Luna's Lament Lunar Cycle: Book 3 by David Colby

Author:David Colby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thinking Ink Press
Published: 2020-08-18T21:35:26+00:00

9

Targets of Opportunity

7/20/2068

Mare Tranquillitatis, 32 kilometers east of Target Omaha (Neutralized)

T-Minus L-Day: –6

[Tangos marked.]

Gloria threw up three targeting glyphs, indicating her intended kills. I tagged two more, then a third when I saw them clambering out of their enclosed buggy. We were both lying flat on a rise that looked down on one of the space defense grid hardpoints.

The hardpoint looked like three concentric rings, each one made out of shiny metal, sunken into the moondust with just the edges thrusting out of the ground at exactly half a meter, thank you augmented vision. Each ring had a series of spherical lenses at every few degrees along the circle. The spaces between the rings—about fifteen meters of open ground—were swept clean and studded with tubes that had been shoved into the ground, only their tips exposed. Each of those tubes held a missile loaded with ball bearings and micro-explosives, designed to scatter in the space around the target.

Boom.

The lenses, though, were the real killers at close range. The missiles could be shot down. But the rings, guided by local automation, could focus three hundred lasers on a single target. Even the best armor couldn’t stand up to that. And if they were fighting lighter armored targets, they could disperse the lasers out to hit as many as they needed. The really clever part, though, was what we couldn’t see: the underground water reservoirs used as heat sinks. The water was safely stored underground for future use, and the lasers had a battlefield endurance that beat the snot out of anything we could put into space.

For a bunch of Loonies, it was sophisticated. The kind of thing that Spacers would build, the kind of defense that only made sense without an atmosphere to muck everything up.

[So … ready to smoke ‘em?] Gloria ducted.

[You know it.] I frowned. The six foot-mobiles we had targeted were a sweeping patrol, checking on the missile racks. They were supported by five drones, little gimbaled sphere things that rolled around, ready to stop, mount, and then open fire on anything their bosses tagged. [So, we going to EMP them?]

[Yeah, they’ve got the new crypto.]

I sighed inside my helmet, feeling the skinpatch tug at my bones. I didn’t actually remember when I’d gotten patched. It’d happened sometime in the sleepless, staccato unrythym of battle: engagement, wait, flight, engagement, wait, wait, flight, engagement, flight. The pain was a dull ache by now. Manageable. I couldn’t even remember which of my teammates had finally popped my helmet and done the patch. I think it was Alvarez. He had said he’d do it.

The easy times were long gone. They’d been gone ever since a shuttle had strafed us and we realized our exploits and hacks were all patched. No more cruising around in buggies and in Loonie colors with spoofed IFF signals. Our firewalls were still holding up, but … well, I liked to think I was a good slicer, but being a slicer isn’t the same thing as being a programmer.

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