David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“So… no good reason?”

“Welcome to the Moon, son.”

They found the catwalk, which rose over the rock pile in an arch that came close to the lava tube’s rounded ceiling. Dechert fell into line behind his mentor for the steep climb. He made an effort to keep his focus on the alien world in front of him; this was his first extended Moonwalk with Fletcher, and he wanted to leave a good impression. A twenty-centimeter pipe ran along the base of the catwalk and out to the tube’s entrance, looking like an artery pumping the lifeblood of the American lunar colonies straight from the heart of the Moon. At its end, three hundred meters down the tunnel, lay Peary Crater and Serenity 1’s frozen manna—the greatest deposit of ice found to date on Luna.

Fletcher leaped up the narrow catwalk two steps at a time, reaching the top and stopping to wait for his pupil. He leaned back against the railing and folded his arms, looking down at Dechert with his helmet tilted back.

“You never run out of energy, do you?” Dechert asked between breaths. He felt light-headed and wondered if the walk-profile computer had somehow screwed up his gas mix.

“This is the Moon, kid, not some low-orbit getaway for wannabes. There’s no time for half-assing it up here.”

“Well, that’s the first time I’ve been called a kid in about a decade,” Dechert replied, “so I’ll forgive the part about half-assing it.”

He made it to the top of the catwalk and took a few long, deep pulls of air. They looked down the other side to see an even larger rubble field than the one they had just climbed over. Massifs of anorthosite and troctolite lay strewn along two sides of a deep, angled depression. It looked as if a giant child had punched through one of the cavern walls hundreds of thousands of years ago, collapsing the roof and leaving a large oblong dent in the floor, which grew deeper and more elongated at its western edge. The pipe running along the catwalk snaked through the boulder field and disappeared into the cigar-shaped hole, and as they began to descend the stairs, Dechert could see what they had come for: ice. Small deposits of it frozen into the lunar bedrock, dirty-gray but flecked with slivers of white that gleamed in the fluorescent lighting. Ice that would never melt, hidden away from the sun that now broiled the Serenity plain a few hundred meters above them.

“The cosmic mother lode,” Fletcher said. “The day we found this was the day that we knew we could live on the Moon without having to squeeze water from miles of polar rock. The day we knew we could survive in situ, straight off the land.”

“Minus the occasional imported beefsteak,” Dechert said.

“Mmm. For now. But one day we’ll overcome that deficiency as well.”

Dechert looked over at his boss. He spoke with the fervor of a man who had just found God and wanted to share him with the rest of the world. But Fletcher’s religion wasn’t theistic, Dechert knew; it was a worship of space. The SMA’s chief lunar explorer hadn’t been back on Earth in six years, the longest off-planet stretch ever for any human being. And he wasn’t going back any time soon—in six months the greatest pioneer the Moon had ever seen would be heading to Mars to set up a way station at its icy south pole.

“As you can see, the comet fragment came in at just the right angle of attack to not completely collapse the tube,” Fletcher said, drawing his arm in an arc across the width of the tunnel. “It was large enough to leave a viable deposit of volatiles, and just small enough to not annihilate them when it exploded.”

“The Goldilocks comet,” Dechert said.

“Exactly. Four times larger than any other known water deposit on the Moon, and much easier to extract than perma-ice.”

They stepped down from the base of the stairwell and made their way through the narrow path cut into the boulder field. Dechert reached the edge of the impact crater and looked down into the pit, where a robotic sifter scraped at the ice and rock, heating it up and then sucking the water into the processing pipe for export back to the silos.

“How much is left?”

“At least nine hundred thousand cubic meters. Enough to supply a good chunk of our lunar operations for ten years, if you include recycling. And by then we’ll find more.”

Dechert peered down into the pit again, making sure he had a strong grip on a reinforced metal stanchion that had been spiked into an overhanging ledge.

“Must have been a bitch getting the sifters set up down there.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Dechert looked over at him. “And after all this work, you’re going to Mars to start all over again?”

“That’s right.”

“You still haven’t told me why.”

Fletcher leaned back from the hole and looked at the man who would be taking over his command at Sea of Serenity 1.

“Because it’s farther out and it’s running its own circle around the sun, free of the Earth. A new world altogether.”

Dechert shook his head. He knew the excitement of exploring alien worlds, but he would never feel it like Fletcher. Dechert had come to the Moon for escape more than illumination, and he wondered if his boss had already figured that out. Joining the SMA wasn’t the typical career path for a dust-broken marine and ex-pilot who had been shot at too many times.

“Yeah, but Mars?”

“Why not? Jupiter’s at least six years away. They’re not even sure the He-3 scoops will survive the Jovian atmosphere, and the last plans I saw for an ice-shielded base on Europa were a disaster waiting to happen.” He patted the large pipe coming up from the comet’s crater. “Mars is the best thing we’ve got going right now. I’ll think of Jupiter once the god of war starts to bore me.”

Good Lord , Dechert thought, the Christopher Columbus of space . How do you replace a man like this?

“Do you think I can hack it up here, John?” he asked.

They stood in silence for a few seconds, both of them looking down into the deep hollow as the sifter sniffed and crawled for water, and life.

“Yeah, I think you’ll be fine,” Fletcher said. “Just remember two things.”

“Okay?”

“One: Keep your crew alive. No one needs to be a hero up here.” He patted Dechert on the shoulder and headed toward the tunnel’s exit.

“And two?”

Fletcher held up a second finger as he reached the catwalk and began the long climb back to the lunar surface, his back still turned to Dechert. “Don’t let anything happen to my station.”

“Commander, it’s Lane. Go secure.”

Her voice cut into Dechert’s daydream at the midpoint of their second hop back to the shuttle, as the three astronauts descended from four thousand meters over the outer washes of the Lake of Happiness. She didn’t yell, but the tension in her voice unloosed the ghosts that had lingered in Dechert’s mind for years, snapping him back to the present.

“Yes—okay, hold on. I’m secure.”

“Dechert, we just got a solar-flare warning from NB-2. I repeat: We just got a solar-flare warning from NB-2.”

Dechert felt like he’d been punched in the throat. His eyes watered, and he swallowed what moisture was left in his mouth to make sure his voice would sound even and in pitch when he replied.

“Confirm, Lane, you have a solar-flare warning from Lin Tzu.”

“That’s confirmed.”

He waited for another second, but she didn’t say anything else, and then he realized that she didn’t have to say anything else.

“All right. Get everyone out of the CORE and down into the main hangar, right now. Get ready for immediate evacuation. I repeat, immediate departure from the station.”

“Copy. We’ll be there in one minute.” She hesitated for a second. “Standard will want to know why.”