Luna (4 page)

7 | Murphy’s Law

“Flight, this is Capsule Command, you read?” Caitlin repeated the question for the third time while Paul and Dallas tried to interpret the chaos of flashing instrument lights and braying alarms.

“Electrical system took a hit,” Paul stated without emotion, throwing switches on the console with practiced skill.

“Ground comm’s out,” Caitlin said.

“We’re still in the clouds,” Dallas confirmed, eschewing instrumentation to look out the capsule window. “Three minutes, ten seconds post-launch. Losing gravity soon.”
Caitlin glanced down at the passengers again. Still strapped into their seats, still conscious. They were the priority. Asami Imura, the moon scientist, held two fingers of her right hand up to her forehead, but otherwise seemed alright. Caitlin was about to try the internal comm system to ask about the selenologist when a raspy voice crackled its way through her headset.

“…-opy that… —ing up, over.”

Ray.
Right now, his throaty rasp was the most beautiful voice in the world. “Ray, I copy. Lost you for a bit. Electrical’s wonky, over.”

“You took a lightning strike 180 seconds after liftoff,” Ray said urgently. “We saw it—the bolt traveled all the way to the ground through your ionized gas plume. We lost flight telemetry for a few seconds but now it seems to be back.”

The crew’s eyes locked on one another with realization. “We saw a bright flash,” Caitlin confirmed to Ray.

“Do me a favor and try switching Main to Aux,” Ray said.

Paul found the switch and threw it. Instantly the Scrabble board of colored lights returned to normal.
“That did the trick,” Caitlin relayed to Ray. She breathed a sigh of relief. They would not have to abort the mission.

Ray’s next transmission confirmed that thought. “Proceed to parking orbit. We’ll do diagnostics from there.”

“Parking orbit” referred to a low-earth orbit trajectory where the spaceship could essentially sit idle and revolve safely around the Earth while the craft was examined.

“Copy that, Ray, we’re punching through to LEO now. See you on the other side, over.”

Ray’s voice was replaced by another Controller’s, and for the next several minutes a stream of technical chatter concerned with things like “escape velocity,” “main engine burn,” and “flight profile” filled the comm loops. Caitlin followed the conversation as she examined her controls, looking for signs that anything was not right. They only needed the big rocket for one more burn on the way to the moon—the one that would free them from Earth’s orbit.

Something caught Caitlin’s attention outside the window. Nothing specific, but a difference from moments before...
black sky
. She noted the dark velvet world outside her window, then looked back down at her controls.

Wait a minute
. She whipped her head up and peered out the window again. With all the simulators she’d been in that provided realistic computer renderings to recreate specific flights, it had taken her a second to realize that this black sky was the real deal.

You’re in space.

And then it grew eerily quiet as the roar and rumble of the main rocket engines cut out. Caitlin recognized the softer hiss of smaller thrusters that now leveled out their ship so that they wouldn’t be tumbling end over end while orbiting the Earth.

Paul spoke into his comm unit. “Flight, Cap-Com here. Commencing diagnostics, over.” A series of computer programs began checking for errors relating to the capsule’s electrical system. Paul and Dallas monitored their progress while Caitlin turned and looked down into the crew bay.

All five passengers were still strapped to their seats, but she was surprised to see a tangible reminder that they had arrived in space. A video camera floated in the weightlessness, seemingly suspended in midair as if by magic.

Blake pointed to the camera. “Really, I don’t get off saying I told you so, Suzette.”

The others turned their heads to follow Blake’s finger. Their eyes lingered on the ultra high definition camcorder as it tumbled end-over-end in slow motion.

“God
damn
it, Suzette!” Asami Imura turned to glare at the Marketing VP. “Blake told you that thing was too big for the mount and you tried to force it anyway.”

“Relax. It’ll still work. Nobody got hurt.”

Asami pulled her hand down from her forehead and turned her head in Suzette’s direction. A thin gash across her right temple oozed blood. “What else are you going to be wrong about on this mission?”

James Burton had perked up considerably, shaking off the rush of the launch like a rider stepping off a rollercoaster and ambling away, wondering what else the park had in store. He scribbled in his pad, eyes darting from Asami’s forehead to the suspended camera to its failed mounting bracket and back to his notes.

Blake’s eyes widened at a developing situation he saw as a potential threat to Outer Limits’ perfect safety record. The
Perfect Safety Record
must not be jeopardized. The space tourism industry was still in its infancy, and nothing but perfection would lead to further flights. If Outer Limits couldn’t deliver, then there were half a dozen other private space outfits waiting in the wings—Black Sky chief among them. And they currently waited not in the wings, but on the moon, Blake reflected.

“Ladies, please. Relax. We followed protocol, the camera was secured, it came loose. No one is at fault.”

“What about that flash of light—what was that?” This from Martin Hughes, who appeared a bit flushed from the experience, but contained.

“It happened right after I got hit by the camera,” Asami said. “At first I thought I was seeing stars from being hit in the head. Scared the shit out of me,” she finished, narrowing her eyes at Suzette.

“We were hit by lightning,” Caitlin called down from the control deck. At this the passenger bay became silent. “No serious damage,” Caitlin explained. “Flight Control just gave us the okay to head for the moon. We just wanted to double-check the capsule electrical system while in orbit before we made the rest of the trip.”

Blake looked up at Caitlin and gave her a big smile and a thumbs-up sign. “The lightning is no one’s fault, people, except maybe God’s.”

Martin, the exobiologist, winced at the statement. Then he swept a large hand out at the thick carpet of stars visible through one window and the blue Earth from the opposite. “You don’t truly
attribute all this to a god, do you, Blake? Surely He doesn’t watch over us, at any rate, or we wouldn’t have been struck by lightning in the first place, right?”

Blake let fly an exasperated sigh and was about to reply when a motion suddenly distracted him. The floating camera had slow-tumbled its way to within Asami’s grasp. She snatched it out of the air, pressed the Record button and turned the cam around on herself.
“Next time, Suzette, you ask before you go changing specs on your own,” she said, flipping the lens the bird. Then she flung it through the weightlessness back to Suzette, who never took her eyes off Asami as she cradled the spinning camera into her gut.

Asami stared the VP down but said nothing else as a drop of blood broke free from the gash on her temple. The scarlet globule floated before her eyes in the weightlessness, a crimson bauble representing a tiny but undeniable piece of her humanity.

“Medic,” she calmly requested through her headset.

Dallas was there quickly. With expert, economical movements calculated to counteract the lack of gravity, he cleaned, sterilized and bandaged the skin over Asami’s right eye.

“You’re good to go,” he pronounced, kicking off a bulkhead and grabbing strategically placed handholds to pull himself back “up” to the control deck, although that directional term no longer held any real meaning.

After a short countdown, the main engines fired and their craft accelerated deeper into space. Asami’s suspended blood drop was thrust into motion, splashing into a window through which Caitlin could now see the moon.

8 | Separation Anxiety

Forty hours later

Caitlin Swain took a deep breath as she tried not to think about the quarter of a million miles that now separated her from home. The lunar surface slid beneath them from an altitude of about forty miles. During the last couple of days, she had watched the moon grow steadily larger in her window until now it filled her entire view. No longer simply a sphere hanging in blackness, the moon’s surface was a grayscale world with visible terrain including vast craters, flat plains and epic mountain ranges. This lunar relief map was rife with navigational hazards for their fragile craft. Caitlin took two more deep breaths to calm her nerves while reminding herself that a small flotilla of robotic reconnaissance orbiters had, in the years prior to this mission, mapped out their landing region—and that of rival Black Sky—in ultra-high definition detail.

It both relaxed her and induced anxiety that she would have little control over their descent to the moon. Dallas Pace, M.D., their Lunar Module Pilot, was in charge of that crucial leg of their journey, and he was as competent as one could be who had never actually done it. Still, she thought, peering into a huge crater that occupied her entire field of view, and then spotting
another
crater deep inside of that one, she would be glad once they touched down safely.

Caitlin’s current train of thought had begun about thirty minutes ago when they had transferred from the Command Module, where they’d cocooned for the last two days, to the Lunar Exploration Module. The LEM, as it was called for short, was actually larger than the Command Module since it would serve as their habitat while on the moon. At the end of their lunar stay, the LEM would take them back up to rendezvous with the Command Module for the return trip to Earth.

Caitlin and Dallas, instead of being seated above the passengers on a separate flight deck, were now situated on the same level as them but out to one side in a control alcove. Paul Abbott, as the Commander of the entire mission, would be the only member of the team to stay behind with the Command Module and orbit the moon while the other seven people rode the Lunar Module to the moon’s surface.

Caitlin tore her eyes from the vivid moonscape outside her window. She glanced back at her passengers. They were seated in a circle around the perimeter of the LEM, mostly quiet since leaving the Command Module. Was it the realization that they were about to land on a planetary body other than Earth, Caitlin wondered, or was it just that they were all sick of each other already after two days in close confinement?

With the comm loops thick with pre-descent chatter buzzing in the background (Caitlin listened for Ray’s voice but hadn’t heard him since they went into lunar orbit), Martin Hughes wordlessly pointed out a mountain range to no one in particular. Asami Imura glanced around the circle, and when it seemed no one else had anything to say, offered, “Many people think of the moon as a flat boring place, maybe with some craters, but in reality it’s home to mountains that are taller than our Mount Everest on Earth. Some of them are high enough, and at the right latitude such that they are never exposed to darkness. Peaks of Eternal Light.”

Presently, Blake Garner dropped into the Lunar Module and took his seat in the circle, the last to do so. “Be nice to put some solar panels up there, eh?” he said, dropping into the conversation as well. “Endless energy!” Then, to Suzette, his videographer: “You filming? Did you get that? I want to remember that.” She nodded.

Asami glared at her. “Why don’t you stow that thing now so one of us doesn’t get hurt?” In reply, Suzette swung the camera’s lens her way.

“Doctor Imura, esteemed selenologist, how about if you tell us your thoughts as we orbit the moon, only minutes from descending on an alien world. Any insights so far?”

Asami was caught off guard by the serious question. She knew Suzette could edit out the line about getting hurt and just cut in with the question and awkward hesitation.

“Well,” she began, “the moon—”

Suzette lowered her camera and put the lens cap on.

“—has had several geological forces acting on it, including volcanic activity, which…” Asami trailed off, stopping when she saw that Suzette was no longer filming.
“Forget it,” Suzette said, reaching behind her to put the camera into a storage compartment. “No one wants to hear it.”

Asami’s mouth dropped open in disbelief.

“I do. I’d like to hear it,” Martin Hughes said.

The marketing veep shot him a withering stare. “We have a couple more minutes where I could have done it, but Safety Queen here’s giving me a hard time. It was just for some B-roll stuff anyway, nobody wants to hear that crap.”

Asami unclipped her seat harness. “I’ve had it with you.” She started to stand up before the weightlessness made that difficult.

Dallas’ voice came over the intercom. “We are go for Lunar Module separation in T-minus two minutes.”

Blake held a hand out toward Asami in a stopping motion and shook his head. The selenologist resumed her seat. They were approaching the calculated point along their orbital path where their descent needed to begin if they were to end up at the target landing zone with minimal travel distance.
“
Better
sit back down,” Suzette said under her breath.

“
What
?” Asami leaned forward in her seat. “Blake, I didn’t sign on to be abused by your crew.”

Caitlin swiveled her command seat around to face the passengers. She’d read enough articles on the psychology of space travel to know that arguments such as these could be symptomatic of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, fear of the unknown and general stress. “Enough! After we land, you’ll all get to stretch out a bit and eat. For now, we need you to sit back in your seats and relax.”

Blake nodded his agreement, as did James Burton.

“Prepare for lander separation,” Paul intoned.

“Let’s light this candle,” Dallas replied.

“Lunar Module, this is Command Module: You are go for descent burn.”

They felt a rumbling surge, powerful but less so than the main rocket for Earth liftoff, and then the LEM departed from the rest of the spaceship.

“Have fun down there,” Paul said. “I’ll leave a light on for you.”