Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Greetings

  Raoul sounded worried, “We aren’t losing the radar track Paul, he’s got us pegged and he’s dwelling long enough every cycle to get a paint on us. The fast movers are falling away but I think they might have gotten a look at us, the F35’s got a good electro-optical package in its belly and I think they maneuvered to get a look at us before breaking away.”

  “I wish I had a radar, I want to know where that damned battle group is, if we go over the top of it they might take it as a threat and pop off an anti-missile shot at us.”

  Patsy coughed, “Ah…they might anyway, I didn’t kink our course, if they do an orbital prediction they’ll know we’re headed for the continental US!”

  “Oh crap…I didn’t even think about that. Damnit! What’s our altitude?”

  “Passing through a hundred thousand feet, at mach three Boss.”

  Paul tapped his comm pad, “Doctor, I hate to say this but we may need to take some major evasive maneuvers, strap everyone down.” He looked at Patsy, “roll in more thrust, break back towards the south, the Fleet’s not going to be in that direction and it’ll pull our path away from the US.”

  Patsy nodded her fingers already flying over her workstation.

  “Alexis this is Fighter One, do you receive me.”

  Paul almost jumped out of his seat, then he recognized Helena’s voice, he saw the green of the receive channel. He felt another sinking sensation in his stomach, separate from the one caused by the increase in acceleration and change in direction. Given their current circumstances he wished he felt good about hearing her voice. He tapped the comm. “Receiving you loud and clear Helena.”

  “Colonel Olarik is very glad that you managed to extract Miss Chisholm from the Admiral General’s care Mr. Richards, but has some questions about your current course. He would like you to return to Luna Haven.”

  “Helena, this whole thing is getting out of hand, you have to know that. A little public scrutiny and openness can only do good at this point.”

  A sigh, “Mr. Richards you are really not in a position to make that sort of decision. You are ordered to return your spacecraft to Luna Haven.”

  Paul shook his head at the speaker, “I have thirty some people aboard, several seriously wounded and in need of hospitalization. I have no space suits aboard; it’s not safe for me to make a Luna Landing at this time. If you really insist I’ll just drop the people off and then take the Alexis back, I’m sure my crew’ll accept the risks.”

  “Mr. Richards you have your orders, you will comply or I will start shooting, I will try and avoid killing anyone but you know that’s going to be difficult.”

  Paul opened his mouth to argue but found he didn’t really have anything to say. He glanced at Patsy, back at Raoul, both looked at him helplessly, none of them had any good ideas.

  Closing his eyes Paul took a deep breath, “Patsy plot a fast orbit for Luna Haven, I hope the low gravity of the moon will offset the lack of a real trauma center for the wounded.”

  Helena sounded almost sympathetic, “Good decision Mr. Richards, and don’t worry about the warships below, we’ll take care of any missiles they fire.”

  Paul sighed, “Thanks.”

  -o-

  Julia moved slowly and carefully, she was frightened by the thought of a heavy fall at what had to be two gravities, she’d be lucky to escape with just bruises. But she was too stubborn to stop following and assisting the even more stubborn Doctor Fleck. The big Doctor was currently checking Sunil’s leg while Julia made sure the Corporal was as comfortable as possible. The girl, for she was no more than that, seemed to be asleep; she was looking drawn but not in excessive pain, unlike the young soldier who had been burnt by the diesel fuel, who was whimpering even in deep, drug induced sleep.

  She moved slowly over to the temporary bed where Sunil was laid out. The tall militia captain was either unconscious or asleep; one of the nurses was hovering protectively next to him, though she looked peaceful enough. She caught Julia looking at her and winked with a smile. Julia couldn’t help smiling back.

  The deck shifted under her and Julia reflexively grabbed onto something and got ready to fall. But the shift was slight, and suddenly she felt almost weightless. Fleck grunted, and relaxed from his sudden tense crouch. It was good to know he’d been just as worried. They were still under acceleration, a flex of her leg told her they might still be accelerating at more than one G, though not by much.

  Whatever the Alexis Aurora’s propulsion system was it so overmatched anything she had ever heard of before that it was almost comic. She looked around again, feeling oddly comfortable. In many ways the interior of the ship was very much like the inside of an air freighter. The cabin was about the same diameter, the interior ‘wall’ panels were the same tough textured fiberglass and the floor was coated with similar heavy duty rubberized matting with lots of freight anchors.

  The front section of the cabin had a small kitchen area, very like the one in an airliner; the rear of the cabin had two toilets and a toilet shower combination. Four rows of four seats at the front took up about a third of the remaining floor space, the rest was open. The seven wounded were laid out on mattresses and bedding with freight straps holding them down against any radical maneuvering.

  One of the two older men from Paul’s crew appeared next to her, he was frowning, “Must have gotten clear without anyone popping one off at us I guess.” His voice was deep and familiar, he sounded like her dad’s ranch hands.

  Julia nodded, “I suppose so, hope we didn’t have to change course too radically?”

  He shrugged and grinned bashfully at her, “Don’t know about that Miss, the Cap or Patsy could probably tell you the change in velocity vector by the seat of their pants but I’m no pilot, just an old wire slinger, came along to patch up the ‘Beam over in the ‘Stan.”

  “One of your other ships went down in the ‘Stan?” Julia asked, the bottom dropping out of her stomach.

  “Yeah, Micah’s crew got too close to some fellah’s with a machine cannon. Could ‘a been a real mess but we were lucky. ‘Beam’s engineer couldn’t get her back up but the Cap and Raoul had her fixed up in a few minutes once we got down to her.”

  Julia could only think of one reason one of Aristide Industries space-freighters would be down in the ‘Stan, gun running, and she hated gun running with a passion.

  Her ears popped faintly and the forward cross-compartment door opened. Paul Richards stepped through and glanced around, he smiled confidently and raised his voice, “We’re out of any danger folks, acceleration should remain steady for awhile. Just like on a normal airliner, I suggest you stay in your seat with your seatbelt on unless you have a reason to be moving around.”

  Having said his piece he moved forward, past the last row of seats; the smile faded to a much grimmer expression. “Ms. Chisholm, could I have some of your time, I’d like to talk to you, Dr. Fleck and Sunil.”

  Julia flicked her head towards the Doctor who was back at the end tending to one of the seriously injured, “Certainly Mr. Richards, Dr. Fleck’s involved with the soldier who was burnt.”

  A nearby bundle of cloth unfolded and Sunil got up with a grimace, “Mr. Richards.”

  Before the Moonship pilot could say more Julia spoke up, her voice a little harsh,

  “Do you fly weapons into the ‘Stan Mr. Richards?”.

  He hesitated, looked away from her his face tired. For some reason her heart sank, then he spoke, “No I don’t Ms. Chisholm,” he sighed, “Unfortunately I can’t say the same in general for Aristide Industries, or the Moonships. As Charlie may have told you, one of our ships was ambushed and we had to go and rescue it, that’s what started this whole mess.”

  “Why? With all this power, with the ability to open space up for the human race why would you stoop to trading in blood?” She kept control of her voice, barely.

  A shrug, “Why does any corporation do what it does? To make mone
y,” he looked at her with a fierce expression but pleading eyes, “I wish I could say I didn’t know....I didn’t at first, a lot of people don’t have a clue. But it was part of the package, the dream paid for in blood.”

  “Please believe me, we didn’t know! Not at first,” his mouth twisted, “I, and a few others, wondered where all the money came from. But we were so deep in the dream we couldn’t make ourselves look at what was going on. For a while, I thought Richard Aristide was gutting his own company, bad, but I could ignore it. Then I found out about the mercenary work, but hell even the US State department uses mercenaries these days! I didn’t like that but I was too wrapped up in what I was doing. It was only a tiny step to condoning gun running.”

  Sunil snorted, “The boiled frog argument, turn the temperature up slowly till suddenly, you’re soup? That is getting a bit used, Mr. Richards.” But his voice was tired more than angry.

  Julia waved a hand, “But you could have blown the market for space access open, every government in the world would have been begging you to loft satellites. NASA would be all over you to help with their renovation of the space station and getting some of the cargoes up to the LaGrange observatory now the Space Tug fleet’s shut down because Beagle blew up.”

  “Would they? Maybe, but they would have slapped all sorts of restrictions and rules on us and we’d have been crawling with auditors and bureaucrats. Aristide Industries would implode and somebody else would have bought up the wreckage, claiming the Paaly Stacks for themselves, put their own team on it and kicked us out,” he replied firmly, as if he knew this for a fact.

  Julia’s mind blanked for a moment, “What is a Paaly Stack?” her voice was commendably even, she thought.

  He pointed at the ceiling, “The Stacks are the power and propulsion system for the Moonships.” He grimaced, “They’re kind of hard to explain, they burn hydrogen like a fusion reactor for power, a kind of waste product of the reaction are temporary magnetic monopoles which interact with magnets to provide the thrust. It’s effectively a reactionless drive, though in fact it isn’t.”

  “Why do you call it the Paaly Stack?” she asked gently.

  He glanced at her, puzzled by her flip-flop in mood. “The core discovery was made by a friend of mine, Cooper Paaly.” He grinned faintly, “A stubborn old coot,” the grin died, and he sighed, “and someone you’re going to meet fairly soon.”

  She wanted to giggle but kept on gamely, “Why would I be meeting him soon?”

  “Because he’s on the moon, been there for several months, and that’s where we are presently heading.”

  “WHAT?” Her mood flipped from amusement at fate to anger, “We’re heading for LA to get the wounded to a trauma center, not taking a couple of days to fly to the moon.”

  He shrugged, “Actually we are accelerating for the moon right now, and the trip takes about four hours at this acceleration.”

  Fleck had heard the discussion and came over, his face thunderous, “We have seriously hurt people here, people who need a world class hospital soon, you said LA?”

  “I’m sorry Dr Fleck, I don’t have an option, there are three space fighters escorting us back, the flight leader gave me no option, though I told her we have wounded.”

  Julia had been about to interrupt but this stopped her cold, she felt numb, space freighters, so of course space fighters. Paul looked at them, “I came back here to talk to you. Why was Halberg holding you captive?”

  He looked at Julia but Sunil, who had been standing silent, answered, “Halberg’s just a flunky. We were being held by the Admiral General and the Crimson Staff.”

  Julia nodded, “I flew Sunil and Dr Fleck to a meeting with a tribal council in the mountains, or that was what we thought it was. Instead it was a trap, the Nightstalkers; the Palalo Sadong Special Forces, had us almost as soon as we landed. Halberg, the bastard, was the pilot who flew the chopper back to New Port. Probably because the Admiral General didn’t want anyone in the capital to know they had us and New Port’s pretty much deserted.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you were here with Aristide Industries?”

  Fleck smiled grimly, “No, we’re here with the Human Freedom Foundation and Medics without Frontiers. We didn’t know that Aristide was a player here until Halberg started needling Julia.” He looked at Julia rather grimly, “I didn’t know Julia was Richard’s granddaughter until then!”

  Paul jumped in, “OK, but Julia, you are Aristide’s granddaughter you might have swing I don’t.” He suddenly looked angry, frustrated, “Look I’ve been all but imprisoned at Luna Haven for some time because they no longer trust me. The only reason I was down was because the ‘Beam got shot up and they needed me to get her off before she was captured.”

  Julia looked at him, realizing that he was doing the best he could in trying circumstances. Like most people he was simply making the best of the situation.

  Fleck snorted, glanced at her, “How close are you to your grandfather? Do you think he’d listen to you?”

  She shrugged, “We’ve met over the years. He’s got a weird relationship with grandma; she ran away from him with my mother and aunt when they were toddlers. These days she runs a network of shelters for battered and homeless women. He doesn’t speak to her but does support the shelters. He provided his kids and us grandkids with trusts for education and getting a start, he sends a small present and card for Christmas and birthdays. Better than many but he’s not exactly your warm cuddly grandpa type. He’s an opinionated, stubborn and impatient man.”

  “Is he likely to let you get killed to keep his secret though?” asked Fleck coldly.

  Julia shrugged, “I don’t know Doctor, I’d hope not…but I’m not sure…especially knowing what I know now.” She said, her mood turning bleak.

  Paul touched her shoulder, she glanced up to see that he was looking sympathetic; she supposed he’d been doing some painful reappraisals of his own recently. She smiled, “Let’s go see if we can talk to him, shall we?”

  -o-

  An hour later she sat trying to tamp down her fury. The woman in command of the fighters had simply stonewalled, and when Paul had tried to call Earth they had found that someone had disabled their permissions into the clandestine, satellite based communication net that Aristide Industries had established. They had tried to call Luna and found that receiver was ignoring their signals as well. .

  Doctor Fleck had stamped off after the first few minutes, when he found yelling at the woman in command of the fighters both pointless and far from satisfying.

  Julia found it hard to remain absorbed by her anger, even given the life and death situation, when sitting on the bridge of a real spacecraft. She was sitting in a cramped little jump seat across from a tall, half familiar rack of equipment. She hadn’t asked but she could guess that it had the same function as the racks mounted in many HFF aircraft, extempore threat receiver systems built up using commercial test equipment and software.

  Paul was sitting next to the bank of equipment his fingers tapping on the worn and scarred work surface next to an ordinary and much worn keyboard. His eyes were downcast, his brow furrowed with a frown. His eyes were a true brown, the rich brown of some exotic heartwood. The most arresting feature in a face that was neither handsome nor ugly, a normal face, of someone you felt at home with almost instantly. It was a face she wanted to trust.

  Pulling her mind off a rather pointless track Julia asked a question she had been hard pressed from screaming at him earlier, “Why don’t you have a conventional radio aboard? I understand the lasercomm for normal use, but no backup, no rescue radio, no beacon even?”

  She saw an attractive wry grin now, “There is one aboard, in the disaster locker, but it would take hours for us to rig up. That’s intentional, we didn’t want any conventional radios in the normal stack because of the chances for a mistake giving the show away, and the temptation would be there to use it when the lasercomm’s
balky, which it is on a regular basis. If things go so badly wrong that you need that radio you’ll either be dead long before anyone could rescue you or you have plenty of time for rescue, if it’s possible.”

  Julia looked at the big displays in front of Patsy and Raoul. Half showed pictures of Luna and Earth as they would appear from outside and the rest showed their trajectory, or rather the path they were following since they were still under power. It also showed their velocity, almost 30 miles a second and increasing, an almost inconceivable speed, over a hundred thousand miles an hour! She hoped they didn’t run into anything.

  “Humbling to try and understand what that number really means,” Paul said sympathetically.

  Julia saw the tired pouches under his eyes, the way one of the eyelids sagged a little more than the other. Noting that his eyelashes were long and dark enough to make many a woman weep, even though he was all but bald on top and his remaining hair was turning gray.

  He started to blush as he noticed her stare. She reached over to touch his arm, blurting out the first thing that came to mind, “I was thinking that it would be a bit grim if we hit anything at this speed.”

  The wry grin was very attractive, “Wouldn’t worry about it too much, we’ll hit a few microscopic grains today but the skin’ll deal with it easily. We’ve been tracking impacts over the months and unless the statistical distribution of particle size is skewed for some reason we figure that it’ll be sometime in the next century before anyone takes a catastrophic hit even if space travel expands at an arithmetic rate,- and that assumes we don’t design some kind of collision avoidance radar system.”

  Julia chewed on this mentally for some time, staring at him again, this time, though his face began to redden even more, he didn’t look away. “You did that calculation didn’t you?”

  Paul’s blush was truly awesome by now but he didn’t look away, “Yeah, trying to figure out whether we needed to dedicate the resources to designing a collision avoidance system for the Moonships, we don’t, at least that’s what I told the ship design review committee.”

  She glanced around, “How much of this did you design?”

  He shrugged, “Relatively little actually, the ship design was all but finished when I found out about all this.” He pointed with his chin, “Patsy and Raoul had a lot more to do with the basic design than I did.”

  Patsy twisted around at this and gave him a disgusted look before looking at Julia, “Don’t believe that crap Ms. Chisholm, this would never have happened without him. Sure the physical structure, we had the basics, any good tech could put that together. Even the stuff we could get from the government space programs, sure. But the Stacks are all Paul’s, as well as the ship’s control system, the engine room, the navigation system. Most everything he took the skeleton and put the flesh on it.”

  “Patsy! You know very well the Stacks are Coop’s and as for the rest, I was mainly the project engineer, smooth some rough edges, helping people do what was needed, but I didn’t do much more than point the way, most of the time.” Paul protested.

  She shook her head fiercely, “Bull, Coop’s a genius, our Einstein maybe, but he was lost in the theory till you came along. In one day you made more progress than he had made in two years! And sure you can’t do everything yourself, but it was you who could see the path, who lead the way, broke down the walls between all the teams and made us work together. You took up the vision we all had and shook it out till it was real. We were on the moon eight months after you came, we wouldn’t be there yet if not for you.”

  Suddenly his blush faded and his face tightened, “I’m not going to argue with you Patsy, you’ve got more stubborn than I do. I was following the dream we all had. I just wish that the dream wasn’t mutating into a nightmare.”

  Julia spoke into the long silence, “The Admiral General knows about the program, and the way his mind works the only way he’d see it is as a chance for domination of space even if he didn’t plan on world conquest.”

  No one said anything after that, Julia realized that she was gently stroking Paul’s arm. Through her fingertips she could feel his tension; she could see the tightness of his jaw muscles. Silence stretched…there was nothing much left to say, for now.

  -o-

  Julia was sitting in the jump seat again as she felt the acceleration fall away. Below, like the images from an old documentary or a sci-fi movie the moon’s surface was approaching. Vast tents of semitransparent gold covered acres possibly tens of acres of stacked shipping containers and a myriad other items, what you would expect to see in a shipping yard. In the near distance golden domes dotted the plain, interconnected by the low ridges of the habitable town. A plume of dust rose in geometric splendor from a cluster of machines nearby and next to the waiting promise of an uninflated dome.

  The moon came up to meet them, spreading out, some parts of the picture hidden now by nearby details. A flash, and a flicker, “Discharge, all systems clear,” Patsy’s voice calm, Julia had decided some time before she’d be very happy to fly with the young redhead.

  The golden tents intersected the horizon and then were above them, they were held up by ridiculously slender rods at an even more ridiculous spacing. There was a slight pulse of increased acceleration, then a faint shock and a shiver. The odd background whine she had tuned out by this time faded away. Paul reached to tap a screen next to his armrest and grunted when a green light illuminated on the panel, “Luna Haven Control, this is Alexis, we are down.”

  The quiet words unleashed an incoming torrent, “…what the hell are you doing Alexis! Answer me damnit!….Paul? Paul, that you for Christ’s sake?”

  Paul smiled faintly, “Conti, yes it’s me, nice to hear your voice.”

  “What the hell are you playing at man? I only knew you were inbound when someone spotted you on final. Why didn’t you call in?”

  “Helena should have called us in Conti; we’ve been locked out of the comm system completely in transit.”

  There was a pause, then, much quieter, “Damn, well I guess it’s all part and parcel, we’ve been incommunicado with Earth for the better part of two days ourselves. Olarik won’t tell us a thing, tells us to keep up the good work and he’ll let us know what we need to know, when we need to know it.”

  Paul looked very tired, “I guess we know something’s going on, but then we already guessed that.”

  The voice on the radio started to speak, Paul cut him off, “Conti, we’ll talk about this later, we have a problem. There are twenty-seven people aboard, three badly wounded and four other wounded. We only have the crew suits on board. I need you to get the disaster crew spun up, get the bus over here and we’ll have to rig a disembarkation tube, though how we get the wounded down without hurting them is going to be a trick.”

  “What!”

  Paul repeated himself, “Conti, get Doc and Janice ready we have someone who’s badly burnt, I hope to hell the lower gravity will help there. We have a Doctor and Nurse among the refugees but we need the clinic ready. Get them spun up Conti…you can chew me out later, after I’ve told you about the rest of the mess.”

  -o-

  Moving around in the moon’s gravity was disconcerting, as long as you focused on what you were doing it was fine, inattention was what got you. Traction sucked in the lower gravity while mass remained the same, Julia found herself constantly running into things, and hitting her head on things that were normally well above head height.

  Julia worked with Sunil, Dr. Fleck and Paul to arrange the evacuation. The biggest problem was explaining things to the surviving militia, none of whom spoke technical English. Sunil and one of Fleck’s nurses, another local with a western education, finally seemed to get them into a calm and accepting state of mind though Sunil still looked worried.

  Noises came from outside, thumps and scrapes that made Julia’s heart jump a little, she could tell that many of the others were petrified by the sounds. They
all knew at least in a vague way that outside the ship’s thin skin was nothingness, vacuum, a frightening enough concept to someone with the background, it had to be terrifying to the young men and women from the jungle island, most of whom had no more than a primary school education.

  There was a hatch on the ‘out’ side of the compartment, about midway. The sounds focused there. Julia took a surreptitious look at Paul, who was calmly watching something on a small display tablet.

  A light above the hatch lit up suddenly, green then amber and finally red as a pump of some kind whined. Then the light went from red to amber, then a pulsing green. Paul flipped up a small panel on the hatch, pushing a red button under it. With a sigh the hatch slipped back into the compartment and Paul heaved it upwards.

  A slender figure was standing in the tiny compartment on the other side, a helmet held at her side. The loose white coverall with its metal throat ring was a bit at odds with the elegantly aged but kindly face with its silver gray bun of hair. A smile flickered, “Hello Paul, good to see you.” The older lady stepped carefully over the coaming and gave Paul a passing peck on the cheek. Then she looked directly at Steve Fleck, “Doctor Fleck I presume,” She smiled, “I know you by reputation, I’m Janice Jones, the RN, Doctor Crawford is making ready for the wounded, using the information you sent, could we go over their situation again, and then we’ll start moving them down to the bus.”

  Another smallish gray haired figure had followed Nurse Jones. Julia had to suppress a giggle again, somehow the image of Luna Haven filled with retirees floated through the back of her mind. She supposed the light gravity would be a boon for many elderly, though the spry and fierce figure of the second visitor hardly fit any normal concept of a retiree.

  Paul moved towards the second visitor, “Hi Conti, quick work on getting the tube connected.”

  The other man grinned, “We’ve practiced on the ships once a month for the last three months, and on other subjects on the off weeks, so we damn well should be quick.” The accent was pure Texan as was the tight smile that came with it and the proffered hand. The two men shook while smiling at each other in approval.

  Now things moved fast, other people came through the door, carrying litters and medical equipment. Though they wore the same white spacesuit coveralls they were a mixture of ages, races and genders. One by one the wounded were carefully strapped to litters and taken through the hatch.

  After the wounded were all down, along with Nurse Jones, Doctor Fleck and his nurse, Paul glanced around. “First five on the list go now. That’s all that can go this load. We should be able to get everyone else out on the next run but stretcher cases take a lot of room.”

  Four troopers and the surviving junior HFF ‘clerk’ headed for the door where Conti was standing directing them onward. Paul reached up and pulled the hatch down, it sealed smoothly into place. A few moments later the light went from green to amber. He glanced over at her, “it’ll take them the better part of an hour to get back here, might as well get a cup of coffee.”

  A few minutes later Julia sat sipping some pretty good coffee. Paul was sitting at the engineer’s station looking at the rack of equipment with a pensive expression. She assessed his profile, the firm jaw, fairly full lips, ordinary nose and somewhat heavy eye ridges. He wasn’t handsome, just normal looking, what made him striking, beyond those dark wood brown eyes, was the mind, you could see it at work, always active, always thinking, assessing and weighing what was going on around him.

  Julia became aware that he had turned slightly and was matching her stare for stare, though for once he wasn’t blushing. The corners of his mouth were turned down and his eyes were tired, the dark circles under them very pronounced. There was also firmness in the set of the jaw and the shoulders that told her the mood she was seeing was not defeat.

  She smiled faintly, somehow it was natural for her hand to reach out across the cramped space and stroke his arm, “You don’t like the decision you’ve come to.”

  One side of the mouth curved up slightly, “I’m pretty transparent I guess.” There was a blush on his cheeks, the only sign that he knew she was touching him.

  “To me, I guess I can’t tell you about anyone else.” She said quietly, realizing that her voice was husky.

  A silent laugh shook his shoulders, “I think to most everyone, when I was negotiating a deal once my lawyer told me to stay out of the room because I was cramping her style.”

  “I guess you’d not be the best poker player in the world.”

  “No, I hate losing money to no purpose and obsess over it, never good in a poker player.”

  “What’s your decision? You going to fight what’s going on here?” Not much of a guess really, what else could he have been thinking about.

  He stared at her the pain returning to his eyes, he looked away, his lips pursed then looked back, “I said it before, I messed up Julia, let my dream, the wonder of taking mankind into space for real, blind me to what was going on around me. Blind me to the fact that the people I was working with, working for, were using me. Thinking back now it’s glaringly obvious what was happening. I just didn’t want to know, because I was having fun and enjoyed the hero worship people lavish on me. People have died because of that vainglory and more, maybe many, many more, are going to.”

  His face was stern, almost steely, an expression that made its ordinariness, quite extraordinary, “I can’t ignore it any longer and I can’t just turn my back on the mess I helped create.” He seemed about to go on then stopped.

  Julia nodded, she was an Air Force officer, and a space buff, and she had read all the basal texts, even Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, “You realize that trying anything is going to result in violence. They are on the cusp of something like world domination on the cheap. All they have to do is drop rocks from orbit to create blockbuster bombs, and they can target anything on the surface. If they can hold sovereignty over near Earth orbit they can pretty much dictate terms to the surface governments.

  Paul grunted, “Lasers and missiles from the surface are fighting Earth’s atmosphere and gravity well. Without the Stack they’ll be fighting at a horrific disadvantage. A tiny space based military powered by the Stack can dominate the whole surface. But they’ll fight, the US, the English, the Europeans, Russia, China, Japan, India they wouldn’t just roll over.”

  Julia raised an eyebrow, “Wouldn’t they? Why? If the surface powers are offered reasonable rates and some access to space most folks on the surface won’t want to pick a fight ‘for a bunch of nothing,’” she hooked her fingers to air quote around the last.

  Paul frowned, “Any strategic thinker, senior officer worth their salt, will scream bloody murder. If the Admiral General can firm up his hold on near Earth space he will, in effect, replace the US as the worldwide hegemonic power, without the relatively libertarian tendencies of the US.”

  She sighed, “I was in the Air Force for long enough, spent some time at the Pentagon even, the strategic thinkers will squeal but the reality is that money talks, deep thinking walks. I doubt the European Union, China, Russia and India would back the US. And the US is still not over Iraq or Afghanistan, hell we still have troops in both places as well as South Korea, Japan, etc.”

  Paul grunted, “I have a friend who spent some time in a Pentagon Think tank, he thinks the Chinese are already in the Admiral General’s camp. If the US puts up a fight the other powers may put pressure on the US to acquiesce. May see it as a win win since the US, for all its problems, is still the main space power.”

  Julia reached out again, this time to touch his hand, slipping hers around his, clasping it gently. “There’s nothing to do right away. We need to find out as much as we can about what is happening.”

  She started to pull her hand back; as she did so his turned under hers and ever so gently gripped hers. Julia was wondering what to do next when a tone rang out, followed by Conti’s voice “
Paul, we’re hooking up again.” He sounded calm, almost happy, “we’re lucky we just finished opening a new habitat line on the northwest quadrant. Connector to the second cluster we have planned. Plenty of space for our refugees till we figure out how to get them home.”

  Paul grinned faintly; let her hand go and leaned back to tap the mic button, “I’ll get over to the hatch, I for one am ready to get off this old rattle trap, I love her dearly but she’s getting a little creaky.”

  “Roger that Paul, we got lots to talk over.”

  “So we do Conti.”

  -o-

  Julia was one of the last to go out the hatch. The airlock was snug and on the other side she found a temporary, tent-like structure, the thin material of the skin stretched tight between reinforcing frames. The tent ended in a tube of the same transparent material going down. There was temporary flooring and she could see the top of a ladder in the tube.

  Stepping carefully, Julia made her way to ladder, while the thin looking material of the tube probably wouldn’t rupture if she fell against it she didn’t want to experiment. Going down the ladder was fairly easy except that the lack of weight and friction made it hard to be sure that she had good footing, conversely she could easily support her weight with her arms.

  Reaching the bottom of the ladder she found the tube snaked over the cargo deck and out the cargo hatch. Attached to the far end of the tube was the airlock of a metal sausage mounted on six large wheels. The whole assemblage looked very flimsy and was very, very ugly.

  She had to duck to go through the door on the sausage, a round hatch instead of the rounded rectangle on the ship. Inside she found rows of seats, each row made up of six seats in pairs with two aisles. The people who had preceded her filled most of the vehicle, greeting her was a girl, who couldn’t be more than sixteen, “Hey, welcome aboard, I’m Becky, kinda the stewardess I guess.”

  Julia smiled faintly, “Hey yourself Becky, I’m Julia, where do you want me?”

  “Any one, you’re almost the last.”

  There were a couple of screens slung from the ceiling showing the moon surface, no windows in the pressure hull, all very utilitarian. Above the seats were big latticework luggage racks. With nothing to put away Julia sat down and waited.

  People were pretty quiet but there was little sound deadening material in the long metal cylinder and the noise quickly got tiring. The air was hot humid and somehow thin. Julia hoped that the system didn’t fail - the thought made her feel an intense pulse of claustrophobic fear, which she fought down. Closing her eyes she tried to relax.

  The next thing she knew a hand was on her shoulder, a voice speaking to her, “Hey Julia, wake up.” She came awake with a start, glancing up at Paul, he smiled reassuringly. “You were out; I guess I can relate, right now I feel like I could fall over.”

  Julia glanced around, was shocked to see that the passenger compartment was all but empty, a couple of people were waiting their turn to go through the hatch, she leaned back, squeezing her eyes closed and taking a deep breath. “Wow, didn’t realize I was that tired.”

  “Come on.” He helped her out of the seat. By the time they reached the hatch it was clear and he ducked through. On the other side was a space a bit like the passenger bridge at an airport. Then another hatch, this one heavy, even a bit crude. They stepped through into another compartment. Julia looked around, the walls and ceiling, where they weren’t covered with conduits, enclosures or equipment of some kind, looked like concrete. The floor was covered with industrial rubber matting.

  Paul saw her wide eyed scan of the room, “Looks a little rough I’m afraid, we don’t spend a lot of time or effort prettying up the utility areas.”

  Julia pointed, “Concrete?”

  He laughed, “Concrete, from Earth, when lift is cheap it makes sense to bring it with you and make it out of material that best combines cheap and strong, in this case prefab concrete. Doubt many other space habitats will be built this way once we’ve figured out the best way to use local materials and set up the fab plants for it, but for now it works and it sure makes you feel secure.” He patted the wall as he walked past the second door of the lock system.

  She nodded, wide-eyed again at the concept of hauling thousands upon thousands of tons of prefabricated concrete up to the moon to build the city. It might make sense but it was also a truly awesome exhibition of raw lift capacity.

  A stentorian if slightly cracked voice spoke out ahead. “Paul, damnit Paul, why did you fly off like that.” .

  Paul spoke quietly, “Cooper, for crying out loud, I had a job to do.”

  “Damnit Paul I thought this flying around crap was done with, you’re supposed to be working on….Urk.” This last as Julia came out from behind Paul into the speaker’s view.

  Julia grinned up at the tall old man, “Hello father, fancy meeting you here.”