Thunder & Lightning Read online

  Thunder & Lightning

  by

  Christopher Nuttall & Leo Champion

  Dedicated to Barb Caffrey,

  A damn fine editor.

  Published by Henchman Press

  Edited by Barb Caffrey

  Oghaldzon created by Tony Jones

  Special thanks to Paul Howard

  Cover by Lydia Kurnia and Worlds Beyond Art

  Thunder & Lightning copyright 2018 Christopher Nuttall and Leo Champion

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Prologue

  It is unwise to summon what you cannot dismiss.

  Neil Gaiman

  There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Fact: the first public demonstration of wireless telegraphy was carried out by Alexander Muirhead and Professor Oliver Lodge in the lecture theatre of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on August 14, 1894.

  Fact: radio waves travel at the speed of light.

  Fact: in 2018, the radio signals will have reached 224 light years into space.

  Fact: there are 33 stars within 12.5 LY of Earth.

  Fact: there are approximately 260,000 stars within 250 LY of Earth.

  Fact: every hour, the radio signals travel an additional 1,079,252,848.8 kilometres from Earth.

  Unknown: who’s listening? And what do they think of us?

  Chapter One: Discovery

  Selene Observatory, Lunar Surface

  The massive dish antennae of the lunar observatory towered above Samra Hussein as she made her way carefully around, with only her suit’s own lights and faint star glow to see by. Here on the far side, the dark side of the moon, you never saw Earth rising, or the Sun’s light reflected. That was why the observatory was there.

  With its scientists, it was shielded by millions of tons of lunar rock from Earth’s endless cacophony of electromagnetic noise; free of any Terrestrial appearance, the far side was the perfect site from which to examine the stars.

  Samra had, as one of the first few hundred children to have been born on the moon, grown up near enough to one of Brightside’s political fault lines that she appreciated her observatory’s neutrality. By international – and now, interplanetary – law it belonged not to any government, faction or corporation, but to the independent International Astronomical Union.

  “Boss, are you all right?” came a signal through her laser communicator. It had flickered from one of the relay points, carefully positioned well away from the ultrasensitive radio equipment. Its own radio interference was a problem the observatory had always taken steps to avoid.

  Samra stepped a little back away from the massive radio dish.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  When she’d taken this post, she’d insisted that all her staff take frequent walks on the lunar surface. That didn’t mean they liked it; some Earth-born in the big colonies refused to go out, even with careful supervision. Her people did as directed, but not all of them were comfortable with their boss coming out here.

  While John was on the line, though, she asked “Is there any update on the supply shipment from Orbit Seven?”

  “None,” the administrator replied, his voice reflecting her own irritation.

  Nearly a hundred and fifty years since mankind had taken its first fumbling steps into space, it was still expensive to bring much up from the surface. Lunar colonists were supplied, for most of their needs, with goods made on the moon or in the zero-gravity factories orbiting Earth. For political reasons, the observatory had to split its purchases across every possible supplier, showing preference to none. It was a tremendous pain; items the observatory could easily obtain from nearby on the moon, instead sometimes had to come all the way from lower earth orbit.

  “Last word,” he went on, “was that they were having production difficulties. We’ll see the supplies in, I quote, around twenty days.”

  Samra sighed as she began to pace toward the observatory’s second dish set. Between dealing with power-seeking bureaucrats and directing astronomers clueless in even the basic facts of her profession, there were times she wondered why she stayed in this post.

  A look up toward the stars – a steady glow of millions of them across the sky – reminded her; where else could you see such sights? As a young adult she’d heard an urban legend that Neil Armstrong, while taking humanity’s first steps upon the moon, had heard the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer. She’d been walking alone on the stark lunar landscape since childhood and had never herself heard the adhan… but this vast specter of silent stars amused her, at times. Perhaps, somewhere amidst them, Allah was still watching over His children.

  “Tell them that if the delivery doesn’t happen within twenty,” she said, “we’ll take our trade elsewhere.”

  That wasn’t quite an empty threat; if she made enough of a fuss, or showed enough gain for the IAU, the bureaucrats would back her up. The problem would be showing enough gain to them.

  The observatory, spread out across nearly two hundred square kilometres across ground near the centre of darkside, was hers… or almost hers. The IAU had appointed her and would someday replace her, but until then she was queen of all she surveyed.

  Not least because the current arrangement, of a lunar-born running the observatory, benefited everyone. Certain internet discussion forums had already raised the question of just who it belonged to; if Karl Bova eventually did manage to put forward his mandate for lunar independence, it would be hard to avoid the fact that the observatory itself was on lunar territory.

  Of course, she thought grimly, that would almost certainly start a war.

  It had been years since the formative events of lunar history; the Lawton Rebellion, the Han Pact, and so on. But as the moon became better-populated and more important to those inhabitants than Earth, it was hard for even an apolitical scientist like Samra to see how the status quo could remain.

  If the Lunar Independence Front ever actually managed to win control of a significant number of lunar colonies… that wasn’t a day she was looking forward to. The moon was like Earth in some ways, but all it took was a leak in your pressure suit to remind you of the differences.

  “Has anything else happened that I should know about?” she asked.

  “No, boss,” John Laud said in his British accent. “Nothing too important.”

  He was Earth-born, from the British Commonwealth itself. Although the British lunar colony of Albion was only five hundred miles from the observatory; several of the installation’s emergency plans relied on Albion’s help. There was also a small military base, in theory present for security against Lawton terrorists. In practice, as everyone knew, it was really there against the day another of the Great Powers launched a land grab.

  “A small set of updates from the LEO tracking system. That’s all.”

  Samra glanced at the display projected in front of her eyes, in the lower part of her field of vision. She still had an hour before she’d start to run out of air, plenty of time to complete the inspection. The Reform Islam practiced by the Caliphate colony where she’d grown up had adopted the principle of ‘Allah helps those who help themselves’. She’d never been very devout, but she understood the lesson. All lunar-born did.

  “Very well,” she said. “Inform me if anything changes.”

&
nbsp; She turned her attention back to the path in front of her. It had been clearly marked out years ago by the original construction crews. Lunar history was filled with tales of people who’d paid with their lives for forgetting they were on what was in fact an extremely hostile world. There were just so many things that could go wrong…

  So she saw only a handful of other workers as she completed her inspection around the vast dish arrays, although there were dozens of small robots active. Farside was oddly oppressive, even to her; most places on the moon always had radio chatter and the internet. Here, radio was banned except for emergencies. The tiniest signal interference, this close to the massively sensitive radio telescopes, would make them convulse in seizures. The IAU would not appreciate the cost of having to repair multibillion-credit equipment.

  Her communicator lit up again, with the icon that meant an urgent call across the laser network the observatory used instead of local radio. It had far, far less bandwidth than any radio network had, but all it needed was voice capability.

  “Yes?” she snapped. “What’s happening now?”

  “Director,” said Tony Jones. Her deputy’s voice was taut and grim. “I think you should come back in. At once.”

  Samra didn’t hesitate. Jones was something of a cold fish, unusual on the moon, but a good worker who knew his business. Angling for her job when she left or was pushed out, he’d probably have handled the matter on his own if he could have. That he was calling her inside meant a very good reason to do so.

  “On my way,” she replied as she headed quickly – few people ran on the moon, but with experience you could walk fast – towards one of the access points. Most of the observatory, like all but the older lunar colonies, was underground. “Have a briefing ready for me as soon as I reach the command centre. Heading there now.”

  Its entire staff numbered less than three hundred, but the builders had dug deep to accommodate them and their supplies, and prepare for possible emergencies. Samra could have hosted, without trouble, ten times as many people as were there. The elevator she rode downwards felt welcoming, but then it always had, and not just in comparison to the stark hostility of the surface. The observatory’s facilities had to appeal to the staff to avoid a high turnover rate; she’d spent too much time dealing with contractors who disliked their facilities or family members resenting the installation’s dedication to pure science.

  At the bottom of the elevator, airlocks hissed and she stepped out. She stripped off her pressure suit; below it she wore a standard lunar-style jumpsuit with soft boots. A tech moved to collect the suit while she headed for the command centre.

  It was a spacious room of terminals, consoles and large screens on the walls, but right now Jones and several others – who should have been at different stations – were gathered with interest around a little-used console on one wall. Had something gone wrong with one of the Bridge Ships, with Message Bearer?

  “Report!” she snapped. “What the hell is going on?”

  Jones looked oddly deflated but said, “I think we’ve just earned our budget for the next decade. Take a look.”

  As Samra went over to the console, Jones hit a button to show her an overview. The Selene Observatory had been given the best deep-space tracking equipment money could buy, which had led to another dispute between the IAU and the Great Powers. The Powers hadn’t liked any international organizations having the ability to look out into deep space.

  There were rumours of secret deep-space bases and testing grounds; a tracking station like the observatory could well manage to follow a craft to its hidden base. The prominence of satellites and probes with similar sensors kept the observatory out of the public eye, because tracking a long fusion burn was easy.

  The image in front of Samra refused to make sense. “Merciful Allah, what the hell is that?”

  Jones looked down at Rebecca Hawthorne, who flushed.

  “Director, I was running a basic overview when the system reported the presence of a fusion light in an unexplored region of space,” she stammered.

  Samra let her speak; ‘unexplored’ didn’t even begin to cover the region Rebecca was talking about.

  “The fusion burn seemed far too large to be creditable, so I ran some checks, and they confirmed the presence of a series of fusion burns well outside the Solar Area, but coming toward us…”

  Rebecca’s voice broke off. Samra felt her blood run cold. Could it be…?

  Jones’ own voice was inhumanly calm as he said, “I ordered a sweep of that region. Collated the data from our own telescopes and the data dumps we get from the other stations in LEO. I had the computers run predictive curves, checked the results against images we’ve recorded over the past few months. We’ve double-checked everything, and…”

  He hit another control. A cold image of deep space materialized on the console screen, hundreds of tiny starlights studded across it. A moment passed, Jones hit another key, and the computer highlighted… easily a hundred lights. Ones that weren’t stars, but something else…

  “Aliens,” Samra breathed.

  “Other than one of the black colonies somehow building that fleet and stockpiling enough Helium-3 to fuel it – and just incidentally, we ran a spectroscopic scan and we can’t identify the mine that fleet’s fuel came from – there is no other explanation,” said Jones. His voice was still cold; inhumanly cold for a time like this. “There is an alien fleet coming to Earth.”

  Samra’s heart was in her chest, her head spinning.

  “Don’t you understand?” She exhaled. “This changes everything!”

  Her deputy gave a snort. “It won’t change a thing. You know how our political overlords think. They’ll try using the aliens as a means to pressure the spacers and the colonies to toe Earth’s line and stay away from independence. A week after the announcement of this makes it out – and that’s if our lords and masters even bother to tell the little people – there’ll be a million soldiers on the moon.”

  “Director,” Rebecca coughed lightly, “I’m not convinced their fusion tech is even similar to ours. At this range the results are far from precise – but it looks like their energy efficiency is far higher than ours. Given the power of their burns, I’m pretty certain they’re somehow achieving far higher fusion rates—” She stopped suddenly.

  Samra rested a dark hand on the technician’s shoulder to calm her. “It’s OK,” she said. “How many others would have seen this?”

  “Given the power of those burns,” Rebecca said, “it’s quite possible that other monitoring stations might have picked them up.”

  There weren’t many sensors pointed in that general direction, but most stations tried to maintain a watch on as much of the sky as they could.

  “The Rockrat stations around Freeport are in a good position to watch from that direction, and they have the sensors to,” she went on. “They’re almost certain to see them within a week, if they haven’t already.”

  “That makes sense,” Samra said. “Tony, we have to inform the IAU before Freeport steals all the credit.”

  “A word,” Jones said. “In your office, ma’am?”

  She allowed him to steer her towards her office, which was large but sparsely-decorated. Two doctorates hung framed among the degrees on her wall.

  “Director – Samra – we have to tell everyone.”

  Samra closed her eyes for a long moment, gathering her thoughts. When she opened them again Jones was pacing back and forth on the office’s smooth rock floor, his pale face flush with excitement. This was a side of the man she’d never seen, and she was intrigued by it.

  “It’s not as if the IAU could keep this a secret for long,” she said. She went to the terminal at her desk and quickly brought up, on the office’s primary wallscreen, a mirror of the terminal’s image showing the lights. “There are at least a hundred craft there, maybe more. And they’re pumping out a lot of energy. If this continues and they get closer, every spacecraft with the crudest det
ectors will see them. And then…”

  “The secret will be out, and too late,” Jones concluded. “And what happens when the Security Council decides that the best way to greet them will be with armed force?”

  “We don’t know what they actually want,” she said. “They must be aware of our existence, but how do we assume they’re friendly?”

  “Interplanetary war seems hard enough,” said Jones dryly. “Interstellar war?”

  “In six months we might learn how hard it is,” Samra said, and scowled at having fallen into the trap of arguing a viewpoint she didn’t really believe. She’d wondered for years whether there was other intelligent life out there, but if there were – they seemed well hidden. A hundred years of endless listening for alien signals had yielded nothing. But surely they wouldn’t be warlike…

  “I told you,” she said with a very slight edge to her voice, “they can’t keep it a secret forever in any case.”

  “Long enough to start a war because they think it’ll give them a political advantage,” said Jones. “Samra, if…”

  She could tell what he was thinking: lunar politics were a powderkeg. The colonists had rebelled before against the governments and corporations that had established them. Some Great Powers had established limited democracies to pacify their colonists; others, like the Chinese, had simply used brute force. Now that a united lunar identity was starting to form across the various colonies, the Lunar Independence Front was gaining real support – and a lot of attention from the Powers in charge of the colonies. The situation was getting to where all it would need to explode was a spark…

  “You have an open mandate to announce any discovery you deem to be of great significance,” Jones reminded her softly. “Announce it; they can hardly blame you for following the procedures they gave you.”

  Samra finally nodded.

  “I’ll send out the bulletin,” she said. “You might want to pretend you don’t know me.”