You couldn’t talk too much about what combat was like on the Moon, on that visit.
They told us not to. Havaldar Chamling told us that order came all the way down from the Lieutenant General of Lunar Command. It was all considered classified information, even training maneuvers. It was pretty silent when you were in Chandnipur. I’m sure the Russians and the Chinese had news of that press visit. They could have decided to put on a display of might, stage some shock and awe attacks, missile strikes, troop movements to draw us out of the Cantonment Area.
I won’t lie—I was both relieved and disappointed. I’ve seen war, as a field reporter. Just not on the Moon. I wanted to see firsthand what the asuras were experiencing.
It would have been difficult. Lunar combat is not like Earth combat, though I don’t know much about Earth combat other than theory and history. I probably know less than you do, ultimately, because I’ve never experienced it. But I’ve read things, watched things about wars on Earth. Learned things, of course, in our lessons. It’s different on the Moon. Harder to accommodate an extra person when each battle is like a game of chess. No extra pieces allowed on the board. Every person needs their own air. No one can speak out of turn and clutter up comms. The visibility of each person needs to be accounted for, since it’s so high.
The most frightening thing about lunar combat is that you often can’t tell when it’s happening until it’s too late. On the battlefields beyond Chandnipur, out on the magma seas, combat is silent. You can’t hear anything but your own footsteps, the thoom-thoom-thoom of your suit’s metal boots crunching dust, or the sounds of your own weapons through your suit, the rattle-kick of ballistics, the near-silent hum of lasers vibrating in the metal of the shell keeping you alive. You’ll see the flash of a mine or grenade going off a few feet away but you won’t hear it. You won’t hear anything coming down from above unless you look up—be it ballistic missiles or a meteorite hurtling down after centuries flying through outer space. You’ll feel the shockwave knock you back but you won’t hear it. If you’re lucky, of course.
Laser weapons are invisible out there, and that’s what’s we mostly used. There’s no warning at all. No muzzle-flash, no noise. One minute you’re sitting there thinking you’re on the right side of the rocks giving you cover, and the next moment you see a glowing hole melting into the suit of the soldier next to you, like those time-lapse videos of something rotting. It takes less than a second if the soldier on the other side of the beam is aiming properly. Less than a second and there’s the flash and pop, blood and gas and superheated metal venting into the thin air like an aerosol spray, the scream like static in the mics. Aditi was a sniper, she could’ve told you how lethal the long-range lasers were. I carried a semiauto, laser or ballistic; those lasers were as deadly, just lower range and zero warm-up. When we were in battles closer to settlements, we’d switch to the ballistic weaponry, because the buildings and bases are mostly better protected from that kind of damage, bulletproof. There was kind of a silent agreement between all sides to keep from heavily damaging the actual bases. Those ballistic fights were almost a relief—our suits could withstand projectile damage better, and you could see the tracers coming from kilometers away, even if you couldn’t hear them. Like fire on oil, across the jet sky. Bullets aren’t that slow either, especially here on the Moon, but somehow it felt better to see it, like you could dodge the fire, especially if we were issued jetpacks, though we rarely used them because of how difficult they were to control. Aditi was better at using hers.
She saved my life once.
I mean, she did that many times, we both did for each other, just by doing what we needed to do on a battlefield. But she directly saved my life once, like an Earth movie hero. Rocket propelled grenade on a quiet battlefield. Right from up above and behind us. I didn’t even see it. I just felt asura Aditi shove me straight off the ground from behind and blast us off into the air with her jetpack, propelling us both twenty feet above the surface in a second. We twirled in mid-air, and for a little moment, it felt like we were free of the Moon, hovering there between it and the blazing blue Earth, dancing together. As we sailed back down and braced our legs for landing without suit damage, Aditi never let me go, kept our path back down steady. Only then did I see the cloud of lunar dust and debris hanging where we’d been seconds earlier, the aftermath of an explosion I hadn’t heard or seen, the streaks of light as the rest of the fireteam returned fire ballistic, spreading out in leaps with short bursts from their jetpacks. No one died in that encounter. I don’t even remember whose troops we were fighting in that encounter, which lunar army. I just remember that I didn’t die because of Aditi.
Mostly, we never saw the enemy close up. They were always just flecks of light on the horizon, or through our infrared overlay. Always ghosts, reflecting back the light of sun and Earth, like the Moon itself. It made it easier to kill them, if I’m being honest. They already seemed dead. When you’re beyond Chandnipur, out on the mara under that merciless black sky with the Earth gleaming in the distance, the only colour you can see anywhere, it felt like we were already dead too. Like we were all just ghosts playing out the old wars of humanity, ghosts of soldiers who died far, far down on the ground. But then we’d return to the city, to the warm bustle of the Underground Markets on our days off, to our chota duniya, and the Earth would seem like heaven again, not a world left behind but one to be attained, one to earn, the unattainable paradise rather than a distant history of life that we’d only lived through media pods and lessons.
And now, here you are. On Earth.
Here I am. Paradise attained. I have died and gone to heaven.
It’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Why we’re talking.
You could say that. Thank you for coming, again. You didn’t have any trouble coming up the elevator shaft, did you? I know it’s rough clinging to the top of the elevator.
I’ve been on rougher rides. There are plenty of touts down in the elevator base station who are more than willing to give someone with a few rupees a lending hand up the spindle. So. You were saying. About coming back to Earth. It must have been surprising, the news that you were coming back, last year.
FTL changed everything. That was, what, nine years ago?
At first it brought us to the edge of full-on lunar war, like never before, because the Moon became the greatest of all jewels in the night sky. It could become our first FTL port. Everyone wanted a stake in that. Every national territory on the Moon closed off its borders while the Earth governments negotiated. We were closed off in our bunkers, looking at the stars through the small windows, eating nothing but thin parathas from emergency flour rations. We made them our personal heating coils with synthi butter—no food was coming through because of embargo, mess halls in the main barracks were empty. We lived on those parathas and caffeine infusion. Our stomachs were like balloons, full of air.
Things escalated like never before, in that time. I remember a direct Chinese attack on Chandnipur’s outer defences, where we were stationed. One bunker window was taken out by laser. I saw a man stuck to the molten hole in the pane because of depressurization, wriggling like a dying insect. Asura Jatayu, a quiet, skinny soldier with a drinking problem. People always said he filled his suit’s drinking water pods with diluted moonshine from the Underground Markets, and sucked it down during patrols. I don’t know if that’s true, but people didn’t trust him because of it, even though he never really did anything to fuck things up. He was stone cold sober that day. I know, because I was with him. Aditi, me and two other asuras ripped him off the broken window, activated the emergency shutter before we lost too much pressure. But he’d already hemorrhaged severely through the laser wound, which had blown blood out of him and into the thin air of the Moon. He was dead. The Chinese had already retreated by the time we recovered. It was a direct response to our own overtures before the embargo. We had destroyed some nanobot anchors of theirs in disputed territory, which had been laid down to expand the micro-atmosphere of Yueliang Lunar Area.