by Scott Rhine
“I guess we underestimated the number of guns in this corral,” Alistair said with a sigh.
Nena listened in horror as damage reports rolled in on both sides. “Several of the North Korean missiles blew up on the pad. The first Iranian salvo hit an old MTV satellite. Zap is 70 percent successful.” It wouldn’t be enough.
Reading her messages, she announced, “We’ve been disavowed.”
“Who?”
“US, UN, everyone in the coalition. They don’t want a world war.”
“But they’ll be first in line with their hands out when Red succeeds.”
Seraph announced, “We splashed what we could on the way in, but enemy missiles turned the Ascension’s drive pods into glowing blobs. The second wave—the big guns—are warming in their silos. We’re going closer to the lens to guard Ascension’s exit zone.”
Unable to slow down enough to use beam weapons effectively, Cherub had invented something they called ‘Puff, the Space Dragon.’ Maximizing their force fields, and firing antimissile, flak-like shotguns, they plowed through a forest of solar panels at L1, shredding and spinning everything away regardless of its country of origin. When they brushed too close to a rocket, the Icarus field would accelerate the hydrogen in the fuel away from the Cherub at relativistic velocities. This caused further chain reactions through the dense cluster of satellites.
However, the impacts caused the Cherub to careen out of control, like a jeep roaring down a jungle hillside. Eventually the shuttle bumped something that tore open its cargo section. Cherub was moving too slowly, too far from the action to stop what happened next.
At ten minutes past the vanishing act, Alistair transmitted images from his control console as he announced, “COIL two has stopped firing! God, there are little insect robots swarming over the portside. MRVs are overwhelming starboard defenses. Someone’s trying to take us alive.”
On the screen, Nena watched Alistair press the button found in so many supervillain lairs. Twenty years of Fortune technology would self-destruct rather than fall into the wrong hands.
She never had the chance to say good-bye.
****
By T plus 20 minutes, the operation was no longer exclusive to the Academy team. UN lunar crews were tracking inbound missiles from several origins, as well as wreckage from the L1 construction platform.
Horvath sat in the center of the chaos, barking orders. “Cherub, report. We think object EV295 may be a survivor from the construction platform. Confirm.”
“We pulled one stray in from the cold, but rescues are taking too long. Life Pod A took shrapnel. We need to patch it ASAP.”
“Roger, Cherub. Jettison your own cargo section, and clip on to the rings on top of the life boat.”
“The clamps will fit?”
“There may be a little space at the back, but the clamps and airlocks are standard for all ships.”
“God bless Fortune Aerospace. This will make our job a lot easier. Who do we line up to kiss?”
Horvath chuckled. “Thank PJ Smith. The board gave him hell for the policy at the time.”
“How about you, Seraph?”
Static laced the reply as the pilot said, “Second volley . . . incoming . . . most . . . Cockpit intact, but they’re using odd warheads—all metal.”
“Shuttle killers. Avoid!” Horvath urged. The all-metal missiles wouldn’t be repelled by the force field and couldn’t be burned away by lasers. That was UN space-alliance tech. Either one of the allies had changed sides, or someone was selling secrets.
“A little late for that. They took out our rear field. I’ll have to crawl in reverse and flip over to stop.”
“Perform a density scan on the rest of the fleet on the ‘dark side’ of the moon. Find any other ship killers, and disable their propulsion before they launch.”
“Friend and foe alike?”
“I’m not sure what those words mean anymore, Seraph. There can’t be more than a few, as expensive as they are.”
“Long live capitalism.”
“Stay safe.”
Ophan reported, “More missiles from the dark side estimated to hit UN moon base at T plus 28.”
Meteor drills had already been announced for civilians, and control was already working in space suits. They were as safe as they could be under the circumstances.
“Any from the Chinese moon base?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Use two interceptor missiles per incoming—sort by first arrival,” Colonel Francis said from the door. The UN leadership had wanted a general, but no country could find one under the age of fifty, or any who could pass the stringent requirements of long-term space duty. Francis was fit because of his incessant training for Ironman triathlons. He was the only straight man Horvath had ever met who shaved his legs—for the reduction in resistance and weight during the race. Even the recent fad of Ping-Pong in the common room fueled his competitive nature, which is how she had lured him off the bridge. Someone had finally unlocked the door to the game room.
The moment Horvath had been dreading arrived when the real base commander walked into the room shaking his head. Half the workers stopped to salute. The others were too busy. When the colonel stepped up to her, she handed him a confession, absolving him of all guilt. “I’m ready for arrest, sir.”
The colonel snorted. “Not a chance. I don’t have spare men to take you to the brig. This is your mess, so you’re getting us out of it. Status?”
“Ascension is inside the artifact. We received a few minutes of broadcast from the craft, which we relayed to Brazil for analysis.”
“The first humans on alien soil. They did it. Welcome to history.” He looked at the image on the screen. “According to Operation Quarterback Sneak, if they die, your rescue shuttle should retrieve their flight recorder?” Crandall had leaked some of the conspiracy plans, and US leaders had looked the other way.
“Specialist Oleander Dahlstrom should rendezvous Out of Body with Seraph at the one-hour mark.”
“If we survive that long. Where are my other shuttles?”
“Ophan’s flying cover for us. Cherub is involved in rescue efforts at L1.”
Interceptor missile racks fired constantly, shaking the ground.
“Two bogeys evaded, and we ran out of welcome for the last few. Five missiles are going to impact,” announced a technician.
Over the international communication channel, they heard, “Surrender the pages or die.”
The base commander deferred to Horvath.
Pushing the transmit button, she replied, “Suck my left nut.”
“Everyone to the bunker,” the colonel said. The shelter was far enough underground that the command structure should survive. Technicians scrambled. First a few people had to drop down the tubes to activate the backup control nexus. Then the bank of elevators could be fed by the standby generators. Once weapons control transitioned, everyone else could follow.
“I’ll head out with a team to fix the last launcher, or every civilian in this place is dead. Anyone who goes with me will probably be vilified—painted as an insurrection leader trying to escape. No one but us will know what really happened. Volunteers?” she asked.
Several men raised their hands.
The colonel warned, “Once you fix the launcher, you won’t have time enough to get back here before the bunker seals.”
She smiled. “There’s never been any scenario where I come out of this alive. My husband, Daniel, is on life-support equipment too big to fit in the bomb shelters. When he goes, I go.”
****
Horvath and three volunteers made it through the airlock into the hall before the pressure shifted, and dust swirled lazily from the fissures in the ceiling. Lights flickered as power transitioned to emergency. All the voices on the command channel meshed into a mélange of woe. “Main power has been disrupted. All three launchers are down. Main satellite dish is trash. That’s how we were aiming the Mori signal.”
The colonel grumbled,
“We’re officially defenseless.”
Then the biggest explosion of all shook the control room. Seraph shouted, “Oh God, the cafeteria’s hit. Those people didn’t have pressure suits. Why kill them?”
“The enemy doesn’t want us to see the next act coming,” whispered Horvath, bounding down the hall in an effort to match the young men with her. She was not going to be accused of running like a girl.
At T plus 30, the Chinese-Muslim alliance declared war against Fortune Enterprises, the first such pronouncement against a corporation.
Realizing that, for all their experience and bravado, they were about to become irrelevant in the battle, Horvath announced, “Seraph, you have the football. The IPBMs are next.”
Interplanetary ballistic missiles had been just a theory until now. She tried to remember the summary Zeiss had written for her. If the long-range missiles took four hours to launch from Earth, and traveled at the same speed as conventional missiles, the UN moon base had as long as 136 hours. If the attack came from L1, moon base had only twenty-one hours. The warheads would represent the worst hell imagined and refined by science over seventy years. If even one reached the lens, it could tear the artifact’s space pocket open and eradicate everything inside.
When they reached the airlock to the final launcher, she said over the radio, “Ophan, watch Asia and East Africa for launch flares. We timed the test so only our allies were facing the moon.” She pushed a file symbol from her helmet toward the link icon. “I count six Chinese bases, Iran, Indonesia, and Kenya. That’s right by Somalia, and this is the perfect opportunity for them to get revenge. The other twenty-five space ports are neutral or friendly.”
Static filled the air before the shuttles could acknowledge.
Once in the silo for the fourth launcher, the lead tech gave her the first good piece of news that day. “One of the surface explosions unjammed the launcher mechanism. If we can feed power to the lift, we might be able to get it up.”
The marine in the rear guarded the area with a rifle while the techs worked out a plan to run cables. Her job was to pull chunks of rubble out of the delicate mechanisms that could crush a limb if they moved.
At T plus 48, they flipped the knife switch on a true Frankenstein creation, and the elevator raised their only remaining antimissile battery into place. The marine sent her a person-to-person link. “The two techs can handle this from here. At worst they’ll have to manually reload. We’ll be more useful at the landing zone. Cherub just left L1. In just over four hours, they’ll be coming in hot. We have to prepare the area for a crash landing. Their systems are overloaded; their med supplies and air will be low. We can help escort the wounded to the clinic.”
She brought up a manifest for the incoming shuttle. Her former assistant, Alistair, wasn’t on the list. “The other refugees can do that,” she replied. “We need to decouple the pod, patch Cherub up, and send them back out as soon as possible. There’s another pod and a dozen suits still floating at L1.”
As she rested in a padded, white tube with a lunar surface view that would’ve been at home in a Kubrick movie, Horvath sent communications out to assorted emergency crews. Shuttle preparations couldn’t reasonably start until the hour before landing. “While we wait, we’ll help clear the dead and the wounded from the cafeteria.”
The colonel interrupted over the base network. He sent her an image of cranes and repair crews outside. “EVA teams are still moving a portable dome over the site and bringing in flexible tunnels. That will take at least another twenty minutes. Opening anything before then would just kill the survivors. Some of them may have made it to the kitchen, bathrooms, or even the janitor’s closet.”
“What do you suggest I do until then?” she asked, afraid she’d fall apart the moment she stopped addressing life-and-death emergencies.
“Tune in to Seraph in a couple minutes and see what your friend from Yale has to say.” Yale was a pun on the Swedish pronunciation for jail. Oleander had been the first woman to be successful in learning the dangerous skill of Out-of-body travel, and she had done so to gain early release from prison.
There were other former felons in dangerous duties around moon base, so she suspected Colonel Francis was biased against women on the frontier; though, he always found other reasons for his objections.
“There were extenuating circumstances,” Horvath insisted. “When Ole was in her late teens, she and her brother lost their jobs in the mines. Her family was kicked out on the street, and the shelter had no running water. Ole blew up the water main for the bank skyscraper so the executives might have a little sympathy. I know she’d do anything for family, and those people up there are her family now.”
The colonel wasn’t swayed. “Oleander was a homeless woman sentenced to years in prison for terrorism when you trained and freed her.”
“She hasn’t been back to Earth since—no different than some of your delinquent recruits who opted for military service when a judge gave them a choice.” Oleander had become a highly paid consultant in the space construction and mining industries, exempt from high-risk duty because of her rare skill set. Yet when Nena was trapped on a crippled and leaking shuttle, Ole had volunteered for the rescue mission. “She saved my life and that of my husband. The worst thing you can say about her since her enlistment is that her bone density is a little low. If I have to trust my kids to someone, Oleander is the next best thing to my being there.”
The colonel grumbled, “Someone guilty of a mutiny that started a war shouldn’t be volunteering character references.”
“Yes, sir.”
****
The ash-blonde Oleander appeared to her brother, Johann, on the deck of the Seraph. As her closest relative and friend, he was the only one who could see her disembodied form without page enhancement. After fifteen minutes of intense discussion, she promised to provide updates every hour.
The colonel broadcast a summary to everyone in moon base and Brazil’s mission control. “As suspected, the artifact is a spaceship so large that it has its own ecosystem. From what we have witnessed so far, combinations of the alien pages have revolutionary applications for medicine, engineering, and war—things we might not have stumbled on for another century. The astronauts are currently awaiting decontamination before they can enter the control room. Oleander can’t scout ahead into the main ship because it’s mu shielded—which means it’s proof against electromagnetic interference as well as Out-of-body intrusion. In about three hours, our first scouts will be inside—Mercy Smith and the esteemed representative from Mori Electronics both volunteered. Then all the astronauts will pass through the membrane except Lieutenant Randall Beaks. After which, they’ve promised to send out the flight recorder with all the data they’ve gathered so far, including detailed schematics.” He paused, deciding how to commemorate the end of two decades of anticipation. “No matter what happens from here, whether we agree with the Ascension crew’s methods or not, our species has been changed forever.”
Chapter 4 – Antarctica
Amanda Mori, wife of the billionaire electronics magnate, took her entourage of bodyguards and assistants to an obscure base in the Antarctic to visit her daughter. It would be her first visit to the dome habitat known as Ward 8. Her husband refused to go along to such a remote and depressing place. He had a business to run. She only considered going because, three days ago, Kaguya’s personal nurse had sent a photo of her patient smiling. After a year of being a near vegetable, the change might signal an improvement in the young woman’s condition. Amanda never left important missions to others. If anyone could snap Kaguya out of this page-induced isolation, it would be her mother.
The hardest part of the expedition wasn’t deicing the vertical-takeoff craft or dodging assassins. No, for Amanda it was deciding what to wear. Since her husband had joined the board of Fortune Enterprises, there would be reporters at every airport along her route. She’d alienated several photographers in the past. Since her role in the compan
y had shifted from bodyguard to ambassador, fashion was crucial. She started with basic New York City tights to accentuate her still-firm legs. Deep snow required knee-high boots. Cold meant layers: blouse, sweater down to her butt, and a thick, quilted coat that went down to her boots. Throw in a few accessories: a weighted scarf for blocking or choking an assailant, satellite uplink earrings, and a lightweight Beretta with an extra clip of explosive tips—perfect. She had her makeup and hair done on the plane ride to match the outfit and look more motherly.
Looking out the window for hours, she had only seen gray, choppy water and white haze. Only when they were close to the base did she see the proliferation of plywood and corrugated-steel Quonset huts. The Plexiglas, geodesic dome and tracking station reminded her of the Louvre pyramid jutting out of Napoleon’s Paris—gauchely modern. The snow was so bright that she had to wear her sunglasses. The Fortune Enterprises stock price appeared in the upper left corner of her lenses. The price had risen steadily since the test of the new prototype had commenced. Fortune Aerospace had done it again. She might buy another vacation island to celebrate.
Turning to her head guard, she asked, “Anything I should look out for?”
Hansel didn’t need to read the inside of his sunglasses to report; he was quite diligent for a Rex—a guard with the Override talent. “The area over there is Chilean. Attackers have moved weapons through Chilean companies in the past. The country isn’t actively opposed to Fortune, but they haven’t signed the treaty.”
“Other than espionage, why would anyone build here?”
“Even though the UN declared that Antarctica belongs to everyone, Chile thinks the more people they have born in the Antarctic, the better their claim is on any resources.”
“What resources could they possibly have here? Snow? Penguin ranches?”
“Antarctic ice holds 90 percent of the world’s fresh water, ma’am. They also store food here, frozen.”
“You’re serious.”
“As a heart attack, ma’am. They have some steel components off shore, along with coal and platinum.”