Authors: Niko Perren
“Help me,” Rajit gasped, his voice fading as his lungs emptied.
“Sharon! Emergency!” Jie shouted. “Breach! Breach!”
He tore the emergency patch kit off his belt. He thought he heard Sharon say “I’m on my way.”
Rajit clenched his hands around his upper leg in a vain attempt to stop the airflow. Jie couldn’t see past the mirrored glass of Rajit’s helmet, but the external status light blinked an ominous red. Full depressurization. Fluorescent self-repair glue leaked from the edges of the gash, but the cut was too wide. Bare skin bulged out of the jagged hole; blood trickled out, freezing into glimmering rubies as it hit the vacuum.
“Jie, this is Earthcon, can you describe…?”
Jie snapped off the transmission. No time for distractions. His fingers scrabbled at the patch kit’s lid. It burst open, spilling its contents onto the ground in agonizing slow motion. Wasted moments. Jie caught the largest patch in midair, fumbling with the pull-tabs. Don’t glue it to myself!
Rajit slumped, dropping to the ground like a corpse.
Stay calm. Unconsciousness is normal. I’ve got sixty seconds.
He examined the hole. No point trying to pull the edges of the suit fabric together. I’d need three hands for that. They’d skipped a lot of lessons, but suit breaches had been drilled into him. Start at the top. Patch the hole. He flattened the patch with his glove to make a good bond with the suit material. A startling amount of blood had escaped from Rajit’s leg now. I’m amazed this glue even sticks to this mess. Jie repeated the process with a second patch, overlapping the first by a few centimeters. Once more should do it.
He pulled the tabs off the third patch, but as he reached for Rajit’s knee, Rajit convulsed. Jie dove on top of him, grabbing the injured leg with his free hand. Rajit bucked in the low gravity, forcing Jie to hold the patch at arm’s length, like a flag, so that it wouldn’t fold onto itself. How long do I have? Rajit sagged. Quick! Jie slapped on the patch. Pressed the emergency air button on the outside of Rajit’s helmet. Vapor plumed from the repair.
‹Son of a turtle. Don’t you dare leak.› Jie pushed with his hand. The flow stopped. The suit light returned to green.
“Rajit? Can you hear me? Your suit is fixed. You are going to be fine.”
No response. Rajit’s head hung at an unnatural angle.
“Rajit?”
Breathe. Please breathe. The solar panel sentinels faced the sun, catching the rain of photons, undisturbed by the drama unfolding below them.
***
Sharon raced up a few minutes later, her bounding ten-meter strides carrying her so fast that she needed three stutter-steps to slow to a halt. She bent over Rajit. “He’s breathing,” she panted. “See, his oxygen levels are moving. Help me get him to the rover.”
They lifted Rajit together, Sharon at the head, Jie at the feet. “Careful,” said Jie. “The patches are not sticking well to the blood.” Rajit sagged like a bag of rice. He weighed surprisingly little in the low gravity, more awkward than heavy.
They stepped forward, synchronizing their movements to make up for their tenuous connection to the ground. It took several tries before they found a comfortable rhythm. “Left, right, left, right.” Sharon called it like a drill sergeant. When they reached the rover, they placed Rajit on the bench seat. Jie sat next to him, gripping Rajit’s slumped body to make sure he didn’t bounce out. Sharon drove the rover like an airplane, soaring over bumps, the ground merely a launch point between flights. Jie nearly screamed as they kamikazied towards the airlock, but Sharon slammed the brakes and turned the vehicle sharply, somehow finding enough traction to swerve to a halt.
They swept the spare parts out of the airlock and lay Rajit on the floor.
“I’ll run the lock,” said Sharon. “You stay outside and finish the repairs.”
“By myself?” No. How can I? Not after what had just happened.
“You have more engineering experience than I do,” said Sharon. “Earthcon will help.”
I’m glad she can’t see how scared I am. A trillion neurons shouted at him to flee. Then the door closed on the only bubble of safety for a half million kilometers. The moon stretched away. Empty. Deadly. I’m completely alone out here. No backup. No margin for error.
‹Jie, we’ll walk you through this.› The voice from Earth had changed. It was a woman now, with a calm, reassuring voice, speaking Chinese instead of the usual English. ‹Your first step is to find the replacement circuit board.› A picture appeared in his helmet display.
Focus on the task. Jie searched the gear strewn in the rocky ground around the airlock. Please, let it be here. Without power, he had no way to call inside for parts. It would be terrible if, after all this, he couldn’t find a piece.
‹It’s at 2:00, Jie.› His helmet display lit the location, and he dug the board out of the dust. He stowed the board, sat down at the driver’s seat of the buggy, and stared at the unfamiliar controls. Nobody had expected him to drive on the moon, so they’d had him try the simulator just once. For ten minutes.
He’d rolled the rover and killed everyone.
‹The left pedal controls acceleration, right?›
‹No!› came a panicked voice. ‹The right pedal controls acceleration. The left one brakes. Take it slow, Jie.›
He pivoted his foot, easing the right pedal towards the floor. The vehicle crawled forward. I could walk faster than this. He pushed a little harder, struggling to sense the pressure through his thick boots. The vehicle lurched. He stomped on the brake pedal with his other foot, throwing himself into the steering wheel. As soon as he lifted his foot off the brake, he leapt forward again.
‹Use the same foot for both pedals!› yelled Earthcon. ‹That way you won’t accelerate and decelerate at the same time.›
Wǒ cào! Jie stopped the rover until the adrenaline drained out of his bloodstream. It must have been carnage before self-driving cars. He tried again, more controlled this time, and started up the hill. The rover jounced, jostling his legs and changing the pressure on the pedals, weird oscillations that were hard to dampen. The learning curve was short, though. By the time he summited, he was starting to get a feel for the controls.
He returned to the junction box, his sense of isolation like a hunger that increased with distance from the airlock. The damaged circuit board lay in a black pool of frozen blood, still clasped in the vice grip’s jaws. Jie placed it on top of the power controller so that he wouldn’t step on it by accident.
‹Jie, find the blue-handled cutters. Trim the remaining lead wires.› The woman from Earth directed him like a puppet, with a constant stream of commands that allowed no time for worry. ‹Point the camera slightly left. Attach the red wire to the coupling.›
The thick, insulated gloves made the smallest manipulations maddeningly difficult. ‹Good. Now twist the two red wires together.›
He had no idea how long he had been out. Minutes? Hours?
‹That’s the last one, Jie. Congratulations. Turn the power on. It’s the red switch on the earthward side of the exterior.›
Jie’s neck and shoulders ached, and his elbow felt as if it were broken. This had better work. He put his hand on the switch and pushed, then stood motionless in the pale earthlight. The story would be all over the news by now. Are Cheng and Zhenzhen awake, hanging on every update? What about Rajit’s family? He had a nephew and niece with his sister in Delhi. She was a math teacher.
He’s dead. I fumbled too long with the patches. There was too much blood.
Jie started back towards the base.
***
Jie found both airlocks still dark. Not unexpected. They’d be turning internal systems on sequentially, making sure everything worked. Jie sat down to wait and somehow managed to doze. When he looked up again he saw a LED’s green glow.
“Sharon?” he said, using the local frequency.
Nothing, other than the obvious invitation to enter.
‹Earthcon? What do you think?›
‹We don’t have com yet, › said Earthcon. ‹They’ll likely power up the computers last. But we think you should go inside. Good luck.›
Jie squeezed into the airlock and tapped the pressurize button. A yellow light came on and the screen read “cleaning cycle error.” Not surprising given the state of the dome. He triggered the cleaning cycle bypass, and air flooded in. What will I find? Rajit dead? Their fragile home damaged beyond repair? Beyond survival? Horror movie visions of a dark, ruined interior filled his head.
He stepped into sterile brightness. Sally’s suit hung on the wall next to four empty hooks. He twisted off his helmet and the world jumped into focus. Dust caked him so thickly that it obscured the GBOP logo on his sleeve. He peeled off the suit, turning the fabric inside out, breathing through his nose. Don’t inhale anything below a micron. Too many horror stories. Weird cancers that resist gene therapy. Autoimmune diseases.
Naked, he shuffled into the hive, like a dying patient heading for lab results. Sally was slumped in one of the chairs, head down, medical kit spread on the table next to her. Rajit lay on the floor, lips caked with dried blood. Networks of capillaries had burst across his face, leaving islands of furious purple. His eyes were closed.
‹Oh, no,› said Jie.
‹Jie!› Sally leapt up, nearly knocking over her medical supplies. She bounded over, hugged him, and then kissed him square on the lips. ‹I was trying to wait until Earth…› she laughed. ‹But given the circumstances…› She kissed him again, for much longer this time.
Rajit turned his bulging bloodshot eyes towards them. “Apparently I owe you my life,” he coughed. “What a rookie mistake.” He coughed again. “I miscalculated my angular momentum.”
SALLY EMERGED WITH a heaping bowl of porridge. “Three scoops for Sharon, three for Rajit, three for Sally, and two for Jie since he’ll be eating a proper lunch.”
For four days the crew had stayed inside, inspecting every subsystem in the base while Rajit recovered from his injuries. But now Rajit had been declared fit for light duty, and he, Sally, and Sharon faced 12 hours on the surface, trying to claw back the receding schedule. They’d be sipping lunch through a tube. And Jie – he’d dine in the greenhouse on fresh fruit off the vines.
I’m glad I don’t have to go back out there.
Jie shifted over to make room for Sally, but she took the extra chair on the other side of the table instead of sitting next to him. She ignored his attempt at eye contact. Not unfriendly. Just aloof. That kiss the other day sure didn’t go very far. Jie decided to let it rest and turned his attention to the television. Penguins waddled, light entertainment to kick off the day. Everyone felt enough pressure already without more grim news from Earth. Just yesterday, Tania Black had been on, explaining how she was willing to risk a severe hurricane season to give the lunar team a chance to finish their work.
The penguins faded. Incoming call.
“I have no idea,” said Sharon.
Tetabo Molari’s dark face appeared, and next to him, the wrinkled Nishad Singh. The colorful wooden masks of Molari’s Urumchi office were a stark contrast to the bedraggled fabrics of the hive.
“Tetabo,” said Sharon. “This is unexpected.”
“I’ll get right to it,” said Molari. “We’re sending the Earth return vehicle on the next cargo drop. And your replacement crew on the launch after. In a few weeks, you’ll be going home.”
I’m going home? Home!
“Is that a good idea?” Sharon’s voice rose an octave. “Rajit’s fine. And I thought Jie was irreplaceable. Right, Jie?”
“I…” While Jie tried to formulate a reply, Molari reached out of frame and came back with a donut. Jie glimpsed a forested urban park through the windows behind him. Blue sky filled the gaps between the surrounding office buildings. In two weeks, I could be back there. I could step out of my door with Cheng, and walk into sunshine. “Who… who taking over for me?” Jie asked.
Awkward silence as the message bounced to Earth and back.
“We’ve been training one of the backup astronauts how to use the nanolab,” said Molari. “He’s not as skilled as you, Jie, but he’s got talent. And you’ll be able to guide him from Earth.”
“You trained somebody fresh?” Jie felt panic fluttering in his chest, like the first time he’d experienced low gravity. He looked from Molari to Singh, but the time delay made it impossible to read their emotions. “I have fifteen years of experience. At least send another nanoengineer. You would not send a brain surgeon after a two month training.”
Stop arguing, said the voice in his head. Let somebody else sit in the workshop, hoping the wall doesn’t develop a hole. I’ve done my part.
But the other voice, Cheng’s voice, did not agree. If you leave now, Dad, you’ll place my future in the hands of an amateur. This is about more than just you.
For a moment the voices battled for supremacy. “I’d like to finish this,” said Jie. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to replace me. I very good at what I do. I’ve already gone through the lunar learning curve. And I’m making progress.”
“It’s not your nanolab skills that are the issue,” said Singh. “We can’t use you outside, Jie, and with Rajit injured, the mass driver construction will fall even further behind schedule.”
“Of course we’re behind schedule,” snapped Sharon. “The electromagnet mounts weren’t drilled properly.”
Rajit nodded. “Average variance is 2.5 millimeters. Can’t you get them made in China?” Rajit broke into a coughing fit. Jie cringed. This isn’t helping.
“We had to give the Americans something to do,” said Molari. “Would you rather they designed the control systems? I’m sorry. China and the US run this project. They made the call to bring you back. I’m just the contractor.”
The screen blanked. Sharon hunched over her oatmeal. The morning’s cautious optimism had vanished like air in a vacuum.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Sally. “Jie, you’ve had more low gravity experience than any trainee. And you saved Rajit’s life. Why can’t you go outside?”
Because it scares me to death. A shiver ran down his back. That’s not really a reason, is it? He spat out the words before he had a chance to change his mind. “I will come out today. Help you get back on schedule. A break might clear my head. And I can still do a few hours research in the evening.”
Sharon appraised him, lips pursed. She nodded. “It would help a lot.”
Jie pushed over his bowl of porridge. “One more scoop, please.”
***
As Jie was suiting up at the airlock, the ceiling speakers came to life. “Jie, this is Earthcon. I’m sorry, but we’ve got orders to keep you in. Your research is too important.”
Jie snapped his glove into place. “If I’m so important, why are you sending me home?”
A long delay. “Sorry, Jie. We can’t risk you getting killed.”
“And I can’t risk you sending me back and ruining mission. So, how you stop me?”
“We’ll turn off airlock power,” said Earthcon.
“Fine,” said Jie. “I’ll sit here then. No work gets done today.” Sally squeezed his leg and gave him a thumbs-up. Jie felt a warm glow in his chest. He smiled at her, but she quickly looked away. He twisted on his helmet, and after Sharon did a safety check, he stepped into the airlock. The power stayed on. He hit the depressurization button.
‹Jie, my name is Fungli,› said a voice inside his helmet. ‹I’ll be your support today. Let me know if you have any questions.›
‹Thanks, Fungli.›
Jie felt surprisingly exhilarated to be on the surface again, as if having agency in the decision to come outside had loosened the moon’s grip on him. Where the moon had felt dangerous and uncaring four days ago, he could see now that it was also a place of beauty. The sun had crept another 40 degrees around the horizon, shuffling light and shadow to paint a whole new landscape in a hundred shades of gray. A tropical storm on Earth was a spiraling ghost against the Atlantic’s dark night. Brilliant stars seemed to light the way to the end of the universe.
The other crew members joined him, and the four of them climbed into the rover. Sharon drove. She raced across the flat landing field following a well-worn track to where the mountain dropped off more steeply. For a moment it looked as if they’d launch into space, but she tapped the brakes just as they hit the edge. When Jie opened his eyes, they’d skidded expertly onto a road. It had been freshly torn out of the hillside, a descending line fringed with fans of dark rubble. In the distance, where the road terminated, a mining truck moved in robotic rhythm, highlighted against the impenetrable blackness of the valley beyond.
“We finished the road two weeks ago,” said Sally. “Now we’re digging out a platform to hold the material refineries and nanofactories that’ll supply the mass driver base. Where ‘we’ is mostly the remote drivers at Earthcon.”
“You’ve done a lot of work,” said Jie. Twelve hours out here will go a long way to clearing my head.
Sharon parked the rover on a flat area ten badminton courts in size. Stacked neatly on one side were silver boxes full of supplies from Earth. Jie was stunned to see just how much equipment had arrived already. Sharon hoisted a box onto her shoulder, and Rajit and Sally followed suit. “Be careful,” Sharon warned. “They’re eighty kilos each. They feel light, but they have more mass than you do.”
Jie hauled a box onto his shoulder, wobbling for a moment as he tried to find his balance. The great mass driver ramp stretched steeply up the hill they had just descended, as if it had been scraped out of the soil with a giant ruler. They formed a line and plodded up one side of it, following a footpath worn into the dust. Twenty of the mass driver’s electromagnets had been placed so far, coils of wire resembling old-fashioned life preservers. They were tied together by ceramic scaffolding to give them rigidity and alignment. When the whole thing was completed, each magnet would fire in sequence, pulling the Nanoglass-filled payloads through the central holes like bullets through the barrel of a rifle. The structure had an eerie, skeletal beauty, as if some mechanical leviathan had died long ago and left its vertebrae stretched up the hillside.
Jie had visions of a load of Nanoglass spraying into a rainbow cloud as its container slammed against the inside edge of a magnet. “How do you keep payload centered?”
“Every tenth magnet is for steering,” gasped Rajit. He coughed, then pointed at the magnet they were passing. Instead of the normal coiled wire donut, this one was made of six sections mounted at 60 degree increments around the central hole, like a six piece pie with a hole cut out of the center. “Each wedge is an independent electromagnet. We have to prevent resonant oscillations of course, so we use the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix to calculate the velocity ellipsoid.”
“Umm. OK.” Jie shook his head to loosen the bead of sweat wandering towards his eye. Hopefully they’d sit soon so that the suit’s heat-exchangers could dump some of their excess energy into the ground.
“The last 50 meters of the track are entirely steering magnets,” continued Rajit. “They widen in diameter, like a musket. We can vary the launch vector by seven degrees. Velocity can vary as well, giving us two degrees of freedom.” He laughed, a raspy sound that decayed into a cough. “Obviously, that’s not nearly enough to solve an arbitrary celestial mechanics calculation. But if …”
“Thanks Rajit,” Sharon cut in. “We’ll finish the lesson when we’ve got our calculus references handy.”
“The math’s not that hard,” grumbled Rajit. “Jie’s kid could probably do it.”
They dropped their boxes beyond the last magnet, laying out the contents on white plastic sheeting. “How are you doing, Jie?” Sharon asked.
“I’m good,” said Jie. “You can stop watching me so carefully. Rajit is the one who has accidents.”
Sally giggled.
Sharon showed Jie how to snap together the paper-thin ceramic scaffolding. While they were doing that, Rajit and Sally placed the next electromagnet, pinning its struts to the ground with self-tapping screws, then lining it up using the hilltop guidance laser. Precision was critical. The electromagnets would apply a staggering 100 Gs to accelerate their Nanoglass payloads to the 3-kilometers-per-second lunar escape velocity. The slightest misalignment would rip the driver apart.
Jie took another moment to admire the view. Across the valley only the backlit ridges were visible, pencil lines of light separating the starry blackness above from the starless one beneath. For a brief moment he felt the pull that had caused adventurers of old to abandon their families and set sail across the seas. What wonders lie down there? This whole beautiful terrible world was theirs alone, to explore from this tiny foothold. Even here, just a few hundred meters from the base, most of the soil had never seen footprints.
“Beautiful isn’t it,” said Sally, looking up from where she and Rajit were working. Music flooded Jie’s helmet. Opera. ‹I’ve switched us to a private channel,› she said. ‹We need to talk. I’m sorry if I’ve been distant.›
‹Yeah. You’ve been avoiding me since Rajit’s accident. Since we kissed.›
‹I like you, Jie. A lot. But this is my career and relationships get messy in such small groups. I have to stay professional. At least until we get home.›
Jie dug at a patch of undisturbed ground with his toe. Tiny divots pockmarked it, like a hail-damaged car, the result of endless bombardment of pollen-sized meteorites. ‹If you’re worried about sex, I can live without it,› Jie said. ‹I’ve had a kid – leprous monks get more action than new parents. Just don’t feel you can’t be my friend. I really need a friend here.›
‹In that case, can I watch Cheng’s swim meet with you next week? I know how much you want to be there. Popcorn at the hive television?›
Jie groaned. ‹Are you that hard up for entertainment? Watching nine-year-olds is overrated – unless they’re yours.›
‹I like Cheng,› said Sally. ‹Besides, there’s nothing else happening. The lunar soccer league is cancelled that night. We’re short players again.›