by Brian Smith
A small knot of men and women moved from the transfer boat into Ross Station, while another moved from Ross Station onto the transfer boat for the trip back to Armstrong Station. When the process was complete, the hatches were sealed and the umbilical withdrawn, and the transfer boat received its lift clearance and raised ship without any fuss. The entire layover lasted less than ten minutes.
According to longstanding naval tradition, seniors are the last to embark a boat and first to go ashore. The first one off the boat and into the reception area was James Ford, once again dressed in a uniform jumpsuit with his helmet clipped to his belt. He was met by a similarly dressed lieutenant, who introduced himself as Mike Ashburn and affably welcomed Ford to the station.
“Thank you, lieutenant. I’m Jim Ford,” he replied, sounding not so affable. His attitude wasn’t hostile, just distant and very stoic.
Ashburn was well briefed on the man and his ship, including their recent exploits. They’d been through literal hellfire, but he could tell right away that Ford was wrestling with something else, maybe something personal. He wondered if Ford hailed from California or had family there. It wasn’t any of his business, but he had been curious and even somewhat eager to meet the man who had fought his ship past impossible odds and brought her home intact. Not very many people ever earned two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart!
“I’m one of the project officers here at Ross Station, sir,” Ashburn explained. “I’ll be part of the team briefing you in, as well as the other members of your crew when they arrive. I’m aware you’ve been given next to no information about what this is all about—your questions will be answered in short order, I assure you. First things first, though. I thought you might like to see your ship moved into her dock. We’ve got an observation deck built into the crater wall, just below the control tower. You can watch it for real, not on an imager. It’s actually pretty spectacular.”
“My gear?”
“It’ll be moved to quarters for you, sir.”
“Very well. Lead the way, lieutenant.”
Ford followed Ashburn. They rode an elevator underground and then stepped into a tubecar that whisked them rapidly from Ross Field to the crater wall. What followed was a repeat of the same scene Ashburn had witnessed everytime someone new showed up at Ross Station: that first step into Earth-normal gravity, almost universally followed by a surprised expletive and then questions about how it was possible. With Ford as with the pilots of VMF-52, Ashburn promised that explanations would come soon.
He led Ford deeper into the station and eventually to another lift. This one took them up almost a half kilometer, still inside the crater wall but much higher than the crater floor. It eventually disgorged them into a comfortable-looking lounge with autotinted transparent ceramic viewports that looked directly east, out over the crater itself. In fact, the imagers just outside were the ones that transmitted a nearly identical view to the flatscreens at the back of Cernan’s Folly.
The upper rim of the crater was still over a thousand meters higher than their current elevation. The station itself was in shadow at present, but the far side of the crater was bathed in brilliant raw sunlight bright enough to wash out the stars and even Earth. Ashburn moved over to the coffee service and drew two cups. He handed one to Ford and they settled in to wait.
Soon enough, they caught sight of the battle-damaged torchship as she was tugged down toward the lunar surface. It was an unusual sight, next to unheard of, really. Torchships were built and repaired in space docks that were integrated either into much smaller celestial bodies like the Aberdeen facilities on Phobos or into large spin stations like Armstrong or the late Halsey Station.
Ashburn watched Ford tense up as the currently unmanned Reuben James fell into the Ross Crater; for all practical purposes she might have been plunging to her doom. Ford needn’t have worried, however. Six tugs were hard-docked to the frigate like pallbearers at a funeral, an analogy that wasn’t lost on either man as gigantic doors to the outermost dry dock beyond the Ross Field tarmac suddenly split open, revealing a rectangular crevasse as black as any grave.
In unison the braking rockets fired aboard the six tugs, and fine-tuning bursts of RCS thrusters and internal gyros meticulously precessed the battered torchship, lining her up and settling her into her berth as gently as a feather. A few lights switched on inside the dry dock at the end, offering just enough illumination to see the ship down and clamped into position. Once she was in, the lights immediately switched back off. As soon as the tugs detached and lifted clear of the dock, the outer doors slid closed without further delay, sealing Reuben James safely and covertly beneath the lunar surface.
Ashburn could completely relate to the worried look on Ford’s face throughout the whole maneuver, and he found his thoughts wandering back to Thuvia. Had it really been only four months? It already seemed to him like another lifetime. At least twice a day he stopped and wondered where she was and how she fared. Last he’d heard, she was running supplies and personnel back and forth between Earth and the allied fleet interdicting Mars. No news was probably good news, these days.
“That’s not something you see every day! It’s like the moon just . . . swallowed her up,” Ford said quietly. “I suppose all of this is a big secret, eh? I was surprised to find my security clearance bumped to the code-word level before I could even come down here.”
“Yes, sir,” Ashburn confirmed. “This place wasn’t anything special up until a few months ago—just a test-and-evaluation center, really. Now it’s the outer-space version of Area 51, at least until the war’s over. We’ve got a lot of little projects bubbling on the stove down here. Given the advanced nature of the facilities, it’s not necessary to rotate personnel back up to Armstrong or Earth-side to keep them healthy. Once the essential personnel from your crew arrive, you’ll all stay here until the repairs and modifications to your ship are completed and she’s ready to get underway again. That’s not to say we’re all prisoners—quite the contrary. But we do try to limit comings and goings as much as possible.”
“Understood. When do the others arrive? And who is considered ‘essential’?”
“We wanted to bring you down and brief you in first. Your wardroom, including your incoming replacements, are considered essential, as are most of your engineering ratings. For them it’s going to be a little like going to A-school all over again. For the officers, it’s gonna be a little mind-bending. You’re on the very leading edge of human technological achievement here, captain. I think you’re going to enjoy it.”
Ford’s rigid self-control finally slipped. “I’ll enjoy using it to kill every last one of those MIM duster bastards,” he growled.
Ashburn was taken aback at the venom in Ford’s reply. Yup, there’s definitely something eating at this guy, he decided. Ironically, he had no way of knowing (and never would have guessed) that the source of Ford’s angst was the unresolved fate of someone they both knew: Deputy U.S. Marshal Diane Hutton.
Chapter 19
Megaplex Daily Dispatch—Your Eastern-Seaboard Story Source!
Trending newsfeeds on the MDD:
-Terra strikes back! Pentagon officials today confirmed that a TOA squadron consisting of U.S. and Royal Navy torchships conducted what they called a “flyby attack” on Mars. The tactic involved a high-velocity pass of the red planet, presumably to keep the attacking force safe from any Mars-based counterattack. Kinetic lance strikes were conducted against the four domed habitats of the Indus Vallis region, resulting in their destruction. Although no hard figures are available, the casualty estimate is estimated to exceed 60,000, primarily noncombatants. Other targets of the attack included Mars-based spaceport complexes in the northern hemisphere, torchship-berthing facilities and a deuterium-refueling depot on Deimos, as well as numerous space construction docks at Phobos having the potential to be converted to military use. No details regarding damage to orbital targets have been released to the public. According to navy officials, the
TOA squadron suffered no losses or casualties in the battle.
-TOA issues statement following the Indus Vallis bombing! A joint press release by a TOA spokesman on behalf of all member nations was issued today, stating that the decision to attack a primarily civilian population was not taken lightly and was considered necessary, given the massive number of casualties resulting from indiscriminate kinetic strikes aimed at Terra. According to government officials, the settlements in the Indus Vallis were selectively targeted because of their early, outspoken affiliation with the Ares Freedom Alliance and the Martian Coalition. Finally, the statement also included a stern warning that any future planetary-scale kinetic attacks made against Terra from anywhere in the solar system will be met with reciprocal retaliation against Martian settlements, beginning with those that were founding members of the UMF and ending, if necessary, with domes that formerly fell under Terran governance.
-Human-rights debate extends to casualty statistics! The leadership of the Natural Life Movement (NLM) has publicly censured disaster officials for “artificially” inflating West Coast casualty numbers by including the loss of thousands of exowomb embryos that were not yet viable. Local government officials involved with the disaster-relief efforts have ignored the outcry as irrelevant. Arizona’s often controversial crèche-born governor issued the following statement: “If the NLM truly cares about life, then those vultures need to quit counting the dead and start helping the living, regardless of birth method. Congress ought to consider nationalizing the NLM’s funds for humanitarian disaster relief!” NLM leadership responded by threatening legal action, repeating the organization’s position that exowombs should be outlawed and the crèche-born prohibited from holding public office.
-Americans! Your countrymen need you! The American Red Cross has put out the call for citizens to donate blood “the good old-fashioned way.” Stocks of synthetic blood substitutes, respirocytes, and other lifesaving supplies are critically low, and production facilities are unable to keep up with demand. The need for volunteers is especially critical if you live in the western or central-western states. Clothing, processed food, bottled water, medical supplies of any kind, human-portable cold-fusion units, and any form of temporary shelter such as recreational vehicles or even tents are desperately needed! Do you have an extra bedroom? Consider opening your home to a displaced fellow citizen. Remember, we’re all in this together!
-Chinese Federal Republic offers U.S. emergency-aid package! The CFR government has pledged some twenty-five trillion dollars in emergency foreign-aid money to the United States. Most of this aid is expected to take the form of forgiven debt, but the Chinese people are generously offering direct material aid as well. A daisy chain of cargo ships is now plying the Pacific Ocean between China and northwestern coastal ports such as Seattle; Vancouver, B.C.; Portland; and San Francisco. The ships are reportedly loaded with foodstuffs, textiles, and replacement components for the reactors and pipelines vital to supplying desalinated water to the continental interior. The Chinese president is quoted as saying that “the one good thing stemming from this war is the way the nations of Terra are coming together like never before. It has shown us that we are truly one people and one planet.”
-The MIM pledges retaliation for Indus Vallis! Self-appointed UMF chancellor Gabriel Rogan has finally issued a formal response to the Terran attack against civilian population centers on Mars. In it he states: “The arithmetic is simple. For every free Marsman killed by his Terran oppressors, ten thousand Terrans will die by fire falling from the heavens. The massacre at Indus Vallis will not go unpunished.”
-Tsong-Hyman astrophysics: Are you ready for the future? Physicists worldwide are reeling in the wake of a posthumously published thesis by Martian physicists Chiang Tsong and Samuel Hyman. Prior to their tragic, untimely deaths on Mars, this unlikely pairing of mathematical and cosmological prodigies has produced what appears to be a seminal work in the annals of science. Although the thesis is still undergoing extensive peer review at academic institutions all over the solar system, early indications are that its new theoretical framework will profoundly change mankind’s understanding of not only our own universe but of multiple higher dimensions with which it interacts. Sir Nigel Walker, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, has completed his initial review of the work. He states that “it represents the most fundamental shift in human understanding of the cosmos since the works of Galileo and Copernicus.”
May 2094 (Terran Calendar)
Office of Naval Intelligence Annex
Armstrong Naval Station, Lunar L1 Point
CW5 Cheryl Ayers was in her secure office adjacent to the spaces occupied by the staff of COMTHIRDFLEET, glumly reading over the intelligence report telling her there was a serious lack of intelligence regarding current events on Mars. One thing intelligence had learned, however, was that Gabriel Rogan and the MIM weren’t lying about being in control of most, if not all, flagged habitats on Mars.
As of the last reliable information, it appeared that the enemy’s absolute control over the Marsnet and all cloud-based data storage had given the revolutionaries the means to carry out a near-surgical purge of anyone working for a Terran government. Local government officials had been treated slightly more gently—they were offered the choice of defecting and performing their job functions for the Mars government, or perishing. She imagined that most of them had subordinated themselves to the MIM in order to survive, at least for the time being. Her inquiries about the status of the Scobee Federal Center and its staff in New Arizona had been met with a grim response: all federal-government and military personnel were essentially gone, with casualties thought to be at or near one hundred percent.
The bottom line was that Diane Hutton had almost certainly perished somewhere on Mars and that her friends and family back home would never know how, where, or when. The knowledge had come like a punch in the gut to Ayers and left her feeling very low. Every so often she found herself thinking about Jim Ford down on Ross Station and wondered how he was doing. Hutton’s probable fate had sent him into a stone-cold killing rage that he could barely keep contained. The lack of confirmation one way or the other just made it worse.
While most flagged habitats and Terran citizens on Mars were being spared, it wasn’t always the case. Unbeknownst to the general public, the MIM had gone a step further with the Chinese after the population of Tongling Habitat had refused to knuckle under. The Chinese population of Tongling hadn’t forgotten the first massacre they’d suffered at the hands of Gabriel Rogan and the MIM. When this population proved too troublesome to control, the MIM had simply destroyed Tongling Habitat and every man, woman, and child inside it. That savagery, coupled with a number of attempted kinetic strikes (and one successful one) at Terra, left her at a loss to interpret Gabriel Rogan’s true motivations. From her vantage point, the man had to understand that his stated objective, a free and independent Mars, had become politically impossible the moment he’d sent the first asteroid down-well, aimed for Earth.
The governments of Earth had initially been sluggish to respond, almost as if they were in a state of shock. That indolence was ending, however, and the war was threatening to escalate dangerously in the near term. The MIM wasn’t letting up or even offering to negotiate, and Earth clearly couldn’t surrender and leave a mass-murdering maniac like Rogan ruling over Mars. Personally, Ayers was mentally moving toward a place where she just wanted somebody to put a stop to it all before Earth was irreversibly damaged and the long-term survival of the human race called into question. If one subscribed to the theory that the essence of morality was “survival behavior” that ensured the continuation of the species, then this was the most immoral war ever fought and it needed to be ended, regardless of who won.
Worst of all, from her perspective, was the cyber-warfare picture. Terra’s forces were so hopelessly outclassed in that arena that the Martian revolutionaries’ cyber capabilities more than compensated for
the latter’s clear disadvantage in terms of standing military force. Not only that, the situation seemed to be getting worse as time went on, as if the enemy’s capacity for control of information and networks and for infliction of cyberattacks was expanding.
The AI algorithm to keep the Omnisynths a secret was present and active on all Terran-based data clouds—it was one of the first things Ayers had checked upon her return. The infiltration of markets and financial institutions was further proof that the MIM had their cyber “hooks” into Terra as well as Mars, even if not as completely.
Then there was the debacle of Operation Ares. Ayers was at a complete loss to explain how the enemy could penetrate the onboard computers of several squadrons of military assault ships in midflight, spoofing them all onto fatal trajectories. The long and short of it was that networks of any kind could no longer be trusted; encrypted communications essentially weren’t secure; and anything run by a computer that could talk to the outside world seemed to want to turn against the user completely at random—which meant that any system that had not yet run amok couldn’t be relied upon anyway.
The entire fleet was denetworked, cooperative engagements were practically impossible, AI-run systems were effectively sidelined, and task loading on human personnel was now at a critical tempo that was unsustainable over the long term. Everything took twice as long to do and needed more than twice the number of people to do it. The aura of desperation around Armstrong Station was palpable, and unpleasant. What began as a general mocking disbelief that Mars could wage an effective war against Earth had turned into the stark realization that Earth was losing. Most recently, the tsunami that had wiped SoCal’s coastal megacity off the map had brought the war starkly home for everyone—nobody was left unaffected by some degree of personal loss.
