Debris Dreams by David Colby

Author:David Colby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thinking Ink Press
Published: 2018-10-17T19:08:59+00:00

12

Defense Is The Best Offence

2/20/2068

Earth-Moon L3, The Forge

500,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth

“Five days ago, the Loonies pulled something at about the same time Texas tried their attack. They’re aiming to take Tiananmen.” General Lau’s face filled a whole wall. “They allocated one of their two ROVers to the task, and they burned hard. They’ll be there in another three days. Now, either their intel is spotty, or they think they can take you, because you’ll be right on top of them by the time they arrive.”

“So, you want us to go to Tiananmen,” I said. “And hold it against Loonie attack?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” I gulped, hoping that the general couldn’t see it behind my gesture telling Shiva to show me exactly what Tiananmen Station was. A schematic popped up next to Lau’s face. Ah, okay. It was a fuel distillery.

Basically, Shi-Armstrong did all the heavy fuel mining, and it sucked for them. Lunar regolith isn’t the richest source of helium-3, but it was the closest and best we had. That’s why Shi-Armstrong is so much bigger than people originally thought it would be: they needed more bodies to churn through the Lunar dust and grit to make fuel for the new fusion reactors that popped up across the Earth as we slid out of the Slump. The Loonies claim that in its early years, the place was no better than a slave camp for political dissidents. I half believed them, but it’s hard to care when Nairobi’s a smoking crater.

While helium-3 is great for fusion, people in space just needed straight-up hydrogen fuel—if only because fusion reactors were too heavy to make up for their power output. We got plenty of said fuel from that big ball of gas we called the sun. Solar winds carried particles of hydrogen, most of which got buffeted away by the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. So we had some stations that were nothing but a bottling facility attached to huge scoops, which sucked up the solar wind and slowly distilled fuel from it. Once, there had been tons of distilleries putting out enough hydrogen for every ROVer and personal shuttle in orbit, each with its own macabre name. After all, who wanted to live on what amounted to a gigantic vat of liquid hydrogen? You had to have sort of a weird sense of humor to cope.

Now, there were only four, the rest blasted to bits in the Disaster. So maybe their names had been prophetic in the end. Fresh Kills had already been taken, but it orbited near the Earth-Moon L1 point, so it was pretty much a goner the instant the war started. But Tiananmen was a “wandering” fuel distillery, going in a steady equatorial orbit, and it was gonna be going right past the Forge soon.

“Head out within the hour and ride Tiananmen until they attack. They won’t be using Sandcasters for fear of damaging the station, but we can’t be sure what else they might throw at you.”

“All right, sir,” I said, signing off as I tried to plan our approach.

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