by Aer-ki Jyr
Within minutes the cargo bay doors opened and a landing ramp extended down past the legs to the surface, with a pair of manned rovers driving down hauling wheeled cargo sleds behind them. The pair split up on opposite sides of the dropship and began depositing crew and cargo around the perimeter.
Hank Ronald stepped out of the passenger compartment of the second rover onto the ground, making him the first Star Force representative to set foot on Luna, and only the 46th person in recorded history, though that number would be passing the century mark within a couple of days as the dropship fleet would begin making continuous trips up and down from the starport, relaying the unending stream of supplies from the starships continuously ferrying them in from the Earth starports and the various Star Force orbital factories.
Ronald walked awkwardly in the 1/6th gravity in his hard plated space suit, but found his footing quickly enough as his muscles and mind suddenly seemed to remember the extensive low gravity training he’d gone through prior to this assignment. He grasped the controls of a portable lifter from the cargo compartment on the back of the Humvee-like lunar rover and extended its retractable third wheel, driving it over to the tractor trailer bed and beginning to unload crates onto the level piece of ground where they had parked.
Off in the distance a few kilometers another dropship landed softly and began disgorging supplies and personnel that would establish a second impromptu landing site and warehouse. When Ronald’s ship had fully unloaded it took off back into orbit leaving him and four others behind as they were busy at work assembling a command center that had been expertly designed into six canisters of equipment that unfolded like a giant tent and connected together like children’s toys.
Once it was fully erect they used variable pylon struts underneath to level the two-story high complex before attaching the oxygen canisters and power supply and ‘warming’ up the facility as they waited for the next shipment of supplies, which came down only a few hours after the first.
In that next dropship came more crates and two dozers which Ronald and another worker began using to scrape up the lunar surface and gently bury the command center to provide extra protection against radiation and meteorite impacts. After 14 straight hours of setup work and seven O2 tank refills/restroom breaks, Ronald retreated to the command center and stripped out of his suit, glad to be rid of the protective carapace. He showered in a small compartment, watching the water droplets fall peculiarly slow while trying not to hop into the top of the ceiling with every reflexive step.
He caught a restful 8 hours of sleep in the shared bunkroom then suited up again the next ‘day,’ redonning his hard suit and taking up the next shift on the round the clock construction site as Star Force quickly and firmly established its presence on Luna, putting more equipment down on the surface in 12 hours than all the nations of Earth had done in the past 75 years.
With their two crude spaceports established, the army of engineers and other specialized workers began creating roads and setting up prefabricated mono-rail tracks out to several predetermined sites for the construction of permanent startup facilities, the first of which would be a proper spaceport that would be marginally operational inside of two months, with a small mining facility coming online not long after that.
Hank Ronald, along with hundreds of other Star Force employees, took up residence on the moon for the next several years, with occasional trips up to the starport for normal gravity shifts to maintain some of their physical strength, making them the first unofficial Lunar colonists as they worked day in and out to build the habitats for the official denizens that would follow later.
As they worked the nations of Earth watched from surveillance satellites, gaining newfound respect and trepidation for the space agency, with a few of them rethinking their future plans and realizing that they had more to gain by working with Star Force than opposing them.
A great deal more…
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