by Bruce Bethke
Chapter 22
Tycho Research Station
26 November 2069
17:00 GMT
In no hurry to go back inside after his hour-long surface patrol, Lloyd Thompson sat gingerly down on a ledge that appeared stable enough to hold his Moon-weight, and looked out over the rocky bottom of the massive depression left by an asteroid's chance encounter with the Earth's lonely satellite.
The crater was supposedly one of the Moon's youngest, though Thompson couldn't remember if "recent" meant thousands or millions of years in lunar time. He wondered how big an asteroid had to be, and how fast it had to be moving, to make a hole this big. Big as it was, it still wasn't as large as the newly made crater at Volodya, but he doubted anyone would be building a dome there anytime soon. Not unless somebody developed a way to scrub radiation out of the rocks.
His suitcom bleeped at him, and a radar map appeared on his display. It showed two objects moving slowly toward him, and he raised his ACR and glanced wildly around the vicinity until he realized the radar was zoomed out as far as it would go. The units were in hundreds of kilometers, and he whistled when he saw how fast the objects were approaching.
He knew hopshuttles didn't fly that fast, and wondered why space defense command hadn't warned him that hostile craft were heading toward the dome. Unsure whether he should contact AtCon or the on-duty central security officer, he began to walk toward the nearest airlock. But after he had taken only three or four bounding steps, the objects disappeared from his radar.
Puzzled, he stopped and adjusted the map controls, but the objects didn't reappear. He walked back toward the ledge, as if moving physically closer would make any difference. He was shocked when the objects reappeared.
Thompson was an experienced vet, but he'd never before seen anything like this. He stepped back and forth in an impromptu test to see where the signals appeared and disappeared. After marking the invisible line of demarcation by gouging a furrow in the regolith with his toe, he began to measure how far around the Tycho dome the anomaly extended.
He'd walked more than fifty meters and detected the anomaly's existence every step along the way before he realized that the entire dome was surrounded by what he was mentally referring to as the blindness effect. Then the truth hit him like a cheetah, and he looked up at the black sky.
"AtCon, this is Major Thompson, on surface patrol. We've got two incoming craft, presumed hostile, at a range of one hundred twenty kilometers, ETA seven minutes."
"What? I'm not seeing that on our screens, sir."
"Yeah, I didn't think you would. We're getting hit by some kind of electronic mask that's suppressing our radar. Probably getting laid down by that damn USN ship up there. Fifty meters out, I can pick 'em up clear as day on my suit radar, but I take a step or two in, and nothing."
"I don't know ... I'm still not getting anything, Major. I've run through all the frequencies, and there's nothing out there."
"Listen here, boy. You just call a code red right now! We're gonna be under attack in less than ten minutes, and with only two squads to protect the brass, we'd better be ready! That's an order, soldier. Now do it before I come in there and cut your cojones off!"
"Y-yes, sir, Major." There was a brief pause as the AtCon sergeant pressed a button and spoke a few urgent words into an open mike. "You got your code red, sir."
"Good work, boy. Now go get yourself a gun."
Major Thompson breathed a sigh of relief as he lifted his ACR and checked the status indicators. Time to get his boys ready, because it sure looked like the Blacksuits were coming. In a way, he was almost glad. He had a score to settle with those bastards. Grinning ferally, he drew his bowie knife and saluted the sky. Somewhere, he knew Yuji Nakagawa and the spirits of other samurai, dead many centuries ago, were nodding with grim approval.
Port Aldrin
26 November 2069
"Hurry, Dalton!" Another blacksuit popped up and risked a wild shot at them, and Bunny sent him back to cover with a burst from her railgun. "I'm almost out."
"Hold on," Dalton said, as he worked the norton in the door lock just as fast as his gloved fingers would let him. "I've almost..." The door beeped and a set of status indicators switched from red to green. "Got it!" Dalton crowed. He pulled the norton out of the slot and slipped it back into his belt. As the door began to slide upwards, the blacksuits surged forward, and Bunny rolled under the door and into the room. Dalton dove after her.
"Shut the door!" he shouted, as he rolled over onto his back and began firing at the pursuing blacksuits. Bunny desperately punched every button she could see, hoping one of them was the right one. Apparently one was, as the door slammed shut.
"Hit the red button. No, the other red one!" Still lying on his back with his weapon leveled at the closed door, Dalton breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay, it's locked now. We better hurry, though. It won't take them long to cut through it."
"So which one do we take?"
He looked at the transporter pods—three rectangular structures, each with a central disk above and below radiating an eerie, alien blue light. One led to Tycho, one to Grimaldi, and the other to Kepler, but Dalton couldn't remember which was which.
Was it Tycho, Kepler, Grimaldi, left to right? He thought so, but he vaguely remembered that the order was the opposite of what he thought it would have been. Or maybe that was the Picard transporters. He couldn't remember. Either way, he was pretty sure Kepler was in the middle.
"It's not the middle one," he said finally.
Bunny stared at him for a moment. Although he couldn't see her features, he was pretty sure they were showing disgust at the moment. Behind them she could hear scraping noises as the NDE soldiers worked at the door. "Pick a number," she said. "One or two."
"Two."
"Okay." She pointed to the pod on the right. "That one." Without waiting for a response, she jumped into the rightmost transporter and disappeared without a flash. Dalton stared at the eerie device for a long second, then closed his eyes and leaped into it—a scant moment before the door to the room exploded inward, spraying lethal shards of metal through the space where he'd been standing.
Tycho Research Station
26 November 2069
17:15 GMT
Lloyd Thompson had never subscribed to the myth that life was fair. He'd been kicked in the teeth often enough to realize that sometimes a man just had to endure. He'd regretted having to leave Yuji Nakagawa to his death at Lacus Mortis, but he hadn't doubted the necessity of it, and he wasn't the sort of romantic fool who wished that he could have been the one left behind.
But standing around out on the lunar surface, doing nothing while the bluesuits attacked the two surviving squads of his platoon inside the dome, made him want to scream at the stars at the unfairness of it all. But then again, as the young captain in the control center had put it, there just wasn't anybody else outside. So he sat and waited, watching the map display on his suit.
The sitting and waiting wasn't too bad, not to a soldier who'd laid down thirteen or fourteen ambushes in his time; he wasn't sure of the exact number, but it was something like that. No, the hard thing was watching the gunships cut down the two young fools who'd come out to be his backup, who had more bravery than sense. They were glorious in their own stupid, tragic way, he thought. Two young men who thought they could outshoot a gunship with their ACRs. And now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure how smart those Texans at the Alamo had been, either.
He shook his head sadly at the two white-suited corpses lying near the airlock. It was a pity and a waste, but he knew that Death had quite a few more hands to play. The gunships he'd first seen had dropped their ATFOR troops five minutes ago, and those troops were now inside, engaging his strike teams. The gunships themselves were overhead somewhere, darting around like giant venomous insects, hunting for more stragglers like himself.
His suit beeped a warning, and he glanced at his display. Much as he hated to admit it, the contr
ol captain had been right in pleading with him to stay outside, beyond the boundaries of the blind zone where radar was suppressed. There were two more ships coming toward Tycho at a speed that suggested armored transports. Two platoons worth, he guessed, and from Port Aldrin if remembered the relative directions correctly. Those would be the Germans, he figured: ETA eight minutes.
Lloyd Thompson opened a broadband comm link. * * *
For Dalton, the experience of teleporting was neither as thrilling nor as terrifying as he'd expected. There was no magical glimmer as he disappeared from Aldrin, nor was there a blinding flash of green light, just a weird throbbing whine as he reappeared stumbling off the yellow receiver disk at Tycho. Opening his eyes, he managed to regain his balance before falling and saw Bunny standing at the far side of the room facing him, with her railgun pointing at his midsection.
He looked around and saw that Josef, Britt, and Jeff were there too, along with two battlesuited guards from Alpha Company, and all of them had their weapons drawn.
"Get out of the way!" Josef commanded. "Those blacksuits'll be coming through in a minute. Bunny said they were right on your ass."
Dalton nodded, but instead of moving to the side, he turned and examined the MANTA receiver. Unlike the transmitter pods, built later, the Tycho disk wasn't a large device, it was simply bolted to the floor by four screws driven into the plazmetal.
"Do these things have a top?" he asked thoughtfully. "And a bottom?"
"Dalt, what the hell are you doing?" Britt screamed. "You're in the goddam line of fire!"
"Shut up, Britt," he responded absently, as he dropped to his knees in front of the disk and withdrew an autoscrewing device. Working methodically, without rushing, he removed the four screws, then lifted the disk and began to flip it over.
Just as it reached an angle perpendicular to the floor, a Blacksuit appeared in midair above the disk's "top." The NDE slammed into the floor with such force that his shields flared explosively.
Surprised nearly out of his wits, Dalton dropped the disk as the Blacksuit, stunned by the impact, lay motionless on the floor. The others in the room were stunned too, but Britt was the first to react, killing the NDE soldier with a burst from his plasgun.
Another Blacksuit appeared just as Dalton desperately crawled toward the disk, lying two meters away with the yellow receiver pointed up.
"Flip it over!" Bunny shouted as her railgun roared and blasted the Blacksuit's shields away. Dalton's own shields flared as bursts of energy ricocheted off the Blacksuit onto him, but he ignored them as he gripped the rubbery sides of the disk and finally turned it over.
Each of the LDF fighters in the room watched the disk and waited expectantly. Dalton didn't know what to expect—perhaps a scream or a bang or at least some other noise as the NDE invaders materialized into solid rock and metal. But there was nothing, just two square meters of rubbery material, six centimeters thick, lying upside down on the floor.
"May as well make sure it doesn't go anyplace," Dalton said finally after a long moment of silence. He shoved the receiver disk roughly back into position with his foot, then knelt and lined the corners up with the mounting holes in the floor. After screwing the first three screws down, he looked around for the last one.
"Here it is, Dalt." Bunny handed it to him. He screwed that one in too, then stood up. No one said anything. It was too bizarre, standing there doing nothing as men and women died undetectably, almost within reach.
Finally Britt broke the morbid silence. "Well, that's one way of doing it. Not all that dramatic, though, is it."
But while the others were staring at the MANTA receiver, Josef had been in communication with the Tycho Central Computer. He closed the link, then slammed his armored fist against the wall. "Damn! They've already got two squads in the south side, and more transports are on the way. We've got to get to the governor's office and move my father to Farside!"
"Who's 'they'?" Britt asked. "NDE?"
"No, ATFOR. Two squads of heavies. Looks like it's not the NDE behind this after all." Josef pointed a threatening finger at Bunny. "You've done well by us so far, Lieutenant, but don't forget, you're still on probation."
"I never forget, Colonel." She spoke coldly, but Bunny couldn't blame him for being a little paranoid. Von Hayek had no way to know what she was really thinking. And even now, if she was honest with herself, she really didn't know which side she would come down on when the moment of truth arrived. Killing Blacksuits was one thing, but gunning down her own former comrades was another. She shrugged as she followed Britt out of the transport room. She'd find out soon enough.
Patrick Adams didn't like the way the governor's hand kept returning to his chest. Pieter von Hayek looked haggard, and his face seemed wan and gray once the confrontation with the Chairman Wu was over and his anger had begun to fade. Now he looked desperate and old.
"This doesn't change anything," Amalia Trelstad snapped. "We're better equipped to fight now than we were three weeks ago. Our troops are rested, and the militias have been training nonstop since the cease-fire was declared. We fought them to a standstill once before. Why should anything have changed?"
Adams ignored her protestations as he circled the table and offered support to von Hayek, who was grimacing with pain and clutching at his chest. "Pieter, are you okay? Do you think you're having a heart attack?"
"No, no. I'm all right. It's just—my chest feels tight." He reached out blindly for a chair and sat down hard. "Just give me a moment to catch my breath. Where's Josef?"
"He's at Port Aldrin, directing the defense, no doubt." Adams turned to the second councilor. "Governor Trelstad, could you call the medics? Tell them we need a paramedic team immediately."
No stranger to crises, Amalia nodded quickly and ran to the controls at the other side of the room.
"Get me a link—to Graf, in New York," von Hayek gasped.
"Not now, Pieter. Wait for the paramedics."
But before the emergency medical team could respond,
Governor Trelstad turned her head and called for Adams. "Patrick, we're getting some kind of message here. A UNET channel just opened up Earthside from the New German Unity. It's a diplomatic channel, marked priority one urgent."
"Play it," von Hayek said, wincing as another wave of pain hit him.
Amalia looked quizzically at Patrick, and he nodded. She pressed a button, and a haughty Aryan face filled the screen. The woman's cold blue eyes seemed to glare at them out of the display as she began to speak, in German. "Ich bin Katja Buhtsbach von der Neue Deutsche Einheit." Her harsh, guttural accent was both unpleasant and impossible to understand, but fortunately, English subtitles began to appear on the screen below her.
"This is Katja Buhtsbach of the New German Unity. As first ambassador to the Free State Selena, it is my duty to inform Governor Pieter von Hayek and the people of the Moon that, as of null nine hundred hours, the people of the New German Unity officially declare a state of war between our two nations."
The woman's face disappeared, replaced by the full English text, displayed in white with red highlights on a black background. No one spoke for a moment.
Then Pieter, with some difficulty, cleared his throat. "Well, at least someone's finally recognized us," he rasped.
Despite the severity of the moment, Adams couldn't restrain a chuckle. "It's a start, I suppose."
Governor Trelstad regarded the two of them with disbelief, but before she managed to say anything, the door opened and Josef von Hayek burst into the room, followed by Dalton, Britt, Bunny, Jeff and two Alpha commandos. Right behind them was the paramedic team.
"Blacksuits are coming!" Josef cried. "We've got to get you out of here, Dad!"
UN Headquarters, New York
26 November 2069
12:30 P.M. EST
The comm system chirped. Aguila answered. Shi Cheng Wu's face was, as always, calm and unreadable. "Antonio? It appears we have made a significant miscalculation. The NDE has j
ust recognized the Lunar government."
Aguila was stunned. "And reached a separate peace?"
"No. They've declared a separate war."
The implications of this were immediately clear to Aguila. "Have they claimed any of the territory they've taken?"
"Not yet. But it is only a matter of time."
Aguila nodded and bit a finger. "Thank you for telling me this." Shi Cheng Wu rang off.
I was a fool to think this was almost over, Aguila thought. It's hardly begun.
Tycho Research Station
26 November 2069
17:30 GMT
Both Patrick Adams and Amalia Trelstad were shocked by the sudden arrival of Josef and his companions, but the most severe response was provided by Josef's father. Upon the colonel's entry into the room, the governor slumped back in his chair, one hand reaching for his son, and the other clutching at his heart.
"Vati!" Josef cried, reverting in a moment of panic to the German of his childhood. He leaped across the room and dropped to his knees before his father, covering the old man's hand with both of his own. He turned back toward the paramedics, and although his visored face was unreadable, there was fear in his voice.
"Help him!" he pleaded, and the two women rushed forward, moving the distraught Josef out of the way. Over on the far side of the room, Bunny and Britt were briefing Trelstad and Adams and on the situation.
"Only two squads of ATFOR troops are attacking now, and the garrison here could push them back, with our help, but at least two platoons are heading this way, and we suspect that they're NDE regulars." Bunny spoke rapidly, hoping no one would question her too closely or ask who she was.
"When will they get here?" Adams asked.
"ETA five minutes. We've got to get out of here now. Aldrin is going to fall, and there's nothing we can do about that." Britt's helpless anger showed in his voice.
Adams nodded. "The teleports here lead only to Farside and Port Aldrin. Aldrin's out, so we'll have to go to Farside. That's better anyway, since it'll be harder for them to reach us there."