Gunpowder Moon

  But this was when they thought about death. Right about now, when there was no ambush scheduled for the coming night and no ingress to plan over a map table in a stifling tent, and they could sit in the dirt and play poker and let the adrenaline settle in their veins like blood pooling at the bottom of a corpse.

  “You keepin’ count, Snook?” B-Dog drawled. “Your ass has gotta be two grand in the hole this week.”

  “Fuck you. My dead ass’ll pay its markers before your live one ever will.”

  That got a chuckle, even from Dechert. B-Dog did anything to avoid paying cash on a poker debt. He’d trade his last plug of chewing tobacco, his precious virtual porn minutes, or even the twice-distilled white lightning he brewed in an arms depot at the far end of the firebase. He’d even take another grunt’s foot patrol if the debt was large enough, and word got around quickly through the brigade that B-Dog found paying a bet much more difficult than losing one.

  “Yeah, well your dead ass may have to if we go back into Aanjar tomorrow,” B-Dog said, and the laughter dissolved. No one spoke at the mention of Aanjar. The name itself held sinister energy. The Muslim call to prayer had died away on the glowing air, and a rare eastern breeze came in off the Litani River. It carried the smell of burning oil and rotting fruit with it.

  “Yeah, boss,” Matchstick said, the enjoyment drained from his voice. “When they gonna bring some real armor in here, maybe even a hover-tank or two? Humpin’ through that Hajiville without any tin cans behind us is getting old.”

  “Maybe they’ll do it the tenth time I ask,” Dechert replied. He flicked away a camel spider with the tip of his boot and took a sip of warm water from his canteen. They had lost fourteen men in Aanjar in the last month, most of them to homemade rattler mines. Even the children in that mud-bricked town looked dangerous. A year ago, the U.S. government had talked about winning hearts and minds in the Bekaa Valley. A week ago, when a reporter asked a corporal on his third tour whether the “hearts and minds” campaign was still operative, he had replied, “Yeah, but now it’s two in the heart and one in the mind.”

  The corporal caught hell from Political Reengineering, but he got free cigarettes for a week from every marine in the company when his quote was picked up by the stream.

  “If I gotta get it in Aanjar, I’ll take it like Habs,” B-Dog said. “One round in the thumper. Through and through, nice and clean.”

  “Yeah, that goddamn Mexican was dead falling down.”

  Matchstick shuffled the deck, his pupils fixed on the cards. “Not me, man. I’ll take mine between the eyes. High velocity round, nonexplosive tip. Then you don’t even hear the shot before the whole damn game shuts off.”

  Snook spat a small fleck of leaf tobacco through the gap in his front teeth and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. “Are you shitting me? You don’t even want a second to know you’ve bought it?”

  “A second for what?”

  “I don’t know. Repent of your sins, whatever the hell.”

  Matchstick snorted. “Jesus, Snooky, you’d need a lot longer to do that.”

  Dechert smiled again as the rest of them laughed. This was the low-desert version of catharsis, he thought. Figuring out how you wanted to die in some godforsaken, sandblasted guerrilla hamlet while playing poker behind a latrine. But even in the closeness of the death cult, he felt detached from the rest of them, almost wishing that he’d be the next casualty or at least that he’d catch some kind of evacuating wound before his tour was up. Then he wouldn’t be abandoning them.

  The platoon didn’t know it yet, but Dechert would be rotating out in less than three months. His second tour was done, and he had asked to be transferred to the Air Corps. They needed pilots, and he had flown the Alaska hop before the war, and the logistics boys figured that was good enough. The air is arctic at forty thousand feet, which suited Dechert just fine. He was done with the desert. Done with the heat and the spiders and the political reengineering bullshit—done with thinking that his tactical skills could keep his men alive in a place where everyone hated everyone else and no one stayed alive for long. Dechert looked over the oil can at his troopers, at their dirty faces in the gloaming, and had a strong premonition that all of them would be gone before the war was over. They’d all be dead or too fucked up to know otherwise, and he’d be alive. That was the sick kind of luck that he had.

  “What about you, Dawes?” B-Dog asked. “When it’s your time, you gonna go as quietly as you’ve walked the Earth?”

  Dawes looked up from his hole cards as if startled from deep thought. “Huh?” He gave his best impression of a smile as the rest of them laughed and he continued to digest the question, a single eye open and the other half squinted at his cards.

  “I guess it all depends on how I go.”

  A marine could only nod at logic like that. Every infantryman in the Bake wanted to take a round through and through if they had to die. Something clean, so their parents could put them in an open casket and know that their little boy or girl was going into the ground intact and ready for corporeal resurrection when the trumpets blared. No one wanted to get hit by a bomb or a seeker-slug or, even worse, a sonic charge, which ripped you apart from the inside and left you collapsed like a suit of skin. Some deaths were too gruesome to consider. At least a clean kill provided an acceptable ticket to the theme park in the sky that the chaplain kept telling them about.

  “Commander, are you ready? Commander?”

  Dechert looked up. Lane was standing over him, a slim, blurred figure in a dark blue heavysuit. He came back to the room and saw that he was sitting in front of an equipment locker near the main hangar, and that he had one boot locked down and sealed onto the padded leg of his pressure suit. The other remained on the changing table, its clamps extended.

  “Yeah. Yes. How much time?”

  “Two minutes until takeoff. Are you okay?”

  He nodded and grabbed the other hard-shelled boot and began to cram his foot into it.

  “Yes, I’m fine. How are we looking?”

  She got down on one knee and grabbed the bottom of the boot, helping to push his heel into the tight opening. “Thatch and Hale are in prelaunch. Vernon’s working on a flight plan. I think it’s to drop into Crater Yangel’, and then you take the jetsuits from there. Hopefully their radar can’t track a hopping astronaut. The shuttle’s last coordinates were about fourteen kilometers north of the crater, in the Lacus Felicitatis.”

  The shuttle’s last coordinates. Lane didn’t want to say “crash site.” She kept her eyes down as she locked the seals on his footgear. Dechert thought of his snap daydream from a moment ago—how vivid it had been. He had smelled the Bekaa Valley, that unctuous mix of sewage, roasting meat, and decaying fruit. How much our memories are meshed to smell, he thought, and he wondered how that fact would affect his future recollection of their time on the Moon. The things you smelled the most up here were gunpowder out on the regolith and the hydraulic grease that kept everything lubricated on the inside of the station.

  And then, of course, there was Lane. She didn’t wear perfume but she smelled like the lavender his mother used to keep on the kitchen windowsill. Better than Quarles’s weed-infused clothes and Thatch’s . . . well, Thatch pretty much stank. Still, if he could remember those human essences from his time on the Moon, it would be better than the stench of cordite and machine oil.

  “Does Jonathan have the jetsuits rigged for direct video feed?”

  “Yes, we can look at each other as we witness the end of all things on the Moon.”

  Dechert stood up and stomped his feet, pushing his toes toward the front of the boots. He caught Lane’s eyes and held her gaze.

  “Listen, I want you bugging out at the first sign of trouble. You hear me? No heroic bullshit if an alarm goes off, just trigger the AMD and get the hell out of here. And I want everybody in pressure suits, as soon as you get us launched.”

  “What about you? I’m trying my best not to fall
off the edge here, but if you and Thatch don’t come back, I can’t make any promises.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  Lane grabbed his helmet and they walked together toward the hangar hatch. They were silent, even though they should have been talking about contingency plans, message encrypting, SAR operations, jetsuit configurations . . . something.

  Dechert stopped and put his hand on Lane’s shoulder. He didn’t have his gloves on yet and she felt solid but small under his fingers as he squeezed. “I’m serious, Lane. I’m telling you to stay alive.” He paused. “And please keep Quarles and Vernon in a similar condition.”

  She looked at him and flashed a meager smile, one side of her mouth turning up slightly and the other descending. “Finally an order I can take without complaint.” Her anger at Dechert seemed washed away as she turned her eyes from his face. “I’m heading up to the CORE. I’ll be monitoring you from there.”

  “Okay.”

  Dechert pulled the hatch open and put a foot inside the circular opening. “Lane?”

  She turned around. “Yes?”

  “I thought you should know. Nietzsche was wrong. God isn’t dead.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “No. He just has shitty representation back on Earth.”

  She smiled, enough this time so that a few of her teeth flashed white. “So that’s it. Just in case you’re right, I’ll be praying for you.”

  20

  They talked in pilot-speak because there was little else to say. Being encapsulated in their pressure suits and helmets heightened the sense of isolation within the tiny shuttle cockpit. Three men alone in the same cramped space, taking brief moments to call out technical bits of information.

  “Turning to two-nine-five.”

  “Turning two-nine-five.”

  “Eighteen hundred knots, altitude five hundred meters.”

  “Okay, let’s keep it there.”

  “Negative feedback on passive radars.”

  “Keep an eye on them and I’ll watch for EM spikes.”

  “Okay.”

  The Moon slipped away under the shuttle, every kilometer a blur of regret. It had happened so fast, Dechert thought, and he realized how much better it was to show up in the middle of a war than to be there at the beginning. Now that he was experiencing one this way, he could say without a doubt that the beginning is worse. He wanted to yell into his helmet, yell for them all to stop. To dial up Peary Crater and tell them the whole thing was a setup, that someone other than the Chinese had drilled a bomb onto the hull of the Molly Hatchet. That some other force had caused Cole to die alone in the vacuum. That the theft of the helium-3 casks and the crippling of the water mine at DS-7 were little more than political pranks. That an American strike on China’s spiral mine in the Mare Imbrium could be apologized for. That all of it was a bunch of bullshit cooked up on Earth, by men who have their coffee brought to them while they draft papers in oak-paneled rooms for institutions connected at their roots to the Ivy Fucking League or some exclusive Chinese think tank. Dulce bellum inexpertis, Sheldon Starks had said. War is sweet to those with no experience of it.

  That’s about damned right.

  But it was too late for that. There were four dead marines somewhere in the barrenlands of the suddenly poorly named Lake of Happiness, and nothing else mattered now. There was no way to unring the bell. Peary Crater was in crimson red war mode. Dechert could picture General Trayborr rallying his troops for the coming assault, telling them that he regretted what was to come even as he inhaled the intoxicant of war that every field commander privately indulges in. How can you despise the genesis of your profession?

  And Commodore Yates, leaning back in his prefect’s chair and watching the marshaling with eyes gleaming from under a pair of white-piled eyebrows. He might not have wanted things to degrade to the point where Peary Crater would be in jeopardy, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything to stop it now. He was the SMA’s man and enough of a gambler to realize that going for the whole pot of gold was a value bet at this point. He might take some hits that would damage short-term productivity, but he could end up with half of the Moon if the battle went America’s way.

  All U.S. lunar stations had gone to DEFCON-1. Full wartime footing, expectation of an imminent attack. Someone up there at the North Pole was waiting for word to launch the big AI seeker missiles—the ones that would fly like sentient things, outsmarting their stupid antimissile cousins as they cruised toward New Beijing 1 on the opposite pole of the Moon with algorithmic precision. And somewhere in the Chinese main base someone was tickling their finger across a similar red button. Neither side was supposed to have a stockpile of the big cruise rockets on the Moon, but Dechert was certain that by now both of them did. Weapons-grade lasers still weren’t powerful enough to take out an entire station. Missiles certainly were.

  He pictured every coming event in his mind’s eye with a soldier’s clarity, as if it had already happened and he was reliving the whole thing in a dream. One side would decide that waiting was no longer a viable option and would target the other’s Level-1 and Level-2 mining stations. If they went to full-scale war—if no shred of sanity seeped through on Earth—the low-hanging fruit would be the first to go. Sea of Tranquility 1. Eastern Sea 2. Sea of Serenity 1. New Beijing 2. A bunch of miners and astro-scientists would become small green icons in the midpoint of a radar screen, with fast-moving dots blinking toward them through narrowing sets of concentric circles.

  Dechert wanted to close his eyes and keep them closed. In their rush to launch he had asked Yates once again to pull his crew off the station, to let them bug out to the impact ridges of Menelaus Crater. But Yates couldn’t let mining stations be abandoned. There was $90 billion of SMA hardware scattered across the Moon’s equatorial bulge, and an effort had to be made to protect it. Dechert took two deep, calming breaths. What the hell was there to say? And how the hell could he say anything to Hale after his men had just been killed by a Chinese missile? Yet, just as Hale had his obligations, Dechert had his own.

  “Hale, maybe we should . . .”

  Hale turned his helmet toward Dechert as soon as he spoke, and the look in the captain’s eyes was empty and complete in its amorality. There was no right or wrong in the black of his pupils, no anger or sorrow. There was only a will to take the next action because that was what nature had intended.

  “Never mind,” Dechert said.

  The entropy was complete. Dechert felt as though he were spinning around the rim of a black hole, being sucked toward the singularity. No force in the universe, maybe not even God himself, could resist the pull of so much gravity.

  “One hundred eighty klicks from Crater Yangel’,” Thatch said. “ETA five minutes.”

  Hale nodded and spoke, a man on autopilot. “Why don’t you go in the back and work up your jetsuit, Thatcher? You can help us gear up when we land.”

  “Will do,” Thatch said, looking at Dechert before unbuckling his harness and crawling into the rear of the cabin.

  They flew the ship together in silence for several minutes, the thermal image on the windscreen casting a dark green glow to the cockpit. The eerie flatness of the Serenity basin gave way to a series of rounded bumps and ridges as they reached the outer approaches to the Apennine Mountains. Hale brought them lower to the lunar surface, dodging outcrops with light nudges on the controls.

  “We’re going for a quick in-and-out, Commander,” he finally said. “Just a confirmation of the crash. No retrieval of bodies if there aren’t any survivors. How long of a trip in the jetsuits will it be from Yangel’ to the shuttle’s beacon?”

  “I figure four hops each way, maybe fifty minutes total EVA time.” Dechert looked at him. “You understand there’s very little . . . ?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Two minutes to Yangel’.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?”

  Hale breathed and the sound comfort
ed Dechert. It was the first sign that the captain still retained some human qualities.

  “Best guess is we’ll launch on their substations soon after we get confirmation of the shuttle loss. Trayborr is pushing it right now.”

  “And they’ll launch on us. Probably on Serenity.”

  “Good chance. I don’t think either side will go after a main base yet. Too much risk of losing it all. But who knows? If a shooting war starts on Earth as well, all the gloves will come off.”

  So it would be Vernon, Lane, and Quarles in the crosshairs, with Standard tagging along for the death ride. Three miners and a bureaucrat manning antimissile defenses and electromagnetic pulse domes, hundreds of kilometers from any help. God help them.

  “My people aren’t soldiers, Hale.”

  “They’re going to have to be.”

  Dechert shook his head, his jaw clenched. “No, the first whiff I get of a launch, they’re bugging out. They can set the auto defenses, but I’ll be damned if I’ll leave them there to die.”

  “You make that call, Commander. It’s not my station, and they’re not my people. But you’ll have to answer for it.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  They could see Crater Yangel’s blast wall now, a nine kilometer lip reaching up from the monolithic expanse of the lunar desert. Hale slowed the shuttle and pulled it up from the surface of the Moon, and Dechert felt his stomach lurch as the craft climbed over the looming cliffs and began its rapid drop into the crater’s mouth.