Mary dropped her work on the radio and joined Kate at the oxygenator outport.
“We’d better not get too comfortable here, Mares,” she said. “I forget this machinery hasn’t been used in a while.”
Mary leaned on her elbows in front of the main viewer, studying the array of green lights and flickering measurements. “But we’re okay, aren’t we?”
“For now, yeah, but I don’t think we can keep filling those air tanks. It’s putting that much more strain on the system.”
Half a dozen filled canisters lay in a row on the dusty floor like bodies in a makeshift morgue, holding 15 to 20 minutes of oxygen each. Barely enough time to do anything but wait.
“We’ve gotta get that radio working and get the hell out of here.”
Katie
They rarely had permission to leave the Training Center campus unescorted, but Katie hacked into the panopticon security program and dropped in a few lines of creeper code, leaving the impression with their overseers that all was normal.
She and Martin squeezed under a low point in the wire fence by the kitchen prep building and flitted off into the woods. Twenty minutes later, they sat across from each other at a food joint, stuffing burgers down their throats.
“Happy birthday, Katie. Thirteen already, hm?”
She wiped her mouth and shrugged. They finished their meals in silence, ignoring the stares and odd smiles of the normies around them.
“C’mon, we’d better get outta here.”
She pushed her plate aside and stood up, then waited for Martin to finish his drink and join her. He’d grown taller these last few months, but hadn’t lost that frail appearance, or the distance in his eyes. Katie noticed a bearded man sitting on a stool at the counter, staring at him and grinning. He winked as the two darted outside.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“That slob? Never mind, I’ve seen that look before. Most normies ignore us Spacers, but some of them are weird. My trainer said they’re curious about us because, well, we have no real parts, no real sexuality.”
Katie sniffed. “That is neural.”
“Yeah, so like no puberty, no real gender I suppose. Some freaks are attracted to that.”
They strolled down a side road toward the park, sticking to the shadows, caught up in their own thoughts. Katie had had the dreams, strange ones where sometimes she was a boy and sometimes a girl. Since she’d cut her hair a year ago to prevent it from interfering with her space work, she looked more like some boys she remembered from the higher grades at her old school. Bony, and angular. Nondescript.
“Katie?”
“Hm?”
“What are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Boy or girl, you know. Are you a boy or a girl?”
Katie stood like a statue under a large maple and faced him. Wind rustled through the leaves and swirled around them, tousling his beautiful hair. She looked up into his eyes. They were puffy and red.
“I guess I’m still a girl, mostly. Why?”
He gulped and inhaled. “I think I might be too.”
They continued wandering through the park. She held his hand for a while as they shuffled back toward campus. No other words passed between them.
The next morning, Martin wasn’t at breakfast. Katie overheard a group of trainers say when they cut him down from the window, one of his eyes had popped out.
Kate
For several minutes, Kate scanned the environmental parameters on the console’s main screen, looking for any kind of trend, any evidence of a pattern. Finding coherent signs or signals in apparently random data was her forte. In fact, it was her filter designed around pattern recognition that allowed Jim to isolate those first transmissions from Ross 128.
She regretted ever helping him out. That small decision to use Spacer technology, contravening the agreement she signed when they finally turfed her out, took her down the path to this point right here, right now: marooned on Luna with little hope of surviving. Not that she honestly cared about her own life much anymore, but to think Mary could die under her watch filled her with heavy guilt and remorse, reminding her of the girl-boy Martin.
“What’s on your mind, Kate?”
“Hm? Oh, yeah . . .” She drew a deep breath and refocused on the display. “I’m looking for possible patterns in the data here. Actually, it’s the deviations I’m really interested in.”
“Anything out of the ordinary?” Mary had returned to work on the radio and amplifier, matching cables and connectors, and removing all useless parts from the workspace.
“No, at least nothing I can see. Perhaps it was one of those hiccups in the machinery.” The oxygenator had been running quietly since the odd thumping sound a few minutes ago. “On the other hand, I don’t want to hang around here any longer than we absolutely must. The place is giving me the creeps.”
Mary smiled and said, “I know what you mean. Walking through the dark sleeping quarters when we first arrived here weirded me out. Like, not that long ago men and women lived and worked at this mine site, hm?”
“A few years now, I suppose. Anyway, it all looks good again here.” She adjusted the external heat control on her envirosuit. “How much time before we can transmit?”
“Not long. I have to make sure the connections fit tightly, then mount the antenna on the comms mast.”
“And your elbow? Still good?”
Mary flexed it back and forth, rotating her shoulder. “Yeah, just really stiff. I’m keeping the medi-patch on.”
Kate marveled at the speed of her recovery. There was a time when she could heal that quickly too, in the early Spacer days. Not so much anymore. The daily anti-rad pills she took had the unfortunate side-effect of thinning her marrow blood, making her bones significantly more brittle than when she was Mary’s age. Having been off them now for two days—maybe longer—the withdrawal symptoms had flared up, especially the pain that kept chewing away at her gut. Like a smoldering fire finding oxygen, and coming back to life.
She considered Mary again, enlivened by this experience, happily working on the radio project. The fear existed, she’d seen it, but Mary could somehow keep it compartmentalized, distancing it from the work she undertook. Some of her Spacer colleagues had done that—some still did—and, curious, Kate wanted to understand. Was this ability born to them or learned? If the latter, then how could she learn it, too? She asked her about it.
Mary glanced up from her equipment and answered, “To be honest, I don’t even think about being afraid. I mean, sure, I don’t want to die up here and I miss my dad a ton, but that doesn’t stop me from doing things.” She snapped the heat sink back on the amplifier. “If I dwell too much about the danger we’re in, I suppose I’d become paralyzed with fear of dying.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“So, you’re able to consciously block out the fear? Is that it?”
“I don’t know, I just don’t see the point of worrying about things that haven’t happened yet.” She paused. “Why all these questions?”
Kate hopped on the console and swung her legs over the edge. She could watch Mary working and keep an eye of the main monitor. “I’m curious. I mean, overcoming fear is a major accomplishment—something I haven’t been able to do all that successfully. Yet, here you are, 17 years old, talking and behaving like some ancient, wise mystic.”
Mary’s laughter filled the control room. She rubbed her fingers, and shook her head. “I read a lot of books. You know that. I must have picked it up somewhere along the way, ‘cause I never really think about.”
“Most of us have to make conscious decisions to be brave.”
Mary threw the remaining unused radio gear into the storage box and shoved it aside. In front of her on the console lay the transceiver, the small amplifier, the Yagi antenna, and a random collection of patch cables. She looked over at Kate. “So, remember the farty old existentialists had a saying about consciousness and finding their own meaning
?”
“Sure. ‘I think therefore I am’. Descartes, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, he proved his existence only because he could think. But you want to know something?”
“What?”
“He and the others got it wrong.”
“What do you mean, Mares?”
“All the ancient texts show this.” She stood up and eyed Kate with a curious, almost whimsical smile. “For me, it’s the other way around.”
Ten minutes later, Kate’s scooter hovered in front of the telescopic comms tower. As she’d done before with the emergency beacon, she lifted the LunaScoota up, and secured the antenna at the highest point possible, close to the tip of the 10 meter mast. Earth floated over the horizon and she pointed the beam toward it. Then, she ran the coaxial feedline down the tower, and along the dusty compound until she came to the input junction connectors on the far side of the habitat. She dismounted and took several more minutes to secure the uncooperative outer feedline connection before she contacted Mary.
“All set?”
“Stand by. Let me check it.”
As Mary verified the connection inside the main control room, Kate again experienced that anxiety of being watched. She stole cursory glances around the habitat, looking for anything different, any deviation from what she expected.
What could possibly make her so paranoid?
They were the only souls on the surface of Luna, except for whoever or whatever was skulking about in an alien spacecraft half-buried in the dust on the eastern limb. Still, the hairs on the back of her neck fluttered. She turned away from the habitat, gazing past the parked scooter toward the horizon. There was nothing there. No bogey-man, no bug-eyed monster, no strange blue light hovering overhead. Only the cold, grey monotonous landscape of this planetary abortion against the stark backdrop of endless space.
“It all checks out, Kate. We’re in business.”
“We can test the radio?”
“Roger.”
“I’ll double-check the power from the other battery and be right in.”
Kate floated around to the main access hatchway, dismounted, and brushed new dust away from the secondary scooter’s battery. She confirmed power levels remained solid, and the portable solar array they’d set up functioned well, even if it couldn’t keep up entirely with the drain on the battery’s reserves. Hopefully, they wouldn’t need it much longer.
“Systems are a go out here, Mares,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
Kate
The frequency readout from the low-power transceiver glowed orange in the dim light of the control room. Mary sat cross-legged beside it on the console and tuned the receiver to 435.800 MHz in the UHF band. Static from the small internal speaker crackled against the backdrop of the oxygenator pumping fresh air into the habitat.
“Hear anything?”
She turned a couple knobs and listened intently. “Nothing. I wonder if the receiver’s sensitive enough to pick up any signals.” She adjusted the VFO to investigate other frequencies in the band, with no change in the low-level static. “You’re sure the antenna’s pointing to Earth?”
Kate placed her helmet on the console. “Yes, as far as I can tell from eyeballing it.”
Mary returned the VFO to 430.800 MHz and leaned back.
“Anything special about that frequency?”
She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands, exhaled, and said, “Dad used to hang out on it when he listened to his radio astronomy cronies around town. I don’t know if there’s something unique about it or not, but it’s familiar.”
Both remained silent for a moment. Kate thought she heard a voice in the muddy static, but more than likely fatigue played tricks on her.
“You’re sure the antenna is—”
“Mares, I’m sure.”
Mary flashed a look she hadn’t seen before, a sweep of frustration and defiance. The circles under her eyes grew darker and for a moment, she’d aged ten years in a matter of minutes. Her face also had a familiarity to it. She’d seen it in herself and others during those brutal all-night training sessions the Spacer overseers put them through. Personalities changed in seconds. One eleven-year-old even sliced her wrists with a utility knife outside Kate’s dorm. Made a hell of a mess.
“Come on, let’s check the connections, okay?”
Mary didn’t move.
“Now!” She preferred not to use that tone of voice but knew from experience that over-tired soldiers and Spacers responded best to direct, firm commands, and this was no time for either of them to vacillate.
“Sure, okay.”
“Let’s start with the feedline coming in.” They bounded over to the large input junction and followed the cable to the connector. Kate unscrewed it a half-turn, inspected the pins for dust or damage, and handed it to Mary who also checked it. Then she reinserted the connector to the junction box and secured it with another twist.
“We’ll check everything in here before I go back out.”
Next, they traced the feedline up to the antenna input connector on the transceiver. Mary unscrewed it, and they both inspected the holes and pins before she put it back. Still no change in the audio; it remained full of static. Meanwhile, the activity seemed to help Mary regain her composure.
“It’s more than odd, Kate, that plugging and unplugging the antenna makes no difference to the audio. Like, we should hear something, even static crashes from solar flares. But we’re not.” She closed her eyes, head down. “I wonder if I cut the elements wrong.”
“Or there’s a problem with the connection at the antenna itself?”
“I can go check,” she said, reaching to pick up her helmet.
Kate shook her head. “I’d rather have you stay here. You know what you’re looking for and how to operate that equipment, so I’ll go.”
She fastened her gloves and secured her helmet seal, then vanished through the airlock. She radioed, “I’ll confirm the connection point on the outside of the junction box first. If there’s any change, tell me.”
“Roger.”
Kate maneuvered the scooter to the back of the habitat where the junction was located. She unplugged the feedline and inspected it. Some dust infiltrated around the pins, but nothing significant, so she plugged it back in. “Any change?”
“Negative.”
“Okay, I’m off to the antenna.”
The scooter hovered around the top of the comms tower. Kate floated to the reflector side of the Yagi and confirmed visually that it pointed toward Earth. She pulled on the mounting clamp and noted it was solid; it appeared to be fully secure. Finally, she removed the feedline connector from the antenna itself. That’s when she noticed one of the coupling pins had bent over.
That little bastard.
She continued hovering in place at the top of the tower and balanced herself on the machine to repair the connector. She had a pair of pliers on her utility belt and, although not quite the right tool for the job, she bent the pin to its original position. After manipulating the connector back and forth in its socket, the pins finally fell into their respective holes, and she jammed the feedline in and screwed it securely.
“Kate, it’s working!”
“Great. I’m heading in.”
The radio sang with activity. Numerous signals filled the control room, some weak, others strong, from operators on the near side of Earth.
“Jesus, Mares, you did it.” A rush of tears welled up. Mary jumped up and down.
“I need to test that amplifier first, then we can break in on a conversation.” She gazed at Kate with those large, blue eyes. “We’re almost there.”
The power booster Mary dissected earlier sat in line between the transmitter output and the antenna. She flipped the toggle switch on its facing and the unit’s light glowed.
“At least we know it’s operational.”
Kate stood behind her, holding her helmet. “So, if it doesn’t work, we’re stuck with low power, right?”
>
“Correct.”
“Even that might work, given all the active stations.”
Mary tuned to an open frequency and picked up the microphone. “I’m going to key the mic first to test it. The output will show on this meter.” She pointed to a measuring device the size of an indie-comm that also patched into the radio.
“Got it. Let’s give it a shot.”
She flashed Kate a thumbs up, held the microphone in both hands, and closed her eyes and squeezed the push-to-talk button.
The screech coming out of the radio’s speaker pierced the air, causing Mary to throw the mic down as if it bit her. The odious smell of burned circuits and plastic filled the room, and still the radio blared like an urgent klaxon.
“Mary, what’s going on!”
“I—I don’t know. That amplifier . . . the voltage is cascading!”
Kate hopped to the main screen. The environmental parameters all shone orange and red. The power level indicator measuring output from the scooter battery had dipped to extreme lows. Control room lights flickered out one by one. Worse, the rhythmic thrum of the oxygenator had morphed into an ever-increasing pounding like a machine gun spitting out bullets.
Kate reacted quickly. “Pull the plug on that thing! Now!”
Mary yanked the power supply leads from the radio, killing the screeching noise. A puff of smoke erupted from the unit, and its operating lights faded to black. The oxygenator, however, continued hammering away, overloaded with surging current, until finally, it coughed and sputtered, and with an ear-splitting metallic bang, the machine stopped.
No sound emanated from the control room, now completely bathed in darkness. For a brief, suspended moment, Kate dared not breathe. She couldn’t see Mary in the black shadows, but her short panicked breaths told her she was there. As the echo of that shattering screech faded, she picked up another sound, a faint one that sent a shiver of terror down her spine.
Echoes In The Grey Page 20
