The corridor came to an intersection but closed emergency doors blocked two routes. As they turned down the only open passage, Charlie saw suited people silhouetted in the beams of their own lights. They weren’t more than ten meters away. She thumped Smitty on the chest and retreated around the corner before the intruders saw them. Smitty followed. They wouldn’t have heard them: there’s one advantage to working in vacuum. Charlie kneeled on the floor and carefully looked around the corner. She saw two people working on the airlock controls. One was rather fat. They were having trouble figuring out how to open the airlock that had gone into emergency mode. Good, they’re busy, thought Charlie; less chance they’d notice her and Smitty. She pulled her head back.
“Okay,” Charlie reported into her suit radio, “we’ve got two unknowns at airlock 4582.”
“Armed?” Rodriguez asked.
“Yes, small weapons, look like submachine guns. We’re taking them out, right Smitty?”
“Damn right.”
“We can get help to you soon,” Rodriguez said, sounding anxious.
“Negative,” Charlie answered. “Hesitation kills. They’ll get out that airlock and then who knows where. Ready, Smitty?”
“Ready.” He pumped a shell into the shotgun and Charlie repeated the motion on her weapon. It was a strangely silent action in vacuum.
They went around the corner. The fat one was looking right at them. She (Charlie could see it was a woman) started firing wildly, the muzzle flashes strobe-lighting her grimacing face.
Charlie and Smitty jumped back around the corner as the bullets impacted silently on the walls and floors.
***
DeWite heard the emergency door slam shut, locking him in the room. He knew it would never open until the pressure in the room equalized with the pressure in the hall.
He stood, aimed his shotgun, braced his leg behind to compensate for the low gravity, and fired. He was surprised he heard it at all. Must still be a little air in the room, some part of him thought.
The figure with the recoilless rifle was thrown back and blood ejaculated from its torn body. It was freeze-dried before it hit the lunar plain. The remaining figures turned with their weapons firing. DeWite barely heard the bullets hitting the wall behind him. His ears felt as if they were going to explode. He screamed, not in fear, but to empty his lungs to prolong his already forfeit life a few more seconds.
Pump, FIRE, Pump, FIRE, Pump was DeWite’s whole existence. Another figure crumpled, spouting blood. Then the bullets ripped into DeWite. Blood flowed like a fire hose. FIRE—DeWite could no longer stand, even in one-sixth gravity. He sank to the floor and died in a puddle of his blood that was boiling and freezing simultaneously.
***
“You okay?” Charlie asked, breathing hard with excitement, adrenaline pumping through her veins.
“Yeah, you?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?” Rodriguez demanded, his tension coming through the radio.
“They saw us,” Charlie said, watching the rounds hitting the metal structure of the corridor. Occasionally, she’d feel the vibration of the steel from the punishment it was taking.
When the bullets suddenly stopped, Charlie, again low, peeked around the edge. The airlock was closing with the intruders inside.
“Damn,” she spat and ran after them. She fired and pumped another shell into the chamber. But the door was closed and the pellets just scarred the white paint then bounced back at her. Most lodged harmlessly in the fullerene armor of her suit. One chipped her faceplate.
Charlie tried to stop before hitting the door. In her anger and excitement she had allowed herself to get going too fast. Her momentum slammed her into the thick metal airlock door face first. She heard a loud snap. A rivulet of a crack cut across her faceplate. A shrill whistle indicated air was leaking out of the crack.
Smitty came up behind her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No,” she said, removing a shell from her bandoleer and shoving it into the magazine tube. Always have a full magazine, they’d taught her. “Rod, they went out. I can’t pursue; I cracked my faceplate and I’m losing air.”
“I could go,” Smitty said.
“No,” Rodriguez barked. “Get Charlie to safety.”
“I’m okay,” Charlie said. “It’s a slow leak. I can get back by myself.”
“No,” Rodriguez replied. “Regulations —”
“Smitty,” Charlie said cutting him off, “go and stop them.”
“No,” Rodriguez yelled, the radio distorting his voice.
Smitty started working with the airlock controls as Charlie walked quickly but carefully back to the provisional airlock.
Her faceplate shattered.
She started running and screamed, like they taught her, to empty her lungs. Holding your breath only increases internal injuries.
Her eyes and ears hurt unbelievably and her neck throbbed painfully. She began to weaken as she reached the emergency airlock and dropped her shotgun.
The controls seemed wrong; she couldn’t figure them out. Her legs stopped supporting her and she slid to the floor.
The airlock opened and strong arms picked her up and threw her inside. The door closed behind her and warm, sweet air smacked her in the face as it was bled into the ersatz airlock. When the pressure was close to equalized, the emergency door was flung open and Rodriguez pulled her into the corridor. The emergency door closed again. Charlie took long, deep breaths. Her throat felt as if she’d been inhaling a gaseous acid. There was a strange pulsating sensation at her neck. She reached up to feel it but Rodriguez batted her hand away.
“Don’t touch it, you’ve got a vein protruding,” he said to her gently. Then he barked an order to the assembled personnel: “Get her to the medics.”
Smitty came out of the airlock.
“Smitty,” she croaked. “How?” It hurt like hell to talk.
“I heard the air rush out of your suit on the radio.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. It hardly seemed adequate.
***
Charlie and Smitty walked slowly across the lunar landscape toward the observation lounge, both in their pressure suits (Charlie using her spare), and both carried shotguns. Charlie had been cleared by the doctor and insisted on going on this trek. The lounge emergency door was closed and the sensors indicated the interior was in vacuum.
Charlie’s stomach knotted as she moved. Two men were unaccounted for: Prince and DeWite. Frank DeWite, Security Chief and Charlie’s lover: Missing and presumed dead, Charlie thought, swallowing hard on her impending grief.
Rounding a corner of the facility, they got a view of the shipyard. The intruders had left three ships, but some weapon had fired upon all three. One was a crumpled metal mass.
Two human shaped figures were prone in the dust. Charlie felt her heart try to move into her throat.
“We have two bodies in the shipyard,” Smitty reported over his suit radio. Charlie hated him for the calm in his voice.
“Understood,” came back Rodriguez’s voice.
Then Charlie realized the pressure suits weren’t SRI design.
Her heart settled into its usual niche. Why did I volunteer for this? she asked herself for the nth time.
They went to the bodies. There were black stains on the ground around them.
“These bodies are in bad shape,” Smitty said. “There are shotgun wounds and automatic weapons wounds to the head area.”
“Understood,” Rodriguez repeated.
Charlie was looking at the grotesque tableau. Smitty looked toward the lounge.
“The lounge’s window has been breached,” Smitty said. “There’s another body.”
Smitty pointed. Charlie looked up. The body wore no pressure suit and was surrounded by debris sucked out of the lounge. Charlie’s heart began its upward migration. She had never seen a man that died in vacuum; she didn’t want her first to be Frank. They walked to the corps
e. Smitty turned the body, which was literally frozen stiff. “It’s Prince,” he reported calmly. He and Charlie exchanged a look through faceplates. Grief and anger crossed the vacuum.
Charlie looked at the dead man. His face was calm, his eyes closed. He’d died before being thrown into the air-less shipyard. Blood was freeze-dried on his uniform and on the lunar dirt.
“Do you see DeWite?” Rodriguez asked. Charlie couldn’t help resenting this man who was warm and safe inside the facility while they looked at a dead friend.
“Not yet,” Smitty said, again, keeping his tone professional. “We’re entering the lounge now.”
“Roger.”
“Watch that the shards of Crysteel don’t rip your suit,” Smitty warned as Charlie stepped through the window.
“I will,” she replied, her voice still harsh and raspy from exposure to vacuum. For a moment, she wondered if this was another shit assignment to make sure she wasn’t getting any favoritism from Frank.
The lounge was a disaster. Anything that wasn’t nailed down had been thrown to the window or out of it. Liquor bottles had been smashed open and their contents vacuum-frozen.
The lights here, too, had shattered from internal pressure. Without air to refract the sunlight, anything in shadow was in pitch blackness. Charlie turned on her flashlight and passed its piercing beam around the room. It passed over a crumbled shape. At first Charlie thought it was a tablecloth or maybe a drape. But then the red color of the fabric made her realize it was an SRI Security uniform. She moved to it. Even from the back, she recognized Frank lying in a pool of black blood. He was still holding a shotgun. Three expended shells lay nearby. She bent down and gently turned him over. His face was a portrait of determination, frozen like that forever.
“We found the chief,” Smitty reported over the radio, his voice catching on his grief.
Charlie’s tears moved like a viscous oil.
Chapter Two
“…taking asteroids for your own, greedy purposes.”
A few hours later, a space plane was crossing the Pacific Ocean, west to east, at about Mach 25. The plane had just reached the top of its parabolic trajectory. On board, Alexander Chun was glad these flights were short; it meant he spent very little time in free fall so he suffered only a short time with space sickness.
Alex watched the monitor in the back of the seat ahead of him. Working in space, he was usually too busy to pay attention to the news. This trip from Tokyo–where SRI Headquarters was located–to Denver–where his wife Kirsten lived–gave him plenty of time to catch up. The Tokyo to Seattle flight wasn’t too long, but the Seattle to Denver flight would take much longer. The United States had a law against commercial supersonic flight over land dating back to the last century. The government was so lethargic that such an outdated law was still in effect.
Alex had instructed the plane’s computer to load his configuration off the net—encryption kept everything private—so all he had to do was run a macro he had written that would search for and show major news stories for the past months while he was in space. He’d been the Assistant Director of SRI-1859. That was the 59th asteroid SRI had brought in from the asteroid belt, mining it during the two week trip, and put in Earth orbit at a Lagrange point to finish off the job, which took another four months.
Alex carefully followed the news when he could although it was usually depressing as hell. If somebody wasn’t doing violence to someone else, someone was trying to start something stupid or stop something good. The Greens got three California and one Massachusetts seats in the House of Representatives in the last election. One, a California one, had been indicted in the sabotage by the Gaia Alliance of SRI’s Mojave microwave power antenna field. A sympathetic judge threw out the indictment. The stupidity of the masses never ceased to amaze Alex.
Suddenly, a story was interrupted in mid-interview (Alex had it set up to break in with any stories containing keywords such as “SRI”).
A reporter on the Moon was standing in a standard NESA-issue pressure suit in front of a security door that was being repaired. A small icon in the lower left corner of the screen indicated that this was a live report.
By the way the reporter’s suit was crumpled, Alex could tell she was in a pressurized area and wearing the suit as a precaution. There were blackened walls as evidence of an explosion.
“Details are sketchy,” she was saying over her suit radio, “but it appears the Space Resources Incorporated facility here on the Moon was attacked by unknown assailants.” (“Damn,” spat Alex.) “NESA and SRI Security personnel are inside the facility right now. Neither NESA nor SRI is saying if anyone was killed in the attack. However, there were two bodies found here. One was wearing an SRI uniform, the other a pressure suit, and there is no indication of who either is.”
An unseen commentator said, “Susan, is there any indication of who carried out the attack?”
Susan said, “Yes. A radical environmental group, the Gaia Alliance, has claimed responsibility. In an anonymous email sent to NESA company offices here on the Moon the GA said, and I quote,—” she began to read from a tablet, “—’Space Resources Incorporated is the worst perpetrator of the pollution and desecration of both space and the Earth and will pay the price for their greed.’
“They also left this reminder.” The camera panned to the wall. On the pristine white, in the blood of some unfortunate SRI employee, were the letters GA.
“God damn those bastards,” Alex growled loudly. He violently hit the spot on the screen to close the news program and the monitor went to his default display of a map showing the plane’s position. Only then did he notice that the other passengers were looking at him. He turned and looked out the tiny window at the peaceful looking planet below. Then he picked up the headset on the armrest and instructed the computer to call one of the people in his address book. There was no video available.
There was an unusually long delay before a woman’s voice answered. “Mr. Mitchel’s office,” she said curtly. “Miss Oh speaking.”
“Meyoung,” Alex said. “This is Director Chun. Is Mitch there?”
“Yes, Director,” she replied with a torrent of emotion her calm words belied. “Mr. Mitchel can talk to you.”
“Thanks.”
Waiting, Alex noticed the man seated next to him was pointedly trying not to listen.
A brusque “Mitchel,” and Alex turned back to the computer.
“Mitch, Alex. What’s happening? I just heard the news.”
“The GA attacked our lunar facility. They killed everyone they met, which, luckily, wasn’t many. Frank’s dead, Alex.”
“Oh, hell,” Alex whispered softly. “How?”
“Not sure. They found his body in the VIP observation lounge. The window was blown out and he was shot. Prince’s body was with him.” Mitchel paused. “There were two bodies in the shipyard. They got two of ‘em.”
“Good,” Alex barked angrily, not caring that he was happy about the death of two humans. “Did they do anything but kill people?”
“Yes, they sabotaged the file-server room with incendiary devices and destroyed all the ships on the ground. Except, one is missing–the Rock Skipper.”
“Damn,” Alex exclaimed. The Rock Skipper was the flagship of the newest, fastest interplanetary class of ships SRI had built. There were four all together.
“It had just been provisioned and prepared to go to the belt,” Mitchel added.
“Do you suppose that’s a coincidence?” Alex conjectured.
“No. They were after that ship. But why?”
Yeah, Alex thought, why? The Rock Skipper-class was used primarily to scout asteroids. It carried ten “asteroid-probe missiles” that could be used as fairly effective weapons. Boy, Alex thought, what a stink it would raise if the terrorists used the ship in some sort of an attack.
While Alex thought, silence traveled electronically for a few seconds.
“This isn’t a secure connection, Alex,”
Mitchel finally said. “I’d rather not talk about it anymore.”
“I understand, Mitch,” Alex replied. “Can you connect me with Nakata?”
“Sure, hang on.” More expensive silence.
“Nakata.”
“Sir,” Alex reported, “this is Director Chun. Do you need me to come back?” he asked, hoping the answer was “No.” He hadn’t seen Kirsten in almost seven months. However, if he were needed, he would gladly do his duty.
“No,” the Deputy Director of Space Operations for Asteroid Operations said. “Enjoy your vacation, Chun.”
“Yes, sir,” Alex breathed, relieved. He hung up the handset and again looked at the blue planet below him. It was hard to believe such a beautiful place could breed such ugliness as the GA and those that helped them.
***
Syria’s president called him Faruq; everyone else called him “aqid.” He had no official title in the government although he held rank in the Baath Party.
“News off,” he said in English. He had tried to get a computer for himself that had the right software to understand Arabic–money was no object. But when Baathist tanks rolled into Yemen and over the populace, most countries making computers or software had joined in the sanctions against the United Baath Arab States. The computer had to be purchased in Europe and smuggled in.
The Western environmentalists had succeeded, it would seem; they had started to hurt Space Resources Incorporated–and what hurt SRI hurt the West. The Party would be pleased even if the president would not; not that that mattered. Faruq had been pleasing the president since he was the governor of a small nawahi and the president was the minister of the interior. Now Faruq had other, more lofty goals. The president offered him a cabinet position regularly, and Faruq knew he could only beg off for so long. The president was not about to believe Faruq had lost all ambition, but a cabinet job would keep him too busy to pursue his aspirations–and Faruq had ambitions. The Alawite usurpers, Assad and his son Bashar, before his own Baathist Party rebelled (and the son died of lead poisoning, the nine millimeter type) had formulated the dream of Greater Syria: the return of lands that, by historical right, belonged to his country. Assad had succeeded in bringing Lebanon into the fold, but, since then, nothing. Faruq intended for his name to be whispered throughout history as the man that finished the dream of Greater Syria by bringing Palestine and Jordan inside Syria’s borders. And, he would be the man who convinced Saudi Arabia–with the best convincer of all, a superior army–to join the United Baathist States. It did not strike Faruq as ironic that the UBS was based on the former Soviet Union, which had failed under the weight of its own system. He knew he could lead the UBS to glory. There would be no Gorbachevs to bring down the UBS.
Rock Killer Page 2