As she reached for the radio, a ding-dong sound about made her jump right out of her skin. Nora spun in a circle, looking in all directions. A brief moment passed before she realized it was a doorbell. She patted down the wrinkles in her shirt and opened the front door.
Thomas Belew stood there in his royal blue jacket, his left arm hanging in front of him as casually as a woman might wear a purse. He greeted her with cheer and aplomb.
“Bastard,” Nora said.
Belew leaned away with a hurt look on his face, then stepped over the threshold. “And after you didn’t trust me to transport you to your hideout? I should be the one offended.”
“It would have been suspicious if a Zettafleet ship showed up to pick me up.”
Nora walked back a step as Belew entered the home and casually strolled around her. He appraised the cottage silently. When he reached the desk, he put a finger on one of the pages. “Your confession?” he asked. “About eight years ago, you had me clean up someone who was leaving your team. You told him he was going to live out his years on Freeport. I figured that this was your escape plan.”
The open door stood before Nora. It was late evening. There was nowhere for her to go. She shut the door.
“The USSN doesn’t know you’re here,” Belew said, “but the intelligence agencies are looking for you very hard, my dear. Luckily, it’s a big galaxy. They might never find you. Not without a tipoff, anyway.”
Nora sighed and wrapped her arms around her body. “What do you want?”
Belew spun around the desk chair and sat down, his free hand on his knee. “Everything,” he said with a shrug. “Account numbers. Transfer authorizations. You don’t need it, anymore. Do they even have PPC shopping here?”
Nora sneered. “Give you everything or you turn me over to the USSN? Is that the deal?”
Belew stood upright in an instant. He crossed the distance between them in two strides. Nora was at least a foot shorter than he. Belew leaned forward so that he could look her in the eyes. His limp arm swung forward and bumped into her chest. “Or I could just kill you, myself.”
With the war on the lunazoe over, things became quiet on the US3 Hamilton, again. Enforcing the quarantine took little work, and the moon plumes had dropped to their lowest rate ever. Only this time, instead of descending into pettiness, Jason and Erin found themselves screwing at every possible moment to help pass the time.
Jason laid on his back, Erin bouncing on top of him. Her breasts swung in his face, smothering him. Heat radiated from their bodies. Jason could taste the sweat on Erin’s damp skin. The soft flesh pressed harder against him, covering his mouth and nose. Smothering him. He turned his head and drew a partial breath, but Erin squeezed her chest into him harder.
Erin put her whole weight into Jason’s face. He could hear her moaning. He tried to push her off, but she had him pinned down effectively, and it felt like she had transformed into a 250lb body builder. Jason felt what little air he had managed to suck in squeeze from his lungs. He pounded on Erin’s back with the heel of one arm, but she made no effort to move.
The world dimmed at the edges of Jason’s vision. Then, there was a shift, and both he and Erin rolled off the mattress. Jason felt something in his wrist crack as he tried to catch himself on the way down. On the floor of his cabin, Jason finally managed to inhale, but only with great difficulty. He tried to sit up, but the muscles in his neck and abdomen only strained against unseen forces. The US3 Hamilton was accelerating hard.
Captain Hawley had once been swimming in the ocean as a young soldier. He was a healthy, strong lad and a powerful swimmer. He swam past the breakers and rolled on his back. The open blue sky seemed so lovely after an eighteen month rotation on a class 2 starship. Hawley felt a sensation like falling in love. He relaxed and watched the birds glide overhead.
Eventually, Hawley could no longer hear the gallivanting of his brothers. He rolled upright in the water, and found that he had drifted dangerously far from shore. He was young, but not stupid. He began a freestyle swim stroke directly back to the beach. In five minutes, his heart was pumping, and he breaked to check his progress. A tinge of fear struck the young man’s heart as he saw he had lost ground. Panic reared its head at the back of Hawley’s mind.
Calmness prevailed. The steadfast nerves that would earn Hawley a pilot’s chair in a capitol ship were just as present in his younger self. He remembered how rip tides worked. Hawley swam parallel to the shore for a way. When he turned back, he was able to make headway towards the beach. He reached it after what felt like an eternity, so exhausted he could barely stand. Robert Hawley stayed out of the water for the rest of that leave.
This was exactly what went through Captain Hawley’s mind as the US3 was plummeting towards the moon. He fought against the unseen pull as the gee force pressed him firm against his captain’s seat, yet no matter how hard they pushed the ship’s engines, they still slipped lower in orbit.
Hawley recognized immediately that the Hamilton could not reverse its course, so instead, he rammed it forward. Agonizing seconds went by while they continued to fall, but then, just like that, the downward acceleration ceased and the ship rocketed back towards its original orbit. It was just like escaping a rip tide.
When he had a chance to breathe, Hawley barked out for someone to give him a damn status. There was confusion as the techs read the systems. The anomaly had come from nowhere. Finally, he was given an answer.
“Some sort of gravity well opened above the moon. The Soul-Eater tried to pull us down to the surface.”
8.
The moon crash was the obvious conclusion to the moon wells. It promised to be the single most destructive event in the history of humanity.
The first moon well closed just thirty seconds after it opened. Physicists across the galaxy were at a loss to explain how the lunazoe was able to manipulate physics at such a large scale. The mass offerings were ceased immediately. The president was forced to admit that letting thousands offer themselves to the lunazoe may not have been the wisest course of action. The quarantine was expanded again, and the cruisers took up random, elliptical orbits.
Riots broke out aboard civilian and commercial spacecraft. Waste victims who had been waiting three years for their turn to offer themselves now had their chance delayed indefinitely just before they were to be delivered. The passengers overwhelmed the skeleton crews. Even though their bodies were crippled and desiccated, their numbers defeated the able-bodied crew. Inexperienced pilots charged their hijacked vessels at the quarantine periphery.
The USSN attempted to disable the ships, but in the frenzied chaos, some were destroyed entirely, and all souls aboard were lost.
“Critics of God,” the televangelist said, “call Him the Soul-Eater. We know this is not true. We see our brothers’ and sisters’ souls restored whole in the visions He sends us. We see their souls unharmed. In fact, they are serene and jubilant. No, my friends. The Soul-Eater is the United States Space Navy. The men and women on those ships have lost their souls forever. They were consumed by the fear in mens’ hearts. It came at a time when they were closest to meeting the lord. We must not back down in the face of this adversity. We must remain strong and steadfast.”
The president watched the preacher from his office. The reception his offering program had received had ensured his reelection. Had something like this happened the year before, he might not have gotten a second term. He turned to Admiral Vogel for counsel.
“I have to announce the offerings will be restored soon,” the president said. “Even if it’s a lie. We’ll have civil unrest if I don’t.”
“Perhaps we can offer a change in schedule,” the admiral suggested. “Tell them that all future offerings will be managed through government channels. We slow it down through bureaucracy. Accept something like ten people a day through the program. But then, we fake everything. The Waste victims never get sent to the moon. Instead, we put them in a medically induced coma and ship t
hem to a facility on another world until this whole thing can be sorted out.”
“Sorted out?” the president asked. “The lunazoe has been around for over forty years. You spent nearly a decade in active war against it. Now it’s reaching up and snatching at our cruisers. How long before it starts grabbing satellites? How long before it grabs the orbital Pelagic base? I got elected to sort out the economy. I got elected so I could give people suffering an option. Do you have a timeline for getting this sorted out? Or do you suggest we just hide millions of people on some rock and hope no one notices?”
The admiral took his rebuke stoically. “Unfortunately, Mr. President, most of our options for destroying the lunazoe were scrapped when you disbanded the Eradication Council. However, I do believe we have one promising option which was filed as a containment protocol. I’ll admit it’s extreme, but given the extreme nature of the abilities the lunazoe is now demonstrating, I find it fitting.”
“I want it on my desk for review immediately. And double the bounty on Dobbs. If we don’t get anything, double it again.”
The poker games were a bit less lively without Randall. He sobbed when his application was accepted. They threw a block party for him the week before he sailed off. Michael had never seen a bigger collection of freaks, but he had also never seen such mass celebration. The men and women there really believed that Randall had won a lottery ticket to heaven.
People jokingly called Michael Soul-Eater as they danced and limped and waddled. He was known for his anti-lunazoe stance and openly mocked for it. He might have become an outcast if his previous fame and ongoing success and hosting of his own house parties hadn’t given him a sort of untouchable celebrity status. Now he was able to get away with his opinion, no matter how unpopular.
Michael reported on each moon well with appropriate gravity. He characterized the lunazoe as a hungry beast insatiable for human flesh. It played well with the Soul-Eater crowd, but it was standard fair. Michael wouldn’t catch another big break until he scored a press pass to the Pelagic trials.
Nora Dobbs had been sold out by a mercenary whom she had contracted for various jobs. Reportedly, his intel had been so precise that he was able to provide the USSN with her exact address. A two-week operation followed, during which the capture of every missing Pelagic researcher was coordinated.
An unusually modern car rolled through the market square that morning. Nora noticed it immediately. It was a dark SUV with massive side doors and tinted windows. She clutched a gallon of milk in one hand and a bag with bread, cheese, and potato chips in the other. When it was half a block away, she found herself paralyzed. Her legs refused to take another step. Her breath caught in her chest.
The vehicle stopped beside her. Masked soldiers erupted from the side door, threw a dark bag over her head, and whisked her inside. Hands patted her down. Fingers probed inside her mouth. Nora was sedated. The next time she woke, she was in a USSN holding cell. She had no way of knowing whether she was still on Freeport, on Earth, or in transit somewhere between.
To her great surprise, Nora was given access to legal counsel. She was never tortured or put under duress. She was not drugged or plied with any psychotropics. Nora complied and submitted to sixteen hours of questioning each day, with only small recess for meals and bathroom breaks. She admitted to all her violations of laws and ethics.
The breakthroughs in nanotechnology were initially funded by the Pentagon for purposes of espionage. It was thoroughly successful. Any touch could deposit thousands of microscopic cameras on the clothing or skin of important state heads. Smaller than the dander on a man’s shoulder, nanites recorded and transmitted live data to their headquarters. GPS trackers could be ingested and passed without notice from the subject. Any building, no matter how secure, could have its ventilation systems breached and every room spied upon. There was not a place in the galaxy that the US government was no longer able to penetrate.
Of course, there were still secrets that the current generation of nanites could not procure. They could not pluck the thoughts from men’s minds. They could not record the motives of actors. They could not transmit internal dialog.
Nora believed that would change. With the research of Dr. Alan Fabrykcy, Pelagic had created nanite robots with the ability to monitor individual electrical signals of the brain. Understanding and translation of these signals was still rudimentary, reducing complex thought to vague emotions, but she was confident that future decades would bring precision.
The second step of the plan was the Waste vaccine. The plague had ravaged mankind for decades. Never had there been greater suffering in the galaxy. Never had there been such pressure exerted by the people. If Pelagic had devised a working prototype that neutralized the Waste pathogen, they would have a platform on which the mind reader nanites could piggyback into the willing bodies of every living human in the United Space. With one stroke, Pelagic would have access to the thoughts of every person alive, something that was currently only privy to God, Himself.
Nora hadn’t predicted the containment breach. She hadn’t desired the deaths of three of her staff. She could never have anticipated the large-scale conversion of lunar mass into lunazoe material. As for the bizarre moon callings and now the manipulation of space-time, she could only offer wild speculation.
By their nature, the lunazoe nanites were capable of wireless communication. Nora explained that a computer, comprised of nothing but 1’s and 0’s, was capable of solving the most incredibly complex calculations through their coordination. She theorized that the nanites, corrupted by the Waste pathogen, now formed some sort of neural pathway. Those same nanites trawled and recorded every fiber of brain tissue in the three doctors who were consumed to the horror of those watching. This somehow allowed their memories and possibly their very thought processes to be preserved on this pathway. There were many holes in the theory, but each of them could be attributed to the inexplicable nature of the Waste.
The president and USSN Admiral Vogel watched much of this testimony in real-time. Occasionally, they would ask Nora questions, using the interviewers as proxy. Eventually, the president instructed she be asked how to stop the lunazoe.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “We’d been trying to figure that out the whole time. Believe me, nobody wanted this mess over with more than I did.”
The president could name a few individuals who did indeed want this cleaned up more than she.
The trials dragged on for nearly a year. Nora had a list of charges longer than she could count. She was charged with acts of treason, with war crimes, with crimes against humanity, and with all manners of conspiracy and violations. The courtroom gasped as she freely admitted to hiring a Zettafleet captain to murder former colleagues who might expose her.
Michael reported on the events as faithfully as he could. He also continued to drum up as much fear and worry as he could regarding the escalating moon wells. Measurements proved they were becoming more powerful. When he finally had evidence of the moon crash, the established moon panic turned into outright moon terror.
USSN Astrophysicists monitored the gravity fields above the moon and routed cruisers out of the path of any moon well that formed. They typically lasted from one to two minutes and could be seen as funnel shapes on the big screens in the science bay. Each funnel pointed down towards one of the swampy lunazoe areas, with a correlation between the size of the swamp and the strength of the moon well.
When the event dubbed God’s Glance by lunazoe supporters began, the gravity flux did not appear as a funnel, but as a corona blooming over and past the lunazoe mass. Scientists watching it described it as a gravitational storm cloud and directed all USSN traffic away from the event.
It took fully an hour before the scientists realized the magnitude of the event. By nightfall, the orientation of the moon had changed enough so that the silver swamp was now pointed directly at Earth.
Michael had to admit that during the next full moon, with the circ
ular swamp in the middle like a pupil and the lunazoe branches spreading outward like veins, it really did look like a giant eye staring down at him. The televangelists warned that God had cast a disapproving gaze and that if our president didn’t restart the offerings soon, his soul might be forfeit.
It was his old contact, Erin Zeiger, who gave him the tipoff. For once, she was able to provide some information instead of a crackpot theory. A friend of hers on the navigation team confirmed that the extended moon well degraded the moon’s orbit by about one tenth of one percent. Michael was unsure exactly what this meant at first, but the answer was relatively simple: The moon had moved about twenty-five miles closer to the Earth.
It was a somber thought. Michael rubbed the arch of his new foot and contemplated Erin’s message. He had to decide if he was making too big of a jump. Finally, he opened the word processor and began typing.
“Moon Crash: The Soul-Eater Falls From Heaven”
From that point forward, there were two primary reactions. On nights the moon was visible, the crippled and the twisted would fill the streets and bask in the moonlight. They dotted hills and fields. They gathered on rooftops. Those that were less mobile would stay awake by a window, hoping for a glimpse of their savior.
The healthy and those who weren’t ready to give up their Earthly presence took up an object aversion to the moon. They kept their blinds drawn. They refused to venture out at night. When the moon was visible in the day, they stayed home sick. The spaceports were booked again. Prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications increased by orders of magnitude.
The only thing these two groups had in common was prayer.
The week after Michael’s moon crash article went live, another prolonged moon well began. It lasted over four weeks. The lunazoe pulled the moon approximately one and a half miles closer to the Earth every hour of this period. The president addressed the union. There was nothing to fear, he promised. The National Guard was deployed in metropolitan areas across the country.
Moon Panic Page 8
