Moonrise (47 page)

“You might still die, kid,” said Killifer. “You’re not out of the woods yet.”

Doug grinned weakly. “Thanks for the news.”

Killifer walked away.

Does he blame me for Brennart’s death? Doug wondered. He turned to Bianca. “What about the Yamagata people?”

“What Yamagata people?”

“The men in the lander … on the other side of the mountain.”

Rhee shook her head. “Don’t worry about them. You’ve made the claim to the mountaintop. I’ve got your vidcam.”

“No … you don’t understand.” Doug tried to raise his head, but the effort left him dizzy, exhausted. “They crashed. They’re hurt. They need help.”

Rhee’s eyes widened. “They crashed?”

“We talked to them. They need medical help.”

“Wait,” Rhee said. “I’ll tell Killifer.”

She disappeared from Doug’s sight. He lay on the bunk, too weak to do anything else.

Bianca returned with Killifer, who looked more annoyed than usual.

“What’s this about the Yamagata team?”

Doug told him. Killifer eyed him suspiciously. “You sure about this? Maybe you were delirious out there and dreamed it up.”

“I’m sure,” Doug said, too weary to get angry.

“Well,” Killifer groused, “they’ve probably reestablished communications with their own base. Let the Japs take care of their own; we’ve got enough on our hands.”

“No,” Doug protested. “Go get them.”

Glaring, Killifer said, “Get real, kid. Why should we help the competition?”

Trying to pull together enough strength to get a whole sentence out, Doug said, “Because … if we rescue them … it wipes out any hope Yamagata might have … of making a claim … to any part of this region.”

Killifer stared at him for a long moment.

“Do it,” Doug urged, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’ll impress … management.”

“Think of it as a working vacation,” Joanna was saying to the tiny display screen.

Kris Cardenas looked distinctly unhappy.

Glancing up at her window, Joanna saw that the jetcopter was approaching the landing circle at the far end of the Savannah rocket port. A Clippership stood waiting on Pad Three, a thin wisp of white vapor wafting from the liquid oxygen hose connected to its LOX tank.

“Kris, I don’t have time for pleading with you. My son is dying from a massive radiation dose. If you tell me there’s nothing that nanotherapy can do for him, all right, I’ll have to believe you. But if there’s the slightest chance that you could help him …” Joanna ran out of words. For the first time in years she felt on the verge of crying.

“But I’m not the one you want,” Cardenas replied. In the screen set into the armrest her face still looked earnest, intent.

“Then who?”

“Zimmerman, at the University of Basel.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

Cardenas almost smiled. “He keeps a very low profile. But he’s the best there is at this kind of nanotherapy.”

“Can you get him for me?” Joanna asked. “I’m leaving for Moonbase in a few minutes.”

“You mean, talk him into going to the Moon?”

Nodding briskly, Joanna said, “Offer him anything he wants. The sky’s no limit.”

“I don’t know—”

“Get him to Moonbase,” Joanna commanded. “And quickly.”

Cardenas looked bewildered by the idea. “I’ll try.”

“You come, too,” Joanna said. “Both of you. And any equipment you need. I’ll get my people to contact you, make all the arrangements.”

“I’ll try,” Cardenas repeated lamely.

“Thanks, Kris,” Joanna said as warmly as she could manage. Then she cut the connection and immediately called Ibriham Rashid, back at the office in Savannah.

The jetcopter was settling on the ground in a flurry of
rotor-blown dust and the high keening wail of its engines as Rashid’s dark, bearded face appeared on Joanna’s screen.

“Omar, I don’t have time for details. I’m leaving for Moonbase. Get Kris Cardenas and Zimmerman, at the University of Basel, off to Moonbase as soon as possible. They’ve got to be there in twenty-four hours or less. I’ll call you from the Clippership with more. Understand?”

Rashid nodded as if he had been expecting such a call.

“Harkening and obedience,” he said.

Bianca Rhee finally left Doug’s bunk and trudged wearily to the airlock hatch. She slumped tiredly to the plastic flooring and started to unseal her boots.

“Need help?” Roger Deems asked.

“Thanks,” she said, letting him tug the boots off her.

Slowly she got to her feet and, with Deems’s help, lifted the upper half of the suit over her head. Deems hung the empty torso on its rack.

“You’ve been wearing Killifer’s suit,” he said, noting the name stencilled on the chest.

“Seems like I’ve been wearing it all my life,” Rhee said tiredly.

“It’s only been a couple of hours.”

She started worming out of the lower half of the suit.

“Do you think Doug will live through this?” Deems asked, his soulful brown eyes looking almost tearful.

Rhee shook her head slowly. “He’s awfully sick. So pale, like there’s no blood in him.” Suddenly she wanted to cry.

“It’s a shame,” Deems said.

“Yeah.”

Rhee finally worked her legs out of the suit and hung it on the rack. Without another word to Deems she padded in her stockinged feet to the toilet. When she came out, Deems was gone. She was alone with the row of empty suits. No one could see her sobbing quietly.

After a few minutes she tried to pull herself together. The vidcam, she remembered. Doug was worried about the vidcam.

She went to the leggings she had just hung up and searched through the thigh pouches. Sure enough, Doug’s vidcam was there. As she pulled it out, Rhee thought, This is what all
the mess is about. Doug put our legal claim on disk. This is what’s killed him.

There was something else in the thigh pocket. Thinking it might be a part of the vidcam that had somehow worked loose, Rhee took it out. It was a flat square of reinforced cermet, about four inches on a side, anodized flat white on one surface and gleaming gold on the other.

Rhee felt puzzled. This isn’t part of the vidcam, she told herself. But she took it along with her, back to her bunk, where she stuck both the vidcam and the strange piece of cermet into her personal bag for safekeeping, until they got back to Moonbase.

“Do I really have to do this?” Kris Cardenas asked.

Greg Masterson’s image in her desktop phone screen smiled gravely. “How long have you known my mother, Kris?”

“I owe her, I understand that. But I can’t just pop off to the Moon like I’m going to the mall for groceries.”

On the wall behind her desk hung the round gold seal of the Nobel Prize. The rest of the wall was covered with photographs, mostly family—husband and children who had grown to adulthood and now had children of their own. A few of the photos were not family, although each of them had Cardenas in them, together with a former president of the United States, a six-time Oscar-winning actress, a group of scientists posing before a splendid vista of the Alps.

Cardenas herself looked much younger than her fifty-eight years. Much younger. Her hair was still a sandy light brown, no trace of silver. Her bright blue eyes still sparkled youthfully. She looked as if she could spend the day surfing or skydiving or skiing down those snow-covered Alps, rather than delivering lectures to university students.

Greg’s smile looked strained, she thought. He was saying,
“Look, Kris, we’re talking about my half-brother here. Mom will kidnap you if she has to.”

“But I can’t do anything for him! Zimmerman is the man she wants.”

For almost three seconds she waited for Greg’s reply. Finally, his smile transformed itself into a knowing smirk. “Zimmerman’s on his way here.”

“He is?”

Greg continued, not waiting for her reply, “A Masterson Clippership lifted him and four of his assistants half an hour ago on a direct trajectory to Moonbase. They’ll arrive here in about ten hours.”

Dumbfounded, Cardenas asked, “How on earth did she swing that?”

When her question reached him, Greg actually laughed. “Simplest thing in the world. She just threatened to reveal to the media that he’s running a nanotherapy clinic for wealthy foreigners right on the university campus.”

“Blackmail!”

“Black and green,” Greg replied after the lag. “She’s also making a hefty donation to his department at the university.”

Cardenas said, “She hasn’t offered me anything.”

When Greg heard her words, he replied, “Come on up here, Kris. Bring your husband if you want. Even if it’s just to hold her hand, she needs you. She’s not as strong as she’d like everyone to believe, you know.”

Who the hell is? Cardenas asked herself. To Greg’s image in the phone screen she said, “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Doug swam in and out of consciousness. He seemed to be floating, but that couldn’t be. He dreamed he was drifting in the ocean, bobbing up and down on the long gentle swells of the open sea. Yet somehow he was stretched out on the desert sand, broiling in the sun, every pore sweating and Brennart lay beside him saying, “Like the man says, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed.”

When he opened his eyes, Bianca Rhee was always hovering over him, gazing down at him with an expression that mixed tenderness with desperate fear.

Is this real, or am I dreaming? Doug asked himself.

“We’re on our way back to Moonbase,” Rhee said to him at one point. “They’re bringing specialists up from Earth to take care of you.”

Embalmers, thought Doug. Undertakers. Bury me on the Moon, he wanted to say. And don’t forget Brennart’s statue.

“The Yamagata team?” he heard himself croak.

“Killifer went out to get them,” Rhee replied gently, soothingly. “Moonbase agreed with you: rescuing them blocks any claim they might have tried to make.”

“They’re okay?”

“We don’t know. Killifer hasn’t reached them yet.”

“I get all the shit jobs,” Killifer grumbled.

Deems, wedged into the cramped cockpit beside him, shrugged resignedly. “Well, you’re not alone, are you?”

They were piloting one of the lobbers over Mt. Wasser, searching for the crashed Yamagata ship. Killifer had been ordered to do so directly by Jinny Anson, Moonbase’s director.

Two big lobbers had arrived at their south polar camp from Moonbase, filled with oxygen and other supplies, but without a single human being aboard. Killifer had to guide their landings remotely and use the expedition’s remaining personnel to unload them. Instructions—orders, really—from Anson back at Moonbase crackled along the satellite relay system: Get Doug Stavenger back to Moonbase
immediately.
Then go find the wrecked Yamagata lander and save its crew.

Killifer had loaded the Stavenger kid onto one of the lobbers. The astronomer, Rhee, volunteered to go with him. Volunteered, hell, Killifer thought. Nobody could tear the little gook from the kid’s side.

The expedition was a mess, but from what Anson told him, the corporation would have a valid claim to the area as soon as Stavenger’s vidcam pictures were verified. As he monitored the lobber’s automated takeoff for its return flight to Moonbase, Killifer almost hoped that the radiation had ruined the vidcam and the disk would be a blank.

What the hell, he told himself. It rankled him, though, that even if he died young Stavenger would be a fucking hero. Especially if he died.

“I’m getting a transponder signal,” Deems said.

The summit of Mt. Wasser was below them. Glancing down through the cockpit’s transparent bubble, Killifer could glimpse the telescope and other gear that Brennart and Stavenger had left on the mountaintop.

“Show me,” he said to Deems.

With the tap of a gloved finger, Deems brought up the transponder signal on the cockpit’s starscope display of the deeply shadowed ground below them. The screen showed not much more than a blur, with a red dot winking at them.

“Let’s take it down to five hundred and hover,” Killifer said.

“That’ll burn up a lot of propellant.” Deems’s face was covered by his helmet visor, but his voice sounded scared.

“We gotta see the ground before we set down on it,” Killifer said. “Friggin’ starscope sure isn’t showing much. Switch to infrared.”

“It’s too cold down there in the dark,” said Deems. “Must be two hundred below, at least.”

“Switch to infrared,” Killifer repeated, louder.

Silently Deems touched the keypad and the cockpit’s main screen showed a false-color image of the ground below: mostly deep black.

“That must be ice,” Killifer said.

“Yeah, it’s absorbing the infrared.”

“And the transponder signal’s right in the middle of it.”

“They must’ve landed on the ice,” said Deems.

Killifer nodded inside his helmet. “Landing jets melted the ice under them and they splashed in. Dumb bastards.”

“Good thing the ice isn’t too deep.”

“Nah, it must’ve refrozen as soon as they turned off their rocket engines.”

“Then they must be stuck in it.”

“Yeah,” Killifer said disgustedly. “And we better make sure we don’t get caught in the same stupid trap.”

Killifer was not primarily a pilot, although over the years at Moonbase he had trained in both lobbers and hoppers and flown them many times. But setting down in pitch darkness in totally unfamiliar territory—no wonder the Japs crashed, he said to himself.

Hovering above the ice field while Deems worriedly stared
at their fuel gauge, Killifer jinked the lumbering spacecraft sideways, searching for solid ground to land on.

“Ice field’s a lot bigger on this side of the mountain,” he muttered.

“But they won’t be able to claim it once we rescue them, huh?”

“That’s the theory.” The only ground the infrared display showed looked too rough for a landing, strewn with boulders the size of houses.

The radio speaker crackled. “Anson to Killifer. Yamagata just launched a lobber from Nippon One on a trajectory for the polar region. Must be their rescue party. Where are you?”

“Looking for a place to land without breaking our asses,” Killifer replied.