Gunpowder Moon

  “Lin, if I didn’t know better, after seeing you, I’d say the Moon’s a happy place.”

  “Dechert,” Lin said with a softness that bordered on affectation, nodding his head in acknowledgment. “You know what my ancestor said about the necessity of deceiving your enemies. I look better than I feel.”

  If Tzu allowed any element of narcissism in his life, it came from the fact that he traced his lineage, generation to generation, directly back to Sun Tzu, the Chinese general whose words were still read with reverence by military commanders at every compass point on Earth, more than twenty-five hundred years after he had written them.

  “Yes, you rarely fail to remind me,” Dechert said. “I also remember what he wrote about maintaining the element of surprise.”

  They assessed each other for a moment without speaking. Dechert had never known a man who thought more like he did, or commanded more like he did. They came from worlds that couldn’t be more different, worked for governments that couldn’t begin to understand each other, and yet the two finished each other’s sentences with uncanny ability. Dechert knew that Tzu was waiting for him to ask the first question.

  “I need to know something, Lin, and I don’t have time to be diplomatic about it. Did your government hit our crawler at Posidonius?”

  Tzu shifted in his seat, a barely discernible movement that could have been discomfort with the question, but his eyes didn’t blink as they remained focused on Dechert.

  “I don’t think so. But of course, I’m not able to say for certain. My leaders—like yours, I assume—haven’t been very open with me about their recent actions or their future intentions.” He leaned back, unclasping his hands and laying his palms on the table. “Still, it does not seem to me an action that they would take. It is—how would you say it in English—too aggressive a move at this juncture?”

  “I’ve heard some very aggressive things have been happening back on Earth, Lin. Maybe you’re looking at it from the wrong frame of reference?”

  “Perhaps.” Tzu sat still for a second, as if reconsidering the question. He never answered quickly, which is why Dechert had confidence in what he said. “But still, I don’t think so. I’m a student of my people, Commander. An inveterate Sinophile. We’re a country that has existed for more than four thousand years and we’ve learned to move with more caution than you. Your country is still, how should I say this without offending, bristling with the overconfidence and energy of youth?”

  Dechert rubbed the stubble on his chin and wished he had shaved. He didn’t have time to pursue Tzu’s five-second psychoanalysis of the immaturity of America or to give his opinion about the cultural and psychological shortcomings of the mainland Chinese as a rebuttal.

  “Okay. So who the hell planted a bomb on my crawler?”

  “That’s a question we both have to answer, Dechert, before it doesn’t matter anymore. But if I may be bold, I think you agree that it didn’t come from my government, at least not at the official level. There is always the chance that it might have happened in this way, but neither of us thinks it is so.”

  The hologram buzzed in the background. Neither man spoke. Dechert could hear Quarles tapping his foot. Crazy as their government may be, blaming the Chinese for the Molly Hatchet never felt right, and Dechert had a keen instinct for such things. Fighting a guerrilla war in the Bekaa Valley had honed his senses for treachery. Every time an attack happened in that godforsaken place, eight different groups could have been guilty, and each of them blamed another one. Druze. Shiite. Sunni. Christian. Unraveling the truth among them was like watching loose tea settle in the bottom of a cup and hoping for a recognizable shape to appear.

  “I agree that it would be out of character for the Party, at least at the Committee level, but what about a rogue element?”

  “That scenario would be much more likely,” Tzu agreed.

  “And yesterday we discovered that a good chunk of helium-3 has gone missing from one of our spiral mines. Do you think the Space Mining Administration is stealing its own gold as well?”

  “No, that would be more in my government’s province. I think they would describe such a thing as a proportional response.”

  “Proportional to what?”

  Tzu paused, and then he sighed. “I’m going to trust in our relationship enough to believe that you’re not feigning ignorance, Commander, much as you must put your trust in me about the destruction of your crawler and the loss of your man. But our grid mine in the Sinus Lunicus was disabled four days ago. It appears that an EMP microburst caused the damage and that the blast came from orbit. One of our crew lost power in his suit and had to perform a few miracles to keep his oxygen supply running. He nearly died before we reached him.”

  Dammit, Dechert thought. How many times am I going to be blindsided by my own people?

  Tzu nodded as if he heard Dechert’s thoughts. “Yes, Commander. Whoever is responsible for these acts, it seems clear to me that the progression is logical and aimed at an unavoidable outcome. Consider for a moment: The escalation has been slow but steady over the last six months. I’m sure your internal propaganda is just as stimulating as ours and just as bent toward conflict. I know you’ve been finding it harder to communicate openly with the outside, just as we have.”

  He leaned forward. “Think about it, Dechert. We’re being slowly shut off, isolated like two scorpions placed in a bowl for rich men to gamble on. I know about your water mine being disabled in Dionysius. And then your crawler is sabotaged. A few days later, our grid mine is hit. And then some of your helium-3 is stolen. Why? I think it’s because powerful people in our two countries are starting to see limits to what they once considered a limitless resource. And limits frighten them.”

  “You think they’ll risk war after everything that’s happened on Earth?”

  Tzu shrugged. “Maybe they don’t think the war will involve Earth. Isn’t that how most conflicts start? With a gross miscalculation of the possibilities of escalation? A village first, then a peninsula, and then a continent? It is cold up here, Commander. Cold and distant. Just a point in space from their viewpoint—valuable, but aesthetically detached.”

  Tzu exhaled again and sat back in his chair. It was the most emotion Dechert had ever seen him display.

  “Look beneath your feet the next time you go for a Moonwalk, Dechert, and tell me what you see. I see the Ghawar oil fields and the Kovykta gas reserves all rolled into one and multiplied by a billion. Pure energy. Enough energy to control the planet for a thousand years. Enough energy to base Jupiter and Uranus and begin building for the trips beyond the heliopause. Consider that for a second. Control of Earth has been the dream of emperors and tyrants for millennia. Now imagine the temptation of controlling the solar system and the systems that lie beyond. Think of how much bigger the hoard of treasure has become.”

  Dechert shook his head, seeing the logic in Tzu’s words but still wanting to deny them. How many treaties had been signed since 1967, guaranteeing free access to the lunar surface for all nations? Six? Seven? He wasn’t so naïve to believe that treaties couldn’t be abrogated, but . . . he had hoped. Maybe still hoped.

  “The Moon was supposed to be different, Lin. It was supposed to be demilitarized. It was supposed to be shared.”

  “Nothing so valuable ever is.”

  Quarles fidgeted in his seat and rapped his knuckles on the table. “Two more minutes,” he whispered. “No more.”

  Dechert nodded. “We don’t have much time, Lin, so I’ll dispense with the utopian bullshit. I agree with you, but I also know we’ve got to figure out a way to gain some sort of a tactical edge here. I might die on the mare, but it’s not going to be as a goddamned sheep walking into the corridors of steel.”

  “That’s why I like you, Dechert,” Lin said, smiling. “Such unbridled enthusiasm for a man of your age.”

  “Yes. Which leaves us one option—finding out who’s behind the sabotage of the Molly Hatchet, and exposing it before
this thing becomes fully developed. Can we sign our own treaty right now? Just the two of us? No knowledge shared between us in regards to the Molly Hatchet goes to our respective governments until that knowledge can prevent a war?”

  “I can agree to that.”

  “Good. Then I’ll go first. The explosive that opened up the Hatchet was polymeric nitrogen, pretty exotic stuff, and my government claims it was last in the hands of Chinese Intelligence, sold to them by an Indonesian arms merchant in 2066. Name of Serkasa. Can you do some digging on that?”

  “I’ll make a few inquiries.”

  Dechert stood up. “Okay, and on my end I’ll try finding out what happened to your mine at the Sinus Lunicus and where that order came from.”

  Quarles tapped on the table again. “Thirty seconds.”

  Would it be the last thirty seconds that they would ever speak to each other?

  “That’s it then, Lin. We try and stop it, as best we can.”

  They looked at each other, knowing what had been left unspoken. They were friends but their governments were fast becoming enemies, and neither of them felt comfortable with this clandestine maneuvering. Dechert waited for Tzu to broach the subject, knowing he would.

  “I’m no traitor, Dechert, and neither are you. And that is our quandary. How do we warn each other if an attack is imminent, and is it something we should even consider? Trading state secrets on the underpinnings of war is bad enough; giving warning of an impending strike is quite another matter.”

  “I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately, Lin. I didn’t spend ten years in the service to turn my back on my country. I propose that we warn each other only if an attack is pending against Serenity 1 or New Beijing 2. Peary Crater and your leaders at the South Pole will have to fend for themselves. Five-minute alert and we use the Solar Flare Warning System as a trip wire. No one else will know what it means, but it may give our crews enough time to bug out.”

  Tzu thought about this, nodded, and stood up. “Very well then, I agree,” he said. “We risk treason.”

  “This is the Moon, Lin. As far as I’m concerned, the first rule is still safety for all.”

  Tzu’s image began to distort, his face pulling in two directions for a second before coming together again as the link began to degrade.

  “I hope you remain safe, Dechert,” Tzu said. “If I contact you again, it will be in a different manner.”

  “Good luck, Lin.”

  Dechert stared at Tzu as his image continued to fade and saw him flash a wry smile before he disappeared into the ether. Tzu didn’t believe in luck any more than he did. They both believed in probabilities, and the cold math that they contained didn’t hold any comfort for either of them.

  15

  The marines arrived at Sea of Serenity 1 the way marines always arrive: with grim faces and an array of weaponry. They lumbered down the gangway of their long-hop shuttle and emerged into the warm dock carrying coffin-shaped olive chests with white lettering stenciled on the sides. Weapons on Serenity 1. Dechert had a 10mm semiautomatic locked away in a safe in his quarters, partly because an old Moon-hand had recommended it in case one of the crew got space-crazy, and partly because he couldn’t scrub the lingering feelings of nakedness when he didn’t have a weapon nearby. But that was a twentieth-century handgun. These were real weapons coming into his hangar bay. Electromagnetic rail guns, probably, with a horrific muzzle velocity of more than three thousand meters per second, enough to punch a projectile through a line of twenty men standing front to back. Smart antimissile arrays and liquid lasers to blunt the impact of a concentrated cruise missile strike on the station, and maybe even micro-EMPs, which could be shoulder-fired at incoming shuttles to fry their electrical systems. Dechert pictured the same scenario playing out on New Beijing 2—a somber-looking bunch of Chinese commandos unloading their arsenal in a cold and dusty hangar with Lin Tzu standing by and observing, as Dechert was now.

  Standard and Hale were with him near the sub-hangar hatch, watching the marines disembark as venting gas hissed out of the shuttle’s conical engines and a blue strobe flashed and dimmed over the main hangar doors. Standard had a gleam in his eye, the excitement of the uninitiated. Or maybe he was just happy to have people on the station who didn’t cast dark glances at him in passing. Either way, Dechert wanted to wipe that look away with his fist.

  The look on Hale’s face, on the other hand, was inscrutable, like a shark swimming in the ocean. Anyone who got to Hale’s level in the Air & Space Marines had to be a realist or a true believer. Dechert thought Hale was the former—that he could be bargained with because he knew that the enemy can come from within as well as without. He would consider his options before acting. Dechert was a realist himself, which is why he wasn’t completely upset about the marine arsenal being off-loaded onto Serenity 1. If things really do come unhinged, he thought, at least we’ll have a fighting chance to defend the station. Still, he didn’t have to like it.

  As if reading Dechert’s mind, Hale said, “This is not my choice, Commander. The last thing I want is a gunfight. We haven’t even war-gamed the lunar theater yet, and my troopers are fresh off bioquarantine patrol on LEO-1.”

  Standard looked over, surprised that Hale would announce any reservations about his mission, or maybe disappointed to hear that Air & Space Marines spent some of their time serving as customs cops, making sure that exotic minerals and microorganisms weren’t smuggled from a low-orbit station down to Earth. He started to speak and then stopped.

  Dechert said, “I remember complaining about escalation when I was in the service as well, Captain. I don’t remember if it made me feel any better when the shooting started.”

  Hale grunted and turned to walk down the rubber-padded stairs to greet his fighters. Vernon and Lane stood on the flying deck together, looking down at the spectacle with their elbows on the guardrail as Thatch paced back and forth in front of the shuttle, directing the soldiers with broad waves of his arms on where to put their cargo before finally grabbing a handle on one of the big green boxes to drag it to a recessed storage rack himself. Thatch knew where everything went on the station, hoarder that he was. Out of all of the crew, only he seemed enthusiastic about the marine landing, an odd thing considering his dislike for the military. He lumbered around the hangar like an old harpooner preparing to go to sea to avenge a bitter loss. One of Cole’s cigars extended from his clenched lips like a cold, unlit missile. He wanted this fight to come, and Dechert still hadn’t found a way to confront him about that.

  Dechert turned back to Standard. “I’ve got secure data feeds set up in the crew mess for the 1530 briefing. Hard lines only, per your instructions, with AI encryptions. The CORE was too small to fit everyone in.”

  “Everyone?” Standard asked. “This is a special access briefing, Commander, well above the classified level. How many people did you invite?”

  “Just the ones who understand how to run complex operations on the Moon, Commissioner. That would be Quarles for Propulsion. Waters for Flight. Thatch for EVA, and Briggs for Mission Safety.” He paused. “I think that’s just about all the people I have left.”

  Standard shook his head. “I’ll have to ask Commodore Yates about that. He wanted this briefing to be compartmentalized. Most of the people at Peary Crater don’t even know what’s going on yet, just that we’re on alert. That’s why I’m getting Parrish out of here.”

  “Don’t ask Yates about it, tell him,” Dechert said, pointing a stiff finger at Standard’s chest, “and if he objects, have him check Section Nine in the Planetary Mining Code. These marines may be good at what they do, but they don’t know shit about operations on the mare. You run a mission out of my station and I’ve got oversight authority, even in a military emergency.”

  Dechert didn’t wait for a reply, brushing past Standard and shuffling down the steps to help Thatch lug another of the weapon crates into a holding rack. One of the marines, who looked no older than Quarles but
had arms that rippled and curved like the thick stretches of a restricting python, sang under his breath as he maneuvered what must have been a thousand-pound chest of equipment down the shuttle gangplank, bouncing it along with microgravity’s help. Dechert listened closely and realized it was a song he knew from his youth, when life’s worries amounted to finding beer for the weekend and fumbling with the snaps and clips that covered his girlfriend. He could almost hear a mandolin intertwining itself with the background noise of hissing gas as the marine sang on, something about the pain of war, and how it could not exceed the woe of aftermath.

  The crew mess was cramped and warm. Serenity 1’s air conduction system tried to keep up with the overflow of people now on the station, but like a frantic host with double the expected guests arriving for a party, the CORE’s flash-servers still hadn’t found their rhythm. Eight people sat around the narrow white table waiting for the briefing to begin, fanning themselves or fidgeting in the torpid air.

  Quarles: tapping his feet at the general lack of motion and sound in the room and stretching the sweat-stained collar of his heavysuit with a thumb and forefinger.

  Lane: leaning forward in her chair with her smooth hands folded and her lips bitten inward, ignoring the young marine who stole looks at her as he plugged a cable into the power deck under the table.

  Waters: punching numbers into a Touchpad as he rehearsed the Aerosmith’s upcoming run into Menelaus Crater, mulling every contingency Thatch had given him, memorizing coordinates for the major contours of the road, gauging potential hazards.

  Hale: perched like a stone monolith near the hologram port, not looking at anybody, staring at the drab bulkhead across the room with eyes that seldom blinked even as sweat ran down into their corners.