by Ian Douglas
“Can I take anyone along? Dr. Sullivan has been working with me on…”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. Space is limited, and there’s no time for training.”
Teri was going to be disappointed. Hell, he was disappointed…but the thought of getting into the field again—and on the Moon!—was too much to resist.
Besides, he knew what LEO-Lunar transports were like. There’d have been no privacy, no opportunity to give Teri a chance to join the Three Dolphin Club.
Later, after his visitors had left, David stood at the window looking down at the demonstrators outside, thoughtful. There was someone he needed to talk to just now.
Someone he wasn’t supposed to talk to at all….
EU Science Research Vessel
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Co-orbit with Asteroid 2034L
2235 hours GMT
Dr. Jean-Etienne Cheseaux floated alongside the Laplace’s tiny observation port, slipping his dark glasses into place as sunlight flooded into the compartment. Outside, the sun was just clearing the edge of the Rock as the ship’s slow drift brought her clear of the small planetoid’s shadow. He still wondered why the Académie des Sciences had insisted that he come here.
Cheseaux was an astronomer; his primary specialization was selenology, the geology of the Moon, but the Academy had asked him to serve as payload specialist aboard the Laplace. Not that he was complaining, necessarily—he liked it in space, enjoyed the sensations of free fall and the spectacular purity of the sunlight—but the measurements he was taking of 2034L’s mass and spin and precise orbit could have been made by any competent technician. It was, he supposed, an indication of the importance the Academy attached to this mission. The knowledge stirred his professional pride, and his ego; there was talk, he’d heard, of naming this particular rock Cheseaux. Of course, the astronomical society frowned on using the names of living people, but there were precedents.
Asteroid 2034L had been discovered eight years ago, one of the fast-growing number of near-Earth asteroids whose orbits carried them periodically inside the orbit of Earth. This one was particularly disturbing; as carbonaceous chondrite, like the majority of asteroids, it had an extremely low albedo, rendering its surface as black as the blackest coal. It was also small, less than a hundred meters across.
That combination of orbit, albedo, and small size made 2034L particularly dangerous, a prime target for the Phaeton Project. In Greek mythology, Phaeton was the boy who’d lost control of Apollo’s sun-chariot, bringing it too near the Earth and nearly destroying humanity in fire. Since the 1980s, the particular danger Earth-crossing asteroids and comets represented to the Earth had been well understood; the lesson of the dinosaurs, exterminated by the ten-mile body that had smashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago, could not be ignored. By the early 2000s, several skywatch operations were in place, identifying and charting the flying mountains that might someday pose a direct threat to Earth and her inhabitants.
Phaeton, one of the most comprehensive of the sky-watch programs, had been begun in 2029, a collaboration between the European Union, Japan, and the United States. The UN had assumed financial responsibility five years later, the same year in which 2034L had been discovered. The war, of course, had interfered to the extent that neither the United States nor Japan was participating any longer, but the work was vital enough that the EU Space Agency had continued the program, war or no war.
Cheseaux was now confident that this rock, at least, posed no immediate threat to humanity. With precise measurements now complete, he could confidently report that 2034L would pass within a million kilometers of the Earth in another five months. That was twice the distance from Earth to the Moon, a cat’s whisker when you looked at the sheer size of the whole solar system, but comfortable enough as a margin of safety. He would need to run his figures through the supercomputer center at the Sorbonne to be sure, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that 2034L would again pass close by the Earth in another forty-five years. That passage would be a near miss of perhaps one hundred thousand kilometers that would slingshot the body in toward the sun…which in turn would either destroy the asteroid in celestial flame or send it careening out into the thin, cold dark of the outer system.
Either way, this particular Earth-crosser posed no threat.
“Upload complete, Doctor,” Laplace’s commander, Colonel Denis Armand, announced, drifting alongside of Cheseaux in a head-down position relative to him. “They have asked us to hold our position, however, until another vessel can rendezvous with us.”
“Another craft? What other craft?”
Armand gave a Gallic, inverted shrug, then reached out to brace himself against the bulkhead before he started turning. “They didn’t say. The war, after all…”
Cheseaux gave a soft grunt of understanding. It was always the war. Abject foolishness! The European Union needed to be working with the Americans and the Japanese and even the Russians, now…not fighting them. The Americans had already slammed the door to Mars shut in the UN’s face rather decisively; the UN risked losing access to the Moon as well, if they persisted in this insanity. It was time to end this, declare a truce, and find out how best to get all of humankind working on the problems of recovering and learning from the newly discovered alien technology.
Squinting against the sunlight, Cheseaux looked for and found a pair of tiny crescents, one silver, one gray, well beyond the horizon of 2034L and bowed away from the sun. Earth was now less than ten million kilometers away, its attendant moon somewhat farther. Both seemed transcendently delicate, ethereal, and small. The war that had wracked the world for the past two years, the burning political questions of Aztlan independence and control of ancient alien technologies all seemed so completely insignificant from this vantage point. It was true, what they said: Looking back at the Earth from space gave one an entirely new perspective, a new outlook.
Perhaps it was Earth’s politicians who should be shipped up here, the lot of them, and not her scientists and soldiers. Let them work out their differences bathed in heavenly radiance, with the Earth nothing more than a frail, silver sliver in the night.
“Well, I think I’ll turn in,” he told the commander. “Let me know if there’s a call from Earth.”
“Of course.”
Laplace was neither large nor luxurious, even as space-craft went. Her hab module and laboratory together were ten meters long and five wide, small enough to have fit easily inside the living and working area of the old Skylab, and she carried twice as many people, three crew and three payload specialists. Cheseaux’s cabin was a closet-sized space in the aft of the hab module with thin plastic walls and a sleeping bag attached to the bulkhead. His “desk” pulled out from one of the walls, a plastic board with Velcro surfaces, to which his laptop was attached.
Pulling the folding panel shut behind him—the only concession to the human need for privacy aboard—he peeled his computer from the desk and wiggled into the sleeping bag so that he didn’t have to think about not floating about. Outside his cabin, the bumps and thumps, the conversations, the smells of ready-heat meals and men in close confinement continued to permeate his world. As much as he’d been enjoying this mission, he was going to be glad to get back to Paris. He’d actually felt, he realized now, a pang of disappointment a few minutes ago when he’d learned Laplace would not be immediately returning home.
He logged onto Spacenet.
Everyone in Laplace’s little crew had his own Net account; the best defense against the feelings of isolation and depression common on long missions in space was the ability to log onto the Net and have immediate access to news, to books or music, to v-mail and e-mail that let the astronauts keep in close touch with people and events back home. As his browser came up, the new-mail icon flashed cheerfully on the menu bar.
Twenty-seven messages, including five requests for real-time v-chats. One from Annette that he’d been looking forward to…the rest from sources as
varied as the Académie des Sciences and the Cousteau Foundation, and a British UFO e-mag looking for an interview on ancient aliens. Maybe instant communications through the Net weren’t such an all-encompassing and unalloyed blessing after all.
One e-mail was flagged as confidential and encrypted, from a masked address. He knew immediately who that was from, and it worried him.
He accessed the message. It was in text only, to make the multilevel encryptions it employed simpler…as well as making them less obvious to anyone who might be monitoring e-mail packet transmissions.
The immediate address was a remailing service in Finland; he knew, though, that its author was in the United States. It was hard to decide who would get into more trouble if this correspondence was ever discovered—David Alexander for writing it, or Cheseaux for reading it and not reporting it at once to UN officials.
Not that he would even consider reporting it. David was a good friend, had been a friend and close correspondent ever since the two of them had met at a symposium on the Cydonian ruins held in Athens in 2037. It had been one of those relationships that sparks from the first meeting, as though they’d known one another for years, a reflection of what the Latinos called simpatico.
His screen went dark as the encryption software began chewing through columns of numbers and letters. There were several such software packages available, none guaranteed a hundred percent secure…but the sheer volume of encoded messages routing their way through the Spacenet nowadays meant their correspondence was probably safe, even though such traffic was actively discouraged by both sides in the war.
The words decryption complete appeared, followed a moment later by the complete text of the message.
JEAN-ETIENNE:
THEY’RE SENDING ME TO THE MOON TO INVESTIGATE ARTIFACTS YOUR PEOPLE FOUND THERE. I GATHER OUR MUTUAL FRIEND MARC BILLAUD IS THERE ALREADY. WHAT GIVES WITH THE INCREDIBLE SECRECY SURROUNDING THIS THING? THEY TELL ME THAT MARC FOUND AN ET SHIP, WHICH IS FANTASTIC NEWS, IF TRUE. IT MIGHT EVEN BE THE SORT OF THING THAT WOULD GET OUR GOVERNMENTS TO BURY THE HATCHET AND DECLARE PEACE.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOUR PEOPLE ARE OUT AND MINE CONTROL THE SITE NOW. IS THERE SOMETHING I SHOULD KNOW GOING IN? DO YOU HAVE ACCESS TO ANY OF MARC’S REPORTS ON THE SITE, THERE IN PARIS, OR DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HIS FINDS THAT WOULD BE USEFUL ON THIS END? I’LL PASS ON WHAT I CAN LEARN AS I GET THE CHANCE.
CORDIALLY,
DAVID A.
Cheseaux smiled. A charming letter, and so utterly naive…but then, the Americans were a naive people. As much as he liked, admired, and respected young Alexander, he was not about to give the American military secrets. There was a war on, after all! And as for ending hostilities—he assumed that that was the meaning of the enigmatic phrase “bury the hatchet”—he surely didn’t think that the UN Authority was about to surrender its claim to the wreckage discovered recently at Picard, did he?
Except…
Cheseaux sighed. How much of what David wanted was classified for honest reasons of legitimate state security, and how much was due to the shortsighted scrabblings of small-minded and paranoid UN bureaucrats?
Just what was it that had divided the world for these past two years, anyway? The United States refusal to hold a UN-mandated plebiscite on the question of independence for some of its Southwestern states. Cheseaux snorted. He scarcely blamed Washington for refusing that one, especially since the vote was to be limited to the American states involved and would have included the populations of Mexico’s northwestern states—a stacked deck if ever there’d been one. That wasn’t even worth a decent riot or two, to say nothing of the war!
What else? Russia’s refusal to back down to China’s demands for parts of Siberia; those land claims went way back and could have been settled in other ways. The fear that the United States and Russia were using their superiority in spaceflight technology to grab the newly discovered archeological discoveries and exotechnologies for themselves. The willingness of the United States to actually publish some of those discoveries prematurely, without weighing the impact they would have on religious, political, and social systems worldwide.
Those last two, Cheseaux thought, were rarely trumpeted as reasons for the continued crusade against the US and Russia, but he suspected that they were the real reason for the hostilities.
If so, however, it was possible that his friend was headed into considerable danger. He hadn’t heard anything about an American attack on the Picard site, but that was implied by David’s letter. He doubted that the UN forces at Tsiolkovsky would let the Americans stay without a damned stiff challenge.
He hoped David knew enough to keep his head down when the shooting started.
SEVEN
WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL 2042
USASF Tug Clarke
Nearing the Moon
0740 hours GMT
The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage point, the terminator line a crinkled, ragged lace-work of silver-gray, brown, and black, the rest of the visible face as dazzling in the sunlight as new snow. David Alexander struggled to orient himself but found an excess of map detail too confusing. “So…where is it we’re going?”
The tug’s pilot was a US Aerospace Force captain named Heyerson. He pointed beyond the sunset terminator, into darkness.
“About there,” he said. Sunlight flashed off the dark glasses he wore inside his comset helmet. “The Mare Crisium is well past sunset, now. You guys are gettin’ dropped off at Picard Crater, just inside Crisium’s wall.”
The third man in the tug’s cramped cockpit clung to the back of the pilot’s couch, trying to see. He was a Navy man, HM1 Robert Thornton. “What I wanna know,” he said, “is where Tranquillity Base is.”
“Ah.” Heyerson pointed again, this time toward a dark, smooth plain bisected by the terminator. “Up that way. Almost to the horizon. You won’t be able to see it naked-eye, though, if that’s what you were expecting.”
“I just want to see the place, man,” Thornton replied. “Where it started.”
The Aerospace man chuckled. “Whatever.” He glanced at Thornton. “Y’know, I still don’t know what the Navy’s doing up here. The Marines, I can understand, kinda. The Army, no problem. Civilian scientists, all in a day’s work. But the Navy?…”
“Read your briefing, Captain,” David said. “The Marines don’t have medics, like the Army. They rely on Navy corpsmen instead.”
“Bravo Company’s corpsman was killed in the assault,” Thornton said. He was black, his skin so dark in the instrumentation-lit cockpit that it was difficult to make out any expression at all. “I’m the replacement.”
“Yeah, well, the jarheads are all goin’ home as soon as I get this lot settled in,” Heyerson said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the forty US Army Special Forces troops crammed into the tug’s cargo bay aft. “Don’t know why you bothered to make the trip when you’re just gonna have to turn around and go back again!”
“Yeah, well, it’s the government’s dime,” Thornton said. “They say ‘Go,’ I go.”
“The Navy likes to take good care of the Marines,” David added. “It’s tradition.”
“Nah,” Thornton said. “The leathernecks just need someone to ride herd on ’em. Us corpsmen, we control their health records, see? Any of ’em get out of line, we lose their shot card, and they have to get every shot all over again. They know better than to make trouble with us around.”
“How about you, Doc?” Heyerson said, turning to look at David. “Why’d they send you out?”
“First of all,” David said, nodding at Thornton, “he’s ‘Doc,’ not me. Second, you really should’ve looked at your briefing.”
“I did…sir. Didn’t say much, except that I was to deliver forty soldiers, one Navy corpsman, and one civilian scientist to Picard Crater.”
“Maybe they didn’t want you to know, then.”
“Screw ’em.” His gaze dropped to the garish cloth patch sewn to David’s le
ather flight jacket. “How about that? Is that classified?”
He touched the patch. “What, this?”
“Yeah. I been wonderin’ about that since we boosted from LEO. T’tell you the truth, I didn’t know at first whether you were civilian or military, wearin’ that rig.”
Temperatures aboard a spacecraft, no matter how good the life-support systems, could vary swiftly from too warm to chilly, depending on the craft’s attitude of the moment with respect to the sun. David was wearing Marine-issue slacks, deck shoes, and orange T-shirt—garb he’d become comfortable with during his long cycler passage back from Mars. Since it was a bit on the chilly side aboard the Clarke now, he’d pulled a flight jacket on over the T-shirt—again, Marine-issue, but with a highly unofficial patch sewn to the left breast.
The stitching was a bit crude, but the elements were all clearly recognizable. The badge was shield-shaped, dark blue with a black border. Two black Advanced Tech Assault Rifles were crossed over a red disk representing Mars; a gold, white, and gray cylinder—a fair representation of a beer can—was superimposed over the ATARs. The legend, gold against dark blue at the top of the device, was HOPS VINCET. Curving all the way across the bottom of the badge, in tiny, carefully stitched gold letters, was the unwieldy line of characters: ATWTMATMUTATB.
“‘Hops vincet?’” Heyerson said, mispronouncing the last word.
“Hops winkit,” David replied, stressing the proper pronunciation. “Latin, sort of. It means ‘beer conquers.’”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll buy that.” Heyerson shook his head. “Some kind of fraternity?”
“You could say that.”
Thornton grinned. “‘Hops’ ain’t the Latin word for ‘beer.’”
“Don’t tell the Marines,” David replied with a chuckle. “It would disillusion them. The poor dears.”
“You two better strap down,” Heyerson warned. “We’re coming up on our final thrust phase, here. I’d hate to deliver the jarheads’ new corpsman with two busted legs.”
