Gunpowder Moon Read online

  Dechert looked up in time to see a massive ball of flame rocketing over their heads toward the Haemus Mountains. Standard flung his left arm toward the sky as if to ward off the flying object. He hit Dechert’s shoulder, throwing the rover into a half spin. Dechert slammed on the brakes and the vehicle skidded violently, its starboard wheels coming off the ground for more than a second before succumbing again to the Moon’s weak gravity. They slid to a rest perpendicular to the road, the rover’s rear wheel spinning into one of the light footers that lined its margins.

  Dechert watched the projectile cross the horizon without a sound, a glowing specter casting an emerald shadow on the Moon’s dark surface. He took his clenched hands off the steering column and waited for his pulse to slow and the plume of dust around the rover to settle. He could hear his heart beating inside his suit and Standard’s raspy breathing over the com. His ears rang with adrenaline.

  “What the hell was that?” Standard asked.

  “The first thing was a meteor,” Dechert said, taking several deep breaths of his own to calm down. “The second thing was very nearly a bad accident. You hit my arm.”

  Standard didn’t answer for a long moment and then looked over. “What? I’m sorry. That thing . . . it didn’t make any noise.”

  Dechert pulled the rover forward a few feet and parked it, loosening his restraints and getting out on wobbly legs to check the titanium-cleated tire and the roadway marker. He bounced lightly on his feet, getting used to the microgravity and the bulk of the suit. Both the tire and the light appeared to be in working order. Jesus Christ, he thought, looking down into a ravine off the side of the road that he had missed by no more than three meters. A few more degrees of turn and we’d be sliding back-assward down that gully. Or worse.

  “Tenuous as it may be, the Moon has an atmosphere,” Dechert said. He grunted as he pushed the triliptical light back into its metal footer, sticking his boot under the side of the rover for leverage. “If a big enough meteor enters at a high enough speed, it’ll light up.” He finished the job and stood up. “Interesting fact: We’ve increased the Moon’s atmosphere by seven hundred percent since we’ve been here, just through the gas emissions of our stations and propellant-driven craft.”

  Dechert walked around the rover for a final check and got back in, fumbling with his restraints, which he couldn’t see beneath his helmet. He figured them out and clicked on the motor, flaring up the rover’s system consoles and running lights, and checked all the onboard systems. Green lights everywhere. He put the vehicle in gear and they started down the road again in silence, emerging from a shimmering ring of dust.

  “Not my best moment,” Standard said, his voice more subdued. “I suppose I’m better suited for an office than a shotgun ride on the Moon.”

  “Don’t worry about it. That thing gave me a jolt, too. That’s the Moon, Commissioner: hours of boredom followed by a few seconds of terror. You just have to remember to make small movements out here, even when you’re scared. The low gravity exaggerates everything you do.”

  Standard laid his helmet back on the headrest and laughed. It was a strange laugh, thin and self-conscious. A tax collector’s laugh. “Right. Well, I’ll remember that the next time I see a flaming ball of iron flying over our heads.”

  “Like I said, don’t worry about it.”

  “Thanks.” Standard readjusted himself in his seat and grabbed the roll bar again. “Shall we resume our debate, then, as it might keep my mind off of throwing up?”

  “Good idea, as you definitely don’t want to spend the next half hour or so with vomit in your suit. I think you were about to explain how we could maintain our production numbers while being shot at by the Chinese.”

  Standard tried to suppress a grunt.

  “I was about to say that diplomacy is a two-way road, Commander. I don’t think you realize how bad things have gotten between our two countries.” He paused, perhaps considering how much he should tell Dechert. “The newsfeeds on the stream don’t give the full scope of the crisis. Your miner isn’t the only recent casualty.”

  “You mean on the Moon or on Earth?”

  “On Earth.” Standard lowered his voice as if he could be overheard on the empty mare. “I’m not authorized to tell you this and I probably shouldn’t, but I understand your need to know after what happened to your man at Posidonius.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Okay then. I’ll tell you what I can.” The man was actually whispering, as if someone was pointing a directional mike at him out here on the surface. Dechert just kept quiet, though—this was what he was waiting for.

  “An American nuclear submarine collided with a Chinese boomer in the South China Sea three weeks ago, just south of Macau. Chinese territorial waters. Unbelievable, really, given our advanced systems. She was in stealth mode, running on biodrive, and our captain seems to have gotten too aggressive or too close. The Chinese sub did a crash stop and turned to starboard, probably to check her baffles for trailers, and our boat cracked her in the stern. The accident killed sixteen Chinese sailors, Commander, and they almost lost the boat. Their reaction was quite negative.”

  “I bet.”

  “Yes. And it occurred just as our lawyers were fighting at The Hague over the Altschuler and ISA Treaty interpretations of central mare mineral rights and production reports, and certain economic disputes in the Pacific Rim back on Earth. A few days after the incident, the Chinese ambassador advised us that they would fire on any U.S. vessel or craft that strayed within two hundred kilometers of their territory, either terrestrial or lunar. Then he left Washington with the entire consular staff.”

  Dechert slammed his foot on the brakes. Blood pumped into his neck as he fought to hold his anger in check. He turned his head toward Standard, squeezing the steering column as tightly as he could.

  “Why the hell wasn’t I told about that?”

  “Because it shouldn’t have been an issue. We don’t have any mining operations that close to the Mare Imbrium. Your mobile habitation unit was on the east side of the Serenity basin when the explosion occurred, Commander, a full seven hundred kilometers from Chinese-claimed mineral rights. We had no reason to believe you would be in jeopardy.”

  Dechert suppressed the urge to launch a stream of profanity at the lunar heavens, grab Standard by the shoulders, and slam his helmet onto the roll bar in front of him until it cracked open like a nut, exposing his bureaucratic lungs to the vacuum.

  “You had no reason to believe we’d be in jeopardy? We’ve had a good chunk of our water and air supply sabotaged, and I’ve got a dead miner in the fucking freezer at Peary Crater, Standard. What do you call that? Safety first?”

  He let the anger radiate through his body as Standard sat next to him, immobile. After a minute he took several deep breaths and shifted the rover back into gear.

  “Unbelievable,” he said into the quiet.

  They crawled their way up an eroded plateau, Dechert concentrating on the vibration of the low gears and leaning over the side to see if the wheels were holding their traction. Both men could feel the uncertain purchase of the rover’s wheels on the regolith. The craft started to sideslip on the hill. Dechert threw the all-wheel drive onto its lowest setting and released stabilizers from all six tires, which pushed out from the inner wheel wells and dug into the lunar regolith like tiny, spiked training wheels. The added traction helped, and they continued to push up the hummock. The heads-up monitor showed the grade lessening from thirty-two degrees to twenty, and then to twelve. Both men exhaled.

  “What the hell else haven’t we been warned about, seeing as how we’re not in any jeopardy?” Dechert asked when they reached the top.

  “Nothing I can think of.”

  “Great. And since you’ve brought up the Molly Hatchet, maybe you could answer a few nagging questions. For starters, how the hell did the Chinese plant the explosive on her hull? My sources at Peary Crater tell me there wasn’t any forensic evidence a
t the Posidonius site. No tracks or footprints. No sign of intrusion. So where was the bomb planted, and how?”

  “Your ‘sources’ at Peary Crater? And who might they be?”

  “You shouldn’t ask questions you won’t get an answer to, Standard. It makes you look like a fool.”

  Standard threw up a hand. “Fine—I guess the exchange of information is to be strictly one-sided. I don’t know how the Chinese pulled it off. I’ve read the full report and there are no definitive conclusions. The charge may have been set when the rover was at Drill Station 3 near the Montes Caucasus. That’s less than three hundred kilometers from Archimedes, and Captain Hale said the device was placed in a recess under the EVA hatch, where it wouldn’t be noticed or get in the way.”

  Dechert considered this. New Beijing 2 was nestled inside the Archimedes Crater on the Mare Imbrium. It was the first substation built inside a lunar crater, on the premise that the impact walls would provide extra radiation shielding and allow it to be buried more shallowly in the regolith. But the Molly Hatchet hadn’t been near the Montes Caucasus in over a month, and Dechert had a hard time believing someone would plant a bomb and set it to go off thirty days later, especially on the Moon, where temperature changes and radiation spikes wreak havoc on even the hardiest systems. Nor would they put it in a place where a misguided boot or a gloved hand could knock it loose. At the very least, it wasn’t a response to the South China Sea incident, which according to Standard had happened after the Caucasus mission.

  How the hell can I get my hands on the classified version of that report, he asked himself. He didn’t find a ready answer. He had already called in all his markers at Peary Crater, and the few people who still owed him weren’t stupid enough to go digging through the SMA’s black files.

  “So the bomb was stuck to the side of the Hatchet for more than a month before it went off?” he finally said aloud. “And it was set to be triggered by an orbital cue? Do you know how twitchy those Lunar Positioning Satellite uplinks are, especially when you’re out on the mare? I wouldn’t trust them to turn on a microwave at lunchtime, much less trigger a bomb, and I know a lot of people who would agree with me. Until someone comes up with a better theory, you’ve got a pretty lousy case against the Chinese.”

  “What do you mean? We have the explosive itself.”

  Dechert laughed. “God knows how many times that stuff changed hands before it got up to the Moon. You don’t think Chinese Intelligence sells stuff on the black market?”

  “Well, who else do you intend to implicate, Commander?” Standard asked, and he swept his arm lengthwise across the black lunar field. “The last time I checked there weren’t a whole lot of suspects in the neighborhood. There aren’t any Brazilian rebels running around on the Moon, and no one else up here is angry with us.”

  Anger isn’t the only reason people kill, Dechert thought, and not even the most frequent.

  The rover reached the top of the plateau and Dechert parked it, retracting the stabilizers and dimming the display lights. The road twisted downward through a decaying box canyon and ran north onto an open plain, a glowing blue serpent that appeared to end at a point of nothingness in the dark. It was black here. They were close enough to the southern spur of the Montes Haemus to be fully in nightside. Dechert clicked on his com as he looked into the void; the features a few feet to each side of the road were indiscernible, and the feeling of emptiness was disorienting.

  “Vernon, we’re at the Fletcher Promontory. Light her up for us, please.”

  The com popped and hissed and Vernon’s voice came through, distorted this time by the distance.

  “Lights coming online, boss. Cycle 3, solar reserves.”

  They watched in silence as the dark plain below flared with red and yellow lights popping on in a domino-like succession until the blackness was replaced by an arc of light that stretched across ten acres of lunar lowland. Dechert could see the main power station in the center, a fixed point at the end of the Haemus Road, its cylindrical structure bristling with the four giant silos that converted processed lunar soil into liquid helium-3. The mining field radiated out in a giant circle like a pushed-over Ferris wheel on the dark center of the Moon, lights marking the areas where more than a meter of regolith had been tilled and sifted for the solar isotope.

  All of this engineering, Dechert thought, just to pick up moondust.

  “The power of the stars,” he said, “everywhere under our feet.”

  Standard nodded, enraptured by the shimmering valley. “Now that’s a sight that makes you believe in the glory of God.”

  Or at least the glory of gold, Dechert thought, but he was entranced as well. Damned if it wasn’t beautiful, even after all this time. He started the rover again, and they drove the final leg of the Haemus Road toward the mining platform’s central hub, down into a sea of lights.

  12

  The mine ran in silence. If a comet slammed into it with all the power of a fusion bomb, they wouldn’t hear a sound before they died. Dechert always marveled at this. The only sounds on the Moon’s surface existed inside their spacesuits. The exaggerated thrum of the rebreathers. The scrape of an arm hitting the inner insulating layers. Hair brushing against the top of the helmet or the soft whir of the walk-profile computer. But outside, a tapestry of total blackout. No wind, no air, no noise. The telescoping arm of the spiral mine should be popping as its aluminum skin contracts in the newly supercooled air. The roving platform should be whining like an industrial vacuum as it sucks in regolith and runs it through the heaters. The processed fine should be pattering like rain on a window as it rushes back to the power station and blasts into the containment silos for liquefaction. Instead there was nothing. No one knows what true isolation is until they’ve been in space, Dechert thought. Even when you’re sitting next to someone, you’re completely and utterly self-contained. Alone.

  Standard could sense it, too. It’s one thing to ride across the mute expanse of the Moon. It’s still essentially an off-road car trip, when you get right down to it. But it’s entirely another to watch heavy industry take place in silence. We’re the aliens here, Dechert thought, and we always will be.

  “Quite a remarkable thing,” Standard said, forgetting their argument for the moment.

  “Yes.”

  “And you only come here once a month?”

  Dechert pulled onto the grid road leading to the power station and dimmed his visor to cut the glare from the minefield lights. “Usually two or three times a month. Once or twice for a site check when we’re in the neighborhood, and once with a MOHAB and trailer to load the He-3 casks for orbital ejection back at Serenity.”

  He stole a quick look at Standard without moving his helmet. The commissioner knew this had been a sore point with the Mining Guild and an even greater source of anger for the diggers themselves.

  “It’s a shame we couldn’t build a mobile launcher or finish the fixed ejectors at each of the main spiral mines,” Standard said, hearing the passive-aggressive complaint. “The cost structure just didn’t work out.” He looked back at Dechert and waited for a response. He was clearly used to affirmation after he spoke, and not getting it seemed to irritate him.

  “There are times, Commander, when I get the sense that you don’t approve of anything the Administration does up here.”

  Dechert laughed. “What the hell do you want me to say, Standard? That I don’t mind the added danger of an extra mission every month because your accountants couldn’t stomach finishing a rail launcher? You’re right. I don’t like my crew being put in jeopardy so the SMA can turn an extra two-percent margin, and I don’t like the Moon becoming a playground for men who’ve never heard the sound of a bullet cracking the air over their head.”

  Standard stiffened. “I’ll forgive the inference, Dechert, but I won’t be laughed at. We all serve in our own way, and sometimes you have to stand for what is right, whether you’ve worn the uniform or not.” He looked Dechert over again, ca
refully this time. “You do believe we’re right, don’t you? Will you at least concede that we’re the good guys in this? That’s your man who died out there at Posidonius, for God’s sake.”

  “There’s only one ‘right’ up here, and that’s staying alive. Dying is the wrong, no matter how the hell it happens.”

  It was Standard’s turn to laugh. “No, Commander, that’s too easy. I can’t let you get away with that. If you believe such an ordered simplicity can endure among men, I suggest you take a closer look at Earth out of your observatory window. Look at how China turned her back on her starving neighbors during the height of the Thermal Max and did everything to shore up her own power. Or maybe you should read the Old Testament—the parts about the righteous and the wicked. That may sound ridiculous to you, up here in your underground station where you have the luxury of disregarding nasty things like politics, but what about back on Earth? Do you think the Chinese are raising a finger to protect anything other than their interests? And do you really think they’re an honest broker here on the Moon?”

  They reached the silo, its bank of clear yellow lights casting a long shadow behind the rover as they flashed in unison. Dechert parked, and both of them craned their necks to look up at the looming platform. It stood as the central spoke of the spiral mine, which stretched across the regolith farther than they could see. A half-built rail launcher—an electromagnetic gun that would have shot helium-3 casks into low-lunar orbit by sending a massive jolt of electricity through two conducting rails—sat like an abandoned artillery piece a few yards from the silo.

  “I didn’t realize our government considered altruism one of its core competencies,” Dechert finally replied. “Is that why we’re dropping a treaty that provides free helium-3 for the New Third World?” He started to unstrap his restraints. “I thought it was so we could prove to the orbital executives that we can keep up with their production demands.”