Chapter 3

“Tempting, but no.”Because the Rook Dweeb Engineer was the one in command.

Killing a superior officer—even a temporary one who might deserve it—was outside even her typical fast-and-loose get-it-done-and-explain-later tactic.

“You’re not even military. What tight orbit do you have on the commander’s personal exhaust port that he did that?”

“Personal exhaust por…”

“Whatever you call an asshole on Earth.”

“We, uh, call it an asshole.”

She just grunted at the foolishness of that, but could feel a slip of a smile trying to form even though she ordered it to stay hidden. The guy wasn’t just cute, he was definitely an engineer through and through. They always had to understand everything as they went along. RDMs learned to make it up as they went.

“I think,” he seemed to be inspecting the ceiling. His hair shifted so lightly and easily. If she had hair like that, she might wear it long—even if it was blond. “It’s because the required methods of success are extremely specific. He wanted to make sure that you didn’t try to countermand them. There’s only one way in.”

She didn’t like his mindreading trick either. Telepathy was still all debris-field, but it unnerved her anyway.

“Target?” she snarled at the eye-dent chip for lack of a better victim. Syra hoped that her on-board comp caught that she was yelling at the chip and not her. Star—technically called Strategic-Tactical Analysis and Response computer by unimaginative people like engineers who actually called her Starc—got sulky when Syra yelled at her. But Syra’d be spaced before she’d ask some civilian “commander” for anything.

In answer, a hologram unfolded between them. It built layer by layer from the inside, rather than simply flashing up. The sheer volume of data that implied was a little humbling. Normally Star would be able to interpret it in a single gestalt.

Once the complexities of the inner structure expanded, the outer structure began taking shape. It wasn’t just the complexity, it was the sheer scale of it.

Something was definitely wrong with her suit. The recirc and process layer fit her like a second skin. In many ways it was a second skin: controlling temperature, moisture, and chemical balance into a steady state from inside the habitat to floating in open space. It also fed biometrics alerts. If her helmet was on, they’d probably be flashing her blind. Heart palpitations. Cold sweat on her palms and forehead. If her hands ever shook, they’d be shaking.

“I did not sign up to die,” she managed to keep her voice steady.

“Me either.”

“But…” she could only point.

“The Mirror Moon, as the India Beam reflector is colloquially called, is held in a geostationary orbit at an altitude of only five hundred kilometers.” The fuel expenditure to do that had always been mind warping. Geostationary was another thirty-five thousand klicks up the grav well.

“It’s too well protected, we’ve never been able to destroy it.” Syra could only glare at the thing that made every ship’s life pure hell.

It had to be the best offense system ever devised—it was the upper point of the India Particle Beam. No one, in or out of their right mind, entered that sector of space, or any sector for a long way around.

Most economies had launched into space as the Earth became less and less viable as a biome. The Brits had built a whole chain of habitat cans at Lagrange 2 above the Lunar Farside. They might be in the “asshole of space” but it was one of the best strategic locales in all Earth orbit—nothing done from Earth, by India or anyone else, could reach them here behind the moon. Once Canmerica West had abruptly collapsed as thoroughly as East, the remaining military forces had fought their way into orbit. Delta Force had joined the Royal Marines and the Night Stalkers had just kept doing what they did—delivering Special Operations teams any time, any where…and getting their asses back out afterward.

The Aussies and Kiwis had stayed on the surface, but had come up with the best defense system ever. The Aussies had thrown up a force dome that nothing penetrated. Certainly nothing human-made. The eggheads had determined that fish, waves, and wind went through, but not even a guy in a rowboat made it in. Just a flash and all that was left was a puff of molecular components. Even seeing it, no one could figure how it had been done. One day, after a lot of constant begging by the Kiwis, the dome had suddenly extended to encompass New Zealand. Now that they’d truly gone Down Under, none of DUs were saying how it worked. They might as well not be on the face of the Earth any longer.

India, confronted with how to move its five billion into space with almost no resources, had come up with a different solution for national security. They had launched a vast reflector into space—without anyone quite knowing what they were up to. Solar power harvesting didn’t need such a device anymore, but with the Indian way of thinking, it was impossible to tell what they were up to until it was too late.

India had explained the kilometer-wide reflector’s purpose on a Thursday morning with a clear demonstration. They unleashed a massive particle beam that had punched upward from an underground complex deep in the peaks and ridges of the Western Ghats.

From its height in orbit, the mirror had redirected the beam back down to the surface at an angle. With a strategic horizon of twenty-five hundred kilometers at the mirror’s altitude, the Indians had laid down a thousand kilometers of scorched earth in every direction past their borders. The Saudis, Iranians, Afghanis, and especially the Pakistanis weren’t going to bother anyone ever again. The Nepalese, and a wide swath from Bangladesh to Myanmar weren’t going to say much ever again either.

That single, massive energy expenditure had caused a minor ice age across the Ghats and the terawatts of heat retransferred had finally tipped the balance on the polar ice, drowning all of India’s coastal cities from Mumbai to Calcutta as Antarctica and Greenland mostly disappeared beneath the rising ocean. Between the descending ice and the catastrophic ocean rise, there were now closer to two billion Indians rather than five. Up in orbit, there was much debate about whether or not that might have been part of the plan—down on Earth, no one was saying.

But still the India Particle Beam and the IPB Reflector (the Mirror Moon) dominated the entire hemisphere. And while even the Indians weren’t likely to fire off another major burst, they weren’t above minor bursts to make sure no flights entered most of the Earth’s Eastern hemisphere.

Syra finally absorbed the implications of the mission. Without the Mirror Moon, the particle beam’s effective reach would shrink to a narrow cone of space little bigger than India itself. For those still on Earth, it wouldn’t merely be a boon to navigation, it was a matter of survival to get off the surface.

“You can do that? Destroy the Mirror Moon?” Not many people awed her. Colonel Deeton was one, though she’d never let him know that. But if the Roodee could pull that off, Lucius Markham could be making a fast jump into that category.

But he shook his head.

“What? Then what are we doing here?”

“Where’s the fun in destroying it when we can steal it?”

“Steal it?” Syra just shook her head. What was wrong with this guy? “I get that your name means light, but…well…damn, Lucius. And don’t forget all of the control systems on the back of that thing; they mass way more than the mirror. Where are you going to hide a kilometer-across mirror?”

“That’s for me to know and them to never find out. They’ll never see it again where we’re headed.” Then he smiled.

She knew that smile. It was the same one she saw in a mirror just before a mission.

He might be a Rook Dweeb Engineer, but he was her kind of Roodee.

She released the computer. She didn’t have to tell Star anything. Star had long since learned that when Syra released the controls, it meant “Go. Now.”

They went. And she wondered what else the RDE wasn’t so dweeby about.