David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“Because you’re the only one who gets paid enough to risk explosive decompression. Also, you volunteered.”

“Remind me not to do that again.” Dechert looked around. “We shouldn’t have tried this without infrared.”

“You told me to rig the helmet without FLIR so we could simulate blackout conditions,” Quarles replied. “Look down and make sure Alpha is clear. Radar’s not picking anything up, but we’re gonna need at least twenty seconds to change your trajectory if there’s terrain below.”

Dechert craned his neck so he could see beyond the lower lip of his helmet, hoping that concentration on a task would ease the vertigo. Pilots aren’t supposed to get sick , he thought. But pilots are usually inside a ship , instead of free-falling in the dark. Steam from his breath left a halo of fog on the bottom of his faceplate. His headlamps moved through the surrounding blackness as he rotated them in a slow arc, but the beams were too narrow to renew his sense of up and down. He widened the circles of illumination and saw the ground. There was only fine lunar powder in the place where he was supposed to land, regolith pounded into dust by eons of cosmic barrage.

“Looks like nothing but reg,” Dechert said between breaths. “Small boulders, breccia I think, about a hundred meters to the north and a wrinkle ridge to the east, but Alpha looks clear. Remind me again what the hell I have to do on impact.”

“Impact? Jeez, boss, have a little more faith. The thrusters are already slowing you down. Should be a featherbed landing. Take two steps like you’re dunking a basketball and punch reengage.”

“How often do you think I’ve dunked a basketball?”

“True enough, white boy.”

“Yeah, you’re white, too, Quarles.”

“Well, you’ve seen guys do it, right? Anyway, the launch sequence will start automatically and the computer will adjust the jets for orientation. We’ve got you set for fifteen hundred meters on the next hop. DS-7 is only two hops away after that.”

“Copy.”

Two hops away if something doesn’t go wrong and I end up flying off into space , Dechert thought. He hated physics even when he wasn’t in a panic and didn’t have the mental energy needed to compute escape velocities, but he did know two things: If the minijets didn’t shut down at the right moment on the way up, he could keep going into space, and if they failed to reignite on the way down, even the Moon’s weak gravity had enough of a pull to make him hit like a snowball on concrete. The shutdown of DS-7 would have to be investigated by someone else.

After they collected his frozen remains.

“Two-zero seconds, reverse thrust at eighty percent, rate of descent one meter per second,” Quarles said.

Dechert refocused and saw the illuminated rounds of lunar surface had grown into finer definition through his faceplate. Specks of color at the sharp edges of his field of vision had turned into ejecta boulders; hairline cracks, into deep, rocky rilles. His breathing quickened. The heads-up display flashed with numbers and a blinking quadrant of arrows pointed to the place where he would land. A muted alarm began to beep.

“Five seconds.”

The steps on the powdery crater floor came quickly and with surprising anticlimax and then he was spaceborne again, climbing from Dionysius’s bottomland as thrusters on his boots, shoulder harness, and backpack hissed propellant and the heads-up display in his helmet registered the ascent with a jumble of red and green numbers and attitude markers.

“One hundred meters and climbing,” Dechert said, scanning the data as g -forces pushed him into the back of his suit. “Oriented at seventy degrees and in the pipe.”

“Roger that, boss,” Quarles replied. “Fly-by-wire is a beautiful thing. Three-zero seconds to apogee; two-six seconds to reverse thrust.”

“How we looking for radiation?”

“Sun’s asleep and you’re shielded by angles anyways. Safe for six hours at least. Looks like a beautiful day on the Moon.”

He landed at Drill Station 7 ten minutes later. It was Bible-black and cold. The water mining grid and the hydrogen reduction reactor should have been illuminated with a perimeter of blue triliptical lights. They weren’t. Dechert turned up his lamps and took a few cautious steps to ease his body out of vertigo. He inched his way toward the rille, which snaked northwest across the crater floor like a finger pointing to the deadness of the Mare Vaporum. He scanned the pit’s monochrome grays for several seconds before catching a flash of white.

“Okay. I’m here. I can see the sifter about twenty meters below me on the eastern wall. It’s down. Doesn’t look damaged. Just off-line.”

“Copy. What about the command deck on the reactor?”

“Everything’s off. No illumination. Making my way there now.”

Dechert scrambled up the spine of the ridge to the reactor’s operating shack, which looked for all the world like a telephone booth plopped down on the belly of the Moon. He could tell before he got there that nothing was on. He reached the structure and wiped a coating of dust off a hardened plasma screen. Blackness looked back at him. As he moved closer, his foot knocked into something and he glanced down at his boots.

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“One of the power cells has been pulled out of the chassis. It’s sitting here on the ground.”

“You mean it’s physically pulled out?”

“Yes.”

“Which cell?”

“Hold on. A6.”

“Is it damaged?”

“There’s gotta be dust intrusion, but otherwise it looks okay. I’m not sure I should put it back in. Recommendations?”

Quarles was quiet for a few seconds. “Blow it out as clean as you can with compressed air and reinsert it, carefully please. We’ll probably have to go back and replace the drive anyways. Let’s see if that’s the main issue.”

“Copy. Reboot in one minute.”

Dechert blew as much moondust from the triangular power cell as he could and jammed it back into the rack. He flipped the breaker and green and red dots flashed into life on the plasma screen. He could sense the xenon mining lights charging up behind him, blooming one at a time.

“She’s recharging.” He walked around the shack. “I don’t get it, though—why didn’t we receive telemetry when the cell was pulled out?”

Quarles hesitated and Dechert could almost hear him thinking. “I’m not sure. It’s a variable frequency drive and it’s got advanced cell bypass, meaning if one power cell fails it gets automatically isolated, and the others pick up the slack. But it also means the other cells burn out quicker.”

Dechert continued to walk a widening circle around the shack. “So whoever did this knew it would slow-bleed the sifter, but we probably wouldn’t be alerted?”

“That’s right,” Quarles said. “And they knew not to pull the cell at the star point of the configuration, which would have shut the whole thing down immediately.”

“Well, whoever did it left footprints all over the place down here, and they aren’t ours.”

“Okay, are they alien or human?”

“I mean they aren’t American, smart-ass. Treads are different, and I don’t recognize them from anything I’ve seen on Luna. Taking pictures now. Tell Vernon or Lane to cross-reference the soles and look for a match.”

Quarles was silent for several seconds. “Okay. So what the hell’s going on, boss? Is this someone’s idea of a prank?”

“Making us do an EVA in a shadow-sided crater is no fucking joke, Quarles. Neither is screwing with our water supply. Someone’s sending a message.”

“Great,” Quarles said. “What language do you think it’s in?”