He was used to the bureaucratic bullshit, at this point. Nothing new to find that he’d only gotten half the things he asked for, and was sent a pile of crap someone else thought he ought to need instead of the things he actually needed. He’d take care of it in his office later – put the list of things he needed in the next shipment order, along with a terse letter to the guys on Earth responsible for making sure those lists were filled. If they kept sending him more crap he didn’t need, he was going to end up having to put up one of those new domes just to store the unnecessary crap. In the meantime, they’d run out of parts for things they actually needed.
Predictably, the thought of running out of parts brought his mind back around to Carmen again. She was obviously still upset with him over the incident on the ship. He wished he could undo that – find some other way. Hell, maybe he could have used one of those new domes to store the guy in quarantine here on the moon. But he hadn’t known he had them until he was already here. And besides, he’d seen videos of how the people sick with this virus died. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t pleasant, and he was pretty sure he’d done the man a favor by putting an end to it for him in a quick and relatively painless manner.
But it wasn’t like he could just explain all that to Carmen. So what could he do that would win back her trust? He found himself wanting to do that with an intensity that surprised him.
5
CARMEN LOOKED UP from her work. She stared, watching the machine chug away at the samples they’d carefully prepared. One of those samples might be it – might be the cure that saved millions from the virus. She had to work at not holding her breath, and looking around the room she could tell she wasn’t the only one. Lab techs and doctors alike were hovering, waiting for the results to come back.
There wasn’t much work to do until they did come back. The most likely result was that all their samples would be failures. And that was OK. It was expected. They’d analyze the failures, learn from the data they collected, and try again.
But the idea that they might just win the lottery and break the virus on the first try was like an attractive nectar, and they were all trapped.
“That’s enough of that,” Doctor Rosa said, he voice sounding firm without being unkind. She broke her gaze away from the samples – her Dad was looking at them all with a smile on his face. She had to grin back. He’d been through this process many times before. He knew precisely how they all felt. But it would be hours before those samples were ready for analysis, and they were all wasting time staring at them like it was a pot of water getting ready to boil!
“I want you all to get out of this lab,” Doctor Rosa said. “You’ve been working very hard. Go read a book. Catch a nap. Eat something. Bathe,” he said, looking pointedly at one of the male lab techs who’d gotten a little shaggy over the last three days. “There won’t be any results for at least six hours. Come back then.”
One by one, everyone began filing out of the room. They all looked a little dazed to Carmen’s eyes. She knew how they felt. There was life outside this lab? After spending so much of the last three days working in here, it almost felt like she’d forgotten about the outside world. She was determined to work harder than anyone else, though. It was the only way she could earn her place here.
“You too, Carmen,” her father said in a chiding tone.
“Oh!” she said. “I’d meant to stick around and help you out…tidy up, if nothing else.”
“There’s nothing left to do, Carmen. Go. Rest. I am sure you can find something to occupy you outside this laboratory for six hours.” He patted her on the shoulder. “You’ve done well. Now rest, because we have more work to do again soon. I need you fresh, and sharp.”
Carmen stood up. “OK, Dad. I’ll be back later, I guess.” She felt as dazed as her co-workers had looked. She set down the tablet that she’d been working on and headed for the door. Six hours. What to do? It was still morning, as the base went. Everyone used Eastern Standard Time here, to keep it simple. She’d only been on shift for a couple of hours, so she wasn’t at all tired. There were a few books she could read…
She hadn’t eaten much at breakfast, and it was heading toward lunch time. An early lunch might be nice. She worked her way around to the dining area. It was really an entire dome, at this point. Carmen had heard that they’d only started with a small space here for food prep, but in preparation for the expanded crew they had cleared out an entire dome for food storage, prep, and eating. Now they had enough tables in place to seat about half the total personnel compliment on the base.
The room was pretty empty as Carmen came in, though. A couple of women from the lab were sitting in the corner, chatting. Carmen took a bowl of stew from a smiling woman working the food line.
“Gracias, Elspeth,” she said.
“De nada,” the woman replied, still smiling. Carmen smiled back. It was hard to keep a smile off your face around that woman, and she had rarely skipped meals since arriving on the moon, as a result. That, and Elspeth gave her a chance to practice her Spanish, which was otherwise getting rusty.
She took the stew and found a seat at an empty table. The two women looked deep in conversation, and Carmen felt loathe to intrude. Instead, she pulled out her pocket tablet and took her father’s advice: she opened a book she’d only just barely started reading, and tabbed to the next page. While she read, she took bites of the hot stew.
One down side of eating in lower gravity: you were limited in what you could prepare and eat. Crumbs and such would eventually fall back to the floor, but things tended to scatter. So thick meals like stew were among the easiest things to prepare and serve. Luckily, Elspeth was a wizard with her meals, and knew the recipes for more sorts of stew than Carmen had even heard of before coming here. Every meal was delicious, which made up for the lack of variety in texture.
She dug into the novel as she ate. It was a romance novel, set some four hundred years ago. A private preference, these books, but she enjoyed the diversion and fantasy. Plus, on her tablet, she could read whatever she wanted and no one else could see what she was reading.
“Carmen. Good to see you.” The voice came from right behind her, and made her jump. She turned, setting down the tablet, and found herself looking up into Patrick’s face.
She inhaled sharply. He was close – had he been reading over her shoulder? She’d let herself get distracted. How long had he been standing there?
“May I?” Patrick asked, gesturing to the chair next to her.
Carmen nodded, and he slid into the seat. Now their eyes were at the same level, and she found she couldn’t break her stare away.
“So I heard the lab is making progress?” he asked.
Shop talk. He wanted to know how the cure was coming along. She could do shop talk… And why did she feel a pang of disappointment? “Well, it’s just the first test,” she said. “It’s unlikely to give us what we’re looking for. There’s probably still a lot of work to be done.”
Patrick nodded. “But until the results are in, you’ve got some free time, right?”
Where had he heard that? “Yes,” she replied cautiously.
“Listen – I know you wanted to spend some more time outside,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea for some of your crew to get certified in the suits and lunar vehicles, and get some experience out there. I’ve got to do a survey run for the next couple of hours, and I was wondering if you’d like to come along?”
Carmen blinked. Was this the same man who’d all but ordered her not to step outside again? Where was this coming from? To be fair – he had said something about not going out without admin permission. If she went out with the base commander, she supposed that ought to qualify! She realized she was staring at him open mouthed, and looked down at her watch quickly.
Still more than five hours before she was due back at the lab. Plenty of time. She looked back up at Patrick and shivered.
“I’d love to. I have to be back in the lab in about fi
ve hours, though,” she said.
“That won’t be an issue,” Patrick replied.
She found herself watching his face. He was so expressive right now, so excited. Nothing like how he looked when he locked his face down. She really appreciated these moments all the more for how rare they seemed to be.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. The stew was about done, so she picked up the bowl and brought it over to the kitchen.
“We’ll take one of the hoppers. I have four survey stations I need to check out.”
“Hoppers?” she asked.
“Come see,” he said with a grin.
Burning with curiosity, she followed him around the ring of domes. Two domes down, they were in a section she hadn’t explored yet. It had been so hectic these past days – there just wasn’t any time to go wandering.
“What is this place?” she asked. It was obviously a research lab of some sort, and pretty well appointed. It wasn’t bio-research, but she recognized tools for geology, chemistry, and there was plenty of gear here that she’d never seen before, too.
“It’s the home of my pet hobby,” Patrick explained, making an expansive gesture with his arms. “It’s where we work to better understand the moon.”
“You do research here?” she asked.
He stared at her for a moment, a quizzical look on his face. “Yes. That’s why the station was built here in the first place, you know.”
She hadn’t. It wasn’t something she’d paid much attention to, beyond hearing bits and pieces in the news about how things were going on the one and only very expensive lunar station. It made sense that there was research going on here, but – if she was honest with herself, she hadn’t expected Patrick to be one of the people doing it. She’d had him pegged as a pilot, administrator type. She needed to re-assess her preconceptions!
And damned if that didn’t make him seem twice as sexy.
“Come on, I’ll show you the Hopper,” Patrick said. She followed him through the room, and down a short hallway. At the end was something that looked a bit like the hatch on an old submarine, hanging open. He grabbed the rail at the top and swung himself through.
Carmen followed a bit more tentatively, not really sure what she was going to bang into if she went too fast. She realized as soon as she crossed the threshold that she’d entered a vehicle of some sort. The space inside was a sphere of transparent material with two seats, both side by side and facing the front. A broad control console rested in front of the seating. Looking through the glass, she saw thrusters attached to the body of the thing, outside the dome. And landing gear.
“It’s like a little spaceship?” she asked.
“More like a submarine designed to operate in low or zero gravity,” Patrick replied. “Come sit down, and I’ll close the hatch.”
She sat. He pulled the hatch in behind her, and turned a wheel, locking the door into place. Then he took his place in the seat next to her. Patrick flipped a series of switches, and the console came to life.
“Base, this is Hopper One. Detaching clamps,” he said.
“Roger, Hopper One. Good hunting,” said a voice over the radio.
Patrick touched a control on the console, and the entire sphere jolted a little. Carmen found the web straps of a seat harness on either side of her and belted the straps into place.
“Just the magnetic locks letting go,” Patrick said. “You ready?”
“Ready?” Carmen said. For what, she wanted to ask. But he took her response as an affirmative, not a question. Patrick gripped two control joysticks on the console, pushing a button on one.
Just like that, they were airborne! Carmen gasped, watching the domes recede under them. The floor was as transparent as the rest of the dome. She saw jets of something that looked like smoke or steam when Patrick hit the thrusters, but aside from that she had a clear view of the land below. She gripped her seat firmly with both hands, hanging on for dear life.
“How high are we?” she asked.
“The altimeter is right there,” Patrick said, pointing to a display with numbers that were climbing steadily. “We’re a hundred feet up right now, see? I’m going to take us up to about five hundred and stay there. You OK?”
Carmen closed her eyes, and then opened them again. She looked ahead, where she could see the horizon of the moon’s surface spilling away before them. It was a glorious sight. Finger by finger, she forced herself to relax her hands.
“Yeah, I’m good,” she said, forcing herself to take even breaths as she slowly relaxed. The more she relaxed, the more she was able to enjoy what she was seeing. “It’s really beautiful up here.”
His eyebrows went up a little in surprise. Aha! So he had done that fast ascent to see if he could shock her. She smiled. Well, he had his fun, but she wasn’t that easy to scare.
“I’m glad you like it. It’s too stark for most people,” he replied.
She could see that. It was stark – bare rock, and fields of dust. Craters, mountains, boulders, cracks and crevasses all displayed themselves beneath the hopper. The terrain was geographically diverse. But it was missing the play of color that you’d see on Earth. No blues, no greens. No amber fields, or rolling hills covered with corn. Despite that, she could see the beauty here.
“I do like it,” she said.
They flew on in silence a little while, each taking in the scene rolling by outside. But the lunar landscape looked much the same in one place as it did in another to Carmen. And she realized she didn’t know much about the mission they were on. Patrick said this was more than just a joyride to show off, right?
“What are we doing?” she asked, breaking the silence.
“Right,” Patrick said, looking over at her. “I have little stations set up, collecting surface data. But they need maintenance. Nothing lasts forever out here, especially if it’s not tended regularly. We’ll check out four of them, but I’m especially worried about one down on the south pole that’s acting up.”
“Isn’t that far?” she asked.
“It is. But we’re moving pretty rapidly. We’ll be there in two hours, work for a bit, and then be back in time for you to be back at the lab.”
Now she was really curious. Two hours seemed an awfully long way away for a remote station. “Why so far?”
“It’s the pole,” he said. “There’s ice down there, in some of the craters, where the sun never shines. Water ice. It’s a great resource for us. This station is doing all sorts of readings – radiation, temperatures. But it’s also a control and charging station for a bunch of little robots that are checking the craters nearby for water.”
“Water seems like such a simple thing,” she said.
He laughed. “On Earth, it is! But out here, it’s life. It’s expensive to get water up here from Earth, but the more humans we bring here, the more of it we need. So if we can find some decent supplies already here…”
“Then you can bring more people, expand the base, maybe even have a small city here,” she said.
“City!” Patrick seemed startled by the idea. “Well, I suppose. But we’re a long way from being ready to build a city here.”
He seemed lost in thought after that, and Carmen felt awkward interrupting his musing. He was such a strange man! Every time she thought she had a bead on him, he went and showed her some new aspect to his personality. It made him both frustrating and fascinating at the same time.
A short while later Carmen felt the thrusters shift and looked over at Patrick again. He was working the controls, and she realized that he was throttling back, applying thrust to slow them down. They must be closing on their destination. She looked outside, but all she saw was more craggy rocks and ridges.
“I’ll bring us down near the site and show you around,” Patrick said.
“We don’t have suits, though?”
“We won’t need them. The Hopper has arms that will manage the maintenance we need to do today. If there was a more complex malfunction, I’
d come out with a suit. But mostly I think we just need to blow dust off the solar panels. And probably clean another rock out of one of the robots’ charging ports.”
She nodded, trying to picture what the work would look like. She’d see soon enough though. Patrick had stopped their forward motion altogether, and now the Hopper was descending. The ground was coming up fast, and Carmen found herself clutching her seat in spite of herself. But Patrick braked gently a few times, and their downward plunge slowed, then halted just a few feet above the rocky ground. Their ship, seeming even more like a soap bubble to her this close to the ground, came to rest with a gentle bounce as the legs absorbed the weight.
He’d set down on the ridge of a crater. Through the glass bubble, Carmen could see dusty solar panels spread out above a crate-like structure the size of a refrigerator.
“If the water is in the craters, why set the base up on the heights?” she asked.
“Need the light for the solar panels,” he replied, setting the ship down gently on the ground. Carmen shook her head slightly at her folly. Of course they needed the sunlight. She could see the panels herself, right? Thankfully, he seemed happy enough about her curiosity to overlook her stupid questions. She held her tongue and watched him work instead.
Patrick goosed the thrusters just a little, and their ship jumped up about two feet into the air and two feet forward. It settled back onto its landing legs as gracefully as the first time, but now Carmen had a much better idea why they called these things “hoppers”! They’d closed about half the distance to the little automated outpost. She looked at Patrick. His brow was furrowed with concentration. His entire being seemed focused on those controls. He hit the thrusters again – a tiny spurt – and they went up and forward another foot. They came to rest about a foot away, and he relaxed back into his seat.
“It’s a pain in the ass if we bang into something in one of these,” he said. “The sphere is strong – aluminum oxynitride. It’s designed to survive even small meteor strikes. But the mass of the Hopper would crush those solar cells, for example. And anytime we bang into anything, we have to take the Hopper offline for a full series of inspections. Takes forever.”
Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1) Page 6