Luna

by Rick Chesler

  The fight escalated, with Kennedy and Blake clinching, arms around one another, until Kennedy shoved his opponent toward the astronauts. They caught him, preventing him from slamming into the wall, but Kennedy was charging, head down like a bull. The astronauts scattered, leaving Blake standing there alone. The Outer Limits CEO sidestepped Kennedy at the last second and it was Kennedy’s turn to stumble forward, until he collided with the same wall he had intended for Blake.

  They heard the thrum of electronic systems activity and Caitlin spun around. She picked up her suit helmet with two hands, about to put it on. “Thirty seconds until we have to leave. Suits on, everyone.”

  “Someone has to get off!” one of the astronauts screamed just before he donned his helmet and secured his suit.

  “Not me!” Stenson shouted, cowering back from the astronauts, further away from the ship’s airlock. He pointed at Kennedy. “He cheated. I played fair. I’m not losing my life to a cheater. I’ll fight! I will fight any of you who try to throw me out! Rip your fucking suits!” He suddenly produced a box cutter, razor blade extended as he waved it around.

  Blake and Kennedy began trading blows again, avoiding the helmets in favor of random body blows. They careened about the ship, the fight getting wilder, more out of control. Caitlin knew it wouldn’t be long before they broke something critical, but even that wasn’t her main concern anymore.

  She shouted at the top of her lungs.

  “Initiating liftoff! Someone leaves or we all die.”

  Kennedy swung a hard right cross at Williams, who tried to come between him and Blake. The astronaut backed away after the fist grazed his chest, tripping and falling onto the floor. Kennedy went back to his pursuit of Blake, who stood his ground when he could but was being slowly pushed back as he dodged multiple blows.

  “Do something, now!” Caitlin wailed.

  James Burton, who had been silently watching the battle play out from his place against the wall, prepared to move as Blake was backed up toward him by the advancing Kennedy. As Burton started to move, he brushed against the airlock switch, which had a safety cover that had already been opened. The inner airlock door slid open, although no one seemed to notice. Caitlin still yelled that they were going to miss the rendezvous, and the astronauts still tried to break up the fight. Stenson continued to cower far from the airlock, box cutter in hand while his gaze darted nervously about.

  And then Burton saw his opportunity. He wasn’t sure what came over him, how he knew that this was what he must do, but something inside him hinted it was the only way. He slid along the wall away from the now open inner airlock door. Kennedy threw a powerhouse left at Blake’s stomach, but missed, his fist connecting instead with the doorframe. He howled in pain while Blake jumped on his hunched over form, knocking him to the floor. Around them they heard the rumbling, industrial sounds of the spacecraft preparing for its ascent into lunar orbit.

  The two fighters rolled on the floor into the airlock, the battle having gone to the ground. They were wrestlers now, wearing spacesuit costumes. The other astronauts, seeing the chance to physically contain the belligerent men now that they were on the floor, started to rush into the airlock. But Burton’s hand lashed out onto the button and the door slid shut before anyone else could enter the transitory space.

  “What are you doing?” one of them breathed at Burton.

  “You heard Caitlin. We have to go. Those two don’t want to go, then fine. Let them stay here.”

  Burton heard a gasp from someone but he didn’t care. No one protested, either, as his hand moved to the button that controlled the outer airlock door, the one that led directly out onto the moon, into space. He clicked the button and the outer airlock door opened.

  The two billionaires were locked in embrace by the outer entrance, continuing to grapple with one another as the outer door opened. Then Blake executed a decisive and forceful move, hurting Kennedy but sending both of them tumbling outside in the process.

  Burton hit the button inside the airlock to close the outer door.

  44| You Both Lose

  The two fighters stopped brawling to look up at the ship. The outer airlock door was closing. Blake scrambled up and started to run for the door first, but he was too late, the door sealed before he could slide a boot under it. Inside the LEM, James flipped a switch to disable the outer door control.

  Kennedy smacked the airlock door button on the outside of the ship, then hit it harder when that had no effect. Blake and Kennedy began transmitting from their helmet radios, shouting at the crew to open the door.

  James ran from the airlock back into the ship and hit the button for the inner door, closing it also. The astronauts stood watching him, unsure of what to do. He turned to face them.

  “What else can we do? Caitlin says we need to leave or we all die.”

  Her voice confirmed Burton’s statement. “Ignition sequence in ten...nine...eight...”

  No one said anything, but no one did anything, either. Kennedy’s and Blake’s voices could be heard over the rumbling of the rocket engine as it prepared to liftoff.

  “Only one person needs to be left behind! It’s Kennedy, not me—I’m still out here! Let me in...”

  Caitlin directed the other astronauts to man their stations. Then she spoke to Blake. “I warned both of you, we had to leave. We still may not even make it back ourselves. There is nothing we can do. I’m sorry, Blake and Kennedy, but you two have brought this upon yourselves. Good luck and peace be with you. You will be remembered.”

  “You can’t do this! This is murder!” Kennedy yelled into his helmet radio. He and Blake backed away from the ship’s exhaust plume, no longer fighting as they watched their ride home prepare to depart without them.

  “Being the first humans to die on the moon will ensure your legacies will never be forgotten,” Williams pointed out.

  “Where is your compassion?” Blake asked.

  Caitlin’s voice answered them amidst the intense thunder of the liftoff engine. “...and liftoff!”

  The lunar module rose from the moon’s surface. James looked out of the small window to see the two CEOs staring up at him, their differences finally forgotten. He didn’t know if they were aware of it yet, but a thick ring of the creatures surrounded them, waiting for the liftoff exhaust to clear. Already they were moving closer, James could see. A couple of huge, tanker truck-sized individuals lumbered among them. He couldn’t help but wonder if soon Blake and Kennedy would be embedded into one of those large organisms, taken on an everlasting tour of the moon...

  Ahead in the Command Module, Paul Abbott prepared for docking with the lunar lander as the mixed but now united crew stared in awe at the magnificent, humbling earthrise filling their windows. James Burton left the window and strapped himself into a seat, the closest one to Caitlin, who sat in what would have been Dallas’ position in the pilot’s seat. She adjusted the radio to the frequency that would call Outer Limits’ Mission Control and asked if anyone copied. After a few seconds, her face lit up as she heard Ray’s voice coming in much clearer than it had been for the last transmission.

  “Oh my god! Mission Control to Outer Limits, we copy you loud and clear! Caitlin?”

  “It’s me, Ray, it’s me!”

  “What the Hell happened? The telemetry we’re getting shows that the LEM is out of oxygen completely! We thought you were...I thought...” His voice broke as he imagined the unthinkable.

  “It’s okay, Ray. Our LEM is out of oxygen, but we’re not in it. We’re in Black Sky’s LEM. Their Mission Control should be patching through to you any second to establish communications for the rest of the flight.”

  “Copy that! The dust storm is clearing here on the ground. You should be okay to land by the time you get here in a couple of days, over.”

  “Roger that, Ray. I’m coming home, baby.” Caitlin clicked off and turned her attention back to the flight controls. Then, after a brief technical chat with Paul in the orbiter, she tur
ned her attention to the view outside. James Burton also marveled at it, in an almost trance-like state.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said to him.

  Burton nodded as he stared at the Earth, growing slowly larger in their window. “It is, but I’m starting to think it’s a lot more beautiful from the ground.”

  THE END

  Read on for a free sample of Red Carbon

  1

  At 4:38 a.m. Rothschild Standard Time, Sandeep "Dip" Benegal opened up the v-mail he had received in the night and watched for four minutes as his brother-in-law filled him in on his sister's condition. When the video cut him off in mid-sentence, Dip figured it was just another hiccough in the notoriously crappy signal.

  Although no one would realize it for another couple of hours, this was the first sign any of the employees in Mining Colony Miranda had that something had gone terribly wrong on Earth.

  2

  In her previous life, Annabeth Crick had been a fast food worker. She regularly put up with customers that thought she was lower than dog shit, dealt with managers who thought their different colored shirts made them superior despite the fact that she had a college education while they hadn't even finished high school, and would often come home at the end of the night with a thin coating of grease on her arms that she could scrape off with her nails. Even considering her profession now, she still considered it the worst job she'd ever had. But there were occasionally little annoyances in this job that made her long for a life of frying burgers. Such as right now, for example, when she had just finished putting her entire bulky environment suit on, including the helmet, before she looked over at the floor near her client's bed and realized she had forgotten to put on her underwear.

  She unlatched the seals on her helmet and then undid her gloves. Despite the fact that there was nothing sexy about her suit or the hurried way she removed it, her client, Mikhail Svensson, grinned at her from his prone place on the bed as though she were repeating the striptease she had performed for him hours earlier.

  "Decided to stay for a little overtime?" he asked. He gestured at the time clock on his wall. As much as she wanted to smack that look right off his face, she found herself grateful for the comment anyway, since her frilly panties weren't the only thing she had almost left without. Her tiny plastic time card was still in the clock. If she'd walked out without it and this ass had done something to it, then she wouldn't just lose her pay for last night but for all of last week as well. Time cards were like magic talismans in Miranda- they kept starvation and eviction away in the same way environment suits staved off the deadly elements.

  Annabeth grabbed the timecard, put it in the carrying pocket on the left side of her suit, then continued pulling the suit off. It would have been much easier if she just put the underwear in the pocket as well, but nothing in the pockets received the same protection from the elements that it would inside the suit itself. She'd made the mistake of stuffing a bra that she had forgotten in a similar manner into the pocket once. The tiny bits of moisture on it had resulted in the bra freezing into a hard clump after she'd gone outside. Thawing it out and smoothing it back into a recognizable shape had taken longer than she was willing to deal with now.

  Even as she continued to strip off the suit, Svensson seemed to lose interest in her. He extricated his pasty naked body from the sheets, stretched, then stood up and walked to his personal kitchen unit with an extra bounce in his step that could have either been from the post-coital bliss or from forgetting to walk more carefully in the lower gravity. Either way, certain parts of him jiggled in ways that Annabeth wasn't in the mood to watch.

  What she did watch as she struggled out of the suit and pulled off her jumpsuit underneath, however, was his breakfast. His kitchen was barely worth the name, containing only a small stove, a mini-fridge, and a counter that had a few cupboards under it. However, this small nook in his apartment was still more than most people in Miranda had. Unlike Annabeth, who would have to make her way to the central mess hall soon, this guy actually got to make food for himself. He pulled out a small pitcher that appeared to contain some kind of juice and poured himself a glass – a real glass, not one of the air-tight sippy cup things everyone else got – then took out a pan, put it on the burner, and removed from the fridge…

  "Is that an egg?" Annabeth asked. Despite her attempt to sound disinterested, her voice came out almost reverent.

  Svensson grinned at her as he held it over the pan. "I have a second one, if you want it. You'll, uh, have to pay for it though."

  Annabeth wanted to scoff at the idea, but suddenly she felt her stomach rumbling as she imagined that rich protein taste on her tongue. There were no chickens here, no livestock of any kind. This egg had been shipped here special. Math wasn't her strong suit, but she could come up with a very rough estimate of how much it was worth. The fuel, the planning, the engineering that it would have taken just to get that egg here in one piece, it had to cost thousands of United States dollars. In Rothschild company scrip, it would be worth more than she would earn during her entire five year stay in Miranda. She didn't want to think about all the depraved things this jackass would expect her to do in payment.

  Still though, she hesitated to say no. It was an egg. An honest to God egg. Just one bite would be all she needed to clear her mind of that God-awful protein slop they served in the mess hall. Not even Leah Hartnup had access to something like this.

  "I'll…" She forced the word to come out of her mouth. She was surprised at just how much effort it took. "…pass."

  Svensson shrugged. Annabeth could tell from his shit-eating smirk that he knew just how close she had come to saying yes. She was sure she would pay for it later. At some point in the future she would have to service this ass again, and didn’t like the thought that next time he might have something that could break her will.

  The phone charging on Svensson's wall rang as Annabeth shimmied out of her jumpsuit. This thankfully occupied him as she bent over, naked from the waist down and pulled on her underwear. She didn't want him ogling her when he wasn't paying. He picked the phone up and asked what the hell the person on the other end wanted at this hour. Annabeth tried not to listen in on his conversation, since she didn't really care about or want to get involved in any of the petty drama among the management types.

  "Well, so the fuck what?" he asked the phone. "Coms go down all the time. Why would I want to interrupt my breakfast for that?"

  Someone mumbled something Annabeth couldn't hear, but whatever he said it must have struck a nerve. He looked over at Annabeth, then turned away from her. When next he spoke, it was in a voice slightly above a whisper.

  "Look, I'm not alone… Yeah, that's right… So just give me a few minutes and I'll be right over."

  Annabeth had gotten the legs of her environment suit back on by the time he hung up. "Okay sweetheart, time for you to get the hell out of here," he said. "Chop chop. I've got to get back to the business of keeping all your sorry asses alive." He actually snapped his fingers at her and pointed at the outer door. Annabeth resisted the urge to say something rude and obnoxious. Instead, she moved faster to get her environment suit back on. He dressed in his own jumpsuit, one that was decidedly newer and sleeker than her own, then stood tapping his foot impatiently at the inner door while she took a moment to inspect her suit for tears. He wouldn't need an environment suit to leave his apartment- the inner door led right into the administration wing- but if he had, Annabeth was sure it would be one of the slender, top of the line suits designed only a few years ago specifically to protect against all manner of hazards in any given emergency situation. Annabeth didn't have that luxury. When she had first arrived here three years ago, she'd been assigned an old and bulky repurposed Russian suit that had likely been made before she was even born. If something ripped at an inopportune moment, the tear wouldn't fill with emergency foam to keep the suit from depressurizing. Instead, she would have to run for the nearest shelter and hope someo
ne would let her in before she asphyxiated or her blood started to boil.

  When she was satisfied that she wouldn't die (at least not immediately) when she walked out the door, she finally went to the outer exit, pressed the button next to it, and walked into the airlock beyond. She looked back through the viewport in the door to see Svensson going through the inner door. That was odd. She'd never known one of the management types to leave her alone when she could still get back into the apartment. They had this paranoid idea that the "physical employees" of Miranda such as herself were just waiting for the perfect opportunity to rob them blind. In fact, given how much she disliked this dick, she had half a mind to do exactly that. Jeanette Weasel (she insisted that was her real name, although Annabeth doubted it) ran a healthy black market and Annabeth was sure she would pay some serious scrip for what Svensson had lying around his apartment.

  But Annabeth really didn't want to lower herself to that level. She might rent her body out every night, but she had her standards. And she was too unnerved by Svensson's actions. She couldn't help but think something had to be wrong for him to leave that quickly. And something wrong in a place like Miranda meant there was something wrong for everybody.

  She tried to push it from her mind. This was not her business. Her business was concluded until she got the next call from somebody with a little extra scrip to spend. Now it was time to simply go home and get some real sleep.

  She pressed the button to depressurize the airlock and then, after putting her visor down against the sun rising on the horizon, stepped out onto the cold and desolate red desert that made up the entirety of the planet Mars.

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