David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“Fine. Just take your scalps after I’m dead.”

Dechert shook his head and turned to the door.

“And Dechert?” Yates asked to his back.

“What?”

“Make me some money when you get to Europa, or all deals are off. Business is business, you know.”

“And I thought you loved the Moon,” Quarles said.

They sat in the passenger hold of a freighter on the way to Low Earth Orbit 1. The station hung in space like a gleaming snowflake a few thousand kilometers away. Lane and Quarles were across from Dechert in folding jump seats, looking bruised and stiff but alive. They all stared out at the space station and the home planet below it. Earth took up half of the porthole. Its bright colors made it seem less than real.

“I did love the Moon,” Dechert said, his eyes fixed on the Pacific Ocean. “It’s just too damned close to Earth.”

Lane began to laugh, but she stopped midway when she looked at Dechert and saw that he wasn’t smiling.

“I wonder how long it will be before you think the same thing about Jupiter,” she said.

Vernon wasn’t with them. He was still in a medical pod in lunar orbit, getting treatment for his damaged lungs. Dechert had visited him every day for the last week, sick at the sight of a man who had been so strong, now stuck full of tubes and immersed in a nucleopeptide bath. The doctors said he would recover and could even make the trip to Jupiter if his lungs healed in time, but Dechert had never done well around the injured and was guiltily relieved that he wouldn’t see his mission chief for a while. He hoped that the next time he entered his hospital room, Vernon would at least be lying in a regular bed and looking human.

The shuttle banked in its final approach to LEO-1, the spars of the station gleaming white and gray against the blue backdrop of Earth’s oceans. Six months of training if the deal holds up , Dechert mused, and then a one-year hop to Jupiter in the largest spaceship ever constructed . He wondered if the deep-space medical tests they gave these days were more intrusive than the ones he had to undergo for lunar service. Hopefully, the instruments were smaller by now.

“I can’t believe we’re letting those bastards walk away from this,” Lane said, breaking the silence. “It feels like we’re leaving Cole behind.”

Dechert’s eyes strayed from the window to Lane’s face. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you should look for a story about war and treachery on the Moon sometime next year, after we’re long gone. A Reuters story, by a kid named Josh Parrish.”

Quarles’s eyes flared open. “You broke the NDA?”

“Hell no. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then who did?”

“Standard—from the moment he walked into Serenity 1. He had me give Parrish access to our server the day after our first meeting, so he could file a story to his editors back on Earth. How was I supposed to know the little snoop would look up my personal passwords?”

“You mean…?” Lane asked.

“I mean I’m pretty sure he found a stream address that can’t be opened until the end of 2073. An address containing my updated personal logs. It might not have any videos, but you know how anal I am about writing down all the details.”

“You’re my hero,” Quarles said.

“All I did was misread reporters. I thought they had better ethics.”

They laughed, and Dechert returned to the view below, the Earth taking up the entire margin of the glass now, no blackness of space to be seen. Quarles punched a button on a miniature player he had strapped to his belt, and the faraway voice of a singer spilled from the tiny device. A man who was long dead, singing about something stirring and trying to climb toward the light.

“That’s some depressing stuff,” Lane said.

“It’s deep, my princess of Jove,” Quarles replied. “Someday I’ll explain it to you.”

“Call me Commander, and don’t even try.”

Quarles made a gagging gesture.

“Good Lord,” Dechert grumbled.

The shuttle slowed as it neared an open landing bay on one of the station’s rotating trusses. The Earth shone like a marker in the surrounding void, seductive and alive. Dechert stared at her oceans and continents and clouds, and thought of the Catoctin Mountains and their greenstone streams, brimming with trout.

Then he closed his eyes and dreamed of Jupiter’s moons, the spell of the Earth broken.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my agent, David Fugate of LaunchBooks Literary Agency, and my editor, David Pomerico of Harper Voyager. They made this a much better book than it would have been and did so in true professional fashion. I’d also like to thank all of the people at Harper Voyager and HarperCollins who had a hand in bringing this book to life. A special shout-out to Dr. Mark Pedreira, professor of English literature and rhetoric, who took time away from the genius of Milton, Johnson, and Locke to read this story and provide valuable feedback; and to Madison Pedreira, budding young scientist, who helped with math and other thorny issues that exceeded my intellectual capabilities. Also, I’m indebted to all the reporters and editors I worked with over the years at Capital News Service, The Annapolis Capital , the Tampa Tribune , and the St. Petersburg Times . They all made me a better writer, whether it’s reflected here or not. Lastly, my deepest appreciation to my entire family, for their decades of patience and love.

A former reporter for newspapers including the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, David Pedreira has won awards for his writing from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

GUNPOWDER MOON. Copyright © 2018 by David Pedreira. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Harper Voyager and design are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers LLC.

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Owen Corrigan

Cover photographs: Courtesy of NASA, scan by Kipp Teague (moon); © 3DMI/Shutterstock (suit); © Maxx-Studio/Shutterstock (suit detail); © seyfettinozel/iStock/Getty Images (hole); © Kris Wiktor/Shutterstock (stars); © fStop Images - Caspar Benson/Getty Images (helmet); © showcake/Shutterstock (crack)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267608-5

Digital Edition February 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-267609-2

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