Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

He was right, of course. Although it added another layer of complication. Not only was she going to have to campaign for this ridiculous lashed-up lunar mission, but she was also going to have to get her ex-husband and her Russian lover to work together on it…

Frank, frowning, started to sketch in a Soyuz on his napkin: a pepper-pot, with fragile solar wings.

“Holy shit,” he said respectfully. “Maybe it will work. I think we could do it.”

“Hell, of course we can do it,” Jays boomed. “Makes you think, though. What did we learn in all those years of flying Shuttle, all those billions of bucks, to help with this, when the chips are down? I’ll tell you. Diddley.”

Geena said to Frank, “Can you turn this into some kind of formal recommendation?”

Frank said, “For what audience?… Never mind. We can cover that when we have the material. We have a lot of studies to do. The conversion of the Shoemakers. Looking into the IUS. Figuring out the Soyuz option. Confirming the mass estimates. Figuring out what you’d need on the surface — what about EVA suits, for Christ’s sake? — and then there’s the operational stuff. Assembly at the Station. Who and how? Looking at the launch manifest for Shuttle and Titan and Proton, figuring out what can be bumped…” He looked at her nervously. “You know, it doesn’t pay to go into these things just one chart deep.”

“I understand. I’ll start pulling strings. If,” she said heavily, “you think you can do it.”

“Oh, I can do it.” He grinned. “After all, everything’s off the shelf.”

Jays said, “You say you put forward this kind of proposal a few years ago.”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “An internal study. A little less improvised, of course—”

“What happened?”

“It was too expensive. We aimed to get back to the Moon for less than a billion bucks. We still found we came in at nearer two billion.”

Jays belched. “Hell,” he said. “Speaking as an old Air Force man I can tell you that’s the cost of one B-2A Spirit bomber. A return to the Moon, for that. What a waste. What a fucking waste.” He grabbed the empty bottles. “Where’s the waitress? You want another?”

They all did, and before the waitress could clear the tables, Geena took the napkins Frank had sketched on, and folded them carefully, and put them away.

They stayed for more beers, long into the night, and the Outpost got steadily more raucous.

…There was a quake in Seattle, in fact, on June 1st, the day before Joely Stern moved there.

For a vet of LA like her, it sounded like no big deal: Richter five or six, hardly enough to slosh the water in the bathtub, even if it did send enough dilute mud out of Elliott Bay to flood the Waterfront Park and knock out the street-cars. But it sent the locals into a spin, coming so soon after the Rainier eruption.

And anyhow just then Joely had bigger problems on her mind.

Like negotiating her pay at Virtuelle, which still hadn’t been settled even when the company’s big eighteen-wheeler had turned up at her apartment block in LA, and the movers had loaded up everything, right down to her car, for God’s sake.

She had gone in pitching at eighteen hundred bucks a week, but the executive who hired her, in the end, managed to lowball her to fourteen hundred. And on top of that she would lose twenty per cent to the employment agency Virtuelle were recruiting her through, which in turn meant that she was engaged not as a staff employee but as a perma-lancer, no health benefits or pension or stock options. And by the time Uncle Sam had taken his cut she was left with little more than eight hundred a week, which felt like a defeat, even if it was more than she had earned in her twenty-seven years…

But she went to Seattle anyhow.

She spent a day exploring, and she immediately fell in love with the place.

She liked its topography, the way it was folded over the compact hillsides above its bay. She liked being able to drive from snowcapped mountains to a yacht-filled Sound in half a day. She liked the Elliott Bay Book Company, whose boast to stock every book in the world she was not able to invalidate with her standard three-title test set.

Work was a little iffy, though.

Virtuelle’s campus — all paid for by the unexpected profitability of the world’s first successful virtual reality e-zine — was a carpet of neat quadrangles of grass, separating three-storey office buildings like children’s blocks, gleaming blue glass, identical save for their red numbering. The bottom storey of each building was an open car lot, so that the buildings were fat, top-heavy boxes held up there by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete, all of it a little rickety in the eyes of a Californian.

She spent most of her first day sitting in a cubicle before a blank screen, waiting for her magnetic photo-ID key and her e-mail address to be allocated her, without which, as far as she could tell, she didn’t really exist here, and she certainly couldn’t go anywhere or do anything.

The cafeteria — where a kindly security guard bought her coffee and a sandwich for lunch pending the day her IDs arrived — seemed to be the centrepiece of the campus. It was a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide Berlin Wall, laden with graffiti, and giant posters of happy customers, overlooking a sparsely populated food hall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it.

White security vehicles openly toured the campus. There seemed to be video surveillance in most office areas. She couldn’t receive faxes; these arrived at a central drop point and were distributed throughout the campus. A notice over her desk reminded her that even her e-mails could at any time be subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

A slow start, then.

On her third day, though, once her e-mail alias had been allocated, she arrived to a blizzard of mails, almost all of them utterly irrelevant.

She met her boss once, a pushy New Man who insisted on bringing his three-year-old kid into work every day: fun, but it made serious progress impossible, although he didn’t seem to recognize that.

Still, he gave her a first assignment: a major feature on the Rainier blow-out.

There was no shortage of material, of course, a lot of it gripping and dramatic, much of it in IMAX or 3-D formats. Here were the first ash eruptions, small, but sufficient to shroud Rainier’s snow-capped peak with black streaks. Here were the geologists earnestly studying the bulge that had grown out of the hillside at a rate of yards a day, in a time-lapse sequence visible to the naked eye.

Then came the sharp earthquake that dislodged the giant avalanche of ice and rock from the northern face of the mountain, releasing the pressure on the superheated groundwater and magma beneath the volcano.

And the explosion. Half of the remaining peak was torn off, like a cork popping, hurling the fragments across five hundred square miles of forested ridges, the biggest seismic event in the Cascades since Mount St Helens.

A whole set of last words, distorted and stark.

Here was the geologist from the USGS who had been measuring the bulge, and when the explosion came, just had time to radio his headquarters: Vancouver — Vancouver — I think… Here was the old Navy guy who had been manning a Department of Emergency Services volunteer warning station a mile north of the avalanche, who had coolly described the avalanche, and how it overwhelmed his partner a half-mile away, and even how, in the end, it came to get him too.

Great pictures, of course. Gas, billowing out of the exposed magma body for twelve hours, jetted ash high into the sky and sent ash flows down the shattered north flank. Rivers of mud flowed down the miniature valleys that drained the mountain. A little town called Orting was overwhelmed with ash, but not before heroic feats of evacuation led by the guys from VDAP, lots of human interest stuff.