David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“And I hate to tell you,” Dechert said, looking back at his flight officer, “but you are going to have to climb into one of those suits once we dump the profile from this hop. As soon as Peary Crater hears about what happened down there, we’ll all be taking Moonwalks. We’re going to have to check all our spiral sites, water mines, and substations now to make sure the Chinese or whoever the hell else hasn’t been screwing with them. And we’re gonna have to go back to DS-7 to replace that drive.”

He engaged the quarantine sequence and waited for the clean-room door to slide open so he could kneel down and clear the hatch. “Take it from me, Vernon. Eat light before your first hop.”

As Dechert walked into the CORE, Lane Briggs was slouched over the communications console, her face cupped in her hands and her elbows propped on the blue composite worktop. Her ankles were coiled one around the other as she tapped a heel on the floor with rapid bursts of energy. Quarles sat at the Lunar Positioning Satellite station across the circular room, staring at her backside. The moment was almost incestuous—the two bickered like siblings stuck in a small room and Dechert could imagine no stranger scenario than finding them making out in a corner. And now that he had that image in his head, he was sorry to have even had such a thought. He rapped an open palm on the gunwale, wondering if Quarles had exceeded his virtual porn minutes. The sound reverberated like a rifle shot in the small amphitheater and they both jumped as Dechert bent low to clear the door.

“Jesus,” Quarles said.

Dechert glared at him and looked back to Lane. “What do we got? Are Benson and Thatch done at Posidonius?”

She stood up and stretched, pulling her arms back to impossible angles. Quarles turned back to his station and pretended to review the incoming data stream from the Posidonius mission. The banks of polymer and holo-displays cast a green and yellow glow to the room, playing across Lane’s pale face and dark copper hair, which was cut short above the neckline and moved in slow rows of color as she turned her head in the low gravity. If you ever want to understand the beauty of a woman , Dechert thought, she has to be seen in less than one-sixth g. And then he shook his head.

My God, we’ve been up here too long… .

Lane broke his reverie. “They got DS-4’s converters up again and they’re about to lay the test strips on the new fields,” she said. “Thatch is already prepping the Molly for the run home. They should have her ready to move by 2230.”

She checked the computer on her slim wrist, but he knew she was also watching him as he tried to maneuver his aching legs down the rubberized gangway without wincing. Her lips pulled together in a red bead and she leaned back against the console, tapping her fingers as she used her palms to support herself, her every movement a controlled outburst of energy. Dechert knew she was angry, and he knew it had to be the Molly Hatchet ’s communications system. He waited for her to go off.

“I’ll say this one last time, Commander, before I file a complaint with the SMA-holes back at Las Cruces. We’re going to be walking through black water if the com keeps shitting the bed every time we run an op outside the perimeter. Someone’s going to die out there, and they’re gonna form a panel of the clueless back on Earth to try and figure out what I’ve been bitching about for six months.”

She picked up a fuse cord from the worktop and pulled at it, stretching it in her hands like a garrote until he could see the veins standing out on the tops of her knuckles. Dechert grimaced as he watched the rubber stretch. Quarles moaned with feigned dismay. Chronic worry and a distrust of management were parts of Lane’s ethos, spurred equally by her cynical nature and her role as the station’s safety officer. If she could pile up every Space Mining Administration bureaucrat back on Earth and drop a napalm bomb into their tepid, flabby center, Dechert knew she would do it. He just wasn’t sure she understood that such an action would make no difference: You can always find more drones to fill their space, and the company was probably not going to change if it meant spending more money.

“I believe ‘bitching’ is the key word there, boss,” Quarles said.

Dechert turned and raised a finger.

“Jonathan, don’t make me do something I’ll regret. I was out in the cold soak too long to deal with your bullshit.”

Quarles hated his first name, which is why Dechert used it. The young man turned back to the screens and pretended to review mission data. Dechert figured it was for the best; if Quarles got under Lane’s fingernails, she might just kill him as a proxy for the bureaucrats. He looked again at the fuse cord in her clenched fists and admitted to himself that it would hurt on more than a professional level if she ended up in a brig at Peary Crater because of a spontaneous act of violence against his young propulsion engineer. Lane Briggs thought as he did—a cynic who left nothing to trust. She was his security blanket, the person he turned to first when he wanted to make sure he wasn’t going Moon-crazy.

Dechert rubbed his temples and sat in one of the CORE’s worn microsuede seats. His EVA hangover had gotten worse and he longed for Earth air, real air, not the stuff that ran through a thousand meters of carbon filter.

“Look, I’ve been asking the commo shop at Peary Crater to send someone over for two months. If they don’t put a techie on the next resupply, I’ll personally fly over there and trash some offices for you.”

She grunted, disbelieving. They had run four deep-site missions in the Molly Hatchet in the last two months, all with a sputtering com, an aging half-track, and no reliable redundancies. Not even a satellite phone on the damned thing that worked right. Lane is prescient , Dechert thought. Someone is going to die. If the Administration doesn’t grind down on the gears a notch or put a few more communications satellites in low lunar orbit in a hurry, someone is definitely going to lose a life in the name of Sino-American competition.

“What about dipshit over here?” Lane asked, pointing a finger at Quarles. “Don’t they pay him to fix this stuff?”

Quarles grinned, happy to be a part of the conversation again. His desire to talk grew proportionally to Lane’s anger.

“Transport, my chestnut-haired Artemis,” he said. “I do transport. Communications is a more problematic beast, and I’ve been with the Administration long enough to know you don’t break something you haven’t signed for. That said, if the Hatchet throws a piston, I’ll be happy to fix her for you.”

With all the radiation damage, Dechert doubted if Quarles could fully repair the Molly Hatchet ’s communications system anyways. A solar flare had fried most of her satellite uplinks two weeks ago when she was outside of the Bullpen during a heat/freeze check. Her systems couldn’t be shielded as well as the stations’, and if the Hatchet happened to be crawling on the surface when another flare cooked up she would be as vulnerable as an earthworm on a field of bricks. The controllers at Peary Crater had been able to only partially restore her backups, which left Cole Benson and Rick Thatcher with few options if the com failed them.

Dechert scratched his forearm, trying to wake up enough to think as the electrical systems in the CORE buzzed around him, giving the spherical room the feel of a soothing, charged cocoon. Redundancy on the Moon is as important as a tent in the Himalayan death zones, Fletcher used to say. Without it, nothing is safe. If communications failed and another flare erupted, Benson and Thatcher couldn’t be warned. The Hatchet ’s short-range sensors might not pick up the radiation wave in time, and they’d die before they could spin up their electrostatic domes and retreat to the leaden tub in the center of the crawler.