“Professor Takashi, I thought this was supposed to be a scientific mission. Shouldn’t we be sending more scientists?” The question grabbed Farr’s attention. The owner of the question was Kemmler, the electromagnetic specialist.
“I’ll answer that Mr. Takashi,” Farr said calmly. “What makes you think this is a scientific mission Mr. Kemmler?”
“Well… I just thought there should be some more scientists going down, that’s all,” Kemmler stammered caught off guard by the question.
“Listen up folks. I want to explain something to you because we’re going to be having quite a few of these situations arise in the near future, and I intend to be honest with you from the word go. Our mission is humanitarian first and scientific second. We don’t know what is down there yet. We’ve detected some anomalies, as Mr. Takashi informed you. I’m personally responsible for each of your lives and ensuring your safe arrival back home to your mother, father, lover, wife, dog or whatever. It doesn’t really matter to me who you go home to as long as you go home. We leave no one behind and I want to make that clear.”
“Now, is there danger down there? We don’t know and until we do I’ll not allow a mass exodus down to the surface. Once I’m sure it is safe down below, you’ll all get your turn. But until I know for sure, I only want the bare minimum on the team and I prefer some military training if you’ve got it. I’ve been on several humanitarian missions on Earth that went wrong fast and the Earth Services are very familiar with isolated groups of humanity, and, shall we say, the problems that are often found there. If there are people there, they may be starving, they may be desperate or they may not have a clue who in the hell we are and when people see strangers their reactions aren’t always predictable. ”
“Yes but Ming is a biologist, so what qualifies him to go down first?” Kemmler blurted out. Ming had an irritated look on his face as he turned to Kemmler.
“Because I spent five years in Earth Services. Because I commanded a scout ship in the south pacific and because I am trained in survival and fighting techniques and I once survived for five days in a battle zone with no weapons. Anything else you’d like to know or can we get on with the briefing.” Ming had spoken every word calmly and clearly and sat staring at Kemmler, who eventually broke eye contact and murmured a reply.
“No, that’s good enough for me.” Wells, who’d been quietly observing Kemmler, stifled a snicker.
“People, no one will be left out when it comes to the places we’ll visit, but the lunar colonies are just a workup to prepare us for what’s in the asteroid belt. The lunar surface was actually a weekend hop for the super-rich a century ago or, as in the case of Lunar bases five and six, mining facilities meant to support the retreats of the rich. Trust me when I say that the things ahead of you will be far more interesting than the Moon, but also trust me when I say protocol will be followed. Tegev, please brief the crew on the weapons the landing party will carry.”
Everyone was little surprised to hear the word “weapons” and suddenly the interest in being one of the first down dwindled. Sasha Tegev stood, all one hundred and eighty centimeters of her tanned, muscled body moving fluidly in the low g, and swung the bulky weapon in her grip around lightly to display its features.
“This is the DEW 251, a directed energy weapon that uses microwaves to agitate the water molecules under a person’s skin. This results in intense pain to the recipient, and on exposed flesh, may sometimes give a serious sunburn-like rash. It immobilizes the person for up to ten minutes. As you can see,” she said hoisting up the heavy weapon, “it’s bulky and hard to handle. It’s capable of delivering six thirty second bursts. It only takes ten seconds to put a person down, so move on after the first screams. And there will be screams,” she said with an evil little smile.
“Excuse me,” Skorsson said raising his hand meekly. Alexander Skorsson was in his early fifties, one of the few people you were likely to meet in the twenty third century whose name matched his appearance. He stood two meters tall with blonde hair that was graying at the temples and hazel green eyes. His expression and disposition were exactly opposite of his Viking heritage however. He was one of the most polite and pleasant people you’d ever hope to meet. “Do all of us really need to know this, I mean, we’re only taking one and you’re obviously qualified to use it?”
“Suppose we’re greeted by a hundred starving scarecrows doctor, and despite my best efforts, I go down because they think we’ve got food. I mean obviously we won’t look starved to them so we must have food right? What happens when I go down?” She asked, her brown eyes stern, yet inquisitive.
“Well, obviously one of the other trained crew members will pick it up and protect us,” Skorsson said, smiling pleasantly at her. In spite of her intensity, she almost smiled back at him.
“Suppose I’m wounded in the rush,” Faye broke in assisting Tegev in the point. “And the Commander and Mr. Ming have twenty bodies between them and the DEW, what do you do then? Just lie down and die, let us die? You keep fighting for your team members. That’s what you do.”
“You ladies are so right.” Senior Sergeant Evander Solomon broke in and his affirmation was echoed by the military members sitting at the table and Farr didn’t interfere. He let the discussion run its course. “We’ll protect you with our lives, but as Mr. Ming says, shit happens, and if we go down, we need to know that you’ll step into the breach, so we don’t think it’s too much to ask that you learn the weapons you may have to use.”
“Right you are Senior Sergeant. Good points were made by Tegev and Faye as well. From this point on Senior Sergeant, all ship personnel will be qualified on the weapons onboard, no exceptions,” Farr interjected and his last statement cut off Skorsson as he was about to speak. “Finish up Tegev.”
Tegev then demonstrated how to field strip the weapon and explained its basic components as the scientists and crew got involved asking questions, intelligent ones for the most part, Farr thought. The important thing was that they’d taken another step toward becoming a crew. He looked to his right where Ming was sitting. Ming grinned evilly.
“Well played Commander,” he leaned in and whispered.
The right side of Farr’s mouth twitched in a stifled smile. “I don’t know what you are talking about Mr. Ming.”
Six hours later the landing craft was loaded and the crew aboard. Everyone was at their stations on the Resolution eagerly waiting for the craft’s departure.
“Do you want to take her down?” Farr asked Ming, entering the small cockpit for preflight checks.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Ming replied, nodding at Farr to acknowledge the gesture and taking the pilot’s seat. “After all, the computer controls most of it.” Farr slid into the co-pilot’s chair and quickly wrapped up the preflight checklist.
What Ming had said was true, at least up until the last seconds before landing. The flight down was already programed into the craft’s computer by Dr. Thangruph. Ming would be required to manually control the craft once it descended under one hundred meters and the computer had slowed its’ speed to a bare crawl. The fact that their destination was seventy meters below the Moon’s surface just made it interesting. They’d have to descend through the broken ceiling to the floor below in order to get to the access door in the wall of the decimated area. There’d originally been a series of compartmentalized doors on the surface but the Master Chief had confirmed that they were all unusable.
Landing on the surface and then descending into the depression was not really an option. Too many things could go wrong. The only place to descend was the gaping hole that the landing craft would go through. To land away from the ceiling and then attempt to descend would’ve been foolhardy because they’d have had to traverse the ceiling on foot in life support suits and they’d ruled that out almost immediately.
“Away team this is the Bridge. Are all systems go on your end?”
“Bridge, away team, all systems go.” Ming replied.
“This is the bridge you’ve got clearance to drop on my mark… 10, 9…” The age old countdown proceeded and on zero the ship was released from the belly of the Resolution using nozzle bursts of compressed carbon dioxide to put distance between them. Ten seconds later attitude jets at the front of the craft changed the craft’s trajectory and it descended toward the surface with the forward attitude jets firing bursts to slow the craft at predetermined points. Space travel is all mathematical, Farr thought as he watched the surface coming rising toward him rapidly, and if you did the math wrong, there wasn’t a makeup test, just a very bad result.
As they dropped downward toward the battered face of the lunar surface Farr noted the large ice deposits lying just inside the shadowed rims of the scattered craters, forever cast in the shadows of darkness due to the mechanics of the Moon’s rotation and the angle of the sun. Takashi was right though, he thought, future colonists would have a much easier go of it than their predecessors. Most people thought that it would be the abundance of valuable minerals that would allow human colonies to flourish, when in reality, the availability of water was the most crucial element as to whether or not a colony survived.
By the time they’d reached the ceiling of base six, their forward momentum had slowed to a crawl. Ming was watching the ceiling approach and the altitude descend and when it reached one hundred and twenty meters he took control from the computer.
“Computer I’ve got control of the craft; slow forward momentum to twenty kilometers.”
“Executing,” the computer replied.
“Different strategy?” Farr asked calmly.
“Yeah, that opening looks a little jagged and tight to me. I think I can open it up some.”
“Roger, pilot’s call,” Farr responded, giving Ming the green light to follow his instincts.
Ming brought them in very low to the ceiling, perhaps two meters and continued to slow the craft. As the craft flowed over the ceiling, perfectly aligned with the opening Ming fired the lower engines at full followed by the upper engines at full and then switched both to standby to wait. He didn’t have long to wait either. The material of the ceiling had been pummeled by micro meteors over the years and the gaping hole had created a spider web of micro-cracks along the material. It had also made it unstable. So when the burst from the lower engines slammed into it and Ming stabilized his position by firing the upper engines, the pressure destabilized the whole section in a chain reaction of cracking acrylic. In one excruciatingly slow motion the entire section between the lower supports gave way and fell lazily to the ground below opening a roughly straight line twenty meters wide all the way across the depression which Ming then lowered the craft through.
“I hate tight spots,” Ming said.
“Obviously. Captains do too. Nicely done.”
“Hey, I’m the best with this bird.”
“There are only three people qualified to fly this bird in the entire world, me, you and the Master Chief.”
“And I’m the best.”
“Suit yourself but I don’t want to see you and Wells trying to prove a point in my bird.”
“If you’re the best you’ve got nothing to prove,” Ming sniffed, setting the craft down in the center of the ceilinged area. There was barely a bump, Farr noted admiringly.
“Engine shutdown,” Ming called.
“Shutdown, aye, bringing systems to standby,” Farr replied.
“Do you want to call the ship?” Ming asked.
“That’s the pilot’s privilege.”
“Roger that,” Ming said grinning. “Mama Bird this is Baby Bird, we’re in the coop.” Ming could hear the whoops in the background as the Master Chief replied.
“Roger that Baby Bird. I noticed your landing deviated from the planned route.”
“I’m just showing you who’s the best with this baby Master Chief.”
“We’ll see about that Mr. Ming,” Wells replied taking up the gauntlet. Farr just sighed and rolled his eyes.
“Mama Bird this is Baby Bird, Charlie Oscar, we’ll be checking equipment for the next hour in preparation for debarking. I want a full spectrum test on communications, complete with expected blackout areas when we enter the tunnels.”
“This is Mama Bird; we’ll have that for you in ten minutes, out.”
“Okay people, gear and instrument check in thirty minutes. Faye you’re going to take the watch on the lander when we debark as planned. You’ll keep the communications relay going between us and Mama Bird for as long as possible.” Farr finished his initial orders and went to oversee the preparations that were ongoing.
He knew the whole world would be watching and tried to put it out of his mind. It was every commanding officer’s nightmare multiplied by a hundred. As eager as he was to enter the tunnels he was even more eager to be on his way to the belt where communication lags would be ten minutes long or longer eliminating simultaneous conversations and, therefore, the ability of politicians to cause headaches. No one likes another person looking over his shoulder while he’s trying to do a difficult job, but Farr had seven billion looking over his and he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the thought of so much company.
The exit chamber would only allow two people at a time to exit and Farr and Ming were naturally the first. Farr gazed around the structure which was half natural - half manmade. The original moon hole had been maybe five hundred meters across in all directions, almost a perfect circle. On Earth it would’ve been quite an engineering feat to have encased this enormous opening in acrylic and graphene, but lunar architecture was another matter entirely. The one-sixth gravity made the impossible possible. The entire ceiling had been supported by forty slender graphene and carbon nanotube columns sixty-eight meters tall. Each column was no more than eighty centimeters wide. Ming joined him as his gaze swept across the structure.
“Magnificent isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Farr responded, pointing. “Until you look closer.”
Ming followed his outstretched arm until he spotted the form lying in the dust that had collected over the last century. The form was human and it didn’t appear to be alone. There were several others spread across the area. Ming let his eyes wander the interior destruction caused by the sudden expulsion of the facility’s atmosphere. Long dead and desiccated vegetation decorated the landscape as did the battered remnants of fountains that had once sprayed water perhaps halfway to the ceiling of this habitat. Water that most precious of things to life, that had boiled away as the pressure loss had swept through the area. There was a telltale mound of flotsam nearly beneath the original break in the ceiling, just as they had seen at the destroyed domes on the nearside. Ming reluctantly approached the bodies. There were four, three men and a woman. They resembled the Peruvian mummies unearthed back home except they had more flesh, he thought, and they were incredibly well preserved in the near vacuum. Farr joined him and looked down on the scene.
“They appear to be the only ones around,” he said. “There may’ve been some who were ejected but I didn’t see any bodies on our inbound trajectory and we could’ve spotted them as far away as ten kilometers. I think they’d have come down closer than that.”
“So these were probably the only four casualties then?”
“No, there were five,” Farr said and he pointed to footprints that were still visible in the dust after almost a century leading away toward the door that they themselves would attempt to use. “That one was smarter than the rest, for all of the good it did him. I’ve seen this kind of thing a couple of times before, accidents that happened when they were putting the communications satellites in orbit. If a person is smart and is able to control his panic enough to exhale all of the air from his lungs when the habitat is depressurized he can survive the vacuum for up to ninety seconds. He could probably be revived with no ill effects.”
“But a person’s first reaction is to breathe deep and hold their breath. That’s what these four did and fortunately for them they died
almost instantly. Their lungs shredded when they expanded in the vacuum. I don’t think it could’ve been more than ten to twenty seconds at most. You can tell from the mottling around the ribcage. They never moved a step. This one,” he said following the tracks toward the door that awaited them, “blew the air out of his lungs or else he’d never have gotten this far.” They found him, probably thirty-five meters away from the first four, facedown.
“It was just too far,” Ming said sadly, “he still had another thirty meters to the door. His blood was boiling when he reached this point and he just couldn’t go any further. He was probably alive for another minute, unable to move, when his brain finally suffered terminal damage.”
“It’s a really strange thing,” Ming said. “But the body doesn’t lose its heat very fast in a vacuum because there’s nothing to absorb it, so the cold wasn’t involved in his death at all. His fluids just boiled until they killed him. If no one disturbed these people, they’d look the same in ten thousand years.”
“Yeah,” Farr agreed shaking his head, “those four were the lucky ones,” he said jerking his head back toward the cluster of corpses.
The other members joined them, their gaze deliberately averting the corpse.
“Faye, can you read me?” Farr asked.
“Loud and clear, Commander.”
“Alright, let’s get started,” Farr said to the others moving toward the ingress hatch. He took one last look around the enclosed area, thinking it would’ve been worse landing in one of the domes. Five corpses were bad enough, but he was pretty sure the domes contained hundreds.
He moved to the hatch, the low gravity impeding him somewhat, but his suit was extremely pliable, so he wasn’t flopping about like the first humans on the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin. Besides, he’d practiced one sixth g on board the ship, as had the other members. They were all feeling a little discomfort caused by being back in a gravity well, but it was nothing that a few hours wouldn’t dissipate.
Children of the Dark World Page 9