by Ian Douglas
So far as Larouche was concerned, France and the UN had done just that in this century, first by trying to force the issue of independence for the Southwestern United States, then by attempting to take over the American archeological finds on Mars, and finally, and most unforgivably, by trying to end a war that never should have begun by dropping an asteroid into the American heartland. There would be, there could be no forgiveness now from the Americans, not unless they were completely exterminated…or the UN threat arrayed against them crushed for all time.
And Larouche did not believe the Americans could be exterminated, not by any force or combination of forces that could now be brought to bear on them.
The UN’s last chance had been the AM warship Guerrière.
If the Guerrière could have been made fully operational, she would have been a weapon of overwhelming, of devastating power; Guerrière alone, armed with her positron main weapon, could have ended all American space operations and obliterated her cities one by one. Sooner or later, the Americans would have been forced to surrender, for they would have been unable to touch a warship of Guerrière’s capabilities.
But, inevitably, it hadn’t been that simple. The problem was the damned alien technology.
The basic physics for an antimatter-powered space drive had been understood for years. Inject a very small amount of antimatter into a large volume of water; the annihilation of a small part of that mass turned the remaining water into plasma at extraordinarily high temperatures, which could be channeled aft as a highly efficient drive.
Ordinary plasma drives worked the same way, except that the water was either heated first in a liquid-core nuclear reactor or channeled through layers of corrugated plutonium. Either way, the water was heated to plasma to provide thrust. The difference was one of degree…or, rather, of degrees. The antimatter drive produced a much hotter and more energetic plasma jet than a liquid-core reactor; more, it could sustain high thrust for days or weeks at a time, allowing steady acceleration at one G or more. Guerrière, when she was fully operational, would be able to fly to Mars in a few days; the skies would be opened, and at long last the bounty of the solar system would be free for the taking.
Unfortunately, the Directorate of Science had decided to use the wreckage found at Picard as a kind of shortcut. The ancient, spacefaring An, evidently, had known how to produce antimatter in a steady, constant, and powerful stream; the antimatter generator of one of their freighters had been recovered intact by Billaud’s team of archeologists and transported to the growing French base at Tsiolkovsky. A French, German, and Chinese team had attempted to reverse-engineer the technology.
Larouche smiled at the thought, though there was very little good humor there. Half a century ago, there’d been wild rumors that the Americans had recovered alien space-craft from various crashes—or even as gifts from extraterrestrial visitors—and were trying to reverse-engineer them at a secret base in the Nevada desert. It was possible that the rumored cover-up by the US government in the second half of the twentieth century had been responsible, in part, for the paranoid fear within the UN that the Americans were going to keep recovered technology found at Cydonia, on Mars, for themselves…a fear that had led, at least in part, to the current war.
Larouche’s own experiences with back-engineering alien technology had convinced him that those old stories could not possibly have been true. Figuring out how something worked and going back to figure out how it was made was an effective tool only when the technologies more or less matched. Merde! Could Leonardo da Vinci, brilliant as he was, have reverse-engineered a television wall screen if a time traveler had presented him one as a gift? Could he have discovered the science and engineering behind generating and propagating radio waves, behind constructing cameras, behind encoding and decoding transmissions, behind all of the myriad sciences and technologies discovered and developed from the eighteenth century onward that made modern, flatscreen digital displays possible?
Da Vinci wouldn’t even have been able to understand the plastic of the wall screen’s display.
The alien technology recovered on the Moon so far was at least five centuries ahead of current terrestrial understanding of physics, engineering, materials processing, and control technologies. Reverse-engineering meant figuring out how to build not only the device in question, but how to build the tools that made the tools that made the tools that made the device…as well as principles of physics and engineering that were balanced one atop another in a terribly unsteady tower of innovation. Less than a century and a half had elapsed between the difference engine and silicon chips; there were elements of recovered An technology at least as strange to the UN engineering team as a PAD would have been to Charles Babbage. It was going to be decades more, perhaps centuries, before the fragments of An technology were understood within the context of human science. Merely knowing that something was possible was rarely enough to transform possibility into reality.
There were two basic approaches to powering an antimatter spacecraft. You could manufacture the antimatter, a few atoms at a time, in a particle accelerator, and store it in magnetic bottles, an approach using old and well-established technology that had been around for half a century at least, almost certainly the route the Americans had pursued in their AM-drive research.
But the An had known how to manufacture antimatter, specifically positrons—antielectrons—in large and continuous quantities. How the antimatter reactor recovered from the dusty floor of Picard did this was still not well understood—at least in terms that Larouche could comprehend, and he suspected that the UN engineers working on the problem only dimly glimpsed the principles involved. Zero-point energy? Energy drawn from the vacuum of space? Energy converted in its creation into, not matter, but antimatter? It sounded like magic to Larouche.
Using the An AM generator as a weapon was relatively easy, so long as you knew how to manipulate positrons in a magnetic field. Using it in a controlled fashion, however, feeding a precisely measured and balanced stream of antimatter to the reaction chamber, was orders of magnitude more difficult. It must have been much the same in developing early atomic energy; slapping two chunks of plutonium together to release energy in an uncontrolled chain reaction was relatively simple; producing controlled and controllable energy from the same equations had been much harder.
They’d had the weapon portion of the project working in April, when they’d first used a positron beam to destroy an American reconnaissance spacecraft. The actual weapon emplacement had been mounted high atop Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, with power provided by a large, deeply buried fission reactor. The Guerrière, then still the Millénium, had at that point only recently arrived at Tsiolkovsky, and the engineering team hadn’t yet begun the conversion of the big shuttle. In fact, they’d used the ship as an ordinary transport, first to ferry troops to Picard during the fighting there, and a month later, at the Lunar north and south poles, to stop the American takeovers of the Moon’s only sources of water.
In June, however, the engineering team had begun the actual ship conversion, removing Guerrière’s liquid-core fission reactor and primary thruster assembly and replacing it with a much more robust thruster unit shipped up from Earth. The positron weapon had been dismantled in August and lowered down the mountainside; by October, the positron weapon was working again, mounted now inside the sleek, black hull of the Guerrière rising above the Tsiolkovsky plain. A ball turret in Guerrière’s side channeled the positron stream through magnetic conduits and directed it at any radar-locked target within line of sight. It was that ball turret that was vulnerable to enemy counterbattery fire. And if they hit the turret while positrons were actually in the conduit, the result would be the same as an antimatter attack against the Guerrière.
As for the drive, however, the engineers still were having trouble finding a way to regulate the flow of antimatter from the generator. They were confident that they would have the problem under control soon…but how soon was unk
nown. Guerrière could fight, but she could not fly. It left Larouche’s forces at a terrible disadvantage.
They would have been better off, Larouche thought bitterly, if they’d simply used the alien machinery to produce positrons and store them for later use, as the Americans were. The thought of using equipment that no one really understood to power a spacecraft was, frankly, a bit frightening.
Worse was possessing such a terrible weapon, but finding oneself in the faintly ridiculous position of knowing that if he used it, he would lose it almost immediately. At the same time, if he didn’t use the primary weapon, the enemy might well take the ship.
An impossible dilemma.
“Colonel d’André?”
“Yes, General.”
“Have the special weapon crew stand by to engage with the primary weapon. We may not be able to fly, but by God we can give a good account of ourselves!”
“Yes, General.”
“Get the hopper fireteams aloft.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And place the computer safeguards on active,” he added after a moment’s consideration more.
It was a measure of last resort, but a vital one.
He might sympathize with the enemy cause, might hate the fact that his countrymen had attempted what amounted to genocide against the Americans, might have the gravest of doubts that the UN cause was right.
But there was also the matter of honor and duty, virtues instilled in him by his father long before their falling-out.
He would not be known as the man who’d lost the UN’s greatest weapon to the enemy.
TWENTY-FIVE
MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0034 hours GMT
On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make top speed, bounding across the surface at eighty kilometers per hour. The faster it went, of course, the higher and broader the plumes of dust thrown up by its tires. This was both blessing and problem. It made their approach a lot easier to see; on the other hand, the enemy couldn’t be sure of exactly what it was that was approaching from the west, or even how many of them there were.
Kaitlin clutched the sides of her seat as LAV-1 bounced and lurched across the Lunar regolith. Though her armor was securely harnessed to the seat, she was taking a beating inside, and she had to grab hard and hold on to keep from rattling around inside the suit’s hard torso like a marble inside a tin can.
Beside her, Hartwell drove with sharp, precise pulls left and right with the joystick, trying to be as unpredictable as possible as the LAV raced across the plain. Ahead, on his monitor, Tsiolkovsky’s central peak rose against the night, smooth-sided, its flanks scoured by eons of infalling micrometeorites. Tucked away at the mountain’s base, just visible now rising behind a low-lying spur of the mountain, was their objective, the slender spire of the UN supership they’d come to capture or kill.
There’d still been no fire from the mountaintop, which suggested that the enemy weapon was now mounted aboard the ship. That made the most sense; the UN couldn’t have many of the alien-derived antimatter weapons and likely had only the one.
But the three LAVs were almost certainly in the enemy’s sights now. The only reason they weren’t firing was the fear—a fear quite justified—that at the first shot, the LAVs would target the antimatter weapon’s vulnerable turret. Lasers allowed a degree of pinpoint accuracy and precision in running gun battles unheard of in any previous war in history.
The Marines, Kaitlin decided, needed something better than an armored, four-wheeled box to deploy troops across modern combat distances. She hurt, the wild motion was making her sick to her stomach, and something like panic claustrophobia—a gnawing dread that within the next instant or two white fire was going to sear through the LAV and reduce them all to a cloud of hot plasma—was growing with each moment that she was trapped inside. Hartwell’s tiny display screen was no substitute for the wide-open spaces and a place to dig deep and hide; it would be even worse, she knew, for the rest of her Marines, who could do absolutely nothing but sit there strapped to their seats, wondering what was happening.
“We have aircraft taking off at the base, Lieutenant,” Hartwell announced.
Kaitlin twisted her head inside her helmet, trying to get a better view. The term aircraft was almost comically in-appropriate here, in the Lunar vacuum, but old habits die hard. On the monitor, she could just make out four tiny constructs gleaming in the sunlight as they lifted off from beyond the low-lying spur. They were hoppers, short-range Lunar transports, like the one Chris Dow had taken out during the approach to Picard. They would have enemy riflemen aboard, probably with squad laser weapons at least as good as the Sunbeam M228, and the LAV’s upper-deck armor wasn’t all that thick…a design compromise for greater speed and fuel efficiency.
An even greater danger, though, was the possibility of a low pass by a hopper with its ventral thrusters on full. She well remembered the Marine use of that strategy at Picard, and the UN forces would remember as well.
“Are we close enough yet to pinpoint the ship’s main weapon turret?” she asked.
“I’ve got five different blisters or bumps registered on that thing that could be the turret, Lieutenant,” Hartwell replied. “Don’t know which is the target.”
“If we start shooting randomly, they’re liable to open up,” she said. “Of course, we might get lucky.” She thought for a moment, working up her courage. She felt like she was about to stick a pin into a sleeping lion. “Any sign of First Platoon?”
“Negative,” Hartwell replied. “Other side of the mountain.”
They were pursuing their original plan, with Second Platoon swinging south of the central peak, while Captain Fuentes and First Platoon swung around to the north. With the enemy base probably located on the site of the old radio-astronomy facility, nestled up against the southeast flank of the central peak, the idea was to split the enemy’s fire and keep him guessing…but with Second Platoon, Second Squad stranded back there on the floor of Fermi Crater, it was getting a bit cold and lonely here to the southwest of that high and brooding mountain.
Another twenty kilometers to go.
“Okay,” she told Hartwell. “Keep an eye on the ship, but let’s engage those hoppers before they get close enough to fry us.”
“Roger that.” He manipulated a joystick, centering a targeting cursor to move the LAV’s laser turret topside. “Firing!”
PFC Jack Ramsey
USS Ranger
0035 hours GMT
The Ranger was now less than ten minutes from its objective, and only now was Jack beginning to hope that he was going to make it.
After only minutes at six Gs, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to be able even to think about doing more work on the nutcracker code. The pressure, the apparent weight of five full-grown men lying in a stack on top of him, was suffocating, crushing, and made gasping down each breath a struggle. Finally, he’d shut Sam down and switched the seatback display instead to a view relayed from a camera in Ranger’s nose.
The view of Earth, visibly growing larger minute by minute as the Ranger accelerated toward her, was absolutely spectacular, but Jack hadn’t been able to muster more than a passing and somewhat lethargic interest.
An hour after they’d cut free from the L-3 construction shack, at just before midnight GMT, they’d whipped past the Earth, traveling now at over two hundred kilometers per second. For a blessed span of minutes, zero gravity had returned as the Ranger pivoted, nose skewing toward the fast-passing Earth with an unpleasant wrench to the gut and head, until she was traveling tail first, past the Earth and on her way now toward the Moon.
Jack had heard hear the harsh retching sounds of several Marines being sick elsewhere in the cabin. He’d kept his eyes carefully on the screen, unwilling to let his own stomach rebel as well. Amazing how contagious nausea could be.
Then acceleration returned…deceleration now, r
ather, as the Ranger began killing her tremendous velocity after the turn-over. Jack’s maltreated stomach twisted, and he’d nearly lost it then; only the fact that he’d been on a special low-bulk diet for three days already saved him. The diet, evidently, hadn’t helped everyone in the company; when weight returned, Jack was glad he wasn’t farther aft, where, judging from the yells and curses, tiny, free-floating globules of vomit were suddenly falling like rain.
“Okay, people,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the cabin comm system, moments after the six-G torture resumed. “Not much longer. Remember, we’re going…for either Plan Alfa…or Plan Bravo. Which way we go…depends on…our fellow Marines. On whether they…were able to nail that damned cannon…or not. Either way…we have a good chance…of pulling this thing…off. Stay focused…stay alert…and you’ll come through fine….”
He spoke quietly, calmly, and reassuringly, despite the pauses between each phrase as he caught his breath and rallied his strength for the next handful of words. What Captain Lee was saying, Jack found, wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that he was saying it…demonstrating to each miserable Marine in that cabin that he or she was not alone, that this punishment was routine, that it was all part of the game. After a few moments more, he wasn’t even aware of the captain’s voice…only of the reassurance.
With a grunting effort, Jack found he was able to toggle the seatback screen’s display either to the receding blue-white beauty of Earth or to the fast-swelling, crater-battered visage of the Moon, visible now beyond the Tinkertoy struts of Ranger’s landing assembly. After several changes of mind, he settled on the Earth; he thought he knew now what the Apollo astronauts had felt, seventy-some years ago, when they’d looked back at the world of their birth and realized that all of humankind, all art, all history, everything that made him what he was, was contained in that one small and delicate bubble of cloud-swirled blue.
