Girl on the Moon (31 page)

Jake wasn’t having it. He fired attitude jets three more times to point in the right direction, then let loose with the main engine. The sudden acceleration pressed the astronauts back against the command module walls, and Conn watched the viewscreen in horror as a Pelorian spacecraft got bigger, bigger, bigger. She winced, and braced herself—then they were past it. Jake hadn’t given any ground, so Conn figured the Pelorian had moved out of the way.

They were in their slingshot orbit around the Earth. Jake looked back at Daniels and Conn.

“I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet,” Conn said.

“No,” Jake said. “If they want to stop us, they can.”

“Maybe they won’t,” Daniels suggested. “Maybe they were trying to stop us from leaving, but now that stopping us would be dangerous...” His voice trailed off. Conn thought about how dangerous trying to stop them now could get.

“Man, I wish this was the
Starship Enterprise
, or something,” Jake said. “Something with scanners.”

“And shields,” Conn said.

“And photon torpedoes,” Daniels said. Conn and Jake looked at him.

They saw nothing as they fell through one orbit, then two. Then, it was time to go to the moon. Jake broke orbit.

“There,” Conn said, pointing at the starboard window. A Pelorian spacecraft was tracking alongside, keeping a safe distance. They saw another on the port side.

Conn unstrapped and pulled herself down to the window that partially looked below the command module. There were two Pelorian ships visible there.

They were surrounded.
Rocinante
was under escort, it seemed. Conn prayed escorting was all the Pelorian craft would do.

August 28–31, 2035

For two and a half days, the Pelorians flew beside, beneath, and above
Rocinante
. It nagged at Conn that the Pelorian craft had presumably come from the moon or lunar orbit, then turned on a dime to fly back to the moon without refueling. Not for the first time, she daydreamed about getting her hands on
all
the aliens’ tech.

The command module felt crowded compared to her previous trip with Jake. She got aggravated with Daniels, ostensibly for crowding her, but really because she was in the mood to be aggravated. They didn’t pass their journey to the moon on affectionate terms. Jake made a crack about the cool temperature in the command module, and then let it drop.

It was unclear who the commander of the mission was. Conn thought of Jake as the commander, she couldn’t have said why. On their two-person moonshot, Conn and Jake hadn’t needed either one to be in charge. But Conn considered him senior to her, in age and experience. However, traditionally the commander on a moon mission landed. Also, Conn was now Jake’s boss. Daniels was the senior astronaut in terms of total time in space, and NASA was paying for the mission, so he often acted like he was entitled to order the other two around. Conn decided privately that she would take the lead once they landed. She found herself wondering more than once if Daniels would go along with that.

Conn missed Peo on the flight, more than she had in a long time. She hadn’t had the time to miss her recently. She knew Peo would have loved the fact she was going back to the moon. She reminisced with Jake, a pastime Daniels couldn’t really participate in, and thereby pointedly excluded the other astronaut. She asked Jake about his flight to the moon with Peo, and discovered something she hadn’t known—that Peo had never told her.

“Her landing on the moon was supposed to be a one-way trip,” Jake said, reddening. He clearly felt uncomfortable spilling the beans, having most likely assumed Conn already knew all this. “Her cancer diagnosis—it was before the mission. A year before, at least. She’d been given a death sentence, pretty much, and she decided to die on the moon instead of in a hospital bed.” Conn blanched. Peo had died in a hospital bed, after all. She fought back tears. “When we turned around and headed home, her life was saved. And then she beat the cancer—for a while. So...” Jake wouldn’t go on about the mission after that, and Conn didn’t press him.

Conn felt hurt that Peo had never told her. She wondered why Peo didn’t trust her with what was obviously information known only to a select few. But mostly she felt an even greater reverence for her mentor. The moon had been important enough to Peo that she was willing to die there. Did Conn have the same drive, the same sense of clear purpose in her life?

Did she want it? It would feel good to have something you were willing to die for—until you died for it.

As the moon loomed larger, the astronauts’ conversation was increasingly about their Pelorian escorts. What would they do when their course took them around the moon? Would they continue to shadow
Rocinante
? The idea seemed to have been to prevent them from leaving the space station—if so, might they obstruct the lander so that it couldn’t separate? Would these ships peel away and leave Conn’s vessel open to the antiaircraft guns around the Pelorian compound? That possibility scared her most of all. She imagined a silent, unseen blast from one of the guns vaporizing her without her even knowing what hit them. She had nightmares about it, during the brief times she was able to sleep.

They would find out soon enough. The Pelorian spacecraft held formation as they approached the moon.

“
Rocinante
, Brownsville. Telemetry looks perfect. We show you go for lunar orbital insertion.” Jody, clearly excited to be in the CapCom’s chair—he’d lobbied for it, and Conn thought he would be good at it, so she gave him a shot—didn’t display any anxiety about the Pelorian escort whatsoever.

“Not too late,” Daniels said. “We could just keep going.”

“Catch up with Callie?” And Grant.

“Roger that, Brownsville,” Jake said. “Stand by for lunar orbital insertion.”

The Pelorian spacecraft fell back. They were going to let
Rocinante
into orbit. Conn was relieved—and troubled. She wondered how the Pelorians knew to break formation. None of the mission audio or video was going public this time. Were they directly hacked in to their radio? Or just following their telemetry very closely?

As they began to curve around the moon, Jake slowed, allowing the moon to catch the spacecraft in its orbit. There was no further sign of the Pelorian escort.

Conn and Daniels made their way to the lander. Conn thought the separation and descent checklists would go faster with two people sharing the work, but they didn’t—after one of them said out loud what they’d done from the checklist, the other would check or acknowledge it, then Brownsville would have its say. Safer, but certainly not faster.

“
Dapple
,
Rocinante
. I have you go for separation,” Jake said.

“Roger that.” Conn separated and slowed, Jody echoing her steps as she accomplished them and sounded them off. As absorbed as she was in her task, she spared some attention to worry about their descent and landing near the Pelorian fortress. Had the Pelorians let them come this far only to blockade them? Or shoot them out of the lunar sky? If Conn and Daniels did land safely, would they be surrounded and captured?

The fortress was enormous, as wide across as many of the moon’s deepest impact craters. Sailing over the crater Hertzsprung, itself in excess of five hundred kilometers wide, did nothing to diminish the scale of the structures the Pelorians had built.

The barrier around the mountain was the color of metal or concrete, its straight edge and uniformity setting it off from the similarly colored background. It had to be at least twenty meters high. Several small outbuildings were in evidence inside the fence line.

Conn tilted the lander into its descent to squeeze some more speed out of it. She wanted to make sure it cleared the perimeter, and if she could keep them out of likely range of the Pelorian antiaircraft weaponry, all the better.

She looked for a relatively flat area some manageable distance from the fortress. As the lander continued to descend, she got a glimpse of a number of huge vehicles inside the barrier, at the foot of the mountain. A ribbon of gouged-out ground that had to have been kilometers long showed that the Pelorians had burrowed at an angle underneath the mountain. Conn looked for the huge piles of removed stone they must have dug out; then she realized the Pelorians were probably using that material to make their walls and machines.

The lander’s contact light came on, and Conn cut the engines, musing that very soon, no human being who had ever lived would be as experienced as she was at landing a spacecraft on the moon. They dropped the last two feet to the surface. Daniels squeezed her shoulder, and she was pleased to have had a live audience this time.

There was nobody to congratulate them on the radio. Jake was rounding the near side. Conn didn’t know what the range was on the Pelorians’ telepathy, but she said in Basalese, “We are here. We are friendly.” There was no response in her head.

“We come in peace?” Daniels snarked. He had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want to come in peace.

The two astronauts suited up. Conn had lost the battle with NASA and the US Senate over her plan to use personal pressure fields. The concern was that antagonistic Pelorians could remotely shut down the tech, exposing the astronauts to the vacuum where they stood. To Conn, it seemed that if the Pelorians wanted to kill them, they would die, whether they made it easy for the aliens or not.

Their plan going forward was: find a Pelorian and ask to see what they were doing. Not terribly complicated, other than it assumed they could actually find a Pelorian. Daniels had advocated landing inside the perimeter because there would be Pelorians inside. What would they be doing outside? Conn second-guessed herself.

She thought landing outside the secured area would be a show of good faith, of good intentions. She expected the Pelorians to come out: after the two-and-a-half-day escort, Conn and Daniels were certainly expected.

They depressurized the lander and opened the door. At the foot of their ladder, a dozen Pelorians stood in a half circle with weapons aimed and ready.

August 31, 2035

Conn squeezed her eyes shut in anticipation of some ray-gun blast incinerating her. It didn’t come.

Instead, they heard someone speaking Basalese in their heads, making no effort to keep it simple. “Deliver,” she understood; “military home,” probably; “command center,” or something like that; “meet,” then a name. The name meant Purposefully.

Seeing the Pelorians on a vid was no preparation for seeing a group of them in person. Their tangle of limbs made it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. In a close group, they gave the sensation that they were slithering. Conn’s felt a clench of fear in her insides, but she kept calm.

The foremost of the group stepped forward. He was balanced on six limbs, and faced her with three more—two of which held a weapon low, either because he wasn’t going to hurt them, or to allow him to see out of the eye in the middle of the three limbs. Head-on, balanced as though on hind legs, the Pelorian looked like nothing so much as a multi-limbed frog.

As the group shifted and moved, Conn could see that some in the back were on hover-sleds. Conn secured the lander’s hatch. She and Daniels obeyed gestures and each mounted different sleds, each behind a Pelorian driver. Conn had to lean forward and rest her hands on the back of the driver for balance. She didn’t want to touch them, but she reminded herself that her pink, spindly, bilateral, apelike body probably disgusted the Pelorians on some level.

Presently, they came to a gate in the barrier. Above it was a parapet where guards could watch and where, Conn presumed, they could drop boiling oil, or otherwise repel the unwelcome.

“Boiling oil. You would pour. On those entering. The gate?” The driver of the sled, making an effort to be understood. What Conn understood was that he had just read her mind. She tried to remember if she had possibly said something out loud, or intended to—enough that she would have sent the boiling oil bit to the communication center of her brain.

“It would be effective,” she said.

The Pelorian gave a mental screech combined with a growl. From context, Conn understood it to be laughter. “Yes, it would,” the Pelorian said. “I will steal. That idea.”

She decided that her thought must have been close enough to speech to be picked up. The other possibility, she wasn’t prepared to deal with just then.

The sleds entered the gate single file. Daniels was on the sled behind Conn’s. They turned left and sped up. Conn estimated they must be going thirty kilometers an hour. She dug her fingers into the back of the Pelorian driver and shut her eyes. Finally she had to lean down farther and wrap her arms around the alien as best she could. She tried not to think about how squishy it felt.

They rode for at least forty-five minutes by Conn’s reckoning. During that time, she made a supreme effort to keep her thoughts from the communication center of her brain. The Pelorian driving the sled had nothing else to say, either. She wished she could look behind her and satisfy herself that Daniels was still there.

Their journey ended at a tent. A Pelorian lifted the flap of the tent up; as Conn and Daniels stepped inside, they passed through a pressure field.

Three Pelorians awaited them. The tent was big enough to hold about twenty. There was what Conn took to be a work surface along one side, with a Pelorian regarding material that looked like papers strewn across it. He turned their way as they entered, but then went back to his work. The other two regarded the humans in a way Conn felt was contemptuous.

“We will need. A way back. To our spacecraft,” she said. The Pelorian who Conn gathered from his bearing was Purposefully clucked and said something she couldn’t follow to his comrade. “Before there is no air.”

The second Pelorian crept up to Conn, and motioned for her to take her glove off. “Pressure is for us,” he said—or that’s what Conn got out of it. “Your hand will be well.” She took off her glove. She ground her teeth and let the Pelorian grasp her hand. His skin was rough, like the back of a frog. Synapses fired in her brain, a familiar sensation. Language. He motioned for her to replace her glove. He didn’t offer to take Daniels’s hand.