David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

She smiled, and this time it was full. “Yeah, I want it. Especially if Quarles is coming. I’ll run that little shit into the ground.”

Dechert laughed. “Don’t go Ahab on me.”

“Only when it comes to Quarles.”

And they both laughed.

Yates poured scotch into a pair of cut-glass tumblers with a precise hand, as though the two drinks were the most important thing in the universe. Dechert wondered if he got the stuff from the same smuggler that Lane and Quarles used or if his rank allowed him to openly break the Administration’s prohibition of alcohol on the Moon. Hell , he thought, what’s a little booze when you weren’t supposed to have weapons up here ?

“We’re working under the theory that Foerrster brought the bomb to Thatch when he visited Serenity in November,” Yates said as he stood at the beverage cart. “Military Intelligence believes it’s unlikely that Thatch was sitting on a vial of polymeric nitrogen for the last three years. Much more plausible that Foerrster brought it up to the Moon after the op was green-lighted. Thatch probably screwed it to the crawler right before they went out to Posidonius.”

He turned to look at Dechert. “He’s gone, by the way. Foerrster, I mean. Disappeared like a dust cloud on the terminator. Probably went to ground somewhere in Africa or the South Pacific.”

“I’ll find him if they don’t.”

The old man sighed. He was in full uniform, pressed and white, with a gold Space Mining Administration insignia on the chest, and he had no gravity-inducing weights on his body. Legend had it that Yates refused to wear his 1- g heavysuit, arguing that he planned to die on the Moon and wouldn’t need the extra bone mass to get around back on Earth. He looked tired, but was clearly trying not to show it.

“Have you ever read von Clausewitz, Dechert?” Yates asked as he finished measuring a few drops of water into the whiskey. “‘War is the continuation of politics through other means?’”

“I remember the quote.”

“Well, you’ve pretty much subverted those other means. And a lot of people on Earth are pissed about it.”

“I’m just a dirt digger, Yates. What exactly are you trying to say?”

Yates gave the drinks a quick stir with a silver bar spoon, letting the alcohol chill into the ice. He turned to hand one of the glasses to Dechert.

“I’m trying to say that I’m a little amazed someone hasn’t come up to the Moon yet to toss you into a black bag.”

“They already tried, remember? And I’m right here. Tell the next one to look me up.”

Yates shook his head. He glided around his large circular desk, which appeared to be made of organic wood and obsidian and must have cost a fortune to ship up from Earth. He sat down in his high-backed black leather chair.

“Such brio,” he said. “I don’t understand it. There was a time when business was strictly business on the Moon. Now everyone wants to get personal. It’s… so unprofessional.”

“I’m not in the mood to talk business or political theory with you, Yates. And I’m not here to listen to excuses. I’m here to set my terms and find out when there’s going to be a reckoning.”

Yates sat back in his chair and took a tiny sip of the scotch. His white eyebrows hung over the glass like a condor’s wings as he studied Dechert’s face. “A reckoning,” he whispered. “All right, Commander. What are your terms?”

Dechert stood up and walked over to the panoramic window, which ran from one end of Yates’s cylindrical corner office to the other and gave a spectacular view of the sunlit reaches of the lunar North Pole. An astronaut appeared below, bounding along the surface toward a storage silo at the far corner of the station. Dechert could see the small plumes of moondust he kicked up in his wake.

“Pretty simple. A bilateral weapons ban in space. And the Jupiter mission for my team.” He took a sip of the scotch. “I want Briggs for station chief, and I want full control of the mining operation.”

Yates coughed into a closed fist. “Well, you don’t come cheap. Do you really think you can blackmail them, Dechert? At some point new leaders will take over in D.C., and they won’t care if you expose the dirty little secrets of their predecessors.”

Dechert turned. “I’m sure that’s true, Yates. But for now I think they do care, and that’s all that matters. Let the ones who remain standing know that if any of my crew conveniently dies in the next few years, my little montage of Thatch doing bad things will be all over the stream, with a lot of appending information.”

“But a weapons ban in space?” Yates said, chuckling. He put his glass down on a stone coaster and rubbed the wrinkled seam of his forehead with an index finger. “Isn’t that like asking for world peace?”

Dechert shrugged and returned to his seat. “It’s like a one-night stand in Vegas. It might not matter a month after it happens, but it feels pretty damned good at the moment. I just want to buy some time so my crew isn’t running from missiles again anytime soon. Once we’re dead and gone, you assholes can start all the inner-system wars you want.”

Yates considered him. Dechert had heard enough through side channels to know the predicament the government was in. Parrish and the rest of the Earth media had been banging down doors in Washington and Beijing to figure out what had happened on the Moon over the last few days, and despite the news embargo, word was trickling down to the home planet about the destruction that had been wrought on U.S. and Chinese mining stations. The main bases were still intact but Sea of Serenity 1 and New Beijing 2 had been wiped from the lunar surface, as well as a few smaller Chinese and American mining stations. His friend Lin Tzu was dead, as were twelve other Chinese miners and soldiers. Tzu had stayed at his post until a U.S. missile bored in and ended his life, and even though Dechert knew the Chinese government would never have allowed him to evacuate the station, he felt a slight twinge of envy at the bravery of his last act. Who was the better man? Once again Tzu had proven that he was, by a significant margin.

Nine U.S. crew members had also been killed, including Hale, Thatch, and the shuttle team led by Cabrera. Billions of dollars of mining infrastructure had been destroyed, tourism and sys-ex and terra-energy franchises had been put in jeopardy, and Chinese and American production of helium-3 had been set back by months.

And then it all stopped, like the shutter on a camera being closed.

The fallout had begun to disperse behind a lot of important doors on Earth. The previous head of the Office of Environmental Analysis—currently the chief of naval operations and a candidate for president—had been quietly relieved of his duties. Word had it that he was going to claim ill health and retire from the presidential race. Other heads had been lopped off completely, mostly two-star generals and a few cabinet-level bureaucrats.

But why had the Chinese agreed to stand down? Why had they been so quiet about a one-day war that apparently had been launched by the other side? That was the one thing that Dechert couldn’t figure out, but he knew from the look on Yates’s face that the Moon’s American prefect was about to tell him.

“You know Thatch was right about the Chinese?” Yates finally asked. “They were grossly underreporting their He-3 production to the ISA, and working side deals in Holland and Peru to cut us out of some very large contracts. They also stole our specs for the magnetic drive on Magellan , maybe the biggest intelligence coup of the twenty-first century. Word has it they’re launching the Yang Liwei to Uranus before next summer, and it will get there before we get to Jupiter. They’ve been playing the big new bully on the block to a tee. They were stomping their boot right on our neck, and they didn’t seem to care that we knew it.”