Stark’s Crusade

by John G. Hemry

  She nodded, her face calculating. “What is it you want, then, Stark? We just forget about this?”

  “No. We file reports, on my guy and on whatever contacts you had with Maguire.”

  “Good idea. Then we should tell everybody about them.”

  “Everybody? Why?”

  “Because, if we announce we’ve been contacted and have turned it down, then anybody else who gets contacted will know we’re watching for any more of that. They’ll be a bit more scared of accepting a buyout, or whatever deal they’re offered.”

  “That’s a good idea.” Stark eyed her appraisingly. “You certainly know a lot about this kind of stuff. Spying and security and everything. Just what kind of junk were you involved in before all this started, Stace?”

  “Me? I’m still a virgin, Stark. Pure as the driven snow.”

  “Sure you are. And I bet you’d be willing to sell me that snow at a substantial discount.”

  “If you’re buying, you can have a one-time special good-deal just for you. And the snow’s guaranteed to stay frozen until it melts.”

  “Get out of here, Stace. I’ll see you at the staff meeting.”

  “Yes, sir, Commander.” Yurivan stood, saluted with mocking precision, then left marching to a cadence only she could hear.

  Stark lay near the defensive perimeter around the American Colony, studying the view ahead through his face shield. Scan highlighted brief detections of enemy forces moving behind their own lines, and the occasional movements of friendly forces to either side of and behind him. Not far to Stark’s right, a concealed bunker holding a squad of soldiers formed the linchpin for this small area of the perimeter. Inside that bunker, he knew, the soldiers would be monitoring every tiny movement, every tiny emission, every tiny anomaly for signs of enemy action. If those signs added up to an enemy probe, weapons concealed in the lunar terrain around Stark would open fire, hurling grenades and high-velocity explosive projectiles toward anyone foolish enough to test their defenses. On the other side of the area between the opposing forces, similar enemy bunkers and weapons lay in wait for any moves by Stark’s forces. The stretch of lunar terrain between the defensive lines had been dubbed the dead zone long ago, an all-too-appropriate name for any soldier trying to move across it.

  It had been quiet for some time now, just minor probes by each side to keep the other side worried. Stark didn’t want to lose soldiers testing enemy defenses that had claimed too many lives already, especially when the long-term American goal of taking control of all the Moon’s real-estate had been abandoned when Stark took over. The enemy, for their part, had been hurt badly by their own attacks on the Colony perimeter over the years and had recently learned some very nasty lessons at the hands of Stark’s newly flexible and unpredictable forces. Lunar war, never cheap, had sucked the combatants dry. It had been a quiet born not of victory or defeat for either side, but simple exhaustion of soldiers, national treasure, and ideas.

  But the quiet wouldn’t last much longer, not once the work Stark was observing had been completed.

  Much of the activity was screened. Armored bulldozers had scraped up rock and dust from positions occupied for countless years and piled them into a berm closing off the open end of the Mixing Bowl. The berm’s height didn’t match the valley walls to either side, but it was good enough to block direct observation of the valley’s surface. Tremors within the berm had been analyzed by Stark’s technicians, who had concluded that prefabricated defenses were being hurriedly buried within the berm, along with strings of sensors to allow unimpeded surveillance of Stark’s forces. There was at least one tunnel beneath the berm, the technicians advised, possibly more, with only a thin opening remaining in place to screen its location until whatever needed that tunnel was ready to come forth.

  Shuttles came down, bright spots of light curving through the blackness overhead, raising thin, slowly falling dust clouds from the new landing strip carved from the surface of the Mixing Bowl’s valley. Their flight trajectories came within extreme range of the Colony’s own weapons, but Stark hadn’t attempted to engage them. He didn’t know what, or who, made up the cargo for each shuttle, and had no desire to score a hit on a shuttle packed with American troops.

  Stacey says her sources claim the Pentagon’s dropping a reinforced brigade from Second Division to provide security for the Mixing Bowl base. How many people does a Brigade Combat Team add up to? I know Second Division was understrength. If they packed people into one brigade, that probably means there’s only about one full-strength brigade-equivalent left back on Earth. Maybe less. How can they take that kind of risk? Even with all our super hi-tech gear, one brigade can’t defend the entire country. What if some of our long-term enemies back home decide this would be a perfect time to march a division of soldiers over the border and into one of our cities? What’ll we do, nuke the city to get ‘em out?

  Stark knew full well he could have received the same pictures, analyzed the same sensor readouts and gazed at the same view of the Mixing Bowl activity from back at the command center. But he lay among the scattered rocks of the perimeter and watched the activity in person, thinking and absorbing information. I need to know how this terrain feels. How the situation feels here. Before all hell breaks loose in the form of Jabberwocks.

  “Ethan?”

  “Yeah, Vic.”

  “I take it you’re not seeing anything we haven’t seen before.”

  “Nope.” He smiled, then moved just enough to see slightly back and to his left, where Vic Reynolds also lay in battle armor.

  “The Jabberwocks are going to come out of that tunnel. There’s probably more than one tunnel, too.”

  “That’s what I figured. When they blow the tunnel entrances, we’ll know they’re on the way.”

  “Right. Of course, the dust and gravel thrown up by the entrances being blown will help screen the Jabberwocks’ advance.” Vic fell silent for a moment. “What if the nano rounds don’t work, Ethan? What if we have to handle these things the hard way?”

  “Then we’ll kill ‘em the hard way.”

  “No slogans, Ethan. I’m thinking we need to be sure every weapon shooter is ready to switch to standard rounds the instant we say so.”

  “Good idea. We’ll make sure everyone knows that.” Stark watched the work a little longer, trying to sort out the emotions he was feeling, then uttered a brief laugh as he identified at least some of them. “Hey, Vic. You wanna hear something funny?”

  “I could use a little humor about now.”

  “I don’t mean ‘funny’ ha-ha, I mean ‘funny’ strange.” Stark studied the Mixing Bowl work as he spoke. “I’m looking at everything goin’ on over there, and I’m thinking: ‘Alright. That’s how we do things.’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s how we do things. Americans. We build stuff. Look at it! Moving dirt, throwing together structures, doing big things. It’s kind of cool, ain’t it? We’re Americans. We build stuff.”

  “Ethan, you’re hopeless. I hate to break your bubble, but the only reason they’re building stuff over there is so they can come over here and break stuff. Including you and me.”

  “I know. I know. So what’s all this making you think about?”

  Vic spoke meditatively, as if she were still thinking through her ideas. “A couple of things. Stacey handed me some new information just before we came out here.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Is it ever good? She has it reliably that some of the bodies in the Second Division Brigade over there were brought in from other units.”

  “We knew that. They had to pull them from the other brigades in the division.”

  “No, Ethan, I mean units from outside Second Division. There’s a number of survivors from Third Division in there.”

  “Third Division.” Stark stared across/the distance again, remembering the shattered remnants of Third Division, rescued by his mutiny, then sent home if they chose. Most had chosen that, incl
uding Stark’s old friend Sergeant Rash Paratnam. Rash, you turned me down flat when I asked you to join us: Hell, you almost bit my head off. But, then, your sister had just been killed and I’d been the one to tell you about it. Now, you might be over there. What if we end up in each other’s rifle sights? Maybe I am in hell. “Any names?”

  “No.” A pause. “I had some friends in that unit, too. But it gets worse.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “Those people from Fifth Battalion. The mutineers we sent home in exchange for some more family members of people up here. They’re with that Second Division force, too.”

  “Why the hell they’d do that? You think they’re volunteers?”

  “I seriously doubt it. They probably got sent because they’re lunar vets, Ethan. That kind of experience is seriously lacking among those Second Division troops.”

  “You’re probably right. Damn. We were already wondering if we’d be able to shoot at other Americans. Knowing some of them personally doesn’t help things.”

  “But we know they’re willing to shoot at us. They did during the mutiny, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Stark ran through the Fifth Battalion soldiers in his head, trying to remember each of the thirty soldiers who had been too heavily involved in the mutiny to be let off lightly. “No. Knowing all that doesn’t help much. You said a couple of things, though. What’s the other one?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if we’ve missed something important about these Jabberwocks.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Laying here, looking at that dead zone they’re going to cross, I started imagining how our orders would have been laid out in our Tacs. The brass would have spelled out every step we were supposed to take. Right?”

  “I won’t forget that soon. We’ve figured the Jabberwocks would just have some sorta super Tacs to do the same thing.”

  “But that’s important, Ethan. Think about it. We always had strict orders laid down in our Tacs; do this, go here, do that. The Jabberwocks are going to have the same sort of thing, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “But when we ran into something unexpected, something the Tacs didn’t allow for, what would we do?”

  Stark couldn’t shrug in his battle armor, but he made the gesture mentally. “Improvise. Work around it. Whatever… I think I see what you’re driving at.”

  “Uh-huh. The brass has always wanted soldiers who didn’t think, who just followed orders to the letter. Okay, they’ve got them at last in the form of these Jabberwocks. And the fact that there’s no link means the Jabberwocks are going to be dependent on their Tacs for their courses of action.”

  “So if we screw up that planned course of action?”

  “Bingo. They’re going to have to think for themselves. We may not have their reflexes or speed, but I’ll lay you odds we can handle combat situations better than any AI they could pack into those things.”

  Stark studied his scan, viewing his own defenses in the area and the lay of the terrain. Exact positions of defenses were rarely identified, but the Jabberwocks had to be programmed to attack the general locations where bunkers were known to be. Yeah. We can mess with whatever a Jabberwock uses for a mind. Can’t hurt. Might help a lot. “Thanks, Vic. I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  “Ah, shucks. I bet you say that to all the girls.” Stark saw Vic’s symbology begin moving backward. “For now, I think I’ll get out of immediate range of the enemy. Are you coming?”

  “In a few minutes.” Stark lay on the ridge, in his battle armor, on the dead surface of the Moon, watching the preparations in the Mixing Bowl to attack his forces, and feeling perfectly at home.

  If meetings could solve every problem they faced, Stark reflected, then there shouldn’t be any problems left by this point. “This is likely to be the last staff meeting before the big attack goes down. I want everyone to think, real hard, about anything we haven’t considered. Little things or big things. What kind of questions do we need answered?”

  Stacey Yurivan smiled vacantly, affecting a spaced-out voice. “Why are we here?”

  “To make my life difficult, Stace. I take it you have nothing new to report?”

  “Not really. The demonstrations back home are getting bigger. Everybody apparently liked hearing you confirm the earlier reports that we weren’t planning on dropping into D.C. to party hard. That was a decent job planting those reports to set the stage for your interview, by the way.”

  “Thanks. The government helped me do it.”

  “So I understand. Apparently it hasn’t been able to prove your father’s connection to the reports, though. Still, the whole mess is putting more pressure on the government to put up or shut up. They’re promising to end the rebellion and recover this Colony by the end of the month.”

  Vic checked the calendar on her display. “That only leaves them about a week.”

  “Very good, Reynolds. Have a donut. Yeah, I can’t imagine the generals that are running this op are pleased to have the politicians localizing their attack date. Ummm, what else? There was another big drop in the stock market because some of the countries whose contracts with corporations have been enforced by American soldiers are taking advantage of the lack of said soldiers to renege on the contracts. Just the usual political, economic, and social turmoil.”

  “Commander Stark?” All eyes shifted to look at Private Mendoza. “I have been wondering if our countermeasure against the Jabberwocks may not already be known to the government.”

  “The nano rounds?” Stark frowned. “Why do you say that? I mean, no security is perfect, but we’ve kept the nano rounds pretty quiet.”

  “Yes, sir. But the fact that we put down the mutiny without killing any mutineers has been widely discussed within the Colony. It has even been transmitted to Earth by various means and reported by the vid stations there. And, of course, we sent some of the mutineers back to Earth. Even though they lacked direct knowledge of the weapon we used to disable their armor, they could have described the effects.”

  “That’s right.” Stark rubbed his chin, gazing around the table. “Has there been enough information in any of that to clue the Pentagon in to the fact that we used nanobots to disable the mutineers’ battle armor? Stacey? Vic?”

  Vic shook her head. “We don’t know. But, if there was, the Pentagon may have had an unusual attack of common sense and realized that if we could use nanobots against battle armor, we could also use them against Jabberwocks. They might already be working on countermeasures. Mendoza, I sure wish you’d thought of this earlier.”

  “I am sorry, Sergeant Reynolds, I only just—”

  “That’s okay, Mendo,” Stark broke in. “We won’t get down on you because you just thought of something the rest of us never did. So, worst case, assume Mendo is right, and the Pentagon knows about the nano rounds. What’ll they be doing?”

  Lamont spread his hands. “Working on countermeasures. What else?”

  “Sure. What kind of countermeasures? The Jabberwocks already would’ve been armored and camo’d as well as possible. What could they do to stop nano rounds?”

  There was a babble of replies as his staff hurled suggestions. “Spaced armor? Would that work?”

  “No. How about improved point defenses?”

  “Against rifle rounds? No way. Maybe make ‘em faster, harder to hit at all—”

  “They can only do that by taking off armor! Why would—”

  The debate subsided as Bev Manley rapped the table. “You’re forgetting something, people. If the Pentagon has figured out we used nano rounds, they might have made some of their own. We might be facing that weapon, too. Which means we have to figure out how to defend ourselves from it.”

  Vic rubbed her forehead as if fighting off a headache. “This just keeps getting worse.”

  Stacey Yurivan smiled. “We could handle it the traditional way the brass deals with stuff that might interfere with our plans. Pretend it’s not th
ere and keep the plan unchanged.”

  “Thanks, Stace. Keep chiming in with those helpful observations.” Vic glared around the table. “Okay. Assume we’re defending against nano rounds. How would we do it?”

  An uncomfortable silence stretched for long moments, until Lamont made another helpless gesture. “You’ve got to assume you’re going to get hit, sooner or later.”

  “Fine,” Stark agreed. “So, you’re hit. How do we handle that? How can we stop nanobots from freezing our battle armor?”

  Sergeant Gordasa waved one hand. “Do you know what this sounds like? To me? It’s like an infection. Little bugs that get inside you and screw everything up. You can’t stop the bugs from getting inside. So if you can’t stop the bugs from getting inside, how do you stop them from doing a lot of damage once they are inside? Some kind of, uh, nano vaccination or nano-antivenom?”

  Vic turned to Stark. “Gordo’s right, Ethan. We have to think of these things as sort of like a medical problem. But a vaccination doesn’t seem workable, not with the time we’ve got. I’m not even sure how that could work. Hunter-killer nanobots inside the battle armor? Lamont, you’re our best equipment expert.”

  “And I never heard of anything like that. I mean, you’d have to figure out IFF of some sort for the nanobots so they could identify intruders, nanoscale weapons of some type, a way to get the killer nanos to the infection site. All kinds of stuff. I don’t see how we can invent something like that in less than a week, let alone install it in our armor.”

  “Me, neither. How else do you counter the nano rounds if you’re thinking in medical terms?”

  Stark turned to his comm pad. “None of us are likely to know that. But maybe I know someone who might have some answers.” He punched in a code, waiting until his screen cleared to show the face of the tired-eyed medic. She seemed to be standing somewhere in one of the casualty wards, the shapes of life-support equipment vaguely visible in the background.