Gunpowder Moon

  “Jesus.”

  After five seconds of listening, Dechert realized with a jolt that his station was being put to sleep. It was in emergency lockdown/shutdown, the type of quick-freeze that would be initiated only in a full-scale solar storm. And there was no solar storm—only a fleet of missiles flying more than seven thousand kilometers per hour toward his entrapped crew.

  “Dechert,” Thatch yelled into the com. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Station’s on emergency shutdown,” Dechert managed. “Crew’s still inside.”

  “What the hell?”

  Dechert ignored him. Think. Slow down. The infrared Moon view above the video display in his helmet began to blur, the interlocking grids becoming a haze of glowing green. Could the Chinese have sent a command directly into the CORE, ordering it to lock down and turn off its defenses? Impossible. Only hardwired code could shut down the station, and the CORE was completely protected from wireless signals. Could they have snaked a line into the station itself? No, it had to come from within.

  “Quarles, run command override Dechert two-one-one-two. Repeat, Dechert two-one-one-two.”

  “Roger. Dechert twenty-one twelve.”

  Quarles punched in the command. The sirens still wailed. The Bullpen door continued to close—now half shut. Thirty seconds more, and they’d be sealed inside the station.

  “Negative on command override.”

  “Can you run a bypass into the CORE?”

  Vernon appeared in the video’s background, outside the Bullpen door. He was trying to wedge one of the crawler’s thick hydraulic tire chucks into the portal in an effort to keep it open. It had only a few meters to go before shutting them in completely.

  “Negative on bypass. Takes too long. I’m shit out of ideas.”

  How much time left before missile impact? Three minutes? Dechert’s mind flashed through alternatives. Quarles and Lane had to keep trying to regain control of the station’s servers so they could get the outer pressure door open and keep the defensive systems on. Waters had to keep the Bullpen hatch ajar so they could all make it to the rover and escape the station—if they could find a way to pry open the outer doors.

  “Standard, help Waters!” Dechert yelled. The commissioner’s head snapped up when he heard his name, and he turned and shuffled toward Waters, unused to the bulk of his pressure suit and to the need for immediate action.

  “I can keep the mains online, Commander, and I should be able to sequence the autodefenses, because they’re off the CORE’s operating system,” Lane said, “but we’re locked out of the pressure-door controls. We can’t open the outer hatch.”

  “I count three minutes to impact,” Hale said.

  “Lane, can you blow the outer doors?”

  “Negative. Explosives are in the shed.”

  “Acetylene torch?”

  “Negative. Takes at least ten minutes.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds as they all went through the alternatives again. The tire chuck Vernon had wedged into the Bullpen door began to bend from the thousands of pounds of pressure being exerted on it. Should they get into the Bullpen and take their chances, or retreat deeper into the station?

  “Lane, what about sealing yourselves into the Hole?” Dechert asked. “Can you get down there in time?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t know if we can open and close the roof.”

  “What about the observatory?” Thatch asked. “Blow the glass.”

  “Shield doors are reading down in Observatory.”

  Dechert, Hale, and Thatch began their descent over the open mouth of Crater Yangel’. They could see the shuttle now, parked on a small ledge just inside the impact wall about a kilometer below them. Just a few seconds more, and they could begin the run back to Serenity. Maybe the autodefenses would stay online and knock the incoming missiles out of space. Maybe things could still be salvaged.

  Maybe . . .

  The crack of a rifle shot went off in the station. Dechert’s ears rang with the sound. He saw Lane and Quarles flinch and look up, saw Standard stumble back from the Bullpen door, and saw Waters’s head snap back and turn, the visor on his helmet cracking into spider webs.

  The titanium tire chuck had snapped in two and hit Waters in the head, smashing his helmet with machine force.

  “Vernon!” Lane screamed.

  They went to him. Standard turned him over. The Bullpen door—now a little more than four feet from closing them in. Waters didn’t move.

  “He’s venting,” Quarles said. “Jesus Christ, man, he’s losing pressure.”

  “Seal his helmet,” Dechert yelled. “You’re almost out of atmosphere. And get him into the Bullpen. Quarles! Do you hear me? Quarles? Get in the Bullpen!”

  A few random pops of static disrupted the signal. The video feed distorted in waves, first horizontally and then vertically. It fuzzed over completely. It came back again long enough for Dechert to see a horrific scene: Lane running to snatch a bottle of emergency sealant off the bulkhead wall. Quarles leaning over Vernon and yelling his name. Standard, now trying to hold the Bullpen door open with only his thin legs and arms as leverage, a weakling Sisyphus, fighting a losing battle against a rock that was about to roll over him.

  “Lane!” Dechert yelled into the com. He got no response.

  The video fuzzed over again. Dechert tried to increase the signal strength. The picture came back and then died. The screen was black now, the hum of a dead transmission filling Dechert’s ears.

  “Lane, Jonathan, report. Lane! Jonathan!”

  The signal disappeared. Dechert cued his computer to reset. There was nothing but black space in a small rectangular border.

  “Dechert, I’ve lost all communications with Peary Crater as well,” Hale said, his voice coming in as if from a great distance. “We’re being jammed.”

  A muted alarm rang in Dechert’s helmet. He looked down and saw that they were only a few hundred meters from the surface. The touchdown beacon flared to life, illuminating a landing area about twenty meters east of the shuttle, just a few feet in front of the sheer edge of the cliff. Dechert paid the treacherous landing sequence little notice.

  “Lane, Jonathan, report.”

  “What the hell’s happening?” Thatch asked.

  Dechert ignored him, continually trying to punch reset on the frequency button with blinks of his eyes. They landed on the narrow promontory, close enough to the edge to look down into the night-shaded abyss of Crater Yangel’. Dechert stumbled twice and came to a halt near the drop-off, breathing in gasps, his hands on his knees and his temples throbbing.

  The final tally had been set. His team at Serenity would most likely be dead in two minutes. Images of the video feed filled his head as his mind raced through the odds of what would happen next. What were the chances of surviving a missile strike? Were they able to at least keep the autodefenses online? Could the system intercept the smart projectiles before they hit?

  Dechert straightened. He turned to walk back to the shuttle, but he had little energy left. Hale turned toward the shuttle, too, without saying a word, keeping a comfortable distance from Dechert. Thatch stood ten meters away, glowing infrared near the lip of the crater wall, a halo of moondust falling around where he had just landed. The gray dust on his legs and boots stood out as cold spots on the IR signature.

  Fleeting images came together in Dechert’s mind and snapped into place like a dead bolt, stopping time. A white spacesuit staring back at him from the broken innards of the Molly Hatchet, its legs covered in dust. A thick fringe of grime on the control panel at Spiral 6. Groombridge treads at the water mine—old boots from the back of a storage locker. The assassin in the safe house video: A big man, and fast . . .

  Dechert put a hand on the shuttle’s hull near the hatch controls, as if he were taking a rest. He locked his knees so that he wouldn’t fall down. His face burned as a drop of sweat ran down the center of his nose from the bridge to the tip, and fell below his neckli
ne. It had to come from within. He reached for the rail gun at his midsection with his concealed right arm, trying to peer to his left without turning his helmet.

  Thatch already had his gun in his hands.

  “Hale!” Dechert yelled.

  Somehow Hale saw it coming, some instinct moving him into action at the tone in Dechert’s voice. A warrior’s alertness, or maybe he had suspected Thatch all along. He moved with improbable grace in the bulky spacesuit, bending low on a knee, spinning his body, and pulling his own rail gun from the holster on his belly.

  He pointed the gun at Thatch. Thatch fired first. The tiny projectile came out in silence, unimpressively. Just a small puff of plasma and a blue arc of electricity. But it hit Hale’s chest at ten thousand kilometers per hour, making the size of the round inconsequential. Hale’s body flexed inward as if hit by a cannon shot. His shoulder blades snapped with the force. He flipped up and backward over the ledge of the promontory, gas venting from his open chestplate as he fell into Crater Yangel’.

  Dechert had his own gun out and fired at Thatch. Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Then he remembered that Thatch was the one who had loaded the rail guns onto the shuttle. Thatch stood unmoving in the dark of the cliff wall, his weapon recharging.

  Dechert dropped the useless gun and turned and walked to the drop-off, expecting Thatch to shoot him in the back. He looked over the edge and saw Hale falling, a smudge of heat in a frozen abyss. His body bounced once on a ledge five hundred meters below them and then spun into the blackness until it was a green dot in the infrared. In ten seconds there was nothing.

  Thatch walked to the edge and looked down as well, his gun still pointed at Dechert’s guts. They stood there for what seemed like a minute, looking down in silence, and then they turned to each other.

  Thatch. The assassin in the video. Cole’s killer. The man who sabotaged the station. The one who started it all—the one who brought war to the Moon.

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “You said you never took a walk at Posidonius, Thatch. But I looked inside the Hatchet before they took her away, and I saw your spacesuit. You did the first EVA to set a timer on the bomb, didn’t you? The satellite trigger never made sense.”

  Thatch grunted. “Moondust on the suit.”

  “And you logged a flight to Spiral 6 two weeks ago, but the control panel was too dirty for you to have been there. I’m guessing you were busy crippling the water mine.”

  “Dust again. I swear I’m going to live in a rain forest if I get off this rock alive.”

  “One thing I still can’t figure out,” Dechert said. “How’d you land at DS-7 and leave no trace?”

  Thatch tilted his head. “Rigged the outflow valves to brush over the LZ.” He looked at Dechert. “You’re smarter than I thought.”

  “No, I’m pretty damned stupid. There was other stuff, Thatch. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before now.”

  “Give yourself some credit. No one else did.”

  “You killed Cole.”

  Thatch stepped back from the ledge, his gun still pointed at Dechert. “I didn’t like it. He was a good kid.”

  Dechert edged back from the ledge as well. “You killed us all, Thatch. For what? Money?”

  Thatch stiffened and Dechert could see anger in the movement.

  “It’s like you to think that, Dechert, always playing the innocent. You can’t imagine the idea that I’m taking orders. That I’m doing my job, just like you.”

  Thatch turned on his headlamps, blinding Dechert. The burst of light automatically shut down the infrared viewscreen in his helmet, returning the autofilters to visible light. He blinked the spots out of his eyes and opened them, turning on his own lamps. He could see Thatch’s face now in the pale illumination. The big man was frowning as if angry at himself for not having fired yet.

  “You’re OEA, aren’t you?”

  “I was.”

  Dechert looked down at the heads-up display in his helmet. A single dot, blinking red.

  “So that’s it, Thatch? You take orders from some lunatics who were kicked out of special forces on the back end of the Max, and that makes it all okay? You killed your own crew, for Christ’s sake. You started a war.”

  Thatch looked at the shuttle, then at Dechert. “You have no idea where my orders come from. You still don’t get it, do you, Dechert? You think you can run away from Earth and hide up here, and everything will be okay, because the Moon is just kumbaya?”

  Dechert braced himself, waiting to be shot. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “I’ll give you one minute, mostly because I’m sick of your bullshit. You run around the Moon defending your buddies at NB-2. You’re a sucker, Dechert. The Chinese have been lying about their He-3 production for years. They’re converting fifty metric tons a month, and the dipshits at The Hague and the ISA won’t do a thing about it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, Dechert. It’s real shit. The Chinese have won the Moon. And they’re about to win the solar system. And we’re going to continue being what we’ve been since the day the Max hit: a third-rate nation. Unless we do something about it.”

  Dechert kept his hands away from his chestplate, palms extending outward in submission, knowing that a man like Thatch, who had lived among them for three years while waiting to kill them, would pull the trigger on instinct.

  “Let’s say you’re right, Thatch. How the hell is a war on the Moon going to change anything? Or do they want this thing to spread to Earth as well?”

  Thatch shifted his feet, impatient, his eyes getting smaller.

  “I don’t do strategy, Dechert. I follow my orders. But I can tell you one thing, I’m not going to sit around and wait for America to slide back to what she was five years ago. I was out there in the wastelands while you were cruising at fifty thousand feet. I saw kids getting raped. I saw them getting eaten, after they were fucking raped. I’m never going to see that again. I’ll expend you and Waters and Briggs and anyone else so that never happens again. I’ll expend myself if I have to.”

  “Is that why you sealed the station? You could have let them escape.”

  “Like I said. Orders. There had to be enough casualties.”

  The blinking light at the bottom of Dechert’s helmet turned green. He turned his head toward Yangel’, as if to scan the blackness one last time for Hale. He looked up and to the right and blinked twice into his optical cue. The heads-up display in his helmet keyed into sequence.

  “We’re all expendable, aren’t we, Thatch?”

  He turned back, and they looked at each other, standing together on the inside of the rim wall. No one knows what it means to be alone until they’ve been in space, Dechert thought.

  “I regret it, Dechert,” Thatch said, and he raised the gun barrel. “You’re a self-righteous sonofabitch, but you’re a good man.”

  “You’re not,” Dechert said.

  He closed his right eye and opened it again. The green dot flashed and he heard a shrill warble in his headset as the computer accepted his command.

  The minijets on Thatch’s suit flared to life. The two locked eyes and he thought that Thatch flashed him a grin, this time in recognition. He blasted from the Moon’s surface a millisecond later.

  Dechert watched Thatch ascend into space. He could see the big man struggle at first, trying to hit the kill switch on the minijets. Then his body steadied and Dechert saw him aim the rail gun. Dechert jumped to his left as Thatch fired—an impossible shot—the angles all wrong and no chance for sight alignment. But Dechert felt a pull on the back of his shoulder and two sounds rushed into his ears, the hiss of escaping air and the low chime of a pressure alarm. He went to the ground in disbelief, rolling in slow motion onto his back, desperately feeling for the tear in his suit. His eyes caught Thatch through a haze of falling moondust, still climbing into space, a blue arc once again spitting from his rail gun. The second bullet punched into the regol
ith an inch from Dechert’s faceplate. The concussion knocked him onto his side. He rolled over again, in a panic now, blinded by the ring of dust kicked up by the bullets. He pushed the air from his lungs and tried to focus on not breathing as he felt the warmth of the suit escaping and the coldness of space closing in. He pulled a bottle of quick-seal from a leg pocket, but then realized he couldn’t find the tear on his back anyways.

  Dechert’s world spun around in snapshots and distorted sounds:

  The heads-up display showing pressure at 0.6 atm.

  Oxygen at 20 percent.

  The hissing of air.

  The alarm even louder.

  He crawled to his feet and stumbled toward the shuttle, remembering at the last second to look up. Thatch was a white dot in space, but he fired yet again, the projectile whomping into the Moon a few yards to Dechert’s right. Blackness closed in on the margins of Dechert’s vision. He reached the shuttle and punched at the hatch, his sight reduced to two small circles directly in front of him. The door opened. Dechert lurched in, his hand reaching for the pressure controls. He was blind now. He scrabbled at his helmet as he heard the pressurization sequence kick in. It sounded miles away. He tried again to pop the seals on his helmet, but it was too late. He collapsed on the shuttle floor and everything went away.

  24

  He heard an alarm clock and tried to punch snooze, but the button didn’t work. He kept trying, but the beeping wouldn’t stop. The sound clawed at his dreams, twisting them until he realized they weren’t real at all. He felt cold and opened his eyes. Dechert was lying on a rubberized floor, his cheek pressed against the matting, a temperature warning still ringing in the distance. It took him a few seconds to realize he was alive—that somehow he had engaged the pressure button and managed to pull off his helmet before passing out. He didn’t remember doing either.

  He wouldn’t have moved if it weren’t for the impossible cold . . . and the memory of Thatch firing at him from space. How in God’s name had he managed to hit me while being launched like a cruise missile? That was his first thought. Then he wondered where Thatch was now. Dechert got to his knees and crawled to the shuttle cockpit, his breath steaming and his nostrils frozen. He turned on the heaters and then slipped into the pilot’s seat, firing up the computer to search for Thatch’s beacon, all the while craning his neck to look out the window into space. The locater numbers came back. Thatch was six hundred kilometers from the Moon and traveling faster than a bullet. His thrusters were drained, but that didn’t matter anymore. He was heading toward Arkab in the constellation Sagittarius. Arkab. Almost four hundred light-years from Earth. Dechert imagined Thatch arriving there in a few hundred million years or so—a frozen man, crossing the void alone. It was almost enough to make him smile. But then he remembered what Thatch had done and knew there was nothing to smile about.