Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira

Author:David Pedreira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

15

The marines arrived at Sea of Serenity 1 the way marines always arrive: with grim faces and an array of weaponry. They lumbered down the gangway of their long-hop shuttle and emerged into the warm dock carrying coffin-shaped olive chests with white lettering stenciled on the sides. Weapons on Serenity 1. Dechert had a 10mm semiautomatic locked away in a safe in his quarters, partly because an old Moon-hand had recommended it in case one of the crew got space-crazy, and partly because he couldn’t scrub the lingering feelings of nakedness when he didn’t have a weapon nearby. But that was a twentieth-century handgun. These were real weapons coming into his hangar bay. Electromagnetic rail guns, probably, with a horrific muzzle velocity of more than three thousand meters per second, enough to punch a projectile through a line of twenty men standing front to back. Smart antimissile arrays and liquid lasers to blunt the impact of a concentrated cruise missile strike on the station, and maybe even micro-EMPs, which could be shoulder-fired at incoming shuttles to fry their electrical systems. Dechert pictured the same scenario playing out on New Beijing 2—a somber-looking bunch of Chinese commandos unloading their arsenal in a cold and dusty hangar with Lin Tzu standing by and observing, as Dechert was now.

Standard and Hale were with him near the sub-hangar hatch, watching the marines disembark as venting gas hissed out of the shuttle’s conical engines and a blue strobe flashed and dimmed over the main hangar doors. Standard had a gleam in his eye, the excitement of the uninitiated. Or maybe he was just happy to have people on the station who didn’t cast dark glances at him in passing. Either way, Dechert wanted to wipe that look away with his fist.

The look on Hale’s face, on the other hand, was inscrutable, like a shark swimming in the ocean. Anyone who got to Hale’s level in the Air & Space Marines had to be a realist or a true believer. Dechert thought Hale was the former—that he could be bargained with because he knew that the enemy can come from within as well as without. He would consider his options before acting. Dechert was a realist himself, which is why he wasn’t completely upset about the marine arsenal being off-loaded onto Serenity 1. If things really do come unhinged, he thought, at least we’ll have a fighting chance to defend the station. Still, he didn’t have to like it.

As if reading Dechert’s mind, Hale said, “This is not my choice, Commander. The last thing I want is a gunfight. We haven’t even war-gamed the lunar theater yet, and my troopers are fresh off bioquarantine patrol on LEO-1.”

Standard looked over, surprised that Hale would announce any reservations about his mission, or maybe disappointed to hear that Air & Space Marines spent some of their time serving as customs cops, making sure that exotic minerals and microorganisms weren’t smuggled from a low-orbit station down to Earth. He started to speak and then stopped.

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