April 3: The Middle of Nowhere

by Mackey Chandler

  "Okay, But I'll do a narrow pattern too. If he spreads out I'd bet on him stringing the group out lengthwise. It's harder and it takes practice to keep a bunch of vehicles spaced out in a wide pattern. So I'll do one plan five hundred meters wide and a kilometer long. Do you want them dropped time on target?" he asked.

  "Not precisely, but all within thirty seconds say. Just so they don't see a line of fire walking toward them and have time to maneuver."

  Outside Katia was folding forward the steel shutter which covered the glass and protected it from micro meteor erosion when they were parked. The bar that folded over and could be locked also could stand as a brace and hold the steel plate horizontal like a big eyelid over the port. She engaged the catch pin into one of the slots cut along the bottom of the brace and wiggled it to make sure it was engaged.

  "Looks good, anything else before I cycle in?" she asked.

  "No, just do a walk around inspection since you are out there and come back in," Heather instructed. She spun the turret around on top and looked off back behind them with the sight set as wide as it went. The last road train was a good half kilometer away already and she was glad to have them away from her. It amused her to see each train had a single blue light mounted on the rear trailer. That was a mark of how sure they had been they wouldn't be pursued.

  She was pretty sure the Americans didn't have anything like counter-battery radar or even an indirect fire weapon, but they could have a ship brought in from Earth orbit and she'd never know. Their own radar was of limited range to do a deep space sweep besides being unable to look over a very close horizon. If they attracted attention firing, at least it shouldn't draw fire on the refugees. Now they just had to wait.

  When a tense half hour had passed without much conversation Heather seated her helmet and looked to see Happy had already mounted his. She announced a pump down and closed her faceplate.

  "Mark!" Katia and Johnson called suddenly. Heather looked at the screen and there was a dot of light just like they'd seen a few hours ago. She glanced at the screen corner and it said 03:27:02. No way it could be that close. These rovers didn't even have a throttle lock you could set to hold an even speed. On virgin ground it was too tempting to use as your attention could wander with fatigue.

  "Two sets of lights next in line," Katia pointed out. Then as they watched there was a single rover to the left and a single to the right, then two more sets of two staggered.

  "They're still all running, no stragglers."

  "I make out seven hundred meters front to back," Johnson said. "What do you want to do?"

  "Lay the short pattern of three by three on them. Match the back of your grid to the rear of their formation. I'm guessing three hundred meter craters so that will put the front runner past the edge of the worst blast effect from thrown dirt. I'm hoping there is enough left of them to gather some intelligence."

  "Okay, entering program," Johnson acknowledged, keying something and touching a stylus to the screen. "First impact at 03:34:17, about fifteen kilometers, closer than we wanted but the flight time forced that even with the cannon auto setting for reduced muzzle velocity."

  >Kra-chunk< rattle-rattle >Kra-chunk< rattle-rattle, sounded nine times. The empty casings bounced and rolled across their roof before the next round fired. The suspension rebounded once each shot until the cannon sensed it was sitting stable again and fired at about two second intervals.

  Johnson wheeled the rover around and pointed the front view ports away from the impact. He pulled forward into the bottom of the dip so the direct line of sight would be hidden. Heather hadn't actually ordered that but let it go since it was what they'd discussed. She dimmed the windows down to 5% transmission. She wasn't sure she needed to, but better safe...

  "It doesn't feel like a battle should," Heather told them. "I can't believe we just killed people and it's just falling on them with no way to call it back and we have to wait..."

  "Yeah when I shot the missile back at Central we could see it racing away into the sky even though we were ripping across the mare... crap!"

  There was a flash behind them that rippled in intensity, but the sharp shadows that leapt away from them behind every pebble on the surface were strange because they started long and as the light got softer and faded through gold and red they grew shorter as the source of the illumination expanded upward behind them. Too late Heather thought she should have had a camera pointed back even if she risked sacrificing it.

  In seconds the ground waves traveled under them like taking a stiff truck over a washboard road. The rover actually turned and walked a little, skittish over the shaking ground. Johnson got the driving lights back on and the ports transparent again just in time for a blast of fresh blown regolith to rush past them. The first wave was almost white, then quickly turned grey. It had not started to thin before the hiss of fine particles like sand sounded sliding down their sides with an eerie sound. Finally there were significant impacts of pebbles and rocks, bean size to hand size raining down in a deafening cacophony. When they thought it was easing off and started to relax, a sharp edged chunk the size of a twenty liter water cask landed in front of them and bounced away hard enough to throw pieces up that rattled on their front. It was a good ten minutes before they were confident enough to turn the machine around and start forward.

  The landscape was altered. Grooves were drawn through the loose, previously smooth regolith by flying or rolling rocks. More rocks stuck up where they'd fallen than the plain had featured before. The going was not that much slower, but the landscape was not as smooth and harder to drive. The treads rumbled over more small rocks than before.

  Johnson kept the speed way down from his usual style without any urging. Several times they came to chunks of fresh sharp rock bigger than their ground clearance they had to avoid. The dust was disturbed but they still could see the tracks of the road trains to follow.

  When they saw the rover it was well to one side of the track. Johnson approached cautiously, but from well away they could see it was upside-down with the tracks in the air. As they got closer it was visibly damaged with both ends smashed in and arched in the middle from the whole chassis being bent. It appeared to have been lifted and rolled end over end for about a half kilometer. Happy and Johnson cycled out to examine it and take pictures.

  The forward driving ports were empty holes and after making sure there were no ragged edges Johnson crawled in. They could see his flash working inside as he took more pictures. Then he passed some items out to Happy before easing out with obvious caution so as not to snag his suit. They walked back carrying some sort of plastic pallet between them that supported the take.

  When they got back both looked grim. The booty was a hard shell laptop that just might be functional since it was a hardened military model. They also had several personal hand comps only one of which was visibly damaged and a carbine style rifle that looked like a H&K variant. There were two standard 10mm military pistols and extra magazines in vacuum safe holsters and webs.

  The rest of the salvage was quite a pile of freeze dried meals and coffee. There were a couple plastic jugs of water that were not vacuum rated, but they were frozen solid. They put them in plastic sacks in case they leaked on thawing. Lastly there was a medicine chest, the sort that unlatched from a bulkhead as a unit. The plastic pallet was tossed on the upper deck as it was too big to fit in the lock.

  "You're sure nobody was alive?" Heather asked.

  Johnson shook his head no. "You'll see in the pix. There was one body hanging in the command seat still strapped in. He has a name tag like Dakota mentioned - Loesher. He already had frost on the inside of his faceplate - pink frost. There was another body loose laying face down. You could see the suit wasn't pressurized so I didn't bother to roll him over. Another body was still strapped in a chair but the pedestal had ripped out of the deck and the chair bounced all around the inside with him strapped in it. I was trying not to look too closely actually. There is enough stu
ff inside there may have been a fourth person but he's not there. Maybe he flew out an open port when it was flipping end to end."

  "As my first official decree I'd like to rule the photos you just collected are not public access. There will be a detailed public description of them available in our public archives, but anyone claiming a need to see them for legal or scholarly purposes will have to agree not to dispense them further or publish them in any manner."

  "I think that's very civilized," Johnson agreed. "God knows, I will be happy not to refresh my memory of them. If you send somebody back to salvage the radios and fuel and such you should have them bury the remains in a temporary grave with markers. If they are left to cycle through the full temperature range every lunar there won't be much left soon."

  "You up to driving or you want me to awhile?" Heather asked.

  "I'm fine," Johnson assured her and strapped in.

  When they got near the first crater the crushed rock and dirt thrown out was softer than the usual surface to which they were accustomed. They didn't sink but they could feel the treads work and a little wallowing motion. They stopped right where the crater rim really pitched up and parked. Heather and Katia went out climbing the loose hill, dragging some gear. The inside dropped off sharply. They agreed the edge was dangerous but wanted to see the bottom. Katia went back to the rover and got the winch cable off the front keeping tension on it as Johnson played it out for her slowly. Heather tied the line off the rover and her personal safely line both on the plastic pallet handle and eased forward pushing the pallet ahead of her until it was right on the edge. She crawled on it leaving her legs hanging off the back. Katia had stayed back in sight of the rover so her radio did relay, playing out the rope. Heather grabbed the edges and rocked a little. The ground stayed solid with the pallet spreading her weight.

  "I believe it's safe if you want to come see."

  "Let me step back and tell them we're both going near the edge. I'll tell them to pull the winch line in from the rover if we don't come back in a few minutes."

  "They didn't like it, but too bad." Katia said when she came back. She clipped on the line well back and inched in beside Heather. She had the big search and rescue light that was a standard part of the rover's kit. When she tried to illuminate the whole thing on wide beam it just soaked the light up. Heather took a couple pictures hoping the camera would gather more light than their eyes could.

  With the beam narrowed down they could see the crater was almost a perfect cone. The bottom didn't have the spiky central peak that so many natural craters did, but it had a sort of mound or dome at the very bottom. The far side was just about where Heather had guessed - a bit less than three hundred meters, maybe two-fifty and it was obvious the next crater beyond had been formed first and the rim of this one overlapped the other.

  The craters beyond were invisible in the dark, but if they were like these they overlapped anyway. chances they would find even pieces of wreckage searching around in the dark without metal detecting equipment were pretty slim.

  They climbed down leaving the plastic pallet for a marker, but retrieving their line. Nobody else wanted to climb up. Especially after they processed the pix and they were better than eyeballing it.

  * * *

  "President Wiggen, automated instruments on the moon and communications from the other moon bases indicate there were nine more seismic events consistent with nuclear weapon detonations. They were all in a small area near Central and of the same magnitude as the event at Armstrong."

  "And how many rovers were in the pursuing force that Col. Loesher decided to take out after his, what did he call them?... elopers?"

  "I believe there were nine Ma'am."

  "Yes, that would make sense. Ms. Anderson seemed like the sort that would figure anything worth doing should be done to excess. Why use just two or three nukes against a formation of rovers when you can individually vaporize the pestilent things?"

  "On the other hand perhaps she has been profligate with her munitions and will be in a bind if another force moves against her," her advisor mused with a hard edge to his voice.

  "You didn't talk to the girl, Freddie. I'm not willing to play that kind of poker with her. She seems like a normal eighteen-year-old one moment and then she's a fifty-year-old stone cold bitch like flipping a switch. What I'm also remembering is this - Jon Davis who used to be our man and is one of the most forthright men I've met, laughed when I asked how he could treat a teenager so seriously. He said she was a pussy-cat, but if we ever decided to screw around with her boyfriend he'd appreciate time to get to Mars where he might be safe. I didn't like the sound of that even then, but now I have to wonder how much he knew about the weapon the boy used on China. Everything considered, I don't like the scale of the risks involved."

  * * *

  The third shift com tech for Armstrong handed base Vice-Director James Crawford a print-out. He took it eagerly and then looked disappointed.

  "That's it? Meet the Heavy Hauler Frederick Mann tomorrow and be packed for return to Earth? No answer to the messages I sent? I have a career here. I have a contract I haven't worked out."

  "Well welcome to our reality. Everybody here lives with that everyday - not knowing if some error or even something beyond our control will put us on a ship back to the Big Sleaze Ball. Ernie told you when you ordered him to disconnect that you don't hang up on the President's Secretary when he's telling you to hold for her. If it had been my shift I'd have told you the same thing."

  "But Col. Loesher was very specific I not discuss operational information with anybody. I didn't have the authority to reveal his mission."

  "Yeah, maybe if you send another text message explaining all that again they will finally understand. You've only sent what? Seven of them?"

  Crawford just blinked at him uncomprehending. He was one of those humorless bureaucrats so far gone he couldn't recognize sarcasm. Neither could he recognize he'd bet on the wrong horse and the race was over.

  Chapter 23

  "Johnson, when you and Katia called 'mark' I looked at the screen to see the light and then I looked at the clock which said 03:27:02. Now I know the first headlights became visible within at most a second of the estimated time. This is a friggin' Royal Decree. The terms of the bet were not met. They were neither early nor late. And if you are disposed to argue about it I may declare all forms of gambling and cards, dice and such are forever banned from my kingdom because gamblers are a pain in the ass. You wanna push me and see if I won't?"

  "No your Majesty," Johnson agreed. Somehow it didn't sound as respectful as it should.

  "Heather," she insisted. "If you have real authority you don't need a bunch of bowing and groveling and genuflecting. I'm not Her Highness, or Majesty and I don't rule by the Grace of God or any such foolishness. I suspect like most rulers I will hang on until the ammo runs out. I'm not going to issue any titles that require a special form of address either. My peers will stand in the harsh light of public opinion and make their own case for respect. There may be a Baroness Dakota, but nobody will be required to address her specially."

  * * *

  "She what?" April asked, incredulous.

  "Heather needed to have a consensus from her customers to act on their behalf. She didn't feel she could initiate force to defend them without some general agreement they were a political unit. There wasn't time to form an Assembly and take votes like we did here, so she took an oath of fealty from two Armstrong residents buying lots. Their households together make up more than half of the new residents so she felt she had a valid mandate."

  "So, she'll probably dissolve this arrangement and do a proper democratic republic when things calm down, won't she?" she asked Jon.

  "I wouldn't be too quick to assume so. She said nothing about that. In fact they seem really happy with the arrangement. To the point two other heads of households gave their oaths back at Central after she returned. So the entire population has voluntarily put themselves u
nder the arrangement. I mean, she did go to war and save their bacon. The way she told the story it was their idea not hers. This Ted fellow stepped forward and freely offered it to resolve the crisis. It would appear you are not the only one who can do rescues," he said, smiling.

  "I was getting a lot in payment, but I'm not sure I even want to visit if it's a monarchy. If I take up residence I'd be a subject. I'm not sure I approve of the whole thing and even though it is Heather and I love her, I don't want to be subject to her."

  "Come now, you had no problem visiting Tonga. They have a King and you were subject to him while in his territory. A constitutional monarchy doesn't really have any more power over people's lives than a republic when you get right down to it. Besides, that doesn't really apply to you anyway." Jon added, looking distressed.

  "It doesn't?" April asked eyes narrowing. "What aren't you telling me? You look guilty as hell and that isn't like you. I've seen all sorts of things on your face but not this look."

  "I'd have rather not been the one to tell you, but Heather indicated she intends to name you and Jeff and whoever else it makes sense to name, as peers."

  "Peers?"

  "Well, yes, although technically I believe you will be Baroness Lewis if you wish to accept," he added. "Or is it Baronetess? I'm not up on the fine details of titles."

  He was really glad he was recording. The look on April's face was priceless.

  "Don't worry though, she isn't going to allow titles of address to be mandatory, so you wouldn't commonly be addressed as Dame Lewis unless someone just wanted to do so as a point of respect to you," he assured her.

  "Arrrrh…" April managed to squeeze out.

  "Although I admit I have such high regard for you I might take up that habit if I should have opportunity to visit you on your lunar estates." He actually managed, with great effort, to keep a straight face saying that.

  "I'm going to kill her," April vowed.