“Yeah, right. Every two years, the supposedly smart people say this same stuff.”
“But this time is different.”
“I’m not worried,” Elfrida said, and paid for her mozzarella.
The signal delay, 1.5 seconds, was just long enough to make the conversation feel unreal. Mendoza, frustrated, hit disconnect. As the screen went dark, Elfrida’s voice floated out, from 1.5 seconds ago: “I miss you, that’s all.”
“I miss you, too,” Mendoza whispered to his empty apartment.
He had signed a non-disclosure agreement. He wasn’t allowed to mention D.I.E. to outsiders. So he had not been able to tell Elfrida why he (and a lot of people smarter than him) believed this time was different.
Because of D.I.E. itself.
The PLAN seemed to be changing its modus operandi at the very same time that a few brave humans had poked it.
Coincidence?
Not freaking likely.
Their anxiety seeped out to the population of Hopetown. One day a group of protesters besieged the Hope Energy campus with holographic projectors that enclosed the campus in lurid footage of PLAN attacks. “SCIENCE KILLS!” they shouted. “STOP THE MADNESS!”
“Science kills,” Frank Hope IV said, staring out of the window in the analysis section. “That’s a good one. Without science, they’d be sucking vacuum right now.”
“We’ll have to do something,” Jasmine Ah said. “We can’t just hunker down. They’ll go to the media.”
“The PR department’s on it.”
In the air above the lawn, a toilet roll swooped towards an asteroid, vomiting hot plasma from one end and projectiles from the other. The asteroid exploded.
“That’s fake,” Youssef said. “No one ever got footage that good.”
But Mendoza could feel the impact that the graphic images of destruction were having on his colleagues. And on himself. He tasted fear, like biting on an antique coin.
Frank set his jaw. “I want to show these guys what they’re protesting against. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, come with.” He looked at Mendoza.
Down on the lawn, a handful of young men sat crosslegged, operating their projector. They were the type of young men who wore jeans under their dishdashas, and probably got their news from chitchat on gaming forums.
“Science kills!” said the beardiest one.
“Salaam aleikum to you, too.”
“Oh shit, you’re Frank Hope.”
Mushroom clouds seethed silently overhead. Now Mendoza knew the footage was fake, because he had seen nukes go off in vacuum. They just made bright flashes.
“Guess you guys are into gaming?” Frank said. “That looks like a scene from Existential Threat VII.”
“Ulp. How did you know?”
Frank touched his left eye. “Zoom functionality. You forgot to remove the watermarks. Anyway, I’d like to show you a sim we put together here, kind of a demo. We can do it right now, if you brought your immersion kits. If you’re not interested, fine, but in that case, I’ll have to have security escort you off the campus.”
The young men conferred. Suddenly, they all jumped.
“What?” Mendoza blurted.
“Text message from the King,” said the beardiest one. “He says do it.”
The protesters unpacked their immersion kits. Guys like this always had the spendiest gear, and they toted it everywhere. They put on their masks, headsets, and gloves and lay down, like corpses in white body bags (and a few black ones—there were some girls among them), scattered across the bristly gengineered grass.
Frank had immersion kits brought out for Mendoza and the other newbies who’d followed him downstairs. Mendoza found a place to lie flat. Newly mown stems prickled his back through his shirt and waistcoat. The protesters had turned off their holographs, so that sunlight bathed the campus once again. You could only tell it was fake because it was not warm.
He settled his mask over his face, aligned the breathing holes under his nostrils, logged in—
--and opened his eyes in a dim auditorium.
The protesters stood in front of the stage. Their avatars came straight out of Existential Threat VII or Grimdark Tales—cyborgged out with augments, or sporting elf ears and animé hair.
Frank stood alone on the bare stage. His avatar looked just like his real self, except that it was wearing a Lunar Defense Brigade uniform. He said, “One of our subsidiaries, Hope Space Industries, has developed a revolutionary new class of spaceship. It’s got a four-tiered thermal cooling system that utilizes water/glycol, ammonia, sodium, and macguffinite, a new material developed right here in Hopetown by our materials scientists. Macguffinite has a specific heat capacity per kilo of eleven thousand joules per kilogram kelvin! Its phase change from solid to gas sucks up enough energy to mask the heat emissions of a VASIMR drive. Yeah, I know ion propulsion is out of fashion these days, but it ain’t slow, and you get a high specific impulse for maneuvering. While invisible.” Frank spread his arms. “People, this is as close as we’re ever gonna get to matching the PLAN’s stealth technology.”
No, it isn’t, Mendoza thought. He felt a pang of pity. If only Frank knew that someone else had surpassed this achievement already. Far from being revolutionary, the thermal cooling system Frank described was just a better version of existing technology. In comparison, somewhere out there was a 100-year-old Longvoyager that could magically vanish.
But there was no point mentioning the Yonezawa brothers or their Ghost, since Mendoza had no idea how the Ghost worked, much less where the Monster was now. Anyway, Jun and Kiyoshi wouldn’t thank him for blowing their cover.
Frank answered a few questions about the new heat-shielding technology. Then he cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to present to you … the Fragger stealth fighter!”
The auditorium suddenly doubled in size. On a low pedestal, rotating beneath strobe lights, stood …
One of the Dust delivery shuttles, which Mendoza had seen plenty of pictures of before.
The erstwhile protesters crowded around the ship, seduced by its streamlined silhouette. “Kickin’ railguns,” breathed a girl.
Those railguns had not been in the pictures Mendoza saw. Nor had the clusters of nukelets slung beneath the shuttle’s wings.
The pieces suddenly fell into place.
“I get it. The Fragger isn’t actually a shuttle at all,” Mendoza texted Frank. “The so-called shuttles were designed as fighter-bombers from the start.”
“You got it,” Frank texted him back. He switched to subvocalizing for everyone to hear. “Another interesting thing about the Fragger is that its hub is dumb. Supercomputers run hot. They make stealth that much harder.”
Unless you’re an ASI, Mendoza thought.
“For that reason and others, we’ve taken the opposite tack from Star Force. They’ve been building smarter and smarter ships. The newest generation of Gravesfighters can do everything except kiss you goodnight. The pilot is only there to take responsibility in a court of law when the ship screws up.” Laughter. “Well, we’ve moved away from that. These ships put the pilot back in charge. What I’m saying is, to fly a Fragger, you’ve got to really be a pilot.” Frank waited a beat. “So, anyone want to take her for a spin?”
There were no takers at first. Then a few. Then a dozen. Since this was a sim, as many could participate as wanted to. Mendoza tagged after the gamers as they climbed up onto the Fragger’s wing and into the cockpit, one by one, like clowns getting out of a car in reverse.
Reaching the cockpit, he was alone again, in his own iteration of the Fragger sim. Levers, dials, and screens encrusted the interior of an egg-shaped cavity barely large enough for his flight couch. He had no idea what was what, so he touched nothing. He looked down at himself. He wore an EVA suit, and could feel the lump of a recycling tube between his buttocks. Fragger pilots would not be flying in comfort. But that was on purpose, wasn’t it? Feel like you’re sacrifici
ng something. Feel like you’re risking everything. Because you are.
“Here we go,” Frank’s voice echoed out of nowhere.
Mendoza’s heads-up screen lit up with an optical feed. Mars floated in the center of the screen, a russet ellipse etched with high-resolution megastructures.
Mendoza leaned forward, fascinated. This image must be based on the data from the nanoprobes. It was not someone’s best guess. It was not a clip from an immersion game. It was the most accurate map of Mars in existence.
And another piece fell into place.
The whole purpose of the Dust surveys was to gather data for pilot training.
A stream of black flecks drifted across the Elysium Planitia.
“Your mission,” intoned Frank, “should you choose to accept it …” He broke off to chuckle. “That line always cracks me up. Sorry. Your mission is to penetrate the PLAN’s orbital defenses. Go in low and hard. Your primary target is the Big Turd, where we suspect that the PLAN has its main computing assets in an underground data center powered by geothermal electricity. Secondary targets are the other surface facilities you can see on this map. However … HEADS UP!”
Mendoza flinched at Frank’s sudden shout. A black shape blurred across the optical feed. Then his screens flashed white and went off. The cockpit darkened to a womb-like gloom.
“You got slagged,” Frank said to him.
Mendoza rubbed his mouth in irritation (his hand went straight through the imaginary helmet that he wore). “That’s some kick-ass stealth technology. Just saying.”
“Don’t forget, masking your heat emissions is different from hiding your radar profile. Of course, the Fragger uses every known deflection and absorption technique, so it shows up on radar as something much smaller than a ship. A chunk of rock, maybe. But the PLAN has toilet rolls patrolling this volume all the time, specifically to zap anything that moves. Even chunks of rock. So, you got unlucky.”
“Unlucky, hell. You did that on purpose to give the wannabes a taste of combat.”
“What fun is a sim without space battles?”
“I’ve never been big on sims. Or space battles. Did any of our gang survive that?”
“Five guys slagged the toilet roll before it could get them. Three of those survived the next attack, too. They’re now approaching the outer ring of orbital fortresses. In real life, that’s the tricky bit. Those fortresses are the size of asteroids. Maneuvering through a debris field that’s moving at orbital velocity … it’s not a game for pikers. But Vicky managed it. Abdul and Erik did too, we believe.”
Wishful thinking, Mendoza decided. “Can I see?”
“You’re supposed to be dead. Oh, fine. Here you go.”
Suddenly, he seemed to be floating in space, as if he had survived the destruction of his fighter. He was now much closer to Mars. It filled the sky. Gigantic rocks glided between him and the Red Planet, sidelit by the sun.
“Those are the PLAN’s orbital fortresses,” Frank said. “Megawatt laser cannons emplaced on each one.”
“Where’d all those rocks come from, anyway?”
“Mars used to have two moons.”
They heard a distant screech. “Allahu akbar!”
“Sounds like someone’s having fun,” Mendoza said.
“They have a long cultural tradition of this kind of thing,” Frank said.
“Suicide bombing?”
“Let’s call it berserking. Scandinavians, too. The Irish. All the Celtic peoples. My family comes from the old United States. A nation of latte-sipping bleeding hearts. It took a long time on Luna before we learned to unleash the crazy.”
“So maybe there’s hope for me.”
“Ha, ha. Yeah. I think so. It’s nothing to do with ethnic heritage, really. When we start recruiting pilots, we’ll be looking for people who don’t care if they live or die … who are ready to sacrifice everything to save humanity.”
“That’s what you’re doing right now, isn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“Recruiting.”
Frank chuckled. “You got me.”
“Allahu akbaaaaarrghh!”
A concatenation of white flashes twinkled between the orbiting fragments of Phobos.
“Looks like someone took a few toilet rolls with him,” Frank said. “Give that man a job.”
A second later, Mendoza felt the space around him shiver, as if the vacuum were a waterbed and someone had jumped on it. “I felt that,” he said, puzzled.
“So did I,” Frank said.
“Must be a bug,” Mendoza said. “You can’t feel shock waves in a vacuum. You’d better fix that.”
Frank did not answer.
Another tremor rolled through Mendoza’s body.
Which was one hell of a bug, actually. Since he didn’t have a BCI. And wasn’t lying in a telepresence couch. So he shouldn’t have been experiencing any sensory feedback beyond what the mask and gloves could provide.
He logged out. Sitting up on the lawn, he wrenched off his mask and headset.
A wave of noise crashed over him.
Klaxons.
Screams.
Automated voices bellowing in English and Arabic, overlapping so that neither language was intelligible.
Frank hurried around the lawn, pulling headsets off, wrenching the protesters out of immersion. He gestured for Mendoza to help. Still woozy, Mendoza just sat there, staring.
Until he felt a breath of wind touch his hair.
Wind.
In a dome, that meant only one thing.
Depressurization.
xxvii.
Mendoza did not even think about the other people still sprawled on the lawn. He bounded towards the R&D building.
A voice said, quietly, but clearly, in his head: “Go back and help the others.”
Mendoza turned back, into the teeth of the wind, which was now a gale. It pulled leaves off the trees. It fluttered the dishdashas and niqabs of the people still lying on the lawn. Mendoza helped to drag them out of immersion. As he hauled an obese girl to her feet, something car-sized smashed on the path outside the R&D building, right about where Mendoza would have been standing if he’d been banging on the door, trying to get in.
“That,” Frank shouted, “looked like a piece of the roof!”
The wind picked up. Mendoza could now hear its thin howl, despite the din of alarms and screams. He dragged the fat girl towards the R&D building. She blubbered, “Laa hawla wa laa quwwata illa Billaah, laa hawla …”
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” Mendoza responded. They were praying in different languages, but they were both praying for the same thing: to live. “The Lord is with thee. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners …”
Another piece fell out of the roof. It hit the cross on top of Notre Dame de la Lune and knocked it upside-down.
“ … now and at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary …”
Roof tiles danced in the air, proving that they were not tiles in the Earth sense at all, but rectangles of lightweight insulating material. The wind sucked them towards the hole in the top of the dome.
“… full of grace …”
Frank led them around the R&D center. With the wind howling between the buildings, they had to fight for every step. Mendoza dragged the fat girl bodily, and her mass (he later realized) saved him from being blown away, like the other people now thrashing in the air.
There was a trapdoor in the terrace outside the cafeteria. It opened to Frank’s command, explosively. They tumbled down into a bunker where the rest of the staff had already taken refuge.
★
“Well,” Trey Hope said, “so that was the long-rumored, much-feared PLAN attack.”
The PLAN fleet in orbit around Mars had been a ruse. While humanity’s attention was fixated on it, the PLAN had launched a smaller strike force. Four nine-packs had snuck up on Luna, fully stealthed. They had disabled the PORMSnet with a wave of EMPs. The Lunar Defense Brigade had never even got
off the ground. Star Force had slagged a few of the toilet rolls as they were leaving … by which time, they’d already bombed hell out of Luna. They had rained enhanced-radiation nukes on the surface cities, and deployed kinetic missiles against the underground habs.
The regolith above Marius Hills had fractured, causing shards of igneous rock, each weighing hundreds of tons, to fall into the lava tube. One of these had struck the Hopetown dome, and breached it.
Armies of repair bots had instantly leapt into action. They had wrestled a nanofiber mesh net over the breach, and then squirted liters and liters of splart on it. Air had continued to rush out while they worked, so that as it solidified, the patch bulged up like a boil from the roof of the dome.
The agony of Hopetown had lasted just under seventeen minutes.
Death toll: eighty-three, mostly people working in the building that the shard had fallen on top of, plus a few who had been sucked out of the dome to their deaths.
Wounded: lots.
Traumatized: pretty much everyone.
The therapy industry was going to have a bumper year.
“But you know what I think?” said Trey Hope, a silver-bearded lion of a man, prowling the stage at an all-hands meeting on campus. “If that’s the worst they can do? Pffft.”
He raised his face to the ceiling, shook his fist.
“We’re still alive! Damn you! We’re still here!”
Laughter and cheers rang out. Mendoza applauded as wildly as anyone. His heart overflowed with gratitude for the simple fact of survival. He had gone to Mass this morning, and joined the volunteer party who scaled the steeple to restore the cathedral’s cross to its upright position.
When the clapping died down, Trey Hope got serious. He confirmed that Shackleton City had been hit much worse. Verneland had been flattened. Confirmed deaths had already mounted into the five figures, and many more were missing, presumed dead.
“They’ve asked us to take some refugees,” Trey Hope said, “and we’ve agreed, of course. I want all of you to open your hearts and your homes to our unfortunate neighbors.”
The Luna Deception Page 28