by Bruce Bethke
REBEL
MOON
Bruce Bethke
and
Vox Day
2069: After decades of futility, the United Nations has finally done what it was designed to do: established peace on Planet Earth. At long last the centuries-old dream of a new world order within reach....
But fifty thousand lunar colonists aren't buying into the plan, and they need volunteers. Soldiers, warriors, brave and true. Too bad Dalton Starkiller is what they've got. A techno-geek who joined the Lunar Defense Forces in a moment of patriotic weakness, Starkiller's a hacker, not a hero; a gamer, not a guerrilla.
Does Starkiller have what it takes to be a twenty-first-century soldier? Can he inspire his fellow rebels in their hopeless revolt against Mother Earth? Can he even shoot straight? And will he be able to guide his comrades through the moon's labyrinthine battlegrounds to victory without getting lost?
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1996 by Theodore Beale and Bruce Bethke
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To Ted, from Ted. And to Gami, with love.
A Prelude to War
When seeking the root causes of the Lunar Revolution of 2069, one needn't dig far. The United Nations' position of power on Earth depended on control of the food supply; control of the food supply in turn depended on control of the lunar hydroponic food factories; and the hydroponic food factories themselves were heavily dependent on the ingenuity, the sweat, the determination, and far too often the blood of the lunar colonists.
Did this revolution have to happen? Not necessarily. The Committee on Lunar Development [CLD] could have admitted the colonists' complaints were legitimate and then acted to improve the working conditions, repeal the much-hated oxygen taxes, and remove certain petty and corrupt committee-appointed colonial officials. The Peace Enforcement Command [PEC] could have admitted that its easy victory over the Idaho Christian Patriots Militia (see The Sagebrush Rebellion, Chapter 5) was a fluke and responded to the initial outbreak of civil disobedience with less shooting and more diplomacy. Or the Security Council could have recognized the legitimacy of the 2068 plebiscite, and granted the Lunar delegation a seat in the General Assembly. Any of these actions alone might well have defused the revolution.
But the so-called fourth possibility — that the colonists could have given up, surrendered quietly, and resigned themselves to their lives of near-indentured servitude?
That was never an option.
— Chaim Noguchi, A History of the Lunar Revolution (Herschelton West Mars: Cebrenia Publishing, 2201).
Chapter 1
Port Aldrin, Luna
Block J64, Apartment 23
24 October 2069
18:22 GMT
The thief and the barbarian slipped cautiously through the main chamber of the Great Temple of the Dark Goddess, their long steel swords unsheathed and ready for action. The walls and pillars of the room were decorated with vast friezes, worked in silver and gold and highlighted with fistfuls of sparkling gems, showing the goddess Kharauma in all of her most obscene poses.
"Get a load of that," Finn Fingers whispered, pointing with his free hand toward a particularly lurid construction. It showed the goddess in her half-woman, half-snake incarnation, the one her devotees called the Serpent Whore, writhing with pleasure in the black-taloned embrace of the Scarlet Rider.
Icehawk the Barbarian responded with an inarticulate grunt and flexed his massive pectoral muscles as he stifled a yawn. He found himself bored by the unimaginative eroto-occult images associated with the Dark Goddess and frankly felt he'd seen more stimulating artwork on black velvet in a back stall at the Minas Tirith bazaar. But he did not seize the moment to engage the little thief in an esoteric debate on lousy religious art: instead, he tightened his grip on his sword and kept his mind focused on the quest. Somewhere in this temple, the devotees of Kharauma had hidden the Key to the Great Rune, that which kept the Scarlet Rider and his hordes imprisoned forever in the Mirrored Abyss. Now Icehawk and Finn Fingers had mere hours left in which to find the Key and either return it to Ice Mountain or destroy it, in order to keep the high priestess of the temple from using it at midnight to unlock the Forbidden Gate and unleash the Lord of Hell.
Somehow, it seemed to Icehawk, his quests always ended up like this. Three months before, he'd joined a party of twenty adventurers setting out from the Wolf Isles in search of nothing more than a little mayhem and booty. They'd fought their way past draugs and drekis, played murderous hide-and-seek with orcs and Imperial patrols, had their fortunes told by the Wise Woman of the West, and been steered to the Isle of the Viprans.
And now here they were, deep in the bowels of an ancient temple, only two of them still alive, and just six hours left in which to save the world.
With a sudden start, Icehawk realized he was still staring at the frieze of Kharauma and the Scarlet Rider. He peeled his eyes off the image, looked at Finn, then frowned and pointed. "Hey, your sword is glowing."
The thief looked at his own weapon and nodded. "You know, I think you're right." As they watched, the pale blue aura surrounding the weapon grew steadily brighter, and previously unseen runes on the blade began to emerge as letters of fire.
"That'll teach you to go poking around in Va'ardish burial mounds," Icehawk said. "Boris told you that thing was enchanted. I wonder what those letters say."
Finn looked up, first at Icehawk, then past him, and the little thief's eyes slowly grew wider. "How about 'Look behind you'?"
In a flash of flowing blond hair and gleaming blue steel Icehawk spun around to face the frieze again.
"Er, Hawk?" the thief asked nervously. "Am I seeing things, or are the Scarlet Rider's eyes glowing?"
"More like blazing, my fine fast-fingered friend." Icehawk raised his sword and began to back carefully away from the frieze. "This does not bode well for us. I suggest we leave."
"And I concur. Which way?"
"Deeper into the temple. If we go back the way we came, we'll never find the Key in time."
"Gotcha," the thief said. "And if we don't find the Key, this whole party was for nothing."
Icehawk heard Finn sigh. "Okay, I'll take point. You cover my back. Let's—"
The Scarlet Rider's eyes flared a blinding crimson. There was a loud crack as the frieze split down the middle, the sound of a massive grinding of stones, then something oily and black spurted out of the crack in the wall and began collecting in a thick pool on the marble floor.
Icehawk faced the black pool and dropped into a zenkutsu fighting stance. "Run, Finn!"
"No! We stick together!"
"Wrong! I'm the muscle; you're the brains. If only one of us is left to steal the Key, it has to be you!" Icehawk shifted his stance slightly as the pool drew itself together and began to take definite form. "Leave the monster to me! I'll catch up with you later, if I can."
The thief made no answer, but from the soun
d of rapidly receding footsteps behind him, Icehawk guessed Finn Fingers had taken his advice. He shifted his grip on the golden hilt of his sword, edged sideways slightly, and focused all his attention on the thing before him.
The black pool had coalesced into an eight-foot-tall creature that combined the least appealing features of a snake, a spiny ridgepig, and a hill troll. Its eyes were fiery red and it wore a flowing crimson cape, but it wore nothing else to hide the definite fact that it was a male and apparently an excited one at that.
"So," Icehawk said, feeling more than a little nauseated by the sight, "are you a demon from the deepest pits of hell, or are you just happy to see me?"
"Beware, mortal!" The thing's voice was deep and mostly growl. "I am the Scarlet Rider, and I shall feast on your soul!"
Icehawk laughed bravely. "The Scarlet Rider? You? I don't think so! It's not midnight yet, and besides, what loser wrote your lines?"
"Blasphemer!" The beast lunged. Icehawk easily ducked under the outstretched black talons and slashed upward, his blade biting into the monster's left forearm. The thing screamed and recoiled, black ichor spraying wildly.
"You call me blasphemous? What about these?" Icehawk gestured around the temple chamber, feeling more confident as he realized that none of the other friezes had come to life. The beast roared incoherently and lunged at him again. Again Icehawk dodged the blow and slashed, but this time a spatter of the creature's thick black blood landed on the back of his neck and began to sizzle like hot acid.
"Yeow!" Icehawk slapped at the burning spot, then slapped his burning fingers against his leather pants, then noticed that his blood-covered sword blade was melting away like a plastic knife on a barbecue grill. He ducked another blow and darted to the side. "Okay, Little Red Riding Hood, I'm through fooling around with you. Kair-blema'gh!"
The monster shuddered at the harsh sound of the Word of Change, pausing a moment in its attack. "What are you doing, mortal?"
Icehawk cast the hilt of his ruined sword aside and smiled as he felt the mighty surge of blood-power flooding through his veins. "Getting back to my roots, beast. Bet you didn't know I was a half-breed."
The thing squinted suspiciously. "Half what?"
"Well, Mom was a princess, of course. So I'm half human."
"And your father?"
"Was a Belkranagh Dragon, I'm afraid."
The beast began to mewl with fear and retreat toward the frieze it'd come from. Icehawk followed, smiling dangerously as his form began to shift and expand.
"Now, what was that you said about feasting on my soul?"
"Dalton!" a female voice called out from somewhere off to his right.
"Hang on, honey!" the mighty Icehawk yelled back. "I'm just about to kill this thing."
"I don't care. You've been saying 'Hang on, honey' for the past two hours. I'm hungry!"
"Damn," he muttered. "It's only been an hour. At most." He broke off his attack and invoked his real-time clock. It was 18:32. Oops. "Okay, hold on, honey, I'm coming out. Just give me a few seconds to save game and tell DeShayne." He invoked the save command, then called up the real-time comm channel.
Three seconds later DeShayne Jones's coffee-brown face popped into view. Normally Finn Fingers's real-world alter ego was smiling and unflappably cheerful, but this time he wore a scowl. "Yo, Dalt. What up? Why you ditching now?"
Dalton shrugged. "It's my girlfriend. I promised I'd have dinner with her tonight, and she's getting impatient."
Another three-second light-speed lag. "Dinner? Already?" DeShayne looked alarmed. "Aw, shoot, I hosed my two p.m."
Dalton laughed. "Relax. I'm six hours ahead of you, remember? You groundhogs can never keep time zones straight."
DeShayne laughed with Dalton and looked relieved. "That's right. You Loonies are on Greenwich time, ain'tcha? Guess I can make it to my calc class after all."
"I guess you can." Dalton paused. "So what do you think? You want to pick this up again later? Say, in about two hours?"
"Sure, but make it more like three. I got that calc class at two, like I say, and sometimes it run long. The prof gets pissed if you log off before he done droning, you know?"
"I know. So tell you what: I've got a little gopher I can send you; wrote it when I was telecommuting to M.I.T. It sets up a proxy that pretends to take your place and automatically logs out when the class ends. Pretty seamless, actually."
"Hey, that'd be cool!" A note of respect entered DeShayne's voice. "Man, you never told me you graduated from M.I.T."
"Well, I didn't, exactly. Came up here to research my thesis, got offered a real job, never went back. You know how it goes."
"I wish. There are days I think I be lucky to ever get out of Chicago alive, much less find a real job. Here you taking your life in your hands just by going down to Skyway level, and forget the street or subway. At least in the games the monsters got reasons for trying to kill you."
Dalton nodded. "Understood. And that, my friend, is why I really think you should think about moving up here after you finish school. Granted, the taxes up here suck like vacuum, and the Colonial Office learned bureaucracy from the Russians. But the people here are real smart, we've got artificial gravity in most of the living domes now, and there's no shortage of work if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Not like down there, where you've got, what? Twenty billion people competing for two billion jobs?"
DeShayne looked unconvinced. "I dunno, man. I spent a month in North Dakota one weekend. I got to imagine the Moon is even worse. Fifty thousand people spread out across an entire planet? It'd be way too slow for a big-city boy."
The next voice was neither quiet nor light-speed lagged. "Dalton! Aren't you ever going to—"
"Whoops, gotta go! Call you after twenty-two hundred."
"That's, uh, four o'clock Central, right?"
"Right. Bye!" Dalton broke the connection, then pressed the button that retracted the flatscreen into the headboard of his bed. Rolling off his pillow, he winced as a shot of pain flashed through his lower back.
"Honey," the voice nagged from the other room, "come on."
"I'm coming, I'm coming." Dalton found his way to his feet and worked his back and arms into a stretch at the low ceiling. "Just give me a minute, okay? I've got a bad kink in my back."
"And whose fault is that? You've been lying in bed for more than three hours. That can't be healthy."
Dalton finished his stretch, let out a quiet sigh, and tottered into the other room of his tiny apartment.
Like the bedroom, the living-dining room was cluttered by dirty coffee cups, unlabeled data disks, and computer hardware in various stages of disassembly. In the far corner sat his latest prized acquisition: a real Twentieth Century Vectrex. It didn't work, of course, but he'd located a complete scan of the original service manuals at a library site in New Guinea, of all places, and he was planning to upload them just as soon as he finished breadboarding together a power converter. It was a project he'd been puttering with off and on for the last two months.
In the center of the room, though, stood the reason why the classic system and so much else still wasn't finished: the woman who was at once both the love of his short life and the bane of his existence. A slender, sexy auburn-haired hydroponics engineer with an athletic build and a proximity-fuse temper.
Dara.
"Honey, why don't you ever let me clean this place?" To avoid answering, Dalton picked his way through the obstacle course and kissed her. "You look pale. Are you feeling all right?" "Yeah."
"You were on-line an awfully long time. Who were you with?" "DeShayne."
"Oh, him. So how's the game going?"
"Well," said Dalton, suddenly coming to life, "Fingers and I are the only ones still on the quest, since the ice dragon froze Boris and the Viprans killed Shawn. We've managed to find a way inside the temple that holds the Key, but we only have until game-time midnight to steal it before the high priestess of Kharauma uses it to unleash the Lord of H
ell and—"
Dara interrupted. "And that would be bad, right?"
Dalton recognized his cue. "Yeah. Right." The flow of words shut off like a spigot. Dalton looked around, moved a box full of computer parts, and uncovered a chair.
"DeShayne?" said Dara, thinking out loud. "Isn't he that tall blond guy from Kepler we met at Myra Cakan's party?"
Dalton considered sitting down on the chair, then realized he'd been flat on his back for three hours and decided to keep standing. "No, that was Shawn. DeShayne is the college kid in Chicago."
Dara shook her head and smiled. "I don't see how you get off on those games, but it is pretty cool how you can play them with people all over the world. Both worlds," she corrected herself.
Dalton shrugged. "No big deal."
"I mean," Dara went on, "whenever I talk with people back on Earth, there's always that blasted light-speed lag. How come you can keep UNET synched and stay interactive in real time?"
"Uh ..." Dalton froze, suddenly stricken with the sensation of being a coyote that'd just run off the edge of a cliff and was now standing suspended in midair, afraid to look down for fear that gravity would reassert itself. "It's technical. Really technical. You wouldn't understand."
Wrong answer. Dara took a step closer, put her hands on her hips, and screwed her face into a frown. "Just try me."
Dalton was saved by a sudden inspiration. "Gee, honey, I'm tired of always talking about, you know, my work. How was your day?"
"Rotten!" Dara said, to Dalton's boundless relief veering off onto the new topic. "You'd think the damn FAO would test their new genetic nightmares before they bother to ship 'em up here, y'know?"
Dalton nodded attentively and simulated the appearance of being interested. "Um ... FAO?"
"You know, the Food and Agriculture Office—the amateur Frankensteins responsible for all the new genetically engineered crops we're supposed to be growing in the greenhouses. They sent us a beaut this week: hybrid zucchini-kudzu with termite digestive enzymes. It's supposed to grow in anything, right? Save us tons of money on biomass recycling?"