David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

The shuttle skimmed over the northern terminus of the Dorsa Smirnov, a wrinkle ridge that snaked like a scar across the Serenity basin. “Give me ten percent continual outflow on the valve seals,” Dechert said. “We don’t need to be inhaling dust right now.”

The ridge receded and Vernon pushed the craft lower. Dechert spotted the Molly Hatchet in the distance, her boxy metallic hindquarters glinting in the lowering sun. She sat just to the west of Posidonius’s snowy ejecta blanket, and as they grew closer, Dechert could see a thin wisp of gas rise into the blackness from the back of the crawler. Gas rising from the surface of the Moon was never a good thing.

The Molly Hatchet was venting.

Vernon flew the shuttle in too fast and reversed thrust two hundred meters from the stricken craft, the g -forces from the maneuver pinning both men into their seats. Moondust billowed up as they landed.

They saw it at the same time, a speck of white against the darker hulk of the mining crawler and the ash gray of the regolith, lying just outside of the rear EVA hatch in a ring of debris. It was a pressure suit. Dechert could see the control board on the suit’s midsection through the rising blanket of dust, blinking red. He looked at Vernon and didn’t want to look back out the window. The suit wasn’t empty. It was turned on. But there was no helmet attached to it, just a smaller object extending from the solid circular frame of the suit’s neckline. The object looked extraordinary on the surface of the Moon, incomprehensible. It took Dechert a few seconds to understand why. Its exposed reaches had curly blond hair.

“Oh no, baby, no,” Waters whispered. “No way. No way.”

A year ago

“Why did you come to the Moon, Cole?”

“I don’t know, boss. Boredom, I guess.”

“Boredom?” Dechert asked, looking up from a Touchpad with his eyebrows raised. Cole Benson sat across from him on a 3-D–printed chair in the Astro-Mechanical lab, his knees bunched together and his shoulders tucked in toward his chest. “People go to the movies when they’re bored, Cole. They don’t take a spaceship a quarter-million miles up to a dead rock in the sky.”

Cole fidgeted, wiping his blond hair from his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know what you want me to say, boss. It just got old for me down there. All of the bullshit.”

“Elaborate,” Dechert said. “Humor me.”

“You know—the whole thing. Half the world is starving on the back end of the Max, and I’m spending my time surfing with the Safe Zone elites, those freakin’ pussies. You know I was junior champion in Encinitas, and we all got waivers for international travel? I did all the big breaks from Snapper Rocks to Burleigh for a year in ’66 when Australia started getting those six-month monsoons. Surfed Bells Beach just after Typhoon Andora rolled by and the wind switched offshore. Must have been twenty-foot sets that were as clean as cut glass. Everyone said it was a good diversion for the people who still had power. That’s how they justified it. And we were eating like kings and getting laid. Fuckin’ hell.”

Dechert sat back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. He clenched his jaws in an effort to calm down; he didn’t want to give his youngest miner a lashing that he couldn’t recover from. Cole had become a good digger in his first two years on the Moon, better than Dechert could have hoped for. But the kid had a flair for recklessness that bordered on self-destruction. Maybe he hadn’t been close enough to death yet or the realization of the Moon’s always imminent danger had yet to sink in enough for him to feel its regulating squeeze on his heart. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

“So I’m guessing it was boredom that led you to build a makeshift snowboard and take it for a run down the Montes Haemus during a survey mission, when you were supposed to be covering Vernon’s ass?”

Cole looked over at the laboratory equipment that sat unused on a far table, as if he were counting the test tubes and sub-A-scopes lined up there. “We were on break and the theodolites were on auto and green. I told Vernon I was gonna check something out for a few minutes. He said it was fine.”

He picked at his pants leg while Dechert stared at him, keeping his face turned away from his commander’s gaze. Dechert had almost been amused at the description Vernon gave him of the incident out on the Serenity basin earlier that morning—of how Vernon had heard a scream over the com that would freeze any man’s soul out on the reg—and how he had looked up into the foothills above him to see Cole Benson shooting down a steep ravine like a ground-hugging missile on what appeared to be a carbon-fiber corrugation sheet, catching twenty meters of space every time the jury-rigged snowboard hit a small bump in the microgravity.

Maybe he would have stayed amused about the whole damned thing if Cole hadn’t wiped out at the bottom of his ski run and cut a small gash in his pressure suit, triggering a decompression alert that had thrown the station into a panic. Vernon had moved quickly, bounding up to Cole and spraying some quick-seal on the cut before it blew out his suit, but the alert had shaken the crew, and it was a good thing that it had taken Cole and Vernon a few hours to get back to the airlock after the accident. If they had returned sooner, Dechert might have throttled his young mining specialist with a pipe cleat.

“Cole, let me explain something to you about boredom, and residual guilt. They will get you killed up here, plain and simple. And not just you, but the ones around you.”

“I realize that. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, kid,” Dechert said, leaning forward in his chair. “You fuck up out on the reg, and sorry won’t bring back the dead.”

Cole looked even worse now. His eyes were getting moist and his legs began to shake as he tapped both feet on the rubberized floor, his hands still on his knees. He was a child, Dechert realized, a curious, reckless child who pretended to be a man. And here he was at Serenity, a thousand klicks from the nearest main base and working one of the most dangerous jobs inside the Asteroid Belt.

“Boss, you know me,” Cole mumbled. “I might be stupid once, but I’ll never be twice. I swear to God it won’t happen again.”

Dechert puffed up his cheeks and let loose with a blast of air. He had put together a good team for Sea of Serenity 1, but they were too damned young. Between Cole’s recklessness, Quarles’s penchant for practical jokes at the most inopportune times, and Lane’s inherent surliness, the trio often left him feeling more like a high school counselor than a Level-1 station chief. But Briggs was starting to come around, and at least Waters and Thatch had some age to them , he thought. My rocks of Gibraltar in a stormy hormonal sea.

“All right,” Dechert said. “We’ll leave it at that for now. Get your ass over to Bio-Med, and have Lane check you out for decompression sickness.”

Cole looked up, hopeful but still wary. “Is that it? I mean, I’m not getting docked or anything?”

“Not right now. But don’t worry, I’ll find other ways to make your life a bone-sucking misery for the next few months.”

“Thanks, boss,” Cole said. He stood up, still not convinced that he had been temporarily spared the hangman’s noose. “I promise I’ll square it away. Strictly protocol from now on.”

Dechert shook his head and scratched the stubble on his face, knowing that the penitence in his young miner’s soul would eventually be overtaken by the testosterone coursing through his veins. Knowing he would do something ridiculous again and hoping that things wouldn’t end up worse when he did. Hoping the next incident wouldn’t come until at least 2072.