Gunpowder Moon

  “A code?” Lane asked.

  “Yeah, a code. Just twelve letters and numbers in variable sequence, but they formed a stream address.”

  Dechert looked back at Vernon and Thatch, who were making the first run with the plow through the rock washout, trying to get traction against the slide as the rear wheels of the rover spun in slow motion. Both of their white spacesuits were already gray with moondust. “Any chance anyone else could have picked up on it?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the two working outside. “I’m sure Peary Crater gave it a good scan.”

  “Doubt it. It was pretty ingenious, but then so am I. Who’s going to take the time to run telemetry from a routine meteor impact through a quantum computer?” He grinned. “And who else could notice offhand a few degrees in variation on the declination of a cosmic bullet strike? Luckily, the powers that be are still letting impact reports and solar bulletins come through the open pipe.”

  Lane shook her head again, already losing her patience. “All right, all right, we’re duly impressed with your intellect. Now what the hell was at the end of the address?”

  Quarles typed with two index fingers on the port inside his briefcase, and then turned it to Lane and Dechert with a flourish. “A message. And a video that you have to see. It was placed on the back end of a discrete server somewhere in China, near Shanghai I think. Probably a black-market gambling box, or maybe a porn aggregator. As soon as I downloaded the file, it self-immolated on the back end.” He looked over at Dechert. “Your friend Commander Tzu is very clever.”

  They leaned forward like conspirators in a small, clandestine basement as the screen flared and a few paragraphs of text appeared:

  This is all I can provide you, Dechert. It came from the surveillance camera of a Chinese Intelligence safe house near Guangzhou, October 2066—a safe house that had a cache of polymeric nitrogen in its stores.

  Our government spreads the word internally that this is an American conspiracy, planned years ago and designed to foment war. But others say more quietly it is a Secretariat operation, a double-switch by our own intelligence services. I don’t know the truth. I only know that I trust no one, and neither should you. Both parties appear to want what is coming.

  Do with it what you can. I think the next time we communicate it will be with warnings of a solar flare. Luna has been a kind mistress, but like all kept women, she is having her revenge.

  Warnings of a solar flare. Their coded alert that an attack was imminent. If Dechert took any solace from the cryptic message, it was in the fact that he wasn’t the only sane person on the Moon who had lost hope. Tzu was probably a stronger man than he, and certainly a smarter one. His despair made Dechert less angry at himself for similar feelings of helplessness.

  The text disappeared and a grainy video filled the screen, distorted and backwashed with overexposure. They huddled closer in the center of the cockpit, Lane peering over Dechert’s back, her hand absently on his shoulder. It was the feed from a fixed video camera showing an empty, nondescript hallway. Tan painted walls. Dirty linoleum floors. A time stamp in the bottom right flashed the seconds away, but there was nothing to indicate the year, and there was no sound or movement. Dechert saw a wisp of blue smoke at the bottom of the screen—and then another. Not much smoke, not enough to be a breaching charge. Must be muzzle fire. Then he saw it again. Tracers. Unmistakable. Quick orange lines of lead, lit up by tiny pyrotechnic charges in the bases of the bullets, lancing down the hallway.

  Dechert squinted. The smoke in the nameless corridor grew. And then at the far end, the end under attack, a man appeared low to the ground, leaning his body from around a corner to fire. But he was doing it wrong, leaving himself exposed for too long. Shooting wildly instead of taking a quick glance and fixing his weapon on a planned axis to enfilade the corridor and block the intruder’s assault, as they teach you in close quarters training. No skilled soldier, that one. A panicked man. And then, as if to confirm Dechert’s silent opinion of the defender’s war-fighting skills, he was down. A clean shot to the head, judging from how his neck snapped backward and his body relaxed.

  Five seconds passed. No one in the cockpit of the Aerosmith moved. They stared at the video as the sound of the overhead heating vents grew louder. And then the second man appeared at the bottom of the screen. The attacker. Dechert grunted when he saw him. This was a warrior. Even through the veil of smoke and the distortion of the old video, it took only two of his metered strides for Dechert to recognize the man for what he was: a predator. He moved with purpose and a near-nonchalance, his weapon rotating to cover all of his threat points. A big man, wide-shouldered and thick at the center. Unusual for a special operator. Typically the best killers are small. And there was something in the way this barrel-shaped man moved that unsettled Dechert, causing him to shift in his seat and lean even closer. Graceful. Efficient for his size, even for a trained soldier.

  The man made it to the end of the hallway—obviously an L-shaped accessway—focusing only on his left flank. He reached the corner, crouched low, and peered over the person he had just killed, using his unmoving legs as a makeshift barricade. And then, just as quickly, after firing a few more shots, he was gone. Up and around the corner, closer to his objective. A large shadow moving with purpose, his face and head covered by a balaclava. The screen popped with static and then went blank.

  All three of them breathed and sat back, and Dechert looked out the cockpit window to see that Thatch and Waters had cleared half of the washout from the Menelaus Road. Moondust sparkled in the torchlight around them like falling silver.

  “Well,” Lane said, looking at no one in particular. “Can someone tell me exactly what we just saw?”

  “I can give it a try,” said Quarles. “Someone in China obviously wants us—or at least Tzu—to believe the stuff that blew up the Molly Hatchet was stolen from them by the guy in our poorly shot matinee. Only there’s no time stamp or date, no proof of location, and no direct evidence that it’s anything other than a taped training exercise.”

  Dechert rubbed the stubble on his chin and shook his head. “No, for whatever else it’s worth, that was no training exercise. The one who went down was definitely shot. I’m more concerned about how Tzu got his hands on that video, or why he was able to get his hands on it.”

  “Someone within the Chinese Lunar Authority is trying to convince him the Chinese are being set up,” Lane said. “But judging from his message, the video didn’t seem to do the job for him, and it sure as hell won’t convince anyone on our side of the mare.” She leaned forward and rubbed her knees, closing her eyes as she always did when she wanted to think something through.

  “So,” she continued, “according to Lin Tzu, some of his people are saying this whole thing is an American setup that has its roots in a weapons raid six years ago, while some in the CLA also suspect their own government is behind it. And on our side, we have Mr. Standard painting the U.S. as an innocent victim, while at least one SMA official, whom I happen to trust more than anyone else down there, isn’t so sure of our purity. And we’ve got about twelve hours to untie this Gordian knot, with a blurry video and the few bits of circumstantial evidence I collected in the Bullpen?”

  Dechert closed his eyes, hoping Lane’s mental exercise would work as well for him. There was something about that attacker. He moved like . . . an American. It seemed ridiculous, and he didn’t want to say it out loud, but Dechert had seen special operators from dozens of countries in action. This one looked as though he had been trained at Bragg or Little Creek, not in the sheep hills of Hereford or the steppes at Balashikha 2. To the layperson, a SEAL in tiger stripes may look identical to an SAS trooper or a Spetsnaz, but to Dechert they were as different as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. Or was he just projecting his own suspicions and bias into the moment? Did he believe it was an American because it confirmed the doubts he had about the actions of his own government? The video didn’t show anything that could allo
w them to make a definitive identification or to prove that Lin’s representation of it had any validity. But something about it left him unsettled. The attacker’s face could never be seen, but Dechert could almost picture it in his mind’s eye. A big man, and fast. Whom had he known in Special Ops who reminded him of this killer?

  “Lane, I hope your bits of evidence are more substantial.” He looked up at her, and he knew in that instant that she saw the uncertainty in his eyes. They stared at each other for a few seconds, forgetting Quarles was there. She was surprised at the hesitation she had seen, and he wondered if he had always hidden his self-doubt from her so well.

  “More interesting than revealing, I’m afraid,” she said, biting a finger between her white teeth and looking away from Dechert. “I don’t have any visual aids, so my presentation will be quicker than Jonathan’s. Bottom line, I found no traces of polymeric nitrogen in Serenity 1. No decaying atomic particles, nothing to suggest the presence of a hyperexplosive anywhere near the base.”

  “Can you say without doubt there was never any polymeric nitrogen on the station?”

  She shifted in her seat. “No, and that’s the problem. If the material was properly stored in an inert containment device, protected by a pressurized chamber filled with xenon or halocarbon, it’s doubtful there’d be anything to find.”

  “But?”

  She looked at both of them. “But I did find something I can’t explain on the floor of the Bullpen—screw shavings from the hull of the Molly Hatchet.”

  Quarles, who had been storing his briefcase under his seat, craned his neck to look up at her. “Screw shavings? Are you sure?”

  “The molecular signature was unmistakable. I’m guessing it was a one millimeter drill bit, and the titanium shavings are a perfect match for the specs of the Molly.”

  That is interesting, Dechert thought. Nothing is ever screwed onto the hull of a mobile habitation unit—too much danger of stress fracture. Everything is plate-welded on. But if someone were going to stick a bomb on the side of a crawler, why not use bonding magnets? Were they worried they’d be detected by the sensors, or maybe that the magnets could be disabled by solar radiation or the Moon’s fluctuating magnetic fields?

  “Can you tell what part of the ship the shavings came from?”

  “No. Only that they came from the outer hull.”

  “Did you check the maintenance logs? Have we ever screwed anything onto the outside of the Hatchet?”

  “Of course not, and I did check the logs. No one’s crazy enough to drill into the hull of a pressurized EVA craft after it’s been commissioned. Even boy wonder over here isn’t that strapped for brain cells.”

  For once, Quarles ignored the dig. “She’s right. No way Thatch or Vernon or Cole would take a drill to the side of the Hatchet. Hell, maybe the shavings came from inside the ship somewhere, from drilling a hard-point onto the interior side panels or something.”

  Lane shook her hand. “I told you, I checked the molecular signature. Radiation, ionization. Everything. The shavings came from the outer hull of the Molly Hatchet.”

  Nobody spoke. Dechert looked out at the Menelaus Road again; Thatch and Waters were almost done now. Just a few more sweeps of the plow and the road would be ready for the descent.

  “All right. So what do we have on recent visitors to Serenity? Last resupply, for example?”

  “That’s also interesting,” Lane said. “The last shuttle run from Peary Crater was forty-two days ago, more than a month before the explosion. It was a one-man resupply, which isn’t unheard of, but it isn’t standard protocol. I dug up the logs. An Ensign Kale Foerrster flew the mission; he stayed here for a quick hot-bunk and went back to Peary Crater twelve hours later.”

  Dechert nodded. Crews that made the thousand-kilometer run from Peary to Serenity 1 were required to take a nap before the return leg. Twelve hours was a bit of a long stay, but not unheard of. Dechert vaguely remembered the resupply. It had been a routine mission, nothing unusual to recall, and he never ran into Foerrster while he was on-station.

  “One other thing,” Lane said. “I got access to the current Peary Crater manifest. Ensign Foerrster is no longer on the Moon. He was here for only three months, and then he was reassigned to LEO-1. And his flight to Serenity forty-two days ago was his only long-hop run while he was up here.”

  “That’s right,” Quarles said. “I remember it. I was pissed Cverko wasn’t doing that run.”

  He didn’t have to elaborate that Cverko was the biggest black-market smuggler on the Moon, a pack rat who would barter anything from a lobster tail to a quart of homemade vodka, and get the better of his own mother in the deal if he got the chance. Dechert recalled thinking at the time that his crew would be most upset to hear that their sideways supplier of contraband wasn’t coming to the station with his monthly treats.

  “I met Foerrster when he got out of quarantine,” Quarles added. “He seemed normal enough. Liked the Stones, if I recall.”

  Dechert didn’t care about his musical taste, though. Twelve hours on the station, he thought. Enough time to slip into a pressure suit, sneak into the Bullpen, and drill a bomb onto the side of the Molly Hatchet, which just happened to be off-regolith at the time. One hell of a risky maneuver with six other souls on the station, but maybe it could be done.

  “Is there any way Foerrster could have made an EVA into the Bullpen without any of us knowing about it?”

  Lane shook her head, her lower lip bitten between teeth again. “I’ve run through it a dozen times. It wouldn’t have been easy. Whoever was on duty in the CORE would have seen the pressure door open, unless Foerrster disarmed the sensors somehow. He would have had to rig the tunnel cameras and the quarantine alarm as well. Vernon was on duty for the first half of Foerrster’s stay; I was on for the second half. Neither of us would have missed any of those alerts.”

  Dechert looked at Lane and Quarles, but neither of them spoke. A possible scenario had taken shape inside of all their heads for the first time, a scenario for what had killed their friend. It felt cold with age and implausible, but real nonetheless. Dechert bored his mind for alternate possibilities but found none. There’s just no way a man in an EVA suit could sneak up to a mobile habitation unit out on the lunar surface and strap a bomb onto its belly while two crew members were inside or nearby working the mines. That theory never made sense. This one, unlikely as it may sound, did, but he still couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of Foerrster accessing a depressurized part of the station without being noticed. Of course, there was another possibility: What if Lane or Waters were lying about what they did or didn’t see while on duty that day? Dechert didn’t even want to think about that possibility, but it couldn’t be eliminated. I’m missing something, he thought.

  “Well, can anyone think of a more likely solution?” Dechert finally asked, deciding for now to focus on the theory that Foerrster had somehow pulled off the improbable. “This is a pretty big leap we’re taking.”

  They looked at one another and shook their heads.

  “Okay. It sure as hell isn’t conclusive, but maybe I can take the screw shavings to Standard, or better yet to Hale.” He picked up his helmet and popped the seals open. “Lane, get me your forensics data when we get back to the station. But not a word to anyone about the safe house video. There’s no way to explain how it got into our hands. We’ll rely on the evidence we collected ourselves. And I’ll try to find a way to get my hands on the full employment dossier of Ensign Foerrster.”

  Quarles fumbled with his own helmet as they turned back to their stations and looked out at the Menelaus Road, each automatically going through their silent checklist for the final run to Hawking’s Rim as they watched Thatch run the rover over the washout to smooth out the passage.

  “You think it’ll be enough to convince them that something crazy is going on?” Quarles asked.

  Lane and Dechert stole a look at each other, and Dechert snapped his helmet onto his head
, the seals reassuringly locking into place.

  “I doubt it.”

  17

  “So, are you prepared to cross the Rubicon?”

  Dechert asked the question as Hale came in through the quarantine hatch from the hangar. The captain had just given the final prep to his Air & Space Marines and watched them buckle into their seats in the long-hop shuttle, which was retrofitted with missiles, EMP shielding domes, and redundant thrusters. It now had the look of an angry wasp. And it was definitely just as capable of delivering a sting—but also could easily be swatted out of the sky.

  Hale’s face was luminous with tension. He tried to smile. Dechert felt compassion for him and a nagging sense of envy at the same time; he remembered the soberness of sending men into dangerous places, but he also recalled the rush it provided.

  “Unlike Caesar, I plan to make a quiet entrance,” Hale said. “Hopefully they’ll be shadows in the night.”

  Dechert nodded and they turned to walk back toward the CORE. “Maybe our Chinese friends are just digging for ilmenite up there in the hills.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments as they digested the unlikeliness of that scenario. They walked side by side down the narrow corridor, listening to the heating fluid flowing through the pipes around them and feeling the harmonic throb of the fusion reactor as its distributed energy came up through the flooring and into their legs. The living pulse of the station felt good, and Dechert hated what he was about to do; Hale had a mission to run that would put his men in harm’s way, and he was wrapped up in it like an artist in the throes of creation. He didn’t need to be distracted with the conspiracy theories of a Level-1 mining chief. Dechert was a former soldier and maybe Hale would respect that, but he wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion into his focus on the task ahead. Especially now, when the mission was an electric current running through his head.