by Bruce Bethke
Haversham took a long pause, staring straight at Aguila with unabashed anger, and all trace of age or weakness vanished from his pale gray eyes. "Why? For years you've been seeking an excuse to kick out the civilian government and institute direct rule. Isn't that what you're going to recommend now?"
Aguila fell silent. Once again Haversham had managed to surprise him with a moment of startling lucidity.
"Antonio," Haversham went on, changing to a gentler voice, "those are our children up there. If you'd done any serious reading of history at all, you'd have realized this moment was inevitable." Haversham paused. "True," he added, apparently to himself, "it's happening twenty years earlier than I expected, but ..." His voice tapered off.
Aguila jumped into the gap. "Sir, I—"
"No," Haversham interrupted, "you listen. The problem here is that the original colonies were built by Americans and Russians, and we've spent the last thirty years packing the place full of hotheads, malcontents, and refugees! When we founded the CLD two decades ago I told them the thing to do was clear the whole lot out and replace them with nice docile Canadians, or maybe Belgians. But we didn't, and now we've got this mess!"
"Sir—"
"Now, Antonio, we have one chance left. If we play this right, we can co-opt the revolution and lay the foundation for an interplanetary commonwealth that will bind the worlds together long after you and I are dust and forgotten! But if you go charging in now with a gang of jackbooted thugs ..."
Haversham sighed, and his face sagged. The outburst clearly had taken a lot out of him. He looked at Aguila, a childlike hurt showing in his eyes. "There really was only one vote against this madness?"
Aguila kept his face impassive. "You may present a dissenting opinion, if you like." Without a backward glance, he turned and strode out of Haversham's office.
The United Nations Reacts
The United Nations' response to the Lunar Declaration of Independence was, of course, entirely predictable. First, they imposed a news blackout to ensure that all parties were operating with insufficient information. Next, Undersecretary Aguila held a press conference in which he flatly denied that there was any trouble at all. Following this, the Committee on Lunar Development [UNCLD] met in secret session and boldly voted to fob the problem off on the Security Council.
The Security Council emergency session took place the next morning, on 25 October, under conditions of strictest secrecy. At this meeting the United States of North America (USNA), eager to regain control of those colonial possessions it had given up in the 2054 Djakarta Conference, presented a detailed plan which called for using the Americans' vaunted Rapid Deployment Force to restore order in the rebelling colonies and which, not incidentally, put the Americans in sole charge.
This plan was of course immediately vetoed by the other permanent members of the Security Council, only to be followed by the Russian Kosmospetznaz plan, which differed in some particulars, but sprang from much the same motivation and achieved much the same effect, in that it nearly precipitated a fistfight between the ambassadors from France, China, and the New German Unity (NDE).
There were other moments of high drama and poignancy in this session as well: Field Marshal Bernard Leighton-Smythe, supreme commander of the Peacekeeper Corps, threatening to knock the Quebecois and West Samoan ambassadors' heads together if they did not behave; Dr. Indira Singh, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Office (UNIFAO), admitting that without lunar food production, the Earth would face mass starvation in just slightly over eight weeks; elderly Lord Edward Haversham, founder and chairman emeritus of the CLD, arguing eloquently, if futilely, that there was still time to pursue a diplomatic solution. Even now one wonders if the history of the past century might have been vastly different, had the members of the Security Council spared a moment to listen to Lord Haversham — or, for that matter, to each other.
Instead, in the end it was Shi Cheng Wu, chairman of the Committee on World Peace [UNCWP], who won the day with his proposal. Operation Restore Justice called for the creation and deployment of a multinational peacekeeping team called ATFOR, the All-Terran Antiterrorism Force. Combining elements of the Russian Navy and the American Special Forces as well as the Danish, Ivory Coast, Papua New Guinean, and Palestinian armies, ATFOR was a compromise solution that — to view it in the most charitable possible light — pleased no one.
It has been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. If so, then ATFOR was created to be a cranky and lame camel with a foul disposition and severe flea problems.
— Chaim Noguchi, A History of the Lunar Revolution
Chapter 6
Office of the Governor, Port Aldrin
25 October 2069
17:31 GMT
The comm unit on von Hayek's desk chirped. Like a pouncing cat, he was on it. "Yes?"
"Governor?" The voice was that of Patrick Adams, calling from his own office. "General Consensus reports something odd. UNET just came back on-line all by itself for point-oh-two-five seconds. Then it blacked out again."
"Did anything get through?"
"That's the strangest part. It looks like just an ordinary blip packet—junk mail, personal e-mail, UNET system messages, that sort of stuff. There's only one thing with a UN origin tag on it, and it's meaningless. Gibberish."
Von Hayek grabbed the comm unit with both hands and with white knuckles. "What is it?"
"A background report on thorium production. But it's almost unintelligible, and the data tables don't checksum."
Von Hayek sucked in his breath sharply. "Route that report to me. Immediately!"
There was a pause, possibly while Adams shrugged.
"Okay." Moments later the report file popped up on von Hayek's desktop.
Von Hayek wasted a minute reading the first page, just to see if Adams was going to find an excuse to barge in and interrupt him. In that time he learned that Patrick was right: the report was dense, incomprehensible, loaded with arcane information, and written in a dry and academic style virtually guaranteed to make the mind wander. Von Hayek's mind nearly did.
But his desktop timer pinged; the minute had passed without interruption. Von Hayek took one more glance to make sure his office door was closed and locked, then moved the report file into his desktop compression processor and applied his decryption key.
Seconds later the real meaning hidden in the gibberish appeared in a pop-up window: "Security Council has chosen military option. Expect drop-in guests within 96 hours. No more info at this time. Regrets, Beacon."
Port Aldrin, Luna Hrbek Memorial Gym 25 October 2069 20:00 GMT.
"Hey, Starkiller! What are you doing here?" Dalton looked up with a start and glanced around the gym until he spotted a striking blond woman a full head taller than everyone around her.
"Svetlana!" Dalton broke away from the group he was with and wormed his way through the crowd, trying to get closer to her. Svetlana Kosov was a friend, sort of. He'd partnered with her on Treasures of Tannin a year or so back and had gotten halfway through level 23 before he realized that Ivan the Not Bad was actually a woman. Since then he'd made a point of playing Deadly Disks with her at least once a month, time permitting.
Dalton broke through the last knot of people and got close enough to speak without shouting. "So, Kosov. You're joining the militia?"
"Thinking about it," she said. "Figure they need medics as well as fighters. What's your excuse?"
Dalton tried to find something cocky and brave to say, but settled for something closer to the truth. "I've got friends over in Kepler. When I heard about that massacre last night—"
"Massacre?" Kosov's bright blue eyes went wide. "I heard the UNI-thugs broke some skulls and legs, but I didn't hear about anything about a massacre."
Dalton shrugged indifferently but secretly treasured his sense of being privy to inside information. "Oh, yeah, it's all over the chat nodes. Some SAS officers opened fire on a crowd. Governor's office is trying to hush it up so there won't
be a riot, but I heard they killed three people."
"You heard wrong." Some black-haired guy Dalton didn't know pushed himself into the conversation. "I got a friend whose wife works in the same dome as the Kepler emergency room, and she says it was five dead, seven wounded."
Another person joined in the conversation then, a skinny teenager with more freckles than bare face. "You folks talking about that mess in Korolev yesterday? The one where the blues shot up that corridor party?"
The black-haired guy shook his head. "No. This was Kepler, late last night."
Freckle Face's jaw dropped. "Kepler too? God, the dirt-bags are killing us left and right! We gotta defend ourselves!"
Svetlana seized this opportunity to step back into the conversation. "Well, that's why we're all here, boys. To show those UN bastards they can't kick us around."
"Damn right," the black-haired guy affirmed.
"Hey," Freckle Face wondered aloud, "you think they got enough guns for all of us?" He craned his neck and looked around the gym. "I mean, there's gotta be, oh, forty or fifty people in here tonight."
Svetlana stood on tiptoe, towering over Freckle Face, and surveyed the crowd. "Thirty-eight, actually." She settled back to her normal posture. "And what? You think they're just going to pass out guns like party favors?"
Freckle Face shrugged. "Well, sure. I mean, we gotta be ready in case the CLD tries a sneak attack, right?"
Svetlana pursed her red lips. "Do you really think that's likely?"
Freckle Face looked nonplussed.
The black-haired guy pushed in again. "Look, kid," he said to Freckle Face, "the Earth is 384,000 kilometers away. No way they can launch a major sneak attack: we'll see their translunar injection burn, and that'll give us three days' advance warning, at least. The point of our being here tonight is to show Kinthavong and his blue dogs we mean business. Once the UN sees that, they'll back down and start negotiating."
"You really think so?" Freckle Face looked disappointed.
Dalton clapped a hand on the kid's shoulder. "Aw, don't let those two bring you down. I'm sure we'll get plenty of chance to suit up and play soldier." He smiled and offered Freckle Face a handshake. "Starkiller's the name. Dalton Starkiller."
The kid's face lit up, which made his freckles look like sunspots on Betelgeuse. "The Dalton Starkiller? Icehawk?" He seized Dalton's hand and shook it vigorously. "You're the guy who holds the all-dome record for Space Hawk!"
Dalton nodded, trying to smile demurely but ending up smug. "Yep. That's me."
"Jeff Mahoney!" the kid said, still shaking Dalton's hand. "But you can call me Stormrider! And I've got to tell you it is an honor to meet you, sir! I downloaded a macro of your play on the last Nightstalker match, and it was, well... beautiful!"
"Thank you," Dalton said as he started wondering how he was going to get his hand back.
"Starkiller?" the black-haired guy whispered to Svetlana. "What the hell kind of name is Starkiller?"
"I heard he changed it when he immigrated," Svetlana whispered back. "It used to be Totschlagenstern."
"I mean," Mahoney prattled on, "the way you smoked that hormagaunt on level 15. Stellar!"
"Nothing to it," Dalton said, finally prying himself out of the handshake and feeling more than a bit embarrassed. Actually, in that match he'd switched to the plasma sword because he was running low on rockets and hadn't expect to find anything worse than a coldwraith down that corridor. When the hormagaunt jumped out, he'd had no time to switch weapons; and while everyone else assumed the fight was an incredible display of skill and bravado, Dalton knew in his heart that if he'd even suspected there was a hormagaunt in the shadows, he'd have hosed the corridor down with homing fusion grenades and then tried a different corridor.
"I can't believe this," young Mahoney continued babbling. "We got Icehawk on our side! Icehawk and Storm-rider, fighting shoulder to shoulder! Those dirtbags don't know what they're in for!"
Dalton looked to Svetlana, who only smiled and rolled her eyes.
A commotion broke out by one of the doors to the gym, which finally got Mahoney's attention and shut him up. People began jostling for position and craning their necks; Dalton found an opening in the crowd, grabbed Svetlana's hand, and tried to work his way to the front.
"Attention!" a new voice bellowed from somewhere over by the door. The buzz of conversation died away, and Svetlana stopped moving, dragging Dalton to a halt.
"Okay, people," the new voice continued, "let's start by forming a line so's everyone can see! Y'all can form a line, can'tcha?"
This time Svetlana started moving first. Dalton tagged along, and after a minute or so of shuffling around, the group in the gym had formed a rough facsimile of a straight line. The black-haired guy had somehow managed to end up standing on Svetlana's right, and young Mahoney was standing off to Dalton's left.
Two men stood at one end of the gym, facing the line.
Both wore the new white-with-gold-trim uniform of the Lunar Defense Force. The tall one was a lean, sunburned, and rawboned Anglo, with a droopy brown mustache and, of all things, a white cowboy hat, while the short one was thin, muscular, dour-faced and unmistakably pure Japanese. The two men exchanged glances; then the tall one put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath.
"Howdy!" he shouted, in a voice that made young Mahoney jump. "Ah'm Major Lloyd Thompson, formerly of the short-lived Republic of Texas, as if y'all couldn't guess! My partner here," he extended a hand toward the other man, "is Major Yuji Nakagawa, formerly of His Majesty's equally short-lived New Imperial Japanese Navy!
"We are here tonight because we are professional soldiers and officers in the Lunar Defense Force! You are here for a much better reason: because you are citizen volunteers, willing to bear arms in the defense of your homes and families!"
Without realizing it, Dalton stood up a little straighter and puffed his chest up a little.
"Now," Thompson said, sweeping his gaze up and down the line, "who here is responsible for organizing this cozy little get-together?"
Hesitantly, almost shyly, Dalton's boss, Terrell Davis, stepped forward, along with another middle-aged man. "I guess we are. I mean, Bob here is the one who knew someone in the LDF, and I—"
Thompson strode forward and seized Terrell's hand. "That's exactly the kind of initiative we need in the LDF Militia!" Thompson dug a hand into his shirt pocket and came up with two pairs of simple gold bars. "Congratulations, Lieutenants!" He handed one set of bars to Terrell and the other to Bob, then stepped back and saluted proudly. After some confusion, Terrell and Bob returned the salute, sloppily.
"Easiest promotion you ever got, innit?" Thompson said with a smile. "The bars go on your collar, like this." He tilted his head back to display the gold oak leaves on his own uniform collar. Terrell and Bob stepped back into line and started futzing with their insignia, while Thompson pivoted and strode back to front and center, next to Nakagawa.
"Now!" Thompson resumed, in his parade-field bellow, "we don't have the time to turn y'all into professional soldiers, and frankly, I don't believe that's what y'all really want." This got a collective laugh from the group, which died away quickly when everyone saw that Major Nakagawa was scowling. "So what we're gonna cover in this meetin', and in the next few days, is real basic military organization. That, and we're gonna get y'all checked out on the powered battle suit, which is the real uniform of the LDF!"
Thompson looked down at his clothing and made a little hand gesture to direct attention to himself. "This thing here is just our formal monkey suit, y'know? For parades and banquets and all that crap. If y'all really want one, you're gonna hafta enlist in the Regulars."
Something in the word "enlist" made Dalton shudder inwardly. He noticed that young Mahoney was nodding and smiling, though.
"However," Thompson shouted, "tonight we are gonna begin with some basic training in the ab-so-lutely fundamental fightin' infantry skill. Major Nakagawa?" The other LDF officer turned his
back to the line, and when he turned around again, he was holding a briefcase-sized brushed aluminum case in his hands. He popped the latches and, using both hands, held the case wide open to display its contents.
It held four pistols.
Thompson grabbed one and held it aloft. "This," Thompson bellowed, "is the Heckler and Koch LP-seven Mark Five. Standard military police-issue laser pistol. This little sucker here is the basic combat weapon of the LDF."
"Wow," young Mahoney gasped. And Dalton had to admit that for a gun, the Mark Five was pretty sexy. Without thinking, he took a small step forward.
So did everyone else, except Svetlana.
"Don't crowd," Major Thompson said. "We only got four pistols here tonight, but rest assured, when the time comes we'll have enough for everybody. Tonight we're just gonna concentrate on gettin' y'all checked out on basic operations and safety, and maybe if you're real good we'll let y'all do a little target practice." "Cool," Dalton and young Mahoney moaned together.
General Jackson, on the LDF
The LDF? Don't make me laugh. It's a Potemkin army, with delusions of grandeur! Peace Corps Intel estimates they have 250 soldiers, tops, and most of them are either disgruntled veterans or cashiered junior officers from third-rate Fourth World armies. Their organizational structure looks like the damn Bolivian navy — all admirals, no deckhands. Their arsenal: well, let's just say we know there are fewer than fifty serviceable weapons in private hands on the moon, and I think that speaks for itself. As for this "General Consensus" of theirs — clearly a nom de guerre, and a particularly idiotic one at that — his speech patterns show he's obviously ex-American, and the USNA Army can account for all of its former officers above the rank of captain!
In short, the LDF is a contemptible little band of street thugs and losers led by a fraud and armed with nothing more lethal than hot air. I predict they will melt away at the first sight of official United Nations Peacekeepers. They'll scurry away to hide in dark nooks and crannies just like the cockroaches they are!