TEARS OF SELENE:
A Riddled Space Novel
by Bill Patterson
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
TEARS OF SELENE
Copyright © 2019 by Bill Patterson
All rights reserved.
Cover design © 2019 CHRISTIAN BENTULAN
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Preface
TEARS OF SELENE
Forecast
Stirrings
Purpose
Bird In The Hand
Disorder
Phoenix
The Lunatic Mission
Danger In The Air
Reference Desk
Step by Step
The Slog
The Last Step
Entry Interface
The Ties That Bind
Bonus Novelette
The Last Patrol
Credits
Want more?
Dedications
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Preface
It was an event that had never happened in the history of mankind.
It was terrifying
It was so unforgettable, so unique, that it went by the name of The Event.
The Moon had exploded. Now the Earth has to cope with megatons of Lunar crust shotgunning down up to eleven kilometers per second.
It wasn’t just mankind that was in danger of sudden crushing death from rocks of all sizes travelling five times the speed of the fastest rifle bullet, anyone in space was in extreme peril. The crew of the Chaffee, a huge orbital factory. The two hundred crew of Moonbase Collins, the lunar outpost that keeps the Chaffee supplied with oxygen and metals. Last, but fortunately not least, the two hundred scientists of the Mars Expedition three months into their fifteen month trip to the Red Planet.
It was the Mars Expedition that built the Perseus, a shell of asteroidal iron fifty meters thick and well able to survive a suddenly hostile in Earth Orbit, where to step outside is to risk bloody whizzing death.
The crew of the Chaffee made it back to Earth safely, and the crew of the Collins, together with the Mars Expedition, were getting used to their new home inside the safest place around--the inside of the Perseus.
There comes a time when safety is not enough. Not when your loved ones are still walking the surface of the Earth, or sailing on her waters, or flying in the bright blue sky. Not when a random bit of exploded Moon can snuff them out like a blown candle flame. That is when you create, out of almost nothing, a way to return to them.
Return to face what they face, when the skies at night are aflame with thousands of fiery trails. To see in their eyes the light of vaporizing Moon rock. To wonder whom will pay when the Tears of Selene rain down. To share their fate, win or lose.
This is their story...
TEARS OF SELENE
Forecast
UNSOC Debris Response Center, Kitzingen, Germany, April 14, 2087, 1833 CET
“Temperature today is a balmy twenty-five degrees and the UNIPS Impact Index remains at three, meaning any Moon rocks surviving reentry will be eight centimeters or less in size by the time it hits the ground. So get outside, it's going to be a lovely day!”
Farheed turned to the viewplate and flipped the display to off. He smiled broadly. It wasn’t often that the weather was so agreeable and the rocks blown off the Moon from that explosion five years ago decided not to mess up a perfectly fine spring day.
Of course, if I did get hit by one, it would be a rock about size of a baseball, going a couple of kilometers per second.
He had just pulled up to Charlotte's place when the door sprang open and she ran out, carrying a large wicker basket with the stereotypical red and white checkered cloth covering the contents.
“Need a hand?” he called through the open car window.
“No, just pop the trunk,” she replied. She stashed the basket, slammed the hatch, and scooted inside the car. Farheed drove carefully from the manual stretch of road to the automated lanes, then flipped on the autopilot.
Charlotte’s arms went around him. “Why don't you slide over here?”
“Come on, you know I have to stay behind the controls.” Farheed growled in his throat. “Fifty years since they've perfected self-driving cars and if you leave the wheel, the car rats you out to any nearby cop then bang, the points go up.” He looked directly at her. “Two more and they'll shut off my autopilot for three months. No highways allowed. So it would take me an extra half-hour to get to work in the morning.”
“How'd you get so many?” she asked.
Farheed gave her that look that means, Really?
“Never mind,” she said. “At least we're still dressed, not like when you got us pulled over. I still don't know how you managed to keep the body cam footage from getting released.”
“Cost me another few hundred,” Farheed grumbled. “You still owe me for that.”
“Owe? I gave you the best night of your life back at my place. Paid in full, I'd say.”
“I'm not complaining. What's in the basket?”
She smirked. “A picnic, what else?”
“Good. But how about a hint?”
“No. Now concentrate on the road, even if the car is doing the driving,” she said.
“Wait, you just wanted me to slide over to your side. Make up your mind.”
She shook her head. “I don't want you to get pulled over. I'm doing this for you.”
Farheed's brain locked up momentarily, trying to tease out a thread of logic from Charlotte's actions. He shrugged. “I'll never understand you,” he said, and checked the road ahead, the side mirrors, and looked in the rear view, just like his Dad taught him. His glance was just in time to see the shock wave racing up the road behind them, throwing cars to either side. He stared at it in disbelief, and missed the sight of a different shock wave heading towards them from dead ahead.
###
“How was lunch?” asked Shep. He was no substitute for Lisa at the center of the United Nations Space Operations Command Debris Response Center, but he could hold down the fort when she held a quick senior staff lunch. “Anything worthwhile?”
“Bayerischer Bratwurst. We're all going home with ten extra kilos.”
“Said every GI ever sent over here,” said Shep, rising out of her chair and holding it for her. “Your throne awaits.”
Lisa snorted softly as she slid back behind her worksurface. It was far too intricate an electronic marvel to be called a 'desk.' From here, she could call up literally any feed available to the UNSOC computers, from the cameras at the kaserne gates to any of the one hundred nuclear missile silos. Those silos held the weapons she commanded to defend Earth from the rain of Lunar rock. She had mastered the intricacies of her worksurface long ago, and operated its god-like omniscience without conscious thought.
Still, it was a jolt when a box off to the far left developed a yellow border and began pulsing. She looked at it in a moment of confusion before toggling it to the center of the screen.
Only after a brief glance at it, a far larger box bordered in flashing red overlaid it. She read the larger box quickly, then looked up at Shep.
“Meteor shower onto Interstate 95 around Roanoke.”
“That doesn't sound good.”
“At least it wasn't packed with cars. Still, if you get blown off the highway doing a hundred and thirty k's, you're going to have a bad day. It was like a cluster bombing—almost five kilometers of the highway just wiped cle
an from impact shock waves.” She re-read the article again with a bit more deliberation.
“You know, Shep, I am damned glad that they changed the name of this organization.”
“That's a PR name—I never liked it,” said Shep. “Sounds like the Slorg were right around the corner and ready to ravish the ladies.”
“Don't get any ideas, big boy. Earth Defense Operations—we can't defend ourselves from this! But we can respond to it, so Debris Response Center is a better fit.”
She toggled on the infofeed. A young man covered in blood and sweat and, yes, tears, was holding a woman in his lap, her face covered with what looked like a white and red checkered cloth. Lisa left the sound off, but kept the closed captions on.
GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU GHOULS, it said. I DON'T WANT THE WORLD TO SEE HER BLOODY AND HURT.
“Smart man,” said Shep. “Glad he's telling them off.”
DO YOU BLAME THE UNSOC-DRC?
FOR WHAT? THE METEORS? IT'S ALL THE WILL OF ALLAH. NO UNIPS NUMBER KEEPS THE ALMIGHTY FROM SMITING ME AND THE WOMAN I LOVE.
“Let's not get smitten,” said Shep.
“Don't be irreverent. We’re just as vulnerable here in Bavaria as that guy is in Virginia,” murmured Lisa. “Well, that's a vote, I guess, for our side.”
She turned off the infofeed and dismissed the red-bordered message window, but not before she dropped a message to Predictions to see if the swarm of meteors had shown up on their scopes before they hit the atmosphere.
The yellow-bordered window reemerged from behind the red one. She read the automated message, opened the corroboration link to the original report, and read it carefully.
“Problem?” asked Shep, completely forgotten for a moment.
“You're not going to believe this. Plus, you better start brushing up on your marksmanship.”
Stirrings
SC Prison; Perseus in High Earth Orbit, April 24 2087, 2038 GMT
“Welcome back,” said Sanchez as Garth Wakeman moseyed around the common area of prison, blinking in the bright sunshine. “How was 'the hole?’”
“Quiet. Had a lot of time to think.”
“If it's escape, I don't wanna know.” Sanchez looked around the prison yard.
Garth smiled humorlessly. “Then I better keep moving.”
“Where they got you?” asked Sanchez as Garth turned to walk away.
“D Block.”
“D for Deutschland. That's where the Nazis are. It was nice knowing you.”
Garth chuckled. “My cellie's more scared of me than he is of Rogers.” Garth earned his stretch in solitary confinement by giving Head Nazi Rogers a concussion and a broken rib when they first met. The story had spread.
“All that means is they'll shank you in your sleep.”
Garth smiled with his lips only. “That's why I'm not going to be sleeping here much longer.”
Sanchez made shooing motions. “Get away from me, man. I don't need to get hassled by the screws when you go over the wall.”
“Anyone you'd like me to see on the outside?”
Sanchez stared at him. “Why would you do that?”
Garth shrugged. “Just sort of occurred to me. 'Course, if you don't want me to give anyone a message, fine by me.”
“When?” asked Sanchez.
“Not tonight. Not this week. But soon.”
“Know Julio? Missing an earlobe and the last joint of his FU finger? Look him up tomorrow. Bye, ex-cellie. Nice knowing you.”
Garth continued to mosey around the yard. That way, the Nazis had to keep adjusting their attack paths, and he could avoid them.
###
The young man was barely conscious. It wouldn't have mattered anyway—his head was wrapped in a t-shirt and his neck was tightly encircled by a strong man's arm.
Nobody talked.
Garth took out the sliver of razor blade from its hiding place in the window putty and carefully slit the skin of the victim's forearm. He held the arm in the beam of sunlight that fell into the cell from the small windows two meters up the cinder-block wall.
Garth smiled, using the blade to carefully lever up the metallic sliver from amongst the tendons and muscles of the quivering forearm. He didn't remove it yet—the RFID tag would deactivate if it fell below body temperature.
He dipped the blade in a jar of clear fluid and waved it around to dry off the alcohol. He thanked whatever fool had sent him the small bottle of hand sanitizer in the mail. This was the tricky part.
Using the mind control techniques he had learned from all of his martial arts training, he applied the razor blade to his own forearm, cutting down through the skin and thin layer of fat, then levering up his own RFID tag. He nodded to the other man, who tightened his grip on the victim.
“Hold real still, or I'll tell Buster how much you want him.” Buster was the queen of the cell block, and the most brutal of the prisoner abusers. The victim subsided.
Garth nodded, then swiftly transferred the RFID tags between arms. He put down the razor blade, then held the edges of the man's wound together, painting it shut with a liquid bandage. He cleaned the blood off the victim's arm, then nodded to his accomplice.
“Move, and it's Buster for you.”
Garth jerked the thumb of his good arm towards an array of items from the prison commissary lined up on his bunk. The man smiled and helped himself to a few things. He reattached himself to the inmate and dragged him towards the open door of the cell.
Garth was busy painting his own forearm wound shut as the other two men departed, the victim still in the makeshift head bag. Garth dismissed them from his world, which had compressed down to a single timeline.
Now that he had switched the RFID tags, the security computer was certain Garth was walking around with the enforcer, while the weaker man was sitting in Garth's cell. Garth got up and left his cell without a backward glance.
The guards really didn't try to keep track of the prisoners—overcrowding made the mob of orange-suited men look like a sea of breakfast drink—but guards relied on the security computer to manage who could go where. You held your arm up to a door scanner, it read your tag. If the computer said the door could open, then it did. The tags were constantly under scan, and body heat monitors ensured that every tag matched to a source of thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Every prisoner had a tag, every tag had a prisoner.
The guards were just interested in keeping the violence inside the pen down to a dull roar and staying alive themselves until the end of their shift.
Garth knew the little weasel whose tag he now carried. He was a snitch that nobody trusted. Garth had bribed a few of the less fanatic Nazis for that information, as well as a general knowledge of the weasel's usual routes and privileges. That knowledge would be put to work right after dinner, when the day's heat was dissipating, guards were thinking about their own dinner, and the danger of eating with the other caged animals was past.
###
Ragesh Puna, one of the awake crew on the Mars Expedition, frowned at the bundle in the hammock. Commander Smithson had a standing order that all crew of the Expedition were to spend as much time on the ground as possible. It was reasonable—they had spent five years in microgravity and needed to get their bodies used to gravity again. The Perseus spun at three revolutions every four minutes, enough to produce one-half the force of Earth's gravity at the outer shell, where everyone slept. The Farm sent green plants upward towards the LED lighting at the central axis. Trust Mickey Donovan, fellow radioman, to find a place to rig a zero-gee hammock along the central axis where microgravity still prevailed. Puna carefully spun the hammock, winding it up.
Mickey woke up when the hammock started crushing him. He tried to lift his head, but the tightening mesh held him fast.
“Whoever this is, you better not let go.”
It had been a popular prank after the awake crew formed the Perseus out of a potato-shaped nickel-iron asteroid. A tightly wound hammock would spin rapidly when released, throw
ing the victim out of it in a random direction. Most of the pranked crew would somehow hang on to the mesh to avoid injury, which gave the perpetrator time to escape.
“Hang on,” said Ragesh, releasing the hammock and moving towards Mickey's head, holding out his hand. Mickey, whirling around as the hammock unwound, had his face slapped with every revolution. “I'm just slowing you down,” said Ragesh, laughing.
“I'm gonna kill you,” said Mickey, as he disentangled himself from the hammock.
“Don't even try. Come on, man, you trying to jam us both up? Smithson would put us on farm detail in an instant if he caught you catching zees in micrograv. You know the rules.”
“Freaking rules. We'll do just fine downstairs—look at the workout we got making this damned ship.”
Ragesh had to agree with Mickey. Earth was buzzing with stories, some of them almost true, of the herculean efforts of the awake crews of the Mars Expedition.
Cut off from Earth when they refused to follow orders that would have meant certain death, they changed course to slingshot past Mars out into the Asteroid Belt. With the help of McCrary and the entire crew of Moonbase Collins, they intercepted a comet on its way back to the Kuiper Belt. Using just what they had on board and whatever the Moon could send them, they boarded the comet, installed a small nuclear engine, and bent the comet's path to intercept a second asteroid, this one made of iron and nickel.
With a large plastic mirror and unlimited sunshine, they heated the iron asteroid until it was almost plastic, then inflated it with steam made from cometary ice. When the asteroid, now named Perseus, cooled, they moved inside it, ships, comet, and all, through temporary ports in the side of the forward chamber. The nuclear plants, under some very ticklish conditions, produced enough fissile uranium to make two thousand small nuclear bombs, perfect for setting off right behind a fifty meter pusher plate.
Using this crude but workable propulsion method, the Perseus flew back down into the inner solar system while the awake crew worked frantically to turn the forward bubble into a spherical farm and wake up the sleeping crew from hibernation. They rounded the Sun and climbed back up towards the Earth, warping around Venus to get the right injection angle. The Perseus settled into Earth orbit. Five days later, the entire crew of the Collins, escaping the deathtrap that was the Moon, rendezvoused with the Perseus in a huge slab-sided craft dubbed the Tank. A total of four hundred people were scattered all over the forward chamber of the Perseus.
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