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  Surrounding most of the dots was a dashed red circle. Neeta knew that anything within the circle was aiming directly for Earth.

  While Neeta stared at the screen, she asked, “How many targets are in the red zone, and what’s the smallest object size in the survey?”

  Next to where Neeta was standing, one engineer responded, “There are 13,517 objects in the survey with a minimum resolution of fifty feet. They have an average density of 3,000 kilograms per cubic meter.”

  Neeta recalled that the density implied stony objects, which are more prone to breaking up in the atmosphere. She smirked at the lunacy of her even caring about the density. It was like asking whether you wanted to be beaten with a wooden bat or a metal one. Either of them was liable to kill you.

  She walked closer to the screen and pointed at some of the larger dots. “So, tell me, what’s the biggest bloke in the bunch?”

  “Doctor Patel, we couldn’t resolve all of the individual sizes in the dense cluster of objects at the center, but we’ve not yet found anything over one-kilometer wide in the first wave.”

  Neeta took a step back and pondered their problem for a moment. “Show me where the biggest ones are, let’s say 500 meters and larger, mask the rest away.”

  There were only about a dozen or so, mostly clustered in the center. “Good,” she whispered to herself, “we might be able to do something useful.”

  Then she raised her voice. “Someone tell me what the damage profile looks like for a fifty-meter stony asteroid impacting us at a forty-five-degree angle and a thirty-five kilometer per second velocity prior to hitting our atmosphere.”

  Neeta listened to several of the engineers type, and one asked, “Water impact or land?”

  “Let’s do both, assume water depth of 4000 meters.”

  One of the engineers behind her reported, “Doctor Patel, a fifty-meter-wide stony asteroid with that approach angle and velocity will likely begin to break up at about 30,000 feet. I would not anticipate a crater, but there may be a heavy shock wave. Some structural damage to wood-frame houses is likely. In a water impact, I wouldn’t expect a tsunami or any major damage to speak of.”

  Neeta panned her gaze across the room. “Is that confirmed?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” announced an engineer on the other side of the room announced. “I get roughly the same figures.”

  “What about a one-hundred-meter stony object with the same parameters?” Neeta asked.

  A few seconds passed and another voice reported, “That object will likely shatter high in the atmosphere, approximately 200,000 feet up, but the blast will be gigantic. Nearly 230 megatons in the air, and on ground impact, it will be the equivalent of 32 megatons. The blast will devastate everything in a mile and a half radius. Over water, there’s a chance of a minimal tsunami, but no higher than eight feet.”

  “I get the same figures,” another voice confirmed.

  With determination flowing through her, Neeta snapped her fingers to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, folks, this is what we’re doing. Bring the DefenseNet lasers online. We’re going to start targeting the biggest rocks, but not for a center of mass hit. This is like billiards. We target the edge of these monsters, it won’t do any substantial damage, but the sudden heating and explosion along their inside edge will push these things outward. And just like a properly hit cue ball, it will curve the way we want to.

  If we’re lucky, we may knock a lot of the smaller debris out of the red zone as well.”

  Neeta gazed around the room, intentionally making eye contact with each and every person. “You all know what’s happened and how our timelines are unexpectedly shifted around. This can buy us the time we need, so each of you is holding the fate of the world in the palm of your hand. Let’s not screw this up, folks. Are we clear on the importance of what we’re about to do?”

  “Yes!” All of the voices rang out.

  “Fine, let’s get the DefenseNet laser synchronizing computer online. We’ll be giving some of these things full-blast doses of what we’ve got. I doubt any observatories will see the effect of the lasers firing, but just in case anyone sees anything, I’ll let the Department of Defense know that some fireworks are about to start.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Gripping the belt strapped across his shoulder, Burt grimaced as the shuttle shuddered with the thrusters firing to slow their descent to the lunar surface. Surprisingly, his nausea settled slightly as the deceleration pressed him against his seat. Never having experienced zero gravity for any length of time, the whole trip to the Moon had unsettled him.

  He glanced at the fifty soldiers packed into the passenger compartment with him. None of them seemed to be disturbed by the rattling of the shuttle. In fact, some were still asleep, despite being strapped tightly into their seats.

  The comms officer sitting to Burt’s left tapped his shoulder and handed him something that looked like a tablet PC with an oversized antenna sticking out its side. “Doctor Radcliffe, we just received a security alert you should probably know about.”

  Burt studied the rugged tablet and tapped on the alert flashing on the screen.

  *** Security Alert ***

  ----------------------------------------------------------

  Intercepted transmission dated: 19 Nov 2066

  Timestamp: 13:53 GMT

  “Praise to you, my brother. May God bless you and your faith in Him. As has been prophesied, Armageddon is upon us.

  It is only through God’s design that the savior can be brought forth, and those working in your midst are interfering with His plan.

  It is time.

  Do what is necessary and you will be marked as one of the righteous in God’s eyes.

  Praise God and may he guide your hand in His mission.

  - BR”

  Burt glanced at the time displayed on a nearby bulkhead, and sighed—the message had just been sent. His stomach gurgled and the bile rose up in his throat as he handed the tablet PC back to the comms officer.

  The shuttle rocked as the ship made contact with the lunar surface and the lights flickered in the cabin.

  With a hard swallow, Burt gathered his resolve, unbuckled from his seat, turned to the captain sitting to his right, and said, “We have to hurry, the shit’s about to hit the fan.”

  ###

  “Are you Jeff Hostetler?” Burt asked the gray-haired man who stared worriedly as heavily-armed soldiers streamed through the airlock and began filling the Moon base’s transit area.

  “Yes, I’m Jeff Hostetler, Chief of Operations for Moon Base Crockett as well as the Director of the Moon-mining operations.” The man panned his gaze across the large room filling with soldiers and asked, “What’s going on? First thing I know is that I get an alert from the head of security for the ISF that I’m to expect the arrival of soldiers, and I’m not supposed to say anything to anyone.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s on me to explain,” said Burt, “and I’ll be honest with you. There’s reason to believe that the Moon base may have taken on some folks that have an interest in destroying the base, so instead of trying to figure it out and giving them any heads up, the president sent these men to perform a clean sweep of the entire site.”

  Just as Jeff was about to open his mouth, a soldier approached and addressed Burt, “Doctor Radcliffe, we’ve got the maps for the base. If you’re okay with it, I’ll keep some soldiers within the transit area to coordinate off-loading, and I’ll begin sending the rest out to sweep from the far ends of the base and then back to this transit area. As we begin gathering the civilians, we’ll offload them in the shuttles lined up behind us and continue the sweep through the rest of the site.”

  Jeff leaned to the side and looked out the loading bay portal. His eyes widened and he pointed to the line of shuttles approaching. “You’re evacuating everyone?”

  Burt clapped his hand on the captain’s shoulder and nodded. “Go ahead, Captain P
eron. I’m going to take Mister Hostetler with me to help figure out where some of the things are that I need to mess with.”

  “Roger that.” The Captain nodded curtly, turned, and made a circular motion in the air with his hand. Almost immediately several of the company’s lieutenants appeared in front of him. He singled out one of the lieutenants and ordered, “Peters, your platoon goes wherever Doctor Radcliffe goes. I don’t care if he goes to the head, you clear the area and make sure there isn’t even a roll of toilet paper out of place. It’s on all of us that nothing happens to him, and that order comes from the top.” He turned to the rest of his lieutenants and said, “The rest of you, gather your soldiers and initiate a clean sweep in all directions. Anyone you find comes back here for evac, no side trips. You got that?”

  All of the captain’s officers barked, “Sir, yes sir!” and with a quick dismissal, the lieutenants began barking orders. For a few moments, the transit area became a flurry of activity as the troops raced in four separate directions.

  The Captain turned to Burt and hitched his thumb toward the lieutenant, who still stood by his side. “Lieutenant Peters will lead your escort. As you heard, General Keane advised that the soldiers sweep the area ahead of you as a precaution. Also, after everyone is evac’d, we’ll be taking our pressure suits out and doing a survey of the outside of the Moon base as well as the mining interests. We need to be sure that this place is cleared inside and out.”

  “Thanks, Captain.” Burt picked up a suitcase he’d brought with him and turned to the Moon base’s director. “I’ll need access to where the signals from the satellite dishes come into the main complex, and also I need to get access to the administrator terminals for the site’s primary server.”

  The Lieutenant pulled out a map and showed it to Jeff. “Sir, can you show me on the map where we’re going?”

  “The satellite feeds come in through the signal room, right here.” The Director pointed at one of the rooms on the map and then traced his finger to another room. “And the main terminal complex where Doctor Radcliffe asked to go is there.”

  The Lieutenant motioned to two of his sergeants, pointed at the map, and ordered, “Clear those locations and radio back. Go.”

  The sergeants barked orders to their squad and twenty soldiers raced toward their objective, while the Lieutenant motioned toward the hallway the soldiers had sped through. “Let’s take a slow walk toward the objective, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get an a-okay from them before we get there.”

  ###

  Kneeling in what looked like a rat’s nest of network wires, Burt found what he believed to be the communication uplink cables and plugged them into his debugging PC. With a borrowed military-grade satellite phone, he punched in Neeta’s number and waited for a connection.

  “Hello?” Neeta’s voice broadcast through the static-filled connection. Burt could tell by her voice that she was annoyed. “Who is this and why the hell are you calling at three in the morning?”

  “I’m sorry, Neeta. I wasn’t paying attention to the local time.” Burt chuckled.

  “Oh, Burt, it’s you.” The tone of her voice softened. “You’re on the Moon now, right? What can I do for you?”

  “Neeta, I’m about to put signal monitors on everything coming into the computer system here, but I need to make sure I’ve got the right link. Can you do a test ping of the Moon base’s computer? Also, can you tell me what the IP address is that you’ll be coming in from?”

  “Sure, one second.”

  The muffled sound of a door opening and closing was soon followed by someone in the room greeting Neeta.

  Burt activated his packet tracing software and began monitoring the datagrams coming through the satellite connection.

  “Burt, I’m logging in now.

  “Okay, I’ve got my workstation’s IPv6 address. I sent it via an SMS message to your phone. I’m now sending a ping to Moon Base Crockett’s server.”

  Burt’s phone vibrated as he received her message. He glanced at the text and smiled as Neeta’s IP address also arrived in one of the Moon base’s network routing packets, confirming that he had the right cable.

  “I see your ping. I’m about to cut remote access to this site and put up a status portal instead. That way, people can see if things are still okay up here, but they won’t be able to send denial-of-service attacks or have any other direct interaction with the onsite control systems.” As Burt adjusted a variety of parameters on the network filter driver, saved the changes, and restarted the network filter service, this all began to feel very familiar. “It’s like riding a bike, I suppose,” he muttered to himself.

  “Neeta, if what I did works, the filter driver on this machine shouldn’t forward any incoming network packets to the main server. I’ll setup a status portal, but can you try a ping first and then see if you can remotely connect to the site’s server?”

  Burt heard the sound of typing across the static-filled connection. “Sending a ping now.... Okay, the ping looked good. Now trying to connect to the server. Wow, it’s taking longer than I’d expect it to ... nope, I just got a timeout error. Whatever you did seems to be working.”

  A warm feeling of satisfaction flushed through Burt. “I suppose I still know how to twiddle the bits here and there. Thanks, Neeta. How’s the debris survey going? Are we going to be able to buy ourselves any time?”

  “It’s going well, and I’m hoping to buy us some time, but I can’t be sure yet. So far, we’ve sorted through the first cloud of junk heading towards us and we’ve managed to identify the critical-sized objects. I had the idea to try to use the DefenseNet lasers to nudge some of the big guys sitting in the center of the cloud outwards and try to create an empty pocket in the middle.

  “If things go as planned, it could buy us a week or two as stuff flies past us in all directions. We shouldn’t get hit by anything substantial. I’ve been up for thirty-six hours straight, watching and waiting. The center rocks are starting to move, so it’s beginning to work, but I’ll feel better when I see more. It’s really dusty in the center of that cloud.”

  “That’s good to hear. Keep me apprised of anything new. I know how you are, so try not to run yourself too ragged. Get some sleep.”

  With the sound of a barely stifled yawn, Neeta replied, “I’ll be fine. You just take care of yourself. Okay?”

  “Don’t worry, I have a few more things that I need to do here and I’ll be heading back. Good night.”

  Burt hung up and returned the phone to the Lieutenant. As he began packing some of his equipment back into its case, he glanced over his shoulder at the Moon base’s director and said, “I’ll need access to the primary server’s terminal. There are a few things that need to be locked down.”

  ###

  Having spent the last four hours in the Moon base’s control room, Burt managed to finally locate and download a private copy of the server’s boot firmware so he could edit some changes into it. It had been years since he’d rolled his sleeves up and worked on the code responsible for platform initialization, but once he started to trace through the code, it all came back to him.

  “Doctor Radcliffe,” the lieutenant said softly, and crouched next to Burt. “All the civilians, including Mister Hostetler, are now en route to Cape Canaveral. We haven’t found anything suspicious yet.” He held up a remote video monitor and noted, “We have six squads now walking outside the base and two near the mining operations looking for anything out of the ordinary. Would you like to get a view from each of the sergeant’s helmet cams?”

  Burt glanced at the handheld screen, which broadcast eight separate video images, each image hovering above the device. “Sure, is there any audio?”

  The soldier had just laid the device on the table next to the open chassis of the base’s primary server when another soldier’s voice barked through the remote viewer, “Listen up. Just like back home, do your five and twenty-fives as we walk the area. We don’
t know what we’re dealing with, and remember–this is space. A flesh wound up here can be fatal.”

  Burt asked, “What’s a five and twenty-five?”

  “Sir, that’s when a soldier scans the area five and twenty-five meters away. The reason for that is if you’re traveling in an armored vehicle, an explosive inside the five-meter radius can take you out, even with armor around you. If you’re walking around, then the kill zone is typically anything within twenty-five meters. To be frank, I’ve never done a training mission in space, so I’m not an expert on how some of the standard procedures change up here.” The lieutenant pointed at the laptop that Burt was busily editing code on and asked, “Sir, I don’t want to pry, but I’m dying to ask ... are you the same Doctor Radcliffe that received the Turing Award for Fundamental Advancement in Microprocessor Design and Artificial Intelligence in 2055?”

  A sense of surprise mixed with amusement filled Burt as he slowly turned to the soldier and stared at the rough-looking man in full battle gear. Burt gave the soldier a lop-sided smile. “How in the world could you possibly know about that, Lieutenant Peters?”

  The lieutenant’s eyes widened, and he spoke with a reverent tone, “Oh, sir, I’m sorry. It’s just that I got my masters in computer science and I was following your work at the time. I just thought it was amazing what you’d done with your AI and CPU designs, and how you integrated the two together.” Suddenly the soldier seemed embarrassed and backed away. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to distract you.”

  Burt motioned the man closer. “Don’t be silly, I’ll walk you through some of what I’m doing here.” He pointed at the hardware initialization code he was editing and said, “One of the things I’m doing is modifying the platform’s initialization routines so that anyone who wants to access or change the settings of the server needs to go through a biometric scan to confirm identity.”

  The soldier nodded. “So you’re adding physical presence detection. That way only someone who is at the console can make the change, right?”