David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“Lane!” Dechert yelled into the com. He got no response.

The video fuzzed over again. Dechert tried to increase the signal strength. The picture came back and then died. The screen was black now, the hum of a dead transmission filling Dechert’s ears.

“Lane, Jonathan, report. Lane! Jonathan!”

The signal disappeared. Dechert cued his computer to reset. There was nothing but black space in a small rectangular border.

“Dechert, I’ve lost all communications with Peary Crater as well,” Hale said, his voice coming in as if from a great distance. “We’re being jammed.”

A muted alarm rang in Dechert’s helmet. He looked down and saw that they were only a few hundred meters from the surface. The touchdown beacon flared to life, illuminating a landing area about twenty meters east of the shuttle, just a few feet in front of the sheer edge of the cliff. Dechert paid the treacherous landing sequence little notice.

“Lane, Jonathan, report.”

“What the hell’s happening?” Thatch asked.

Dechert ignored him, continually trying to punch reset on the frequency button with blinks of his eyes. They landed on the narrow promontory, close enough to the edge to look down into the night-shaded abyss of Crater Yangel’. Dechert stumbled twice and came to a halt near the drop-off, breathing in gasps, his hands on his knees and his temples throbbing.

The final tally had been set. His team at Serenity would most likely be dead in two minutes. Images of the video feed filled his head as his mind raced through the odds of what would happen next. What were the chances of surviving a missile strike? Were they able to at least keep the autodefenses online? Could the system intercept the smart projectiles before they hit?

Dechert straightened. He turned to walk back to the shuttle, but he had little energy left. Hale turned toward the shuttle, too, without saying a word, keeping a comfortable distance from Dechert. Thatch stood ten meters away, glowing infrared near the lip of the crater wall, a halo of moondust falling around where he had just landed. The gray dust on his legs and boots stood out as cold spots on the IR signature.

Fleeting images came together in Dechert’s mind and snapped into place like a dead bolt, stopping time. A white spacesuit staring back at him from the broken innards of the Molly Hatchet , its legs covered in dust. A thick fringe of grime on the control panel at Spiral 6. Groombridge treads at the water mine—old boots from the back of a storage locker. The assassin in the safe house video: A big man, and fast…

Dechert put a hand on the shuttle’s hull near the hatch controls, as if he were taking a rest. He locked his knees so that he wouldn’t fall down. His face burned as a drop of sweat ran down the center of his nose from the bridge to the tip, and fell below his neckline. It had to come from within. He reached for the rail gun at his midsection with his concealed right arm, trying to peer to his left without turning his helmet.

Thatch already had his gun in his hands.

“Hale!” Dechert yelled.

Somehow Hale saw it coming, some instinct moving him into action at the tone in Dechert’s voice. A warrior’s alertness, or maybe he had suspected Thatch all along. He moved with improbable grace in the bulky spacesuit, bending low on a knee, spinning his body, and pulling his own rail gun from the holster on his belly.

He pointed the gun at Thatch. Thatch fired first. The tiny projectile came out in silence, unimpressively. Just a small puff of plasma and a blue arc of electricity. But it hit Hale’s chest at ten thousand kilometers per hour, making the size of the round inconsequential. Hale’s body flexed inward as if hit by a cannon shot. His shoulder blades snapped with the force. He flipped up and backward over the ledge of the promontory, gas venting from his open chestplate as he fell into Crater Yangel’.

Dechert had his own gun out and fired at Thatch. Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Then he remembered that Thatch was the one who had loaded the rail guns onto the shuttle. Thatch stood unmoving in the dark of the cliff wall, his weapon recharging.

Dechert dropped the useless gun and turned and walked to the drop-off, expecting Thatch to shoot him in the back. He looked over the edge and saw Hale falling, a smudge of heat in a frozen abyss. His body bounced once on a ledge five hundred meters below them and then spun into the blackness until it was a green dot in the infrared. In ten seconds there was nothing.

Thatch walked to the edge and looked down as well, his gun still pointed at Dechert’s guts. They stood there for what seemed like a minute, looking down in silence, and then they turned to each other.

Thatch. The assassin in the video. Cole’s killer. The man who sabotaged the station. The one who started it all—the one who brought war to the Moon.

“How did you figure it out?”

“You said you never took a walk at Posidonius, Thatch. But I looked inside the Hatchet before they took her away, and I saw your spacesuit. You did the first EVA to set a timer on the bomb, didn’t you? The satellite trigger never made sense.”

Thatch grunted. “Moondust on the suit.”

“And you logged a flight to Spiral 6 two weeks ago, but the control panel was too dirty for you to have been there. I’m guessing you were busy crippling the water mine.”

“Dust again. I swear I’m going to live in a rain forest if I get off this rock alive.”

“One thing I still can’t figure out,” Dechert said. “How’d you land at DS-7 and leave no trace?”

Thatch tilted his head. “Rigged the outflow valves to brush over the LZ.” He looked at Dechert. “You’re smarter than I thought.”

“No, I’m pretty damned stupid. There was other stuff, Thatch. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before now.”

“Give yourself some credit. No one else did.”

“You killed Cole.”

Thatch stepped back from the ledge, his gun still pointed at Dechert. “I didn’t like it. He was a good kid.”

Dechert edged back from the ledge as well. “You killed us all, Thatch. For what? Money?”

Thatch stiffened and Dechert could see anger in the movement.

“It’s like you to think that, Dechert, always playing the innocent. You can’t imagine the idea that I’m taking orders. That I’m doing my job, just like you.”

Thatch turned on his headlamps, blinding Dechert. The burst of light automatically shut down the infrared viewscreen in his helmet, returning the autofilters to visible light. He blinked the spots out of his eyes and opened them, turning on his own lamps. He could see Thatch’s face now in the pale illumination. The big man was frowning as if angry at himself for not having fired yet.

“You’re OEA, aren’t you?”

“I was.”

Dechert looked down at the heads-up display in his helmet. A single dot, blinking red.

“So that’s it, Thatch? You take orders from some lunatics who were kicked out of special forces on the back end of the Max, and that makes it all okay? You killed your own crew, for Christ’s sake. You started a war .”

Thatch looked at the shuttle, then at Dechert. “You have no idea where my orders come from. You still don’t get it, do you, Dechert? You think you can run away from Earth and hide up here, and everything will be okay, because the Moon is just kumbaya?”

Dechert braced himself, waiting to be shot. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“I’ll give you one minute, mostly because I’m sick of your bullshit. You run around the Moon defending your buddies at NB-2. You’re a sucker, Dechert. The Chinese have been lying about their He-3 production for years. They’re converting fifty metric tons a month, and the dipshits at The Hague and the ISA won’t do a thing about it.”