Tears of Selene
Page 11
Lisa smiled. “It does seem like he's going about this in the most difficult way possible.” The computer blinked, and the yellow border became a red one. “He's inside the kaserne, but still in the sewers.”
“What did you do, wire them all up? He's going to notice wires.”
Lisa smiled so much, her teeth showed. “Nope. We've got some fancy stuff from Interpol. Detects when something changes in the environment. Point it downward over a tunnel, and when something enters the tunnel, it registers. Don't know how it operates, and Sir Rodney won't bilge. Won't let us work on them, either. Hell, we don't even know where they are. And since they are above the sewer system, Garth won't know, either.”
“Fun times,” said John. “Got the entire system mapped out?”
“I left it up to Interpol. They promised they have every spot covered.” The red bordered message disappeared.
“Where is he?” said John.
“Not sure. He was last in tunnel E5, over by the Mess Hall,” said Celine.
Fear draped them both, cold and clammy.
###
Perseus was buttoned up, but not shut down. The Cup, the enormous blast plate that absorbed the nuclear explosions that moved the asteroid from beyond Mars into Earth orbit five months ago, swung into place and latched closed. The aft bubble remained a beehive of activity, since that was where the minimill was operating. The pile of loose rubble from the original construction of Perseus was dwindling as the minimill created a series of curved steel plates.
“How's it going?” asked Commander Standish. “Any problems from closing the Cup?”
Horst switched over to the Command frequency. “None, Commander. It's strange—you get an odd case of claustrophobia, but this place is a kilometer across! It's just different when the 'roof' is open and when it's closed, that's all. It doesn't affect production. We're almost done welding the second ring of the cofferdam. We should be finished next shift. The last of the curved plates are coming out now. Next shift, we'll change the parameters on the mill, and it's going to make flat plates.”
“You're welding them on your side, then passing some through to weld on this side, right?”
“Correct. McCrary again—man's a genius. When we laser that cylinder out, we’ll pass it back, the cofferdam on your side keeping the atmosphere in. Later, when we test the airlocks, we can do so without endangering the atmosphere on your side just because the cofferdam is in place. When the airlocks are complete, we just torch the cofferdams off and recycle the steel.”
“Aren't you leaving out a few things?” asked Standish.
“Oh, yeah, got to build the extensions for the airlock chamber, but I included that when I talked about testing the airlocks. Most of the extension will be on this side anyway, where it's easier to get a nice clean weld, and the leaks are easier to find.”
“How's that?” asked Standish.
“We're going to pump up the atmosphere with steam. Any leak is a little snowstorm on the vacuum side.” Horst sounded proud.
“McCrary's idea?” asked Standish.
“Nope. For once,” said Horst.
“Congratulations, Horst. I'll let you get back to your job. Let me know if you get any EMP effects when the nuke goes off. And no EVA without clearance from here.”
“Understood, Commander. We'll wait for your clearance. Horst out.”
Horst was still smiling about the elegance of the steam idea when a Moondog came up with a question.
###
The launch of the missile was almost anticlimactic. Lisa noted it out of the corner of her eye as she watched the sensor ghost of Garth traverse the sewer tunnels almost beneath her feet. She watched the monitors of the launch, noted the solid white column leaping from its underground lair in a burst of fire, a long-range shot of the drive plume etching a straight line out of the ground, only to have upper level winds swirl it around. She turned up the Control Room commentary when the weapons package was armed. The explosion, when it came, was utterly silent, except for the howls of static from the speakers as EMP dumped random voltages into the electrical systems immediately under the blast.
Later, as the systems recovered and the incandescent sphere of furiously radiating atoms expanded and cooled, radar pulses were finally able to make the round trip to the hot surface of the debris and back to Earth, confirming that the chunk of the Lunar surface was indeed on a new trajectory, one that posed no further threat to Earth.
“Commander, mission accomplished,” said the event controller.
“Well done, team,” said Lisa. “Return to normal operations.”
She and John returned to watching Garth's struggles in the tunnels below.
###
Garth was surprised to find the chamber. After all the struggles, especially with immovable manhole covers, he expected to have nothing but bad luck for the rest of his air tank. The final cover was just above him, and he tried it half-heartedly. Either a cover was a lot heavier than he thought, they were all glued down, or somehow, he had the bad luck of a vehicle parked on top of every circle of cast iron along the main road of the kaserne.
This manhole chamber was different than the rest, though. Instead of a sloping chamber made out of concrete and poured in a factory, this one was clearly made out of bricks mortared together.
Must be one of the original ones from when the kaserne was built.
Garth took a moment after trying to lift the cover (futile, like all of them) to look around the inside of the chamber. There—a second ladder. It led up to what looked like a crawl space near the top.
Garth quickly scaled the ladder, went into and over the manhole vault wall, and found himself in a dry chamber on the other side. He quickly looked around and noticed that the beam of his mining lamp was swallowed up before it reflected back at him.
This is one of the old Nazi tunnels. Booby-trapped, if the stories are true. Deteriorating, certainly.
According to local rumors, nobody dared to go into the tunnels any longer—stories abounded of special forces soldiers exploring the tunnels with elaborate equipment, never to be seen again. Garth's BS meter went off every time he heard one of those tales.
But he had to get back—he was at the forty-five minute mark on his tank, and he couldn’t afford to run out. This tunnel would have to wait for another day. Maybe, just maybe, this could be the perfect place to play with his captives. After all, he could just float John's body down to the nearest sewage pump, do some simple butchery, and let the forces of civilization wash away the evidence.
He scrambled back over the wall and reentered the sewer. Halfway back, while climbing one of the long vertical tunnels from a lift station, he wished that he’d tried using the Nazi tunnels as a way out. He finally staggered out of the system with five minutes of air remaining in the tank.
Subby would never make it. And he'd have to steal a second scuba system for the little weasel. He almost regretted teaming up with the worthless pest.
###
“Glitch,” said Sir Rodney. “There was a problem with the sensor over that tunnel, and it was replaced. When the system realized no sensor had a target, it erased the alert.”
John was silent. Lisa looked at him curiously. “Are you buying this?” she asked him. “This is your life, after all. Yours and Celine's.”
John stirred. “Yes. Sir Rodney demonstrated it to me. He even showed me how the sensor failed—there was a battery failure, and the sensor didn’t switch over correctly to the secondary battery for two minutes. That's why it dropped out and recovered.”
“Has anyone been inside the sewers?” asked Lisa.
“Oh, no, that can't happen,” said Sir Rodney. “The only bootprints in there must be unmistakably old or his. We can't even put a drone in there. Opening a manhole cover leaves traces that someone like him would easily pick up. No, we have to leave the system completely alone so that he thinks he got away with it.”
“But he was, in fact, down there,” said Lisa.
Lisa frowned. “I don't like it. I want one hundred percent confirmation that he was underneath us here. Can't we send one of those wheeled things you use to see if you've got tree roots in your line? From what I understand, the branch lines are actually up on the walls of the tunnel and dump from there. I doubt he’s looking into each branch line for signs of counter-surveillance.”
Sir Rodney frowned. “I fail to see why you do not trust our sensors.”
“Maybe because one of them failed on us,” said John, somewhat roughly. “What Lisa says makes sense. So call up your boys, or maybe I should go see if I can scare up a crew myself and go see what there is to see.”
Sir Rodney held up his hand. “No need to be hasty. We'll have a crew here within the hour. Mr. Hodges, if you wish, can accompany us to act as your witness.”
“Fair enough. Let me know, John, when you have something to see.”
###
The ore processor was humming along, producing bricks of concentrated KREEP minerals without the dross of extra useless mass. Alex was carefully attaching the methane sensor package to the underside of the Disco, where it would have a clear, unobstructed view of the terrain below. The best place to mount it was in the center of the disk, and the best way to access that was through the hole the chunk of debris had punched through it over a year ago.
I've got to hand it to Travis, he sure earned his paycheck that day.
They were going to have an advantage that Eddie Zanger never had. Since the Lunar Disco didn't have to fly at orbital speed, the imager would produce a superior image as well as sensing fainter fluorescence coming from the methane boiling out of a carbonaceous chondrite buried right under the lunar soil.
On the other hand, since they were going to be flying at Lunar night, they wouldn’t have the Sun baking the ground underneath them, generating that fluorescence. McCrary put the question to the lunar scientists inside the Perseus. They recommended a tunable laser, set at a precise frequency. It would illuminate any seeping methane, causing it to re-radiate at a distinctive frequency different than the one used by the laser. The seep would shine out like a plume of color on a black and white image.
That was the theory. What Alex was dealing with was brutal reality. He was working with his arm completely through the hole, adjusting the controls on the laser, when he realized that he was stuck. Pulling his arm out was impossible—something was snagged on one of the rough edges of the impact hole. He obviously couldn't go any further inside.
“Uh, Lima? Mary? I've got a problem here.”
No answer.
Of course. The tarp is aluminized on the inside to reflect heat back inside. It's got to be blocking my radio transmission.
He knew better than to tug hard—that would just be a fancy way to suicide as his breathing air gushed out of the torn sleeve. No guarantee that he could patch it in the nine to fifteen seconds he'd have before he passed out.
So he continued to work until the job was done then stayed there. His arm wasn't constricted in any way—the suit was simply snagged on a bit of metal. He couldn't pull his arm out of the suit sleeve either—second thing he tried after calling for help. Nor could he actually see what was snagging him—his head was too close to the plate to see. He couldn't even move his other arm over to free the first one, because he had no slack to get the suit glove in between his body and the plate.
So he lay there, on the plate, awaiting rescue. Alex sure hoped Lima and Maricella would wonder where he was before his oxygen ran out.
###
Garth was able to clean up before he returned to the hostel where they roomed. Even so, he had to shower twice before the stink of the sewers left him. His clothes were a total loss, but he had already counted on that, and had worn the worst of his limited wardrobe. He didn't just throw them away, though. He tied them onto a stake on the bank of a nearby creek. Maybe the current would clean them up by tomorrow. He'd hang them up to dry, and use them on the next foray.
Subby, as usual, couldn’t keep quiet.
“How was the trip?” he asked. “Did you reach your goal?”
Garth ignored him as best he could. Garth, as usual, collected their morning breakfast, bringing the wrapped sandwiches back to the dorm. Subby kept trying to speak in code, and a terrible code it was, until Garth held up a fist between them and directed an angry look over it. The slighter man gulped and concentrated on his meal.
Garth was exhausted and wanted to sleep, but house rules required everyone to vacate the building during the day, to keep up the pretense that the hostel was just a place to sleep for the night instead of a permanent address, as it was for some of the stoned youths who were bumming around Europe.
So the two of them walked to a local park, where the benches were still the kind that a tired man could sleep on. Subby squatted comfortably on his heels while Garth fell into a dreamless sleep. The sun swept through the sky, delivering light but not a great deal of heat. Still, fifteen degrees in a light coat wasn’t that terrible, especially if you had the sun on your face.
Garth stirred and woke. He sat up and rubbed his face, examining the shadow he cast. Middle afternoon, he thought. “That was good. Let's go,” he said.
Subby came back from wherever his mind had wandered as he meditated. He felt refreshed, as if he’d slept a couple of hours. This time, he would be quiet. Maybe Garth would loosen up and tell him things without prompting.
They arrived at the library without Garth saying a word. Subby sighed as they strode to the public computers and logged in once again.
###
Once the danger of debris from the nuclear detonation had passed, the Perseus swung the Cup open again. This time, though, the crew slipped it open just enough to pass out rubble from the pile in the aft bubble, and to pass the pipes for the molten nickel-iron from the solar mirrors that melted the rubble.
The welding of the airlock extension continued. The plates emerged from the minimill with regularity, and the red-hot slabs of nickel-iron were transported to the correct spot, welded into place, and left to cool by radiation, which was notoriously slow. An entire ring of the extension was the goal of every shift, working against time to get the last plate in before the first one had cooled appreciably. As the ring cooled, it shrank, and the contracting nickel-iron only got stronger as the welds compressed.
The eleven meters long by thirteen and a half meter extension was completed in just under two weeks. During that time, curved and flat plates for the fore bubble passed through the existing airlocks and construction on the interior cofferdam began. The welders built up an enormous flat plate from overlapping flat plates from the minimill. When it was completed, they welded the cover over the open end. A human sized airlock was rigged, along with a transfer tunnel to the other end of the extension, and the aft portion was evacuated.
“Damn, these are as thick as my arm!” said Jimmy Fields. “Reminds me of the power leads to the Flinger back on the Moon.”
“Same kind of cable, that's why,” said McCrary. “Except we're rigging for a laser, not a lineac.”
“What kind of laser needs this much power?” asked Jimmy.
“The kind that can cut through fifty meters of iron,” said McCrary, completely deadpan.
“Reminds me of an oil rig,” said Devore. “Leave the drill bit down the hole, but keep pushing it deeper with pipes.”
“Same principle,” said McCrary. “Kinda close in here, isn't it?”
“Bother you?” asked Devore.
McCrary snorted. “I woke up in a dented MoonCan. Had to get myself out. That was a little close. You?”
Devore sighed. “I was lucky. My can got wedged under a beam. Not a whole lot of denting, but also not a whole lot of ways to get out. I had to bend the door with my legs and feet to get out. There has to be a better way of getting out of the damn things.”
“Problem for a
nother engineer. All we have to do is write it up so they have the data.”
“Already done,” said Devore. “Every time I had some down time, I worked on writing up whatever Collins systems that failed. Sent it in already. Maybe someone's working on a solution.”
McCrary smiled at him, something Devore had never seen before. He felt like he had just been knighted.
“Good man. Send me a copy when we get downstairs. I'd like to read it.”
Devore was tripping. “I sure will!”
“Good. Now, this rig.” McCrary was back to the problem at hand.
“Electric motor. Drilling oil runs in and out by this seal.”
“Where'd you get oil from?”
“I, ah, stashed away a drum of SAE 40 from Collins. I didn't see leaving it up there to rot.”
“How did you know we were going to be in the Perseus? That was Top Secret.”
“There was no way the Tank would ever go into reentry. But it could have been a base in orbit for something. I saw all the extra stuff being loaded aboard, and I thought we’d be constructing something for reentry. I didn't realize we'd have a whole aircraft carrier to do it in.”
“Devore, you should come talk to me more often. What else did you sneak aboard?”
“Nothing extraordinary. Some solar cells. Instrumentation, of course. Some other stocks from Engineering. Mostly, I saw what you were loading, but couldn't think of anything else to add to it.”
“Still, motor oil is like liquid gold here. How much did you bring again?”
“Um, I think they were hundred liter containers. I brought four.”
McCrary clicked his comm gear. “Horst. Devore squirrelled away four hundred liters of SAE 40. Yes, motor oil. Tell the chef he can stop squeezing the chickens now.
“Yes…I’m always serious.”
He turned back to Devore. “We were getting ready to, and I am not kidding, start raising chickens so that we could harvest their fat to make oil to run the drills. You saved us from that.”