Gunpowder Moon

  Dechert rotated the shuttle’s satellite dish toward Peary Crater, its cold motor struggling to warm in the nightside freeze, and in a few moments he was no longer alone. The com popped and fizzled and became awash in cross-traffic. Human voices yelling orders and ticking off targeting telemetry. They were the voices of war, terse and urgent.

  “Peary Crater, this is Cherokee,” Dechert said into the clamor. “Put Yates on the line.”

  After a few seconds, a voice came back to him. “Cherokee? Confirm status and repeat.”

  “Put Yates on the goddamned line.”

  He sat in the pilot’s seat and waited for an answer. The heaters blew warm air down on him. He had the top of his EVA suit off, and he started to spray quick-seal on the two-inch gash caused by Thatch’s bullet. His back felt sore, but it wasn’t bleeding. There was comfort in the task of fixing something, a few seconds of monotony before he had to fly back to the station and look for the bodies of his last three friends on the Moon.

  The old man came on the line, his voice electric. “Cherokee, where the hell have you been?”

  “Yates, it was Thatch. Shut it down.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It was Thatch,” Dechert said, his voice flat. “He killed Hale. I’ve got it on tape. I’m sending it over. Shut it down, the whole damned thing, or I’m punching an open transmission to Earth.”

  “What do you mean it was Thatch? Dechert, have you lost your mind?”

  “He blew up the Molly Hatchet. He sabotaged the station. He just killed Hale. Do you hear me, Yates? It was our own fucking guy. He started the whole thing. Now shut it down or everyone’s gonna know.”

  The line went silent.

  “Hold on, I’m receiving your transmission,” Yates said after a few seconds. “I’ll get back to you on a secure channel, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Tell your minders they have two minutes, and let them know it’s too late to try anything clever, like sending a fake SAR team to check on my well-being,” Dechert said. “I’ve already dumped the video to a server and they aren’t going to find it. If I don’t stop it at a set time the whole story gets pushed out into the open.”

  “Dechert, we’ve got missiles en route right now, and so do the Chinese. We can’t just turn this thing off.”

  “Yes you can, Yates. Of course you can. Get it done.” He hesitated then, taking a long breath, not wanting to ask the question. “Do you have any word from Serenity?”

  The line went back to static, and Yates finally answered. “They’ve gone dark. We have no word.”

  “Copy. I’m heading over there now.”

  “Dechert?”

  “You have ninety seconds, Yates. Do it, or the ticker in Times Square is going to say we started a war on the Moon by killing our own people.”

  Dechert put the top half of his suit and his helmet back on, fired the shuttle’s engines, and flew out of the crater’s mouth. In the distance over the Apennine Mountains, the Earth hung in aquamarine splendor over a crumbling slope of gray rocks.

  He saw the first pieces of debris scattered a few kilometers west of the station. The sensors picked them up and plotted them on a plasma screen and the data unfroze Dechert’s blood. It was a missile, shot down just short of Serenity 1, its resin composite hull strewn in a disjointed line across the dark mare. The autodefenses had stayed on long enough to shoot down one of them. Dechert thought for a moment that the system had been smart enough to save his crippled station.

  But reality came thundering back thirty seconds later, draining the adrenaline from his body and leaving him empty. The infrared cameras told the tale when he was still a few thousand meters from Menelaus Crater. The station was emanating too much latent heat. It had been hit.

  Dechert flew the shuttle over the broken remains of Sea of Serenity 1, his hands and feet moving the flight controls on instinct. A jagged hole stood out on the Moon below him illuminated by the infrared cameras—a hole where his station used to be. The observatory was gone, blown away, and moondust hung over the impact crater like a shroud. The southwestern corner of the station, where the Bullpen had been, was missing, caved in by tons of regolith and moon rocks. Dechert checked his gauges; there was no power coming from the station. He flew in a tight circle over the wreckage and landed the shuttle a few meters outside of the dust cloud. He tried raising Lane on the com and got background noise and the sputtering radio sounds of space in reply.

  He unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat, moving slowly, his thoughts broken and scattered. The memory of an interview he had read years ago back on Earth entered his mind like an unwanted ghost. It was of a U.S. Navy lieutenant who had survived the sinking of the USS Florida in 2046. The frigate had been struck by an aerial drone loaded with HIEX, and the lieutenant had abandoned ship with the few dozen sailors who were still alive as it sank from the stern, leaving his captain behind on the tilting bridge.

  The lieutenant had pleaded with his captain to leave with the rest of them: “Sir, we need to get out of here.”

  “I’m staying with the ship,” the captain had said.

  The young lieutenant pressed his boss, telling him there was no reason to die a pointless death for an empty naval tradition dreamed up centuries before. “Sir, it’s a ship.”

  But the lieutenant said the captain sat back in his chair on the bridge and grunted: “Yeah. But it’s my ship, and those are my men down there dying in the fo’c’sle. And I’ll be damned if I leave them.”

  Dechert found his way through the shuttle’s outer hatch and began the long walk toward his station, entering the dust cloud which now stretched for more than a kilometer across the Mare Serenitatis. Why can’t I be that guy? he asked himself. Why do I always watch my people die around me, then walk away?

  The wreckage of four years of his life appeared through the shroud of moondust, everywhere beneath his feet. A saucepan from the galley, somehow unharmed. Pieces of red insulation from the air condensers. Shards of moon-baked clay from the 3-D printer. And wiring, miles of wiring, flung out across the regolith, the expelled entrails of the dead station. Dechert checked the bioscanner on his wrist. It should be able to pick up any living soul within a kilometer of the station. It was flatlined and dark.

  He came to a high mound of rubble that had been heaved upward from the center of Serenity 1. He climbed it using his hands and knees to gain traction in the unstable pile, oblivious to the sharp pieces of metal and fiber that threatened to slash open the legs of his pressure suit. After a short struggle, he made it to the top and looked down with his lamps on full, into the crater that had been formed at the heart of the station. There was no fire in the vacuum, only a few live wires spitting into the darkness. He could see that the missile had reached far down into Serenity’s sublevels, deep into its guts. Must have been a ground penetrator, he thought, realizing that even the confines of the Hole had likely been obliterated by the blast. He looked to his right, and a wall of collapsed rock lay where the Bullpen had stood.

  He sat down on top of the pile, small amid the wreckage. Where to begin looking, where to scrabble with gloved hands in a field of debris that stretched for hundreds of yards? He felt like a man trapped on a cliff wall. Rimrocked. Exposed.

  “Peary Crater, this is Serenity,” he said into the com.

  Yates answered this time. “Go ahead, Serenity.”

  “Station’s destroyed. I need a rescue team out here with heavy equipment, expedited.”

  “Okay, but we’re still fully defensive, Dechert. They’ve asked the Chinese for a cease-fire and your transmission has gone to the White House, but there are missiles still in the air. I’ll have to get permission to launch anything from Peary right now. I repeat, we are fully defensive and trying to pull back to DEFCON-2, but there are no launches authorized.”

  “Get authorization, Yates,” he snapped. “My crew’s buried.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to Trayborr. Do you have anything on bioscan?”<
br />
  “Negative.”

  “Okay.”

  Dechert pulled his knees as close to his chest as he could and put his head in his hands, letting the quiet of the mare embrace him. He stared at a circuit board near his boot, following the crisscrossing lines as they ran from diode to resistor. How random their order appeared to be. Intersecting lines cut by a machine laser.

  He stood up, suddenly angry at himself, and began to climb down the rubble field as fast as he could. Even if they were dead, he had to find them. Static hissed on the open com. A heavily distorted voice broke into his fevered mind.

  “Peary Crater, this is Low Lunar Orbit 1. We caught your last transmission with Serenity. Uh, I’ve got a signal up here that I’m trying to figure out, sir. Do you copy?”

  No one responded.

  “Peary this is LLO-1. Are you reading?”

  “This is Serenity, LLO,” Dechert finally said. “What’s your signal?”

  The voice came back. “It’s an emergency beacon on an He-3 cask, sir, but it’s well below the orbital ejection flight grid. Flying on a southeast trajectory, but it’s too shallow and too slow. Can you confirm?”

  An emergency beacon on a helium-3 cask. What the hell? Dechert’s mind stirred back to life as he pondered the absurd timing of it. Then his muscles tensed and he stopped climbing down the rubble heap.

  “LLO, can you confirm it’s a canister beacon?”

  “Yes, Serenity. That’s what I can’t figure out. It should be heading to Lagrange Point Three, but it’s not even in a stable orbit. And we obviously didn’t have any ejections scheduled for today.”

  Holy shit. The rail launcher. Dechert’s heart fluttered in his chest. Could they have done that? Could they have been crazy enough to do that?

  “LLO, launch your barge on a search-and-rescue to that beacon,” Dechert said, turning around and scuffling back up the wall toward his shuttle. “I repeat, launch SAR immediately to that beacon. There may be souls aboard.”

  “What, aboard an He-3 cask?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus. We’re scrambling now, Serenity.”

  “I’m back in the shuttle in thirty seconds,” Dechert said. “Send coordinates to my craft. Peary Crater, are you hearing this? They may have escaped the station in an He-3 cask. I repeat: Crew may have jettisoned from the Bullpen in an He-3 cask. I’m taking the shuttle into low orbit. Tell whoever needs to know that my launch is not hostile.”

  Dechert bounded from the dust cloud, his heart thumping, crossing the distance to the shuttle in five-meter hops. He waited for Yates to come back to him in protest, to tell him that he couldn’t violate the stand-down with a launch. He got ready to tell Yates he could screw himself because nothing was going to keep him on the surface of the Moon.

  Yates came back. “Serenity, we’ve made a direct call to the South Pole to let them know you’re not hostile. You’re a go for launch. Good luck to you.”

  25

  The technobabble of a propulsion geek from Peary Crater ran through Dechert’s mind in a loop as he rocketed up from the lunar surface, his hands turning the insides of his gloves wet with perspiration.

  The engineer had been overseeing the installation of Serenity 1’s rail launcher just as Dechert was taking over the station in early 2069, a few months after John Ross Fletcher had died in the shuttle crash near Tycho. The electromagnetic gun, which rose from the Bullpen like a five-story howitzer, was built to shoot two-ton casks of helium-3 into orbit like so many spitballs, out to a Lagrange point for pickup and delivery to Earth. The engineer had looked up at the launcher’s giant dual conducting bars as if they were his newborn twins.

  “Amazing, aren’t they?” he asked Dechert. “This baby will spit out sixty megajoules per ejection and accelerate a four-thousand-pound projectile from zero to three kilometers-per-second in the time it takes your heart to skip a beat.”

  “As long as it works right,” Dechert said, not wanting to prompt an additional stream of physics from the man.

  “Oh, it’ll work right,” the engineer replied. “Just make sure no one’s inside when one of those babies gets launched. They’d be pulling enough g’s to shoot their eyeballs straight out of their assholes.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Yeah,” the engineer said, his eyes glassing over. “What a ride that would be.”

  What a ride that would be.

  Dechert was no mathematician. He couldn’t pinpoint the amount of g-forces involved in an orbital ejection by rail launcher, but he figured a standard shot had to be at least forty. Forty g’s. Enough force to make a two-hundred-pound man suddenly weigh four tons. Enough force to rip the pulmonary artery right out of the heart muscle or rupture every organ. But the com-jockey at LLO-1 had said the cask was well below the flight grid and moving below escape velocity, so Quarles or Waters must have rigged the launcher for a slow, shallow shot. How many g’s would that have cut from the launch, maybe ten or fifteen?

  And how long would the high-g acceleration have lasted? That was the critical question. Just five seconds of that force would kill them all, but what about two seconds, or three? Could their bodies have survived that? An air force doctor had endured over 40 g’s in a rocket sled back in the twentieth century, Dechert recalled, and some lunatic test pilot had taken 80 g’s in a similar experiment a few decades later, but those were controlled tests of horizontal force—for a very brief amount of time. Vertical force was worse, wasn’t it? And helium-3 casks don’t have any seats or five-point harnesses.

  Dechert pushed the shuttle to its operational edge, keeping the thrusters on maximum as he climbed into a low orbit over the Sea of Serenity and felt the force of acceleration pushing against his chest. LLO-1 had already sent him the coordinates. The emergency beacon was now over Copernicus, in sector D-3, so the cask must have nearly made an entire orbit around the Moon. He turned southeast over the equator and punched numbers into the shuttle’s navigation system. His closing speed had him less than four minutes from intercept, somewhere in the northern Mare Nectaris. Four minutes from an answer to the most important question of his life: Would he ever command a crew that remained alive?

  How had B-Dog died back in the Bake? Was it a roadside bomb? No, a sniper in Aanjar had taken him out. And Snook? Brought down when he stormed a mud-brick house with a cherry private covering his ass. Dawes had killed himself. And Matchstick? Didn’t he make it? Yes, he was alive the last Dechert had heard. But he’d probably never be able to eat without someone feeding him.

  And Cole. Can’t forget Cole. He spent the last few seconds of his life feeling the water in his body boil under his skin, not knowing he was killed by a man who had been his friend for more than three years.

  “LLO, this is Serenity shuttle,” Dechert said, brushing aside the image of his young mining specialist. “I’m just crossing Sinus Honoris, about three minutes from intercept. Report, please.”

  The transmission bounced and warbled a few times, and Dechert could hear nervous cross-chatter on the open channel.

  “Serenity, LLO-1. I’m patching you over to collection barge Xerxes. They’re heading almost due east over Albategnius, less than two minutes from capture. Be advised the cask is only four kilometers above the surface and slipping, so they’re pushing safety protocols for a quick grapple. Terrain ahead is a concern.”

  Dechert’s grip on the stick tightened. Terrain ahead. He plumbed his memory for the lunar topography in front of the He-3 cask. There wasn’t much in the way of vertical relief. The Montes Pyrenaeus was about it, but those peaks weren’t high enough to be an immediate concern . . . were they?

  “Xerxes, this is Commander Dechert in Serenity shuttle. Report please.”

  “We read you, Commander. This is Xerxes’ pilot. We have eyes on your He-3 cask; velocity about two thousand meters per second, altitude about three-point-seven kilometers. It’s in a precession of about eleven degrees, probably from irregular weight distribution. We project it’s g
onna hit terrain in four minutes or less. We’re one minute to intercept. This is going to be close.”

  “What terrain, Xerxes?”

  “Mons Penck. They’re heading right for it.”

  Dechert felt sick. Mons Penck is a wide promontory that rises four kilometers above the lunar flatlands. “Copy, Xerxes. What’s your plan?”

  “Expedited capture and then a quick burn to get over the hump—if we don’t abort. I’ve got an EVA team waiting at the storage rack. I’m not sure I can pull a g-maneuver with them out there, and I don’t have time to bring them back in.”

  “We’re locked into our suitports and holding on, lieutenant,” said another voice on the com, obviously one of the three astronauts strapped to the back of the collection rail. “We’ll live if you don’t plow us into a mountain.”

  Dechert wanted to plead with the barge pilot not to abort, but he had done the math and knew how close it would be. His mind raced with convincing words, but the pilot spoke first.

  “Are you sure there are souls on board, Commander?”

  “I am,” Dechert said.

  There was a short silence. “Okay. Going for capture. Twenty seconds. Tran, you got one shot at this.”