Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  “Right, Nimrod, ready to get on board and suit up?”

  “After you, sir.”

  Unable to hide the thrill he felt at their impending expedition outside the dome of Luna Prime, Ulysses put a hand and a foot on the ladder leading up to the rover’s rear boarding hatch.

  “So this is adieu?”

  Ulysses paused, then climbed back down – signalling that Nimrod should ascend and board the rover first – and strode across the scrapyard to where Selene stood beside the Juggernaut, her travelling cloak wrapped close around her meagre frame.

  “No, my dear,” Ulysses said, taking her hands in his and bending to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Think of this only as au revoir. We will see each other again, have no fear. I’ll be back.”

  As Nimrod entered the Copernicus and took his place in the driver’s seat – clearly visible now through the reinforced glass bubble of the cockpit – Ulysses turned to Billie, a useful person to know if you were ever in a fix on the Moon, it would seem.

  “And thank you,” he said, not knowing whether to kiss her, hug her or shake her hand, so he gave her a punch on the arm instead.

  “And you promise you’ll keep an eye on her?” He nodded towards Selene.

  “Cross me heart and hope to die,” the girl chuckled, drawing a finger across the front of her boiler suit twice. “You won’t find a better bodyguard than Rusty this side of the Caucasus Mountains.”

  “Good girl! But hang on; I thought he was a cab.”

  “He’s a girl’s best friend, that’s what he is.”

  Ulysses sprang back up the ladder to the Copernicus’s airlock.

  “And don’t forget, give us a few hours’ head-start from when we leave the dome before you put that call through to Inspector Artemis of the Luna Prime Metropolitan Police and tell her where we’ve gone and why.”

  “Will do.” Billie called back. “What about your girlfriend?”

  Ulysses hesitated. “Emilia’s... She’s not my girlfriend,” he blustered.

  “Yeah. Course she isn’t. Just like Rusty’s not an ex-military grade robot.” Ulysses blushed. “So do you want a message passed on to her as well?”

  “No. Don’t worry about Emilia. I left her a note with the receptionist back at the hotel.” Ulysses hoisted a hand in their direction. “Farewell then, ladies. Rusty.”

  With Selene waving her own farewell, he disappeared inside the LEV, sealing the airlock behind him.

  IT WASN’T FAR from the scrapyard to East Gate Six. It wasn’t the norm for tourists and everyday Joes to leave the habitation domes on their own, and traffic through the dome skin was carefully monitored. However getting out onto the surface wasn’t a problem if you knew the right people, or you had the right level of clearance.

  Having fully recovered from the knock to the head he received during the crash, Nimrod skilfully steered the Copernicus out of the yard and joined the queue of mining vehicles trailing back from East Gate Six. There was no other traffic; the guided tours so beloved of tourists set off from North Gate Two or over at West Gate Eight, where the paying passengers were afforded much more appealing views of the lunar landscape, rather than the steady stream of scrip-miners and haulage trucks that traversed the plains in ceaseless toil over on the borders of the Mare Nectaris.

  Finally the last truck in front of them entered the complicated series of airlocks that kept Luna Prime’s carefully-created atmosphere in, and then it was their turn.

  A judicious reveal of Ulysses’ ‘By Royal Appointment’ ID, pressed up against the inside of the Copernicus’ goldfish bowl cockpit, and the gate guard on duty initiated the opening of the massive airlock. With a nod from the guard, Nimrod drove the clanking bucket of bolts inside the shielded tunnel.

  The two of them sat there, a smell of old leather seeping into the stale air of the cockpit. Within the gloom of the gate they waited for the inner door seals to lock before the next set would open. As each set of doors did just that, one after another, Nimrod rolled the rover slowly forwards.

  Ulysses’ pulse was racing in excitement. They were leaving the protection of Luna Prime’s environment dome in pursuit of the mysterious Fourth Man – who doubtless held all the pieces of the puzzle, ready to face him in his lair on the dark side of the Moon.

  And then, with a final hiss, like the last gasp of a dying man, the last of the air in the airlock was sucked out by huge compressor fans. A halo of hazard lights slicing the darkness, the yellow and black zigzags on the circular reinforced steel portal parted as the gate ground open.

  A simple push on the lever in Nimrod’s right hand and they were through. The massive wheels of the rover crackled over the compacted regolith of the track way that led from Luna Prime to the strip mines of the Mare Nectaris to the east as the LEV’s engine throbbed beneath them.

  With the lunar longitude and latitude entered into the rover’s navigational control, Nimrod steered the Copernicus off the well-worn and dusty road, heading for the far horizon and the dark side of the Moon.

  Act Four

  The Dark Side of the Moon

  June 1998

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, 1867

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Black Moon

  T MINUS 18 HOURS, 57 MINUTES, 6 SECONDS

  THREE HUNDRED AND fifty miles out from Luna Prime, and seven hours later, the Copernicus came to a stop, jolting Ulysses out of the dream he’d been having – in which he, Billie and Selene had been battling the evil robot minions of an Emilia-lookalike Queen of Villainy.

  “Where are we?” he mumbled, taking out his fob watch to check how long it had been since they had left Luna Prime.

  Nimrod lent over to the navigational control, turning a knurled knob on the side of the device.

  “Just shy of the terminator, sir.”

  Ulysses sat up and peered out of the glass bubble of the cockpit. Some miles ahead of them, he could see the line where the light of the sun gave way to complete darkness.

  “Why have we stopped?”

  Nimrod pointed beyond the windshield.

  “Tracks, sir.” Ulysses could see them quite clearly now, the fresh tyre-marks, clear to see in the regolith. “We’re not alone out here.”

  “Good.” Ulysses said with a smile.

  “Good, sir?”

  “Well,” Ulysses said, a devilish grin on his face, “I’d hate for us to be wasting our time on some wild goose chase.”

  Fully awake now, Ulysses looked from the tracks to the ominous, oppressive darkness before them.

  “Where are they heading, as if I really need to ask?”

  “They’re on the same bearing as us, sir.”

  “I knew it!” Ulysses declared.

  “But who are they, sir?”

  “That is the sixty-four thousand guinea question, isn’t it, old boy? And to be honest with you, I have no idea. No idea at all. But then that’s why we’re driving half way round the Moon, isn’t it? To find out.”

  THE COPERNICUS TRUNDLED on its way, Ulysses paying full attention as his butler and driver negotiated the myriad craters and basalt boulders that littered the Moon’s surface, like the aftermath of a giants’ game of knuckle stones.

  Amidst the craters and the splintered ridges illuminated by the rover’s arc-lights they saw other things too that reminded them of how human life on the Moon had begun, leaving the two companions in a melancholic mood.

  The great hulks of the great gravity cannon shells that had been used before cavorite had been successfully produced on an industrial scale – preserved by the airless and waterless conditions that existed on the Moon’s surface – stood as sentinels to another, darker time; to the thousands of lives lost in the Empire’s drive to become the first nation to colonise Earth’s satellite and turn it into yet another outpost of the British Empire.
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  Thousands had died all those decades ago, as the ruthless masters of Magna Britannia continued to expand the realm of Her Majesty Queen Victoria beyond the limits imposed upon it by the Earth and the burgeoning empires of the Far East. Thousands had been forcibly transplanted from their homes in the Sudan, Uganda and the British Empire’s other African colonies.

  The price paid for Magna Britannia’s dominance of the Moon had come at too great a cost for anybody’s moral conscience to deal with, paid with the lives of thousands of men, women and even children – all of them transplanted from the heart of the Dark Continent.

  “Will you look at that?” Ulysses gasped, in dreadful awe. “Think of all the lives lost.”

  The only memorial that now stood to the memory of those first lunar travellers – so many of whom died so that that the great and the good, and every ticket-buying tourist could see Earthrise over the Caucasus Mountains for themselves or charter a solar yacht to travel in style across the Sea of Dreams – were these lifeless hulks. And none of the tourist transports ever came out this way to see them.

  The gravity cannon shells lay, like the bones of those first lunar travellers buried just below the regolith, discarded and abandoned, conveniently forgotten about by all those who should have thanked them with every iota of their being and made the pilgrimage to their mass graves to give thanks for their sacrifice.

  ANOTHER FOURTEEN HOURS later and the Copernicus ground to the top of a steep incline that had brought the rover to the lip of a vast geological feature in the otherwise grey desert. They had crossed the terminus, passing over from the near side of the Moon into the dark beyond, some hours previously. The crater that now stretched out beneath them lay in total darkness. The LEV was already descending the inner wall of the ridge before either of them spotted the tiny pinpricks of light visible within the distant dome, looking like a gleaming carbuncle of steel on the far side of the featureless crater.

  Ulysses punched the air in delight. “I knew it!”

  “Well done, sir,” Nimrod said, in his usual emotionless way.

  “How far away are we?” Ulysses asked, leaning forward anxiously in his seat.

  Nimrod turned the knurled knob on the navigational control again. “Roughly thirty miles, sir.”

  “And there’s no sign of the other vehicle? I can’t see it, can you?”

  “No, sir. Only the tyre tracks we’ve been following.”

  “Then I suggest you kill the lights and we proceed at half speed from here on in, using the navi-con alone to guide us.”

  “Very good, sir,” Nimrod replied, calmly pulling a lever, the note of the LEV’s engine changing in pitch accordingly.

  Ulysses flicked a series of switches on a panel above his head and the lumin-lamps inside the cabin died. The view beyond the cockpit melted into darkness.

  “Steady as you go,” Ulysses instructed, his voice becoming a low whisper.

  The only visible light came from the distant twinkling pinpricks dotting the distant dome, a smattering of stars an impossible distance away, and the glowing green screen of the navigational control.

  And so they proceeded down the side of the great basalt ridge and across the bottom of the Jules Verne crater.

  ULYSSES STARTED SUDDENLY. “Did you feel that?”

  “What, sir?” asked Nimrod, the vibration of the LEV’s engine and the vehicle’s jolting progress over the uneven floor of the crater bouncing him around in his sprung seat.

  “A tremor.” It had been barely perceptible, but Ulysses had felt it just the same.

  The rover suddenly lurched and tipped sharply to port. Nimrod fought to control the steering column.

  “What was that?” Ulysses said.

  Nimrod glanced at the instruments. “Some sort of fissure, sir. It just opened up beneath us.”

  Ulysses waited until the Copernicus had pulled itself out of the fracture that had formed in the Moon’s crust, allowing Nimrod to proceed for a good hundred yards, before calling a halt.

  “Turn the engine off,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Just do it.”

  The engine died with a rattling cough. The continual shuddering motion that had been with them ever since they had set off from the scrapyard ceased. All was still. Ulysses peered out of the cockpit at the shadowed crater beyond and the unobscured star field above.

  The distant lights of the curious moonbase still twinkled in the dark, like reflections of the stars. There was no other sign of anybody else being out here.

  This time they both heard the tremor as well as felt it.

  It was as if they had parked on the back of some lunar leviathan – like the sailors of old who had supposedly mistaken the backs of basking whales for dry land – that was even now stirring from its eons old slumber and shaking to rid itself of some irritating parasite that had taken up residence while it slept.

  The Copernicus bounced and jerked around them as, beyond the bubble of the cockpit, Ulysses saw the powdered grey sand covering the floor of the crater dance like iron filings on a taut, vibrating drum skin.

  As the shuddering passed, Ulysses turned to Nimrod, a horrified look on his face. “I was stupid! Start the engine. We have to get out of here now!”

  Nimrod didn’t need to be told twice. Punching the ignition switch, activating the headlamps, he put the LEV into gear and his foot to the floor. Kicking up a spray of regolith from its back wheels, the rover took off, bouncing over the crater floor at a giddy fifty miles per hour.

  Ulysses didn’t care now that they might be spotted. Whoever awaited them inside the moonbase either already knew that they were coming or were about to find their day taking a most unusual twist. Besides, Ulysses decided he would rather take his chances with whoever was lurking in their lair than end up plunging into some newly-opened chasm God alone knew how many feet deep.

  Nimrod jinked and wrestled the vehicle as it bumped over the lunar surface – the LEV sometimes losing contact with the ground entirely in its hurtling flight while Ulysses clung on to the edges of his seat. The surface of the Moon seemed to be fracturing all around them, making it harder and harder for Nimrod to navigate a safe way through the tectonic turmoil.

  The was a terrible crash and then Ulysses was tumbling about the cabin as the Copernicus was bowled over sideways and started to roll. The battered LEV bounced over the fracturing crater floor.

  It was too late to regret not fastening his seat-harness as he was thrown free of his seat, the side of his head making contact with the navi-con, and before Ulysses knew what the ultimate fate of the Copernicus was to be, he lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tremors

  T MINUS 4 HOURS, 1 MINUTE, 56 SECONDS

  AS THE TREMORS subsided, Nimrod opened his eyes to near total darkness. He was still in his seat, thanks to his pilot’s harness. Below him he could just make out the motionless form of his master, Ulysses Quicksilver, lying against the inside of the cockpit bubble. The rover was lying at an angle of forty-five degrees, with its nose pointing downwards, the main body of the Copernicus extending behind and above his current position.

  The time for stealth was over. They were already in about as much trouble as you could ever expect to be on the Moon, and yet still be alive. Unclipping his harness, he leaned across and flicked the switches that activated the cabin lights. The dull lumin-strips began to glow, suffusing the cabin with a dirty nicotine-yellow light.

  His master didn’t move. Blood oozed from a bruised cut on the side of his head. Carefully, Nimrod climbed out of his chair and down into the reinforced glass bubble. Putting two fingers to the artery in the man’s neck he breathed out with relief as he found a pulse.

  “Sir?” His voice sounded strange in the confined space of the LEV. “Sir!”

  Still there was no response.

  Nimrod looked about him, carrying out a more detailed assessment of their condition.

  His master was unconscious, but alive. The Co
pernicus, however, was as good as dead. It was stuck, nose-down, in a crevasse and the only way it was ever likely to get out again was if another, larger vehicle winched it out.

  They still had water and food for six days, and, as long as they had power of some description, the air would keep being recycled too. The lady inspector would have doubtless sent a party to look for them by now and, if he activated the LEV’s emergency beacon, they would probably be rescued within a day, two at most.

  All they had to do was stay put and wait for help to arrive.

  Nimrod’s attention was drawn to a blinking red light on the control panel above him. Pulling himself back up into the driving seat, he studied the bank of lights.

  “Oh dear,” he said to himself.

  The blinking bulb was labelled ‘ATMOSPHERE BREACH.’

  “Vacuum suits it is then,” Nimrod added, keeping quite calm.

  Without the slightest modicum of fuss, but with efficient, economical movements, Nimrod set about accessing the locker containing the two environment suits they had brought with them.

  Had the LEV still been horizontal, it would have been a straightforward process that would only take a matter of seconds. However, with the Copernicus half buried, and with his master in a state of persistent unconsciousness, it was touch and go whether Nimrod would be able to get them both into their sealed suits before oxygen levels in the LEV reached a critical point and he too blacked out.

  He climbed up through the body of the rover, using pipework and storage cupboard handles for support. With one hand, he managed to yank open the cupboard containing the two vacuum suits and the associated paraphernalia that went with them, including two pairs of heavy, lead-soled moon boots.