The Luna Deception Read online

  THE LUNA DECEPTION

  THE SOLARIAN WAR SAGA, BOOK 4

  Felix R. Savage

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  THE LUNA DECEPTION

  i.

  Leaning on his maneuvering jets, the squadron leader jinked into a gap in the enemy’s offensive formation that did not exist—yet—but would in 2.1 seconds. The flash of a nuke lit up the cockpit of his Fragger, dimming his readouts. Gamma radiation washed over the ship, along with a burst of neutrons lethal enough to mangle human tissue at the cellular level. The enemy wasn’t holding back.

  Neither was Frank Hope IV.

  “On my go, release the nail bombs. And go!”

  From the ordnance portals of all three surviving Fraggers, the volume-denial warheads leapt into the darkness. Guided by IR-tracking, they shot towards the enemy fighters closing in on the squadron in three dimensions. None of them reached their targets. The enemy’s kinetic cannon batted them aside. But the nail bombs exploded on impact, spraying shrapnel across a volume of several thousand cubic kilometers. Each ‘nail’ was a mini-bomb, filled with combustible foil that would eat steel like a space-age version of naptha.

  Whoops erupted on the comms channel when two enemy fighters slowed down, drifting as if stunned. Worms of fire crawled over their hulls.

  That only left eighteen, that the squadron could see.

  The PLAN’s fighters, dubbed ‘toilet rolls’ for their cylindrical fuselages, possessed a stealth technology unmatched by humanity, which allowed them to go undetected until the moment they pounced on you and nuked your ass. Even during combat, they eluded detection. They showed up as ghosts on your radar, transient flashes of heat that should not have been able to go that fast.

  Stealth overturned the basic fact about space combat—its predictability. Like chess, normal space combat was governed by rules: Newtonian physics and ship specs. A sufficiently powerful computer could predict the outcome of any given engagement before it happened. Stealth removed those assurances. It restored raw intuition to its throne.

  Once again, you had to be a pilot.

  You had to really know how to fly.

  And it sucked balls to be stuck 2.1 seconds behind the action, forced to guess that much harder.

  Frank pivoted on his thrusters and flew backwards through the fringe of the shrapnel field, slashing a path for himself with the hot plasma of his own deceleration burn. The other two followed. “That’s bought us some time,” Abdul gasped cheerfully.

  The nearest toilet rolls would have to change course before they could pursue the Fraggers, and the ones already pursuing them would now have to detour around the shrapnel field.

  We might just make it.

  At that very minute, a startled gasp forewarned him of tragedy. Abdul’s fighter blossomed into a fireball.

  “They’re still throwing slugs at us,” Vicky said. “Must’ve got him smack dab in the VASIMR.”

  It was just the two of them now. “Hold your course! We’re almost there.”

  Mars.

  Nightside speckled with ruddy alien light, it floated in the middle of Frank’s optical feed. The PLAN—an unholy hybrid intelligence descended from rogue AIs and a lost Chinese space fleet—had conquered Mars back in the 22nd century. Humanity had gone through all the stages of grief since then: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and full-frontal assaults. All had proved futile.

  You couldn’t bargain with an AI.

  Couldn’t beat it in battle, either.

  Thousands of Star Force pilots had died, over the decades, in this very volume, sacrificed to non-strategies driven by PR needs rather than military realities.

  Now, finally, humanity (or at least a tiny portion of it) was getting smart.

  Frank poured on the delta-V. The gees immobilized him in his flight couch. All he could move was his eyes.

  Black dots glided across the face of Mars. They weren’t enemy ships. They were much bigger than that.

  “Vicky?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Next up, the orbital fortresses. We’ve shaken off those toilet rolls, but—”

  Her scream cut across his words. Slewing his gaze to his IR feed, he saw her Fragger expanding into a dandelion puff of debris.

  “Vicky!”

  Silence.

  Guess we didn’t shake them off, after all.

  Tears painted his temples. But it didn’t matter. They’d all known, setting out, that only one of them had to get through.

  Grunting, because he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs to scream his rage and hate, he hurtled across the void. There was a way through the lethal cloud of fortresses surrounding Mars. En route to this rendezvous with doom, he’d analyzed their orbits and found several holes in their coverage where a Fragger might slip through.

  A Fragger.

  Not a Star Force ship.

  He’d flown for Star Force when he was a kid. What a clusterfuck. Thirty-year-old hardware running twenty-year-old software, operated by mouth-breathing eighteen-year-old gamers.

  The Fragger represented a new paradigm. Sure, its VASIMR engine was less powerful than a standard fusion drive, but it was also lighter. And with that much less mass to push around, you could afford other new-tech features.

  The orbital fortresses loomed like tiny, irregularly shaped black moons. Effortfully, Frank moved his left hand to the button on the arm of his couch that would launch the payload.

  The reason he was here.

  The reason seven other Fraggers had already gone up in dust.

  Dust.

  Ha, ha.

  The orbital fortresses continued their inertial dance. They hadn’t seen him. But a PLAN picket had. A dozen toilet rolls popped out of stealth mode and slagged his ship. In the split second before the Fragger disintegrated, he pushed the launch button.

  “Fuck! Fuck fuck FUCK!”

  “Cool it,” Vicky said, helping him off with his headset, gloves, and all the other feedback devices that had enabled him to feel as if he really were present in the Fragger’s cockpit.

  The other Fragger pilots stood around the telepresence room, vaping cigarettes, reviewing holographic reconstructions of the battles they’d lost.

  “I might have launched my payload in time,” Frank said. ”I got close enough.” But he knew he hadn’t. His payload had been fragged along with his ship. “I was just trying to get a bit closer. Dammit!”

  “Well, I launched mine,” Vicky said. “I know. 8,000 klicks out. What are the odds?”

  “Non-zero. Good work, Vicks.” He pulled her in for a kiss.

  His gaze fell on a screen behind her. It was a realtime view of Mars, a feed from the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which was as close as the PLAN would allow human facilities to exist. The Red Planet hung in the blackness of space, impervious to the dogfight that had just added S500 million worth of junk to its orbital retinue.

  “It was the delay,” he said.

  They cavilled, but they knew he was right. How could you hope to elude the toilet rolls, when you were 2.1 light-seconds from the action?

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “It worked better when we just shot the payloads in on inertial trajectories,” Abdul said bleakly.

  “Sure, we got close that way. But we never got down to the surface. We have to get the Dust down to the surface. And there’s only one way to do it.” He watched their faces, seeking understanding and acceptance. “Next time, we’
ll have to go ourselves.”

  ii.

  Later that week …

  In a slum near the south pole of the Moon, John Mendoza woke to the Te Deum of Bruckner and dressed for work. He pulled his trousers on, the suspenders already buttoned onto the waistband in back. At the same time, with one foot, he hit the ‘Print Last’ button on the 3D printer under his bunk, which spat out a new detachable collar made of recycled plastic. Mendoza jerked yesterday’s shirt off its hanger, buttoned on the new collar, wriggled into the whole assemblage, fastened his suspenders with one hand, and scrubbed a depilatory wipe over his jaw. He did all this while lying on his back. This was the only posture possible in the narrow confines of his capsule, which was ridiculously called a ‘studio apartment.’

  Lace up the boots, clap the derby on head, done. The compleat Victorian gentleman, circa 2288.

  He collected his walking-stick, opened the door, and sailed down the zipshaft.

  Out on the street, it was just as stuffy, but at least you could walk upright. Nightingale Village consisted of one very steep, poorly lit street lined with pubs, payday loan merchants, immersion cafés, and pawnshops. Twisting alleys led to thousands of apartments like Mendoza’s, most of them accessible only by ladder. His was one of the better ones.

  He joined the tightly packed throng waiting for the funicular. Someone’s hair tickled his face. The funicular came. They shuffled on board. The string of cable-cars travelled slowly down the dark side of Malapert Mountain.

  Outside—and on the heads-up screens in each carriage—a stunning panorama unfolded. Flanked by ramparts of life-support infrastructure, the domes of Shackleton City spilled luminescence into the lunar night. The city sprawled across a plateau fifty kilometers long by ten wide. It straggled up the boundary slopes of Malapert Mountain to the north, Shackleton Crater to the south, Haworth Crater to the northwest, and Shoemaker Crater to the east. All three craters held still-productive water mines. He3 fusion reactors pumped out electricity, and big-box farms supplied food for the city’s population of seven million. The residential domes appeared mottled green from above, an effect of the rich verdure lining their streets. Beneath the glass of the largest domes of all moved the stately silhouettes of airships. The ocean-wrapped sphere of Earth floated in the sky.

  Mendoza ignored the view. After all, he saw it every day. He was listening to the second section of the Bruckner and catching up with the news.

  His BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), plus retinal implants, enabled him to scan massive amounts of information very fast, running secondary searches on anything intriguing.

  A headline from Earth caught his eye.

  Charles K. Pope, director of the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, is dead at 48.

  “Susmaryosep!” Mendoza breathed. He assigned a squad of virtual searchbots to the topic.

  ★

  The funicular terminated at Huxley dome, where Mendoza transferred to the commuter rail. By this time, he knew everything that everyone else knew about the death of Charles K. Pope.

  Guy had gone windsurfing in bad weather. Drowned.

  His work pals were emailing back and forth about it. He even exchanged a line or two with Elfrida Goto, far away on Earth.

  “I’ve decided to take the job on Mercury,” she wrote.

  Mendoza’s interest in Charles K. Pope evaporated.

  That was news.

  This was bad.

  Elfrida Goto worked for the Space Corps. After her last assignment on 4 Vesta, where they’d shared some hair-raising adventures, she had been given a choice of working on Luna or Mercury. He’d assumed she would come to Luna. Why had he been so naïvely optimistic?

  “Why?” he emailed back.

  He had sixteen minutes to regret the blunt question: long enough for his email to reach Earth, and Elfrida’s reply to travel back to Luna; long enough for the high-speed train to plunge through the network of tunnels between Malapert Mountain and Shackleton Crater, stopping at underground stations beneath outlying domes, until it reached Gingrich Station in Wellsland. Still waiting for Elfrida’s reply, Mendoza got off and took the elevator up to Hope Circus.

  People in mechanical wingsets clogged the sky of Wellsland, soaring dangerously close to the airship lanes. Mendoza shuffled around a grove of trees shaped like egg whisks, where the servants of the well-to-do were walking dachshunds and Yorkies. The scent of freshly watered grass tinted the air. A huge statue of Dennis Hope III peeped through the trees, garlanded with posters for yet another campaign to improve childhood health. Mendoza noticed none of this. He was immersed in his personal tragedy.

  “I just feel like it would be interesting to see Mercury,” Elfrida emailed at last.

  Mendoza entered Doyle Tower, a fantasia in fake brick and marble. He subvocalized to his comms program, ~Does this have anything to do with Pope’s death? Stared at the words on the virtual screen in his left eye. Deleted them.

  ~Congrats! he emailed, as the elevator carried him up to the 14th floor. ~Hope it goes well. Keep me posted. –John

  He stumbled into the office of the United Nations Venus Remediation Program’s data analysis division, section three, feeling like a dirty nuke had just hit his future.

  No one noticed. They were all chattering about the death of Charles K. Pope. He had been their boss, after all, the director of the United Nations Venus Remediation Program (UNVRP). When Mendoza’s supervisor, Nate Sindikuwabo, strolled into the office, the first words out of his mouth were, “Anyone for coffee? We need to share our feelings of loss and abandonment.”

  Half the office took up the offer. It was a good excuse not to do any work this morning. Mendoza demurred.

  He sank onto his high stool. The starmaps on the screen made no sense. All he could see was the face of a klutzy, brave, cute-as-hell Space Corps agent who had just told him that she wasn’t interested.

  He pulled himself together. Got a pouch of inferior java from the machine. Booted up his search engines.

  It had been a long and improbable journey for John Mendoza, born in Manila to a single mother, to wind up on Luna, employed by the United Nations Venus Remediation Project as an astrodata analyst.

  No matter what happened, he couldn’t jeopardize his job.

  But it was not astrodata that he called up now.

  Guiltily hunched over his screens, he navigated to one of the internet forums that discussed forbidden topics.

  Well; not forbidden.

  Just.

  The kind of thing no one talked about in real life.

  Join conversation: HEY GUYS NEW SURVEY IT’S FOR REAL AFAIK CHECK IT OUT

  Thread: Survey data.

  Forum: All-We-Know-About-Mars/secret.cloud.

  New replies: 261.

  Holy crap. His thread had really taken off.

  Mendoza felt excited, and a bit scared.

  ★

  Mendoza left the office at six, local time (GMT+10). He took his walking-stick.

  It was getting on for dusk. The roof of Wellsland displayed delicate citrus hues in the west, where a theoretical sun might be setting on this whimsical recreation of Victorian London.

  Mendoza passed thousands of men dressed like himself, and thousands of women in high-necked blouses and long skirts. The majority were spaceborn. Mendoza stood 175 centimeters tall, but he was dwarfed by these beanstalk people. Even with their longer legs, though, the spaceborn did not bound ahead or leap over others. (Pretty difficult to do that in ankle-length skirts.) Rush hour in Shackleton City was regimented, dictated by the commuter rail schedule and the sheer density of the crowds.

  That regimentation was one secret of the city’s longevity and prosperity, Mendoza knew. To keep millions of people alive in the deadly environment of Luna was no small feat. You needed some degree of conformity. Couldn’t just have everyone doing their own thing.

  He took the train out to Cherry-Garrard, an outlying suburb on the slope of Shackleton Crater. This was a humbler dome than Wel
lsland. A low-slung roof seemed to press down upon terraced houses of Luna rock and splart. Wrought plastisteel streetlights lit up the fronds of pignut palms, whose fruit provided high concentrations of vitamin B12. Parents called tall, spidery children in to supper.

  Mendoza went into a building near the perimeter of the dome. Large and square, it sported an unobtrusive cross. It was St. Ignatius Church, one of only two Roman Catholic churches in Shackleton City.

  Down in the basement, practise had already started. He bowed towards the scrum of sweating men and women and hustled into his stabilizer braces. At the touch of a button, his walking-stick shed its handle and expanded into a two-meter shinai. He put on his gi and hakama and joined in.

  Mendoza had once thought of himself as a peaceable person. But last year, he’d nearly died on 4 Vesta, when the PLAN took over the protoplanet’s infrastructure and murdered its human population. Mendoza had survived, but not through his own efforts. A peaceable person? Ha! He was simply a wimp. He’d let Elfrida and that Japanese guy do all the shooting, while he cowered in fear. He couldn’t fire a gun to save his life. Couldn’t even throw a punch.

  So why wasn’t he out on a shooting range? Or taking krav maga, or Greco-Roman wrestling, or something?

  What was he doing in Shackleton City’s one and only part-time dojo, learning the ancient Japanese art of kendo?

  Well, for one thing, a shooting range on Luna? Wasn’t happening. The plebs might get ideas. As for krav maga, etc., Mendoza wasn’t at the point where he wanted to trade punches with 200-centimeter laborers on crazy-making muscle therapies.

  Kendo had rules. It had history. It had masks that made you look like a ninja.

  And hitting people with a two-meter plastic sword turned out to be really, really satisfying.

  All the kendo-ka wore stabilizer braces, to simulate the resistance of Earth’s gravity. That ruled out the balletic leaps seen in pro vids, but you could still pull some cool moves. 0.16 g was 0.16 g, braces or no braces. Watching the final bout of the evening, between Sensei and one of the black belts, Mendoza absolutely understood why micro-gravity kendo was a thing, despite the fact that the practical applications of swordfighting skills in a spacefaring civilization were zero.