Sixteenth Watch

by Myke Cole

  “Sorry it took me so long,” she chuckled. “I know this was an additional three weeks you hadn’t planned for.”

  Avitable shrugged, floating up a few inches. Oliver took comfort in noting that even what must be a seasoned micro-g operator wasn’t in full control of his position. “I think it was a good call, ma’am. You’re leading from the front, and I find that inspiring.”

  “Oops,” Ho smiled at him.

  Avitable’s face fell. “Commander?”

  Alice put a hand on his arm. “Don’t compliment mom, she can’t stand it.”

  Avitable turned to Oliver. “I don’t understand, ma’am. Are they serious?”

  “No,” Oliver smiled.

  “Yes,” Ho and Alice said at exactly the same time.

  “This is very confusing,” Avitable said.

  “Well, I’m the boss,” Oliver said. “Alice isn’t staying on Pico, and Ho has to do what I tell him. I say they’re not serious, and I beg your patience for putting up with my insufferable inner-circle. Anyway, thanks for the kind words. It’s appreciated.”

  “Wow,” Alice stared at her in exaggerated surprise. “Who are you and what have you done with my mom?”

  Oliver pursed her lips. “May I recommend, commander, that you never try to meet a commander in the company of her family? At least I can have Ho here court martialed.”

  “If I remember correctly,” Ho said, “you tried to spank Alice exactly once. You said you chased her around the house for five solid minutes and gave up when you couldn’t catch her.”

  Avitable blinked. “Duly noted.”

  “So, you brought a ride?” Oliver smiled.

  “Yes, ma’am. Got an executive shuttle docked and waiting. Brought an extra hardshell for your daughter.”

  “Aw, man, I hate wearing those things,” Alice said. “I thought the shuttles had atmosphere?”

  “They do,” Avitable said, “but it’s policy to suit up just in case there’s an emergency, though I guess your mother has the authority to grant an exception if she wants.”

  “I can’t very well lead a unit and expect them to uphold rules that I break myself,” Oliver said, “but because I need my XO, I’ll let him wear the hardshell inside the shuttle, and overcome my strong inclination to put him in it and tow him from the engine cowling.”

  The executive shuttle wasn’t much bigger than a rhino but featured a finished interior, pressurized, with white plastic paneling and swivel mounted chairs upholstered in a fairly convincing approximation of cream-colored leather. The weapons-racks were replaced with video screens and slots for binders, each held in place with a tiny rubber strap to keep it from drifting away in micro-g.

  A slim blue folder lay on a round table nested between the four chairs. COMMANDER’S INTRODUCTORY BRIEFING was written on a yellow stickie note stuck to the front. Avitable knelt beside his hardshell. “I have that memorized,” he said. “I’ve actually worked with people who can leaf through papers in a hardshell, but you don’t have to. I just brought it along in case you were one of those… enthusiastic types.”

  “She is absolutely one of those enthusiastic types,” Ho said, putting on his bunny-suit, “and I would pay money to see her try to page through a briefing while wearing a hardshell.”

  “What my XO means,” Oliver said, “is that I prefer to talk turkey with my staff. How much of that is fluff?”

  Avitable froze for a moment, and Oliver could practically see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to figure out how direct he could be with her. After a moment, he shrugged. “Honestly, ma’am? Ninety percent. A lot of it is housekeeping. Unit history. Stuff you can Google on your downtime.”

  Oliver arched an eyebrow. “I’m going to have downtime?”

  Avitable spread his hands and smiled. “No, ma’am.”

  “So, screw the briefing then. Let’s suit up, strap in, and you can tell me what I really need to know.”

  Oliver ignored the irony of being strapped into what looked like the first truly comfortable chair since she’d left Earth, prevented from enjoying the experience by the hardshell, or more accurately, by the hyper-safety-conscious Coast Guard policy that forced her to wear it. Pick your battles, she thought to herself. You’re coming into a new command. Go slow, listen more than you talk, and make changes slowly.

  The shuttle launched like a small boat, dropped by crane out of the bay doors. Oliver tensed her muscles in expectation of the acceleration into a gut-wrenching drop, but the shuttle’s helmsman knew their business, and there was only the slightest sensation before the belly thrusters compensated, gently floating the shuttle along below OTRACEN and down towards the Moon’s surface below. The shuttle banked as it descended, the windows near her dipping to give her a clear view of the landscape in what was probably a deliberate action on the part of the pilot.

  If the helmsman was trying to suck up to the new boss, it worked. Oliver caught her breath as she realized that over the past three weeks, she’d been so focused on getting through NCD/0G that she had almost forgotten this incredible landscape slowly rising up to meet her, silver-gray and shining, the wash of radiation and the combined refraction of her helmet and the window making it waver like a mirage. Of all the analogies for the Moon’s surface, the food ones had always suited Oliver the best, the whorls of impact craters melting into the trails of ancient lava flows amidst the slopes of long dead volcanoes like the crannies of crusty bread.

  It would have been far more economical to just let the shuttle drop, but the helmsman was happy to burn propellant keeping them under thrust the whole way. This gave Oliver the chance to see the landscape materialize before her slowly, the ridges and plains slowly sprouting the bubble-fields of the habs, some still glinting from the binding agents the gardeners used in the 3D printing process. Some of them were bigger than she remembered. When she’d last been on the Moon, even big municipal buildings were little more than simple, sprawling domes, the lobes of their curving roofs the only indicator of the partitioned rooms inside. Now, Oliver spotted towers, tallish cylinders that looked a lot like old style rocket ships without their fins, bubbling around their bases with support structures. As they drew closer, Oliver could pick up the maser-lanes, bounded by the huge towers firing their invisible microwave beams. The ship traffic had increased too, and in places she could see actual traffic jams as shuttles, regolith-haulers and government vehicles dipped their solar sails into the beams, gathering thrust as the ablative surface cooked off, leaving tiny clouds of dust behind them. “Wow,” she said on the open channel. “Business has picked up since I was last here.”

  The silence that followed jerked her head up, and she took in the awkward looks on her companions’ faces. “Guys,” Oliver said, “it’s fine. We’re not going to tiptoe around what happened the last time I was here. I plan to hit it head on, so there’s no need to walk on eggshells.”

  Avitable nodded, relaxed, but not much. “Thanks, ma’am. That is definitely top of the list of things I think you need to know.”

  “Hit me,” Oliver said.

  “Morale is low, ma’am,” Avitable said. “You know the SAR element just got folded into SPACETACLET, and a lot of the SAR operators are seeing it as a punishment, like they need adult supervision from our folks.”

  “Because of what happened at Lacus Doloris,” Oliver said.

  “Yeah,” Avitable agreed. “Because of that.”

  “That was over three years ago,” Oliver said, “there’s been no improvement?”

  Avitable only shrugged.

  “And is their impression correct, commander?” Oliver asked. “Have you received any directive from Ops or someone else on high directing you to babysit the SAR staff?”

  Avitable met her eyes, “No, ma’am.”

  “So, what have you done to combat this impression?” Oliver asked.

  Avitable looked at his lap. “Well, now I feel like an idiot, to be honest, ma’am, but I was working on the assumption that if I tried to tac
kle it, I’d just throw gasoline on this thing. I figured the best move was to give it time. When sailors are in tight together, doing the work every day, well, they get past differences. They tighten up. I was hoping to let that machine just run. But listening to you, I–”

  “It’s all right,” Oliver interrupted him. “Your instincts are good, and you’re absolutely right. A lot of the time, you don’t want to draw attention to something like this. You pick the scab off too soon, and things don’t heal. But sometimes things aren’t like a cut with a scab. They’re like a broken bone that’s set wrong, and you have to get under the surface and fix it if you ever want it to heal right. Even though digging down into the old injury hurts worse at first.”

  “No disrespect, ma’am,” Avitable said, “but what makes you sure this is that kind of… wound? The digging-down kind?”

  “Because it’s my wound,” Oliver said, feeling her heart speed up, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, “and because I didn’t realize until now, just now while I’m talking to you, that I’d been treating it like the scab would hold. That if I just sat tight for long enough, I would get better. But it won’t and I won’t.”

  She turned, met Alice’s eyes, toggled her radio to a private channel. “I needed to be up here to handle this. I can’t wait for Tom to give up real estate in my heart. That won’t ever happen. I need to honor the spot he’s carved out there. I need to do what he would he would have wanted me to. I was out to pasture running TRACEN back on Earth. I was trying to make up for the family I’d lost. I was trying to take care of a family by proxy. It wasn’t enough. Training isn’t enough. I need to do the job. I need to take care of things for real. I couldn’t save Tom, so maybe I’ll save the world instead. Does that sound crazy?”

  “It absolutely does,” Alice said, “and it’s exactly right.”

  “I need to… I know this sounds stupid, but I need to make your father proud again. One last time.”

  Alice reached across and placed her hand on her mother’s knee. “He already is, mom. I know it.”

  They sat in silence for a while after that, Oliver holding her daughter’s hand through the hardshell gauntlet, imagining she could feel the pulse through the layers of plastic as the landscape rose up around them.

  Pico meant “peak,” but Oliver was struck by how squat the mountain looked as the shuttle closed in and the SPACETACLET complex came into view. The broad expanse of the mountain was almost entirely obscured by the concrete pads and 3D-printed structures around it, rising in a rash of gray-white bubbles that made the peak look like a pill-case or some kind of insect-hive. Not far to the north, she could make out the icy lip of a vast ghost crater, the faint imprint of some tectonic event long past. Sometime back, they’d assigned the gardeners to 3D-print directly onto the surface at the mountain’s base using some kind of reflective material visible from above. She could make out the crossed anchors and shield, the American flag above it. UNITED STATES COAST GUARD, was printed in letters Oliver assumed had to be twenty feet across, SPACE AREA – TACTICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT DETACHMENT.

  Just below it was a massive concrete pad clustered with small boats, almost entirely rhinos, but here and there a longhorn or two which had yet to be mothballed. There’d be no more sickening crane-drops here. SPACETACLET, and now SAR-1, launched straight up into the Moon’s tiny shred of atmosphere using their belly thrusters. Beside the pad, Oliver could make out a massive tower, far too big to have been built by gardeners, a structure of concrete, rebar and steel most of which had probably been shipped from Earth or made in one of the Moon’s few industrial plants. It rose up to support a huge ball of habs, all bolted and welded together until they looked like nothing so much as a giant white fist atop an extended gray arm. Clenched in that fist were massive metal gangways, each sturdy enough to act as berthing for the command’s two assigned Constellation Class cutters.

  The first, Oliver knew, was the Volans. She thought she’d be prepared to see that ship again, the last one she’d seen before the Lacus Doloris dustup, but the sight of the flying fish painted on the side made her tear up. She’d known that everything she’d see from the moment she left OTRACEN would be a stark reminder of Tom, and she’d thought she’d been prepared, but the actual sight of it brought the memories flooding back. She could taste the panic in her throat as she wrenched at the frozen door handle, see the gray-white landscape blurring into a solid gray line as she raced to shoulder Tom’s boat out of the way.

  She closed her eyes, resisted the urge to shake her head. She was confident she could show that kind of weakness in front of Ho and Alice, but Avitable was new to her. He was one of the people she was here to lead. She blinked hard, then flicked her eyes up again, taking in the other cutter. It was identical to the Volans but in better repair, freshly painted, with some kind of refit featuring a taller antennae boom, and bigger shoulder pods port and starboard, that Oliver assumed covered the cutter’s massive solar sails. For a moment, she dared to hope it was the Aries, but she already knew that had been assigned to quarantine enforcement duties on the Moon’s far side. She squinted until she could make out the logo painted on the side, a stiff wooden board cutting through storm-churned waters. Carina – the keel.

  Oliver wasn’t a superstitious type, but she couldn’t help but view it as a good omen. Steady as she goes, she thought, exactly what I need.

  She turned and glanced through the opposite window as the shuttle leveled off, affording her a view of what looked like an unbroken gray-white expanse of lunar regolith – the Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. It did look like a sea from this distance, albeit an unnaturally calm one. It arced out of view, the black void of space descending until the glowing albedo swallowed it, but Oliver could see the jagged boundary where the American habs began to peter out and finally stop, and the bigger structures of the Chinese EEZ control posts began. They were squat, black structures, sprouting concrete small boat pads like toadstools, each emblazoned in the center with the red and yellow logo of the PLAN. Here and there, above the endless gray plain, she could see the firefly glimmer of the PLAN small boats’ running lights, the white-blue plumes of their thrusters. She wondered if some of those lights came not from PLAN boats but from American quarantine runners, trying their luck launching through the Chinese EEZ in an effort to save days and dollars. Perhaps there were Coast Guard or Navy boats in pursuit, guns fixed to their hard points, all just one bullet away from sending the whole mess over the edge and into war.

  OTRACEN had been… a ship of sorts, so the kind of cramped opulence that was O-country berthing on sea-going vessels had made sense. But her stateroom on the landlocked SPACETACLET campus made her realize this was simply the way people lived on the surface of the Moon. Oliver’s quarters befit her status as the incoming commanding officer: blue carpet, two rooms, not including the head, a wide quartz-glass window with a view of the small boat pads, and the broad basalt sweep of the Sinus Iridum, the Bay of Rainbows, beyond.

  They’d tried to assign her an orderly, but she’d immediately shut the idea down. “I’m not going to have junior enlisted washing my feet for me,” she said, cocking an eyebrow at Ho. “I’ve got an XO for that.”

  Alice was enthralled by the view. “This is amazing!”

  “I thought you were the old lunar hand,” Oliver said.

  Alice shook her head. “Are you kidding me? Sinus Medii is worse than Nebraska. You stand on a beer can and you can see the whole thing.”

  “The Apennines aren’t too far away,” Oliver said.

  “I wish I had time. I’m burning money just to have the operation covered while I’m here.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

  Alice looked horrified. “Sorry, mom. I didn’t mean it that way, it’s just that…”

  “I get it, honey. And I appreciate you taking the hit.”

  “Oh, you know I wouldn’t have missed it. I needed to be here as much as you needed me here. I’m grateful you invited me.”<
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  Now it was Oliver’s turn to look horrified. “You cannot seriously think I would have done this on the Moon and not had you present.”

  Alice shrugged, looked back out the window. “I’ve never been up this high. Not on the Moon, anyway.”

  “This is nothing,” Avitable said. “If you want, I can take you up to the cutter launches. That’s the highest point here. Can’t swear if it’s exactly accurate, but I think the cutter antennae booms are higher than the top of Pico.”

  “You OK with that, mom?”

  Oliver waved a hand, and Avitable led her daughter out.

  Ho made to follow, but Oliver stopped him with a touch on his elbow. “I thought you were my orderly now.”

  Ho rolled his eyes, but he waited with her as she unpacked her sea bag, hung her uniforms in the closet, one of the few ones made of real wood on the whole installation. She stepped back, smoothing the settling clothing as it rippled in the lunar-g, and sighed. “This will need ironing.”

  Ho folded his arms. “I don’t iron. Or do windows. You should have taken the orderly.”

  “Relax. I can walk them down to the laundry same as… Shit. Where’s the laundry?”

  “This is why you have an orderly, Rear Admiral Select.”

  “Never mind. I’ll figure it out eventually.”

  Ho took a seat at the room’s expansive desk, carved from the same glass topped reflective cherry wood that decorated most high-ranking government offices on Earth. “Nice digs, anyway.”

  “Needs decorating. We can get that sorted out once we’re settled in. For now, all we need is this.” She plunked down the same picture she’d kept taped to her desk monitor on the Aries. It was protected by a silver frame now, and she misjudged its weight in the lunar gravity, and watched it bounce a millimeter before settling back down again.