Luna Marine(96)
“This woman says she’s sending this same message out to everyone on Dr. Alexander’s v-mail address list, hoping someone can help. Since I exchanged some mail with him, I guess I was on the list. Ma’am, I don’t know what I can do, but I do know that the Prof is a good guy, and he’s getting the shit-dipped end of the stick, here!”
“If this is a legal matter, Sergeant, there’s not a lot I can do….”
“Sure, I understand that, ma’am. But it sounds to me like the Prof is having his rights run over by a Mark II Cataphract, y’know? There’s gotta be someone we can tell, someone who can check on this thing, but damn if I know who.”
“Judge Advocate General’s out. Alexander’s not military.” Kaitlin pulled the MD from her PAD. “I’ll keep this, if I may. I might know someone after all.”
“Sure, ma’am. I knew you’d come up with something.”
“I appreciate your confidence. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Anything else?”
“No, ma’am!”
“Dismissed.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am!” He turned on his heel and left, and the relief he felt was like an awakening. Kaitlin Garroway was a lot like her father, he thought. Sharp. Determined. Bulldog-stubborn. And always looking out for her people. When she’d testified at his inquiry, she’d damn near had the board ready to give him a promotion instead of a court-martial for that friendly-fire incident. She was a damned good Marine to have on your side.
And God help you if she had you in her sights.
THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2042
EU Spacecraft Sagittaire
Pacing 2034L, on intercept
vector with Earth
2028 hours GMT
She was not a pretty vessel, with a blunt, cylindrical hab section, a cluster of spherical tanks holding water as reaction mass, and the massive, squat ovoid of the heavily shielded main reactor and plasma-drive inducers. She hung in the shadow of the low-tumbling mountain called 2034L, as the Moon grew slowly larger dead ahead.
Sagittaire had started life as a survey vessel, one of the small fleet of ships, like Laplace, built at the old International Space Station ten years before to serve as a part of the Phaeton Project, searching out, cataloging, and visiting near-Earth asteroids that might one day pose a threat to the mother planet. There was a special irony in the fact that the Sagittaire, outfitted now with an eight-hundred-megajoule gas-pumped laser in a dorsal ball turret, was being used by her UN masters to deliberately divert 2034L into a collision course with Earth.
Colonel Victor Antoine Gallois, formerly of the French Air Force, now a senior officer of the EU Space Force, viewed his orders with a mixture of stoicism and the career military officer’s mistrust of bureaucrats and politicians. His orders, delivered to him sealed hours before his launch from Kourou, had been most specific, devoting three full pages to a discussion—unusual in military orders—of just why his mission must be carried out precisely as specified. It was clear that if he refused them, his career would be over, and another officer would be found to take his place and see that the job was done.
The explanation had been unnecessary. He would carry out his orders. He just hoped the politicians knew what the hell they were doing. He’d read all about dinosaur-killing comets and nuclear winters, and 2034L was a hell of a big rock to drop in anyone’s backyard. This rock wasn’t as big as a dinosaur killer, not by several tens of thousands of megatons…but it was a serious threat to anything as small as a continent.
“Monsieur Capitaine?” Abelard, the ship’s chief electronicist, said, turning from his board. A clipboard with a galley stores manifest drifted by, and he snagged it from the air and slapped it against a Velcro pad on the bulkhead. “We may have a problem.”
“What is it?” He floated closer, snagging the back of Abelard’s seat to see. The radar showed…static. That wasn’t right. “What the devil is that?”
“I would guess, Monsieur Capitaine, that we are being deliberately jammed. Diagnostics indicate our equipment is functioning normally. This interference appeared a few moments ago, from a point source. The way it is expanding, I would have to say it is chaff, probably from a munitions canister of some kind.”
“Ah. And the question is, what is being hidden by the chaff cloud? Have you tried a ladar sweep?”
“Yes, Captain.” Abelard touched a control, and the display switched to a different kind of snow, clumpy and multicolored. “Chaff…and some type of aerosol or powder which scatters the laser beam. Range now 240 kilometers, relative velocity three kilometers per second, in direct approach.”