David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“Cole?”

“Yes, sir?”

“If you ever do something as cosmically stupid as that again, at least get it on video. You’ll need a keepsake of this place when I fire your ass, and nobody will ever believe this one when you get back on the beach.”

Cole Benson grinned. “Right. I can’t even screw up good.”

“Then don’t screw up at all.”

The dead settle in our mind like cooling embers. After a time they diminish, snuffed out by the immediate, and then a puff of memory rekindles them and for a moment they are hot and near once again. The smell of cigars did it for Dechert. He had opened Cole Benson’s locker and it hit him with a palpable blow, a sharp and immediate pain in the chest that replaced the numbness of the last few days and triggered his daydream of Cole’s attempt to be the first snowboarder on the Moon. As the memory faded, he shook his head and stared at the small stash of cigars in the cubby.

Benson had a connection at Peary Crater who smuggled reconstituted “Thermal Max” Dominicans up through resupply, probably the same entrepreneur who ran Lane her small-batch bourbon. Their earthy smell wafted out of his locker and Dechert envisioned Cole in the crew mess, his feet up on the white basalt table, lighting a forty-gauge Churchill and describing the perfect sets that rolled in from the Pacific Ocean and broke on the sandbars of the Playa Hermosa.

“Ten hours of surfin’, then ten hours of lovin’,” Cole would say. “That’s what Costa Rica is all about.”

Dechert gathered up the cigars and put them in an evidence bag with Cole’s other personal effects. He thought of giving them to Thatch, but he was in too much of a stupor now to want them. They all were. The station felt like the foyer of a funeral home, where people linger to avoid the sight of the casket but still feel its powerful presence. Quarles and Vernon and Thatch had barely said a word in two days. But at least they had honest reasons to be depressed , Dechert thought… genuine reasons to mourn. They lived and worked with Cole like brothers, risking their necks with him every day on the exposed lunar plains. Even Lane, as distant as she tried to keep herself, could mourn without any guilt. She used to muss Cole’s shaggy blond hair and call him her little man. It was probably the deepest sign of affection she’d shown to anyone in her three years on Serenity.

But what about Dechert? What was he most sorry about: Cole’s death or his unblemished command record vanishing in the vacuum? Dechert hadn’t lost a crew member since taking over Serenity 1, and now he had and it was Cole. And in the back of his mind he would always equate his sadness over Cole’s death with guilt over the notion that maybe he was sorrier for himself than he was for Cole Benson. Even grief can be selfish , he thought.

Or maybe it was just the rekindling of old memories that haunted him. He hadn’t dealt with death in many years, but there was a time when it was a weekly visitor to the confines of his soul. What line officer didn’t lose soldiers in the Bekaa Valley? A gunnery sergeant or a cherry private would be dismembered by a sonic charge or a seeking bullet, and he’d be replaced a few days later like a broken rear axle that was requisitioned, processed in triplicate, and shipped in from the States just in time for the next firefight. Dechert hadn’t even learned the names of some of the kids who had died under his command. The young ones were just too goddamned ignorant to stay alive. And in the end it might not have mattered how good or bad they were as warriors. The instinctive ones had a better chance, but no one can stand up for long before the withering law of averages. People just died out there in the Bake, for no damned reason at all other than the fact that it was a war.

But this wasn’t a war, and that made things worse. And Cole didn’t just die—an occurrence in many ways more natural than remaining alive on the Moon. An occurrence that wouldn’t have been too hard to fathom, given the young miner’s reckless nature. No. Someone had killed him.

Someone killed Cole.

Every time the phrase entered Dechert’s mind, he shook his head as if he had just walked through a cobweb. The idea seemed impossible. People kept people alive on the Moon. They didn’t kill them. Accidents might be an order of magnitude more likely on Luna than they are in the most treacherous places on Earth—the exposed rocks of Mount Everest stabbing into the jet stream; the poison-filled rain forests; the scorching miles of the great deserts. But at least you can survive long enough in those places to come up with a plan. At least there is some air there, some boundary between human beings and the void of the universe.

When mishaps occur on the Moon, they degrade into catastrophes before there’s time to reverse the sequence. Seven Russians had died in their first attempt to open a permanent station on the far side in 2067 because of a few grains of moondust. The spiky chunks of anorthosite shorted a hardened circuit that shorted another hardened circuit, and—in a seemingly impossible move—the master computer opened up all of the decompression hatches on the tiny station without so much as a blinking light to warn anyone. A SAR team found the men a week later, strewn wherever they had been before the air went away and frozen so deep that they had to be thawed with handheld heaters before they could be unfolded enough to be put into bags and shipped back to Earth. One had been sitting on a toilet, an old paperback copy of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don in his frozen hands and his pants around his ankles.

And just last year a landslide in the Apennine Mountains had crushed four Chinese diggers. One of the men had lost his spatial reference—a common thing on the Moon’s monochromatic expanse—and fallen into an unmapped rille. The others tried to recover him by lowering a cable from their rover, but the steep walls collapsed around them, crushing them inside their pressure suits.

Hell, even Fletcher had succumbed to the Moon’s cold embrace. The unbreakable John Ross Fletcher. One frozen thruster and his shuttle went into a spin from which no man or machine could recover.

But no one had ever been murdered on the Moon, and Dechert wouldn’t have thought it possible if he hadn’t seen for himself the blown EVA hatch on the Molly Hatchet . It didn’t take a forensics expert to realize it had been detonated from the outside, and that it wasn’t a micrometeor or some stellar phenomenon that did the job. Someone had planted an explosive under the crawler’s manual hatch release. Dechert had seen enough bombs in the Middle East to read the tapestry: black carbon-scoring, shrapnel, a four-inch circular hole gouged into the hull just under the hard seals, pointing upward. It looked like a shape charge to him, and he wondered if Thatch or Vernon had realized it as well. Probably not Thatch. He was too deep in shock when they got him out of the crawler through an umbilical airlock. But Dechert saw Waters look at the blown hatch when they had scrambled out of the shuttle to go to Cole, and then look again. And if Waters realized that Cole had been killed by a saboteur, then the rest of the crew knew it by now as well.

It doesn’t matter , Dechert thought to himself, closing Cole’s locker and sitting down on the cold metal bench in front of it. Peary Crater had a full forensics team working on the Hatchet , which had been towed to the main base by a lunar barge at no small expense—and over strong protests by Dechert, who wanted to run the investigation himself. They would know by now what had happened; Dechert was just waiting for the blowback and wondering how much access he would have to the report.