Luna Marine (22 page)

She didn't look at him for a long moment. “You may not have much choice. Not if you want out of here before the war ends.”

He looked up at her sharply. “He told me he could make me…disappear. He said they could keep me from going to trial and just keep me locked away for the rest for my life! Julia, they
can't
just keep me locked up in here, can they?”

She took too long to answer. “David, I'm afraid you've made some people mad. Powerful people. This ancient-alien gods garbage is getting out of hand, with its end-times melodrama and its message that our real allegiance is to angelic beings or whatever on some other planet. Some people, high up, think it could undermine the war effort. And they see you at the center of this thing.”

“I don't have anything to do with those lunatic cults!”

“Guess again. You found those human skeletons on Mars and uploaded the news to the whole world. You found the Cave of Wonders in the Cydonian Face, with all those weird aliens on TV, including some that look like they might be the folks who were visiting this part of the galactic neighborhood just a few thousand years ago. And you found those tablets on the Moon, with information that got passed on to the churches almost before it was deciphered.”

“I didn't—”

She raised a slim hand. “I know. You didn't. But you
did
broadcast that stuff from Mars all over the Net for everyone to see and download.”

“They—the UN—were trying to suppress it!”

“And you kept them from doing that, yes. Kept them from suppressing
your
discovery. Your little news flash from Mars probably caused the UN a lot of domestic problems, just when they didn't need them. But it also caused
Washington some similar problems. And that wasn't appreciated.”

“So…what? I betray these people, and that makes it better?”

“It makes you some friends in high places. And, believe me, David. You need some right now.”

“Just whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Yours,” she snapped. “And don't you forget that! Now…I've got some things to go over with you, here….”

She opened her briefcase and began laying out papers for his inspection. He couldn't really focus on them, though. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, Carruthers had found a deadly, weak chink in his armor. David was an archeologist, but that didn't mean he was suited to the academic, indoor life. He was, above all, a
digger
, a man who lived for getting out in the field and conducting his own excavations, who still felt that spine-tingling thrill each time he picked up a coin or a pottery shard or a graven bone tool and knew that he was the
first
, in some thousands of years, to see and touch that bit of human ingenuity, industry, and artistic skill. He needed the sun on his face…the dirt under his fingernails.

His love of fieldwork had taken him as far as Mars and the Moon. How could he possibly cut himself off from that?

But how could he buy his freedom by betraying his friends? An impossible dilemma. Worse was the growing fear that he was on the
wrong side
, that somehow, when he'd not been looking, the so-called land of the free, home of the brave had acquired some of the blood-encrusted patina of a police state.

War could bring out the worst in people and in governments. Just as, occasionally, it brought out the best.

He found himself thinking of the Marine, Kaminski. The man had little education, but a good mind, a kind heart…and absolutely unimpeachable loyalty to his buddies and to the Corps.

What David admired most about the Marines, he thought, was the way they looked out for one another.
He'd been with Garroway on the March from Heinlein Station to Mars Prime; the esprit, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging during that cramped, uncomfortable, and desperate three-week trek through a portion of the Valles Marineris had been downright magical. Powerful. Throughout that time, there'd been a sense of us-against-the-world, a do-or-die flame that could not be quenched.

Marines never left their own behind.
Never
. They didn't turn on their own. They
belonged
to one another in a way civilians could never quite comprehend.

The scientific community was hardly the same as the United States Marine Corps. Still, David wondered if he'd somehow assimilated Marine values after being locked up with them for three weeks on that grueling march.

Semper fi
!

Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1510 hours EDT

“Move it, move it,
move
it, recruits!” Gunnery Sergeant Knox yelled. “
Hit
that wall!
Up
and over! We don't have all freakin' day!”

Jack ran down the path, taking the muddy stretch in two steps, then leaping, high and hard, slamming against the wooden barrier, his outstretched arms snagging the log at the top three meters above the ground. He chinned himself, dragging his body up and over.
Couldn't have done
that
ten weeks ago
, he thought, a little wildly. As he straddled the barrier, the next recruit behind him leaped and slammed; Lonnie Costantino's hands were muddy from an earlier fall, and he nearly lost his precarious handhold. Without thinking, Jack reached down with a hard, forearm grip, helping the other recruit over the top.

“Thanks, man!” Lonnie gasped.

“Semper fi, man,” Jack repeated, dropping down the farside of the wall. Technically, each recruit was being timed on this run, with the results entered in his final rec
ord. In fact, the average time of the entire platoon was what counted toward the awards and honors ceremonies at graduation next week. It was one small part of the not-so-subtle process of indoctrination here. You could run the obstacle course as fast as you could and get the best personal time possible.
Or
you could help your platoon win.

By this time, the recruits scarcely needed to think about that. They were a unit, a team. The good of the platoon came before the good of any individual.

Knox was still shouting as more recruits came over the wall. “What're you ladies
waiting
for? I don't wanna see
nothing
here but amphibious green blurs!…”

Amphibious green Marines. It was an old concept, dating back at least to Vietnam. There were no black Marines, the saying went. No white or yellow or red Marines. Only amphibious green Marines. Recruit Platoon 4239 was down to fifty-one men now, and they made up a fair cross section of American society. Twelve were African-American, seven were Asian, fifteen were Latino. One, John Horse, was Lakota, while Gary Lim was Polynesian. Such distinctions, though, had been lost on the recruits a long time ago, lost in their step-by-step metamorphosis from civilians to Marines.

Another hard, quick run, a leap, a grab. Jack snatched hold of the Cable, a massive rope, stretched at an angle across the mud pit, which bounced and swung dizzyingly as he gripped it with hands and legs and began working his way along it, head down. If he slipped and fell, tradition demanded that he emerge from the mud singing the “Marine Corps Hymn” at the top of his voice; he'd done that a time or two in weeks past and knew it would knock precious seconds from his score.

He didn't slip, not this time. He hit the ground running, as Knox made a notation on a PAD and kept on shouting. “Go-go-go-
go
!”

Jack attacked the final line of obstacles with a second wind that was more of the spirit than in his lungs. Flat on his back in the mud, he slithered forward beneath tangles of barbed wire, as an old-fashioned machine gun yam
mered somewhere close by, live bullets snapping and hissing a meter or two above his body.

One more week, and he would be a Marine. A
Marine
, not a recruit. Even now it was hard to credit; boot camp had been his whole life for so long he scarcely gave a thought anymore to what was going on outside the narrow, isolated, sandbagged and leveed world of Parris Island.

It was hard to imagine being free of the mud and the aching muscles, of the night firewatches and the sand fleas, of the drills and Gunny Knox.

Damned if I'm not going to miss this
. The thought made him laugh. Somewhere along the line, he'd gone over that infamous hump that every recruit faced.

Gung ho
! All together…

EU Science Research Vessel
Pierre-Simon Laplace
In Trans-Lunar Space
2150 hours GMT

Laplace
was eight thousand kilometers from 2034L, falling toward the distant twin-star pair of Earth and Moon, when Jean-Etienne Cheseaux saw the flash. It was small, an unremarkable pulse of light partially blocked by the body of the asteroid itself, but his instruments registered hard radiation—gamma and a flux of high-speed neutrons—together with the electromagnetic pulse that was the characteristic fingerprint of a nuclear detonation.

“Damn them!” Cheseaux exclaimed, pulling back from the eyepiece on his broad-spectrum analyzer. He checked the readouts again, to be sure there was no mistake. “
Damn
them! What do they think they're doing?”

The second EU ship, the
Sagittaire
, had rendezvoused with
Laplace
and 2034L over a month before. Two weeks ago,
Laplace
had been ordered to return to Earth.

Cheseaux had liked no part of the arrangement.
Sagittaire
was unmistakably a military ship, with a dorsally mounted ball turret that he suspected housed a high-energy laser. What possible interest could a military vessel and
crew have in an asteroid orbiting the sun in deep space?

He could think of only one possible reason, and the mere possibility chilled him to the core.
They couldn't be thinking of…that
!

Colonel Armand and the rest of
Laplace
's small crew were eager to leave the desolate boulder in space and return to the Moon, but Cheseaux had found a pretext to stay—a broken spectrometer and the urgent need for some additional data on 2034L's chemical composition.

A message had arrived from Earth a few days later.
Laplace
had until the twenty-third and then she
must
burn for the return trajectory. Food and water would soon be a problem, and the crew of the
Laplace
were obviously angered at Cheseaux's apparent scientific fussiness.

Let them fuss! As
Laplace
had completed her burn, falling into a vector that would carry her to the Moon and then to home, he'd stayed at the science vessel's instrument suite, watching the asteroid and the tiny
Sagittaire
hanging in its shadow.

He wasn't surprised when the nuclear explosion briefly flared against the night, but the horror nearly overwhelmed him. Maybe,
maybe
they were changing the asteroid's orbit for some other purpose than the one he feared, but he couldn't imagine what that purpose might be. A base of some sort? Raw materials for the highly secret construction rumored to be proceeding on the Lunar farside?

As hour followed hour and he continued to watch the change in 2034L's course, the surer he became. Running simulations on his computer suggested that the nuclear blast—which he estimated to be in the fifty-to one-hundred-kiloton range—had nudged the tiny, flying mountain just enough to swing it inward, ever so slightly toward the Earth.

His software wasn't good enough, and his measurements over the course of twenty-some hours weren't precise enough and they didn't cover a long enough span of time, but Cheseaux was now convinced that the European Union government was planning to smash 2034L into the Earth. He wasn't sure of the target; it might be Russia, which would be on the outer, nightside of Earth at impact.
But it might also be aimed at the United States, which would be on the trailing, sunset side of the planet when the asteroid came plunging in from space.

The sheer irresponsibility of the act was staggering; not for the first time, Cheseaux wondered if he was on the right side of this war. He rarely followed politics; politicians were buffoons at best, criminals at worst, and any claims they laid to concern for ordinary people was purely for show. Still, he'd read the Geneva Report and thought that its conclusion—that civilization could collapse across the planet if Earth was not united under one rule within another eight years—was accurate, if unduly pessimistic in the timetable it presented.

But,
mon Dieu
! How serious could they be about their concern for the plight of Earth's billions when they were willing to drop an asteroid on the planet? It was insane!

For the next hour, Cheseaux thought carefully about what he must do. He could talk to Colonel Armand, of course…but that didn't seem to be a productive option. What could the man do, save, possibly, join his protest to Cheseaux's? And he certainly wouldn't condone the single other option Cheseaux could think of, the only option possible, under the circumstances.

No, Cheseaux would have to shoulder this particular responsibility alone.

After copying the visual and spectographic records of the explosion and the observations that showed the asteroid's new and deadly orbit to PAD microdisk, he made his way hand over hand through the zero-G complexity of the ship to this quarters.

He had an important call to make….

THURSDAY
, 26
JUNE
2042

Interrogation Room 12
Joliet Federal Prison
1445 hours CDT

The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers, but a small, dark-haired man with a worried accountant's expression. He had a large-screen executive PAD open on the table as they led David in. “Dr. Alexander?” He stood, and offered a hand which David refused. “I'm Bill Twiggs. We need to talk.”

“Not without my lawyer present,” David replied.

Twiggs sighed. “Dr. Alexander…
David
, this is not a formal interrogation. We need your help.”

“That's what Carruthers has been telling me for the past month. I am not going to use my friends as, as intelligence sources.”

“All I want you to do is read this.” He turned the PAD so that David could read what was on the screen.

The header was David's own Net address. This was a message sent to him, which someone else had intercepted electronically.

David read the message through twice, his mind racing. His first thought was that this was some sort of a trick, that the FBI was baiting him with this message in an effort to set up the backdoor intelligence line they wanted him to establish with Jean-Etienne.

The more he thought about it, though, the less likely that seemed. The message header proved it had arrived encoded, so someone had broken that code before delivering the message to him; they didn't need him for that. The reference to the Athens conference, well, how could the Feds know that much detail? His attendance at the conference was a matter of public record, but they wouldn't know about Donni, unless Donni herself had been a spy.

Despite himself, he smiled at that small stab of paranoia. Just because you're paranoid, the old saying went, it didn't mean they
weren't
out to get you. Still, Donni, a graduate student spending a year in Greece, had been anything
but
a government agent. He would stake anything on that, including the nights they'd spent together in bed. Besides, she'd been in the pool, a nude and gaily playful water nymph, when he and Jean-Etienne had had that particular conversation.

He remembered the conversation well, too.

“David, we intercepted this message through our court-
ordered tap on your home-computer system,” Twiggs said. “We know that you have been in communication with Dr. Cheseaux in the past…as recently, in fact, as the tenth of April, just before your departure for Luna. We would very much like to know what has Dr. Cheseaux so worried.”

“I'll bet you would,” David replied.

“Dr. Alexander, please! We're not trying to get you to betray anything, or anyone! From the contents of this message, it sounds as though Cheseaux
wants
to tell us something. Specifically, he wants to talk to you, and to tell you something he thinks Washington needs to know.”

How were they using this situation against him? The message had to be from Jean-Etienne. There was simply no way they could have gotten that level of detail on his meeting with Cheseaux in Athens.

“I'll be honest with you, Dr. Alexander,” Twiggs went on. “We are extremely concerned right now about some sort of weapon the UN is building on the farside of the Moon, a weapon which they used two months ago to destroy one of our reconnaissance craft. We believe this weapon is a device that creates, contains, and fires a beam of positrons. Antimatter. The weapon almost certainly uses technology acquired from the aliens you've called the An. In fact, they may have picked up an intact antimatter reactor or generator at Picard, shortly before you visited that site.

“What we are wondering, quite frankly, is whether Dr. Cheseaux might have some information on the UN antimatter-beam project for us. Was that what the two of you were discussing in Athens? Such a weapon would be devastatingly powerful, certainly. A spacecraft armed with such a weapon would be able to obliterate any city on Earth and would be next to impossible to destroy. Might he oppose antimatter research on humanitarian grounds?”

“No…” David said, softly.

Twiggs looked surprised. “We have quite a dossier on Cheseaux. While he's not a confirmed pacifist, he doesn't seem the sort of man who would advocate wholesale destruction of cities.”

“Eh? Oh, no. Of course not. He wouldn't. What I was saying no to…well, you have the wrong idea. We weren't talking about antimatter weapons that afternoon in Greece.”

“Oh? What were you discussing?”

David drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Asteroids. Specifically, how easy it would be for an irresponsible government to turn one into a weapon.”

“Go on.”

“Actually, we talked about a lot of things.” He smiled, thinking of Donni. “And not all of them had to do with business. But, looking back, I think he must be referring to our discussion about using asteroids to bombard an enemy.” He shifted in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. “This is really Dr. Cheseaux's field, not mine. He's the astronomer. But we got to talking about some unexplained climatic changes in Earth's history, times when the climate grew much colder.”

“The ice ages?”

“Oh, no. Nothing that dramatic. There is evidence, though…rather vague evidence, in fact, but evidence, that something strange happened in Europe in, oh, about
A.D.
500, I think it was. Rome had fallen, but you couldn't say that life was that much worse for the fall. But, well, some of the records of the times hint at unusually cold winters. At crops failing with the long winters. At ‘dragons' and other aerial phenomena in the skies. At unusual sunsets and glows in the skies. Some theorists have suggested the Earth was hit by one or even several small asteroids that threw up enough dust into the atmosphere to change the climate. There are other cases like that in the Middle Ages, too.”

“I read something once,” Twiggs said, “about a…a minimum of some sort in the Middle Ages? Making the winters unusually harsh?”

“That would be the Maunder Minimum, and that referred to a decrease in solar activity, not asteroid strikes. We talked about that, too, as I recall. The point was that Earth's climate is really terribly delicate. Volcanic eruptions like Tambora and Krakatoa and Pinatubo have put
enough dust in the air to lower global temperatures and cause unusually severe winters for years. Fifty years ago, scientists were discussing ‘nuclear winter,' a possible ice age brought on by the exchange of nuclear weapons. And the KT event—the asteroid or comet that struck the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago—must have turned high noon into midnight all over the Earth for a year or more. Something like seventy percent of all of the living species on the planet died off, became extinct.”

“I wonder,” Twiggs said. “Now that global warming is accepted, we know the sea levels are rising…I wonder if some folks haven't been thinking about dropping mountains on the planet to deliberately stop the temperature rise.”

“I can't believe anybody would be that irresponsible,” David replied. “I mean, how do you balance a thing like that? How do you know just how many degrees the average temperature is going to drop?” He snorted. “I'd rather go with some of the cultists and a few blue-sky technoarcheologists who claim we're going to find a cure for the warming in the ruins on Mars.”

“You think we will?”

“It's possible. They were way ahead of us, whoever they were, and they were certainly trying to alter the Martian climate. We know that much. But it'll take a long time to figure out how they were doing it.

“Anyway, in the past fifty years or so, we've been finding out just how vulnerable Earth is to bombardment by asteroids. Even a small one, a few hundred megatons, say, could conceivably change our climate, bring on a sudden cooling that might last for years. We learned back in the nineties that near misses were frequent, that multimegaton asteroids that exploded high up in the atmosphere—usually well away from inhabited areas—were commonplace, every few years or so. In any given century chosen randomly, it turns out you have a good chance of at least one major impact, somewhere on Earth.

“And that's what we face
naturally
. Now. You get some unscrupulous dictator who has a grudge against the
United States and owns his own spacecraft. He finds a convenient asteroid, ideally one that already passes within a million or two kilometers every few years. He gives it a tiny, tiny nudge…just so…and a few years or months later, it comes thundering down, dead on target. Bang. Armageddon in a conveniently sized package.”

“And that was what you and Cheseaux were talking about in Athens? You think that's what he's referring to in this message?”

“That would be my guess. We talked about lots of things but…yeah, that would have to be it.”

“I see.” Twiggs was silent for a long time. “Two days ago, one of our orbital telescopes picked up a flash in space, somewhere out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We weren't able to confirm the flash, and it could have been a strictly deep-space phenomenon, but the spectrum matched that of a small, low-yield nuclear detonation.

“What has some folks worried is the fact that the position of that explosion was quite close to the expected position of a small asteroid, a near-Earth asteroid, one discovered only a few years ago. The coincidence seems a bit too much, here. There's been some speculation in Washington that someone has just…as you put it, given that rock a nudge. It sounds as though Cheseaux might have some information about that.”

“I don't see how. He's in Paris.”

Twiggs smiled. “Apparently your pen pal doesn't tell you everything. See here in his message where he's talking about having your reply relinked ‘here'? Cheseaux has been on an EU space mission for the past two months.”

“In space!”

“Intelligence tells us he's the chief science specialist on an asteroid rendezvous mission. With that same damned asteroid.”

“Oh…God…”

“In light of all this, I wonder if you would consider calling the guy back and getting some clarification? Or confirmation.”

David felt light-headed. This was all happening too fast.
Any thought that this might be some sort of elaborate deception by the government was gone; it felt too…
right
. The UN was preparing to drop an asteroid onto the Earth somewhere, and Jean-Etienne—bless the man!—wanted to talk about it, to warn the United States.

“Yes. Of course I will.”

“Thank you,” Twiggs said. “You know, we do appreciate this. I know you don't have…well, any cause to trust us. Or a reason to want to help us, or even talk to me.”

David shrugged. “You talk to me like a human being. Carruthers makes threats. There's a difference.”

“Will you talk to Cheseaux now?”

“Will you let me go if I do? That was Carruthers's deal, you know. I talk to my French buddies so that our side gets the intel. That's what I'm doing now, isn't it?”

“I'm sorry, Dr. Alexander. I can't promise anything. But I'll certainly talk to my superiors and see what we can arrange.”

David considered this. Almost, he decided not to help until there was a more substantial offer.
Hell with it
, he thought.
This is too important
. “Give me the computer.”

It didn't take long to establish the connection. Using Twiggs's PAD, David logged into his home system, then linked through the series of anonymous servers that put him in touch with Cheseaux's home system in Paris. There, he left a v-mail stating that he was ready for a real-time link; how soon that was depended on how soon Cheseaux contacted his home system from space, but a flashing “You've got a message” alert on his PAD would let him know that one was waiting.

In fact, just five minutes and twenty seconds passed before Twiggs's PAD shifted to real-time mode and an image built itself up, in rippling clusters of pixels, of his old friend Jean-Etienne Cheseaux.

“Jean-Etienne!” David exclaimed. “
Bon jour
!”

For several long seconds, the face on the PAD's screen showed no reaction. Cheseaux's face looked lined and worn, and he'd not shaved in several days. His head and
shoulders were not perfectly aligned up and down on the screen, and David realized that the man must be drifting in zero G. The background was nondescript and fuzzily out of focus, but David was pretty sure he recognized the sort of thin, cubicle partition common aboard manned spacecraft that he'd grown all too familiar with during his months of deep-space voyaging to Mars and back.

Suddenly, Cheseaux's face brightened, and something of the old sparkle returned to those intensely blue eyes. “David!
Allo
! I see your accent has not improved in the past months. And it is evening here. We are on GMT.”

“I got your message. I remember that night in Athens. Ah…I should tell you, I'm not alone. There are people here who're worried about what you might have to say.”

Again there was no response. David silently counted off four seconds before the worn face on the screen reacted to his words. Time delay. He'd forgotten about that. A four-second there-and-back lag time, though, meant that Jean-Etienne must be two light-seconds away. The Moon was about one and a quarter light-seconds away, with a two-and-a-half-second round-trip lag. The UN ship must be something just under twice the Moon's distance from the Earth…a million kilometers or so.