Chapter Six

The Maddening Desire

Wednesday, 8 November 2034

Lunar Setup Mission II, Day 8

Van Richards couldn’t see the stars, but he knew they were there and that was enough.

It should’ve been dark enough in the lunar night, even with the Earth glowing up above, to see the stars—but the worklights all around were too much. Even the head-up display in his helmet washed out any ambient light from the distance of space.

Van didn’t care: he loved it, whether he ever saw any star except the Sun again. He was convinced he was in the right place, with the solemn assurance of a recent convert to the religion of his choice. This was his purpose, his calling.

Okay, maybe not this particular job: opening what, at the moment, was essentially a shipping crate bigger than a Greyhound bus. He was unscrewing the dozen bolts that held down the man-sized access cover: an unglamorous task by any standard. But the fact that the crate was on the surface of the Moon aligned it with his purpose. The thing that solidified his confidence that this was what and where he was meant to be, however, was knowing that within a year he and Barbara would both be here.

Van’s partner at the moment was Roy Chesterfield, the crew foreman. Roy had been a crewmember on the first setup mission before being selected as foreman for the second; his North London accent came through louder and clearer over work channel one than his words. “How are we doing, Van?” he said.

“Gooder ’n snuff,” Van said, putting as much of a drawl in as he could. “Best laydown yet.”

“You think we’ve topped out the learning curve, finally?”

“No, pretty soon we’ll be measuring our errors in microns.”

It had been the cleanest installation yet of the prefabricated shelter units. The shelters had semi-circular cross-sections, so that those that were entrenched close to the surface and covered over with lunar soil for radiation protection looked something like Quonset huts. The exceptions were the central dome about eight meters across and six high that the first setup mission had erected, and the garage units that had big airlocks along their sides.

“Keep it up, Van, and we’ll have you digging all the trenches.”

“Alright by me, boss. I like driving the big machines.”

“Don’t we all,” Roy said. “But the rest are going to be even harder. Coming up behind you now. Spot me while I back up, if you don’t mind?”

Van hopped up the slight incline to the top of the trench. Calling anything that was only a meter-and-a-half deep at its deepest point a “trench” seemed overly generous, but that was the convention. The incline to the surface was so slight that it took three hops to cover the length of it. There would be more digging out and even some rock hauling for the next few shelters, since the Consortium hadn’t gotten the best real estate in the lottery/buyout the U.N. had brokered. They bought some of the less desirable pieces of property and spent more to develop theirs fast, rather than buying better property that they’d have to wait longer to develop. It made the work harder, especially if they had to do any blasting—setting the little shaped charges to break up boulders was tedious enough, but setting up shields to keep the fragments contained was the worst—

But the signature element was that they were further along in getting established on the Moon, and that made all the difference.

Van counted down the meters until Roy had the flatbed MPV—multi-purpose vehicle—in place with plenty of maneuver room. Roy climbed down from the “cab,” which was little more than a roll cage. Only the big truck had a pressurized cabin.

“Ready to open ’er up?” Van asked.

“We’d better be. Henry and Jovelyn should have the junction hooked up to the other end in an hour, and have power up a little after that. It’ll take a few more hours to hook up the ductwork and piping, so pressure check and systems check will have to wait until next shift. Still, we’ll have to work fast to get a path cleared in there.”

“Fair enough,” Van said, and unscrewed the last two bolts.

Roy tugged on the access cover but it didn’t come free. “It’s stuck,” he said. “Give me a hand.”

Van grabbed one handle and pulled when Roy counted three. The access cover resisted, the way a vacuum-sealed lid didn’t want to come off a jar. But that didn’t make any sense, because the cover had vacuum on either side of it.

The cover vibrated through Van’s glove as it came free a second later. Roy carried it to the side; they would find a good use for it somewhere.

Van looked inside. As expected, the stack of transit cases blocked the narrow corridor up to the low ceiling. The shelter was packed from end to end along its entire length, just like all the others. Heavy webbing held all the gear in place against the stresses and vibrations of launch, landing, and emplacement. Van adjusted a worklight for a better look.

Everything—the stacked crates, the straps, even the floor—reflected back shimmering white. He cursed.

“What’s the matter?” Roy asked.

“Looks like it snowed in here,” Van said. He hung the worklight on the inner pressure door—open for shipping, it would seal against the hatchway when the shelter was aired in—and stepped inside. He wiped a thin film of ice off the nearest transit case. “We’ve got ice.”

“How much?”

“Can’t tell. Very thin layer, all over everything. Not whiskers like rime ice, just a thin sheet of crystals.” He started releasing the webbing straps. “I don’t think it’ll slow us down any, I just wonder where the water came from. Shouldn’t be from the plumbing, unless some idiot charged the system before they sealed everything up.”

“Didn’t you read the inventory?”

Van didn’t bother answering. Of course he didn’t read the inventory; why clog up his brain with what was packed in the thing when they were just going to empty it and rearrange everything anyway?

“This prefab’s another farm module,” Roy said. “It has some tooling for the garage that we can take out and stage, some crates of spare suits, and a few other small things, but it’s supposed to have four water tanks. Not bladders, but tanks, filled. Do you suppose one of them cracked?”

“Don’t know what else it could be,” Van said, “or how much we’ll lose when this ice sublimates away.” He had the webbing undone and pulled the first transit case down from the stack. He composed a litany of complaints as he pulled the case backward through the hatch. “Damn low-bid outfit. I bet they didn’t assemble the tank right, left a weak weld or something. Or are they composite tanks, filament-wound?” Roy grabbed the other end of the crate and together the two of them made their way up the incline. Van barely paused in his diatribe; he didn’t leave time for a response. “Maybe a thin spot, or some other defect. Then I bet when they filled the tank they didn’t leave enough ullage in it. Who knows how many times that water froze and thawed since it launched? Tank probably busted when the water froze and expanded, or when the whole package heated up in the sunlight—”

“Are you quite finished?” Roy asked as they swung the case onto the back of the flatbed.

“No. These things always make me wonder what else we’re going to find messed up.” Van hadn’t been impressed with the general workmanship of some of the equipment they used, and it wasn’t as if all of the Consortium’s plans had worked without a hitch. The third set of prefab shelters had crashed instead of soft-landing; the AC built another set and worked it into the supply launch schedule, but that original set remained a twisted hunk of scrap about forty kilometers northwest of the colony on the north rim of Campanus Crater. Eventually it would be salvaged; maybe when Van came back as a colonist. “I bet one of those water tanks cracked. Water couldn’t escape like from a comet. It got deposited and stuck by surface tension, then froze—”

“Enough, please, Mr. Richards.” Roy’s sigh carried over the radio. “We’ve a lot of work to do, so let’s get to it.”

Van frowned. Frustration simmered in his gut—this time ice in the shelter, the time before a broken tool, before that a defective control unit. He knew one day something big would go wrong, and hated giving in to the thought because it smothered little bits of his enthusiasm. He took a deep breath and forced himself to smile. “Aw, Roy,” he said, “why d’you want to take all the fun out of work?”

* * *

“Good work today,” Shay Nakamura said as he stepped through the hatch. His slight Japanese accent echoed in the dome that most of the setup crew had taken to calling “Grand Central.” Grace Teliopolous, for some reason, preferred to call it the “pimple.”

Van looked up from his bowl of reconstituted potato soup. It was thick, the way he liked it—he never added as much water as the instructions called for—and a few good shots of Texas Pete gave it enough flavor to make up for the slightly pasty taste and feel. It helped overpower the usual stale locker-room-and-sewer-gas smell, too. He hoped once more of the farm units were up and running the air would clear; and he’d have to make sure some hot peppers got planted, as backup.

“Thanks,” Van said. Despite the way he’d dogged Van during their first orbits, Shay was a good guy, even if he was the setup mission commander. “Didn’t run into too many rocks, so the trenching went pretty easily.”

Shay pulled a packet out of the cabinet, tore off the cover, and tossed the pack in the oven. He sat down opposite Van while his dinner heated, picked up a deck of cards, and without shuffling began laying out a hand of solitaire.

“Why do you do that?” Van asked.

“What?”

Van sighed. He reached into the side pocket of his coveralls and withdrew his datapad. “See this? I know you have one, and if you like I can transfer about a hundred different versions of solitaire or any other game you want to play.”

Shay shook his head. “I like the feel of shuffling cards. I like the sound they make.”

“I bet I can find that sound on here, too, and you can program it to play the sound whenever it starts a new game.”

Shay laid the three of hearts on the four of clubs, with a little thwack as he released the corner of the card. “Yeah, that’ll be authentic.”

“I bet you still read books on paper, too, don’t you?”

“I have one or two,” Shay admitted. “You might try it sometime. Expand your horizons.”

“I’ve got the widest horizons of anybody I know,” Van said.

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Neither do I.”

Shay glanced up toward the high windows. “Whatever.”

Van didn’t like the emptiness in Shay’s eyes. “Something eating at you?”

Shay played two more cards before answering. “They lost one of the one-way-trippers yesterday.”

“Anybody you know?”

“No.”

“Still,” Van said, “I’m sorry to hear about that.” If Van had been single he would have thrown in with that bunch, but he’d known better than even to apply. Barbara would have skinned him alive if he’d volunteered to go to Mars knowing he would die there. He didn’t understand her reluctance; you had to die somewhere. “What happened, do you know?”

Shay shook his head and played another card. “No, they just posted the notice. Kind of brings the issue of risk into the spotlight.”

Van nodded, but only out of courtesy. He refused to dwell on risks. Risk management was Barbara’s specialty.

“Probably best to concentrate on what’s front and center, things we can control. Which reminds me: you were just telling me what a good job I did today.”

One corner of Shay’s mouth twitched upward; not much, but enough. “Yes, I was,” he said. “And as long as you keep laying down shelters as smooth as that last one, we might even get back on schedule.”

Van grinned a little in response, but he shook his head. “Don’t count on it.”

“I’m not. Even if we weren’t starting to creep up on the crater’s edge, Murphy always shows up to ‘help.’ Like losing that water tank—that’s going to hurt.”

“How many times you think it froze and thawed?”

“Many. A few times while it was en route, and it’s been on the surface for four months. Do you recall how it was oriented before we split it?”

Van hadn’t been on the split crew for that module. Each habitat had been launched and soft-landed as a set of two, joined base-to-base with another habitat, to form a complete cylinder; the setup crews split them apart—like splitting a big log into two perfect halves, except of course they had to be a lot more careful—so they could be rotated and planted flat side down. It was a delicate maneuver, even with the support cradles and rigging, because the prefabs were monstrous big. They were small enough on the inside—especially filled as they were with everything the Consortium could cram into them—but they were still a little over five meters wide and nearly thirty meters long.

“I wouldn’t know, Shay,” Van said. “Even if I’d been on duty for that split, I probably wouldn’t remember. Everything’s starting to run together in my mind.”

“Is that why you didn’t take down your observations of the ice today? I didn’t see any details in your log.”

“No,” Van said, “it was more important to get the unloading done.” He didn’t add that he hated the “typing mode” built into the suits; the gloves had feedback sensors that let you do touch typing by just wiggling your fingers, but Van had trouble getting it to work. Especially trying to contort his fingers for the SHIFT function—that was the worst. “I took a couple of images, and I’ll write up a report before I rack out.”

They had been on the Moon just over a week, but Van was tired enough that sometimes it seemed like a month. Murphy’s Law had conspired, among other things, to temporarily shut down the furnaces in the unit that processed metal-oxide-rich layers scraped from Mare Nubium into alloys and oxygen—officially the Automated Regolith Processor, Oxygen Extraction and Smelting—which put them behind schedule on pressurizing the habitats. They were also behind schedule because they were still finishing up the first setup team’s unfinished tasks. That was no surprise: all the corporate-built schedules were so ambitious that they weren’t just success-oriented, they assumed success. It produced a near-impossible workload and added to Van’s creeping sense of frustration. Nobody minded pulling extra duty, least of all Van, but it was easy to get discouraged when their progress still left so many things to do. And when he had to write reports about every little thing.

Van yawned. “So tell me some good news, Shay. How’re Oskar and Scooter doing?” Two days ago the pair had flown to Faustini Crater at the lunar south pole, where the first survey team had set up the Lunar Ice Collection and Extraction Operations Module: an automated processor that extracted ice microgram by microgram from dust collected from the crater floor, and compressed the ice into blocks for later recovery. There were no polar oases of ice like people back in the 20th century had hoped, and again the AC had not gotten the best of the available sources, but the surveys showed they would be able to process enough to keep the colony going. The LICEOM, pronounced “lyceum,” was powered by an Advanced Radioisotope Generator—officially Lunar Power Plant, Nuclear, number 2—installed on the crater floor in perpetual darkness. Since the Lunar Suborbital Vehicle—LSOV—wouldn’t always be available for ice runs, and everyone hoped the loads would mass more than its capacity anyway, Oskar and Scooter were surveying and blasting a route so teams could drive down into the crater to collect the ice.

“Oskar’s last message said he thinks it’ll take five or six days to do the main blasting. Then they should be able to grade and fuse a path at least partway up from the crater floor. He’s not sure they’ll get to the top, and they definitely won’t get started on the outer wall.”

Van nodded. “If there’s a way to make it happen, Scooter’ll find it. He’s the best. Hope he waves at the yokels on the Shackleton rim while he’s down there.

“On another subject, you gonna make us draw straws again to see who gets to go next time? I’m still happy to volunteer.”

“I’m sure you are,” Shay said. He checked on his food, stirred it around a little, and put it back in the oven. Van coughed; Shay was warming up the tuna-like casserole that Van always avoided. It smelled like tuna the way a dairy farm smells like milk.

Shay came back to the table and said, “What’s that about, anyway? You trying to score points with the bosses, always volunteering for things?”

Van wasn’t sure how to express his sense of urgency, the maddening desire to get each job done quickly and right. Sometimes his hands itched to be put to work, and he knew from past experience that when that happened he had to do something right or he might end up doing something wrong.

“As cute as I think you are, Shay, I’m really not trying to kiss up to you. I just get antsy sitting around for too long. I feel like I need to be doing something, so I may as well work. Never mind. Got any other news?”

“Heard that all is well on the Forty-Niner. They’re on track to rendezvous with Aten-Galliani in early December.”

Van nodded. Forty-Niner was the second of the Asteroid Consortium’s prospecting ships; the first, with the comfortably uncreative name Prospector, had already rendezvoused with Aten-Ichijouji and was on its way back to the Earth-Moon System. The ships were originally supposed to be named Prospector I and II, until elementary school students in San Francisco collected thousands of signatures on a petition asking the AC to name the second ship after those who went west during the Gold Rush. The asteroids’ double names at least made some kind of simplistic sense. They combined their type—Aten asteroids crossed the Earth’s orbit from time to time—and their discoverers.

Van had considered trying for the asteroid mission, but after taking over a day to get used to freefall on the way to the Moon he was just as glad to be on the ground support side of things for now. Plus, Prospector had been out almost eighteen months—a little too long to be cooped up with just three other people. Their first shipment of ore and ammonia, sent back on a different orbital track than either the ship or the asteroid itself, had been captured a month before.

“Prospector still due back next month, too?” Van asked. The ship was supposed to return just before the new year; the Aten-Ichijouji asteroid was supposed to be captured—or near enough—near L-4, the Earth-leading Lagrange point, five months later.

“Haven’t heard anything different.” Shay pushed aside his game, retrieved his meal, and sat back down. They ate in silence.

Van had just scraped the last of his soup from the bowl when the hatch opened and Henry Crafts came in. He was a compact, powerful fellow from Tullahoma, Tennessee. Like Van, Henry was another “grunt” on the lunar setup mission. Nominally, the five grunts—Van, Henry, Jovelyn Nguyen, Grace Teliopolous, and Scooter Mast—worked for the three bosses: Shay, Oskar, and Roy. Everyone deferred to Shay but he didn’t stand on ceremony; in practice, what hierarchy existed didn’t come into play very much except when Oskar was in charge of something. Of all the setup crew, though, Van got along with Henry the best: he didn’t take himself too seriously, the way some of the others did.

“Hey, Henry, Shay was just telling me the Forty-Niner’s flying true. Didn’t I hear from Grace that you were going into the mines once we’re all done?”

Henry sat down and looked skeptically at Shay’s meal. “Not if I can help it,” he said. “I like flying too much to become a mole. I’m hoping to run one of the ferries.”

“So you’re just going to sit on your hands for the time being? They won’t be making regular runs for two years or more.”

“No, it’ll be sooner than that,” Henry said. “If the government was running this show, maybe it would take so long. They could drag things out forever and just keep asking for more money. But the AC’s got to turn a profit soon or one of the other outfit’s going to raid them.”

Shay said, “You think one of the other Horsemen will be able to take Hansen down?”

Van took his bowl to the sink and wiped it clean. He wasn’t that interested in Morris Hansen’s wheelings and dealings, or in any of the other space entrepreneurs the media had dubbed the “Four Horsemen.” He knew all he needed to know: Hansen, who once quipped that “Anybody should be willing to risk a few billion if they stand to make a trillion,” was the driving force behind the Asteroid Consortium, the wide-reaching multinational that planned to exploit its two asteroids and was setting up the lunar colony as its mining camp. The other big players also reached across national borders and were headed by equally flamboyant people: Bhuresh Golgawethy of Extra-Solar; Ferdinand Garcia Vasquez Albierto of Low-Gee Processing, Ltd.; and Alistair MacInnis of Orbital Salvage & Recovery.

He interrupted Henry and Shay’s discussion of international—interplanetary?—high finance. “This is fascinating, guys, but I’m beat like a bad dog, and tomorrow’s only six hours away. Holler if you need me.”

The other two barely missed a beat as Van headed for his rack.