by Garon Whited
On the bridge, Kathy was still mostly business. There were a few nonregulation pats, squeezes, and smooches. I think we can be excused.
We went over the reports and ran the diagnostics together. The damage from the Heinlein station attack was fully repaired and the engines converted to the lower-power fuel. Now all we needed was to finish installing the weapons, connect their servos to the radar, test the firing program, and we would be ready to go.
The only thing left on the Luna herself was the weapon upgrades. Chang and I went over the current work and I didn’t change anything; he’s a good man. I showed him what I wanted for Kathy’s personal guns. A lever arm with a four-plex of railguns would tilt up, bringing the railguns into position just above the bridge and parallel to the ship’s centerline. A simple thumbswitch on the shuttle’s joystick would fire them in series as long as it was held down.
Kathy’s also a fighter pilot.
I left Chang in charge of the gun mountings; he saluted silently. I took it for an affirmative and went into the Remote Robot Rumpus Room to see how the construction crew was doing on the runway. I still needed to get the runway ramp built before we could try a low-power landing that didn’t involve crashing.
A broad strip of Copernicus was graded and level; this was a good thing. The paving ’bots were still creeping along, though. It takes time to scoop up enough dust to mix, melt, and pour lunar concrete. I’d expected them to be the bottleneck, at least until we started work on the ringwall ramp. The ramp itself would be just about line-straight for several kilometers—all uphill, right to the top of the ringwall. The actual angle of ascent would be pretty shallow, but without an atmosphere to get in the way, it wouldn’t matter.
One of the main reasons a rocket launches straight up from Earth is to get out of the pesky thick atmosphere; it wastes a lot of fuel to accelerate against air resistance. This isn’t a problem on the Moon. We just aim for somewhere above the horizon and give a good push.
From the looks of it, we were about to start work on the actual ramp. Far enough away from the base and the ramp would require a lot building up before the pavement surface could be laid over it. I had a robot out at the ringwall already, looking the place over. The camera just wasn’t good enough for me; it didn’t give me a feel for the project.
“Sir?” I asked, keying the Captain’s channel on my radio.
“Go ahead, Max.”
“I need to make a field trip out to the ringwall.”
“Why?”
“Man on the ground, sir, to look over the ramp-building potential out there. It’ll be faster to go look than to do a robot survey.”
“Fair enough. Permission granted.”
“Roger that. I’ll pack some sunscreen and be back before dinner.”
Daytime surface jaunts are never pleasant. Last time I went out, it was to plant a decoy radio. This time, I had a lot of laser ranging apparatus. I fired up the rover, made sure my sunshade was adjusted, and tore out for the ringwall at top speed.
It was a fast trip; the first two kilometers or so were paved and the rest of it was free of the thick ground-cover of dust. It still took the better part of an hour just to get out there; it was a long roadbed.
The survey of the ringwall took about two hours, which still gave me more than enough time to get back under the four-hour time limit. Just looking it over by eye, I could see the ringwall was workable. The only thing that bothered me was the timetable. I beat it back to the base and did the math. Not good. I went to see the Captain.
“Sir?”
He looked up from his datapad and gestured me into his office.
“Sit. What’s on your mind?”
“Time, sir. We’ve got a manpower problem.”
“Explain.”
“The ringwall is going to make a great ramp. But the robots we have on hand—even counting the ones we can build during construction—are going to take a minimum of six weeks to build the ramp we want. That’s an absolute minimum, sir, and doesn’t allow for maintenance, mishaps, or malfunctions. We can install the catapult later. But the ramp has to be straight; we can’t just curl it up sharply at the end without making things we want to keep go ‘crunch.’ This means we build up an awful lot of ramp, almost from our doorstep to the top of the ringwall. All that ground-pounding will move more dirt and rock than we could get from the Great Pyramid.”
He looked troubled. “Six weeks is long enough to starve to death. What’s the solution, Max?”
Crap. I knew he was going to ask that. But I have to be asked before the Hammer of Inspiration can hit me between the eyes.
“A damn hot pilot, sir, and a big net.”
His eyebrows went up. “I hope you don’t have visions of a gigantic trampoline.”
“Only when I nap after having the Brussels sprouts and cheese.”
“Fair enough. Elaborate on your plan.”
The idea went like this. The Luna can come down like an atmospheric aircraft coming in for a landing. She orbits the Moon once, dropping lower, spiraling in at a shallow angle. She comes in backward and uses her main engines to kill some of her forward vector, then yaws around and runs her belly jets to prevent hammering her landing gear too badly. She touches down, uses the brakes as best she can in this gravity, and a safety net makes up the difference. It wouldn’t work in an atmosphere, but it wouldn’t need to work in an atmosphere.
“I’d love to just land her on her tail and be done with it,” I admitted, “but she won’t have the fuel with our flight plan. There are a lot of guns aboard, along with extra life support for the… marines… plus the mass of the volunteers, themselves. I’ve run the numbers twice, and they say the same thing. Even if we don’t have to maneuver at all at Heinlein, she’s going to have to come in hot and kill some of her momentum on the ground. We don’t have a choice.”
“Could we switch back to the old fuel?”
“It would take a week and a half, but that would be faster, yes,” I admitted. “On the other hand, I’ve got a plan that should save us about five weeks of work.”
“I am all ears, Max.” He pressed is fingertips together and leaned forward across his desk.
“First, we carve a chunk of the ringwall out so our angle of attack in landing is as shallow as we can make it. Our present numbers depend on a ramp that reaches some awful height—if we can lower that, our schedule gets easier. Better, when we want to use it for launching, we’re at a shallower angle and that’s easier to shape into a lunar orbit. As for landing, we build a series of large nets, a lot like the emergency nets on a carrier. We attach these to cables, and the cables to weights.
“The Luna comes in for a landing through the notch, touches down like a plane, and hits the first net. This wraps around her nose and wings and drags what are essentially anchors through the regolith to either side. With the shallower angle of attack, I’m pretty sure we can get away with that. While the weights may not actually weigh a lot on in this gravity, they’ll be dragged through the dust, like a sea anchor gets dragged through the water. Added to the friction brakes of the Luna’s wheels, we should be able to touch her down intact and drag her to a stop. We can put a robot grading unit on either side to scoop lunar dust back into the grooves after every landing—resetting the dust-brakes, you could say.” I paused for a second.
“At least, we have a chance. It’s not safe, sir. It’s something we’ve never tried with a ship this massive, and there could be problems scaling it up. And the touchdown… we can’t program that in advance, not with the timetable you’ve given me. I don’t know how much of a notch we can take out of the ringwall, or how much road we’ll have paved when the Luna tries to land… What I’m saying is it’ll take a hot pilot to do it just right, and even then I’ll be biting my nails to the elbows.”
Captain Carl nodded.
“You know your business, son. Is this the best idea you have?”
“For the time we’ve got and the resources at hand? Yes, Sir.”
* * *
Meals aren’t optional when the military is involved. Chow call means you get your boots in gear. You eat, and eat fast, or a large, ugly man takes your food away. Then you get back to work.
Fortunately, we’re not quite so tightly scheduled. A lot of what I do can be done with a protein bar in one hand and a drink somewhere within reach. This still allows me to actually have a sit-down dinner in the evening. Since the people I eat with are usually the people I work with, the job follows me to dinner. But that’s okay; a lot of good ideas bounce around the table.
There have been a few changes made. Kathy and I eat dinner together now, and my work gang asks permission to sit down, which I defer to my superior officer. She’s good about it; I think she likes them, at least as much as a bloodthirsty non-human can. But she’s trying. About halfway through dinner, she starts letting the guys join us, which gives us some time, if not alone, at least to ourselves. A nice distinction, but an important one.
I took the private opportunity to discuss the possible landing scenarios with Kathy. She seemed to think it would work.
“Pick your flat spot and I’ll put her down.”
“I think it’s a little more complicated than that, actually.”
She smiled at me and patted my arm.
“You think like an engineer, Max, and that’s good. We need an engineer up here, probably even more than we need a pilot. But I think like a pilot, and I say I can put our bird down with nothing but a flat stretch of maria if I have to.” She kissed my cheek and continued, “You’re sweet for worrying. Go ahead and build the runway; I’ll need it to take off again.”
“I just want everything to go smoothly,” I told her. She grabbed my ears and kissed me more thoroughly; nowadays. I don’t really regret that they stick out. There was considerable whooping around us. When she let go, I was grinning. I can’t help it.
“Trust me, Max. You don’t need to worry about my flying.”
“Okay.”
We turned back to eating and she allowed Chang to sit with us when he came by. I listen to him; he doesn’t talk a lot, but he says a lot, if you see the difference. He may not speak often, but when he does, it’s well worth hearing.
I was also keeping an eye on Svetlana. She watched Kathy kiss me, and she didn’t look at all happy. Rather than the seething glare I expected, her expression was one of sadness. She didn’t seem angry or upset, just melancholy. I would have buttonholed her and asked what was wrong, but she shoved the remains of dinner in the recycling hopper and left without looking back. Kathy noticed, but ignored it.
I was going to have to find time to talk with Svetlana. I didn’t want her to wake up while Kathy was busy breaking her neck.
* * *
The volunteers—I have trouble calling them “Marines”; they are not Marines. They’re just volunteering to try and do a Marine’s job—were looking moderately good. Nobody can learn to use a sword in a matter of days, but knives are another matter. When all you’re after is slashing open someone’s suit, the knife is a devastating weapon.
I went down to the gym for my exercise and watched them practice for a while. An old lady with a harsh voice and a sharp eye was apparently the one in charge.
Nobody keeps me in the loop. Well, I’ve been busier than an umbrella in a hurricane. Besides, I just got back from my honeymoon.
I found out later that Ms. Hoom was a sixth-degree black belt back on Earth. She was on the habitat for her heart; she had to be careful not to overdo anything, but it didn’t affect her vision—or her tongue—in the least. Once she decided to join the Lunar Republic, or whatever we are, the Captain knew exactly what to do with her talents.
Given a few years, she might even make the volunteers into something like Marines. She was a harsh and relentless taskmistress.
I wore myself out on the exercise equipment; I’ve been on light duty forever and I needed to play catch-up before I got too flabby. This light gravity plays hob with a man’s muscles, and spending so much time in the infirmary didn’t help any. Someday, we needed to go get the Liwei Habitat, mainly for the full-gravity decks.
The President wandered in while I was grunting and sweating under the bench press. He looked around, watched the volunteers at work, and strolled over to me.
“Lieutenant-Commander Hardy. Good to see you.”
I grunted. What else was I supposed to do under a pneumatic press?
“Might I have a word with you?”
I grunted, toed the release, and sat up. “What’s on your mind, Mister President?”
He sat down on a leg lift machine and licked his lips.
“It has come to my attention that there are… difficulties in governing a State that is, ah… in being a government-in-exile.”
“Well, you were elected to deal with it,” I said, trying to sound sweet.
“Ah. Yes. Well, the Vice-President has recently retired, and I have no staff, you see.”
“Retired?” I asked, surprised. I rather liked the Vice-President.
“Yes. He’s… he’s found a better job.”
“He emigrated, you mean, and went to work for us,” I said, realizing his problem. Andrews flushed a nice shade of embarrassed.
“Yes.”
“If you’d care to quit you present job, I’ll ask the Captain to look over your resume.”
“Would you?” he asked, sounding slightly desperate. “I am very interested in what sort of position he might have for a man of my talents.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering what talents he might have, aside from lying, weaseling, and backstabbing. I watched him leave, and I chuckled to myself. It’s not every day you find the President asking you to put in a good word for him.
As soon as I showered and changed, I went to find the Captain. I’m still not sure the man sleeps. Ms. Yin, his new secretary, told me he was taking a report from Julie; I settled down to wait my turn. Just as I got comfortable in the outer office, Julie came out.
“Go on in; you’ve got priority.”
“I do?”
“I don’t have anything of an emergency nature right now, and your jobs usually have a mission-critical time crunch,” she replied. “I don’t envy you, Max.”
“I eat pressure for breakfast,” I quipped, “but I need a better dental plan. This won’t take long.”
“Thanks. I’ll just wait, then.”
I cruised into the Captain’s office; he saw me coming and gestured me to a seat even before I could hail him.
“What have you got, Max?”
“I’ve got a guy on the runway construction problem; he’s good with the robots, and he’s got an idea for blasting. I put Peng on the anchors and netting. Hashiko is helping him, with Chang to referee. Patrick and Li are crawling around in the Luna right now, wiring up the small railguns and coordinating the servos for computer-controlled radar targeting. The mirrors are taking a back seat on production, but the ground-based railguns are coming along nicely. The Marine volunteers are looking dangerous, at least, and I hope they’ll get to practice in free fall before they tackle anyone seriously. We’ve got three cargo shells ready to go; any module they hit will be opened up like a tin can hit by a shotgun. And the President wants a job.”
He blinked.
“I’m sorry. The President…?”
“He wants a job.”
“No.”
I blinked. “No?”
“No. He fought to get elected and get the power of the Presidency. He tried to take command of this base with that power. Now he sees he can’t win that way. He acts as though he wants to switch sides when all he really wants is another chance to grab power. He’s a self-serving little man with a traitorous streak. I announced he would be repatriated, and he will be.”
I considered what I wanted to say. I mean, yes, I agreed with Captain Carl’s assessment of the man, but still, to condemn the guy just because he’s a weasel seemed a bit much.
�
�Isn’t that a little…” I trailed off.
“Harsh?” Captain Carl asked. “Yes. He’s brought it on himself.”
“But do we have to send him back down there? The place has a hostile biowarfare agent on the loose, glazed craters where we used to have civilization, and enough radioactive fallout to listen to it on the radio. With all three of those and the initial EMP to kick it all off, I doubt we could even make ourselves heard by any survivors—if, in fact, the Earth has any. Have we heard from anyone yet?”
“No. I am beginning to suspect that we will not.”
“Then you see what I mean. Sir, I can land him without breaking any bones, but once he’s down… I think he’ll last two minutes. Maybe ten, if I pick him a good spot. But I’m not putting money down on anything longer.” I was only exaggerating a little.
Captain Carl rubbed his temples and leaned back in his chair.
“Commander, if it consoles you, I don’t like it. But if he stays, he’s a problem, a crystal in a saturated solution—trouble waiting to happen. Since he can’t or won’t be a good example, I’ll find a use for him as a warning.” He pinned me with a look from under lowered eyebrows. “Not all the former residents of Heinlein Station are pleased to be here, Maxwell. Many are ‘citizens’ just to gain more privileges. They would welcome a change in the,” he quirked something that vaguely resembled a smile, “tyrannical, dictatorial, and self-serving government of the Moon.” Captain Carl sat up again and folded his hands on the polished aluminum of his desk.
“Maxwell, I made a statement in front of witnesses that he was going home. Everyone else can quit his country and we’ll find a job for them—to hell with whether or not they mean it. But Andrews is the President of a country that has no people in it. He’s the commander-in-chief, and he fought for the position. Now he’s going to learn what it means to be in command. He’s stuck with the job, and I’m shipping him home as soon as we have time to build him a capsule.”
“Sir, I admit he’s a putz, but does that mean we have to launch him? So what if a bunch of old people don’t much like the place? Andrews hasn’t got anything better to offer, not really. I mean, where do they want to go? The construction people carved out three emergency shelters in the ringwall of our crater, but they’re just that, shelters. Can’t we just put Tchekalinsky Station back in order and ship malcontents there?”