“But how?” Qi exclaimed. Then: “Who’s doing this?”
“Red Spear. They’ve got a cell at the moon’s south pole, and they’re sending missiles up from Earth. So listen, there’s a solar storm shelter about two or three kilometers from your current location, two hundred meters off the road you are on, to the left. Seek shelter there.”
“But how—”
“Let’s talk more later! For now, get out of that rover!”
“We need to go,” Fred said to Qi, who was sitting there looking stubborn. “We’re leaving!” he said to Ta Shu, and rose to his feet.
“Shit,” Qi said. Her mouth was pursed into a tight knot, and one hand was on her belly.
“Come on,” Fred said. “You’ll still fit into a spacesuit.”
“I guess.”
“When’s your due date again?”
“I don’t know, I’ve lost track what day it is.”
“It’s October twentieth, but when are you due?”
“October twenty-fourth.”
“Geez,” Fred said. “Well, even so. We have to get out of here.”
“Shit.”
They descended to the rover’s lock room and Fred pulled two spacesuits out of a closet. He gave the largest one he could find to Qi. She just barely got its midsection over her middle; he helped her pull it up to her shoulders. Then they got helmets on, checked each other’s seals, tested the air, and looked at the red heads-up displays on their helmet screens, which reminded Fred of his translation glasses. He kept those with him just in case, putting them in his spacesuit’s big thigh pocket, along with the quantum comms device that Valerie Tong had returned to Qi as she sent them on their way.
When they were ready he felt a bit lunar-competent, although really it was just a case of user-friendly tech. Their suits said they were safe, so they got in the lock and opened the outer door, and were confronted with their first problem: the rover’s automatic pilot was beyond them to alter, and the rover was trundling along at around fifteen kilometers an hour.
“Oh no,” Fred said.
“It’s just a jogging pace,” Qi snapped. “Just step off and start running.”
“No!” Fred said, shocked.
“Just remember the g,” she said, and jumped down.
“Damn,” he said, and stepped off.
He landed on both feet and pushed off forward, but too hard, so that he flew ahead and nearly crashed into the back end of the rover. It rolled out of the way just fast enough for him to avoid rear-ending it, and when he hit the ground again he put one foot forward, using it to thrust back and make a little bunny jump, trying desperately to calculate his push-off correctly. He didn’t; he found himself in the air again, or the non-air, spinning his arms but still angled forward as if diving. There was no way to recover from that tilt, no jerk forward of the feet fast enough, at least not from him. He put his hands out instead and did a face-plant, sprawled over the dust like a kid on a playground. It was a shock, but at one-sixth of his true weight, and protected by his spacesuit, and landing on the smoothed surface of the track, he came to no harm, nor his suit either. Or so it appeared as he clumsily got to his feet and checked the heads-up monitor in his faceplate. All normal, supposedly.
Then he saw that Qi had suffered the same fate as him. There she was behind him, lying facedown on the ground.
“Oh no!” he cried, hopping back to her as if on a pogo stick and crashing to his hands and knees beside her. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was right in his ear. She rolled and sat up, holding her belly in both hands. “I landed right on the kid.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes. Damn, this kid is going to have seen everything.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know! Help me up.”
He stood, grabbed her outstretched hands, both of them awkward in their thick gloves, and precariously they pulled on each other until she was standing too.
“Let’s get to that shelter,” she said.
Two or three kilometers had not sounded like much when Ta Shu had mentioned it in his warning, but as they began to walk, Fred couldn’t help realizing that it was farther than would have been nice. If they had only stayed on the rover another ten minutes, they would have been next to it.
But then the empty rover, by now several hundred meters ahead of them on the road, and thus looking as if it were almost to the horizon, flew apart. No sound, no gout of flames—just explosive dissolution and a giant puff of dust, which shot into space equally in all directions and then slowly drifted to the ground, after which the blackened and twisted wreckage of the rover stood there in the middle of the road like an ancient wreck. A faint plume of ultrafines hung over the thing, then around it. Then all around them flares of dust started jumping out of the moonscape. Pieces of the rover, these had to be, falling lazily back onto the moon and kicking up clouds of dust. A piece could fall right on them, possibly a big piece, and Fred scanned the starry sky overhead to see if he could spot anything, but saw nothing. If they got hit they got hit. At least it would be sudden.
He wanted to say something, but nothing came to him. His tongue was tied. Hers too, it seemed. He could feel his pulse thudding hard and fast in him.
“Damn,” he said at last.
She looked at him through their faceplates, looked away. “Someone’s after us.” Having her voice right in his ear was a strange disjunction, one of several caused by wearing the spacesuits. He could barely see her face through their faceplates, but her voice was right there in his left ear, as he presumed his was in hers.
“Yes,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Apparently so.”
“It means Ta Shu’s information was good. Can you tell him what happened, and ask him if he can find out anything more?”
“When we get to the shelter I can try. I’d also like to know if whoever it is can still see us now, even just walking around. From orbit I mean. Or from Earth for that matter.”
“We better hope not. Come on, let’s get to that shelter.”
She led the way, starting at a good pace, which soon began to flag. “Hell,” she said. “I feel like crap.”
“We’re almost there,” Fred said.
She made a disgusted noise. “Shut up and walk.”
They did that, although walking was not quite the right word for it; on the flat surface of the road it felt easier to lope, or bunny hop, or skip in a kind of syncopated way that kept one foot always ahead. Soon enough they passed the wreckage of their rover; they gave it a wide berth, although they couldn’t not look at it. It was crushed, and it appeared large parts of it had melted. As they got past the thing and walked on, it struck him that the idea that a moon colony could successfully rebel and throw off Earthly control was an absurd fantasy. Also, that Ta Shu and his unknown informant had saved their lives. For a while anyway. It was hard not to feel somewhat killed; his legs were trembling and he felt sick; but Qi was there and he needed to attend to the moment, so he clenched his racing thoughts and focused on walking.
On they skipped. At one point, despite his efforts to focus, their skipping reminded him of Dorothy and her three companions on the yellow brick road, and he wondered if he was Qi’s Tin Man, Scarecrow, or Cowardly Lion. Possibly he was an amalgam of all three—of the weaknesses of all three. Although the point of the story was that their weaknesses had been illusory weaknesses, indeed unrecognized strengths. He tried to take heart from that, but in truth the sight of the blasted rover was so disturbing his thoughts were still completely scattered.
When they passed a boulder that was almost cubical and about waist-high, Qi veered for it and sat down. “I need to rest,” her voice confessed in his ear.
He sat on the far side of the rock. “We’re almost there.”
“Shut up with that!”
But soon she rose to her feet with a groan, and took a few hopping steps down the road; then she stopped and took Fred’s arm as h
e caught up with her. That almost brought them both down. They were like two drunks trying to get home after a bad night out. She was cursing continuously, or so he assumed by the sound of it.
“What?” he said. “Are you hurt?”
“I think my water has broken,” she said, staring at him through their faceplates for several seconds longer than she would usually make eye contact. It occurred to Fred as he held her gaze that they very seldom made eye contact. All this time together not looking at each other, and now they were. Then she looked away as usual.
“Oh no!” he said helplessly. “Can you still walk?”
“Yes I can still walk! Or I could if it weren’t for this gravity! Let’s go. Let’s try regular walking this time. Very slowly.”
It seemed to Fred that went better, and after a while, during a short rest, he suggested they try going faster. “Try doing a Groucho and see if that’s a bit easier.”
“What’s a Groucho?”
“Didn’t you ever see a Marx Brothers movie? Groucho Marx used to glide around in a weird lowered position. Long strides with his knees bent.”
“I don’t want to bend my knees.”
“Oh. Okay, no bent knees. But let’s try long smooth strides. That’s more like truckin’.” He hadn’t known that he knew so many famous strides of the past.
“Please, just shut up and walk.”
So they tried gliding, and it seemed to Fred both easier on the lungs and less impactful per step. For sure the g lessened all impacts, and they got along pretty well. Once she stopped him and held on to his arm with both hands, bent over at the waist. A shaft of fear shot through him, as no doubt a shaft of pain was shooting through her. This was how disasters started, he saw all of a sudden. You thought you could make it and then you didn’t, and boom, something happened you could never fix or undo.
His suit’s GPS indicated they were no more than a kilometer from the roadside refuge. “We’re almost—”
“Shut up!” And then with a groan she bent over even farther. Hands on knees, shuddering—
“You’re not going to throw up are you?” he asked, remembering that this was supposed to be very dangerous in a spacesuit. “You can’t.”
“Shut up. I’m not going to throw up. It’s a contraction. And don’t say oh no!”
“Okay, but oh my God, we have to get to that shelter.”
“Give me a second, it should pass.”
Then she lost her balance and he caught her and held her from going down, not sure if that was the right move or not. But it was surprisingly easy, and that gave him an idea.
“Here,” he said. “You only weigh about thirty pounds, and so do I. I’ll carry you for a while.”
“Balance,” she objected, and groaned again.
“I know.” He reached an arm down behind her knees and said, “Hop up into my arms. Let me see how that feels.”
She did that and he lifted her up and into him, took a step back to balance her weight against his chest. One arm under her knees, another behind her neck. She had an arm around his neck, and was like no weight at all, or rather a weight like a bag of groceries; a fairly heavy bag of groceries, but nothing like a person. But she still had the mass of a person, as he would have cause to remember if he lost his balance and they started to fall. In his present state of mind, very close to panic, he couldn’t quite remember the laws of mass and weight and velocity and inertia, but he knew from his time on the moon so far that they were tricky nonintuitive problems for a human brain to solve on the fly. He would have to be extremely careful.
He started out slow and stumped steadily along. After a while he felt he had a handle on it and could tell what would happen step by step, if he could just keep to that rhythm.
“How are you feeling?” he asked at one point.
“Bad.”
Their faces were about six inches apart, separated by their helmet faceplates. He kept his gaze ahead, spotted a little road sign on the left side of the track he was following.
“Looks like we’re almost there.”
“Good. I think I can walk now. The contraction is over, if that’s what it was.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
So he let her swing down to her feet, holding on to her shoulders until she was upright and steady. They walked to the road sign, which was in Chinese; she said “Good” and they followed a side track to a mound of lunar rubble with an aluminum door in the side facing them.
The door had a manual handle like a commercial freezer door, and when he opened it they found a lock room, with another door on its far side. This one had a number pad over its handle. Again the instruction panel was in Chinese, but Qi read it and said “Oh good,” and after they closed the outer door and heard the lock aerate, she pressed the zero, and the inner door clicked and she opened it. Another lock, another door, and then they were through and in.
Here they found a functional but adequate space, about the size of a studio apartment. Kitchen nook, tiny bathroom with triangular shower, cabinets filled with supplies, two beds and a table with four chairs filling the living space almost completely.
“Have a seat,” Fred said. “We need to get you comfortable. And I want to turn off all our GPSs.”
She sat on one of the beds and started unlatching her helmet.
Turning off their GPSs turned out to be hard. There weren’t on-off switches in any of the systems, as far as Fred could see; they were more in the nature of little transponders, possibly designed to keep working even if the objects they were part of got smashed in an accident. Black boxes. He had to cut the power to all the gauges in their spacesuits to get their GPSs to stop. In their own wristpads he had to open the backs and detach the wires connecting the GPSs to everything else. Messy brutal hardware surgery, and all the while his attempts to focus were badly hampered by Qi’s muttered curses and outright groans from one of the beds. He knew she would never groan if she could have stopped herself.
While he was disabling the GPSs she got out of her spacesuit, and then her clothes. Shocked, Fred looked to the side until she pulled down the sheets and blankets from one bed and sat down on it and pulled a sheet partway over her. She was not a big woman; her belly seemed about as big as the rest of her.
He had seen the thermostat on the shelter’s control panel when turning the building’s system on. Now he asked her what temperature she would like the room to be, but her vastly irritated “I don’t know, how should I know!” left him with no clue as to what would be best. He guessed warm would be good, and set it for twenty-four degrees, hoping his sense of Celsius relative to Fahrenheit was correct. Actually maybe that was too warm, as he saw her face was sweaty, and it seemed likely that she would only get hotter as her efforts increased. He tapped it down to twenty-one.
He went to her side and told her he had disabled their GPS systems.
“Do you have any medical training?” she non sequitured.
“I took a CPR class once,” he said.
“Shit. I’m not having a heart attack here.”
“I know. But if you do I’ll be prepared. Actually,” Fred said, to forestall her snapping at him, and remembering all of a sudden, “once, when I was staying at a friend’s place, I woke up in the middle of the night because there was this whimpering sound coming from under the couch I was sleeping on. I looked under it and it was a dog giving birth, there was already one puppy out. So I sat there helping her while she had four more.”
“No!” she cried. “Don’t tell me that!”
“Well, it was okay for her. So I think you’ll be fine.”
She kept cursing him, but he did his best to ignore that, and in fact he felt a little reassured by this memory from his past. Birth was a natural process. It happened no matter what the mother wanted or knew about it. Then again, as his mind spun through the years, remembering the few encounters he had had with births of any kind, he recalled a doctor friend of his brother’s telling them that attending to
births was the scariest thing he did, because, as he had put it, you were dealing with two healthy people, either or both of whom could die on you.
This memory Fred regretted remembering, but there it was, and it wasn’t going to go away. All he could do was hope things went normally for Qi, no matter the vagaries of her pregnancy, which had included g forces from zero to about four or five, not to mention the descent of a steep urban mountain, a solar flare event, and the recent fall on the road outside. There was little he could do if things went wrong, and there was no hiding that from either of them. Here they were.
He moved one of the shelter’s four chairs next to the bed Qi was on and sat next to her, intending to time her contractions and the intervals between.
Loud beeps came from Fred’s spacesuit and they both startled badly, Fred even leaping to his feet, which of course threw him up into the ceiling. When he had landed and collected himself Qi said, “What was that!”
“It’s probably that unicaster,” Fred remembered. “I brought it with me.” He went to his spacesuit, unzipped the thigh pocket, took out the device. It was heavier than it looked like it should be; the qubit stabilizers were the cause of the extra weight, Fred knew. He turned it on, then took his translation glasses from the spacesuit pocket. He put the glasses on and peered at the screen, which was now filled by a line of Chinese characters. The red scroll read Calling Chan Qi. This is Peng Ling. Calling Chan Qi.
“Whoa!” He handed it over to Qi.
She read it, looked up at Fred, blinking in surprise. “Do you suppose it’s really her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before this thing was someone claiming to be inside the Great Firewall.”
“Looks like it changed hands.”
“Can they track us here by way of this device?”
“Not instantly. It’s meant to be used for confidential conversations.”
“And no one can overhear us?”
“No. It’s a unicaster, like a phone, and it’s entangled so that if someone tries to listen in the connection will be lost.”
Red Moon Page 41