David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“LLO, can you confirm it’s a canister beacon?”

“Yes, Serenity. That’s what I can’t figure out. It should be heading to Lagrange Point Three, but it’s not even in a stable orbit. And we obviously didn’t have any ejections scheduled for today.”

Holy shit. The rail launcher. Dechert’s heart fluttered in his chest. Could they have done that? Could they have been crazy enough to do that?

“LLO, launch your barge on a search-and-rescue to that beacon,” Dechert said, turning around and scuffling back up the wall toward his shuttle. “I repeat, launch SAR immediately to that beacon. There may be souls aboard.”

“What, aboard an He-3 cask?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. We’re scrambling now, Serenity.”

“I’m back in the shuttle in thirty seconds,” Dechert said. “Send coordinates to my craft. Peary Crater, are you hearing this? They may have escaped the station in an He-3 cask. I repeat: Crew may have jettisoned from the Bullpen in an He-3 cask. I’m taking the shuttle into low orbit. Tell whoever needs to know that my launch is not hostile.”

Dechert bounded from the dust cloud, his heart thumping, crossing the distance to the shuttle in five-meter hops. He waited for Yates to come back to him in protest, to tell him that he couldn’t violate the stand-down with a launch. He got ready to tell Yates he could screw himself because nothing was going to keep him on the surface of the Moon.

Yates came back. “Serenity, we’ve made a direct call to the South Pole to let them know you’re not hostile. You’re a go for launch. Good luck to you.”

The technobabble of a propulsion geek from Peary Crater ran through Dechert’s mind in a loop as he rocketed up from the lunar surface, his hands turning the insides of his gloves wet with perspiration.

The engineer had been overseeing the installation of Serenity 1’s rail launcher just as Dechert was taking over the station in early 2069, a few months after John Ross Fletcher had died in the shuttle crash near Tycho. The electromagnetic gun, which rose from the Bullpen like a five-story howitzer, was built to shoot two-ton casks of helium-3 into orbit like so many spitballs, out to a Lagrange point for pickup and delivery to Earth. The engineer had looked up at the launcher’s giant dual conducting bars as if they were his newborn twins.

“Amazing, aren’t they?” he asked Dechert. “This baby will spit out sixty megajoules per ejection and accelerate a four-thousand-pound projectile from zero to three kilometers-per-second in the time it takes your heart to skip a beat.”

“As long as it works right,” Dechert said, not wanting to prompt an additional stream of physics from the man.

“Oh, it’ll work right,” the engineer replied. “Just make sure no one’s inside when one of those babies gets launched. They’d be pulling enough g ’s to shoot their eyeballs straight out of their assholes.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Yeah,” the engineer said, his eyes glassing over. “What a ride that would be.”

What a ride that would be.

Dechert was no mathematician. He couldn’t pinpoint the amount of g -forces involved in an orbital ejection by rail launcher, but he figured a standard shot had to be at least forty. Forty g ’s. Enough force to make a two-hundred-pound man suddenly weigh four tons. Enough force to rip the pulmonary artery right out of the heart muscle or rupture every organ. But the com-jockey at LLO-1 had said the cask was well below the flight grid and moving below escape velocity, so Quarles or Waters must have rigged the launcher for a slow, shallow shot. How many g ’s would that have cut from the launch, maybe ten or fifteen?

And how long would the high- g acceleration have lasted? That was the critical question. Just five seconds of that force would kill them all, but what about two seconds, or three? Could their bodies have survived that? An air force doctor had endured over 40 g ’s in a rocket sled back in the twentieth century, Dechert recalled, and some lunatic test pilot had taken 80 g ’s in a similar experiment a few decades later, but those were controlled tests of horizontal force—for a very brief amount of time. Vertical force was worse, wasn’t it? And helium-3 casks don’t have any seats or five-point harnesses.

Dechert pushed the shuttle to its operational edge, keeping the thrusters on maximum as he climbed into a low orbit over the Sea of Serenity and felt the force of acceleration pushing against his chest. LLO-1 had already sent him the coordinates. The emergency beacon was now over Copernicus, in sector D-3, so the cask must have nearly made an entire orbit around the Moon. He turned southeast over the equator and punched numbers into the shuttle’s navigation system. His closing speed had him less than four minutes from intercept, somewhere in the northern Mare Nectaris. Four minutes from an answer to the most important question of his life: Would he ever command a crew that remained alive?

How had B-Dog died back in the Bake? Was it a roadside bomb? No, a sniper in Aanjar had taken him out. And Snook? Brought down when he stormed a mud-brick house with a cherry private covering his ass. Dawes had killed himself. And Matchstick? Didn’t he make it? Yes, he was alive the last Dechert had heard. But he’d probably never be able to eat without someone feeding him.

And Cole. Can’t forget Cole. He spent the last few seconds of his life feeling the water in his body boil under his skin, not knowing he was killed by a man who had been his friend for more than three years.

“LLO, this is Serenity shuttle,” Dechert said, brushing aside the image of his young mining specialist. “I’m just crossing Sinus Honoris, about three minutes from intercept. Report, please.”

The transmission bounced and warbled a few times, and Dechert could hear nervous cross-chatter on the open channel.

“Serenity, LLO-1. I’m patching you over to collection barge Xerxes . They’re heading almost due east over Albategnius, less than two minutes from capture. Be advised the cask is only four kilometers above the surface and slipping, so they’re pushing safety protocols for a quick grapple. Terrain ahead is a concern.”

Dechert’s grip on the stick tightened. Terrain ahead. He plumbed his memory for the lunar topography in front of the He-3 cask. There wasn’t much in the way of vertical relief. The Montes Pyrenaeus was about it, but those peaks weren’t high enough to be an immediate concern… were they?

“ Xerxes , this is Commander Dechert in Serenity shuttle. Report please.”

“We read you, Commander. This is Xerxes ’ pilot. We have eyes on your He-3 cask; velocity about two thousand meters per second, altitude about three-point-seven kilometers. It’s in a precession of about eleven degrees, probably from irregular weight distribution. We project it’s gonna hit terrain in four minutes or less. We’re one minute to intercept. This is going to be close.”

“What terrain, Xerxes ?”

“Mons Penck. They’re heading right for it.”

Dechert felt sick. Mons Penck is a wide promontory that rises four kilometers above the lunar flatlands. “Copy, Xerxes . What’s your plan?”

“Expedited capture and then a quick burn to get over the hump—if we don’t abort. I’ve got an EVA team waiting at the storage rack. I’m not sure I can pull a g -maneuver with them out there, and I don’t have time to bring them back in.”

“We’re locked into our suitports and holding on, lieutenant,” said another voice on the com, obviously one of the three astronauts strapped to the back of the collection rail. “We’ll live if you don’t plow us into a mountain.”