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the Kalisun Initiative

The Kalisun Initiative

The KaliSun Initiative is a science fiction series starting in the near future and spanning decades. It’s a mixture of short stories and novels that explore the KaliSun Initiative’s efforts to colonize space against the backdrop of a cold war between the United States and China, industrial espionage, secret research programs, and the absolute danger of space. The challenges associated with this push for the stars lay bare the mortal peril to those involved, forcing them to answer a dark question. What cost are they willing to pay to shape their destiny?


The Kalisun Initiative Novels Timeline

  1. 20 BFF
  2. 10 BFF
  3. 7 BFF
  4. 6 BFF
  5. 5 BFF
  6. 8 BFF
  7. First Flight
  8. 1 AFF
  9. 1+ AFF
  10. 5 AFF
  11. 10 AFF
  12. 15 AFF
  13. 16 AFF

  1. The Kalisun Initiative

    20 years before FF

    The Kalisun Initiative is formed by a consortium of private companies, hedge funds and billionaires pooling their resources together in a major push to colonize the solar system.

  2. The war between the United States and China

    10 years before FF

    The war in the Korean Peninsula and South China Sea saw extensive conventional combat that resulted in heavy losses on both sides and ended with a limited nuclear exchange. Horrified, the International community forced a peace treaty on the US and Chinese. Their militaries were substantially downsized, resulting in thousands of battle hardened soldiers being disbanded into civilian life.

  3. The First SARine

    7 years before FF

    The weakened United States struggled to retain order for its far flung allies as hostile forces the world over attempted to take advantage of the situation.

  4. Going Viral

    6 years before FF

    Dr. Kapple's research leads to a near life experience for Martin Knudsen.

  5. On a Rock in a Hard Place

    5 years before FF

    The Kalisun Initiative abruptly sent ships from their Moon Based Training Center out to Saturn and began construction of an extensive base on Saturn's moon Phoebe.

  6. The War in Africa

    8 years before FF

    Islamic Militants saw the US military stretched thin and made a major push to turn the east coast of Africa into a new Caliphate stretching from Somalia to South Africa.

  7. The Kalisun Initiative First Flight

    Year 0: FIRST FLIGHT

    The first experimental flight of a new KSI ship occurs. Over three days the course of Human History abruptly changes.

  8. The Price of Progress

    1 year after FF

    Fallout from the First Flight continues, old tensions boil over and new enemies rise from the shadows

  9. War rages through the solar system

    1 year after FF

    War rages through the solar system as different factions assert themselves. In danger of being overwhelmed, KSI settles independent miners and mercenaries around the solar system providing them with equipment and weapons.

  10. Marin's Last Stand

    5 years after FF

    Eugene "The Marine" Marin and his company of Space Marines board a hostile ship and try to capture it. During combat, the ship vanishes without a trace.

  11. Superior

    10 years after FF

    A new base is built and the Kalisun Initiative expands its influence, enabling it to once again go on the offensive.

  12. Heavy Raider

    15 years after FF

    The heavy raider "Eugene Marin" strikes deep into enemy territory and makes an unexpected discovery.

  13. Lost and Found

    16 years after FF

    Joe goes on his most important Search and Rescue mission yet.

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The Kalisun Initiative

A misjudgement between super powers on the Korean Peninsula led to a devastating war between the United States and China. The conventional forces fought themselves to a standstill, leaving the United States Pacific Fleet in ruins and the Chinese Army on the verge of taking the Korean Peninsula and threatening Japan.

To check their advance, the United States launched a brazen strike on the Three Gorges dam, destroying it and releasing a massive flood which devastated the Chinese logistics and population centers. In retaliation, they fired a limited set of ICBMs at the United States, destroying Portland. The United Nations held an Emergency Session demanding all parties cease fire immediately. With neither side capable of defeating the other without another nuclear exchange, an uneasy ceasefire was agreed too.

The World, led by the Russians on the UN Security Council, demanded the warring factions disarm, imposing a treaty that significantly limited the size of their armies and reduced their nuclear forces. Reluctantly they agreed; in public.

Secretively they both began developing technology to take the fight to the next battleground, in space. The Chinese through a series of bases on the Moon disguised as technology demonstrations. The Americans by funding a private Corporation called the Kalisun Initiative to train a new space force, to take the high ground and defeat the Chinese once and for all.

This new cold war had unintended consequences.

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The Kalisun Initiative: Chapter 37

×

Jacobs leaned forward in his command seat, studying the data feed from the top deck. He always got a little nervous watching the Mongooses try to land on the deck when they were in transit, but Sirano had assured him that the pilots for this trip were the best available. He snorted to himself: perhaps the best available wasn't the most reassuring response given how many pilots had shipped back to the MBTC recently.

The pilot came in steady, slowly rotating the tips of the Mongoose's spears so that they got a full view of the approaching deck. At a respectable and cautious distance, the pilot flared the thrusters, slowing the craft to a very sedate closing velocity, before gingerly setting down on the deck. Two SARines walked over and hooked clamps onto the ship as the pilot powered down. The cockpit opened and the pilot slipped out, briefly inspecting the job the SARines had done. She quickly returned the salute the lead SARine gave her before hustling in through the airlock.

Ten minutes later, the pilot entered the command deck and strode over to Jacobs. Her armor was space chilled; as she walked through the warmer temperatures of the command deck, condensation formed on the plates, running off in little streams. She took her helmet off, shaking her hair out.

"Commander Jacobs, Lieutenant Sinclair, requesting permission to come aboard."

"Granted. How does it look out there?"

"Well, I can't say this is my favorite duty. The light from Saturn can alternatively help and hurt in seeing the cables, so whenever I take a pass through the formation there is NICK WYCKOFF 379 always the chance I'll hit one. Next time we do this, I say we hang little strobes off the cable along the way to help spot them. Other than that, it's actually not looking too bad. By my flight plan we have one more refuel to go then we'll be on station. So it's getting a bit exciting."

"I actually hope it stays boring. Strobes aren't a bad idea. Wouldn't work on the freighters because the tow cables stretch so much you wouldn't be able to fix them tight to the cable. They'd just slide around, but this ship doesn't mass even a fraction of a freighter, so we're barely straining the tow cables, or my ship for that matter. I do wish we could get a few of those recon pods you're carrying for freighter duty. Resolution and data collection is far better than what my drone squadron can provide, even when they are set up for stereo viewing."

"You could ask G-LOC, er Major Sirano. She might cut one loose for you guys to uh, test with." Jacobs laughed. "Yeah I suppose I could. You know, I know the reason you guys don't use call signs, but it really does take a bit of the romance out of being a fighter jock."

Kimmie smiled back at him. "Yeah I was disappointed when they told me as well. Major Sirano says once things are public about our squadrons we can get back to the SOP. Until then, Victor 1-3, signing off; I'm going to go grab some chow and get some rack time." With that, Kimmie ambled out of the command deck, shutting the hatch behind her.

Jacobs leaned forward out of his chair to get a better look at her as she left, turning back toward his console as the hatch closed. His XO looked at him bemused.

Jacobs smiled sheepishly. "She makes that flight armor look good eh."

The XO smiled back and replied. "Yes sir."

Jacobs sighed, closing his eyes briefly. "Alright. Back on task. Let's get the tankers prepped for launch, we've got a narrow window this time, so we're going to need to be on the numbers or else I owe Chief Graves a night at Phoebe's."

*

Molly watched from her chair in the Mission Control room as Hatfield surveyed the room. He was sitting in an oversized chair, his command armor on but helmet off, leaning forward with an elbow on one knee and his chin resting on his fist peering out over the room. His eyes roamed over every position, seeing everything but focused on nothing, his ears occasionally twitching when a crewmember raised their voice, but otherwise he was still. Watching and waiting, letting his team go through their checklist progressions one by one.

She shifted her gaze to the pit where the Mission Controllers were. Brenner cruised the rows of monitors in his mottled grey command armor like a hungry shark on the prowl, checking in on operators, making sure everyone was staying to the timeline, and even bringing food and drinks to several who had been on station the longest. He was in direct contrast to the watchful eye of Hatfield, a whirlwind of efficient energy keeping the staff functioning like a well-oiled machine. He'd done large testing before and his very presence seemed to act like a calming balm on the feverishly working controllers. His arrival signified almost immediate assistance with any problems they had.

Molly marveled at the completely different personalities of these two men under stress. Hatfield was normally a philosophizing schemer who liked to hear himself speak, yet in here he silently let his team function. He let them do their part, while absorbing every detail from his perch in the dimly lit observation deck. Brenner was an almost boyish prankster most of the time, sarcastic and perverse, yet in here he was as emotional and efficient as a rapier. Focused on the task at hand, with a single-minded intensity that showed why he was considered one of the better test engineers during the Sino-America wars.

She leaned over towards Sloan, who was flipping through her display, calling up views of the different stations below them and watching the progress. "Sloan, why are we all wearing suits? I mean, we're way down inside the base."

Sloan answered without looking up. "Murphy's Law."

"Uh, which one?"

"The first one, about what can go wrong, will."

"Oh they have. But if something they didn't foresee happens, at least wearing the suits might let us last long enough to explain what happened back to Earth before we run out of air."

Molly started and stared back at Sloan, trying to figure out if she was kidding around or not. But Sloan was still flipping through screens, intently soaking up the massive amount of data flowing past. "Uh, I am not sure that makes me feel better."

Sloan smiled at her. "Well fortunately you have no choice in the matter, might as well accept it." With that she went back to looking at the display screens, reviewing the data from the Atlas as she moved downrange.

Molly looked over her shoulder at the screen and saw a number in yellow flashing repeatedly on the screen. "Why is that flashing?"

Sloan looked at it and smirked. "Just Jacobs showing off again. He beat the fuel projections to get on station by almost ten percent. I swear he intentionally gets the most conservative tug pilot to produce the fuel estimates just so he can beat them and ask for more money."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"Nah, he has a thankless job. He deserves it. Besides, those conservative estimates kept the fuel flowing from Earth at higher rates than we needed. When he beat the projections, we stashed the surplus. Now we finally have our own fuel manufacturing set up and we have a handy surplus to boot. We'll never come up short at the wrong time."

"Won't the accountants catch you eventually? Seems like you should tell them what you use fuel for."

"Nope. They could never reconcile our fuel use against our fuel bill. All fighter training ops are off the books for OPSEC reasons. We just invent other activities and say we used the fighter fuel and excess fuel for those, that way nobody back home can use our fuel numbers to figure out what we're doing."

As she was speaking, Ed Styles and Jim Dover entered the area and went over to Hatfield. Molly watched them curiously and looked back at Sloan who had already gone back to studying yet another screen. This screen appeared to show the countdown clock, but it wasn't moving any longer. Before she could ask Sloan more questions, she saw Brenner turn toward Hatfield and his aides and look up at them. He leaned down and briefly conferred with a man in a maroon spacesuit with a mission patch on the shoulder. They talked for a moment then walked to the command deck. Molly strained her ears to hear what they said.

Hatfield looked at the man in the maroon suit and asked. "Is there a problem Gallagher?" The Flight Test Director shrugged and looked at Brenner briefly before answering. "Not really sir. It's just that one of the goats appears to have gotten loose from it's enclosure and is wandering the halls of the ship."

"Got loose? I thought we had all the enclosures locked and sealed." "Brenner and I just checked the log, the procedure checklists show the goats were locked and given a short duration sedative as per the plan. It appears, based on footage of the test area, that the goat was unaffected by the sedative and managed to squeeze between the bars on his cage and get out."

"Is it an acceptable risk? Has it caused any damage?"

Brenner shrugged. "Minor risk. So far it took a shit in the corridor and has chewed up one of the seat cushions in the NICK WYCKOFF 383 staging area. It can't get into any of the access plates or push any buttons so it probably doesn't matter. Obviously we're not going to get much data off the life support monitor since it's out of range of the receiver. Other than that, not much of an issue I guess. We were debating sending a couple of SARines back to the ship in an Angel to put it back in the cage."

Hatfield made a disgusted face at them. "Fuck that. You're going to waste time flying back, burning fuel, catch the goat and be halfway back to the Atlas when it squeezes out again. Once they learn a barrier has a weak spot they don't forget just 'cause you put them back in there again. I'm not delaying the flight test over that. If that is the last issue, let's push ahead with it."

"Yes sir," Gallagher said, before heading back down into the pit. Brenner let him get out of earshot before commenting. "Good chance the goat gets smeared on the wall if he goes outside the gravity controlled zone during acceleration. Just saying."

"Be a good datapoint," Hatfield said quietly, trying to shield his response from other ears.

Brenner nodded once and headed back down into the pit. Shortly after he arrived the countdown clock started moving again. Molly watched as the Flight Test Director nodded to Brenner and made his final call.

"All stations, I need a GO/NOGO for launch."

"Magnetics, GO."

"Primary propulsion, GO."

"GNC, GO."

"TELMU, GO."

"INCO, GO."

"DATCOL, GO."

"Observers, GO."

"Ephemeris, GO."

"PTC, GO."

"SRO, GO."

The Flight Test Director looked at Brenner then keyed his mic. "FTD, GO."

Brenner nodded and spoke into his suit mic. "Launch Director is GO. Commence final count."

Molly listened intently as each station began calling out final markers for the launch, the main screen in the center of the room shifting to a view of the KALISUN, taken from a polar orbit satellite over Saturn. Other screens showed the clock ticking down, energy flux levels for the propulsion system and the probability graphs of particle contact with the outgoing fuel particles.

The counter dropped to zero and started to tick up into positive numbers, the KALISUN remained stationary. A minute passed, then another. Tension began to rise in the room. Suddenly there was activity on a number of the screens. Technicians rapidly began making adjustments to their controls, causing energy levels to spike on several monitors.

"FLIGHT, TELMU, first confirmed particle intercept. Gravity gradient detected, .5 strength and holding."

"FLIGHT, Propulsion. Confirmed first particle intercept, automated systems modifying aiming profile to increase probability now."

A graphical depiction of the outgoing particles began to adjust, as the rails launched particles along better paths to make intercepts. The rear facing drive began to calibrate as well, searching for a first intercept. Molly leaned over to Sloan and whispered.

"Why is the system automated?"

"We won't be around when it comes back, so it has to be. Eventually they'll get enough intercepts in a row so that the trailing particles are drawn to the gravity gradient, making the probability of intercept far higher. Right now, the automated systems are trying to avoid reaching critical mass until the rear projectors get a lock, otherwise they may leave before the system is working right and end up off target. It's pretty complex, maybe Erik can explain it to you better later. Right now he's down there with the propulsion lead."

Molly tried to make sense of the diagram in front of her, which showed shifting boxes with various gradients of color that changed frequently. "What am I looking at here?" Sloan looked over and explained. "These particles are very tiny. We can't actually detect them, so these gradients represent the mathematical probability of where the particle might be if it actually left the rail like we think it did."

"You can't tell where they are? How do you know where to aim then?"

"You use those little colored boxes, it's just math. As for detecting, well are you familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?"

"Uh I sort of remember it from college," Molly replied weakly.

"Alright, then you probably don't really get the Observer Principle either. Basically if we try to see it, touch it, sense it, we cause the particle to destabilize before it reaches its destination. If it destabilizes, it will turn into different particles before it reaches the target zone. Sometimes they turn into energy. Either way, it means when it gets to the target zone, it doesn't have the right properties to cause a gravity gradient. Having said that, some of the particles naturally decay before they get there no matter what we do. Maybe they hit stray gas molecule along the way or something more physical, either way they show up in different forms. If the gradient is strong enough they can actually still help, we think. It's hard to say."

"Uh, that would imply that you don't know if what you are sending out the ship rails is even the right stuff . . . right?"

"Oh we'll know. If it's the right stuff, the ship goes 'VROOM'," Sloan said with an animated arm motion.

The buzz from the pit was getting louder, drawing their attention back to the displays. Sloan tapped a few command keys and gave a happy sigh. "Hey look, they got the rear projectors dialed in, any moment now they should ramp up the particle speed and then . . . " Before she could finish, there was a flash of light across the electromagnetic spectrum that blinded most of the optical sensors for a moment. When they cleared up, the ship was gone.

"FLIGHT, Propulsion. Critical mass obtained, ship is en route."

"FLIGHT, TELMU confirms, we are picking up time delayed data transmissions. Analyzing now to determine rate of acceleration."

Sloan got up to leave, but Molly reached up and grabbed her arm. "Wait, so you got a few bits of data as it zipped away and that's it? You have no other way to communicate with it?"

"Well the first few bits are coming from the sensors we have several light minutes away, they're sending back their readings as the ship goes past. They won't get any more readings until the ship comes back in about three days. Think of it as playing with a boomerang in the dark." Sloan turned away, putting her hair in a ponytail before raising a fist and shaking it at Brenner to congratulate him.

Molly sat there as the cheering commenced from the flight controllers. She looked at the display showing the ship had left; it showed a calculated speed of 0.8 the speed of light all the way up to six times the speed of light, with a note flashing next to it, saying "best guess" in blinking red text. Even with her relatively limited physics knowledge, she knew that was a huge range of possible speeds. She turned a worried eye toward Hatfield, wondering if he was at all comfortable with the situation.

He was back to leaning forward, elbow on his knee, his chin resting on his fist, staring down thoughtfully at the data from the sensors while the other observers cheered and gave each other backslaps in the pit in front of him.

 

CLOSE

 

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The Kalisun Initiative:
THE PRICE OF PROGRESS

The second book, The Price of Progress, picks up immediately after the end of The KaliSun Initiative, as the consequences of the Corporation’s first attempt at interstellar travel become painfully evident. Daily combat rages around the Moon-Based Training Center as the two sides struggle to establish dominance.

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The Kalisun Initiative: The Price of Progress

×

Captain Mike Spears looked out over his assembled men and women and smiled inside his helmet. As Commander of the 3rd Company First Space Marines, he was the primary offensive commander in the KaliSun Corporation. The other four companies at the MBTC had important duties, but were primarily focused on defense of the base. For this mission, his company of one hundred and twenty Marines was supplemented by a scout unit with their fast rovers, a pair of mobile artillery units from 1st Company and SARines along to exploit any intel they could find at the site.

He smiled confidently at his XO standing nearby, even though it was doubtful she could see him in the shadow of the crater wall. This would be their seventh major operation in the short weeks since the war had started. So far they hadn’t lost a single Marine to enemy fire. A combination of superior equipment, surprise, and local force superiority had allowed them to smash organized resistance before the Chinese could mount a credible defense. His smile faded as he pulled up the layout of the enemy base on his HUD. This time was likely to be very different.

The Chinese had perched their command module on the lip of a crater overlooking the area in front of them in a perfect enfilade position. Anyone charging through the crater would be eating radar controlled weapons fire the entire time. Any approach along the top of the crater rim would be picked up by a sensor net that enabled them to see approaching Kalisun rovers dozens of kilometers away.

It was a problem straight out of the training they had received at Saturn Base when training in the Pit, except this crater was a lot larger and wasn’t shooting targeting lasers. They were sitting behind a collapsed wall in the crater, waiting for everything to be in place before they ran the gauntlet.

He glanced over at the SARine leader, Chief Morris, and pulled him into his battlenet.

“How’s it lookin’?”

“Should work, provided they didn’t seed the crater floor with mines,” the SARine said quietly.

“Nobody has used minefields yet on the Moon, not sure why they would here,” Spears said thoughtfully.

“Nobody has seen one of these firebases fully operational before either, Captain. Usually the pilots dust them before they’re set up. I can’t promise they won’t have mines, then again with the amount of fi re they intend to dump into the crater if anything is detected, I’d be surprised if their own mine field didn’t get wacked in the process.”

Spears thought for a few heartbeats and nodded. “Let’s go then. We’ll start the timeline when you initiate the decoys.”

“Yes sir!” the SARine said with a tinge of excitement as he took bounding leaps over to the waiting scout rovers, raising his clenched fist above his head as he went.

The waiting scout troopers looked up and eagerly jumped into their vehicles, lunar versions of special forces dune buggies from the Earth Wars. Spears watched his blue-force tracker display suddenly come alive as the rovers came online. A predatory grin crept across his face; this was much better than the first time they hit the Chinese when he couldn’t even talk to his detached units due to all of the ambient radiation.

The rovers lined up on the edge of the wall debris and paused, like greyhounds waiting for the mechanical rabbit to race out in front of them. Each one had three scout Marines in it, a special group chosen more for their ability to handle the nauseating high-speed transits across the moon’s surface while still accurately shooting their weapons than they were for their technical skills.

Convinced they were good to go, he licked his lips and entered into the support Angel’s battlenet.

“Hemingway.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

He muted his connection, mumbling under his breath, “Here we go . . . ”

*

Commander Zhao looked up from his report at the urgent sound in his subordinate’s voice. He stood from his desk and strode across the cramped space of the command module.

“Yes?”

“We picked up a single exchange from the Americans.”

“Was it encrypted?”

“Yes, using one of the codes we got from the Intelligence Directorate.”

Zhao smiled to himself, careful not to let his subordinate see that he was pleased. For months now, the Intelligence Directorate had been promising that they would crack the American Government systems again and scrape some useful information to use against the corporate war criminals. For the first few weeks their lack of success was understandable; half the infrastructure between them and the United States was damaged in the strange radiation event, and the groups they were targeting didn’t seem to know what was going on any better the Directorate did. That lack of knowledge had come at a terrible price when they had launched what should have been a successful attack against the enemy moon base.

Instead of rooting them out of their underground caves and venting them into space, their space forces had been pushed back with serious losses. Fortunately, Senior Command on the moon had had the sense to hold back with the initial attack. He clenched his fist at the memory, causing the nearby officers to avert their eyes. But now, the Directorate had finally come through.

“The enemy will attack soon. Ready our defenses and get the reserve mobilized,” he said with a fierce glare. They had known putting a base this close to the Americans would be intolerable, and knew they couldn’t resist attacking.

He walked back to his command chair and sat down, pulling up a video display of their reserve. A full company of their best space defense troops was scrambling to get suited up and ready. When these company men tried to swoop in with their fighters, his men would be ready to light up the skies with chemical lasers, missiles and exploding flak. He smiled secretly, patting the locked box to his right. Yes, and if they were starting to get overwhelmed, he could always detonate the nuclear weapon sitting just under the surface.

The EMP alone would be enough to destroy most of the enemy spacecraft in one fell swoop.

One way or another, the balance of power was about to shift in their favor.

“Sir, we’re detecting incoming missiles come from sector 12!”

“No jamming? Initiate point defense system.”

“No jamming detected. Point defense system is tracking and will engage in moments.”

He leaned back in his chair to wait, watching the displays on his console. There was something strange about what was going on, nothing specifically out of place, just a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Are any ground troops visible?”

“No commander, no troops, no spacecraft . . . wait, SIR!” the sensors officer screeched while pointing up at his display.

The missiles split into dozens of objects just as they entered weapon range. As they watched, some of the objects seemed to spawn more objects from progressively smaller packages, like a Russian nesting doll. The sensors chugged as the number of targets to shoot at increased exponentially.

The sensors officer looked down at his display in horror. The sensors were being blocked by a wall of debris and they had no idea what was following behind. With a roar more felt than heard, the point defense weapons started firing, spraying tracers and exploding rounds into the oncoming debris field in a light display to rival any in history.

Zhao leaned into his microphone, screaming for his reserve space defense unit to deploy and engage anything hiding in the debris. Collision alarms began to sound as the sensors intermittently picked up heavier objects among all the chaff, flares and decoys.

Zhao swore viciously and ordered the manned turrets to fire through the chaff. Whatever was trying to sneak in behind this wall of junk wasn’t going to see his outgoing fire any better than he could see them.

*

Henry Adler saw the missiles streak overhead and tightened his hands on his weapon grips. The waiting was the hardest part, the missiles had to travel almost four more kilometers before they reached what was presumed to be the edge of the enemy engagement volumes. If his scout unit left the jump-off point too soon, they’d be visible before the chaff bomb exploded and the enemy would have time to react. Leave it too late and the chaff and other debris would have arrived at its destination and their cover would be gone before they could get close enough to drop their package and escape.

Looking to his left he saw the loaned artillery units and two armadillos waiting to engage the enemy. He chuckled—the armadillos were the complete opposite of his nimble little rover platoon. Heavily armored and packing several star-fighter gun systems on top, they were intended to supply heavier weapons fire in support of the infantry.

The designers had struggled with how to make them move effectively over rough terrain. So, after a few different aborted designs they had come up with the armadillo concept, a heavily armored shell that could use pistons in legs to leap along the ground like a scared armadillo. He’d heard that riding in one when it was at high speed was a full contact sport.

The countdown approached zero on his HUD. Finally, after five days of sneaking up on this position through the stark lunarscape, they were ready to go. As the counter ticked to zero he flashed his beacon strobe once. As a group, the scout rovers leapt up over the lip of the collapsed wall, soaring through the vacuum before bouncing down on the surface. After that it was a race. Individual rovers left to follow the best path available to them, bouncing and skidding across the surface in a flash of dust and rock.

He risked a glance upward at the decoys heading toward the base; enemy anti-space artillery was spraying out in continuous streams of light at the oncoming mass of debris. Occasional flashes erupted within the cloud when larger objects were obliterated, but the cloud continued on. He looked along the rim of the crater and upped the magnification on his HUD.

To his amazement he saw that the entire crater rim was crawling with Chinese, far more than they had been expecting, all of them firing weapons at the incoming debris. It wouldn’t take much for one of them to look down into the crater rim and see the rovers ducking in and out of the pocketed crater floor; their shifting optical camouflage was good, but there was no disguising the dust they were stirring up.

He shifted his gaze toward the nearer point defense weapons as his body was jarred by the constant shifting acceleration of his driver. The barrels of the guns were glowing white hot from the constant fire. He shook his head. They must have just turned the system on full automatic and let it blaze away.

His drivers were experts at traversing the lunar surface and veterans of the first battle of the MBTC, and they quickly covered the eight kilometers to the crater wall under the Chinese base. With a rough retro-thrust they stopped at intervals along the sharp crater edge, dust settling slowing around them in the low lunar gravity. Along the line of scouts, the gunners hopped out and sprinted toward the crater wall, dragging bags of explosive shape charges behind them. The drivers climbed into the gunnery position and manned the turrets covering the crater rim expectantly.

He listened as the rasping breath of his men came over the battlenet. They worked feverishly to boost themselves up the nearly shear face of the crater wall, attaching themselves to the wall as they strung the charges up in rows. The explosives were custom made by the SARines using lessons learned from mining on the moon. The result was strange explosion that happened in two parts—a sharp, explosive pulse into the rock, followed an instant later by a longer pulse explosion. In mining tests, the result had been a deep-penetrating shaped charge that could carve off large chunks of a crater wall to get at the material within.

Nervously, the commander looked up at the precipice, noticing for the first time that shell casings were cascading in slow motion down the cliff face. His face softened—it was really beautiful. The streaking tracers reflected off the shiny brass as it tumbled through the low gravity like a star field against the dark gray of the cliff face. He shook off the reverie as his men and women began to descend the cliff face, using their boot jets to kill their velocity before they got to the bottom.

Pulling up the objective menu on his HUD, he scanned through making sure that everyone’s package came back green. He felt his driver drop down out of the top turret and get resettled in his seat as the gunner sprinted back. As soon as the driver’s HUD showed the gunner’s ass in the seat and strapped in, he hammered the throttle and left without waiting for the commander to say anything.

*

“Enemy rovers retreating through the crater!” shouted the sensor technician over the warbling alarms.

For an instant Commander Zhao hesitated before screaming back, “Retreating from where?” The sensor tech turned around, fear crowding his eyes. “The crater rim . . . ”

As Zhao sat staring at the display the entire base was rocked by a series of sharp explosions, followed by a low rumbling vibration that he could feel through his suit at the base of his spine. He looked across the exterior video feeds, searching for clues as to what happened. One of the feeds showed several of the space defense soldiers drop their rocket launchers and look down fearfully at their feet. Seemingly in slow motion they turned to run back toward the module. As they ran the lunar dust behind them spurted up, obscuring for a moment the fact that the face of the cliff was gradually falling away behind them.

Zhao stared in horror as they ran toward the camera’s location. They passed an automated mini- gun that fell away behind them, the power and ammunition systems ripping up out of their mountings and breaking free. One of the power cables snapped and whipped through the vacuum, silently arcing out and electrocuting soldiers as it passed, before plowing through a cluster of men operating a crew- served weapon. With a flash, the high voltage sparked off the remaining rounds in their weapon, throwing parts of soldier, weapon and space suit across the lunar surface.

The ground continued to give way, racing past the outer edges of the command module as the entire hillside slid down into the crater. With an agonizing screech heard throughout the module, connections to other supporting structures and gun emplacements were ripped from the command module’s walls as it slowly succumbed to the inevitable and rode the collapsing crater wall down into the pit below. The automated defense systems blinked out as the control function failed, darkening the sky again as the steady stream of tracer fire ended.

As the module crashed toward the bottom of the crater, the debris field cascaded down behind them, showering the module with a fi ne mist of fiber, ash and metal. Before the billowing dust of the collapsing wall obscured his sensors completely, Zhao saw a much larger enemy ground force approaching, racing toward the escaping scout rovers, weapons tracking the module. He slammed the send button on his communication console once, sending a final call for help back to the main base.

Gripping the armrests of his chair he tilted his head back to emit an angry scream as the front of the command module slammed into the crater floor and tipped forward, landing on its top.

 

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book cover

The Kalisun Initiative:
Going Viral

Martin Knudsen is nearing the end of his life and makes the fateful decision to trade his company’s classified research in exchange for medical treatment to extend his life so that he can spend more time with his daughter. He transferred decades of research in secret to the Kalisun Initiative, a conglomerate of rich billionaires with deep ties to the military attempting to colonize the moon.

Kalisun Art Gallery Author Bio Buy Now on Amazon

The Kalisun Initiative: Going Viral

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Captain Mike Spears looked out over his assembled men and women and smiled inside his helmet. As Commander of the 3rd Company First Space Marines, he was the primary offensive commander in the KaliSun Corporation. The other four companies at the MBTC had important duties, but were primarily focused on defense of the base. For this mission, his company of one hundred and twenty Marines was supplemented by a scout unit with their fast rovers, a pair of mobile artillery units from 1st Company and SARines along to exploit any intel they could find at the site.

He smiled confidently at his XO standing nearby, even though it was doubtful she could see him in the shadow of the crater wall. This would be their seventh major operation in the short weeks since the war had started. So far they hadn’t lost a single Marine to enemy fire. A combination of superior equipment, surprise, and local force superiority had allowed them to smash organized resistance before the Chinese could mount a credible defense. His smile faded as he pulled up the layout of the enemy base on his HUD. This time was likely to be very different.

The Chinese had perched their command module on the lip of a crater overlooking the area in front of them in a perfect enfilade position. Anyone charging through the crater would be eating radar controlled weapons fire the entire time. Any approach along the top of the crater rim would be picked up by a sensor net that enabled them to see approaching Kalisun rovers dozens of kilometers away.

It was a problem straight out of the training they had received at Saturn Base when training in the Pit, except this crater was a lot larger and wasn’t shooting targeting lasers. They were sitting behind a collapsed wall in the crater, waiting for everything to be in place before they ran the gauntlet.

He glanced over at the SARine leader, Chief Morris, and pulled him into his battlenet.

“How’s it lookin’?”

“Should work, provided they didn’t seed the crater floor with mines,” the SARine said quietly.

“Nobody has used minefields yet on the Moon, not sure why they would here,” Spears said thoughtfully.

“Nobody has seen one of these firebases fully operational before either, Captain. Usually the pilots dust them before they’re set up. I can’t promise they won’t have mines, then again with the amount of fi re they intend to dump into the crater if anything is detected, I’d be surprised if their own mine field didn’t get wacked in the process.”

Spears thought for a few heartbeats and nodded. “Let’s go then. We’ll start the timeline when you initiate the decoys.”

“Yes sir!” the SARine said with a tinge of excitement as he took bounding leaps over to the waiting scout rovers, raising his clenched fist above his head as he went.

The waiting scout troopers looked up and eagerly jumped into their vehicles, lunar versions of special forces dune buggies from the Earth Wars. Spears watched his blue-force tracker display suddenly come alive as the rovers came online. A predatory grin crept across his face; this was much better than the first time they hit the Chinese when he couldn’t even talk to his detached units due to all of the ambient radiation.

The rovers lined up on the edge of the wall debris and paused, like greyhounds waiting for the mechanical rabbit to race out in front of them. Each one had three scout Marines in it, a special group chosen more for their ability to handle the nauseating high-speed transits across the moon’s surface while still accurately shooting their weapons than they were for their technical skills.

Convinced they were good to go, he licked his lips and entered into the support Angel’s battlenet.

“Hemingway.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

He muted his connection, mumbling under his breath, “Here we go . . . ”

*

Commander Zhao looked up from his report at the urgent sound in his subordinate’s voice. He stood from his desk and strode across the cramped space of the command module.

“Yes?”

“We picked up a single exchange from the Americans.”

“Was it encrypted?”

“Yes, using one of the codes we got from the Intelligence Directorate.”

Zhao smiled to himself, careful not to let his subordinate see that he was pleased. For months now, the Intelligence Directorate had been promising that they would crack the American Government systems again and scrape some useful information to use against the corporate war criminals. For the first few weeks their lack of success was understandable; half the infrastructure between them and the United States was damaged in the strange radiation event, and the groups they were targeting didn’t seem to know what was going on any better the Directorate did. That lack of knowledge had come at a terrible price when they had launched what should have been a successful attack against the enemy moon base.

Instead of rooting them out of their underground caves and venting them into space, their space forces had been pushed back with serious losses. Fortunately, Senior Command on the moon had had the sense to hold back with the initial attack. He clenched his fist at the memory, causing the nearby officers to avert their eyes. But now, the Directorate had finally come through.

“The enemy will attack soon. Ready our defenses and get the reserve mobilized,” he said with a fierce glare. They had known putting a base this close to the Americans would be intolerable, and knew they couldn’t resist attacking.

He walked back to his command chair and sat down, pulling up a video display of their reserve. A full company of their best space defense troops was scrambling to get suited up and ready. When these company men tried to swoop in with their fighters, his men would be ready to light up the skies with chemical lasers, missiles and exploding flak. He smiled secretly, patting the locked box to his right. Yes, and if they were starting to get overwhelmed, he could always detonate the nuclear weapon sitting just under the surface.

The EMP alone would be enough to destroy most of the enemy spacecraft in one fell swoop.

One way or another, the balance of power was about to shift in their favor.

“Sir, we’re detecting incoming missiles come from sector 12!”

“No jamming? Initiate point defense system.”

“No jamming detected. Point defense system is tracking and will engage in moments.”

He leaned back in his chair to wait, watching the displays on his console. There was something strange about what was going on, nothing specifically out of place, just a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Are any ground troops visible?”

“No commander, no troops, no spacecraft . . . wait, SIR!” the sensors officer screeched while pointing up at his display.

The missiles split into dozens of objects just as they entered weapon range. As they watched, some of the objects seemed to spawn more objects from progressively smaller packages, like a Russian nesting doll. The sensors chugged as the number of targets to shoot at increased exponentially.

The sensors officer looked down at his display in horror. The sensors were being blocked by a wall of debris and they had no idea what was following behind. With a roar more felt than heard, the point defense weapons started firing, spraying tracers and exploding rounds into the oncoming debris field in a light display to rival any in history.

Zhao leaned into his microphone, screaming for his reserve space defense unit to deploy and engage anything hiding in the debris. Collision alarms began to sound as the sensors intermittently picked up heavier objects among all the chaff, flares and decoys.

Zhao swore viciously and ordered the manned turrets to fire through the chaff. Whatever was trying to sneak in behind this wall of junk wasn’t going to see his outgoing fire any better than he could see them.

*

Henry Adler saw the missiles streak overhead and tightened his hands on his weapon grips. The waiting was the hardest part, the missiles had to travel almost four more kilometers before they reached what was presumed to be the edge of the enemy engagement volumes. If his scout unit left the jump-off point too soon, they’d be visible before the chaff bomb exploded and the enemy would have time to react. Leave it too late and the chaff and other debris would have arrived at its destination and their cover would be gone before they could get close enough to drop their package and escape.

Looking to his left he saw the loaned artillery units and two armadillos waiting to engage the enemy. He chuckled—the armadillos were the complete opposite of his nimble little rover platoon. Heavily armored and packing several star-fighter gun systems on top, they were intended to supply heavier weapons fire in support of the infantry.

The designers had struggled with how to make them move effectively over rough terrain. So, after a few different aborted designs they had come up with the armadillo concept, a heavily armored shell that could use pistons in legs to leap along the ground like a scared armadillo. He’d heard that riding in one when it was at high speed was a full contact sport.

The countdown approached zero on his HUD. Finally, after five days of sneaking up on this position through the stark lunarscape, they were ready to go. As the counter ticked to zero he flashed his beacon strobe once. As a group, the scout rovers leapt up over the lip of the collapsed wall, soaring through the vacuum before bouncing down on the surface. After that it was a race. Individual rovers left to follow the best path available to them, bouncing and skidding across the surface in a flash of dust and rock.

He risked a glance upward at the decoys heading toward the base; enemy anti-space artillery was spraying out in continuous streams of light at the oncoming mass of debris. Occasional flashes erupted within the cloud when larger objects were obliterated, but the cloud continued on. He looked along the rim of the crater and upped the magnification on his HUD.

To his amazement he saw that the entire crater rim was crawling with Chinese, far more than they had been expecting, all of them firing weapons at the incoming debris. It wouldn’t take much for one of them to look down into the crater rim and see the rovers ducking in and out of the pocketed crater floor; their shifting optical camouflage was good, but there was no disguising the dust they were stirring up.

He shifted his gaze toward the nearer point defense weapons as his body was jarred by the constant shifting acceleration of his driver. The barrels of the guns were glowing white hot from the constant fire. He shook his head. They must have just turned the system on full automatic and let it blaze away.

His drivers were experts at traversing the lunar surface and veterans of the first battle of the MBTC, and they quickly covered the eight kilometers to the crater wall under the Chinese base. With a rough retro-thrust they stopped at intervals along the sharp crater edge, dust settling slowing around them in the low lunar gravity. Along the line of scouts, the gunners hopped out and sprinted toward the crater wall, dragging bags of explosive shape charges behind them. The drivers climbed into the gunnery position and manned the turrets covering the crater rim expectantly.

He listened as the rasping breath of his men came over the battlenet. They worked feverishly to boost themselves up the nearly shear face of the crater wall, attaching themselves to the wall as they strung the charges up in rows. The explosives were custom made by the SARines using lessons learned from mining on the moon. The result was strange explosion that happened in two parts—a sharp, explosive pulse into the rock, followed an instant later by a longer pulse explosion. In mining tests, the result had been a deep-penetrating shaped charge that could carve off large chunks of a crater wall to get at the material within.

Nervously, the commander looked up at the precipice, noticing for the first time that shell casings were cascading in slow motion down the cliff face. His face softened—it was really beautiful. The streaking tracers reflected off the shiny brass as it tumbled through the low gravity like a star field against the dark gray of the cliff face. He shook off the reverie as his men and women began to descend the cliff face, using their boot jets to kill their velocity before they got to the bottom.

Pulling up the objective menu on his HUD, he scanned through making sure that everyone’s package came back green. He felt his driver drop down out of the top turret and get resettled in his seat as the gunner sprinted back. As soon as the driver’s HUD showed the gunner’s ass in the seat and strapped in, he hammered the throttle and left without waiting for the commander to say anything.

*

“Enemy rovers retreating through the crater!” shouted the sensor technician over the warbling alarms.

For an instant Commander Zhao hesitated before screaming back, “Retreating from where?” The sensor tech turned around, fear crowding his eyes. “The crater rim . . . ”

As Zhao sat staring at the display the entire base was rocked by a series of sharp explosions, followed by a low rumbling vibration that he could feel through his suit at the base of his spine. He looked across the exterior video feeds, searching for clues as to what happened. One of the feeds showed several of the space defense soldiers drop their rocket launchers and look down fearfully at their feet. Seemingly in slow motion they turned to run back toward the module. As they ran the lunar dust behind them spurted up, obscuring for a moment the fact that the face of the cliff was gradually falling away behind them.

Zhao stared in horror as they ran toward the camera’s location. They passed an automated mini- gun that fell away behind them, the power and ammunition systems ripping up out of their mountings and breaking free. One of the power cables snapped and whipped through the vacuum, silently arcing out and electrocuting soldiers as it passed, before plowing through a cluster of men operating a crew- served weapon. With a flash, the high voltage sparked off the remaining rounds in their weapon, throwing parts of soldier, weapon and space suit across the lunar surface.

The ground continued to give way, racing past the outer edges of the command module as the entire hillside slid down into the crater. With an agonizing screech heard throughout the module, connections to other supporting structures and gun emplacements were ripped from the command module’s walls as it slowly succumbed to the inevitable and rode the collapsing crater wall down into the pit below. The automated defense systems blinked out as the control function failed, darkening the sky again as the steady stream of tracer fire ended.

As the module crashed toward the bottom of the crater, the debris field cascaded down behind them, showering the module with a fi ne mist of fiber, ash and metal. Before the billowing dust of the collapsing wall obscured his sensors completely, Zhao saw a much larger enemy ground force approaching, racing toward the escaping scout rovers, weapons tracking the module. He slammed the send button on his communication console once, sending a final call for help back to the main base.

Gripping the armrests of his chair he tilted his head back to emit an angry scream as the front of the command module slammed into the crater floor and tipped forward, landing on its top.

 

CLOSE

 

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