‘We’ve got to get a ship out there,’ Doria Bohm said. ‘A ship from here, from the Moon, out to Planet Nine before Earth gets there. We just have to. Or at least to Saturn so we have cards in the game there. All that helium-3. And meanwhile those Conservers found a planet-mass black hole! Why, we could build a whole technological civilisation around that one thing. Just throw stuff in and pow! Catch the white-hot debris …’
Which was a sentiment Matt Kord shared, more or less. But the aspiration wasn’t realistic, even if a capable ship had been available on the Moon, which it wasn’t.
And Kord, who as ‘Resource Coordinator’ was the nearest thing to a head of this semi-independent colony under the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, had a zillion better things to do than argue about Planet Nine – mostly tangling with Earth’s endless multinational and interplanetary politicking and commercial manoeuvring. And he might have demurred altogether if he’d known this conversation was going to be about more madcap missions to the edge of the Solar System.
But then, Moon-born Doria Bohm, twenty-three years old, was a nascent rebel who had a voice among the young here, and he was a sixty-nine-year-old Earthborn who probably didn’t look like a rebel to anyone, even himself. So Doria had to be indulged.
‘We just have to find a way to get a piece of the action,’ she said now, and reeled off reasons why, in a highly articulate, high-speed peroration.
Kord just waited. He had become good at listening with half of his aged brain while analysing, assessing with the other. Let her get it off her chest, he told himself. Only react to something substantial.
When she ran down, briefly, he butted in, not harshly.
‘What can we do about it? I understand the dream, Doria. I really do. But you have to see the bigger picture.’
With an angry gesture, Doria grabbed a bag of water from a dispenser, held it up, and squirted the water into the air, a transient low-gravity stream that she caught neatly in her mouth without spilling a drop.
Kord suppressed a sigh. Still essentially a creature of Earth, he would never be able to pull stunts like that.
She was looking back at him. ‘What “bigger picture”? I just spent the afternoon arguing with some go-between flunky about why our shipments of nitrogen from Earth are being cut, again …’
‘That is the bigger picture. And nitrogen is the key to the interplanetary politics of the Solar System. For now, anyhow.’ Until helium-3 becomes the issue. He waved a hand. ‘Because you need nitrogen to buffer the air that you breathe, and sustain the plants you grow in your life support cycles … And the Moon has none.
‘Look at it from Earth’s point of view. Historically, you know, at first Earth did allow some limited exports of nitrogen and its compounds from its own atmosphere, to supply the Moon and the other colonies, the free-flying space habitats. But for a long while now there has been a ban on such exports.’
She snorted. ‘Because of “environmental impacts on Earth”.’
‘Yes. That’s valid enough. The rationale was to protect the environment of Earth itself from the effects of multiple space launches, atmosphere scoop-mining, high-speed re-entries and so on. A lot of heat was being dumped into the environment. Earth’s air can literally burn under a fast craft’s heatshield – nitrogen will burn, ironically, leaving you with various toxic compounds. All that is history.
‘But there was a political background to the ban as well. Or an ideological one. Even by 2100 or so there had been threats to Earth from space – criminal gangs or rogue nations would threaten just to dump massive objects onto the planet, artificial meteorites that could cause a lot of damage if they hit the ground. Later there was one ambitious plan to divert a near-Earth object, a whole small asteroid, onto a collision course. It came to nothing, but people learned.
‘People on Earth, that is.
‘The mood shifted, with space being seen not as a resource, not as some wonderful arena of adventure, but as a source of threat. Or at best a dangerous place to retrieve valuable goods from. Like an unstable gold mine.’
‘Gold is cheap—’
‘Just a metaphor,’ he ploughed on. ‘Short term, space defences were beefed up. Longer term, the mood towards supporting the establishment of new off-world colonies turned hostile. And an easy way to impose control of such colonies, and to contain the growth of existing colonies, was to keep a tight control on nitrogen, among other essentials. Which meant, in particular, putting the squeeze on us.’
‘And now we’re threatening Earth again, are we? Us, a new generation of miners. With our sharper teeth.’
‘Well, maybe,’ he said dubiously, not wishing to provoke her any further. ‘It might look like that, to them. All we can do is react to Earth’s latest moves.’
‘Moves such as blocking us from Ceres, and the gas giants and their moons … Never mind nitrogen. As far as the helium-3 trade is concerned, it’s their turn to try a home run to Saturn … Did I use that idiom correctly?’
He nodded grudgingly. ‘Not quite.’
‘Economically that would shut us out completely. And now there is this complication of Planet Nine too. Whatever the Conservers have found out there, whatever opportunities and risks it poses for our future. Earth means to take it all, that’s clear …’
‘What can we do about it? This is the Moon. We’re a mining colony. We don’t have huge interplanetary liners like the Cronus. We don’t even have a slow deep-space craft like the Conservers’ Shadow. All we have are our rock-hopper surface craft, and a few Moon-Earth freighters … much loved as that battered old fleet may be …’
But with scarcely a breath she launched back into her case.
While Kord distracted himself by thinking about spaceships.
Of which the most modern and impressive on the Moon, to his own ageing eyes, was the Aquila, a graceful hundred metres long, spinning end over end in flight to create artificial gravity, carrying its loads of lunar aluminium, uranium – and, especially, precious helium-3 – to Earth orbit.
But even Aquila had been designed, to his understanding, to reach no further than the asteroid belt – and, given Earth’s embargoes, it would probably never even get that far. Certainly not out to the giant planets and their resource-laden moons and their own heavy, resource-rich atmospheres.
But here was Doria Bohm, who seemed to be making a case for some kind of dash out to Saturn, chasing the Cronus – a mission which itself, by the way, was linked to the Conservers’ discovery of Planet Nine, whatever the hell that was. Making her case by shoving her way into his subterranean office without an appointment. Well, what case? He had yet to grasp it, but no doubt he soon would.
Bohm, Moon-born, young as she was, was forceful, relentless. Whereas Kord had been born long ago on Earth, and so had his stomach, and, increasingly, neither of them relished being reminded of how far they were from the home world’s comforting ground, its enfolding one-gravity field.
By profession Kord was a mineralogist, and had found a perfect fit on the Moon, in some ways, a world of little but minerals. Such was the churn of staff, though, through low-gravity medical issues, confinement and a general sense of demoralisation, that he had eventually found himself the last one left on the Moon of his own generation of lunar scientists and prospectors – and had been given the job of Consortium director, since, it seemed, nobody else would take it.
He had never had aspirations to lead, in this organisation or any other. In a job he never wanted, he liked to feel he’d been conscientious, if not always as competent as he’d have hoped for.
But now he had to listen to Doria, because Doria was the future, he told himself. Doria, and the generations who had mostly been born on the Moon, unlike their parents, grandparents. Young as she was, she was impressively forceful, he thought. And just as he often felt pulled back to Earth, so she seemed to be pulled outwards …
Quite possibly she was right that the anomaly that was Planet Nine, let alone helium-3 caches in the outer Solar System such as at Saturn, were all part of that outward future too. If only such things could be reached. And legally mined.
But, whatever the validity of her argument, to Kord, Doria was utterly intimidating. Aside from the force of her personality – apart from the striking face, the sharp jaw, the intent blue eyes, the neat stubble of black, shaven hair – she had a whip-thin frame, muscular yet tall, typical of those born on the Moon with its one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. After nearly three centuries of human spaceflight hard lessons had finally been learned in how to cultivate the human body in such conditions. And Doria Bohm had been brought up as expertly as anyone he had ever met on the Moon.
She was the future, he reflected glumly. Probably no human being existed, or had yet existed, better adapted to off-Earth conditions than Doria and her generation. He supposed he envied her, in a dull, cloddish way, even as he attempted to deal with her, and the shadowy factions in lunar society that she represented. While Matt Kord – pale and bloated, born on Earth, at sixty-nine more or less exactly three times Doria’s age – represented the past.
Maybe it would be different if he had been that bit older still, one of the true pioneers of the exploitation of the Moon: one of the first ‘miners’, as they had been called even back then, who were now the subjects of dramas of heroic pioneering days, of battles with an unforgiving nature. That was the quasi-legend that had drawn him out here himself as an idealistic youngster.
He supposed he had been atypical in staying around as things slowly soured, as the global Earth government’s relations with its lunar pioneers became harsher, with excessive control and punitive taxation. An exploitative relationship in all but name. But legally justifiable because, in Earth’s eyes, the Moon’s riches, like all the resources of space, belonged to nobody.
Such resources were to be regarded as a common benefit – evidently a philosophy and legal principle descended from early space law, in turn derived from the centuries-old law of the sea. Which meant in practice that the resources of deep space, including essentials for living such as water, even that most precious of fusion fuels helium-3, even before they were extracted, belonged by right to Earth – or at least to mankind as a whole – and ought to be dedicated to supporting the sedentary culture of Earth and all its billions. You could be paid for the labour of digging it up, but Earth didn’t buy helium-3 and the rest, as it owned it already. Legally.
While all the time the descendants of the first miners bred and swarmed and explored their way across the face of the Moon, and chafed against the political and commercial constraints that resulted in resources needed for growth up here being sent back to prop up a bloated society down there.
More recently all this had come into a sharper focus. Doria was a leading figure in a newly rebellious faction of lunar folk, mostly younger citizens. Younger miners who pushed even against older miners, who had once seen themselves as rebels. Even now he half-listened to her continuing and quite eloquent monologue on the inequities of the modern social set-up.
But in the longer term the real problem, as Kord was in a position to know better than anybody, was the sheer smallness of the Moon, at least in economic terms. Its poverty. No matter how you bought or sold it. The Moon itself had been created in the aftermath of a tremendous primordial collision between Earth and another protoplanet during the formation of the Solar System. An accident like that tended to drive out any volatiles before the remnants even cooled down. So there was hardly any lunar water. What little there was, a residue of later comet impacts, was scattered thin through the regolith and gathered in Shackleton and other permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.
There were treasures to be had here: uranium to be mined in Copernicus Crater, for example, at a density of a relatively rich hundred parts per billion of the regolith, the Moon’s impact-gardened soil. The greatest treasure of all was helium-3, the optimal fusion fuel. The richest lunar deposits of that were found, alongside Apollo footsteps, in the Sea of Tranquility – but even these offered only four parts per billion of helium-3 in that dust – a tiny fraction even of the already low uranium density. To get a useful cargo load you had to strip-mine the regolith down to three metres and across square kilometres, creating scars you could see from space, or even from Earth with binoculars.
But despite the wailing about that ugliness, Earth hypocritically welcomed the helium-3, a vital isotope for its power plants, and imported all it could, paying a pittance for the labour of the lunar colonists. For now.
Meanwhile leaving the lunar colonists themselves with nothing but low-power fission engines to sustain their habitats and drive their ships, most of them slow freighters shipping aluminium and other products to Earth orbit.
Miners and their families living in hovels constructed largely of lunar rocks and dirt, because they couldn’t spare the water to make decent bricks, even.
Thus the romance of space.
At the back of his head Kord always remembered that the Moon would offer such meagre treasures for only a few more centuries before even marginally accessible useful resources would be depleted – leaving much of the regolith ploughed up in great trenches and fields that would be visible from Earth for a million years.
And quite possibly the Moon had less of an economic future even than that, since Earth had already set up a trial plant at Saturn, so the rumours went, that could sift out helium-3 from that huge world’s atmosphere. When that treasure could be returned safely, and in huge quantities, from Saturn direct to Earth, when that supply chain started operating, what then for the Moon?
Still Doria spoke, reiterating now over-familiar arguments.
And he found himself staring, distracted, at a pendant she wore at her neck: a disc of what looked like lunar glass, a kind of obsidian perhaps, volcanic, smoothed, polished. Her one adornment; he’d noticed it before. Was this some kind of statement of identity? He didn’t remember such a thing being worn by anybody else …
He tried to focus.
The problem was, when it came to views about this situation, of the two of them in this box of an office it was Doria Bohm who was by far more representative of the population of the human Moon as a whole. Unfortunately that also meant that Doria’s impatience and aggression – her lack of judgement, as he saw it, despite her sharp intelligence – was typical of an increasing percentage of the electorate. Whereas Matt Kord – fat, old, his body Earth-bred but much abused by too much space travel – still, like it or not, represented much of what wisdom there was to be had among the Moon’s inhabitants.
He didn’t feel his authority was threatened. Not quite yet. Give her a few more years, a little more of the power she seemed to have accrued among her peers already – the mail-bombing he had received about meeting with her to discuss this project was testament to that. Some day you will have to stand against me in an election, he thought, studying her as she spoke. Even our primitive, this-isn’t-Earth lunar constitution puts limits on the terms of people like me, and my powers. And yours in the future. Then we’ll see whose judgement wins out, generation rivalry or not. We aren’t there yet, he told himself. But for now …
Now she faced him.
Here it comes. The proposition. What all this has led up to.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I think we agree on the situation. The real reason for me coming here to see you is to tell you we’ve decided to do something about it.’
He’d known this was coming – or at least, that something was. Brace yourself, Matt.
‘Who is “we” …? Never mind. So what is it specifically you wanted this meeting for?’
She looked irritated, but shrugged. ‘Specifically, to let you know we’ve been refitting the Aquila. Refitting for a new mission.’
That gave him pause.
The colony’s most up-to-date and useful freighter, mostly dedicated to transferring cargoes to and from low Earth orbit …
He suppressed a frown. Suppressed a snap back: You did this without my permission, even my knowledge? He let that go, for now. He needed facts.
‘What mission?’ He made a stab in the dark. ‘Ceres. You’re here to talk about Ceres, right? Any such mission would break Earth’s embargo – you know that.’
She shook her head, and sounded almost diplomatic. ‘Not Ceres. Bigger than that. We always intended to show you it all first – hell, to give you the final decision as to its deployment, or otherwise.’
‘Kind of you. The deployment of what?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s simple enough. Earth is trying to keep the Solar System bottled up. Yes? But now we know about Planet Nine. Nobody knows for sure what it is yet, but it appears to be a massive, energetic object. Who knows what we could make of that? A game-changer—’
He nodded. ‘Maybe. Yes, the potential could be huge. But the Conservers found the thing, they’re on top of it now …’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But the Conservers won’t do anything with it, will they?’
‘Perhaps not. I admit I never really understood their programme … But right now it’s not the Conservers you’re worried about, is it?’
‘No, it’s not. We’re worried about the Cronus. Earth.’
Again he had heard hints about this. ‘Cronus. Earth’s super-freighter, on the way to Saturn—’
‘And launched since the Planet Nine news broke. Limping along on its fission drive, but it will get there in a few years.’
‘And then?’
‘And then … You’ve heard the rumours, you know as well as I do. They already have a pilot helium-3 extraction plant at Saturn, right?’
He hadn’t heard anything beyond that. But he now put it together quickly. ‘Oh. I get what you’re thinking. And then, what if they already have a helium-3 fusion drive? Much more capable, much faster …’
‘Such drives have been on the drawing boards for decades. Centuries? But nobody had the helium-3 to spare. Saturn offers that. And there are rumours that Earth is close to such a drive.’
‘I hadn’t heard that.’
She shrugged. I had.
A small triumph for her, he saw.
‘So, you see the strategy. The news breaks of the existence of Planet Nine. The Cronus dashes out to Saturn, refuels there with helium-3 – and then on to Planet Nine,’ Doria said. ‘Taking years, I guess, rather than the decades of that Conserver sail-ship. And the decades our own best fission-powered ships, like the Aquila, would take.’
He was stunned; suddenly he understood what she and her allies had perceived. What he should have perceived. And they were right. Thus Earth would requisition the greatest mystery in the Solar System, and whatever wonders flowed from it.
On to Planet Nine …
He nodded, grudgingly. ‘You have a point. Talk about a hegemony. Whoever owns all that could end up with the control of an emperor – you could shut out others from alternate sources, even the other gas giants. What a play to make.’
‘That’s the long view. But even from the start, when Earth starts shipping home Saturn’s helium-3 on a large scale, with Cronus-sized freighters—’
‘It’s the end of us.’
‘An economic assassination. I can show you the scene of the crime from this window …’ She turned to a control panel.
And a wide stretch of grey wall turned transparent. Doria, impatient, messed with the smart window’s settings until the star fields came clear. At first he could see little, a scattering of stars, shining above the dusty horizon of the Moon.
She pointed. ‘This is the constellation of Sagittarius.’
He shrugged. ‘Is it? I was never an astronomy buff as a kid, ironically. Even though my parents chided me about how much clearer Earth’s air was than when they were kids, after the climate restoration programmes—’
Doria brushed that away. ‘See those star clouds? You’re looking towards the centre of the Galaxy, as it happens.’
He squinted. ‘And there’s that odd red spot at the centre. Has anybody got a handle on that yet? I heard something about an anomalous heat flow coming out of there …’
She ignored that question too. ‘And the bright star over here—’
‘Not a star. A planet, I’m guessing. Saturn?’
‘Right. Where Cronus will be on its way soon. And beyond, much deeper into space, not visible to us, is Planet Nine. Happens to be neatly lined up just now – Earth, Saturn, Nine, Galaxy. ‘She laughed, bitterly. ‘So the Cronus crew will actually have a head start. A start on sewing up the whole damn future of mankind, as they have done the past.’
Kord tried to focus. ‘And you’re the genius who’s going to fix all that, are you? You and your covert cohort.’
She seemed irritated at that. ‘You want to hear our proposal, or not?’
‘I need to, I’m guessing.’ He asked more gently, ‘What do you intend to do, Doria?’
‘We’re already doing it.’
She tapped the smart window again.
The star-field picture dissolved to reveal what Kord recognised as a loose construction jig, a frame of girders and lines, floating in space.
This was a now venerable space construction technique: you used the jig to line up a large assembly quickly and accurately in the microgravity of space. The detail of the craft or structure being assembled within this particular jig, constructed first, was hard to make out: a rough cylinder, with two massive sections connected by a spine, reinforced with a framework of triangular struts …
Suddenly he recognised the basic layout. ‘Of course. That’s Aquila! Why am I seeing this? What’s that in the hold? Oh … Propellant tanks, right? She won’t be able to carry much like that, but she can go a long, long way …’
She grinned. ‘The fact is, although we only have a fission drive here – uranium fuel, hydrogen propellant – right now we can match the performance of the Cronus, to Saturn at least. Because Cronus hasn’t got its helium-3 drive up and running yet. All it can do is follow a minimum-energy trajectory out that far. Six years. We can match that. And we will. In Aquila, we are going to match Cronus, and Earth.’
He nodded cautiously, trying to pry out the logic. ‘So you track Cronus to Saturn. And then?’
‘And then – well, we’ll see what’s what. At least we’ll be a player in the game, as the whole of humanity’s future pivots. What do you think of that?’
I think I’m as scared as hell.
Looking at her, his eye was distracted by that lens of lunar obsidian at her neck, like a third, wide-open pupil.
And he thought back to the Sagittarius image, that strange red light at the heart of the Galaxy, another inhuman eye that seemed to peer back at him.
He was bewildered. And Doria’s faction already had Aquila set to go.
He, it seemed, had no control over what was to follow.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What next?’
She seemed taken aback. ‘I guess we find us a pilot.’