Chapter 34
2064: AFS The Wookkiee, between Earth and the Moon
Captain Kear pushed himself off the bulkhead and flew down the corridor. Excitement and fear had led him to kick off too hard - he was traveling faster than he liked and he landed hard at the far end. He also didn't have velcro slippers, and he bounced off the wall before catching himself on a stanchion. He cursed under his breath, righted himself, and aimed. His next kick sent him toward an open hatch halfway way down the next corridor. Then he was through the hatch and in the stairwell. One flight down and he'd be at the arms locker. The pistol he'd taken off of Tudel was better than nothing, but if he could get a shotgun he'd -
There was a series of distant echos: a pistol shot, then automatic weapons fire, then the crump of a grenade.
Kear grimaced. The PKs must have found Iosif and Luka. This wasn't good - but there was nothing he could do for them.
Hand over hand, and he was at the right level. Then he kicked, flew through the open hatch, and was in the hallway. He turned, kicked again, and sailed down the corridor. The arms locker was just a dozen meters -
He heard the gunshot first. Had it come from behind him? He reached out his left hand to grab a pipe to stop himself so he could look... and realized his left arm wasn't working.
* * *
Captain Kear screamed as his left shoulder was tugged behind him. The bastards had poured clotting powder in the wound and slapped bandages over the holes, but he could feel the fragments of his broken shoulder blade grind against each other.
Another tug as the last zip tie was cinched tight and the PKs were done. One said something to the other, and they both left the room.
A moment later Tudel pulled himself into the room. Clearly someone had found him and freed him from the pipe where Kear had lashed him. Kear noted small patches of duct tape adhesive still clinging to the other man's face.
For a moment - just a moment - Kear thought about begging for mercy, but he looked into Tudel's eyes and knew it would be pointless.
Tudel looked at him slowly and grinned - the smile of a predator. "We've some unfinished business."
The PK grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself closer. "Where the fuck do you get off kicking me in the balls, faggot?" He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of channel lock pliers.
Kear whimpered despite himself, and then regained control. He wouldn't give the PK the satisfaction. He wouldn't.
He managed to keep that promise to himself as his first two fingers were broken. He whimpered as Tudel grabbed his third finger in the iron teeth. When the bone snapped, he started screaming and didn't stop.
Chapter 35
2064: AFS The Wookkiee, between Earth and the Moon
Tudel looked down at the sobbing expat.
These people wanted to play at being grownups? They wanted to break laws, carry illegal guns, refuse to listen to the authorities? Look at this brave rebel now. Fingers broken, snot streaming out of his nose. He shook his head. A fucking disgrace.
People who wanted to make their own rules? He hated them. No thought at all about society, about hierarchy. No discipline. No respect. They were brave - so brave. Until shit got real.
He grabbed a handful of the sobbing captain's hair and pulled, forcing the expat to look at him. The expat tried to twist away but Tudel dug his fingers in. "Hey, tough guy? Still think you're allowed to fuck with a real soldier? Huh?"
The ship captain shook his head from left to right. "No. No. I'm sorry. Please. Please. I-".
"Do you promise to be good?"
"Yes, yes. I promise!"
Tudel tisked. "Why should I trust you?" The expat shook his head even harder.
"No, I promise! Please!" He sobbed, and... Ugh. Tudel pulled his hand away.
"You got your fucking snot on me." He wiped his palm on the captive's shirt. "Guess you need another lesson."
The captive screamed. "No! No!"
Good.
Tudel anchored his feet under a rail before removing his belt. He whipped it experimentally through the air. The buckle whistled satisfactorily.
"Time to learn some respect for your betters."
Chapter 36
2064: AFS The Wookkiee, between Earth and the Moon
The PK was talking, but Darcy found it hard to focus on his words. She stared at his face. Those small patches on his cheeks might be duct tape residue, but there was no doubt about the spatters across his face and the back of his hand.
She'd heard the other PKs talking about killing Iosif and Luka.
Please, God, let Captain Kear be OK.
She forced herself to pay attention to Tudel's words. "OK, so we're floating in orbit - how do we get back down? I already heard the lecture about how we can't drop back down to the same place we left. Fine. Fuck it. How do we get back down anywhere?"
Darcy moved her mouth, trying to find words. Her co-navigator Waseem spoke first. "We're not in orbit - when we left the atmosphere, we had no forward velocity. Well, not much, just what we had from the Earth's -"
Darcy saw a dangerous look in Tudel's eyes. What was wrong with Waseem, giving a long drawn-out explanation? Didn't he realize the kind of people they were dealing with? Didn't he see the blood on Tudel's face?
Darcy should interrupt Waseem and give Tudel a shorter answer. She should. She opened her mouth -
...but Waseem apparently saw Tudel's dangerous look, too. He stumbled to a stop and restarted. "Short version: the drive pushes us away from any other mass. We go flying straight away. So we're flying straight away from the Earth, on a traje-"
Tudel interrupted him. "You haven't told me how we're going to get down."
Waseem swallowed. "I know. Um - look. We can't go down. We're committed at this point. We're flying straight away from the Earth, like a ball thrown from the bowler to the batsman."
"What the fuck is a 'batsman?’”
Darcy looked at Tudel. This was getting dangerous. She interrupted. "He means, like a pitcher throwing a ball to the batter. The Earth is the pitcher, and this ship is the ball. The pitcher has already thrown us. We're coasting now."
Tudel turned seamlessly to Darcy. "How do we reverse course?"
Darcy licked her lips. "We can't." Tudel's face darkened. She took a quick breath and continued, "It's just like baseball. The pitcher's already thrown the ball, right? We can't turn around - but we can go to the catcher, and he can catch us and then throw us back. So we have to fly to the moon, and then we -"
"OK, I get it." He thought for a moment. "How long until we get there and can throw ourselves back?"
Darcy breathed deeply to steady herself. "Actually, we've got some problems. We weren't due to launch for another hour, so we're way outside the normal flight path. The good news is that we're flying away from the Earth in the general direction of the moon. The bad news is that we launched early, so we're going to be flying through the moon's orbit before the moon gets there - it's like the pitcher aimed the pitch a bit wrong." She swallowed. That'd been a pretty good explanation, hadn't it? She looked at Tudel. He still seemed dangerous - very dangerous - but he no longer seemed to be balanced right on the edge of violence.
"Also, there's a worse complication," Waseem said. "We were 10 degrees north of the equator when we launched, and we went flying out from the Earth exactly away from the center of the Earth - well, not exactly, because mass isn't evenly distributed - but, anyway, we're flying up away from the Earth at an angle, and the moon isn't at the same angle. The problem is -"
Tudel barked at Wasseem. "Ahead of the moon? At an angle? Cut the detail. I want to know one thing and one thing only - how do we get back to Earth as quickly as possible?"
Darcy gave Waseem a warning look, silently begging him to please shut up and let her handle it without extraneous detail, and then she turned to Tudel. "We need to do some tricky maneuvering, and we need to do it as soon as possible. If we're lucky, we can land on the moon. If we can do that, we can recharge the b
atteries and get you and your men back to Earth as soon as possible." She left unsaid her hope she and the rest of the bridge crew wouldn't be forced to make the trip with them.
Tudel stared hard at her. "If you're lucky? What do you mean?"
Darcy swallowed. "I mean that depending on our speed and angle we might not be able to get to the moon."
Tudel had a questioning look on his face. "I thought you said we're headed there?"
"We're headed toward it. Roughly. We've got some work to do to try to hit it."
"And if we can't? Then what?"
"If we miss it -" Darcy exhaled. "If we miss the moon, then we either drift off into space or settle into a really long eccentric orbit."
Speaking the words suddenly made the navigational problem she faced even more real. She'd been so focused on the blood on Tudel's face and avoiding a beating - or worse - that she hadn't paused to think through the bigger problem. She tried to continue, but felt like there was a strap around her chest, tightening and tightening. She opened and closed her mouth a few times but no words came.
Tudel repeated his question. "If that happens, if we end up in a 'long orbit', then what?"
Darcy tried again to form a sentence but couldn't. She closed her eyes. If he was going to beat her, she couldn't stop him.
Next to her Waseem answered for her. "Don't you get it? If Darcy and I can't plot a way to get to the moon, there is no third option. We get there, or we - all of us - we die.”
Chapter 37
2064: near Konstantinov Crater, Lunar Farside
John shimmied backward on his stomach, away from the crater lip. The suits were well designed for walking but crawling chafed his knees and bunched suit material uncomfortably in the crotch. After putting several meters between himself and the craper lip he rolled onto his back and sat up. He still didn't like the idea of using radios, but with meters of rock between them and the activity on the crater floor, and no ionosphere to bounce signals he hoped it would be OK. "Guys -"
John's breaking radio silence was the only cue the Dogs needed to begin talking at once.
"Who is it? The US? The Hindi -"
"If they've got a base on farside -"
"How could it be so huge? If they-"
"It's aliens! Got to be!"
John sighed. "No, Duncan, I don't think it's aliens.
"Aw. It would be totally cool if it was aliens though."
John ignored him and composed his thoughts. "It's probably the US...but it could be the Hindi States... or the NEU."
"How did the get here - do they have the AG drive too?" asked Blue.
"I bet they had help from the aliens!" Duncan said.
John felt his jaw tighten. The thing that frustrated him to no end with Duncan was that the Dog was so much smarter than ninety percent of the idiocy that came out of his mouth. Heck, he was clearly smarter than John himself was, but he enjoyed entertaining crazy ideas more than he did actually thinking.
John unclenched his teeth. "No." He paused for a moment to regain his composure. "We need to figure out who this is, and then we need to figure out what we do about it. How did we not see this? How did Gamma not see this?"
Blue tilted his head. "The satellites got burned a week ago. Maybe that was the first stage of the invasion, and landing here was -"
John shook his head. "No." He shared some images from his suit across the local network, and then added annotations and pushed them as well. "Look at the size of the installation. Konstantinov is sixty-six klicks wide and about half a klick deep. That facility has got to be twenty square kilometers. At least."
Rex said, "So you're saying it would be hard for the PKs to drop that much materiel that quickly?"
John shook his head. "Not hard. It's flat out impossible."
Max pawed at the ground to get their attention. "Maybe there's not as much equipment there as we think. We see lights, and we assume that we're looking at heavy development - but could it be some sort of decoy? In World War Two both sides used all sorts of decoys - inflatable tanks, fake ships, huge tarps with fake cities painted on them."
John started to rub his chin as he thought, but his glove bumped into his helmet. "It's possible, but it doesn't make sense. Why burn the satellites in order to drop a bunch of decoys - in a crater that can't be seen because there are no satellites, and no one is even supposed to be around? It makes no sense. No matter how -"
Rex interrupted, "What if we're wrong about it all being recent - what if it's been here for months, or even years?"
John pursed his lips. "With his satellites Gamma would have -"
"What if they stuxed Gamma months ago? Or even years ago? If they can edit his video feeds, Gamma wouldn't know this was here."
Blue said, "But Goldwater has satellites too -"
Rex held up one paw. "If Earth forces can pwn Gamma they can certainly pwn Goldwater's sats."
Max looked around. "Whoever it is, if they've got that much industry down there, there's a good chance that they've got rovers up here too. We need to get out of here."
"But they'll know we were here," said Duncan. "Our tracks."
Blue turned to John. "John, what do we do?"
The other Dogs fell silent and also turned to John. John took a long moment. This was big. And this wasn't just a tactical issue of fleeing the area. This was strategic. If the US or the NEU was on the moon, that changed everything. They needed to get word back to Aristillus. That meant exfiltrating the immediate area, finding some hard rock to walk across to break up their track, getting to the next drop point, and then getting back to Aristillus on the next hopper.
"Guys, we're moving out. Right now, we'll backtrack three - "
A tone sounded in their helmets, and a new, cool, and uninflected voice spoke.
"Hello, John."
John knew the voice. He tilted his bead back and looked up, and then caught himself - there was no chance of seeing the birds overhead. "Hello Gamma. Your satellites are back?"
"I don't expect my replacement satellites to launch until tomorrow."
John was puzzled. "Wait. Then how -"
Blue understood. "This facility. It's Gamma's."
John frowned. "No, that - wait. Gamma, what's going on?"
"Yes, John, this is my facility."
"What? Why did you move from Sinus Lunicus to here? And why didn't you tell us?"
Gamma paused for a long moment and then answered, "This is a second facility."
John waited, but after a long pause it became obvious that Gamma wasn't going to share more - at least not without being explicitly asked.
John felt a sense of cold dread building, and chose his words carefully. "You've got two facilities now?"
"I felt the need to have redundant capabilities."
John had long since noticed that while Gamma never seemed to lie, he did sometimes evade. And because his phrasing was so precise, once you knew the trick, you could often maneuver Gamma into leaking information. John had never shared this, even with Mike, Darcy, or his other friends. Not only was it an advantage that he wanted to keep for himself, but also he couldn't trust others not to leak it back to Gamma and risk Gamma either changing his tell or freezing John out entirely.
He'd deliberately asked Gamma if there were two facilities, and Gamma hadn't confirmed the number - he'd merely agreed that there was more than one.
Noted, Gamma. Noted. To stop the pause from seeming suspiciously long, John hurried on: "If your satellites aren't back yet that means our radio signals are reaching you down at the bottom of Konstantinov."
"Some of your signal is leaking down there, but I'm talking to you through the picket of rovers you walked through 400 meters back."
John flinched and looked over his shoulder involuntarily, but saw nothing. How had they walked through a screen of rovers? Were they intentionally hidden? Camoflauged?
A secret facility on Farside was bad enough, but Gamma had all but confirmed that there were multiple hidden faciliti
es - and he'd developed camouflaged rovers? John sucked his teeth for a moment. This was worrisome.
He'd always opposed the Bureau of Sustainable Research and its mandate of regulating - or stomping out entirely - new technologies. And then when circumstances forced his hand, he'd turned his principles into action: he'd formed The Team and rescued the Dogs and - coincidentally, almost accidentally – Gamma.
He'd felt good about that at the time. Great, even. Now, though, he felt a chill at the back of his neck.
He'd known that BuSuR's stated mission of preventing a "hard take-off singularity" was just propaganda - a mask for a jobs protection scheme that was just plausible enough to cobble together a left and right coalition. Ban self-driving trucks to keep teamsters employed. Ban robotic barber chairs to keep another voting bloc employed.
But maybe the fear of the singularity wasn't just cover? He'd never had even a second of doubt about rescuing the Dogs. They were people. Intelligent, loyal, foolish, willfully obstinate, hilariously funny people.
Gamma, though, had given him second thoughts more than once. He'd thought he'd seen flashes of warmth, and attributed the coolness to the loneliness of a wounded strange creature, brought into existence against his will, the only one of his kind.
Now, though, those doubts multiplied. If Gamma was replicating himself - and was doing so in hiding -
John tried to collect his thoughts and respond measuredly, but without meaning to he blurted out, "'Picket'? That's a pretty militaristic term."
"Yes, it is a militaristic term. To reference what is purported, with minimal justification, to be a Chinese curse, these are interesting times."
Blue asked, "What do you mean by interesting?"
"An illuminating analogy is to think of current geopolitics as a Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld sand pile."
John shook his head. "I don't know what that means, Gamma, but you're deflecting my question. What the hell is going on? Why do you have a secret industrial facility?"
The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1) Page 14
