April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (36 page)

Ted turned back and offered his hands. "Do you want me to repeat the whole thing?"

"No I think it would be diminished by repetition," Heather said. She put her much smaller hands on each side and said,  "I accept your service." The rest of them shocked her by applauding politely. She couldn't even tell who started it.

"Thank you," he said, moving to leave again, but it was different now.

"I'll offer the same deal," Dakota said with her hands out. "I'm not sure I could repeat it word for word."

"He speaks very prettily and dramatically, doesn't he? I'll run the black box recording and print it out for you," Heather chuckled. "I suspect we'll need it again, I take your service too," she affirmed and held the woman's hands still for a moment. This time Ted got to clap.

When Dakota withdrew with Happy to rig her seat Heather sat silent for a moment Johnson looking at her funny. The weird thing was she felt different. She was publicly responsible for these people. Happy was right, ceremonies really did matter.

Chapter 22

The road trains started up again and filed past their ports. Some were rather interesting combinations of living quarters and storage containers. The designers who had developed the modular concept of lunar construction never considered just how easy it made stealing an entire building instead of some of the contents. For a couple at the rear they’d run out of rolling carriages so they were on skis.

"I'd like some advice here," Heather requested. "What are your thoughts on this follow-on group and how they will behave?"

"You remember what Charles said?" Happy reminded them. "They are spread out like somebody knew what they were doing. Maybe somebody that had military experience with armor. My bet is once they heard we could shoot back they opened the separation up as much as they felt comfortable."

"As Ted said, the commander is a control freak. I don't think he would let the rear elements get out of his sight and just relay instructions to them by radio," Dakota offered.

"If I wanted to keep my rovers line of sight I would want the rear not to fall back more than about a kilometer," Heather said. "More than that you'd start losing them in the dips and contours too often."

"You have a cannon and the plain is fairly flat. Couldn't you just sit and wait for them to drive up and then open fire? How could they get close enough to use an RPG on you?" Dakota asked.

"Okay, say I do that," Heather allowed. "I sit in a dip like I did with you guys and wait. If the lead rovers get within a kilometer I open fire, because I don't want to open fire with ten kiloton shells at a few hundred meters. We'd blow ourselves up too. I don't have enough practice to want to use the conventional shells except if we have to approach a rover to check for survivors or to do salvage. If I have six of the nine in sight and manage to shoot them before they can run away I still could have three out there almost two kilometers away. They can run different directions and hide behind rocks and in dips. They can put flankers out on foot to ambush us with the RPGs. There's entirely too much chance one of them will get lucky and bag us instead of the other way around."

Katia spoke up too. "And we have no idea if they have sufficient fuel to return to Armstrong. If they lose us out here they may have no choice but to still follow us back to Central and wait until we are off guard to raid us. If we don't know we'd have to set a permanent guard and watch. They could get in close with the rover and then infiltrate us on foot. Better to make a clean sweep if we can."

"We know approximately where they are," Johnson pointed the plot out on the big screen. "They will have plotted on their maps that they will catch up with the others before they get to our administrative area at Central. Any intercept should be fine as long as they don't have time to disperse into their ranches and dig in."

"But we don't know if anything happened to slow them down. They could have had mechanical problems and stopped for an unknown time." Heather theorized."

"Ma'am?"

"Yes, Dakota?"

"I can't imagine Jack being afraid of us. So I'm pretty sure he'll just follow our tracks. If we'd known he was following we'd have set up an ambush of some sort, but he'd never give us that much credit. Doesn't that make things simpler for you?"

"If that's true, we know where we saw the road trains come over that rise on the map about twenty kilometers away. We can lay a fire mission on them when we see the lead element," Johnson suggested.

"No," Heather said. "We can watch that hill from where we stopped, go ahead and position us back there right in our tracks Johnson, but we watch their lights and wait until the
last
rover has cleared that hill. Then we lay a barrage on them only a few kilometers ahead. That's getting close. I'd rather shoot them over the horizon. But this is much more certain. And we don't waste rounds covering a huge area if they haven't spread out. Questions? Suggestions?"

"The shutters for our ports..." Katia spoke. "If you undog them and swing them down you can prop them up with the lock down bar like an awning. I'd do that and then turn away after you fire. At sixteen kilometers we may still have rocks fall from the blasts and I'd rather take it on the shutters than the glass."

"Sounds like a plan," Heather agreed. "You EV and do that when we stop."

Johnson had taken them on a long loop back into the dip and followed their old tracks right to the spot from which they'd sighted the fleeing rovers before.

"It looks like forty minutes until they hit that hill from our over flight data if they've kept their speed unchanged. That's 03:27:00. I've got a hundred bucks says we'll see their lights before then," Johnson offered.

"You're on," Katia accepted. "No way they didn't stop along the way for something. A full day of riding in a fast rover will beat you half to death."

"Dakota - you want a piece of this?"

"Not me. This Jack can push them pretty hard. If anybody broke down he might just leave them. Won't even surprise me even if they are early."

"When you're through placing bets, I'd like several patterns worked out for firing. If they are still bunched up in a five hundred meter square, or if they are spread out in twice that area," Heather told him.

"Okay, But I'll do a narrow pattern too. If he spreads out I'd bet on him stringing the group out lengthwise. It's harder and it takes practice to keep a bunch of vehicles spaced out in a wide pattern. So I'll do one plan five hundred meters wide and a kilometer long. Do you want them dropped time on target?" he asked.

"Not precisely, but all within thirty seconds say. Just so they don't see a line of fire walking toward them and have time to maneuver."

Outside Katia was folding forward the steel shutter which covered the glass and protected it from micro meteor erosion when they were parked. The bar that folded over and could be locked also could stand as a brace and hold the steel plate horizontal like a big eyelid over the port. She engaged the catch pin into one of the slots cut along the bottom of the brace and wiggled it to make sure it was engaged.

"Looks good, anything else before I cycle in?" she asked.

"No, just do a walk around inspection since you are out there and come back in," Heather instructed. She spun the turret around on top and looked off back behind them with the sight set as wide as it went. The last road train was a good half kilometer away already and she was glad to have them away from her. It amused her to see each train had a single blue light mounted on the rear trailer. That was a mark of how sure they had been they wouldn't be pursued.

She was pretty sure the Americans didn't have anything like counter-battery radar or even an indirect fire weapon, but they could have a ship brought in from Earth orbit and she'd never know. Their own radar was of limited range to do a deep space sweep besides being unable to look over a very close horizon. If they attracted attention firing, at least it shouldn't draw fire on the refugees. Now they just had to wait.

When a tense half hour had passed without much conversation Heather seated her helmet and looked to see Happy had already mounted his. She announced a pump down and closed her faceplate.

"Mark!" Katia and Johnson called suddenly. Heather looked at the screen and there was a dot of light just like they'd seen a few hours ago. She glanced at the screen corner and it said 03:27:02. No way it could be that close. These rovers didn't even have a throttle lock you could set to hold an even speed. On virgin ground it was too tempting to use as your attention could wander with fatigue.

"Two sets of lights next in line," Katia pointed out. Then as they watched there was a single rover to the left and a single to the right, then two more sets of two staggered.

"They're still all running, no stragglers."

"I make out seven hundred meters front to back," Johnson said. "What do you want to do?"

"Lay the short pattern of three by three on them. Match the back of your grid to the rear of their formation. I'm guessing three hundred meter craters so that will put the front runner past the edge of the worst blast effect from thrown dirt. I'm hoping there is enough left of them to gather some intelligence."

"Okay, entering program," Johnson acknowledged, keying something and touching a stylus to the screen. "First impact at 03:34:17, about fifteen kilometers, closer than we wanted but the flight time forced that even with the cannon auto setting for reduced muzzle velocity."

>Kra-chunk< rattle-rattle >Kra-chunk< rattle-rattle, sounded nine times. The empty casings bounced and rolled across their roof before the next round fired. The suspension rebounded once each shot until the cannon sensed it was sitting stable again and fired at about two second intervals.

Johnson wheeled the rover around and pointed the front view ports away from the impact. He pulled forward into the bottom of the dip so the direct line of sight would be hidden. Heather hadn't actually ordered that but let it go since it was what they'd discussed. She dimmed the windows down to 5% transmission. She wasn't sure she needed to, but better safe...

"It doesn't feel like a battle should," Heather told them. "I can't believe we just killed people and it's just falling on them with no way to call it back and we have to wait..."

"Yeah when I shot the missile back at Central we could see it racing away into the sky even though we were ripping across the mare... crap!"

There was a flash behind them that rippled in intensity, but the sharp shadows that leapt away from them behind every pebble on the surface were strange because they started long and as the light got softer and faded through gold and red they grew shorter as the source of the illumination expanded upward behind them. Too late Heather thought she should have had a camera pointed back even if she risked sacrificing it.

In seconds the ground waves traveled under them like taking a stiff truck over a washboard road. The rover actually turned and walked a little, skittish over the shaking ground. Johnson got the driving lights back on and the ports transparent again just in time for a blast of fresh blown regolith to rush past them. The first wave was almost white, then quickly turned grey. It had not started to thin before the hiss of fine particles like sand sounded sliding down their sides with an eerie sound. Finally there were significant impacts of pebbles and rocks, bean size to hand size raining down in a deafening cacophony. When they thought it was easing off and started to relax, a sharp edged chunk the size of a twenty liter water cask landed in front of them and bounced away hard enough to throw pieces up that rattled on their front. It was a good ten minutes before they were confident enough to turn the machine around and start forward.

The landscape was altered. Grooves were drawn through the loose, previously smooth regolith by flying or rolling rocks. More rocks stuck up where they'd fallen than the plain had featured before. The going was not that much slower, but the landscape was not as smooth and harder to drive. The treads rumbled over more small rocks than before.

Johnson kept the speed way down from his usual style without any urging. Several times they came to chunks of fresh sharp rock bigger than their ground clearance they had to avoid. The dust was disturbed but they still could see the tracks of the road trains to follow.

When they saw the rover it was well to one side of the track. Johnson approached cautiously, but from well away they could see it was upside-down with the tracks in the air. As they got closer it was visibly damaged with both ends smashed in and arched in the middle from the whole chassis being bent. It appeared to have been lifted and rolled end over end for about a half kilometer. Happy and Johnson cycled out to examine it and take pictures.

The forward driving ports were empty holes and after making sure there were no ragged edges Johnson crawled in. They could see his flash working inside as he took more pictures. Then he passed some items out to Happy before easing out with obvious caution so as not to snag his suit. They walked back carrying some sort of plastic pallet between them that supported the take.

When they got back both looked grim. The booty was a hard shell laptop that just might be functional since it was a hardened military model. They also had several personal hand comps only one of which was visibly damaged and a carbine style rifle that looked like a H&K variant. There were two standard 10mm military pistols and extra magazines in vacuum safe holsters and webs.

The rest of the salvage was quite a pile of freeze dried meals and coffee. There were a couple plastic jugs of water that were not vacuum rated, but they were frozen solid. They put them in plastic sacks in case they leaked on thawing. Lastly there was a medicine chest, the sort that unlatched from a bulkhead as a unit. The plastic pallet was tossed on the upper deck as it was too big to fit in the lock.

"You're sure nobody was alive?" Heather asked.

Johnson shook his head no. "You'll see in the pix. There was one body hanging in the command seat still strapped in. He has a name tag like Dakota mentioned - Loesher. He already had frost on the inside of his faceplate - pink frost. There was another body loose laying face down. You could see the suit wasn't pressurized so I didn't bother to roll him over. Another body was still strapped in a chair but the pedestal had ripped out of the deck and the chair bounced all around the inside with him strapped in it. I was trying not to look too closely actually. There is enough stuff inside there may have been a fourth person but he's not there. Maybe he flew out an open port when it was flipping end to end."