Chapter Twenty-seven

Faustini Crater

Friday, 11 January 2036

They drove as straight as they could toward Tycho, along one of the bright rays of ejecta that was visible from Earth. The trail before them had been blazed monthly since the first colonists landed, and with no wind or rain to erode it the track stood out clearly. Here and there previous crews had burned warnings—on rocks or on the trail itself, especially where they had fused patches of dust together—that mimicked earthside traffic signs. “Bridge Out” was a favorite, since no bridges had been built to straighten the path; the farther they went, the more often they were forced to creep around or through obstacles or ravines.

By Friday they were on the southwest side of Tycho and stopped at the Halfway House. The scavenging station was operating normally, the LPPN and ROPS producing power and oxygen within normal limits. While they hooked up the Turtle and replenished its oxygen supply, Stormie looked back toward Tycho. It would’ve been nice if they’d driven close enough to see the Surveyor-7 landing site, just north of the crater, but they couldn’t afford a detour of over 200 kilometers. To the south, the tracks led as far as she could see and continued on, past Maginus to Clavius and beyond. Stormie chuckled at the realization that she was standing between Tycho and Clavius. As prophetic as 2001: A Space Odyssey was, with its Clavius base and that monolith at Tycho, she didn’t remember Kubrick including anyone like her as part of the starring cast.

Topped off with oxygen, they continued south. On Saturday, the fourth day out from Mercator, Stormie was engrossed in calculating the projected respiratory totals for next month’s new colonists when the truck slowed and stopped. She looked at her watch; it was an hour before her sixth driving shift was supposed to start. Bruce was snoring in his corner of the commons, and Gabe had his nose in a book on his datapad, as usual. Stormie figured Capell was sick, so she started suiting up. As she was sealing up her suit, she realized how long it had been since she’d bathed. So much for Bruce’s detailing job; she was glad everyone’s noses were desensitized by now.

But the truck hadn’t stopped because Capell needed her to drive; he had stopped because the Turtle told him it had a problem with the drive circuits. And because she was the one suited up at the time, Stormie found herself outside checking out the situation.

The first things she noticed were the shadows. Her team had traveled far enough south that the Sun cast shadows toward the pole, though it had not reached its zenith. Nor was it close enough to lunar noon for the Moon to have entered the Earth’s magnetotail, but that couldn’t be helped; she would try to limit her time outside, where she was less protected from the solar wind.

She pulled one of the lamps from its charging socket and started her walkaround. Capell and Bruce had done all the troubleshooting they could from inside. The truck’s diagnostics were inconclusive, but they’d tracked the problem to one circuit feeding the body’s number two wheel: the front wheel on the right side. Stormie crawled under the truck and used the lamp to drive back the shadows. She looked at everything from different angles and reported back what she saw, which amounted to nothing wrong. When he was satisfied, Bruce talked her through unhooking the secondary power cable for that drive circuit. Stormie capped the cable and crawled out from under the Turtle. When she was clear, Capell applied power to number two through the redundant circuits. Stormie watched the wheel grab and try to move forward; it spun through half a rotation before Capell stopped it. He applied reverse power and the wheel complied. Stormie reported her visual confirmation, and the others verified they could feel the motion inside.

Stormie reconnected the secondary cable, then disengaged and capped the primary so they could test that circuit. Again the wheel grabbed and spun, clockwise and counter- from Stormie’s perspective.

“No alarm that time,” Bruce said. “Stormie, go ahead and hook that power cable back up. We’ll watch it, but we need to get going again.”

Stormie’s fingers had stiffened a bit, and it was harder to attach the cable than it had been to detach it, but in a few minutes she was tightening the collar—

—and the truck started moving with her still under it.

“Whoa, stop!” she said. She twisted around to keep out of the way of the spinning wheels. “I’m under here!” The truck rolled almost a meter before it stopped. She watched carefully to be sure it wasn’t moving any more.

Capell cursed over the radio link. “I got a green light and just reacted.”

“What?” Stormie asked. “How did you get a green light? I thought you disabled that circuit.”

“That’s my fault,” Capell said. “I reset the breaker at the wrong time. Are you okay?”

Yeah, no thanks to you. Stormie got her breathing back under control, and checked to make sure she hadn’t torn her suit on something. The pressure in her suit stayed steady, and she closed her eyes for a second to let the pressure inside her escape. Idiot could’ve killed me. Spend all my time keeping him and all of us alive, just to have him run me over with a truck. Stormie reached up to her helmet, and wished she could just rest her head in her hands. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m locking down the collar and coming out now.”

Bruce said, “Good, Stormie. I slapped Karl around a little, and I’ll look the other way if you want to punch his lights out.” Which she probably could: she was almost a head taller than Capell. Bruce continued, “Now, when you get out from under the truck, just climb up and strap in. I want us to drive a klick or so and see if we get any more alarms.”

She weighed the extra radiation exposure against getting back inside where she would encounter Capell. She decided a few extra rads wouldn’t hurt that much. “Roger,” she said.

The open beds on either side of the ARG were small, and crammed with gear; Stormie made herself somewhat comfortable atop a transit case. She found it almost pleasant riding in the bed of the truck. She at least had her choice of views; inside the Turtle’s shell, all they got were camera views, though the cab had a good view out the front and to either side. She looked back the way they had come and the shadows reached out toward her like the fingers of a great lunar goddess—damn it, she should remember who that was … Minerva? no—guarding the trail behind them.

Stormie used the trailer as a reference point to judge the distances and sizes of rocks and ridges, but that only worked within a narrow range. To the side, beyond a hundred meters it was much harder to estimate size accurately. A boulder that looked to be as big as a car, only a short distance away, could really be a kilometer away and turn out to be the size of a house. She wished her helmet had a laser rangefinder, like the new ones made for Barbara Richards’ crater development team.

They drove slowly and made some maneuvers where the landscape allowed. They sped up and slowed, went up a hill and down, and for a while Stormie actually closed her eyes and let the Turtle’s motion rock her. She breathed deep and tried to decompress. After about twenty minutes, they stopped.

Stormie unstrapped and climbed down. “How is it, Bruce?”

“We got the same alarm again,” he said, “but that wheel seems to be turning with all the others. Come on back inside.” She put the lantern back in its charger and cycled through the airlock. Once the pressure equalized, but before she moved into the common area, she did what she could in the tiny space to clean her suit; unfortunately, crawling in the dust under the Turtle’s belly had made decontamination a losing proposition.

All four of them crammed into the commons. Capell, thumbing through a checklist on his datapad, didn’t acknowledge her entrance. As Stormie pushed herself into one corner of the small volume, Bruce said, “Here’s how I see it. The electric transmissions are all working, else number two wouldn’t want to turn on any circuit. Plus, I checked the power flow on that test drive and they were all drawing within normal limits and feeding power back when we braked.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Stormie asked. “Is the wheel drawing more current on that one circuit than it should?”

Bruce shook his head. His blond hair settled back into place before he spoke again. “Not so it’s out of tolerance. It’s a problem with that particular circuit, no doubt, and it bugs me.

“So here it is. We’re less than a day and a half away from the ice plant. According to the decision matrix in the checklist, we continue on. That makes sense to me. Once we get the ice loading started, I’ll do what I can to troubleshoot, but we ought to be able to go the whole way even if we lose that one drive circuit completely. And that’s a lot better than driving four days back empty-handed.”

Bruce looked at each of them in turn. Gabe shrugged. Capell gave a thumbs-up. Stormie said, “We should have enough air to breathe, so let’s go.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “Don’t push too hard and we’ll get there okay.” He looked at his watch, and continued, “We’ll keep to the regular rotation and stay on the original timing. Stormie, you’re up.”

Of course I am, that’s why I didn’t take off my suit. Stormie sighed, put her helmet back on, and went forward to the cab. She resisted the urge to punch Capell as she slid by.

* * *

Sunday, 13 January 2036

Frank had endured much worse, but his previous experience did not make this any more pleasant.

Another spasm of nausea hit him as he put away his datapad. At least it was only nausea now; at first, it had brought back the fire—the latent manifestation of the picophage blaze that he had not experienced in many glorious weeks—and he had struggled just to stay conscious.

He had been even more circumspect than usual in his last message to Stormie. Primarily because he did not want her to worry too much, but also because she would remember his earlier joke about Legionnaires’ disease and chide him about his wishes. “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” she would say. He had not, in fact, wished for this, but making that point would not matter.

In that way, Stormie and his mother were quite alike, though Stormie would neither acknowledge nor appreciate it. His mother would also tell him he needed to be more careful about words he said, but for a different reason: she had for many years followed the pseudo-magical “name it and claim it” evangelical fringe, and had often made the point that it worked both ways. Her intention was to name and claim things that were going to do her good, in the hope that by some miracle she would experience the good; at the same time, she assiduously avoided even naming things that might bode ill, out of fear that she would experience the ill. That always seemed too much like hocus-pocus for Frank, and he had no concern that his careless speech had somehow wrought this illness.

His father never agreed with or supported his mother’s insistence on naming and claiming; he firmly believed that the answer to prayer was sometimes no, and that the ways of God were, in the end, unfathomable. His father tolerated her worldview, though, and once when he had rolled his eyes at one of her claims, Frank had asked him why. His father said it was a small thing to allow, and family harmony was much more important than any small things; that had been an important lesson in Frank’s life, and one he tried to apply in his own marriage.

Frank was drawn from memory and reverie when Barbara Richards knelt next to his head and put an infrared probe in his ear to register his temperature. “Are you doing any better?” she asked.

Frank swallowed the trace of saliva he had in his mouth, and said, “Not appreciably.”

“Well, it’s only been about twenty-four hours yet, so I guess it’s got a little longer course to run.”

“How many of us are sick?”

“Twenty-eight, including five transients.”

“So,” he said, trying to think, “twenty-three out of thirty-six permanent party and five out of eight miners.” The proportions seemed about the same, but his brain was fuzzy and would not do the math.

“Actually it’s twenty-three out of thirty-two,” Barbara said, “since we don’t have any report that Bruce and Stormie and the others have gotten sick. So whatever it is, and Yvette is leaning toward some kind of contamination in the food supply, it hit after they were gone.”

Frank resolved that he would give Stormie the details in his next message to her, even though Gary may have already briefed Bruce on the situation. If it was a food issue, her team would have to be careful since they were eating food they took from the colony.

Frank hoped it was not a food issue, for Stormie’s sake; but for the sake of their business, he hoped it was.

He needed to get up and get some samples taken and analyzed to rule out the water supply as a potential cause. He pulled his legs up under him and tried to kneel, but the nausea and pain came again, hard and fast, and he found himself lying on his side with his knees drawn against his chest. Barbara’s hand rested on his shoulder: it was heavy and hot and it hurt.

“I don’t know where you think you’re going,” she said. “You just need to stay here and take it easy until we get all this figured out. I’ve got to check on some other people now, but I’ll be back—and when I come back, I want to see you lying here quietly, resting, just like everybody else.”

Frank nodded, but did not speak. As she walked away, he unfolded himself like a creaky, rusty lawn chair.

He pulled his datapad close. As soon as he could get up, he needed to be ready to act fast—and not just to take samples to help isolate the cause. He was losing ground every hour on routine maintenance that had to be done. In order to be effective, he needed to make a plan. He called up the schematics of the water and air systems on his datapad, and started writing a message to Yvette to ask for reports on where and when everyone started getting sick.

His stomach contracted around nothing, as if his bowels had activated a vacuum pump in his gut. Tears came to his eyes.

Lord, please don’t let Stormie get this.

* * *

Monday, 14 January 2036

The craters they passed started to run together in Stormie’s head: Gruemberger, Moretus, Short, Newton, and a hundred others unnamed until they finally drove between Malapert and Scott. They were running behind schedule now, and started pulling extra driving shifts. Stormie started her eighth rotation six days into the trip, just to the southeast of Malapert Crater. The Malapert Mountain ridge was distinct in the sunlight, the long shadow behind it dark as lunar night.

This far south, the Sun lit only the peaks of the craters. The solar cells only caught the Sun when the Turtle crested a hill, so almost all lights and nonessential equipment inside were turned off to conserve power. But the shadows below the peaks were so deep that the big lights on the truck were kept burning all the time. Stormie followed the well-worn track, angling a little away from Amundsen Crater as they approached the pole.

She found it hard to concentrate whenever her imagination took her back to the colony and the misery evident in Frank’s last couple of messages. This was not the time to lose her focus, though: she had to go forward and complete this task, in order to get back to help him.

Stormie got them within one diameter of Faustini Crater—about thirty kilometers away—by the time her shift ended. She gratefully turned the driving over to Gabe. She had barely finished her supper of crackers and the cold remains of what had been a nice vegetable soufflé when Gabe reported contact with the LICEOM’s radio beacon. Bruce told him to start running the arrival checklist. When Stormie started getting into her suit, Bruce told her to wait—it would be a while yet.

Gabe stopped the truck at the crest of Faustini Crater. The Sun lit the rim through most of the lunar day, so that by parking there to run the procedure they put a little charge back into the batteries, but the crater interior, thirty-five kilometers across, was completely shadowed. The same was true for the other craters at the Moon’s pole.

Faustini was near but not at the pole; nineteen-kilometer-wide Shackleton Crater had that distinction. The U.N. had allocated the relatively young Shackleton as a science outpost, even though it was unlikely to have accumulated much in the way of cometary ice, but the enthusiasm of the late ’20s had waned and only a five-member international team was left in the outpost NASA and ESA had set up. Shoemaker Crater, right next to Faustini, had once been considered a good candidate for resupply, with its fifty-kilometer mouth wide open to the sky; the Lunar Prospector spacecraft had crashed into it in 1999 with Gene Shoemaker’s ashes on board, and by the early 2000s astronomers from Cornell along with subsequent orbital missions had ruled it out as a supply point. Faustini itself did not have huge deposits of ice, or the Consortium would not have been able to afford the rights to it, but it had enough to last for a while.

“Got confirmation yet on the power beams, Gabe?” Bruce asked.

“Not yet. All the working scavengers are accounted for and moving to safe locations. The station estimates fifteen more minutes until the beams are off.”

Since the crater floor stayed perpetually dark, the power system for the scavengers was based on solar collectors on Faustini’s rim. The collectors tracked the Sun as it traversed around the pole; they had the Sun in view ninety percent of the time. The energy produced was converted to microwaves and beamed to the scavengers as they moved about on the crater floor, but the beams had to be shut down before the team was allowed to drive the truck into the crater.

“Okay, Bruce, we just got the green light.”

“Roger that, Gabe. You feel comfortable about taking us down?”

“Sure, as long as the route is marked.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s clear, especially the places we had to blast out to make the path. Once you’re at the bottom, just follow the arrows and keep the centerline on the stripe. Pretend you’re driving one of the big floats in the Rose Parade. The line will take you around to the loading area. You won’t even have to back up the trailer.”

It took over an hour to get down the hill and into position; the LICEOM was a third of the way into the center of the crater. By the time they stopped at the loading zone, Stormie and the others were suited. They piled out of the airlock into the blackest darkness Stormie had ever seen. Even the partial Earth was hidden by the crater wall, and the only light came from the Turtle’s headlights. Outside the glare of the lights, with her internal displays dimmed, the stars seemed tiny, and distant, and cold.

Once they unhooked the trailer, Bruce directed Gabe to pull the truck over closer to the ice plant itself, where he could hook up work lights to ground power. Like the ROPS oxygen plant at the Halfway House, the LICEOM was powered by its own ARG, much bigger than the Turtle’s. Only the scavengers ran off beamed solar power; the ice plant required so much power that it couldn’t spare any to run the robots, but it wouldn’t be operating at full capacity while they were there.

“Okay, everybody, back in the truck,” Bruce said. “Mandatory rest period. We’re behind schedule, but we can afford to take a couple hours, just not the full four. Then we need to get started.”

* * *

The first hour after their rest interval, they unloaded and checked out the scavenger robot they’d brought from Mercator. They put it through a last function check, then sent it to the holding area until the power beams were turned back on.

Once that was done, they started collecting the ice.

The ice plant processed the soil the scavengers collected into blocks about forty centimeters on a side. They were grimy—the plant stripped off most but not all the lunar dust as it melted, formed, and refroze the water—but they were ice.

Stormie chuckled a little at the uniform blocks the plant produced. The ice harvesting wasn’t quite as simple as scratching the soil and digging up cubes, but the scavenger-bot-and-ice-plant setup made it seem almost that easy. Still, the supply was limited both in absolute terms and in terms of extraction efficiency; they needed to make the most of everything they had. With the asteroid mining operation in full swing and finally making money, they might be able to build more scavengers and increase the ice production within the next year, but unless the colony became far more efficient it would run out of water before then.

For now she, Capell, and Gabe sweated and grunted and moved the ice block by block into place on the trailer. They slid the blocks down an adjustable ramp from the holding area, then maneuvered them into place using old-fashioned ice tongs; it was an overprecaution, since everything stayed super-cold in the lunar night, but having a block of ice freeze to a glove or part of a suit would cause problems.

Stormie had already lost count of how many blocks they had moved when Capell radioed, “Hey, Bruce, how long until we get a tanker trailer and just haul back liquid water instead of ice?”

Bruce replied from over by the Turtle. “Don’t think I’ve seen any kind of timeline for that. Have to install tankage and plumbing here, first. A tank to fit on the trailer wouldn’t be too hard, though it would have to be baffled for slosh … a lot of momentum in moving liquid. And the CG would be higher, that might be a problem.”

Stormie sipped some of her suit water and nodded, thinking of some of the turns she had made during the drive south. A high center of gravity might make some maneuvers pretty precarious, and maybe even require a new route.

She was about to comment when Gabe said, “Yeah, hate to have a rollover out here. No way to call triple-A, that’s for sure.”

Shifting the ice blocks around was fairly easy—owing to lunar gravity, each block could be carried by one person—but their mass still gave them considerable momentum. They took their time, to avoid any accidents: about ten minutes moving and placing each block. They worked in pairs while the third rested; nominally, they got four hours’ rest for each eight hours’ work. They could have worked in two pairs, except that Bruce was busy examining the Turtle. He slept little and cursed a lot.

Stormie was exhausted by the tedium as much as the exertion and lack of sleep. She could tell how tired she was every time she took a break to recharge her suit’s oxygen supply: she dozed on her feet until the chime rang in her helmet. So when Gabe radioed, “That’s the last one,” close to the end of her third eight-hour shift, she almost shouted in relief.

Until she realized the trailer was only two-thirds full.

She was about to ask when Bruce did. “What do you mean, that’s the last one?” He was bounding over to the loading area, hopping in big Apollo strides.

Gabe said, “I mean, that’s the last one.” Stormie could almost hear a shrug in his tone of voice. “I don’t see any more in the hold.”

Bruce skidded to a stop with a practiced turn. “That can’t be right,” he said. “You’ve only been loading for what, thirty hours or so? How many blocks have you loaded?”

Stormie had lost count. Gabe said, “That last one should be 212.”

Bruce swore. “Supposed to be more like 240 or 250. Last October we only got 235, but 212 is down to about what the setup teams got on the first couple of runs, before I even got here.”

Stormie asked, “Is the plant working right?”

“Seems to be,” Bruce said. “It’s probably that bad ’bot, plus there’s always some variation in the output. The ’bots come back with more dirt than ice sometimes. They’re smart little things, and they have detectors on them, but they don’t each carry a mass spec.”

Gabe said, “Maybe this crater is all fished out.”

Static buzzed in Stormie’s ear for a few seconds. Her mouth suddenly very dry, she said, “Don’t even think that.”

Bruce cut in. “No, Gabe, even though there’s not as much ice as we’d like in this crater, it’s still close to two hundred square kilometers. It’ll be a while before we scavenge the whole thing.

“But if that’s all for this trip, then that’s all—can’t make ice out of vacuum. At least this should put us back close to our original schedule. The bad thing is, we get paid by the ton and we’re not bringing back the usual tonnage.” He paused, then said, “Go ahead and get that block in place, then start putting up the frame. I’ll be back in a few minutes and we’ll get this thing tarped.”

Stormie and Gabe stowed the ice ramp before they put the poles in place for the frame around the ice blocks. Bruce came back and helped install the aluminized Mylar tarp over the frame. They ensured that no part of the frame or tarp touched any of the blocks. The ice already sat on insulation that blocked heat from the trailer bed; by keeping the ice in shadow and limiting the heat conducted into it, the blocks would mostly stay frozen while they drove back to the colony.

As they were finishing up, Capell came out of the Turtle to start his shift. He wasn’t happy when they told him what had happened, but there was nothing he could do.

They replenished their oxygen supply from tanks at the ice plant, and discussed whether to load some of the ingots of metal the oxygen plant left behind from breaking down the regolith. Bruce ultimately vetoed the idea in favor of picking up the wayward scavenger robot, the location of which they determined from the LICEOM telemetry records.

They rested for a few hours and started back early Wednesday morning almost exactly a week after they left. Bruce drove the Turtle to the top of the crater and ran the checklist to switch the power beams back on, then he consulted his trip plan and decided that the regular rotation would continue, with Stormie in the driver’s seat for the first shift back. Gabe spoke up and pointed out that he and Stormie had driven an extra shift each on the way out, but Bruce stuck with his decision. Stormie was too tired to argue; she just decided to log the extra hours and bill the Consortium later.