Gunpowder Moon Page 4

  The ridge receded and Vernon pushed the craft lower. Dechert spotted the Molly Hatchet in the distance, her boxy metallic hindquarters glinting in the lowering sun. She sat just to the west of Posidonius’s snowy ejecta blanket, and as they grew closer, Dechert could see a thin wisp of gas rise into the blackness from the back of the crawler. Gas rising from the surface of the Moon was never a good thing.

  The Molly Hatchet was venting.

  Vernon flew the shuttle in too fast and reversed thrust two hundred meters from the stricken craft, the g-forces from the maneuver pinning both men into their seats. Moondust billowed up as they landed.

  They saw it at the same time, a speck of white against the darker hulk of the mining crawler and the ash gray of the regolith, lying just outside of the rear EVA hatch in a ring of debris. It was a pressure suit. Dechert could see the control board on the suit’s midsection through the rising blanket of dust, blinking red. He looked at Vernon and didn’t want to look back out the window. The suit wasn’t empty. It was turned on. But there was no helmet attached to it, just a smaller object extending from the solid circular frame of the suit’s neckline. The object looked extraordinary on the surface of the Moon, incomprehensible. It took Dechert a few seconds to understand why. Its exposed reaches had curly blond hair.

  “Oh no, baby, no,” Waters whispered. “No way. No way.”

  5

  A year ago

  “Why did you come to the Moon, Cole?”

  “I don’t know, boss. Boredom, I guess.”

  “Boredom?” Dechert asked, looking up from a Touchpad with his eyebrows raised. Cole Benson sat across from him on a 3-D–printed chair in the Astro-Mechanical lab, his knees bunched together and his shoulders tucked in toward his chest. “People go to the movies when they’re bored, Cole. They don’t take a spaceship a quarter-million miles up to a dead rock in the sky.”

  Cole fidgeted, wiping his blond hair from his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know what you want me to say, boss. It just got old for me down there. All of the bullshit.”

  “Elaborate,” Dechert said. “Humor me.”

  “You know—the whole thing. Half the world is starving on the back end of the Max, and I’m spending my time surfing with the Safe Zone elites, those freakin’ pussies. You know I was junior champion in Encinitas, and we all got waivers for international travel? I did all the big breaks from Snapper Rocks to Burleigh for a year in ’66 when Australia started getting those six-month monsoons. Surfed Bells Beach just after Typhoon Andora rolled by and the wind switched offshore. Must have been twenty-foot sets that were as clean as cut glass. Everyone said it was a good diversion for the people who still had power. That’s how they justified it. And we were eating like kings and getting laid. Fuckin’ hell.”

  Dechert sat back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. He clenched his jaws in an effort to calm down; he didn’t want to give his youngest miner a lashing that he couldn’t recover from. Cole had become a good digger in his first two years on the Moon, better than Dechert could have hoped for. But the kid had a flair for recklessness that bordered on self-destruction. Maybe he hadn’t been close enough to death yet or the realization of the Moon’s always imminent danger had yet to sink in enough for him to feel its regulating squeeze on his heart. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

  “So I’m guessing it was boredom that led you to build a makeshift snowboard and take it for a run down the Montes Haemus during a survey mission, when you were supposed to be covering Vernon’s ass?”

  Cole looked over at the laboratory equipment that sat unused on a far table, as if he were counting the test tubes and sub-A-scopes lined up there. “We were on break and the theodolites were on auto and green. I told Vernon I was gonna check something out for a few minutes. He said it was fine.”

  He picked at his pants leg while Dechert stared at him, keeping his face turned away from his commander’s gaze. Dechert had almost been amused at the description Vernon gave him of the incident out on the Serenity basin earlier that morning—of how Vernon had heard a scream over the com that would freeze any man’s soul out on the reg—and how he had looked up into the foothills above him to see Cole Benson shooting down a steep ravine like a ground-hugging missile on what appeared to be a carbon-fiber corrugation sheet, catching twenty meters of space every time the jury-rigged snowboard hit a small bump in the microgravity.

  Maybe he would have stayed amused about the whole damned thing if Cole hadn’t wiped out at the bottom of his ski run and cut a small gash in his pressure suit, triggering a decompression alert that had thrown the station into a panic. Vernon had moved quickly, bounding up to Cole and spraying some quick-seal on the cut before it blew out his suit, but the alert had shaken the crew, and it was a good thing that it had taken Cole and Vernon a few hours to get back to the airlock after the accident. If they had returned sooner, Dechert might have throttled his young mining specialist with a pipe cleat.

  “Cole, let me explain something to you about boredom, and residual guilt. They will get you killed up here, plain and simple. And not just you, but the ones around you.”

  “I realize that. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, kid,” Dechert said, leaning forward in his chair. “You fuck up out on the reg, and sorry won’t bring back the dead.”

  Cole looked even worse now. His eyes were getting moist and his legs began to shake as he tapped both feet on the rubberized floor, his hands still on his knees. He was a child, Dechert realized, a curious, reckless child who pretended to be a man. And here he was at Serenity, a thousand klicks from the nearest main base and working one of the most dangerous jobs inside the Asteroid Belt.

  “Boss, you know me,” Cole mumbled. “I might be stupid once, but I’ll never be twice. I swear to God it won’t happen again.”

  Dechert puffed up his cheeks and let loose with a blast of air. He had put together a good team for Sea of Serenity 1, but they were too damned young. Between Cole’s recklessness, Quarles’s penchant for practical jokes at the most inopportune times, and Lane’s inherent surliness, the trio often left him feeling more like a high school counselor than a Level-1 station chief. But Briggs was starting to come around, and at least Waters and Thatch had some age to them, he thought. My rocks of Gibraltar in a stormy hormonal sea.

  “All right,” Dechert said. “We’ll leave it at that for now. Get your ass over to Bio-Med, and have Lane check you out for decompression sickness.”

  Cole looked up, hopeful but still wary. “Is that it? I mean, I’m not getting docked or anything?”

  “Not right now. But don’t worry, I’ll find other ways to make your life a bone-sucking misery for the next few months.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Cole said. He stood up, still not convinced that he had been temporarily spared the hangman’s noose. “I promise I’ll square it away. Strictly protocol from now on.”

  Dechert shook his head and scratched the stubble on his face, knowing that the penitence in his young miner’s soul would eventually be overtaken by the testosterone coursing through his veins. Knowing he would do something ridiculous again and hoping that things wouldn’t end up worse when he did. Hoping the next incident wouldn’t come until at least 2072.

  “Cole?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If you ever do something as cosmically stupid as that again, at least get it on video. You’ll need a keepsake of this place when I fire your ass, and nobody will ever believe this one when you get back on the beach.”

  Cole Benson grinned. “Right. I can’t even screw up good.”

  “Then don’t screw up at all.”

  6

  The dead settle in our mind like cooling embers. After a time they diminish, snuffed out by the immediate, and then a puff of memory rekindles them and for a moment they are hot and near once again. The smell of cigars did it for Dechert. He had opened Cole Benson’s locker and it hit him with a palpable blow, a sharp and immediate pain in th
e chest that replaced the numbness of the last few days and triggered his daydream of Cole’s attempt to be the first snowboarder on the Moon. As the memory faded, he shook his head and stared at the small stash of cigars in the cubby.

  Benson had a connection at Peary Crater who smuggled reconstituted “Thermal Max” Dominicans up through resupply, probably the same entrepreneur who ran Lane her small-batch bourbon. Their earthy smell wafted out of his locker and Dechert envisioned Cole in the crew mess, his feet up on the white basalt table, lighting a forty-gauge Churchill and describing the perfect sets that rolled in from the Pacific Ocean and broke on the sandbars of the Playa Hermosa.

  “Ten hours of surfin’, then ten hours of lovin’,” Cole would say. “That’s what Costa Rica is all about.”

  Dechert gathered up the cigars and put them in an evidence bag with Cole’s other personal effects. He thought of giving them to Thatch, but he was in too much of a stupor now to want them. They all were. The station felt like the foyer of a funeral home, where people linger to avoid the sight of the casket but still feel its powerful presence. Quarles and Vernon and Thatch had barely said a word in two days. But at least they had honest reasons to be depressed, Dechert thought . . . genuine reasons to mourn. They lived and worked with Cole like brothers, risking their necks with him every day on the exposed lunar plains. Even Lane, as distant as she tried to keep herself, could mourn without any guilt. She used to muss Cole’s shaggy blond hair and call him her little man. It was probably the deepest sign of affection she’d shown to anyone in her three years on Serenity.

  But what about Dechert? What was he most sorry about: Cole’s death or his unblemished command record vanishing in the vacuum? Dechert hadn’t lost a crew member since taking over Serenity 1, and now he had and it was Cole. And in the back of his mind he would always equate his sadness over Cole’s death with guilt over the notion that maybe he was sorrier for himself than he was for Cole Benson. Even grief can be selfish, he thought.

  Or maybe it was just the rekindling of old memories that haunted him. He hadn’t dealt with death in many years, but there was a time when it was a weekly visitor to the confines of his soul. What line officer didn’t lose soldiers in the Bekaa Valley? A gunnery sergeant or a cherry private would be dismembered by a sonic charge or a seeking bullet, and he’d be replaced a few days later like a broken rear axle that was requisitioned, processed in triplicate, and shipped in from the States just in time for the next firefight. Dechert hadn’t even learned the names of some of the kids who had died under his command. The young ones were just too goddamned ignorant to stay alive. And in the end it might not have mattered how good or bad they were as warriors. The instinctive ones had a better chance, but no one can stand up for long before the withering law of averages. People just died out there in the Bake, for no damned reason at all other than the fact that it was a war.

  But this wasn’t a war, and that made things worse. And Cole didn’t just die—an occurrence in many ways more natural than remaining alive on the Moon. An occurrence that wouldn’t have been too hard to fathom, given the young miner’s reckless nature. No. Someone had killed him.

  Someone killed Cole.

  Every time the phrase entered Dechert’s mind, he shook his head as if he had just walked through a cobweb. The idea seemed impossible. People kept people alive on the Moon. They didn’t kill them. Accidents might be an order of magnitude more likely on Luna than they are in the most treacherous places on Earth—the exposed rocks of Mount Everest stabbing into the jet stream; the poison-filled rain forests; the scorching miles of the great deserts. But at least you can survive long enough in those places to come up with a plan. At least there is some air there, some boundary between human beings and the void of the universe.

  When mishaps occur on the Moon, they degrade into catastrophes before there’s time to reverse the sequence. Seven Russians had died in their first attempt to open a permanent station on the far side in 2067 because of a few grains of moondust. The spiky chunks of anorthosite shorted a hardened circuit that shorted another hardened circuit, and—in a seemingly impossible move—the master computer opened up all of the decompression hatches on the tiny station without so much as a blinking light to warn anyone. A SAR team found the men a week later, strewn wherever they had been before the air went away and frozen so deep that they had to be thawed with handheld heaters before they could be unfolded enough to be put into bags and shipped back to Earth. One had been sitting on a toilet, an old paperback copy of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don in his frozen hands and his pants around his ankles.

  And just last year a landslide in the Apennine Mountains had crushed four Chinese diggers. One of the men had lost his spatial reference—a common thing on the Moon’s monochromatic expanse—and fallen into an unmapped rille. The others tried to recover him by lowering a cable from their rover, but the steep walls collapsed around them, crushing them inside their pressure suits.

  Hell, even Fletcher had succumbed to the Moon’s cold embrace. The unbreakable John Ross Fletcher. One frozen thruster and his shuttle went into a spin from which no man or machine could recover.

  But no one had ever been murdered on the Moon, and Dechert wouldn’t have thought it possible if he hadn’t seen for himself the blown EVA hatch on the Molly Hatchet. It didn’t take a forensics expert to realize it had been detonated from the outside, and that it wasn’t a micrometeor or some stellar phenomenon that did the job. Someone had planted an explosive under the crawler’s manual hatch release. Dechert had seen enough bombs in the Middle East to read the tapestry: black carbon-scoring, shrapnel, a four-inch circular hole gouged into the hull just under the hard seals, pointing upward. It looked like a shape charge to him, and he wondered if Thatch or Vernon had realized it as well. Probably not Thatch. He was too deep in shock when they got him out of the crawler through an umbilical airlock. But Dechert saw Waters look at the blown hatch when they had scrambled out of the shuttle to go to Cole, and then look again. And if Waters realized that Cole had been killed by a saboteur, then the rest of the crew knew it by now as well.

  It doesn’t matter, Dechert thought to himself, closing Cole’s locker and sitting down on the cold metal bench in front of it. Peary Crater had a full forensics team working on the Hatchet, which had been towed to the main base by a lunar barge at no small expense—and over strong protests by Dechert, who wanted to run the investigation himself. They would know by now what had happened; Dechert was just waiting for the blowback and wondering how much access he would have to the report.

  As it was, the only intel Dechert had was his own memory of the horrific scene, which tormented him with disjointed flashbacks of color, sound, and smell. The burnt cordite scent of the Moon mixing with the unmistakable smell of an explosion, which had either infiltrated his spacesuit somehow or had been some kind of olfactory hallucination triggered from his time in the war. The sight of Cole collapsed in a ring of debris only five yards from the helmet that would have saved him. Cole had tried to get to it. His right hand was dug into the regolith in front of his body, and the tracks left behind him were those of a man crawling. Thatch’s voice, high-pitched and desperate from the cockpit as Dechert and Waters tried to work on Cole’s body. The flotsam from the explosion, which blew equipment that wasn’t locked down out of the Molly Hatchet’s EVA module in a concussive instant. And the emptiness inside the back of the crawler, void of oxygen and warmth, with only a few tools left to show the life that had once been there. Dechert had glanced inside just long enough to take the grim inventory: a surveying tripod latched down to the port wall; a gammon reel that had somehow managed to stay inside the tiny workroom when the air blew out; magnetic locaters clipped onto a small workbench; and Thatch’s spacesuit, an eerily human-looking thing inside the blown-out module—its white gleaming hulk strapped to the bulkhead, dirtied with gray moondust on its legs and boots.

  Mocking everyone, as if saying, “This one could have saved him. This one had
a helmet attached to it.”

  Who the hell would do this? The question spun in Dechert’s mind like something without weight being blown through a storm. Would the Chinese go as far as murder because of a territorial pissing match? The Russians? An American? A loner with some kind of grudge, or maybe even Moon hysteria? A kid back at Peary Crater had gone Moon-crazy last year, and it took four men to stop him from using a breccia drill to punch a six-inch hole in one of the station’s central-hub portholes. He had just wanted to get a little fresh air, he explained afterward, when he was sedated and shackled to a wall.

  The suspects were many; the suspects were nonexistent. This was the Moon, and none of it made any sense.

  The com buzzed above Dechert’s head, and he looked up with regret at the blinking control panel. It buzzed again. Dechert tried to resist the years of military conditioning that willed him to answer. Eventually, though—moving in slow motion, cursing as he did—he flipped the metal toggle and sat down on the bench again.

  “Yes?”

  “Commander, we just got a flash message from Peary Crater, marked for priority,” said Quarles, and he sounded no happier than Dechert felt. “It came in with a quantum encryption code. You believe that shit? They’re sending a shuttle down here at 1430. We’re getting a visit from the Space Mining Administration.”

  I bet we are, Dechert thought.

  “Right. Tell Vernon to prep the hangar and turn on the basin’s running lights. Get the CORE’s autonomics configured for extra souls. You know where Thatch is?”

  “He’s in the observatory with Lane.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there, too.”

  He looked at Cole’s closed locker one last time and stood up, feeling old and encumbered even in the microgravity. Even his anger felt weak. Too many suspects. No suspects. Or was it really a mystery at all? The SMA and the Chinese Lunar Authority had been bickering about mineral rights for months. The U.S. and Chinese governments had entered the fray at the prodding of the bureaucrats in their mahogany-walled think tanks. A crisis waiting for a tipping point. Hadn’t the same thing happened hundreds of times before—the few pushing the gullible straight toward the walls of Troy?