"And what motivates them?"
Kaspar looked at him, astounded that he had to spell it out. "They want their freedom, of course. Just like the rest of us. Freedom to have a family without justifying it to the Population Board, freedom to start a company, freedom to eat beef without a ration card, freedom to drink a large soda -" Kaspar raised his beverage in illustration. "- freedom to own guns, freedom from asset forfeitures."
Matthew sensed that he'd steered the conversation in a too obviously political direction and hastened to get back onto more solid footing. "So tell me how you and your family came to be here in Aristillus."
"Not much to tell - after the Tres Amigas was bombed most of the infrastructure spending switched to security and surveillance. There was less work for me, and I had to figure out what to do next. Did I ever tell you that my grandfather crossed the border? Yes. Back in the late twentieth century. He wanted to work hard and improve himself, so he went to where the jobs were, where the freedom was. I figured it was time to follow in his footsteps."
Kaspar paused and looked at him. "That's my story. Now you share yours with me." He fixed Matthew with his gaze. "What brings you and your men here, Matt?"
"Pretty much the same thing: looking for work and - wait, what?" Matthew stumbled.
Kaspar said nothing but raised one eyebrow.
"I'm sorry, Kaspar, did you just -"
"I called you 'Matt.’ That is your name, right? Captain Matthew Dewitt of the US Special Forces?"
Chapter 101
2064: Senator Linda Haig's Office, Tester Senate Building
Linda Haig nodded and smiled. "I absolutely understand your concern, and you've got my word that Hamilton Sundstrand will be the primary manufacturer of space suits for any military operations."
The silver haired CEO shook his head. "I'm not sure you do understand my concern, senator. The military operations will be over soon, and I can't imagine that the contract would entail more than a few thousand units. That's peanuts." He paused and gave her what he no doubt thought was a stern and meaningful glance. Linda was annoyed at his presumption, but this wasn't the time to let that show. Instead she tilted her head and raised her eyebrows in a look calculated to seem open and earnest.
Linda's assistant, Kerri, hovered nearby. She was clearly concerned that this was running long, and reasonably so. This meeting was already over schedule five minutes. Linda caught Kerri's eye and tipped her head, just a millimeter. Kerri saw it and stepped back a pace. Good girl.
Chuck Sunderstrand continued his explaination, as if he was talking to a child. "Senator, you know as well as I do that given the state of our currency, we'll be taking over those gold mines and running them for years. Now that- that - is the spacesuit contract I want."
Linda repressed a scowl. She'd tried to play dumb, hoping that Sunderstrand wouldn't catch her. It hadn't worked. What he was asking for now was a bigger token than she had wanted to spend. On the other hand, she did need the influence that Sundstrand could deliver.
Shit.
Linda fought the urge to smile tightly and instead forced - no, let - a larger, more honest-seeming smile reach her face.
"Oh, there shouldn't be a problem with that."
He stared at her intently. "I have your word?"
Damn it. "Of course." Another full smile.
"There's one more detail. Once our forces -"
Behind him Kerri cleared her throat. "Excuse me, Mr. Sundstrand, but the senator really -"
Sundstrand held up a finger. Linda didn't like the man's arrogance, ordering her assistant around that way, but she kept the smile on her face.
Sundstrand tilted his head forward and looked at Linda from under his brows. "Now, senator - that one detail. There's some intel that the DoD has shared with us. Apparently there are two firms in Aristillus making spacesuits. One isn't even a 'firm,’ properly speaking - more of a hippie collective or something. Still. 'Airtight' and 'Shield.’ If we're going to get the sole contract for suits afterward, we'd really like to make sure that we lock down those assets. That'll give us what we need to make sure that the government gets what it needs."
Now Sundstrand was asking for too much. Primary contractor? Sure. Primary contract for years running? A hard bargain, but she'd give it if forced - and she had been forced. But both of those and the assets of two firms? No. Not remotely. The suit contract would be put out as a multiple manufacturer deal, like most other DoD procurement, and those secondary manufacturer contracts were valuable. Airtight and Shield were her choice plums, and she wouldn't hand them over that easily.
Linda shook her head and smiled ruefully. "Now, Chuck, you're getting greedy. You've got primary on this contract - you're going to have to be happy with that."
Sundstrand paused for a moment and then chuckled. "Well, you can't blame me for trying."
Linda smiled back, and for the first time in this conversation it was an honest smile. "Not at all."
Kerri cleared her throat again.
Linda nodded at her. "If you'll forgive me, Chuck, there's a scheduled call that I've really got to take."
"I understand. It's been a pleasure." He extended his hand. "Senator."
Two minutes later the door was closed and Linda took the call. She listened silently, then put down the phone.
"Ma'am? What is it?"
"That bitch."
"Who?"
"The president. She sandbagged me. The invasion is under way."
Kerri’s eyes grew wide. "Do you want me to route a call to your son?"
"Yes, set that up. In fifteen - no, make it thirty minutes from now." She checked her watch. "Get Jim on the phone, right now."
"What should I tell him this is about?"
"Tell him -"
The door flew open. Linda looked up - it was Jim. His hair was damp and his tie was askew. "Did you hear -?"
Linda nodded in silent fury. "Just now."
He wiped the sweat off his forehead. "She's stabbed us in the back."
Linda nodded, lips tightly pressed together. "A month ago she told me she was trying to bridge the two Party factions. But an invasion? This didn't come together just now. She was plotting this - launching it without consultation - the whole time."
Linda felt the world swim. She'd had all of her moves planned, and now that bitch had screwed her. "Damn her. She moved up the invasion just to screw me."
Jim shook his head. "Don't flatter yourself; by launching this earlier than anyone knew, she's wrong-footed a lot of people. You were probably just collateral damage."
Linda pointed to a chair. "Sit." Jim did. "That woman is a lot smarter than I gave her credit for."
Jim looked at her. "Smart? How -"
Linda let half of a chuckle escape. "This is perfect. She used me to get the Internationalist wing of the party behind her moon invasion idea. She needed that - we've got large chunks of State, Interior, other parts of the bureaucracy. But then she pulled the trigger early, before we can get to use it for our advantage. Mark my words - she's going to go on the air soon. Today. She'll concentrate on the economics of it: she's doing it for the gold, she's doing it for the working man. She's going to talk about California. She's going to talk about increasing the Minimum Guaranteed Income - all the typical populist talking points. But she'll have the money to back it up for once."
Jim nodded as he listened, his face grim. "You're right." He caught the senator's eyes. "Before we decide how to jump, I need to know if the deeper plan -"
Linda held up one hand to stop Jim, and looked pointedly at Kerri. The aide took the hint and stepped out of the room, closing the thick mahogany door behind her with a solid thump.
Jim continued. "You wanted to sabotage the invasion by leaking the existence of the special forces team to the expats. Has that worked?"
Linda shook her head. "I don't know. I made some calls, but I haven't heard anything back." Her nostrils flared. "Damn it, this stuff takes time. I thought we had weeks. Months."
"And?"
"I have to assume that the invasion is going to work."
Linda nodded. "That's what I think too. So what's your advice?"
Jim paused to consider. "If the invasion is going to succeed, we've got to get out in front of it. Make it look like it was as much our idea as anyone's."
"You're half right."
"Half?"
"Themba thinks she can screw over the Internationalist wing of the Party and exploit us to advance the Populists? Screw that. I don't want half the credit for this - we should get all of it. We need to steal her thunder."
Jim furrowed his brow. "How?"
Linda ignored him and pressed the intercom button. "Kerri, get Jacob from The Minute on the line."
"Yes, ma'am. I've got your son Hugh -"
"Hold that. I need to speak to Jacob first.”
Chapter 102
2064: just west of Zhukovskiy Crater, Lunar Nearside
Blue peered over the crater lip. The mule and Tudel's corpse lay broken on the boulders at the bottom. Splashes of blood and solar panel fragments surrounded them. Blue turned away and looked back to Rex's body. Blood caked the exit wounds in the suit. The faceplate was shattered. And where Rex's head had been -
He turned away.
It felt unreal, and yet there was no avoiding the truth. There it was, on the rocks just meters from him.
Rex was dead. His friend. His pack-mate. His younger brother. Numbness wrapped around him. He knew the truth but somehow didn't know it. Wouldn't know it.
A small knife of pain probed and found its way through.
It was real. Rex was gone. Not just for a day, or for a week, but forever.
Blue felt his lip quiver. He heard something, fuzzy and clouded and distant. He slowly realized it was Max and Duncan. Discipline was gone. Radio silence was gone. They were wailing.
Blue didn't so much give in to instinct as feel it wash over him, infinite and inexorable. He joined his brothers, tilting his head back and letting out his own full-throated howl, broadcasting his grief to the lifeless rocks and the black sky overhead.
How long did he howl? He didn't know. Seconds? Minutes? Longer? At some point, though, he felt his scattered parts coming back together.
Blue forced himself to stop. The other two Dogs continued their mourning without him.
Blue cleared his throat. "Guys?"
Max's howl warbled, then stopped. Duncan went on for another minute; then stuttered to a stop.
Blue turned to Max. The two of them spent more time fighting - about politics, about the future of canine culture, about everything - than they did cooperating. Now, though, they had to work together. Their lives depended on it.
Blue switched off his radio and targeted Max with his com laser. "John was guarding the slope. If this PK found us -"
"The PKs reached the crater wall. Which means John is dead. And now we have to defend ourselves."
Blue swallowed. They had no weapons, no tools. If there were PKs around, he, Max, and Duncan were almost certainly doomed. Still, they couldn't give up - they had to at least try. "We need to know how many there are."
"John must have killed some of them."
Blue said, "And the three mules that Rex reprogrammed might have gotten some."
"How many PKs were left?"
Duncan sniffled. "What are we going to do?"
"They killed Rex. They killed John. They'll kill all of us." Max paused. "Unless we kill them first."
"But we don't have any weapons. What do we -"
"John had two rifles. We need to find his body and get the guns."
Blue shook his head. "We already tried that - we can't operate them".
Max was grim. "We're going to have to figure out a way. Tape. Parachute cord. Something."
Duncan said, "Do you think Rex's mule hack worked?"
Blue raised his eyebrows. "We'll know soon enough."
"Enough talking." Max said, and then reached down and picked up a rock. He set off, walking awkwardly on three legs and carrying his improvised weapon cradled against his chest with one fore-paw.
Duncan picked up a rock of his own and followed him.
Blue looked down. This wasn't going to work. If there was even one PK left, they were going to die.
But better to die trying. He picked up a rock and set off after the other two.
Blue walked behind the other two dogs, scanning to his left and right constantly. His mouth felt dry no matter how much he sipped from his drinking tube.
Max and Duncan crested a small hill ahead of them and paused. Duncan barked in excitement. Blue targeted him with the com laser and started to ask "What?" but before he got the word out, Duncan dropped his rock and disappeared over the hill. Max followed a second later.
God damn it!
Blue hurried to catch up as quickly as he could on three legs.
He crested the ridge a few later. And below - Duncan and Max, jumping around. And between them were the three mules they'd left behind.
Rex's last-minute coding had done its job.
No, it had more than done its job.
One of the mules was badly damaged. Four legs had been mangled by rifle fire or grenades or something, and twitched spastically. The machine was pitifully trying to pull itself forward on its two remaining legs.
The other two mules stood back to back. At their feet were four - no, five - PK corpses. The bodies each looked the same - pristine suits marred only by one circular hole punched directly through the spacesuits' faceplates.
As Blue watched, one of the two surviving mules lifted its leg. A PK lifeless body followed it up, like a strip of duct tape stuck to the bottom of a shoe. The mule shook its leg back and forth.
Blue recoiled. The mule's foot had somehow punched all the way in through the glass and had stuck inside, and as the mule shook the corpse twitched hideously.
The mule put its foot back down. A few seconds later the behavior routine fired again: the mule lifted its leg and shook the corpse from side to side. Again it failed. The flared foot was stuck on something, either some mangled machinery inside the helmet, or perhaps the shattered bones of the PK's skull.
Blue looked away and tried to calm his stomach. A moment later Duncan called out, "Hang on, I'm taking manual control...OK, I got it."
Blue looked back. The mule was unstuck and was backing away from the corpse.
Max looked around the carnage. "Duncan, this is awesome. How the hell did you and Rex do this? You only had ten minutes."
Blue could see Duncan puff up a bit, even through the bulky suit. "It was Rex's idea to program the mules to attack, but it was my idea to dig through the code archives and find a whack-a-mole program in the 'games' directory. Rex ripped out the targeting code and replaced it with a pattern-matching subroutine, and I did an image search for spacesuit helmets. There were a couple of million in our caches, so it was pretty slow. It took the neural net training system minutes to process them all."
"You got vengeance for Rex, and that's the important thing. Good job."
At being reminded of Rex, Duncan snarted to sniffle, then whimper. It was contagious: Blue realized that he was starting to whimper too. He tried to fight it, and then Duncan started howling. Max yelled at them both. "Enough! The PKs are still out there, and we need to focus!"
Blue forced his lip to stop quivering, and a moment later Duncan silenced himself. Duncan nodded. "You're right."
Max turned and look
ed at the machines and the dead PKs. "I don't see any other footprints. The mules might have killed all the PKs...but we can't be sure. We need to arm ourselves."
Duncan sniffled. "We can also put the mules back in combat mode."
Max considered it for a moment, and then shook his head. "They've got all of our airscrubbers and food and water. We don't know how long we're going to be out here. We can't risk losing our supplies. No, we've got to arm ourselves and keep the mules in reserve."
Blue nodded. "And speaking of supplies, we need to scavenge airscrubbers, water, batteries, everything we can." He tilted his head to indicate the bodies of the PKs.
Duncan chirped "Sure!" and fell on the corpses. Max followed him, and soon the two were working as a team: Max rolling corpses over, Duncan reaching under and twisting off airscrubbers. A moment later Max started humming a ditty that Blue knew too well from the MMORPG. Duncan joined Max in the humming, and then broke out in a sing-song when the chorus arrived: "Loot the corpses, loot the corpses!"
Blue frowned. Rex was dead, and so were these PKs. It might be necessary to kill them, but they'd been real people. There was nothing funny about this, and singing songs from a videogame as they stole from their bodies was wrong.
He couldn't lecture. Not now, at least. But he could set an example. Blue walked to a fresh corpse and tried to avoid looking at its face as he rolled it over and reached for the KO2 rebreather canister.
* * *
Ten minutes later they were done. Done looting the corpses, done loading the contents into the mules, and done rigging up weapons.
Max held the piece of aluminum bar that he'd duct-taped to the foreguard of a PK's YM-20 in his left paw, and used his right to pull the loop of parachute cord that threaded through the trigger guard. The rifle jerked back as the muzzle flashed. "Hmm. I can't aim it very well, but it's better than nothing." He shook his right paw out of the loop of nylon and clutched the gun against his chest with his left, and then dropped to all fours.
"OK, let's get to the crater wall and see if there are any PKs left below. We'll also look for John's - Well anyway, let's move." Max started walking and Blue and Duncan fell in behind.
The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1) Page 45
