Defense of Waygo Port
by M.T. Reiten
Trix waited impatiently in the tunnel outside the secure conference room. The war had started and they were busy talking, not defending the home that they had carved from below the lunar surface.
The soundproof hatch finally opened with a dusty creak. Officers spilled out clutching clipboards with scribbled timetables and hand-drawn defensive positions. Nothing could be trusted to the network or computers. Every one of them moved with desperate purpose. Some had already donned their in-station pressure suits. They dispersed to protect the Oasis, the man-made skylight lava tube that let sunlight in and let life grow. They had broken the corporate hold on prime lunar real estate, so their community could be more than a high-tech favela living off discards and trash heaps in the dark.
Trix looked for her commander, who emerged frowning and troubled. Colonel Shivankar came to her and they pushed against the smoothed basalt of the tunnel to let the others pass. The musty organic scent from his vegetable greenhouse clung to the old man’s rumpled coveralls, which now served as the official uniform of the defense force.
Colonel Shivankar rubbed the fringe of gray stubble on his scalp. “You’re reassigned.”
“I’m your bodyguard.” Trix patted the gyro carbine slung across her chest. “I go where you go, sir.”
“Enough with the sirs. There aren’t enough of us for formality.” The anger left Shivankar’s tired face as quickly as it had appeared. His raspy voice softened as he shook his head. “Sorry. You were requested by name.”
Trix should have been honored, but instead she felt abandoned. “Did you offer me up?”
“No.”
But Colonel Shivankar hadn’t fought to keep her. Trix scowled. “So what? I protect you. I don’t have to blindly obey.”
“You do, Trix. The quiet war is getting loud. Not the tit-for-tat sabotage we’ve been running the past few years. It’s a real war now. We’re on the verge of recognition by the UN.” Shivankar touched her chin to hold her gaze. “The UN, on Earth, will recognize the Luna Republic as a sovereign nation. They vote in two days and we need to hold out.”
“We held in Derbtown,” Trix said with burning pride.
“That was different. Derbtown is a tunnel complex. It would take a hundred years to dig us out.”
“But—” Trix started to object.
“But we inhabit the only Goldilocks zone on the Moon that the Congloms don’t control. We made the Oasis and they want it. And here we’re open to attack from the sky.” Shivankar pointed his finger up to emphasize his point. Black soil matrix from his garden was crusted under his nails.
Trix sniffed and wrinkled her nose. She wanted to play her part alongside Colonel Shivankar in the coming fight. She would follow someone worth following, not hide in a flare shelter. “Who am I babysitting?”
“You’re with Cody Hiru.” Shivankar gestured with an open hand at the briefing room doorway behind her. “You won’t be babysitting.”
Trix glanced over her shoulder to see the last occupant of the briefing room march into the tunnel. An Earthborn who didn’t have to duck through the standard hatch.
Cody Hiru was a compact cement block of a man in tight coveralls with a wear-faded military name tape sewn over his right chest. Bald headed and with a dark square beard, he looked like a dwarf from the Tolkien books Trix had once loved. Everyone agreed Cody Hiru was a proper veteran, an experienced warfighter. An “Operator.” He didn’t need an assigned rank among the lunar irregulars to have authority. Special Advisor Cody Hiru had been Space Force before finding his way to Derbtown and settling among the economic refugees. He had proper military training and wikipedic knowledge of the weapon systems the defenders had scrounged.
Shivankar turned to her and whispered, “We need his help. He’s the best we have on our side.”
Cody Hiru boomed out, “Beatrix, I’ve heard good things about you.” He thrust out his hairy-knuckled fist in greeting.
Earthborn never understood Derbtown etiquette. Noise echoed in confined spaces and there was always someone nearby, trying to sleep or—more often—overhear. He emitted the self-assured obliviousness of a colonist. Trix touched knuckles with him.
“Good luck, sir,” Shivankar said with a courteous nod. He squeezed Trix’s elbow to keep her from automatically following when he shuffled away to the stairs at the end of the corridor.
Cody took a deep breath through his nose and then looked up at Trix. He gave her a tight grin. “Meet me at the Waygo auxiliary port in twenty. We’re going up top. Pack for forty-eight hours with no resupply. I’ll brief the operation there.”
“Understood.”
Special Advisor Hiru spun and went the opposite way up the tunnel.
Trix knew this was going to end up bad.
Trix lugged her combat suit in its hazbag to the abandoned cargo entrance dubbed Waygo. The crude entrance was the first one the community had constructed, before Detonation Day, utilizing existing subsurface lava tubes to access the vertical shaft that would become Oasis. But after they dropped the roof and opened Oasis to sunshine, they bored new tunnels closer to the settlement that weren’t a meandering spaghetti mess. The twisty tunnels that took her here were deserted now. All the noncombatants had gone deep into flare shelters or back to the warrens of Derbtown. Unease settled in Trix’s stomach as she trudged up the gentle inclines under the weak glow of emergency lights.
She was five minutes early to the cargo lock. The prickly scent of gunpowder and the taste of throat-coating chalk reminded her to put on her mask. She hung her hazbag and peered at the cracked, but still functional, monitor that showed the interior of the cargo lock. An autonomous surface scooter in a cheery blue, white, and orange color scheme, waited patiently at the huge exterior door under a large load. Trix didn’t recognize it, but she’d only come over from Derbtown a few months ago. The mongrel scooter was a unique agglomeration of parts: wide, low chassis, sport motors in each wheel, and a cut-down carry-all deck from a mining dumper. In the cargo bed, massive barrels, like fungal spore pods, clung to gimballed mounting brackets. The stress-optimized mounting system from laser-fused titanium, bumpy unfinished metal surfaces and no right angles, made it seem even more organic. The repurposed scooter, with hasty modifications and oversized load, did not look like it was up to fighting a war.
Trix heard Cody before she saw him, huffing through the dim tunnel singing a running cadence about being an “airborne ranger,” whatever that was. He bounded toward her with an inefficient loping stride like a tourist. He carried a battered stack of printed signs under his arm. He tossed them to the floor in a clatter outside the personnel airlock entrance. Untreated dust swirled up.
The signage had been for intersection markings toward Oasis proper. Trix asked, “Did you take down all the signs?”
“Most.” A manic grin stretched Cody’s bearded face. “I swapped a few pointing the wrong directions. Don’t want to make it easy for them if they make it past us.”
No wireless location service had ever been installed in Derbtown or Oasis for that specific reason. Trix nodded and then pointed at her mask to remind him.
Cody pulled on his filter mask—a new model that sealed through his beard—and shrugged. “I wasn’t born here.”
“Yes.” Trix heaped as much scorn and sarcasm as she could into her single word reply.
Oblivious to her disrespect, he continued directly into his briefing. “Our task is to emplace the Mark 22 Azawakh missiles and defend the auxiliary port. Our purpose is to delay their attack at this entry point. Most likely threat is a full-on assault through the Oasis main shaft. Most dangerous is if they break through here. Nearly all of our defenders are in Oasis proper. We’re all that can be spared to cover our flank.”
Trix caught the action-movie jargon. She had wondered if operators actually talked like that. Or, maybe, he should spend time learning their way of speaking, since he was the outsider. She followed him into the personnel lock.
Cody continued his banter as he opened his hazbag which was already hanging inside. “Two days until the emergency vote at the UN on our sovereignty. Until then we’re just a labor dispute.”
Cody unfurled his high-tech suit. The latest issue Space Force Orbital Commando rig. Ceramic trauma plates and reactive fiber musculature. Extra optics hung from the helmet. Attachment points and external pouches by design rather than kludged together from recycled junk. Everything was clean and new, no scratches or wear. The swooshing delta of the U.S. Space Force filled the chest plate in subdued grays. Trix felt jealous, but the little suit wouldn’t fit her. She doubted they made them in her elongated size. With a sigh, she stripped and climbed into her dome-made patchwork suit, accepting its familiar and comforting full-body hug. Then she slung her carbine across her chest.
“The Conglom’s only hope is to hit us hard and end it right away before the UN can react. The attack will come when the sun rises over North America. No ground-based observatories can watch in real time. There will be a shift change then. The overnight crew will be tired and the incoming crew won’t have their heads in the game yet. Closest thing to surprise they can get.” Cody didn’t slip into his combat suit with well-practiced ease. The Space Force Operator grunted and wriggled his arms. The shell seemed a bit too tight for him.
Trix verified his back weld, as common courtesy, and adjusted the mating closure which should have happened automatically.
He tugged at the neck seal, pulling his slightly too-long beard free. “Expect radio jamming. We won’t have voice comms during the attack except for close-range optical.” Cody seated his helmet and his words were lost while the omni-voice link regained crypto. “—independent and a top shot according to Shivankar. We may be bored and forgotten or we may be in a fight for our lives.”
“Got it.” At least now, Trix could control his volume. She thumbed it down a notch.
Cody and Trix cycled through the personnel lock and stepped into the cargo entrance. The exterior layers of Trix’s suit tightened with a plasticky creak in the vacuum. The massive uricrete and metal overhead door lifted slightly and slid back, exposing the black sky above. A slender omni-antenna reached straight above them and seemed to disappear into space at the tip. The hum of the pumps vibrated the floor. Trix checked her dosimeter as they walked to the overloaded scooter. She set two spare oxygen packs in the scooter to fill out forty-eight hours if needed. They hopped onto the rear running board and held the grab bar. The weaponized scooter’s suspension barely responded to their extra mass, bottomed out as it was already.
“Scooter, go ahead,” Trix commanded.
“Listen to her. Pad Three,” Cody said. He sounded like he said “Tree” instead of the number.
The scooter edged forward, swaying under its load. The fat tires whirled up the ramp with the illusion of speed and they emerged onto the lunar surface. The dark rock all around seemed to draw the heat out of her. Her fingers gripping the carbine felt a chill pinch through her haptic gloves as her heaters lagged the changing environment. Her eyes adjusted to the ghostly, earth-lit barren world that was her only home.
Trix oriented herself to the Earth, ever present in the sky and currently half shadowed. She identified the Atlantic Ocean sliding out of the terminator. The great shaft of Oasis opened into the Moon behind them, smooth blackness against the rumpled gray surface. Ahead, accreted regolith landing pads, the color of bone, sat in a hex pattern at the end of the straight paved road leading from the cargo lock. The guide beacons and marker lights were off. Abandoned Waygo gave off a serious cemetery vibe.
She didn’t like it. Minimal cover. A few recessed equipment holes were dug near each pad, but the rest of the landing field was wide open. Important for a landing site, but bad for a defensive position. So much open sky for their enemy to come from and the horizon was close.
The scooter whisked them efficiently to Pad Three. It must have been the dedicated scooter for Waygo, since it didn’t pause for further directions at the end of the taxiway.
Cody and Trix off loaded the Mk 22 Azawakh launcher by hand, an easier task than she had imagined. As soon as the mass lifted from its cargo bed and its suspension recovered, the scooter shot away on its own and jounced over the nearby lunar surface.
“Thank God for the low g,” Cody mumbled as they slowly lowered the tripodic mounting legs to the flat pad surface. The framework relaxed into place.
“Shouldn’t we stick this in a hole or something?” Trix asked.
“Nope. Need unobstructed field of fire.” Cody scrambled up the framework like a kid on playground equipment. He aimed the missile pods, consulting his onboard computers and cycling through various helmet optics. His carbine hung loosely, not rigged properly, and whacked against his hip or the titanium frame as he clambered across the equipment. He kept adjusting the orientation of the missile pods.
Each missile pod had eight sealed tubes, supposedly housing a Mk 22 in each. Four pods meant thirty-two shots. The Conglom, or their mercenaries, couldn’t fly more than ten assault craft. Colonel Shivankar had made sure of that two weeks ago with his daring raid. There was a definite chance they could succeed, at least by the balance of numbers. “Anything I can do?”
“Stand guard.”
Trix paced around their dome-grown missile battery to generate some body heat. She scanned the horizon and the empty sky with eyes and warning sensors. She used her gun camera on maximum zoom to look at the jagged peaks to the south—nearest straight-line direction to a major Conglom port—and the wide flat mare to the west. Nothing. She checked her time and double-checked the orb of the Earth. Maybe the Conglom had decided it was too costly to fight the self-proclaimed Lunar Republic?
Trix turned to watch the scooter’s antics, the only visible activity. The unburdened buggy jiggled across the barren landscape. High rooster tails of ash-gray dust flipped up behind it. Must have a repurposed canine biomimetic of some kind in the control box. How long had it been left alone until called on to fight? Trix whistled for “Scooter” to calm down and come to them. It spun around once and then zipped back to wait obediently, just off the landing pad with rear wheels on powdery regolith.
The sense of exposure nagged at her as she circled the launcher. There were no permanent satellites peering down at her; the lunar gravity was too lumpy for stable orbits. She doubted any pattern-recognition program could identify the launcher as more than an odd pile of junk even if there were fast-moving cameras pointed at them. Nothing like this ugly unit could exist in any military database, though the missile pods might give it away.
Trix patted the lowest hanging missile pod above her head. These were big and surprisingly light. Harsh plasma etching had left bare patches in the gray coating. Dents from rough handling dimpled the surface now that she looked closer. Were those scorch marks around holes in the outer case? “These missiles are munged up and ancient.”
Cody grumbled as he positioned the flat-panel antenna like a folding table above the missile pods. A slight hiss of bleed over static edged in on their omni-voice channel as the radar lit up. He made another satisfied old-man grunt as he held the control umbilical. “The Azawakh has two stages and vectored nozzle, not fin steered. Perfect for LEO defense. Good enough for LLO.”
“Why did they get scrapped then?” The defenders of the Lunar Republic only had castoff weapons.
“Prebiomimetic controls. They’re vulnerable to electromag countermeasures. Their state-machine controllers drop out for ten seconds on upset.”
“Long time to recover.” Ten seconds was forever when someone was shooting at you.
“That’s because they had a tendency to home in on the launch radar when spoofed.”
“On the source radar?” Trix stopped and rotated to face Cody. “Back on us? Fratricide?”
“That’s a roger.” Then he murmured something about “more like suicide” as he fiddled with the control unit.
“They sold the Azawakhs like that?”
“Sure, passed milspec shock and vibe and was shielded against hostile electromagnetics. In separate tests. On the ground. When you think you know the answer, you stop asking questions.” Cody flicked through screens on the display. “Hadn’t considered combined environments. When the missile is under thrust, it vibrates. The vibrations flex seams and allow high-power EM to penetrate to the control electronics.” Cody spoke with such supreme confidence about things she had never considered. “Hard to predict everything all at once.”
“Let’s hope the Conglom doesn’t know that vulnerability.” Trix’s sense of possible victory diminished.
“Hope is not a plan,” Cody said cryptically.
Trix felt alone and unsure.
An hour later, Cody Hiru still fussed with the Mk 22 Azawakh launcher like he was rearranging furniture, not emplacing a hypervelocity weapon system, their last line of defense for an unlikely scenario. Two of the pods pointed toward the horizon to the north. Half of their shots. Perhaps he anticipated an over-the-pole attack from the Congloms? Cody dismounted the flat panel radar and shifted it to another pad. He played out the cables effortlessly, even though his tactical posture seemed rusty or half forgotten.
“Shouldn’t we rig these pads for demo?” Trix decided it would only take a minute or so to get from here to the entrance on the smooth bridgeway. “Set some cratering charges. That would slow anyone down.”
“They’ll know. They’ll suspect. Then they won’t come into the kill zone. Congloms and their mercs are risk averse. Any hint that things aren’t what they expect, they’ll go with the guaranteed solution.”
“Most likely threat?” Trix stared into the distance at the shadow that was Oasis. There was no protective cover to slide over the huge skylight, unlike the Waygo Port entrance. There was no way to hide its location. They had broadcast it to the solar system asking for sovereignty and recognition. Most likely threat was an attack from the sky.
“That’s a roger.”
There was a lot of North America for the sun to rise over. Cody hadn’t specified where in North America the observatories were located or who would be watching. How many hours was that from east to west?
Bored, Trix asked, “Azawakh? What does it stand for?”
“Eh? Nothing. Some acquisition guy apparently liked dogs. All the other dog names were taken, like terrier or malamute.” Cody chuckled from atop the launch frame. Again. “Azawakhs were desert hunting dogs. Sort of appropriate. Deserts are wastelands on Earth where only a few can survive. Our desert and oasis is here.”
“That’s why we named it Oasis.”
“I know,” he said tolerantly. Cody hopped down and resumed messing with the firing controller. “I was here the day we dropped the roof. I helped set charges.”
“You did? Just how old are you?” Trix did the math. That was before she was born. Long before the Space Force stood up its orbit-capable direct-action teams.
When armed conflict with the Conglom became inevitable, Trix had read and watched everything she could find about military operations in space with the same focus as she had on her abandoned engineering studies. She consumed everything that their pirated LunaNet bandwidth would let her access. The Space Force wasn’t taken seriously as a warfighter until Delta 9 Orbital formed. She knew this as a fact. Cody Hiru would have been behind a computer if he was from the prewar earthbound Space Force. Just an ordinary guardian if anything. He was no “operator.” He was a poser. Stolen valor all the way.
And her leadership had believed him! They let him shape their strategy. He knew the whole defense plan. Every little doubt fell into place. No wonder she didn’t like him. He reeked of fake. Some Earther come here to live out his video-game fantasy.
“What sort of special operator were you really?” Trix demanded.
“Come again?”
“Have you been in combat?” Trix loomed over him and pressed closer. She couldn’t stop blinking as her fury swelled. “We were depending on you and you lied!”
“I never claimed to be a special operator—” Cody protested and acted confused. He backed away, something a true lunar native would never do, unable to see where feet were going. He bumped into the titanium cage of the Azawakh launcher.
“You didn’t correct them.” Trix pushed forward until only her slung gyro carbine separated them. She stared down through his metallic-coated visor to see the face of the liar. All she saw was her warped reflection. “Did you even serve in a military?”
“I did—” His hand groped toward his external weapon pouch.
“Everyone listened to you. You sound so confident.” Trix caught his wrist before he could withdraw his hand from the pouch.
With a dismissive chuckle, he said, “No one knows what this will be like.”
His lack of proper shame drove the anger burning in her chest. He was caught and only laughed at her. She yelled, “My parents are down in Oasis! You don’t have to be here. Why are you even here?”
“I was an operator—”
“You’ve got slick gear. Buy that used? Are you here because it’s cool? Get off on this?”
“I was a satellite operator for ten years. I served at Schriever. JTF Space Defense. Yes, I was at a computer most of that time. But that was long ago.” Cody slowly broke free with his Earther strength.
Trix let go of his wrist when she couldn’t stop him.
Cody pulled his fist from his pouch and passed his spare magazines to her. “And why am I here, if you’ll listen, is the same as you. A free self-governing lunar settlement. Not a colony.”
She clenched the gyro mags in a trembling hand as she stumbled back. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Fight.” Long pause. “What do you think we should do?”
Stunned at his answer and sudden embarrassment knifing in where she had been enraged a millisecond before, Trix fumbled the extra mags into her ammo pouch. “We need cover,” she snapped.
“Roger.” Cody Hiru followed her.
The nearest equipment hole would have to serve as their fighting position. An inert landing beacon and the power hub for the safety lights crowded the shallow excavation. The pit was only deep enough to prevent nozzle exhaust from whipping small rocks onto its contents and to keep the electronics shadowed during the hot lunar day. Trix tore the landing beacon out and tossed it away with all her strength. Scooter zipped over to investigate the tumbling box. Doing something, anything, felt better than the nothing she had been doing before.
Cody strung the umbilical over the crusted lip of the pit. The barrel of his carbine dug into the regolith, but he didn’t seem to notice. Cody hunched over the Azawakh firing control screen. How much more could he do now?
Annoyed, Trix whistled. “Scooter, go recharge.”
Scooter spun in place and paused. Its sensor turret pointed toward her.
“Go!” Trix said.
Scooter scurried along the bridgeway toward the Waygo entrance. The wispy omni-antenna, the lone indicator, marked the location of the cargo lock. Scooter disappeared down the ramp. An alert icon of a charging battery popped in her display.
Trix settled into the hole and glared at Cody Hiru. He had full cover. She had to fold in half to fit. She tried to scrape out the bottom of the pit to improve the position, but she wasn’t able to dislodge the rocks trapped in the subsurface crust. It would take a boring tool to bust through the densified sediment. She gave up and hunkered down. She checked the time readout. They had only been outside a few hours. It felt like forever.
Cody started talking. “We had put Mark 22s on some satellites for offensive security. We never used them.”
“So what?” Trix said.
“You asked if I had ever been in combat. Not like you. Not like Delta 9. But we were engaged in our own alternate conflict. Creating orbital debris is a war crime now.” Cody pointed at his chest with his thumb. “I was responsible for a fair share of that Kessler Syndrome wreckage myself.”
He sighed. “The situation in the U.S. went downhill fast when the Congloms got voting rights. I had sworn to protect the U.S. Constitution, not corporate profits. So, I took my medals and bonus pay, resigned my commission and signed on with an orbital salvage crew.
“Tough work, but I was good at it,” Cody continued. “Satellite operations had been my entire military life. I had a good sense of which orbits these unused Mark 22 Azawakhs would end up in after the shooting was over. We pulled these babies on board along with a few choice metric tons of useful materials and precious recyclables.
“The Conglom would have loved to get their hands on these. Heavy weapons are hard to get off Earth. Serious big money. But they couldn’t pay me enough.”
Trix took a sip from her drinking tube, but only enough tepid water to clear the chalky taste from her mouth. “Is that so?”
“Instead, I boosted up to the Moon with my share of the haul, not to make big cash or enhance my personal stock, but to join you. Because we can’t get trapped on Earth and die as a species. Who knows if we’ll make it past the next self-inflicted disaster down there?” Cody waved his gloved hand at the Earth. “The Lunar Republic is the last chance at a free society that is open to immigrants like me.”
The old man knew the right words to say. Trix growled, “Can’t let the Congloms win.”
“Can’t let the Congloms win,” he repeated.
Trix was unsure in places where she had been dead certain before.
In a flat monotone, Cody Hiru said, “Inbound.”
Instantly alert, Trix tracked to the azimuth he transmitted to her display. West. Toward Oasis and to shadows passing in front of a starry background. Her stomach went sickeningly soft at the sight. She raised her gunsight to zoom in on the distant shapes in time to see the first open bombardment of the war. Netwide warnings flashed from the consolidated command on her message stream. Not a drill!
Bulbous assault craft, long-range hoppers from the Conglom, dropped from a high ballistic trajectory over the blacked-out lava tube a few kilometers away. The hoppers were dark blue, she knew, but looked black at this distance, and unmarked. They hung like fat dragons breathing fire on the town below. Missiles fired from Oasis streaked toward the approaching targets. Some missiles left slowly expanding smoke trails and detonated early, defective. Return fire from the Conglom gunships lit the walls of Oasis with staccato explosions, like silent flickering lights at the far end of a tunnel.
Trix imagined Shivankar’s greenhouse at the bottom of the main shaft under a shower of rocks. Shattered. She imagined Shivankar trapped. Asphyxiated.
Trix should have been there with her people, her family, facing the fight directly from their home. Down in the tunnels like before. Not out here waiting for nothing to happen watching from behind her faceplate. Distant and removed. The anxiety of the hours exposed on the surface mingled with the guilt of being safe while others probably died in the first wave and the soul-deep hurt of broken trust. She turned on Cody Hiru to vent her frustration.
The old man had just tilted his body to stare up at the southern sky. The firing control unit blinked hostile red.
Another three hoppers configured as troop carriers had appeared. Her guilt and anxiety vanished. The fight had come to them. Most dangerous threat. She became a charged wire of adrenaline.
Trix shouldered her carbine and focused with her gun camera at the descending assault craft. The range and velocity numbers dropped as they approached. Jets fired and rotated the ships. Landing gear extended fully, talons reaching to clutch the ground. Cargo doors sat wide open with combat-ready mercenaries visible inside. The three Conglom hoppers were coming in for a controlled soft landing, directly into the range of the vulnerable Azawakhs. Just as Special Advisor Hiru had predicted.
Trix whispered, “As long as they don’t know.”
“They know,” Cody answered.
“How can you be sure?”
Cody launched the entire Mk 22 Azawakh battery with a press of his thumb. “Because I told them.”
The Azawakhs leapt out of their pods in rapid-fire grace. A volley of arrows toward the armored flying beasts. The fleeting impression of snub-nosed cylinders, glowing for a second in the fire of their exhaust, was left. The rocket streaks left blue traces in her vision. Blown grit hissed on her faceplate. Metal shavings and plastic bits floated around them. A dozen points of light swirled upward at the invading spacecraft.
Then electromag jamming hit from the lead assault craft. Their omni-voice link turned to static and then squelch silence. All data feeds outside her own suit went blank or flashed last known number. She only heard her own shallow breathing and the whir of her helmet fan. The guided trajectories of some missiles straightened. The hoppers fired engines and juked higher to avoid the disrupted barrage. The enemy’s point-defense guns shot down the closest missiles in sparking wreckage. However, the majority of the Azawakh salvo accelerated, unimpeded and ignored, toward the north pole, nowhere near any intended targets, no change to initial trajectories. Shots thrown away. Shots that might have made it through defenses to the enemy ships. The assault craft had slowed their approach, but they were about to land unopposed.
Trix screamed and raised the gyro carbine on reflex at Cody’s helmet. Tight range wouldn’t get full velocity on the round, but enough to kill. He was a liar and now an admitted traitor. She flicked the safety off. This wasn’t how she expected her last act in this life to happen.
“You told them?!” Her own breath smelled sour as Trix screamed and he couldn’t hear. She hesitated with her finger on the firing stud. This was wrong. She lowered her carbine slightly. He could have eliminated her at any point before now when her back was turned if he really was a traitor. It was easy to die on the Moon. Maybe she didn’t have the right answer.
Cody raised his hands palm out, but he still held the controls for the spent missile battery. Then he pointed behind her.
Wary, Trix keyed her gun camera and kept him in her helmet display as she turned her body to look. She edged to the west and straightened to peer over the rim.
Across the broad flat mare, a swarm of drones rode on jets of compressed gas that kicked up regolith like a cavalry horde on the charge. The low-flying crosses were standard surveillance models from the Conglom, usually posted to debris fields and facility perimeters. Familiar foes to any derb diver. The biomimetics were based on wild-bee neural paths, solitary by nature, but territorial.
These drones had been repurposed into a swarm. The Conglom didn’t do that. Ever. They imported single-use equipment. These had been modified. And the invaders above were waiting for the drones to lead the fight. To clear the defenders of Waygo. She had no idea how these drones were armed or even how many were in the swarm, but they were a clear threat.
Trix whipped her carbine around, braced herself on the lip of their position, and fired aimed shots at the leading drones. A few tumbled, broken, but replacements appeared from the back ranks. The lifted dust obscured her sights. The ground felt like blocks of ice below her elbows and against her thighs as she shifted and fired. The next hit sent one drone spurting into the sky with a pierced gas line.
The prominent X shape of the drone chassis grew more distinct as the swarm grew near. Their spherical payloads behind their camera and controller pods hung like black spider bellies at the intersection of the X. The drones reached the far western edge of the landing area where less dust flew up and their cameras focused as one as they converged.
A few probing shots came from hoppers above. Only light-caliber gyrojets. All their heavy weaponry must have been bombarding Oasis. Cody fired a burst of return fire at the hoppers, an undisciplined fan of reddish streaks into the sky, as Trix concentrated on knocking out drones. She felt an immediate jolt of triumph for each drone she blasted and kept herself from counting the ones following behind. She dropped an empty magazine and reloaded.
Drone carcasses littered the landing pads like black shards of broken glass, but the wave barely slowed. Then a red light glowed behind the single eye of the nearest drones as if they had grown angry.
Now Trix knew how they were armed. Tasers. Very limited range of a few meters, although most likely no longer limited to less-than-lethal currents.
The nearest one reached their position and fired its stinger at her. Two needles, spooling out coiled wire, rocketed out of its fat spider-belly.
Instinctively, Trix raised her left arm to shield herself. The needles sank into her forearm. A strobe flashed. The twisted wires jerked. Sharp, muscle-clenching pain penetrated through the tough outer shell of her suit. Malfunction warnings lit on her display. The reactive fabric of her suit failed near the taser hit. The now unbalanced pressure between her internal atmosphere and the lunar vacuum stiffened her elbow, like her arm was trapped in webbing or numbed with poison.
Trix stood and smashed the attacking drone with the butt of her carbine. The spider belly shattered. Her med warnings flashed in her helmet: heart rate racing and a spike in oxygen usage. The suit warnings alerted her to a possible micrometeor strike, but integrity held. For the moment. She didn’t want to take another taser hit.
More drones dropped into taser range and their eyes glowed warning red.
Trix backed away, firing into the swarm. Walking backward was drilled in as forbidden on the surface. She had no choice. She dropped another empty magazine and struggled with her stiff arm to reload quickly. She stumbled when her heels banged into the power hub. Floating black Xs descended from the landing pad toward them. Their fighting position was about to be overrun.
A blue, white and orange shape bounded down the bridgeway. Scooter zoomed past their position, knocking the low-flying drones to the side. It drove over the nearest fallen ones and ground them under its tires. Shards of skeletal ceramic and metal tubing snapped apart. Scooter spun and braked and lifted its front tires off the ground in a dervish frenzy. Something about the drone behavior had clearly triggered hidden biomimetic subprogramming. The surviving drones fired tasers at Scooter, who shrugged off the sparking wires and grew more agitated with each sting.
Trix regained her balance and fired at the closest one still flying. The gyrojet didn’t strike hard enough to destroy it cleanly. The drone flopped to the surface on its back. The nozzles at the ends of its booms twitched like little claws. It spun on the pad and righted itself before Scooter trampled it into crushed fragments. Trix hurled herself prone at her original firing point, ignoring the growing number of system alerts from her suit.
Another drone cast its stinger at her. Trix rocked to the side and took the hit on her carbine. The barbed needles glanced off and the floppy wires trailed below the drone. She shot it and then found another target.
Cody scrambled to the wall next to her. The optic voice link connected at close visor-to-visor range. “Get forces shifted to Waygo.”
“Let’s go.” Trix reloaded with her good arm.
“I need to man the launcher. I’ve got two shots left.”
“There’s three hoppers!”
“Move out!” Cody commanded.
Trix nearly argued with him. She would have to go to the cargo lock and tie directly into the comm network to avoid the jamming. He would have to delay. She nodded, a useless gesture in a suit, and whistled for Scooter. Also a useless impulse.
Scooter shimmied to untangle a pair of drones that were caught in its tires. It was unaware of her commands, engrossed in its own vengeance against the drones.
Trix jumped out of the hole. Bounding covered ground quickly, but she made herself a visible target. Scooter zipped in front of her when it recognized her. Plumes of dust fountained up nearby—harassing fire from the ships. She climbed onto Scooter’s rear running board, kicking broken bits of drone from beneath her boots. A trace of burning gyro exhaust appeared to her left and a jagged hole suddenly penetrated the cargo bed directly in front of her. She felt the impact shock through the grab bar.
Trix crouched—a stupid reflex—and heard the beep of the optic voice link accepted by Scooter’s controller. “Inside!”
Trix shot one-handed behind her back as fast as she could depress the firing stud. Most of the swarm jetted toward her, the easily identified antagonist for their insect-like brains. She tried to knock down as many of the black drones as possible, to keep them off Cody, to keep them after her. To buy a few more moments.
Scooter leapt ahead, spraying basalt grit from tires. A chunk flew off its left front wheel where another gyrojet round caught it. Scooter wobbled, but compensated, and settled for a periodic loping as it raced to safety. Trix rode the jolting buggy with flexed knees, unable to return fire from the unstable platform.
The assault craft didn’t need the landing pads, but were clearly taking the easy option for a clean touchdown and rapid airlock breach. The electromag jamming abruptly stopped. External signals came back online. Alerts from Cody’s suit and Scooter’s diagnostics filled her display. But nothing from central command. The omni-voice link was clear again. She didn’t need to retreat. She could pass the message now and return to the fight.
“Scooter, halt!”
Scooter came to a skidding stop. Trix held tight with her stiff left arm. She fired at the few drones that still trailed them. “Command, Command. This is Waygo Port. Three hoppers with ground units assaulting Waygo. Need reinforcement ASAP.”
Nothing.
“Command, Command . . .” Trix started to say again. Then she looked up from her gunsight display to observe the scant surroundings.
The slender omni-antenna, their data and voice relay to the rest of the Lunar Republic military, was destroyed. Concentrated gyrojet fire had left hundreds of pock marks in the regolith where the base of the antenna had been. Only the local omni-voice network was active between suits and scooter. No one except Cody would hear her cries for help.
Now the mercenaries shifted fire to the Azawakh launcher. Gyrojet traces lanced in three jumbled streams from the nearing hoppers and converged on Pad Three.
“Launch!” she yelled. Why didn’t Cody fire his last rounds? Was he down? No. He didn’t fire because there were no Azawakhs left to fire, she realized. Trix now saw the scorched and empty missile tubes torn to shreds under streams of enemy rounds. Cody had already launched the entire battery. He never had two more shots. The drones that remained near Pad Three were caught in the massed fire from the mercenaries. She couldn’t see any sign of Cody Hiru. The lying bastard better be digging deeper somehow. He’d better be alive.
Then Trix heard the sideband hiss in her omni-voice link as the targeting radar turned on. The Mk 22 radar, shifted to the adjoining pad, painted the assault craft as they landed. What was this hopeless gesture?
Over the distant mountain ridgeline to the south, near the constellation of Orion, flame trails ignited. A flight of Mk 22 Azawakhs reengaged targets. The missiles’ second-stage warheads hit the invaders like a volley of deadly arrows in rapid succession. Molten metal erupted from the rear of the hoppers, sending hypervelocity shrapnel toward the ramp. The attack ships crumpled into the landing pads in slow motion. Surviving mercenaries leaped out before impact.
Orbital mechanics had been his military trade. Cody Hiru had launched Azawakhs into a low lunar pass from north to south pole! He had gauged the orbital trajectories with minimal instruments and raw intuition well enough to predict a full transit. He sent the vulnerable Azawakhs to catch the Conglom mercenaries from behind.
Trix hoped the stupid missiles don’t think she was a target. Who knew what machines thought? “Scooter, inside!”
She kept firing from the back of the limping Scooter. Screw accuracy. One drone would get hit and spin before dropping into the dust. Then it would spring up in a splash of fine power and spurt toward her again. Her last magazine came up dry. The drones got closer and fired their twisted wire stingers.
Then Trix felt weightless, falling, and they were down the ramp. The chasing drones overshot the below-ground cargo entrance. Trix hopped off Scooter and punched the Emergency button. “Locking the door,” she announced.
She wanted to hear something back in the instant before the retainer bolts fired. Nothing. The massive overhead door slammed shut, barricading out the attackers for the moment. And Cody Hiru if he still survived.
She hesitated before pushing the atmosphere flood. A deeply ingrained fear of wasting oxygen and knowing that it would delay the opening of the overhead hatch. The attackers would have to breach with thermal lances now. That would buy time. But she wouldn’t be able to open it to recover Coby. Time lost. She flooded the chamber without knowing the answer. She could finally move her arm freely as internal and external pressures equalized.
A black cross zipped across the corner of her vision. One drone had managed to follow her inside. It circled the interior of the cargo lock, bumping into the now-closed overhead hatch. A delicate ting-ting of fused ceramic sounded with each strike. A red glow came to its eye as it locked on and descended toward her.
Trix detached her empty carbine and readied it like a club. She eased toward the lock control panels, ready to dash for the personnel hatch.
Scooter spun. Its wheel jammed against the far wall. It readied to pounce, but seemed to hesitate with Trix directly in the path.
The drone’s jets gave out, its reservoirs empty. It flopped uncontrolled to the ramp where it clattered and slid to the bottom. The red eye on the spider belly twitched to target Trix from the ground.
Scooter rolled forward and delicately crushed it beneath a wheel.
Trix plugged directly into the comm network and connected. No static. She dropped onto the open channel. “Command, command. This is Waygo. Need reaction force. Three hoppers with mercs. Cody Hiru caught topside.”
Scooter left the crushed drone and climbed up the ramp. It rocked back and forth on its damaged wheel at the top, nudging the overhead hatch as if it wanted to go back out.
Colonel Shivankar’s calming voice replied, “Roger, Waygo. Help is on the way.”
For a second, Trix felt relief. When the answers are known, questions are no longer asked. Coby had told the Conglom about the Azawakh vulnerability somehow. She had assumed treason. The attackers had also assumed their own knowledge was sufficient, that they understood the risks. Coby took advantage of their arrogance to put outdated, easily defeated weapons onto target. To buy a little more time for desperate people struggling after their own freedom. No one else in Oasis or Derbtown could have done that. She had nearly killed him and only a moment of doubt kept her from losing the fight that had barely begun.
Everything shifted for her. Cody Hiru wasn’t the special operator, the highly trained trigger puller of action movies and tip of the spear in warfighting. He wasn’t what Trix had expected when she had assumed she had all the answers. It didn’t matter that Cody Hiru once served behind a computer. He managed to apply what little the self-proclaimed Lunar Republic had on hand and what he had brought to the fight, without regard for his personal safety in an act of noble heroism for their shared ideals.
Coby Hiru was not a dwarf with strength in swinging a battle axe, but a wizard who worked unimagined magic.
Now she had to find a way to hold against the invaders, if any were left, until reinforcements arrived, so that Cody’s sacrifice could be built into victory. She whistled for Scooter and opened inner airlock door to prepare more surprises for the enemy in the dark tunnels ahead.
***
M. T. Reiten served in the military, with deployments to Bosnia and Afghanistan, and worked as a scientist at a national lab (proving that there is such a thing as too much research for writing science fiction). A Writers of the Future and Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest winner, he has published stories in Analog and DreamForge and several anthologies, including S. M. Stirling’s The Change and, recently, “Higher Ground” in Robosoldiers: Thank You for Your Servos. He practices aikido, makes pizza, and now lives near Washington, DC, with his wonderful wife and daughter. www.mtreiten.com