Stephen Baxter - Space

Their conversations lasted a million years.

The Rains were spectacular, but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploding, as she drank in the thin, temporary air and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.

And with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.

But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.

Soon there were so many of them that it was as if all of the Land was alive with their birthing, its rocky heart echoing to their joyous shouts.

And still, in the distant future, the Merging awaited them.

As the comets leapt one by one back into the sky, sucking away the air with them, she held that thought to her exhausted body, cradling it.

Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his couple-of-kilometers-a-day target pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.

This was mantle, after all. They were suffering rock bursts. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.

Costs escalated. The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.

Many of the investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the rich ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon to seek out further lodes. Frank had proved his point. Why go farther, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?

But metal ore wasn’t Frank’s goal, and he wasn’t about to stop now.

That was when the first death occurred, all of a hundred kilometers below the surface of the Moon.

She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earth man caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.

“Omelettes and eggs,” he said. “Omelettes and eggs.”

“That’s a cliché, Frank.”

“It was probably the fucking Grays.”

“There’s no evidence of sabotage.”

He paced. “Look, we’re in the mantle of the Moon —”

“You don’t have to justify it to me,” she said, but he wasn’t listening.

“The mantle,” he said. “You know, I hate it. A thousand kilometers of worthless shit.”

“It was the changeover to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?”

He ran a hand over his greasy hair. “If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I’d challenge you on ‘caused.’ The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes.”

They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing or the cooled lunar glass Frank had used in the upper levels. To get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology. It was a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it: a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.

Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. “It’s the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It’s based on diamond, but it’s a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it’s a good heat insulator similarly. Besides that, we support the hole against collapse and shear stress with rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure…”

This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.

When the first subterrene started up, it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred meters. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometer of bore, and a single life, of a senior tool pusher.

“We’ve already restarted,” Frank said. “A couple of days and we’ll have recovered.”

“Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss,” she said. “It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.”

He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent for maybe half a minute.

Then his mood switched. He started pacing. “You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to turn this guy we lost — what was his name? — into a hero.” He snapped his fingers. “Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero. ”

“Frank, the dead engineer was a she.”

“And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher a criminal.”

“Frank—”

He faced her. “You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs?”

“For this?”

“Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it’s impossible to turn back. If that tool pusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.” He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. “This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you’re with me, Xenia.”

She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “You know I am.”

He softened, and dropped his hands. “Yeah. I know.” But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. “Omelettes and eggs,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He clapped his hands. “So. What’s next?”

This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.

Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

“I must startle you again.”

She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

“Life on the Moon,” she said.

“Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres — like the present — and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.