Gunpowder Moon Page 9

  Jonathan looked at Dechert, then Lane, and pulled at his ear. “I suppose. Hell, no one uses traditional i-mail anymore except you dinosaurs, so it probably isn’t being watched as closely as the holos and the virts. Who are you planning on talking to? You have a secret friend over at Peary Crater?”

  “No. New Beijing 2.”

  Both of their eyes widened. “Jesus. Lin Tzu?” Quarles asked. “I mean, couldn’t they hang you for that?”

  “I doubt there’s a yardarm at Peary Crater,” Dechert said, “but, yes, it wouldn’t go over very well if they found out.” He put his hand on Quarles’s shoulder. “Look, I’m not going to talk to Tzu until the story about Cole hits the wire, and I’m not planning on giving up any state secrets. But we have to know what he knows, and I trust him to keep our confidence. He likes his government about as much as we like ours. More important, he respects the Moon more than anyone on Earth does.”

  Lane looked troubled. “But what about his minders at the South Pole? Don’t you think they’ll be watching his traffic?”

  “I’m sure they will, but we’ve already worked out a little code for emergency situations, to get around that. I think we can keep their spies from getting suspicious, at least long enough to set up another channel of communications.”

  Lane and Quarles looked at each other, surprised once again at the conspiratorial streak they had never seen before in their boss. “All right,” Lane said. “What about the intelligence side of things?”

  Dechert hesitated, knowing how angry she would be. The one thing Lane had always demanded as a woman on a Moon full of men was her privacy, and he couldn’t begrudge her that. She had been living in an underground cocoon with a bunch of alpha males for more than three years. The problem was that, in all that time, she had never fully realized the lack of privacy that came with being a member of the Space Mining Administration.

  “I’ll work on the Molly Hatchet,” Dechert said to her, “but I need you to keep digging on those boot prints at DS-7. Find me every damned pair of Groombridge boots requisitioned to the Moon in the last ten years and see if you can get into the corporate files on Earth relating to sales to us, China, and whoever. And . . .” He paused. This was where he might lose her. “And I need you to reach out to your friend at the Administration’s public affairs office, in New Mexico.”

  She looked at him, not understanding, and then her face turned red. She clenched her jaws and he could see the bones pushing out of the sides of her cheeks and then retreating again. One of her hands slid off the sloping module wall and found its way to her hip. “What friend?”

  “Sheldon Starks.”

  Her mouth opened and then closed, and Dechert thought she might slap him. Quarles looked on, intrigued, as though hoping she’d slap him.

  When she didn’t say anything, Dechert said, “The Administration runs thorough background checks on everyone doing extended lunar tours, Lane; you know that. I was under orders to read everyone’s private file before clearing them for Serenity. I’m sorry.”

  Without her personnel jacket, Dechert wouldn’t have been able to say for certain if Lane even liked men—or women, for that matter. She had kept her personal life too closely guarded on the station. But Lane’s dossier had painted in the colors of her sexuality that she had tried to blur with protocol, describing in detail her brief and reportedly electric affair with Starks, the public relations chief at Las Cruces. She had met him on a layover after off-Earth mining school in Arizona, and they were together for at least four months before she got shipped to Serenity 1. The dossier said she had broken it off, apparently unable to accept an ultimatum from the young mining executive. They traded i-mails and virt messages for a few months after she got to the station, as lovers do until the realization sets in that things are really over, but she had never mentioned Starks to the crew.

  “Goddammit,” Lane said. She lowered her head, too furious to even look at Dechert. “I knew those bastards were thorough, but I didn’t know they were fucking spying on us when we were off duty.”

  She remained silent for a moment, her hands gripping her hips, and when she finally looked up at Dechert he could see the glassiness in her eyes and the loss of trust. He had become part of the system to her. A lesser evil than the SMA, perhaps, but a part of the system nonetheless.

  “All right. I can send him a message on his private account. But I don’t know how willing he’ll be to respond. You’re asking me to risk his neck as well—and at least he’s never betrayed my trust.”

  Dechert breathed out between pursed lips. He felt cold, and spoke quickly. “I know. Just act like you’re scared and you want to know what’s going on down there. Make it sound as innocent as possible and unsolicited, so he can say it was unprovoked if someone’s listening in. We’ll gauge how far he’s willing to go by his response.”

  “I’m not sure how far I’m willing to go.” She had turned from enthusiastic to arctic in an instant, and it felt as if all the blood in the room had pooled on the floor. Even Quarles kept silent, his eyes avoiding hers. “I’m beginning to think that there’s no one I can trust.”

  You can trust me, Dechert wanted to say. You know I wouldn’t have violated your privacy if those psych-assholes at New Mexico and Peary Crater didn’t force station commanders to review the mental profiles of their crews as though they were specimens in bottles. You know I would never do anything to hurt any of you.

  “You’re right, Lane,” was all he could muster out loud, talking to her back as she turned to put her hand on the latch. “There probably isn’t anyone you can trust.”

  11

  The shield doors opened on a darkening Moon. In an hour the sun would set, and it wouldn’t rise again over the Acherusian headlands for fourteen days. Roughly a fortnight of darkness, the Sea of Serenity embraced by space. Already the solar disc receded to the west, its lower half obscured by the crumbling flanks of the Montes Haemus. Still a brilliant white, its light shafted and split into rays as moondust rose from the Serenity basin like an alien fog. Dechert heard Standard gasp as he watched the billions of particles climb at the terminus of the light, enshrouding the landscape in a thin, opaque cloud. The commissioner’s gloved hands gripped the rover’s roll bars.

  “It’s okay, Standard, you’re not hallucinating,” Dechert said. “Those are Moon fountains. Dust streaming up from the surface to meet the sunset.”

  “It’s . . . unbelievable,” Standard said. He breathed in quick, shallow bursts as though he were sucking air through a pipe as he watched the phenomenon, which reminded Dechert of a sandstorm rising in the Lebanese desert at dusk. “What causes it?”

  Dechert cranked the rover into low gear and drove out of the subterranean hangar, checking over the sides to make sure the wheels gained traction.

  “The dayside of the Moon is positively charged, the nightside negatively, and that creates an electrostatic field at the terminator, or the boundary between dark and light. Remember as a kid, when you used to rub a balloon on your head and watch your hair stand on end as you pulled it away? It’s the same concept here—the particles in the light rise up to meet the ones in the dark.”

  “This is a little more spectacular,” Standard said with his polarized faceplate fixed on the setting sun and the rising wall of silver before it. “I didn’t realize the Moon was so active.”

  “Everything’s active in space, Commissioner. We just aren’t able to see most of it.”

  The rover spun its rear wheels despite the low gear as it crossed the boundary from the hangar to the soft lunar regolith, struggling to gain footing in the microgravity and the chalky blanket of soil. Pulverized dust and tiny pieces of basalt flew into the air and settled behind them in slow-motion circles as the airlock closed. Dechert rolled the rover into the open and stopped to run a system check. They had a five-kilometer drive to Spiral 6, and they would be going from light to darkness, from a slow-cooking 260 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 290.

  “Vernon, I�
�m at the foot of the Haemus Road. Boards are green, radiation looks nominal. Batteries one and two at a hundred percent, EVA suits and coms are in line. Requesting clearance for Spiral 6.”

  The com barely sputtered this close to the base and Vernon’s voice came back with little distortion. “Looks five-by-five from here, boss. We’ve got a good uplink and your transponder’s got a heartbeat—you’re a go for Spiral 6. How’s the view out there?”

  “There’s Moon fountains, Vernon. Quarles will be jealous.”

  “Roger that. He’s chopping up nanotubes in the Aerosmith. I’ll let him know what he’s missing.”

  Dechert put his boot on the accelerator and pulled onto the Haemus Road, which took a northwesterly route into the lower expanse of the Serenity plain. The road was marked with flashing blue triliptical lights staked into the ground every ten meters like an airport runway back on Earth, only this runway cut its way across an alien and desiccated landscape. The lights turned on automatically as they fell into shadow, and Dechert and Standard could see them glowing in the patches of blackness ahead, popping to life as the sun continued its descent behind the mountains.

  The view was truly unearthly, and Dechert figured if ever there was a chance to get honest answers from Standard, this was it. Fletcher had taught him the trick years ago. Put a man in a completely alien environment, in a place where his mind tells him he has no business being, and his shocked system will react in a consistent fashion. He’ll become a lemming, latching on to anyone with more experience than him as a lost man does to God. And in his effort to remain alive—to not make any mistakes that could lead to an unnatural death—he’ll forget the tendency to say only the things that are in his best interest. He’ll be scared into candor.

  But Standard was a unique challenge. He was the consummate bureaucrat, trained to speak with precision and then only to advance the causes of the Space Mining Administration and its fiduciary patriarch—the United States government. He would be difficult to unpeel. The solar system would be fully inhabited by now if we had thrown politicians and their bureaucratic lackeys into the sea a few centuries ago, Dechert thought. True believers. History is littered with their flotsam back on Earth and now one of them is here on the Moon, the sound of his lungs erratic and loud in the lunar dusk. I could end his life out here on the reg and not a soul would know, Dechert mused. Just a simple malfunction in his EVA suit, all for the common good . . .

  “Try breathing normally, Commissioner,” he said aloud, shaking off the fantasy. “Your suit will adjust the air mix to keep you from hyperventilating, but it’s best to focus on taking regular, steady breaths.”

  “Thank you, Commander. I’ll try.”

  “You’re doing fine. We’re four kilometers from Spiral 6. Should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “That soon?” Standard asked. He put his hands on the rover’s roll bars again. “I didn’t think we could drive that fast.”

  Dechert chuckled under his breath and pushed down on the accelerator.

  “We keep it below thirty kilometers per hour on unmarked terrain because spatial reference is so difficult on the Moon. But we can do up to sixty on the lit roads. Only thing we have to worry about is a new impact crater or a washout from rover traffic, and I haven’t seen one of those in a few weeks.”

  Standard kept his grip on the rover’s titanium frame. They crossed into permanent shadow, and even in the suits they could feel the sudden drop in temperature, as if they had just jumped from the midday desert to a frozen massif in Antarctica. The sunlit plains were yards away, but the areas of shadow were almost black, touched only by Earthshine. The sweat in Dechert’s hair and on the back of his neck turned clammy and he shivered, waiting for the auto-heaters in his suit to take effect. The blue beacons of the Haemus Road flashed brilliantly now, casting long shadows in the darker gray mare surrounding them as they blinked in descending unison.

  “I guess this is better than taking one of your jetsuits,” Standard said, relaxing his grip but keeping his boots wedged against the floorboards. “I wouldn’t sign up for that mission anytime soon.”

  “It’s a . . . unique experience. Not for someone who hates negative g’s.”

  Dechert thought of his free fall into the pit of Crater Dionysius and the sense of powerlessness it had given him as he stared into the void below. How would a roach feel if it had sentience and a fear of heights, as it was being picked up by a human hand and thrown into a toilet? Something like the way Dechert had felt that day as the thrusters on his jetsuit pushed him down toward the black mouth of the crater, he was sure.

  “When will all the suits go online, and what benefits have you calculated?” Standard asked. He sounded steadier as he focused his attention on the firmer footing of lunar economics—quarterly revenues and cost benefits a tonic for his unsettled stomach.

  “We’ve got three suits built but I’ve only taken one out for an extended hop. The others have been short-flighted on the Serenity grid. Once they’re fully online—maybe in a few weeks if there isn’t a war—they’ll increase ice and ilmenite production by as much as thirty percent. They’ll have a smaller impact on our He-3 operations.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the helium-3 sites are more accessible. They won’t benefit as much from terrain flexibility. Like Spiral 6, they’re mostly on the flatlands of the mare. The ilmenite and ice sites, however, are in craters or lava tubes or on the shadow sides of mountains, so the jetsuits will provide their greatest benefit there.”

  Dechert stopped talking for a second to navigate a notch in the road that ran along the rim of a deep rille, watching for signs of erosion. Once he was convinced they were all good, he continued. “And besides, most of the He-3 fields are automated now. The only human attention they need is an initial survey, the gridding, and routine checks like the one we’re doing today—or a MOHAB run to pick up the He-3 casks for orbital ejection.”

  He drove them into a white ejecta field, its contrast from the darker lava flows of the mare stark even in the weak light of the road beacons. It looked like Vermont snow, but was instead a blanket of pulverized material spewed out of the Menelaus Crater hundreds of millions of years ago and unchanged ever since—the last signature of a catastrophic collision that occurred long before vertebrates could warm their blood. Except now a road ran through it, and the two men could sense their intrusion on its ancient power.

  “Well, any little bit will help,” Standard said after a few minutes of awed silence. “I don’t need to tell you how necessary a production increase is at this point. We have to retain our tourism and sys-ex franchises when the next open bids are complete. Any Chinese increase in market share would be devastating, and I’m not privy to all the talk on the top floor, but I know there’s a lot of concern that we’re falling behind.”

  Dechert imagined he heard Standard click his tongue inside his helmet—the first Moonwalking accountant. The commissioner was talking at ease now, forgetting the fact that he was only a pressure suit away from the vacuum of space. Even as they ventured deeper into the cold of the darkness, he was warming up.

  “The Moon helped pull us out of the worst crisis in our history, Commander. If we lose even twenty percent of our space mining revenues, it will stunt the recovery and force us to reallocate some of the power subsidies we’ve used to shore up the economy.”

  Dechert shook his head. He never understood how bureaucrats were so blind to the irony of their actions. They would say something that directly contradicted their own stated intentions and be ignorant of the fact that they had just done so. Wasn’t that the definition of madness?

  He couldn’t help himself. “Then why the hell are we spoiling for a fight with the Chinese?” he asked. “I might be politically naïve, Standard, but I don’t see much sense in messing with a good thing. You’re getting energy for the masses and money for the government troughs. What the hell else do you want? Because I have to tell you, a war isn’t gonna get you ther
e.”

  Standard sighed loudly enough to be heard through the com. “You’re thinking like a commander, Dechert. Short-term and tactical. If you were a general, or even better, a president, you’d have a wider perspective.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the long-term strategic viability of our astro-economic programs. We’ve lost our dominance of the Pacific Rim and with it the world economy. The Thermal Max pushed us back twenty years, and India and China have leaped that much ahead. Our terrestrial output is still down across the board—agriculture, heavy industry, technology, you name it. And if you’re about to say we should have been prepared for the disaster, just look at Canada and Western Europe.” He paused and tried to shake his head in the bulky suit, but his helmet barely moved. Dechert wondered how many times Standard had given this speech.

  “Asteroid collisions you can prepare for, carbon emissions you can legislate against, but who expected a subsea methane eruption would plunge us back into the Dark Ages for more than a decade?”

  Dechert had to concentrate to not look over at Standard. It was a difficult thing to get used to, not looking at the person you’re talking to, but he had learned long ago to never take his eyes off the lunar surface when he was driving.

  “I understand what the Thermal Maximum did, Commissioner, and I seem to recall the scientists deciding we played a role in the melt. But that doesn’t explain the present crisis. Why don’t we send negotiators to China or the ISA to sort this out instead of putting the pieces in place to jeopardize everything we’ve gained up here? You want greater production? Send more miners, not soldiers. Remember: Mining won’t be easy if missiles start flying around the mare.”

  “Well, for one thing . . .” Standard said, and then he screamed as a green flash ripped across the top of their field of vision.