Luna (9 page)

18 | Life

Although James was glad to shake Blake up with his request to go back to the rover, the singular thought continuously refreshing itself in his mind was that writhing animal thing.
That’s not microbial
! A lot of people expected the discovery of life outside Earth to be first seen under a microscope. He wasn’t sure what the hell this thing was, that was for sure; he was no scientist. But he knew a wiggling animal when he saw one.

He could barely pay attention to the outrage expressed by Martin Hughes after being blindsided by Blake’s find. Apparently Blake knew about these...creatures...from previous trips up here and had suppressed the news thus far, saving it for when he would have the corroboration of top scientists.
I can’t wait to put this in my report.
But even James knew the stunning implications of the find.

That’s not microscopic. A full-on animal found living on the moon!

He tried to tune out
Blake and Caitlin arguing as he thought about it while both teams made their way through the tunnels.

Whatever it was, it was alive. The entity was either worm or insect or something in between.

But
how? There’s no atmosphere here on the moon.

That didn’t change the facts, though. In Blake’s possession was a life form from another world. He couldn’t yet fathom the implications, not just for how people regarded the moon and taking trips to it, but for how our species regarded Earth – and itself.

What else might reside in these subterranean walls?

“Caitlin,” Blake said into his comm unit, “meet me at the outside entrance to the tunnels.”

“Blake,” she protested, “I’m not going anywhere until we find Suzette.”

Suzette
. That’s right. Blake’s VP of Marketing had gone missing somewhere in the next tunnel over. That would absolutely have to find its way into his report, too, Burton thought. No doubt the walls were simply too thick in some areas to communicate via the radios.
How far could she have wandered off?

“We are
going to find Suzette,” Blake said. “But first
,
we are going to escort Mr. Burton to the surface per his deliberately untimely request. Then you are going to drive him in a rover back to the LEM while Asami, Martin and I go back to get Suzette.”

As James, Asami and Caitlin moved through the tunnel, James again felt out of breath.
Maybe that’s why you asked to leave the tunnels? Maybe you really are scared? Can’t hack it anymore?
He turned to check his oxygen gauge. When he did, his headlamp shone on the wall to his right. The rock appeared to shift ever so slightly.
Seeing things
.
Gotta get out of here before I pass out.

When he reached the exit to the parallel tunnels, Blake and Martin were already there, standing on the crater’s interior slope. Behind his helmet, Burton’s eyes narrowed while he waited for Blake to meet his stare. Instead, Blake simply offered his hand. “James, we’ll see you back at the LEM.”

Burton shook his hand but didn’t say anything as Blake walked around to the exit of the other tunnel, Martin Hughes trailing him by several feet. Just up ahead a single headlamp beamed in their direction. Blake waved at it.

“Asami, lead us to the spot where you last saw Suzette.”

19 | Car Trouble

Outside of the tunnel, Caitlin picked her way toward the crater’s rim. After the darkness of the subterranean labyrinth, the glare of the sun off the moon’s surface was as brilliant as a ski slope on the brightest of days. Still, she was glad to be out of the dungeon-like environment. Glad, that is, except for the company of James Burton. He was doing a weird sideways hopping move as opposed to Caitlin’s steady long strides, but it was getting him up the crater.

“Everything seems okay with your suit, Mr. Burton. You feel okay? Claustrophobic down there? You can answer truthfully, they can’t hear us over the comm, it doesn’t penetrate underground.”

“Nah, I was fine. I wanted to prove a point to Blake that it’s not as simple as it seems to give people the choice of leaving once they get so far from the LEM, especially underground.”

Caitlin stopped her forward progress about twenty feet from the crater rim. She grabbed Burton’s arm as he went hopping past and turned him back toward her.

“You
asshole
! Suzette is missing down there! We should both be searching for her. This is not the time to try and prove some petty point. I’m going back down and you’re coming with me.”

“Take it easy. I’m exaggerating a little. It’s not like I had to go running out of there or anything, but I have no interest in exploring the tunnels. It wasn’t even in the itinerary. And that strange life down there—”

“Blake wanted it to be a surprise.”

“He certainly succeeded on that score. Even the exobiologist didn’t seem too happy about being taken for a loop like that. I was surprised Blake brought us all down there. Let him be surprised that I wanted to leave early.” Burton hopped off again, breaking free from Caitlin’s grip as he bounded toward the rim. Caitlin started after him.

“It was a mistake for Blake to even allow you to escort me out of here alone,” Burton continued.

“Why is that?” Caitlin swallowed hard as the Earth came into view above the crater rim.
Ray...

“What if I just completely freaked out? Could you really control me? I must outweigh you by a good fifty pounds!”

“Stop it, Mr. Burton, you’re scaring me.”

“Well, think about it! Suppose I’m Joe Tourist and I’ve come this far but all of a sudden I’m not comfortable anymore and I just…WANT TO GO BACK HOME!”

Caitlin winced in pain with Burton’s sudden yelling and clawed at her comm unit’s volume control. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” she said but she was drowned out by Burton, who now pointed at the Earth, screaming, “TAKE ME HOME! I WANT TO GO NOW, WANNA GO RIGHT FUCKING NOW TAKE ME HOME!” He jumped up and down, rising high in the weak gravity before landing again, sending a loose jumble of gray rocks and soil sliding a little ways down the crater.

Caitlin hurried past Burton to the lip of the crater. “Are you done?” she asked when he stopped yelling.

“I think I’ve made my point.”

“We have psych tests to predict that kind of behavior in potential clients. You took them yourself.”

“Easy to fake your way through. And not only that, but they can be plain wrong. Psychology is certainly not what you would call an exact science. In fact, some would argue it’s not really a science at all.”

“Just don’t do anything like that again, okay? You’ve made enough points for one afternoon. I won’t—holy
shit...
.” She paused, staring down the outside of the crater.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Alarm crept into Burton’s voice as he moved to Caitlin’s side. When an astronaut said,
holy shit
, it wasn’t going to be a good thing. But then he thought about it...“Oh, wait… I see. Good one! Giving me a little scare back, are you? Fair enough.”

Caitlin swung her helmet side to side, pointing down the crater. “We’re missing a rover.”

Burton followed her finger with his eyes until he spotted the lone moon buggy parked about twenty feet down from the rim. “What? Where is it?”

“Down there,” Caitlin said, pointing all the way to the crater’s base, where the other vehicle lay on its side.

“My God. How did that happen?”

Caitlin almost told Burton about how she had placed the wheel chocks, but decided she didn’t want to give him any more ammo against Blake. Maybe she hadn’t been careful enough about it because Blake was rushing her back into the crater, Burton would allege. This was bad enough.

“Got me. It rolled down the crater, obviously. Some loose rock must have slipped out from under the wheels, disturbed by our passage, I guess. Let’s ride this one down and check it out.”

Caitlin climbed into the rover behind the joystick control. James walked around to the other side while Caitlin’s earpiece crackled with Dallas’ voice.

“Well, hello again, darlin’. Good to have you back in comm range. Everything copacetic, over?”

“I copy you, Dallas. Switch to Q-band, please, over.” James would know she’d just went to a private channel with Dallas, but that was too bad. She made the frequency change while the FAA man took a seat beside her. She ignored his look and put the rover into gear.

“What’s up?” Dallas asked. “How was the crater?”

“Lot going on, Dallas, and most of it not good. Burton and I are taking one of the rovers back to the LEM now. The others are still in the tunnels. Blake discovered some kind of small life form and he and Martin captured it in a specimen box. Also, Suzette—”

“Say again, Caitlin?
Life
?”

As she drove down the crater’s outer slope, Caitlin recounted events for Dallas.

“You did the right thing,” he said when she finished. “If somebody says they want to go back to the LEM, take them back to the LEM. Even if they say they’re joking. It’s nothing to mess with. Blake will find Suzette. She’s probably updating her social network status with how we go to the bathroom up here or something like that.”

Caitlin laughed out loud as she leveled out the rover after navigating around a large boulder. James pointed wordlessly off to their right.

“I can see the other rover now,” Caitlin said to Dallas.

“Before you switch back to the party channel, I promised Ray that I’d relay his message to you, although it’s too late now, anyway.”

Caitlin’s breath caught at the mention of Ray’s name. She stole a glance at her home planet before returning her attention to the lunar terrain beneath her wheels. “What’d he say?”

“He said to get you back to the LEM as soon as possible, that you should stay out of the tunnels. Sounded highly concerned. Something I don’t know about?”

Caitlin pulled up to Blake’s rover, wondering how Ray could have known about those living things in the tunnels. Or maybe it was just general concern about doing a subterranean EVA so far from the LEM?

The rover lay on its side, two of its wheels still spinning with no air resistance to counteract their motion. “Tell him I’m heading back to the lander, and I’m fine. First, I’m going to check out Blake’s rover, see if it’s salvageable.”

She pulled her rover to a stop and walked to the overturned moon buggy. She felt her stomach clench as she surveyed the damage. It wasn’t good. The battery casing had cracked, and she could see flammable electrolyte leaking into the lunar soil.
Great. We’re polluting the moon already.
The electrical wires leading from the battery had been ripped from their connections. Even worse, the rear axle had been severely bent.

Caitlin was about to speak over the common frequency when an anomaly on the moon’s surface caught her eye. It was in the distance, about halfway between the wrecked rover and... the other LEM. Black Sky’s lander. She focused on the object for a bit and saw that it was really two objects. Bouncing, moving. Hopping.

Spacesuits!

Two space-suited figures were making their way toward the Black Sky LEM.

Caitlin’s blood ran as cold as the space around her. She looked back up the crater, carefully examining the ground. There! Extra sets of boot prints.

“What’s wrong?” James asked, watching her silently gaze up the hill.

Could it be that the Black Sky team had deliberately sabotaged their rover, and tried to make it look like an accident? If they hadn’t come out of the tunnels early, after all, those two people would probably be back at that LEM and she wouldn’t have thought to look around for the footprints...

She cautioned herself not to voice this concern to Mr. Burton. Not now.
Way
too much going on. She could give him the other known issue, though, that he would be confronted with sooner or later.

“Just thinking about our rover situation, James. Axle’s shot, battery’s shot. This thing isn’t going anywhere and I’m afraid my Triple-A membership expired.”

Dallas’ voice came over the private frequency. “Get your asses back to the LEM, Caitlin. Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking about how to solve our problem.”

“What problem is that?” Caitlin asked him.

Dallas replied, “How to transport six people in a four-person lunar vehicle. Because
the oxygen supplies in your suits won’t last long enough to walk back to the LEM.” After a slight pause, he came back. “Looking on the bright side, if you can’t find Suzette, it’ll only be five people in a four-person vehicle.”

Caitlin shook her head, aware that James was watching her. “Not funny, Dallas. Not funny at all.”

20 | Found Footage

Asami Imura clipped one end of a climbing rope to a special harness on her spacesuit. She handed Blake the other end. “I’m counting on you to belay me, Blake. Don’t get distracted by anything, okay?”

Blake gave her an okay hand signal since they couldn’t read each other’s eyes through the helmet visors. He knew her command wasn’t insubordination. They were both rock climbers, and he knew that’s where she was coming from. Safety first. “What, me mess up the first ever rock climb on the moon, you’ve got to be kidding? Steady as she goes.” He took the rope and threaded it through his own harness.

“Be careful down there,” Martin Hughes felt the need to add, gazing down at the fallen video camera from a safe distance away from the edge.

“I will be.” Asami backed up to the opening in the wall and leaned back, testing the rope with Blake’s grip.

“This is much easier than it is on Earth!” The entrepreneur held up the rope in one hand as if to demonstrate this fact.

“Fractional gravity or not, Blake, please watch what you’re doing. Here I go.”

Asami jumped into the hole, sliding down the rope and pushing off the cave wall once with her feet on the way down. She landed in a crouch nearby the camera.

“I’m on the ground. Okay so far.”

She stood fully upright and turned around in a slow circle, assessing her new surroundings.

“You see her?” Blake wanted to know.

“Negative. Small chamber, too, and I don’t see any outlets at all...it’s just this one room. The way I came in is the only entrance or exit.”

“What? That’s impossible! Check again.” Blake’s voice was edgy.

“Will do.” Asami walked the perimeter of the subterranean cavern, paying close attention to the walls and floor to be certain she wasn’t overlooking a small passageway. But by the time she had walked all four walls, she had still found no other way out. She informed Blake of this fact.

“Check the camera, then. I told her not to film but I’m guessing she did anyway. Maybe it’ll show what she saw right before she dropped it.”

Asami went to the video recorder and picked it up. She played back its images, soundless due to the lack of air, and watched.

The point-of-view was from Susan herself, occasionally showing her other gloved hand in the foreground as she aimed the lens. For the first few seconds, the video showed the same environs Asami now found herself in. But soon things changed. The camera view became unsteady, as though Susan were struggling to keep her balance. And then the floor itself yawned open, revealing a throat-like passage into which Suzette floated along with a shower of swirling dust particles.

“Asami, what’s on the camera?” Blake sounded impatient as always, but the moon scientist was having trouble processing what she was looking at. How could this be? It looked from the footage as though the marketing exec had simply been swallowed up by the floor. A sudden and severe moonquake, or cave collapse?

Asami tore her gaze from the camera’s display to examine the actual ground beneath her feet.
It is ground, right?
Bending down to touch the chamber floor through her gloved hand, the selenologist sensed something wasn’t quite right about it. It didn’t have the rock-solid feel that moon
rocks
should have. Not only that, she thought, studying the striations—(
more like
patterns)
in the floor—
they don’t really look like
...but she never completed that thought.

The cave floor moved. She steadied herself, to be certain, and waited. There it came again. It
moved
. She considered that she was lightheaded from lack of oxygen, but a quick check of her gauges showed this not to be true.
The ground is moving
.

As she began to voice her concern to Blake and Martin, her feet started wobbling even though she was not moving them. She screamed into her transmitter. “Blake pull me up! Up now!”

At that moment the ground parted beneath her feet—opened up completely—and she started falling. She looked down to see how far she had to fall, but it was too dark to see past the...
what is that?
A glistening, slimy cavern, sort of like a raspy tongue with row upon row of tooth-like structures. Moving, like a swallowing throat. And she was dropping straight into it, too stunned to even utter Blake’s name again.

She felt a harsh tug on her midsection as Blake jerked upward on the rope and she began to float up through the bizarre cavity into which she had fallen. Wet, organized structure passed before her eyes in a dizzying array of patterns and motion.

And then she was in the chamber again, being raised through it by Blake’s climbing rope. Walls. Normal-looking. Unmoving. Dry, like the moon should always be. But looking back down one last time before she was yanked through that strange hole in the wall, Asami saw the soaked, moving structure drop lower into the recesses from wherever it had come.

And then there was only a black hole.