by Homer Hickam
“Fine,” Crater snapped.
“Fine,” Maria snapped back. “Pick up our dishes, wash them, and tidy up the kitchen. I’m going to bed.”
Crater did as he was told, his lower lip out in grumpy fashion, while Maria climbed into one of the bunks and snapped the curtain shut.
During the dustup between Crater and Maria, Captain Teller kept his eyes focused on his puter screen though he was listening. He was also smiling. “Kids,” he said, then shook his head.
He’d have to keep an eye on those two. They liked each other, though they hadn’t figured it out yet. He also took a moment to think about something other than the convoy. He was wondering if maybe he’d done enough convoying. He had a fine wife and three marvelous kids in Armstrong City. He also had a nice savings account in Armstrong City stuffed with johncredits. Teresa wanted to invest it in a sundome that could hold a vineyard. She was from the Italian Amalfi Coast and her family had owned vineyards for centuries. Why not one on the moon? With enough water and fertilizer and sun, the grapes would grow, and during the long shadow, they could use sunlamps. She had it all figured out, and Teller was thinking perhaps it was time to follow her dream. After all, how many times could a man cross the moon and come through unscathed? Any man could run out of luck, and Teller figured he’d almost used up his allotment.
But that decision was for later. Now, he had a convoy to get across the moon, a convoy laden with the treasure of the Alpine Valley. He turned back to the puter, plotting his course, calculating the time line.
:::
TWELVE
Take the point, Crater,” Teller said.
Crater was happy to do it, just to get away from Maria and the unhappy glances she kept sending his way. After an hour of driving, he approached a series of craters named after the old states of the original American union. He took them one after the other, Montana, West Virginia, and Texas, then drove down a long straightaway. He opened up the fastbug, just to see what it could do.
Sixty miles per hour, the gillie said.
Crater let off the accelerator. He could have gone even faster, but he didn’t know the road ahead and feared hitting a hole or a bump. After an hour of steady driving, the captain called him. “Change out with Maria,” he said.
Crater did a u-turn and sped back to the convoy, passing Maria who diverted her eyes from him. Crater turned around and began to pace alongside the leading trucks.
The gillie had been very quiet as if absorbing all the new things it was seeing but, Crater wondered, were they new? The gillie had crossed the moon, probably near this very track, when he was brought across as a baby by his foster parents.
Could it remember that far back? It occurred to Crater he’d never asked the gillie what it recalled about that time.
But questioning the gillie would have to wait. He needed to focus on driving.
Number eleven truck out of line, the gillie said.
Crater checked his mirror and saw the gillie was correct.
He called the driver. “Number eleven, please get back in line.”
There was no response and the truck kept coming. The next time Crater looked back, number eleven had passed two trucks. Then Crater saw another truck move into the open lane to the left of number eleven.
Truck number twelve out of line, the gillie advised.
Crater couldn’t figure out why the trucks had pulled into the other lanes. After all, Captain Teller had read the official rules of the convoy, and there was one that said there would be no passing. “Truck twelve, get in line,” he called. There was no response.
Crater threw the wheel hard over, skidded around, and floored the accelerator to send the fastbug flying back. He zoomed between the errant trucks, then performed the maneuver again, coming up behind them. “Gillie, are they talking on another freq?”
Yes, the gillie said and made the connection.
“Move out, boys and girls!” he heard one of the drivers urge the others. “Race time!”
“Time to stretch it!” another driver called.
“You’ll pay this time, Ching Hoo!”
Crater understood. The drivers were racing. “Get back in line!” he demanded. The result was more trucks swerving into the open lanes.
“This ain’t nothing to do with you, sonny boy!” came an anonymous reply.
“Yeah, watch yourself, youngster. This is a man’s race!”
Captain Teller called, “Crater, why are those trucks out of the line?”
“They’re racing, sir,” Crater replied.
“Why are you letting them?”
“I’m not, sir. They just started on their own.”
“Then stop them!”
Crater wanted to ask the captain how he was supposed to stop the trucks. They were ten times the size of his fastbug and could run right over him. He did the only thing he could think to do. He accelerated past the leaders, then swerved back and forth in front of them in an attempt to slow them down. The maneuver didn’t faze the drivers, who bore relentlessly down.
Crater saw a curve ahead and knew he was going too fast.
He slowed, then smoothly accelerated to get around the curve without skidding. As he came through it, he spotted a crack in one of the lanes. Although he’d covered the road on his scout, he’d not paid much attention to any of the outer lanes. Steering quickly, he avoided the crevice which was about eight feet long and looked to be about six inches deep.
“There’s a crack in the road,” he called to the trucks barreling along behind, but his warning came too late. Truck eleven hit the crack, its front wheels collapsed, and it smashed into the dustway and started coming apart. Right behind, truck twelve slammed into eleven and flipped, its heel-3 canisters tearing loose and raining down on top of it and scattering on the road. The rest of the convoy slid to an abrupt stop, some of the trucks forced into the dust off the road.
Crater turned about, going first to truck eleven where he found the driver’s compartment separated from the rest of the truck. The driver within, a big fellow with a blond handlebar moustache, was lying very still, and Crater didn’t know if he was dead or alive. “Condition of this driver,” he said to the gillie.
Alive. Broken arm. Probable concussion.
Crater drove to truck twelve which had rolled off the dustway and was lying atop a crater rim. The driver’s compartment was beneath a pile of heel-3 canisters. “Condition of number twelve driver,” Crater asked.
The gillie took a moment, then said, Dead. Driver compartment breach.
Crater muttered an oath stronger than any he’d ever used, then got out and climbed through the debris. By the time Captain Teller and Maria arrived, he had the driver pulled free and lying in the dust. Her name, according to the name patch on her left breast, was Tilly. She was wearing an ECP suit, but she hadn’t been wearing a helmet. When the truck flipped, the cab cracked and the big suck got her.
Captain Teller scowled at the sight, then said, “Maria, get the drivers out of their trucks. March every one of them over here to see this.”
The driver of truck eleven limped up, holding his arm.
“Think my arm’s broke, Cap’n,” he said.
“Klum, I’m sorry,” Teller said, “because I wish it had been your neck.”
Klum took on a sorrowful expression. “Aw, you don’t mean that, do you, Cap’n?”
Teller pointed at the woman. “It was your stupidity that killed Tilly.” He cut his eyes back to Crater. “Say a prayer for her, Crater.”
Crater didn’t know why the captain wanted him to say a prayer, but he gave it some thought and said, “Dear Lord, I didn’t know Tilly, but I hope You’ll take her into heaven. She messed up here at the last but that doesn’t matter now, not to her and maybe not to You either.”
“I said say a prayer, not write an editorial,” Teller growled.
The gillie jumped in. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, blessed be the Lord thy God who
loves thee still. Amen and good-bye.
Teller stared at the gillie, then said, “Well, at least that thing’s got some sense.”
Maria went from truck to truck, making sure the drivers were all in their ECP suits with their helmets on and properly latched. If they were going to act like children, she was going to treat them like children. She ordered them out of their cabs to gather at the wreckage of truck twelve.
Once all the drivers were standing in front of him, Teller raged at them for a while, calling them every name in the book of evil names, then said, “So now you’ve managed to kill one of yourselves. Don’t give me those innocent looks. I saw most of you start to jockey for position as soon as those two numbskulls decided to race.”
“We were just trying to have some fun,” a driver said.
Though the man was twice his size, Teller picked him up and threw him, his arms and legs flailing into a small crater.
“My suit coulda unraveled!” he protested, whereupon Teller went after him and tossed him into another crater, this one deeper.
Crater started to walk toward the driver to help him up but Teller said, “Crater, you take another step and you’ll find yourself hiking back to Moontown.”
Klum meanwhile was trying to lose himself among the other drivers, but Teller grabbed him by his broken arm and dragged him howling back. “This is the Colonel’s convoy,” he said. “When you signed on, you signed his articles. One of those articles says I have full control of every manjack or womanjill driver in it. The charge is murder, Klum, the evidence is in and weighed, and I sentence you to death.”
Klum went pale and held up the hand attached to the arm that was unbroken. “Please don’t do it, Captain.” The supplicating hand sought out Crater and with it an accusing finger.
“That child there shoulda seen the crack. He was down the road ahead of us and said it was all clear. It’s his fault we wrecked.
Otherwise, we’da just raced awhile, then we woulda backed off.
You execute somebody, it ought to be him. Dereliction of duty.”
The gillie, turning orange, said, in imitation of some longdead king, Balderdash, this man is clearly a fool and deserves to die.
“Hush, Gillie,” Crater said. “I can take up for myself.”
Then Klum began to weep and sagged into the dust. Teller said, “Well, there you go, Klum. First, blame a mere boy and then start crying like a snot-nosed baby. You’re not worth killing. If any of you pea brains care anything about this piece of trash, you’d best drag him out of my sight. Maria and Crater, get a detail together, gather up those loose heel-3 canisters, and spread them out amongst the trucks. We’ll also need a couple of volunteers to bury Tilly.”
“We can’t take anymore canisters, Captain,” Carlos said.
“We’re all overloaded as it is.”
Teller was in no mood to be told anything by a driver, even one as respected as Carlos. “You’ll do as I say.”
Crater had an idea. “Captain?”
Teller cut his eyes toward his scout. “What do you want?”
“I could cut up those wrecked trucks and build some trailers out of them. All I need is a welding rig and a cutter.”
Teller gave it some squinty-eyed thought, then said, “There’s a welder in the chuckwagon. Cutters too. Get busy.”
“I’ll need some help. Petro’s a fair welder.”
Petro looked out from the crowd of drivers and said, “No thank you. I’ll help bury Tilly.”
Crater went to their private channel. “Why won’t you help me?”
“Captain Teller’s crazy and you’re on his side.”
“I’m just doing my job. So is the captain. The drivers were wrong to race.”
“That’s your opinion,” Petro said.
“It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact.”
Petro shrugged. “Good luck on finding someone to do your welding.”
It took four hours to convert the truck beds into serviceable trailers, and Crater ended up doing most of the welding. The collected canisters were then strapped aboard. After seeing Tilly properly buried and the plot marked on his puter map— the plan was for her body to be picked up by a return convoy and carried back to Moontown later for proper cremation— Teller came over and inspected Crater’s work, then took his scout aside. “You failed this convoy by not reporting that crack, Crater, but I suppose these trailers show you have at least some utility.” When Crater made no reply, Teller said, “I’m surprised you didn’t blame Maria.”
Crater felt like the captain had slapped him in the face.
“Do you really think so little of me?”
Teller’s eyes went hard. “Why, yes, son, I do. I think you’ve got a good heart, which usually hides a host of other weaknesses. Maybe I’ll think differently if you give me a reason, but so far you’ve been mostly a disappointment.”
Teller walked away, yelling, “Pull those panels in and let’s go, people! Maria, you have the point. And pay attention to the entire road, you hear?”
Maria mounted her fastbug and sped off. Crater, his face hot with embarrassment at the captain’s opinion of him, didn’t wait for Teller’s orders. He climbed in his fastbug and took up station in one of the offside lanes. Teller waved the trucks forward and the convoy lurched ahead. Most of the drivers didn’t look at Crater as they passed but Petro did. The look wasn’t friendly.
:::
THIRTEEN
The captain tried to call the Dustway Inn but there was no answer. “Likely their comm terminal is down,” he said, then gave the situation some thought. The Dustway Inn was where they hoped to spend the night, but he knew well enough that the little inn wasn’t the most efficient place in the wayback. He’d stopped there before without checking first, and he and his drivers had spent half their rest time waiting for beds to be made and food to be cooked. He needed a scout to go ahead and alert them. He started to ask Maria to do it, then decided to give Crater a chance to redeem himself. “Go ahead, Crater, and alert the proprietor of the Dustway Inn that we’re coming. Tell him we’ll need food, showers, and medical aid for Klum’s broken arm.”
“And don’t get lost,” Maria chimed.
Crater ignored her. “On my way, sir,” he said and sped off.
Before long, he’d put some miles between himself and the convoy. The track led through craters and low hills, then wound through a series of tight turns and a run up a steep hill and down the other side. It was there he discovered a utility truck parked alongside the road. There were three people inside it, an older man and a woman with a young boy between them. The man waved him down. “Can I help you?”
Crater called.
“S’pose you can, s’pose you can’t,” the man said. “Operate the Dustway Inn, we do, but we’ve run from it. There’s a creature there scared me and the missus so we says to ourselves let’s take the boy, run away, wait for Captain Teller and the convoy. You it?”
“A scout,” Crater said. “What kind of creature?”
“Big one, like a giant. Black armor over its pressure suit.
I’m a vet of the Sand War in old Persia. A trooper of the Legion Internationale is what the thing is, crowhoppers is what they’re called because of that black armor and how they hops around in battle aboard spiderwalkers. Fights for money and blood and loves to choke their enemies to death. They’re a genetic mush, grown in some awful laboratory. This one has itself a rifle that shoots lightning and a slug of some sort. It shot up the ceiling of my bar. Guess that was to get my attention. Then it asked when the convoy was set to come. When I told it I didn’t know, the thing puts its boots up on a table, says it’ll wait, and starts to drink my best earthshine. For the good of our boy, we evacuated out a hatch we got in a secret place.
Saw where it had blew up our comm antenna, so glad we did.”
Crater absorbed all that, then told the gillie to call the convoy. It did with no answer. “If you’re thinking about going there,” the innkeeper said, “
you should think twice. Let Captain Teller deal with that thing.”
Crater considered the innkeeper’s advice, which he supposed was good advice, indeed. On the other hand, if he was found huddled with the innkeeper and his family, Captain Teller would likely tell him he was soft again and a coward to boot. “I’ll just take a look,” he heard himself say and drove on, his nerves taut as banjo strings.
A few miles down the road, he reached a mound of yellowish dirt with a sign on it that read Dustway Inn. Below the sign was a hatch and below the hatch were six mooncrete steps leading up from the dust. On the other side of the road, he saw the communications tower that had been knocked down.
Taking a closer look, he could see rough edges at the break in the legs and the discoloration of the lunasteel. An explosive had been used.
A spiderwalker was parked beside the steps. He’d seen such eight-legged contraptions on vidpix but the Colonel had outlawed them in Moontown. The reason, or so Crater had heard, was the Colonel had fought against the bioengineered troops who rode them and was unnerved just by the sight of the things. Crowhoppers, that’s what the innkeeper had called the killers who rode spiderwalkers into battle. If a crowhopper lurked with mayhem on its mind, what chance would Crater have against it? On the other hand, Crater considered, maybe he could talk to it. Crowhoppers were still human, even though they’d been genetically altered, and surely they could be reasoned with. If so, maybe he could find out what it was after, then report it to Captain Teller. Maybe the captain would like that Crater had taken such initiative.
All of that thinking led Crater to the conclusion that he had to try.
Reining in his nerves as best he could, Crater climbed the steps and entered the airlock, the gillie ordering the airlock puter to close the hatch behind him, pressurizing the chamber, and opening the first dustlock hatch. Crater hesitated.