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“Sweet Zeus.”
“Fairly well sums it up,” agreed Whitmore.
“What do we know and what do we think we know? And what’s just guesswork?”
Whitmore considered Kendra’s question.
The final reports from Free Luna had come in.
Tycho Under hadn’t fared badly. Surviving an apocalyptic scenario was what it had been built for, after all, so a nuclear weapon detonating on the surface was, relatively speaking, child’s play. Between Diana’s sensor logs and the recordings of Novak’s confession from the various implants there was more than sufficient evidence of the Union’s attempt to kill a million Lunar citizens. Kendra, with Diana’s assistance, packaged all the evidence up and sent it Earthside to the UE, asking for a summary judgement against the Union.
Any hope of a quick declaration of violation of the UE Grand Charter was snuffed with the discovery of Mya Hartman’s body. Even though she wasn’t directly involved in foreign policy, she was the single most influential Director in the UE, and her death ground everything to a halt.
But Tycho Under was recovering, and recovering quickly. The 241 dead were a fraction of what could have been. The revelation of the Union’s involvement, combined with Autumn’s speech, had galvanized the people of Free Luna and solidified their support for the Revolution.
Not every warren had gotten off as easily. The smallest ones, the individual farms and two- and three-family domes, had mostly done well. They were generally overengineered for safety, as the compact size and population gave no margin for error. Most of the other warrens in Free Luna had suffered some damage, injuries, and occasional death. The greatest loss of life was at Marseilles en Lune.
Most warrens were built underground and into what caverns might naturally occur, and Marseilles was no exception. However the underground compartments were open to the surface through a network of tunnels and ventilation shafts, for Marseilles en Lune had been constructed with a dome. This had given the warren unique conditions topside, as no other could provide as much direct sunlight. The founders of the warren had imported grapevines from the finest vineyards, reasoning the fine Lunar regolith would be similar to volcanic ash. They were right. With judicious application of artificial sunlight the transplanted grapes produced, eventually, excellent vintages.
The dome was the weak point, and the seismic shock from the detonation shattered it like an eggshell. Ninety thousand people died out of a hundred and ten thousand; only those quick-witted enough to seal into their suits, or deep enough to be behind sealed hatches survived when the dome went.
All told, Free Luna lost slightly more than 95,000 citizens in the Union attack and the aftermath.
“Director McAllister has already taken steps to aid the investigation into Ms. Hartman’s death, with the assistance of Harpo.”
“Good. Something about the timing really stinks.”
“I agree. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.”
“No. What about Luna? Tycho Under? The revolution?”
“Functionally, Free Luna is at probably 85% of where they were before the attack. Except for Marseilles most of the warrens suffered minimal damage.”
“How did that happen?”
“You want a lecture on Lunar seismology? I’m sure Diana would be happy to provide.”
Kendra winced. “No, I’ll pass for now.”
“Politically, it was a jackpot. Whoever thought this up really underestimated the resolve of Loonies. From what the Chief has said, and some other reports I’ve gotten, they’re about ready to march shoulder-to-shoulder on Artemis City and finish the job. And with Novak out of the picture, the opposition has lost a valuable link in their chain of betrayal.”
“How’s Autumn?”
“Mac saved her life, no doubt about it, and she should make a full recovery. I don’t think she realized how much of a boon the nanobots were until they started repairing the damage Novak did almost before the blow had gone home.” Whitmore considered her next words carefully. “I think her confidence is shaken, though, which could be a long-term issue.”
“I don’t disagree, but explain.”
“I didn’t know her particularly well when she was in her Ministry, but I always had the impression she was playing, you know what I mean?”
“I do, actually,” Kendra said. “When I took over the Phoenix Project I got a lot of resistance because they didn’t think I was serious about their mission. I’d inherited it, and the prior owner hadn’t given it too much direction, or attention. For me, though, it was a dream come true, so I dove right in. Bruised some egos, stepped on toes, but eventually everyone figured out to take me seriously.”
“I think Autumn’s case was, is, worse. She never had to ‘do’ anything she didn’t want to, being part of the Newling Family. She didn’t really take the Ministry job seriously; it wasn’t a passion. When she started agitating for change and reform, it was the voice of a favored child asking for an extra dessert and was taken as seriously.”
Kendra nodded agreement. “I read the report about her internment in the PRC; sounds like it was pretty easy.”
“It was, and that’s not normal. She never really had to face any consequences, nothing real. She was uncomfortable for a bit after her escape, and it hasn’t been easy, but I don’t think it’s really been real to her. Not completely. Not until now.”
“But since Novak betrayed her...”
“Right. Novak betrayed her personally, killed Mwangi, and tried to kill her. Like the Chief said, ‘A knife to the throat is a fair dinkum wake-up call.’”
“So what do we do?”
“Do? There’s nothing we can do as such; it’s up to her to snap out of it. Having Nicole there is going to help. Once thing I’ve learned about Crozier is she’s as tough a bitch as ever I want to meet.”
“Where do we stand in terms of defense?”
“Nothing from the Union is going to get within a hundred klicks of any Free Luna warren or habitat. We dropped two ‘Eyeball’ satellites into orbit to track everything groundside. Between those, Diana, and the CAP, we’re covered.”
“What about the damage to Njord?”
“Deep but superficial, if it makes any sense. Diana?”
The AI’s avatar materialized next to Whitmore.
“Admiral, the hull breach caused by the barge was the most significant damage. The internal damage, though extensive, was far more minor.”
“Where are we on repairs?”
“My ‘bots are finishing the internal repairs today, then I will begin external reconstruction with the Commodore’s personnel. Full functionality should be restored in less than a week.”
“Have we heard anything else from groundside? Davie, you talked to both Lynch and Hartman; what’s your impression?”
“I believe that the late Director was completely surprised by the revelation, but something was off about Director Lynch. He made the right sounds but it didn’t ring true.”
“Admiral,” said Diana. “It is not my specialty, but voice stress analysis of the automatic recording of the transmission lends credence to Admiral Whitmore’s supposition. Director Lynch almost certainly was concealing information during the discussion; what he was concealing is impossible to determine without more data.”
“Lynch is a liar and a sleaze. I’ve known for years. Have Montana dig into Lynch and see what she can find. Anything else? Status of the Union navy?”
“All the Luna-based ships are accounted for, except the al-Battani.”
“He’s the one Defiant is chasing? Where the seven hells did they go?”
“They could be just about anywhere,” Whitmore answered. “We know where they aren’t, which is any star we’ve already explored, which still leaves a huge chunk of sky.”
“We’re sure they’re still in pursuit?”
“Honestly? No. But until your pet geniuses come up with a sensor suite which has light-year range we’re essentially blind outside the System.”
“Frak. Well, we still have Endeavour, Defender II is a couple days away, and Enterprise ought to return next week. Right. So give Autumn some support, continue relief efforts for the rest of Free Luna, see what Mac can dig up on Earth and Mya’s death, and keep the Union locked down. Does that summarize where we stand?”
“Pretty well.”
“Good. Then we need to start planning how to end this once and for all.”
*
THE UNION DIDN’T GET off as easily.
Seismic waves are funny things. As they travel through rock they can be bent, deflected, distorted, amplified, and diminished. There are many documented accounts of a building being utterly destroyed by a quake while its neighbor suffers little damage. The quirks of the underlying structure are the reason, and Luna has its fair share of them.
Hong Kong Luna, the closest warren to Tycho Under, was relatively unaffected by the blast and subsequent shaking: the pattern of the seismic waves skipped over it. Marseilles en Lune was struck, not by a direct wave but by a secondary surface wave triggered by the primary shock.
Artemis City was hit.
Hard.
The explosion a few lunars earlier at Grimaldi had been far less damaging even though it was more powerful. The floor of the crater was fractured and had absorbed much of the shock. Not so the explosion above Tycho, which was on a plate which had not shattered. An intact plate leads to good transmission of seismic waves.
Two primary waves bracketed the warren, one five kilometers out, the other eight kilometers away, the distance just enough so the effects of the waves impacted the warren slightly out of sync. The effect was as if Artemis was a toy being pulled between two dogs.
Like most warrens, Artemis was constructed first in naturally-occurring caverns beneath the surface. As the first permanent settlement, though, it had long outgrown the natural space and had excavated for more room, totaling in excess of ninety cubic kilometers. There were a considerable number of open areas even still, as people needed to be able to feel open air and get a sense of spaciousness, no matter how many generations they’d lived in Luna.
Construction was fairly standardized for warrens, all based on the original plans in Artemis. Each ‘neighborhood’ was created as a fairly self-contained unit, though they varied widely in size. Some were as small as a single cubic kilometer, while the largest was fifteen.
The government was housed in a separate excavation, apart from the commercial and residential areas, and close to the surface. It was more robustly constructed than other areas, with more bulkheads, more airlocks, more redundancies in the safety features.
This kept the entire complex from being opened to vacuum. When the shock hit, the surface shattered like a plate dropped on the floor and collapsed into the center below.
The upper level pancaked.
Below that the damage was more diffuse. The shock of the impact warped many of the airlock hatches, rendering them useless, as Newling and Phalkon discovered. This pattern would be repeated through many of the ‘neighborhoods’ around Artemis City: a partial collapse on the levels closest to the surface, with decreasing damage the further one descended. Ironically, the Undercity suffered the least damage and loss of life, as the structures were more temporary and flexible. They swayed to the shock rather than trying to resist it and so most survived, if perhaps a bit the worse for wear.
The casualty list was immense, though.
Nearly three million citizens were killed outright, and another eight million injured to one degree or another. One ‘neighborhood’ survived the initial waves but was cut off from the rest of the City. The same shock also knocked out their power and air connections. The slow poisoning of their air and loss of heat, too gradual to be noticed, wiped out the population silently.
The Empress survived. Phalkon took the lead in the recovery efforts. She reached out to the UE and contacted Lynch.
“It didn’t work.”
“I noticed,” she snarled back.
“Whose idiotic idea was it to detonate a bomb?”
“Whose idiotic idea was it to ram a barge into the habitat?” she countered. “There’s thousands of people aboard that thing! Did you think your couple hundred soldiers would actually succeed?”
“All we had to do, according to your agent, was reach their command and control. ‘Behead the snake’, I think you told me.”
“There’s no point in blame,” she said. “What next?”
“I have one more string,” Lynch said. “It’s going to take time to put in play.”
“How much time?”
“Ten days. Two weeks, maybe.”
Phalkon pondered the timing. “Take your time and plan for the 14th. We have some surprises for the Federation; I think if we hit them from multiple directions one of our arrows will penetrate, and one will be enough.”
“And you’ll ensure the Union accepts scrapping the Accords? The Empress won’t interfere?”
“In two weeks, the Empress will be in no position to interfere with anything, ever again.”