Girl on the Moon (23 page)

The computer did most of the work on liftoff, anyhow. She didn’t have to sight out the window and look for obstacles and flat landing spots.

She went through the launch checklist, vocalizing each step, and each was confirmed by Gil. The pressure was holding at nine hundred sixty millibars so far. Conn glanced at the patch in the hull. Then she spared a last look at the surface outside. She saw her footprints in the regolith. She smiled.

Launch checklist complete. Jake and the command module had emerged from around the far side and were on their way to meet her. The world would be watching her lift off. Peo would be watching. Thoughts were cycling through her mind too fast to follow. She realized she was exhausted.

As the descent engines came online, a whine filled the lander. She focused.

“Firing descent engines,” she said, and tapped the screen. Her knees bent as the lander rose a meter off the ground, clearing the way for the ascent stage to fire. Last one off the moon. She felt a stab of regret.

“Ascent engines online,” she said. “Firing.” She toggled a switch.

All that happened was that the descent engines quit and she dropped a meter back onto the ground with a crash. She lost her footing. Her helmet fell on her, slow motion in the lunar gravity.

She scrambled to her feet. Fear gripped her heart and squeezed. In eight tries, nobody had ever failed to blast off from the surface of the moon. And this wasn’t the time for the first. She was utterly alone.

Willing herself not to panic, she backed out of the warning screen, typed the command for the correct menu, and retried the sequence. Crash. No ascent engines.

“Conn, let’s back up and go through everything again,” Gil said. “We both missed something, that’s all.”

They went through the checklist again, making sure of every step. Again a whine. Descent engines fired. Ascent engines online.
Fire
, Conn willed as she toggled the switch.

Nothing. Dropped again. Something was going to break if they kept this up.

Conn’s eyes were already leaking with frustration and exhaustion. She didn’t want Brownsville to think she was crying. She sniffed and got herself together.

OK, no big deal. Something’s not working. We’ll fix it.

They would have to.

September 5–7, 2034

It wasn’t obvious that it was sabotage until Conn really got a good look at it. Whoever it was had been thorough, and had gone to some lengths to hide what they’d done.

The starter that ignited the ascent engines was scrapped. Something, a micrometeorite or a loose piece from another part of the engine, could have done that, though it would be strange indeed for the starter to be destroyed with no damage to anything else around it.

But the fuel tank ruptured, too. The ascent stage used liquid propellant—a nitrogen solution that until power-up for liftoff used the lander’s power to keep it above freezing (in its case, minus-346° Fahrenheit). The coils that kept the fuel above freezing had been severed. The fuel froze in the absolute zero of the moon, expanded, and ruptured the tank. During the ascent stage’s power-up sequence, the frozen fuel melted and leaked out onto the lunar surface.

“Seriously. There’s no way this computer could have told me I was leaking fuel?”

“It’s only used for liftoff,” Sandy said after a time. “They say there’s no way you wouldn’t have anything but a full tank when the time came.”

“I can think of one way,” Conn growled.

One of those things—a busted starter or busted heating coils—would have been rotten luck. That it was both probably meant somebody wanted to strand her on the moon. “Probably” became “definitely,” to Conn, because both components were broken with too much precision for it to have been accidental.

At least her list of suspects wasn’t long. She immediately thought of Daniels, so strangely upset at her for obtaining concessions from the Basalites.

Eyechart had never liked her at all. He had probably sabotaged her training at the Neutral Buoyancy facility. He definitely gave off the vibe that he couldn’t stand her, couldn’t abide the fact that an untested girl was going to the moon at the same time he was. He had waited a long lifetime for his chance.

If it had been Luan—or even Cai Fang—then there was a political reason behind her attempted murder. She’d done nothing to make Luan angry enough to want her dead, of that, if of nothing else, she was sure. Same for Cai, since she had never even so much as met him. The Chinese made themselves suspects by trying to strand her on the moon in another way: having Luan take off when she was within sight of their lander.

But if this was a political assassination attempt—Conn’s mind reeled when she thought about it—then the Chinese couldn’t be the only suspects. They all were, in that case. Even though Conn could think of no good political reason to kill her.

And what if it was the Basalites? What if Persisting decided she couldn’t be trusted, and tried to get her out of the way? They were in every way alien. Perhaps they arranged one anothers’ deaths routinely. Maybe it was a sign of respect. But if they had shaken on a deal and then immediately turned around and tried to get Conn killed, what did that say for the future of the relationship between Basalites and humankind? Nothing good.

She briefly entertained the possibility that two different entities wanted her dead, one trashing the starter and one cutting the heating coils; but as unbelievable as this whole thing was, it couldn’t be
that
unbelievable.

All this careened through her brain in the minutes after she told Brownsville that she had been sabotaged. If Brownsville let the information out, a billion people would be thinking all the same things she was now. It lent further intrigue to the moon missions, that was for sure.

“Conn, stand by for Peo,” Sandy Kearns said.

Peo’s fury scorched Conn all the way from her hospital room to Hadley-Apennine. “The Chinese have already denied responsibility,” Peo said. “Wasn’t that quick?”

“It might not have been sabotage at all,” Conn said, trying to keep Peo calm. “Things break—”

“Two things? Two things you wouldn’t know were broken until it was time to lift off? When everyone else is gone already?”

“OK, Peo, I get it,” Conn snapped, her nerves frayed. “Now what do we do about it?”

Russia had issued a statement calling for a joint Roscosmos/ESA/NASA rescue, Peo told her. The ESA had enthused about the idea, if NASA had any recommendations as to how actually to pull it off. NASA hadn’t said anything, yet. “But we can’t count on that anyway,” Peo said. “There’s too much inertia in those agencies to get everyone turned around and pointed in the right direction quickly.”

“Then can we do something?” Conn said. “Anything?”

“I don’t know how long it will take to get somebody up there to bring you home,” Peo said, “but I’ve already got them loading up an unmanned spacecraft with supplies, air, fuel, and parts. As soon as the eggheads do all the math, it will be on its way to you.”

“We’re talking at least three days.”

“I would rather think at
most
three days.”

“I have about two days’ worth of air left.”

“You’ll sleep as much as you can. You’ll wring every oxygen molecule out of your pressure suit tanks. You will stay alive until the supplies reach you.”

“I’ll do my best,” Conn said weakly. She had been angry; talking to Peo made her scared. This was really happening. There wasn’t really anything they could do about it.

“If only the Basalites had left you with a way for you, or us, to contact them,” Peo growled.

“I’m headed for the joint mission landing site in a bit,” Conn said. “See if their descent stage has any parts I can use. The Chinese, too. Hell, I’ll scavenge Apollo 15.”

“That’s the spirit. The one thing you can’t afford to do is to give up. You wouldn’t let me give up. I won’t let you.”

September 7–8, 2034

Brownsville got the schematics for the joint mission, Chinese, and Apollo 15 descent stages that had been left behind. They locked a team of people in a room with a breakdown of that equipment, and a list of every part, tool, and item on board
Mrs. Whatsit
. The team would be let out when they figured out how to fix the starter using only what Conn had at her disposal.

Realistically, all this accomplished was to give the company, and especially the team members in the room, a tangible goal to achieve. Fixing the starter would only solve half of Conn’s problems. She still had no fuel.

Peo’s promise of an unmanned spacecraft laden with fuel, air and supplies was problematic for a number of reasons. They had to reconfigure a spacecraft that wasn’t designed for landing into one capable of landing, with precision, before Conn ran out of air. And even if she could take off from the surface, there would be no command module to meet her: Jake Dander would run out of air sooner than later, and would have to make for home before he did. That stranded Conn as surely as a trashed starter and a lack of fuel did. Making a spacecraft capable of landing on the moon was one thing—but even Peo would acknowledge that conjuring one that could rendezvous with the command module to replenish Jake’s air and supplies was impossible. Rigging something that could attach was out of the question. A rendezvous with supply transfer via EVA was a pipe dream.

Conn understood all this. Part of her wanted to tell all the people busting their asses for her in Brownsville and at Gasoline Alley that they could stand down. They weren’t going to be able to help her.

Conn knew that Peo was trying every trick in the book, and would write any size check, to get the ESA or Chinese mission to refuel at Gasoline Alley, turn around, and go get her. The Chinese didn’t think Luan could land by himself, and that was that. Their excuse was that their computer didn’t do as much of the work as in Conn’s lander, and Cai Fang was instrumental to their landing. Conn had trained with Al Claussen long enough to know that both people in a lunar lander had to know everything there was to know about how to operate it. Maybe the Chinese did things differently, but she doubted it.

The ESA hemmed and hawed and talked about getting buy-in from each of the contributing agencies, about insurance, about this red tape and that red tape, until Peo accepted that just wasn’t going to happen, either.

All of this left Conn in the exact same position: stranded on the moon, with no realistic hope of rescue. A day passed with no good news. The Dyna-Tech team came up with a way to fix the starter—but it involved soldering, with an improvised soldering iron and improvised solder. Conn gamely took instruction, thanked everybody for their hard work, and cobbled together a starter. It solved exactly one problem, out of two.

Conn wasn’t an introspective person. Even now, when she thought of the sabotage, she dwelt on the implications for a good relationship between Earth and Basal. If the Basalites struck a deal with her and then turned right around and had her killed, humanity was in big trouble. If somebody had stranded her because of the deal, that did not bode well for future humans who tried to bargain with their new neighbors. She fervently hoped it had been Eyechart, because he hated her. Or the Chinese, because she overshadowed their first manned lunar mission. Or Daniels, who, admittedly, she could scarcely see hating her enough to kill her after what little interaction they had together. (So it was probably him, she cynically reasoned.) In any event, she hoped it was something personal. She’d be just as dead, but it would end there. She wouldn’t influence human-Basalite relations from beyond the grave, or anything so dramatic.

There were cracks in her objective facade, though. She recalled how she felt when Peo had told her that the cancer had come back. She imagined Peo feeling the same way now. Billions of people knowing she was going to die: that didn’t move her. One particular person—Peo—knowing she was going to die, that almost did her in.

Nor was it uniquely her feelings about Peo. She imagined her dad. Even Cora—how they must feel right now, she thought, knowing she only had hours to live. When she felt a surge of panic over her plight, it was because the people closest to her had to suffer with the knowledge she was going to die and there was nothing they, or she, could do about it.

As much as she would have spared them all those feelings, she also had moments where she regretted not having people in her life who were truly close to her. She had earned a reputation in high school for being brainy and obsessive, and the caricature survived her bipolar diagnosis and treatment. As a result, she had never made any lifelong friends in high school. She was blessed to have her friend Jody from college, but that friendship only came about because they were starting an adventure together as freshmen. She had friends she worked with, but true friends? Good, solid, always-there-for-you friendships?

Good friends had obligations to one another, standing appointments. They couldn’t decide in advance when to be there or whether to comfort, commiserate, help out, join forces, conquer the world together—the demands of friendship didn’t line up neatly on a schedule. It was too disorganized, friendship. Too much of a potential time suck. She didn’t expect that kind of thing from a superficial friend like Jody—and he didn’t expect it of her.

She had a chance to be close to Grant. But she had screwed that up like every other relationship she’d had. It wasn’t the time to dwell on whether she had made a mistake pushing Grant away, but it was hard not to think about him as she surveyed the wreckage that was her personal relationships.

Peo was like a mother to her, and she was like a daughter to Peo. Right? What made the relationship work, Conn imagined, there on the moon, was that being there for one another was part of their jobs. Peo was trying to move heaven and Earth to prolong Conn’s life and get her off the moon—but doing so was good business. Was that it? Wasn’t there any more? She didn’t love Peo because she signed her paycheck. She wished she was in a frame of mind to believe Peo loved her back no matter what Conn could do for her.