Spaced Out

by Stuart Gibbs

  The rover garage wasn’t far from the main air lock, so it didn’t take us long to get to it. Or at least, what was left of it.

  The garage had originally been a simple white dome, but when I’d been attacked, the robot arm had torn a gaping hole in the roof. Back on earth, the government probably could have repaired it within a few days, but on the moon, where getting new parts for anything required a rocket mission, it was probably going to be years until it was fixed. In the meantime, to make sure it didn’t collapse, Dad, Chang, and Dr. Balnikov had simply sliced off the top of the dome, making the whole thing look like an igloo with a sunroof.

  The adults had left the garage door open when they’d taken the remaining big rovers out. Overlapping trails of moon dust led to and from the spots where the big rovers that still worked were normally parked. The wreckage of the third big rover—the one that had been destroyed by the robot—was to the side, where it could be cannibalized for spare parts. The small rover sat tucked in the back of the garage.

  It was so spindly, it looked as though a kid had built it. The metal bars of the chassis were as thin as my fingers, and the motor seemed like a toy. The only part that looked sturdy was the wheels, which were quite large with extremely thick treads, designed to plow through moon dust and roll over sharp rocks.

  Kira eagerly slid into the driver’s seat and flipped the ignition switch. The engine shuddered to life. “C’mon!” Kira exclaimed. “Let’s see how this thing handles!”

  I buckled myself into the passenger seat. Kira immediately stomped her foot on the accelerator and let out a whoop. To her dismay, the little rover wasn’t nearly as powerful as she’d hoped. Instead of roaring across the lunar surface like a Formula One race car, it puttered along like an anemic golf cart.

  “What the . . . ?” Kira asked. “How do I make this thing go faster?”

  “I think this is as fast as it goes,” I told her. “Its maximum speed is eight miles an hour.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Kira steered toward the launchpad. “My grandma can walk faster than this thing.”

  I became aware of some movement out by the blast wall that surrounded the pad. Two of the four Moonies who’d stayed close to base to look for Nina were hurrying back toward the air lock, obviously concerned that their helmets might crack and explode at any moment.

  I turned and spotted the other two adults rounding the side of the base, hurrying as well. Even though I couldn’t see their faces, I could sense their fear. The harsh reality of our mission settled on me.

  Despite Kira’s annoyance over the rover’s speed, it was still much faster than walking would have been. It wasn’t long before we had cleared the launchpad and were venturing onto part of the moon I’d never laid eyes on before.

  The lunar surface around Moon Base Alpha was scarred by human impact; virtually every bit of it was covered with human footprints or rover tracks, and there were piles of construction debris scattered about as well. But beyond the launchpad, most of the moon was still pristine. Except for the well-traveled road between the pad and the site of MBB—a makeshift highway of thousands of rover and robot tracks—everything still looked exactly as it had for the past hundred thousand years. There were wide seas of moon dust, a few islands of rock, and thousands of craters.

  To our right, a great dune of moon dust rose, a beautiful pure white mountain two hundred feet tall. “Check that out,” I said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Kira agreed. “I wish we could drive on it.”

  I glanced back at her. “But then we’d ruin it forever.”

  “So? It’s gonna get ruined sooner or later. We might as well be the ones to do it. If we were the first ones up it, I’ll bet we could name it after ourselves.”

  “We could probably name it anyhow,” I pointed out.

  “Mount Kiradash!” she exclaimed. “Aw, man, if this wasn’t an emergency, I’d drive right up there.”

  “Look out!” I yelled.

  Kira had been so busy looking at the mountain, she hadn’t noticed the other rover coming down the road. Dr. Balnikov, Dr. Merritt, Dr. Kim, and Dr. Alvarez were racing back to the safety of MBA before their helmets failed. Kira was steering toward them, while they were all waving at us desperately, signaling us to move to the right. Kira veered out of their way so quickly I almost got whiplash.

  They slipped past us, barely missing us by inches, then jounced onward toward MBA.

  “Oops,” Kira said.

  “There’s only two other vehicles on the entire moon,” I pointed out. “And you almost hit one of them.”

  “I wasn’t expecting there to be traffic,” Kira explained.

  I made sure there wasn’t anyone else coming our way, then looked out over the endless expanse of moon. Roddy’s warning came back to me: that Nina could be almost anywhere out there, and if she was, she’d be almost impossible to see. I turned back toward MBA, to find it had already disappeared from sight behind Mount Kiradash.

  “Do you think Nina would have really come all the way out here?” I asked. “By herself?”

  “We’re not that far,” Kira replied. “This stupid rover is so slow, I’ll bet we haven’t even gone a mile.”

  “But still, we’re in a rover. It doesn’t seem like Nina to come this far from the base alone on foot. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Leaving the base at all doesn’t seem like Nina,” Kira told me. “Neither does stealing moon rocks. But obviously, none of us knew her as well as we thought. Everyone’s been thinking she’s the ultimate goody two-shoes and it turns out she’s had this secret criminal life going on the whole time.”

  I sighed. “Well, at least now we know she wasn’t murdered.”

  “Not necessarily. Murder’s still totally possible. Maybe someone found out Nina was smuggling rocks and wanted in on it. Then Nina said no and things got out of control.”

  “You think she was killed because of some rocks?”

  “They’re supposed to be worth millions, right? People have killed each other for a lot less.”

  I stared out at the lunar surface, thinking about that. Once again, Kira was right: The fact that Nina was up to something secret didn’t mean someone couldn’t have murdered her. Or at least, tried to murder her. Zan had said she wasn’t dead, but that was hours before. I wondered how much worse Nina’s condition had grown since then. I wondered where Nina could be, period. There didn’t appear to be any sign of her on the surface. But then, if Nina had been buried even a few feet off the track, I never would have seen her.

  “So who’s your number one suspect?” I asked.

  “The Sjobergs,” Kira replied.

  “The Sjobergs? They don’t need a couple million dollars! They’ve got billions.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe they blew all their money on stupid stuff like vacations on the moon. And now they’re bankrupt and desperate. Those people are used to being rich. They wouldn’t do well having to live like the rest of us, without solid-gold bathtubs and refrigerators full of caviar and pet snow leopards and stuff.”

  “A few million wouldn’t be able to support that kind of life for them.”

  “It’d still be something. And if anyone on our base is depraved enough to kill for money, it’s that family. Who knows? Maybe they’re not bankrupt but they’re still willing to sink this low to get more money because that’s simply the kind of monsters they are.”

  “I don’t know about that. . . .”

  “Well, whatever the case, you have to admit they’ve been acting awfully suspicious lately.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, thinking of the long periods they were spending in their room and whatever Roddy had witnessed them doing the night before. “They’re definitely up to something.”

  “Look,” Kira said, pointing ahead of us. “There’s the Moon Base Beta site.”

  It was still a good distance away from us, and it didn’t look like much yet: only a few surveyor lines staked into the moon dust. MBB was going to b
e several times larger than MBA, but the footprint still looked awfully small compared to the amount of empty space surrounding it. Twelve space capsules were scattered about the area, each the size of a one-car garage. I couldn’t tell which was the one that had come that morning, as they all looked exactly alike. None had been unloaded yet; that wouldn’t happen until it was time for construction to begin.

  I couldn’t see the operations pod, though, as it had been built underground to protect it from meteorite impacts. It was inside a lava tube, an enormous natural tunnel of basalt that was a remnant from billions of years ago, when the moon’s surface had been molten rock. The tubes had formed when the lava hardened, and they were like subway tunnels beneath the moon dust. They were pretty rare; this area was one of the few places on the moon they existed. In fact, the tubes were one of the main reasons for selecting the sites for both moon bases; the operations pods weren’t sturdy enough to leave exposed on the lunar surface.

  I noticed the lunar rover my parents, Chang, and Dr. Howard had taken, off to the side of the MBB site. It was parked by a dark slash of rock, the top of a lava tube, poking through the dust.

  I pointed to it. “That must be where the pod is.”

  And then, far to my right, there was a sudden movement.

  It happened quickly, at the edge of my peripheral vision. By the time I turned that way, whatever it was had vanished.

  “What’s wrong?” Kira asked.

  “I thought I saw something,” I said.

  “Like Nina?”

  “I don’t know. Stop the rover.”

  Kira nailed the brakes. Even though we weren’t moving all that fast, we still skidded a bit in the moon dust.

  I scanned the horizon to the right, looking for more movement, hoping to spot Nina out there, alive and well. But I saw nothing.

  Then, near the MBB site, there was a small puff of white. A tiny cloud of moon dust had been thrown into the air. Because of the moon’s weak gravity, it drifted for a while before settling back to the surface. It looked kind of like the plume of spray a humpback whale made when it spouted.

  “There!” I said, pointing.

  “I saw it,” Kira responded.

  Another puff rose, much closer to us, off to our left.

  Fear seized me as I realized what it was.

  “Meteorites!” I yelled.

  They were plummeting to the ground around us. Stray bits of rock that had been floating through space. Given the size of the impacts, they were certainly quite small, no bigger than pebbles. On earth, they would have burned up in the atmosphere. But on the moon, there was no atmosphere to slow them. They streaked into the surface at rocket speed, hard enough to crater the ground.

  Fast enough to go straight through our space suits and kill us.

  Another two puffs of dust arose, one on either side of us. More meteorites had plowed into the lunar surface. And no doubt more were coming.

  We were out in the open in the middle of a meteorite shower and there was nothing to protect us.

  Which meant our lives were in very serious danger.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  METEORITE IMPACTS

  Perhaps the least controllable danger at MBA comes from outside the moon itself: meteoritesI. Because of the lack of atmosphere, rocks that would burn up heading to earth are not slowed at all when falling to the lunar surface, impacting at extreme speeds. Therefore, even a rock the size of a pinhead can do great harm to a space suit—or a person—unlucky enough to be hit by it. (Don’t worry, though: MBA has been constructed with exceptionally thick walls and windows to repel meteorites; even the skylight over the greenhouse is strong enough to withstand a major impact.) Before heading outside, check the most recent lunar atmospheric surveys to make sure there are no meteorite clouds in the area—although be aware that NASA can’t track every rock in the solar system. Should you find yourself outside when meteorites are coming down, find shelter immediately. Where meteorites are concerned, the best protection by far is simply having a roof over your head.

  * * *

  I. To clarify the difference between meteor, meteoroid, and meteorite: A meteor is the flash of light in the night sky when a piece of interplanetary debris hits the earth’s atmosphere; a meteoroid is the piece of interplanetary debris itself; and a meteorite is a meteoroid that makes it through the atmosphere to the planet. Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, any meteoroid that encounters the moon’s gravity will become a meteorite, and thus the terms are essentially interchangeable.

  DEATH FROM ABOVE

  Lunar day 217

  Possibly the last few minutes of my life

  “Drive!” I yelled to Kira.

  “I know!” she yelled back, planting her foot on the accelerator.

  The rear wheels of the rover spun wildly, kicking up their own cloud of moon dust. For a few moments, I feared that we’d sunk into the surface and were stuck, but then finally, the treads caught and we lurched forward. My helmet clanged off the back of my seat hard enough to rattle my head around like a peanut in its shell. The emergency helmet repair kit nearly slid off my lap, but I snagged the handle at the last second and kept it from tumbling into the dust.

  In our hurry to rescue everyone, we had forgotten to follow official moonwalk procedures and check for any potential clouds of meteorites in the area before heading onto the surface. Now there was nothing we could do except get to safety as fast as humanly possible.

  Three more meteorites plugged the ground in front of us, sending up plumes of dust.

  And those were merely the ones I could see. I had a limited range of vision in my helmet, which meant there were probably other rocks streaming in from outer space all around us.

  There wasn’t any way to see the meteorites until they hit the ground. There was no atmosphere for them to spark off, and against the black sky the dark rocks were invisible. There was no sound as they hurtled downward. Every impact was eerily silent. We couldn’t even hear the motor on the rover. The only sound was our own frightened breathing, relayed through our radio headsets to one another.

  A minute before, when Kira had been driving like a madwoman, I’d been worried that the rover was going too fast. Now it seemed terrifyingly slow. Meteorites were slamming into the surface around us at hundreds of miles an hour, and we were barely moving. The safety of the lava tube ahead didn’t seem to be getting any closer at all.

  A new sound suddenly echoed in my helmet. My mother’s voice on the radio. “Dash! Kira! Are you out there?”

  “Yes!” both of us shouted back at once.

  Mom gave a gasp of concern. I’m sure she hadn’t meant for us to hear it, because when she spoke again, she was obviously doing her best to sound steady and reassuring. “Where are you?”

  “We can see the lava tube,” I reported. “It’s about a hundred meters away.”

  Several more meteorites streaked into the ground around us. There were too many to count now. The shower was growing in intensity.

  “Get here as fast as you can,” Mom ordered. “We’ll be waiting by the air lock. Once you’re inside the tube itself, you’ll be safe.”

  I looked to Kira helplessly.

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” she told me, then jammed her foot on the accelerator again, showing me she had it down as far as it could go.

  Everywhere around us, there were puffs of dust. They were rising from the plain where Moon Base Beta would be built, from the dunes in the distance, and in the road around us, disturbingly close by.

  Kira kept her gaze focused straight ahead and her hands locked on the steering wheel, putting us on the most direct line toward safety. Every second counted.

  The tube was getting closer, though our progress still seemed agonizingly slow. I locked my eyes on the dark slash of rock, willing it to come closer.

  Suddenl
y a meteorite shot past me, so close I could feel it, and the right rear tire exploded. The rear axle dropped and plowed into the ground, spinning us off course. The rover leaped over a small ridge of rock and soared into the air.

  On earth, we might have jumped a foot or two, but in the low gravity, the rover was airborne for a frighteningly long time.

  “Hold on tight!” Kira screamed at me.

  I was already doing this, clutching the chassis as hard as I could with my right hand while keeping my left arm locked around the emergency helmet repair kit.

  Thankfully, we landed in a wide-open plain of dust, rather than on rock. The front of the rover plowed into the ground, kicking up a wave of dust that poured over us, turning the world blinding white. I was thrown forward from the impact, but my seat belt held, yanking me back hard into the seat. The emergency repair kit was torn from my grasp.

  I’d closed my eyes to brace for the impact, and when I opened them again, I found myself plunged into darkness. For one brief, terrifying moment, I thought I might have gone blind, but then I realized that my visor had simply been covered in dust. I did my best to wipe it away, but it clung tenaciously, allowing me only a tiny smeared window to see through.

  There was so much dust still flying around us, I could barely see my own feet. It was as though we’d been plunged into a snow dome and shaken. At first I thought Kira had been thrown free, but then I realized she was still in her seat beside me, only so coated with dust that she blended into the scenery.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “You?”

  “I’m good,” I said, hoping it was true. “Let’s move.”

  Kira and I tried to unbuckle ourselves as quickly as we could. Unfortunately, the latch on my belt stayed stubbornly locked while I fumbled at it with my bulky gloved hands.