Gunpowder Moon

  But what choice do I have?

  “Captain, look, I know this is the wrong time, but we need to talk,” Dechert said.

  Hale glanced at him, surprised, but still only half aware of his presence. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I think I’ve got evidence that the Chinese weren’t responsible for the sabotage of the Molly Hatchet.”

  Hale’s pace slowed, just for a moment. He drew his lips back into his mouth and his jaws clenched and unclenched but then he continued walking, as if moving forward would help him escape the consideration of Dechert’s words.

  “Evidence?”

  “Circumstantial, maybe, but it suggests that someone screwed something to the Molly Hatchet’s hull while she was sitting out in the Bullpen—our cold-soak hangar—more than a month ago.” He paused. “I think it might have been the bomb.”

  A vein in Hale’s temple pulsed and his voice grew quiet.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you don’t drill into the outer hull of a pressurized spacecraft. Ever. It’s about as smart as opening a window on a submarine. Nobody on my crew would do that, for any reason.”

  “And?”

  “And an ensign from Peary Crater apparently had the opportunity to do it on the last resupply that came in to Serenity, an ensign who left the Moon three days after he came here.”

  Hale continued to walk toward the CORE, but he wouldn’t look at Dechert. He spoke almost in a whisper, his lips barely moving, his eyes lidded almost shut. “Are you telling me an American blew up your crawler, Dechert? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  They were close to the inner station hatch now, just thirty seconds or so from the command center, and Dechert knew that once he got into the CORE, Hale would think of nothing other than his crew skimming a shuttle through lunar canyons in blackout conditions, with Chinese commandos lurking nearby. He took the chance and grabbed Hale’s arm to stop him, turning him around until they faced each other.

  “Yes,” he said. “Look, off the record, I found out this ensign used to work for the Office of Environmental Analysis. You remember those guys? Half spooks, half assassins. They ran so much crazy shit during the height of the Max that the president had to shut them down. And this ensign flew only one mission on the Moon. Think about that—an SMA pilot who used to be a special operator, who showed up here on a resupply, and then bolted back to Earth? And it’s been suggested to me that the polymeric nitrogen used in the bomb was stolen from a Chinese safe house back in ’66. I don’t know who the hell stole it, but I think Standard’s claim that the Chinese were the last ones with their hands on the stuff might be wrong.”

  The two stared at each other for several seconds and Hale glanced down for the briefest of moments at Dechert’s hand on his arm, as if it were a piece of dust that might blow away if he didn’t bother with it. His gray eyes didn’t blink, but the lids continued to narrow into even tighter slits.

  “Do you know how many times you said the word ‘might’ in the last thirty seconds, Commander? You’re bringing this . . . this story to me right now, and you expect me to do what with it, exactly?”

  “Tell Standard to request a delay of the mission. He’s SMA Commissioner; he can go to Trayborr.”

  Dechert thought Hale might punch him in the mouth; he thought he might laugh out loud. But he remained stock-still. “Why don’t you?”

  “He won’t believe me. He’s incapable of believing anything other than Administration gospel. I could bring it up the chain of command, maybe to Yates, but he won’t do anything unless I’ve got a signed confession. Right now you’re the only one who can delay the recon, or at least convince Standard that the case against the Chinese has holes in it. Just let me show you what I . . .”

  But Hale was already shaking his head and looking down at his watch, his body wrapped in cords of tension. “Dechert, you know that’s not going to happen, and I can’t believe you would bother to ask. I’ve got orders from a four-star to begin a recon of the Apennine Mountains in exactly sixty minutes, and his orders came directly from Cheyenne Mountain. If you have actionable intelligence,” he paused and stuck two fingers into Dechert’s chest, hard enough so that it stung, “actionable intelligence—then I’ll send it up the chain of command. Screw shavings from the floor of your hangar and hearsay from one of your Chinese friends in the Mare Imbrium doesn’t fit that profile. The OEA guy is interesting, but it sure as hell isn’t enough to call off a mission that just may save our asses from a missile strike.”

  Hale was right and they both knew it, and Dechert was surprised that the marine hadn’t knocked him unconscious or walked right past him without listening. This wasn’t Hale’s problem. He had four thousand problems right now, but this wasn’t one of them. And yet, even then . . .

  “I know, look, I know. But you get how this will go down. If something happens out there in the badlands today, the whole damned thing will spin out of control. And it won’t turn back.”

  He locked eyes with Hale one last time; the two of them only inches apart in the narrow accessway. “We don’t know the truth, Captain. We don’t know why this is happening.”

  “Really? I know why it’s happening, Commander. It’s happening for the oldest reasons there are. But when were we put in charge of assessing reasons?”

  Dechert didn’t know what else to say. “Maybe now is the perfect time to start assessing the reasons. When was the last time the people in charge got it right?”

  But the conviction had left his voice. There is a moment, he thought, when all soldiers forget about the underlying reasons for war and just take the damned job. And Hale was past that moment.

  The captain smiled from one side of his mouth and put his hand on Dechert’s shoulder in a strong grip. “You’re absolutely right, Dechert, but I’ve got my orders.” He turned and started walking, and spoke again without looking back. “Do you recall those words?”

  “What words?”

  “‘I’ve got my orders’? That’s you talking, Commander. That’s you talking not so many years ago, as a captain in the Bekaa Valley, when you were given a mission that you knew was an absolute clusterfuck and you still took it.”

  “I didn’t always take the mission,” Dechert said to Hale’s back. “And sometimes I was wrong when I did.”

  Hale popped the hatch open and waited for the sound of escaping gas to move beyond them down the tunnel. “Allow me the same mistakes of youth,” he said, and disappeared through the entrance.

  The shuttle flew on the deck, lights out, and low enough to kick up a line of leaden dust in its wake as it skimmed across the Sea of Serenity with the velocity of a rifle shot. The view from its nose cone filled the large quantum-dot display screen in the CORE, showing an eerie landscape of infrared green, passing by at speed. They watched from their chairs in the command center as the craft flew over the eastern rim of Crater Sulpicius Gallus, all of them except Waters, who was on the flying deck in the hangar in case a rescue mission had to be launched.

  “Specter, Home 1 actual. Initiate Ballgame in one-zero seconds,” Hale said into the comlink.

  “Roger, Home 1 actual, heading three-three-seven degrees on my mark, dropping to one hundred meters.”

  Lieutenant Cabrera’s voice projected calm even through the magnetic distortion of the signal. A few seconds later, she called her mark and the craft banked, heading north-northwest over the Serenity basin and descending even lower to the surface of the Moon. Cabrera found a deep lunar rille, and when she dropped into it, Dechert saw Lane wince. The canyon was steep-walled and uneven, and from their vantage in the CORE, it looked as wide as an air-conditioning duct, but Cabrera flew with a light stick, weaving the craft with graceful nudges through the crumbling flutes of ancient lava and rock as she assessed its maneuverability. Dechert and Thatch looked at each other.

  “The kid can fly,” Thatch said.

  “Yes she can,” Hale replied from the center of the room, not looking ov
er, his eyes fixed to the data that streamed into the bank of touchscreens and holo-displays on the operations console in front of him.

  Dechert recalled the first time he had flown a high-maneuver profile on the Moon, through the Rima Hyginus just south of the Sea of Vapors. He had made the run in the simulator a hundred times and had practiced rapid banks and rolls on the Serenity plain, but nothing prepared him for that first drop into the chute, as lunar pilots call it when they fly into two-sided vertical terrain. As a marine aviator on Earth, Dechert had learned to muscle the stick of his fighter jet, heaving it back and forth and up and down to force his aircraft into high-g turns and ballistic climbs as the forces of gravity fought against him. But on the Moon flight controls had to be handled with a soft touch, like a stick of old dynamite ready to explode in your hands if you failed to treat it with respect. A bit too much pull to the left or the right, and the dozens of microthrusters affixed to all corners of the hull would have you into the canyon wall before you could call out a Mayday.

  Flying in low gravity violates every human instinct to react with vigor when facing an imminent collision; you don’t tiptoe out of the way of a truck that’s bearing down on you. But that’s the trick in one-sixth g—little inputs on the stick and rudder with the touch of a pianist. Dechert remembered when he had pulled out of that hundred-kilometer run through the Hyginus back in ’67. He had wiped his wet palms on his thighs and put the shuttle on autopilot . . . and then he had thrown up into a gravity bag.

  If Cabrera felt the same queasiness, she wasn’t showing it. The additional plasma and HEDM thrusters Quarles had welded onto the shuttle’s titanium skin and plugged into its fly-by-wire network had obviously added nimbleness, because the lieutenant darted the craft through the crumbling ravine in ways that even Waters wouldn’t have tried.

  As if to confirm Dechert’s thoughts, Cabrera came on the com: “Home 1 actual, tell your propulsion guy he did well.” There was an enjoyment in her voice, a pure pleasure in the flying that cut through the tension in the room. Quarles smiled, but kept his eyes on his screens.

  “Roger that, Specter,” Hale said. “Shake her out for a few more seconds then get back up on the basin. You’re about four hundred and fifty klicks from leg two, ten minutes and counting.”

  “Roger, one-zero minutes to leg two.”

  Dechert looked around the CORE as the com popped and hissed and retreated into the background, a whisper of static. In ten minutes the shuttle would begin its run into the Montes Apenninus. For the first time in the history of the Moon two groups of people would be staked out across an unmarked boundary, looking for each other through the sights of a gun. Maybe the Chinese crewmen weren’t even armed; maybe they didn’t have radar domes set up to watch the northern approaches of Crater Conon, no missile launchers seeking an electromagnetic warble to lock onto. But maybe they did. Dechert cursed his decision to wait until after the mission to confront Yates with the evidence they had found. Knowing Yates, it wouldn’t have done any good, but at least he could have tried.

  He sat back in his chair in the half-light, watching the blinking consoles splash the gunmetal walls of the CORE with diffuse blotches of red and green, yellow and blue. The room had an air of grim, professional morbidity. The focus on the protocol of their jobs kept each of them from thinking about the consequences of what might happen out on the lunar surface. Dechert and Standard were the only two in the CORE without a mission-critical duty. This was Hale’s operation and he was utilizing Quarles, Lane, and Thatch as his own. Each one’s head was frozen in place before a monitor, only occasionally glancing up at the thermal image of the shuttle thundering across the left flank of the Serenity basin.

  Standard kept his focus on the main monitor, engrossed by the nose-cone video being fed in real time back to Serenity 1 and by the altitude and velocity numbers that scrolled like a stock ticker along the bottom of the screen. His dark eyes were alight with energy, and his body looked as if it wanted to twitch every muscle. He sat up in his seat, his hands gripping the armrests, and it occurred to Dechert that he had never seen the commissioner so alive.

  What is it about the potential for battle, Dechert wondered, that so enraptures people who have never taken part in it? He plumbed the depths of his memory to see if he’d felt that same flare of excitement at the first sniff of war before he had become a marine, and the image that unexpectedly came to mind was of the snowball battles he used to have with his friends back in Maryland when they were children, after the first winter storms had blown in from the Allegheny Mountains. Ironhorse Lane against Five Logs Way, with two teams of kids spread out in equal numbers. It was a game of Capture the Flag with hardpacked slush balls as weapons, running all morning and afternoon and into the dusk until their mothers called them home for dinner. He recalled that surge of excitement, that sense that something important was about to happen as he pulled on his snow boots and picked a pair of climate gloves that weren’t too thick to impede his ability to throw. Death wasn’t a danger or even a distant thought in those days, but there was a recognition that a conflict was about to take place, and to their young minds, the results of that conflict meant everything.

  Had it been any different years later when he went into actual combat? He had learned to transfer that same surge of adrenaline into pure awareness, to be at the polestar of mental focus as bullets flew by with ballistic cracks and rockets tore up the bricks around him. And wasn’t it that same rush, that same feeling of being alive and engaged, that had stayed with him even after the first man went down? As he looked at the nervous energy pouring from Standard’s body, Dechert knew exactly what the young commissioner was feeling. We are war-lovers, he thought. It’s written in the code that runs through our systems. Nobody remembers Gaia, the goddess of the Earth. But who forgets Mars, the god of war?

  “Are you sure our communications can’t be picked up?” Standard asked into the silence. His voice sounded too high in the stadium-seated room, and it gave Dechert a start.

  Hale barely looked up from the operations table. “Unlikely.”

  Standard knew not to ask Hale for clarification, so he looked to Dechert, who tried to ignore him as he pulled back from his memories and returned his focus to the screen in the middle of the CORE. But Standard continued to stare, and Dechert finally leaned over and said, “They’re using multidirectional maskers and voice-and-data dampers. If the Chinese pick anything up, it’ll sound like background noise from the rest of the communications bouncing around the Moon at any given moment. It won’t have any structure for them to decrypt.”

  “Of course,” said Standard. “Thank you, Commander.”

  The shuttle skimmed over a featureless and constant terrain; Dechert couldn’t see anything he recognized. The Sea of Serenity is a caldera almost seven hundred kilometers wide, and within its annular borders are great stretches of volcanic cinder unmarred by craters and the brilliant white filaments of their ejecta. But Dechert somehow sensed that the marines were getting close to their first objective, the left turn toward Mons Hadley and the Apennine Mountains. After that, they would be following the profile Thatch had navigated for them down to the northern rim of Crater Conon. Dechert looked over at his EVA specialist and saw that he was sweating. Thatch had lobbied hard to be a part of the reconnaissance mission. He had been agitating for action ever since Cole’s death, and maybe being out there with the marines would have been a catharsis for him, but Hale had refused to allow any nonmilitary personnel on the mission. Thatch’s wide body barely fit into the microsuede chair he was sitting in, and his unkempt curls of brown hair hung down to his eyebrows as he squirmed—a caged bear in a tiny room, wanting to be let loose.

  “One hundred klicks and they’re in the pipe,” he murmured, his eyes darting over to Dechert.

  Dechert nodded and looked away. He swiveled his chair to the left, toward Lane, and watched as she ran threat variables through the Quantum. She sat with a straight lower spine, leaning forward in her
chair. So small, but she was the largest person in the room. Standard had shrunk when Lane chastised him in the mess hall a few days ago, as though he had been scolded by a general. Thatch followed her orders without complaint, even if he disagreed with them, and even Hale gave her a wide berth, wise enough perhaps to know when to avoid conflicts that couldn’t be won. She was a woman on a man’s Moon, outnumbered fifty to one, but that was never a consideration for Lane. People were either weak or strong in her reckoning—which coincided well with the Moon’s own reckoning, he supposed—and somewhere deep within herself, below any insecurities she might have, Lane knew she was strong. It projected out of her in unexplainable ways.

  Her approach to the job was simple, similar to his own: You do your job, I do my job, and everything else is just noise up here. Even Waters, a man Dechert trusted as much as anyone, didn’t always seem to grasp that. Lane, of all of them, knew that respect and competence were all that mattered on the Moon. Maybe it was because she had fought her entire career to remind others of her worth. Either way, she could rest assured that if Dechert was looking at her, the only thing she saw in his eyes was respect.

  He couldn’t imagine Lane working for a boss who didn’t give her that.

  “All right people, one minute and counting to Ballgame,” Hale said. “Let’s go through our checks.”

  “Propulsion is looking good,” Quarles said.

  “Passive radar is active and forward-scanning,” Lane said. “Countermeasures online.”

  “They’re in the socket for leg two,” said Thatch. “Change of heading, two-zero-four degrees in fifty-one seconds on pilot’s mark.”