The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1)

by Travis J I Corcoran

  And then Max had the left lever in his grasp... and then the right. He twisted them both at once. And nothing. There was supposed to be a release of air. What was wrong?

  Ah. Of course. The suit was holed. So was the helmet unlocked? Max released the neck ring levers, steadied himself in his awkward squat, and then grabbed the helmet and pulled. It moved a few centimeters and got stuck. Probably the chin of the dead peaker. Max wiggled the helmet and pulled it free.

  Duncan said, "Awesome. John'll be psyched!"

  Max ignored Duncan and looked at the dead PK's face. His mouth and eyes were open in a silent scream. The flesh of his face was pale and dusted with frost. Max had never seen a dead person before - human or Dog. He stared. He had no reason to believe that this particular PK had been involved in the Euthanasia, and yet this man was his enemy.

  It was weird.

  This dead human hadn't killed his siblings back in the labs. He hadn't killed Rex up on the crater wall. He wasn't even one of the men that attacked John.

  So what did that make him? Innocent?

  Max scowled.

  No.

  The PK hadn't had the chance to kill John or one of the Dogs. But he would have. He'd signed up with the peakers, he'd taken this mission. He was here to kill John and the Dogs.

  He was Them, not Us. Wrong pack. Losing pack.

  Max handed the spare helmet to Duncan, dropped to four legs, and lifted his back left. The urine all went into an internal bladder of the suit, but the geo-tagging software timestamped his territorial claim.

  Chapter 108

  2064: bridge of AFS Poyekhali, 80km above the Earth

  Wasseem scanned his board. "Landing in T minus 180 seconds. Entering the mesosphere... now. 80km and falling."

  Darcy watched her screen. "AG braking is at 0.5g. Drive is at 99.2% efficiency. Batteries are taking power, heat buildup is fine. We're green across the board." 99.2% was good - the batteries would be nicely charged so they could launch again as soon as they wanted to.

  Orbital mechanics permitting, of course.

  Darcy knew that the wind was starting to whisper against the hull, but the thrumming of the AG drive was loud enough that she couldn't hear it.

  Waseem said, "T minus 140, 50 klicks up, now in the stratosphere." He checked his screens. "Hull temperature normal."

  Darcy nodded. With the drive operating in its peak efficiency band all of the potential energy was being soaked up by the batteries. She called out her own stats: "T minus 60 seconds. 8 klicks up, 250 meters per second. Right in the envelope."

  Darcy called out the time: "T minus thirty."

  The descent was textbook.

  "T minus five. One hundred meters."

  "T minus one. Three meters.

  "Holding at three meters. Two meters. One meter. We're at local sea level. Ready to collapse the bowl?"

  Waseem nodded. "I'm green - go."

  Darcy tapped a button. The thrumming of the drive slowed and quieted. Darcy grabbed the arms of her chair just before the ship lurched and slid to one side. A moment later it rolled back and the booming of waves hitting the hull echoed.

  Darcy took her hands off the armrests and tapped one last button. "AG in standby, and - off!" She felt a final twist in her gut and then suddenly felt her full weight. Oof. She felt heavy - it'd been a while.

  "OK, Waseem, let's do the post-flight.”

  Waseem groaned theatrically but fell to - a moment later he had the checklist on his screen and the two of them began safing the quick-discharge capacitors, reverifying lubricant levels on the cranes, and three dozen other steps.

  An hour later Waseem punched a final button. "Done! Now on to the fun part. We're just 600 kilometers to Tho Quang. As soon as we get there, I - what? Why are you shaking your head?"

  "We need to calibrate the new software first."

  "Come on, Darce. Do you know how long it's been since I've seen the sights?"

  Darcy raised one eyebrow. "The sights?"

  Waseem grinned, caught out. "I like Vietnamese women. Sue me."

  "Calibration shouldn't take more than 30 hours; we'll head to port soon enough."

  "Thirty hours? Ugh. I need a break."

  Darcy called up a schedule. "So take a break. How about one hour, then we break out the prototype and start characterizing it?"

  Waseem sighed theatrically and then agreed.

  Darcy turned to Riese. "I assume everything is under control?"

  Riese, who'd been silent during the reentry, spoke. "Claymores on the decks are armed, gunwale cameras show no boats or buoys. I've got troops at both airlocks. Your days of being hijacked are over."

  Darcy smiled her thanks. "I'm going to grab a shower and a bite to eat."

  Waseem yawned once. "I'm feeling a bit tired. I might take a nap - do we have time for that?"

  Darcy yawned too - it was catching. "OK, but make it a short one." She yawned a second time. "Sorry, don't know what's with me today. I'm going to make an espresso - you want one?"

  Waseem blinked languidly, then closed his eyes. There was something weird about that. Why was he closing his eyes? And why were her arms so heavy? Not just sort of heavy, but really heavy.

  She needed that espresso, right now. She unbuckled, stood, and took a few steps toward the galley. She grabbed the back of Riese's chair. She was dizzy.

  What - what was going on?

  A few seconds later she fell to the deck.

  Captain Schrodt watched through night vision goggles as his men did their work, and then scanned the area. The ship beneath them was dark but the low swells of the sea around them shone with a phosphorescent glow. The sea was eerily beautiful, like some sort of light show except for where their discarded parachutes made dark spots as they sank. But this was no time for staring at the ocean. He turned back to his men.

  One soldier, black against black in his heat cloaking uniform, looked up from the clock on his wrist computer and gave a thumbs up. Another man nodded, closed the valve on the tank, and then pulled the hose out of the hole they'd bored in the deck, coiling it as he went. The sergeant made a hand sign and two other soldiers moved in, carrying the plasma cutter between them. A second later light flared from the cutting tip, and Captain Schrodt's goggles compensated. For a full half minute the tool hissed and crackled, and then a circle of steel decking fell into the ship. The massive clang as it hit the floor below rang out over the quiet sea. Before the sound had died out the two soldiers manning the cutting tool stepped back and two other troops stepped forward and threw a thermal blanket over the still glowing edge of the hole. Then they stepped back and the point team - four soldiers with carbines at the ready - vaulted into the ship.

  As soon as the point team was in the rest of his men lined up.

  Captain Schrodt watched his men disappear into the hole, one after another, until he was alone on the deck. He would have loved to be in the action, but one of the sacrifices that came with rank was more responsibility and less fun. His duty was to stay here, monitoring the situation. He'd trade the responsibility and rank away for the excitement in a heartbeat, but it wasn't a trade he was allowed to make.

  He looked at the hole, sighed, and scanned the deck and the sky. Nothing. He tapped his earpiece. The drones overhead reported that all was well. Schrodt sighed again.

  A few minutes later the first report came in. "Team 1. We've got three from high value list. Number one is Ponnala, the AG guy. Number two is Srinivas Waseem Vivekanand, second cousin of the first. Number three is Darcy Grau. Says here she's the girlfriend of Mike Martin."

  Well. That was good news. Really good news, actually. But, damn it, he still wished he could have been down in there, doing something real with his men.

  Chapter 109

  2064: just west of Zhukovskiy Crater, Lunar Nearside

  John sat cross-legged on the tent floor, the helmet rim riding uncomfortably on his bare shoulders as he paged through the menus in the helmet display. Everything worked fine,
but it felt... weird. It wasn't the fact that the helmet didn't have his customizations. He'd transferred those - along with the logs, programs, music archives and everything else - from the old helmet. So what was it about the new helmet that seemed foreign?

  Maybe it was the smell? After six months of wearing his old helmet 12 hours a day it smelled like him, despite his washing the liner every few days. Maybe that was it?

  He breathed in. Yeah, he'd put his finger on it: this replacement helmet from the dead PK smelled of fabric and new foam. Hm. You could borrow a buddy's armored vest, or his pack, but you never asked to borrow his boots, or his underwear. There was something personal about those. It seemed that spacesuit helmets were the same.

  Well, there was nothing to be done. He'd go to war with the helmet he had. John closed the menus, powered the helmet down, took it off, and set it on the floor. "Guys."

  Max and Blue turned. John waited a moment. "Duncan!"

  Duncan whipped his head around. "Huh?"

  "Guys." John paused. "We need to get back to Aristillus, and we need a plan." Max and Blue nodded without hesitation. Duncan, though -

  "Why?"

  Max said. "A war is going on."

  John nodded. "Exactly."

  Max focused on him. "I was talking to you, John. The war is going on - like I told you would happen."

  There was no mistaking Max's accusing tone. John blinked, then understood the anger. Rex was dead, and it wouldn't have happened if ... if what? If they'd abandoned the trip earlier? If they'd never started the trip in the first place?

  There was no time for this now. They could deal in recriminations later. John held up a hand. "Yes. I was wrong. And I'm sorry. But we can fight about this later, Max. Right now we need to concentrate on survival - and getting back to Aristillus."

  He turned from Max to face all three of the Dogs. "Our supplies - food, water, air - are dwindling by the minute. I don't know if resupply ships are flying, but even if they are, when Gamma's sats went down and he told us to get to Zhukovskiy, we went far, far off our plotted course."

  Blue said, "So no one knows where we are."

  John nodded. "Gamma might. Which is something else we have to worry about."

  Duncan tilted his head. "What do you mean?"

  "Everyone at Aristillus knows that Gamma has just one facility at Sinus Lunicus. He kept the rest secret. But now we know that not only does he have a secret facility at Konstantinov, but he has another one at Zhukovskiy, and -"

  Duncan interrupted. "Well. Had."

  John waved the pedantry away. "The point is that Gamma has secret facilities, and he's worked hard to keep them that way. He's clearly been editing satellite data - maybe even cockpit data - Darcy never saw anything from orbit."

  Blue asked, "So what does that mean? Is Gamma an enemy?"

  Duncan tilted his head. "Why does it even matter? Gamma's facility here is nuked. He's dead."

  Max said, "But Gamma's still at SL. And that copy of Gamma knows that we know about the other bases."

  Blue said, "So what are you saying? That if we get back to Aristillus, the copy of Gamma there will be angry at us?"

  "Maybe, Blue. Maybe."

  Max bared his teeth. "We can't waste our time worrying about what Gamma might think. The war is here, and it's changed everything. Gamma told us that he needs humans and Dogs on his side. So maybe he doesn't like the idea of us knowing about his facilities, but he's got no choice now." He slapped the tent floor with a forepaw. "It's time for us to fight."

  John nodded. "Yes, it is. And to do that, we need to get to Aristillus. So, here's the question: how do we do that?"

  Blue said, "We can't walk. We don't have enough supplies."

  "Probably not."

  Max said, "If walking is out, what other options are there?"

  Blue said, "Maybe there are vehicles we can scavenge from Gamma's facility."

  John nodded. "Let's inventory resources. We've got three surviving mules. There are a few PK corpses and whatever's on them." He held up his new helmet. "One downed PK ship. Gamma's nuked facility, and whatever wreckage we can scavenge there."

  Max said, "So where does that leave us?"

  Blue said, "We could scavenge a radio from the PK ship."

  Max shook his head. "Won't work. The relay satellites are gone, and there's no ionosphere to reflect our broadcasts. Line of sight or nothing."

  Blue nodded. "OK, so we need relay satellites. What if we make our own?"

  Max looked at him. "What?"

  "Could we cobble one together?"

  "How would we get it into orbit?"

  "Let's not worry about that yet. Can we build a relay sat? Do we have tools to solder, or whatever?"

  Duncan put down his slate. "We don't need to make a relay. We could just make a message beacon. We take a radio - or, heck, maybe we just take one of the other PK helmets, program it to repeat a message, and launch it over the horizon toward Aristillus. If we can launch one, we can launch a couple. Send one every few hours, maybe."

  John raised his eyebrows. Duncan rarely engaged with pragmatic day-to-day issues, but when he did, the results were always solid. "That's - that's doable. So how do we launch a 5 kg payload and send it over nearside?"

  Blue said, "Using just scrap from the PK ship and from Gamma?"

  "Yeah."

  Blue shrugged. "In this gravity you don't need much propellant. The Apollo landers were small." He picked up his slate. "Let me dig through some records."

  John watched Blue tap at his slate. Technology hadn't advanced much in fifty years - even Moore's Law had crapped out under the reign of BuSuR - but it had crept forward some. Enough so that Blue's slate, like most cheap consumer devices, had yottabytes of archives built in. Cached versions of wikis in every language, millions of open source software projects, tens of millions of books, billions of video clips, CNC models of everything from car fenders to blacksmithing jigs to remote control quadcopter toys, not to mention endless magazines, journal articles, TV shows and movies.

  Blue barked in excitement. "I got it. Check this out." He swiped a paw across the screen and slid a window to the wall screen. John turned and looked. A clip of an Apollo LEM standing on the lunar surface began playing. In the corner a countdown flashed.

  Max shook his head. "It looks exactly like it did when we were there. It's crazy that this was almost a century ago."

  Duncan laughed.

  Max turned to him. "What's funny about that?"

  "No, not that. Look at the caption!"

  John read it. “Apollo 17 - last humans on the moon.” He smiled wanly.

  On the screen nothing changed except the countdown - until it reached zero. Then there was a bright rainbow flash and the top half of the spindly little spacecraft broke free and flew straight up. The camera panned to follow the departing ship. John looked at the ascent stage. The thing wasn't even a quarter the size of their tent - and they'd called it a spaceship. He shook his head. People had actually flown to the moon in that thing. Crazy bastards. They had some balls back in the twentieth century, he had to give them that.

  The video ended and was replaced by thumbnails for other videos, a cloud of tags, and a list of links. John scanned them. Many of the thumbnails and links were for video games, movies, and the like, but a few promised more information on the old NASA LEM.

  Hmm. He picked up his slate, pulled a copy of the window from the wallscreen and started clicking. A few of the resources were out of cache and gave errors, but most of the data was available somewhere on the local network. He dove deep, and within a few minutes was looking at scans of Grumman and Bell Aerosystem blueprints - which were some sort of hardcopy version of CAD files, apparently - dated a full century ago.

  He pulled up a copy of the engine specifications. That thrust. It was too small - that couldn't be right. Could it?

  Blue barked. "I've got it figured out. If we're trying to launch a 5 kg helmet -"

  John raised one finge
r. "Hang on a sec."

  Blue paused and John kept reading. The LEM's ascent stage engines were puny - just 16,000 Newtons. On Earth that wouldn't be enough to accomplish anything... but on the moon, it was enough to get a two-man spaceship up to lunar orbit. Sure, it wasn't a big ship, just 4,500 kilograms, but -

  John blinked.

  It wasn't that easy, was it?

  John dragged the blue print and the specifications sheet from his slate to the wallscreen.

  "Blue. The ascent stage on that lunar lander massed 4,500 kilograms."

  Blue looked at him and furrowed his brow. A moment later he gave a yip.

  John smiled. "You're thinking what I'm thinking, right?"

  "Yes!"

  Duncan said, "What are you guys talking about?"

  "Yeah, what are you talking about?" Max asked.

  John pointed to the specifications. "Look at the mass."

  Duncan shrugged. "Yeah, so?"

  Blue said, "Getting to orbit is hard, right? That's why we're just sending a small relay made out of a helmet."

  "Yeah, you need to go fast enough -"

  John cut him off, grinning. "Getting to orbit on Earth is a huge deal. But here on the moon -"

  Duncan furrowed his brow. "Yeah, OK, orbital speed is a lot slower, but what -"

  "How much do one human and a few dogs weigh?"

  Duncan thought for a moment. "I don't know - maybe 500 kilograms if you include suits?" He paused. "Holy crap! You think we can build our own spaceship?"

  John nodded. "Something simple - an open frame, four seats, an engine. I bet we scavenge propellant from Gamma's facility."

  "What do we use for a motor?"

  John waved the objection away. "We can salvage a CNC machine from Gamma's wreckage. If you can hack an interface to it, we can turn a small rocket bell."

  Max raised one skeptical eyebrow. "You're proposing that we try to ride a pillar of exploding hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide - salvaged from a facility that was nuked less than a day ago - and channel that thrust through a rocket bell created by a bunch of nonmachinists using CNC machines that are utterly out of calibration after being hit with an atom bomb?"