by M.A. Harris
February
The Alexis’ Stacks were singing happily as they broke the fall of almost a hundred and forty tons of cargo and her own mass. Luna’s surface was coming up fast, spreading out around them in its typical enigmatic way. Paul saw the first signs of civilization, the hexagonal footprints of the first two garden domes and the equipment shed, then the trenches of Luna Haven’s first residential arm. The staging area’s piles of building material and freight containers then came into focus.
Paul glanced over at Patsy who was piloting this run with Paul in oversight. Steven Evans was the Engineer this flight, Raoul was working on the MoonDream right now. Since the first month they had begun training new Moonship crews. The pace was grueling, though the Moonships were easy enough to fly, Paul had been in space almost every day for three months and he wanted a few days off. Both Patsy and Raoul had been able to take a break as the new crews came up the curve, but Paul had been in command every time, even with the three new command pilots.
Paul had wanted Patsy to get a slot but so far he hadn’t won that battle, she was simply too young for the selection committee. Still, that didn’t mean he’d given up, and in the end he figured he would win. Two of the chosen command pilots were nowhere near as good as Patsy in his opinion. She was cool under pressure and had a natural feel for the Moonships that was turning out to be rare.
Today there was a secondary stress as they were carrying an almost full passenger compartment as well as the first Aristide Industries VIP tour. He always felt a lot tenser with passengers aboard. There were two VIP’s; remarkably one was the COO, Howard Conrad, a tall cold Brit who Paul had never met before. Cliff and all the longer-term members of the team treated the almost skeletally thin man with respect bordering on fear.
This was the ninth passenger flight and the largest so far. When they’d taken Conti Smithers and his full construction team up they’d actually sat on the surface for almost forty-eight hours as the construction shack was finished out. The now buried shack was made up of a set of five interconnected cylinders like those built into the Moonships, just longer. The systems in them were similar though, except that the APU was a battery pack and photovoltaic array, main power was provided by two Paaly Stacks in concrete cisterns buried a hundred feet from the shack. The ten men and four women in the construction team had been on the moon ever since.
This new batch of nineteen men and women would be part of the construction team as well but they would be living in the finished section of Luna Haven, four sections of buried canal pipe and one of the connector nodes. There were also two pressurized transparent domes, one finished, one almost finished, that were the beginnings of the farms and gardens that would feed the town.
Thrust fell away and they were no longer moving cross range but slowly falling onto the landing stage. Paul watched as Patsy rolled the ship to align the cargo hatch with the offloading ramp the construction team had built early on. There were two huge electric tugs and a drag waiting nearby, ready to pull the forty-by-forty by twenty some connector off the Alexis’ cargo deck. The massive connectors were the heaviest single things the Moonship carried, especially since they were filled with items that would be unpacked later. There were also four of the curiously shaped lightweight cargo containers that had started arriving recently. All that plus the passengers and their baggage meant this was the heaviest cargo they had ever lifted.
That sort of record was constantly falling, in this environment they were almost meaningless but they were an intellectual exercise of some interest to the men and women of this clandestine community. The most people in space at one time, the longest period on the moon, the total number of man-hours in space. Tons of cargo delivered, highest velocity achieved. There were hundreds of records on the lists people passed around.
There was a flash as the grounding strap dumped charge and they were almost down. One hundred feet, fifty, thirty, twenty, ten, then came the thump and soft bounce as almost two hundred tons of spacecraft came to a stop. Paul reached over and patted his copilots shoulder, “Great work Patsy.”
She flashed her grin, he noted that she was beginning to mature, and there was perhaps a little more restraint in the face as well as a little fatigue. They were all working flat out. They all felt the pressure though no one seemed able to fully articulate why they felt it.
Patsy and Evans ran through the shutdown routine as Paul looked around for a few moments. From this overlook you could see the massive series of trenches being dug and leveled ready for the sections of rectangular piping that made up the living quarters. To one side was the staging area with a couple of the modified canal pipes ready for installation. These were all the standard two-unit housing tubes; none of the other designs had been lofted yet.
Paul climbed out of his seat around the clutter of the bridge and made his way back into the crew quarters, which were set up for VIP transportation this trip. Two men were there, Howard Conrad and a broad, dark skinned black haired man with dark brown eyes who was some kind of special consultant, for what was left unstated. His name was Arkan Olarik, he spoke a clipped, almost British English, and smiled a lot, but in Paul’s opinion the smile never reached the eyes.
The two men had come to the Hollow already equipped with spacesuits, obviously based on Cliff’s team’s design but different. Their overall ‘moonsuits’ were significantly bulkier looking than the lightweight version Paul and the other ship crew wore on their occasional jaunts onto the surface. The helmets were a hybrid between the heavy work helmet and the lightweight pilot’s model. More than anything else it bothered Paul because it reminded him of what he didn’t know about what was going on.
“Hope you were comfortable Mr. Conrad, Mr. Olarik?” Paul asked calmly.
Conrad nodded, “Amazing Mr. Richards, never a moment of zero g the whole way here, and it took us what? About five hours? Amazing!”
Olarik’s eyes bored into Paul’s, “You Americans so like to take the fun, the joy, the risk out of things. This, this was more like riding to the moon on an elevator. Where is the joy, the thunder, the risk in that I ask you?” But there was a hint of warmth in those blank brown eyes for the first time.
Paul felt himself smiling at both of them, “Getting into space in itself is exciting but, for it to be practical, the getting into space, to Luna, has to be about as exciting as riding in an elevator, now you can have all the adventures you would like. Think of it as taking the elevator up the Petronas Towers so you can sky dive off the top.”
There was a real smile on Olarik’s face for a moment, gone in the next instant, “An interesting analogy Mr. Richards, I’ll keep that insight for future thought.”
Paul nodded, looking around. The two men’s luggage was netted down against the wall of the crew’s sleeping compartment. The space was beginning to look lived in, scrapes and dents giving it personality. Then he glanced back at the two VIPs, “If you would like to suit up we’ll go down and you can see them offload the cargo. I’ll help you carry your baggage over to Luna Haven if you’d like. I made sure that Conti had a buggy here for you, it’s not a long walk but it takes a while to get used to carrying loads in the reduced gravity.”
Conrad nodded, “That sounds fine Mr. Richards, you’re sure you don’t need to stay with your ship?”
“This trip it’s really Patsy’s and she and Evans can do the shut down and make sure we are ready for the flight back tomorrow night.”
“Very good then, your escort will be very welcome.” Conrad nodded sharply.
Paul made sure the two newbies got their equipment on right. There was actually little that could be done wrong and literally nothing that could be done wrong enough to kill you without warning, but it was a good idea to check.
Helping Olarik on with his moonsuit Paul realized, with a bit of a chill, that the reason for the suit’s bulkiness was not insulation, but armor. All the moonsuits had Kevlar shells, but this one was made of s
everal heavy layers and had the distinctive overlapping plates of cermet armor in the body.
The helmet was also armored, with thick transparencies that were probably proof against a lot of things. Paul also noted that it had something that looked like the deployable disaster helmet on the inside.
The whole thing made Paul’s stomach twitch. He had never been fool enough to expect mankind’s militaristic and violent streaks to be left behind. It was still a shock to realize that Aristide Industries must have spent millions thinking about and designing these suits; if that, then what else?
After helping Olarik into his armor Paul stepped back and found Conrad viewing him calmly with his helmet tucked under his arm. The engineer turned Moonship commander had an intense hallucination, overlaid for a moment was the image of a Norman Knight in chain mail and padded gabion, steel helmet tucked under his arm. The only thing missing was the sword at the waist, and somehow Paul knew that wasn’t far away.
The sandy eyebrow cocked up, “Mr. Richards you look a little upset?”
Paul sighed, “Not really, it’s just a little earlier than I had expected is all.”
Conrad’s lips twitched at the unstated in their conversation but nodded, “You have to take some responsibility for that Mr. Richards, you have done wonders. Sampson and the Coots are very dedicated and Paaly brilliant - but you have provided impetus and leadership that have hurled this into high gear almost from a standing start. There are many forces at play behind the scenes; this is one, hopefully small, part.”
There were many men and women who were not members of the Church of the Stars working their bodies into a stupor here and at the Hollow and probably elsewhere, but Paul understood that Conrad was using the nickname as shorthand for the dedicated Luna Haven supporters.
Paul smiled faintly and shrugged wordlessly, then turned and went back to the bridge, “Patsy, Evans - you OK?”
Patsy nodded abstractly, “We’re going to check Stack twelve. It looks like one of the converters’s going out. I want Evans to go over the cable link between the north face antenna array and the electronic intelligence suite again, I think it’s intermittent. Also the star trackers optics may be dirty or the sensor’s going out. We’re still fully redundant but I don’t like the thought of losing some of our deep space and farside navigation capability.”
Paul smiled, “Check Stack fifteen’s blower wear gauge as well, would you? The temperature in the shell has been on the rise for the last ten hours. I checked it before lift out, nothing to note, do it again and check it against my notes please?”
A very serious bob of the head, “You got it boss, I’ll see you at Sara’s?” Sara MacDougal had started a small café operation on the side, when she wasn’t running one of the big excavators.
“Probably Patsy, standard watch schedule?” They all needed sleep and food and someone needed to be on watch in case something came up. Normal schedule was the engineer on first watch, dealing with any minor issues that had come up during the flight. Then the copilot and then the commander, who would also start bringing the ship up to flight status at the end of his or her six-hour watch.
Patsy hesitated, blushed a little, “You take midwatch and I’ll take the command watch?”
“Done, see you in a little while; I’m going to show our guests the ropes.” He pulled his head out of the little room and turned to pull his moonsuit out of the crew locker. His helmet he unsnapped from its belt strap and hung on the hangar placed nearby for it.
Pulling on the coveralls was a few moments work and he snugged up all the various closures and then picked up the helmet and sealed it down. He flipped the sun visor completely out of the way and unsealed the main visor and it rotated up and in.
When he looked the two VIP’s had divided the baggage between them, it was sitting around their feet, they were both holding their helmets, “OK, lock the helmets on and we’ll haul the stuff out to the main airlock, the construction crew will be using the passenger lock, Conti’s already with them.” It had been decided fairly early on that the construction crews would have their own chain of command as it were. Paul had declared a total hands-off policy except when they needed, and asked for, help.
The door between the cabin cylinders couldn’t be locked open so one of them had to hold it while the other two transferred the five largish bags, two of which were airtight.
They then had to cycle through the airlock twice since it was only big enough for three people if they were friendly. Paul went through with Howard Conrad and three bags first, then Arkan Olarik and the remaining two. Conrad was staring out over the moonscape when they come out. Paul wasn’t sure what emotions the tall Englishman was feeling right now; even without the helmet he was hard to read, with it, it was impossible.
The sun was a blinding white hole in the black sky, a blazing presence in the heavens, almost oppressive. But if you looked away from the sun you found that you could actually see stars, as alien pinpricks of color set in velvet black.
Arkan Olarik stood next to his boss for some time in silent contemplation.
After several minutes Howard spoke quietly over the radio link, “It is odd how little the pictures that came back from the Apollo visits really captured the feel of this Mr. Richards. There is a bleakness, a fierceness, an alieness that they hardly hinted at, yet there is a potentiality here waiting to spring out.”
“The stars pull at you as if their very gravity is trying to suck you to them.” Olarik’s voice was a little rough, his accent no longer quite so clipped, for the first time Paul wondered if he might be Russian, though the name wasn’t exactly what you’d expect.
There was a newly rigged baggage chute running down the inside of the main structural post. After making sure there was nothing particularly fragile in the bags Paul sent them down the chute, then swung onto the ladder, Conrad then Olarik followed. At the bottom Paul waved at the chute and the ladder, “We have a couple of changes in the MoonDream, one of them is a kind of lift for the crew and baggage, this is a stopgap. No one ever thought about how to deal with baggage and so on. Never been much of an issue with spaceships in the past.” Olarik’s bark of laughter was an agreement. Paul went on, “Hopefully, when we can take the Alexis out of service for awhile in a few months, we can have her refitted with that and a couple of other items the new ships’ll have.”
He got no more than a grunt from one of them to this.
Paul opened the auxiliary hatch and flipped out the little stage and attached steps, it was almost nine feet down to the Luna surface here. The three men carefully went down the lightweight ladder carrying the baggage. Once on the surface the baggage was abandoned and all three of them started to walk and bounce around. The pure joy of the light gravity bubbled through them like an elixir of youth. Paul still found it fun to hop and jump around on the surface, he called it getting his moon legs back, but in fact it was almost purely for the fun of it.
Hopping around he noted the four-seat moon buggy sitting nearby, Conti’s response to his request. They had come out on the East face of the ship. A quarter of a mile away to the east was the slightly disorganized stockyard of freight containers. Many had food and other stores in them but some were empty. A few would be going back with them tomorrow. It was odd to see the peeling and scratched logos of the freight lines that owned them. Paul wondered what those freight lines would think if they knew their containers had made a trip to the moon.
The other two men were bounding around like big gray white rabbits. They chattered like almost everyone else who had ever done this. There were more distant voices as well, the construction crew coming down and starting to get their ‘moon legs’ as well. The digital radio system could make a good guess as to range and direction of a signal and provided volume and stereo differentiation to give you a more intuitive ‘feel’ for direction and distance. Those features could be switched off but most left them on; it was a comfort whe
n things worked more like at home, even in this dangerously alien landscape.
To the north Paul saw the massive electric tug carefully steering the jack drag up the freight slope towards the Alexis’ cargo deck. The thing was the equivalent of an overgrown forklift; it would slide under the enormous concrete, steel and plastic hub section and lift it. Then the tug would drag it out and directly to the worksite, they’d been waiting a couple of days for this.
The construction crew was running ahead of the delivery schedule. Once they’d gotten into the swing of it, the trenching and placing had all gone much quicker than expected, though the interior fitting out was taking more time and effort than planned.
Paul stopped his horsing around and went to collect baggage, he found that he could carry three quite easily and he strode over the gravel to the Luna buggy. He stacked the bags in the cargo basket over the battery pack and turned to get the others. Olarik and Howard were already on their way over, each carrying a bag.
“I see they’re moving the jack drag up already Mr. Richards, impatient?” Howard’s voice was neutral, perhaps tinged with respect?
“They were waiting for it to start the second leg of the main village concourse Mr. Conrad. They’re making great progress on the whole system but they wanted to start the second leg now, instead of later, it looks like the underlying rock structure may slow the first leg down before we get to the end connector. If we’d stopped and done a lot of checking before starting construction we might have caught that, but it would have taken months and I think it would just have led to endless debates about location and layout. Mostly pointless, since in my experience in this kind of situation, all options have problems, just in different combinations.”
Conrad chuckled, “How refreshing to find an engineer with a realistic view of the perversity of the universe.”
“Hate to argue but most good general engineers know the universe is designed to frustrate them.” Paul said quietly.
“Yes but those two modifiers, good and general, are in my experience rather rare Mr. Richards.” There was still an underlying chuckle in the senior manager’s voice.
Paul was glad he had his helmet on, his ears were burning fiercely, he hadn’t been fishing for compliments. It was also a little unsettling to realize how much this man he had never met before today, hadn’t really known existed even, knew about him and the work here. Along with the other disturbing discoveries of the day it was enough to make his stomach do flip-flops as he climbed into the buggy’s driver’s seat.
The Luna buggy looked a lot like the ones that the Apollo astronauts had used for the last few moon landings but it was much larger and longer ranged. It was still battery powered, there were designs floating around for a mini Paaly Power Stack but it was not likely for some years and in most ways Paul figured it made more sense to make the buggy a ‘hopper’ if you did that. You could go further faster and probably with less energy that way.
As they rolled up next to the tug, Paul saw that the operator was Charley Wipple, as usual. The tug was massive and, like all the occasional use pieces of equipment, was battery powered. The big excavators, scrapers and bulldozers all had a Paaly Power Stack to provide electricity for their heavy duty traction motors. The Stack was overkill in all cases but it was simpler to use the single, already relatively compact design, rather than try and develop several different ones. Those power Stacks were smaller, simpler and overall much less powerful than the ones in the Alexis - but they did use a lot of the same components.
They watched from the buggy as the tug maneuvered the jack drag in and the jacks lifted the connector off the resilient blocks it had been sitting on. The forest of stout tie downs was all gone now and the tug slowly started the almost hundred ton mass out of the cargo hold.
“It’ll be a while Mr. Conrad, won’t go much more than two miles an hour at max and I doubt Charley will hit that until they’re on the road. Why don’t we head for the Village, you can get yourselves set up and talk to Conti, I assume he’ll be there by now, I saw the bus heading that way a few minutes ago.”
“It’s your tour Mr. Richards, sounds like a good plan to me.”
Paul swung the buggy around in a bounding circle and accelerated for the village. The cross shaped initial core was all buried, there were aluminum frames over the ends that would connect to the extending ‘street’s and ‘crossroads’ that allowed the full layer of dirt to be put over the tubes, giving them essentially full protection until the rest of the system could be installed.
They pulled up next to the tube that was finished, terminating in a connector into the first of the garden domes. At the joint there was an airlock, outside of which was a parking structure, a long low open sided shed covered by corrugated metal sheets, this roof was covered with a couple of feet of rock and dirt as shielding. It was a temperature moderator as much as anything else, stopping the equipment from going through the full cycle of heating and cooling while it wasn’t in use.
The airlock was more than big enough for all three of them and their baggage. It was a two-stage system; the outer lock was about half an atmosphere. It was more efficient overall and stopped a single door accident from causing a disaster, though all the doors hinged in so that the airflow would tend to close them.
On the inside they found themselves in the ten by ten tunnel that was the village street. Conti Smithers stood waiting. Iron gray hair, pale blue eyes, skinny and wrinkled and physically hyperactive, Conti was ultra organized and always seemed very cool calm and collected, especially in retrospect. A long-term member of the COTS, he wasn’t outwardly religious like Cliff and many others. He had spent a long lifetime building things all over the world; apparently he’d been an Aristide employee for more than twenty years, most of it in Arabia, Africa and Russia. He had built oil fields, oil refineries, supertanker harbors and no few bridges, highways and towns.
The calm eyes took in the three newcomers, “Hello Mr. Conrad, Mr. Olarik, there was a faint emphasis on both Mr.’s as if Conti was resisting using some other title or name. “I’ll show you to your quarters in a minute?” The two VIP’s nodded, few people ever contradicted Conti. “Paul, I have the return manifest on the intranet for you to look at, should be in your e-mail. I also have a modified load out for the upcoming flights; we’re getting way out of sequence because things aren’t working quite like we figured in the ops planning stage. Mostly good but I’d hate to have people twiddling their fingers. Any news on the MoonDream?”
“I left Raoul working on her Conti, she’ll be ready at least two weeks ahead of schedule, perhaps more, and the MoonBeam is less than six weeks behind her, they’re already pre-fabbing sections. We’re well ahead on Stack build ups and test, still only the one major Stack failure in almost fifty thousand running hours.”
“Sounds great Paul, we need the Dream and Beam on the run, to get this buildup going faster.” Some of this was a little play-acting on Conti’s part Paul realized; he could say things to Paul that he couldn’t say to the VIP’s directly.
“We are going to see about lifting two cells out on the next lift Conti, it will slow us down some but I don’t see a real problem.” Paul said quietly.
Olarik interrupted, “That’s well over the rated lifting power of your ship, Mr. Richards.”
“Yes Mr. Olarik, but it’s actually more of a concern structurally than anything else. We have well over two hundred and seventy tons of lift at full power and the two cells with a light load out are about two thirty something. We won’t get up and out as quickly as usual but we could still lose two Stacks and not lose a return to base option. Once we get to orbital velocity we can make it to Luna with a quarter of the Stacks.” Paul said quietly.
Conti was bouncing up and down in excitement; his old habit of flexing his toes to work off nervous energy had a much more pronounced effect in the Moon’s one sixth gravity, “If you can do that a few times Paul we’ll get well ahead of schedu
le, even before the MoonDream starts the run.”
Conrad smiled faintly, “It sounds like you’re pushing ahead about as hard as you can.”
The construction boss nodded, “About as hard as is humanly possible, you’ll see sir, my people love this, it’s about as great an opportunity as anyone has ever had.”
Paul laughed, “I’ll talk to you later Conti, I’ll probably hole up at Sara’s, I’ll pick up the incoming mail from there and look at your stuff.”
“Fair enough Paul, see you later.”
Paul said his goodbyes to the other two as they separated at the ladder up to the second floor of the connector. Sara’s little self-serve cafe was in the center connector section with Conti’s office and the village’s computing and communication infrastructure.