by Bruce Bethke
Dalton nodded again, then saw Dara's expression and switched to shaking his head. "It didn't work?"
Dara let out a snort that turned into a cynical laugh. "Oh, it worked all right. We put it out in G-seven dome, just to be on the safe side. Damn thing grew two hundred meters overnight! Took over the dome completely and was starting to digest its way through the airlock seal when we finally figured out a way to kill it." She sighed again.
"Poor baby," Dalton said sympathetically. "Rough day."
"Yeah," Dara said. "So now you owe me a wonderful night. That starts with dinner, and if I don't get fed soon, I'm going to faint from starvation. Ergo, chef, s'il vous plait."
"Right." Dalton shuffled over to the CityComm panel and thumbed a touchpad. "FoodNet, please."
There was a soft hum and a few clicks; then the calm, synthetic, gender-neutral voice of the Port Aldrin Central Computer answered. "FoodNet ready."
"Central? What dinners are available for delivery now?"
The computer digested his request a moment, then responded. "Option one: succulent roast turkey breast with mashed potatoes, gravy, and carrot coins. Option two: tangy Szechuan vegetarian entree, with lo mein noodles and rice. Option three: traditional beer-battered cod, with English chips and no vegetables. Please order by option number."
Dalton turned to Dara to ask which she preferred, only to find her glaring at him. " 'Tangy'?" she asked, her pug nose wrinkled into a sneer. "'Succulent'? Have you tech boys been screwing around with Central's vosynth again?"
Dalton put his hands up in a don't-hit-me gesture. "It wasn't my idea. The Nutrition Authority is trying to get people to stop cooking in their rooms and eat balanced meals, so they had us put more adjectives on the menu." He tried a weak smile on her. "Any of those options sound appealing?"
Dara switched off her mock glare and smiled sarcastically. "Let me see: the cod is actually processed neokrill, the Szechuan vegetables actually are vegetables, but I can't stand to look at anything green right now, and the turkey is actually a cloned tissue culture growing in a big vat over at Kepler—which means it once was part of an actual bird. I'll have the turkey."
Dalton nodded, then turned back to the comm panel. "Central? Two option one turkey dinners, please." He looked over his shoulder at Dara. "Anything for dessert?"
"Me?" she suggested brightly.
Dalton sighed, smiled, thumbed off the comm panel, and thanked his lucky stars he'd met a woman who didn't require being re-seduced on a regular basis.
Chapter 2
Mare Tranquillitatis, Luna
Chaffee Memorial Launch Control
24 October 2069
21:30 GMT
An alarm bell chimed softly. Lars Hendrickson, senior cargo launcher supervisor, grade 3, swore a mild oath, then took one more sip of his coffee before setting the cup down on the computer console.
"Nine-thirty already? Jeez." He took a last look at the crossword puzzle that lay unfinished in his lap—the eight-letter word for "subvert" starting with s was still eluding him—then sat up straight, tossed the puzzle onto the console beside his coffee cup, and grabbed his electronic smartpad.
"Stupid UNSHA safety rules," he grumbled to himself, as he knew he was alone in the launcher control center. "Every hour on the hour, manually check the flinkin' readouts." Lars stood up, hitched up his sagging pants, then plodded off on the first leg of his rounds. "The readings never bounce. They never will. So who's to know if I'm half an hour late?" He paused before the first telesense console, gave it a quick eyeball, and nodded approvingly, then started scanning the readings into the smartpad by passing his hand over the console. "Everything is always perfect. A chimpanzee could do this job. In his sleep."
"Input complete," the smartpad said, indicating it had accepted the scan and was digesting the data.
"I mean, heck of a challenge for a retired master sergeant, innit? Twenty years with the Peacekeepers, only to wind up here?"
"Invalid command," the smartpad said.
Lars ignored the response. "Baby-sitting this pile of junk. Sucking up to twerps from UNSHA and UNCLD and every other pack of half-wit New York bureaucratic twits. And then I had to fire that damn Limey, Britt, yesterday and take his shift myself!"
"Invalid command," the smartpad repeated.
"I mean," Lars said to the pad, "wasn't much of a choice, huh? Sneaking six days off just this month for a bunch of stupid political meetings?"
"Ready for the next entry," the smartpad suggested.
Lars gave the smartpad a backhanded slap. "You want politics? I'll give you politics! You little punk protesters are unhappy? Out the airlock! Don't like the way the UN runs things? Out the airlock! Let's see how smart you talk when you're sucking vacuum!"
"Please move on to the next entry," the smartpad asked politely.
Lars took a deep breath, then deflated, sighed, and shuffled around the corner.
The four strangers clustered around the interociter matrix generator immediately got his attention. Especially as they seemed to be taking it apart. "Hey! You!" Lars bulled in, waving the smartpad like a weapon. "This is a secured area! How did you—"
Lars stopped cold when he noticed the strangers were carrying real weapons. Pistols. H&K LP-7 Mark Fives: laser pistols, to be precise, military-police issue.
An instant later he registered that the men were also wearing hologram hoods to hide their faces, and their black coveralls carried forged dome identification badges.
Lars Hendrickson, UN-PEC master sergeant (retired), stood frozen in his tracks.
"We're rerouting control of the launcher," one off to the left side of the group said in a voice that was barely more than a hoarse whisper. "Don't interfere and you won't get hurt."
Deep in the back of his mind some part of Lars's brain started screaming, Retreat, dummy! But a lifetime of master sergeant authority was still in control of his voice and his hands, so he thumped a fist on the smartpad and shouted louder, "Rerouting control? Impossible! Not without written authorization from— Where's your authorization? I demand to see your authorization!"
A moment later he was staring into the main collimator lens of an LP-7 Mark Five. It looked much bigger than he remembered.
"Here's my authorization," the man holding the gun said. "Now, much as I would enjoy vaporizing that lump of fat you call a brain, I'd prefer it if you'd just politely step aside."
Something in the timbre of the man's voice triggered a matchup from Lars's memory. "Britt?" Through the eyeholes in the hood, suddenly familiar blue eyes went wide, and this time it was the gunman's turn to freeze.
The reflexes of a lifetime die hard. In the few moments while Britt was still surprised and hesitating, Lars saw an opening, and for one brief, glorious instant he was once again a warrior: a hundred kilos of muscle, steely nerves, and total dedication to the United Nations Peacekeeper Corps. As if in slow motion, he feinted with his left hand, lashed out with the smartpad in his right, batted the pistol aside while gathering his legs under him like mighty coil springs, and threw himself into a heroic headlong leap at the large red security alarm button on the other side of the interocitor console.
He never made it. Too many years of doughnuts, sugared coffee, and living in the low-G parts of Lunar domes had taken their toll on the master sergeant's body; he was now closer to one hundred fifty kilograms of slack muscle and adipose tissue, and his rebuilt titanium knees simply weren't up to the job. His outstretched fingers fell agonizing inches short, as he landed on the floor with an "oof that knocked the wind out of him, and before he could recover, a heavy gun butt crashed down on the back of his skull. Then the waves of pain came rolling in like the breakers on the beach at Chenghai, and as his world faded out to a bloody red and black, it finally dawned on him.
The eight-letter word for "subvert."
Sabotage.
"Think he's dead?" One of the men nudged Lars with his toe.
"Think I care?" Britt Godfrey peeled off his hol
o-hood and shook out his short blond hair.
The third member of the spook team finished a look-and-peek around the corner, then rejoined Britt and the other two. "What went wrong? I thought you said he made his rounds at the top of the hour?"
"He was supposed to." Britt shrugged.
The third man wasted another glance at Lars. "And we were supposed to avoid confrontation. Major Nakagawa is gonna be pissed if you killed him."
Britt sniffed. "Nakagawa can bite me bloomin' bum. He never had to work for this clown." He let out a bitter little laugh and kicked the unconscious man, then turned to the fourth member of the team, who was hunched over the open control panel. "Any luck with that cracker yet, Roberts?"
Ken Roberts shook his head slightly, but kept his attention focused on a small black box haywired into the panel. "Uh-uh. We're in, but I'm still trying to get through to Dalton. I'm getting a busy signal from his computer."
"Oh, God," muttered the second commando, shaking his hooded head. "The kid probably got bored waiting and started playing games or something."
Britt's eyes narrowed. "You're bloody kiddin' me, right,
Willits?" He glared menacingly at Roberts. "You said we could rely on 'im!"
Roberts grimaced. "I said we needed him for the remote hack. I never said he was dependable."
Willits giggled nervously under his hood. "And why shouldn't we trust a kid who thinks his family name is Starkiller, y'know? When he isn't calling himself Icesparrow or whatever."
"You mean Icehawk." Roberts shrugged. "So Dalt's a pathological gamer. That doesn't mean he's a complete flake. Maybe something's come up." For what seemed like the hundredth time, he punched a button on the device plugged into the control panel.
"Joe's Pool Hall. Who in the hall do you want?" a familiar voice squawked out of the device, and the four waiting men nearly jumped out of their skin. "That you, Ken?"
"Where the hell were you?" Britt snarled. "Who's that?" Dalton asked.
"Ahh ... never mind, Dalt." Roberts angrily waved Britt away from the panel. "You ready to rock?"
"Oh, yeah. Okay, I got your dataflow reading through. Looks like ... Oh, this'll be easy. They're two revs behind on the OSS."
"OSS?" whispered Willits.
"Operating system security," Roberts replied. "That's good."
"Good, is it? Well, hurry it up, will you?" Britt cradled his pistol and looked around nervously. "How long is this gonna take?"
Roberts patted the black box and smiled reassuringly. "Shouldn't be long now."
Britt scowled and checked the load status of his pistol again. It was becoming a nervous tic. "I still don't see why you needed to involve this boyo. Why couldn't you just do it yourself?"
Roberts gave Britt an irritated stare. "Because we're not just hacking into some yo-yo's private pornopix collection; we're up against a very serious security system here. I could handle the local stuff, like the access codes for the doors, with just the cracker, but to take over the launch control system you need more juice than that little thing's got. So we needed someone to operate from remote, and we needed somebody good enough to make it work, like Dalton."
"Oh." Britt wrinkled his brow and looked perplexed for a moment, then shrugged and edged up to the nearest corner and took a quick peek around it.
The fourth commando was kneeling next to Lars, dabbing at a trickle of red from the fallen man's ear. "Look, he's bleeding."
"Let 'im bleed," Britt snapped over his shoulder. "Stinking One Worlder. He'd just as soon turn you in to the Stasi as look at you."
"Stasi?" The kneeling man looked up.
"Von Braun slang," one of the others volunteered. "UN Special Aerospace Security. UNISAS. You know, the guys who make the arrests that never show up on the news, never come to trial, and way too often lead to fatal airlock 'accidents'?"
"Oh," the kneeling man said. "In Volodya we call them the Loyalty Cops."
Britt edged into the conversation. "Well, they're going to be calling us cryomeat unless we—"
"Open sesame!" Dalton's voice sang out of the device. "Damn, I'm good! Coming your way, Ken."
"Got it!" Roberts replied happily as he rapidly punched at the keypad. "Okay, I'm through the encryption, and ..." He paused to quickly stroke a few more keys, bit his lip nervously, then push one more. "And we're in! System control is ours! Thanks, Dalt. Nice work."
"No problem, Ken. Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Over and out."
"Brilliant." Britt made sure his handgun was on safe, then tucked it into his waistband and pulled out a comm link. "Badger?" he said, thumbing a button. "The fox is in the henhouse. Repeat: the fox is in the bleedin' henhouse."
The man kneeling next to Lars looked up. "Henhouse?"
Office of the Governor, Port Aldrin
24 October 2069
21:47 GMT
Pieter von Hayek sat in his black chrome office chair like a convict in an execution chamber awaiting a call from the governor. Except that I am the governor, he reminded himself, and this was all my idea. He'd long since given up trying to project an aura of confidence to the dozen or so other people crowded into the small spartan office and was now simply hoping that his sweat wouldn't soak through the armpits of his best gray pinstripe suit.
This is what I promised I'd do, if elected, he reminded himself. He took off his bifocals, massaged the bridge of his long, aquiline nose, then put his glasses back on and picked up the photo in the ebony frame on his desk. It was a holo of his long-dead wife, Erika, still young and beautiful forever on film, cradling their son, Josef. We committed to this day more than twenty years ago, my love. All my adult life I've worked toward this. He set the picture down carefully.
So why do I want to scream out now, "Wait!"?
Somewhere in the room a personal comm unit chirped. Von Hayek glanced up; Patrick Adams, the governor's shadowy right hand, fished a phonewire out of his coat pocket and pressed it to his left ear. "Yes?" Adams listened, then nodded once, folded up the phonewire, and put it back in his pocket. He turned to the governor.
For a millisecond he smiled.
"Ladies? Gentlemen?" Adams strode across the room and took up his station at von Hayek's side. Like flowers tracking the sun, all faces in the room turned toward him. "It is my pleasure to announce that our people have taken operational control of all six cargo launchers. General Consensus reports no casualties, no violence, and no alarms." Adams stepped away from von Hayek, then turned to face him and bowed. "Governor? We await your orders."
Though his stomach was churning, von Hayek pasted a confident smile on his face. No turning back now. "My fellow governors," he began, addressing the dozen other men and women in the room. "I have tried many times to prepare words for this occasion. We owe our posterity some grand statement that will ring down through the ages; some careful explanation of how we have exhausted all diplomatic channels, grown weary of endless fruitless negotiations and how it is that now, only after all else has failed, we at last resort to the threat of violence in our quest for freedom.
"I have tried to find those stirring words, and I have failed. So let me just say this: the die is cast. As of this moment, we in this room are no longer the democratically elected but completely powerless governors of the UN's lunar possessions. We are now the Governing Council of the Free State Selena."
He picked up the comm unit from his desk. "So let's ring up New York and tell them the good news, shall we?"
Patrick Adams
As with many of the pivotal characters in the 2069 Lunar Revolution, Patrick Adams is something of an enigma. First off, "Patrick Adams" was clearly his nom de guerre, as no record of the man exists before his abrupt appearance in 2067 as Pieter von Hayek's right-hand man. To this day, the story of Patrick Adams's true origin — and his ultimate fate — remains a mystery.
As for his exact role in the von Hayek administration, that also is the subject of considerable debate. His title was chief of staff, although it appears his actua
l duties went well beyond that. Depending on the occasion, he seems to have functioned as von Hayek's intelligence director, military adviser, public relations manager, or even nanny, as the situation demanded.
It is believed that Adams was an American, before he emigrated to the Moon. Beyond that, almost nothing is known about his personal life. Presumably he had one, although that may be an unjustified assumption.
— Chaim Noguchi, A History of the Lunar Revolution
Chapter 3
UN Headquarters, New York
24 October 2069
4:54 P.M. EST
Antonio Ramon Aguila, undersecretary for lunar affairs, United Nations Committee on Lunar Development, sat behind his broad executive desk, in theory reading a highly technical report on thorium production, but in fact, daydreaming.
Look at this office, he thought, as his dark eyes traced patterns in the grain of the Bavarian walnut panels that lined the walls. My father raised eleven children in a squalid shack no larger than this room. No electricity, no water, no sewer except the roadside ditch. Papa's world was made of corrugated tin and cast-off plastic, and his floor was hard-packed naked dirt. If he'd ever stumbled across a piece of expensive polished wood like this, he'd have burned it to keep his children warm. A small, bitter smile played at the corners of Aguila's expressive lips as his gaze came to rest on the matched pair of French Provencal chairs in the corner. We could have fed the whole barrio for a year on what my predecessor paid for those two chairs.
Aguila looked away from the chairs and let his gaze wander on, across twenty years' worth of accumulated symbols of his own success and power. Old collegiate athletic trophies, the brass furnished to a pleasant glow. A bookcase filled with century-old printed books, from back in the days when information was stored in toxic ink on murdered rain forests. A dozen or so quite authentic, and probably now quite illegal, primitive cultural artifacts, collected during his many fact-finding trips around the globe. Two carefully selected and gently understated pastel sketches, originals signed by Edgar Degas.