Gunpowder Moon Read online

  Dechert rubbed his temples and sat in one of the CORE’s worn microsuede seats. His EVA hangover had gotten worse and he longed for Earth air, real air, not the stuff that ran through a thousand meters of carbon filter.

  “Look, I’ve been asking the commo shop at Peary Crater to send someone over for two months. If they don’t put a techie on the next resupply, I’ll personally fly over there and trash some offices for you.”

  She grunted, disbelieving. They had run four deep-site missions in the Molly Hatchet in the last two months, all with a sputtering com, an aging half-track, and no reliable redundancies. Not even a satellite phone on the damned thing that worked right. Lane is prescient, Dechert thought. Someone is going to die. If the Administration doesn’t grind down on the gears a notch or put a few more communications satellites in low lunar orbit in a hurry, someone is definitely going to lose a life in the name of Sino-American competition.

  “What about dipshit over here?” Lane asked, pointing a finger at Quarles. “Don’t they pay him to fix this stuff?”

  Quarles grinned, happy to be a part of the conversation again. His desire to talk grew proportionally to Lane’s anger.

  “Transport, my chestnut-haired Artemis,” he said. “I do transport. Communications is a more problematic beast, and I’ve been with the Administration long enough to know you don’t break something you haven’t signed for. That said, if the Hatchet throws a piston, I’ll be happy to fix her for you.”

  With all the radiation damage, Dechert doubted if Quarles could fully repair the Molly Hatchet’s communications system anyways. A solar flare had fried most of her satellite uplinks two weeks ago when she was outside of the Bullpen during a heat/freeze check. Her systems couldn’t be shielded as well as the stations’, and if the Hatchet happened to be crawling on the surface when another flare cooked up she would be as vulnerable as an earthworm on a field of bricks. The controllers at Peary Crater had been able to only partially restore her backups, which left Cole Benson and Rick Thatcher with few options if the com failed them.

  Dechert scratched his forearm, trying to wake up enough to think as the electrical systems in the CORE buzzed around him, giving the spherical room the feel of a soothing, charged cocoon. Redundancy on the Moon is as important as a tent in the Himalayan death zones, Fletcher used to say. Without it, nothing is safe. If communications failed and another flare erupted, Benson and Thatcher couldn’t be warned. The Hatchet’s short-range sensors might not pick up the radiation wave in time, and they’d die before they could spin up their electrostatic domes and retreat to the leaden tub in the center of the crawler.

  But redundancy wasn’t at the top of the list at Peary Crater right now. Dechert would complain to the managers once again and they wouldn’t do a damned thing—not unless they could spare the extra man-hours without losing ground to quota. They were running at 120 percent at the Moon’s North Pole, just like the crew at Serenity 1 and the newly opened U.S. mining station on the southeastern rim of Tranquillitatis, and the whole machine was grinding toward a breakdown, not just the Molly. Dechert had done enough postmortems on disasters to realize that outsize demand was one of their greatest causes.

  Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing he could do about that.

  But it wouldn’t be for want of trying. “Quarles is right; it isn’t his job,” he said, stealing a quick look at Lane but refusing to lock eyes with her. “Look, we’ve got a CM at 2130. Put together one of your razor-worded dispatches for me to send over to Peary Crater, and I’ll transmit it after the meeting. If those guys can get their shit together long enough to do something right, maybe we can make quota this month and keep the dogs in the kennel.”

  “And what about DS-7?” Lane asked. “I’ve run the images you sent. Those treads don’t match any of the standard EVA boots currently being used on the Moon. That includes the Chinese.”

  “Great. Where are they from?”

  “Looks like they’re an older model made by Groombridge Space Systems. A bunch of countries used them in the mid-60s, including us, Russia, and China. There’s no way to match a tread to a specific pair without actually inspecting the boots.”

  Groombridge. One of the biggest general aerospace contractors on Earth, they had been supplying missions to the Moon since the 2050s. Tracking a pair of their old boots would be like trying to pin down a particular set of Nikes in New York City.

  “What about the power cells?” Dechert asked Quarles. “Should we be concerned that whoever sabotaged our water drill at Dionysius knew how to do it without us getting immediate telemetry?”

  “Not necessarily,” Quarles said. “The VFD in the power shack uses a pretty standard advanced cell bypass, and it’s not proprietary equipment. Anyone could have dug up the topology and figured it out.”

  “Lovely.”

  “You gonna tell Yates?” Quarles asked. “Peary Crater’s gonna go shit-crazy when they hear about this.”

  “I’ll call him. Later.”

  He stood up to leave, not wanting to consider any more questions, mostly because he didn’t have any answers. Especially to the question that had been nagging him since this first started: What the hell was going on back on Earth that was causing everything to blow up on Luna?

  When Dechert left for the Moon in ’68, much of Europe and North America were still being called the New Third World. The Thermal Maximum was an unequal dispenser of misery. Two trillion tons of methane hydrate had bubbled out of the Pacific Rim with almost no warning in the North American spring of 2058, enveloping the planet in a Venusian shroud. For the next several years, Earth was a wasteland. Epic flooding on one continent, drought on another. Superstorms. Pandemics. Fires. Biblical stuff and some things that were even worse—at least people didn’t eat one another in the darker parts of the Old Testament. The midlatitudes fared the worst, and much of the industrialized world became the Third World before its overfed, upholstered residents had time to absorb the shock.

  Climatologists called the catastrophe a cleansing of an overpopulated and overheated planet. Religious extremists took a bloodier route to the truth. They killed one another en masse and tried to kill everyone else in between as they wrestled over which verse of which holy text was to be taken as the literal truth and fulfilled to its conclusion. By the early 2060s, there were three billion fewer people on the planet, and a freeze on carbon-energy emissions forced the remaining civilized nations to quell the holy wars and figure out how the hell to survive.

  Fusion energy sprang out of that reflexive effort, clean and powerful as the stars. But fusion reactors needed an exotic fuel, stuff not found within the womblike magnetic field of the Earth. The best thing available was helium-3, a light, nonradioactive solar isotope that could be easily contained. An isotope that lay in abundance on the dead regolith of the Moon.

  And just like that, space became important again. Lunar mining turned into a brief unifying force for a scrabbling world, a reminder that humans could control their destiny—even if they had to leave the planet to do so. It stayed that way until the late ’60s when the star-burning energy the scientists created began to bring the larger economies back from their depressions. Within a year of Dechert’s deployment to the Moon, common cause had been run over by a bull market.

  It was once again nations instead of humanity.

  “How are the Posidonius core samples looking?” Dechert asked Quarles, hoping for some good news. “Did we at least get decent He-3 trace outside of the DS-4 perimeter?”

  “Not bad for a sunlit zone,” Quarles said. “About thirteen parts per billion in the early runs.”

  “Good.”

  It’s almost funny, Dechert thought. When helium-3 was a lifeboat keeping the drowning masses alive, lunar miners were treated like heroes. When it became a marketable commodity, they were chastised for falling behind their numbers. And now the Chinese were getting aggressive about disputed He-3 fields in the Tranquility and Crisium basins, and the Americans were pu
shing back hard, forcing their own diggers to double-shift to stay in competition, forcing them to dig in places that were orders of magnitude more dangerous than the diamond mines of central Africa—all with aging, vacuum-cracked equipment. Dechert had been getting desperate vibes from the managers at Las Cruces and Peary Crater in the last month, as if they were taking heat from higher sources and channeling it back toward him. Safety had always been priority one on the midlatitudes of the Moon.

  Now production was.

  “This is going to blow over,” Dechert said aloud.

  “All hail the power of wishful thinking,” Lane replied, and Dechert knew that she could read the empty spaces of doubt in his eyes.

  He shrugged his shoulders, too tired to give a better defense. “Wishful thinking is a command prerogative.”

  He pulled the brim of his baseball cap lower on his face and climbed back up the steps leading out of the CORE, wondering how much longer he would remain in control of things on his own station and how much longer it would be before a real fight broke out between the powers on the Moon.

  Wondering how long he was going to be kept up thinking about it.

  “I’m going to go catch a quick two hours,” he said. “Wake me up if something bad happens.”

  4

  Serenity 1’s master alarm rang thirty minutes later. Dechert woke in a panic. The lights in his quarters flared to 200 percent and then dimmed to emergency status. A red strobe over the hatch brushed the tiny room with flashing crimson. Dechert slammed his shoulder against the bulkhead as he leaped from his bunk, his heart thumping with blood as he swore. The alarm had gone off only once before in his nearly four years of command. It sounded like the departure warning on a high-speed train, a low and sinister series of baritone bells. When it came on, the CORE’s audio alert was no more comforting:

  “Condition 1-EVA, Condition 1-EVA. Decompression alarm on Mobile Habitation Two. Location 31.1 degrees north, 29.2 degrees east, 400 meters west-southwest of Crater Posidonius. No communication from crew. Telemetry incoming.”

  Decompression alarm. Dechert almost didn’t believe it. What the hell could cause a decompression alarm on the Molly Hatchet? They were on the Serenity plain, as smooth a terrain as you could hope for on the Moon. They weren’t drilling and they weren’t supposed to be moving for another three hours. And other than her fickle electronics, the Hatchet was built like a navy warship—a bulk of carbon-carbon weave wrapped over a skin of superalloy.

  He didn’t stop to put on his heavysuit, bolting out of his room and careening through the crew quarters passageway in an unsteady sprint, half flying through the low gravity as he used his arms to ward off the pipes and conduits that layered the white-tubed walls of the station in corded veins. He almost hit Vernon head-on as he approached the CORE’s outer hatch.

  “This shit real?” Vernon asked. His eyes were wide and his forehead gleamed.

  Dechert barely heard him. He yanked at the CORE’s hatch, almost pulling it off its moorings. Quarles was already at the telemetry station. He didn’t take the time to look up.

  “It’s a definite decompression,” he said. “I’m getting sporadic data from the low-gain antenna. They’ve lost pressurization in the aft section.” He punched up a schematic of the Molly Hatchet on a stereoscopic display and finally looked at Dechert. “It’s in the EVA room, boss, but the hatch is dogged. I’m reading a closed hatch.”

  Dechert said a quick prayer that Thatch and Benson were in the Hatchet’s cockpit. “Can we raise them?” Where the hell was Lane? She must be on-station in the main hangar or Bio-Med, or she’d already be up here by now.

  “Trying.”

  “Keep trying, and turn off master-alarm audio. Remain at condition one,” Dechert said. He punched the com. “Lane, are you down there?”

  “Jonathan’s right, Commander,” Lane said. “The beacon triggered in aft EVA. Navigation module is still pressurized, but I’m reading no primary life support in the aft section.”

  The emergency beacon only went off if a module lost pressure outside of the standard depressurization sequence. Explosive decompression.

  “I’m trying cockpit and suit coms,” Lane continued. “System is green but no response.”

  The tension in her voice filled the CORE. She left the channel open as she repeated calls to Thatch and Benson every five seconds. The static that came back across the Moon broken by her metered transmissions chilled each of them, slowing them down as they waited to hear a human voice cutting into the distortion.

  “Vernon, get the shuttle ready,” Dechert said finally, flipping channels on the com to see if Thatch and Cole were knocked off frequency. “Maximum velocity profile. You’re flying. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  He gave up on the com and pulled the base phone off the wall. “Peary Crater, this is Serenity 1, Peary Crater, SOS-1. We’ve got a master decompression alarm on MH-2. I repeat . . .”

  The landline immediately crackled to life. At least someone was working up north. “Serenity 1, Peary Crater, I copy a master alarm on mobile habitation number two. Can you confirm?”

  The dispatcher’s voice sounded too calm, and it made Dechert angry. The bastard probably hadn’t been outside of an airlock in months. But he took a deep breath, because snapping at this com-jockey wasn’t going to change anything. “Confirmed, Peary Crater, decompression alarm on MH-2. No communications from crew. She is four-seven-zero klicks north-northeast of the station, just southwest of Posidonius. We’re relaying coordinates and launching the shuttle. I’ll be on open com in five minutes.”

  Dechert hung up the phone before hearing a reply. He knew that Commodore Yates was already stirring to action and would be looking for an immediate briefing. He didn’t want to talk to him until after the launch. Economy of motion, he thought. Economy of action. What did Fletcher tell him? Time kills on the Moon. Have to move quickly.

  “Jonathan you’ve got the CORE. Give us telemetry updates as you get them and help Vernon upload a flight profile. We’ll be on open channel.”

  Quarles nodded, his face fixed to the display screens and his shaven head gleaming as his hands moved across the console. Dechert lurched out of the room, sealing the hatch behind him. He ran down the launch checklist in his mind as he flew down the red-lit passageways, past the hatches for Observatory, Greenhouse, Supply, Bio-Med, and Astro-Mechanical. Launches made him nervous, even with Vernon flying. They had to stay sharp. Couldn’t compound one emergency by creating another. Dechert felt the old carbonation of self-doubt bubble up inside him and tried to push it back down. His heart pounded and his mouth felt papery. He wished he had ordered Quarles to turn off the emergency lighting along with the audio.

  Lane was fighting to get a pressure suit on Waters when Dechert got to the hangar. After John Ross Fletcher was killed in the Sea of Clouds crash, they didn’t fly without personal life support. Neither of them spoke, barely looking up as he came into the room. Dechert went to a locker and grabbed a suit. He threw it onto a bench and picked up the flight pad.

  “I’ve already got her sequenced,” Waters said. “Tanks are stirred, electrostatic shielding coming online.”

  Dechert looked at Vernon and saw a thin line of wet running down one cheek into the thick, dark stubble of his beard. Lane was pale and silent, moving as fast as she could. Dechert put down the pad and attacked his suit, knowing it would take him at least three minutes to get it on and powered up.

  Time kills on the Moon.

  “They’re probably just off-com,” Dechert said, knowing how unlikely that sounded. “Concentrate on the mission. We’ll get them back.”

  Thatcher’s voice broke through a field of static when they were four hundred kilometers out. It sounded as if he was talking through a stream of running water. “Serenity, this is Molly Hatchet. We’ve got an emer . . . decompression in port EVA module. Can you hear me? Can’t raise Cole. Cole is . . . outer hat . . .” He spoke in quick, confused bursts.

  “We
read you, Molly Hatchet,” Dechert replied. “We’re inbound shuttle, five minutes out. I repeat, ETA zero-five minutes. Uh, Thatch, give me Nav-Mod’s status and repeat last on Cole.”

  The com popped and hissed like a blown transformer. Solar activity again, or worse. Dechert prayed Thatcher was confused about Cole Benson or that he hadn’t heard him correctly. Maybe Cole was stuck in the prep module with the inner hatch sealed off, and the Molly’s internal communications weren’t working.

  Thatch’s voice came through again in garbled urgency. “Explosion . . . A module. Boards green in navigation. Cole . . . EVA. I can’t reach him. Do you read . . . Commander? . . . Cole.”

  Static washed out Thatch’s last sentence, but they had heard enough. Cole was in the EVA module. Now in open space. Was he just getting back into the crawler or prepping to go out? Please, God, let him be in a pressure suit.

  Dechert looked over at Vernon but his flight officer didn’t look back. The big man kept his face forward, concentrating on flying as they skimmed over the Sea of Serenity at nearly a kilometer per second. The shuttle’s multidirectional HEDM thrusters hissed with propellant bursts, keeping the scarab-shaped craft from tumbling out of control. Dechert thought he could see Posidonius in the distance, its shallow rim almost overwashed by an ancient lava flow. The crater’s sloping western spine grew too slowly in the cockpit window.

  “Forty klicks out, descending to one hundred meters,” Vernon said. “Retracting electrostatic spheres, radiation levels in the green.”

  The shuttle skimmed over the northern terminus of the Dorsa Smirnov, a wrinkle ridge that snaked like a scar across the Serenity basin. “Give me ten percent continual outflow on the valve seals,” Dechert said. “We don’t need to be inhaling dust right now.”