Free Sample
The Lunar Gambit
A Novel of Digital Warfare and Diplomacy
by Shay Sabbah
Chapter 1: Midnight Signal
The rain on the windows of the Lincoln was a constant, percussive hiss, a sound Eleanor Vance had come to associate with the end of days in Washington. Not the biblical kind. The political kind, which was often worse. She watched the water bead and race down the glass, distorting the sodium-orange glow of the streetlights into smeared comets. The city was a ghost of itself tonight, the usual parade of think-tank receptions and diplomatic soirees silenced by the storm. A fitting backdrop for the news that sat like a cold stone in her gut.
Her phone vibrated on the leather seat beside her, a low, insistent hum that was more felt than heard. She didn't look at it. She already knew the litany of urgent messages waiting for her: the Director of National Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the President’s Chief of Staff, all demanding her presence, her counsel, her immediate fucking response. They were all shouting into the void, looking for someone to blame, and as Secretary of State, she was the natural target. She was the architect of the engagement strategy, the one who had argued, with elegant logic and a mountain of economic data, that engagement was the only sane policy. And now, a company in Beijing had made her look like a fool.
Lunar-2.
The name echoed in the cavernous space of her skull. Not a missile, not a carrier group, but something infinitely more destabilizing. A frontier open-source