We moved forward slowly and I could see sweat beading on the faces of each of my newly minted heroes. Looking farther down the corridor, I could see two more bodies lying on the ground, apparently civilians who had tried to run away. As we approached, the sergeant started to howl again, catching her guard’s attention, so I risked unlocking a door just behind the huddle of civilians. As we approached, the civilians backed slowly away in fear until one of them bumped against the door and pushed it slightly ajar. He grabbed the arm of the woman next to him, pushing her through the door. One by one, they vanished into the room behind. There were two left when the sergeant suddenly went silent.
I halted the team.
Nasruddin/private, “You should be closer. You are only likely to get one chance.”
She raised the guns in both hands and tried to train them on me, but Corporal Mirza and the centre soldier in my team stood between us. They were all looking increasingly nervous, their rifles quivering with the strain. I noted that none of them had their fingers on the triggers. I raised both hands in the traditional sign of surrender.
“Sergeant Nguyen, may I approach? You can see I carry no weapons and mean you no harm. I will not touch you, nor even approach close enough to try. You can see also that I’m crippled and attached to this wheelchair by my medical equipment.”
She hissed out, “It is the Ghost and all his Followers. They have come to kill us. LOOK AT THEM! THEY ARE ALL GHOSTS!”
To Nasruddin/private, “You are spooking her.”
Out loud I called, “Guards, we don’t need your help. Please leave us alone.”
She waved her guns, tipped her head back and screamed. Covered by the outburst, the last two civilians jumped through the door beside them and pulled it shut.
Our team moved forward even more slowly.
Her scream faded away. Still staring at the ceiling, she grated out, “I don’t want to kill you, but the voices say I must. They fill me with hate and fear. Leave me to die. I can’t forgive myself for what I’m doing.”
I was close enough to ping both her personal comm unit and the one in her armour. To her armour, I sent the paralysis token. To her, I sent emojis for happiness, sleepiness and cooperation. I watched as her armour stopped responding, turning her into a human statue.
“Sergeant Nguyen, dear friend, I forgive what you have done. Please forgive me for locking your armour. I’m sending you two additional tokens. You must install them yourself. When you do, the voices will stop and you will be yourself again.”
She screeched, “Release me immediately. I will not do it under duress. Stop your torture, Ghost.”
I replied, “Sergeant Nguyen, I locked your armour only to prevent you from doing any more harm. Please install the tokens.”
Her two soldiers pleaded, “Sergeant, please install the tokens. I have heard of them. They were prepared by LE, our people. Even for Martians, the Viceroy just declared it is not treason to install them,” and from the second, “Sergeant, we don’t even know why we are fighting. The people we killed were trying to help. That cannot be what the Commander intended. Please install the tokens. Then, we can figure out what went wrong.”
Inside her helmet, I could see the Sergeant’s head jerk and sag. I sent the token to release the armour. She swung the guns around and fired at the Corporal before I could paralyze the armour again. Rage and self-loathing spoiled her aim, so she grazed his chest and probably broke a rib, but did no major damage. A second bullet binged off my own armour.
I dropped the pitch of my voice, “Sergeant Nguyen, you have attempted to murder one of your own soldiers in cold blood. You are indeed a traitor and will face justice for this crime. You chose to pretend compliance while remaining a violent rebel. Soldiers, arrest this criminal. I will not release her armour again until we have proper support.”
My gentle emojis had not been effective. I could not see any messages on the main comm, but an indecipherable buzz came through the doors and lights. I could have sent her the weaponized token that would have installed itself to block the direct emoji attacks, but the token to block the secondary channel still had to be installed by the recipient. I felt that both would be more effective when installed by choice.
Her two soldiers stepped forward, “I’m sorry Sergeant, but he is right. You are out of control and need professional help.”
They could not pry the guns out of her paralyzed gloves but removed the ammunition clips. For the first time, they looked around and realized that the civilian hostages had vanished. They whirled back to confront me. One whipped up his rifle, demanding “Who the hell are...”, but before the question was complete our guards had shot him five times in the legs, arms, and gun hand. The second soldier dropped her rifle and raised her hands in surrender.
“To answer the question you were asking,” I replied, “I am a citizen and an officer in the TDF. I am loyal to the TDF, to the Lunar Council, to the principles of the Lunar Constitution, and now to the Imperium through its Viceroy Fenghuang.
“As such, I do not hold my fellow citizens at gunpoint without just cause. I do not kill people whose only offence is to run from crazed murderers. I do not slaughter innocent people who offer help.
“You are witnesses to these crimes but failed to prevent them, perhaps even committed the murders yourselves. I am grateful for your assistance in subduing the sergeant but I must wonder who you are, who commands your loyalty, and what you have chosen to do today. Every citizen has not just the authority but the duty to stop a murder if they can, regardless of the rank of the criminal.”
Neither soldier answered. I lowered my own hands, no longer pretending to be powerless. I looked back at our own soldiers, cleared my mask a bit more and commended them. “Soldiers, you have done well today. You maintained discipline, did not fire without orders, kept formation, and faced an unexpected enemy with courage. We need to get the Corporal to proper medical treatment and there may be more fighting before we do. We now have injured to carry and soldiers to guard whose allegiance is deeply suspect. I am placing you under Commander Nasruddin. Obey him as you would your regular commander until we understand what is happening.
“Everyone, form up. We must continue to the next maintenance room. That should be along the hallway that runs over to Gagarin on the right up ahead.”
Guard Three checked Corporal Mirza’s injury, pronouncing it painful but minor. A chip of the substandard armour had sliced into his side and was embedded in a rib, but ze had applied painkillers and a field bandage to stabilize the wound. The rebel we had shot was more serious, but they fetched rods and packing tape out of a nearby garbage bin to improvise some splints. With TDF high-strength painkillers, he was unlikely to cause further trouble, but would still face an uncomfortable ride to proper medical care. Nasruddin ordered them into formation carrying the sergeant, while the public officers and their staff improvised a human stretcher to carry the injured rebel. Corporal Mirza could no longer carry his rifle, so Guy volunteered to carry it for him. I felt that nothing more was likely to happen of legal significance, so I turned off recording.
2357-03-28 16:00
A Taste of Civil War
Roads in most lunar cities ran arrow-straight from one side of the city to the other, but not in Orientale Tereshkova. Our corridor ran straight north/south until it crossed Renoir Street, but Gagarin Road north of the last cross-corridor angled away to the east. Guy had carried equipment between the two maintenance rooms regularly and warned us that the hallway to the maintenance room we were approaching would be longer than we might expect.
We approached the door into the hallway but paused when the female rebel offered that the rest of their patrol had vanished down that hall seeking help for the sergeant. The doors slammed shut before they could return.
This was a sliding door that moved flush with the walls of the corridor, so the guards moved into position on either side of the door. The rest of us tried to flatten ourselves against the wall. I unlocked the d
oor and opened it a crack.
Smoke billowed through the opening until the air-quality monitors in our corridor began to scream, forcing the door to close again. We watched the smoke in shock. Open flames were almost never permitted on the Moon. Nor could any but the wealthiest corporations afford flammable materials like wood. Fire suppression was a seldom-needed duty of the maintenance workers, so the fire suppression equipment would have been stored in the large maintenance facility down this hallway.
I pinged the alarm and turned it off so we could speak again.
Anna moved up beside the guards, asking, “Is there any oxygen at all in that hallway?”
One replied, “There were no bullets, so probably very little. With luck, the people will be in airtight rooms, but who would have started a fire? What were they burning? And why?”
Anna said, “Everyone, stand back – the smoke may be toxic.”
She picked a chemical meter out of a pouch on her belt and handed it to One. Ze took it, reached as high as ze could and jumped up towards the smoke. The meter showed carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbonaceous soot, but nothing overtly toxic. Ze asked for the door to open enough to slip through. Comm was still quiet, so I agreed, but would open it again if we did not hear anything in ten seconds.
The door slid sideways and One vanished into the smoke as I slammed it closed again. We got a message, full of static but intelligible, saying that the smoke was too thick to see the other end of the corridor clearly, that oxygen levels were negligible, most of the air replaced with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. There was a surprising amount of nitrogen. The smoke was particularly thick near the ceiling, or perhaps it was just that soot had coated the surface. Some of the emergency lights were on but seemed very dim.
I worried about the nitrogen, which was a minor component of the air we breathed on the Moon. It was too easy to vent gaseous nitrogen through small cracks in the ironcrete. Also, it was too valuable to be wasted where it was not needed. Most of our ‘air’ was low-pressure oxygen with a bit of carbon dioxide from our respiration and enough water vapour to maintain our health. Nitrogen was brought in with the ores from the Belt as part of the organic matrix that bound carbonaceous asteroids together. It was usually converted directly into ammonia or nitrates which were sold to farms, chemical factories, and mining companies. The miners converted it into explosives.
One reported bodies on the floor. Ze moved down the corridor, counting five bodies in maintenance uniforms, ten civilians and four in rebel uniforms. Like our captive rebels, the latter wore minimal body armour, without helmets or breathing apparatus. The doors into the rooms along the corridor were locked shut, except for one far ahead on the right where a flickering light illuminated the floor and the bottom layers of smoke.
All the normal lights were out and even most of the emergency lights at the far end. Switching on zer headlamp, ze could see another cluster of bodies outside the open door, mostly wearing rebel uniforms. They were hard to count because the door itself had been shattered into pieces that partly covered them. Ze jumped up into the smoke near the ceiling again, reporting that there were vaporous traces of highly explosive compounds in the gas, as well as metal oxides in the soot that suggested hot electrical arcs.
Nasruddin told zim not to go much farther because zer messages were getting harder to understand. Ze acknowledged the problem but wanted to look through the broken door. Ze agreed to run forward, take a few images and return immediately to communications range.
We waited with increasing concern, but three minutes later we heard back. One of the door fragments carried a sign labelling the room as WR87-19. Ze passed us images of dead people mixed amongst slabs of the broken door. The maintenance workers and captive soldiers mourned their fallen friends when they could recognize them.
Then ze passed us images taken through the broken door. The room had been devastated. Fragments of bodies were everywhere. Soot covered every surface, making it difficult to distinguish bloodstains from other deposits. The partitions that divided one side of the room into small offices had been shattered into a jumble of shards.
Metal fragments littered the floor, most of which appeared to be the remains of packing cases for mining explosives. There must have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of the cases, a stockpile of explosives packed into the maintenance room. There were undoubtedly more buried in the rubble, ready to detonate if anything triggered them.
The ceiling had collapsed in several places from the force of the explosion. What remained looked unstable, lacking the surface layers of ironcrete and carbon nanotube cables that normally supported the walls and ceilings.
The recorded heat was terrible. The foam plastic that cushioned the cases had burned, generating copious amounts of smoke and soot that still rose in pillars to the ceiling. Smoke was also rising from the piles of broken ironcrete. Perhaps the carbon nanotube cables were hot enough to burn in the scant remaining oxygen, or perhaps it was just buried fragments of foam plastic.
The light came from a combination of arcing in the overhead electric cables and spilled explosives burning on the floor. An explosive is its own oxidizer; where it had spilled onto the floor, it burned with an intense flame.
Explosives in storage are usually inert and safe to handle. These ones had exploded en masse. I could only guess that several of them in the core of the dump had been ganged together and triggered deliberately in a room filled with people. It was an act of madness, shocking in its calculated brutality, but an act that no longer surprised me. In my gut, I had a feeling that the Sultan Mustafa was involved, although I doubted we would ever find evidence from this site.
What chilled me most was the airtight room, barely visible over the heaps of rubble on the far side of the ruined complex. Airtight rooms on the Moon are incredibly tough, intended to survive roof collapse and prolonged burial. They carry their own air supply, enough to last for up to a week. Properly bolted to the floor, you can detonate high explosives beside them and their occupants will survive. However, intense heat can be tolerated only for a limited time. The rooms had small refrigerators to carry off the body heat of their occupants. Like the armour I wore on Mars, the rooms can dump heat into a core of inert material for a short time if no other means of refrigeration is available. When surrounded by the heat of a furnace on all sides, the core will soon melt and become ineffective as a dump. After that, the occupants of the room will roast to death or will be dismembered when the air tanks rupture.
Unmistakably visible beside the door was the green panel that showed this room was occupied.
“Is there another door into that maintenance room?” I asked.
My mental map was six years old and had never been detailed in this region, but it would be sensible in such a large complex to have a second door close to the junction of the hallway with Gagarin Road. Anna was sure there was, although even Guy had not spent enough time in the room to be certain it was in use. Nothing was visible from where One had taken the images, but it might have been obscured by the soot, wreckage and even the airtight room.
The floor shuddered and One reported a detonation in the room with dust billowing into the hallway. Further exploration of the room from this end was far too dangerous for our small team. Nor could we usher our unarmoured colleagues through the smoke-filled, oxygen-starved hallway. We had to go around, to find another route in from Gagarin Road.
We quickly discussed the options, which were limited. It would be fastest to cut through one of the local businesses to Gagarin, but none along this section of C35 extended all the way to the road. We could go forward to Renoir Street, or back beyond the previous cross-corridor. We decided it was safest to go back, since we already knew there were no people in the corridor.
We were wrong. Since we had cleared the corridor, people trapped in the shops and factories along it were emerging, trying to find their way home. They reported that Gagarin was still occupied by soldiers with unfamiliar uniforms holding civilian
hostages. Some of the braver business people were staying to try to rescue the hostages when the soldiers were distracted. We did not want to take our tiny force onto that section of Gagarin.
We offered our own reports on the corridor, warning that the airtight doors were closed and locked along the way. One of the shopkeepers smiled and informed me, “Ah, but we live here. Romanov’s Housewares shares a basement with Keil’s Laundry and Keil’s shares an overhead power tunnel that runs all the way to the Pushkin Cafe on the other side of Renoir. Their corridor doors are airtight, but they will open them for us. We should be able to get that far without trouble. A lot of us are trying to get to our homes in the Tolstoy district on the other side of Renoir.
It was a useful reminder that airtight doors were intended to prevent catastrophic air loss, not to stop armed insurgents or local citizens. For people who needed to move around, Lunar cities were extremely porous. It was faster to move along the corridors and roads, but not strictly necessary.
He continued, “Did you say the maintenance room was losing its ceiling? That is probably why Renoir has no power in this neighbourhood. The people from Kiel’s sent a runner along the power conduit as far as Renoir. They say that there was fighting near the intersection of Gagarin and Renoir a while ago, but this section of Renoir is quiet now.”
In this conflict, it was not obvious who would be fighting whom, but it sounded like the intersection of Gagarin and Renoir was our next destination. No power meant the doors would have to be unlocked by hand and pushed open. From there, we would have to rush back to WR87-19 if we were to have any chance to save the occupants of the airtight room.
I asked how big the power tunnel was. Unfortunately, Keil’s ‘runner’ was a euphemism. Anyone bigger than Bobo was going to have to stoop or crawl. Nasruddin vetoed taking the tunnel since we only needed to open one more door along C35 to reach Renoir. Chief Rowald warned that the section we were about to enter was outside the area he had been able to check using security cameras. He had not been able to check WR87-19 either, but had thought that the DDoS was at fault.
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 29
