April 5: A Depth of Understanding (27 page)

"Define 'big'," Tim said skeptically.

"Over a quarter Gigaton."

There was a silent pause. "They are in a low orbit, so I'm only going to be a few hundred kilometers away when that detonates. Is that going to burn out my cameras and cable runs?"

"I'd point any cameras away or it'll burn out the sensor chip. If you can get to them it might be a good idea to unplug any antenna leads you don't need. That's one reason I wanted you to stay grounded to shoot. You obviously have to track them by their radar emissions like you have been. That system may very well be damaged too. If you get hurt bad enough that you can't lift ship safely we
will
rescue you and see to repairs," Jeff promised.

"Crap, how much Gamma are we going to absorb?"

"A little. About like an old fashioned medical x-ray."

"Give me two – three minutes to talk to my crew," Tim asked.

"No problem, standing by."

It was five minutes and Jeff was anxious to start moving his warheads, but when Tim came back he agreed. "They are both willing to do it. You can get the exact performance numbers for our little birds from Dave. I know you deal with him. That should let you assign us an exact attack profile."

"Thank you. I'll be back to you within the hour." Jeff closed the com channel, accessed his command programs and gave the warheads an initial burn command. He'd run the numbers and refine it, but that nudged them on the general vector. He better call Jon and let him know something was happening.

* * *

Sam Bia was sitting thinking. His crew knew it and knew their lives hung on what he decided. He should have reported to Earth already, asking further orders, but he had sent nothing. It was making them nervous. You could only delay so long before that itself would be punished. Samuel had no stomach to massacre a habitat full of civilians. He also had no a desire to go home to finish out his days in a hard labor punishment prison.

His fleet commander had not shared details of his orders and he carried no contingency plans in his safe, but he was pretty sure their mission was the destruction of Home. The decision not to call home was made easier by the fact a six man crew didn't carry a dedicated political officer. And the fact he'd visited his cabin and returned wearing both pistols from the tiny locked arms cabinet.

The fact that none of his five subordinates were demanding to know why he didn't press the attack or ask what he was going to do, suggested there wasn't even a political sleeper, which he knew for certain they slipped into small crews sometimes. He finally decided to speak frankly with the crew, which would seal his fate if it not theirs.

"Comrades," he laughed at himself for automatically using that term. That drew worried looks. "Perhaps crewmates would be better. I am having both an attack of conscience and an attack of critical thinking. I not only do not want to slaughter almost three thousand civilians, I honestly believe that in the long term such action will prove ill advised for our nation and race. Is there any of you who actually
wants
to rush forward and slaughter these people?"

He waited but there was overwhelming silence.

"I've considered what we can do. If we return not having followed orders we will be punished most severely." That at least got nods from the two he could see. "If we press on I suspect we will be destroyed like our three companion ships. Some would say we did the correct thing and at least we'd be remembered as heroes. I'm not feeling terribly heroic."

"Do you propose an alternative?" his XO asked. That was damn near agreeing to conspiracy and treason right there, if he didn't protest such questions.

"If we shape course for Home, but not to attack, China has no other ships of our class. Until and unless they build them, they have no way to come punish us or retrieve the
Ruyi
. I am convinced in my mind Home and the people on the moon are quite capable of enforcing this L1 limit they have set. I would propose we break orbit in about a half hour, start a slow minimum energy transfer to near Home's halo orbit, that won't be mistaken for an attack run and surrender. Offer to yield our weapons to whatever authority will take them and beg to retain our ship as a prize for defecting. Is there anyone of you that can't separate yourselves from China? Well, not
China
. We are unchangeably Chinese in blood and culture, but from the government we suffer at the moment? Do you have family or possessions you can't leave behind for a new life?"

"Ha! You are out of turn, Sam. Don't you know mutiny is supposed to come up from the lower ranks? Hell of a commander and naval historian you are!" his engineer Wong said.

"Well, I guess we know how Wong feels, if he can make a joke of it," Sam allowed.

"I seal my fate too," his com tech decided, "I have only my elderly parents for them to hold hostage. My father has privately counseled me to defect if I had good opportunity, so they already were willing to bear the burden of a traitorous son. I'll defect. If we can keep the ship we will be far better off than most refugees."

"I'm not a big talker," their systems engineer and environmental officer told them. That was an understatement, he could go days without a word unless it was forced out of him. "I'll go."

"You do not know my circumstances," the XO told them. "I married the daughter of a minor party official. She has an appetite for luxury my pay won't cover. She eats up my substance and draws on her father for more. She bore me a son when I'd been gone to the moon base for fourteen months and her father blocks me from getting a divorce. I'll gladly leave the shrew twisting in the wind, looking for a new sucker."

"Damn, I never knew," Sam said.

"It's not a tale of which one may be proud."

"The lack of pride is not at all yours," Sam insisted.

"Thank you."

The lowest rank sailor who heated meals and did the menial cleaning such as filter changing and cleaning the head was left. "This is disturbing. I will admit I never saw such a thing coming. I have been loyal, even when I felt I was not treated entirely fairly. I know there are defects in the state, because there are defects in all of us, but I believe in it. I'd be a rice growing peasant if I hadn't joined the People's Army. Yet here all my superiors, every one, are eager to reject it. How can I stand against all of you? And how would I ever redeem myself if I could make my way home later? They'd want to know why I didn't stop you or somehow stop the ship if I couldn't, as if that is some easy thing and no answer would satisfy them. What am I to do?"

"Hu, you are not a fanatic if you can acknowledge the state has defects. I'm sure the state will have defects where we are going too, like all nations. For the same reason you gave, all of them are made up of people. I'd counsel you that we are all older than you and I think we all shared the same idealism as you when we first entered the service. We'd have never been recruited if we hadn't. I submit that if you can't trust the state to allow you to return, knowing you are totally blameless, that is answer to what you owe it right there. We have all become disillusioned. When you are older like we are, this will appear as a most fortunate opportunity, not a disaster. Do
you
have anything to go back to, besides quite a few more years as a toilet scrubber and filter monkey? Surely you have seen that a farmer's son doesn't get sent for more education and a rise in rank if you are politically unconnected?"

"Well yes, I knew that. It may be hard for you to understand, or believe. But toilet scrubber is still a step up from a dirt grubbing farmer who will never rise above sharing the village TV set and still never be outside the danger of famine like a thousand years ago. Do you know my parents still put a handful of rice in a clay pot every day while things are good and bury it safely against bad times? That is their insurance. At least they are so unimportant I don't think anyone will bother to punish them for my leaving." He paused quite long. "So you may consider that my
yes
answer."

"Let's move smartly then. We've talked so long our burn window is only twelve minutes away. Let's secure for burn. Check all systems and while you take care of that, I'll try to compose a surrender that is clear, but not too groveling."

* * *

"This is
Flash Gordon
, Captain Houston speaking. They didn't come around again! The Chinese ship has either maneuvered significantly or left orbit. What do you intend to do now?"

"I don't see anything to do but stand down and wait for the situation to resolve," Jeff told him. "My weapons are still in a stable orbit. I may have wasted some fuel maneuvering, but they have quite a bit of delta V left. We may be able to do another intercept mission if we need to. Or maybe they got smart and went home. One may hope," he said, heartfelt.

* * *

The slightly radioactive soil on their ramp was pushed to the side and the entry to the tunnel was clear and flat again. After the rovers were parked outside they walked around the tunnel with a hand held counter and found a few hot chunks and swept up a few hot spots with no obvious rock, not even a pebble, but whatever small particle was hot was swept up with the dust and regolith to toss outside. They even found a few small pieces had bounced all the way in past the second rover.

The usual team took the 'A' rover and drove toward Central. The GPS said they were where the road should be, but it was gone. The soil was loose and the rover kind of wallowed. The 'B' rover crew, Katia and Julie stayed behind. They brushed their machine down to remove any hot dirt, before they backed all the way back in. They also rigged a handheld radio in a long cable, as far from their tunnel entry as they had line.

"This is getting pretty hot," Dakota warned Johnson, watching the count rate climb. "I might want to have children someday. With one head," she added after a bit.

"I'll turn back in about ten minutes," he promised. "I want to see if there is a crater. I'm not interested in stopping and having a picnic either. The radiation instrument is mounted outside, So the hull of this Russian rover is cutting off everything but the gamma and some of it. If we were in an American rover, built like a beer can, it would be much hotter."

 They went for another five minutes before he slammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt. They were about sixty meters from a drop off. If the other side was any indication it was steep too. They couldn't drive down it, they'd have tumbled end over end. Sixty meters was even too close on loose soil of unknown depth.

"OK, they did detonate it right on the surface. Grab some pix of that while I move us back." He shifted to reverse and applied the power with uncharacteristic ease. The tracks dug a little in the grooves he'd cut sliding, but gently started moving them back at a walking pace. He added power after they had retreated a good hundred meters and didn't slew the rover around by reversing one track until they were a good two hundred meters from the edge.

"I couldn't see the bottom could you?" he asked.

"No and I'm glad we didn't. If we went that far forward I think we'd have ended up
on
the bottom. Probably upside down, breached and very dead. If the fall didn't kill us I figure it has to be far hotter down there where the fireball melted it, than up here on loose debris."

"It looked to be five or six hundred meters across."

"Five hundred thirty. I checked it with the cannon range finder before we'd backed up too far. Assuming seventy meters to the edge, which was sort of rolled over."

"And soft."

"And scary as hell," Dakota agreed.

"If they have about the same profile as the craters we made with smaller weapons, then the bottom is about two hundred to two fifty meters deep, but there is usually a little mound in the center for some reason. When we shot the rovers from Armstrong the craters were about two hundred fifty meters across and a hundred or a little more deep."

"Your  cannon shells are pretty small. This doesn't seem like it's big enough."

"With nukes, or the equivalent, the destructive effect goes up as the
cube
of the yield. So looking at the amount of dirt moved – it sounds about right. I doubt the Chinese had specialized warheads that can penetrate deep in the ground before they go off. Although if they did the crater might actually be
smaller
."

"You think our people could ride this out?"

"At a kilometer and a half down and fifty laterally? I think there is a very good chance, yes. I'd bet two Solar straight up at even odds that they are OK."

Dakota hoped Heather never heard him reducing her life to wagering odds. She wasn't fond of obsessive gamblers. She had come very close to banning public gambling in her kingdom.

* * *

"The more I know the man the less I like him," Alice complained.

"Is he being obnoxious? Is he harassing you?" Barak asked.

"No! He was horribly self assuming and smug the first week. Then when I wouldn't even sit and eat with him he sort of clued up. It took about another week, but he started acting much more solicitous, polite even. He's actually being
nice
now, but that's even creepier, because I know what he's like from the first week. The Leopard does
not
change its spots in two weeks. He's just smart enough to put on an act and I'm not going to fall for it. There's nothing
nice
about him!"

"I take it you don't think he'd stay nice for a year and a half?"

"No way. If he gets what he wants it won't take another week before he is full of himself again and I have too much self respect to get close to somebody I don't really trust. If I did I'd feel like dirt. He wouldn't understand either. My sister dated a creep just like him and once you appease them then they think they are entitled and can't figure out why should you complain if they start acting all self centered again. It's a big game to him."

"It's a shame they didn't catch this in the psyche profiles." It bothered Barak, but it wasn't a total surprise and certainly not enough to put him off his feed. He chased down the last bit of egg with his toast and finished it up.