Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (5 page)

“But they didn’t, and so we’ve got an unknown to evaluate,” she said, taking the cup and pacing around the small office. Since the first reaction to the announcement of the asteroid, things had been so bad the DHS had insisted she never set foot in the White House again. So now, instead of looking out the windows at the lawns and the park, she looked at walls. Stark, white walls. It made her uncomfortable. Claustrophobic.

“A flier from Stormhaven happened to catch a glimpse of the body near the rim of the crater,” she said.

“Someone from Stormhaven found it?” Dick chuckled at the irony. “I suppose there was a good reason why they were flying around New Hope?” he asked, knowing there was no answer.

“Uhm, yeah,” she said, shrugging. “They were pointing out that we had no defenses around the Prometheus installation.”

“You’re kidding. Stormhaven was trying to probe our defenses, and in the process did us a favor?” Dick snorted. “This just keeps getting better. I suppose while they were showing us a picture of ourselves with our pants around our ankles, they just happened to discover this dead guy out there on the lunar surface?”

“Basically,” she said, smiling at his dark humor. “We’re going to be putting up defenses, but according to what Marquez told me this morning, it’s going to be four to six weeks before we can get anything into the launch rotation.”

“So until then, we’ve got nothing to do but hope they don’t come in and take a whack at us?” He sat back again, looking at the screen in his lap.

“Well,” John said, sounding like he was apologizing, “we figured that since we’ve all got the same goals, it’d be idiocy to try to take shots at each other up there, and being a quarter million miles away is like having a fricking huge moat to protect you from the serfs.”

“I guess so, but do we have any way of knowing what this guy was doing?” Dick asked.

“Not really,” she said. “The manpower in the colony is stretched tight, and it might be a week before we can send anybody out to look around.”

“All we can say for sure is that we’ve got no clue about the Chinese agenda,” the Secretary of State said, “and somehow Stormhaven pulled our collective asses out of the fire.”

“Again,” Dick added.

“That pretty well says it,” she said.

“If only they were interested in giving us a hand with the political situations closer to home,” Dick sighed, reading the next item on his copy of the e-genda.

***

Chapter Three:

Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority

Tsiolkovskiy Crater, Luna:

Battered and scorched. The rim of the crater had sagged outward in the last test, like the swirly on the top of an ice cream cone in the summer sun. The 640-gigaton detonation had altered the crater’s topography, smoothing it, changing its dull grey to a flat black. Toward the edges of the scorched surface, boulders the size of apartment buildings had been tossed outward, leaving gouges and scrapes as they dug smaller craters of their own. It had taken more than a month for the dust to settle, and the usually undetectable lunar atmosphere had thickened almost to the point of becoming visible, with half a billion tons of regolith vaporized in the blast. It would take years for the gasses to escape the weak lunar gravity and for the moon to restore itself to its normal airlessness. This explosion had, like the first test, occurred at 10,000 meters above the surface.

The final test was going to be at low altitude: less than 2,000 meters above the crater floor. They’d decided that since every test had been detected, there was no point in trying to hide the test, at least after the fact. Dr. Chun had argued that their mission planning would be better served if they reduced the altitude so they could determine the most effective detonation placement for the warhead they would use against Antu. For all the lunar surface showed the scarring from the first tests, thus far the real impact to the regolith had been minimal. If they gave the moon a serious thump, then they’d get some useful data.

A small booster rocket sat cradled on what was left of the up thrust ridge. It had been positioned by a six man team several days ago, waiting for its moment while Chinese crews set up sensors, relays and cameras in concentric circles around the site. The nearest ones sat on the slag heap of the crater rim, the furthest nearly four hundred miles away. The distant ones were set to launch themselves upward before the test so they could reach sufficient altitude to see over the horizon to the crater itself at the moment when the warhead went off.

No human eyes were on the backside of the moon, at least as far as the Chinese could tell. After the loss of Lunarcom II they’d learned to time their tests when there wasn’t something orbiting overhead. Lunar orbits could be very low and fast, but they were easily predicted.

The nearest humans to Tsiolkovskiy were at Amundsen, from there they watched everything. They tracked Lunarcom I until it dropped over the horizon, then started the test. Twenty-two sensor rockets launched simultaneously, and the countdown for the warhead started several seconds later.

Screens all over Amundsen and Chang Er carried the view from the outer ring of sensors. The second ring of rockets launched, streaking toward their appointed positions. The third ring inward, the last of the sensors that were beyond the horizon launched on schedule. The inner rings were visible on the high-resolution cameras as tiny sparks in a rising disk. Finally, the booster for the warhead ignited, brighter by far than the smaller sensor rockets. It carried itself upward, an altitude display showing its ascent.

1,800 meters ... 1,900 meters ... and then a star erupted, hundreds of times more intense than the sun, and then the cameras died. All of them.

***

Amundsen Radio Observatory, Amundsen Crater:

Once they’d picked themselves up off the floor, the cheering began in earnest. And then stopped as ejecta started raining down. First there came a loud hissing, like rain on a tin roof, then it progressed to a pounding like giant hailstones.

Dr. Chun realized what was happening first, grabbing his assistant and shoving him toward the stairwell to the lower deck. Several of the other technicians looked around in confusion, watching him pushing people from the room. They’d survived the quake, and they were below the dish of the radio telescope.

Another loud crash reverberated through the Control Room, this time a small boulder bounced across their roof. “Get below!” Chun shouted, his voice drowned out in the roaring noise. Another shaking thump made his point obvious as everyone ran for the stairs. Chun looked around one last time, making sure nobody was left behind before he dashed for safety.

A shattering crash, louder than any before, threw him painfully against one of the computer consoles. He howled in agony, a red fog of searing pain clouding his vision. His ears rang, then popped. A shrieking whistle rose above the hissing of the sandstorm. His ears popped again, and he saw the emergency door slide shut at the bottom of the stairs.

The whistling became a roar. Debris from around the room began flying into his face, cutting him, then battering him to the ground. He looked up at the ceiling, blinking his eyes to clear the haze away. Above him he saw stars. Then blackness.

***

Sentinel Colony:

Viki rolled out of bed, her feet hitting the floor even before she knew she was awake. Something in the distance rumbled, sounding familiar, but alien. Dave sat up almost as fast as she had, bouncing high off the mattress as the first shockwave slammed through the Colony. It felt like an explosion, in the next room.

“What the fuck was that?” he said, as the floor danced sideways under Viki’s feet, and she grabbed her desk to keep from falling.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” she said. The monitor on her desk slid back and forth, and Dave caught it as it fell slowly toward the floor. “It’s a quake.” She grabbed a coverall and ran toward the door, the floor of her apartment swaying. She careened off the jamb and out into the hallway, still struggling to get dressed as she stumbled out.

Dave stopped to get into his clothes before he followed her. She was still running toward the Command Center, but he wondered if they’d have been smarter to have run for their spacesuits instead. He could see her ahead, still half naked but running steady now that she’d gotten her bottom half into the suit.

One of the emergency airlocks had closed, and she was cycling through when he caught up to her. There was still pressure on the other side, so he followed her as soon as the door released. The ground had quit shaking. If they hadn’t lost any of the domes they’d be in good shape. She didn’t slow down as she hit the door to the Command Center, still some distance ahead of him. What he had in strength, she more than made up for in grace. He couldn’t match her speed because every time he tried to sprint, he ended up banging into the ceiling. It took a lot of practice to move like she did.

He got to the upstairs operations deck several seconds behind her. She was already on the comlink listening to her crew chiefs reporting in.

“No damage in Life Support.”

“No damage in Robotic Processing.”

“No damage in Hydroponics.”

“No damage in Communication Control.”

“Minor power disruption in the Processor Core, auxiliary power activated in 1.3 nanoseconds, PAPA function is unaffected.” The list went on and on.

She relaxed as each station confirmed they were intact, and she realized they’d come through whatever it was unscathed. The only significant damage was to a cargo container in the return pile that had fallen off the stack and cracked open. Fortunately it was empty, so there was no lost cargo.

Torri Capone, Sentinel’s only lunar geologist, waited till the damage reports had finished before she opened a link. “Hey boss,” she said, as her face appeared on the screen. “That measured 7.3 if you’re interested.”

“I thought you’d said that the moon was geologically dead,” Viki said. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know yet. It was a slow foreshock, and then a sudden single primary. After that, everything appeared to be echoes.” She fed the seismograph traces across the bottom of the screen. Dave stepped forward and looked at it.

“Looks like an ELF from a nuke,” he said. “The military has a sensor array set up in New Mexico, where they listen for weapons tests. I’ve seen some of their reports, but never for anything this size.”

“Elf?” Viki asked, looking confused.

“E.L.F. Extreme Low Frequency,” Torri said, nodding. “Sub-harmonic sounds that pass through the Earth from a single-wave seismic event. Usually the result of a large explosion.”

“Wanna bet on whether the Chinese just lit another one off?” Dave asked, stepping toward the window and looking over the top of the dirt ridges that covered the colony.

“Uhm, that’s not right,” he said, pointing at what looked like a dust cloud rolling over the horizon.

“What is it?” Viki asked, hearing a hissing sound like sandpaper dragging against the window.

***

Unity Colony, Eastern Mare Frigoris:

Other than Stormhaven’s Sentinel Colony, Unity was the most ambitious of the lunar settlements. Funded with the combined economic power of the EU, Japan, India, and Australia, it was a monumental undertaking. It was the only colony that was trying to dome over an entire crater, albeit only five kilometers across.

Dozens of inflatables spread out from the rim in the four cardinal directions, each quadrant representing a sovereign territory, but connected with underground corridors to the crater itself. Almost a thousand workers had been sent up already, and the translucent membrane that would become the cover of the central dome was en route within a week.

A thin lattice of composite girders had risen from the dome’s foundation on the rim, arching toward the center. The structural load had been carefully calculated so that the frame would hold itself once completed, but after the crater was sealed, the weight of the dome’s skin would be suspended on the air pressure inside. For now, several long, temporary columns held the partially completed frame. Other than the single spire in the center, which would be built much later, the entire bowl would eventually be terraformed and planted. Once it was finished, it would be beautiful and practical, even if the construction schedule was tight to get it completed before Antu arrived.

Crews crawled over the lattice, securing beams in place with polymer adhesive, extending the eighteenth tier up another layer. Benjamin Fukazawa flew a skycrane, a stripped-down Japanese copy of Stormhaven’s mini, hauling components into position. His team, two Aussies and a Brit, stood a thousand meters above the crater floor as he maneuvered a beam toward their next connection. They each wore an MMU in case of an accident, but otherwise used their sense of balance to keep their footing.

“Bring it down two,” Calvin Grady said. The team lead always called the position to the skycrane. “Slow. Now forward six.” He gave his instructions with precision, working to get the beam into place.