Gunpowder Moon

by David Pedreira

  “Touché, Commander. But generosity can only stand so much abuse.” Standard continued to gawk at the platform as he tried to undo his belt, struggling with the five-point buckle on his chest harness. “Half the power we give away as charity is being stolen by the warlords in Africa and Northern Europe, and what’s supposed to be allocated for the needy is wasted like so much wheat left on the docks.”

  Dechert reached over to help him, pushing Standard’s hand away so he could get at the restraint system. “So when the power is cut off, will you just blame the warlords and read a Psalm for those left in the dark?”

  “Maybe,” Standard said, climbing from his seat to test the lunar soil with the toe of his boot. He looked over at Dechert. “It seems your cynicism is boundless, Dechert, reaching as it does even to heaven. Can you witness mankind’s handiwork in this splendid wasteland and still mock his Creator? Do you really think such a spark of genius had its infancy in the random explosion of a star a few billion years ago?”

  He said it lightly, but Dechert knew Standard was testing him. The Administration didn’t like atheists. That attitude probably had something to do with their sudden hawkish posturing. When you’re always in a foxhole, there’s no room for nonbelievers. Dechert shuffled around the rover to the commissioner’s side, ready to help him if he stumbled in his first few steps in the spacesuit.

  “I was mocking us, not the Almighty. And I do believe in a higher power. I’m just not presumptuous enough to believe it’s on my side.”

  “Ahh, a deist. That’s even worse.”

  Standard took an abbreviated step, accepting Dechert’s assistance. They walked to the side of the power station and looked up again, arching their necks as far back as they could to view the towering building. The thirty-meter silos looked like solid rocket boosters framed against the stars, ready to be launched to the edge of the solar system. But these were going nowhere. They remained fixed to the lunar dirt as cooling gas spilled from vents along their vertical processors. Dechert tapped Standard on his faceplate to get his attention and led him to a small hatch under the number-three processor. He unclipped a thin aluminum rod from his belt and inserted it into a rectangular slot and the rod turned clockwise, grooves snapping into place to open a tiny console. Dechert punched the command code onto a small alphanumeric keypad. The hatch opened and gas escaped from the control shack and into the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere. A small piece of refuse—maybe a crumpled shipping cover for one of the plasma screens—shot between their helmets, rising above the surface as if in a stiff leeward breeze and then disappearing into the darkness.

  “Let’s put aside the theological debate for now, Commissioner,” Dechert said. “There’s limited space in the control shack. Be careful what you brush against, and please don’t touch anything without asking.”

  They turned on their lamps and entered a dark chamber the size of a coatroom, a bank of telemetry monitors and freeze-hardened polymer displays on the aft wall. Dechert went to the mine’s central server. A glaze of dust and ice coated the display, so thick that he couldn’t see the information on the screen. He frowned. This much dust intrusion in a few short weeks? Just one more thing to worry about as everything under his command seemed to be breaking down around him. He brushed away the grime and punched a code into the oversize keyboard. He pressed enter.

  “We get limited real-time telemetry back at Serenity, mostly power-critical data from the silos and LPS coordinates for the roving miners.” He watched as a series of numbers scrolled across the screen. “Everything else is stored here and sent back to the CORE in a data dump once a day.”

  “What about production numbers?”

  “Also stored here, along with selenology, yield percentages, and mining anomalies.”

  Standard stared at the stereoscopic display, and Dechert could see the man being mesmerized by the data that he was used to reading on the first Tuesday of every month back on Earth, probably while sitting in his tower office with his feet up on his desk and a cup of tea in his hand. Standard was clearly impressed.

  “The next-generation systems will be far more efficient, you know,” he said. “The new algorithms are incredible, quantum factoring and DNA sequencing—we’re talking additional zettabytes of data processing. And they will be fully self-sustaining.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard,” Dechert said, not wanting to get into that argument. He had read the papers from quantum computing experts who predicted that the full automation of space-mining was only a generation away. They had said the same thing about fighter pilots sixty years ago when the first Predator drones patrolled the battlefield skies of the Middle East and Asia. But most ships, airborne or spaceborne, were still manned, and Dechert didn’t think that would ever change, any more so than the colonization of the Moon by living, breathing people would ever slow down. Humans don’t like giving up too much control to the inanimate, he thought. One of our more admirable qualities.

  Dechert snapped back to the present and frowned again as he looked down at the data flashing to the front of the display. Several rows of numbers didn’t make any sense. The telemetry he had scanned yesterday in the CORE had changed, which was as statistically likely as a cheetah bounding across the lunar flatlands just outside the control shack. He ran a query to make sure he hadn’t missed something. The data came back the same. He checked the storage manifest and got the same reading. Standard was right about one thing—the computer’s algorithmic processors never got things wrong.

  He clicked on the com. “Vernon, this is Spiral 6.”

  The transmission popped and hissed. “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “What was our manifest on the last He-3 haul?”

  Vernon took a few seconds to respond. “Looks like fourteen casks on dayside eleven, boss, or November the twenty-first. I repeat, one-four casks on eleven twenty-one.”

  “Copy. Now check yesterday’s data dump for storage numbers so far this cycle.”

  “Got it,” Vernon said. “Eleven casks, on target for ninety-eight percent production this month. Freakin’ FMO set us back a bit.”

  “Say again.”

  “That’s one-one casks. There a problem?”

  Dechert looked over at Standard and then left the control shack, shuffling to the back side of the silo where the massive helium-3 casks were stored in locked-down vertical containment racks.

  “Yes, there is,” he said, looking up at the car-size barrels.

  “What is it?” Standard asked.

  “The mine has processed eleven He-3 casks so far this cycle, and put them into the orbital ejection holding rack to be brought back to Serenity.”

  “So?”

  “Start counting, Mr. Standard.”

  He stared at Standard as the Administration’s man began to add up the casks by pointing a gloved finger at each of them, one at a time.

  “Four casks are missing,” Standard said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not good at all.”

  Dechert wondered how much worse the week could get.

  13

  “What the hell is going on, Caden?”

  Lane looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. Her eyelids were rimmed with gray, and Dechert realized that she had used his given name for the first time since they’d known each other. He closed the hangar hatch, heard the reassuring sound of the elastomer seals expanding into place, and motioned her to follow. The station felt different than it had just a few weeks ago—more closed in. He had once considered Serenity’s cramped quarters womblike and embracing, almost motherly, but now the station’s close confines felt incarcerating. Dechert remembered an SMA seminar from years back on the early warning signs of remote-station stress: If any of your crew exhibits signs of claustrophobia, if they complain in their weekly psych evals of the station appearing smaller or ambient noises appearing louder, administer forty milligrams of Dopodran orally twice a day. If symptoms persist, transfer to a main
base, Low-Earth-Orbit station, or preferably, temporary duty back on Earth.

  This was said in monotone by a psychologist with bad posture who looked like he’d never get closer to space than the top of a New Mexico hill, and all the mission commanders in the room had laughed. Stress was for Earthbound bureaucrats, not astro-miners.

  Now Dechert couldn’t put the psychologist’s words out of his mind. Especially with new personnel coming soon.

  He walked to his quarters with Lane in tow. Waters and Thatch were prepping the hangar for the marine squad’s arrival, and things were about to get complex. Eleven souls in a Level-1 mining station. Christ. All of them on edge, and a good percentage of them armed to the teeth. Waiting for the next crisis; the next master alarm. At least Parrish would be leaving with the next supply shuttle, which was bringing as many weapons as rations with it. Dechert didn’t need a reporter on site to add to the volatile mix—or sucking up their air—but he realized it may have been a good thing that the young journalist had come over with Standard in the first place. If he could find out what really happened on the Molly Hatchet in the next few days, maybe he could leak something to Parrish that would defuse the situation back on Earth. A reverse Gulf of Tonkin incident. It might cost him his career with the SMA, but Dechert was rapidly becoming less concerned about his employment.

  He popped the hatch to his cabin and stood to the side, ushering Lane in with an extended arm. A metal plaque read commander next to the door. Dechert grimaced at it and walked into his Spartan quarters. The room was white-walled, like all of Serenity 1’s personal habitation modules, and sparsely furnished, with a tiny bunk bed that folded up into the bulkhead and a black swivel chair that tucked under a thin-framed carbon desk. Tall, narrow recessed doors hid clothes lockers. The lavatory was no larger than a missile tube and had to be entered with one’s arms tucked to the side. A single picture hung over the desk: his father in a flight suit on the tarmac at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, a helmet tucked under his arm and a half smile of contentment on his face.

  Dechert knew the smile, that feeling of tired satisfaction after a successful flight, and it always drew him closer to his father. He stared at the picture often, amazed at how connected he felt to a man he had barely known. He recalled a letter Colonel Philip Dechert had written to his mother long ago, a year before he had died in a suborbital flight over the Indian Ocean. Dechert had found it in an old wooden cigar box in her Victorian farmhouse back in Maryland, and he remembered with clarity the musty smell of that cedar box and one passage in the creased, yellowing letter: “There are only two things that make me happy in life, Molly. Being with you and the kids, and flying. I hope you’ll forgive the latter as a tragic character flaw.”

  Unlike his father, Dechert never had children. He had thought of the men and women he commanded in the Bekaa Valley as his surrogate kids, but most of them were long dead. His crew on Serenity 1 became their emotional replacements, and now he was no longer certain he could protect them, either. That left flying as the only link he had to his father, and for the first time in his life, it no longer felt strong enough.

  “You look whipped,” Lane said.

  “So do you.”

  She slid the chair out from under the desk and melted into it, her legs spread out in front of her and her body slouched like a man’s. It wasn’t a posture Dechert was used to seeing from his safety officer.

  “I spent my last off duty staring at the emergency decompression sequence on top of my bunk,” she said. “You know I can’t take those damned REM pills.”

  Dechert nodded. He never took the sleep pills, either—they left a hangover worse than bourbon—and he often stared at the emergency decompression sequence himself. Some masochistic bastard from habitat engineering had emblazoned it above all of the station’s bunks on placards set with threadless screws, so that they couldn’t be easily removed. The last thing you saw before you fell to sleep, and the first thing you saw when the alarm went off awakening you for your next shift, was:

  IN CASE OF EMERGENCY DECOMPRESSION . . .

  It reminded Dechert of the pamphlets they used to put on commercial airliners explaining what to do in the event of a water landing, with pictures of serene cartoon people bobbing in calm water. False comfort in process, he thought, for a crisis that would probably result in a slow-motion death.

  “I’m going to make a command decision about those plaques at some point,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just have Thatch melt them with a welding torch.”

  “That would be nice.”

  He pulled the bunk bed down from the wall and sat on its cushioned edge. “You heard about the He-3 casks?”

  “Yeah. The latest scene in a show I’m getting tired of watching.”

  “Standard’s got visions running through his head of Ninjas creeping around the Serenity basin, planting bombs.”

  “Weren’t the Ninjas Japanese?”

  “Whatever. Chinese monks in spacesuits. Any news on the boots?”

  “Great news if you like Easter egg hunts,” Lane said. “Groombridge has sold forty-eight pairs of boots to go with their EVA suits on Luna since 2062. That’s the earliest date I could find a requisition on. No sales since 2070. All treads are the same and they can be used with our newer suits with a little tinkering.” She ran her hands through her hair. “They’re spread out all over the place. Peary Crater, Tranquility 1, a few pairs were requisitioned here on Serenity five years ago. Even the Chinese and Brazilians bought a few pairs.”

  “Any way to track them?” Dechert asked.

  “Not really. Hell, there could still be a pair here on the station for all I know, although we’ve been using nothing but Procyon boots since ’68. You realize this was pretty much the Wild West in the mid-2060s? Trying to find out what happened to old equipment is like looking for one specific tire in a junkyard. I mean, think about the equipment locker down in the Bullpen. I doubt even Thatch and Waters know half of the crap piled up in the back of that thing.”

  Another dead end, Dechert thought. Nothing but dead ends. Even with his own inquiries. “I tried to dig into solo flight records to figure out who from our side could have gone to DS-7 without being traced,” he said. “That didn’t go much better. There have been thirty-seven solos launched from Peary Crater, SOT-1, SOS-1, and our other subbases in the last three weeks. You can look at the logs, but there’s no way to track flight telemetries. We just don’t store that stuff and it gets erased with new mission inputs.” He grimaced. “Hell, I did a solo last week up near Bessel, and Waters has three solos this month. Thatch has one, too, out to Spiral 5 and Spiral 6 for site checks at the end of November. But we don’t save profiles on routine hops unless there’s a reason for it. So I guess each of us could be suspects.”

  “Maybe you,” Lane said, “but not Thatch or Waters. When they go out on the mare, they don’t have time to jerk around.”

  “Nice,” Dechert said. “Has Starks gotten back to you?” he asked quickly, because he didn’t know how else to broach the subject.

  Lane swiveled the chair around and stared at the picture of Dechert’s father above the desk, her back turned to him. “Yes. He wasn’t all roses and chocolates.”

  Dechert wanted to apologize again about delving into the blue-tabbed sections of Lane’s personnel file, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Just the mention of Starks’s name, and she closed up like a damned oyster. Dechert wondered again if Lane thought of him as worse than the bureaucrats back on Earth. At least she knew what to expect from them. His betrayal of her trust was less expected, and her discomfort in his presence was now a living thing that made the room feel even smaller.

  “Can you elaborate?” he asked after a few seconds, annoyed at the entire situation and too exhausted to try to fix it. He cursed to himself. Does she think it’s my damned fault that the SMA spied on her?

  Lane unzipped the breast pocket on her heavysuit and pulled out a small piece of folded paper, handing it to Dechert without
looking at him.

  “Don’t worry. I deleted the chat with one of Quarles’s washing programs. If his techno-gadgets work, it wasn’t tracked from our end. Whether our government minders are watching Starks’s account or not, who the hell knows?”

  Dechert nodded, unfolding the paper and scanning it, finding Lane’s original message at the bottom of the string. It was brief and antiseptic.

  Sheldon, I know it’s been a long time and I apologize for not communicating. Things have been worse than crazy up here. You met Cole Benson at Las Cruces, didn’t you? We’re all shell-shocked. Does the Administration really think the Chinese are behind this? Because I have my doubts. Can’t really give you a SITREP, but we’re all worried about what’s coming next. We’ve been goddamned deputized—do you believe that—and didn’t the deputies always die in the westerns? Any insight you can give me would be greatly appreciated. How’s Milo?

  Yours, Lane.

  He read the letter twice, going back over the lines that hinted at intimacy. They seemed foreign to him. Starks’s response was also short, his effort in brevity obvious enough to be contrived. Dechert wondered how the man had restrained himself not to write more. If he had spent a week with a lover on a sloop off the coast of Cozumel only to have her blast off Earth and rarely correspond again, he would have been tempted to ask a few more questions.

  Lane, it’s good to hear from you. I’ve been worried sick, but I’m too stubborn to be the first one to write. I can’t discuss operational stuff or intelligence, you know that, but I’d feel better if you were off the Moon. Can you request temporary duty on LEO-1? Things are busy here and tense. Milo is well, still fat and eating too much, and will barely chase a thrown stick. Not that I’ve been able to take him to the Crossings lately. Too jammed up. Do you remember the day we dove the Santa Rosa Wall? You quoted Nietzsche and I asked how you could after swimming through those pillars of coral. I told you Erasmus was as cynical as I would get. I still like Erasmus, but you know I’m a sucker for satire. Have to go. Stay safe, and consider what I’ve said about temporary duty. You’re due for some R&R and the Moon must be getting old.