Gunpowder Moon

  Yours, Sheldon.

  Dechert frowned and read the response again. “I take it Milo is his dog and the references to philosophy are some sort of code?” Crude code, he thought. Does he really think if this gets intercepted by the SMA—or even worse, Military Intelligence—he won’t catch a twelve-hour interrogation in a windowless room?

  “Yeah,” Lane said, twisting a lock of her hair in a finger, her eyes on the ceiling. “But it wasn’t from the day we were diving. We were talking about the Administration right before I shipped out from New Mexico and he told me he was worried that the SMA brass were getting pushed by the Feds to get overly aggressive on lunar mineral rights—to essentially cheat on the Altschuler Treaty and hide it from the ISA. Said the government minders ran their production numbers a few years out and things didn’t look good for the long-term helium-3 franchises.” She looked up. “He tried to get me to quit my contract.”

  “What does any of that have to do with Nietzsche or Erasmus?”

  Lane stopped playing with her hair and gripped her knees. Her hands were white from the lack of sun and perfectly formed. Like the hands on a Greek statue, Dechert thought. He wondered if Starks had gotten over their relationship yet, and guessed the answer was no.

  “He’s referring to what he said that day before I left. He was predicting we’d get into a shooting war with China over the Moon in the next five years. Said the government would do whatever necessary to protect U.S. interests in space. Then he started muttering Latin. He was a real sucker for the classical stuff, and he knew it annoyed me. He said ‘Dulce bellum inexpertis,’ and I asked him what the hell that meant.”

  “Go on. My knowledge of Latin doesn’t go past ‘Et tu, Brute.’”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s a quote ‘from Pindar by way of Erasmus,’ as he put it, an ancient Greek translated by some old Dutch writer, if you’d like the scholarly description. It means ‘War is sweet to those with no experience of it.’”

  Dechert sat up from the bunk and leaned back against the bulkhead. They looked at each other in silence. He felt a grudging respect for Starks. For a man who had never been in battle to say something like that . . .

  “He’s pretty wise for a bureaucrat. You think he’s referring to the U.S., though, or the Chinese?”

  “I think he’s referring to us, or maybe both sides to some extent, but mostly to us.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, that was the context of our conversation. He was railing about the government bureaucrats stepping on the SMA when he started spouting Latin; he wasn’t bitching about the Chinese.”

  Dechert rubbed the stubble on his face and scratched the back of his head. He was tired, not thinking clearly. Would the U.S. really be insane enough to start an armed conflict on the Moon? Insane enough to plant a bomb on one of its own mining skiffs? Would they kill off one of their own just because their long-term production numbers didn’t work out with the Chinese in the mix? And how the hell could they have pulled it off? There was no way someone from Peary Crater could have gotten to the Molly Hatchet without Dechert knowing about it. But then, neither could the Chinese. No ships or rovers had been within eight hundred klicks of Serenity 1 in the last thirty days. And how could either side steal a shipment of He-3 casks from a remote spiral mine and leave no trace in the regolith, or pull the plug on the water mine in Crater Dionysius? There wasn’t even a foreign footprint to find at Posidonius or Spiral 6, and footprints don’t go away on the Moon.

  Waves of conspiracy theories ran through Dechert’s mind and crashed against a stone wall, and he wished, not for the first time, that he had a more analytical mind. But a thought began to take shape, and it made him feel sick as it tied itself together.

  “Lane, how good are our portable foreign-material sensors?”

  “You mean here on Serenity? Pretty good for hazardous materials and the full spectra of interstellar radiation, but shit for everything else.”

  “How about exotic explosive compounds?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  Lane thought for a few seconds as she looked into Dechert’s eyes. “I’d have to check. I know they’d pick up the usual mining stuff, but I’ve never looked for traces of an exotic before. I don’t even know the chemical compounds I’d be searching for.”

  “Cross-check the SMA library for polymeric nitrogen and get started on it—quietly. They should have the molecular structure listed for their micromining sites. Then run a scan on the entire hangar bay and all the dirty rooms and subgarages. And remember, if there is a trace, it could be a few months old, so take into account atomic decay.”

  Lane pursed her lips. “Our best bet for preserved traces would be out in the vacuum. I’ll sweep the Bullpen, if I can figure out what the hell I’m looking for.”

  It was a good idea on Lane’s part. The Bullpen, the unpressurized hangar where the mobile habitation crawlers and the reserve shuttle were docked, wasn’t quality-controlled as strictly as the pressurized areas of the station. It would be the one place where an explosive like polymeric nitrogen could be hidden.

  Dechert nodded again. “And use Quarles’s Touchpad on the Aerosmith for your search. He’s got it encrypted.”

  They didn’t speak for a minute, each considering the implications of their line of thinking. Could the bomb have been planted here, inside Serenity 1? When was the last time a supply crew came over? More than a month ago? Dechert had a hard time believing someone could get into a pressure suit and spend an hour in the Bullpen without being noticed. But it was the only explanation that he could come up with, and it left him with a question that clattered in his head like a wind chime: Is everyone on Serenity a suspect now?

  Even the members of my crew?

  Dechert pushed his shoulders off the wall and stood up straight. He would at least have to trust Lane and Quarles or he wouldn’t have a chance to find out what was going on. And he couldn’t bear the thought of either of them as suspects. Hell, he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone on Serenity 1 as suspects. Because that meant one of them killed Cole. Jesus . . .

  One thing at a time, Caden.

  “Okay, I’m going to find Quarles and see about our message to Lin Tzu. Why don’t you try and get a manifest of our visitors for the last six months? And—of course—let’s keep this between us.”

  Lane looked like she wanted to say something more, but she just nodded and walked to the hatch. Dechert had hoped for a fleeting second that their sharing of a secret would help seal the wound, but she remained detached and cold. He shook his head, angry at himself. He was thinking like a child. Lane keeping her emotional distance was definitely for the better right now.

  “And Lane?”

  “Yes, Commander?” she asked, stressing the formality of her reply as she leaned down to clear the hatch and half-turned her body to look back at him.

  “What about the reference to Nietzsche?”

  She gave him a small smile. “Oh, he was referring to one of my favorite quotes. It used to piss him off when I said it.”

  “What was it?”

  “‘God is dead,’” she said, and stepped out of the room.

  14

  Quarles disappeared into the Hole whenever he needed solitude. Engineers had built it as an emergency shelter for a hundred-year solar storm—an eruption of plasma from the sun that would tear into Mare Serenitatis with the destructive force of a nuclear airburst. Even solar scientists couldn’t predict if Serenity 1’s canopy of moon soil and emergency shielding would protect the station from a coronal mass ejection, so the lunar architects had wedged a leaden bathtub into the bowels of the station just under the Level-2 Astro-Science Lab. A hideaway of last resort for the crew, complete with a retractable lead roof and a one-week cache of water and meals ready-to-eat. Quarles had converted the sunken bunker into his own personal workshop, filled it with mock-ups of his latest engineering and propulsion experiments, and then bored a direct patch into the CORE’s flas
h-servers so he could run diagnostics on his latest monstrosities. He also equipped the room with a holistic-wave stereo that poured out bass from a pair of thick, black, custom-built subwoofers, enough to shake the sublevel floors from the Bullpen to the storage shed. Dechert could feel the heavy thrum of the music in his feet even before he got to the science lab’s access door. It felt like reggae this time, no . . . blues. He turned the corner and J. J. Cale’s rootsy voice floated out of the subterranean chamber, swelling ever louder as Dechert entered the lab and approached the Hole. Dechert would have put his hands to his ears if he didn’t need them to climb down the ladder, wondering all the way down how Quarles could still hear as well as he did. Cale sang away, his fingerpicking on an old Harmony guitar scorching a smoky background into the song as the sound system picked up the slight, rapid squeak of his left hand sliding up and down the fretboard.

  The song, unbelievably, was about the Moon.

  Dechert let slip a tight smile, his first in what felt like days. Quarles. An astro-engineering genius with the frail psyche of a middle schooler and enough contraband marijuana to put everyone in the station into a ten-hour coma. The idea of Quarles being a murder suspect felt like a paranoid mirage to Dechert, and he tried to shake it off. Dechert had handpicked the kid from all the propulsion engineers loafing around LEO-1 three years ago, after he heard him debate an MIT grad student about the feasibility of extracting propellant from the methane expelled in human gas and using it to fuel the micromachines that lubricated and cleaned the roving mine platforms out on the lunar surface. Crude and laden with sophomoric language as his argument was, Dechert was intrigued by the fact that when the debate turned technical, Quarles had driven the MIT kid straight into the floor, leaving him in a state of depression and self-doubt that forced him to retreat back to Earth. He later read Quarles’s personnel jacket and learned that his IQ was somewhere north of 160. Einstein, Kepler, and Vorgmann territory.

  But large frontal lobes don’t always contain the stuff of seriousness, and as intelligent as Quarles was, his childlike sense of reality made him a young ward for everyone on Serenity 1. To Vernon he was the kid brother who always wanted to play. To Lane he was the kid brother who always wanted to pester. To Thatch he was the kid brother who always wanted to impress. And to Dechert? An adopted son, maybe, as far as he would allow that to go.

  Quarles sat at his workstation with a microsoldering gun in one hand and a bundle of carbon nanotubes in the other, his back turned to the ladder. Dechert swung down, avoiding a clutter of boxes and tools on the floor as he maneuvered to the stereo. He turned the smooth, circular dial counterclockwise and Quarles spun around, lifting a magnifying visor from his eyes.

  “Aww, you can’t turn down J. J. Cale. There’s something wrong with that.”

  “There’s something wrong with you, Quarles,” Dechert said, struggling to make his way back to the workbench. “What’s the word on the Aerosmith?”

  Quarles put down the gun, pulled the visor off of his head, and cracked his knuckles. “She’s been a bad-tempered girl, boss, but we’re getting there. I had to change out one of her trannies and strip half the wiring out of her subsystem processors. It looked like a dish of bad pasta down there. She’s been in the cold soak for almost seven months, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Will she be ready?”

  “Ready enough. Thatch is plotting the route into Menelaus as we speak, and we’re taking her through a wet check at seventeen-hundred.”

  Dechert found the correct path through the flotsam of tools, pipes, and disgorged circuitry on the floor and sat down at the bench opposite Quarles. The kid had shaved his head a few months ago, and it made him look even younger, like a precocious child-monk with a teenager’s lanky body. Nothing Quarles wore ever fit; even his heavysuit hung on his spindly frame like a flight suit on a coat hanger, and it was supposed to be a custom fit.

  “You guys did a good job getting her ready, Jonathan.”

  Dechert clasped his hands behind his head and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the workbench. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and enjoyed the darkness. Cale’s wistful tones washed through him. A white Oklahoman singing black Delta blues. Singing about getting away to the Moon. How the hell had he pulled that off? The feelings of guilt came back to Dechert then, and he wondered if anyone on the station would be alive to see the next lunar sunrise. Dechert had wanted nothing more than to get away from the military and the Air Service and the desk generals four years ago, and he did, all the way up to the Moon, and he slowly assembled a crew that reminded him of the grunts he had once led into war. And he promised to take care of them, because this time, he had thought he would actually be able to.

  “I bet you’re real happy you took my advice and came up to this rock.”

  “What do you mean?” Quarles asked.

  Dechert opened his eyes and looked up at him. “I mean you could be on LEO-1 right now, drinking beer with the other nerds and debating dark energy.”

  “Gee, thanks for lumping me in with the nerds. But you know I wouldn’t want to be anyplace else right now.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Quarles tapped his foot on the bottom of the stool. He never could sit still. “Yeah, I mean, I’d make the run out to Europa if they ever get the Magellan finished, but why do you think I’d want to bail on Serenity? It’s the best thing going in space.”

  “I don’t know, Jonathan, maybe because you could get killed sometime in the next few days.”

  “Yeah and I could get hit by a bus in Baltimore.” He paused and held Dechert’s eyes, which was a thing he usually didn’t do. “Why do you think we’re up here, anyways? I mean, I know you’re on a walkabout from the wars and Lane is on some kind of weird, masochistic, man-hating immersion trip, but me and Vernon and Cole and Thatch, we came up here for the audacity of it.”

  “Say again?”

  Quarles kept Dechert’s eyes and stressed each word. “The sheer, freakin’ audacity of it. I mean, people living on the Moon? Jesus. Just fifty feet away from us it’s two hundred and eighty below zero in the shade and pure vacuum, enough to boil the water out of your body before you get the chance to freeze. We have no business being here, boss, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

  Dechert smiled. The kid definitely smoked too much weed. But isn’t that how he had felt the first time he took a rover out on the Serenity basin? That he was a second from death and it was the most liberating, exhilarating feeling he’d had in years? No enemies. No guns. Just the thin margin of human existence inside a pressurized spacesuit. Dechert recalculated his view of Quarles. The kid was a knucklehead, but he had some explorer in him, and regardless of his other weaknesses, that made him a person to be reckoned with.

  “Besides,” Quarles said in a more serious tone, “I’m not about to bail on Serenity after what happened to Cole. Not until we know what happened. I couldn’t meet him in the next life, walking away like that.”

  “Amen.”

  They sat in silence for a few seconds as the song faded in the background. After a few pops of static, Cale came back with a new, faster riff. More city blues than Delta. Singing about traveling. Traveling light.

  Dechert waited about half a minute and turned the stereo off. “I like the choice of tunes today, Jonathan, but let’s save it for the next time we drink one together. I have a call to make.”

  Quarles nodded his head and cleared enough equipment to put a Touchpad down in the center of his workbench. His fingers struck the pad with a stenographer’s precision, light but fast.

  “Right. I just hope that Lin Tzu’s techies are as good as they appear to be.”

  Dechert leaned over, trying to get a glimpse of the complex code Quarles was punching into the stream, and he looked up with alarm as he absorbed what Quarles had said.

  “Wait a second—you don’t think the connection will be secure?”

  Quarles typed in some more code and the message from Lin Tzu hovered over t
he table, opaque but readable from all sides. It contained a string of instructions for linking into a virtual meeting, a connection that couldn’t be tracked by the Space Mining Administration or the Chinese Lunar Authority or anybody else, and the link was supposed to be made at 1240 hours, in less than five minutes.

  Quarles shrugged. “I don’t know; the data packets are supposedly getting broken up and bounced off a few commercial satellites before being reorganized at secure remote servers on Earth, kinda like the piggyback we ran for Lane’s message to her ex, but this is a full-on hologram call. Much more complex. Seems like a pretty heavy data packet to not get noticed by anyone.”

  Dechert hated the ambivalence of technicians. They were never a hundred percent certain of anything, and for a moment, his earlier good feelings toward Quarles evaporated in a haze of frustration. He took a deep breath to calm himself.

  “I need a yes or no answer, Jonathan. Is this thing going to be tracked or not?”

  “Umm, no. I don’t think so.”

  Curse words ran through Dechert’s head with marine fury, and he bit his lip so he wouldn’t yell at his young technician.

  “All right, just make the damned connection.”

  Lin Tzu’s upper body appeared in three dimensions of high definition above the crowded workbench, hovering with spectral precision. Only an occasional scattered ion broke the illusion that he was there with them in the Hole, just a few feet away. Tzu sat with perfect posture behind a plain white desk. He wore a chalk gray uniform with a circular tan collar, and a thin smile etched itself across the even line of his mouth when he saw Dechert. The Chinese commander looked impeccable, as always, his short black hair combed and parted to the side, his lean face clean-shaven and scrubbed. Even his fingernails, on placidly folded hands, were polished and trimmed. Dechert thought of his own stubbled face and his frayed and faded heavysuit, and he cursed inwardly. If this was a battle of appearances, we’d lose the war hands down, he thought. Lin looked like the owner of a five-star casino, and Dechert looked like the just-fired kitchen help.