David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Yeah, they’re all gonna make it. Even Standard. Vernon’s messed up bad, but you know him. Couldn’t kill him with a tank.”

“Or a missile, I guess.” She tried again to smile. “He saved our asses. I thought he was freakin’ dead, and all of a sudden he’s grabbing epoxy foam and throwing it into the cask. Probably kept us all from snapping in two. And he couldn’t even see—he was blinded by the deco sickness and the seal on his helmet.”

“Sounds like Vernon.”

“Yeah. And Quarles rigged the launcher for auto-eject and found a way to override the safeties for trajectory and escape velocity. Little creep finally did something right.”

Dechert laughed. “Vernon Waters, the best man on the Moon. And Jonathan Quarles, a little better than you’ll ever want to accept. But you’re the one who saved them, Lane. It was your insane idea to climb into the business end of a rail launcher.”

She grimaced. “I thought I was killing us, but I couldn’t come up with anything else. I mean, I was trying to guess what you’d do, but you were running around out on the mare.”

“I’ll tell you what I would have done,” Dechert said, “I probably would have died, along with everyone else. I sure as hell wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“Well, don’t start handing out ribbons. It was a selfish thing, really. I just figured I’d rather die moving than standing still.”

Lane closed her eyes. It would be at least a week before she’d be able to stand on her feet, the doctors had told Dechert. And another two weeks before her body started to feel like it hadn’t been squeezed in a vise. She might never be able to have children, but we don’t think there’s any brain damage. Has she been known to have seizures? Questions and possible side effects tumbled out. One of the neurosurgeons had asked Dechert if they could keep her in an observation dome for three months since she had broken the known g -force survival load for a woman, and the tests could result in a groundbreaking medical study for deep-space exploration. Dechert was too tired to break the man’s nose, so he had just cursed and walked away.

She tugged at Dechert’s sleeve.

“Is it over?”

“Yeah, it’s over. The station’s a total loss and a lot of people are dead, but it’s over. The assholes down on Earth are trying to wiggle out of it, and I think they want to see us disappear, but I’ve got a little leverage.”

“What leverage?” she asked, trying to arch an eyebrow. She was always alert to a scheme. Then she looked up and around the room again. “Where’s Thatch?”

Dechert put his hand on her shoulder. How to tell her that Thatcher, her crew member and friend, was an assassin—a killer that had been sizing her up for death every time he had looked her in the eyes? How to tell her that Thatch had betrayed her, just as he once did?

“Thatch is off the Moon, too. Stop worrying so much,” he said. “We’ve got all the time in the world to go through the details.”

If she sensed something was wrong, she didn’t let him know it, closing her eyes and letting the drugs take hold of her again. “All right,” she whispered, and she was in between the room and someplace else.

“How do you feel?”

“Ever get shot out of a cannon?”

“No.”

“Lucky you.”

Dechert grinned. “Well, the doctors say you just might heal up, even though you pulled somewhere north of twenty-five g ’s. I’m thinking you’ll be flipping off bureaucrats in no time.”

She coughed. Dechert sat back and wiped a dry eye with his index finger. He had cried when he first heard they were alive, cried for the first time in thirty years, and it was an incredible feeling, both liberating and revolting. He was glad they were all unconscious at the time, but now he felt the emotions welling back up and he fought to suppress them. All he wanted to do was pull them out of their hospital beds and take them to a bar and get them drunk. Really, really drunk. They were alive—all of them except Thatch, who deserved to be dead anyways. A freakin’ miracle—for the first time in his life.

“So what’s next for us?” she asked, just when he thought she had fallen back asleep. “A few years in the brig? A burrito stand at Las Cruces?”

“Probably a long debriefing in a cold room, and then a little R&R. After that, I don’t know. Are you done with space?”

She tried to get up on her elbows. “Hell no. Like I said, I want to die moving.”

“Then how does Jupiter sound?”

She raised both eyebrows this time. “Europa Station?”

“Why not? They’ll be launching the Magellan next year, and I think the government wants us to be out of the neighborhood for a while. You wanna check out the only permanent colony beyond the Asteroid Belt?”

“Maybe.” Her hands moved across her hips as if she were checking to make sure the bones were still there. She licked her lips, and Dechert wet a cloth and put it to her mouth.

“I feel like my tongue’s wrapped in sandpaper.”

“Yeah I know. They don’t want you to drink yet; your guts are all messed up. Just let me know when you need some moisture. Nursing’s my new specialty. I got Quarles an electrolyte Popsicle a few hours ago, for Christ’s sake.”

She opened her eyes again, and this time they were focused.

“You know, I read the specs for the Europa base. Looks pretty dicey.”

“Oh yeah. Fletcher thought the same thing. Radiation. Gravity wells. Geysers. Moonquakes. Wind up to four hundred knots on Jupiter. At least a ten percent chance of catastrophic failure, last I heard.”

She laughed. “You’re a pretty terrible salesman. If you want me to be safety officer at the gates of hell, you could at least make up a few positives.”

Dechert remained silent for a long moment. Finally he spoke again.

“There aren’t too many positives, but I wasn’t thinking safety officer.” He dabbed her mouth with the cloth again. “I was thinking station chief.”

She looked at him. “Station chief? That’s your gig.”

“Here, maybe. But there—no, I think it should be yours. I’ll run the mining ops on Jupiter, but this is a two-track mission. Half the station will be devoted to the science team running subs into Europa’s ocean, and someone needs to manage the whole show.”

Lane’s eyes focused and he thought he saw a flash of anger. “I’m not one for handouts, Dechert. Don’t try throwing me a promotion because you feel guilty that you almost got us killed on the Moon. I know you’re a masochist when it comes to self-blame.”

It was Dechert’s turn to be angry—or at least pretend that he was. “I don’t throw promotions around, Officer Briggs. I’d can your ass tomorrow if I didn’t think you could get things done anymore. But you’ve been working your way to command for two years now, even if you didn’t realize it.”

“I didn’t realize it.”

“Well then, work on your self-awareness. It’s an important command attribute.”

She digested his words for a few moments. “You’d report to me? You know how crazy that sounds?”

“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. I intend to have plenty of autonomy running the helium-3 ops. But yeah, if a decision has to be made concerning the entire station, it will be your call.”

“I would have thought they already had a crew in line for the mission,” Lane said, almost like it was a final protest to his offer.

“They did. It was the guys at Sea of Tranquility 1, but the commander and XO got killed in the same missile strike that took down Serenity. Don’t think we’re the second string, though. You earned this, Lane, and I can get it for you. Do you want it, or not?”