Battle Luna

by Travis S. Taylor

  “The spoon is mostly one thing, with some of three other things,” David said.

  “Plastics have all sorts of stuff in them. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, could be sulfur or chlorine,” Sarah stated. “We’ll need to get known sources to calibrate the symbols.”

  “Eureka!” Jerry shouted, somewhat startling David. “A brand-new spoon.”

  “Very nice!” Mayor Hamilton clapped his hands.

  “Look at this icon, here. Now there are two of them.” Sarah pointed at the “monitor.”

  “I want to try something now.” David took a plastic bottle out of the trash pile and placed it on the Object input tray. “Think of the spoon again, Jerry.”

  “Okay.”

  A moment later two spoons slid out of the output side.

  “There are three of the icons this time. I think this is the object counter.” David pointed where Sarah had before.

  “Do some more!” Jerry said. “Try it without plastic this time.”

  “Okay.” David scrounged through the trash and pulled out some pieces of a paper box and he grabbed the aluminum can. He sat them on the input tray. Carla got up and placed her Styrofoam coffee cup on the tray as well.

  “Ready, Jerry.”

  The counter ticked away. After a couple minutes there were eight spoons made from materials that weren’t plastic. There were several of the element icons lighting up showing empty bar graphs beside them.

  “It didn’t just copy the spoons because it didn’t have all the right stuff,” Carla surmised.

  “Can I try something?” Sheriff Jones asked.

  “Sure, what do you have in mind?” David looked up at her and watched as she unholstered her handgun.

  “Here, take this round as the blueprint.” She slid a bullet from the magazine and handed it to Jerry. She then slid two more out and sat them on a nearby worktable. “You have some pliers anywhere?”

  “Oh, yeah, I see what you’re doing.” Jerry turned to a wall cabinet. “Tools in here.”

  He pulled out a hammer, some needle-nose pliers, and a pair of vise grips and handed them to the sheriff.

  “Alright, if we pop the lead out, and then just pour out the powder”—Tami managed to unload the rounds onto a paper plate—“this should be enough ingredients to fix them back.”

  “Hold on. Let’s make it a little harder.” David reached in and plucked out one of the lead bullet tips and then took the aluminum fork from the previous run. “Let’s see what it does with this.”

  “Alright, Jerry, do your thing.” The mayor clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Um, okay.” Jerry took the plate of the broken bullets and the fork and sat them on the input side. He then held the good round in his hand and focused on it. The beam of infrared light hit the bullet and the system flashed. The materials icons on the monitor showed multiple material symbols with multiple percentage graphs and then on the other side appeared two perfect-looking bullets.

  “Wow! Let me see those.” The sheriff picked them up and examined them very closely. “I expected there to be one with a lead bullet and one with aluminum, but this looks more like some amalgam of the aluminum and lead in both. Hold on a sec.”

  Tami took the rounds and chambered them into the pistol and then walked to a far corner of the room. Bang! Bang! David was expecting her to fire the weapon, he guessed, but he was also startled by how loud it was.

  “Cycled through fine. No stovepipes. Good rounds.” Tami nodded approvingly.

  “The A-team!” The mayor sounded elated and was almost bouncing up and down. “You’ve done it! You just got this thing to copy bullets! Now that is going to be handy in the days and weeks to come.”

  “No, it didn’t copy them, Mr. Mayor. Since they weren’t exact duplicates the device did its best,” David said. “Our object, thing, artifact isn’t a copier. It’s a mimic!!”

  Mama’s Express

  by Travis S. Taylor

  It didn’t really matter to Paul that there were people at Luna 11 that hadn’t had a drink of fresh water in almost three months or that any of them had actually reverted to diets of protein shakes if they were lucky. Many of the Luna 11ers were down to a few hundred kilocalories per day, which meant they were flat-out starving to death. All of those stories were hard for Paul Jennings, captain of the cargo hauler Mama’s Express, to really believe or at least connect to. At least until the United Earthers had allowed one ship through the blockade for humanitarian reasons—for political optics and soundbites was more to the truth.

  One ship was allowed through the Ueys’ formidable blockade orbiting the Moon—the Mama’s Express. One ship out of hundreds that up until a year prior carried trade and commerce goods back and forth between the Moon and Earth. The economic symbiotic relationship between the two had ground to a screeching halt once the war had broken out. Paul had once been the captain of a very lucrative ship, but the UE forces didn’t have quite the logistics requirements of thirteen lunar colonies.

  “Mama’s Express, we have you locked in on lidar. Just switch on the ALS and we’ll bring you in,” the Luna 11 port authority voice said. Paul switched on the automated landing system, then leaned back, and relaxed.

  “It’s in your hands, Luna Eleven,” Paul replied. He sat back and waited for the hauler to come to rest on the hangar platform and then for the airlock tube to attach. Once the pressure equalization lights chimed on Paul sighed and then stood up. “Time to go to work.”

  Mama’s Express was a typical privateer hauler about thirty meters long and ten meters on each side. Haulers of the type were reminiscent of the river barges from Earth—no frills and designed to hold maximum cargo for minimum mass and volume. Paul had started as a freelancer making the cargo runs from Earth to the Moon and back. Up until the Earthers started acting all foolish about possession rights on the lunar colonies it had been a fairly lucrative endeavor. But for the past nine months or so, the only business had been logistics to the blockade, which was no way to make a living. And this humanitarian run wasn’t making him more than breaking even. To top it off, the damned Ueys wouldn’t let him bring an offloading crew.

  “Mama’s Express, you are free to disembark,” a voice from the other side of the cargo door shouted. It was followed by three loud metal clang-clang-clangs against the bulkhead. Paul depressed the cargo lift door control and the tail section began to swing open making a loading ramp. As the door fell slowly against the floor Paul noticed three scarecrows standing by with rifles pointed in his general direction. The men’s faces were all sunken inward and dehydrated and looked like a scene from a horror movie. Paul did his best not to stare.

  “Uh, hi,” he said cautiously. “Capt’n Paul Jennings. I’m the only crew aboard. Cargo hold, as you can see, is full of stuff. Where would y’all like it?”

  “Captain Jennings, we’ll unload this. In the meantime you have to come with us. Your presence is requested in the pub.” One of the scarecrows motioned with the rifle.

  “Uh, okay. Is that thing loaded?” he asked. “If it is, why don’t you point it in a different direction.”

  “Yes, it is loaded. It would be difficult to hold the Ueys at bay with unloaded weapons, would it not?”

  “Man, I don’t know. I’m just a hauler captain. Heard you folks down here were starving so I brought food and medicine and stuff. From what I see, you could use a bit of it yourself.” Paul continued along in front of the scarecrow and was uneasy about having that rifle in his back the whole way to “the pub,” wherever that was.

  The pub actually turned out to be just that, a bar. It was one of the Loonie brew pubs that seemed to be in all of the colonies. The scarecrows he passed along the way were hard to look at. Paul had never really seen a starving human being before, but once he did he realized it was the most wrong and disturbing thing he’d ever seen. The fact that one group of humans would do this to another group of humans he’d thought was a primitive thing of the past. Whatever the Ueys were after on
the Moon couldn’t justify this.

  “In here.” The scarecrow with the rifle nudged him through the outer pub area into a dark room in the back. “Sit.”

  Paul sat. Three minutes later another scarecrow appeared and placed a tall schooner filled with a golden hazy and very hoppy-smelling beer beside him with a small bowl of nuts. Paul looked at the nearly thousand calories sat beside him and started to offer it back.

  “Don’t. They wouldn’t take it anyway.” A well-fed individual that Paul recognized offered him his hand. “Nathaniel Ray. You are?”

  “Captain Paul Jennings.” Paul shook the well-known Loonie beer tycoon’s hand and sat down.

  “Call me Nate,” the man said as he sat across the coffee table from Paul in a red leather wingback chair. “It’s all a show, Paul.”

  “A show? What is?”

  “The scarecrows. The siege.” Nate waved his hands about. “The visible tier of people here are all volunteers. They are being kept alive and healthy but on a near-to-nothing diet. The goal is political warfare. We want the Earthers to see what their government is capable of. I won’t tell you how just yet, but we’ve got plenty of food here.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’d tell this to somebody out there?” Paul wasn’t sure if these Loonies were too trusting, naïve, or if he was being set up somehow. He sipped the beer. It was very hoppy. “Why tell me?”

  “We need an ally from the other side of the blockade. You managed to get yourself chosen to make this humanitarian run. So, honestly, you are the first person we’ve been able to make the proposition to.”

  “What proposition?” He sipped the beer again. “Not bad stuff.”

  “I know, right? Took me months to get that one right. Then all this had to happen. It’s just sitting there in the barrels downstairs and I can’t move it. Costing me a fortune.” Nate grimaced. “But that’s not why you’re here. Although, you might could move some of this back with you if you’d like. I would cut you in for a good piece.”

  “Ha-ha-ha. The Ueys might let me back through the blockade with it, but then I’d have to explain why y’all are starving down here if you have all this beer and nuts laying about,” Paul said. “So, what the Hell is really going on? You had to know that.”

  “Just making sure you did, Paul.” Nate leaned back in his chair. “And you are right. We can’t move the beer right now. But someday.”

  “Then what?” Paul shrugged. “What is your proposition?”

  “Imagine that you had a machine that could pump out any object, device, machine—whatever that your culture, your society, your army might need,” Nate said over his steepled fingers resting against his chin.

  “Sounds great, but there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.”

  “Very true. The catch is that you have to have the ingredients the devices are made from as raw materials in order to build them. While the Moon has an abundance of things like carbon, titanium, even metals lying about the habitats and cities, there are some things that just are missing. Things we need.” Nate sighed. “We can make guns all day long, but we can’t make enough gunpowder to reload the bullets.”

  “Well, how about that?” Paul realized what this was all about finally. The Loonies didn’t have any ammunition to fight back with and if the Ueys figured that out they’d be sunk. “The Ueys would never let me through the blockade with gunpowder.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. But we don’t need gunpowder.”

  “Wait, you just said you needed gunpowder.”

  “I said we can’t make enough gunpowder to make enough ammunition. We have all the carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, magnesium, and other things. What we are missing is potassium nitrate. Well, we can make the nitrate, we need the potassium.” Nate sighed and leaned back. “Apparently, there just isn’t a stable ready source of potassium here on the Moon.”

  “Potassium?”

  “And here in a few minutes we’re gonna video you and the doctors analyzing all these scarecrows out there and guess what? They’re all gonna be suffering from hypokalemia as one of the side effects of the starvation.” Nate smiled. “You know what hypokalemia is, Paul?”

  “Let me guess, potassium deficiency?”

  “Ding-ding! Give the man a prize.

  “So, we need you to make another humanitarian run with potassium-rich foods, vitamins and supplements, cream of tartar, sports drinks, and even hide some potassium metal in there if you can manage it,” Nate explained. “The doctors will give you a list.”

  “That might could be done. I know a guy that does runs out to the Belt that might could hook me up with some larger chunks of potassium. Might could hide it in the structure somewhere.” Paul pondered the idea of helping the Loonies out. “But there’s still a big question.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Bingo. Give the man a prize.” Paul finished off the beer. “What’s in it for me other than a trip to prison if the Ueys figure out what is happening?”

  “We’ll never let you be a willing accomplice,” Nate assured him. “As far as you know you are purely doing a humanitarian run. And, if things work out, setting yourself up for a very lucrative future.”

  “Lucrative? How so?”

  “Paul, if we suddenly could repel the Ueys we’d be a free market. Even more than we’ve been for the last thirty years.” Nate leaned in toward him with a raised eyebrow. “And, Paul, I’m always looking for distribution lines I can trust. This would put you in on the ground floor of what might be billions, maybe trillions in future revenue.”

  “You had me at billions.” Paul smiled and rose from the chair. “Let’s go look at these scarecrows and see if we can’t get them some sports drinks or something. Thanks for the beer.”

  “If you’re not going to eat the nuts, we’ll recycle them.” Nate frowned. “Lot of potassium in them, you know.”

  “Didn’t know.”

  “It’s just medical supplies and foodstuffs! You hold me up much longer and I’ll have a cargo hold full of rotten bananas and avocados and antibiotics that are going to be useless!” Paul shouted almost nose to nose with the young lieutenant commander holding him at gunpoint. “Check your logs. This is the Mama’s Express on a Red Cross humanitarian mission to Luna Eleven and it has been approved by the UNE! This is my second run. Haven’t you people seen the news vids?”

  “What the Hell is going on here, Lieutenant Commander Haines?” A man with three full blips on his collar stepped through the UNE carrier’s cargo hold doors through the airlock and onto the Express.

  “This man has a cargo for the sieged colony and there are three ships in convoy with him. His manifest is nonmilitary humanitarian goods, but I was only given notice of one ship, not three. Sir, I wasn’t aware we were letting more ships through the blockade.”

  “I already explained that! We had the opportunity to get much-needed foodstuffs to the starving and dying human beings on the Moon below! If we don’t get this food there now it will be bad before we can distribute it. The bananas are already turning black!” Paul continued to oversell the predicament with hopes that the captain of the blockade would just not want to deal with him. “I have no weapons of any sort on board and we’re approved by the Red Cross and the UNE!”

  “Captain Jennings, is it?” the blockade captain asked calmly.

  “Yes.”

  “Captain, this is just a bad day for you. We have things going on and nobody is supposed to be getting through the blockade today.” But the captain paused and was clearly perplexed by the situation. Paul was causing him trouble he didn’t want. “You’re only going to Luna Eleven with this, right?”

  “Yes sir, humanitarian goods only. I mean, have you seen the scarecrows down there? It’s terrible.” Paul waved his arms about at the cargo. “I’m just hoping some of this stuff can get to them and keep some of them alive. I’ve never seen children so frail looking!”

  “Captain, if I let you through with this cargo, I won’t be able to let you back
for an unforeseen time to come. We’re about to clamp completely down on the Moon and nobody will be going in or out. Not even humanitarian missions.”

  “I see.” Paul hesitated slightly. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. “Sir, I’ll gladly sit down there for weeks if that’s what it takes to get this stuff to them.”

  “You might end up one of them, Captain Jennings. Do you understand what you are asking for here?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I see.” The captain looked at the lieutenant commander briefly then nodded approvingly. “It’s a noble thing. Good luck, then. Don’t try to return or we’ll be ordered to open fire on you.”

  “Understood. And thanks, Captain . . . uh, sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Blalock. Captain Blalock,” the man told him. “We’ll see if you’re thanking me in a few weeks when you start getting hungry too.”

  “The bananas and avocados are mostly going bad, Nate,” Paul explained as he walked him about the cargo hold of the Mama’s Express. “The potassium should still be there, just not edible.”

  “Didn’t plan on eating it anyway,” Nate laughed. “But three cargo haulers full of bananas is only a start, not sure if it’s enough to run a war.”

  “Good thing I brought you more than just bananas and avocados, then.” Paul grinned from ear to ear. “Look here. You see this bulkhead here? Does it seem out of place to you at all?”

  “Not sure what you mean. It just looks like a bulkhead at the aft end of a cargo box.” Nate pounded his hand against it and there was nothing unusual about the metallic clang sound it made. “Should it look out of place?”

  “Well, if you measure the outer length of the ship this cargo hold should be a good five meters longer on the inside.” Paul leaned against the bulkhead. “I asked around before making this run. I had a feeling it would be my second and last one through the blockade and I knew this might be our only shot at getting to you what you need. On the other side of this wall is a container filled with petroleum jelly and inside of that petroleum jelly is a five-meter-by-five-meter-by-three-meter chunk of pure potassium metal. I had to hock everything I own and take out a loan against the Express to pay for it, but it’s there. The other two ships have similar holds but they’re filled with potassium metal ion batteries. Most of them are old and bad but there’s a lot of potassium there. I had to autonav them down. Ueys wouldn’t let me crew them. The guys I, uh, borrowed them from are gonna be pissed that they ain’t getting them back anytime soon.”