Moonrise (36 page)

“Strip it down. How many do we actually
need?”

Studying the list on his screen, Killifer said, “Two to handle the nanobugs, one to pilot the hopper.”

“Martin and Greenberg are the nanotechs,” Brennart said.

Thinking swiftly, Killifer said, “Maybe we oughtta leave one of them here. No sense taking both of them up to the summit.”

“One person can’t physically handle the task,” Brennart objected.

“All you need is an extra pair of hands. A warm body will do. Either Greenberg or Martin can direct the warm body, and you haven’t risked both your nanotechs.”

Brennart pondered it for all of three seconds. “Right. I’ll take Greenberg. He’s the more experienced of the two. Who can we spare to help him?”

“The astronomer?” Killifer suggested.

“Put her to some useful work,” Brennart muttered.

“You oughtta take Stavenger, too,” Killifer pointed out. “Let him make a legal record of the claim.”

“Perfect!”

Killifer stayed in the comm cubicle as Brennart marched off to the airlock where the spacesuits were stored. With a little luck, he said to himself, they’ll all break their friggin’ necks.

Doug felt excited when Brennart came out and told him they were making a dash to the summit of Mt. Wasser. He had been spraying plastic sealant along the tunnel walls just dug out by the others; the sealant made the tunnel alright. It was dull and clumsy work, inside his spacesuit with no light except from his helmet lamp. The sealant was doped with a weakly glowing phosphor, so that any gaps in its application would be easily seen.

It was the safest job Brennart could find for him. The more experienced expedition members were handling the flammable aluminum/oxygen propellant mixture out on the surface, desperately working to break up the rock-hard ground enough to allow the tractors to scoop it up and dump it on the shelters and tunnels.

Scrambling out of the tunnel at Brennart’s command, Doug checked the equipment pouches on his belt while two of the other expedition members topped off his oxygen tank from the supply on the undamaged cargo ship. Yes, the miniature vidcam was there. Doug pulled it out and checked that its battery was fully charged. Not that he had used it, digging tunnels and sealing them.

He was surprised to see a short, stocky spacesuited figure
join Brennart and Greenberg. Sure enough, the name stencilled on the chest of her suit was Rhee.

“We’re making a dash to the summit,” Brennart told them as they lifted the spindly-legged little hopper from its hold in the cargo ship. “Rhee, you assist Greenberg here. I’ll pilot the hopper.”

“What’s my assignment?” Doug asked.

“Official record keeper,” said Brennart. “Unless you know how to handle a hopper.”

Why is he so hostile to me? Doug asked himself. Aloud, he replied, “I’ve never actually flown one, but I’ve put in a lot of hours in simulators.”

“Fine,” Brennart snapped. “You can be my co-pilot. Just don’t touch anything.”

Doug helped Greenberg and Bianca Rhee to wrestle the tall canister of nanomachines onto the platform of the little hopper. Then they began strapping it down. The rocket vehicle looked too frail to take the four of them, Doug thought, even in the Moon’s light gravity. The hopper was little more than a platform with a podium for its controls and footloops to anchor a half-dozen riders. There was a fold-down railing, too, with attachments for tethers.

To Doug it looked like a great way to break your neck. Racing jetcycles seemed safer.

“Come on, come on,” Brennart urged, pushing between Rhee and Greenberg to help finish the strapdown. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”

“Why the sudden rush?” Doug asked. “This isn’t on the mission schedule.”

“No, it’s not,” Brennart snapped. “But maybe Yamagata isn’t waiting for our schedule.”

“Yamagata? They’ve got a team here too?”

“On its way,” Brennart said.

“You’re certain?” Doug probed.

“Certain enough.”

“Has it been confirmed by—”

“Who’s in charge of this expedition, Stavenger? You or me?” Brennart bellowed.

His ears ringing, Doug said, “You are, of course.”

“Then climb aboard and let’s get going.”

Doug dutifully stepped up the rickety little ladder and
started to slide his boots into the foot loops alongside Brennart.

“Lift up the railings,” Brennart ordered, “and see that everyone’s safely tethered to them.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” said Doug snidely. Brennart paid no attention.

The tethers won’t be much help if we crash, Doug thought as he snapped the flimsy railings into place. By the time he returned to Brennart’s side and clicked his own tether to the rail, Brennart had powered up the hopper’s systems. All the controls showed green, Doug saw.

“Ready for takeoff,” Brennart said.

Doug heard Killifer’s answer in his earphones. “You are cleared for takeoff.”

Brennart nudged the T-yoke of the throttle forward a bit. The platform beneath Doug’s boots quivered and leaped upward. There was no sound, no wind, but the dark, rocky land fell away from them so rapidly Doug felt his breath gush out of him.

Their little base dwindled quickly: four humps of shelters surrounded by spacesuited figures and a pair of minitractors, all digging tunnels and pushing rubble over the shelters like busy, scurrying ants. The brief flare of propellants burning into the rock strobed like a miniature lightning stroke.

Looking upward he saw the bare flank of Mt. Wasser coming near, sliding past dizzyingly as the hopper continued to rise. The rock face of the mountain looked glassy smooth, sandpapered by dust-mote-sized micrometeoroids for billions of years.

Suddenly they were in sunlight: brilliant, almost overpowering sunlight. The mountainside glittered like glass, like crystal, as it rushed by. Doug heard his suit fans whir faster, and something in his backpack groaned under the sudden heat load. He gripped the railing with both gloved hands.

“This is flying!” he said appreciatively. “Like being on a magic carpet.”

He heard Brennart chuckle softly. “You like it, eh?”

“It’s terrific!”

Neither Greenberg nor Rhee said a word. Doug wondered how Bianca was taking the flight. At least they weren’t weightless for more than a few seconds at a time; Brennart
kept goosing the little rocket engine, pushing them higher in short spurts. But the lurching, spasmodic flight was starting to make Doug’s stomach gurgle.

Brennart took the little hopper up above Mt. Wasser’s flat, U-shaped summit, looking for a safe place to land, checking the actuality against the satellite photos they had studied.

“Flat area over to the left,” Doug said. “About ten o’clock.”

“I see it,” said Brennart.

A minuscule puff of thrust from two of the maneuvering jets set along the corners of the platform and they slid over sideways until they were just above the relatively flat area. It was clear of boulders, although Doug saw the sharp-rimmed edge of a crater big enough to swallow their hopper, clearly etched in the harsh sunlight.

His stomach told him they were falling. Then a burst of thrust. Falling again. Another burst, lighter, and Brennart put them down deftly on the bare rock.

It was like being on the top of the world. Doug unhooked his tether and pulled loose of his foot restraints, then turned around in a full circle. All around them stretched peaks of bare rock, as far as the eye could see. They seemed to be floating on a sea of darkness, the land below them in perpetual cryogenic night.

“We made it.” Bianca’s voice sounded breathless in Doug’s helmet earphones.

We’re up higher than Mt. Everest, Doug thought.

“Let’s get to work,” Brennart ordered. “Stavenger, I want you to record every move we make. Hop down and start taping us as we unload the nanobugs.”

“Right,” said Doug. He slapped down the railing and jumped from the hopper’s platform, floating gently to the bare rock. His boots slid; the rock was smooth as glass.

Pulling out his vidcam, Doug put its eyepiece to his visor and was just starting to record when Killifer’s voice grated in his earphones:

“Killifer to Brennart. We just received word that a solar flare broke out at seventeen twenty-six and forty-one seconds. Moonbase advises all surface activity be stopped and all personnel seek shelter immediately.”

Greg asked, “Are they going to be all right?”

“Brennart’s as experienced as they come,” said Jinny Anson. “He knows how to take care of himself and his people.” But the worried frown on her face belied her confident words.

They were in the base control center, a big low-ceilinged room crammed with control and communications consoles. Every pump, valve, airlock hatch, air fan, sensor, heater, motor, and other piece of equipment in the base and outside on the surface was monitored from the consoles and could be manually controlled whenever it was necessary to override the automatic programming. One whole wall of the darkened, intensely quiet control center was an electronic schematic map of Moonbase, glowing with colored lines and symbols that showed everything in the base and its environs.

Anson had rushed down the tunnel from her office, with Greg in tow, the instant she heard that the flare had erupted. The focus of the center was a U-shaped set of communications consoles, with a trio of operators sitting within fingertip touch of a dozen different display screens. On those screens Greg saw several sections of the underground base, mostly labs and workshops, a lot of plumbing and pumps, and one chamber that looked like a hydroponics farm. There were also views of the surface outside on the floor of Alphonsus. The transfer rocket that had brought Greg to the Moon still sat out there, unattended. Tractors were pulling into the main airlock, trundling slowly across the crater floor to get into the garage and safely sheltered from the expected radiation cloud.

One screen seemed to be looking in on an office Earthside. Greg could see a window with trees outside, behind an earnest-looking middle-aged man in a tweed jacket.

Anson pulled up a spindly wheeled chair at one end of the consoles and worked the keyboard there. The tweedy graying man’s face appeared on her screen.

Standing behind her, Greg tried to figure out where on Earth he might be. Then he noticed a saguaro cactus poking its stiff arms into the bright blue sky amid the trees on the hillside beyond that window. It had to be Arizona.

Noticing him behind her, Anson handed Greg a headset.

“… Class Four,” he heard the man saying as he slipped on the earphone. “Almost a Class Five.”

“Yes,” Anson said, “but will it hit the Earth-Moon region?”

“Still hard to tell, Jinny. If we had warning satellites inside Mercury’s orbit, as I’ve been begging for over the past ten years, we’d be getting data right now. As it is, we’ll have to wait for the plasma cloud to reach Venus’s orbit before we get any hard numbers.”

“How long will that take?” Anson asked.

“Judging from the microwave measurements, about another two hours.”

“It’s moving fast, then.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet.”

“Okay, thanks. Keep us informed, please.”

The gray-haired man nodded. “Certainly.”

Anson blanked the screen, then turned to Greg. “Well, they’ve got at least a few hours before the heavy radiation hits. If it hits at all.”

Greg asked, “It might miss us altogether?”

“There’s a chance. The flare spits out a big cloud of plasma, mostly very energetic protons. Bee ee vee protons.”

“Bee ee vee?”

“Billions of electron volts. Killer particles. Fry your butt in a few minutes.”

Doug’s out there, Greg said to himself. He hardly knew his half-brother. Over the past eighteen years he had seen Doug in person fewer than a dozen times, and then always with their mother between them.

“A couple meters of dirt is enough to stop the particles,” Anson was assuring him. “So as long as they’re inside the shelters they’ve dug they’ll be fine. Just like we are.”

“But you said the cloud might not even reach here.”

She nodded vigorously. “The cloud’s a plasma: ionized gas. That means it’s steered by the interplanetary magnetic field. The field is weird; it gets all looped up and tangled by the Sun’s rotation. So until we start getting radiation data from the satellites we’ve got between us and the Sun, we won’t really know if the cloud’s going to come our way or not.”

Greg murmured, “I see,” as he watched Anson’s face closely. She was telling him pretty much what he already knew about solar flares, but to her this was no dry astronomical colloquy. This was as real and vital to her as breathable air.

“They’ll be okay,” Anson said, trying to smile. “Your brother will come through this fine, I betcha.”

“Of course he will,” Greg said, wondering if that’s what he wanted. Doug’s only eighteen, he told himself. He’s no threat to me. But another voice in his mind countered, Not yet. He’s no threat at present. But he’s out there on the Moon’s surface getting experiences that you’ve never had. Sooner or later he’s going to challenge you for control. Sooner or later. And Mom will be on his side. You know that. She’ll be helping him.

“Hey, he’s going to be all right!” Anson repeated, mistaking Greg’s withdrawn silence. “Really! You’ll see.”

“Of course,” Greg said.

“Come on.” Anson got up from her chair. “There’s lots more to see around here.”

“Now?” Greg asked, surprised. “With the flare and all?”

“Nothing we can do about the flare,” Anson said, almost cheerfully. “It either hits or it doesn’t. In the meantime there’s a lot for you to learn about and not much time to get it all in.”

“But I—”

“I’m not going to miss my own wedding because you haven’t been completely briefed,” Anson said. She was smiling, but her tone was far from gentle. “Come on, we can start at the water plant.”

Feeling just a little dazed, Greg followed her out of the control center and down the long tunnel.

“We’ve got to go all the way down to the end and then cut across,” Anson said.

Feeling awkward, almost embarrassed in the weighted boots, Greg asked, “Aren’t there any cross-tunnels? Besides the one up at the main airlock?”