Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  He glared down at the status reports. Nearly a hundred years of the combined ingenuity of humanity had been devoted to spaceflight, once the human race had stopped messing around and really developed it’s off-planet facilities. The real problem had been in moving items off Earth, so they had developed space-based industries, which had funded additional development for the future…but the industry under his direct control was very limited. Some industrial stations had been moved to the asteroids before the aliens had opened fire, but the aliens had to have tracked them, which meant he didn’t dare bring them directly to Area 51. There were bottlenecks in his production, ranging from components for the ships, to crewmen. He could deploy fifty warships…and, if he pointed them at Earth, he might as well have been throwing eggs against a brick wall. The aliens had fortified Earth very quickly; he would need more ships and better weapons to make an impact, because he would have only one shot.

  “We have too many bottlenecks,” he growled, and thought about it. The aliens might have surrounded Earth, but if they suspected the existence of Area 51, they were almost certain to try to come drop a hammer on him before he had his fleet completed. The remaining USAF personnel in the solar system were on the moon, or Mars, and there weren’t enough of them to make a real difference. If he picked up the personnel from the other Great Powers, it still wouldn’t be enough; besides, the other Great Powers might have their own hidden construction bases. He hoped so, but they would doubtless be maintaining radio silence as well; there was no way to know, let alone meet up with them. “Do we have any solutions?”

  “We can increase the amount of automation,” Doctor Kelly Jorgensen said. Her voice was excited; she, at least, was enjoying the challenge. “It would allow us to reduce the crewmen to six per craft, but it would mean that we would have to retrofit some of the craft we have already deployed in Hanger 18. It would also be more costly if we actually had to do in-flight repairs; there would be fewer crewmen available for the job.”

  She paused. “There is some good news,” she continued. “We have managed to duplicate their laser system, it’s actually a refinement of something we already have, but never developed because the original use for the system included cooking asteroids to force them to expand under flash-heated water. Quite why the aliens thought of it as a weapon and developed it that way I don’t know, but they have been in space longer than we have and might simply have more experience than we do at such matters. The sheer size of their fleet suggests that they have a very different economic system than we have…”

  “We are getting into waters that, while interesting, are not actually important, Doctor,” Brown said. “The only thing that matters now is breaking the blockade around Earth as quickly as possible; all of the efforts on this base have to be devoted towards that end, not…ideal speculation.”

  Kelly met her eyes with all the fury of her ancestors. “Understanding the aliens, who have sent a massive fleet across the gulf between stars, might be the most important project in the history of the human race,” she proclaimed. “Unless we exterminate these…Oghaldzon, or they exterminate us, we will have to live with them. The history of the human race changed the moment that Samra Hussein detected them approaching the solar system. We are no longer alone.”

  “The aliens are here to reform us, or so they say,” Brown snapped back. “I can’t help, but notice, Doctor, that they have already killed, perhaps, more than a billion people on Earth…and thousands more will die in the next few weeks. We have been considering the dangers of an asteroid impact for years; by now, a week after the invasion, there may have been millions more deaths as emergency services break down, disease spreads rapidly, shortages of food and water become rampant…with all due respect, Kelly, you have always lived in space.”

  She took a breath. “In space, we can control the environment,” she said. “In space, no one starves; we can feed everyone in the habitat by growing algae-based foods rapidly, within a day if we forced it forward. It may taste like it was vomited out of the back end of a mule, but it is edible and it meets human needs; on Earth, people might be starving, right this minute. You saw the reports from the moon; China has been hit by an asteroid, India and the Middle East have been battered by tidal waves, the entire Eastern seaboard has been swept clean and the aliens have landed there, to add insult to injury…”

  “Enough,” Waikoloa said, before she could finish. “It is true that our main priority has to be defeating the aliens, but we cannot risk speeding up the work here and perhaps doing a shoddy job. Doctor?”

  Kelly composed herself with an effort. “We can duplicate the micro-mass drivers and rail guns the aliens have deployed,” she said, carefully. “Again, there’s nothing actually new here; they’re both applications of our current technology that we simply never developed for ourselves. I’m not convinced that they would actually be useful in a tactical situation, Admiral; the aliens only used them to fire on relatively immobile targets like space stations, or missiles that followed a predicable course. We might be better off concentrating on lasers instead, although some of the analysts down in the hanger believe that rail guns might come in handy for close-ranged combat.”

  She scowled down at the table. “What we don’t have – yet – is their fusion drive,” she said. “It seems to defy any application of our own fusion drives and the theory behind them; the current belief is that they actually cause some form of twin fusion-fission in their drives, giving them much more energy – we don’t, yet, have any theory as to actually how they do that?” She smiled thinly. “Of course, that could be complete bullshit and they might do it some other way. It is suggested that we try to capture an alien ship.”

  Waikoloa had thought about it. “I don’t see how it would be possible,” he admitted. Space piracy had never caught on, mainly because the Rockrats would quite happily hang any pirates they caught, but the USSF had looked into the issue of suppressing space piracy if it actually happened. “Destroying an alien ship? Yes, easy. Capturing one…?”

  Brown nodded. “They could dodge one of our ships forever if they wanted to prevent us from boarding them,” she agreed. “The IAU wanted to try to run an inspection routine of some commercial ships – meaning our Rockrat chums – in the belt; it not only didn’t work, they discovered that they had had charges filed against them at the freeport nearby and it nearly came to a second embargo before the IAU, under heavy pressure from the Great Powers, backed down and paid compensation. One imagines that the aliens won’t be doing that…”

  “They might,” Waikoloa said slowly. “What happens if they cut Earth off permanently from Helium-3?”

  She frowned. “They collapse the world economy,” she said. The USSF had run endless simulations; as far as they knew, the other world powers had run similar simulations. Nuclear fission power had such a bad reputation that when fusion had become available, it had rapidly been replaced by fusion plants; the absence of the Helium-3 they used as a power source would rapidly bring the plants – and Earth’s power supplies – to a halt. “Of course, with all the destruction in orbit, that might not make that much of a difference.”

  “True,” Waikoloa said. “These days, everything is interconnected; how does the belt and the moon and the mining stations floating above Jupiter get most of their cash inflow?”

  Kelly blinked. “From sales of Helium-3, of course,” she said. “That’s Political Science 101; why would the powers on Earth be so determined to keep control of the moon, unless they needed a guaranteed supply of Helium-3?”

  “Exactly,” Waikoloa said. “One of the reasons that the government ordered here to be created was that there was a fear that there would be a Great Power war, and the ability to cut them off from Helium-3 – and preserve our own supply lines – would be all-important. A sudden boost in the number of active American warships would have turned the tide in America’s favour, no matter whom we were actually at war with…and we would have won the war. Now, the aliens are blockading Ea
rth, and parts of the belt and lunar economy are just going to collapse.”

  Brown glared down at the display. “Those bastards on the moon are likely to try to sell Helium-3 to the aliens,” she snapped. “It’s not enough that they insist on a veto over all policies on the moon, but they’re going to strangle us, or help the aliens strangle us…”

  “Perhaps,” Waikoloa said. “Or perhaps they’ll have no choice. Having a massive fleet and an enemy of proven ruthlessness in the area does tend to make people consider appeasement rather than digging in to fight, or at the very least, find out what the aliens would offer in exchange for supplying them with Helium-3 and lunar rock without a fight. The Rockrats might be able to hide in the belt, perhaps safe from the aliens, but the bigger colonies would be thinking about how they could make their own deals with the aliens.”

  He looked down at the map, not really seeing it, his mind drifting out over the solar system. There were small colonies on Venus, trying to terraform the planet; nearly five thousand men and women, under the impression that they could turn Venus into a paradise. There were nearly a hundred thousand men and women on Mars, sharing the same belief…and the Mars terraforming project was showing some very real progress. It didn’t help that the different colonies were showing the same signs of a national – planetary – identity that the moon had shown; China had crushed a revolt on Mars with a great deal of brutality, only a few years ago. Further out, there were the Rockrats…and the colonies on the gas giant moons; Titan, Ganymede, Europa…

  Some of them had been carefully placed; Titan’s development by the Israeli Government might have been a shrewd decision, one that had been loudly regretted by the USSF and the other Great Powers. Titan supplied water to a dozen different settlements and the Israelis had bargained wisely; given time, Titan might become an economic powerhouse…unless the aliens got there first. They would want Titan’s resources for themselves; they might even offer to transfer settlers from Israel to Titan. Did they really want to help the human race, or had they cooked the entire statement up as a lie, to convince their own people to take part in an invasion?

  “We really need to take an alien alive,” he mused. It was a fantasy and he was smart enough to understand it; there was no way that they could take an alien alive, not yet. “We have to know if they are telling the truth, or if we are in a fight for survival that requires us to exterminate them before they exterminate us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brown said. “Is there anything we can do about possible traitors in the belt?”

  “Not yet,” Waikoloa said. A thought was bubbling away at the back of his mind, a way of solving both problems at once, perhaps even making new alliances for the future. “For the moment, our task remains the same; we build the fleet, prepare it as best as we can, and then liberate Earth. Doctor, continue research on the alien fusion drive, subject only to not transmitting anything that might reveal the location of this base. We’re not ready to beat off an alien attack.”

  “Of course, Admiral,” Kelly said. She started to clump towards the door in her magnetic boots. “We’ll continue the development project as fast as we can.”

  Brown waited until the door closed before leaning forward. “Sir, is there any way we can overcome the bottlenecks?”

  “The industrial stations in the belt can produce most of what we need,” Waikoloa said. One danger was the Rockrats getting curious about what was happening to the supplies; they would know they weren’t going into the local economy, while the handful of corporate stations that had been placed at the disposal of the local USSF officers were only supplying the industrial stations…and nothing else. It represented yet another problem; it was quite possible that the crewmen on the stations would decide to join the Rockrats and declare independence, something that neither the locals nor Waikoloa could do anything to prevent. Decades of ill-treatment had left scars, even if most of the corporations had been brought to heel; it was one of the ways the number of Rockrats grew. “We can have it shipped here slowly enough not to alert the aliens, or the Rockrats.”

  “Maybe,” Brown said. Her face darkened slightly. “What about crewmen?”

  Waikoloa looked down at his dark hands. “I don’t know, yet,” he said. He wasn’t quite being honest; he had had an idea, but it would almost certainly draw fire from the Pentagon…assuming the Pentagon still existed. He smiled to himself; forgiveness was easier to seek than permission, and, besides, time was of the essence. What else could they do? Insist on every female on the base becoming pregnant and then wait sixteen years for the children to grow to maturity? He’d have a mutiny on his hands. “Can you see that all of Kelly’s concepts are passed through the analysts before she puts them into full production?”

  Brown took the hint, saluted, and left the room.

  Waikoloa watched her go, and then tapped the intercom. “Lieutenant Cindy Short, please report to the Admiral’s office,” he said, and sat back. It had been a long time since he had seen Short; the classified briefing on parts of her past had slipped across his desk, including a note that suggested she should not be trusted. He’d ignored it; there were few officers indeed with her level of hands-on experience. The hatch opened and Short strode in, her hand already snapping into a salute; Waikoloa returned it sharply. “Thank you for coming.”

  In person, Cindy Short came across as wolf-like – her name had been used to mock her when she was younger before her fellow cadets had learned how tough she was - and aggressive; she had once been on report for punching a training sergeant in the mouth. She’d been very lucky not to have been tossed out of the USSF on her ass for that; her CO at the time had suggested that flogging should be brought back into the USSF just for her. Her short-cropped dark hair perfectly displayed the massive chip she wore on her shoulder.

  “I had little choice,” Short said. Her voice was almost accent-less, unsurprising given her origins. “You called me here.”

  “I need you to carry out a mission for me,” Waikoloa said. There was no point in trying to sugar-coat anything for Short; he knew enough about her to know she took every mission as a personal challenge, even to the point of breaking rules to carry the mission out. “You may know your great-uncle…?”

  “Of course,” Short snapped, her stance tightening. Waikoloa guessed that she expected an order to arrest or kill him; she looked as if she would be delighted. There was a lot of bad blood there, none surrounding Cindy herself, but her particular branch of the family. “What has that bastard done now?”

  Waikoloa’s lips twitched. “He’s become the Chairman of the Rockrat Association,” he said, and smiled at the expression on her face. “I want you to carry a message from me to him, an offer that I believe he can’t refuse. Do you think that you can do that?”

  Chapter Thirty-One: A Shot Heard Around the Moon

  New Jamestown, Lunar Surface

  Governor Hastings II –no relation to the most infamous American lunar governor in history – had several strikes against him when it came to dealing with the people he was supposed to rule. The first one, perhaps the most important one, was that he was a former Marine; on the moon, American Marines were disliked at best, hated at worse. No one would forget the original Governor Hastings and his decision to use Marines to break a strike against impossible living conditions; even seventy years after the Lawton Rebellion, Hastings was burned in effigy every anniversary of the rebellion. The second problem was that, technically, he was appointed by the federal American Government; unlike every other governor, he was not elected by his constituents, but appointed over them by the President.

  It was not, Hastings privately conceded, a very fair deal. The redistribution measures introduced into Congress by President Culpepper – in which every state accepted into the USA would have one Senator and one Congressman – might have been intended to prevent the Anglo-Saxon parts of the United States being overwhelmed by Hispanics from the newer states down south, but they had had the unintended consequence of effectively
disenfranchising the voters on the moon. There was one senator and one congressman for the moon in both of those august bodies…and over a hundred from states on the ground, all of whom had a vested interest in keeping the price of Helium-3 as low as possible.

  The original people who had run the moon had treated it almost like a prison; the first miners had been treated as if they were convicts with no hope of parole. Even after a handful of reforms had been carried out, it remained obvious to anyone who cared to look that the American citizens on the moon had a raw deal from their government…and felt more kinship with the independent states on the moon, even the Chinese and Russian settlements, than they did with their own government. Karl Bova’s growing Lunar Independence Front had been stealing voters for years; Hastings had privately calculated that within ten years at the most, there would be a major lunar rebellion, pitting the colonists against all the Great Powers.

  It would be a nightmare, he knew; the sum total of military power under his command was a small force of Space Marines, two thousand men in all. It was something that was bitterly resented by the colonists – an irony for anyone who knew anything about American history – not least because the Space Marines not only policed the settlements, but because they risked drawing the lunar colonists into war. There had been several Chinese penetrations of American territory recently; the Marines had treated it as an armed incursion, the colonists had treated it as a case of the Chinese getting lost, something that happened too often for it just to be dismissed as an excuse. The aliens might have provided an excuse for shipping more forces to the Moon, and it was true that the numbers of anti-spacecraft weapons in New Jamestown had been rapidly increased, but popular resistance to additional deployments of Marines had been too strong to overcome. Hastings had seriously considered asking for relief; sooner or later, some idiot was going to fire a shot that would be heard around the moon…