Crises and Conflicts: Celebrating the First 10 Years of NewCon Press

by Ian Whates

  Stone laughed. “After that, I turned off the ship air, and pretended to have problems breathing when you two did. The plan was that I’d wait for the moment when Harbinger tried to use the empty oxygen booster cell. He’d be going into hypoxia, confused that the oxygen booster cell wasn’t helping him, and assuming I was running out of air too. It would have been the perfect time for me to attack him, but you got impatient and decided to make your move before I could make mine.”

  She turned back to her controls. I saw the ship was turning, the distant solar array seeming to drift round outside the windows until it was directly ahead of us. I’d thought I was safe before when I wasn’t, but this time it was true. I could go home to Adonis and report Chief Negotiator Kwame Ansah’s death to my superiors. It would be a little awkward admitting that I’d abandoned Kwame Ansah’s body, but explaining how I’d killed his murderer would be far worse.

  “I think I’m about to have a career crisis,” I said. “The Alpha Sector Diplomatic Service won’t react well to me stabbing murderers in the throat with my diplomatic badge.”

  “If they don’t want you as a diplomat any longer, you should consider joining the military instead.”

  “I’m not the right sort of person to join the military. I believe in using words not weapons.”

  “You believe in using words not weapons, yet you’ve killed one more human being than I have,” Stone pointed out. “I think you should stop making decisions based on the type of person you’d like to think you are, and make some based on the type of person you are in reality.”

  I thought that over uneasily, and gave a glance at the blood-covered mess in the seat next to me. Perhaps Stone had a point.

  “I’d better let the solar array know what’s happened.” Stone tapped at her controls. “Retrieval One to Hestia Solar Array Command. Situation secure. Harbinger has suffered an almost certainly fatal injury, and we’re coming home.”

  “Hestia Solar Array Command to Retrieval One,” said Leveque’s voice. “That’s excellent news. I’d expected you to have to wait considerably longer before Harbinger tried to use the empty oxygen booster cell, but now we’ll be able to leave on schedule for our wedding anniversary celebration.”

  “Harbinger didn’t try to use the empty oxygen booster cell,” said Stone. “There was... an unexpected development.”

  “What sort of unexpected development?”

  “The cabbage ate the goat,” said Stone.

  Pickaxes and Shovels

  Christopher Nuttall

  We weren’t soldiers.

  I want you to get that clear from the start. We – myself and Alan and Jimmie and Eric and Tanya – were not soldiers. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we were, like some complete moron in the Pentagon. Shit like the shit we faced is meant for soldiers, not us. And to think there were at least two companies of space marines who could have handled the task, if only someone back on Earth had the common sense to realise what was coming our way.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Pour me a drink and I’ll try and tell you the story the way it happened. Forget what you’ve read in the news, ignore that goddamned film; we weren’t strong men (and a beautiful woman) any more than we were soldiers. Poor Tanya practically became a hermit after the movie, where she was played by a barely-legal girl with her tits falling out of her spacesuit every time she moved. I heard she clonked some asshole on the head after he made the mistake of thinking she was easy...

  We weren’t soldiers, all right? And we weren’t movie stars either. We were just ... men. And I’ll have that drink now, if you don’t mind.

  Okay, okay... think back to the days when NASA finally landed men on the moon for the second time. The Japanese were getting serious and so were the Chinese, even the Russians were working hard to put more in space than the good old US of A. And so NASA finally pulled its thumb out of its ass and launched us into space, establishing a new space station and several Earth-Luna transports in short order. The Japanese had beaten us to establishing a lunar base, the President said, but that was no reason to give up. A crew of fifty Americans, including me, were landed on the moon the very next year. And we started, just like the Japanese, to mine ores, water-ice and He3.

  There was, of course, a shitload of argument over who actually owned the moon. The idealistic approach – that all of humanity owned the moon – fell apart very quickly, once the Japanese were firmly established. Plenty of internationalists insisted that the moon still belonged to everyone, but the people with real power and investment said no. The ambassadors haggled for years before it was agreed that whoever landed a base on the moon and set up a permanent settlement would have clear title to a hundred square miles surrounding their bases – wherever those bases happened to be. And some bright spark in Houston had the idea of settling up inflatable bases on the moon, allowing us to claim more territory than we, by rights, should have been permitted.

  You probably can’t imagine those early lunar bases – and I drink to forget. They started out as tiny complexes, put together from prefabricated crap and then expanded as we burrowed under the ground. The domes you see on TV didn’t come along for another fifteen years, after we set up ore refineries on the lunar surface. Forty men and ten women, crammed into the complex, our lives dependent on machinery that we knew wasn’t completely reliable... it was enough to drive us to drink, or it would have been if not for the certain knowledge that anyone fool enough to get drunk on the moon would be pitched out the airlock. Privacy was practically non-existent. We used to gamble for the right to take one of the lunar rovers and be alone, just for a few short days. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have won the last game I played on the moon. But I did.

  The boss was a straight-laced son-of-a-bitch called Colonel Harold Fletcher. He wasn’t actually that bad, but... well, after a long few hours of working on the lunar surface the last thing you want is to have to chat to a spit-and-polish martinet. He’d been in the USAF before transferring to NASA and he had some pretty firm ideas on how we should look, while we counted ourselves lucky if we looked barely human. We spent half of our time stinking to high heaven and with our clothes dirty and grimy... Really, all the nice girls might love an astronaut, but only after we’d had a shower and several successive baths. And when he called us into his office – well, technically it was the CIC – we all groaned together. It couldn’t be anything good.

  “The Japanese have been making inroads to the north,” he said, tapping the map on the display. Our network of bases were surrounded by red circles, showing the territory we – theoretically – controlled. “Houston wants us to set up a new inflatable base here” – he tapped a point roughly seventy kilometres to the north – “and cut them off.”

  “Unless they decide to just ignore us,” Tanya said. She’d always been the most pessimistic about the likelihood of the latest Outer Space Treaty lasting longer than a decade. The Russians would certainly feel no obligation to uphold it if the treaty locked them away from the moon. “It isn’t as if those bases are manned.”

  “You’ll be there for at least a month,” Fletcher said. He gave us the firm-jawed, strong-chin look of a true patriot. Personally, I think he practiced the look in front of a mirror. “They won’t be able to claim the base isn’t manned if it is manned.”

  We argued, of course, but Fletcher was immovable. The five of us were to be isolated for thirty days, barring accidents. So Tanya and I headed down to the lunar rover to make preparations, while Alan, Jimmie and Eric went to record their final messages for the folks back home. We had no reason to expect trouble, but ... We knew death could come at any time. Anyone who tells you that outer space is safe obviously hasn’t read The Cold Equations.

  “Well,” Tanya said. She looked nothing like her movie counterpart, you should know. After being covered in as much grime as the rest of us for the last five months, it was hard to remember that she was actually a woman. “At least we’ll be away from the base for a while.”
>
  “Bah,” I said.

  The rover, to be fair, was really more of a small spacecraft in its own right. Looking like something out of a Gerry Anderson movie, it had very limited flight capabilities as well as a large and airtight compartment that could hold five people reasonably comfortably, as long as they didn’t mind the lack of privacy. It couldn’t possibly have flown on Earth, of course, but the moon’s low gravity allowed some extra flexibility. We piled in, ran through an exhaustive list of checks and rechecks, and then drove off into the lunar night. And, while we might have grumbled, we enjoyed the chance to spend some time away from the base, which was more than a little claustrophobic.

  Driving on the lunar surface, it should be noted, has its own set of challenges. There are no roads, of course, and the ground is warped and twisted. We’d already lost one of the mini-rovers after the ground underneath the vehicle – a much lighter vehicle – give way unexpectedly. I drove for an hour, then allowed Eric to take the wheel while I went back for a quick snack and a nap. It was generally better for us, all of us, not to think about just what we recycled to make our food. There were promising candidates, back at Houston, who managed to get halfway through the course and then turn their nose up at recycled... Well, let’s just say that the giant lunar gardens were still twenty years in the future.

  Two days later, we reached our destination and sent a microburst transmission back to the base, informing Fletcher of our arrival. There was little point in saying anything else, really; if we’d run into trouble, we’d have been thoroughly fucked. Fletcher was a good man, despite having a stick up his butt, but there was literally nothing he could have done if we ran into trouble so far from the base. They’d find our corpses when the next set of settlers arrived from Earth, probably.

  What we got back, in a high-priority code we’d never seen used outside of drills, was an order to go doggo, to curb all electromagnetic transmissions and hide under a tarpaulin until we received further orders.

  “There’s no solar flare predicted for months,” Jimmie noted.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time someone messed up the calculations,” Alan pointed out. “Jack?”

  “We do as we’re told,” I said. Solar flares were nasty, even if the rover was shielded against most forms of radiation. It’s why we all made sperm or egg donations before we blasted off from Houston. “Get the blanket out and over our heads.”

  “Of course, boss,” Alan said. He might have scoffed, but he knew to take solar flares seriously. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Twenty minutes later, a second message popped up in the display. And when I read it, I felt my blood turn to ice.

  “WARNING... WAR WARNING... JAPANESE FORCES HAVE TAKEN EO... FURTHER ORDERS TO FOLLOW....”

  I’ll spare you the details. What it boiled down to was simple. We were at war – and our base, and our CO, had already been captured.

  We didn’t know what was happening on Earth, of course; I didn’t find out the full story until later. Tokyo – Japan – hadn’t taken the land-grab on the moon lightly; Japan had made too great an investment in next-gen spacecraft technology to allow Uncle Sam to steal all the resources for itself. The Japanese, their technology second to none, had snatched control of the high orbitals, then dispatched a raiding force to the base. Colonel Fletcher had no weapons, so resistance had been futile. The Japanese owned the moon...

  ... Except, of course, for us.

  Alan put our thoughts into words. “What the fuck do we do?”

  It was a problem, I had to admit. The rover could keep us alive for three months, assuming nothing went wrong, but eventually we’d be thoroughly fucked. Too many air filters would die, perhaps, or the recycling system would conk out. Surrender seemed the only logical option. As romantic as the idea of mounting resistance might have seemed, we were in deep shit. We had no weapons, we had no back-up, we had no plan. It was at that point the third message popped up in the display. A hyper-compressed message from Director Rutherford, NASA’s head honcho. I pushed play without a single inkling of what might be awaiting me.

  “I’ll keep this brief,” Rutherford said. I hadn’t liked him, the one time we’d met, but there was something stout and resolute in his voice. “We’ve identified a key weakness in the Japanese space-based weapons network. Much of their power, along with their raw materials for kinetic projectiles, comes from the moon. If that connection can be broken, their control of space will also be broken. Your country needs you...”

  I tuned out the remainder of his appeals to patriotism, opened the datapacket and skimmed through the details, such as they were. The Japanese had always relied on more automaton and high-tech than ourselves – it was quite likely their system did have a giant weakness – but we weren’t soldiers and we weren’t armed. Could we do anything more than get ourselves killed? I surveyed the charts, noting the positions of Japanese satellites orbiting the moon. If they spotted us while we were moving, we were dead. But if we moved quickly, we could get close to the Japanese base before there was any real chance of them seeing us.

  “We’re a group,” I said, addressing the other four. “And there’s no way one or two of us can survive indefinitely in the inflatable base. If we don’t go as a unit, we can’t go at all.”

  There was a long agonising pause.

  “There’s no choice,” Eric said. “If the Japanese win... they’ll ship us back home.”

  I nodded in agreement. The Japanese probably wouldn’t kill us out of hand – they weren’t terrorists – but, if we refused to work for them, being shipped back home was the best we could hope for. And that would mean never returning to orbit, never flying a spacecraft to the moon or one of the local asteroids... It was an unbearable thought. The beancounters at Houston might not have understood, but we had gone to the moon and stayed on the moon because we loved it.

  “I agree,” Tanya said.

  “We could get killed,” Jimmie said. “But who wants to live forever?”

  Alan snorted. “Has it occurred to you that we don’t have any fucking weapons?”

  “We’re engineers,” Eric pointed out. “We’ll make our goddamned weapons.”

  And, with that, the matter was decided.

  I spent the next twenty minutes checking and rechecking our route to the Japanese base, hoping against hope that they hadn’t added more satellites or altered any orbital trajectories. If they had... well, there’s no wind on the moon, nothing moves without human intervention. f they caught sight of a moving object, they’d know it was a group of rogue Americans and send troops to intercept. Praying silently, I started the engine as soon as the blanket was safely stowed away, and we started moving. The others hastily caught up with their sleep.

  It took us four days to reach the Japanese base, four days during which we sweated, prayed and struggled to come up with a plan. There were just too many unknowns, we reasoned, and we didn’t dare send a signal home to ask for further data. A single burst from a radio transmitter would be enough to reveal our presence. Indeed, we had a couple of very close shaves with orbital watchdogs before we finally reached our destination and hid near a ridge. It was risky to conceal the rover under the blanket – a sharp-eyed computer might notice any discrepancies – but there was no choice.

  “Well,” Tanya said, after we had rested. “I suppose we’d better go take a closer look.”

  The Japanese base was larger than ours, but it was instantly understandable. A large nuclear reactor provided the power, which was beamed back to Earth orbit via a colossal microwave beam... not unlike one of the giant solar power satellites NASA was planning to build, before they finally ironed the bugs out of fusion power. A network of automated mining systems were churning up lunar ore and transporting it to the compactor, which was crushing it into projectiles. These were then shipped to the mass driver, where they were blasted towards Earth. This was precision stuff. If the Japanese lost control of their systems at any point, disaster would result.

 
; “There don’t seem to be any armed guards,” Alan pointed out, after we had surveyed the outskirts of the base. “You think they’re keeping hard-ass under control?”

  I shrugged. Fletcher and the remainder of his crew would be easy to subdue, once they were moved to an inflatable habitat without spacesuits or a direct connection to the rest of the case. They could remain there, breathing their own farts, until a truce was agreed and they were shipped back to Earth.

  “See if you can hack their Wi-Fi,” I ordered Tanya. “If their system is anything like ours, we should be able to break into the command network.”

  Tanya went to work at her computer, trying to access the local network node. The Japanese systems weren’t that different from ours – they and NASA had agreed, back in the early days of lunar exploitation, that we’d standardise as much as possible, just in case one of us ran into trouble and needed assistance from the other. Yes, we would have saved the Japanese astronauts if they’d needed help. I hope they would have done the same for us.

  “I can read their system, but their main command network is firewalled,” Tanya said. “And it’s probably hard-coded too.”

  I nodded. The Japanese had a worse problem with hackers than we did – and some pimpled teen in his basement fucking up the entire system was a recurring nightmare, back on Earth. It would be more of a problem for them than us, given their dependence on computers and automaton. Still, that did offer possibilities...

  “What can you get out of the system?” Alan asked. “A list of personnel?”

  “No,” Tanya said, after a moment. “But I do have the schedule for shift changes at the power plant.”

  I smirked. Health and safety insisted that our nuclear power plants, even fusion plants, were to be kept separate from the rest of the base – and it seemed the Japanese had the same problem. Which goes to show, I think, that human stupidity and ignorance are universal conditions. Without the fusion plants, neither base would have been truly viable. But this offered us an opportunity.