“Used to be, they had family dorms down below the main batteries, over on the other side of the MSS compound.”
“But now?” I ask.
“No humans live in this section anymore. They’ve all been moved out.”
“That’s good,” I tell him.
“Why’s that?”
“Because this part of the moon isn’t going to be here, pretty soon.”
“How’s that?”
“You let me worry about that,” I tell him. “Are these new Grays living down in the thousand-foot deep Eden yet?”
“About half of them, from what I heard,” he says. “I didn’t work on it. After the new bunch showed up, I lost my job as foreman supervisor. I’ve been on a maintenance crew ever since.” He looks over his shoulder at the survivors of Phil’s handiwork. “With this bunch.”
“But you know how to get down to the lowest level?” I ask.
“I know most of the guys who did the building.” He reaches over and taps his d-pad. “I got updated maps of the whole complex. My d-pad was wired for it a long time ago. The new bunch doesn’t understand computers, so they don’t know how we use ‘em. So when the plans got updated in the MSS system, all the changes flowed down to me, and nobody said boo about it.”
“Can we get down there?” I ask.
“All the way down to the thousand-foot Eden?” he asks.
“Ideally, we need to place the weapons around seven hundred and fifty feet, someplace smack dab in the middle of all of it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve got a thermonuclear weapon,” I tell him. “I don’t know what size. Maybe nine megatons. I want to put it where it’ll kill every one of those bastards.”
Frank’s grin is real and it’s mean. “Why didn’t you start with that? There’s a vertical utility shaft that runs from a hangar not too far from here, all the way to the bottom. I know a back way to get to it. I can take you right there.” He turns and points out one of his coworkers. “We should bring along Skip. He was SDF down here for a lotta years. Manned one of the batteries up top. He’d have a good idea of where we might run into some Trogs or MSS along the way.”
I turn to Phil. “Can Skip be trusted to come with us?”
Phil shrugs. “Won’t matter. He’ll die either way.”
Frank grimaces.
“Don’t pay him too much attention,” I tell Frank. “Phil’s wife just died.”
“My soul died,” snaps Phil and he turns and stomps away.
Chapter 40
Above us, hardly any railgun rounds are lighting up the sky as they tear off into space. Instead, grav lifts are accelerating away from the moon, not in any kind of order, ones and twos, dozens, all headed for the earth.
Brice and I are standing on the edge of the crater with the front half of the Turd II buried at the bottom. He checks the time on his d-pad. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on, the moon is sending reinforcements to the battle stations. That’s where those lifts are going.” In the absence of a reply from me, he goes on to say, “That’s bad for our marines down there. Reinforcements might turn the tide against ‘em. Good, though. The assaults are going so well that reinforcements need to be sent. Don’t you think?”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.” I glance into the hole. We have more bodies than we need jimmying the nuclear devices out of the bent racks.
"I hate to even think it," says Brice, "but it thins out the herd here on the moon, and makes what we have to do easier.”
I turn my eyes to the sky, toward the blue dot of my home planet. A quarter-million miles away, yet it still seems odd that the eighteen orbiting battle stations aren’t visible.
“Big as those things are,” says Brice, guessing at my thoughts, “you think you’d see ‘em from here. Or at least the flashes of railgun fire. They gotta be fighting now. Ya think?”
“Yeah.” I check my d-pad for the time. “They were all supposed to arrive just as we nuked the moon base, coming up on an hour ago.”
“You think Blair got those nukes Bird gave her in position to level Pyongyang?”
I shrug. “Those nukes won’t do any good unless we detonate the ones here. The last message from Bird said her people wouldn’t glass Pyongyang and launch the coup unless the moon base was taken out first.”
“And Blair’s not going to stick her neck out for the rest of us,” says Brice, “no matter how many Free Army marines are dying down there.”
"She's a piece of work." I turn my attention to the crater.
Both of the lifts are hovering above the sloping sides near the bottom. Most of the surviving workmen are down there, doing what they can. Four of the workmen are skipping across the surface, heading back to the hole where the back half of the ship lies in the tunnel.
“You sure you trust those guys?” Brice raises his railgun to his shoulder and looks down the sight. “I can kill all four of ‘em from here. It’ll happen so fast they won’t even feel it.”
“We talked about this,” I say. “We need these people to fight for us. They’re headed to the worker dorms to see how many of these people still have the will to stand up for themselves and die for their children’s futures.”
“Dead,” says Brice. “That’s what you call a soldier with no weapons.”
I’m already only paying half attention to him. I’m looking at Phil. He’s sitting on the edge of the crater with his comm links turned off. That doesn’t matter, though, I can hear him sobbing through the telepathic link between us. It’s too overpowering to tune out. I think he’s doing it on purpose, willing me to feel his grief.
“He shouldn’t have a weapon,” says Brice, following my eyes.
“I know.”
“I can take it from him.”
I shake my head. “Let me deal with it.”
“He might shoot you.”
I shrug.
“You two,” starts Brice, and then he shakes his head.
“I told Clark to set a timer on the last nuke.” I check my d-pad again. “There’s will be a timer set on every one of them, right from the beginning. We’ll be on the clock once this thing kicks off. No fuckups. No tactical retreats. No looking for a better way. It’ll be bull-rush-with-guns-blazing or die.”
Brice pretends to startle awake. "Wait, were you saying something about how this was going to be different? ‘Cause it sounded a lot like the same shit we've been doing for over a year." He finishes with a chuckle.
I chuckle, too. “Same shit, I guess.”
“You like living on the edge. I’ll give you that.”
“If we’re killed trying to deliver the bombs,” I say, “I still want them to detonate. Then Blair’s people will have their signal and start the coup. Besides, these weapons can’t fall into Trog hands.”
“Even with a nuke,” says Brice, “reverse engineering one, if that’s what you’re thinking, would require a mountain of science the Grays don’t possess. They’d be better off starting from scratch.”
“They’ll have plenty of time,” I tell him. “The Grays have been around for thousands of years. If they can’t figure it out, there are still plenty of scientists on earth who I’m sure could be convinced to help the
Grays ramp up their tech.”
“Or they could fly down to earth and find a nuke all on their own. I’ll bet the MSS still has a few dozen lying around they’d happily share with the Grays for the right price.”
“Well,” I tell him, “they aren’t getting these.”
Chapter 41
Everything is set. I wish Clark all the luck in the world. I do the same for each man and woman in the work party who has chosen life over slavery. Some of them are going with Clark, others are headed into the moon’s population to share with them what’s going on, and to stir up the revolution. Frank and Skip are coming with my team. Based on the efforts I’ve seen from all of the work crew survivors, I think Phil’s probing assessments of them was correct. Which means the four with loyalist tendencies probably did need to die along with those three MSS types.
The timers on the nukes are synced and double-checked.
“At least five kilometers,” I tell Clark as he steps into the crowded grav lift, one of the two he’s taking, each carrying two nukes.
“Godspeed,” he tells me as one of his crewmen slams the lift door shut.
I give Brice, Silva, Lenox, and surly Phil a nod. Skip, Brice, Silva, and Lenox have the nuke hanging between them in a sling fashioned out of suit cloth taken from the bodies in the tunnel. Together, they can fly using suit g with each carrying the equivalent of thirty-five pounds of extra weight from the nuke. Frank, my guide, will fly out front with me. Phil doesn’t have a job—not exactly. He just needs to stay with us. I need to keep an eye on him, and I need to keep him alive. He’s my endgame.
“Let’s go,” I tell everyone as I lift off the surface and pick up speed.
Phil, to his credit, seems to have little trouble with the suit controls, yet he has a more intimate relationship with gravity than any human I’ve ever known.
Frank lifts off and hurries to catch up with me. As for the four handling our weapon, it’s awkward going, but only at first. They soon become more coordinated and pick up speed.
Inside of a minute, we’ve passed the gaping hole in the tunnel system and the front half of our ship. We’re skimming over the surface, staying two to three meters off the ground and making speeds upwards of two hundred kilometers an hour.
Frank has worked his way up beside me, and he points to the right. “That’s the rise I was telling you about.”
“The one with the gun emplacements on the other side?” I confirm.
“Anti-personnel railguns,” he says. “They defend one of the hangars over there from ground assault. The Grays wised up a month or two back and forced ex-SDF troopers to train some of their Trogs on using the guns. You can bet with what you’ve got going on up on the battle stations, the Trogs will have those manned.”
I point to the left. “Is that where the depression starts?”
“We’re on course,” he says. “What’s our time?”
“Six and a half minutes.”
To our right, past the rise holding the railgun bunkers, a line of lifts accelerate into the sky, pushing hard g’s and glowing bright blue grav fields off their plates.
“There goes another couple hundred assholes,” says Brice over the comm.
“Just for another six minutes,” I tell him, “and the parade stops.”
Chapter 42
We come to a stop in the open, as Frank checks the detailed map on his d-pad. He points to a grid square. "They're a kilometer apart, those gridlines. We should be ten kilometers away right here."
I know that's plenty far. I know it in my head, mostly, and in my heart not at all. With the moon's horizon only two and a half kilometers away, ten kilometers should be plenty of distance for us to be well below the horizon with respect to the crash. Still.
I look farther down the length of the depression. "How far is that rock mound?"
“Two kilometers,” Frank guesses. “Maybe less.”
I look at my d-pad. “We still have nearly two minutes.” I glance at the others. “Who’d feel comfortable having that mound at your back when the timer hits zero?”
All raise a hand, except for Phil. He’s glaring up at the earth, anger boiling over in his brain.
Frank points to a row of broken boulders, each maybe the size of a travel trailer. They’re maybe a half-kilometer to our right. “That’s our entrance point over there. On the other side of those big rocks.” Looking toward the mound I’ve selected two kilometers away, he asks, “You wanna be that far when it blows?”
I nod as I lift off.
The others show their agreement by rising with me.
In moments, we’re all flying as fast as we dare so close to the ground. The clock is ticking, and destruction like we’ve never experienced, so close and personal, is coming.
Chapter 43
When we hit the ground, we lay our nuke in the softest pad of gray dust we can find within a few meters of the rock mound. We each sit down and put our backs to a large stone that seems to be firmly planted in the ground. Lenox and Silva have to wrangle Phil into place as his mood isn’t allowing him to care whether he’s safely down with the rest of us.
I check my d-pad, and see that we still have nearly thirty-seconds to spare. “Everybody ready for this?”
“How long do we wait?” asks Lenox.
“You mean after?” I ask.
She nods.
“Until most of the rocks have fallen,” I say.
“It’s not going to happen like you think,” says Phil in a weird robotic voice, like he’s trying for all he’s worth not to show one more shred of emotion. “There’ll be no end.”
He’s probably right, yet I don’t want to say anything one way or the other. I can still feel his anger at me flowing out like a salty tide.
Another flight of grav lifts—nearly twenty of them—pass overhead, maybe a thousand feet up, all heading toward earth.
“You think they’ve taken any of the battle stations yet?” asks Brice.
I check my d-pad. “Five seconds.”
That ends the conversation.
Everyone braces.
I don’t hear it, although I feel it shock the ground below my hands so hard it hurts. I see a burst of vaporized matter expanding across the sky. Our first nuclear explosion on the moon.
It feels like it detonated inside my head. My bug goes into spasms.
The big rumbles come in waves that feel like they’re going to liquefy the ground, and the sky fills with glowing rocks of every size. And it’s all happening so fast, and so unending, it feels like the moon is breaking at the seams.
And then calm.
I try hard not to puke as the world spins before my eyes. Every nuclear blast is worst than the one before. With us being so close to this one, I’m starting to think, I’ve damaged myself permanently.
Remarkably, Phil is the first to stand as the ground seems to shiver from the nuclear hammer blow it just took. He looks up at the growing cloud of debris covering the sky. “That’s all coming back down. And it’s all radioactive.”
“Oh shit.” Why wasn’t that the very first thing I thought of?
Chapter 44
Above us, the debris is glittering orange and red from sunlight bouncing off the particles. An eerie glow colors everything around us.
“The moon’s escape velocity,” says Phil, taking on an absent way of talking, like he’s reciting something memorized to bore himself into sleep, “is five thousand, two hundred, and ninety-four miles an hour.”
Everybody’s on their feet, shaking off the effects of the shockwave, and marveling at the fact they’re still alive.
"You think Clark’s squads made it ten kilometers?" asks Silva.
"They did,” I say, as my head starts to settle down. “There's no reason he shouldn't have in the grav lifts."
“In a vacuum,” says Phil, still staring at the sky, “gravity pulls everything down at the same speed it went up.”
No one is p
aying him any attention.
Brice is urging Silva and the others to help him with the nuke. Frank isn't saying anything, but his eyes are full of doubt and an urge to run somewhere far away.
“Some of it will be ejected,” says Phil, not moving from the spot he’s claimed. “Some of it will go into orbit. Most of it—the boulders, the pebbles, and the dust—will come back down. It’ll cover the whole moon in radioactive particles.”
“We need to go now,” I tell everyone. “We need to get underground.”
“Clark and his people don't know that," says Silva.
“They have both of the lifts,” says Brice. “The steel will protect them while they’re inside.”
“At first,” says Phil. “Then the particles will irradiate the metal boxes and they’ll become death traps.”
“We’ll be long done with our business before that happens.” I lift off, hoping I’ll feel steadier afloat than on my feet.
Frank rises as well.
The four with the nuke manage the sling and lift it off the ground.
“Phil,” I say, “stop staring at the pretty colors. We gotta go.”
He takes that as a reminder I'm still alive, and his eyes drill me with hate as he comes off the ground.
I spin in the air, confirm the direction with Frank, and go.
I feel the others follow. As we pull away from the false safety of our rock mound, I pour on the speed.
The sky from ground to zenith is filling with dust. Rocks start to impact the ground around us, most falling slowly. They don’t seem like a danger, but some are as large as basketballs, a few are the size of dishwashers.
Before I realize it, we’ve crossed the two kilometers, and Frank urges me to slow down. He points out the row of huge stones that mark our destination.
I brake hard and drop boots-first to the ground. Frank comes down beside me, and we hurry to the edge of a tall hunk of rock to look out onto the plane above the spaceport.
“I can’t see anything,” I tell Frank. “Just the haze.”