by Bruce Bethke
So to answer to your question: how do I feel about sending the 82nd Airborne up against the LDF? Why not ask me how I'd feel about going up against the South Central Crips?"
In fairness to General Jackson, it should be pointed out that he made these remarks in October 2069, some eight months before the beginning of the Crips' 2070 Summer in Hell campaign. To this day, despite all American and United Nations claims to the contrary, the South Central Crips [SCC] still control all territory south of Beverly Hills and west of Interstate 5.
— Chaim Noguchi, A History of the Lunar Revolution
Chapter 7
Office of the Governor, Port Aldrin
26 October 2069
01:05 GMT
Patrick Adams knocked lightly on the doorframe, then went in. "Governor, it's one o'clock in the morning. You need your sleep."
Von Hayek didn't look up. "I can't sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see blue-uniformed storm troopers marching through this city."
Adams tried a smile; the effort was wasted. "C'mon, gov, your secret intelligence source must be wrong. If the UN really was sending in the Peacekeepers, they'd have to be launching right now to make the window. I've got twelve autotelescopes locked in on Earth, and not one of them has logged any major spaceflight activity."
Von Hayek toyed with his bifocals. "Maybe there's a hole in your surveillance. Maybe the Peacekeepers have a stealth launch technique that we don't know about."
Adams shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe they think this is important enough to risk the high-G forty-hour transit, but I don't suppose that's likely. You've seen General Consensus's analysis. If the Security Council votes to send in Peacekeepers, it'll take them a week, minimum, to organize the force and transport it here. Anything less than that and the boys in blue will arrive either too space-sick or too underequipped to fight."
Von Hayek finally looked up at Adams. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. "Or perhaps General Consensus has miscalculated. Are you sure the militia recruitment meetings were conspicuous enough?"
Adams let out a little snort. "Gov, they couldn't have been more conspicuous if we'd mailed each SAS informant a handwritten invitation. The Security Council must know we've got more than two thousand volunteers in the colonial militia."
"How many of those can we rely on?"
Adams considered his answer. "Most of them, I'd say. Pieter, you always underestimate how popular this revolution is. Not only have we got more militia members than we can arm, but we've also picked up three hundred eager new recruits for the regular LDF."
Von Hayek nodded slowly. "Good. Now, about weapons: you're sure the UN knows that we're armed?"
"If they don't, Kinthavong is either stone blind or asleep at the switch. We're keeping the heavy stuff under wraps for now, but your boy, Josef, has had LDF officers swaggering all over the place, each of them packing two laser pistols. All the SAS had to do was count."
A sobering thought apparently occurred to von Hayek then. His eyes slowly widened, and he took off his bifocals and bit lightly on an earpiece. "Patrick?" he said softly, as he took the earpiece out of his mouth. "What if no one's paying attention to Kinthavong anymore?"
Adams felt a deep, cold chill settle into his spine. "Then the UN just might believe a small strike force could succeed," Adams answered in a hollow voice, as he started to worry through the implications. "The troops they'd send would be lightly armed; with minimal support staff. Battalion strength, tops. That they could transport in one jump. They wouldn't have enough people to occupy and hold all thirteen colonies, but if they hit just a few strategic targets ..." His voice tapered off.
Von Hayek put his glasses back on and fixed Adams with a steady stare. "Which targets?"
Adams stroked his chin, subconsciously noting that he needed to shave. "Well, General Consensus has always assumed they'd start by reinforcing Lacus Mortis and Sinus Roris. But if they're planning to use a blitzkrieg strategy, they'll either try to grab some of the cargo launchers or else ..." Again his voice tapered off, and he looked straight at von Hayek.
"Or else what, Patrick?"
"They'll try a surgical strike to decapitate the government." Adams gulped and licked his lips. "They'll be hunting for you, sir."
Von Hayek nodded. "Yes. I thought as much." He pursed his lips and scowled slightly. "Well, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it." He turned in his chair, picked up the ebony-framed holo of his long-dead wife, and seemed to communicate with it. Adams fought the urge to intrude and peek at the picture.
The moment passed. Von Hayek set the picture down and turned to Adams. "Okay, Patrick, here's what I want. First off, are any of the other governors still here in Aldrin?"
"Trelstad and Veerhoven are. Kozhevnikov too, I think."
"Well, get hold of them and tell them to go home. No point giving the UN an eggs-in-one-basket target. In fact, since Trelstad is my second, I'd be happier if she went to Farside for a few days."
"Got it. I'll pass that along. Next?"
"Patrick, at all costs, we must protect our civilians. How do our evacuation plans look?"
Adams nodded. "Actually, since most of our reactors were built by the Russians, we've got really good evacuation plans."
"Wonderful. We might want to consider a few emergency drills. Let me think about that." Von Hayek looked down at his desktop, seeming to search for the notes that weren't there, then back to Adams. "Next: how's the MANTA project coming along?"
Reflexively, Adams looked around to make sure no one else was within earshot. "The engineers have hit a new snag. We're still at least two weeks away from beta test. Maybe more."
Von Hayek balled up a skinny fist and thumped his desktop, making the various video windows and icons jump like dried beans. "Damn. We really could use MANTA right about now."
Adams reddened slightly under the implied rebuke. "I know, sir. My people are giving it their best."
"I'm sure they are, Patrick." Von Hayek looked down again and casually blanked a few comm windows even though they appeared to be inactive. "Now," he continued, in a voice barely above a whisper, "what about our friends on Farside? Any chance of pulling a fresh rabbit out of that hat?"
Adams shook his head. "Not on ninety-six hours' notice, sir."
Von Hayek frowned. "I thought not. But I figured it was worth asking." "Of course, sir."
"Very well." Von Hayek rolled his chair back from the desk, reached over to the left bin drawer, and tapped in a code on the lock keypad. "Okay, here's the big one. If the Peacekeepers do hit us, and if they hit us hard, our only hope is to make this so expensive for them that they decide to go back to the negotiating table." The lock clicked; the drawer slid open.
"Patrick?" the governor said, as he reached into the drawer and extracted a dull black plastic case. "I want all the cargo launchers rigged for demolition."
Adams arched an eyebrow. "Risky strategy, sir. We won't know where the Peacekeepers are going to hit until they get here. There won't be much time to evacuate civilians."
"There isn't much time now. I'm giving you forty-eight hours." Von Hayek laid the plastic case on his desktop, and pressed a thumb to the lock. A bar of green light swept over his finger, and the lock opened.
Adams was still dumbstruck. "Pete ... Governor ... Sir? Forty-eight hours? But—"
"Then you'd better get going on it, hadn't you?"
Adams blinked again, then turned and started for the door.
"Wait. Patrick?"
Adams turned around to see that von Hayek had lifted open the top of the case. There were two small chrome pistols inside.
Pieter von Hayek smiled in a way that reminded Adams of Pieter's son, Josef, and for that reason made Adam's skin crawl. "Josef sent these over," Pieter said as he lifted out a pistol and offered it to Adams. "He thought we might need them."
Adams considered the pistol, then looked in the first councilor's eyes. They stared at each other for a long moment; then Adams accepte
d it. "Thank you, sir. But I have to tell you, I hope to God I never have to use it."
Von Hayek picked up the other pistol, and tested its heft. "Frankly, Patrick, so do I."
The Deceptive Calm Before the Storm
The days immediately following an apparently successful revolution are always a heady time. In this, the new citizens of the Free State Selena were no different from the Muscovites of 1917, the Czechoslovaks of 1968, the Berliners of 1989, or the Tiananmen Square survivors of 2012. Within hours of Governor von Hayek's Declaration of Independence the people were thronging the malls and galleries of their domed cities, cheering for parades, celebrating wildly, and generally congratulating themselves on their stunning good sense and good fortune. This general air of surreal excitement resulted not only in a notable surge in the birthrate come July 2070 but also in a brief, intensely enthusiastic, and occasionally quite promising flowering in the creative arts.
For example, the Volodyan poet-playwright Dmitri Khy is said to have listened to the declaration, turned off his media center, then sat down before his computer and in forty-eight hours, nonstop, composed a brilliant new work, savagely satirizing the United Nations Committee on Lunar Development in general and Lord Edward Haversham in particular. Such was the tenor of the moment that he was able to collect a group of prominent actors, secure satellite access time, and present a live reading of the rough draft a mere three days later, on the morning of October 28. Those lucky enough to catch the performance said the new play was both viciously intelligent and profoundly funny and that the finished version would no doubt have been the capstone on Dmitri Khy's long and distinguished literary career.
It is indeed a tragedy that no one thought to record the broadcast, and that Khy put off sending a backup copy of the script to his agent in Port Aldrin. For on the morning of October 28, of course, Dmitri Khy, along with so many others, had less than twelve hours left to live.
— Chaim Noguchi, A History of the Lunar Revolution
Chapter 8
Port Aldrin, Luna
Broadway Gallery, East Food Court
28 October 2069
19:04 GMT
It'd been a really nice dinner. Then Dara had spoiled it by mentioning the M-word again.
"Honey," Dalton said, shaking his head, "we've been through this a hundred times. I am not going to quit the militia."
"But, darling," Dara pleaded, as she tried to take his hand. Dalton pulled back. "You saw the announcement on RealNews One this afternoon. The UN caved. Secretary Kinthavong has agreed to all our demands and handed over the government to von Hayek. All he wants now is a fair trial and safe passage to Copernicus."
Dalton snorted. "Right. And suddenly we're supposed to trust that little gangster?"
"Why not? It's over. We won."
Dalton fidgeted with his juice box, then put it down without taking a sip. "That's what Kinthavong says. But I won't believe it"—he pointed upward in the universal Lunar shorthand for Earth—"until they reopen UNET and I hear them saying it. In a regular newscast. To their own people."
Dara looked at Dalton, with the expression that always gave him the feeling she was sizing him up, like something delicious she was considering whether or not to pick. "Now you're starting to sound paranoid, like your friend Ken Roberts. I don't want him." She leaned forward across the table and caught Dalton's right hand in both of hers. "I want you. At home, in bed, where you belong." Her smile slid into a salacious grin, and she winked. "You should be happy that I miss you when you stay out late."
Dalton sighed and extracted his hand from her grip. "The militia meetings are important. To me and to the colony."
Dara snickered. "Oh, spare me. You just get off on clanking around in that armored battlesuit!" Dalton's eyebrows went up in surprise, and Dara snickered again. "You talk in your sleep," she explained.
That got a snort of annoyance out of Dalton. "Dara—"
Whatever he was about to say next was lost forever in the first blast of the alarm siren. Dalton cringed at the piercing wail, and it took him a few seconds more to realize that every other siren and alarm within earshot was also blaring. The nearest ones sounded as if they were right in his ears.
Dara was already on her feet. "That sounds like ... airlock rupture!" She grabbed Dalton's hand. "Come on! This way!" Shoving the table aside, she dragged Dalton out of his chair. "We've got to find a survival shelter!"
Dalton dug in his heels and pulled back. "No! There's a militia emergency suit locker right—"
As abruptly as they'd started, the klaxons stopped. Dalton stopped too, with Dara piling up next to him, all his attention suddenly focused on the eerie silence.
"False alarm?" Dara whispered hopefully.
"Shh." Dalton bit his lip, closed his eyes, and after a moment he heard it: the flat, synthetic voice of the Port Aldrin Central Computer, muttering through every intercom speaker and comm panel in the domed city.
"Code seven. Code seven. Code seven ..."
Dara's pale face blanched a sickly white. "Oh, sweet Jesus," she murmured, "it can't be. This must be a drill."
Dalton shuddered, then grabbed her hand. "Come on!" This time when he tugged, there was no resistance, and a moment later they were both racing down the corridor. Already Dalton could feel his ears popping as the air pressure dropped. They rounded a corner and nearly collided with a crowd of thirty or so fellow dome dwellers, all wrestling with white emergency vacuum suits.
The crowd had a strangely calming effect on Dalton. Though quite clearly frightened, everyone was observing lifeboat-drill discipline, queueing up in orderly rows to accept the packages that three white-suited emergency workers were doling out from the locker, and then stepping off to the side to put them on.
A fourth figure—a tall man in a white battlesuit with a gold-mirrored visor and a gold oak leaf on the helmet— wandered around the fringes of the group, making sure the anxious crowd stayed calm. "Stay cool, y'all. Just stay cool, y'hear?" His amplified voice crackled out of a comm unit on his chest. One frantic woman tried to elbow past him. "Hang on there, ma'am. We'll have a suit for y'all real soon."
"But my little girl—" the woman protested.
"We'll have one for her too, ma'am. Don't fret. We got kiddie suits here too; everything's gonna be fine. Just remember, get yours on first, then help your daughter into hers." He gently nudged the woman back into line. A few moments later one of the emergency workers handed her a small suit with a helmet attached, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief. The man in the battlesuit patted her on the back, then looked up and saw Dalton.
"Militiaman Starkiller? Your platoon is 'sposed to muster in Sector Three-B."
Dalton took a step closer and tried to peer through the reflective visor. "Major Thompson? I thought your voice sounded familiar. I was having dinner—"
Thompson stood up a fraction of an inch taller. "That's Major Thompson, sir, Militiaman!"
Immediately Dalton snapped to attention and managed a sloppy salute.
"All right, enough of that crud," Thompson said as he turned around and pulled a small laser pistol out of a nearby locker. "Here, take this."
Dalton carefully took the laser pistol and looked it over with an appraising eye: Heckler & Koch LP-7 Mark Two, an older model with a little holster wear around the muzzle and trigger guard but otherwise in good condition.
"It ain't much, but it's all I can spare," Major Thompson said. He passed Dalton two power cells for the pistol. "We got heavier stuff cached in Sector Five, but your platoon is assigned to Sector Three-B. Grab something better when y'all get the chance." Major Thompson turned to the white-suited emergency workers and raised his voice to his trademark bellow. "Hey, we got us a militiaman here! Are there any more of them armored suits?" Someone passed over a bulky white package.
"Thanks." Dalton took the suit and juggled it, the pistol, and the power cells for a few moments, then handed the gun to Dara and started tearing open the suit package. "Uh, Major
Thompson? Sir? Any idea what the hell's going on?"
Before Thompson could respond, the alarm sirens let out another blast, the intercom system buzzed to life, and a tense human voice replaced the drone of the Central Computer.
"This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill! Port Aldrin is under attack by UN Peacekeepers. All LDF and militia personnel report to duty stations immediately. All civilians report to the nearest evacuation point! Again, this is not a drill. Armed and hostile UN troops have penetrated Sectors Four-A, Six-A, and Nine-C." There was a pause. "Avoid those areas. All LDF and militia personnel, report in now!"
The voice cut out, and a moment later the synthetic voice of the Central Computer resumed its chanting: "Code seven. Code seven. Code seven ..."
Major Thompson turned to Dalton. "That about answer your question? Now y'all know as much as I do."
Dalton shook his head. "But I thought we were supposed to get advance warning. I thought there was supposed to be no way an Earth ship could approach—"
The major shrugged. "Obviously we thought wrong. I expect we'll sort this out later, if n we get the chance. But right now your job is to join your unit and get your butt in action. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" Thompson went back to crowd control, and Dalton turned his full attention to donning the armored battlesuit. He stepped into the leggings, slid the heavy white one-piece garment easily up over his slender torso, and sealed the tabs at his throat. He unsnapped the leash that tethered the helmet to the suit's waist and lifted it up to place it over his head. But before he could pull it down, a slender hand grabbed his shoulder.
"Dalton, please. Be careful." He turned around to face Dara, who was already wearing her vacuum suit—the civilian model, with no ballistic plating and the headgear tilted back from the shoulders. Tears welled up in her brown eyes as she leaned forward and gave him a long, anxious kiss. "You don't have to do this to impress me," she whispered. "We can still catch the evacuation shuttle."