The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  He left with that hanging in the air.

  They did well though. They were in suits and at the airlock in less than twenty minutes. Their suits were really nice too . . . brand new and made specifically for each individual. Bear was a little jealous. His own people wore surplus Russian suits, patched and reworked in a hurry. The company in the US that made the NASA suits had been reluctant to sell them to TESS. The corporate leadership myopically worried about alienating long established business relations in the American Space Administration. They were responding to hints and allegations—byproducts of ill will planted by mid-level NASA bureaucrats dripping poison into the other end of the phone and were slow in realizing that Bear and his people represented a serious source of new business. Poor Pinta and Gaston looked shabby beside the flashy US suits. Gaston was actually short a little toe from working in his used suit. He had been space walking during repairs a couple weeks before and complained that his leg felt numb. He came in and they had found his suit busily venting gas from a half inch tear where a patch on the foot had given way. The numbness in his leg had been from cold, but most of the team were very used to working in cold since the heaters on the suits were often substandard and tended to break fairly often. In fact, suit heat was so hit or miss at times that Gaston had thought nothing of it until his leg actually quit working. In the end he had been lucky, the leg and foot recovered with some frostbite, but his little piggy would never go wee-wee-wee all the way home again. Bear grinned ruefully since it had fallen to him to cut it off with a chisel and hammer. The shop tools were not the surgical tool he would have chosen but they had left surgical tools out of their first aid kit and Bear felt he had to act quickly. It turned out improvised surgery made Bear queasy. It was now high on Bear’s list to ship a medical officer aboard since the discovery that as a surgeon he made a good carpenter. His earth-side recruiter’s ears were burning. You can always learn more from your errors than your successes.

  Bear went on.

  “Lieutenant Gaston and Mister Pinta are going out with you. They are now highly experienced in space operations and performing work in suits in space. I should tell you though that Mister Pinta is a bit deaf these days so speak up will you? They will render some support for an hour or two. After that you are on your own. Stay on the push 1 frequency for communications. We will monitor them on the bridge for difficulties and emergency support.”

  The Air Force Lieutenant Colonel simply nodded. The informal but businesslike way that Bear talked about stepping out into vacuum spoke of experience but did not encourage discussion, which is what he wanted.

  Pinta and Gaston secured their shabby battered helmets and entered the lock like peasants going out to harvest wheat in the fields with hand tools—and looking only a little better. O’Hara had a deal in the works with the outfit that made suits for the European Space Agency so Bear hoped for a change soon. A commander always hated to see his guys not looking strack—it was embarrassing to Bear that he had not given his guys the very best there was.

  A green light later the Americans followed suit, or space suit, and Bear made his way up to ten forward in the ship’s old sail. Through the wide view port that looked aft, he saw TESS’ first American tourists exit the lock’s mouth and stand on the hull gawking at the full spectacle of the moon hanging hugely above them every thirty seconds or so as the ship spun it across their view. When the moon was not there TESS had rigged bright spotlights to counter the dark side part of the spin. It gave everything the appearance of a strobe. No questions in the American’s minds about where they were now—Tycho looked so close you could reach up and touch it. Bear sat down with a longneck to watch. The screw off top bottles worked best in Null-G. You sucked beer up the neck, swallowed carefully, working the muscles of your throat in the absence of gravity to help the beer reach your stomach, then finished with a little out-puff to push the leftover beer back into the bottle. If you shoved your thumb into the corner of your mouth and over the bottle top after a swallow it kept the rest of the liquid in while you watched, conducted your business, or wanted another pull. It was the only way to travel but you had to watch the gas . . . it tended to expand in your gut a bit in space. The curious social by product of this was that the crew barely noticed those around them passing gas from both ends anymore and seldom apologized. It happened too often. It turned out that flatulence does not smell in airplanes or spaceships and the repetitive social politeness conventions were evolving with the extended TESS effort in space.

  He needed his drinking skills a minute later when the Gaia lost spin and he compensated effortlessly, hooking an ankle under a pole by his chair to keep drifting to a minimum. He saw the team of Americans gathered in a cluster at the stern carefully anchored there by their poor TESS relations. He could hear the radios squawking below in the command center and knew they were chatting back and forth excitedly—it was the first time in space for three of them. In between conversations he could see them doing the tourist bit, craning their necks around during their work, their heads back and tracking at the Earth’s moon which now hung motionless above them now. It would not last. Their tour of duty here was for six months. Bear figured they would be sick of looking at the moon by the time they left it.

  The NASA grunts reversed the process of loading done back on Terra without the difficulty of gravity fighting them. Seven people did what had required multi-ton cranes and winches on the boats to do dirt-side—No hoo-hoo. Through a good use of ropes and bungies they controlled the inertia and had their loads out in a couple of hours and lashed tight and handy on the outer hull. By that time Pinta had left them and was standing beside Bear in the lounge watching and drinking a beer companionably.

  He shook his head disgustedly.

  “Rookies!” Pinta said under his breath. “That bastard almost drifted out to the asteroids there . . .”

  Bear thought about that. He would have to check, but suddenly realized that Pinta probably had more space hull working time than anyone in human history.

  “So what are they gonna do Admiral?” Pinta spoke up in a friendly way. “How are they gonna get down to the surface? I don’t think I heard.”

  Bear nodded, Pinta was busy all the time and could easily have missed the meeting on this one. He had been hard-working before the bomber—now that he had survived the attack with only a couple hearing aides to show for it and Bear knew he was going to become a workaholic demon to work off the anger and the boresom of the hospital stay. Bear already planned to order him to bed occasionally. There was some aspect of combat stress there, bits of Baxter had literally splashed on him. He was a danger to no one and the work was his therapy.

  “They are checking numbers on stuff in the load, but when they are done and have it laid out in assembly order they will put together a landing craft just astern of us where it can be tethered to us without the spin of the ship being a problem.”

  “Is it gonna be like the one in the old films from the first Luna mission? The lunar lander thing?”

  Bear shook his head.

  “No. We know a lot more about the moon than we did in those days. They wanted to go straight down and straight up in 1969 because they thought lunar dust might be fifty feet thick. We know better now. This one will be a kind of glider without wings or anything since there is no air to provide lift. This lander will really be just a big clunky fuselage. It’s almost a sled or canoe with skids along the bottom and outrigger wheels for balance. They are learning from TESS to keep things ultra-simple. The idea is that they load all their junk into the thing and spit a bit of fire from a rocket in the rear. It will orbit the moon once and land at a clean shallow angle on some flat ground on the skids. It will slide to a halt using brakes that I understand are just a little better than you find in a luge at the winter Olympics.” He shook his head and shrugged. “For all I know they will throw out an anchor. They will eventually slide to a halt in one big clo
ud of lunar dust. Once down, they offload their gear which is kind of a geo-dome city with airlocks, half dig it in and armor the exposed bits with solar panels, pump in air and bingo, you have a lunar colony. They are already calling it McMurdo since the international space treaties around the moon look a lot like the one for Antarctica. The US is anxious to keep the moon international and figure they can set the standard by being the first to act like it. If it works for the moon they hope it will extend to all new planets. I wish them luck. Not everyone has such high ideals. As for their gear they have some experimental and exploratory equipment and laboratory aides with them, but most of their load is air, food and water. Even with all that we still have to resupply them every two months or so using an unmanned version of their sled. Mostly we will bring more water until they can find some of their own.”

  “Water, Sir?” Pinta asked with an absent air . . . Bear was not sure if he was distracted or had missed some words through his poor bomb-mauled ears.

  Bear nodded visibly.

  “Roger. They need water to scrub their air, replacing oxygen by breaking it out of the water molecule. Also to drink, bath and grow some foodstuffs. They hope to find supplies of ice on the moon, but it will take time if they find any at all. Until then we are their Culligan guys.”

  Pinta nodded and glugged. He swallowed with a bobbing Adam’s apple—Like a digeredoo player using circular breathing. The movement of the knob up and down his long neck was an entertainment in itself.

  ‘That’s a lot of water.’ Pinta said mildly.

  Bear shrugged.

  “We’re water animals. We evolved in water, we are conceived in fluid, we live in H2O for nine months, breath water in our mother’s womb and are eventually born in water. Hell we are just big sacks of the stuff that dribble it out of our pores on a hot day . . . no wonder we need a lot.”

  “I’m trying to replace mine with beer.” Pinta quipped and glugged.”How will they get back up to us when they need to go home?” Pinta asked changing the subject.

  “Oh! When we bring them out, their replacements go down on their own sled that they bring later. This team’s sled is two way. They accelerate to speed along the surface on wheels until they reach a gazillion miles an hour or so and then it pops some rockets or some kind of explosive cap downward, I forget the specifics, and she noses up then and climbs to some kind of orbit—easy in the lesser gravity field of Luna. It does not have to be too exact either with lots of electronics and complicated controls now that TESS is part of the equation. They just need to get to altitude; we catch up, match their orbit, and get them aboard.” He looked at Pinta. “Give that some thought. You and Gaston are probably the poor bastards who will have to go out and snatch them into the ship—we’ll need tactics and techniques to get it all done as safely as possible.”

  Pinta simply nodded. There was plenty to fill his time between now and then. He belched quietly. Bear smelled nothing and ignored it with the new TESS etiquette.

  TESS was in business and making it businesslike was part of the job. When everything is new, everything you finish is a lesson learned. So is everything you don’t finish—which are often called disasters. TESS had been lucky so far. The service had lots of trouble and not too many disasters—at least not big enough disasters to destroy her. If there had been a rope stay nearby Bear would have scratched it for luck like the sailors of old . . . instead he crossed his fingers.

  It was an American company. Li stood in front of their corporate headquarters. They made controls . . . . lots of controls. The controls they made were common in aircraft, automobiles electronics and even in every house and building in North America. Most people would have been surprised to find that they were also common in most of the buildings in Africa, Asia, Antarctica, South America and the Middle East. They were slightly less common in parts of Europe and Australia, but still very widespread even there. Small controls were big business.

  Li smiled and picked up his briefcase. His appointment was for 1030 and it was 1015, He was an important man . . . a recent and new customer of the company who was going to talk to them about new business. New business was the tail that always wagged the dog of American enterprise. The sales staffs were typical whores who would sell anything to anyone for a price that could always be negotiated. There were no exceptions, no reservations and no higher ground so they would say or promise anything. Li had looked with contempt on the prostitution inherent to the marketplace in his youth. Now he understood and found he rather liked the hookers he always found in capitalist businesses. They were egalitarian and eager to please and provided genuine service is you knew how to negotiate. All it took was money.

  Li had money. Worse, he had the promise of a lot more.

  They had not finished building Murray’s team and Murray resented it.

  “Chief . . .” He called First Admiral MacMoran. “This is a big job.” He used the term in the way Jimmy Olsen called Perry White ‘Chief,’ as opposed to Chief of Staff, Chief Warrant officer, or the ever popular Native American Tribal leader. It was a generic term to essentially show his coolness and familiarity with the big Kahuna that Bear had inadvertently become.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Bear said.

  They were jawing in the cafeteria at Anglewood. The place looked like a pastel painted corporate pleasure palace with the recent addition of annoying inspirational posters with really big words like COURAGE, INSPIRATION and INOVATION everywhere. To be correct, he saw them EVERYWHERE. It was depressing to see the distant dreams of corporate drones in the palace of true innovation called TESS. He would have to talk to the cafeteria manager. Get him to replace them with something more related to reality like HARD FREAKING WORK, SHEER FUCKING LUCK or THIS PLACE MAKES MY HEAD HURT!

  “Look!” Murray said, holding his hand wide and leaning forward earnestly as if poised to grab Bear’s head and give him a big bus on the lips. “TESS is a target and I essentially need to watch the whole human race to make sure they are not out to get us. I need help!”

  Bear showed his teeth.

  “That’s an oversimplification. I had a very nice postcard the other day from a little old lady in Zimbabwe who wants us to give her best to the sky gods and wishes TESS great happiness and many children. She bears us no ill will, and certainly does not need watching. So that right there puts you under 7 billion people on your “must watch” list . . .”

  Murray sighed. Bosses in whimsically humorous moods could be very trying to agents of earnestness.

  “OK then!” He said caustically. “With her off my plate I’ll start cutting staff tomorrow.”

  Bear grinned tiredly.

  “I get it Murray.” He said quietly and rubbed his eyes through the lids. “Just so you know all of TESS is under our authorized compliment. You know as well as I do that we can’t cut corners on security, especially after that prick Smith and his bang-o-gram. It takes time to fill slots though; especially if we need to keep out the loons like that bastard. In the mean time we are all short. I talked to Craig and he tells me he gave you three new guys last week. Aren’t they working out?”

  “Oh . . .”Murray large jowls framed almost sensuously pursed fat wet lips to make the sound. “Don’t get me wrong, they are great, but they are just nowhere near enough. I need a person to be assigned to the each country on the planet just for analysis purposes . . . let alone intelligence. Right now I have one for every ten nations on the planet. They just cannot get smart enough fast enough”

  Bear held up his hand.

  “I need your help Murray. Can you just make do for now? As the saying goes, this too shall pass. Actually a better saying translates from the racy Korean. ‘Kashege non Ka she ge da’—loose translation ‘it is what it is.’ Or in English . . . suck it up! I am getting you help as fast as I can.”

  Murray looked defeated as he did whenever anyone appealed to h
is better instincts. He did not have many better instincts and those few were sorely out of practice. “OK, boss.” He said looking more like a whipped dog staring at the rear end of an enthusiastic teammate at the front of the sled’s traces.

  Bear wanted to pat his head, but refrained.

  “Look . . . you are a smart guy . . . focus on the worst . . . leave the rest for later . . . Give me an update on China if you can.” Bear said instead.

  Murray squared his shoulders—a feat in a man whose shoulders were naturally those of a doughboy.

  “I got four different sources looking at China now and I also have synopses of their unclassified intel analysis almost every day. Three of them say that the Chinese are studying us and their intel team inside China think the hit at the three TESS sites was orchestrated by a Chinese rogue agent named . . .” He flipped open a notebook and glanced at it. “Po!” That position makes some sense because Po was known to be a total loose screw who got buried a long time ago here in the US. He was looked at by US intelligence and never made their radar. The FBI and CIA both labeled him a mental incompetent who the Chinese were obviously trying to ditch. He was considered a red herring at the time.”

  “What do you conclude from that?” Bear asked.

  Murray looked like a he had bitten a lemon.

  “For one thing, we need to be better than the CIA and FBI who have moved on to looking elsewhere. I also think the Po answer is at least partial shit. Po was apparently the head of Chinese intelligence for the Eastern US . . . a fourth source I have tells me that he was the lead compiler of Eastern US intel all-source intelligence reports for both industry and espionage.”