by Garon Whited
I made it back to citizens’ country with little more than a nod and a wave at passerby in the corridors. Once I was through the security door, I found a smaller, but more substantial obstacle.
Svetlana.
“Hello, Max.”
“Evening, Svetlana.” I nodded politely and started to move past her. She stayed in front of me.
“Max, can we talk?”
“At this hour?”
“Please?” She fluttered her eyes at me. I’ve never understood why that’s supposed to be attractive. It looked like she had a twitch.
“All right. What is it?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew. She stepped closer, well inside my personal space.
“You’re getting married, Max.” Her voice was breathy and low.
“Yep.”
She took one of my hands in both of hers. “I like you, Max. I like you a lot. I can’t show you how much I like you once you’re married.”
“Sure you can,” I answered. She smiled lazily up at me.
“Oh? Won’t Kathy mind?”
“Not at all.”
She pressed my hand to her chest and stroked my forearm. “Good,” she purred.
“Anytime you want Anne to pick out a wiggler for you,” I said, “just head on down to sickbay and ask. I’m not going to say you can’t. I’d suggest picking someone else to partner with in raising the tyke, though. Kathy might not appreciate that part of it.”
She stared at me. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got gene samples in the freezer,” I said. “I’m sure Kathy won’t use them all—or want to, for that matter. If you want to show how much you like me, you can use a few of them for baby-making.”
Her eyes laughed. Well, not really, but she was highly amused at my clever attempt at sidetracking. But she was quick.
“I would rather make one the old-fashioned way.”
I shrugged. “Clear it with Kathy and I’ll be up for it.”
Her hand reached out for me, low. “Oh, I think you are now.”
Svetlana is fairly short, and the lights in the corridors dim to just the red safety lights when the timers click over. Thus, I could see someone open my door and the silhouette of a head stick out. I wonder if Kathy was ever tested for ESP? She’s nearly superhuman in many other respects, so maybe. Or is it just a sort of instinct all women have?
“Maybe so,” I admitted, quickly, “but it’s already taken, thanks.”
Her touch turned to a grip. I hate these baggy jumpsuits.
“It is now,” she said as she stepped closer.
The silhouette of a head turned into the outline of a naked female. It started padding quickly and silently down the corridor as is only possible with bare feet in one-sixth gravity. For some reason, I was reminded of a cruise missile.
“No, Svetlana,” I said, softly. “I said no, I mean no, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll let go and start running right now.”
“You wouldn’t hurt me, Max,” she crooned, looking up at me and stepping closer. “You’re too noble. Far, far too—”
She was right, but she still should’ve listened.
Kathy didn’t shout, didn’t say anything, didn’t even let bare feet make a slapping sound on the deck. She moved up behind Svetlana like a shadow and reached for her. What happened next was very fast and the lights were dim. I can’t swear how it happened, but a second or so later Svetlana was down, face pressed into the corner of the deck and bulkhead, with both hands reaching for the back of her own neck. Kathy was sitting on the folded arms, pressing the elbows into Svetlana’s back, facing toward Svetlana’s feet. She had one of Svetlana’s legs bent awkwardly around and up until it nearly touched the opposite hip. Kathy was twisting the ankle and didn’t look as though she was exerting herself at all.
Svetlana didn’t take this quietly; she screamed. Can’t say I blame her; I would have. Kathy let go with one hand, reached behind herself, grabbed a handful of Svetlana’s hair, and hammered the deck twice with Svetlana’s forehead. The screaming stopped.
“Shut up,” Kathy advised. “You’re a tramp, a slut, and a catty piece of trash. You’ve been ridden more than a bright green carousel at a statewide munch! But you will not play merry-go-round with Max. Do you get me?”
Svetlana said something, muffled against the deck. Kathy spun to put one knee on Svetlana’s arms, lifted hard on her hair, tilted her head back.
“Then get this,” Kathy snarled. “Max is a human being. He can make his own choices. If he wants to nail you like a railroad spike, he’ll let you know. But until then, if you so much as lick your lips in his direction, I will boil your eyes for breakfast! Do you get me?”
Svetlana gurgled something and Kathy let her go. Kathy stood up and glared down at the slowly-unfolding woman. I’m pretty sure Kathy was debating kicking her. If she’d been wearing boots, she might have. Instead, she turned gracefully—there’s gracefully and ungracefully; there’s no middle ground in lunar gravity—and glided back to our quarters.
Svetlana’s nose was bleeding freely and she would have a forehead-wide bruise in the morning. From the way she unfolded, I’d guess her shoulders and one ankle were in bad shape. If we’d been in full gravity, I don’t think she could have stood up on her own.
I’m a sucker. I reached out to help her to her feet, but she shoved me away—not such a trick in lunar gravity, when she was against a wall and I wasn’t braced. I stumbled back against the other wall and found my footing while she clawed her way up to her feet. She glared at me with undisguised fury.
“Need help to the infirmary?” I asked. She could be as hacked as she liked; I’d still help her if she needed it.
“Nyet,” she whispered, coldly. “Not from you.”
“Anything broken?”
“No,” she said as she leaned against the wall. “Leave me.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Goodnight.”
She shivered and staggered off—a real trick on the Moon. I sighed. I don’t understand why she had to be cheesed at me, but I’ve never understood the thought processes of women.
Once into my quarters, I locked the door behind me. It was pitch-dark in there, but it was also soft and very warm.
“My aren’t we ardent?” I observed. I had some surprising help in getting out of my clothes.
“It’s been a long time since I got into a fight,” Kathy replied. “It gets my blood going.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a woman willing to fight for me,” I said. “That’s pretty exciting, too.”
Kathy put her arms around my neck and pulled herself up to whisper in my ear.
“I saw Anne before the party.”
“Yes?”
“She gave me something. From you.”
“Oh? Ah!”
“Max… make love to me.”
I’m silly, not stupid. I didn’t need a second invitation.
* * *
In the warm darkness, Kathy snuggled to my side and put an arm over my chest.
“Max?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you ever miss Earth?”
I thought about it. I’d been too busy to give it much serious thought. Too much to do, and all of it needing to be done immediately or sooner had distracted me. I said so.
“I suppose it would,” she replied, half-chuckling. “I’ve had it a bit easier, I think, and I’ve missed Earth a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Storms, for one. Big, black, noisy, lightning-filled thunderheads rolling in. Wind. Rain. I used to love a good thunderstorm. The air here is always the same temperature and humidity. There’s no wind, no rain, and certainly no thunder.” She sat up on one elbow in the darkness. “Have you noticed how quiet it is?”
“I have. First day here, I noticed.”
“There’s nothing to make noise, except us,” she went on. “Even then, it’s all man-made… the noise, the walls, the air, everything. Is there any chance we can
get some weather, someday?”
“Give me a big enough cavern and I’ll make weather,” I promised. “Somehow.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” She settled down against me again and squeezed. “Now, what do you miss?”
“Hmm.”
“Come on, there must be something that leaps to mind. Or do I have to tickle you again?”
“Chocolate,” I promptly answered.
“What?”
“Chocolate,” I repeated. “We don’t have any up here—at least, none that I’d call chocolate. That stuff they freeze-dried and vacuum-sealed tastes like chicken.”
Kathy laughed and squeezed me harder. “It does not!”
“Well, maybe not a lot like chicken,” I allowed, “but it’s a long way from Godiva, or even Hershey.”
“Seriously, Max. What do you miss the most?”
I thought about it. Of all the things I remembered from my life on Earth, what did I miss? My nephew? Ford? Uncle Jim? That beat-up gas-burner I’d named Ford after? How about that house in the hills, hidden from the world behind trees and rolling ground? My grandmother’s flapjacks! Oh, my; those would be long-remembered and much missed. The Annapolis campus? The deck of a ship at sea? The Sea? A storm on the ocean? The ripple of wind over a field? Snow? Skiing? The smell of a winter morning lurking outside the tent? The song of a bird in the sunrise?
“Tough choice,” I mused.
She snuggled down and relaxed. “Think about it and let me know.”
“I will.”
* * *
I finished supervising the repair and retrofitting of the Luna, but the majority of my thinking was on space arms.
Lasers have obvious applications in a space war, especially when the target is a big, fat space station. My only real problem with a laser was an almost total lack of knowledge about laser weapons. Sure, I can build a laser—communication lasers for use between two planets are powerful, precise, and especially useful during periods of intense solar activity; radio can be scrambled by sunspots. It’s hard to jam a laser communicator in space.
But weapons-grade lasers are another kettle of boiling kippers. It’s the difference between a kid launching spitwads from a straw and a modern electrothermal sniper rifle. Gas pressure propels the projectile down the barrel at the target—that’s where the similarity ends. I couldn’t upgrade my spitwad-shooter’s lung power, and I wasn’t familiar with the details of laser artillery. Sure, I knew what a free-electron laser was, but I never studied their construction. Maybe, someday… but the Captain wanted something effective now. So, I needed something else.
Railguns. More electromagnetic launchers, but with a different method. I could make them much smaller than the cannon, but still powerful enough to be useful.
For the Luna, I could mount capacitor banks in the hold to power a railgun. It would take some effort to produce enough high-temperature superconductors to coat the rails and the ammunition, and we wouldn’t have much initial choice in ammunition besides solid slugs, but if enough holes are punched in anything, it’ll stop working.
Maybe a dozen railguns? Volley fire can be much more devastating…
I did the numbers. With the Luna’s solar panels deployed and a dozen railguns mounted in the cargo bay, we could cram enough capacitors in there to fire about sixty volleys before the recharge time started to slow things down. That should do for most things. Add a couple of laser ranging sights and get Li to add a targeting program to the radar… yes, this could be worthwhile.
Now, how to arm Luna Base? The Luna could go anywhere in orbit, armed for close-range engagements, but what about the base? Sure, a couple of railguns for close-in defense—I didn’t like the threat of an OTV aimed at us. I know how this base is put together. More than anyone else, I know this would be a Bad Thing. Breathing vacuum is easy. Anyone can do it, just not for long.
How do I shoot things down when they can be anywhere in the sky? A really big railgun in a turret? There are problems with scaling up a railgun past a certain point, even with superconductors. Railguns wear the rails out; at least coilguns don’t erode themselves with every shot. My big honkin’ space gun could launch loads up to a meter in diameter with no trouble; it doubled as a cargo-launch catapult. I had that in mind when I designed it. But a railgun has horrendous acceleration and much smaller loads—it’s not a launcher for anything much less durable than a metal block.
Ironically, it was the replacement of the Luna’s airlock door that gave me an idea. I was polishing down the glass for the window when I realized that we have more aluminum than we’ll ever need. It polishes well. We’re in low gravity. We have about fourteen and a half days of sunlight.
Why not big parabolic mirrors? Or, since we wanted to target things at variable distances, why not several hundred or several thousand flat ones that could all be focused on the same point? Raw sunlight is bad enough, but a square kilometer focused on one square meter is much, much worse. We could put a field of the things on either slope of the mountain over us and attack almost any portion of the sky that way.
I spoke to Li about it. He assured me a computer program for it was easy enough, but the servomotors would be the tricky bit. He’s working on it. It’ll only be useful half the time—that is, during daylight—but every little bit helps.
Once we had the Luna spaceworthy again, I moved my crew to the robot shop to hasten the robot manufacturing process for a while. It was good training for everybody, new guys and oldsters alike. Knowing how the robots were put together gave everyone an idea of their capabilities, as well as their limitations. Besides, it gave us a leg up on producing additional construction crew.
Not all the robots are suited to building more robots. We have big, tracked mining robots that suck up regolith, mainly just dust and rocks, do some basic chemical extraction, and deliver the rest to the main processing plants at the base. Ingots come out of our refining facilities and other robots start the fabrication process for actual parts. Other robots take the parts and assemble, weld, bolt, solder, and otherwise put together actual units, whether it be a new unit or repairs to a damaged one.
While we were helping the robots build more robots, several other ’bots were mapping out a runway to the ringwall of Copernicus for me. Most of those were mining robots, clearing away the lunar dust; close behind them were rockbots, grading, leveling, and melting down preliminary lunar concrete for a roadbed.
Between building a prototype railgun and keeping an eye on everything else, I was busy. Besides, the Captain came up with another project for me: Swords. He wanted a dozen swords suitable for saber drill—and sharp enough to open a man’s suit without any trouble at all. After all, they were simple to make, compared to needle guns.
I still think he’d enjoy swinging on a rope from one deck to another, but that’s just me. I considered having an eyepatch made for him, and a hook, but I’m crazy, not stupid.
“May I recommend knives, sir?”
He blinked at me. “Knives, Max?”
“Yes, Sir. Swords are okay as long as we have at least lunar gravity, but if we get into a brawl in zero-gee, it’ll be a lot less useful. Too long, too heavy, too much inertia, the works. A knife would be handier. I’m thinking of people going over to the station and kicking some kidnapper butt, of course, sir.”
“Very well. Swords and knives. A dozen of each, please.”
“Aye aye, mon Capitaine,” Isaid, and saluted. “Are we going to trust some civvies with sharp things, sir?”
“Yes and no,” he replied. That’s what I love about working for him. He always makes things so clear. I looked at him with my best puzzled expression—I do it well—and he elaborated.
“I don’t intend to arm everyone,” he said, “but it would be silly to think we can keep them unarmed if they set their minds on it. I would rather see to it those who are wholeheartedly citizens of Luna have superior weapons and training.” He smiled at me and his eyes twinkled. “Besides, it will make a good show o
f trust on my part.”
“I’ll get right on it, sir.”
The Captain was also a busy man. Negotiating for the release of a hostage is enough to tax anybody’s patience. Add to this the constant stream of people who suddenly think it’s a good idea to learn a trade and apply for citizenship and you’ve got a recipe for exhaustion. The Captain preferred, whenever possible, to interview the potential citizen himself. I think he wanted to have a better feel for them, instead of lumping them all under the general heading of “civilians.”
At least it was better than planning how to shoot them back to Earth.
Kathy ran the tests on the Luna while I started installing railgun parts. Everything but the flight test went fine; there would be no flight test until we had a runway for her—there was no getting around it; a landing with this new fuel was going to be tricky. Kathy compared it to parking a motorcycle on a steep grade—while towing a trailer. I could appreciate her disdain for the relatively low-power fuel.
What else, what else…?
Our latest addition to be Plumbing Crew is Hashiko, a nice lady, about my age. I had thought all the staff personnel of the Liwei habitat were Chinese, but apparently I was wrong. Peng showed her into my office after the Captain assigned her to my department. She saluted, and correctly. I returned it.
“Have a seat,” I told her. “So, the Captain sent you down to the janitor’s closet, hmm? What do you do?”
“I’m a mechanical engineer, graduated from the University of Texas, Houston, with my M.E. degree eight years ago,” she said, and I detected a trace of Texas in her English. “I’ve been working on Liwei for the past month in the maintenance and repair division, becoming familiar with their systems.”
I blinked, surprised. She noticed.
“And you thought I was just a frail little oriental flower, didn’t you?” She didn’t sound upset; rather, she sounded amused.