It was a particularly rugged and forbidding stretch of terrain, heavily cratered and broken. The only flat area at all was a flattened oval that stood out as much darker than the surrounding highlands, a large, deep bowl of a crater with an off-center central peak and steep walls.
“This is the crater Tsiolkovsky,” Avery told them. “As you can see, it’s one of the very few flat places on the entire Lunar farside. The near side is characterized by the flat-plain maria, with some highlands. On the farside, there are no true maria at all, except for the Mare Moscoviense, farther north, and the Mare Ingenii to the southeast, and those, properly speaking, are just large craters with lava-plain floors, a little larger, a little less steep than Tsiolkovsky, here. On the whole farside, there are no seas at all even as large as the Mare Crisium. Very rugged territory. Very hard to traverse on the ground.
“The crater Tsiolkovsky was originally chosen as the primary site for the joint US—Russian SETI radio telescope project back in the ’20s. The Mars landings and the discovery of alien artifacts at Cydonia resulted in the funding for the project being cut. After all, if we had an actual alien civilization to study, even a dead one, we wouldn’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an antenna to listen in on their equivalent of Monday Night Football.”
Polite chuckles rose from the audience. Avery smiled and continued. “In any case, the facility was mothballed and came under UN control in 2036. Since the beginning of the war, we’ve known they were up to something back there, but intelligence has been damned hard to come by. This series of intel photos, unfortunately, is almost two years old. We have nothing more recent, and attempts to send recon spacecraft around the Lunar farside have all met with disaster.”
He touched a key, and the photo on the screen expanded sharply, zooming in until the oblong, dark gray plain of Tsiolkovsky filled the screen. The shot was oblique, taken from the north at an altitude of under one hundred kilometers; the three-dimensional nature of the terrain was plainly visible, with the crater clearly a deep, steep-sided bowl, with the central peak a prominent cluster of smoothly rounded mountains closer to the north rim than to the south. A cluster of lights was just visible in the shadows at the base of the central peak.
“Those lights,” Avery went on, “are at the site of the old SETI base. We believe the UN has simply added to the facilities there. The amount of space transport traffic we’ve tracked going around the back side of the Moon suggests they’ve expanded the port facilities there. They’ve probably built containment tanks of some sort for water hauled in from the Lunar south pole. They probably also have a large nuclear reactor. The creation of antimatter, I needn’t remind you all, requires a very large expenditure of energy, so we expect a small fusion plant on-site, at the very least.”
The scene expanded again, this time zooming in on the central peak. The lights at the base were more numerous now and seemed to sketch out short lines and geometric figures. The base, obviously, was a big one. At the rounded top of the highest mountain, a slender silver tower extended high into space. It would have been almost impossible to see if not for the telltale shadow it cast, a long, black scratch across the sunlit mountaintop.
“That tower was part of the original SETI project. The idea was to raise the tower as the focus for incoming signals. A thin mesh of very fine wires would have extended from the mast clear to the crater rim, kind of like the old RT built in a round valley at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico. That would have resulted in a radio telescope dish 185 kilometers across, big enough to eavesdrop on a private, short-range radio conversation clear across the galaxy.
“What we believe the UN has done is fit that central mast, which was already in place, as a transmitter instead of as a receiver. Easy enough to do, technically. In 1974, scientists used the radio telescope at Arecibo to send a symbolic radio message into space. The UN techies have probably done the same sort of thing, setting it up as a powerful radar station.
“Somewhere in this crater, the UN has also erected a powerful weapon designed to fire bursts of antimatter…specifically, positrons. Antielectrons. Such a burst destroyed a recon Sparrowhawk last April, at a range of some tens of thousands of kilometers. We think, but don’t know, that they would have constructed their weapon somewhere at the top of the central peak, to give it a good field of fire, without raising the horizon by firing out of the bottom of this bowl. It’s also possible, of course, that the weapon is sited somewhere along the crater rim.
“Somewhere inside the crater, we don’t know where, the UN has assembled some sort of shipfitting or ship-building complex and is busily working on their version of our Ranger, an antimatter-powered spacecraft of tremendous range, power, and maneuverability. We believe, but don’t know, that this spacecraft is a heavily modified Dauphin-class transport.” A diagram and accompanying photograph appeared in windows inset over the view of Tsiolkovsky, showing a black, diamond-shaped craft, streamlined for atmospheric flight. “We believe her to be the Millénium, launched early this year from Kourou, the ship some of you reported seeing at Picard. Also, fragmentary reports from the Army expedition at the Lunar south pole suggests that she was there as well, though this has not been confirmed. Intelligence believes that the Millénium is being refitted with both an antimatter drive and an antielectron cannon. It is possible—though we cannot count on this—that they have only one antimatter cannon, which was set up on the ground at Tsiolkovsky in April but is now being mounted, or else has been mounted already, aboard the ship.”