Gunpowder Moon

  “Copy. I’m going for the drogues on the middle of the barrel.”

  Dechert could see them now, a flash of light in the darkness ahead as the barge lit its forward search lamps. They were flying toward the terminator of the waxing crescent Moon, just a few minutes from sunlight. The He-3 cask would go from freezing to broiling in a few minutes. And it kept getting lower.

  “Terrain ahead,” the barge’s navigation system announced in an anodyne voice. Xerxes extended its grappling arm, and Dechert saw the cask, wobbling on its axis as it plummeted toward the Sea of Nectar. The mechanical arm moved slowly, like a robotic mother reaching for her child. A band of searchlights illuminated the cask, and Dechert could see the astronauts locked on to the collection rail, waiting to be sucked into the back of their suits by an orbital burn.

  Slow motion. A few meters per second, as his crew flew in a dying orbit toward one of the Moon’s tallest mountains. Dechert cursed the slowness of space.

  “Closing speed down to one meter per second. How we looking, Tran?”

  “Just fifty meters more. Give me some room on the low side to work with; this thing’s got a shimmy.”

  “Okay. Two minutes to abort.”

  “Roger, one minute to capture.”

  The ship’s computer continued its warning: “Terrain ahead. Pull up. Terrain ahead.”

  Dechert’s shuttle gave him the same alert, but he ignored it, staying a few hundred yards behind the barge and the tumbling cask, willing the mechanical arm to move faster.

  “Ten meters.”

  “That’s good. Keep it there.”

  “One minute to abort.”

  Dechert blinked the sweat out of his eyes. The grappling arm reached around the middle of the barrel. Probes on each side of the arm tried to connect with small drogues built into the cask. . . .

  They missed.

  Dechert could see them scrape down the metal skin, peeling paint.

  “Final report, Tran. We gotta move.”

  “Give me ten seconds.”

  “Warning. Terrain ahead. Pull up. Pull up.”

  The probes inched back toward the sockets. Dechert looked forward; he could see Mons Penck looming in front of them. They were going to lose them.

  “Capture,” Tran said. “We have soft capture.”

  “Retract.”

  “Retracting. How much time?”

  “No time. Get it in.”

  Slowly—way too slowly for Dechert—the mechanical arm retracted, bringing the cask into the metal folds of the ship and locking it into a secure umbilical.

  Dechert’s cockpit filled with Moon.

  “Uhh, boys,” one of the astronauts said.

  “Hard capture. Go for burn.”

  “OMS burn,” the lieutenant said. “Hold on.”

  The barge pitched up and clawed for altitude. Dechert lit his own thrusters as warning alarms from both ships rang in his ears. He could see the Xerxes shudder. It wasn’t built for hard orbital maneuvers. Mons Penck filled Dechert’s viewscreen. The Xerxes stayed below the mountain’s sloping peak, trying to climb as thrusters on its belly pushed spaceward. But it wasn’t happening fast enough. Dechert saw Moon and ship getting closer, and braced for the image of destruction that had been racing through his mind. Moon and ship getting closer . . .

  And then his viewscreen filled with the emptiness of space. Dechert sucked in a breath. The barge was ahead of him. There was nothing solid in its path. The alarms went silent.

  “OMS shutdown,” the Xerxes’ pilot said, and you could hear relief in his voice. “Angels at fourteen and climbing. You guys okay out there?”

  “We’re alive, lieutenant. That was a ride.”

  “How close did we get?”

  “I could have reached down and grabbed some dirt for you.”

  “Roger. Let’s see if it was worth it.”

  “Commencing rescue, lieutenant.”

  The astronauts began working to unseal the maintenance door on the cask. Dechert pulled in close to the barge; he could see the spits of light as they torched the hatch, which must have been jammed from the inside. He squinted and leaned forward, blood rushing into his forehead. A warning beeped on the console and he looked at the heads-up display. He was coming in too fast. He hit reverse thrust and nosed the shuttle up.

  “Xerxes, shuttle,” Dechert said. “You boys are some stone-cold astronauts.”

  “We do it for the glory, shuttle.”

  “Well, I know you don’t do it for the pay. Requesting docking clearance.”

  “You’re a go to dock. Port side, soft seals engaged.”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Lane’s face as he made the final approach, her short, straight, dark copper hair, her upturned nose and small chin. He saw Vernon’s wild hair and lidded eyes, and Quarles’s shaved head and sagging heavysuit.

  “What’s the status out there, EVA?” the Xerxes’ pilot asked.

  “Give me a second.”

  The cockpit boards lit green and Dechert docked the shuttle, taking his clenched fists off the controls, his fingers twitching with cramps. Still the rescue team remained silent. Vernon’s dead, he thought. He has to be dead. They all have to be dead.

  “Damn, we have four souls in here,” someone finally said, and Dechert could see one of the astronauts sticking his head into the open maintenance door as he shined a lantern into the cask’s dark interior, his feet hanging into space like a clown looking into a rodeo barrel. The astronaut began throwing what looked like pieces of packing foam out of the container.

  “What’s their condition, EVA?” he asked, unable to restrain himself.

  “Hold on.”

  Another thirty seconds ticked by.

  “What’s their status, John?” the Xerxes’ pilot asked.

  “Get medical ready,” the spacewalker said. “I think some of them are alive.”

  26

  Dechert slouched in a chair, half asleep, in a corner of the medical pod, his head on his chest and his feet on an overbed table. He heard Lane rustle and looked up in time to see her eyes open and wander around the small room. He saw the puzzlement in her face as she slowly digested the fact that she wasn’t in Sea of Serenity 1. Her eyes continued to roam until they found him. He had stubble on his face and hadn’t showered in a week, but she clearly recognized him. She stirred and coughed, and he stood up.

  “Hey.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, trying to move her legs and wincing in pain at the effort. She looked down and saw a bioscanner attached to her right arm and a fluid drip inserted into the left. A machine beeped in the background, a much less intrusive noise than the alarms that had filled her dreams.

  “So, I guess I’m alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  He came over to her, sat on a stool by the bed, and looked into her eyes, which were still run through with spiders of red from the g-load that had burst most of her capillaries. Her face was swollen from the trauma, and her lips were cracked and dry.

  “How do I look?”

  “Like shit.”

  She grunted and tried to smile, but it hurt. He watched her drift in and out. She opened and closed her hands for a few minutes without speaking, making fists to determine the strength that remained in her arms. Then she turned her head and opened her eyes and looked at him again, more focused this time.

  “The others. Are they okay? Is Vernon okay?”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “Yeah, they’re all gonna make it. Even Standard. Vernon’s messed up bad, but you know him. Couldn’t kill him with a tank.”

  “Or a missile, I guess.” She tried again to smile. “He saved our asses. I thought he was freakin’ dead, and all of a sudden he’s grabbing epoxy foam and throwing it into the cask. Probably kept us all from snapping in two. And he couldn’t even see—he was blinded by the deco sickness and the seal on his helmet.”

  “Sounds like Vernon.”

  “Yeah. And Quarles rigged the launcher for auto-eject and found a way
to override the safeties for trajectory and escape velocity. Little creep finally did something right.”

  Dechert laughed. “Vernon Waters, the best man on the Moon. And Jonathan Quarles, a little better than you’ll ever want to accept. But you’re the one who saved them, Lane. It was your insane idea to climb into the business end of a rail launcher.”

  She grimaced. “I thought I was killing us, but I couldn’t come up with anything else. I mean, I was trying to guess what you’d do, but you were running around out on the mare.”

  “I’ll tell you what I would have done,” Dechert said, “I probably would have died, along with everyone else. I sure as hell wouldn’t have thought of that.”

  “Well, don’t start handing out ribbons. It was a selfish thing, really. I just figured I’d rather die moving than standing still.”

  Lane closed her eyes. It would be at least a week before she’d be able to stand on her feet, the doctors had told Dechert. And another two weeks before her body started to feel like it hadn’t been squeezed in a vise. She might never be able to have children, but we don’t think there’s any brain damage. Has she been known to have seizures? Questions and possible side effects tumbled out. One of the neurosurgeons had asked Dechert if they could keep her in an observation dome for three months since she had broken the known g-force survival load for a woman, and the tests could result in a groundbreaking medical study for deep-space exploration. Dechert was too tired to break the man’s nose, so he had just cursed and walked away.

  She tugged at Dechert’s sleeve.

  “Is it over?”

  “Yeah, it’s over. The station’s a total loss and a lot of people are dead, but it’s over. The assholes down on Earth are trying to wiggle out of it, and I think they want to see us disappear, but I’ve got a little leverage.”

  “What leverage?” she asked, trying to arch an eyebrow. She was always alert to a scheme. Then she looked up and around the room again. “Where’s Thatch?”

  Dechert put his hand on her shoulder. How to tell her that Thatcher, her crew member and friend, was an assassin—a killer that had been sizing her up for death every time he had looked her in the eyes? How to tell her that Thatch had betrayed her, just as he once did?

  “Thatch is off the Moon, too. Stop worrying so much,” he said. “We’ve got all the time in the world to go through the details.”

  If she sensed something was wrong, she didn’t let him know it, closing her eyes and letting the drugs take hold of her again. “All right,” she whispered, and she was in between the room and someplace else.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Ever get shot out of a cannon?”

  “No.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Dechert grinned. “Well, the doctors say you just might heal up, even though you pulled somewhere north of twenty-five g’s. I’m thinking you’ll be flipping off bureaucrats in no time.”

  She coughed. Dechert sat back and wiped a dry eye with his index finger. He had cried when he first heard they were alive, cried for the first time in thirty years, and it was an incredible feeling, both liberating and revolting. He was glad they were all unconscious at the time, but now he felt the emotions welling back up and he fought to suppress them. All he wanted to do was pull them out of their hospital beds and take them to a bar and get them drunk. Really, really drunk. They were alive—all of them except Thatch, who deserved to be dead anyways. A freakin’ miracle—for the first time in his life.

  “So what’s next for us?” she asked, just when he thought she had fallen back asleep. “A few years in the brig? A burrito stand at Las Cruces?”

  “Probably a long debriefing in a cold room, and then a little R&R. After that, I don’t know. Are you done with space?”

  She tried to get up on her elbows. “Hell no. Like I said, I want to die moving.”

  “Then how does Jupiter sound?”

  She raised both eyebrows this time. “Europa Station?”

  “Why not? They’ll be launching the Magellan next year, and I think the government wants us to be out of the neighborhood for a while. You wanna check out the only permanent colony beyond the Asteroid Belt?”

  “Maybe.” Her hands moved across her hips as if she were checking to make sure the bones were still there. She licked her lips, and Dechert wet a cloth and put it to her mouth.

  “I feel like my tongue’s wrapped in sandpaper.”

  “Yeah I know. They don’t want you to drink yet; your guts are all messed up. Just let me know when you need some moisture. Nursing’s my new specialty. I got Quarles an electrolyte Popsicle a few hours ago, for Christ’s sake.”

  She opened her eyes again, and this time they were focused.

  “You know, I read the specs for the Europa base. Looks pretty dicey.”

  “Oh yeah. Fletcher thought the same thing. Radiation. Gravity wells. Geysers. Moonquakes. Wind up to four hundred knots on Jupiter. At least a ten percent chance of catastrophic failure, last I heard.”

  She laughed. “You’re a pretty terrible salesman. If you want me to be safety officer at the gates of hell, you could at least make up a few positives.”

  Dechert remained silent for a long moment. Finally he spoke again.

  “There aren’t too many positives, but I wasn’t thinking safety officer.” He dabbed her mouth with the cloth again. “I was thinking station chief.”

  She looked at him. “Station chief? That’s your gig.”

  “Here, maybe. But there—no, I think it should be yours. I’ll run the mining ops on Jupiter, but this is a two-track mission. Half the station will be devoted to the science team running subs into Europa’s ocean, and someone needs to manage the whole show.”

  Lane’s eyes focused and he thought he saw a flash of anger. “I’m not one for handouts, Dechert. Don’t try throwing me a promotion because you feel guilty that you almost got us killed on the Moon. I know you’re a masochist when it comes to self-blame.”

  It was Dechert’s turn to be angry—or at least pretend that he was. “I don’t throw promotions around, Officer Briggs. I’d can your ass tomorrow if I didn’t think you could get things done anymore. But you’ve been working your way to command for two years now, even if you didn’t realize it.”

  “I didn’t realize it.”

  “Well then, work on your self-awareness. It’s an important command attribute.”

  She digested his words for a few moments. “You’d report to me? You know how crazy that sounds?”

  “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. I intend to have plenty of autonomy running the helium-3 ops. But yeah, if a decision has to be made concerning the entire station, it will be your call.”

  “I would have thought they already had a crew in line for the mission,” Lane said, almost like it was a final protest to his offer.

  “They did. It was the guys at Sea of Tranquility 1, but the commander and XO got killed in the same missile strike that took down Serenity. Don’t think we’re the second string, though. You earned this, Lane, and I can get it for you. Do you want it, or not?”

  She smiled, and this time it was full. “Yeah, I want it. Especially if Quarles is coming. I’ll run that little shit into the ground.”

  Dechert laughed. “Don’t go Ahab on me.”

  “Only when it comes to Quarles.”

  And they both laughed.

  27

  Yates poured scotch into a pair of cut-glass tumblers with a precise hand, as though the two drinks were the most important thing in the universe. Dechert wondered if he got the stuff from the same smuggler that Lane and Quarles used or if his rank allowed him to openly break the Administration’s prohibition of alcohol on the Moon. Hell, he thought, what’s a little booze when you weren’t supposed to have weapons up here?

  “We’re working under the theory that Foerrster brought the bomb to Thatch when he visited Serenity in November,” Yates said as he stood at the beverage cart. “Military Intelligence believes it’s unlikely that
Thatch was sitting on a vial of polymeric nitrogen for the last three years. Much more plausible that Foerrster brought it up to the Moon after the op was green-lighted. Thatch probably screwed it to the crawler right before they went out to Posidonius.”

  He turned to look at Dechert. “He’s gone, by the way. Foerrster, I mean. Disappeared like a dust cloud on the terminator. Probably went to ground somewhere in Africa or the South Pacific.”

  “I’ll find him if they don’t.”

  The old man sighed. He was in full uniform, pressed and white, with a gold Space Mining Administration insignia on the chest, and he had no gravity-inducing weights on his body. Legend had it that Yates refused to wear his 1-g heavysuit, arguing that he planned to die on the Moon and wouldn’t need the extra bone mass to get around back on Earth. He looked tired, but was clearly trying not to show it.

  “Have you ever read von Clausewitz, Dechert?” Yates asked as he finished measuring a few drops of water into the whiskey. “‘War is the continuation of politics through other means?’”

  “I remember the quote.”

  “Well, you’ve pretty much subverted those other means. And a lot of people on Earth are pissed about it.”

  “I’m just a dirt digger, Yates. What exactly are you trying to say?”

  Yates gave the drinks a quick stir with a silver bar spoon, letting the alcohol chill into the ice. He turned to hand one of the glasses to Dechert.

  “I’m trying to say that I’m a little amazed someone hasn’t come up to the Moon yet to toss you into a black bag.”

  “They already tried, remember? And I’m right here. Tell the next one to look me up.”

  Yates shook his head. He glided around his large circular desk, which appeared to be made of organic wood and obsidian and must have cost a fortune to ship up from Earth. He sat down in his high-backed black leather chair.

  “Such brio,” he said. “I don’t understand it. There was a time when business was strictly business on the Moon. Now everyone wants to get personal. It’s . . . so unprofessional.”

  “I’m not in the mood to talk business or political theory with you, Yates. And I’m not here to listen to excuses. I’m here to set my terms and find out when there’s going to be a reckoning.”