The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1)

by Travis J I Corcoran

  Please let this work, please.

  ...And then she heard a distant crack. On the screen the hydraulic pressure fell into the green zone and icons flashed. Wasseem hooted, and pointed to the video from camera 12. "Darcy, look!" She did.

  The hydraulic pressure had forced the twistlocks open against the encasing ice. On the screen chunks of ice the size of filing cabinets were drifting away from the base of the stack of cargo containers.

  Darcy looked at her own screen and scanned the twistlock icons. All sixteen showed green. "They all opened!"

  Waseem squinted at his own screen. Then, sounding a bit worried, he said, "The containers are all still on the deck - should we pulse the AG drive to push them away?"

  Darcy shook her head. "Let's not complicate this. Give it a minute." She pressed her palms together. Please, please.

  On Earth, unlatched cargo containers would have continued to sit on the deck until a severe storm or wave caused them to tip over, but here there was no gravity to hold them down. In fact, the opposite was true: there was the slight - ever so slight - spin of the ship. The minuscule centripetal force should cause them to tumble away.

  And yet they sat there, stick glued to the deck by the ice.

  And then one stack of containers shifted. Darcy pointed and grinned. "Look!"

  Waseem hooted. On the screen the stack of massive cargo containers began to tilt, ever so slowly. Three seconds later it crashed into another stack of containers. The shudder of the impact reached them through the hull of the ship, a long deep rumble traveling through the hand rails, the floor, the walls. On the screen cracks shot through the sheet of ice that covered the deck.

  The second stack of containers shifted and hit the third and around them thousands of shards of ice began to drift slowly off the deck. And then the ship rotated away from the sun and the scene turned pitch black. Darcy tapped on the deck lights. In the Klieg light glare the first stack of containers slowly fell up away from the deck, accompanied by an avalanche of large ice shards and a shower, almost a mist, of smaller crystals.

  Wasseem broke out in a full-throated laugh. "We did it!"

  Darcy smiled and watched the video. Behind her the PKs had stopped talking and were also staring at the wallscreens. Stacks of containers, dozens of them, lifted off the deck. The rumbling of impacts and shifting steel slowly quieted. On the video the last container lifted off and coasted slowly, so slowly, up.

  A cloud of ice crystals drifted in front of the camera and whited out the view for a moment before sliding past. The containers, now almost twenty meters off the deck, appeared to drift to one side as the ship rotated under them. Then, in an explosion of light, the sun rose over a gunwale.

  Tudel broke the silence. "Did that do it? Are we going to live?"

  Darcy felt her smile melt away, at least a bit. She nodded. "We can make it to the moon. We're not out of the woods yet, though - landing is still going to be tricky."

  Tudel nodded and turned away, but the other PKs stayed alert, watching the navigators. She felt the weight of their eyes - and the implied threat - and she thought ahead to the landing, and beyond it. Once they were down, what next? Would Mike be able to do anything to save them?

  Waseem looked back at the video window. A moment later the ship finished a complete rotation and the cargo containers wheeled into view again, now a hundred meters above the deck, half hidden in a cloud of ice crystals. "Hey, Darce - now that I've won them fair and square - where are my earth movers going to end up?"

  She thought for a moment. "We'll be shedding velocity for lunar injection, but the containers will keep going. Hmmm." She looked at some diagrams on her screen and manipulated a ballistic course. "The Moon's not going to capture them. I'm not going to work it all the way through, but my hunch is that they'll fall into a solar orbit, but a really eccentric orbit around the Earth isn't impossible."

  Darcy switched to another camera angle as she thought about the containers. The deck around where the containers had been stacked was now largely free of ice, but the frozen water still clung to the bridge.

  "Think we'll ever salvage them?"

  Something about the bridge caught her attention. What was it? Everything looked normal. The blacked out windows, the airlock, the deck lights and the smaller navigation lights -

  Darcy sucked in a breath between her teeth and looked over her shoulder. Tudel was still watching the screen, fixated on the tumbling cargo containers. She had a moment, if she was willing to take the risk. She reached out and brought up the UI that controlled the navigation lights and typed quickly. She had to get this done before the Wookkiee dropped beneath Aristillus' horizon.

  "Hey, Darce, did you hear me?"

  Darcy closed the screen quickly, turned to Waseem, and gave him a warning look. "The containers? No. The energy budget doesn't make any sense. Those bulldozers will be in orbit ten thousand years from now, even if -"

  Tudel interrupted her. "OK, enough screwing around. What's the next step?"

  Darcy turned to Tudel. "We need to do a burn as soon as we can to correct course, and then lunar injection, a bit over a day from now."

  Tudel nodded. "OK, then do your burn. Sergeant, after it's done, secure these two until we need them again - I don't want them hanging out near the controls."

  Darcy's lips pressed together tightly. She was proud of her big triumph with the cargo containers - and her little one, if it worked - but they were far, far from safe.

  Chapter 43

  2064: near Konstantinov Crater, Lunar Farside

  John realized that he hadn't been reading; his eyes had just slid over the page and he had no idea what words were there. He gave up, turned off his slate, and looked around the tent. Blue, Max, and Rex were all staring at their slates, either reading or coding. Duncan, though - Duncan was obsessively licking his dinner bowl, trying to get the last bit of melted cheese out of the bottom.

  John sighed and was reaching for his slate to try reading one more time when his phone chimed. He checked the display. Gamma. Crap - he would have liked more time to think things through before heading back into those waters. Still, he had to answer it.

  "Hello, Gamma."

  "Excuse me for interrupting, John, but if you look straight up in a few seconds, you're going to see something interesting."

  "What?"

  "I'll explain in a moment, but please look up right now."

  John started to issue a command to turn on the wallscreen and then realized that they were in lunar night, and thus hadn't pitched the gold solar shield over the tent. He issued a command and the tent lights dimmed and the center of the ceiling turned transparent. The sky above was black.

  "Gamma, my eyes will take a few minutes to adapt to the dark, so unless this is something pretty bright, I -"

  Before he could finish a cluster of small white dots appeared low over the northern horizon then climbed and faded as they crossed the sky to the south.

  John squinted. "What was that? Meteors?"

  "They're only called 'meteors' if they hit the Earth's atmosphere, John. Those that don't hit the atmosphere are called 'meteoroids.’ But, no. Those were cargo containers."

  "Cargo containers? From where?"

  "From the Wookkiee, if the transponders are -"

  "The ship? Why would containers from the Wookkiee be flying overhead?"

  Chapter 44

  2064: bridge of AFS The Wookkiee, lunar orbital injection

  Tudel furrowed his brow. "Are you sure that -"

  Darcy yelled, "Yes, I'm sure! We need to power the AG drive up, and we need to do it now."

  Tudel hesitated.

  Darcy breathed out in exasperation. Why was he hesitating? She was afraid of Tudel, yes, but she was more afraid of missing the orbital insertion. She pointed at the countdown timer. "Do you see this? We've only got fifty seconds!"

  She looked at him and saw sweat bead on his forehead. A small part of her rejoiced that the bully was feeling some of the fear t
hat had been clenching her gut since he and his thugs had boarded her ship.

  Tudel nodded. "OK, do it."

  Darcy turned to the screen and tapped keys. The familiar thrumming engulfed her and a moment later her gut began to twist. The field tugged at her and she felt her feet land on the deck. She sneaked a look at the timer. Forty seconds.

  "Darce, simulation ready on workspace one!"

  She nodded - the icon was there. She reached for it -

  And two yellow warning icons popped up on her screen.

  Then two more.

  She ignored them.

  "Dragging workspace one!" Darcy felt the sting of sweat in her eyes. She blinked, but didn't take the time to wipe it away.

  She compared Waseem's workspace to her own figures. Match.

  An urgent beeping. Three of the warning icons had turned red and started flashing.

  "Darce, we missed it!"

  "We're still in the envelope. Go!"

  Waseem hit the approve button and Darcy immediately slid her control to 110%. She'd told Waseem they were still in the envelope, but they were at the very edge of it. She stared at the screen to see if giving 110% to the AG drive had been enough. The projected trajectory slipped outside the boundary lines. Crap! She adjusted the slider to 112%. The hum in the ship increased and her guts clenched, more from fear than from the drive. She fought back the nausea and stared at the display. The projected trajectory danced at the very edge of acceptable and she pushed the slider to 114%. The slight nausea she'd experienced a moment ago was now severe. Behind her she heard one of the PKs retch and the smell of vomit filled the air.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  The velocity was almost there. Almost... Almost...

  And then it was. She slid the AG from 114% all the way to zero. "I've got AG at zero, hit the chemicals!"

  Waseem was yelling at the same time, "I see AG at zero, going to OMC full." She felt the roar of chemical rockets through the deck plates, but she ignored it and concentrated on her own subsystem: the AG drive.

  Alerts crowded her screen. Battery bank 1: empty. Bank 2: empty. Bank 3: empty. They'd done the tricky AG maneuver - barely, just barely - but there was precious little juice left.

  She tried to swallow and couldn't. She needed the AG drive to get them down to the surface - and she didn't know if there was enough charge in the batteries to do it. She crossed herself.

  Beside her Waseem whooped. "We've got orbital injection!"

  "That's good, right?" Tudel asked from behind them

  Darcy ignored Tudel. "Deorbit window in eight five seconds!"

  Chapter 45

  2064: near Konstantinov Crater, Lunar Farside

  "Why would containers from the Wookkiee be flying overhead?" Max asked.

  "That is a fascinating question, and I do not have an answer. There are several other interesting questions though. One is 'why are the cargo containers coming over the northern pole?'. Another is 'why is the Wookiee now also coming over the northern pole?'"

  John asked "The Wookkiee is coming over - ?"

  "Look up."

  John and the Dogs did. A moment later a small dark lozenge appeared over the northern horizon, traveling low and fast to the south.

  Gamma added, "I now have a third question that I find interesting - 'why is the Wookkie partially covered in ice'?"

  John squinted as he stared. "You can see that level of detail?"

  "You and the Dogs were not the first to use synthetic aperture imaging to view objects in lunar orbit from the surface."

  The ship slid across the sky and disappeared behind the southern wall of the tent. John looked down and commanded the lights back on. "Can you show me your images?"

  Pictures of the ice-encrusted tanker appeared on one of the tent's wallscreens. They were stunningly crisp, clear, and bright - much better than the hack job he and the Dogs had managed. Clearly Gamma was skilled at this.

  "The ship is fifteen kilometers above ground and traveling at just over five thousand kilometers per hour. I note that this is almost exactly the orbit that the Apollo missions used, albeit oriented much closer to the plane of the ecliptic." He paused. "Ah. Yes. The Apollo mission parameters are listed in the Wookkiee's navigation code as library defaults."

  Overhead the gray dot of the Wookkiee disappeared as it fell into the shadow of the moon. "How do you - Wait, you've got a copy of the Wookkiee's navigation code?"

  "Of course, John. Parts of me were running in the same cloud hardware that Ponnala Srinivas, Waseem Vivekanand, and Darcy Grau were using for an earlier version of their source code repository. I retain a copy."

  Rex looked up from his slate. "You run in the cloud? I thought-"

  "No, I run in dedicated processing hardware. Several years ago I - or, rather, a precursor entity - did."

  John digested the odd phrasing of last sentence - 'precursor entity.’ And that thing about the cloud...He was pretty sure that outside of NSA-mandated back doors (on Earth, at least), every process in a cloud was supposed to be firewalled from the next. If Gamma had copies of the Wookkiee's source code, taken from a different account, that strongly implied that John's fears about Gamma wiggling into the Goldwater satellites and Aristillus network were valid.

  The same thought evidently occurred to Rex: the Dog tilted his head and opened his mouth to speak. John snapped his fingers to catch Rex's attention and shook his head firmly.

  Blue said, "Gamma, did you see that the Wookkiee's running lights are flickering?"

  "Yes, I'd noticed that."

  "And?"

  "It's Morse Code. It says -"

  Max interrupted him with his own translation. "It says 'Hijacked by PK forces. Twelve troops. Alert Mike.'"

  John clenched his fist. Gamma and Max had been right. The war wasn't impossible. It wasn't even years in the future. It was starting, right now. The PKs had the Wookkiee, and if they had the ship, they had the AG drive.

  "Gamma, there's no way to get word back to Aristillus, is there?" For the first time, Duncan sounded worried.

  "No, my satellites are still down."

  The headache that had been pounding in John's head for hours grew even worse.

  Chapter 46

  2064: Morlock Engineering office, Aristillus, Lunar Nearside

  Mike dragged the spreadsheet sliders back and forth, but it didn't help. He could push on Kevin for lower rates from Mason Dixon, but that wasn't going to make a noticeable dent in his cash flow. The other cost-cutting ideas were similarly trivial.

  So how he could be boost revenue? He had two old A-series TBMs parked near Camanez Beef & Pork's tunnels on level 1. If he powered those up and got them back into production, could he sell the new space to Hector? Yes, but he'd shut the A-series machines down in the first place because of the maintenance costs. Mike switched to another pane of the spreadsheet and played with numbers. No, even aside from the one-time cost of un-mothballing the older machines, bringing them back would increase revenue but decrease profit.

  He shook his head. Over the last year he'd spent wildly on cargo container after cargo container of earth movers, tunnel boring machines, prefab conveyor belt sections, two used cement factories stripped and packaged up in Kenya. The cash flow had made it all possible, but he'd been at the hairy edge of solvency the whole time and hadn't even realized it. He was capital rich but cash poor.

  And now the bullshit with the Veleka Waterworks tunnel that Leroy had engineered meant that his expenses were as high as ever, but a big revenue source he'd been expecting wasn't there.

  There was no way around it: he was in a shitty spot. Cash was tight - too fucking tight.

  Could he -

  The alarm clock in the corner of the wallscreen turned red and started beeping. His appointment with Leroy. He sighed, got to his feet, and picked up his helmet.

  Mike walked out of the office and avoided making eye contact with the employees who looked up as he passed. At the curb his helmet latched itself
as he straddled the BMW. A quick thumbprint, and he was accelerating and then merging into traffic. The narrow road, typical for a C class tunnel in the C-1 configuration, was clogged with delivery vehicles, jitneys, and slow-moving snack carts. As he rode his mind turned away from the anxiety of the coming war, the cash flow problems, and everything else, and turned, as always, to the topics he found easier to deal with: machines, infrastructure, systems. There was always a surge of traffic like this in the middle of the day, but why? The emergent rhythms of the city - and Aristillus was becoming a real city - were a mystery to him.

  He broke through the thickest knot of traffic and sped up. His bike had oversized tires with huge sticky traction patches typical for Aristillus. They did a decent job of compensating for the lower gravity, but they could only do so much; he didn't have the same braking power or maneuverability that he'd have on Earth. Ahead a delivery truck's brake lights came on, and Mike squeezed the brakes gently. If he tried to weave too aggressively or slammed hard on the brakes, the results would be bad. As he'd learned. Several times.

  Traffic accelerated for a minute, and then slowed again as he approached the intersection and the red light. Mike pulled his bike to the left and rode the double yellow past the delivery truck ahead of him. His front tire rolled onto the white stop line and he felt his hand tighten on the throttle of its own accord. The tunnel on this side of the light was laid out in the C-1 configuration, and the road was owned by the neighborhood co-op...but on the far side of the intersection the tunnel was a C-2, and the border roadbed was owned and operated by RMR Highways. Mike tapped his traffic transponder, setting the priority to 8. It cost extra to have the left lane to himself, but he could afford it. Suddenly his mood darkened. Well, maybe he couldn't afford it today, with the cash flow problems.

  Bah - he tried to put finances out of his mind as he leaned forward.