Crises and Conflicts: Celebrating the First 10 Years of NewCon Press

by Ian Whates

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “When the replacement technicians come out of the base, we grab them and take their place.”

  You might think this was an absurd idea, but it actually had some merit. The Japanese spacesuits were identical to ours, save for the flag on their shoulders. We could pass for Japanese as long as we kept our helmets on and our mouths shut. And there probably wouldn’t be any need to key in the right code to enter the complex, even if it was centred around a fusion reactor. Who in their right mind would expect terrorists on the moon? I smirked at the thought, then hastily led the way to the best position to ambush the Japanese workers ...

  That goddamned movie has us battling the Japanese for hours (in movie-time, at least), matching ninja skills against Semper Fu. It wasn’t like that at all. The two Japanese workers had no idea we were there, right up until we jumped them and tore their life support packs away from their backs. As I say, we’re no soldiers, but needs must, and we couldn’t afford any qualms. It was a nerve-wracking moment – the Japanese might well have programmed their suits to send out an automatic alert if something went wrong. Hoping – praying – that no one in the fusion plant could see the flag on my suit, I led Alan up to the access hatch. It opened as soon as I pressed the key, allowing me to step into the airlock. And then we stepped into the complex itself.

  A man was standing by the door, looking as though he needed a piss really bad. I was pretty sure he wasn’t a soldier, but I clobbered him on the head anyway. Once he was down, we hastily opened the airlock and fiddled with the controls. Seconds later, the air vented out of the complex as we overrode the safety systems. Anyone not in a suit was thoroughly screwed.

  We invited the others into the complex, then searched the handful of tiny compartments. The Japanese hadn’t made their reactor anything like as accessible as ours; indeed, I wasn’t sure why they bothered keeping four men on duty at all times. All four of them were now dead. I tried not to retch. We’d had no choice... It was us or them.

  “They sent out an alert,” Tanya snapped, as she took the control console and went to work. It wasn’t easy in her suit, but I wouldn’t allow anyone to strip down in the depressurised complex. It was slowly refilling with air, yet we might have to leave in a hurry. “Jack...”

  “Shit,” I said. “Can you shut the reactor down?”

  “I think so, but they can reactivate it within moments,” Tanya said. “It isn’t looking good, Jack.”

  I swore, again. You can disable a fission reactor if you don’t give a damn about the risks, but a fusion reactor is tougher. There’s no way to make it meltdown.

  “I could wipe the control system,” Tanya said, after a moment. “They’d have some problems rebooting once I’d finished.”

  “They’d just link to Earth and download a whole new command system,” Alan pointed out, grimly. “Can you overload the microwave transmitter instead?”

  “That might work,” Tanya said. She looked up. “You think we can melt the system?”

  “If we overload it, it might explode,” I said. “Can you flush extra power through the network?”

  “I think so,” Tanya said. “Jack ...”

  “Trouble,” Jimmie interrupted. “Jack, we have incoming.”

  That, I should add, is the closest any of us got to actually sounding military. But we needed it, because on the display there were a handful of men in spacesuits advancing towards the fusion complex. Japanese troops, I assumed; they were carrying weapons, rather than industrial tools. The only advantage I could see was that they weren’t equipped to cut through the walls, even though it would have been the quickest way to reach us. Indeed, it looked as if they were heading for the airlock.

  “I can flush power through the system now,” Tanya said. Her voice was rising in alarm. “It should melt some of the system, at least.”

  “Do it,” I ordered. How much had the Japanese planned? If they’d intended to turn their settlement into a military base... No, they hadn’t. They’d done everything on the fly or we wouldn’t have been able to get into the complex. “And then corrupt the control system as best as you can.”

  I looked around, trying to figure out options. The only way out of the complex was through the airlock, unless we cut through the walls ourselves. We did have the tools, but the Japanese wouldn’t have any difficulty catching us before we returned to the rover – and even if we made it, a man in a spacesuit could easily catch us before we escaped. Rovers weren’t known for their speed. Perhaps, if we’d had some mining explosive ... I peered into the compartments, more in hope than in any real expectation, but found nothing, save for canisters of the misty gas we used for seeking out leaks. It wasn’t explosive, sadly; no one would keep anything explosive anywhere near a nuclear reactor.

  A thought crossed my mind, something I’d seen in a movie or read in a book...

  “Help me empty these canisters into the airlock,” I ordered, tersely. “Hurry!”

  We left Tanya to fiddle with the computers as we filled the airlock with gas. It hung in the air like mist, making it harder to see. And then we waited as the Japanese forced their way into the complex, stepping through the airlock one by one. They moved like trained soldiers, definitely, but they didn’t vent the complex. If they had, it might have gone very badly for us, even though we were in suits. My plan would have failed before it even began.

  “Hello,” I said, over the emergency channel. The Japanese would be monitoring the channel, I was counting on that. “I suggest you don’t take off your suits. We’ve filled the air with explosive gas. Surrender now or we all die together.”

  I braced myself, knowing the Japanese might well decide to call my bluff. The gas wasn’t explosive – and even if they believed it was, they might open fire anyway and call it a draw. This wasn’t a perfect plan, more of a desperate one. A trained astronaut might know that we didn’t use explosive gas or that the fusion reactor wouldn’t be damaged unless the explosion was a great deal bigger... there were plenty of flaws, but we didn’t have the time or resources for anything more sophisticated.

  And without the reactor, they’re in deep shit anyway, I thought. NASA will be able to launch shuttles once their orbital weapons network is shut down.

  One of the Japanese troopers lifted his weapon. Another pushed it hastily back down, clearly unwilling to take the risk. I waited, hoping they would believe that I was ready to kill everyone, including my team. They had to believe that a single spark would be enough to set off a holocaust...

  “The network is overloading now,” Tanya said, over our private channel. “It shouldn’t be long before...”

  The ground shook. Something had clearly exploded, and not too far away. I hoped it wasn’t merely a surge protector of some kind. But it was enough to make the Japanese hesitate a little longer.

  “If you surrender, you will be treated in line with the Geneva Conventions,” I said. Mind you, I had no idea what the conventions actually said. “And you will be returned to Earth as quickly as possible.”

  For a moment, it hung in the balance. I was convinced we’d failed, but when the officer said, in precise, accented English, “We have your word on that?” I knew we had them.

  “You do,” I assured him.

  “In that case... we surrender. We surrender,” he repeated, as if afraid I might have missed it, or perhaps that his own troops had.

  We disarmed and secured the Japanese troopers immediately, before they realised we’d been bluffing, then headed outside. The base’s lights had dimmed; they’d had to switch to battery power now the reactor had been shut down. And the transmitter was nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground. Clearly, the Japanese had never intended to turn the settlement into a military base; they’d been forced to improvise when the shit hit the fan. Hurrying over to the main base, we entered through the airlock, our stolen weapons in hand. Thankfully, we knew how to use them, although my aim is pathetic.

  And that, more or less,
was that. We wrecked the mass driver, just in case, then settled down to wait. The Japanese Government threw in the towel after we cut off their power; Washington graciously accepted their offer of a truce rather than risk a war that could easily have turned nuclear. And, once the space marines arrived to take possession of the Japanese settlement, we went back home for booze, women and ... more women.

  What can I say? I’m a simple man.

  Yeah, I know; it’s nothing like the movie. I didn’t seduce a hot Japanese chick into letting me into the fusion reactor, Alan didn’t die bravely singing the national anthem as the enemy stormed the complex and Tanya didn’t convince the Japanese to surrender by taking off her top and doing a seductive dance. (Mind you, it might have worked; if she’d tried, given how ghastly we all looked, the Japanese might have been too busy laughing to resist.) But really, Hollywood can take any story and turn it into a great adventure. I was just doing what I could to ensure we, not the Japanese, were the ones who controlled access into space...

  And now, you can pour me another beer. I’m going back to the moon on Tuesday.

  The Gun

  Ian Whates

  Damn!

  Two rounds, then the bloody thing jammed. He had gently squeezed the trigger, barely registering the dampened recoil as two shells spat out, and then... nothing. The mechanism was abruptly immobile and impotent beneath his finger.

  He crouched as low as he could, knowing that his life now depended on the shallow depression that served as a bunker. The ‘puck, puck’ of bullets burying themselves in the lip of his miserly shelter and kicking up clouds of sand provided stark reminder of the fact. He covered his head and closed his eyes until the dust had settled.

  “Carter, are you okay?” the sergeant called from the next hastily-dug hole along.

  “Gun’s jammed,” he yelled back.

  “Well unjam it then!”

  Avoid panic; that was the first priority. The noise of the ongoing battle receded as he concentrated. He knew what to do. Jettison the magazine, eject any shell that might be caught in the breach, clip on a new magazine and the gun would work again. It had to – the manual said so.

  Not for the first time, the manual proved to be wrong, its diagnosis woefully inadequate. Whoever wrote the bastard thing had failed to make allowance for the havoc that powder-fine sand could wreak once it found its way into a gun’s mechanism.

  Precision engineering could go hang itself! He flung the useless weapon to one side and scrabbled to un-holster his hand gun. Better than nothing, though barely. Sadly, it was all he had.

  Carter crouched lower still as an energy bolt sizzled over his head, transforming a patch of sand behind him to molten glass that bubbled and dribbled down the inside of his makeshift foxhole. He spared it a distracted glance, a small part of his mind debating whether it was worth keeping. Might make a decent paperweight once it cooled, or perhaps he could sell it as an authentic battlefield souvenir.

  Finally the pistol was free. Still he couldn’t bring himself to move. Cowardice, or a rare attack of common sense? All he could think about was how insane this seemed: a small calibre projectile gun? They had energy weapons for crying out loud!

  At least no new stream of bullets puckered the rim of his bunker. The ebb and flow of conflict seemed to have moved elsewhere for the moment.

  “Sarge?”

  No reply.

  “Anybody?”

  His plaintive call was met by hollow silence.

  Feeling sick to the pit of his stomach, he braced himself. Forcing his hand to unclench, relaxing the vice-like grip that threatened to crush the handle of his only remaining weapon, he pushed his body upwards, inch by terrible inch, preparing to look over the rim.

  The sight that greeted him was far from encouraging; so much so that he decided to put all plans for a life after the war on hold for now, to be filed away under the heading ‘pipe-dream’.

  Small arms fire and the deep boom of explosion sounded from afar, but nothing in his immediate vicinity. Around him everything was still. Was he the only one left? Was that why the focus of battle had passed him by?

  A mass of troops faced him in the near distance – the Stylene, their dappled brown and tan combat gear so similar to his own uniform. Both had been designed with the same purpose in mind: to fox the eye and provide camouflage in this arid terrain. Behind the infantry, bulkier shapes moved – hovertanks and armoured personnel vehicles. Over to his left a remnant of his own side’s forces, the UPAF, were still putting up some stubborn resistance, but there could be little doubt which side held the advantage.

  He was just considering burrowing deeper into the sand and playing dead when the ground trembled with a bass vibration, a sound that reverberated through his body to discomfort vital organs, a sound that was felt as much as heard.

  Explosion! Even as that thought registered, the ground rose from beneath him to swat and fling his fragile form into the air amidst a mass of sand and shingle.

  At some point before he landed again, consciousness fled, presumably in terror.

  Carter came to with his body a mass of aches and purpling bruises. He welcomed each and every one of them, because they meant he was still alive. Gingerly he sat up, brushing dust and sand from his torso and face and spitting out more of the same. The simple act sent daggers of pain to lancing through his left wrist as he put pressure on it, to be echoed in his shoulder. He ignored them and took stock of his surroundings.

  All around him lay silence and death.

  The battle had evidently ended or perhaps moved on, though he heard no sound to suggest it continued anywhere close by. After flexing and stretching for a few seconds, he concluded that, miraculously, nothing was broken. His body had been rigorously shaken and stirred, to leave every joint protesting of misuse and every limb bruised, but he had survived more or less intact.

  He needed to find cover, but there were two more pressing priorities to be considered first: water and a weapon. His pistol was nowhere to be seen, but even if it had been he would still have searched for something more comforting, something that packed a considerably heavier punch. Fortunately the field was littered with bodies, motionless brown and tan mounds from which both weapons and a canteen could hopefully be scavenged.

  He set off, heading to his left, trudging towards a stand of stunted trees that skirted a low hill, startling raucous crows as he went. The great black birds had wasted to time in moving in moving in to feed, pecking at the corpses. Some took to the air at his approach and circled above, voicing their indignation, while others simply lifted themselves out of his path in long, wing-flapping hops, to return to their gorging once he had passed.

  He did his best to ignore them and what they were feeding on, his eyes flickering from body to body, careful not to look at any faces. There would be too many here he knew.

  Finally he spotted an accessible canteen, picking it up and drinking greedily. It was as he lowered the canteen again that he saw the Gun.

  It lay by the outstretched hand of a soldier and, whatever it might have been, this was nothing that came under the heading of ‘standard issue’. The design was busy and complex, with bulges and protrusions seamlessly affixed to its long, sleek barrel and stock.

  The Gun appeared to be undamaged and he crouched to study it in greater detail, when a light winked on and a voice spoke:

  “Are you UPAF or Stylene?”

  He stared, open-mouthed, and wondered whether the explosion had affected him more than he realised.

  “I await a response.”

  He licked his lips, considering whether to back away quickly, stamp on the thing, or answer it. What the hell? “I’m UPAF.”

  “Good. Then you are permitted to use me.”

  “I’m what...? What the hell are you?”

  “Intelligent gun; the latest development in advanced weapons technology.”

  “And what exactly do you do?”

  “I facilitate the killing of many enemies.�
��

  That got his interest. “Sounds good to me.” Decision made, he smiled grimly and hefted the Gun up, surprised at how readily he could do so.

  “See how light I am?” the Gun commented, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m constructed from a revolutionary new alloy.”

  Carter grunted. “Lucky you.”

  A soldier alone in the aftermath of a battle, surrounded by the dead: a pretty lonely place to be, but it was amazing how much the Gun’s presence lifted his spirits. Okay, as companions go, the one now cradled in his arms hardly qualified as the most stimulating, but at least it was something. He strode on with renewed purpose, the aches and pains which had seemed so debilitating just moments ago all but forgotten.

  As they drew nearer the scraggly patch of greenery, the Gun spoke again.

  “Don’t stop walking. Three enemy troops are hiding in the trees ahead. If they realise you’ve seen them, you’re dead.”

  He squinted and searched rapidly along the treeline, but could see nothing. “So you do more than simply kill people, huh?”

  “Of course. Heat sensors and acute audio receptors are all built-in. On my mark, aim at the trees at eleven o’clock and fire a burst, sweeping steadily right until you reach twelve o’clock.”

  He adjusted his grip, ready to bring the Gun to bear.

  “Now!”

  At the command, Carter whipped the Gun up and fired. Not crouching, his body still felt too stiff for that, so he settled on planting his feet and standing where he was. A stream of bullets ripped into the undergrowth, scything through bushes and branches in a satisfying cloud of splintered wood and stems. An anguished scream told him that there really were men hiding in there and that at least one of them had been hit as he fanned the arc of fire in accordance with the Gun’s instructions.

  “That is sufficient,” the Gun said after a few seconds, its cool, calm voice clearly audible over the chatter of departing bullets.