David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

Dechert wanted to plead with the barge pilot not to abort, but he had done the math and knew how close it would be. His mind raced with convincing words, but the pilot spoke first.

“Are you sure there are souls on board, Commander?”

“I am,” Dechert said.

There was a short silence. “Okay. Going for capture. Twenty seconds. Tran, you got one shot at this.”

“Copy. I’m going for the drogues on the middle of the barrel.”

Dechert could see them now, a flash of light in the darkness ahead as the barge lit its forward search lamps. They were flying toward the terminator of the waxing crescent Moon, just a few minutes from sunlight. The He-3 cask would go from freezing to broiling in a few minutes. And it kept getting lower.

“Terrain ahead,” the barge’s navigation system announced in an anodyne voice. Xerxes extended its grappling arm, and Dechert saw the cask, wobbling on its axis as it plummeted toward the Sea of Nectar. The mechanical arm moved slowly, like a robotic mother reaching for her child. A band of searchlights illuminated the cask, and Dechert could see the astronauts locked on to the collection rail, waiting to be sucked into the back of their suits by an orbital burn.

Slow motion. A few meters per second, as his crew flew in a dying orbit toward one of the Moon’s tallest mountains. Dechert cursed the slowness of space.

“Closing speed down to one meter per second. How we looking, Tran?”

“Just fifty meters more. Give me some room on the low side to work with; this thing’s got a shimmy.”

“Okay. Two minutes to abort.”

“Roger, one minute to capture.”

The ship’s computer continued its warning: “Terrain ahead. Pull up. Terrain ahead.”

Dechert’s shuttle gave him the same alert, but he ignored it, staying a few hundred yards behind the barge and the tumbling cask, willing the mechanical arm to move faster.

“Ten meters.”

“That’s good. Keep it there.”

“One minute to abort.”

Dechert blinked the sweat out of his eyes. The grappling arm reached around the middle of the barrel. Probes on each side of the arm tried to connect with small drogues built into the cask… .

They missed.

Dechert could see them scrape down the metal skin, peeling paint.

“Final report, Tran. We gotta move.”

“Give me ten seconds.”

“Warning. Terrain ahead. Pull up. Pull up.”

The probes inched back toward the sockets. Dechert looked forward; he could see Mons Penck looming in front of them. They were going to lose them.

“Capture,” Tran said. “We have soft capture.”

“Retract.”

“Retracting. How much time?”

“No time. Get it in.”

Slowly—way too slowly for Dechert—the mechanical arm retracted, bringing the cask into the metal folds of the ship and locking it into a secure umbilical.

Dechert’s cockpit filled with Moon.

“Uhh, boys,” one of the astronauts said.

“Hard capture. Go for burn.”

“OMS burn,” the lieutenant said. “Hold on.”

The barge pitched up and clawed for altitude. Dechert lit his own thrusters as warning alarms from both ships rang in his ears. He could see the Xerxes shudder. It wasn’t built for hard orbital maneuvers. Mons Penck filled Dechert’s viewscreen. The Xerxes stayed below the mountain’s sloping peak, trying to climb as thrusters on its belly pushed spaceward. But it wasn’t happening fast enough. Dechert saw Moon and ship getting closer, and braced for the image of destruction that had been racing through his mind. Moon and ship getting closer…

And then his viewscreen filled with the emptiness of space. Dechert sucked in a breath. The barge was ahead of him. There was nothing solid in its path. The alarms went silent.

“OMS shutdown,” the Xerxes ’ pilot said, and you could hear relief in his voice. “Angels at fourteen and climbing. You guys okay out there?”

“We’re alive, lieutenant. That was a ride.”

“How close did we get?”

“I could have reached down and grabbed some dirt for you.”

“Roger. Let’s see if it was worth it.”

“Commencing rescue, lieutenant.”

The astronauts began working to unseal the maintenance door on the cask. Dechert pulled in close to the barge; he could see the spits of light as they torched the hatch, which must have been jammed from the inside. He squinted and leaned forward, blood rushing into his forehead. A warning beeped on the console and he looked at the heads-up display. He was coming in too fast. He hit reverse thrust and nosed the shuttle up.

“ Xerxes , shuttle,” Dechert said. “You boys are some stone-cold astronauts.”

“We do it for the glory, shuttle.”

“Well, I know you don’t do it for the pay. Requesting docking clearance.”

“You’re a go to dock. Port side, soft seals engaged.”

In his mind’s eye, he saw Lane’s face as he made the final approach, her short, straight, dark copper hair, her upturned nose and small chin. He saw Vernon’s wild hair and lidded eyes, and Quarles’s shaved head and sagging heavysuit.

“What’s the status out there, EVA?” the Xerxes ’ pilot asked.

“Give me a second.”

The cockpit boards lit green and Dechert docked the shuttle, taking his clenched fists off the controls, his fingers twitching with cramps. Still the rescue team remained silent. Vernon’s dead , he thought. He has to be dead. They all have to be dead.

“Damn, we have four souls in here,” someone finally said, and Dechert could see one of the astronauts sticking his head into the open maintenance door as he shined a lantern into the cask’s dark interior, his feet hanging into space like a clown looking into a rodeo barrel. The astronaut began throwing what looked like pieces of packing foam out of the container.

“What’s their condition, EVA?” he asked, unable to restrain himself.

“Hold on.”

Another thirty seconds ticked by.

“What’s their status, John?” the Xerxes ’ pilot asked.

“Get medical ready,” the spacewalker said. “I think some of them are alive.”

Dechert slouched in a chair, half asleep, in a corner of the medical pod, his head on his chest and his feet on an overbed table. He heard Lane rustle and looked up in time to see her eyes open and wander around the small room. He saw the puzzlement in her face as she slowly digested the fact that she wasn’t in Sea of Serenity 1. Her eyes continued to roam until they found him. He had stubble on his face and hadn’t showered in a week, but she clearly recognized him. She stirred and coughed, and he stood up.

“Hey.”

“Hmmm,” she said, trying to move her legs and wincing in pain at the effort. She looked down and saw a bioscanner attached to her right arm and a fluid drip inserted into the left. A machine beeped in the background, a much less intrusive noise than the alarms that had filled her dreams.

“So, I guess I’m alive?”

“Yeah.”

He came over to her, sat on a stool by the bed, and looked into her eyes, which were still run through with spiders of red from the g -load that had burst most of her capillaries. Her face was swollen from the trauma, and her lips were cracked and dry.

“How do I look?”

“Like shit.”

She grunted and tried to smile, but it hurt. He watched her drift in and out. She opened and closed her hands for a few minutes without speaking, making fists to determine the strength that remained in her arms. Then she turned her head and opened her eyes and looked at him again, more focused this time.

“The others. Are they okay? Is Vernon okay?”