Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  U NDER A N A LIEN S KY

  11

  * * *

  E leven years in space could leave anyone jaded, and it was a rare occasion when an object under Randall Williams’s study evoked in him a sense of true awe or beauty. The crystalline forest did both.

  The formation spread over a small patch of the moon’s surface, rising from the gray soil as if grown there, fifty meters across and just over one hundred in length. The crystals ranged from small, clear-diamond spikes only centimeters long to magnificent emerald heights thrusting four meters above, reaching a maximum diameter—as measured so far—of .9 meters. Their progress in development was apparent as the in-between stages varied their greenish hue according to size. The medium to larger crystals formed slender, delicate towers or sometimes melded together into angular archways and latticework walls. Small crystals grew along the edges of larger ones, especially in those places where Williams noticed that previous damage had cracked what he was calling the “parent structure.”

  A team of junior scientists trod carefully through the labyrinth, taking measurements and conducting some initial tests. They all glanced nervously at one another, while trying to deal with so foreign a substance, and here on Luna besides. Two squads of space-specialist Marines under Captain Paul Drake stood an uneasy perimeter around the strange formation, guarding against any run-in with Neo-Soviet forces now that the fence line had been smashed.

  Williams left that remote chance to Drake, concentrating instead on the ultrahigh-frequency pulses being emitted by the formation. At first he’d believed the pulses to be a piezoelectric effect. Compress the crystals, or they compress under their own weight, and they generate a small current that might translate as a UHF signal. His assistant had out-guessed him; Lieutenant Theresa Dupras went straight for a resonating effect. While Williams quickly disproved his own theory by physically stressing the crystals and reading no subsequent change in signal strength, Dupras graphed out the power of the UHF signal against radio communications between guards and the electrical field given off by an antigrav sled’s generator.

  “Efficient,” Williams said, praising the crystalline formation and Dupras at the same time. “The formation reacts to frequencies in our standard comm ranges and above. Those variations are converted to a single, powerful pulse, part of which works in regenerative feedback to create the next pulse.” He nodded to himself as thoughts clicked into place. “There must be energy degradation in there somewhere, or a method of stored power, but we’re not seeing it yet.”

  “Photovoltaic?” Dupras asked. She was one of the few besides Williams who didn’t seem unnerved by the appearance of the formation.

  He nodded. “That’s as good a guess as any.” Just then Captain Drake walked by, checking horizons. He nodded cordially enough, though Williams didn’t believe it for a second.

  Dupras ran one hand over an emerald facet. “I’d like to get some samples of this back into the labs, but I’m leery about breaking off pieces. How much damage until it loses the properties we want to study?”

  Kneeling down next to the base of one large specimen, Williams dug his fingers into the soft gray soil around its base. “There’s no telling how deep they run. They’re well anchored, but the lunar soil is not compacted at all like you would expect if they’d been planted or forced into the ground. Tranquillity reported some odd terrain changes as well, with a similar natural blend into existing topography.” He shook his head. “I’d love to know how they got here.”

  Theresa Dupras smiled weakly. “I’d love to know how we got here.” Her eyes flicked skyward, to the large blazing stain that had replaced the sun. On the opposite horizon the ghost of the nearby nebula darkened the color of the sky.

  Randall Williams remained mute, and after an awkward pause Dupras went over to a pair of scientists to request an update for him. He wanted to keep his mind free of preconceptions until more facts were known. All Union resources on Luna that could be spared were focused on collecting data that might help to answer that question, as well as the question of where here even was. Until then, he would focus on such events as the crystalline forest—a phenomenon never before surveyed by Union forces, anywhere. And he knew that was part of the appeal. That they were so—

  “Alien,” Captain Paul Drake said, more of a loud whisper than a statement for public consumption. He stood a few paces off, having stopped in his rounds to study the crystalline formation up close.

  “Captain?” Williams asked, surprised at how the Marine’s thoughts and his own had traveled the same path. He stood up and brushed the grayish soil from one knee. The lunar-plain winds swept away the light dust.

  “They’re so alien. Major.” Drake tacked Williams’s rank on almost as an afterthought, as if reminding himself to be civil. “Not in your standard little-green-men sense of aliens, but different. Like they don’t belong here.”

  So perhaps not quite the same path. Williams thought of it more that they didn’t belong here, Drake and himself and the rest of Earth-descended man. Drake reached out tentatively to touch the crystal spear. He ran an ebony hand along one smooth emerald facet, then pulled back suddenly. “Are they dangerous?”

  “The first question of a military man,” Williams said, giving a tight smile to take some of the sting from his words. “Can it hurt me? The next being, of course, can it be used to hurt others?”

  Paul Drake’s bearing stiffened, though military protocol was too well ingrained in him to ignite an angry retort.

  Williams waved away the protocol. “You may speak freely, Captain Drake. I know you resent my pulling you off a combat assignment.”

  Drake said nothing as he scanned the full horizon with optics. Finally, he said, “I don’t resent you, Major Williams. But I would rather have fielded with Colonel Allister’s men, yes. Or taken the Icarus after Sputnik-23. She was supposed to be my command, after all.”

  Williams shook his head. “I saw no reason to waste your talents on the mission to retrieve Sputnik-23’s log recorders. The Neo-Soviets cannot place men in space fast enough to save their imaging array from a rapidly decaying orbit. It’s going to burn up, just as our Station Liberty did. We need that data, and when Twenty-three hits the atmosphere it will jettison the computer logs and our men will retrieve them. I believe you would call such an assignment a milk run?”

  Williams shook his head. “And as for Colonel Allister, he did not request you or your men for active combat, which leads me to believe he would rather you remain attached to my command and out of this foolishness.”

  That struck a hard chord in Paul Drake. His eyes widened in disbelief. “Foolishness? We have reports coming in from all over Luna that the Neo-Soviets have smashed the fence line using their human-wave strategies. And Station Freedom monitored the missile launches against Union nations back on Earth right after . . .” He trailed off.

  “Our arrival?” Williams prompted. He gestured to the pale sky and the large, misshapen body blazing down. Earth hung large overhead as well, a sight most lunar residents were indifferent to after their first year, but that was a fresh event now that the Earth was far bigger than ever before as seen from the moon. It was caused by a change in orbit, according to the best minds of three different bases. Fortunately not too drastic to cause much more than heavier tides on Earth when the moon strayed in closer.

  “The event,” Drake said, stressing his own preferred term.

  “Stick your head in the sand if you want, Captain. I’ve seen others doing it, too. But we’re missing the eight planets we normally orbit with, though we’ve identified six others out there we’ve never known. And I guarantee Sol is not one of those few stars you’ll see when we hit our night cycle. Wherever we are now, we are not where we once were or anything close to it.”

  Drake stepped aside a moment, raised his glasses to check a horizon again. Williams followed his gaze, saw by naked eye the tiny speck darkening Luna’s pale upper atmosphere. Spacecraft bound for Tranquillity, h
e guessed. Though it looked to be awfully low.

  “Wherever we are,” Drake said, dropping the glasses to his chest where they bounced easily in the light gravity, “the Neo-Sovs are the enemy.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t be.” Williams shook his head again. “They’re in the same situation we are. We can steal the observation video from Sputnik-23, and it might show us something we haven’t found ourselves, but how much more do the Neo-Soviets possess that we’ll never see? How much of that is vital information, Captain? We should be working together.”

  “They launched nukes against us!” Drake protested.

  “And smashed the fence line, so I’ve heard. So we should launch back and go parading about Luna to defend our territory? All right, but consider this. I lost half of my specialists when Colonel Allister fielded toward Point Gagarin. How many man-hours is that in lost observation and research?”

  Drake considered that, checked the incoming ship again, and frowned. Williams couldn’t say if the frown was directed at his logic or something about the descending vessel that Drake found peculiar. “I can’t change who I am, Major. It’s my sworn duty to engage and defeat the enemy whenever possible, with a minimum loss of life.”

  “I know the oath, Captain Drake. But did you ever stop to think that the oath was specifically written not to say a minimum loss of Union life?”

  For a moment, Williams thought he might have gotten through to Paul Drake. He read the doubts and frustrations playing over the larger man’s face, as his training warred with common sense and the desperate necessities of their situation. Then his face cleared of everything but alarm.

  “She’s coming in hot!” he yelled, pulling Williams aside. In the one-sixth gravity, they leapt away in loping bounds. “Everyone scatter. Away from the crystals. Get away!”

  In the top arc of his third jump, Williams looked back and saw that the craft picked out earlier against the low horizon was coming down sharply and on a line right for the crystalline forest. The blocky construction and forward-swept wings indicated it was a Neo-Soviet craft. A raid? Williams wrote that idea off during his next leap, identifying the vessel as a limited-range explorer. Not even a true military design.

  Everyone was moving away at their best speed when the vessel belly-crashed into the soft soil a half kilometer distant, then skipped back into the air like some impossibly large stone skipping over a gray-white pond. Grounding at such a distance might have given the craft an adequate margin of safety on Earth, but in the moon’s lighter gravity and without landing gear extended to dig into the ground, the vessel would not be so easily halted. It skipped and slid as computer programs or pilot reflexes fought the vessel into the crash landing. Its last low-arced bounce brought the spacecraft down on top of the scientists’ antigrav sleds, smashing them into the soil or sending them tumbling over the landscape. Then the nose of the craft burrowed straight into the crystalline forest, shattering the emerald formations into millions of splinters and pulverizing those fragments as the bulk of the craft skidded over the patch and continued on another good quarter kilometer.

  Dust hung in the air in a grayish haze that reminded Williams eerily of the cosmic storm residue he had watched trail off the Earth. Just proper moondust this time, however, choking the air and making it difficult to breathe.

  Paul Drake helped him to his feet, checked him for damage, then chambered a round into his Pug autopistol. “Perhaps it was a good thing I remained behind,” he said.

  Then he was walking steadily for the craft, calling his men to him. This, the captain obviously knew how to deal with.

  12

  * * *

  T he petrified dunes rolled almost up to the wall of broken rock that now separated the two armies. The permafrost on the ground melted slowly, becoming a dark sludge that pooled in crevices and in the gulches between the dunes and the wall of rock. The ice that ran down the dune slopes had yet to melt and looked like miniature glaciers. In the sky, the misshapen solar body that had replaced Sol was three times larger and burned brighter, but gave off no more warmth than Siberia had known the day before.

  From the top of one rock dune, Colonel Raymond Sainz could pick out a dozen small fights by the echoes of distant weapons fire, all of them within a few kilometers. Outlying remnants of the Seventy-first Assault Group were coming under attack by splintered forces from the Neo-Soviet Striker as they struggled to link back up with the main body Sainz had pulled around his position.

  Sainz had to steel himself against the desire to send further reinforcements into these fights. He’d already dispatched an extraction squad to each one to facilitate their retrieval. He couldn’t squander any more of his strength, not if he hoped to pry his force out of the Neo-Soviet heartland. All told he had so far salvaged better than three-quarters of the Seventy-first, including the Aztec antigrav cycles that had come screaming back after the cataclysm passed.

  He slid down the rock slope, wary of the ice. Two infantrymen waited below and another pair followed him, the minimum guard Major Howard had insisted accompany him to investigate what Corporal Fitzpatrick had reported. The forward two stood at the front of a petrified dune, staring with rapt attention at its ice-covered face.

  Sainz stepped over a narrow stream of sludge to reach them, then stared into the bluish depths of the ice they pointed out to him. Frozen into the small glacier was a captain, both hands reaching out, caught as if trying to swim up from within. Three fingers actually broke the surface of the ice, exposed to the air. A flaw in the ice occluded half of the face, but enough was visible to leave no doubt of his identity. Ryan Searcy, commander of second column. No one spoke, appalled by the captain’s horrifying end. Sainz reached out and gripped the exposed fingers, the best farewell he could manage. The digits were warmer than he’d have thought.

  “Strasvicha, Colonel Sainz. One of your men?”

  Sainz spun at the familiar voice, even faster than his own guard, who were so mesmerized by the ice-encased body that they had relaxed their vigil. A Neo-Soviet officer stood fifteen meters distant, two Vanguard infantry flanking her with weapons drawing a line for his chest. The colonel had forgone the usual armored trench coat and carried no weapon. Still, the aura of command lay about her for anyone to see. It was in her easy stance and confident ice-blue eyes, the authority in her voice.

  The pair of Kalashnikovs backing her.

  The Union infantry were smart enough to leave their own weapons pointed downward, not about to aggravate the situation with their colonel in danger and the Neo-Soviets with the upper hand. The enemy colonel grinned humorlessly at their inaction, but the grin faltered briefly when she glanced at the body imprisoned in ice. Then a mutant handler led a Cyclops from a hidden ravine that led in from the broken terrain. The Union infantry guard tensed, obviously ready to act, but held off waiting for some sign from Sainz.

  “Very smart,” she complimented them offhandedly in English. “No one needs to get hurt.”

  Raymond Sainz did not believe that. “No one, Katya Romilsky?” he asked.

  “I said needs, not won’t, Colonel.”

  Sainz switched to Russian, one-upping Romilsky’s attempt to intimidate his men by speaking English. “You would not live to enjoy my death,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed with suspicion, glancing about for what she had missed. “How is that, Raymond Sainz?”

  Slowly, cautiously, he bent to retrieve a large rock, then held it up for her to see. The Vanguard tracked him the entire time with their vented muzzles. He tossed the rock into the open, away from any people.

  “Stand fast,” he ordered his men in a calm voice. Then he raised his hands and pointed three fingers of his left hand into the palm of his right, closed that hand into a fist, and yanked down as if pulling a lever. The rock disintegrated into splinters with the sound of a ricocheting bullet. The sharp crack of a rifle shot echoed a split second later.

  The shot was fired by Sergeant Tyree, who was Rebecca Howard’s contribution
to the small ground force of guards. He had retained his Bloodhound marksman rifle.

  Romilsky laughed, short and hard. With her head thrown back slightly, Sainz noticed again the silver streak that ran through her short-cropped auburn hair.

  “Again, very good,” she said in English, then threw a quick, angry glance at her Vanguard. “What would you call this, Colonel Sainz? A Mexican standoff?”

  “Insurance,” Sainz said simply. “You wanted to talk?”

  Slipping back into her native tongue, Romilsky turned deadly serious. “What I want is your unconditional surrender, Colonel Sainz.”

  “Nyet,” he said simply.

  “Nyet?” She gestured to the eastern horizon. “You saw the missiles, I’m sure. The Union’s defense systems can’t stop them all. I can send for reinforcements, but you, you are stranded in the middle of the Neo-Soviet empire with no way home.”

  Sainz knew that might or might not be exactly true. The Seventy-first had been able to contact no one in Union Command, but intermittent comms with Station Freedom offered some hope of contact and eventual extraction. “We have a mission to accomplish,” he said.

  Her face clouded with anger again. “A fool’s mission, Sainz! I told you before that Chernaya Gora is a phantom. You throw your lives away for nothing. Nothing!”

  She calmed herself, checked to see that the mutant handler had the Cyclops under control, then continued. “The false intelligence was acquired by the Coahuila Reconnaissance Contribution.” She stumbled over the name of the Mexican district. “A unit captured or destroyed on a resulting mission will discredit Mexico’s Contribution Forces and drive a deeper wedge between them and the vocal Texans. The damage is done, Raymond Sainz. Now it is a matter of how many lives we—you and I—spend to finish the operation.”

  Sainz did not know where the information on Black Mountain originated, but if it did come from one of the purely Mexican Contribution Forces and it was false, then Romilsky’s scenario might well come true. He didn’t know whether or not to believe her. She might be trying to trick him, but even if it were all true, only one course of action lay before him.