The lunar
terrain was desolate. Their liberated Chimera craft was approaching the planned
descent corridor with Riley at the helm. Automation made his role in the
landing one of pure formality, and only marginally redundant. Two million
moving parts working cooperatively without fail was no longer an Everest
achievement of engineering. Between lines of code and satellite systems, ground-based
cell-phones performed at higher standard on a daily basis failing only under
the stress of posterior pressures.
No matter the years of experience,
the nearly perfect eyesight, and near-instinctive reactions, there was no human
alive that could pilot this landing through to the surface as safely as the
Chimera every time. Wielding rockets engineered to gimble at thousandths of a
second was perverse, considering all Riley’s years of experiences in fighter
jets had only honed his muscle memory to approach the theoretical human
response limit; one twentieth of second for the eye to acknowledge information
and the brain to reply. One twentieth of a second versus the digital one
thousandth of a second. Humans were slow, too slow. The sluggish and fickle human pilot in a sleek
streamlined machine of precion was aptly a Chimera of creation.
Riley sat in the pilot’s couch, hand perched
near the joystick , mostly for the human element. Insurance in assurance,
security theatre. While August knew the engineering, he did not trust it, and
while he did not know Riley, he trusted
him. August could not decide whether or
not to call this brave or stupid, instead settling painfully on calling it human.
The
row of couches slung behind Riley were filled by August, Osric, and Jules. Osric
and Jules had the intense look of children looking through an airplane window
for the first time. ‘New York looks so
small. Are the ants, cars? It’s so
vast.’ Now in reverse August could read the expressions, ‘is that Hadley Rille? It looks so deep! Look
there, I didn’t realize those were mountains! It’s so vast.’
August
caught himself enjoying the view. The moon was gorgeous in the pristine
lifelessness, and extreme definition. What looked like course papier mache
through a telescope was now rocky hills and mountains sprouting up at them. The
same sunlight fell on the moon as on Earth, but there was no atmosphere to
catch and spread the light cinematically across the surface. There were no
blanketing tones or hues that shifted across the globe of luna. She was stark.
The mountains a thousand miles away looked just as crisp and bold as the
mountains fifty miles away. In some ways it looked like it could be plucked
from the sky and held for close and intimate inspection.
August
closed his eyes and imagined his toy globe, heavy in his lap. Then he imagined running
his thumbs across a sandpaper landscape of great mare, while the ridges of the Great
Bombardment craters rose up massaging his palms. The icy far side was chilling and
hurt to touch, the hot near side burned. Only along the terminator
did it feel tolerable, but desiccated like everywhere, pulling the moisture
from his hands leaving a gray stain of lifeless dust. He opened his eyes, and greeted the landscape
outside the cockpit window afresh, invigorated, scared.
The
descent required the capsule roll-over and fire retro rockets, providing luna
the chance to reach out with her gravity and pluck them from the sky. For the
rest of the descent the landscape would be beneath their backs and only the
black sky of daylight would greet them through the windows as gravity brought
them down quickly. The longer the computer fired the retro-rockets, the tighter
the grip of gravity retracting the tin can and the faster they fell.
They
plummeted toward the surface, letting the moon embrace them in their next task.
***
Gioja
Crater scooped into the sky around them as they descended the last kilometer.
The wavefront of an ancient asteroid strike
made a rough and rocky horizon in all directions. The Earth, a blue
marble, sat at the top of the mountainous horizon, perched like a beach ball
that could roll down and greet them as the slopes rose up to greet it.
Jules
enjoyed the view, to her it felt like sitting in center of a droplet, frozen just
as it breaks the surface of a pond. They were landing in lesser unnamed crater within Gioja whose surface had similarly
broken, collapsing several billion years ago into an empty and expansive
labyrinth of lava tubes likely created by the Mare Frigoris. In fact the
mountains were already truncating as they settled into the exposed lava tubes. They
were about to go cave diving on the moon! Jules was giddy with delight at what
was sure to be a geologist’s dream.
Through
the entire trip Jules had been enjoying some classical music she rigged her
comm system to pipe into to her headphones on a private channel. An alarming
beep would interrupt the music should someone try and communicate with her on
one of the common open channels. Beethoven, Mozart, a few Gregorian Chants,
they were very comforting and provided her with a warm blanket of symmetry in
these strange days. Her favorite part of 2001:
A Space Odyssey was the trip to the moon with the PanAm flight attendants.
They struck her as so beautiful, so
confident, and in such a wonderful profession getting to travel like that.
For
a young Jules there was a lot of allure there, she tried to convince herself
that her mother had been a flight attendant, and that was why she was never
home; she was too busy seeing the world. For a brief period in middle school
even Jules allowed herself to romanticize the lifestyle and qualifications,
convincing herself that she wanted to be a stewardess on a glamorous rich
airline, but not one of those where people smoked. When she told her father he
only frowned, but that was enough to pop a bubble she had over-inflated for
several years. His frown hurt somewhere deep, a barbed reminder that she was
very young, naïve, and that her mother was not off traveling the world like
some great explorer. Jules kept that frown in memory, something made it stick
more than most events. Whenever she felt herself straying in life it would rise
up like a haunting spectre. Every disappoint in herself conjured the image of
her father frowning at her. Even remembering it filled her a guilt and sense of
judgement only children experience.
Beeeep. Beep-Beep.
Osric
was tapping his wrist pad, signaling for
her to change her comm frequency.
“Did you get lost in there?” through the
static hiss of a radio his voice
still sounded warm to her.
“A
little. There are a lot of tubes and surfaces. Still getting used to the return
to gravity.”
“I feel great about it, I left earth 190lbs,
and now look at me, only 30lbs!”
Osric
was like every astronomer Jules had ever met, eager to talk science and find
some way to make it fun. That was his gift, the ability to speak and make the
people around him feel alive. Jules felt her cheeks blush when he would speak
to her.
“Shall we?” A long arm was gesturing toward the hatch.
The capsule had been depressurized and August and Riley were going to monitor
the systems for the egress.
Percolating
at the chance to set foot on the moon, just as a geologist or any other kind of
human being, made her teeth chatter. The
representative first member of the second generation of explorers, chattering
teeth gave way to wobbly knees. Excitement and anxiety pulled togeth in an ugly
combination of bodily responses. Then remembering the circumstances of how they
came to be here on the surface of the moon, the ‘theft,’ what it meant, the
ignoble welcome waiting for them back on Earth, she could only see the face of
her father in Osric’s faceplate, frowning at her.
“After
you,” she let out weakly.
Then
a sweet smile from Osric, made something
else inside her begin to glow.
“Ladies first.”
***
Privateers.
It was a polite alternative for Pirate.
The
silken fines of the lunar surface had waited the better part of a century for man to return, and she was
considered a Privateer for it. There was little ceremony given, a few mild
remarks mostly between here and Osric, and a couple brief photos. The onboard
cameras certainly were recording everything, but no one was watching the
broadcast.
Time
was precious and they were here to harvest, not to make history.
Osric
and Jules crawled out and down the landing attachment on the Chimera craft,
followed shortly by Riley and August who both took generous time to survey the
landing sight before dismounting. For the second set of first steps on the moon
Jules certainly did not feel like a historic icon, and made no intention of
becoming one. Looking around at the criss-crossing and zigzagging tracks from
automated rovers she certainly didn’t feel like she was some explorer of a new
world. It was plowed, beaten, and bruised by man-made machines already without
her planting any flag.
The
craft had landed nicely on top of a broad bulge in the center of the cavern
floor, with the shelf of the lunar surface jutting out over the blackness of
the cavern. Seventy five meters in every direction, the cavern opening was perfectly circular with
the bulge raising only high enough to give them a limited view of the
rocky horizon. Earth scraping to peak
over the mountains at them.
Riley
and August could be heard brooding over the comms. They had already seen what
Jules was looking at now. All the rover tracks came together in one place,
nearly a dozen tank-width pairs of treads converging on a point about forty
meters off. There were no rovers at the end of the tracks though, instead she
saw fresh new crater and what could only be described as scorched earth.
Commander
Riley was tense in his voice, anger ready to unleash at the first person to
cross him. His words came out terse and brief.
“Did you know, August?”
“No.”
“When then did it happen?”
“Does it matter? It’s done.”
The
two men were staring at the blast radius examining scraps of metal and burnt
fuel contemplating their next move, deciding whether or not to inform the
other.
Osric
came online, “It looks like a missile
strike. You can tell by the debris. Do you think the lander is in danger?”
August’s
comm clicked on, but Riley spoke over
and first, “ They don’t want to kill us
only stop us.”
“…they’d warn us first,” August finished. “I’m guessing they instructed all the rovers to converge together. I’d
think there would be easier ways to sabotage them than blowing them up.”
“They probably thought we’d be
crafyt enough to fix them,” Osric
offered.
“They’d be right,” August corrected.
“Where does that leave us?” came in the chilling tone from
Riley.
Jules saw this as an opportunity to
distract and cast a positive tone, “We’re still in great shape!”
“How?”
“The other two rovers! They didn’t
know we had to invert the geographic commands on one of the rovers in order to
navigate it, so wherever they told it to go, it’s gone somewhere else on its
own! Probably somewhere in the local caverns. The radio relay has been
destroyed by the blast so they can’t possibly know it’s still operational. Of
course, that also means we don’t know how to find it without going on foot… We
just have to find it, then reprogram it and set up a new relay. We just have to
find it.”
“That’s
one rover.”
“No, that makes two. The other
rover is right over here near the cavern wall.”
“I
thought it was broken. A rockfall damaged it.”
“Well…” Jules felt herself
shaking a little, she had spent too much time in the spotligjt speaking. She
preferred being in the audience as a safely removed spectator, “well, …it is broken… but we can fix it! We just
have to figure out how.”
“Oh
good.” The commander was less than amused at the prospect. “What about the fuel? Do we have any reason
to believe they didn’t burn it all?” He emphasized the last word framing
the missile-burned crater and rover detritus.
“How long ago did we know for a fact
that they were active? The rovers.”
“Right
after we departed the station, I was reading a log of their manifest.”
“So, three days?” Jules did some
quick arithmetic in her head. “Just a moment, let me think,” she hated math.
That was one of the many reasons she liked geology. No math. But now she was
growing self-conscious doing arithmetic in her head in front of a bunch of
ego-fueled engineers. “I think that means, that at worst there should still be
at least something like 20% of the manifest left.”
She was greeted by a doubting
silence.
“The rovers only move so fast. If
they were commanded to pack up and move the entire fuel inventory to this spot
right after you read that report, and then got themselves blown up just before
we got here, they would only have been able to move 80% of what they’ve mined
from the storage in the lava tubes. Chances are good they haven’t been at it
all this time.”
“Then
why bother to blow them up?” Osric queried.
“Because
20% isn’t enough.” the commander considered. “ They want us marooned and obedient, and 20% isn’t enough fuel for us
to go anywhere. Even 50% is too little for comfort.”
“So now what, we just go back?”
Jules’ heart was racing, her cheeks flushing read, sweat soaking her backside
at the thought of what waited for them back home, and the idea of everyone on the ground wearing
that face of her father, “we go back because the rovers didn’t make enough
fuel?”
It was unexpected when Commander
Rilery replied, “I thought you said
you could fix it?” It was even less
expected when he smiled at her, like having given a child back her happiness
with a small gift.
“Then
I guess we have a plan.” The craggy voice of August sounded a little less
afraid as well,
“Yes,”
Riley agreed, “I’ll go check the
remaining fuel inventory, afterward I’ll join Dr. (Osric’s last name) in
helping him ready the Salyut as our station. Dr. (Jule’s last name) will start working on
the broken rover, And what would you
like to pursue, August?”
“I’ll
search for the missing rover.”
***
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