by Myke Cole
“Jesus Christ,” Oliver breathed. “Talk about insult to injury.” Enough. Just be professional. “You want me to hold position?”
“Nope. I want you planetside, ready to respond. Bring the Aries as low as you can and launch the small boats. Station keep back from the skirmish line but stay close. I want you ready to respond if there are civilian casualties.”
“There are already casualties, and there’s no skirmish line.”
“I intend to make one. And I mean more casualties.”
“I’ve already ordered the boats loaded for bear. I’m not taking the guns off the hardpoints and…”
“I’m not asking you to. If you need it and don’t have it, then you’ll never need it again.”
She rubbed her temples harder, risked a sideways glance at Ho. Her XO was smiling at her, arms folded. Somehow, the look gave her strength. “OK. When do we jump?”
“ASAP,” Tom said. “We’re going now.” Oliver could see the Navy boats streaming out of the launch bays, moving entirely on thrusters, their solar sails swept over their flanks. Like the frigate they’d left behind, they bristled with armament.
“We… Are you on one of those small boats?”
“Goddamn right I am. This is as delicate a thing as I’ve ever seen. I want hands-on personally.”
“Then I’m coming down too. For the same reasons. This needs the skipper’s touch.”
“Hey, I’m not arguing. See you down there,” Tom’s voice had its smile back, the bigger one he wore most of the time. He toggled to a private channel, so that his voice was only audible to Oliver’s ears. “And angel? I love you.”
“Great,” Oliver said, feeling her cheeks flush.
“Say it,” Tom said, still on the private channel, “come on.”
“I’m on the bridge, Tom,” Oliver said as quietly as she could manage. “Jesus Christ.” Ho laughed, and the watchstander suddenly became very busy with the work on his desk.
“Say it,” Tom repeated. He sounded pouty.
Oliver couldn’t help but snort a laugh. “I love you too.”
“Oh, yeeeahhhh,” Tom said and cut the connection.
The boat bay was outside the cutter’s toroidal spin-gravity module, and Oliver stepped through the airlock with the queasy feeling of her stomach rising inside her abdomen. Christ. I never get used to this. She took a deep breath of stale, recycled air, and drifted toward where the longhorns waited.
Small boats were all named for beetles, on account of their hunched hulls. Nobody ever penetrated atmosphere in a small boat, and so there was no need for aerodynamics. Instead, they’d been designed to carry crews and to deploy solar sails to take advantage of surface maser-lanes, folded over their back like beetle-wings when they were not in use. The Aries carried two Longhorn Class boats, each just twenty-nine feet long. Oliver had ordered the 23mm autocannons mounted on the fore and aft hardpoints, which added to the squat insectile look, a single antennae and ovipositor. The guns were designed to breach the hulls of fleeing craft, exposing them to the vacuum of space. The massive rounds would turn even a human in a hardshell into red mist. If she had to use the guns, then something would have gone horribly wrong, but being responsible for people’s safety meant all people’s safety, and that included her crew.
That crew was mustering outside the longhorns now. A longhorn could run with a crew of four, but was rated to carry up to ten. The guard liked to run light, and so four sailors were doing boat checks now. Chief Brad Elgin was the first to look up at her. He was just a few years younger than her, short and blocky. Most coasties had calloused hands, but Chief had spent so much time underway that his entire being seemed calloused, roughed over and tested by salt-spray on Earth’s oceans and radiation out here with no atmosphere to screen him from the sun. “Skipper,” he nodded, “just finishing up boat checks here.”
“Great,” she said, “sorry I had to finish up a few other things on the bridge. Give me a minute to suit up and we can launch.”
Linda Flecha, the crew’s engineer, stiffened. She was taller than Chief, but not by much, and it was hard to tell, as she’d already put on her suit’s hardshell, the huge articulating plates making her look like some giant, rigid balloon animal. Her long black hair was braided and wound into a bun on top of her head, barely clearing the hardshell’s massive shoulders. “You’re coming with us?”
Chief shot Flecha a glare and she hastily tacked on a “ma’am.”
“If you don’t mind,” Oliver said. “Thought this was important enough to warrant a personal touch.” Her habit of asking her subordinates’ opinions rattled them, she knew, as did her insistence on performing menial tasks below her pay grade, but she wasn’t about to stop. Treating her people like people was the only way she wanted to lead, and though it had likely held her back on the climb up the promotional chain, she slept just fine at night.
“Come on,” Andraste Kariawasm’s inability to control his mouth was mitigated by his unmatched skill at piloting the longhorn, “her husband’s skipper on the Navy detail. He’s down there so…”
“So, I’m going too,” Oliver finished for him. “Thanks, coxs’un. As always, I find your candor refreshing.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Kariawasm grinned, “should have asked permission to speak freely.”
“We’ll discuss that mouth of yours when we debrief,” Chief said. “Get your ass on the boat.”
Kariawasm nodded and ducked through the hatch. His mother was Greek and his father Sri Lankan, and the combination had resulted in a man nearly as tall as Ho, but with more muscle, so big he had almost failed the physical to qualify on small boats. Lucky for the guard that he passed, Oliver thought as he made himself comfortable at the helm.
Connor McGrath had also almost failed the physical qualification for his size. The Irishman was so bull-necked his head seemed welded directly to his shoulders. His eyes were perpetually half-lidded, as if he were eternally ready for a nap. Oliver had always wondered if the guy was a little slow, but that was fine. He was a solid team-player, and as the crew’s designated bruiser, she didn’t want him overthinking things. Even with four long guns hanging around his stub of a neck, he managed to look unburdened. He slapped the butt of one, setting them all drifting on their slings. “You want me to grab another one for you, ma’am?”
“No, thanks,” Oliver said, pushing off to drift behind the privacy screen just long enough to change into the skintight day-glow orange bodysuit that all coasties wore under their other suit layers. She came back around just in time to see Ho setting the plastic case containing her bunny suit and hardshell to float just above the deck.
“Ma’am, with respect, we could really use your help here, on the Aries,” he said. His voice was a bland monotone that showed that he already knew what her response would be, was engaging in a pro-forma ritual out of familiarity.
“I appreciate that,” Oliver said, slipping into her bunny suit and connecting the leads to her bodysuit. The base layer would monitor her heart rate, her breathing, sending information on her vitals to the Heads Up Display on the inside of her helmet visor. The thick layer of the bunny suit would have her sweating in a few minutes, but she’d be grateful for it once the unheated boat launched and departed the climate-controlled bay for the cold of space. “But there’s no one who I have more faith in. Consider this a training exercise,” she said as Ho helped her fit the hardshell torso over her head, testing the shoulder articulation by swinging her arms. “You need more experience running a bridge.”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” Ho said, locking the helmet in place and giving her a thumbs up as the seal indicator light flashed green. “I’ll relay your orders to Commander Montaigne. Both longhorns launched and station keeping.”
Oliver used her chin to toggle the button that piped her voice to the hardshell’s external speaker. “Tell her to use her judgment if it gets hot, but otherwise wait for my mark.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see if the rest of the
crew had already boarded the longhorn, saw only white plastic. She would never get used to the hardshell’s limitations. She checked again, turning her whole body this time, and saw the crew in position and waiting for her.
“I’ll get the crew turned out for SAR-2,” Ho said, motioning to the other longhorn, “just in case.”
She set a hand on his shoulder, the hardshell’s articulated gauntlet making her giant fingers eclipse his upper arm. “Wen. It’s fine.”
He sighed. “I know it is, ma’am. Just be careful out there.”
She frowned through the clear plastic of the helmet’s faceplate. “When am I not?”
“It’s just… this is the first time you and Tom have done a joint op and it worries me.”
“I’m delighted that you care, and horrified that you have so little faith in my professionalism.”
“I do care, and even my judgment would be clouded if it were Ting-Wei down there.”
She felt a lump in the back of her throat, swallowed it down. Wen Ho loved his wife like he loved air and water. The only thing that came close were their two children, at home in New York City. “Wen, thanks, truly. But I’ve got this.”
“I know you do, ma’am, and so do I. Don’t worry about things up here, stay in the bubble.”
“Always,” Oliver said, and ducked through the hatch.
The longhorn’s interior was cramped even by spacegoing standards. Where the Navy insisted on deck gray and black for camouflage, the search-and-rescue oriented Coast Guard insisted on white and the fluorescent orange of their suits. Oliver squinted against a riot of color. The longhorn could pressurize and heat its interior if needed, but it was a cumbersome process, and with the crew expecting to deploy to the Moon’s surface, they’d be relying on their suits to handle that work.
“Everybody hold on,” Chief said as the crane hauled the boat up and over the launch bay doors. The boat bay might not have had spin-gravity, but the Moon’s gravity still exerted a pull, and Oliver reached out for one of the super-sized metal handgrips on the boat’s roof. She gripped it just in time for the deck to pitch sickeningly under her feet as the crane adjusted, tilting the longhorn to point nose down at the bay doors.
She turned and looked out the starboard side window in time to see Ho closing the airlock behind him. A moment later, a red klaxon flashed. “Venting atmosphere in three, two, one…” His voice sounded in Oliver’s helmet speakers. She knew Ho was using the crew-wide channel, and that everyone else on the boat was hearing him as well. “Opening bay doors.”
Below them, the bay doors slid slowly open, and the Moon stretched out beneath them.
“Sound off,” Chief called to the crew, the speakers in his helmet made his voice sound tinny. This was a ritual officers weren’t supposed to hear, Oliver knew, but she had barged onto his boat and that meant she would have to shut up and pretend it wasn’t happening.
“Honor, respect and devotion to duty, Chief!” the crew responded, casting worried glances at Oliver.
“Not that bullshit,” Chief said, “sound off for real.”
The crew’s discomfort was palpable, and Oliver felt a pang of guilt for being the cause of it. Small boats just didn’t get underway with the cutter’s skipper on board. But the thought of Tom out there without her made her stomach do loops. If it was a weakness to want to go help him in person, it was one she would indulge. She used her chin to toggle the radio to the bridge’s channel. Maybe if she were having a separate conversation, the crew would feel more privacy. “Coast Guard Cutter Aries, Coast Guard Cutter Aries, this is CG-23359 requesting designator.”
“Sound off for real!” Chief said again.
“CG-23359, this is Aries,” Ho’s voice came back over the commlink in Oliver’s helmet, “CG-23359 is designated Search-And-Rescue-One for mission duration. I say again, 359 is SAR-1. Good luck, all.”
“We have to go out,” the crew said now, eyes locked on the bay doors, still sliding open, the velvet black of the void swirling below.
“But we don’t have to come back,” Chief said. “Let’s go save some lives.”
The Moon’s surface glowed, swathed in blots of gray terrain that looked like mist to Oliver’s naked eye. The sun’s radiation bathed them, blocked by the shielding in the longhorn’s hull and the armor of their hardshells. The wash of it made the Moon blink like a warning.
“Boat checks are green. Ops normal,” Chief radioed to Ho on the bridge. “Go when ready.”
“Roger that,” Ho said as the bolts fired and the crane released them.
“SAR-1, launch.”
They fell.
They dropped down into the middle of the fight.
Oliver swallowed the last of the sickening nausea of their free fall. Even in the Moon’s low gravity the boat accelerated fast enough, until the plummet became wrenching and she was grateful when Kariawasm engaged the thrusters and the longhorn leveled off just above the Moon’s surface.
The gray-white of the lunar regolith was scarred and stirred by buggy tires, boot prints, and the tread of the gardeners, the mobile 3D-printers leaving divots as they sucked up the regolith before pumping it full of bonding agents and plasticizer and putting it to use as construction material. The fruit of that labor was all around them – the low domes of the habs with their radiation shielding cowls; most of the structure underground where it could take advantage of the Moon’s natural heat exchanging; the maser-pylons firing their invisible beams to create propulsion lanes for the solar sails; and the tall tubes of the Helium-3 furnaces, the shovel scoops funneling in regolith as fast as they could cook it down. The regolith, the Moon’s soil, was the stuff of the surface itself, and Oliver marveled at how quickly humanity devoured it.
All around the structures, the miners fought, utterly careless how they were destroying what they had worked so hard to build. Oliver could see intertwined groups of miners spacing out, drawing back into two groups marked out by their different suits – hardshells on one side, biosuits on the other.
Tom had gotten his skirmish line after all.
She saw the Navy boats immediately, stag-beetles to the guard’s longhorns, bristling with guns that had clearly given heart to the American miners.
“They think the cavalry’s coming,” Chief said.
“Yeah,” Oliver agreed, “they think the cavalry’s coming to help them take the fight to the enemy. That’s not good.”
Below the Navy boats, the American miners were surging forward with renewed aggression. There was still no shooting, but the melee had become tightly locked, urgent in a way that she knew could only get worse. But Tom’s boats had forced a line of separation to open up as the Chinese miners fell back, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an effort to prevent the Americans from advancing toward their habs, where their families were hiding.
“Get me a channel to the Navy’s lead boat,” she said.
“Thought you might want that,” Kariawasm was already toggling the channels for her. “Go ahead.”
“Tom, are you there? They think we’re…”
“I know, babe.” Her husband’s voice had the same maddening smile as when they’d spoken on the bridge. It both frustrated and comforted her that he could be so relaxed in the midst of a crisis. “Calm things down back here. I’ll establish a front and keep them separated.”
As he spoke, Tom’s boat fired its thrusters and executed a smart port-side turn, diving down between the fighting miners and running the skirmish line. The miners scrambled back from the boat’s attitude thrusters, though Tom was careful not to fire them. The two sides parted, drew away from one another. Oliver was put in mind of the fable of the Red Sea.
She used her chin to activate the commlink once more, “Be careful.”
Tom’s response was a popping sound that she belatedly realized was a blown kiss. “Always.”
“Orders, ma’am,” Chief called to her.
“Wen, what’s my SITREP?” Oliver spoke into her own commlink after chin-togg
ling back to the Aries’ bridge.
“LDPD is finally on the move,” Ho’s voice came back. “We must have inspired them. Looks like most of the action in your zone is around the gardener repair facility. I sent the coords to your plotter. It’s pretty hot over there, so don’t take any chances.”
“Roger that, thanks,” Oliver cut the connection, “Chief…”
“One step ahead of you, skipper,” Chief said, as Kariawasm executed a tight burn and the boat spun. He fired the aft thrusters and they rocketed over the heads of the miners. The curved domes of the habs dotted the lunar mare’s surface, big bubbles of their radiation-shielding cowls interrupting the smaller bubbles of the miners’ hardshell helmets. A few of them waved up at the small boat, or pumped fists. The idiots really did think SAR-1 was there to help them rout their neighbors. They’d be singing a different tune when the settlement was placed under martial law. One of the miners had pulled the stars-and-stripes off the roof of one of the government habs and was waving it madly overhead, the fabric billowing in the weak lunar gravity.
“That’s it,” Flecha pointed at the long, broad expanse of the gardener repair facility. Outside, at least five of the mobile 3D-printers were knocked on their sides. American miners boiled around the base, trying to reach two more Americans standing on the roof. She could tell by the make of their hardshells that they were a man and woman. The man was laying about him with a metal pole, and the woman hurling down chunks of debris. One collided with a miner’s helmet, and Oliver could see the puff of atmosphere indicating the neck seal had been compromised. She prayed that the person inside was able to get on emergency oxygen quickly enough. Why are Americans attacking Americans?
Without atmosphere to carry the sound, there was no point in trying to shout a warning, and she didn’t have time to negotiate with the LDPD for the public channel. “Put her down.”
“Where, ma’am?” Kariawasm asked.
“Right in the middle of them. If they don’t want to get squished, they’ll get the hell out of the way.”