Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Oh, shit,” said Geena.

“Yeah. That manoeuvre—”

“No, not that. Look at this place. Where the hell’s the Apollo?”

The Moon was a thousand craters, a thousand pools of shadows. Henry felt an instant of panic. How could they map-read, how could they find their orientation in a landscape like this?

…But suddenly he picked out the rille again, a scar in the Moon, sinuous and twisting, a trowel trench dug into wet clay. And there — a needle-point, glittering brightly, its morning shadow stretching behind it — was the old Apollo lander.

He pointed. “We got it.”

“I see it,” said Geena. “Holy cow. Right ahead of us. The computer is taking us straight in.”

“I guess those geeks at NASA knew what they were doing after all.”

“I guess.”

It was essential to use the Apollo site as a beacon, because that was the site from which Jays Malone had travelled to pick up the fateful rock, 86047; and because that was where Houston had sent their supplies, on the second Shoemaker lander, unmanned. If they couldn’t find the second Shoemaker they wouldn’t even have the fuel to return to orbit.

The Shoemaker turned, its thrusters banging, tipped up through about fifty degrees now. Henry’s viewpoint changed, and he realized the Shoemaker was flying beside a mountain. They were already so low that its rounded flanks shouldered all of five or six thousand feet above him, pale brown curves bright against the black sky.

For a moment he lost the sense of powered flight, and it seemed to him he was drifting, weightless, among these huge shapes.

Looking good, Shoemaker.

“Five thousand feet high, a hundred feet per second,” Geena said. “Right on the nose.”

Shoemaker, you are still go for the landing. Four thousand feet. Three thousand. Descending at seventy feet per second.

A lot of Apollo astronauts had burned up their fuel by coming in along a stair-step pattern. Maybe they hadn’t trusted their landing radar data; maybe they hadn’t trusted the evidence of their own eyes. But the autoland, blindly confident in the thirty-year-old maps in its computer memory, was just going to bring them on down. And so it did, in a smooth steep nerveless glide that brought the ridges and craters and hummocks exploding into unwelcome relief.

The Apollo site was still a long way ahead.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No.” Geena was staring at the little bank of instruments before her, concentrating on the Shoemaker. She was looking internally, he realized, thinking about the machine they were riding, not externally, at the Moon.

And the Moon was not behaving as it was supposed to.

“Look up, Geena. We’re coming down short. Maybe you should take over and bring us in.”

“No. I told you. We’re autoland all the way to the ground.”

“Neil Armstrong did an override.”

“Neil Armstrong hadn’t been here before. We have. We have maps, Henry. We have photographs. Now shut up and let this thing land itself.”

A thousand feet above the Moon, and he was flying towards a bright field of craters, their shadows stretching away from him across the Moon. The Shoemaker was coming in at a low angle, unreasonably quickly, like an artillery shell lobbed across some ancient battlefield; and Henry was riding the shell, feet first.

Let Geena do her job, he told himself. Trust her.

But they were still coming down hard, and now there wasn’t even a sign of Apollo.

It seemed to Blue, now, that he was actually rising into the air, as if Dumfoyne was a raft which he was riding in a swelling lava sea.

Perhaps he should have brought an altimeter.

Lava from the main vent overwhelmed Strathblane, it seemed in moments. The neat buildings, the rich green fir trees, exploded and burned, as the lava, enclosed in a stretching sack of cooling rock, surged through the streets.

There were faults everywhere now, fissures and lava fountains. Already most of the vegetation had burned off. As if the whole area was turning into one giant caldera.

For now he was safe, here at the summit of Dumfoyne. The hill, and its nearby twin Dumgoyne, were little islands of stability, in a sea of fissures and vents and lava fountains.

Dumfoyne was a raft he was riding to the sky.

His voice transmission was still getting through, although his sky was covered, now, by an ugly, roiling cloud of steam and ash, through which lightning sparked continually. But the reception was too poor for his instruments” telemetry to penetrate, and, regretfully, he folded up his instruments and collapsed his laptop.

…incredible, Blue. We can’t believe these radar readings. There must be a magma volume production rate of millions of cubic metres a second…

That compared to hundreds of cubic metres, Blue knew, in an eruption of the size of Mount St Helens.

…as if we’re seeing a million years of geology compressed. Mauna Loa, built in a day. Mauna Loa in Hawaii was Earth’s largest volcano, stretching seven miles above the ocean floor.

“But this may be bigger than Mauna Loa,” Blue said, unsure if Sixt could hear him. “Bigger than anything on Earth.”

There had been no volcanism on Earth on this scale for a hundred millennia. Twice as long as humans had existed.

Perhaps this was Olympus Mons come to Earth, he thought. The giant Martian shield volcano, so huge its caldera poked out of the thin atmosphere. Mars, come to Earth.

The ground lurched, swelling further.

“Geena, we’re coming in short.”

“The autoland is—”

“Going to bring us down in the wrong damn place! Can’t you see that?”

Now, he could see, she actually closed her eyes. “You don’t know that.”

He thought furiously, trying to figure out how this could have gone wrong… “Mascons,” he said.

“We know where the mascons are. We mapped them with Prospector. We allowed for them.”

“We know where they were. Geena, if we’re right about the Moonseed—”

“Oh. Maybe the mascons shifted.”

“Right. Geena, if we land right but in the wrong place, we’ve failed. You know that.”

“Henry, I can’t handle this—”

That wasn’t Geena.

Abruptly he realized she was descending, deep into some unexpected funk. He felt irritation rise; he felt like screaming at her, rerunning the breakup of their marriage.

But right now, she was the only pilot he had.

It’s the lack of training, he thought. They didn’t have time to desensitize her. She’s not used to being in a situation she can’t anticipate, control to the last degree.

But that’s where we are now.

He tried to concentrate on the altimeter, to read off their diminishing altitude. There could be minutes left, no more.

“Tell me about piloting,” he said. “If you don’t like where you’re landing—”

“You have four alternatives. You can go left, right, short, or go over. Going left or right is a hairy thing.”

“Good. And landing short—”

“You got to come down dead. You can’t see what you’re going into.”

“Like a copter. So—”

“You land long.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, and he could see a kind of desperation in her face.

“That’s it, Geena. Land long. Go ahead.”

She looked forward, as if seeing the fleeing surface of the Moon for the first time. She grasped a switch with her clumsy gloved hands, and flipped it to ALTITUDE HOLD.

The Shoemaker pitched forward, sharp enough to jolt him. Now it was almost level, and it skimmed forward, over unfamiliar, empty terrain.