Everyone raised their glasses; Henry and Van said, “Hear, hear.”
After they drank, Van tucked back into his frittata. Henry said, “Why ‘Halfway House,’ Oskar?”
Oskar refilled his water glass. “Because it’s about halfway between Mercator and Faustini.”
Henry rolled his eyes at Van; his lips drew up in a wry smile. Van decided that he would not be the first to tell Oskar what a halfway house was.
“What’s next on the agenda, Oskar?” Van asked.
Oskar looked down at his hand, as if there were a checklist printed on his palm. “While you were sleeping, I deployed the scavengers for their first pick-ups. I used the check-out setting, of course, so each will return with approximately one-quarter of its usual load.” He turned to the wall screen and scrolled through a couple of menus. “Two of them have offloaded and returned to the holding area. One is being offloaded now, and four are in the queue. According to its telemetry,” he tapped the display again, “furnace core number one accepted its first influx of aggregate about three minutes ago. It’s too soon to draw any conclusions, but the furnace appears to be operating normally and the off-gassing is within expected parameters.” He pulled the keyboard off the bulkhead and started typing.
“Status report time?”
“Yes,” Oskar said. “The next satellite pass begins in sixteen minutes. It will be good for our report to go up with the ROPS telemetry burst.”
Van caught Henry’s eye, and winked. “Well, make sure you tell Shay and the gang that the Halfway House is up and running.” He leaned back against the curving bulkhead—it forced his chin down to his chest, but he didn’t mind—and closed his eyes.
Grace said, “You never answered Van’s question. What’s next?”
Oskar typed for another minute—unless Van dozed again, in which case it might’ve been longer—before he answered. “We will suit up for a final EVA. We will perform visual inspections of the scavenger robots, pack up the reflectors and the rest of the equipment, and then do pre-trip inspections of the LSOV and the LVN.”
Van sat back up. “Then let’s get this mess cleaned up,” he said. “Or, on second thought, leave it. The quicker we get done, the quicker we’re on our way south. It’s Grace’s turn to drive, so I’ll clean up the mess before I rack out.”
No one suggested a different plan, and Oskar didn’t have to consult a checklist to agree with the idea. They suited up and cycled through the airlock, at which point Grace and Van met the ’bots in the holding area while Henry and Oskar started stowing equipment.
“Hey,” Henry radioed, “since we’re in the mode of naming things, I hereby dub the LVN the ‘Turtle.’”
Henry must’ve turned one of the reflectors toward the LVN: between the sunlight cascading onto its rounded bulk and the additional light shining up onto its midsection, the truck did resemble a shiny, misshapen turtle. The body was the main living area: supported on four big metal-mesh wheels that were lost in the underbelly lighting, and covered with a shell of solar panels that provided auxiliary power two weeks out of four. On short trips, or even on long trips like this one with a fairly light load, the panels were redundant—the ARG powered the drive system, and the lights, heat, and other necessities ran off flywheel generators that the ARG recharged when the truck wasn’t moving. The vehicle’s cab was the creature’s bulbous head, complete with windows for eyes except there were more than two. But this was a grossly mutated turtle, since the cab had wheels of its own; the LVN was not an articulated rig, but its cab could detach and operate independently for as long as its separate battery power lasted.
Henry’s choice of names didn’t quite describe the vehicle’s complete shape, though: the ARG was in a flat, blocky section at the back where the tail would be, with two exterior cargo beds on either side of it. But Van figured Turtle at least had the virtue of being a short name.
Apparently Oskar liked the idea. “So be it, Henry,” he said.
As Van and Grace finished checking the scavengers after their shakedown run—Grace had to tweak one of the ’bots she’d operated on before—Oskar said, “Grace, Van, these shades are not placed correctly.”
“Which ones?” Grace asked.
“Over the holding tanks,” Oskar said. “When the satellite passed over, it imaged the area and I got it downloaded just before it dropped over the horizon. The image is stored in the ROPS-laydown directory, in a subdirectory called ‘verification.’ Open it and you’ll see what I mean.”
Van swayed a little as he concentrated on finding and opening the image file. His fatigue gnawed at him again.
The image was grainy, as befit the low-bid piece of crap satellite orbiting the big rock. It looked similar to the photo survey of the route they had driven, but that had only been useful because it combined images taken over many days and the different Sun angles made it possible to estimate the heights and characteristics of obstructions. This was a one-pass image, and not a very good one.
The Consortium wouldn’t pay for a good reconnaissance satellite—since the Moon doesn’t change much year to year, like the Earth does, and nothing much happens on it, they figured a dedicated recon satellite would be a waste of money. Not only that, the satellite was more of a big fuel tank than anything else just to keep it from crashing: with very few stable low-altitude orbits, it frequently performed orbit corrections because the Moon’s gravitational field perturbed its orbit. Henry said the Moon’s gravitational field was “lumpy”—a technical term, he promised—because its composition wasn’t uniform: too many mass concentrations from impacts over the millennia. So they put the satellite in a medium-altitude orbit and made it a multi-tasker, which to Van meant that it was a kludge that didn’t meet anybody’s requirements.
In this case, it was a multi-spectral sensor when a hyper-spectral suite wouldn’t have cost that much more, but it was also underpowered and couldn’t run all of its sensors and communications equipment at the same time. Its orbit wasn’t optimized for remote sensing or communications, and it wasn’t supposed to be the communications workhorse anyway. LunarComm had been chartered to build and deploy a twelve-satellite constellation using highly elliptical orbits to provide complete coverage; then their twelve satellites became eight, of which only one had been fielded and it was a dead orbiting rock. If LunarComm didn’t make good on their promise soon, the AC said they would insert a dedicated communications link at the L-1 Lagrange point—but how long that would take, Van couldn’t know. Meanwhile, they put up with intermittent communications and dreadful imagery.
“Okay, Oskar, what am I looking at?” Van asked.
“Look at the angle of the shadows,” Oskar said, “and think about how the Sun angle will change through the entire lunar day. I think the canopies over tanks three and four need to be shifted.”
“I don’t buy that, Oskar,” Van said. “The damn canopies reach almost all the way to the ground.”
“I think I see what he means,” Grace said. “It won’t be too hard to move them. They don’t have to move far.”
Frustration bubbled over into Van’s reply. “I don’t care how easy it is, I just don’t think it’s necessary. But I’m not in charge.” He took a breath and erased the satellite image from his helmet display. “One thing, though. Let’s get everything else packed up, so that’s the last thing we have to do before we leave.”
Oskar agreed, to Van’s surprise. The reflectors were the last things to be put away, once it was clear that none of the shadowed areas needed any more work. They left three of the reflectors with the power station and carried the rest to be re-stowed aboard the LSOV. The flyer was almost three kilometers away, which was still close enough to at least worry about flying debris when it lifted off.
“Shoot, Oskar, we should’ve driven all this stuff over here,” Van said.
“Why? Don’t you enjoy the exercise, the fresh air?”
“The air in my suit hasn’t been fresh for hours.”
“Days
,” Grace said.
Henry added, “I can smell you all the way over here.”
As they loaded the folded units into the LSOV’s cargo hold, Van tried mightily to think of a good name for the vehicle—but the only thing he came up with when he looked at the thing was “Horsefly.”
On the way back, they switched off carrying two sets of worklights and stands. They left them by the LPPN, for future use, then the four of them met together at the base of the canopy shading the number four tank. “I’ve marked the new positions of the support posts,” Oskar said. “It’s mostly a shift in angle for each canopy. It shouldn’t take us too long.”
Van hopped over to the nearest post. Oskar’s mark was only about twenty centimeters away. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Van said. “That’s absolutely ridiculous. You’re holding us up because of a quarter meter? Didn’t you see how fuzzy that picture was?”
“That corner moves the least. The others move more, to twist the canopy to the proper position.”
“No, Oskar, that makes no sense. You’ve gone way beyond the resolution in that image. I’m sorry. I understand you like precision—hell, your eyes are calibrated to the nearest microradian—but there’s at least a half-meter slop in everything we’ve done here.”
“No,” Oskar said, “there’s a half-meter slop in everything you’ve done here.”
A burst of adrenaline came with the urge to hit Oskar, but Van got himself under control. He wasn’t going to win the argument, and he was too tired to keep it going just for fun. He took a drink of stale suit water and set to work with the others.
An hour and a half later, Oskar said, “Good work, everyone. I think that wraps everything up.”
“You wrote a good plan,” Grace said.
Oskar bowed a little. “Thank you. Speaking of which, the next item is a mandatory six-hour rest period.”
“You’re not seriously going to hold us to that, are you, Oskar?” Van asked. “We could be fifty klicks down the trail by then. Grace is okay to drive, aren’t you, Grace?”
“It does not matter,” Oskar said before Grace could answer. “Everyone has worked hard, and resting now will avoid accidents later. Henry and I will preflight the LSOV and run the final checklist when we get up.”
“Plus,” Henry said, “we’ll get a chance to verify everything’s working right with the ROPS before we take off.”
Van couldn’t fault the logic, but he bristled at being told to wait around. Oskar said, “So go back to the LVN—excuse me, the Turtle—”
“Hey, should it be ‘Tortoise’ instead?” Henry said.
“No,” Grace said. “Turtle is fine.”
“As I was saying,” Oskar said, “go back to the Turtle and do your walkaround, then get inside and sleep. We will radio you when we are ready to depart.”
“Affirmative,” Van said. “Come on, Grace. We’ve still got dishes to do.”
She corrected him. “No, you’ve got dishes to do.”
Van climbed on the trailer as Grace gathered the few tools she had used. The remaining load wasn’t much—primarily scavenger robots for the ice collection station at Faustini—and Van rearranged it to his liking and tied everything down in about twenty minutes.
He leaned against the front corner of the trailer and rested for a second. “Okay, I think we’re ready,” he radioed.
Grace laughed. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
Her words choked out between chuckles, “You kind of painted yourself into a corner there, Van.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “though it might look that way to the untrained eye.” He started threading his way around the robots and tooling and crates of blasting explosives, back toward the tailgate, but down each side he quickly ran out of places to step. He could maneuver across the front of the trailer fine, but getting back to the lift gate was another matter.
“Then again, maybe I did,” he said, and considered how long it would take to clear a path and tie everything down again.
Heck with that.
He climbed up the stake bed side, balanced on the corner for a second, and hopped down.
At least it was supposed to be that easy. Hopping around the surface had become second nature, but jumping down from an elevated height was a little trickier—especially when someone put a helmet-sized rock in your landing zone without telling you.
The force of impact wasn’t bad, but inertia and momentum worked just like they did on Earth—mass was mass, after all. Van’s foot slipped down on the rock and he stopped for an instant before his body continued its motion. His knee tore apart. He wasn’t sure if he heard the sound inside his suit or if it had been transmitted through his own tissues, but he could almost distinguish between the pop of cartilage shunting aside and the snap of tendons being wrenched out of place.
Van cursed an instant before he skidded across the lunar plain.
“What’s wrong?” Grace asked, and Oskar echoed her question a second later.
Van gritted his teeth as he rolled himself onto one side. He checked his systems display and verified that his suit was okay, then he muted his microphone while he tried to move his knee. A sharp pain shot through his kneecap as if a circular saw blade was slicing through his leg—not quite as bad as the time he’d taken a crackback block in the third quarter of the state championship game, but almost. He pushed himself partway up, turned his mic back on, and said, “Nothing, Oskar.”
Van twisted around, keeping his right leg straight out. Grace was bouncing toward him. He waved to her that he was okay.
She didn’t get the message. “Van’s hurt,” she said.
“Hurt how?” Oskar asked.
“It’s nothing, Oskar,” Van said as smoothly as he could. “Took a little tumble is all. Go ahead and get the LSOV ready and go to sleep.”
“It doesn’t sound like ‘nothing.’ I’m coming to see.”
Van shook his head inside his helmet. Oskar was coming to see: that hurt worse than the pain in his knee.
Chapter Ten
Intrepid Adventurers and Would-Be Heroes
Saturday, 2 December 2034
Dim light bled from under the bathroom door. It barely overcame the digital clock display and the occasional red blink from the smoke alarm, and the semidarkness matched Stormie’s mood.
Maybe it was because they were back in Santa Barbara, but in her dreams the tires squealed again, metal tore, and glass broke. Again that beautiful girl lay broken, people stared, and she had blood on her hands. As many times as she relived it, she always did the same thing—the only thing she could do.
She slid out of bed as gently as possible, to let Frank sleep, and curled herself into the chair by the window. Her nightgown was gossamer, and the room’s chill raised goosebumps that barely counteracted the lingering fire of the picophage treatment.
She acknowledged that the memory of fire in her bones was all in her head, but she could not shake it. Her pride hurt, that she, the queen of checklists and proper procedure, had ignored every protocol about blood-borne illnesses and put pressure on a bleeding wound with her bare hands. She hadn’t forgotten the precautions, hadn’t exactly thrown caution to the wind, but had she made the right decision? Every time she recalled that girl’s blood, pumping slower and growing colder, she knew the answer was no—she’d almost waited too long. Trying to save the girl wasn’t her mistake; wasting time asking for damn plastic bags was her mistake.
Frank rolled over. He rummaged in the covers, but when he didn’t find her he asked, “Have you gotten any sleep?”
“Not much. A couple of hours, maybe. I can’t get my brain to shut off. I wish Jim would just give us the word and not go through all these eleventh-hour oscillations. I’ll go sit in the lobby or the courtyard if I’m keeping you up.”
“No, my dear, stay exactly where you are. It won’t be long before we have to get up anyway. If you think it will help,” he sat up and patted the mattress, “come here an
d let me rub your back.”
“That’s okay. I don’t need my back rubbed.”
“Very well.” Frank lay down on his stomach and said, “Then come here and rub my back.”
Stormie wondered at his calm. They’d had full physicals the day before, with more bloodwork than usual, but he didn’t seem worried that the Consortium might rule them unfit to fly. Maybe he was just trying to calm her through osmosis.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Frank’s back was broad and warm, not heavily muscled but still strong, especially through the shoulders. He relaxed under her fingers—
She sat back and clasped her hands together, resisting the urge to retreat to the bathroom and wash them. She’d taken to washing them often, as if after six weeks they might still carry some vestige of blood on them. It was an irrational fear, and didn’t she have enough rational fears to worry about? She shook her head. Soon enough they would know if the dream still had a chance of coming true.
She took a deep breath, forced her hands apart, and pressed her fingers against Frank’s back.
* * *
Frank sighed. He had hoped offering Stormie a back rub, and then asking for one himself, might help her put aside the fear that was ravaging her. But where her touch used to be strong and sure, now it was tentative, as if she was afraid to put forth full effort.
After a few moments, he rolled onto his side and grasped her hand. “Come with me,” he said. “Get dressed, and let us walk.”
She tried to pull away from him, but he held her fast. “I don’t know if I’m up to that,” she said.
“You will be, my love, because I am. I will help you.”
The early morning was cold, and the street was comparatively quiet. Frank enjoyed the sensation of Stormie huddled next to him, his arm around her. He could try to protect her, to shield her from the world, but he wished most that he could deflect the criticism she aimed at herself.
As they drew nearer to the beach, Frank recalled their moments there before the accident. He flexed his fingers and remembered the feel of the sand Stormie had dripped into his hand. The grains were sharp, almost harsh, and he had wished for the feel of soft, rich garden soil. Peat moss. Loam. He had closed his fingers tight, to make a little ball, but the ball crumbled when he opened his hand again.
Walking on the Sea of Clouds Page 10