Gunpowder Moon

  “Thirty seconds,” Dechert said.

  “Roger that.”

  “I’m sorry about your men, Captain.”

  “Thank you. So am I.”

  The three men rocketed up from the Moon’s surface in a staggered line, fifty meters apart. Dechert could feel the push of the high-energy thrusters on his back as they ascended from inside the crater rim, their helmet visors set to infrared so they could see one another in the darkness. The hop felt even more disorienting than his first jetsuit leap into Dionysius because of the blackout conditions. They couldn’t risk lamps or beacons this close to the Chinese, and without them it was impossible to get any sense of spatial orientation.

  Their visors provided an artificial grid view, like a scene in a virtual reality game, but the image wasn’t real enough for Dechert to feel as if he were taking part in the scenario unfolding in front of his eyes. He had to trust the telemetry numbers and the false horizon on his heads-up display, never mind the feeling of extreme nausea that threatened to climb up from the back of his throat and take over the upper reaches of his brain. The positive g’s made it feel like all of his organs were being pushed down into his pelvis, giving him an almost uncontrollable desire to squirm. He resisted because he learned from his flight in Dionysius to remain as motionless as possible, so the thrusters on his shoulders and backpack and boots would remain in sync. Dechert imagined being encased in the middle of a giant lake of tar as he looked around the artificial grid-world he was in, and he began to drum up other analogies to keep his mind off the nausea. A mosquito caught in black amber. A diver trapped in the inky midwater of the ocean, with bioluminescent creatures scattered like stars all around him . . .

  “Is this going to start feeling normal?” Thatch asked, breaking the silence. His voice sounded a note higher than usual and he was breathing heavily. The intrusion of sudden noise into Dechert’s helmet made him lurch inside his suit.

  “No.”

  “Great. What happens if you puke in your helmet?”

  “Don’t.” Dechert looked to his right and saw Hale, a glowing silhouette in the deep gray-green of the infrared and the amplified light of the surrounding stars. “How you doing, Captain?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He hadn’t really expected a different answer. “Okay. Two-zero seconds to apogee; two minutes, ten seconds to first hop.”

  “Remind me what to do when we get there,” Thatch said between breaths.

  “Take two steps like you’re dunking a basketball and punch reengage. It’s fly-by-wire from there.”

  Neither of them answered. Maybe they were worried about talking this close to the Chinese, or maybe they were trying not to get sick. Dechert knew it was a bit of both for him. He waited a few seconds and then switched the com to a private channel, using blinks of his eyes to cue the retinal sensors that Quarles had installed in his EVA helmet. It was a modification that allowed him to control the walk-profile computer on his chestplate, which regulated everything from his propulsion systems to his communications, without moving his hands. He hoped that the rest of the modifications Quarles had made would work just as well.

  “Lane, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go secure.”

  Static popped on the line for a few seconds. “Secure.”

  “What’s your status?”

  “We’re all in pressure suits, ready to bug out and waiting for orders. Radar screens are empty so far.”

  “Roger that. Patch in the video feed and get out of the CORE. Go down and do the same in the main hangar. If we have to go back to secure, find a reason to leave the room. I don’t want Standard hearing anything he doesn’t have to.”

  “Okay. How is it out there?”

  “Dark.”

  They rose out of the crater to the Moon’s surface and Dechert could see the gray silhouette of the Lake of Happiness before them. Its ancient lava flow ran through the Apennine Mountains like a river valley cutting between looming peaks. A blackened smear on the Moon in the full light of the sun, but in infrared it was a patch of absolute nothingness. Thatch had them locked onto the emergency beacon marking the spot where the shuttle had crashed. Hale made futile calls to his doomed team of marines every twenty seconds.

  “Specter, search-and-rescue, actual. Specter, SAR.”

  Nothing came back but static, and after the fifth call, they all knew it was a search-and-rescue mission in name only.

  “You sure the Chinese didn’t pick up the shuttle’s communications last time?” Thatch asked. “Maybe we should be quiet.”

  “They were sitting there waiting for them, Thatch,” Dechert said, recalling his training on how to set up a kill-box and realizing that someone with serious military skills was now operating on the Chinese side of the mare. “And you heard Quarles in preflight. There’s probably too much commo flying around the Moon right now for us to be detected.”

  “Yeah, so says Quarles. But what if they do pick us up?”

  Hale answered this time. “Well, they wouldn’t waste a missile on us. If we’re in line of sight, they’d just kill us with a HELS or a rail gun like the one you have strapped to your suit.”

  “What the hell is a HELS?”

  “High-energy laser system. But it’s better if you don’t know what they can do to a man.”

  “That’s not exactly encouraging.”

  “Didn’t mean for it to be.”

  The three astronauts descended; the thrusters on their jetsuits flipping over to shoot a few bursts of plasma spaceward and then turning back toward the ground and releasing smaller bursts to slow them down. Positive g’s turned to negative as they dipped from the apogee of their hop, and Dechert’s organs began to float up into his rib cage. He reached for the harness at his midsection, for the matted grip of the gun that Hale had just reminded them of. It felt strange in his gloved hand. He was a man used to weapons, but he never thought he would have one tucked into his spacesuit on the surface of the Moon. Hale had insisted that all three of them take one from the weapons locker the marines had brought with them to Serenity. They were curious devices—handheld rail guns with twin-mounted conducting bars welded to either side of a dark blue tungsten barrel. They looked more like science experiments than weapons to Dechert, with their bulbous magnetic accelerators, long, slim barrels, and gas ejection ports. But he had read enough about them to not be scornful; the projectile that these guns fired came out with enough energy to go through a man’s head and continue unabated into orbit—with almost no recoil.

  Dechert had never considered himself an intelligent man, but he had enough self-awareness to know from an early age that he possessed a keen sense of irony. How could he do anything now but shake his head at the situation he was in? Three men flying from the Sea of Serenity toward the Lake of Happiness, with guns strapped to their guts and an almost certainly dead crew somewhere in front of them? He decided to think of all lunar features from that point forward in their Latin names. Mare Serenitatis. Lacus Felicitatis. The classical language made them sound less optimistic.

  “Forty seconds to first hop,” Dechert said. “Check your LZ for terrain.”

  “Looks clear.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Copy.”

  Their speed seemed to grow as the surface came closer, but Dechert knew they were decelerating. He exhaled in relief that they wouldn’t have to change their landing areas as he watched the heads-up display pinpoint his touchdown with four inwardly pointing red arrows. The arrows started to blink. He could see the regolith in greater definition now, even in the infrared. What had looked like a polished lunar floor from above became a field of rocky scree on a shallow slope. Would he slip and take off on the wrong trajectory? His computer beeped a warning. The machine sound of their breathing echoed in their helmets.

  “Five seconds, four, three, two, one . . . mark . . . step, and step, and engage.”

  All three of them lit their thrusters at the same time, bou
ncing twice on the lunar soil and then rocketing spaceward. Dechert stole a look to his left and his right to see that they were still in formation. He felt sweat stinging his eyes and he wished he could wipe them.

  “Attitude is eighty-two degrees and nominal,” the computer said into his helmet in an anodyne voice. “Climbing to four thousand meters in one-five-zero seconds.”

  “Good God,” Thatch said into the open com, gulping in air with rapid breaths.

  “Get used to it,” Dechert replied. “You’ve got three more hops to go before we get there.”

  21

  When they were halfway to the crash site, Hale stopped calling to his dead crew. He left the channel open but only static came back across the dark lunar valley. The talk between the three men was limited to quick commands and affirmations. Every kilometer they flew took them closer to the spot where a Chinese launch crew had fired a surface-to-air missile at the marine shuttle. Could the attackers have stayed in anticipation of a rescue to shoot down the next team as well, or could they have moved forward to the crash site to lay a second ambush? Did the three of them provide enough of a radar profile to be fired at with an automated gun or a laser, or enough of an infrared signature to even be detected?

  Dechert shook the questions away. He had learned long ago not to linger on the unknown avenues of death. In Lebanon, where half the windows held a sniper, that path led to a rapid mental breakdown. He closed his mind to the dangers ahead and tried to focus on the events leading up to the bombing of the Molly Hatchet, as though a sudden epiphany to the mystery could stop the scenario that was unfolding before them. But every thought ended with a question.

  How could Kale Foerrster have put a bomb on the crawler? Dechert had checked the ensign’s dossier during his last sleepless evening before the marine mission, calling in some hard-won markers at Peary Crater to get access to the blue-tabbed sections of the lunar pilot’s employment file. Foerrster’s background only reinforced him as a suspect. He had joined the SMA after three years with the Office of Environmental Analysis, a benign-sounding agency that had been formed after the Thermal Maximum with the stated mission of mitigating future environmental disasters. In reality, it was a clandestine wing of Military Intelligence set up to combat the insurrectionists and militias roaming the North and South American post–Thermal Maximum badlands.

  Word of the OEA’s tactics had trickled to Dechert over the years through his military contacts. They were like the “Studies and Observations Group” of old—the SOG operators of the Vietnam War who were so far off the grid that they took orders mostly from themselves. Two months in the triple-canopied jungle alone, stalking the enemy like jaguars hunting food. What the hell would that do to a man? If Foerrster had done more than paperwork for that crew, he could be capable of anything.

  But as logical as it seemed to blame Foerrster for the bombing, especially in light of his background, one thread in the story refused to hold the weave. There was just no way he could have gotten into the Bullpen without Lane or Vernon noticing it. When a pressure door is opened on the Moon, there are a lot of alerts. Something was pricking Dechert’s mind like a burr, some instinct, and it had burned there since the very beginning. He had sensed the same hesitation in Lin Tzu. I only know that I trust no one, and neither should you, Tzu had said. Both parties appear to want what is coming. If that were true, it led to a grim question: How do you stop a war that both sides have deemed inevitable, maybe even necessary?

  Dechert refocused on the black and green virtual landscape around him, telling himself that musings were pointless. Only one thing was certain: The Chinese had just shot down an American shuttle. They had killed four marines patrolling neutral territory. Dechert reached down again for his weapon. If commandos were waiting for them in the Lacus Felicitatis, Dechert was more than willing to fire back. At least the ones he killed wouldn’t be his friends from New Beijing 2.

  “Strong beacon signal two klicks ahead,” Thatch said. “We’ll be landing three hundred meters short of it.”

  They touched down a minute later, each of them stumbling forward for a few meters as their legs got used to the sensation of remaining on the ground. They looked at one another. Any other time, what they had just done would have been an incredible thing, something to celebrate with the colorful adjectives of test pilots. The first formation jetsuit flight on the Moon, in total blackout conditions. But there was nothing here to gloat about. They turned toward the beacon’s signal and began to shuffle in its direction.

  They were in a low valley; a sheer cliff loomed in the distance. They bounced forward, their feet hitting the regolith every two or three meters, and when they got to within a few hundred meters of the cliff’s decaying walls, they saw what they had come to see. How could it be missed? A crater the size of a small office building several stories up the face, gaping at them like an open mouth. A crater on the vertical axis rather than the horizontal, where a crater had no business being. They continued to make their way forward in silence, moving slower now, looking up at the deep rounded hole in the rock face. As they got close enough to have to crane their necks upward, they began to see debris on the ground, small pieces of metal and wiring and carbon fiber strewn across the cinereous lava flow of the valley, mostly unscorched by an explosion that had occurred in the vacuum. Nothing larger than a filing cabinet was left of the shuttle and most of the pieces were smaller than Dechert’s gloved hand. They stopped in the midst of the debris field, within a stone’s throw of the wall. Thatch tilted his helmet down to read the Lunar Positioning Satellite pad strapped to his wrist, and then he shuffled a few yards to the right, scanning the regolith beneath his boots. He leaned over and picked up a small white tube and dusted the ashen lunar soil off with a gloved hand, turning to show it to Hale and Dechert. A red light blinked at its rounded edge.

  The emergency beacon.

  Dechert stared at the thing as if it could tell him the final story of the young marines, the last seconds of their short lives. He cursed the SMA for not putting an escape pod or ejection seats on their long-hop lunar shuttles. The miners had fought for catastrophic survival modules after John Ross Fletcher’s crash near Tycho, but the Administration had already received its contingent of shuttles under a subsidized contract, and it didn’t want to go back to drink from Washington’s trough one time too many. Just another goddamned way of making the margins and keeping their federal minders happy. If Cabrera and her men had had a way to get out of that shuttle before it spun into the cliff wall, they might all be standing here now, waiting for rescue.

  Hale looked at the beacon in Thatch’s hand for a long moment and then turned away, nudging a piece of unmarred metal on the valley floor with the toe of his boot. He opened a flap on his EVA suit and pulled out an Air & Space Marine patch and laid it on the piece of wreckage, where it would remain untouched for a million years if another human hand didn’t move it. Then he straightened up and looked at the marker for several seconds.

  “All right,” he said, and switched channels on the com. “Peary Crater, this is Cherokee.”

  “Go ahead, Cherokee.”

  “Confirmed shuttle down. All souls lost.”

  “Copy, Cherokee. Shuttle down. All souls lost. Return to Serenity and remain at Condition 1. Wait for further instructions. Copy?”

  “Copy.”

  Dechert looked out across the shadowed plain and saw what must have been a helmet sitting near a small impact crater, glowing in the infrared. Its heat signature was dying as it froze in the supercold vacuum, fading its rounded margins from dark green to black. He took a step toward the helmet and then stopped. What additional nightmares lay over there that he didn’t need to see? This isn’t a recovery mission, he thought. It’s a tally. He turned away to prepare for the return hop to Crater Yangel’. Let the bastards at Peary Crater come out here and collect the remains once all the shooting stops.

  22

  John Ross Fletcher picked up a rock and threw it at the vaul
ted cavern ceiling. It ricocheted off the wall in silence, knocking down a few chunks of petrified lava that floated to the ground in slow motion. He warmed up a handheld radar and blasted the roof and side walls with microwaves to check the structural integrity of the mammoth grotto.

  “Always good to make sure the ceiling won’t fall down on you,” Fletcher said. “These lava tubes aren’t young.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  Fletcher looked back at Dechert and grinned. “Yeah, I’m joking. Mostly.”

  He went to the wall and flipped a switch and a horizontal bank of lights on either side of the cavern flickered and flared, illuminating the length of the passageway in the flat blue xenon glow of a subway tunnel. A three-story pyramid of boulders and broken rocks loomed before them, blocking the way to the mining pit.

  “The catwalk’s over here,” Fletcher said, turning to his right. “Watch your step.”

  They shuffled through the most celebrated lava tube on the Moon, an underground pipe that stretched for three kilometers beneath the southern spine of the Dorsa Lista. Dechert had read about these tubes and how much bigger they were than their geologic cousins back on Earth, but he had never imagined the full scale. The tunnel was bigger than the nave of Westminster Abbey. He recalled a John Christopher novel about just such a cavern, inhabited by an intelligent being that spread its plantlike tendrils through the underbelly of the Moon, and he could almost envision such a creature living in a place like this.

  “Why didn’t they just build Serenity 1 in here?” he asked, his head swiveling to take in the scope of the place. “Looks pretty comfortable.”

  “Not enough titanium in the regolith around here. Too far away from the He-3 fields north of Menelaus, and they couldn’t convince some of the selenologists that a Moonquake wouldn’t bring down the roof, no matter how much they did to reinforce it.”

  “So . . . no good reason?”