by Garon Whited
“Hey, you cooked dinner. I appreciate that.”
“My pleasure,” she answered, smiling. “Seriously, Max. Is there anything I can do for you? I’m not used to all this inactivity. I’ll settle for being water-girl and fetching drinks while you and the Captain horse around large chunks of metal if I can’t do anything else. But I bet I can run a laser cutter! Or help with a casting if you’ll just show me how.”
I swallowed a bite to answer. “Now that we have the Luna’s outer lock fixed, things are a little easier. Let me get Julie’s monster ticking over smoothly and I promise to brief you on all the power tools in the machine shop. I think Captain Carl is planning on that for everybody, actually—everyone learning what we can of every job. Lord knows I know more about waste reclamation and recycling than I ever thought I would!”
She cocked her head and swallowed a bite of her own. “You sound a little bitter, Max.”
“Do I?” I thought about it. I guess the situation with Julie was coming out in my voice. “I don’t mean to. I’m just tired and stressed, I think. Weight of the world and all. It’s a small world, but it’s still pretty darn heavy.”
Kathy chuckled. “All right. Finish your dinner and I’ll give you a back rub. Tomorrow I’ll have a word with Captain Carl and see about lightening your schedule a little. I am the XO around here. You don’t need to finish the processing plant instantly—and it would be good if we all learned something of how it’s put together.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am.”
I finished the ration pack and Kathy dumped everything in the bin. I lay down on the bed and she sat beside me.
Kathy gives really great back rubs; she’s amazingly strong and never seems to get tired. Sadly, I didn’t get to enjoy the whole thing; I was asleep before she finished.
* * *
I was a wishbone, lying on a plate, while the diners gobbled down everything else on the table. One item at a time vanished into the toothsome maws of the hungry things—I couldn’t quite remember what they looked like—and the inevitable after-dinner wish was coming closer… and closer… and closer… until I was picked up and the pulling started.
That’s when I woke up. I sat up so hard I bounced into the air, completely above the bed, then drifted slowly back down to the mattress. The room was pitch dark and silent as a tomb. I wondered if I’d cried out in my sleep.
I settled back down, shivering a little.
“Kathy?” I whispered. Only silence answered.
So she’d gone. All right. Was that because she cared? Or because she wanted me more “energetic and lively,” to steal a phrase?
I may not be the last man on Earth, but it isn’t fun to be Hobson’s choice. How am I supposed to feel when the only “competition,” to use an inappropriate term, is a decade older, in command, and encourages familiarity about as well as electrified hedgehog? How would things be different if there were more men to choose from?
Then again, how would I feel if things were reversed? Suppose there were three men and only two women? Wouldn’t I be trying my damnedest to get friendly with one or more of them?
My Uncle Jim was fond of saying, “If Life was fair, birds wouldn’t eat worms.”
Unpleasant thoughts at midnight. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Or tried to. I couldn’t help wondering about might-have-beens. Who was attached to whom. What choices were being made. What would happen when everything came out into the open.
We’re a world of five people. Keeping who-sleeps-where secrets isn’t going to happen, it can’t. Everyone is going to know, and everyone is going to have an opinion.
From one standpoint, it was my duty to, ah… “assist” any of the ladies who asked for it. That’s a duty to the race, not to any government or to any oath I ever took! But what about me, personally? I don’t much care to be passed around like a cigarette. I’d like something more personal and caring, if such a thing is still possible.
Maybe being the wishbone would appeal to some guys. I didn’t like it.
I resolved not to bring it up. If official notice ever gets taken of my situation, I don’t doubt that I’ll get ordered to… to be… helpful. I can’t argue with it. Intellectually, I realize I may have to help. Emotionally, I just don’t like it.
I can just see Captain Carl drawing up a schedule for it, too. I smiled at the thought. Yes, I’m sure he would. With that to amuse me, I finally managed to get back to sleep.
Chapter Three
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned”
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
I was woken by that dadblasted announcing system. I growled something as I rolled out of bed—at least at one-sixth gee it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning—and muttered under my breath about retirement.
Then I realized it was Kathy doing the talking and I listened.
“—radio signal from Earth for the last few minutes. I say again, I have an audio-only radio signal.”
I listened to the rest of it while zipping down the passageway and up my jumpsuit. I wasn’t the first person into the control center, but only because Julie was smaller and could fit through the opening door that much quicker. The speaker of one of the communication sets was on. I listened while the others were still pattering down the corridors.
“This is Richard T. Whitworth of Provo, Utah, calling anyone and everyone who can hear me,” said the voice. It was faint, it fought tooth and nail with the static, but Kathy had the big dish aimed right at it. “There are about two hundred of us survivors here; some of us are hurt pretty bad. A couple are really sick, I think it’s radiation. We’ve got water, not so much food and we’ve got scouting parties out scrounging up whatever they can find, but we need medicine—and a doctor! Is there anybody there? Anybody at all? Over.”
Julie reached for the microphone, but Kathy slapped her hand.
“No. We don’t return their hail unless and until the Captain authorizes it.”
Julie looked shocked. “My ass we don’t! This isn’t a ship under way! Those are people who need help. At the very least, Anne can listen to them describe their troubles and tell them what medicines to try—if they can find some.” Julie reached for the mike again as that Whitworth guy started talking again, mostly repeating himself.
Kathy’s hand blurred, grabbing Julie’s wrist, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “It doesn’t matter if this is a ship or a base,” she said, voice cold. “Captain Carl is in command. We don’t tell anyone we’re here until he says so. Period.”
Julie tried to jerk her arm away; Kathy held on, fingers like steel.
“Sticking to that oh-so-proper military bitch mode, are you?” Julie demanded. “What military are you with, anyway? The Federation armed forces are glowing in the dark. Those are living people down there and they deserve to know we’re here.”
“Stand down, lieutenant.” This from the doorway; Captain Carl was standing in it. We all looked at him. Julie slowly relaxed and Kathy let go of her wrist.
“I heard something of your argument,” he continued, stepping into the control center and heading for the comm panel. “You’ll stand watch every other night for the next week, lieutenant. We’ll discuss command authority later. Colonel Edwards, report. What do we know?”
Julie flushed and subsided. Kathy sat up straighter. “Sir. The signals are in the short-wave band, probably from a civilian transmitter. Our dish is picking them up just fine, but the static is pretty bad; I think it’s a lot of high-altitude radioactives. If so, the static should die down in a few days or weeks.”
“Where are they?”
“Almost where they say they are, sir. A few kilometers northeast.”
“Where is the nearest strike?”
“Looks like Salt Lake City, sir.”
Captain Carl called up a map on one of the screens and considered it.
“Give me a visual, please.”
Kathy tw
iddled knobs. We have a small observatory on the surface—the Moon is ideal for astronomy; there’s no atmosphere to get in the way. The telescope can look at Earth just as easily, or even more easily; the planet is a lot closer and takes up a lot of sky.
Earth appeared on the main display screen. It was the first time we had even looked at our planet in the weeks since we landed. It had changed markedly. There was considerably more cloud cover and a couple of obvious storms. The clouds were also darker than usual; I can only think they were still full of dust and dirt and smoke. Those rare patches of open sky showed us ground that was generally black or brown, or dark water.
Someone made a noise, a cross between a gasp and a whimper. It might have been me.
Kathy dialed up the magnification and zoomed in. It was like falling, almost. Salt Lake City wasn’t covered in clouds, but it was a glassy crater. The heart of it still blazed with an unchanging balefire glow. Much of the surrounding area was black from burned-out forest fires.
Kathy coached the telescope on down toward Provo, homing in on the directional antenna’s coordinates. She zoomed in further, narrowing the field.
“There,” I said, pointing. “That looks like a collection of structures.”
“I’ll see,” she muttered, focusing in more tightly.
“What do you think it is?” Anne asked. “A camping ground?”
“Likely so,” Julie answered. “That’s all forested area up there, or used to be. Looks like the fires burned out before getting that far. If they had a shortwave radio, or found one that wasn’t running when the nukes went off —Hey, look there!”
Kathy had the image at ultimate magnification. It was like looking down from a helicopter at about a sixty-degree angle. People were moving around, tending fires, clustering in small groups. A few of them wore splashes of white—probably bandages. There was no telling what sort of troubles they’d run into before reaching relative safety. The voice was still going on, asking for help and noting their numbers and position.
“Captain?” Julie asked. “Can we call them and at least give them advice? From the sound of it, they’re a bunch of civilians with no clue what to do.”
“What will you tell them, lieutenant?” Carl asked, calmly. “That help is on the way? To stay calm? Or, perhaps, to send up smoke signals? Would you like the good doctor to give them advice on how to treat radiation sickness without chelating drugs? Or walk someone through surgery with a three-second lag in every step?”
“We can’t just sit here!” she demanded.
The image blazed white on the monitor screen while the voice vanished in a blast of noise. We all yelped or screamed. A minute later, Kathy had drawn the focus back and we could see a fresh mushroom cloud rising.
“Son of a bitch,” Julie muttered. There were echoes of her sentiment around the room.
“Colonel Edwards?” Captain Carl asked.
“Working, sir,” Kathy answered. Her hands flew over buttons and switches, checking both what her instruments recorded and what damage might have been done.
“We’re okay, sir,” she said. “It looks like a small tactical nuke, on the close order of a kiloton nominal yield. I can’t tell you where it came from; our ballistic radars weren’t hot. The EMP was inconsequential at this range; it wasn’t an enhanced warhead. But the signal source is gone.”
Signal source. Everyone near the radio. The survivors were gone. We stared at the blooming death-flower for several seconds. I know I was thinking about Hell. That was the first live nuclear weapon detonation I’d ever actually seen. Films don’t do them justice.
“Theories? Anyone?” Captain Carl asked.
There was a long silence. I broke it. “Is... was that the first radio source you heard?”
Kathy nodded. “Even the usual comsat relays are down. Orbital communications really took a beating with the EMP hits; the antenna-heavy comsats are usually in geosynch, and they don’t like voltage spikes. There’s no chatter at all that I can find, not even on the data channels.”
“Okay,” I said. “Hypothesis: there is an orbital platform with a few racks of, at minimum, tactical nuclear missiles. If someone sticks a radio-frequency head up, it drops a supercritical bit of plutonium on it. Anyone want to take a guess at whether or not it would be automated or manned?”
“But nuclear weapons on orbital platforms are illegal!” Julie exclaimed.
“You suppose someone with enough rocks in his head to think that there is a winner in a nuclear war will care about legalities?” Kathy countered. Julie shut up.
“I would wager that your hypothetical satellite,” Anne said into the silence, “would be unmanned. While it could be a manned station, an automated weapons platform would be easier by far to conceal. Changing crews would be bound to cause talk.”
“And,” Captain Carl added, nodding, “it would be able to sit dormant for a year or a decade, virtually invisible to skywatch in some high orbit. From a strategic standpoint, that would be ideal.”
“Unless…” Anne continued, thoughtfully. We paused while she thought. “Unless,” she repeated, “the weapons platform was disguised as a more normal station. Perhaps a weather research station or other scientific platform.”
Kathy nodded. “That’s possible—and something we need to consider in our search for survivors, Captain. We may hail a satellite at ell-four and suddenly find out if you can have a mushroom cloud in vacuum.”
“I do not think so,” Captain Carl mused. He rubbed at his jawline for a moment. “Something as tightly-packed as a space station needs all the space aboard for something. Having a publicly-known station with unidentified components would draw the eyes of intelligence services around the globe. But a single-piece satellite could be placed in orbit easily, and then the last stage of the rocket detonated as a supposed malfunction. That would conceal the fact a stealth weapons platform was placed in the sky.”
“But why?” Julie asked. “Why the hell would someone want to put such a thing in orbit? For use during a war, sure—great spot. But why now, after it’s all over?”
“Perhaps our theoretical automaton does not know the war is over,” Captain Carl replied. “Or, just as likely, it is programmed to deliver the coup de grace. The missiles flew, the bombs fell, the planet is a smoking ruin—but if your side can’t have it, you surely do not want the other side to have it. So you target any radio traffic. I’m sure there are submarines that have not yet surfaced—but I now doubt that they will like it when they do.” He sighed and looked somehow older. Or weary. Saddened. “If there’s anything destroyer-sized or larger left afloat, I’ll be surprised.”
“That’s insane!” Julie all but shrieked.
“It most surely is,” he agreed, gently.
“Good thing you ordered radio silence,” Kathy noted. “Did you suspect orbital weapons platforms?”
“No,” he admitted. “I was worried about drawing attention from anyone.”
“Max?” she asked, turning to me. “Can we take a tacnuke?”
“Just one? Maybe, if it’s on the same order as the one you just mentioned,” I answered. “The base is really just an aluminum-lined concrete box under a hill—a big hill, I grant you. Assuming that we get a single surface detonation instead of a burrowing rocket—or multiple hits—it’d still be touch-and-go to keep all our atmosphere. The concussion wave through the rock could spring a lot of slow leaks. This is a pressurized house, not a bank vault.”
Captain Carl nodded. “Bear in mind that Max’s hypothetical satellite may not be armed solely with missiles; there are other space-based weapons. Nukes are for land targets, like a military base or refugee center; those require area weapons. Laser weapons may also be aboard—if I were the one designing such a satellite, I would include at least one. A beam that cuts a ship in half can be used again; a missile is gone forever. That’s why I’m afraid my… that the Navy isn’t faring well, despite my earlier optimism. I’m afraid we will have to assume the worst until we can
test the hypothesis.”
“How do we test it?” Julie demanded, sarcasm dripping. “Hack the satellite through the internet?”
“Maybe,” I put in, “there could be someone aboard to make targeting decisions. It would explain the lag between the start of the broadcast and the… the destruction of the target.”
Kathy shook her head. “I disagree.”
“Oh?”
“If there is only one satellite, then it may well have been at such a place in its orbit that it couldn’t fire on the radio source. Even if there are multiple satellites to get global coverage—unlikely, just from the expense! —I’d set things up so that I have time to send a friendly signal code. I’d want to be able to shut them off without shooting myself.” She looked squarely at Julie. “I’d also want to see if anyone answered the initial radio call.”
Julie flushed darkly and opened her mouth to say something, but Anne took a stumbling step forward and fumbled her way into a chair.
“I doubt there are any people on any orbital weapons platforms,” Anne whispered.
We turned to her. Captain Carl nodded for her to continue, but her eyes were still on the monitor.
“Think of this from a human perspective,” she said, softly. “The planet has just been ruined. Now you want this lonely man in orbit, who has no chance of ever returning home, to do his duty to a country that no longer exists? Perhaps you can find someone fanatical enough for the job and smart enough to do it—but how can you know?” she asked. “Computers don’t care. They just do what they are programmed to do. People fail.”
Involuntarily, we all looked where she was looking. The mushroom cloud was a dark blot, still spreading.
“People can most certainly fail,” she added, quietly.
* * *
The bouncy little go-buggy looked a lot like the lunar rover of days long gone. Big, fat tires, open chassis, and a guy in a space suit driving it—me. Sure, the solar panels are better, the batteries pack more charge, and the electric motor will get me up to a hundred kph—no air resistance! —on any flat stretch, but the basic design hasn’t changed in a century. Oh, I rigged up a sunshade to keep the direct sunlight off, along with some fraction of the solar radiation, but that just made it look more like a dune buggy than anything else.