Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  Mighty Joe reprogrammed the flight computer to give him a three-dimensional layout of all orbital objects above the lunar nearside. The AOMV stage of the Michael Collins was clearly visible near the left edge of the screen, designated by its blue alphanumeric code-letters, but he wasn’t concerned with its immediate whereabouts. Instead, he typed in a set of commands which logoned the navaids course-calculation subsystem. “Now, where is this sucker going to take us?” Joe asked no one in particular.

  “Hmm?” Rusty glanced up from his situation. “Why worry about it?”

  “Just a little change of plan here …” Mighty Joe’s voice trailed off as he studied the screen. Feeling Rusty’s and Anne’s eyes on his back, he looked up at them. “I want us to get that Spam-can we’re looking for in the cargo bay and checked out before we land again.”

  “Hey!” Noonan yelled. “What do you mean ‘us’? You mean I gotta put that thing in the mid-deck?”

  “Yeah, and bring it back out again.” Before the cargo spec could protest, Joe raised his hand. “Just wait a second and listen. We got that new GM down there, and you heard his speech about him wanting to make everything at the base a straight act. Now, what do you imagine will happen if we open that can while he’s standing around?”

  Noonan’s mouth closed. She slowly exhaled and grumpily lay back in her seat. “Okay, all right, so you’ve got a point.” She shook her head and gazed up through the docking window. “Bet you’re doing this just for that monkey-dick crack.”

  “Naw, hold it a minute, Annie,” Rusty said. “He’s got a good idea, but we’ve got to get the timing perfect.” He leaned over the console, stroking the tip of his blond mustache as he peered at the swift-moving track of the Collins’ estimated trajectory. “Let’s just look at this thing and figure out how to make the offload without someone getting suspicious.”

  A constant signal transmitted by radio beacon by the moonship’s AOMV stage was received by Descartes Station’s space traffic control computers and automatically relayed back to the tug through the ground-based telemetry link. It took a lot of the guesswork out of orbital rendezvous, since the base and tug computers could handshake and agree where a particular object lay in a standard orbit—in this case, a slightly elliptical orbit a little more than fifty miles above the lunar surface. In the subroutine Mighty Joe had plugged in, the computers could also estimate with a low degree of error the trajectory the AOMV would take for each minute of its orbit above the Moon.

  “Look at this,” Rusty said. The blue-tinted object twice circled the lunar polar projection, crossing the dark-shaded eastern terminator, moving on a dotted hemispherical trajectory, moving again into the western terminator, and finally crossing the eastern terminator again. The co-pilot, who had been studying the swift-changing set of numbers at the bottom of the screen, jabbed his finger at the display the third time the AOMV crossed the eastern terminator. “That’s it,” he said softly, and tapped the keyboard’s HOLD button with his finger. “Check out the numbers, Joe.”

  Mighty Joe studied the coordinates. “Yeah, yeah …” He nodded. “I think that’s the ticket, all right. Beauty. Three orbits in two and a quarter hours should give us enough time to get it in the cargo bay and unloaded. We can offload right here at the east terminator if we cut it right.” He pointed at the blue light’s estimated XYZ axial coordinates shortly after it crossed the eastern terminator. “Think we can hack it?”

  “No sweat.” Rusty had already begun to enter the parameters for rendezvous and linkup with the Collins into the navaids computer. “Might be close, though,” he added as he bent over the keypad, fixated on the readout. “Seriously. It’s shaving the fuel supply a bit close, and we’ll have to work fast to get the stuff unloaded in the cargo bay without them catching on.… Three orbits, that’s okay, but if we have to go into four there might be a few questions and … lemme see, if we’ve got the return crew coming up at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow and …”

  He mumbled to himself for a few moments. Joe and Annie stared silently at him until Rusty suddenly twitched and looked up at them again. “Yeah, sure,” he murmured. “We can pull it off. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Don’t worry about it.”

  “No problems, Russ?” Annie asked quietly. “Just like the last two times? You’re sure?”

  The co-pilot blinked and nodded, then returned his attention to the keyboard. They had gotten used to Rusty’s becoming obsessed with the more abstract aspects of orbital mechanics. Mighty Joe looked over his shoulder at Anne Noonan. “We better hope they have some marijuana stashed in that thing,” he said solemnly. “Flying with this guy straight is beginning to get on my nerves.”

  “Hey, at least I can count on his calculations.” Annie was already unbuckling her seat harness. “If we had to rely on you, we’d be on our way to Mars right now.”

  She gently pushed herself out of her seat, did a midair somersault with her knees bent in, then guided herself with out-stretched hands toward the mid-deck hatch. On the back of her utility vest, a skull wearing a space helmet sneered at the pilots. The lower rim of the Vacuum Suckers patch was embroidered with the words: AD ASTRA PER BULLSHITUM. “I’m going down to get in the iron lady,” Noonan said. “Let me know the second we’re hard-docked and I’m outta here.”

  “Okey-doke,” Mighty Joe replied. He was admiring the view of her rear end. So round, so smooth, so positively aerodynamic … “Hey, are you sure you’re eating right?” he asked lasciviously, stretching a hand out toward her buns. “Seems like you’re gaining a little weight right around …”

  “Back off, bub!” Noonan kicked backwards with her left leg, almost landing the sole of her foot square in Joe’s face. He dodged and yanked his hand back as she twisted the latch and opened the hatch.

  “Adolescent sexist …” she muttered as she vanished into the mid-deck cargo hold.

  Mighty Joe chuckled as he turned back around to his console; Rusty looked up at him and shook his head. “One day, you’re going to push it just a little too far with her,” he said quietly. “And man, I wanna be around to watch when it happens.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” Mighty Joe reached up and toggled the switches that opened the jaws of the Dreamer’s forward docking adapter, readying it for linkup with the Collins. He chuckled again, watching through the windows as the flanges of the docking collar slowly spread open. Beyond the prow of the ship, he could already see the elongated spot of light which was the AOMV, slowly coasting above the limb of the Moon. And now for the second nifty part of this job …

  “Episode Five!” he exclaimed. “Space Pirates! When we last saw Flash, he and Dale were about to bang the daylights out of each other, when Ming’s cutthroat pirate fleet suddenly …”

  “Yeah.” Rusty reached up to swing the periscope down from the ceiling bulkhead. “Shiver me timbers and all that stuff.”

  When Les Riddell came up the central stairwell into MainOps, he was astonished by the size of the new command center. Eight years ago when he had been in charge of Descartes, the command center had been a narrow module little larger than the interior of a mobile home; five people couldn’t fit in there together without constant jostling and elbow-rubbing. He had always remembered the old command center as a claustrophobic, vaguely depressing place: cramped, littered with food wrappers and dogeared logbooks, fitted with partly disassembled instruments which looked as if Skycorp had bought them secondhand at a going-out-of-business sale held by the Chinese space program.

  The new MainOps, by comparison, appeared as if it feasibly could be converted into an additional rec room. The large, circular compartment had a twelve-foot ceiling, carpeted floors, upholstered swivel chairs in front of the work stations, even a raised dais in the room’s center for the general manager’s station. Four recessed, wall-sized windows, made of photosensitive lunar glass and spaced equidistant from each other around the room, looked out over the base and the highlands. The indirect lighting was subdued without provoking eyestrain; the
consoles were sleek aluminum desks, with push-button covers that slid over the keypads when they were not in use. Someone had even taken the trouble to hang small pots of ivy and fern on the walls that were not occupied by computer screens and TV monitors.

  In all, MainOps had the efficiency of a supertanker’s bridge combined with the ambience of a den. Lester stopped in the doorway to admire the room. Skycorp’s engineers had obviously learned some lessons over the past few years about designing a user-friendly work environment, even if the rest of the base was coldly utilitarian. It figured that Skycorp would make things as comfortable as possible for the command staff, while failing to take into consideration the living areas and work places occupied by the rest of the personnel.

  Behind him, at the top of the spiral staircase, Tina McGraw coughed and gently prodded his back, shaking Lester from his reverie. The new security chief was impatient to get down to business. Riddell took a couple of steps farther into the command center, and McGraw immediately pushed through the open hatch past him, stalking into the circular aisle which led behind the duty stations.

  “I want a Mercator projection of near-lunar orbit on the main screen,” she said briskly to no one in particular. “Three-dimensional projection, including the positions of the Schmitt and the Collins’ AOMV and their trajectories. Now.”

  The eight shift-officers in the command center looked over their shoulders; first at McGraw, then at Riddell. The expressions on their faces registered the same unspoken thought: Who the hell is this woman, and aren’t you the guy who’s supposed to be giving orders around here? Lester walked in front of McGraw, gently yet firmly pushing her out of his way.

  “This is Tina McGraw,” he explained. “She’s with the NASA enforcement division … our new security chief.” He paused, then added, “Skip the Mercator projection and give us a Lambert sphere only, please. But put the tug and the AOMV on the chart, too.” He glanced at McGraw and pointedly added, “Please.”

  The young Japanese-American man at the Traffic Control station tapped instructions into his keyboard as Lester walked up the three steps to the dais. McGraw followed him onto the platform. As he settled into the command chair—his chair—and touched the studs that recessed the panels into their slots, he caught a fleeting glimpse of McGraw’s irritated face. Tough shit, lady, he thought. I’m the head honcho around here, not you.…

  Lester logged himself in, adding McGraw’s name to the computer record almost as an afterthought, listing her as “Security Chief.” He then put on a headset, fitting the right earpiece against his ear and draping the rest of the unit loosely around his neck. A spherical projection of the Moon and its near-space environment had already appeared, both on a wall-screen above the TRAFCO station and on a smaller screen on his console. A blue and a red point of light moved in circular orbits around the Moon, tracing broken lines as they moved toward an intercept point near the eastern terminator.

  “Focus on the tug, please,” Lester asked. At first, nothing happened. The traffic control officer gazed straight ahead at his console, his headset clamped firmly to his ears. Lester opened his mouth to repeat the request more loudly, then stopped and examined his headset. It was one of the newer bone-conduction units which had replaced the old acoustical headsets. Damn, Lester thought. Have they changed everything in this place?

  He repositioned his own headset so that the bone-phone rested firmly against his jaw and repeated the order. This time the TRAFCO heard him; his fingers danced on his keypad and a window opened on the screen for a zoom-in shot of the Beautiful Dreamer. The red spot, designated by alphanumeric code, appeared in the close-up frame, rapidly closing in on the blue spot of the Collins’ first-stage booster. As the two spacecraft crossed the eastern terminator at the D’Alembert Mountain range, the dotted lines subtly changed, depicting their computer-estimated trajectories. Lester had to remind himself that he’d left the AOMV behind only a few hours earlier. Given the events that had taken place since, it seemed as if it had been much longer. Hell, it had been a long day.…

  He examined the screen for a moment, then swiveled around in his chair to face McGraw. “Okay,” he said, “there’s the tug we just launched and there’s the Collins. Looks like a routine cargo-recovery mission to me. You were saying something about piracy?”

  Tina McGraw’s narrow eyes bored into the projection on the wall-screen. “Why can’t you get more than an estimation of their trajectories over the farside?” she asked. “And why did you ignore my request for a Mercator projection?”

  “We don’t have radar installations on the other side of the terminator capable of reporting a cohesive picture,” Lester replied casually. He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers together; he had to admit he was beginning to enjoy vexing the security officer. “That’s because navigational radar dishes over there would interfere with the VLF radiotelescope at Hawking Station. They’ve got very sensitive instruments working full time at Krasovsky Crater, and any radar we’d put on farside would foul their reception.”

  McGraw frowned. “I see,” she said, in a tone which suggested that she really didn’t understand.

  “You can’t get a Mercator projection without those navigational radar dishes,” Lester continued, “because you need farside radar to give you an accurate fix on something’s trajectory in order to establish its flightpath. All we can do is display its position over the nearside and give a best-guess computer estimate of where it is when it crosses the terminator to the farside. It’s a necessary compromise.”

  McGraw appeared less than satisfied with Riddell’s explanation. Yet she said nothing and stolidly watched the screen. Lester watched as her narrow eyes squinted to slits, her mouth pursed in a pugnacious scowl. There was much about McGraw which reminded Lester of pushy small-town cops he had met in the past, the type who couldn’t get enough of throwing their weight around. “It’ll do,” she said simply. “We’ll just watch and see. Give me …”

  She glanced at Riddell and deferentially rephrased her request. “Can you please ask your TELMU to see if he can locate an orbital object with a radio beacon transmitting at 103.5 kilohertz? If he finds it …”

  She stopped; an enigmatic Cheshire-cat smile grew on her face. “When he finds it,” she corrected herself, “ask him to match that object with the appropriate image on the screen.”

  What in the bloody hell was going on here? Yet instead of asking, Riddell turned around in his chair until he found the young, blond-haired man sitting at the TELMU station. He started to call to him, then paused. If he wanted to establish himself as being the head man, it would help if he started calling his people by their given names. Simply yelling “Hey, you!” wasn’t a good way to gain anyone’s confidence. Funny how those things were coming back to him. Maybe I did want this job back after all, he mused as he tapped into the logbook again.

  He found the name of the telemetry officer now on watch: Schneider, Jeremy. “Schneider,” he said, and the TELMU’s head cocked slightly as he heard the general manager’s voice in his headset. “See if you can locate an orbital object which is transmitting at 103.5 kilohertz. When you get it, pass it over to TRAFCO … ah, Shimoda … for him to plot on the screen. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Schneider bent over his console, but his fingers hesitated for a few moments before they went to work. Lester noticed the meticulous way in which Schneider entered the instructions; he obviously was still learning the commands. Must be another new guy, Lester thought distractedly.

  “There,” McGraw said suddenly. “You see?”

  Riddell glanced back at the screen. Something odd had happened. A second window had opened on the screen; the numbers showed that the frequency-search had discovered just such an object. The Collins’ AOMV was now depicted in a lapsed-time sequence just before it had crossed the eastern terminator. As Shimoda eliminated the unnecessary second window—now the blue blip of light had a second alphanumeric code scrolled beneath it as it circled the farside of the Mo
on—Lester glanced again at McGraw and noticed that she had a distinctly smug look on her face.

  McGraw looked down at him. “That’s a transmitter which was covertly placed in a Spam-can before it was loaded on the Sally Ride, Mr. Riddell,” she explained, reading the expression on his face. Lester couldn’t help but notice that she had reverted to formality in addressing him. “It was supposed to be on a Spam-can manifested for an OTV to Olympus Station. I wonder how it ended up on the Collins instead?”

  Lester stared back at her, then looked back at the screen. He had been on the Ride, too, when he had taken it up to Phoenix Station. McGraw had already been at Phoenix when he had arrived, come to think of it. Too many things were getting weird too fast. “How did … Why was a transmitter put aboard the …?”

  “I’ll explain the details later,” McGraw said impatiently. She leaned over the back of a vacant chair and watched the big screen intently. “The important fact right now is that the Spam-can has a homing transmitter aboard which allows us to track it.”

  Lester rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger as he watched the tracks of the two spacecraft intercept over the lunar farside. He was getting sick and tired of McGraw’s attitude. She had hidden her identity from him for the three days that they were aboard the Collins, then presented herself as the new security chief as if she were the head of a Central American secret police force, following which she attempted to run his command center as if he were a puppet leader. Now she was operating on a hidden agenda which suggested that Skycorp and NASA had plotted something in advance, a weird sting operation in which he was expected to obediently play a passive role. Something strange was happening here, and he didn’t like what he had seen of it so far.

  “Okay, McGraw,” he said softly, “what’s going on?”