David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

But redundancy wasn’t at the top of the list at Peary Crater right now. Dechert would complain to the managers once again and they wouldn’t do a damned thing—not unless they could spare the extra man-hours without losing ground to quota. They were running at 120 percent at the Moon’s North Pole, just like the crew at Serenity 1 and the newly opened U.S. mining station on the southeastern rim of Tranquillitatis, and the whole machine was grinding toward a breakdown, not just the Molly . Dechert had done enough postmortems on disasters to realize that outsize demand was one of their greatest causes.

Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing he could do about that.

But it wouldn’t be for want of trying. “Quarles is right; it isn’t his job,” he said, stealing a quick look at Lane but refusing to lock eyes with her. “Look, we’ve got a CM at 2130. Put together one of your razor-worded dispatches for me to send over to Peary Crater, and I’ll transmit it after the meeting. If those guys can get their shit together long enough to do something right, maybe we can make quota this month and keep the dogs in the kennel.”

“And what about DS-7?” Lane asked. “I’ve run the images you sent. Those treads don’t match any of the standard EVA boots currently being used on the Moon. That includes the Chinese.”

“Great. Where are they from?”

“Looks like they’re an older model made by Groombridge Space Systems. A bunch of countries used them in the mid-60s, including us, Russia, and China. There’s no way to match a tread to a specific pair without actually inspecting the boots.”

Groombridge. One of the biggest general aerospace contractors on Earth, they had been supplying missions to the Moon since the 2050s. Tracking a pair of their old boots would be like trying to pin down a particular set of Nikes in New York City.

“What about the power cells?” Dechert asked Quarles. “Should we be concerned that whoever sabotaged our water drill at Dionysius knew how to do it without us getting immediate telemetry?”

“Not necessarily,” Quarles said. “The VFD in the power shack uses a pretty standard advanced cell bypass, and it’s not proprietary equipment. Anyone could have dug up the topology and figured it out.”

“Lovely.”

“You gonna tell Yates?” Quarles asked. “Peary Crater’s gonna go shit-crazy when they hear about this.”

“I’ll call him. Later.”

He stood up to leave, not wanting to consider any more questions, mostly because he didn’t have any answers. Especially to the question that had been nagging him since this first started: What the hell was going on back on Earth that was causing everything to blow up on Luna?

When Dechert left for the Moon in ’68, much of Europe and North America were still being called the New Third World. The Thermal Maximum was an unequal dispenser of misery. Two trillion tons of methane hydrate had bubbled out of the Pacific Rim with almost no warning in the North American spring of 2058, enveloping the planet in a Venusian shroud. For the next several years, Earth was a wasteland. Epic flooding on one continent, drought on another. Superstorms. Pandemics. Fires. Biblical stuff and some things that were even worse—at least people didn’t eat one another in the darker parts of the Old Testament. The midlatitudes fared the worst, and much of the industrialized world became the Third World before its overfed, upholstered residents had time to absorb the shock.

Climatologists called the catastrophe a cleansing of an overpopulated and overheated planet. Religious extremists took a bloodier route to the truth. They killed one another en masse and tried to kill everyone else in between as they wrestled over which verse of which holy text was to be taken as the literal truth and fulfilled to its conclusion. By the early 2060s, there were three billion fewer people on the planet, and a freeze on carbon-energy emissions forced the remaining civilized nations to quell the holy wars and figure out how the hell to survive.

Fusion energy sprang out of that reflexive effort, clean and powerful as the stars. But fusion reactors needed an exotic fuel, stuff not found within the womblike magnetic field of the Earth. The best thing available was helium-3, a light, nonradioactive solar isotope that could be easily contained. An isotope that lay in abundance on the dead regolith of the Moon.

And just like that, space became important again. Lunar mining turned into a brief unifying force for a scrabbling world, a reminder that humans could control their destiny—even if they had to leave the planet to do so. It stayed that way until the late ’60s when the star-burning energy the scientists created began to bring the larger economies back from their depressions. Within a year of Dechert’s deployment to the Moon, common cause had been run over by a bull market.

It was once again nations instead of humanity.

“How are the Posidonius core samples looking?” Dechert asked Quarles, hoping for some good news. “Did we at least get decent He-3 trace outside of the DS-4 perimeter?”

“Not bad for a sunlit zone,” Quarles said. “About thirteen parts per billion in the early runs.”

“Good.”

It’s almost funny , Dechert thought. When helium-3 was a lifeboat keeping the drowning masses alive, lunar miners were treated like heroes. When it became a marketable commodity, they were chastised for falling behind their numbers. And now the Chinese were getting aggressive about disputed He-3 fields in the Tranquility and Crisium basins, and the Americans were pushing back hard, forcing their own diggers to double-shift to stay in competition, forcing them to dig in places that were orders of magnitude more dangerous than the diamond mines of central Africa—all with aging, vacuum-cracked equipment. Dechert had been getting desperate vibes from the managers at Las Cruces and Peary Crater in the last month, as if they were taking heat from higher sources and channeling it back toward him. Safety had always been priority one on the midlatitudes of the Moon.

Now production was.

“This is going to blow over,” Dechert said aloud.

“All hail the power of wishful thinking,” Lane replied, and Dechert knew that she could read the empty spaces of doubt in his eyes.

He shrugged his shoulders, too tired to give a better defense. “Wishful thinking is a command prerogative.”

He pulled the brim of his baseball cap lower on his face and climbed back up the steps leading out of the CORE, wondering how much longer he would remain in control of things on his own station and how much longer it would be before a real fight broke out between the powers on the Moon.

Wondering how long he was going to be kept up thinking about it.

“I’m going to go catch a quick two hours,” he said. “Wake me up if something bad happens.”

Serenity 1’s master alarm rang thirty minutes later. Dechert woke in a panic. The lights in his quarters flared to 200 percent and then dimmed to emergency status. A red strobe over the hatch brushed the tiny room with flashing crimson. Dechert slammed his shoulder against the bulkhead as he leaped from his bunk, his heart thumping with blood as he swore. The alarm had gone off only once before in his nearly four years of command. It sounded like the departure warning on a high-speed train, a low and sinister series of baritone bells. When it came on, the CORE’s audio alert was no more comforting:

“Condition 1-EVA, Condition 1-EVA. Decompression alarm on Mobile Habitation Two. Location 31.1 degrees north, 29.2 degrees east, 400 meters west-southwest of Crater Posidonius. No communication from crew. Telemetry incoming.”