David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

He struggled to get his right arm out of the pressure suit, but his efforts got little notice from his flight officer. Waters never moved unless there was a pressing need, saving his energy like an old lizard waiting for the sun. It was a passing annoyance. When trouble presented itself, Vernon Waters was the best man on the Moon, the most dialed-in flight officer Dechert had ever had. Waters’s arms rippled as he swayed on the restraining bars and a helixed tattoo circling his black biceps moved in waves, the muscles tensing and relaxing, serpentine. Waters performed two hundred pull-ups a day in a 1- g heavysuit and he was proud of the results. He was wider than a whiskey barrel at the shoulders, and his frame had to be acrobatically realigned to make it through some of the station’s smaller sub-hatches. His large-lidded eyes and Jimi Hendrix hairdo scared the hell out of anyone who didn’t know him, and Dechert always wondered if the microgravity affected him as much as everyone else on the Moon. He seemed to bounce around less.

He was too damned big for the Moon, and too set in his habits, but there wasn’t a man Dechert trusted more on Luna than Vernon.

Dechert powered down the jetsuit, turned off the air systems and the walk-profile computer, and locked down the propellant valves. Waters finally began to help him when he reached down to unbuckle his boots.

“Appreciate the effort,” Dechert said.

“Anytime, boss.”

They continued the work in silence, giving Dechert time to mull things over. If Quarles could get these jetsuits operational, maybe it would take some of the pressure off the station. The Space Mining Administration had been screaming for greater output as it prepared for the basing of Europa. Its market analysts were getting paranoid about the success of their Chinese competitors, whose new station could reportedly convert almost twenty metric tons of helium-3 every month.

Again, it was a difference between being dirtside and being on the lunar surface. The fact was, the crew of Serenity 1 had welcomed the company when the Chinese staged New Beijing 2 from their main base at the South Pole a few years ago. The new station was only six hundred kilometers away, tucked into the lip of Archimedes Crater, and that brought them closer to Serenity than anyone else in the solar system, turning them into adopted brothers and sisters. The two stations traded seeds and flash-frozen dinners and launched homemade vodka to each other on low trajectory nano-packs. Lin Tzu, the commander of the Chinese station, had become Dechert’s friend and online chess adversary. Tzu played like a mercenary, convincing Dechert he was far better as a friend than an enemy.

But the Administration hadn’t adapted as well to its new neighbors. In its view, lunar competition was a violation of the company’s manifest destiny—an insult to the spacefaring nation that had launched Apollo with vacuum-tubed computing more than a century ago. The firstborn are always jealous of their siblings , Dechert thought, and if the Chinese kept up their rate of production and found a way to keep their mining costs in control, they would be able to compete for the most lucrative terra-energy, space-tourism, and system-exploration contracts in the next bidding cycle.

And that, apparently, was his problem to solve.

“Easy on that buckle,” he said. “Shit.”

“Damn thing’s jammed. Wiggle your foot.”

“Okay, hold up. Watch the thrusters.”

“Damned moondust.”

Terra-energy they could have , Dechert thought. He unzipped the inner lining at his neck and scratched at the damp strip of skin that had been pressing against the suit’s metal frame while Waters continued to wrestle with his boot. Terra-energy was still being subsidized by a corrupt international commission to coax the home world back from the Thermal Maximum, and the margins were lousy. Sys-ex wasn’t much better. It required a lot of fuel, and governments were starting to pay decent money for it, usually on a cost-plus basis, but the demand was spotty. After the Thermal Max, scientific exploration had become something of a luxury—and entrepreneurs were only now beginning to scrape up enough capital to explore the inner system and the Asteroid Belt for new riches.

No, it was tourism that was going to command the big money. Once the icy oases of Europa and Miranda were based and miners began running helium-3 scoops into Jupiter’s and Uranus’s roiling atmospheres, newly minted thrill-seekers looking for a week of zero- g would become the Moon’s core market. The deep-system crafts of the near future would pull up to Europa like it was a corner gas station, and Mars would be Mars, a forgotten way station with all the use of a played-out nickel mine. Still, the brand-new resorts orbiting Earth would need helium-3 for their fusion reactors and water and oxygen for their paying customers. The rich wouldn’t suffer a Level-1 bag shower—a quart of recycled urine and a hydro-sponge. They had more refined sensibilities. The Earth is waking up again , Dechert thought. Even if half the planet is hungry, the top of the food chain is back to eating well, and fed stomachs only stretch.

“These things are a goddamned Greek tragedy waiting to happen,” Waters said.

Dechert snapped back to the present and saw Waters release the dust-covered jetsuit boot from his foot and turn it in his broad hands, looking at the thrust-vectoring HEDMs soldered onto its side with eyes that flared theatrically wide. “You wanna strap me into one of these, you better shorten my hitch. I didn’t sign up to be a freakin’ beach ball.”

“Right.”

Dechert got up and unhooked a 1- g heavysuit jacket from the clothes locker, struggling to pull the weighted sleeves onto his frame as the cold air of the accessway ran across his bare shoulders. He could have given Waters a glance to show his displeasure at the feigned insubordination, but Dechert had long ago discarded the SMA manual on maintaining a chain of command. Serenity 1 was more like an oil rig than an army barracks, a place where solitude and danger melded the crew into a state of unwritten informality. You don’t pull rank in a madhouse unless it’s about to blow.

When it came to the crew, Dechert danced on the line between discipline and surrender. He even let Quarles grow a blend of Moroccan cannabis in the greenhouse and play classic rock to his floor-rattling content in his engineering dungeon under the science lab. All that mattered was hitting quota and keeping things at a slow simmer, especially at times when the walls felt close. Dissatisfaction among the natives is a bad thing when you’re off-Earth and more than a thousand klicks from a main base, as Fletcher used to say. When things go wrong, the last thing you want to be is in charge.

Because if there’s a mutiny, the guy with the most patches on his shoulder will almost certainly be the first one tossed out of an airlock.

“You’re a union man,” Dechert said. He took a navy blue baseball cap out of the locker and pulled it low on his head. He rubbed moondust off the epaulettes on his heavysuit jacket and made a halfhearted effort to stretch by reaching for the rubberized floor with his palms, stopping half the way down when he felt the tendons at the backs of his knees start to give. “If your rep can’t short you, you damned well know I can’t.”

“Shit,” Waters said.

Dechert straightened, patted him on the shoulder in mock sympathy, and then walked toward the clean-room hatch, eager to unfold his body and lie under the dry furnace of the decontamination blowers. The heavysuit’s 650 pounds of distributed VECTRAN weighting almost made it feel like he was back on Earth, mimicking the leaden gravity of Terra as it clung to his lean frame. Only his head felt light, and that was just something you had to get used to.