Gunpowder Moon

  “Commodore, I’ll speak plainly. I’m not convinced that this is a justifiable action. I haven’t seen anything stronger than circumstantial evidence that the Chinese hit the Molly Hatchet, and I know those people over there.” He paused, looking into Yates’s eyes, which had narrowed to the point where only black pupils could be seen. “We know them. They’re pawns in this, just like us. I’m not sure my team will be able to take an order that involves killing them.”

  Yates’s eyelids opened and he smiled at the subtle hint of mutiny; Dechert was surprised at how white the old man’s teeth were.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought this was about. I should have reprimanded you a long time ago for continuing to socialize with Tzu and his team after the communication blackout was put in place.” Yates raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you didn’t know that I read the monthly com logs, including the supposedly secret ones that are redirected through black-market Earth-servers? You don’t think I know when your safety officer is trading gardening secrets with her Chinese opposite, or your young engineer is smuggling in booze from NB-2? There may be a few things I’m unaware of on the Moon, Mr. Dechert, but I wouldn’t count on many.” He pulled back from the holo-cam for a moment and frowned, looking over his shoulder at something Dechert couldn’t see, holding up a finger as if telling someone to wait, and then he leaned back in.

  “Listen. I’m a businessman. I don’t like this any more than you. It leads to the one thing I can’t abide and that’s lower revenues. The status quo would have suited me just fine.” He stood up from his desk. “Unfortunately, someone on Earth doesn’t feel the same way, and to be honest with you, I’m not in a position to question them. Do you get what I’m saying? There is only one fact that’s relevant to me right now: I’m allowed to mine on this rock just as long as the United States government gives me an operating license to do so. And they don’t give operating licenses to people who question the judgment of the president.”

  He held Dechert’s stare, straightening his back and arching his shoulders as if the gravity at Peary Crater were equal to that of Earth. An old man who was too clever to resist even minimal forces.

  “I’ve got nothing against the miners on New Beijing 2 and I hope we don’t have to send them into the next reality. But if we do, we do. This thing runs deeper than either of us can know, and even if you’re right, there’s nothing I can do about it—unless you hand me the smoking gun of all smoking guns in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Are you telling me to dig deeper?” Dechert asked.

  “I’m telling you I’m a businessman, Dechert. You can poke around all you want as long as it doesn’t hinder tomorrow’s launch. Just don’t expect me to intervene if you have anything short of the holy-shit truth. I hope you understand.”

  Yates straightened the bottom of his jacket and pushed his chair under the black desk, a sign that the meeting was over.

  “Yes,” Dechert said. “I understand.”

  16

  It felt like old times, mining times, when they had bounced around the Moon’s bloodless surface with the enthusiasm of old prospectors digging for the next lode, the next vein of gold that would make all of them rich. When everyone had looked after one another—Chinese, Russian, American, Indian—and traded tall tales and radiation warnings and wagered vacuum-sealed rib eyes on who would tap the first high-yield ilmenite field or discover the next cache of water frozen in the permanent shadow of a crater. Back when there was supposedly enough helium-3 on the maria to fuel the Earth and every other human endeavor taking place within the Asteroid Belt, and like dolphins feeding on a baitball, they would simply line up and wait their turn.

  All before their leaders in Beijing and Washington began to look at long-term productivity curves and burn rates and question the wisdom of equal portioning. Before life began turning back to normal on Earth, and the politicians called their generals.

  Dechert smiled, forgetting for a second the bastards back on Earth and recalling those early days on the Moon when his handlers at Peary Crater and New Mexico communicated with Serenity 1 only after the monthly output numbers were finalized and illustrated on a bar chart. God, how incredible it would have been to be here back in ’58, when Fletcher first opened the station, he thought. That was deep blue frontier stuff, the kind of adventure that would scrub all the other thoughts from your head.

  He looked over at Lane and Quarles, who sat in the Environmental and Propulsion stations of the cocoonlike cockpit in the Aerosmith, as the big crawler ground its tracked wheels into the regolith and rumbled into the open pit of Menelaus Crater like a migrating beast. All three of them wore pressure suits and helmets, new rules that served as a cold testament to Cole Benson’s death in the wastelands near Posidonius. Thatch and Waters drove the rover just ahead of them, marking uneven terrain along the traverse with blue strobes and updating the old topographic maps of the Menelaus Road with laser range finders. The Aerosmith’s running lights illuminated the black nightside of the crater, and the moondust kicked up by the churning machines cast the descent in a brume of translucent light. Everything moved in slow motion as the two vehicles slogged down the switchback road at less than a kilometer per hour.

  “Feels good to be back out on the reg,” Thatch said over the com. “Even if Vernon is shit for company.”

  “I’m just busy watching your backside, baby,” Waters replied. “I’m a crater-crawlin’, mother-lovin’ sonofabitch. Your mother, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Kiss my ass, Vernon,” Thatch said. “Boss, we got a grade change coming up in twenty meters, nine degrees down-angle, two degrees to starboard. Looks like an eighty-meter leg.”

  “Roger that,” Dechert replied. “Map it. Slope to nine-down, two degrees starboard in two-zero meters.”

  He punched the numbers into the Aerosmith’s navigation computer and stole another glance over at Lane and Quarles as the processors worked on a course correction. They had their polarized lenses turned off, and he could see them both smiling at the banter between Thatch and Waters. Dechert wished they could all stay down in the crater until it was over. His earlier hopes about stopping the iron wheel that had been put into motion had diminished in the last two days. How were they going to find out what happened to the Molly Hatchet in time to prevent what now seemed inevitable? And even if they did find the truth, would it matter? The politicians would be slow to believe it, and the soldiers would consider it of secondary importance. Dechert took no comfort from his time in the military. Captains may occasionally disobey orders in the field, but generals never did in the command bunker. The civilian leadership had always been a joke—and it was always affirmed with a stiff salute by the men with stars on their collars. That was the irony, Dechert thought. The ones who knew the most about the nightmare that was coming were the least likely to prevent it. And he knew the Chinese generals would be no different.

  And his crew, who were now more his family than anyone back on Earth, would be the ones caught on the killing field. Quarles, just a kid with a hard-on for soldering together dust-broken and cold-soaked spaceships so that they would work for one more day. Lane, who he was grooming for future command, even if she didn’t know it. Sometimes she let the darker realities of life brew within her while Dechert chilled his demons with fatalism, but Lane still managed to stand on the right side of things in just about every situation they had been in together. The good side of things. Vernon, his old warhorse. Isn’t that what General Lee had called Longstreet? The one who was always there, ready to rescue him from a bad decision or bring calm to a moment of chaos. Thatch, the lumberjack, who looked more out of place on the Moon than an oak tree on Mars, but ran a mining operation out on the regolith better than anyone Dechert had ever met.

  And Cole. Can’t forget Cole. Dead now, lying in a deoxygenated freezer back at Peary Crater, waiting for the next LEO-1 shuttle to take him to Earth-orbit and then to the alkaline soil of Southern California, where people Dechert had never met would mo
urn as they buried him. Cole, he feared, was just the first innocent to die; the early symptom of a fatal disease.

  “Coming up on waypoint forty-two,” Quarles said. “Slowing to point-three kph.”

  “Okay,” Dechert said. “Taking her back into first, readying stabilizers and emergency braking.”

  The Aerosmith pitched and Dechert’s ears caught the subtle sound of her downshifting gears, grinding as they prepared the massive crawler for the downhill jog. The cockpit jolted twice as the MOHAB slowed down, churning up even more regolith until the rover driven by Thatch and Vernon could barely be seen just fifty yards ahead of them. Even with his helmet on, Dechert smelled gunpowder. It always smelled like gunpowder out on the reg. Neil Armstrong noticed it first, and every Moonwalker since came to know what he described. The cordite smell of war in a barren land.

  “I’d feel better if this bucket of nuts hadn’t been patched together by the boy wonder here,” Lane said, and Dechert knew she had that half smirk on her face as her helmet turned toward Quarles. “Visibility down to four-zero meters, going to infrared, secondary.”

  “Aww, come on Briggs,” Quarles replied, “you know you’ve always wanted to take a nightside ride on the Moon with me.”

  Dechert suppressed a grin of his own. “Let’s get through this leg and then you can rip each other out of your suits if you want.” He clicked the com back to open channel to cut Lane off before she could retort.

  “How we looking, Thatch?”

  “Five-by-five from here, boss. Just keep hugging the left wall. We’re about sixty meters to the midslope, keeping eyes on.”

  “Roger that. Vernon?”

  “Looks good so far. I’m gonna egress to get a look at waypoint forty-three. Should have a solution for you in five minutes, give or take.”

  In the fog ahead, Dechert could see Thatch stop the rover. Vernon unclipped from his safety harness, climbed out of the vehicle, and bounded down the narrow crater road, fading into the haze of moondust and the bordering wall of darkness. Dechert refocused on the road and the heads-up display in front of him, pulling slightly on his control stick’s left-hand toggle as the telemetry ordered him to turn one degree to port. The rippled crater floor lay a vertical mile below and Dechert could sense the open void just a few meters from their starboard half-track, where the edge of the road dropped into nothingness. Happily, they wouldn’t be going to the bottom, stopping instead at Hawking’s Rim, one of the many terraced inner ledges that gave Menelaus its distinctive personality.

  Every crater is different, Fletcher used to say. Some are new and sharp-edged like Menelaus, a cosmic baby of only a few hundred million years or so, still scarred with rilles on its belly and steep, angry impact walls protecting a series of inner ridges on its ribs. Others are ancient ghosts, like the crumbling Posidonius or the even more ruinous Schiller Annular Plain, which stretches across the Moon’s southern hemisphere like a poorly rolled cigar, wider than the borders of the Rocky Mountains and desiccated by nearly three billion years of stellar decay.

  Menelaus was the perfect crater to hide in, much better shielded from an EMP blast or a missile launch than the older impact basins and easier to traverse than the smaller, steeper cosmic bullet holes that poxed the lunar surface. For all the asinine things the Space Mining Administration had done in the last fifteen years, at least they picked the right location for Sea of Serenity 1, Dechert thought. And Hawking’s Rim was only a klick or so ahead. They could reach it in two hours barring any significant setbacks, prepare the Aerosmith for an extended cold soak, and get back to the station in time for a late meal. A last supper, maybe, as the marines were scheduled to make their reconnaissance run into the Montes Apenninus in less than a day. Dechert felt a tightening in the center of his chest every time he thought about it.

  “Uh, boss, we got a little problem here.” Vernon’s voice came into the crawler distorted, broken up by charged particles in the crater’s exosphere. “Small washout of the road on ingress to waypoint forty-three . . . looks like a rim wall collapse.”

  Shit. “Roger that, Vernon. Can we get around it?”

  “Not without pushing some rocks out of the way or taking a tumble down the crater wall. Should take us twenty minutes or so to clean it up. I’m heading back to the rover. Thatch, warm up the plow.”

  “That’s a roger. Turning on the heaters now.”

  Twenty minutes. That wasn’t as bad as it could be. Dechert had counted on a few delays; no lunar mission is without them. And it would give him the time he needed to attend to the underlying business of the Menelaus run. He had to know where things stood with his makeshift investigation, and whether a war could be prevented. And he needed to find out here, out on the reg, because he could no longer trust in the isolation of Serenity 1. By now, the SMA and the Feds were probably monitoring every channel on the station with authoritarian precision, an irony that made Dechert sick. The first Level-1 base built on the Moon after the Thermal Maximum had been named Unity, and both America and China had pledged their cooperative mining efforts would be aimed at ending the dark age of the mid-twenty-first century—the poverty and famine that had struck Earth with an apocalyptic shudder. And now here they were, Dechert and Lin Tzu sneaking around like rebels in a warring banana republic, trying to figure out ways to keep from killing each other while their masters dusted for their fingerprints.

  “Rover, we’re going to power down and park this girl when we hit the midslope, as soon as we have your wall collapse under our lamps.” Dechert turned back to Lane. “How we looking for radiation?”

  “Pretty good. Sun’s napping and nightside’s helping. They’ve got at least seven more hours of EVA time if they need it, and a little extra for the ride back.”

  “Grade starting to come back up,” Quarles said. “Four degrees down-angle, lessening to three. Increase speed to point-six kph.”

  The Aerosmith settled back on her haunches and churned onto the even section of road. The three of them watched Waters climb back into the rover and buckle up and Thatch pull away around the bend. The Menelaus Road narrowed here. It dropped off into space less than three meters off the right side of the crawler, as a sheer cliff in the crater wall fell down to the next terraced ledge. A half-mile drop, Dechert thought, in the slow-motion nightmare of microgravity. We’d have plenty of time to know we’re dying.

  He brushed off the image but continued to hug the rim wall, turning the Aerosmith to maneuver around a slight notch in the passageway as he felt the sweat collect in his gloves. The collapse lay just ahead now, a small washout of breccia and basalt that could have been caused by erosion from the solar winds or even a meteorite. They watched as Thatch raised and lowered the plow on the front of the rover to warm its frozen hydraulic joints.

  “Extending the vertical lamps,” Lane said. Dechert pulled the crawler to within a few meters of the collapse and parked it as the illumination from the Aerosmith’s overhead lanterns bloomed, washing the site in artificial daylight. Dust hung in the air like morning fog, raining down in a small circle around them.

  “All right, people,” Dechert said, looking with concern at the rising cloud. “Let’s go to ten percent continual on the outflow valves on all systems. I don’t want to be sucking in too much powder.”

  “Ten percent, roger that,” said Quarles. “Powering down the reactor. I’ll keep her breathing for the restart.”

  Dechert sat back in the pilot’s chair and pushed his knees out, stretching his cramped body and feeling the blood seep back into his legs. His feet were cold and his head felt wet and clammy. “Vernon, we’re going to go off personal life support while you guys clean up. We’ll keep you on com, so let us know if you need anything.”

  “Yeah,” Vernon said, “you guys just relax in there.”

  Lane punched up the cockpit’s atmospherics on a small touchscreen above her head and boosted the oxygen flow, and the lights on the plasma readout blinked from the orange of Minimal Sustaining to green, illu
minating her faceplate with an emerald glow.

  “We’re good,” she said.

  The three of them unlocked the seals on the sides of their helmets and pulled them off to the sound of escaping gas. It was cold; Dechert could see steam coming off of the top of Quarles’s bald head and feel the chill on the back of his own sweaty neck.

  “Jesus,” Quarles said. “Can we turn up the heaters a little?”

  “In a second, you big baby,” Lane said, but even as she did, she ran a finger across another touchscreen, and a blast of warm, dry air pushed down from the vents above them.

  Dechert rubbed his damp head with a gloved hand, frowned, and took the glove off. “Don’t get used to being off primary support. We just need some time off-com.”

  “Yeah—Big Brother, Big Sister, and every other lunatic on this rock is probably pointing directionals at any spurt of static they can pick up right now,” Quarles said. He took off his gloves as well and turned his chair toward the center of the cockpit. “And I’ve got some pretty heavy stuff to lay on you guys, so it’s best that no one’s listening.”

  Dechert looked over at Lane and then back to Quarles. “All right, Jonathan, you go first, but curb your instinct to wax poetic. We only have a few minutes.”

  “Yes, please,” Lane said.

  Quarles clicked his tongue to show he was underappreciated, but pulled a small metal briefcase from under his seat, unlocking the clasps with a dramatic click of his thumbs. “I’ve taken all of this off the stream and scrubbed the servers—it’s really too unbelievable to put your mind around.” He looked up. “I’m telling you I had to smoke a joint after seeing this stuff.”

  Dechert nodded but didn’t say anything, thinking of the warning Yates had given him about trying to keep anything hidden from the all-seeing eye.

  “Okay,” Quarles continued, “we received a transmission from New Beijing 2 this morning, on the open channel, which initially freaked me out until I realized it was a routine astro-science bulletin on a meteorite hit near T. Mayer A, in the Montes Carpatus a few days ago. Only the telemetry seemed to be a little off, so I ran it through the Quantum on the Aerosmith—off-channel, of course—and I discovered that our Chinese friends had added extra numbers into the coordinates and trajectory of the strike.” He looked up. “Are you following me here?”