Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“But how?” Qi exclaimed. Then: “Who’s doing this?”

“Red Spear. They’ve got a cell at the moon’s south pole, and they’re sending missiles up from Earth. So listen, there’s a solar storm shelter about two or three kilometers from your current location, two hundred meters off the road you are on, to the left. Seek shelter there.”

“But how—”

“Let’s talk more later! For now, get out of that rover!”

“We need to go,” Fred said to Qi, who was sitting there looking stubborn. “We’re leaving!” he said to Ta Shu, and rose to his feet.

“Shit,” Qi said. Her mouth was pursed into a tight knot, and one hand was on her belly.

“Come on,” Fred said. “You’ll still fit into a spacesuit.”

“I guess.”

“When’s your due date again?”

“I don’t know, I’ve lost track what day it is.”

“It’s October twentieth, but when are you due?”

“October twenty-fourth.”

“Geez,” Fred said. “Well, even so. We have to get out of here.”

“Shit.”

They descended to the rover’s lock room and Fred pulled two spacesuits out of a closet. He gave the largest one he could find to Qi. She just barely got its midsection over her middle; he helped her pull it up to her shoulders. Then they got helmets on, checked each other’s seals, tested the air, and looked at the red heads-up displays on their helmet screens, which reminded Fred of his translation glasses. He kept those with him just in case, putting them in his spacesuit’s big thigh pocket, along with the quantum comms device that Valerie Tong had returned to Qi as she sent them on their way.

When they were ready he felt a bit lunar-competent, although really it was just a case of user-friendly tech. Their suits said they were safe, so they got in the lock and opened the outer door, and were confronted with their first problem: the rover’s automatic pilot was beyond them to alter, and the rover was trundling along at around fifteen kilometers an hour.

“Oh no,” Fred said.

“It’s just a jogging pace,” Qi snapped. “Just step off and start running.”

“No!” Fred said, shocked.

“Just remember the g,” she said, and jumped down.

“Damn,” he said, and stepped off.

He landed on both feet and pushed off forward, but too hard, so that he flew ahead and nearly crashed into the back end of the rover. It rolled out of the way just fast enough for him to avoid rear-ending it, and when he hit the ground again he put one foot forward, using it to thrust back and make a little bunny jump, trying desperately to calculate his push-off correctly. He didn’t; he found himself in the air again, or the non-air, spinning his arms but still angled forward as if diving. There was no way to recover from that tilt, no jerk forward of the feet fast enough, at least not from him. He put his hands out instead and did a face-plant, sprawled over the dust like a kid on a playground. It was a shock, but at one-sixth of his true weight, and protected by his spacesuit, and landing on the smoothed surface of the track, he came to no harm, nor his suit either. Or so it appeared as he clumsily got to his feet and checked the heads-up monitor in his faceplate. All normal, supposedly.

Then he saw that Qi had suffered the same fate as him. There she was behind him, lying facedown on the ground.

“Oh no!” he cried, hopping back to her as if on a pogo stick and crashing to his hands and knees beside her. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was right in his ear. She rolled and sat up, holding her belly in both hands. “I landed right on the kid.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes. Damn, this kid is going to have seen everything.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know! Help me up.”

He stood, grabbed her outstretched hands, both of them awkward in their thick gloves, and precariously they pulled on each other until she was standing too.

“Let’s get to that shelter,” she said.

Two or three kilometers had not sounded like much when Ta Shu had mentioned it in his warning, but as they began to walk, Fred couldn’t help realizing that it was farther than would have been nice. If they had only stayed on the rover another ten minutes, they would have been next to it.

But then the empty rover, by now several hundred meters ahead of them on the road, and thus looking as if it were almost to the horizon, flew apart. No sound, no gout of flames—just explosive dissolution and a giant puff of dust, which shot into space equally in all directions and then slowly drifted to the ground, after which the blackened and twisted wreckage of the rover stood there in the middle of the road like an ancient wreck. A faint plume of ultrafines hung over the thing, then around it. Then all around them flares of dust started jumping out of the moonscape. Pieces of the rover, these had to be, falling lazily back onto the moon and kicking up clouds of dust. A piece could fall right on them, possibly a big piece, and Fred scanned the starry sky overhead to see if he could spot anything, but saw nothing. If they got hit they got hit. At least it would be sudden.

He wanted to say something, but nothing came to him. His tongue was tied. Hers too, it seemed. He could feel his pulse thudding hard and fast in him.

“Damn,” he said at last.

She looked at him through their faceplates, looked away. “Someone’s after us.” Having her voice right in his ear was a strange disjunction, one of several caused by wearing the spacesuits. He could barely see her face through their faceplates, but her voice was right there in his left ear, as he presumed his was in hers.

“Yes,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Apparently so.”

“It means Ta Shu’s information was good. Can you tell him what happened, and ask him if he can find out anything more?”

“When we get to the shelter I can try. I’d also like to know if whoever it is can still see us now, even just walking around. From orbit I mean. Or from Earth for that matter.”

“We better hope not. Come on, let’s get to that shelter.”

She led the way, starting at a good pace, which soon began to flag. “Hell,” she said. “I feel like crap.”

“We’re almost there,” Fred said.

She made a disgusted noise. “Shut up and walk.”

They did that, although walking was not quite the right word for it; on the flat surface of the road it felt easier to lope, or bunny hop, or skip in a kind of syncopated way that kept one foot always ahead. Soon enough they passed the wreckage of their rover; they gave it a wide berth, although they couldn’t not look at it. It was crushed, and it appeared large parts of it had melted. As they got past the thing and walked on, it struck him that the idea that a moon colony could successfully rebel and throw off Earthly control was an absurd fantasy. Also, that Ta Shu and his unknown informant had saved their lives. For a while anyway. It was hard not to feel somewhat killed; his legs were trembling and he felt sick; but Qi was there and he needed to attend to the moment, so he clenched his racing thoughts and focused on walking.

On they skipped. At one point, despite his efforts to focus, their skipping reminded him of Dorothy and her three companions on the yellow brick road, and he wondered if he was Qi’s Tin Man, Scarecrow, or Cowardly Lion. Possibly he was an amalgam of all three—of the weaknesses of all three. Although the point of the story was that their weaknesses had been illusory weaknesses, indeed unrecognized strengths. He tried to take heart from that, but in truth the sight of the blasted rover was so disturbing his thoughts were still completely scattered.