Free Stories 2014

by Baen Books

  "Randy?" Bertelli said. "Status?"

  Silence.

  Schröedinger was vast. Now he was going to be in trouble for straying too far. He was a hundred and eighty meters from the ridge.

  Four minutes walk.

  "Randy? Come in."

  Bertelli far preferred the science secondment over his old job. But the suits were flimsier. You couldn't afford to fall down. Not at a full run.

  He'd lived at the moon's south pole for three years. Ice mining.

  That was where he'd picked up bad habits.

  Running his suit empty. Pushing tools beyond their rating. Running across the mare or up crater walls.

  Valerie was glad he wasn't doing that anymore.

  He called for Johnston again.

  Still no response.

  Johnston wasn't where he was supposed to be. Bertelli should be able to see him from here.

  "Orion?" he said. Suze Baldwin, up in the module should have been monitoring all their comms. "Come in Suze."

  Ahead Bertelli saw a smooth area. He jumped across. Another bad habit.

  Clearing fifteen meters he stumbled when he landed. He kept his legs going.

  "Copy you," Suze said.

  "Randy's gone silent."

  "I heard him yell. I was pushing cycles on the scrubber."

  The Orion capsule had been running on a gammy CO2 system since they'd broken Earth orbit. That was the trouble with old technology.

  NASA really needed to retire the Orion and figure out the next thing.

  "Can you spot him?"

  "I'm just over the rim. I'll run the scopes."

  "Just pull the video."

  "His feed's offline."

  Bertelli kept running. The capsule was in a high elliptical orbit. It ran out long and slow over Schröedinger so they had maximum contact time.

  When she whipped around the other side--facing Earth--she was so low she practically stirred up dust. If there'd been an atmosphere.

  Suze joked that on pericynthion she had to aim between the mountains.

  "Where are you?" she said.

  "I'm getting there." His knee twinged. He'd rubbed in liniment before they'd come out. Randy had complained about the stink. Surety was a pretty confined space.

  Suze swore. "Are you off-table again?"

  "I saw some likely rocks."

  "And this is the kind of thing that happens when you do that."

  "It would have happened no matter where I was."

  Randy was on a different grid. They wouldn't have been near each other even if Bertelli had stayed on the grid.

  Still, Randy Johnston did some stuff on his own. Liked to think he was the one in charge. The one who knew everything.

  On the flight up, Bertelli had woken to find Randy running fuel system checks. Bertelli's responsibility. Another time Randy had checked and corrected Suze's flight vectors. Without asking.

  No, Bertelli didn't feel bad for stretching out what he got up to.

  "I am never flying with you again," Suze said.

  Bertelli came up over the ridge. He saw the landing site and realized no one was ever flying with him again.

  The Surety pointed at the wrong part of the sky.

  One of her three legs had failed. She was leaning at a twenty degree angle. Maybe twenty-five.

  Very bad.

  Bertelli started down the slope. He called Suze again. Gave her the news.

  "The leg failed?"

  "Are you getting my video?"

  "Gimmee a second."

  As he drew in he could see the leg hadn't failed completely.

  The grid work had collapsed in on itself. Part of the lower section had jammed into the upper frame.

  It looked like it was barely holding.

  "That's bad," Suze said.

  Understatement, Bertelli thought.

  The Surety was stuck.

  Her maximum take-off angle was a shade over nine degrees. Not much wiggle room.

  And as he closed the distance he could see that it was even greater than twenty-five.

  Running in he passed the broken rover. The new one. A real example of why not to go with the lowest bidder.

  On the first day they'd driven it a half-mile before one of the wheels had frozen. Bertelli had tried going back and forth to dislodge it. He succeeded only in digging a shallow trench.

  "Reminds me of that Mars rover," Johnston had said. "Spirit. That little guy still did a lot of good science."

  "Well, we're not doing any good science with this piece of-"

  "Sure we can. Let me debug the system."

  "Great. You debug." Bertelli had clambered out. "I'm hitting it with a hammer."

  Johnston hadn't replied.

  The hammer hadn't worked. Neither had the debugging. Now the rover was just another piece of abandoned hardware stuck on the lunar surface.

  A three hundred million dollar piece of junk.

  "Gotta call Houston," Suze said.

  "Make it quick," he said. "Then start running scenarios."

  "What do you mean 'scenarios'?"

  "I mean figuring out how to get us out of here."

  He knew it was out of reach.

  The moon was developing fast. There were plenty of people working up here now. But they were all an awful long way off.

  With a surface area more than four times that of the continental United States there was a lot of ground to cover.

  There were probably two hundred people up here. Half of them were on the near side--facing Earth. And most of the rest were at the poles.

  Commercial mining.

  Exactly what he'd been doing.

  That was supposed to be the high-risk stuff. Eighteen lunar fatalities in thirty years of continuous occupation.

  Seventeen of those in the mines.

  The other had been an ESA suicide. Afterwards they'd all looked at her psych profile and scratched their heads.

  The moon was unpredictable.

  Bertelli had pulled two of the miners out himself. A burst hydraulic line had flicked a stay cable like a whip.

  One man had been almost cut in half. The other had gotten just a cracked helmet.

  And a crack was all it took up here.

  That was when he'd given mining away. But he couldn't give up the moon.

  More than once there had been talk of linking up all the various commercial and government installations in a kind of mutual rescue web. Nothing ever came of it.

  It always came back to money. The mines had plenty, but siphoned it all back to Earth. The science installations had none.

  "Colin? Are you still there?"

  "Yes. I mean figure out who's closest to us. Has anyone got a working rover? Or maybe a lander? See if there's anyone about to land and can divert to our location."

  "That's going to take a while."

  "Then get to it."

  "Copy that."

  The Surety was less than fifty meters away. With every step he took the damage seemed worse. The lower tips of the landing nacelles had touched the dusty regolith. Cables connecting the ship to solar gatherers had ripped out.

  He still couldn't raise Johnston.

  "Suze? Any luck?"

  "Houston's sending us alternates."

  Protocols, he thought. "Nothing from your end."

  "I'm waking people up. Working through the list. Sirius haven't got anything ready to fly."

  "Too far away anyway."

  "Likewise ModCon and ESA. The Virgin Hotel's got gear, but they're plum in the middle of nearside."

  "What about something in orbit?" Bertelli stopped and looked over the Surety's exterior.

  Parts of the outer skin had buckled. Right around the leg frame. It was just the landing base--the part that got abandoned--but it was still concerning.

  Surety was basically just an over-scaled Apollo LEM. A crew module and a disposable rocket base with legs, just twice the size.

  The base became the upper module's launch platform for dep
arture.

  Assuming the base stayed level.

  He walked around and couldn't see any sign of why this had happened. Except for the leg, everything seemed nominal.

  The suit air was getting hot. He could hear the dim whine of the regulators trying to keep up with his exertion.

  Completely different to a mining suit. With some of those you had to keep moving or freeze to death. The moon was cold, but mining ice at the poles made Antarctica seem balmy.

  "Sorry Colin," Suze said. "There are five vessels in orbit. None of them has landing capacity."

  "Okay. I'm going to have to climb on board and see what's up with Randy."

  The most recent footsteps led right to the access ladder. Randy had gone back?

  The internal comms might have broken down when the ship went over. Maybe he'd just stumbled and busted his radio.

  There were redundancies though.

  Bertelli didn't like to think of any reasons why Randy didn't use the alternatives.

  "Are you sure you want to do that?" Suze said.

  "Got to find him."

  "What if it tips right over? With you on it."

  "Risk I've got to take." He started doing the sums in his head. If they had to leave, there was spare oxygen on board. They could refill their tanks.

  Once.

  The supply was built into the Surety. If he could bring that with him he could just about walk to a rendezvous point.

  On a single tank his range was no more than fifteen kilometers. Maybe twenty.

  Assuming he wouldn't be walking back.

  The capsule itself was very low volume. Cramped. Like the Orion, it didn't have an airlock.

  They'd taken two excursions so far. It was rated for fifteen swap-outs. But if they stayed in there they had a couple of weeks of breathable air. Without counting the scrubbers.

  It would be stinking inside by then.

  Still, technically they could wait it out.

  Bertelli put his hand on the ladder.

  He didn't want to spend two weeks inside. Not with it at that angle. Suze was right; it could tip over at any time.

  He put some weight on the ladder. It seemed firm.

  They needed another solution.

  He started climbing.

  The ladder shook under his foot.

  "Are you on?" Suze said.

  "Two rungs up. Seems stable now."

  He kept moving up. The normally level rungs angled down at the right and his boots slipped against the upright. He could feel the crushing.

  "How's your oh-two?" Suze said.

  "You tell me. I'm concentrating here."

  "Your telemetry says seven point five liters. Nominal."

  "Twenty minutes then."

  "You shouldn't go out so far."

  Bertelli sighed. He was almost at the top. "Tell you what. Why don't you give me the dressing-down when I'm safely back on Orion?"

  Silence for a moment, then, "Copy that."

  At the top of the ladder he nestled his feet into the exit step. There was nothing there to brace the side of his foot against. He gripped the vertical rungs beside the hatch.

  There was a dinner-plate sized viewport in the hatch. Bertelli peered in.

  And jerked back.

  His feet slipped.

  As he scrabbled for balance one of his hands came loose.

  He got it on the other rung. With some pulling he managed to get himself on again.

  "All right?" Suze said. "Heard you yelp."

  "Got a fright. That's all." He wasn't going to tell her just yet.

  Peering in the window again, he saw Randy.

  He lay against the sample return locker. In the narrow space only his head and torso were visible. He was in his suit, but his helmet was off.

  He wasn't moving.

  Unconscious. Or worse.

  Bertelli swore.

  "Language," Suze said.

  "Problem down here."

  "I know that."

  "What's your telemetry on Randy? Has he still got his medical sensors on?" A holdover from old NASA. Voluntary now, but Randy was a stickler for it. Liked to contribute every bit of science he could.

  "Everything's nominal," Suze said. "Heart rate, breathing. BP's a bit low. Like he's sleeping."

  Unconscious then.

  Bertelli tapped on the window. With his glove on it would be as loud as a butterfly kiss.

  Taking the rock hammer from his waist he knocked it on the hatch.

  Silent to him, but it should ring through the capsule like a gong.

  Randy didn't stir.

  Trying a couple of times more, Bertelli figured what had happened.

  Randy had been standing at the download console when the leg failed. He'd stumbled back, maybe hit his head.

  But why did he have his helmet off?

  Why was he even inside?

  Where he was supposed to be was halfway between Bertelli's waypoint and Surety.

  Protocols.

  "He's down," Bertelli said. "Like maybe he's hit his head or something."

  Suze didn't reply.

  Bertelli tapped again. "I think he's not coming to."

  What had Randy been doing in the module at all?

  Activating the dumb door panel, Bertelli tried to query the system. It didn't give a lot of information. The interior was pressurized. Seals were good. Power was good. Gyros were shot.

  * * *

  That was all he could get.

  "I can't get inside," he told Suze. He wondered what he'd do if Randy had already been dead. Depressurizing the module and opening the door wouldn't make any difference.

  Remembering what Suze had said about Randy's low BP, Bertelli looked in again.

  Yes. There was some blood on the locker.

  Randy needed medical assistance. Someone had to get in there.

  Fast.

  The only way in, without subjecting him to vacuum, was to dock with the Orion.

  But there was no way to launch from this angle.

  And no way for Orion to come down to them.

  If Randy was going to survive they had to get Surety back up to orbit.

  Bertelli realized that applied to him too. Just that there was no way to get inside. No way to tend to Randy. To open the hatch was to kill him.

  "Suze?"

  "Yeah."

  "I need you to pass something on to Valerie."

  "No you don't. You'll be seeing her in a couple of days."

  "Sure. And if I don't, you can tell her from me that I'm sorry."

  "Okay. And I've got a message for you from Valerie."

  "Huh?" How was that possible?

  "She says that you need to make sure you come home. Whatever it takes."

  "Johnston's got kids." Jaimee was three and Samuel was nine months. On the way up both Bertelli and Suze had gotten sick of seeing the photos. Cute kids sure, but who needed to see the seven hundredth photo of the baby asleep? Suze did better with that than he did.

  "Yeah. Valerie's pregnant."

  Bertelli smiled. "You were doing okay until then."

  "Well, she could be."

  He let his smile fade. There weren't going to be any kids for them. Plumbing problems on both sides. There was only Valerie.

  Bertelli sucked in his breath.

  Valerie.

  He focused back on his task. Licking his dry lips, he stepped back down. Standing on the moon's surface again he took another sip of water.

  If he had power tools and six hours, he could cut the other two legs off. The whole thing would settle down onto the open landing nacelles. Nice and level.

  If he had those kinds of tools.

  And if he had the luck of that lottery winner from a couple of years back.

  Two billion dollars. With a ticket bought on the spur of the moment. Minutes before the cut-off for the draw. And the ticket was lost for a month. And went through the laundry.

  When she went to get the prize--just before the money would have
been declared unclaimed--the ticket was barely legible.

  That kind of luck.

  Bertelli wasn't going to be setting Surety back upright. Not with the best will in the world.

  "Suze? Except for the angle, Surety's still in good shape, right?"

  "You can't launch. If the landing section collapses further you're going to turn into a fireball."

  "But everything's in reasonable shape, right?"

  Hesitation, then a curt, "Yes."

  "Okay. Can you launch her on remote?"

  "Yes." The same curt tone.

  "Start the procedure."

  "I've got four minutes left in line-of-sight. Then you're going to lose me."

  "Route the signal." Surely there was a lunar satellite she could bounce off.

  Suze tsked. "Bad coincidence there. Nothing to route from. Schröedinger's in a bad spot. Those satellites I guess you're thinking about? Nothing high or local."

  Bertelli thought fast. He needed to get her to send him control.

  He could fly it out himself using the suit's command systems. They were pretty primitive, but it was just launching. Suze could chase them down in Orion later.

  That's what the command ship was built for.

  "Also," she said. "I've run launch scenarios. Assuming the landing section actually doesn't collapse under you, the Surety will burn too much fuel trying to compensate for the angle. Even if you didn't rip out the gimbals, you're not going to have enough fuel after that to make orbit."

  "This is the moon we're talking about." The escape delta-v was only 2400 meters per second.

  But of course the module only carried enough fuel for that and some maneuvering.

  Bertelli whacked his hammer against the side of the lander. There was still plenty of extra fuel in there. Randy had made a pinpoint perfect landing. Not a drop wasted.

  Of course there was no way to get it siphoned over into Surety.

  "Sit tight until I come around again," Suze said. He could hear the concern in her voice. Worried that they wouldn't live long enough.

  "Sit tight," he said.

  "I'm still working with Houston on alternatives. We're bound to come up with something."

  "I bet. Listen. Download the remote control system to my suit." He would figure this out.

  "Can't do it."

  "Start now. I'm in charge here."

  "I mean it'll take three minutes to just sync. I don't even know if your suit's got enough memory for it anyway."

  "Start. Just start."

  Suze sighed. Bertelli saw a tell-tale light on his helmet's inner rim. The download had started.