April 3: The Middle of Nowhere

by Mackey Chandler

  "Damn straight it is. That's why we got bombed. The first bunch is coming here and the others don't want them to. They probably have some crazy idea we are expecting them - maybe even put them up to leaving. They wanted to make sure we couldn't intervene for them."

  "Oh - crap..." Heather muttered. "I never pictured anything like this happening."

  "How many people with a lunar address did you sell these ranches to Heather? Katia wanted to know.

  "Just four. Three from Armstrong and your buddy."

  "Well, I'll bet all three from Armstrong are in that front group. And maybe some friends and family. You have any restrictions on how many people can occupy a ranch or how they can use it?"

  "No of course not," Heather was indignant. "We have some covenants that you can't shadow your neighbor without permission and you can't excavate in such a way as to make your neighbor's land subside and you can't deny your neighbors the right to over-fly above five hundred meters to gain access to their property. You have to follow flight rules to lift a shuttle off your land giving notice on public channels, but we don't even intend to make people use the port if they want to land on their own property. No stupid needless regulations."

  "Then I'm guessing some of your ranches are about to be occupied by rather extended families," Katia said.

  "But, we're not ready for them. None of the lot markers are laid out and we have no city services or an air plant or water reserve."

  "You better hope they brought what they need for themselves. I'd say about the only service you might start sweating is law enforcement. Because it looks to me like whoever is following them will probably roll in close behind your owners and demand the right to cart them right back to Armstrong. They may even have arrest warrants. You might think about whether you are going to get involved in that or decide it's none of your business. And they are arriving so close to each other you won't have a lot of time to talk to them before the second group gets here. No I take that back. They will catch up with each other out on our plain before they get here to the center and headquarters. If you want to be involved you'll have to ride out to meet them."

  "The way they acted, bombing our landing pad, don't be surprised if the bunch chasing them come in shooting instead of talking," Easy predicted.

  "We can't wait that long," Heather decided. Katia was startled by the change. Heather's voice had the same ring it did when she ordered Jeff and Happy to lift their ship before the attack.

  "Take the rovers out and plow the boundaries of the lots our Armstrong customers bought. Then the Russian gentleman's plot. I'm going to take the Happy Lewis and sit down in front of this first group approaching and find out what the Devil is going on. Johnson, you take your time and don't bust your rover. We have a day and a half and there is no need to hurry and take chances. Julie take the other. Pick your own assistants. Charles and Happy you are our pilots. Happy will land. I saw how slick he did it today."

  "No." Happy interrupted.

  "What do you mean no? Are you still woozy from your faint? Do you want Charles to take it out?"

  "Nobody should take it out. I don't want to hear another word about it until you walk out with me an take a look at it with your own eyes."

  "It got here in one piece. How bad can it be? How am I going to contact these people? Do you want to deal with it here when they roll up at our doorstep?" Heather insisted.

  "We'll figure out something but the Happy Lewis is not going to fly. I'm asking you to have enough respect for my experience to come out and see the damage for yourself."

  * * *

  "That is pretty ugly," Heather admitted, standing with the floodlights behind her looking at the huge hole.

  "You don't know but something vital is cracked and just needs stressed a couple more times before it falls apart and the whole thing could disintegrate in flight. Some vital control could have two paths dead and be running on one connection. All it would take is single stripped wire shifting under high G and shorting out and we'd lose the whole thing," Happy warned her.

  "Okay," she sighed. "Let's go brainstorm. There has to be some way to deal with this before we have a small war right here on our mare."

  * * *

  "If the 'B' rover meets them a four hour drive out from our mare how far behind will the pursuing group be? Heather demanded.

  "Assuming both groups maintained the exact same speed there should still be a good ninety minute separation at that point." Jeff assured her, finger on the map.

  "And Home will be in position to talk when we meet them?"

  "If not at first within five to ten minutes and again before the second group shows up."

  "OK, Jeff, I'd like you to call Jon so he anticipates our call. Tell him we're going out and meet the first bunch and find out what's going on. See if Wiggen has called him again or if he has any other new information. We'll just have to play it by ear. If we have Home for relay maybe we can talk sense to someone. If not, well let's hope it doesn't go past that."

  "Happy I'd like you to come along. Your comment about your experience is valid. I'd like the benefit of it. Charles I know you are April's man on site and should be responsible for the scooter, but Jeff is more familiar with its design. I'd appreciate if you'd allow him help you to verify all the critical control paths and do a jury-rig brace job to get it back to Home for repair. I realize I bypassed you when I sent Happy and Jeff to do an emergency lift. I'll be honest with you. I know them and I don't know you as well. Would you have moved as fast as they did for me?"

  "Maybe not," he admitted. "I might have insisted on asking a few questions. I never had the impression we were under military discipline so I might have balked. But seeing how dead on your gut feeling was I hope I'd have the sense to jump when you say jump now," he grinned, "and as the old saying goes, ask - how high? - on the way up."

  "Thanks for your honesty."

  "I'm going out to meet the first group. The buyers have a contract with me and I want to make sure we can get things settled quickly without relaying back and forth through Home. And what I hate to say but must - if the second group is a threat to not just this first bunch driving toward us, but our settlement too, I intend to stop them. That's why I'm taking the 'B' rover with the auto-cannon. Julie can still be marking out the lots in case our buyers are here to move in and against all good judgment I want Johnson to drive us, because if survival dictates speed over good sense, then much as I hate to admit it, he's the best."

  Johnson just smiled at the compliment, unusually restrained.

  "I won't ask if you will shoot," Katia said, "not after I saw you use the missiles. But I helped assemble your gun. I think we did a good job, but before you trust your life to it I wish you'd test it."

  "That's a good idea. I'll do that before we need it."

  "When you are satisfied it's safe, use your own judgment and lift the Happy for Home," she instructed Charles. "There are only three seats but anybody that wants to bug out with him... First come, first served. Now we have to get some sleep before we go out."

  * * *

  Katia was waiting for Heather after her too brief nap. It made her wonder if the woman had slept at all. The real surprise was she wanted to come along.

  "I thought you didn't want to be identified with us outlaws?"

  "I'm stuck here for who knows how long and you aren't complaining. I doubt if the French or anybody else will fly in here if there may be hostilities. Can I really not return your hospitality? I'm thinking I should safe guard Dima's interest in his land too. You might have trouble with the rover away from base and I'm the best tech here for it. Besides I have as much curiosity as anyone, as to what we are going to find out there."

  * * *

  They headed west making the first part of a dog-leg around the mountains to the northwest that was the only route from Armstrong. When they were thirty kilometers away the peaks were well above the horizon to their right on radar. The ragged boundary where no stars were visible betrayed
them also.

  "Time to test the gun as you suggested," Heather reminded Katia. "Faceplates sealed and test integrity. We're going to pump down to 50% of norm. Johnson, park and lock it ninety degrees to the north and set shocks for maximum stiffness and a one stroke recovery for recoil. How do we look for navigation? Are they still giving us an accurate feed off the LPS sats?" One fear they had was the Americans would not cut off the navigational sats but spoof the signal so they had a false location. Apparently they still needed the feed themselves. So far they had been checking their progress against details on a chart on their biggest screen.

  "We passed a distinctive set of micro-craters two kilometers back. So far we are dead on," Johnson assured her. A micro-crater was any that didn't show on the older set of charts with a ten meter resolution. The newest they were using had a half meter resolution and they had to zoom in tight to pick out details they could see out the ports.

  "I'm cranking the first shot back to six hundred meters per second to ease the recoil," Heather explained. "We'll shoot a high trajectory at one peak and then drop the tube and put another round into the neighboring mountain with direct fire at a thousand meters a second. The camera will laser check the range and record the shot. We're spacing them for time on target."

  "Suspension is set," Johnson reported.

  "Write these setting in as standard for firing the cannon sitting still. We should have a single hot key to set it and a warning on the screen if we engage the cannon to fire without setting the suspension."

  Heather set the ports for minimum transmission so the area lit by their driving lights disappeared. She cut the lights and reminded everybody. "Set helmets for maximum tint. Between the two we should get four ten thousandths transmission. I don't want flash blobbies or a chance I'd damage my retina."

  "Sounds smart," Johnson agreed. "I'm ready."

  Happy and Katia called out ready too.

  The first shot was more like hitting a sharp bump rolling and there was not so much a boom as a loud mechanical noise of the action cycling. The rail around the gun deck had expanded metal for the first half meter from the bottom so they heard the empty casing hit and roll on the deck above. While it was still rolling they felt the servos swing the tube down and transverse to the second target. The screen showed solid black with a contrasting reticle and a momentary dot of light as the range finder worked.

  This time the angle of fire didn't push them down, it rocked them sideways hard. Hard enough to yank their heads uncomfortably on the end of their neck and tilt the rover a good three or four degrees on the suspension. By the time it stopped moving she looked at the ballistic computer and it displayed eight seconds since the direct fire. They all watched until twenty seconds and then looked up at the edge of the port. Heather resisted the urge to blink, not wanting to miss it.

  The points of light were still pretty bright just for an instant and still slightly visible for maybe a half second. They appeared as close to simultaneous as human senses could tell. By the time she cleared the port and her helmet of the tint the fireballs were dimming through orange. In the weak gravity and vacuum the fireballs didn't lift noticeably, instead expanding in a dome against the mountain sides illuminating the slope around it and then in not much more than a second no longer illuminated the mountain sides and they were a jagged black silhouette against the stars again. There were two slight blobs on their vision but not as bad as a camera flash.

  "That will probably show up on the seismic instruments," Katia remarked.

  "Yeah, Johnson thought about that too. Those are the ten kiloton loads. But the shock coming from two points kilometers apart may make them think it is natural. We're more concerned there is a sat watch for comet impacts. Even tiny ones make a pretty good flash. No way they will believe it is natural if somebody puts both data sets together."

  "Too bad you don't have any of the normal shells with just conventional explosive," Katia said. "They would be small enough to go undetected."

  "Oh, we have a couple dozen of those loaded in the back in a spare magazine," Heather explained. "We wanted them along in case we need to use the cannon for direct fire like a tank. If they figure out all the fuss is us shooting maybe the idiots will have a little respect. We'll have to come back in the day and look, but I bet that left a mark on the mountain plain to see. Even with no atmosphere to transmit concussion how close do you want to be to an explosion like that?"

  "Honestly?" Katia thought about it carefully. "I'd want a half kilometer with the view ports shuttered or turned away from the blast and everybody inside sealed up in their suits. Being pumped down like you just did for us would be very prudent too. You know, now that you made me think about it I'd suggest the shells be fuzed for impact. That way the primary fragments from the rock will damage rovers way past the thermal effects or plasma shock wave."

  "We're ahead of you there. That's how all the unguided shells in the one magazine are programmed."

  "And I feel a lot safer in a good Russian rover," Katia added, reaching out to thump the bulkhead with a gloved fist. The sound was muted with the low pressure and sealed suits. "The American ones are built like a beer can," she sneered.

  Johnson limbered the suspension back to normal and turned back to their heading. They hadn't gone a kilometer before they stopped and Heather went out and climbed the ladder to the deck above. Otherwise, the noise of the two empty shell casings rolling back and forth and banging against the rails was going to drive them insane. After that they let the pressure back to normal so they could lift their faceplates.

  Another hour saw them with open plain to their right as far as they could see by starlight when they halted and shut down the driving lights. The driving lights gave a sense of depth that couldn't be matched with night vision. They didn't have goggles, but the forward camera could be cranked up until the gain let Johnson drive using the monitor instead of looking out the view port. Trying to drive with it though had resulted in being banged around by bumps and dips that he could see and avoid using the lamps. The monitor however was the only way to see out past the glare of the lamps.

  The mountains were mostly over the horizon behind on their right. A few peaks to the northwest defined the extreme Easterly straight line from Armstrong that the coming Americans could take. The column of rovers should appear somewhere between them and the horizon and execute a left turn to follow approximately along the track they'd come. They stopped and several used the toilet with the rover no longer pitching and rolling. They took the opportunity to set some lunch out. Then they waited.

  "Johnson, do you think you could find something to park behind?"

  "What do you have in mind?" he asked Heather.

  "Something like a small crater or a rock sticking up we can be behind to shield us from direct fire and leave less of our outline sticking up to see."

  Johnson looked at the sat maps and ran the topo profiles on the screen. He zoomed in on a couple likely features and pulled detail out of the database.

  "How about a dip? I have a dip that is three meters lower in the center than for two hundred meters in every direction. We can pull up the far side until we can see and then when anything shows back in until just the turret shows and watch through the gun sight."

  "Sounds good. Do it."

  Chapter 21

  Johnson maneuvered a few hundred meters to the southwest and stopped flipping the lights off.

  "We're at the bottom now," he explained showing them on the map. They looked up a slight slope to the front and could only see about three hundred yards. It was smooth ground with nothing sticking up bigger than a suit helmet. "Watch what happens when I pull forward."

  They pulled forward about two hundred yards. The view suddenly extended out on the low light monitor as they climbed the slope. A few new stars also came into view as the close false horizon dropped. The already dim cabin lights Heather adjusted down all the way dark.

  About twenty minutes later Heather announced, "I thi
nk I saw something move." She pivoted the gun mount around and zoomed in so they were looking at maybe fifteen degrees of the horizon with the sighting camera. After a few seconds a spot of light moved below the horizon and she adjusted and zoomed in better.

  They watched three trains of vehicles climb a slight rise and fall away from sight again. They were too far away to see details. There was glare off their sides from the lights of the rovers following but no details behind the flare of headlights.

  "They're aimed just a hair to our left," Johnson pointed out on the screen. "That means they are dead on the track that we plotted back at the huts." He added that line in red on the map and it passed ahead of them about two kilometers out.

  "This is the rise we saw the lead elements on," Johnson pointed out on the map. "They should make closest approach to us if they don't turn in twelve minutes."

  "Johnson, back down in your hollow. Katia, I'd like you to help him as soon as he stops and change the left magazine. They're in the locker marked '3'. I don't think we are going to need the guided shells for anti-orbital work, or they would have been back at us with another bombing run by now. I'd like the conventional shells mounted to replace the left magazine. The other ones are just too powerful for direct fire if we pull up close to talk to each other."

  Johnson had backed up briskly and had it stopped almost as soon as Heather was done talking.

  "I think we can both fit the lock if we lie opposite from each other," Katia suggested. "I hate to waste air and we don't have time to pump down."

  They could hear the two bumping around to fit. "That got it." Johnson said. "Just reach around me and give the hatch a tug. It's within a centimeter of closing and our suits will give that much."

  "OK I have a green light for seal. I'll pump it down for two minutes. One of those magazines can be changed in a minute in Lunar gravity. We have lots of time."