Gunpowder Moon Page 2

  “What the hell happened out there?” Vernon asked.

  “Nothing good. You listen in on the com?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve got Briggs analyzing your boot prints. But man, what the hell happened out there?”

  Dechert rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fingers. “You tell me, Vernon. Clearly someone is upping the pissing match over the mineral rights in the Tranquility basin. Who signed the Altschuler Treaty? Russia, the Chinese, Brazil, India, and us. You want to take a guess?”

  Vernon gripped one of the support bars above his head and swayed back and forth. “Well, it wasn’t the Russians. They don’t give a shit about Tranquility. They’re too worried about staying alive on the far side, those crazy bastards. And the Brazilians and Indians haven’t even started to grid their own He-3 deposits. They’re still camping in tents.”

  “So, the Chinese.”

  “Either that or it’s ghosts. No one else knows how rich those fields are—unless someone’s been running test strips out there we don’t know about.”

  Dechert puffed up his cheeks and blew out some air. He was too tired to think about the firestorm that lay ahead once he reported to Peary Crater. “Well I doubt we’re talking ghosts, but here’s a question for you, Vernon. If it is the Chinese, how the hell did they know exactly what power cell to pull out without immediately killing the sifter? Quarles says that if they had yanked A7 or B7 or C7, the whole thing would have gone down. Whoever did this either got real lucky or knew about the bypass system.”

  Vernon frowned for a second and then gave a grin. “Hell, the electronics were probably made in China. I’ll have Quarles do some checking, but I doubt that power system is a state secret.”

  “Yeah. I guess. But have him dig around anyways. Hopefully Lane will get some answers from those boot prints.” Dechert pictured the scene at Dionysius again—how the saboteur’s boot prints had gone from a landing area just west of the drill station directly to the power shack, then to the rille where the water sifter had been operating, and then back to the landing area. Like whoever it was knew the place. And whatever craft had landed on the bottom of Dionysius had left no imprint on the Moon—it had somehow been wiped clean. But how do you wipe clean the landing area of a one- or two-ton shuttle, when the guy who’s flying it is back in the shuttle? The landing gear should have left clear depressions in the soft regolith. It didn’t make any sense. Dechert closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The gunpowder smell of moondust filled his nostrils, and his head hurt too much to work the mystery. He didn’t want to think about the Chinese or anyone else until he had taken something to kill his headache.

  “What’s our status at Posidonius?” he asked Vernon. “Any word from the boys?”

  Two of his diggers, Benson and Thatch, were laying grids and running test bores for a new helium-3 strip mine at Crater Posidonius, and even though Dechert had received an update that morning, the mission had never left his thoughts. Posidonius was in a relatively safe part of the Serenity basin, but this was the Moon. He didn’t like being hours removed from an update on a remote-site mission.

  “They’re good. Lane mentioned something about the comlink screwing up again, but last I heard they’re still breathing air and laying spirals.”

  Waters smiled as he spoke, and his Louisiana drawl reminded Dechert of the last drops of bourbon falling into the bottom of a glass. It was an affectation to some degree, as his accent diminished as conversations went on. Dechert wondered if it was a subconscious thing—Vernon’s way of yearning for the oxygen-rich lowlands of his youth.

  Dechert rubbed the sweat out of his week-old crew cut with an open hand. He looked at a small mirror in his locker and saw the gray pressing its attack on the top of his head. It had started a few years ago, a rogue hair in one place. And then another. And then the assault had grown in silvery numbers and spread from his sideburns up to his temples, amassing like an army preparing for a siege. Age unleashed. It wasn’t just his hair anymore, either. The years had burrowed into Dechert’s muscles and tendons with relentless will, and now he couldn’t let his face go unshaven for more than a few days without looking at gleaming white whiskers, beckoning him to the grassy hills. He was spent, and he knew the recovery from this hop would take much longer than it should—days instead of hours—limping around on bad knees in the feeble gravity of one-sixth g.

  He brushed away the self-pity. It wouldn’t do him any good in this colony of overworked, understimulated lunar miners. Not with the spreadsheet boys back on Earth running production variables that didn’t consider downtime. They were pushing for Serenity 1 to outproduce the Chinese. Pushing hard.

  “You look like hell,” Waters said.

  “I’m aware.”

  Dechert wondered for the hundredth time if the people back home had any clue what it was like to live on the Moon. There was a weatherworn old laser print that he had seen several years back at Las Cruces Spaceport. It showed three miners standing on a lunar mountaintop with helmets gleaming in the sunlight, looking like Spartan warriors in spacesuits, ready to defend the celestial passes of Thermopylae. He thought of a child looking at that ridiculous poster and dreaming about how great it would be to spend a few days on Luna digging for alien fuel to save the homeland. If only the Earthbound could see him and Vernon now, crammed into the access tunnel that led to Main Quarantine like commuters on a city bus, only with charcoal dust in their hair.

  He struggled to get his right arm out of the pressure suit, but his efforts got little notice from his flight officer. Waters never moved unless there was a pressing need, saving his energy like an old lizard waiting for the sun. It was a passing annoyance. When trouble presented itself, Vernon Waters was the best man on the Moon, the most dialed-in flight officer Dechert had ever had. Waters’s arms rippled as he swayed on the restraining bars and a helixed tattoo circling his black biceps moved in waves, the muscles tensing and relaxing, serpentine. Waters performed two hundred pull-ups a day in a 1-g heavysuit and he was proud of the results. He was wider than a whiskey barrel at the shoulders, and his frame had to be acrobatically realigned to make it through some of the station’s smaller sub-hatches. His large-lidded eyes and Jimi Hendrix hairdo scared the hell out of anyone who didn’t know him, and Dechert always wondered if the microgravity affected him as much as everyone else on the Moon. He seemed to bounce around less.

  He was too damned big for the Moon, and too set in his habits, but there wasn’t a man Dechert trusted more on Luna than Vernon.

  Dechert powered down the jetsuit, turned off the air systems and the walk-profile computer, and locked down the propellant valves. Waters finally began to help him when he reached down to unbuckle his boots.

  “Appreciate the effort,” Dechert said.

  “Anytime, boss.”

  They continued the work in silence, giving Dechert time to mull things over. If Quarles could get these jetsuits operational, maybe it would take some of the pressure off the station. The Space Mining Administration had been screaming for greater output as it prepared for the basing of Europa. Its market analysts were getting paranoid about the success of their Chinese competitors, whose new station could reportedly convert almost twenty metric tons of helium-3 every month.

  Again, it was a difference between being dirtside and being on the lunar surface. The fact was, the crew of Serenity 1 had welcomed the company when the Chinese staged New Beijing 2 from their main base at the South Pole a few years ago. The new station was only six hundred kilometers away, tucked into the lip of Archimedes Crater, and that brought them closer to Serenity than anyone else in the solar system, turning them into adopted brothers and sisters. The two stations traded seeds and flash-frozen dinners and launched homemade vodka to each other on low trajectory nano-packs. Lin Tzu, the commander of the Chinese station, had become Dechert’s friend and online chess adversary. Tzu played like a mercenary, convincing Dechert he was far better as a friend than an enemy.

  But the Administration h
adn’t adapted as well to its new neighbors. In its view, lunar competition was a violation of the company’s manifest destiny—an insult to the spacefaring nation that had launched Apollo with vacuum-tubed computing more than a century ago. The firstborn are always jealous of their siblings, Dechert thought, and if the Chinese kept up their rate of production and found a way to keep their mining costs in control, they would be able to compete for the most lucrative terra-energy, space-tourism, and system-exploration contracts in the next bidding cycle.

  And that, apparently, was his problem to solve.

  “Easy on that buckle,” he said. “Shit.”

  “Damn thing’s jammed. Wiggle your foot.”

  “Okay, hold up. Watch the thrusters.”

  “Damned moondust.”

  Terra-energy they could have, Dechert thought. He unzipped the inner lining at his neck and scratched at the damp strip of skin that had been pressing against the suit’s metal frame while Waters continued to wrestle with his boot. Terra-energy was still being subsidized by a corrupt international commission to coax the home world back from the Thermal Maximum, and the margins were lousy. Sys-ex wasn’t much better. It required a lot of fuel, and governments were starting to pay decent money for it, usually on a cost-plus basis, but the demand was spotty. After the Thermal Max, scientific exploration had become something of a luxury—and entrepreneurs were only now beginning to scrape up enough capital to explore the inner system and the Asteroid Belt for new riches.

  No, it was tourism that was going to command the big money. Once the icy oases of Europa and Miranda were based and miners began running helium-3 scoops into Jupiter’s and Uranus’s roiling atmospheres, newly minted thrill-seekers looking for a week of zero-g would become the Moon’s core market. The deep-system crafts of the near future would pull up to Europa like it was a corner gas station, and Mars would be Mars, a forgotten way station with all the use of a played-out nickel mine. Still, the brand-new resorts orbiting Earth would need helium-3 for their fusion reactors and water and oxygen for their paying customers. The rich wouldn’t suffer a Level-1 bag shower—a quart of recycled urine and a hydro-sponge. They had more refined sensibilities. The Earth is waking up again, Dechert thought. Even if half the planet is hungry, the top of the food chain is back to eating well, and fed stomachs only stretch.

  “These things are a goddamned Greek tragedy waiting to happen,” Waters said.

  Dechert snapped back to the present and saw Waters release the dust-covered jetsuit boot from his foot and turn it in his broad hands, looking at the thrust-vectoring HEDMs soldered onto its side with eyes that flared theatrically wide. “You wanna strap me into one of these, you better shorten my hitch. I didn’t sign up to be a freakin’ beach ball.”

  “Right.”

  Dechert got up and unhooked a 1-g heavysuit jacket from the clothes locker, struggling to pull the weighted sleeves onto his frame as the cold air of the accessway ran across his bare shoulders. He could have given Waters a glance to show his displeasure at the feigned insubordination, but Dechert had long ago discarded the SMA manual on maintaining a chain of command. Serenity 1 was more like an oil rig than an army barracks, a place where solitude and danger melded the crew into a state of unwritten informality. You don’t pull rank in a madhouse unless it’s about to blow.

  When it came to the crew, Dechert danced on the line between discipline and surrender. He even let Quarles grow a blend of Moroccan cannabis in the greenhouse and play classic rock to his floor-rattling content in his engineering dungeon under the science lab. All that mattered was hitting quota and keeping things at a slow simmer, especially at times when the walls felt close. Dissatisfaction among the natives is a bad thing when you’re off-Earth and more than a thousand klicks from a main base, as Fletcher used to say. When things go wrong, the last thing you want to be is in charge.

  Because if there’s a mutiny, the guy with the most patches on his shoulder will almost certainly be the first one tossed out of an airlock.

  “You’re a union man,” Dechert said. He took a navy blue baseball cap out of the locker and pulled it low on his head. He rubbed moondust off the epaulettes on his heavysuit jacket and made a halfhearted effort to stretch by reaching for the rubberized floor with his palms, stopping half the way down when he felt the tendons at the backs of his knees start to give. “If your rep can’t short you, you damned well know I can’t.”

  “Shit,” Waters said.

  Dechert straightened, patted him on the shoulder in mock sympathy, and then walked toward the clean-room hatch, eager to unfold his body and lie under the dry furnace of the decontamination blowers. The heavysuit’s 650 pounds of distributed VECTRAN weighting almost made it feel like he was back on Earth, mimicking the leaden gravity of Terra as it clung to his lean frame. Only his head felt light, and that was just something you had to get used to.

  “And I hate to tell you,” Dechert said, looking back at his flight officer, “but you are going to have to climb into one of those suits once we dump the profile from this hop. As soon as Peary Crater hears about what happened down there, we’ll all be taking Moonwalks. We’re going to have to check all our spiral sites, water mines, and substations now to make sure the Chinese or whoever the hell else hasn’t been screwing with them. And we’re gonna have to go back to DS-7 to replace that drive.”

  He engaged the quarantine sequence and waited for the clean-room door to slide open so he could kneel down and clear the hatch. “Take it from me, Vernon. Eat light before your first hop.”

  3

  As Dechert walked into the CORE, Lane Briggs was slouched over the communications console, her face cupped in her hands and her elbows propped on the blue composite worktop. Her ankles were coiled one around the other as she tapped a heel on the floor with rapid bursts of energy. Quarles sat at the Lunar Positioning Satellite station across the circular room, staring at her backside. The moment was almost incestuous—the two bickered like siblings stuck in a small room and Dechert could imagine no stranger scenario than finding them making out in a corner. And now that he had that image in his head, he was sorry to have even had such a thought. He rapped an open palm on the gunwale, wondering if Quarles had exceeded his virtual porn minutes. The sound reverberated like a rifle shot in the small amphitheater and they both jumped as Dechert bent low to clear the door.

  “Jesus,” Quarles said.

  Dechert glared at him and looked back to Lane. “What do we got? Are Benson and Thatch done at Posidonius?”

  She stood up and stretched, pulling her arms back to impossible angles. Quarles turned back to his station and pretended to review the incoming data stream from the Posidonius mission. The banks of polymer and holo-displays cast a green and yellow glow to the room, playing across Lane’s pale face and dark copper hair, which was cut short above the neckline and moved in slow rows of color as she turned her head in the low gravity. If you ever want to understand the beauty of a woman, Dechert thought, she has to be seen in less than one-sixth g. And then he shook his head.

  My God, we’ve been up here too long. . . .

  Lane broke his reverie. “They got DS-4’s converters up again and they’re about to lay the test strips on the new fields,” she said. “Thatch is already prepping the Molly for the run home. They should have her ready to move by 2230.”

  She checked the computer on her slim wrist, but he knew she was also watching him as he tried to maneuver his aching legs down the rubberized gangway without wincing. Her lips pulled together in a red bead and she leaned back against the console, tapping her fingers as she used her palms to support herself, her every movement a controlled outburst of energy. Dechert knew she was angry, and he knew it had to be the Molly Hatchet’s communications system. He waited for her to go off.

  “I’ll say this one last time, Commander, before I file a complaint with the SMA-holes back at Las Cruces. We’re going to be walking through black water if the com keeps shitting the bed every time we run an op outsi
de the perimeter. Someone’s going to die out there, and they’re gonna form a panel of the clueless back on Earth to try and figure out what I’ve been bitching about for six months.”

  She picked up a fuse cord from the worktop and pulled at it, stretching it in her hands like a garrote until he could see the veins standing out on the tops of her knuckles. Dechert grimaced as he watched the rubber stretch. Quarles moaned with feigned dismay. Chronic worry and a distrust of management were parts of Lane’s ethos, spurred equally by her cynical nature and her role as the station’s safety officer. If she could pile up every Space Mining Administration bureaucrat back on Earth and drop a napalm bomb into their tepid, flabby center, Dechert knew she would do it. He just wasn’t sure she understood that such an action would make no difference: You can always find more drones to fill their space, and the company was probably not going to change if it meant spending more money.

  “I believe ‘bitching’ is the key word there, boss,” Quarles said.

  Dechert turned and raised a finger.

  “Jonathan, don’t make me do something I’ll regret. I was out in the cold soak too long to deal with your bullshit.”

  Quarles hated his first name, which is why Dechert used it. The young man turned back to the screens and pretended to review mission data. Dechert figured it was for the best; if Quarles got under Lane’s fingernails, she might just kill him as a proxy for the bureaucrats. He looked again at the fuse cord in her clenched fists and admitted to himself that it would hurt on more than a professional level if she ended up in a brig at Peary Crater because of a spontaneous act of violence against his young propulsion engineer. Lane Briggs thought as he did—a cynic who left nothing to trust. She was his security blanket, the person he turned to first when he wanted to make sure he wasn’t going Moon-crazy.