Short fiction complete, p.145
Short Fiction Complete, page 145
Not that there was much to see. Jay watched his gloved hands tracking along the barren regolith. It reminded him of videos about evolution he had seen as a schoolchild: the emergence of life from the sea onto dry land. Never find land drier than this, he knew.
At last he stopped, sat upright, and took a wiper pad from the pouch on his leg. The dust clung stubbornly to his visor, electrostatically charged by the invisible inflow of solar wind particles.
He helped Kelly clear her visor. Cautiously, he rose to his feet. The damned crawler could still be seen, which meant the men in it still had a chance of spotting them.
Back to crawling, like an infant, like a lizard, like a slimy amphibian just learning to walk. We must make a weird sight, Jay thought. He stopped again and looked back. Only the rooftop of the crawler was in sight. He flicked his suit radio on for the briefest instant; the shriek of the jammer still burned his ears.
Motioning for Kelly to stand, he leaned close to her and said, “They’ve got a tall antenna. We’re still being jammed, but at least we can walk now.”
They cleaned their visors again, then headed off almost due east.
After several minutes Kelly tapped Jay’s shoulder. He leaned down to touch helmets.
“Isn’t Moonbase in that direction?” She pointed roughly southwestward.
Jay snorted at her. “Don’t try to navigate by the stars. The Moon’s north pole doesn’t point toward Polaris.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I’m following 301’s tracks,” he pointed to the churned soil. “If we can make it back to the main beat between Moonbase and Copernicus we’ll come across an emergency shelter sooner or later. Then we . . .”
He jerked with surprise, then swiftly pulled Kelly down flat onto the ground.
Wordlessly he pointed at the crawler that was slowly making its way toward them. From the direction opposite the crawler they had just left. This one was painted bright orange. It too had a life-support module atop it, and a tall whip mast, visible only because of the tiny red light winking at its end.
They sent a team to follow us, Jay realized. They boxed us in: one team from Fra Mauro, the other behind us from Moonbase.
He half-dragged Kelly away from the track of 301, angling toward the Copernicus-Moonbase “road” and away from the oncoming crawler. They might not be part of the terrorist gang, Jay thought. Might be a coincidence that they’re here. They might even be Moonbase security searching for us. Sure. Might be Santa Claus, too.
For hours they walked, seemingly lost. Not the slightest sign of civilization. Not even a bit of litter. No trace of life. Nothing but rocks and craters and the sudden horizon with the utterly black sky beyond it. And the dust that clung to them, rasped against their suits, blurred their visors.
Suits are good for forty-eight hours, Jay kept telling himself. Oxygen, heat, water enough for forty-eight hours. Radiation protection. They’ll even stop a micrometeor without springing a leak. Says so in the instruction manual.
But he wondered.
Time and again they tried their suit radios. Still the wailing scream of the jamming defeated them.
“They must have planted jammers along the whole route,” Jay told Kelly.
“That means we’ll have to get back to Moonbase itself in . . .” she peered at the watch on her suit wrist, “. . . six hours.”
No way, he knew. Not afoot. But they kept walking. There was nothing else to do. For hours.
Kelly fished a wire from one of her suit pouches and they connected their helmet intercoms, like two kids talking through paper cups and a soaped string.
“It’s got a lonely kind of beauty to it,” she said. “I never thought of the Moon as beautiful before.”
Jay nodded inside his helmet. “I wouldn’t call it beautiful. Awesome, yes. It’s got grandeur, all right. Like the desert in Arizona.”
“Or the tundra up above the Arctic Circle.”
“It’ll take a long time before people screw up this place. But they’ll do it. They’re already starting the job, aren’t they?”
Kelly was silent for a while, then she asked, “Why’d you put in with the rebels? Against the Peacekeepers?”
He expected the old anger seething in his gut. Instead he heard himself answering almost calmly, “I fell for their line. Said the U.S. couldn’t trust its defense to a bunch of foreigners. Said Washington had sold us out to the Third World and the Commies.”
“I was with the Peacekeepers.”
“You were? Then?”
“Before. About three years before.”
“So you believe in them.”
“They’ve kept the peace. The nations are disarming. Or they were, before they realized Shamar had made off with his own little arsenal.”
“And how do you feel about a hundred little nations bossing the U.S. around?”
“I’m a Canadian,” Kelly replied.
“Oh.”
They lapsed into silence. Then Kelly spoke up again, “You’re lucky you didn’t have to go to jail. Most of the other conspirators got long sentences.”
“Sure, I’m lucky all right.”
“Your father must have been a big help. He’s running the IPF now, you know.”
The old anger was strangely muted, but Jay could still feel the resentment smoldering inside him. Or was it shame?
“Big help,” he mocked. “Instead of jail he got me banished to the Moon. I can’t set foot back on Earth for another seven years, not unless you get me arrested and bring me back in handcuffs.”
“It’s better than being in jail, though, isn’t it?”
Jay hesitated. “Yeah, I guess so,” he had to admit.
“Your father must’ve twisted a lot of arms to get you off the hook. Most of ’em got life.”
Jay opened his mouth to answer, but he had no reply. He had never considered the proposition before. Dad pleaded with the court to lighten my sentence? He found that difficult to believe. Especially after he had rejected the old man’s offers of help. It did not square with all he knew about the stern, uncompromising man who had left his mother so many years ago. Very difficult to believe.
But not impossible.
Jay was still pondering this new thought when he stopped and stared at a tiny red light blinking against the dark sky, just over the horizon. He reached for another cleaning pad and wiped his visor. The light did not move or waver.
“Hey, look!” he yelled.
He pointed, then gestured for Kelly to follow him. An emergency shelter. Fresh oxygen and water. His suit was starting to smell bad, Jay realized. He hadn’t admitted it to himself until now.
And maybe a radio with enough power to burn through the jamming. Less than three hours left. Won’t do us much good to get to the shelter if Moonbase itself gets wiped. Just prolong the agony.
The shelter was a life-support module from the earliest days of lunar exploration, buried under several meters of scooped-up regolith rubble. Safe as a squirrel’s nest in winter.
The left leg of Jay’s suit was grating ominously as they hurried the last kilometer toward the shelter. The dust was grinding away at that knee joint. He looked over at Kelly. She seemed to be keeping pace with him, despite her shorter legs.
They made their way down the slight slope to the shelter’s airlock entrance. It was too small for both of them to go through at the same time, but they squeezed into it together anyway. Jay heard somebody laughing as the airlock cycled; it was his own voice, cackling like a madman.
“We made it, kid,” he said. “We’re safe.”
“For the time being,” she reminded him, as the inner hatch slid open.
The shelter was old and small; its inner walls curved up barely high enough to allow Jay to stand upright. The equipment inside looked ancient, dusty. Even the bunks seemed moldy with age.
“They’ve already been here.” Jay saw that the life support console was smashed, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. They dared not remove their suits.
Kelly asked, “The radio . . .?”
Also hopelessly battered, useless.
“Just about two hours now,” Kelly said. “How long will it take us to get back to Moonbase?”
“Depends,” he replied, “on whether this shelter has a hopper in working condition.”
Jay led the way back through the airlock and out behind the pile of rubble covering the shelter.
The spidery body of a lunar hopper stood out in the open. It looked like a small metal platform raised off the ground by three skinny bowed legs. An equally insubstantial railing went around three sides of the platform, with a pedestal for controls and displays. Beneath the platform were small spherical tanks and a rocket nozzle mounted on a swivel.
He inspected the hopper swiftly. “Cute. They shot up the oxygen tank. No oxygen, no rocket. Lazy bastards, though. They should have dismantled this go-cart more thoroughly than this.”
Explaining as he worked, Jay ducked back inside the shelter and came out with a pair of oxygen bottles from the shelter’s emergency supply and a set of tools. It took more than an hour, but finally he got the long green bottles attached firmly enough to the line that fed the rocket’s combustion chamber.
At least I think it’s firmly enough, he told himself.
He helped Kelly up onto the platform and then got up beside her, snapped on the safety tethers that hung from the railing, and plugged his suit radio into the hopper’s radio system. Kelly followed his every motion.
“Ready to try it?” he asked.
“Yeah. Sure.” Her voice in his earphones sounded doubtful.
He nudged the throttle. For an eternally long moment not a thing happened. Then the platform shuddered and jumped and they were soaring up over the lunar landscape like a howitzer shell.
“It works!” Kelly exulted. Jay noticed that both her gloved fists were gripping the railing hard enough to bend the metal.
“Next stop, Moonbase!” he yelled back at her.
They got high enough to see the lights of the base’s solar energy farm, spread out across the shore of the Mare Nubium, where automated tractors were converting raw regolith soil into solar cells and laying them out in neat hexagonal patterns.
Jay tried to steer toward the lights, but the hopper’s internal safety program decided that there was not enough fuel for maneuvering and a safe landing. So they glided on, watching the lights of the energy farm slide off to their right.
It was eerie, flying in total silence, without a breeze, without even vibration from the platform they stood upon. Like a dream, coasting effortlessly high above the ground.
Kelly used the hopper’s radio to send an emergency call to Moonbase security. “There’s a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in the oxygen factory,” she repeated a dozen times. There was no answer from Moonbase.
“Either we’re not getting through to them or they’re not getting through to us,” she said, her voice brittle with apprehension.
“Maybe they think it’s a nut call.”
He sensed her shaking her head. “They’ve got to check it out. They can’t let a warning about a nuclear bomb go without checking on it.”
“Nukes are pretty small. The oxygen plant’s damned big.”
“I know,” she answered. “I know. And there isn’t much time.”
Jay realized that they were flying toward the imminent nuclear explosion. Like charging into the mouth of the cannon, he thought.
A long silence, and then they began descending. The ground was slowly, languidly coming closer. And closer.
“Will one nuke really be enough to wipe out the whole base?” Kelly asked.
“Depends on its size. Probably won’t vaporize the whole base. But they’re smart to put it in the oxygen factory. Like a shooting a guy in the heart. The blast will destroy Moonbase’s oxygen production. No oh-two for life support, or for export. Oxygen’s still the Moon’s major export product.”
“I know that.”
“The bomb will kick up a helluva lot of debris, too. Like a big meteor impacting. The splash will cover the solar energy farms, I’ll bet. Electricity production goes down close to zero.”
Kelly muttered something unintelligible.
Jay had to admire the terrorists’ planning. “They won’t kill many people directly. They’ll force Moonbase to shut down. Somebody’ll have to evacuate a couple thousand people back to Earth. Neat job.”
The ground was coming up faster now. Automatically the hopper’s computer fired its little rocket engine and they slowed, then landed with hardly a thump.
“We must be a couple of klicks from the factory,” Jay said. “You stay here and keep transmitting a warning. I’ll go to the factory and see what’s happening there.”
“Hell no!” Kelly snapped. “We’re both going to the factory.”
“That’s stupid . . .”
“Don’t get macho on me, Yank, just when I was starting to like you. Besides, you might still be one of the bad guys. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
He grinned at her, knowing that she could not see it through the helmet visor. “You still harbor suspicions about me?”
“Officially, yes.”
“And unofficially?” he asked.
“We’re wasting time. Let’s get moving.”
There was less than a half-hour remaining by the time they reached the oxygen factory.
“It’s big!” Kelly said. Their suit radios worked now; they had outrun the jammers.
“There’s a thousand places they could tuck a nuke inhere.”
“Where the hell are the Moonbase security people?”
Jay took a deep breath. Where would I place a nuke, to do the maximum damage? Not out here at the periphery of the factory. Deep inside, where the heavy machinery is. The rock crushers? No. The ovens and electric arc separators.
“Come on,” he commanded.
They ducked under conveyor belts, dodged maintenance robots gliding smoothly along the factory’s concrete pad with arms extended semi-menacingly at the intruding humans. Past the rock crushers, pounding so thunderously that Jay could feel their raw power vibrating along his bones. Past the shaker screens where the crushed rock and sandy soil were sifted.
Up ahead was the heavy stuff, the steel complex of electrical ovens and the shining domes protecting the lightning-bolt arcs that extracted pure oxygen from the lunar minerals. The area was a maze of pipes. Off at one end of it stood the tall cryogenic tanks where the precious oxygen was stored.
It was dark in there. The meteor screen overhead shut out the Earthlight, and there were only a few lamps scattered here and there. The maintenance robots did not need lights and humans were discouraged from tinkering with the automated machinery.
“It’s got to be somewhere around here,” Jay told Kelly.
They separated, each hunting frantically for an object that was out of place, a foreign invading cell in this almost-living network of machinery that pulsed like a heart and produced oxygen for its human dependents to breathe.
*** *** ***
Jay watched the six pressure-suited figures, his mind racing. Less than three minutes left! What the hell can we do? Where’s the base security people?
For a wild instant he thought that these six might be Moonbase security personnel. But their suits bore no insignia, no Moonbase logo, no names stencilled on their chests.
Feeling trapped and desperately close to death, Jay suddenly yelled into his helmet microphone, “That’s it! It’s disarmed. We can relax now.”
Kelly scuttled over to him and pressed her helmet against his. “What are you . . .”
He shoved her away and pointed with his other hand. The intruders were gabbling at each other in their own language. Two of them ducked under a conveyor belt and headed straight toward the tall cryogenic storage tanks.
“Come on,” Jay whispered urgently at Kelly.
They duck-walked on a path parallel to the two terrorists, staying behind the conveyors and thick pipes, detouring around the massive stainless-steel domes of the electric arcs until they came up slightly behind the pair, at the base of the storage tanks.
Jay jabbed a gloved finger, gesturing. Beneath the first of the tanks lay an oblong case, completely without markings of any kind.
One of the terrorists bent over it and popped open a square panel. The other leaned over his shoulder, watching.
“I should have brought a gun,” Kelly muttered.
“Good time to think of it.”
Without straightening up, he launched himself across the ten meters separating them from the terrorists. Arms outstretched, he slammed into the two of them and they all smashed against the curving wall of the storage tanks.
Jay had seen men in pressure suits fight each other. Tempers can flare beyond control even in vacuum. Most of the time they were like the short-lived shoving matches between football players encased in their protective padding and helmets. But now and then lunar workers had tried to murder one another.
He knew exactly what to do. Before either of the terrorists could react Jay had twisted the helmet release catch of the nearer one. He panicked and thrashed madly, kicking and fumbling with his gloved hands to seal the helmet again. He must have been screaming, too, but Jay could not hear him.
The second one had time to stagger to his knees, halfway facing Jay. But Kelly slammed into his side, knocking him over against the oblong crate that held the nuclear weapon.
Jay scooped up one of the fallen flechette guns and fired a trio of darts into the man’s chest. The suit lost its stiffness as the air blew out of it, spewing blood through the holes. He turned to see the other terrorist fleeing madly away, legs flailing as he bounced and sailed in the low gravity, hands still fumbling with his helmet seal.
“One minute to go!” Kelly shouted.
Jay pushed the dead body away and grabbed at the nuke.
“It’s too heavy for . . .”
“Not on the Moon,” he grunted as he jerked the two-meter-long case off the concrete floor and hefted it to his shoulder.
