Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  His intercom chimed. “Andrew,” his secretary said, “Karl Bova and one of his people have arrived to see you.”

  Hastings lifted an eyebrow. He would have been much happier if Bova – and all of the independent states – had vanished into nothingness; they provided a bad example to his people of what could be done when the colonists were free to set their own prices for Helium-3. Bova’s endless self-confidence had been irritating when they had met; he had once told a Chinese Commissioner that he could give the workers on the moon limited freedom, or one day they would take it for themselves. The asteroid that had struck China had probably rendered the entire question moot; Hastings had half-suspected that the Chinese Commissioner – a rat of a man whose name escaped him – would call him to ask for the support of Hastings’ Marines, just to put down a rebellion. How long would it be before the Chinese workers rose up again; this time, there would be no help coming in from China…

  He considered, briefly, telling Bova to get lost, but that would have been impolitic, to say the least. Bova’s position as the Chairman of the Lunar Independence Front, his links with all of the independent colonies on the moon and his ability to alter the price of Helium-3 from some of the colonies as he pleased, made him a powerful man. He could even have removed Hastings from office if he had been willing to pay the political price; Hastings had wondered if the fact he had remained in office was because Bova had decided it would be better to remain with the devil he knew.

  “I see, Gloria,” he said. Gloria Bennett had been his secretary ever since he had taken up his position on the moon, a tall black woman who had been secretary to the last two Governors before they returned to Earth, both of whom had spoken well of her. A handful of security types had suggested that it would be much safer to rely on someone brought up from Earth, but Hastings’ had overruled them; the colonists were restive enough without adding the suggestion that they were being discriminated against in their own homes to the mix. Besides, Gloria was very good in bed. “Send them both in, please.”

  Bova was the same arrogant pain in the ass he had always been, Hastings saw, as he stood to shake his hand. Social conventions were more important on the moon than anywhere else; the original colonists had regulated fistfights to the point that they all had to be held somewhere where there was no danger of inflicting damage on the colony. He disapproved of the custom of challenging people to fight, but it had become embedded in the lunar colonist mindset…and it did make people much more polite. The second man was an obvious security type; Hastings examined him with caution, knowing that he was facing a very dangerous man. He looked harmless enough, but Hastings had been a Marine; he would have bet his life that Bova’s friend – bodyguard? – was implanted with all manner of weaponry.

  “Mr. Bova,” Hastings said, as he returned to his seat. Bova had taken one of the seats, but his friend, who had remained un-introduced, had taken up a position behind him, just within range of a hasty move to protect him. “Might I ask what is the point of this meeting?”

  Bova smiled. “I have a long list of grievances, if you would like,” he said, “but then…we are both practical men. You may be working for the wrong side, Mr. Hastings…”

  “Governor Hastings,” Hastings snapped, injecting the comment as sharply as he could.

  “As you please,” Bova said, as if it was a matter of small interest to him. He had once spent nearly thirty minutes explaining, at great length to anyone who would listen, that Governor Barilla, Hastings’ predecessor, was an unelected tyrant and a living breach of the American constitution. Hastings found that worrying; something else had to be on Bova’s mind. There was an uncanny look in the man’s eye; a mixture of shimmering excitement, anticipation, and nervousness. “We are both practical men and I believe that we would both like to cut to the meat of the matter, rather than wasting fifteen minutes chattering. Would you not agree, Governor Hastings?”

  Hastings, who would not have willingly shared anything with Bova, shrugged. “That would be accurate enough,” he said. If anything, the strange look in Bova’s eye had gotten brighter. “Let us, then, cut to the chase; what is the reason for this meeting?”

  Bova leaned back, forcing himself to relax. “Governor Hastings,” he said, “I would like to ask for your complete and unconditional surrender.”

  Hastings kept his face as blank as possible, but a laugh threatened to bubble up hysterically from deep inside his chest. It was…preposterous, irrational, treasonous…and it was happening. The thought almost broke through his face and escaped as a giggle; the sheer lunacy of Bova’s words had finally driven him mad.

  “My surrender?” he asked finally. “My personal surrender?”

  Bova didn’t smile; the strange expression on his face had vanished. “The surrender of all American possessions and colonies on the moon, including the military units,” he said. Hastings realised in a nightmarish moment that he was serious, somehow. “If you do not surrender them, I will be forced to take steps.”

  “I will have to speak with Colonel Forsyth,” Hastings said. He met Bova’s eyes, searched them, and saw no trace of a bluff. “He can inform me of what is actually happening…”

  He tapped the code into the intercom and waited. The Space Marines were based outside New Jamestown, in a set of barracks that had been built to allow them rapid access to the surface, linked only through a single underground tunnel. He’d always wished he could have based them somewhere within the city itself, but public pressure would never have allowed that…and, besides, if there was a revolution, it would be better to have his primary force out of easy reach by enemy forces.

  It took longer than he would have expected for the call to be answered. “Sir, thank God,” an agitated voice said. It took Hastings a moment to recognise Colonel Forsyth’s voice. “What’s happening?”

  “Calm down,” Hastings said. There was an amused half-smile playing over Bova’s face. “I need a situation report; calmly, if possible.”

  “The tunnel to New Jamestown has sealed and the equipment is registering a vacuum,” Colonel Forsyth reported, his voice thin and reedy. Hastings felt his blood run cold; if the tunnel was exposed to the lunar surface – or, more likely, someone on Bova’s team had pumped out all the air – the Marines would have to don their suits and walk across the surface to the main colony. “The spacesuit equipment is not responding; we have no power apart from emergency power, and half of the isolated systems seem to have crashed.”

  Hastings looked up at Bova; there was no doubting the existence of the smile now. “Ask them to check the external sensors,” Bova said. “You might find it revealing.”

  “There are several crawlers out there, with at least fifty men,” Colonel Forsyth reported, once the question was asked. “Sir, what the hell is going on?”

  Bova leaned forward. “We have control of all the vital areas of the colony,” he said. “We have infiltrated some of the security architecture of the base; you can no longer trust your own computers, and we have three hundred armed men near the position of…ah, Colonel Forsyth and his Marines. If you order Colonel Forsyth to fight – and I’m sure they will, them being oh so stoic and heroic and other words that end in ‘oic’ that I’m sure will come to me later – there will be a very quick slaughter and that will be the end of the Marines.”

  Hastings stood up slowly. “And what if we do surrender?”

  “If you do, you will be held somewhere safe, treated well, and then returned to Earth when circumstances permit,” Bova said. “You have my word that the hatred that many of my people feel for Marines will not be permitted to be turned into actual action against them…if they surrender. If not, we will simply burn through the rocky covering with a fusion flame and roast them all. The final outcome is not in doubt.”

  Hastings tried to stall. “I should seek orders from Washington,” he said. “The American Government remains in existence.”

  “There’s no time,” Bova said, his voice firm. “Surrender n
ow, or we take you into custody and…deal with the Marines before they can present a threat to us. The choice is yours.”

  Hastings looked him in the eye. “In that case, under protest, I surrender,” he said. He allowed some of the pure fury to show in his voice. “Colonel Forsyth; please see to the surrender arrangements for your force.” He looked back at Bova. “There’s a massive alien force out there, watching us and waiting for signs of weakness; what you’re doing here is worse than treason against just America, but treason against the entire human race.”

  Bova looked back at him. “The thing about tormenting people, Mr. Hastings, is that eventually they fight back,” he said. “If America, and Russia, and China, and Britain, and Europe, had treated the colonists fairly from the start, this would never have happened. You have only yourself to blame.”

  He nodded to his bodyguard, who produced a small pair of handcuffs from his pocket, snapped them onto Hastings’ wrists, and led him out of his former office. He wasn’t surprised to see a handful of soldiers waiting outside, wearing the uniform of Lunar City, or the handful of his own people, sitting with their hands cuffed, but the real surprise was seeing Gloria there, leaning against the wall and watching calmly. She met his gaze and looked away; he understood, in a flash of understanding, that he had been betrayed by one of the people he had trusted completely.

  “Come along,” the bodyguard said, escorting Hastings towards one of the elevators to the surface. Hastings shook off his arm and walked as proudly as he could, trying to forget the look in her eyes…and the fact that he had lost control of an entire colony.

  * * *

  “You should have seen his face,” Bova proclaimed, when he returned to the small set of rooms that had been placed at Tony Jones’ disposal. Jones had wanted to remain at the observatory or Lunar City; he had doubted Bova’s claim that he could take control of the colony without a single shot being fired. It had helped that nearly four-fifths of the population was firmly on his side, or even that Hastings just hadn’t been very popular, but even so Jones was astonished that it had been accomplished without bloodshed. “He didn’t even know that half of his people had been working for us for years.”

  Jones felt an oddly childish desire to prick his bubble. “If you could just walk in and take over, why didn’t you do it years ago?”

  Bova snorted. “Study the history of some of the lunar rebellions sometime,” he said. “Every time there has even been a faint suggestion of unrest, the Great Powers flood in a few thousand soldiers and revolt becomes much harder. Now, there’s an alien blockade around the Earth and they can’t reinforce… and Hastings, to give him some credit, knew that resistance would only end in his forces being slaughtered. Idiot; one of the companies I partially own offered to build those barracks for him, just because I knew that one day we would have to take them off his hands.”

  He shrugged and threw himself down onto a sofa. “Now, all we have to do is wait and see what happens in the other colonies,” he said. He almost rubbed his hands together with glee, almost intolerably pleased with himself; his plan had come off almost flawlessly. “I dare say it will go well.”

  He was right, Jones acknowledged ruefully. The Russian and European colonies surrendered without a shot being fired; the British and Caliphate colonies surrendered after firing a handful of shots for the honour of the flag. There were smaller colonies, outposts, that would have to be swept up, but none of them were important…and most of them thought more kindly of their rivals in the mining business than they did of the governments back home. It was only the Chinese colony that put up a major fight… and their own people stabbed the defenders in the back. The orbital facilities had been controlled from the ground; the insurgents had made certain to seize those first, apart from a handful of independent stations that would hesitate before trying to take any action. Besides, the weapons that had been intended to deal with the aliens could be turned on them quite easily.

  The remaining soldiers and governors on the moon – apart from the Chinese Commissioner, who had been torn apart by his own people – had been moved rapidly to secure and hidden locations, somewhere well away from any lunar settlement. Bova had explained it all; they could remain there until they could be returned to Earth, or perhaps some of them could be invited to remain on the moon; either way, there was no way out of their trap without assistance…and there was no one left to assist them. The Lunar Independence Front knew all about the military bases on the moon, particularly the ones they weren’t meant to know about…and the ones that various governments had tried to keep hidden from them. It was much harder than it would seem to hide anything on the moon.

  “Good,” Bova said, as the final reports came in. The important facilities on the moon had been captured intact; they could produce thousands of tons of Helium-3 if they felt like it, although Jones wasn't quite sure what they would do for a market. The Belt? The aliens? “Are you prepared for your part of the mission?”

  Jones felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. “You still want me to try and talk to the aliens?”

  “Yes,” Bova said, flatly. His voice allowed no compromise; they had discussed it time and time again, but Jones hadn’t really believed, he realised now, that it would ever happen. Somehow, Bova’s dreams had seemed impossible to fulfil, as if the entire Lunar Independence Front had been dreaming. But today he had proven otherwise. “If we can get an agreement with the aliens, we can build our new society without any interference from outsiders, ever again.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Just Which Side Are You On?

  Freeport One, Asteroid Belt

  Space warfare was a complicated business.

  Jake Ellsworth strode into the Watering Hole, his mind already mulling over their recent exercises, and took a seat along the counter. Ian passed him a Screaming Orgasm without comment; the only real advantage of serving in the Rockrat Defence Force – as Kyle Short had called it, somehow managing to keep a straight face while he pronounced the words – was that the pilots got free booze. It wasn’t enough to keep them; there had been nearly two thousand volunteers from among the Rockrats, half of whom had left in the first month, even before the aliens had entered the inner solar system and opened fire.

  “You look unhappy,” Ian said, pushing a second drink over the counter. “How’s life on the western front?”

  Ellsworth scowled. The Belt had only a handful of people with any expertise in space warfare, most of whom had been reservists for one space force or another, and almost all of whom had gone home to fight in the hopeless battle around Earth. He had been appointed one of the commanding officers, but that had been purely because he had been one of the first to sign up; he knew very little about space warfare. Oh sure, he knew the theory… but the simulations kept making it clear: the Rockrat character was not suitable for organized military forces.

  “Tricky,” he said. “I don’t get no respect.”

  Ian shrugged. Rockrats generally had very limited manpower, so almost any Rockrat who wasn't completely incompetent could write his or her own ticket; the incompetent ones rarely lasted more than a few months before they killed themselves. There might have been the legend of a Joe Shit, who somehow survived accidents that would have killed the average Rockrat, but cold reality always intruded on such dreams. The eternal corollary was that no Rockrat would willingly serve under someone who didn’t know what they were doing…and it was far too obvious that he knew no more than anyone else about space warfare.

  “There may be another big meeting tonight to decide which side we should be on,” Ian said, after polishing a few glasses to make himself appear busy. “You did see the news from Earth and the moon?”

  Ellsworth nodded; they might have been training, but everyone had stopped to watch the battle above Earth… and the asteroids that had fallen and struck the planet. The Rockrats had been horrified; there might have been a few of them who had wished for Earth to vanish, or to at the very least stop trying to interfere with their
lives, but no one had really wanted to kill so many people on the planet. Earth and the Belt were linked together in dozens of different ways, and if the Belt hadn’t needed food or supplies from Earth at the bottom line, having access to Earth’s food and products – the Belt was one of the largest consumers of pornography in the solar system – was generally a good thing. And besides, everyone on Earth – apart from Corporate Rats – was human.

  The Unilateral Lunar Declaration of Independence was something else. The Rockrats shared much of the dislike, if not outright hatred, that the lunar colonists felt for the Great Powers and the cartels that tried to keep the price of Helium-3 down. There were plenty of Rockrats who were descended from Lunar colonists and who had spoken loudly in favour of a second embargo to support various rebellions on the moon, but not all of them had been so concerned; the moon was a market for asteroid ore, and Rockrats rarely rocked the boat unless there was no choice. There was a great deal of sympathy for the lunar colonists, but at the same time, they had effectively stabbed Earth in the back.

  “Everyone knows,” Ellsworth said. It awed him, sometimes; right across the belt, countless Rockrats would be having the same discussion, before voting on it when the Association called for a democratic vote. They could recognise Lunar independence – for all the good it would do with the aliens in the region – or they could deny the existence of the Lunar state. The wrong decision could have unfortunate consequences. “Where do you stand on it?”

  Ian smiled. “I think that people should do more drinking and less fighting,” he said, nodding towards a pair of Rockrats who had been exchanging increasingly bitter insults for the past ten minutes. One of them, red-faced and florid, already looked as if he had had too much to drink; he seemed on the verge of hurling himself across the table at his partner, who was himself somewhat the worse for wear. “Want to bet that one of them issues a formal challenge pretty soon?”