The Complete Heritage Trilogy by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas [Ian Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

EU Science Research Vessel

Pierre-Simon Laplace

In Trans-Lunar Space

2150 hours GMT

Laplace was eight thousand kilometers from 2034L, falling toward the distant twin-star pair of Earth and Moon, when Jean-Etienne Cheseaux saw the flash. It was small, an unremarkable pulse of light partially blocked by the body of the asteroid itself, but his instruments registered hard radiation—gamma and a flux of high-speed neutrons—together with the electromagnetic pulse that was the characteristic fingerprint of a nuclear detonation.

“Damn them!” Cheseaux exclaimed, pulling back from the eyepiece on his broad-spectrum analyzer. He checked the readouts again, to be sure there was no mistake. “Damn them! What do they think they’re doing?”

The second EU ship, the Sagittaire, had rendezvoused with Laplace and 2034L over a month before. Two weeks ago, Laplace had been ordered to return to Earth.

Cheseaux had liked no part of the arrangement. Sagittaire was unmistakably a military ship, with a dorsally mounted ball turret that he suspected housed a high-energy laser. What possible interest could a military vessel and crew have in an asteroid orbiting the sun in deep space?

He could think of only one possible reason, and the mere possibility chilled him to the core. They couldn’t be thinking of…that!

Colonel Armand and the rest of Laplace’s small crew were eager to leave the desolate boulder in space and return to the Moon, but Cheseaux had found a pretext to stay—a broken spectrometer and the urgent need for some additional data on 2034L’s chemical composition.

A message had arrived from Earth a few days later. Laplace had until the twenty-third and then she must burn for the return trajectory. Food and water would soon be a problem, and the crew of the Laplace were obviously angered at Cheseaux’s apparent scientific fussiness.

Let them fuss! As Laplace had completed her burn, falling into a vector that would carry her to the Moon and then to home, he’d stayed at the science vessel’s instrument suite, watching the asteroid and the tiny Sagittaire hanging in its shadow.

He wasn’t surprised when the nuclear explosion briefly flared against the night, but the horror nearly overwhelmed him. Maybe, maybe they were changing the asteroid’s orbit for some other purpose than the one he feared, but he couldn’t imagine what that purpose might be. A base of some sort? Raw materials for the highly secret construction rumored to be proceeding on the Lunar farside?

As hour followed hour and he continued to watch the change in 2034L’s course, the surer he became. Running simulations on his computer suggested that the nuclear blast—which he estimated to be in the fifty-to one-hundred-kiloton range—had nudged the tiny, flying mountain just enough to swing it inward, ever so slightly toward the Earth.

His software wasn’t good enough, and his measurements over the course of twenty-some hours weren’t precise enough and they didn’t cover a long enough span of time, but Cheseaux was now convinced that the European Union government was planning to smash 2034L into the Earth. He wasn’t sure of the target; it might be Russia, which would be on the outer, nightside of Earth at impact.

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