by Andy Weir
When you short out a 2.4 megawatt-hour battery, it gets very, very hot. Like, extremely hot. And it’d be sitting in a sealed reservoir full of wax and compressed oxygen. And the reservoir was an airtight compartment. Let me give you the math on that:
Wax + oxygen + heat = fire.
Fire + confined volume = bomb.
(Bomb + harvester) ✕ 4 = 1,000,000ğ for Jazz.
And it would happen long after I had safely returned to town. They could look as closely as they wanted at the video footage, they wouldn’t know who I was. And I had another trick up my sleeve….
I checked my arm readouts. I had to hope Svoboda’s device worked as advertised. He’d never failed me before, at least.
Back in my coffin, the device Svoboda had made for me would be powering up. I affectionately named it the “alibi-o-mat.” I’d slotted my Gizmo into it before I’d gone on this little adventure.
The alibi-o-mat poked at my Gizmo screen with little probes that had the same capacitance as a human finger.
It typed in my passcode and started surfing the internet. It brought up my favorite Saudi gossip websites, some funny videos, and a few internet forums. It even fired off some emails I’d composed in advance.
Not the perfect alibi, but it was pretty good. If anyone asked where I was, I’d say I was at home surfing the internet. Hardly an uncommon thing to do. And the data logs from my Gizmo and the city’s network would back that up.
I checked the time. The whole procedure—from attaching the hammock to installing my harvester-killing-device—had taken forty-one minutes. This was doable! I’d make it back in plenty of time! One harvester down, three to go.
I crawled back under the now-doomed harvester, collected my gear, and crawled back out. All the while I was careful not to get crushed by the giant wheels. Even in lunar gravity the harvester was heavy enough to squish me like a grape.
I assumed the next harvester would be a hundred meters away or so on some other edge of the collection zone. But instead, it was three meters from my face. What the hell was it doing there?!
It didn’t dig. It didn’t load. It just “looked” at me, its high-resolution cameras re-focused slightly as I stood up. It could only mean one thing: Someone at Sanchez Aluminum had taken manual control of this harvester.
They’d spotted me.
Dear Jazz,
I’m very worried about you. I haven’t heard from you in over a month. You haven’t answered any of my emails. I found your father’s email address through his welding business website and contacted him. He doesn’t know where you are and he’s very worried too.
Artemis’s public contact directory has 7 people named Sean. I contacted all of them and none are the Sean who knows you. I guess your Sean didn’t want his information public? Anyway, that was a dead end too.
Dear Kelvin,
Sorry you got worried. I wish you hadn’t contacted Dad.
Things have not gone well lately. Last month Sean got a visit from an angry mob. About fifteen guys. They beat the shit out of him. He wouldn’t talk about it afterward, but I knew what it was about. It’s a thing people do here. It’s called a “morals brigade.”
Some things really piss people off. Enough that they’ll form up and punish you, even though you didn’t break any laws. Sean is a horny guy—I knew that. And I knew he had other girls.
But I didn’t know he was screwing a fourteen-year-old.
We’ve got people from all over Earth here. Different cultures have very different sexual morals, so Artemis doesn’t have age-of-consent rules at all. As long as it’s not forced, it’s not rape. And the girl was consenting.
But we’re not savages here. You might not get deported to Earth, but you’ll definitely get your ass kicked. I assume some of those guys were the girl’s relatives. I don’t know.
I’m an idiot, Kelvin. A complete idiot. How could I not see what Sean was? I’m only seventeen and he was hot for me from day one. Turns out I’m on the older end of his preference range.
I’ve got nowhere to stay. I can’t go back to Dad. I just can’t. The fire destroyed all that equipment he’d bought. And he had to pay for the damage to the room itself. Now he can’t expand the business at all. Hell, he can barely keep afloat. How can I go crawling back after doing something like that?
I ruined my father with my stupidity.
And I ruined myself too, by the way. When I walked out on Sean, I had a couple hundred slugs to my name. I couldn’t rent a room with that. I couldn’t even eat proper food.
I’m living on Gunk. Every day. Unflavored, because I can’t afford extracts. And…oh God, Kelvin…I don’t have anywhere to live. I sleep where I can. Areas without a lot of people in them. High floors where it’s godawful hot or low floors where it’s freezing. I stole a blanket from a hotel laundry room just to have something to sleep under. I have to keep moving every night to stay a step ahead of Rudy. It’s against the rules to be homeless. And he’s been gunning for me since the fire. He’ll use any excuse he can to get rid of me.
If he catches me I’ll get deported to Saudi Arabia. Then I’ll be broke, homeless, and have gravity sickness. I have to stay here.
I’m sorry to dump all this on you. I just don’t have anyone else to talk to.
Do NOT offer me money. I know that’ll be your first instinct, but don’t. You have four sisters and two parents to take care of.
Dear Jazz,
I don’t know what to say. I’m devastated. I wish I could do something for you.
Things haven’t been great here either. My sister Halima announced that she’s pregnant. The father is apparently a military man of some kind and she doesn’t even know his last name. There’s going to be a baby to take care of soon, and it throws a wrench into all our plans. Originally, I was going to pay for Halima’s education, then she’d pay for Kuki’s education while I saved up money for Mom and Dad’s retirement. Then Kuki would pay for Faith’s education and so on. But now Halima won’t be doing anything but taking care of her baby and we’ll have to fund her. Mom got a job as a clerk at a grocery store on the KSC campus. It’s the first job she’s had in her life. She seems to like it, but I wish she didn’t have to work at all.
Dad will have to work many more years. Kuki is now saying she’ll get an unskilled labor job somewhere to bring in money. But she’s selling her future!
We should count our blessings. Halima will be a good mother. And my family will soon have a new child to cherish. We are all healthy and we have each other.
You may be homeless, but at least it’s in the relatively clean, safe streets of Artemis instead of some Earth city. You have a job and are making some money. Hopefully more than you are spending.
Difficult times, my friend, but there is a path. There must be. We will find it. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.
“Okay, this is some bullshit,” I said to the harvester.
The other two harvesters also rolled toward me. Probably to make sure I couldn’t hide behind a rock to get away. Their controllers now had me on camera from multiple angles. Whee.
I later learned what had happened: The boulder that murdered my air tanks made quite a thump—the harvester felt the tremor. They have very sensitive equipment in their wheels to detect ground vibration. Why? Because they dig on mountainsides. If there’s an avalanche brewing, the controllers want to know right away.
So the harvester called home to report the tremor. Back at Sanchez’s control center, workers checked the previous couple minutes’ video. They wanted to know if a wall of stony death was about to eat their multimillion-slug harvester. Guess what they saw! Me disappearing into the undercarriage! So they sent another harvester to see what the hell I was up to.
Then they called the EVA masters. I don’t know exactly how the conversation went, but I assume it was something like this:
Sanchez controllers: “Hey! Why are you fucking with our harvester?!”
EVA masters: “We’re
not.”
Sanchez: “Well, someone is.”
EVA masters: “We’ll go kick their ass. Not because we care about you, but because we want to continue our stranglehold monopoly on EVAs. Also, we’re a bunch of assholes.”
So right now, the EVA masters were forming a posse to drag me back to Artemis. After that would come beatings, deportation, gravity sickness in Riyadh, and things generally going downhill from there.
I stopped to think about this new situation. There was no way I’d get back into town before an angry mob of EVA masters came out looking for me. So there was no point in aborting. May as well finish the job before the epic game of lunar hide-and-seek began.
The posse would use a freight rover for fast travel. They can go ten kilometers per hour. The uphill climb would slow them a bit. Call it six kilometers per hour. I had a half hour before they arrived.
Subtlety time was over. My plan to make shit happen after I got home was gone. Sanchez would recall all the harvesters for inspection. Mechanics would then go over each one with a fine-toothed comb and undo my hard work.
I had to permanently destroy all four harvesters within the next thirty minutes. On the plus side, Sanchez’s controllers had been kind enough to put them all next to me.
Okay, first things first. I grabbed a pair of wire cutters from my duffel, leapt onto the harvester that spotted me, and clambered to the top. The primary and secondary comm systems were both mounted to the highest point of the cab for maximum range. The harvester (now under human control no doubt) shimmied forward and back—probably trying to shake me off. But harvesters just aren’t very fast. I kept my balance easily and made short work of all four antennas. They were a little thicker than the wire cutters were designed for, but I got it done. It stopped dead as soon as the fourth antenna dropped. Harvesters are programmed to sit idle if they lose connection. You wouldn’t want your harvester wandering around on its own, right?
I leapt directly to the roof of the next harvester over—the one I’d just meticulously turned into a time bomb. All that work for nothing. Sigh.
Snip, snip, snip, snip!
The other two harvesters backed away.
“Oh, no you don’t!” I said. I leapt from the roof and hit the ground running. I caught up with ease.
I climbed to the top of my third victim and got to snipping. Like its brethren, it stopped dead as soon as the last antenna was gone.
I had a bit of a run to catch up to the last one, but I got there soon enough. I snipped three of the antennas and was just about to get the fourth when my left side exploded with pain and I flew through the air. Well, not “air.” Vacuum. You know what I mean.
I smacked into the ground and rolled.
“Whu?” I said. It took me a second, but I realized what happened. Those asswipes at Sanchez had made the harvester smack me with its front-loader scoop!
Sons of bitches! That could have ruptured my suit! Sure, I was trashing their property but you don’t kill someone for that, do you?!
Oh, it was on.
The harvester dropped its scoop halfway down and rolled toward me.
I got to my feet, ran in front of the main camera, and flipped it my middle finger. Then I bashed it with the cutters in my other hand. No more visual data for you, assholes.
“Whoever you are, we know you’re out there,” I heard over the main EVA channel. It was Bob Lewis. Dammit! Of course the guild would send their most skilled member to lead the posse. “Don’t make this hard. If we have to physically restrain you, risking our safety, we’ll make you pay for it.”
He had a point. Contrary to space movies, fighting in an EVA suit is monumentally dangerous. I had no intention of doing that. If they caught up to me I’d just surrender. This had become a game of tag.
One problem at a time. I still had Killdozer to deal with. Without the front camera, it flailed around trying to find me. The wheels might not move fast, but the raw power behind that scoop could really whip it back and forth.
The scoop slammed to the ground a meter to my left. Pretty good guess, but not good enough. I hopped into the scoop and crouched down. I was taking a gamble here. The scoop had very accurate weight sensors and my mass would surely be detectable. I hoped the controller wasn’t paying enough attention.
The scoop reared up again, and when it did I leapt. Between my leap and the scoop’s upward motion, I went way the hell higher than I’d intended.
“Well, shit,” I said as I reached the top of the arc. I think I was about ten meters off the ground, but I’ll never know for sure. I do know that when I landed on the harvester’s roof I damn near broke my legs.
After a moment of reflection on the wisdom of my plan, I reached over and snipped the remaining antenna. The harvester stopped thrashing instantly.
“Whew.” I’d temporarily disabled all four harvesters. Now to permanently disable them.
I started with the harvester that I’d already sabotaged. I climbed up the side as I had done before and opened the breaker box. I reached into my relay box and pawed at the alarm settings on the clock. I couldn’t press the buttons, of course. The clock was designed for use by human fingers, not ham-fisted EVA gloves.
Okay, if I couldn’t set the alarm time, I’d use a less subtle approach. I disconnected both alligator clips, yanked the relay out from between them, and cut the insulation off their cables. I tied the cables into a crude knot and reconnected the alligator clips to the battery poles.
Then I hauled ass.
By removing the relay, I’d created a new device known as a “wire.” The battery was shorted and was absolutely shitting heat.
I ran full-speed to the nearest boulder and slid behind it. Nothing happened right away. I peeked around the edge. Still nothing.
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe I should—”
Then the harvester exploded. Like…exploded. Way the hell larger than I expected. Shrapnel flew in all directions. The blast forced the chassis into the ground so hard it bounced up, did a half flip, and landed on its roof.
I thought I was far enough from the explosion but no, not even close. Chunks of twisted metal bashed my boulder while smaller bits of wreckage rained from above.
“Oh, right,” I said. I’d forgotten to account for the other explosive in there: the hydrogen fuel-cell battery. All that hydrogen had met the oxygen at high temperature and they’d had a brief chat.
The rock shielded me from the initial blast, but it was useless against the debris that came down from above. I belly-crawled to one of the other harvesters while tufts of dust erupted around me. Reminder: There’s no air here. If something gets flung into the sky, it comes back down as fast as it was going when it left. It was raining bullets.
Through pure luck, I made it to the harvester and cowered under it for a while. I waited until the storm abated and crawled out to check my handiwork.
The victim harvester was totaled. Hell, you could barely tell it used to be a vehicle. The chassis was a wreck of twisted metal and a good 50 percent of the harvester was now evenly distributed across the collection zone. I checked the time. The whole process had taken ten minutes. Not bad, but I’d have to speed things up for the other three.
First, though, I picked through the wreckage, found a sheet of metal about two meters square, and dragged it to the far side of my Boulder of Protection. I leaned it against the edge to make a rudimentary shelter.
There. Technically I’d made a moon base. I sat in Fort Jasmine for a few minutes, converting my other relay cables to simple jumpers.
Then I got to work on the second harvester. At least this time there was no need for a hammock. The harvester wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Now that I had the hang of firing up a torch in a vacuum, things went much faster. Also, I didn’t bother marking the site first. I just did it from memory. Nothing quite like experience to speed your hand. I cut the hole, installed the valve, and filled the reservoir with air.
Then I shorted the battery, ran
to my metal plate, crawled under it, and waited. And this time, I didn’t look back like a moron.
I felt the explosion through the ground and readied myself for the “rain of terror.” Would the metal plate be thick enough?
Dents appeared in the plate. Scary as hell, but it protected me from the hail. I waited until the dents stopped and checked the ground nearby to see if the puffs of dust had stopped. It would have been better if I could just hear things. Vacuum’s refusal to convey sound is a real pain in the ass.
I crept out and nothing killed me, so everything seemed to be in order. I came around the rock to see another demolished harvester.
I checked the time on my arm readouts. Another ten minutes had passed. “Dammit!”
If the posse was efficient, they’d be on-site in another ten minutes. I still had two more harvesters to trash. If I left either of them operational, Sanchez Aluminum would still be able to get ore, still be able to make oxygen, and Trond would be keeping that million slugs.
The biggest time sink was when I had to run and hide from the debris. I knew what I had to do—I just didn’t like it. I’d have to blow the remaining two at the same time.
Please don’t quote that last sentence out of context.
I prepared each of the remaining harvesters for kaboominess. Both were now full of oxygen, their breaker boxes open, and my jumper cables dangling from their positive poles.
I laid all the welding equipment under one of the harvesters. Now that I was in a hurry, I wouldn’t be able to drag all that shit home with me. But I couldn’t leave stuff with BASHARA WELDING COMPANY written all over it for people to find.
Eh. A million slugs. I’d buy him new stuff. Better stuff.
I stood at one harvester and looked to the other twenty meters away. This would be tricky. A long-forgotten rational part of my brain piped up. Was this really a good idea? (One million slugs.) Yup! I’m fine!