Gunpowder Moon

  Yates sat back in his chair and took a tiny sip of the scotch. His white eyebrows hung over the glass like a condor’s wings as he studied Dechert’s face. “A reckoning,” he whispered. “All right, Commander. What are your terms?”

  Dechert stood up and walked over to the panoramic window, which ran from one end of Yates’s cylindrical corner office to the other and gave a spectacular view of the sunlit reaches of the lunar North Pole. An astronaut appeared below, bounding along the surface toward a storage silo at the far corner of the station. Dechert could see the small plumes of moondust he kicked up in his wake.

  “Pretty simple. A bilateral weapons ban in space. And the Jupiter mission for my team.” He took a sip of the scotch. “I want Briggs for station chief, and I want full control of the mining operation.”

  Yates coughed into a closed fist. “Well, you don’t come cheap. Do you really think you can blackmail them, Dechert? At some point new leaders will take over in D.C., and they won’t care if you expose the dirty little secrets of their predecessors.”

  Dechert turned. “I’m sure that’s true, Yates. But for now I think they do care, and that’s all that matters. Let the ones who remain standing know that if any of my crew conveniently dies in the next few years, my little montage of Thatch doing bad things will be all over the stream, with a lot of appending information.”

  “But a weapons ban in space?” Yates said, chuckling. He put his glass down on a stone coaster and rubbed the wrinkled seam of his forehead with an index finger. “Isn’t that like asking for world peace?”

  Dechert shrugged and returned to his seat. “It’s like a one-night stand in Vegas. It might not matter a month after it happens, but it feels pretty damned good at the moment. I just want to buy some time so my crew isn’t running from missiles again anytime soon. Once we’re dead and gone, you assholes can start all the inner-system wars you want.”

  Yates considered him. Dechert had heard enough through side channels to know the predicament the government was in. Parrish and the rest of the Earth media had been banging down doors in Washington and Beijing to figure out what had happened on the Moon over the last few days, and despite the news embargo, word was trickling down to the home planet about the destruction that had been wrought on U.S. and Chinese mining stations. The main bases were still intact but Sea of Serenity 1 and New Beijing 2 had been wiped from the lunar surface, as well as a few smaller Chinese and American mining stations. His friend Lin Tzu was dead, as were twelve other Chinese miners and soldiers. Tzu had stayed at his post until a U.S. missile bored in and ended his life, and even though Dechert knew the Chinese government would never have allowed him to evacuate the station, he felt a slight twinge of envy at the bravery of his last act. Who was the better man? Once again Tzu had proven that he was, by a significant margin.

  Nine U.S. crew members had also been killed, including Hale, Thatch, and the shuttle team led by Cabrera. Billions of dollars of mining infrastructure had been destroyed, tourism and sys-ex and terra-energy franchises had been put in jeopardy, and Chinese and American production of helium-3 had been set back by months.

  And then it all stopped, like the shutter on a camera being closed.

  The fallout had begun to disperse behind a lot of important doors on Earth. The previous head of the Office of Environmental Analysis—currently the chief of naval operations and a candidate for president—had been quietly relieved of his duties. Word had it that he was going to claim ill health and retire from the presidential race. Other heads had been lopped off completely, mostly two-star generals and a few cabinet-level bureaucrats.

  But why had the Chinese agreed to stand down? Why had they been so quiet about a one-day war that apparently had been launched by the other side? That was the one thing that Dechert couldn’t figure out, but he knew from the look on Yates’s face that the Moon’s American prefect was about to tell him.

  “You know Thatch was right about the Chinese?” Yates finally asked. “They were grossly underreporting their He-3 production to the ISA, and working side deals in Holland and Peru to cut us out of some very large contracts. They also stole our specs for the magnetic drive on Magellan, maybe the biggest intelligence coup of the twenty-first century. Word has it they’re launching the Yang Liwei to Uranus before next summer, and it will get there before we get to Jupiter. They’ve been playing the big new bully on the block to a tee. They were stomping their boot right on our neck, and they didn’t seem to care that we knew it.”

  Dechert shook his head. “So we start a goddamned war?”

  “You think I’m agreeing with this lunacy? I’m just painting the picture for you, Dechert, because you’re not very good at looking at things from more than six feet above the ground.”

  “So paint away,” Dechert said. “This crazy bastard who used to head up the OEA, Admiral Parks, he ran some kind of clandestine group that planted Thatch on the Moon three years ago, just in case they needed to drum up a war with the Chinese—by killing our own people? Do you know how insane that sounds?”

  Yates nodded. “Of course it’s insane, but I doubt everything was as preplanned as you suggest. And have you forgotten how insane things have been on Earth for the last ten years? Do you think all the fear, all the insecurity that came out of the Max just fades away? Did you think our leaders would react well to becoming a secondary power?”

  Dechert shook his head. “So what did they get out of it? What could they possibly have gotten out of their own gold getting blown up on the Moon?”

  “I don’t know. A pause, maybe. A window for Europa to be based, and the mining operations in the Belt to start turning a profit. Probably, more than anything, they wanted to tell China they weren’t going to go quietly.”

  “And if the whole thing blew up into a war on Earth?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they had those chances calculated down to a percentage point. My guess is, they found the risk acceptable.”

  Dechert could feel his face getting hot. He took a drink and tried to keep his voice down. “Well, I don’t find it acceptable. And I’m not going to sit by and watch Parks and Foerrster and whoever else ran this thing quietly retire to their mansions on the Chesapeake Bay or their safe houses in the Solomon Islands. I told you I want a reckoning. Those bastards killed Cole. They damned near killed my entire team.”

  Yates chuckled, then held up a hand when he saw Dechert was about to blow.

  “Easy. I’m not laughing about Cole or anything else that happened up here. I lost people, too, and I won’t soon get over it. I’m laughing at your naïveté. If Thatch was right about anything, it was that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this: Do you really think a three-star admiral was the last person to sign off on a plan to stage a lunar conflict with China?”

  “Baby me, Yates. I’m still not getting you.”

  “Fine.” Yates stared at Dechert as he ran a finger along the rim of his tumbler. “Did you know that Admiral Parks and the president are both ring knockers?”

  “Come again?”

  “Ring knockers, Dechert. Naval Academy graduates. They were in the same class. I understand they roomed together as plebes.”

  Dechert sat back and took it in. “What . . . you’re saying the president of the United States did this?”

  “Well, I doubt that he knew all the details, and I’m sure you won’t find a written order anywhere, plausible deniability being what it is, but yes. It’s a pretty safe bet that a lunar war wasn’t initiated without his say-so.” Yates leaned forward. “In other words, this is no conspiracy of middle managers, Dechert. And that’s why I’m trying to get you to stop tilting at windmills.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “You’re surprised?” Yates asked. He stared at Dechert again and took another sip of his whiskey. “We’re not talking about some piddling oil field under the North Atlantic, Dechert. This is about the long-term rights to a power supply that could fuel the Eart
h for a thousand years, and perhaps beyond. We’re talking about the gateway to Jupiter and Uranus and the Kuiper Belt. Who knows? Whoever wins this treasure could be the first to reach Epsilon Eridani fifty years from now, and colonize the stars a hundred years after that.”

  He stood up and stretched, putting his hands behind his back and strolling around the desk. “How many kingdoms fell in antiquity trying to win the Silk Road or the spice routes from Asia? Silk and salt? Those are trinkets compared to helium-3, Dechert, the childhood toys of feckless princes.”

  “That was thousands of years ago, Yates,” Dechert said. He had heard this argument in a strikingly similar way from Lin Tzu, and it still irritated him. “I was hoping we could take into account some form of human evolution.”

  “Oh? Then you’re a damned fool. Let me give you the real picture, Dechert. We are still the beast, and we always will be. And all this stuff that we fight over—power, money, territory, helium-3—it’s little more than a carcass on an African plain. A more refined version of life and death in the animal kingdom.”

  Dechert finished his drink and put his glass down on Yates’s desk, ignoring the nearby coaster. He wanted to say that settling space could have changed all of that, that people could have set a new order to things when they left Earth. That they didn’t have to bring all their shit up to the heavens with them. But he only shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’ll let you fight for the scraps with the rest of the hyenas, Yates. I’ve done enough for those assholes, and I want out.”

  “Mmm,” Yates purred. He returned to his desk and sat down. “Which brings us to our current business. You know the spooks will find your secret file on the stream, this blind runner account that you boast of. They’ll find it and destroy it, and their current need to bow to your demands will be rendered obsolete.”

  Dechert laughed. “Are those the same guys who let China steal our plans for a deep-space drive?” He caught Yates’s eyes and held them. “My guy is smarter than their guys, Yates. If he cared a little more about the spoils you speak of, Quarles would probably be running the entire show by now. They’ll never find his program.”

  “You’re wrong, Dechert. Governments may be stupid and clumsy, but they have the advantage of brute force.” Yates straightened his jacket. “Listen, I’ve gone to the mat for you on this thing. I’ve even threatened them with my own personal treason if anything happened to you or your team. I like the idea of you being alive out there beyond the Asteroid Belt—the last idealist in the solar system. But you have to follow my lead on this, or I’ll cut you loose like a torn sail.”

  The two stared at each other for a few seconds, not speaking. Dechert relented. “Fine, what’s the proposal?”

  Yates sighed. “Simple. You hand over your little video of Thatch. You and your crew sign the mother of all nondisclosure agreements, and then you get Europa. Burling and Jenner are dead, so I can make the argument that you’re the next team up. They’ll like the idea of you being very far away, and it won’t be hard to pitch the value of you running the mining operations on Jupiter. You’ve always been a hell of a digger.”

  He put his palms on the table. “I can’t promise you much about the world peace thing, but if it helps, rumor has it we’re already talking to China about a five-year ban on weapons on the Moon.”

  “And Cole? Lin Tzu? Who pays for the lives that were taken?”

  Yates shrugged. “I don’t know, Dechert. If I had to guess, I’d say no one. You hurt them, but this isn’t a beast that you or I can bring down. Even if you went full disclosure with your video of what happened at Yangel’, they’d come up with a way to wriggle out of it. When it comes down to it, most people on Earth are still too worried about food to give two nickels about what happens on the Moon.”

  They locked eyes again as Yates slurped a piece of ice into his mouth and rolled it around his tongue. Dechert nodded and stood up.

  “I’ll do it, Yates, but between you and me, this thing isn’t over. Someday it will get out.”

  “Fine. Just take your scalps after I’m dead.”

  Dechert shook his head and turned to the door.

  “And Dechert?” Yates asked to his back.

  “What?”

  “Make me some money when you get to Europa, or all deals are off. Business is business, you know.”

  28

  “And I thought you loved the Moon,” Quarles said.

  They sat in the passenger hold of a freighter on the way to Low Earth Orbit 1. The station hung in space like a gleaming snowflake a few thousand kilometers away. Lane and Quarles were across from Dechert in folding jump seats, looking bruised and stiff but alive. They all stared out at the space station and the home planet below it. Earth took up half of the porthole. Its bright colors made it seem less than real.

  “I did love the Moon,” Dechert said, his eyes fixed on the Pacific Ocean. “It’s just too damned close to Earth.”

  Lane began to laugh, but she stopped midway when she looked at Dechert and saw that he wasn’t smiling.

  “I wonder how long it will be before you think the same thing about Jupiter,” she said.

  Vernon wasn’t with them. He was still in a medical pod in lunar orbit, getting treatment for his damaged lungs. Dechert had visited him every day for the last week, sick at the sight of a man who had been so strong, now stuck full of tubes and immersed in a nucleopeptide bath. The doctors said he would recover and could even make the trip to Jupiter if his lungs healed in time, but Dechert had never done well around the injured and was guiltily relieved that he wouldn’t see his mission chief for a while. He hoped that the next time he entered his hospital room, Vernon would at least be lying in a regular bed and looking human.

  The shuttle banked in its final approach to LEO-1, the spars of the station gleaming white and gray against the blue backdrop of Earth’s oceans. Six months of training if the deal holds up, Dechert mused, and then a one-year hop to Jupiter in the largest spaceship ever constructed. He wondered if the deep-space medical tests they gave these days were more intrusive than the ones he had to undergo for lunar service. Hopefully, the instruments were smaller by now.

  “I can’t believe we’re letting those bastards walk away from this,” Lane said, breaking the silence. “It feels like we’re leaving Cole behind.”

  Dechert’s eyes strayed from the window to Lane’s face. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you should look for a story about war and treachery on the Moon sometime next year, after we’re long gone. A Reuters story, by a kid named Josh Parrish.”

  Quarles’s eyes flared open. “You broke the NDA?”

  “Hell no. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Standard—from the moment he walked into Serenity 1. He had me give Parrish access to our server the day after our first meeting, so he could file a story to his editors back on Earth. How was I supposed to know the little snoop would look up my personal passwords?”

  “You mean . . . ?” Lane asked.

  “I mean I’m pretty sure he found a stream address that can’t be opened until the end of 2073. An address containing my updated personal logs. It might not have any videos, but you know how anal I am about writing down all the details.”

  “You’re my hero,” Quarles said.

  “All I did was misread reporters. I thought they had better ethics.”

  They laughed, and Dechert returned to the view below, the Earth taking up the entire margin of the glass now, no blackness of space to be seen. Quarles punched a button on a miniature player he had strapped to his belt, and the faraway voice of a singer spilled from the tiny device. A man who was long dead, singing about something stirring and trying to climb toward the light.

  “That’s some depressing stuff,” Lane said.

  “It’s deep, my princess of Jove,” Quarles replied. “Someday I’ll explain it to you.”

  “Call me Co
mmander, and don’t even try.”

  Quarles made a gagging gesture.

  “Good Lord,” Dechert grumbled.

  The shuttle slowed as it neared an open landing bay on one of the station’s rotating trusses. The Earth shone like a marker in the surrounding void, seductive and alive. Dechert stared at her oceans and continents and clouds, and thought of the Catoctin Mountains and their greenstone streams, brimming with trout.

  Then he closed his eyes and dreamed of Jupiter’s moons, the spell of the Earth broken.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank my agent, David Fugate of LaunchBooks Literary Agency, and my editor, David Pomerico of Harper Voyager. They made this a much better book than it would have been and did so in true professional fashion. I’d also like to thank all of the people at Harper Voyager and HarperCollins who had a hand in bringing this book to life. A special shout-out to Dr. Mark Pedreira, professor of English literature and rhetoric, who took time away from the genius of Milton, Johnson, and Locke to read this story and provide valuable feedback; and to Madison Pedreira, budding young scientist, who helped with math and other thorny issues that exceeded my intellectual capabilities. Also, I’m indebted to all the reporters and editors I worked with over the years at Capital News Service, The Annapolis Capital, the Tampa Tribune, and the St. Petersburg Times. They all made me a better writer, whether it’s reflected here or not. Lastly, my deepest appreciation to my entire family, for their decades of patience and love.

  About the Author

  A former reporter for newspapers including the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, David Pedreira has won awards for his writing from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He lives in Tampa, Florida.