David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

The line went silent.

“Hold on, I’m receiving your transmission,” Yates said after a few seconds. “I’ll get back to you on a secure channel, for Christ’s sake.”

“Tell your minders they have two minutes, and let them know it’s too late to try anything clever, like sending a fake SAR team to check on my well-being,” Dechert said. “I’ve already dumped the video to a server and they aren’t going to find it. If I don’t stop it at a set time the whole story gets pushed out into the open.”

“Dechert, we’ve got missiles en route right now, and so do the Chinese. We can’t just turn this thing off.”

“Yes you can, Yates. Of course you can. Get it done.” He hesitated then, taking a long breath, not wanting to ask the question. “Do you have any word from Serenity?”

The line went back to static, and Yates finally answered. “They’ve gone dark. We have no word.”

“Copy. I’m heading over there now.”

“Dechert?”

“You have ninety seconds, Yates. Do it, or the ticker in Times Square is going to say we started a war on the Moon by killing our own people.”

Dechert put the top half of his suit and his helmet back on, fired the shuttle’s engines, and flew out of the crater’s mouth. In the distance over the Apennine Mountains, the Earth hung in aquamarine splendor over a crumbling slope of gray rocks.

He saw the first pieces of debris scattered a few kilometers west of the station. The sensors picked them up and plotted them on a plasma screen and the data unfroze Dechert’s blood. It was a missile, shot down just short of Serenity 1, its resin composite hull strewn in a disjointed line across the dark mare. The autodefenses had stayed on long enough to shoot down one of them. Dechert thought for a moment that the system had been smart enough to save his crippled station.

But reality came thundering back thirty seconds later, draining the adrenaline from his body and leaving him empty. The infrared cameras told the tale when he was still a few thousand meters from Menelaus Crater. The station was emanating too much latent heat. It had been hit.

Dechert flew the shuttle over the broken remains of Sea of Serenity 1, his hands and feet moving the flight controls on instinct. A jagged hole stood out on the Moon below him illuminated by the infrared cameras—a hole where his station used to be. The observatory was gone, blown away, and moondust hung over the impact crater like a shroud. The southwestern corner of the station, where the Bullpen had been, was missing, caved in by tons of regolith and moon rocks. Dechert checked his gauges; there was no power coming from the station. He flew in a tight circle over the wreckage and landed the shuttle a few meters outside of the dust cloud. He tried raising Lane on the com and got background noise and the sputtering radio sounds of space in reply.

He unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat, moving slowly, his thoughts broken and scattered. The memory of an interview he had read years ago back on Earth entered his mind like an unwanted ghost. It was of a U.S. Navy lieutenant who had survived the sinking of the USS Florida in 2046. The frigate had been struck by an aerial drone loaded with HIEX, and the lieutenant had abandoned ship with the few dozen sailors who were still alive as it sank from the stern, leaving his captain behind on the tilting bridge.

The lieutenant had pleaded with his captain to leave with the rest of them: “Sir, we need to get out of here.”

“I’m staying with the ship,” the captain had said.

The young lieutenant pressed his boss, telling him there was no reason to die a pointless death for an empty naval tradition dreamed up centuries before. “Sir, it’s a ship.”

But the lieutenant said the captain sat back in his chair on the bridge and grunted: “Yeah. But it’s my ship, and those are my men down there dying in the fo’c’sle. And I’ll be damned if I leave them.”

Dechert found his way through the shuttle’s outer hatch and began the long walk toward his station, entering the dust cloud which now stretched for more than a kilometer across the Mare Serenitatis. Why can’t I be that guy? he asked himself. Why do I always watch my people die around me, then walk away?

The wreckage of four years of his life appeared through the shroud of moondust, everywhere beneath his feet. A saucepan from the galley, somehow unharmed. Pieces of red insulation from the air condensers. Shards of moon-baked clay from the 3-D printer. And wiring, miles of wiring, flung out across the regolith, the expelled entrails of the dead station. Dechert checked the bioscanner on his wrist. It should be able to pick up any living soul within a kilometer of the station. It was flatlined and dark.

He came to a high mound of rubble that had been heaved upward from the center of Serenity 1. He climbed it using his hands and knees to gain traction in the unstable pile, oblivious to the sharp pieces of metal and fiber that threatened to slash open the legs of his pressure suit. After a short struggle, he made it to the top and looked down with his lamps on full, into the crater that had been formed at the heart of the station. There was no fire in the vacuum, only a few live wires spitting into the darkness. He could see that the missile had reached far down into Serenity’s sublevels, deep into its guts. Must have been a ground penetrator , he thought, realizing that even the confines of the Hole had likely been obliterated by the blast. He looked to his right, and a wall of collapsed rock lay where the Bullpen had stood.

He sat down on top of the pile, small amid the wreckage. Where to begin looking, where to scrabble with gloved hands in a field of debris that stretched for hundreds of yards? He felt like a man trapped on a cliff wall. Rimrocked. Exposed.

“Peary Crater, this is Serenity,” he said into the com.

Yates answered this time. “Go ahead, Serenity.”

“Station’s destroyed. I need a rescue team out here with heavy equipment, expedited.”

“Okay, but we’re still fully defensive, Dechert. They’ve asked the Chinese for a cease-fire and your transmission has gone to the White House, but there are missiles still in the air. I’ll have to get permission to launch anything from Peary right now. I repeat, we are fully defensive and trying to pull back to DEFCON-2, but there are no launches authorized.”

“Get authorization, Yates,” he snapped. “My crew’s buried.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to Trayborr. Do you have anything on bioscan?”

“Negative.”

“Okay.”

Dechert pulled his knees as close to his chest as he could and put his head in his hands, letting the quiet of the mare embrace him. He stared at a circuit board near his boot, following the crisscrossing lines as they ran from diode to resistor. How random their order appeared to be. Intersecting lines cut by a machine laser.

He stood up, suddenly angry at himself, and began to climb down the rubble field as fast as he could. Even if they were dead, he had to find them. Static hissed on the open com. A heavily distorted voice broke into his fevered mind.

“Peary Crater, this is Low Lunar Orbit 1. We caught your last transmission with Serenity. Uh, I’ve got a signal up here that I’m trying to figure out, sir. Do you copy?”

No one responded.

“Peary this is LLO-1. Are you reading?”

“This is Serenity, LLO,” Dechert finally said. “What’s your signal?”

The voice came back. “It’s an emergency beacon on an He-3 cask, sir, but it’s well below the orbital ejection flight grid. Flying on a southeast trajectory, but it’s too shallow and too slow. Can you confirm?”

An emergency beacon on a helium-3 cask. What the hell? Dechert’s mind stirred back to life as he pondered the absurd timing of it. Then his muscles tensed and he stopped climbing down the rubble heap.