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  LUNA

  Garon Whited

  Copyright © 2007 by Garon Whited.

  Cover Art: “Luna” by Rachel C. Beaconsfield

  Library of Congress Number: 2006909365

  ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4257-3975-1

  Softcover 978-1-4257-3974-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For:

  Taylor, Geordan, Brianna, and Stephanie

  Because I can.

  My proofreaders:

  Amy McGraw

  Aubree Pham

  Steve Jumper

  Someday, I’ll learn to spell.

  And

  Everyone at Elfwood, for being demanding.

  Chapter One

  “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

  —REM

  It’s the end of the world, and I have the best seat in the house.

  Roughly three hundred thousand kilometers away—spitting distance in astronomical terms—there was a planet with eight billion people. Eight billion. Cities the length of continental coastlines drew brilliant maps of the land. Bright streaks of aircraft were shooting stars in the upper air. Lines of light covered the side of the world like an incandescent nervous system. Even the oceans held bright points, signs to any with eyes to see that read “Here I am!”

  Right now, it’s a planet full of swirling black vapors, underlit with a hellish glow.

  Someone once tried to convince me the human race would destroy itself with biowarfare—microorganisms engineered to do nasty things inside the human body. Bioweapons don’t just go off and destroy a city; they spread. The problem with a bioweapon isn’t getting it to the target; the problem is keeping it confined to the target. Worse, any foul-up can see it loose in the lab that designed it, and shortly thereafter loose all over the planet. Life tends to escape its confines and spread, even if it kills all other life.

  If he was right, I wouldn’t be listening to radioactive static from my home.

  I’ll probably never know why missiles went flipping about like tiddlywinks at a tournament; I’m an astronaut, not a political theorist. Someone pushed the wrong button, someone said the wrong thing, or someone just felt it was a good day to die.

  How the hell should I know? I was in the Luna, almost halfway to the Moon, when multiple EMPs made the ship hiccup and whimper. That takes work; a moonship has to be tough. Of course, it isn’t exactly designed to take an electromagnetic pulse from a fusion warhead, to say nothing of hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Some of them were bound to be EMP-enhanced weapons, designed to maximize their electronic shockwave. Fortunately, we had a lot of distance—about three hundred thousand kilometers of it.

  The Luna was not a happy ship. No electronic device enjoys transient electrical pulses, but computers and radios are high on the list of things that especially despise it. Lucky for us the Luna is a sturdy ship and she stuck with us until we got her put to rights. I will never again complain that her systems are a decade behind the state of the art; that very lack of sophistication—and sensitivity!—probably saved our lives. Once we were squared away and feeling close to safe, we turned our attention to raising ground control.

  The EMP damage to the Luna turned out to be the least of our problems. We couldn’t raise Houston, or Vandenberg, or even Woomera. All we got was that steady static. So we turned the ship around and had a look. I think we made a mistake, there. We should never have looked. We could have wondered and maybe died from curiosity, but we wouldn’t have seen it, known it….

  We watched the spreading clouds from the continent-wide firestorms. The blue-white marble on which we grew up was now a blackened, smoky ball. Coastlines were fuzzed by the pall of dust, smoke, and ash. The cool blues and greens and browns and whites were either dull grey or lurid red. The surface of the Earth was a thousand screaming mouths to Hell. Each one belched out a black-and-red cloud of poison and hate and death, laughing the last laugh of the destroyer of worlds.

  Damn you, Oppenheimer. Now that’s stuck in my head.

  Yeah, the destroyer of worlds. That’s us. Humanity.

  Captain Carl ordered us to resume our normal heading. When Kathy didn’t move, he did it himself. I don’t blame her for staring; it was the ultimate road accident and it demanded attention.

  When the remains of the Earth finally swung out of view, we sort of drifted and whispered and wondered.

  “All right, people. Let’s not forget where we are.”

  Captain Carl sometimes has the sensitivity of ten-point steel. I’ve wondered if he’s really human, or just an incredibly advanced robot. He’s not unreasonable, though. He wants the job done, and done well, whatever it is. He’ll do whatever it takes, and expects no less from those under his command. That’s a good thing in an officer. But what makes me wonder about him is that fact that nothing ever fazes him. When Judgment Day rolls around, he’ll line up everybody in his ship in alphabetical order, get the chaplain to lead a last prayer, and then patiently wait to be called.

  If it hasn’t come and gone, that is.

  “We’re the last of the human race, and we’re hurtling toward the Moon,” Julie answered softly, tears filling her eyes. It’s hard to cry properly in zero gravity. “That’s where we are. We’re all that’s left.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Captain Carl replied, stolid and matter-of-fact. “There are heavy bunkers that can take even a direct hit. It’s also hard to kill a navy with ballistic missiles. Ships have a frustrating tendency to be moving targets, and it isn’t practical to carpet-bomb an ocean.”

  “So it’s likely someone survived? We’re not the last people alive?” Julie asked.

  “I would say so. The probability of survivors is almost a certainty. The probability they will continue to survive the aftereffects of a global thermonuclear exchange…” He shook his head. “I can’t even guess at that.” His voice hardened.

  “But, regardless of the state of our planet, we have immediate concerns. We’re heading for a parking orbit around the Moon, preparatory to landing at Lunar Base Alpha. We have fourteen hours until our retro burn for lunar orbit and we’ve had a number of systems twitch from the warhead pulses. I want a complete diagnostic on everything from the attitude jets to the head. Move it!”

  With the brain off-line from the unthinkable, I just let habit take over. I think everyone else did, too. Everyone except Gary. He just sat, strapped into his station, staring out at the distant stars. His wife was in a hospital—had been in a hospital—when he boarded for the mission. Their second child was on the way. Gary almost didn’t go, but she—and NASA—insisted.

  I remembered the congratulations, eleven hours into the mission. It’s a boy, they said.

  Now it’s a scattering of atoms in a radioactive cloud. Its baby squalling merged with a shockwave that echoed around the planet.

  Nobody said anything to him; we just left him alone. Shell-shocked ourselves, what could we say? There simply aren’t words. Instead, we divvied up his checklist, worked around him, and let him have a little time to himself. Annette touched his hand every so often, to try and get his attention. She might as well have touched a statue. A dry-eyed statue with a thousand-yard stare.

  After a while, I noticed a drop of water float by. I reached out and caught it, smeared it into the thick material of
my jumpsuit so it would absorb, and looked around for the source. I’d thought maybe Gary had finally started to weep, but I was wrong. A few other drops were drifting, a glittering trail back to our pilot. Kathy was crying silently, but she didn’t let it slow her down. She was doing her job by the book, every movement precise and characteristically quick, every command perfect, but the tears were getting away from her whenever she blinked.

  I got out a tissue and pushed off the bulkhead. Reaching up from behind her, I dabbed at her eyes. She flinched in surprise, then held her head still and let me. I mopped up her tears and offered her the tissue.

  “Thank you, Max,” she said, softly, and took it.

  Giving a checkup to anything as complicated as a spacecraft takes a while and a lot of attention; it kept us busy for hours while we sorted out every detail. Our emergency repairs from the EMP were in good shape, and as soon as we could, we’d see about some more permanent solutions. For the moment, though, the Luna was as sound as a drum. We finished our chores, sealed up, and strapped in for acceleration.

  It’s a hair-raising thing to do this—to go to another heavenly body, even if it is the closest neighbor. We went through a thousand simulation runs during training. I think we were as close to jaded to the experience as we could get without ever having actually done it—I take that back; Kathy has actually been to the Moon a few times, flying cargo runs, but not in our brand-new spaceship. So the rest of us were a little nervous.

  What had us really on edge was the silence from Mission Control, except for the pop and crackle. We should have heard navigation data from the ground installations. We should have heard procedure calls from Harv, our flight director.

  That’s when it hit me.

  Harv was dead.

  Harvey Klum, five-foot-two of pure astronautical genius. If he’d been taller, he’d someday have been the first man to set foot on Venus, by God, if he’d had to drag the spaceship there with his own two hands! He was a marvel of brains, stamina, and determination. I admired him. He had so much talent I always felt like a hippo in a leotard next to his effortless ballet. I wished—everyone who knew him had wished—that the damned military regulations could have made an exception for him. Nobody ever deserved it more. I’d have fought to follow him to Venus, and helped him drag the ship.

  All he ever wanted was to get into space. Mission Control was the closest he would ever get. Except for radiant light and a few rogue particles, I suppose.

  I’m glad I had a job to keep me busy while it all sank in. I didn’t have a wife, just a girlfriend I was semi-serious about; I can’t imagine how it must have been for Gary. Still, it was like a punch to the gut I wasn’t expecting. All the people I knew were gone in a flash if they were lucky, dying of burns and radiation if they weren’t. During the check-off procedure, we sealed our helmets for maneuvering, so right then I couldn’t wipe my eyes. But I touched a switch on the side of my helmet; that turned off my microphone so I didn’t sob into the radio.

  Judging by way people paused before replying to anything, everybody had.

  We yawed around to fire the main engines for the burn. Out the front port, we could see Earth. I couldn’t look away from it; it was the most beautiful and terrible thing I have ever seen. Lucky for me, I wasn’t flying the ship. Captain Carl and Hot Pilot Kathy swung us around the Moon, slamming us into our couches with a short, hard blast; Earth sank below the lunar horizon. We were on the money, too; no corrections afterward. We made a complete orbit to double-check our navigation before we burned for landing.

  That’s when we lost Gary.

  He unstrapped—nobody thought much of it; one orbit of Luna would take us slightly over two hours—and headed aft. I guess we really just thought that he was going to the head, and glad he wasn’t still staring like a zombie. Who could blame him for wanting to climb out of the inboard softsuit and use a proper toilet? The suits have come a long way from the first Apollo days, but the plumbing arrangements still aren’t exactly pleasant. He unsealed his helmet and left it floating in the compartment as he stepped into the airlock.

  The sound of the heavy airlock door hissing closed is a lot different from the gentle swish of the polymer accordion-panel for the zero-gee toilet.

  We started to unstrap frantically, everyone but Carl and Kathy; they had a ship to run. I’m fast and I have legs that would let me play pro basketball if I hadn’t been crazy to get to space. I got to the inner door and started to unseal it when Gary blew the outer door.

  What happened to him is best left to the imagination—and if I had my way, would have been. The emergency purge blows the explosive bolts on the outer lock; the door came away in one piece, shooting away like a cork from a bottle. Gary followed it, carried along by the outrush of air.

  I saw him through the inner door’s window before he left. He looked sad, so incredibly, infinitely sad. It hurt my heart to see it. And then his eyes exploded as he was sucked out into space.

  Our helmets have a tube for occasions when you have to throw up. The engineer who designed them probably designed the waste-relief system lower down, too. Whoever he was, he never threw up in a helmet. The system isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of.

  We made an extra orbit while we corrected our vector from the airlock purge. That gave Anne and Julie a chance to calm down—and me, too. Anne was ready to have weeping hysterics, officer or no officer—it’s one thing to see a planet with nastiness on the surface some hundreds of thousands of kilometers away; it’s quite another to watch a shipmate and a friend decide to die. Captain Carl wound up issuing her a tranquilizer; Julie administered it.

  “Captain?” Julie asked.

  “Yes, lieutenant?”

  “May I have a dose?”

  “No. If you’re stable enough to handle it so far, you’ll be fine. Besides, we have a ship to run and we’re shorthanded as it is.”

  “I—Yes, Sir.”

  While all that was going on, I got my helmet cleaned up. I could have used Gary’s, but nobody insisted, not even Captain Carl. I guess he’s human after all. Not a very nice human, but he’s also the ship’s captain, and we were about to do an airless landing. That’s always tricky.

  Landing on the Moon isn’t like landing on Earth. On Earth, you catch air with your wings and fly down, gliding. On the Moon, you take aim for where you want to go, slow down until you’re falling onto it, then retro until you come to a stop just as you touch down. Coming in with a sideways vector and landing like a normal plane—or as much like one as an airless landing will permit—is moderately pointless. On the Moon, your effective weight doesn’t provide enough traction to be very useful against your inertia. The Luna has a drag chute for Earth landings, but it’s useless on the Moon, for obvious reasons. In vacuum, the Luna uses her main engines for major vector changes and maneuvering thrusters in the nose and belly for a typical Moon landing.

  Landing is actually a lot more complicated than that. I was glad to have professionals at the controls. Captain Carl could have navigated for Magellan, and Kathy’s reflexes make her the hottest pilot to ever hit sky. We came down with hardly a bump.

  Lunar Base Alpha was built by robots as a special project; the idea was not only to build a permanent base, but to use it as practice close to home before blowing a few billion on, say, Ganymede. A three-second delay was good practice for a three, thirteen, or thirty-hour delay, later—not that it looks like there will be a “later.” A ship built on the Moon for a trip to the outer planets can be a lot more economical; it can launch from a smaller gravity well, there’s no atmosphere to penetrate, that sort of thing. And, most importantly, the Moon’s resources are right there—they don’t have to be shipped up Earth’s gravity well.

  The Ares, being built at Heinlein Station for a manned mission to Mars, is a perfect example of space-based construction. It’s not aerodynamic, it’s not pretty, and it’s too big to hold up under its own weight in gravity. The TRITON engine was designed for the initial boost into
a Hohmann-type transfer orbit, while the nuclear plant portion of it also provides enough electricity to power on-board systems for the entire length of the flight. Anything built on Earth would never have made it to space and carried enough payload to support a crew to Mars and back, to say nothing of the problems associated with firing a nuclear rocket engine in Earth’s atmosphere.

  Ha. I wonder what the environmentalists would have to say about it now?

  We were originally going up just to test our brand-new Lunar Base and shake out the bugs; if anything went seriously wrong, we had two fallback positions. First, we could just bug out. The Luna had more than enough go-juice to get us home. Second, there were three survival shelters dug into the ringwall of Copernicus. They were evenly spaced around the crater and contained hydroponics and communications equipment. They weren’t great, but they should support life indefinitely, albeit uncomfortably. Plenty long enough for Earth to send a rescue ship.

  I found myself hoping the engineering boys got it right on the first try. There would be no going to the corner store for a bottle of milk. No milk. No store. Not even a corner.

  Ideally, we would live there for six months in our own little biosphere arrangement. Everything recycled, everything reconstituted. Eventually, if all went well, NASA would have sent up more people—the Moon is a perfect place for manufacturing of all sorts. Raw vacuum by the kilometer, plentiful power from the Sun, temperatures between absolute zero and boiling—the place was a chemical engineer’s playground. And, one day, there would be a city growing where once there was just an experimental base.

  It was funny, in a morbid sort of way. The best-laid plans of mice and men and all that. Good plan, though.

  Getting from the Luna to the base proved to be more of a challenge than we’d anticipated. Gary’s abrupt departure cost us our personnel airlock. We made sure our hardsuits were tight, then went through the tiny, one-man lock into the cargo bay; the bay isn’t usually pressurized. From there, we could open the cargo ramp in the underbelly and make our way down to the mooncrete landing pad.