David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

Sea of Serenity 1 had been open for fourteen years, and it looked it. Buried under ten feet of lunar soil in the southern rim of Mare Serenitatis to protect the crew from radiation, the station’s tunnels, modules, and decks felt more like the innards of a World War II submarine than a Level-1 lunar outpost. The cramped outer passageways stank of sweat, cigar smoke, and hydraulic fluid. Moondust, smaller than grains of sand on Earth but spiked with crystalline edges, covered everything outside of the clean rooms, burnishing the web of access tunnels in a slate-gray haze. The air filters and nano-sweeps fought a losing battle with the dust every day. It found its way into computers, processors, spacesuits, electrical systems, and purifiers, breaking them down like a cancer. The station and everything in it needed more repair work than an old army tank.

In the first decade of spaceflight, Robert Heinlein described the Moon as a harsh mistress, but Dechert always thought of her as a desert gone too far. Earth’s stillborn sister, stripped of the wind, clouds, and air that could have saved her from lifelessness. He felt a connection with the Earth tribes who spent ages perfecting how to live in such desolation. The Bedouin, who handled sandstorms that could rip flesh from bone. The Inuit, who hacked out a life on frozen slabs of ice. How did they do it? After more than four years on the Moon, he was beginning to understand. They learned hard lessons the first time.

There aren’t second chances in such places.

Dechert was a careful man. He always checked twice. So when he sealed the inner hatch of the airlock and checked the board for green lights after coming in from his flight at Dionysius, he punched the status button twice before fumbling with the seals on his helmet.

“You’ve got balls,” Vernon Waters said behind him. “Not a chance in hell I’m serving as Quarles’s guinea pig, especially five hundred klicks out. That boy smokes too much weed.”

“It gives him creative energy,” Dechert said.

He sagged onto a changing bench and pulled off his gloves. The hangover of a prolonged lunar walk seeped through him, cramping his muscles from his calves to his shoulder blades. Seven hours in the cold soak, and most of it taking two-kilometer leaps across the Tranquility basin. Way too much walk time for a man pushing forty. He wriggled his toes to get the burning sensation of bloodlessness and frostbite out of them. He kneaded his thighs with the heels of his palms and thought wistfully of his flight-training days at Pensacola, with its white beaches as long as air force runways.

“What the hell happened out there?” Vernon asked.

“Nothing good. You listen in on the com?”

“Yeah, and I’ve got Briggs analyzing your boot prints. But man, what the hell happened out there?”

Dechert rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fingers. “You tell me, Vernon. Clearly someone is upping the pissing match over the mineral rights in the Tranquility basin. Who signed the Altschuler Treaty? Russia, the Chinese, Brazil, India, and us. You want to take a guess?”

Vernon gripped one of the support bars above his head and swayed back and forth. “Well, it wasn’t the Russians. They don’t give a shit about Tranquility. They’re too worried about staying alive on the far side, those crazy bastards. And the Brazilians and Indians haven’t even started to grid their own He-3 deposits. They’re still camping in tents.”

“So, the Chinese.”

“Either that or it’s ghosts. No one else knows how rich those fields are—unless someone’s been running test strips out there we don’t know about.”

Dechert puffed up his cheeks and blew out some air. He was too tired to think about the firestorm that lay ahead once he reported to Peary Crater. “Well I doubt we’re talking ghosts, but here’s a question for you, Vernon. If it is the Chinese, how the hell did they know exactly what power cell to pull out without immediately killing the sifter? Quarles says that if they had yanked A7 or B7 or C7, the whole thing would have gone down. Whoever did this either got real lucky or knew about the bypass system.”

Vernon frowned for a second and then gave a grin. “Hell, the electronics were probably made in China. I’ll have Quarles do some checking, but I doubt that power system is a state secret.”

“Yeah. I guess. But have him dig around anyways. Hopefully Lane will get some answers from those boot prints.” Dechert pictured the scene at Dionysius again—how the saboteur’s boot prints had gone from a landing area just west of the drill station directly to the power shack, then to the rille where the water sifter had been operating, and then back to the landing area. Like whoever it was knew the place. And whatever craft had landed on the bottom of Dionysius had left no imprint on the Moon—it had somehow been wiped clean. But how do you wipe clean the landing area of a one- or two-ton shuttle, when the guy who’s flying it is back in the shuttle? The landing gear should have left clear depressions in the soft regolith. It didn’t make any sense. Dechert closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The gunpowder smell of moondust filled his nostrils, and his head hurt too much to work the mystery. He didn’t want to think about the Chinese or anyone else until he had taken something to kill his headache.

“What’s our status at Posidonius?” he asked Vernon. “Any word from the boys?”

Two of his diggers, Benson and Thatch, were laying grids and running test bores for a new helium-3 strip mine at Crater Posidonius, and even though Dechert had received an update that morning, the mission had never left his thoughts. Posidonius was in a relatively safe part of the Serenity basin, but this was the Moon. He didn’t like being hours removed from an update on a remote-site mission.

“They’re good. Lane mentioned something about the comlink screwing up again, but last I heard they’re still breathing air and laying spirals.”

Waters smiled as he spoke, and his Louisiana drawl reminded Dechert of the last drops of bourbon falling into the bottom of a glass. It was an affectation to some degree, as his accent diminished as conversations went on. Dechert wondered if it was a subconscious thing—Vernon’s way of yearning for the oxygen-rich lowlands of his youth.

Dechert rubbed the sweat out of his week-old crew cut with an open hand. He looked at a small mirror in his locker and saw the gray pressing its attack on the top of his head. It had started a few years ago, a rogue hair in one place. And then another. And then the assault had grown in silvery numbers and spread from his sideburns up to his temples, amassing like an army preparing for a siege. Age unleashed. It wasn’t just his hair anymore, either. The years had burrowed into Dechert’s muscles and tendons with relentless will, and now he couldn’t let his face go unshaven for more than a few days without looking at gleaming white whiskers, beckoning him to the grassy hills. He was spent, and he knew the recovery from this hop would take much longer than it should—days instead of hours—limping around on bad knees in the feeble gravity of one-sixth g .

He brushed away the self-pity. It wouldn’t do him any good in this colony of overworked, understimulated lunar miners. Not with the spreadsheet boys back on Earth running production variables that didn’t consider downtime. They were pushing for Serenity 1 to outproduce the Chinese. Pushing hard.

“You look like hell,” Waters said.

“I’m aware.”

Dechert wondered for the hundredth time if the people back home had any clue what it was like to live on the Moon. There was a weatherworn old laser print that he had seen several years back at Las Cruces Spaceport. It showed three miners standing on a lunar mountaintop with helmets gleaming in the sunlight, looking like Spartan warriors in spacesuits, ready to defend the celestial passes of Thermopylae. He thought of a child looking at that ridiculous poster and dreaming about how great it would be to spend a few days on Luna digging for alien fuel to save the homeland. If only the Earthbound could see him and Vernon now, crammed into the access tunnel that led to Main Quarantine like commuters on a city bus, only with charcoal dust in their hair.