Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (11 page)

At T plus 7 hours, 45 minutes,
Seraph
limped back to
UN moon base with its cargo from the artifact. Amid a flurry of activity, Mission
Control directed them to bay six, the least damaged landing pad. The shuttle
crew unloaded the
Ascension
recorder and Crandall as Professor Horvath
directed the repair crews around them. “We need this ship spaceworthy in two
hours. Patch the biggest holes first.”

“It’s
all
holes,” complained
one worker.

Horvath ordered, “Swap out the
entire life-support unit in section three. Remote diagnostics say it’s flaky.
Do we have a spare drive unit?”

A technician shook his head. “Only
one of the new ones, for the Tetra prototype. Even if they had a decent mount
point left, we couldn’t synchronize a mismatch like this. Ms. Smith might try
it, but I wouldn’t dare.”

The crew shoved the armored
Crandall out of the ship first. “Anything wrong with him?” Horvath asked,
accompanying the only returnee from the alien expedition.

Clooney, the captain of the
Seraph,
said, “Radiation count was a little high, but other than that, he’s just
depressed.”

Horvath saluted the man in the
golden armor. Crandall waved her away. “I trained for five years and got tossed
aside after a couple hours on the mission.”

“Stop your bellyaching,” Clooney
said, emptying the suit’s waste by connecting a hose from the airlock wall to
his side. “My ship systems haven’t worked right since I rushed to
Ascension’s
rescue. I might have just enough time to eat a hot meal and fix the CD player
before heading out again. They’re going to throw you a freaking parade.”

“Ha. I’ll be lucky to avoid the
brig,” Crandall said. “Why is the airlock taking so long to cycle?”

“Low power, low air, low
everything,” Horvath explained. “Things here are holding together with chewing
gum, and we have to pass the gum around. Have you been debriefed?”

The marine nodded to Clooney.
“First pass, at least. He grilled me the whole flight in. I drew pictures. We
put a copy of my interview on the data recorder.”

“Good. I don’t want to be accused of
influencing you,” Horvath said. “The base commander has already accepted my
confession. You should be absolved.”

“That doesn’t matter. I made my
choices.”

“They’ll claim Red used her empathy
talents to sway the crew.”

“That wasn’t it either. I explained
on the recording how Z recruited me. See, every grunt I’ve ever met who’s seen
action asks himself the same question: why are we here? They never find a good
answer. Up here, life’s just as hard, but we all know the why. I think every
jack one of them would rather die in space trying to make things better for
everyone.”

“Let’s hope it’s a trial by your
peers.”

In a whisper, he added, “The
recorder shows an alien treatment for cancer and a whole bunch of other
diseases. I had to bring it back, professor.”

She patted his massive shoulder.
“You did your duty . . . to everyone.”

The air compressor chugged for the
last time, and the interior door hissed open. Horvath had barely taken a step into
the hall before the lights flickered and they all felt a rumble through the
walls.

Glancing at her helmet display,
Horvath said, “Something’s triggered the perimeter mines.”

The other men peppered her with
questions. “Robots?”

“Chinese?”

“Orbital drops?”

“What does
Cherub
say?”

Horvath held up a hand while she
processed several streams of data simultaneously. “Drone buggies. Academy folks
with signal guns and masers are heading out to stop them.”

“It’s just a prelude to an attack,”
Crandall insisted. “They want the artifact data.”

“And you, probably,” Horvath agreed,
scanning the incoming feeds. “The command bunker is reporting shoulder-mounted
rockets impacting all over the perimeter. Whoever’s shooting doesn’t leave
footprints behind, but the thermal camouflage disrupts when they fire. Intelligence
is guessing men in specialized space armor, dozens of them.” She drew back from
a particularly grisly image. “Our perimeter fence just went down.”

The captain of the
Seraph
hit the close button inside the airlock, and Crandall jumped back inside with
him before the door sealed. “The COIL weapon is the one thing that works
perfectly on my ship. Stay here; you’d just be extra mass.”

Crandall hit the emergency
decompression button used by rescue personnel. The air that had taken minutes
to fill exploded out into space in seconds. “Who says I’m going back in your
sardine can? This is the first time we’ve ever had a real ground battle on the
moon. What we do here is going to make history. I’ll be lecturing at military
colleges for life.”

“You don’t have any weapons,”
complained Horvath over the radio as she searched for an alternate airlock.

Chuckling, Crandall helped himself
to a sharp section of twisted landing-gear pipe that a welder had just chopped
off. “So I’ll kill one of the enemies and use his. Transmit that data to Earth.
We’ll hold them off.”

Horvath looked down at the massive
flight recorder. She couldn’t help with the battle until it was safe. Damn. She
grabbed a hand truck and belted the recorder on. She made it halfway to the
command center before she felt the vibration of
Seraph’s
takeoff.

****

The ground battle progressed faster
than Crandall thought possible. The base’s long-range antenna died first,
destroyed by mortars. There would be no transmitting secrets to Earth in the
next couple hours, and no calls for help. Moon base could only converse with
the shuttles when they were within a few kilometers. He gathered stragglers to
stop the enemy before they reached the tunnels.

The presumed-Chinese contingent was
masked from aerial view, so the shuttles had to rely on explosions and radio
traffic to track them.
Cherub
noticed the dust plumes first and dumped a
lot of watts into the area, firing their lasers in side-by-side wide bursts instead
of in serial. The space armor glowed but the dust didn’t.
Cherub’s
captain shouted, “Holy crap, those mortars just hit us with something that went
right through our force field. Talk about turbulence. Density readings say it’s
depleted uranium shells. Is that what took out your rear engine,
Seraph
?”

“Roger,”
Seraph
replied. “We’ve
also been bounced around by ice-vapor clouds they’re creating. Don’t get too
close. We were two klicks high before we could swap ends and slow down. Did I
mention that we’re out of countermeasures?”

Working together, the shuttles
eliminated each pocket of attackers they detected. With the two zap guns
imported from L1, the UN team would disable enough of the enemy tech to make
them appear on scanners. Then the air power would sweep in.

“Are you sure it’s the Chinese?”
asked
Ophan
.

Seraph
replied, “My
navigator just ran time-lapse and regression analysis on the dust clouds we
spotted on our flight in. We’re 90 percent certain. If you fellows can finish
these guys off, we’ll do the recon to make it an even 100.”

“Why camouflaged troops?” asked the
colonel from the deep bunker.

“They’re trying to avoid all-out
war,” Horvath muttered. “They want what we have. If they can steal it before
the missiles reach us, the evidence of this theft will be long gone.”

“Any other evil ideas from the
jailbird experts?”

“They can kidnap anyone they want
and deny it. After they torture the captives at their leisure, the hostage
could be traded for technology or other spies. I’m in the main data center,
duplicating the information in as many places as I can, including the shuttle
memory, in case they’re the only ones left alive.”

Crandall was certain everyone heard
him gulp. He activated the self-destruct fail-safe on his suit. If his vital
signs flat-lined or he said the trigger word, a built-in explosive would
prevent the suit and its occupant from being captured.

His ragtag band of defenders formed
an arc around the datacenter dome. The field of solar panels gave them partial
cover as they fought. He was shocked to find that a man in dust-colored armor
had snuck past them and was in the process of etching a circle on the base of
the dome with a laser cutter. They could only see the invader when the laser
torch flared.

Crandall couldn’t run and tackle
the way he might have on Earth. Out here, Newton was king and the vacuum was
his unforgiving queen. Instead, the modified and amplified marine picked up a
sharp-edged solar panel and threw it like a Frisbee toward the sapper. Injured,
the sapper was an easy target for the repair crews and technicians who made up
the majority of the defensive line.

“I’ve got your back, professor,”
Crandall said. As an instructor, Horvath had been the only woman ever to knock
him on his butt in under ten seconds. That was someone to stand up for.

Soon the invaders started targeting
spotters and zappers.

Flying low,
Seraph
warned, “One
of the buggies unloaded something suspicious. Something black crawling your way.
Looks like a couple hundred evil little—rocket! Evade!”

When
Seraph
couldn’t dodge
its fate, the captain accelerated along his planned course at maximum. The
cockpit exploded with such pyrotechnics that it must have killed everyone
inside. However, the great ball of Icarus energy continued along its projectile
path west toward the Chinese moon base.

Crandall had to stop gawking to smash
a robot with the metal spear he was carrying. Four bots later, he saw
Seraph’s
impact flash. Icarus fields only made those pretty colors when they hit large
quantities of water. The tremor knocked him to his knees. His radiation meters
spiked off the dial.
God help the people outside in regular suits.

Ophan
reported, “The severed
drive unit bounced through that Chinese base like a beach ball in a hurricane.
The site’s now a giant crater.” Crandall knew what they weren’t saying—the water
storage and personnel had been turned into a multi-megaton bomb. They’d
committed an act of war equivalent to nuking a city. “Well, the action is
pretty overt now. Do you think they’ll withdraw?”

“Hell, no.” Crandall stood back-to-back
with two other UN suits as he broadcast. “Half the bots are homing in on my
transponder, guys. The rest are pouring underground like termites.” He grunted
louder each time he swung.

The Gauss gunner beside him
shouted, “Out of ammo,” before a camouflaged Chinese space marine sprang out of
the dust to kill the unarmed man.

The geek with the signal gun fired
a burst, turning the attacker into a short-term statue. Two more dust suits
behind the statue shimmered. “They have our comm frequencies,” the tech
deduced. “They’re listening.” The disadvantage to being a UN operation was that
quite a number of countries shared information. Sometimes they gave away the
secret, not out of malice, but so their equipment could be mass-produced
cheaply.

Crandall roared like a barbarian as
he jabbed the pointed end of his rod through the pseudo-statue and jerked it
clean. The ruptured suit gushed red from the eight-centimeter hole on each
side. Technically, he’d only needed to cause a rip, but this had been more
satisfying.

The closest man in dust armor
sliced the air hose of the technician with an honest-to-god sword.
The
biggest space battle of all time and this guy brings old school, like freaking Edgar
Rice Burroughs. If I make it out of here alive, this story will earn me free
beers for the rest of my life.

Crandall eased toward the airlock
so his back wouldn’t be exposed as he prepared to take on two swordsmen. Raw strength
and reach would be on his side, but if they killed him, the explosives in his
belt would detonate. He waved the first man forward, thankful that Zeiss had
drilled him with wooden sticks before accepting him onto the team.

In the end, there were too many.

After he killed the first two, five
more converged on him. “
Cherub
, full assault on my position.”

“Negative, you’re still alive.”

“Line up your strafe, because that’s
about to change, and they are
not
getting through an airlock that I’m
guarding.”

Crandall charged. The first two
space marines disarmed him. Air leaked from his glove as automated systems
sealed the damage. Landing in the middle of the pack, he bellowed the motto of
the Override Rescue Squadron, “No limits!” He grabbed a man in armor and
employed the body as both weapon and shield. His brief success awed those
watching until someone launched a grapnel hook through his right kidney. The
suit sealed around the hole and the opposition reeled him in.

Damaged by the penetration, his
small self-destruct charge only killed him and two others. The explosion,
however, highlighted the outlines of every remaining attacker.
Cherub
made a clean sweep.

No human breached moon base.

An hour later, Nena Horvath was still hunting through the
corridors, trying to find the burrowing bots. The robots searched for any
concentration of heat or energy and then blew themselves up. The tech with her
had the only working signal gun left. He’d zap them into immobility, and she’d
put the obnoxious ceramic cockroaches into a barrel that another volunteer
rolled outside to a solar-powered smelter. When the critters were merely grazed,
they detonated, which is how the first bug-hunter team had died. This was the
kind of duty that mutineers were assigned.

After she finally cleared the
quadrant, the colonel gave her permission to return to her private quarters—to
say good-bye to her husband before the next wave of missiles hit. Her suite had
its own airlock and filters for quarantine purposes. Daniel was particularly
vulnerable to lung infections. She badged in and checked her helmet gauges as
the pumps adjusted for minute pressure differences.

Over the mental link to her
husband, she said, “So tired. This has been the longest day of my life. I make
one mistake, and we could all die. We’ve been skirting that precipice too long,
Daniel.”

He rarely responded, but the act of
confiding to his unconscious form helped. Would it be wrong to intentionally sleep
though the apocalypse—to curl up beside her soul mate one last time and tell
the world to clean up its own mess?

When levels were safe, she removed
her helmet and waited for the UV antibiotic sweep. The rapid speed of
completion warned her something wasn’t right. Her equipment was state-of-the-art,
but took a while to warm up. Someone else had been through recently.

Removing her thick gloves and boots,
Horvath drew a pulse grenade she’d scrounged from a dead body. All of her
normal weapons had been confiscated pending trial. This toy could only flash a
bright light and blanket the EM spectrum to confuse enemy communications. However,
that would be enough of a distraction for her to target the closest opponent.
Her killing reflexes were still legendary.

Climbing to the ceiling of the airlock
chamber, she waited for the door to shush open. Then she counted to three and prepared
to roll the grenade into her living room. This encouraged one of the opponents
to move in closer to investigate. Instead of a weapon cocking, she heard a
woman’s voice say, “I told you she’d come here.” She sounded like Petra, one of Daniel’s caregivers.

The man who responded was Grimes, one
of the visiting reporters. “We don’t have much time, Ms. Horvath. For all our
sakes, we need to speak.”

Nena risked a peek. The man and
woman in the living room were at an impasse, with tiny, smuggled, one-shot
pistols pointed at each other. Both of them were spies. Professor Horvath
sighed, “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t call security to have both of you
hauled to the brig?”

The reporter answered first.
“Because we’re all going to die unless we reach a deal.”

Horvath put the pin back into her
grenade and flopped down from the ceiling. “If you had threatened Daniel, I
would’ve ripped out your throats.” Turning to the Croatian caregiver, she
asked, “Who bought you?”

“Tetsuo Mori hired me to protect
you . . . even from his own family.” The name ‘Amanda’ and her hatred of the
Fortunes remained unspoken.

“Really? How considerate of him. Now
that he’s one of three surviving board members, why does he care about me?”

“He wishes to procure certain
guarantees. In exchange, he can broker a deal to save all of us.”

“I believe that’s called
extortion.”

Petra shrugged. “My father stole a
million yen from a very bad man. Mr. Mori covered this indiscretion, and my mother’s
ransom, in return for my services. He keeps his deals.”

Turning to the reporter, she asked,
“And who do you represent at the beggar’s ball?”

The attractive British media icon
smiled. “I’m currently an intermediary for Beijing. My wife’s family is from Hong Kong.”

“And they want the flight
recorder?”

“They want considerably more, but
they also have much to offer.”

A younger Nena Horvath would’ve
told them to shoot each other and be done with it. She asked the caregiver,
“What does Mori offer?”

“The anti-coalition forces want to
either steal or suppress alien knowledge. The best way to prevent them from
attacking you is for Mori to broadcast the information from the artifact to
everyone—unedited and unencrypted.”

Mori doesn’t have the recorder contents,
but the Chinese don’t know that.
Horvath decided to play along. “That
violates the terms of the alliance.”

The caregiver held up a finger.
“No. Only the release of page technology is forbidden. Perhaps if we show them
what’s possible with that technology, public opinion may shift. He’s already
released photos from the artifact through Fortune Media.”

“Could you show me which ones?”
Horvath asked, to play for time while she puzzled out what was really happening.
This was technically impossible.

The woman handed Nena a wide-screen
game system popular with the younger techs. She’d seen the caregiver fritter
away hours on it. Daniel sometimes even smiled at the game sounds. The game was
in high-resolution news-feed mode. She advanced through a snapshot of Crandall
holding the flight-recorder. Control could have fed this image back to Earth
before the antenna was cut. The next few, however, couldn’t have come from the
recorder. These photos came from behind the alien quarantine layer. Her kids
were safe and celebrating. The garbled caption took her breath away. “They’re
using the ship to travel to another star?”

Petra said, “Sort of changes the
game for everyone. Yes? Mori has already informed the UN that Zeiss was his
agent but went rogue to protect his marriage.”

Horvath jerked her head up at the
stinging accusation. “You have proof of this?”

“The technique they used to
transmit the photos from inside the artifact was based on Dr. Zeiss’ quantum
theory work at CERN. The signature on the message and the fact that no other
faction has this technology are sufficient to convict him of espionage.”

“What would his motive be?”

Here the reporter interrupted. “The
Chinese have discovered that Kaguya Mori is in a high-risk prenatal facility in
Thailand.”

“What are you implying?”

Petra changed the game system to a
different photo album: Zeiss attending Lamaze childbirth and early fatherhood
classes. They even had his credit-card statement that showed several e-books on
pregnancy.

Horvath said feebly, “He wants to be
prepared for when Red has her first child . . . eventually.”

The next photo was Kaguya’s signed
confession to the UN that she’d seduced Zeiss—the act that caused her eviction
from the astronaut program. Following that was an image of a visitor’s log in the
Antarctic, with Zeiss as the only one admitted to see Kaguya before her rescue.
Someone had also given Mori a copy of a codicil to Zeiss’ will with vague
wording that granted posthumous legitimacy to any heirs that showed up after
his death. The final photo was an affidavit from the nurse that Zeiss was the
father. Petra said, “Genetic testing, safely after birth, will bear this out; although,
any Active in the area can attest to the unusual aura of the child.”

Horvath knew they were lies, but
with some ulterior purpose. “What do you want?”

Petra smiled. “Zeiss will go on
trial for violating UN orders. This cannot be prevented. The tribunal may be
persuaded to be lenient on you and your husband if you testify to—”

“Screw your altruism. What do you
get out of this?”

“Mr. Mori will name this child his
primary heir and protect him or her with the full force of the corporation. In
exchange, Mori will vote the child’s 2 percent of Fortune stock until it
reaches maturity. Mori Electronics shall also enjoy unrestricted exploitation
and patents on Dr. Zeiss’ quantum inventions.”

Horvath turned white. “Thieves.”

“The two corporations will merge
before long. You’ll benefit, too . . . if you survive.” The caregiver handed
her the game. “This device will enable you to talk to Mori directly. He’s in
conference with the Chinese delegates as we speak. We have our own transmitter
embedded in the linear accelerator aimed at Earth.” That transmitter was
supposed to be limited to tracking data for the ore shipments. Add another lie
to the list.

Petra showed Horvath the high-speed
data port, which would enable her to transmit the
Ascension
data to Earth.
“If you agree to the negotiated terms, the Chinese will destroy all of their
missiles heading toward us, plus those they sold to third parties, about half
the incoming arsenal. Others may follow suit when they know the truth. We could
survive.”

“If I don’t agree?”

“Mori will negotiate terms of peace
without you. Terms will include distribution to the Chinese and their allies of
genetic samples that Zeiss left for Kaguya in case she wanted more children.”

All of Nena’s eggs had been
harvested by her scientist ‘father’ for eugenics experiments. She would never
allow loved ones to suffer the same fate. “Get out,” Horvath growled.

The caregiver bolted for the airlock.

“It’s about saving face,” the
reporter explained when Petra was gone. “You don’t mention the armed assault,
and we accept the Icarus attack as an accident. With no artifact or pages, we
need something to show for all this effort. The blood-filtration techniques
Mori mentioned could save lives everywhere on the planet.”

“The code of ethics has been set,”
Horvath reminded.

Grimes shrugged. “The place they’re
heading is over twenty-five light-years away. By the time the crew comes back—if
they ever do—it’ll be more than fifty years from now. A lot can change by then.
The leadership Chinese will be younger and more mainstream. We’ll have half a
century to forge a compromise.”

“What are your terms for this
bright new future?”

“The UN and Chinese program merge
as equal partners going forward.”

“Half? That’s robbery.”

“We have the only space station
left at L1. We’ve already rescued your other pod from the construction platform.”

“Made them hostages, you mean.”

“We followed international distress
protocols. No one has been harmed, but there are many individuals we couldn’t
reach without shuttles.”

“You’re only one-third the
population of the alliance and one-third the launch sites.”

“The treaty emphasizes the valued
status China has in the endeavor, the leadership they bring to the table—plus
half
the missiles.”

“Face,” echoed Horvath, and the
reporter gave a short bow. “In immediate terms, what will this partnership
entail?”

“The survivors from the Chinese
base take up residence in moon base as soon as possible. In return—”

“We don’t have the room!”

“You’d be surprised: grain storage,
hydroponics, and even the access tunnels to the ore launchers could be occupied
while we rebuild.”

“They’d have a stranglehold on our
life-support sections. It would also mean shutting the launchers down
indefinitely. Rare-earth prices would skyrocket, providing a windfall for your
government.”

Grimes held out both hands. “I’m
just the messenger. You would become dependent on each other totally, fates
conjoined. This means that the antimissile batteries that the Chinese still
have would be at your disposal for defense.”

“What about our shortage of water and
air?”

“Mori said air can be extracted
from spare water, which can be obtained by towing all that superdense ice
construction to the moon using shuttles.”

“Ice-9? The stuff that’s stronger
than steel?”

“I think it’s technically ice-15 or
so, but it’s all salvage now.”

Horvath rubbed her forehead. “It
could
work.”

“For another twenty-four minutes,
if
we preserve both shuttles. Mori is certain.”

“Is that all?”

“To exonerate yourself and remain
on the moon in a civilian capacity—”

“Alive, you mean.”

“The Chinese want you to destroy
your father’s research on human cloning and spearhead an effort to ban it with
the UN.”

Horvath almost laughed. She’d have
done this on her own, but the lab in question did wonders with alien biotech.
“What about the spinal reconstructive techniques we pioneered?”

“Those, you can keep,” he said,
listening to an earbud, “if you share the patents globally. You’ve received
more than your seventeen years of profit from that stranglehold.”

“Fine. But our quarters are
inviolate like an embassy, and we can never be evicted.”

“Done.”

“I can’t change the laws of the
code, though. The Chinese will need to adopt the charter.”

“Only those who go into space,”
countered the reporter. “And support workers who only deliver supplies or stay
less than a week could be exempted like Fortune’s are.”

She blinked. “That’s background
noise. You’ll agree to have one-tenth of your space personnel read the ethics
page?”

“The wording of the treaty refers
to ‘the current standard,’ which by definition is one out of eighteen, the
ratio sent to the artifact.”

It was like arguing with a team of
lawyers. She hated this as much as Jez had.

“One out of eighteen, then.”

“Of course, we’ll need a reasonable
ramp-up period to achieve this ratio.”

“Define reasonable.”

“Your people took twenty years to
achieve current levels.”

“They had the proper percent after
seven years.”

“Seven years after we sign the
formal partnership papers. Give us two years to refine the exact—”

“Seven means seven. Take it or
leave it.”