by Bob Goddard
Still reeling from the news, he’d felt numb as he organised new triple-shift rotas with the engineering staff and briefed a new intake of ‘Lab Rats’ on health and safety. It seemed like everything needed doing at once. He’d sprinted to and from the cavern twice already. Now he was back at the bottom of the farm, checking on the final fit-out of the new tube. It was already being planted up by Lian’s people, new seedlings going into the hydroponics troughs while the LED grow-lamps were still being installed.
He desperately needed to speak to Ginny, but that would have to wait until the sun rose over California. No point in making an awful day worse by waking her early. He also needed to speak to Lian about the next tube which would be connected and pressurised later that afternoon, but she seemed to have disappeared and wasn’t answering her comm.
Ah well. It was 13.10 and his stomach was rumbling. He’d go grab some lunch and try to track down Lian afterwards. On a whim he decided to jog up to the Lunar Lunchbox via the western corridor tube which few people used. Another run would stretch his legs and stop him from thinking too much.
Will had just bounced into the empty corridor and turned ready to run up the gentle slope to the canteen when he heard a stifled moan which stopped him in his tracks. Twenty metres away two people were pressed up against the plass wall in the grip of passion. It wasn’t unusual to catch two colonists stealing a kiss. There wasn’t a lot of privacy at Armstrong Base.
Will was about to retrace his steps and use the other corridor tube to give them some space when he realised something was wrong. Another moan sounded strange, like a hand over a mouth. Then he saw a dark-haired woman struggling before the man slapped her face.
“Hey!” shouted Will. “The hell is going on?”
The man turned his face just long enough for Will to see it was distorted with rage. Then he was off, running up the tube, leaving the woman to slide down the wall to the floor.
Will covered the distance in a few strides and was shocked to find the woman was Lian, a thin trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth and her coverall ripped apart.
“Jeez, Lian. The hell happened here? You all right?”
She nodded but seemed too traumatised to speak.
“Gonna get you some help. Stay right here, Lian. Okay?”
She nodded again.
“And I’m gonna catch that sonofabitch who did this.”
Will straightened up, leaned forward and set off in pursuit, tapping his comm as he went.
“Nadia! Lian’s been attacked and needs help. She’s at the bottom end of the western corridor tube. I’m chasing after the guy who did it. Bring Doc Rozek with you.”
He tapped his comm to end the call as he got up to full speed, leaning forward into the slipstream like a ski-jumper. In the distance he saw the assailant dodge into one of the farm tubes and disappear. But which tube had he gone in?
As he sprinted up the corridor, Will hoped he’d reach whichever door the fleeing man had used before it closed. The farm tube doors opened to a tap of a touchpad but, like all the base’s pressure-proof doors, they closed automatically once a person had passed through.
Will was thinking he must be too late when he caught a movement from the corner of his eye just as he reached unit 25. As he slid past the door, leaning back with his hand trailing on the floor, Will heard the telltale click as the door’s safety bolts snapped into place.
He scrambled back to the door, slapped the touchpad and burst impatiently through as soon as the door started to open. In the distance, between the shelves of crops, he could see a figure running for the exit at the far end. Will was a third of the way along the tube, legs pumping hard, when a female farm worker stepped into the centre aisle to look at the fleeing figure disappearing through the end door.
“Getoutta the way!” yelled Will. “I can’t stop…gotta catch that guy.”
The woman’s head snapped around, eyes wide in surprise. She dodged back out of the aisle just in time for Will to flash past her at full pelt.
“My God!” she gasped, but Will was already leaning back, skidding to a halt as the door clicked shut in his face. Agonising seconds passed before it responded to the touchpad and swung open again.
Once into the eastern corridor, Will stopped to guess which direction the man had gone. There were people walking both right and left so he couldn’t see the assailant, but then there was a shriek from the uphill side and he set off that way.
“Clear the way please!” he shouted as startled colonists jumped out of his path. Now he could see the man running in the distance ahead of him. Will was closing the gap but as the man neared the end of the corridor someone stepped out from the plass tube leading to the mountain and he was able to dodge through the double doors before they closed. These doors, some of the oldest at Armstrong, didn’t have a touchpad but were triggered by a motion detector instead.
“Damn,” muttered Will, as he skidded to a halt and the automatic sensor slowly started to open the doors again. Then he was sprinting at full speed through the half-kilometre-long empty tube and closing fast on Lian’s attacker.
“You can’t escape!” Will shouted, his voice echoing down the hollow tube. But the man didn’t slow or look round as they sped towards the mountain. He looked fairly small and slim now Will was getting closer and he was certainly nimble enough. If the guy got another lucky break with the double doors at the entrance to the mountain, Will realised he might not catch him before he reached the cavern. Once inside the maze of tunnels there he’d take a lot of finding.
“I’m right behind you, buddy!” Will shouted again. He wasn’t, but he hoped to scare the man into making a mistake. Sure enough, he left it too late to slow for the automatic doors and his shoes snagged the floor as he tried to skid to a stop.
The man was propelled upwards and hit the tube ceiling hard then he bounced down again just as the doors started to open. There was a dull thud and the man fell to the floor. Will slid to a stop and grabbed the man’s arms expecting a struggle but the guy was limp. When Will rolled him over he could see why. There was a fierce red mark slanting across the man’s forehead where he’d hit the top of the door. He was out cold.
* * * * *
Moon, 2087
Tamala Ngomi sat quietly beside the sick bay bed where Lian was drifting in and out of sleep after Doctor Rozek had sedated her. Even with her eyes closed the Chinese woman seemed to be in torment, her eyeballs twitching beneath the lids, brow furrowing and murmurs escaping her bruised lips.
This was the last thing Lian needed, thought Tamala. Her feelings of guilt, rejection and isolation already had her teetering on the brink of a full mental breakdown. And now this.
It wasn’t clear yet whether it had been attempted rape or violence for its own sake, but it would have been much worse if Will hadn’t come along when he did. The chase, which had scattered startled workers in the farm and up the eastern corridor, was the hot topic around Armstrong Base this afternoon. A welcome change from the doom-laden Comet Santos that dominated everyone’s thoughts.
Tamala had been finishing a yoga meditation class when Nadia had called her to come and sit with Lian while she interviewed the Japanese man in the sick bay next door. Takemo Nakashima had been treated for the gash on his head and, from the sounds coming through the thin plass wall, was beginning to answer questions.
Tamala knew he was one of the scientists who’d been redeployed to the farm earlier that day, but couldn’t understand why he’d want to attack someone as inoffensive as Lian Song. She called up his biography on her comm and read that he was 37, single and an exemplary chemist with the Sumitomo Chemical Group. There was no hint of any violence in his past, so what had made him snap and assault Lian?
“How’s the patient?” Will’s whisper made her jump. She turned to see his face peering in the door.
Tamala rose and tip-toed to join him in the corridor. “Sleeping,” she said, “but not very peacefully, I’m afraid.”
“I think he’s talking to Nadia now. The doctor’s in there too.”
“I guessed she was, judging by the queue.” Will indicated the overspill from her waiting room a few metres away.
“Lot of people looking for mood meds after this morning’s news,” she said.
“I guess. Any idea why he did it?”
“The comet, Will. Fear makes people do crazy things.”
“Yeah, but why Lian? She’s not responsible for any of this, is she?”
“We know that, but some see her as representing China. She’s an easy target for their anger and frustration. Nadia’s right, I think.”
“About what?”
“About the futility of blaming China for this comet disaster. And about the need to keep emotions under control. I think Nadia is right about most things, don’t you?”
“Emm…” Will screwed up his eyes in a mock ‘thinking hard’ grimace. “Yeah, dammit. She’s usually right.”
“But you don’t like to admit it?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Why? Because she’s a woman, or because she’s the Governor?” Tamala smiled up at him, knowing she had put him on the spot.
Will was trying to come up with a diplomatic answer when the door to the adjoining sick bay opened and Nadia herself stepped out.
“Ah, Will,” she said, “I thought I heard your voice. Could you keep an eye on Lian while Tamala joins us for a few minutes, please?”
“Sure,” he said, wondering how much she had overheard. “But I do have other places I oughtta be.”
“Ten minutes only. Tamala, I want your opinion on this man’s mental state.”
“Gosh, Nadia! I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“No, but you’re the closest we’ve got. Ask some questions, get him talking about his background. I need to know how stable he is before I decide what to do with him. Please…” She opened the door and ushered Tamala inside.
* * * * *
Moon, 2087
Nadia Sokolova stepped into the basket, snapped the two safety lines to her suit then tapped in the code and pressed the green button. She felt herself being lifted then swung forwards and upwards as the ‘ski lift’ commenced its silent ascent to the top of Mt Malapert.
Within seconds she was hoisted out of the shadow of the lift station and into dazzling sunlight. She flipped down her visor’s secondary sun screen and heard the hum of fans and the slosh of fluids as her suit’s cooling system kicked in. The jump in temperature from shadow to full sun was mind-boggling but her suit’s photo-voltaic exterior and the thermo-electric interior generated enough power to keep the suit fully charged.
These latest suits also stored their electricity in the fabric itself, saving the weight and bulk of batteries that her first lunar surface suit carried back in ’78. They were technically superior but would be more difficult to repair, she thought, should something go wrong. Not that she was expecting any problem on a routine operation like this.
This inspection trip should have been Will’s job, since it involved checking the installation of plass shielding for the main optical telescope. But he was run ragged by all the extra engineering works that had been heaped upon his shoulders. Plus he had lost time he couldn’t spare during and after Lian’s attack earlier that afternoon. So Nadia had offered to suit up and climb the mountain for him.
She didn’t mind. The views from the top of Malapert were breathtaking and the summit would be a welcome respite from the emotional cauldron boiling down below. The whole of Armstrong base was awash with angst and anguish on this Terrible Tuesday as the media were calling it.
Her second vidcast of the morning, shortly after Thijs Jansen’s shocking report, had been designed to provide the colonists with practical information for their families. Like who needed to be evacuated, who should be in underground shelters and who might survive in suitably-constructed buildings. Plus the obvious necessities for the longer term: water, food, protective clothing, blankets, torches, cooking and hunting equipment. Well, it seemed obvious to her, but maybe not to those who hadn’t benefited from military survival training or a childhood of hunting and fishing in the snowy wilderness with their father.
Nadia wondered whether she had told them too little or too much. Judging by those asking for more advice and the equal numbers seeking medication to dull their senses, she decided she had got it about right.
She had again urged them to get their loved ones to contact the ISCOM help desk for the best chance of assistance from their governments. She had heard that the Portuguese were evacuating six members of their colonist’s family this evening. They were flying them to Mozambique where a Portuguese-owned gold mine was being adapted as a shelter.
Andres Costa had come to her office to thank Nadia personally for helping facilitate this. He told her that another four of his extended family had secured places on a flight to Brazil tomorrow morning. It had cost them over a million Euros each. The rest of his friends and family, like the majority of his 11 million compatriots, were joining the refugee chaos on the roads and rails, heading east for an uncertain future.
He seemed philosophical about it. The moneyed, the powerful and the privileged would get away to places of shelter, he said. The lucky would escape too, but the majority would be left to face whatever fate threw at them. He shrugged his shoulders, gave her a sad smile then turned and walked back to his job in the recycling plant.
In contrast, Salma Lahlou, the Moroccan woman who worked in the farm, had turned up at Nadia’s door wringing her hands and pleading for Nadia to do something. Her family had called the contact numbers ISCOM had given for her government but there would be no help with evacuation they said. Her family would have to arrange their own transport and their shelter at their chosen destination.
She was the third eldest of nine children, her parents had fifteen grandchildren and she wanted to ensure all of them would be evacuated together as a family. But how? What should she tell them?
Nadia had explained, as sympathetically as she could, that ISCOM could only ask governments to take care of their colonists’ families. If they refused it would be up to the family to use whatever resources they had to secure transport to a suitably distant place where they might find shelter. Did the family have any contacts in other countries?
Two of her brothers worked in Saudi Arabia, she said.
Then see if they can arrange for the family to join them, suggested Nadia. Use whatever influence they had, spend all their money if necessary, but get the family as far away from Morocco as possible and as quickly as possible. She shooed the girl from her office telling her to make the call right now… then pray to Allah that they succeeded.
There had been a dozen more calls and visits from distressed colonists, which Nadia had dealt with in between attending Lian, interviewing her attacker and sorting out a new place for him inside the mountain. He would be working and sleeping there for the next week or so, while they assessed the risk he posed to the other colonists.
Armstrong Base did not have a prison or anywhere other than the medical sick bays to quarantine a dangerous person. And the consensus of opinion between Tamala, Doc Rozek and herself was that Takemo Nakashima was seriously unstable.
There was no doubt that the impending impact of Comet Santos had tipped him over the edge. He was certain that the Chinese were responsible for this, just as they were to blame for all the major problems in the world. Through gritted teeth and spittle-flecked lips, he spat out his final indictment. In two and a half day’s time, he said, they would be guilty of the greatest mass murder in history.
He would not listen to reason, but he did answer questions which brought an explanation of sorts. Tamala’s probing revealed that his elder brother had been killed in a confrontation with Chinese warships when Takemo was a teenager. It was in the East China Sea among islands lon
g disputed between the two nations. He had nurtured his hatred all these years and now, after two attempts at sabotage, it had erupted in a frenzied attack on Lian.
The worst of it was that he was unrepentant. “Somebody has to pay!” he shouted as he struggled against the restraints that held him to the bed. It was clear they had to keep him well away from Lian in future.
Doc Rozek had sedated him and the women conferred with Will over the best way to deal with him. It was Will who remembered that one of the tunnels leading off the cavern, deep within the mountain, contained the remains of living quarters used by the original miners over 25 years ago. Maybe he could be quartered there and they could find him some engineering work, once he’d calmed down?
Nadia’s view of the mountainside changed now as the ski-lift raised her towards Malapert’s broad shoulder and over a vast sea of PV panels. The solar energy collectors spread in tightly packed rows like an enormous ribbon tied around the neck of the mountain. They glittered and sparkled as she passed overhead and reminded her of flying over the Volga River in summer sunshine.
Then she was crossing the flat summit towards the upper lift station and the main observatory. She turned to take in the panoramic view of the stark lunar landscape which curved away on all sides. It was brightly sunlit behind her, sharp black shadows filling the craters, but beyond the mountain top, on the night-time side of the Moon, all was pitch black. In a couple of weeks Armstrong Base would be shrouded in the cloak of the long lunar night and the far side of the mountain would then be bathed in searing sunlight.
It seemed brighter up here on the mountain top. Even with the shielding which turned her helmet visor gold, Nadia struggled with the light. The stark contrast between lit and shadowed surfaces made walking and working difficult up here.
She looked down at the dusty floor of the upper station that was rising to meet her as the ski lift slid silently into the open-fronted hut and the metal basket beneath her feet dropped to the ground. Nadia keyed the pad to deactivate the motor, unclipped the two safety restraints from her suit and stepped out.