Moonrise (31 page)

“Oh,” said Killifer. “Yeah.”

It only took a couple of seconds for Brennart to ask, “Why, are you worried about the kid?”

“Not about him.” Killifer put just the slightest stress on the word
him
.

“Who, then?”

“Aw, nobody. Forget it. I’m just being a geek.”

“What do you mean?” Brennart insisted. “What’s eating you?”

“It’s just that—well, do you think the Stavenger woman would send her son up here just to do a job that any brain-dead clerk could do?”

Brennart did not answer for a while. Then, “Why else?”

Killifer took a breath, then, with apparent reluctance, he answered, “Well … maybe, I don’t know …”

“What?” Brennart demanded.

“Maybe she wants him to get the credit for your work. Her son, I mean.”

“Get the credit?”

“Once we’ve established legal priority and we set up the power tower and everything,” Killifer said in a rush, “
he’ll
get all the credit with the board of directors. And the news media. You do the work but he’ll be the hero.”

“That’s crazy,” Brennart snapped.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“How could he get the credit for what I do? I’m the mission commander. I’m in charge.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He can’t take the credit away from me. That’s impossible.”

“Sure,” said Killifer.

Brennart lapsed into silence. After a few moments he muttered, “So that’s why he was so hot to get up here with me.”

“Maybe it’s not him,” Killifer said. “Maybe it’s all his mother’s idea.”

“Either way,” Brennart growled. “Either way.”

Killifer smiled behind his helmet visor. He thought he could see smoke rising from his commander’s spacesuit.

Joanna cast a knowing eye over the guests who filled her spacious living room. The party was going well; she could tell that with her eyes closed: the chatter of conversations and laughter filled the room and spilled over into the hallway and the library, as well. The clink of ice cubes added a background counterpoint.

Joanna had been nursing the same tall fluted glass of champagne for almost an hour now. Gowned in a magnificent silver and taupe brocade jacket over a filmy chiffon skirt, she searched the crowded room. Men in immaculate white dinner jackets, women in glittering jewels and the latest fashions. But the one man she wanted to find was nowhere to be seen.

Slowly she made her way through the crowd, chatting briefly with a couple here, smiling as she passed a group there. Across the hallway and into the library she went. Still no sight of Quintana. He wouldn’t have left so early, she thought, especially without saying good night to his hostess.

Through the French windows of the library she saw a solitary figure out on the patio, the gleam of a cigar smoldering in the dark Georgia night. Quintana. Still smoking, despite all the laws against it.

Joanna slipped through the open doorway and approached him, her high heels clicking on the patio tiles.

“What you’re doing is illegal, Carlos,” she said softly, smiling as he turned toward her.

He smiled back. “In Mexico we have much more freedom.”

“You also have much more pollution. And cancer.”

Quintana waved his long, slim cigar. “The price of freedom. Will you call the police?”

Laughing, Joanna said, “No. But I’d prefer that you throw that thing away.”

“It’s barely started.” Quintana examined his cigar like a man admiring a fine work of art. “But for you, beautiful one, I make the sacrifice.” He let the cigar drop to the patio floor and ground it out with the heel of his highly polished shoe.

Even in the shadows of the night Joanna could see his gleaming smile. Carlos Quintana was the kind of man for whom the word
dashing
had been coined. A mining engineer who parleyed intelligence and daring into a considerable fortune, he was a champion polo player, a yachtsman of note, and a key member of Masterson Aerospace’s board of directors. Handsome, suave, he had the kind of classic Latin male good looks that would remain virtually untouched all his life. No one knew his true age; the guesses ran from forty-five to seventy.

“My party bored you?” Joanna asked as they strolled side by side toward the garden. Overhead a sliver of a Moon was rising and stars glittered in the dark sky.

“No, I just felt the need for some nicotine,” Quintana said. “And I knew that as soon as I lit up you would come running at me with a fire extinguisher.”

“You’re hopeless,” she said, laughing again.

“On the contrary, I am a man filled with hope.” His voice was soft, gentle, easy to listen to.

Joanna arched a brow at him. “Hope springs eternal?”

“Why not? The world is young, the night is beautiful, and I adore you.”

“
I’m
not young, Carlos. Neither are you.”

“I feel young,” he said. “You make me feel rejuvenated.”

Joanna wished she could say the same to him. Instead, she changed the subject. “I’d like your advice about something, Carlos.”

“Anything.”

“You know my son Greg?”

“I’ve met him once or twice.”

“It’s time to appoint a new director for Moonbase.”

He hesitated only a heartbeat. “I thought that decision has already been made.”

“I’m reconsidering it. Greg has asked for the job.”

“Ahh.”

“What do you think about it?”

This time Quintana’s hesitation was considerably longer. “There are several people on the board who would like to close Moonbase.”

“I know.”

“You’ve always fought to keep it going, even though it’s a drain, financially.”

“Moonbase is in the black,” she said firmly.

“Barely,” Quintana answered easily. “And when you consider all the little extras that somehow get put into the pot …” He sighed. “Joanna, you know I support you unstintingly, but if we did an honest bookkeeping job, Moonbase would be in the red.”

“Perhaps,” she murmured.

“So you want to send your son there to make certain we keep it going.”

“Quite the contrary, Carlos. Greg wants to spend his year there deciding whether or not to shut the base down.”

“Really?” In the darkness she couldn’t see his brows rise, but she heard it in his voice.

“He wants to make a thorough, unbiased assessment of the base’s prospects and then make a recommendation to the board, one way or the other.”

It was several moments before Quintana replied, “Well, he’s certainly got the qualifications, based on the work he’s done with the Pacific division.”

“Yes, I think so too.”

“Would he really recommend closing the base? And if he did, would you agree to it?”

Now Joanna hesitated. But she finally said softly, “Yes, to both.”

“Isn’t he a little old for Moonbase? Most of the personnel we send there are quite a bit younger.”

“He’s forty-six.”

Quintana glanced up at the crescent Moon, just clearing the sycamore trees. “There’s always seemed to be—some sort of shadow on his history. Some scandal or something that everyone knows is there, but no one knows what it is. A family disagreement?”

Tensing, Joanna answered, “You might say that.”

“It must have happened before I joined your board of directors.”

“Yes. A long time before.”

“That’s why he’s been kept off the board and away from headquarters all these years?”

“I think,” Joanna said, “that it’s time to put all that in the past. As you say, it’s family history and it doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation at all.”

“Doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation?” Quintana’s voice was filled with questions.

“Carlos, I’m his mother. I think I know Greg’s limitations and his capabilities. I think he can handle the Moonbase job. But I might be too emotionally close to be seeing clearly.”

“I understand,” Quintana replied. “I think I am too emotionally close to you to render an unbiased judgment.”

“But if you can’t help me, who can I turn to?”

He sighed again. “Joanna, I have always considered your intelligence to be of the highest order. Do what you think is best. I will certainly back you on the board, whatever you decide.”

“Thank you, Carlos,” Joanna said. But she was thinking that unqualified support was no real help at all.

“There it is! Look!” Doug cried out.

Turning awkwardly in her spacesuit to follow his pointing hand, Bianca Rhee saw a tall, wide pinnacle of rock jutting
up into sunlight from the rugged shadowed mountain range below their ballistic lobber.

“That’s Mt. Wasser?” she asked.

“Got to be,” Doug said, nodding inside his helmet. He studied the sunlit jut of rock carefully. Slightly taller than Everest, Mt. Wasser just happened to be situated so close to the south pole that its uppermost reaches were always in sunlight.

And down below, in those shadows, there’re fields of ice, Doug knew. Areas that are always in shadow, where the temperature is always at least a hundred below zero. Water, covered with dust from the infalling meteoroids, kept frozen in the cryogenic dark.

Water and sunlight. The two most important resources of the Moon. Water for life. Sunlight for electrical power. Brennart is right, Doug told himself. That’s the most valuable real estate on the Moon, down there. He felt the excitement building in him all over again.

In the lobber’s cockpit, Brennart was scanning the readouts on his panel displays.

“What are the others doing?” he asked Killifer.

“Right on track. Following us like nice little puppies.”

“Superb.” Brennart’s gloved fingers flicked along the control panel. “Okay. We’re going in.”

The lobber tilted back to its original vertical orientation. Killifer punched up the camera view of the ground on the main display screen.

“Awful dark down there,” he muttered.

“Infrared,” Brennart snapped.

The image on the display screen did not change much: still dark, with vague suggestions of shapes looming in the shadows.

“Braking in ten seconds,” Killifer read from the flight plan display.

“I know.”

“Altitude twenty.”

“I know!”

Killifer realized that Brennart was jumpy. They both peered hard at the camera display.

“Lights,” Brennart ordered.

“Too high to do much good,” Killifer muttered, but he turned on the powerful lamps that had been installed on the underside of the lobber’s main platform.

Brennart’s gloved thumb hovered over the keypad that would override the rockets’ firing. The shadowy ground was rushing up toward them. Killifer could see a jumble of shapes glittering in the reflected light of the landing lamps.

“Boulders!” he yelped. “Big ones.”

Smoothly Brennart ignited the main rocket thrusters. Killifer felt a sudden surge of weight, but before he could even take a breath it disappeared and they were falling again.

“Goldman!” Brennart called into his helmet microphone. “Jump the boulder field. Follow me!”

“Following,” came Goldman’s voice in their earphones, professionally unperturbed.

“Reset the braking program,” Brennart commanded.

Killifer tapped the keyboard. “Reset.”

The camera view showed a smoother stretch of ground beneath them. A great deal of rocks were still strewn across the area, but they were smaller, less dangerous.

The hard stony ground rushed up at them, stopped momentarily, then came at them again. The image on the display screen blurred: rocket exhaust, Killifer knew. Then he felt a thump and the familiar sensation of weight returned.

“We’re down,” he said to Brennart. And realized he was sweating inside his suit.

“Number two?” Brennart called into his helmet mike.

“Hundred twenty … seventy … touchdown. We’re about fifty meters off your left rear. About seven o’clock in relation to your cockpit.”

Both men turned in their seats but could not see the second spacecraft from their position.

“The drones,” Brennart said.

The two unmanned vehicles were programmed to follow Brennart’s craft at a preset distance, and to land a hundred meters on either side of it.

Killifer glanced at the radar display. “Coming in now,” he said, pointing to the blips their beacons made.

They could see one of the robot craft descending, its braking rockets winking on and off against the dark shadows of the mountains.

“Override!” Brennart snapped. “It’s coming down in the boulder field.”

But it was too late. The unmanned lobber touched one of its outstretched legs on a boulder almost as big as the vehicle itself. The other three landing pads were still a good ten meters above the ground. The attitude-control thrusters tried to keep the vehicle from tipping over for several wobbling, twitching seconds, but they gave out and the spacecraft tilted, tilted and finally struck the ground with a soundless crash. Killifer saw the landing legs crumple and the cargo pods split open; an oxygen tank blew apart in a silent burst of frost-glittering chunks.

From the passenger module, Doug saw the crash. His first reaction was, My God, that could’ve been us! Then he wondered how much equipment they had lost.

“Well, we’re down safely, at least,” he said to the others in the bubble.

They muttered replies, voices hushed, subdued.

“I think my telescope was in the pod that broke open,” Bianca said worriedly. “I’ll have to go over and see if it survived the crash.”

By the time the six of them unstrapped from their seats and wormed through the hatch to stand on the ground, Brennart was already striding toward the crashed craft. Everybody’s spacesuit was basically white, although some of them had been used so hard they were gray with imbedded lunar dust. But Brennart was easy to spot, even in a suit. His was sparkling new, gleaming white, and had red stripes down the arms and legs. For recognition, he had said.

Doug followed Brennart and his second-in-command, Killifer. He caught up with them as they reached the edge of the wreckage. It was impossible to see their faces behind their heavily tinted visors, but Brennart clearly radiated disgust, fists clenched on his hips.

“See whose equipment’s on this ship and get them to check out this mess,” Brennart commanded. “Determine if any of it’s still usable.”