by Homer Hickam
The crowhopper glanced at the overhang, then turned back to Crater. “I ask you again by the gods of war and blood, kill me.” It stretched out a hand toward its rifle which had fallen just outside its reach, then fell back with a groan. “Hand me my weapon and I will take care of myself.”
“What’s in that hole?” Crater demanded. “Tell me the truth and I promise I’ll kill you if that’s what you want.”
“We lived there,” the creature answered. “It’s empty now but is wired to explode.”
“Why did you set up camp here?”
“Why not? We had to go somewhere.”
“You’re certain that hole is empty?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you wire it to explode?”
The creature fell silent. After a moment of indecision, Crater picked up the thing’s rifle, removed the flechette magazine, jacked out the final round, then threw it into a nearby crater. The crowhopper’s eyes softened. “I don’t understand. I am sure you have killed many of us before. Why not me?”
Crater planned to interrogate it but he kept silent on his intentions. First, he wanted to find out what was in that hole. He walked to the overhang and knelt down and saw an embedded hatch, probably covering a dustlock.
The crowhopper called out, “Come back! I have secrets I will tell you!”
Crater ignored it and inspected the hatch. Briefly, he considered calling up support, then rejected the idea because he knew the Colonel would strap a detpak to the hatch, blow it, then throw in more detpaks until there was nothing left inside except dust. The crowhopper’s attempt to divert him away from the hole made Crater determined to find out what was in there.
Not for the first time, Crater wished he had his gillie. He tried to recall its face, although it had no face, and its voice, although it had no voice, and the way it looked, although it didn’t look like anything. The gillie could have scanned through the hatch and told him what was behind it. But the gillie was dead. It had sacrificed itself to save Crater during another battle against the crowhoppers. Though the gillie was only a clump of slime mold cells made into a biocomputer, Crater still missed it, almost like a lost friend.
Crater studied the hatch. It was a standard portable dustlock design. He grasped the lever, swung it over, and then pulled the hatch open. Since he was still alive, he assumed that at least the outer hatch hadn’t been wired. He stepped inside, pulled the hatch closed behind him, switched on his helmet lamp, and looked around until he found the button that activated pressure into the chamber. He pushed it and the dustlock filled with air, a meter on the hatch counting until it reached one Earthian pressure. Crater inspected the internal hatch, saw nothing suspicious, and threw the lever to open it. As soon as it swung open, he saw the crowhopper. It sprang away, just avoiding the flechettes Crater sent flying in its direction. He climbed through the hatch and kept firing, but the crowhopper’s shadow was all he hit as it scurried around a corner of the hole.
Crater took a moment to notice that he was in a small lavatube. His eye caught sleeping bags and empty ration cans and water bags on the dusty floor. There were glowing biolume lights hanging from the roof of solid rock. He had entered a crowhopper nest.
Crater eased toward a curve in the tube. He took a breath, dived to the floor, and rolled. When he brought up his rifle, he found it pointed at the crowhopper which was quietly squatting on its haunches, its hands empty of weapons. Crater’s finger stroked the trigger of his rifle but he didn’t pull it. He stood and beckoned the thing out of the shadows. “Come out where I can get a look at you. Come on, I won’t hurt you.”
When he lowered the barrel of his rifle just fractionally, the thing leaped, its spiked helmet aimed at Crater’s chest. He moved aside, grabbed it by its backpack, and threw it across the tube. Crater followed it, kicked it, then drew it up, a forearm across its throat. That was when he realized how small the crowhopper was. He’d never seen one under six feet. Seven was the norm. This one was barely five feet tall, if that. Crater took away his arm from its throat, shoved it down, and put a boot on its chest. A knife suddenly appeared in the hand of the crowhopper, probably drawn from a camouflaged leg holster. It swiped at him but Crater dodged, seized the creature’s wrist, and wrenched the knife out of its hand. He tossed it away, then struck the creature on the side of its helmet with his gloved fist. It cried out, and Crater dragged it across the tube and penned it against the wall. It glared at him, then said in a shrill voice, “I will kill you as sure as the summer sun rises above the tundra.”
“The battle is over,” Crater replied. “You lost.”
“The battle is never lost,” it replied, switching to English. “And the Legion never loses. Life is death. Death is life.”
Crater grabbed the thing by the neck of its armored torso and pushed it toward the hatch. “Move.”
“I am going because I want to go,” it said. “It will give me time to consider how best to kill you.”
“Just keep walking,” Crater growled. He punched it in its back with his rifle and it staggered ahead. In the dustlock, he left the inner hatch open and bled out the air, depressurizing the lavatube. He doubted there were more crowhoppers hidden inside, considering how small the tube was. But exhausting the air would kill anything alive or, if they had a pressure suit, force them outside. Crater prodded the small crowhopper to the jumpcar. The other crowhopper was still there although its situation had somewhat changed. It had managed to acquire a big knife, the kind that Earthian warriors called an elk sticker, no doubt from some hidden recess in its armor.
The small crowhopper, ignoring Crater, walked up to the other one. “You are dying,” it said without emotion.
“Yes, I am dying but too slowly,” the crowhopper said, equally without emotion. “And you are a captive.”
“I will kill this one soon,” the little creature answered. “And then I will get away.”
“That is good.” The dying crowhopper glanced at Crater. “Will you give me your name?”
“Crater Trueblood,” Crater answered.
“Ah, Crater Trueblood, life is death.”
Crater shook his head. “Death is death, you vile creature.”
“You have power over me, do you not?” It nodded toward Crater’s rifle. “But when I do this, you have none. Death is life.” And then the crowhopper used the elk sticker to cut its own throat with a horrific swipe that at the end of it also included tossing the bloody knife to the little crowhopper, which grabbed it and plunged it into Crater’s calf. A slow-motion spray of blood, instantly turning to pink vapor in the vacuum of the moon, burst from the wound.
Alarms cried out in Crater’s helmet. Suit failure! Suit failure!
The little crowhopper cheered. “I knew I would kill you!”
::: TWO
Maria Medaris concluded the meeting called to review the new inventory procedures for her jumpcar factory in Armstrong City. On her reader screen were six black-rimmed squares, each containing an individual image of one of her corporate officers, including her father, vice president for Central European sales and marketing. Maria led each manager through the action items the meeting had produced, but when she reached him, her father was on a do4u call, a casual one based on his smile and relaxed demeanor. “I’ll talk to Dad later,” she said to the others, doing her best to tamp down the resentment she felt for the disrespect toward her he was clearly showing.
It was typical of her father. While her grandfather, the Colonel, believed in her and gave her every opportunity to excel, her father had ridiculed her from the moment she’d expressed an interest in joining the Medaris corporate empire. Her father’s dream was to be a sculptor, a dream squashed by the Colonel, who’d threatened him with the loss of his inheritance. How unlike her father she was! Maria lived for business, especially the business of making the Medaris brand the strongest on Earth and the moon. When the Colonel removed her father from the presidency of the Medaris Jumpcar Company, he had replaced him
with Maria. Since then, she’d taken the company her father had nearly run into the ground and made it prosperous by moving manufacturing to the moon, a solution he had ferociously opposed. The latest balance sheet more than proved her position. Manufacturing jumpcars in Armstrong City, using local labor and materials, was a remarkable success story.
“There’s no time to lose,” Maria said, summarizing her business philosophy. “You have your action items. Get going on them and hit your deadlines. If you run into snags, let me know. Otherwise, I trust you to get everything done on time.”
Maria touched each of the squares to end their participation except her father’s. “Dad, get off your do4u. We need to talk.”
Her father raised his eyebrows but completed his call. “Well, Maria,” he said, “you no longer say ‘please’ to your old man? You just give me orders?”
“I’m sorry,” Maria said, “but I need your support during these meetings. Going offline to take a personal call is disrespectful. Please don’t do it again.”
Her father leaned back, contempt flickering across his face. “How can I be respectful when everything you’re doing shows your inexperience? You’ve had a run of luck with your factory, but over time, it’ll all fall apart. The moon simply has too many drawbacks to be a good manufacturing area. Maybe in a decade or two but not now. So this is what I think you should do—”
“Dad,” Maria interrupted, “my moon factory is running rings around the plant you set up in Shanghai. As for what you call drawbacks, I foresee them and plan for them. If you’d listened to the actions I gave out, you’d know that. Speaking of actions, the sales in your sector have slumped by three percent. What’s the explanation?”
Her father sighed. “Of course they’ve slumped, Maria. I laid off four of our sales staff.”
“You did what?” Maria demanded. “By whose authority?”
“My own, of course. I am still a senior officer in this company.”
Maria’s voice went cold. “Yes, you are, but this is my company. You are responsible for marketing and sales in Central Europe and that is the extent of your authority. Hiring and firing is done by me and me alone. Who did you fire?”
“McCoy, Tsing Hai, Tanner, and Bohannon.”
“Four of our best salesmen! I hired them myself.”
“I didn’t like their attitude,” her father replied with a shrug.
“Hire them back.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hire them back. Increase their salary if you have to, but hire them back today! Do it, or I will do it myself. Understood?”
“Really, Maria, I simply will never understand how you got to be so much like your grandfather. Your mother and I—”
“Leave my mother out of it,” Maria interrupted. “You really don’t want to bring her into any conversation you and I might have.”
Her father pursed his lips, then shrugged. “I was only going to say she and I had hopes you might become a ballerina. You were such a good dancer. I’m sure she would be disappointed to know you would throw away your talents to become a mere businesswoman.”
“If so,” Maria said, “it would be only one more disappointment on top of all the others she had because of you. Would you like me to list them? Let’s start with the booze, then we could talk about the hard drugs, and after that, the women—”
“That’s enough, young lady!” her father snapped.
“Or what? Are you going to send me to my room? Dad, this conversation, such as it is, is over. You have your orders. Either comply with them or I’d be more than pleased to accept your resignation.”
Before he could reply, Maria touched his square, sending it spinning into digital oblivion. Afterward, she realized she was trembling. Her father had that kind of effect on her. He not only didn’t respect her as a businesswoman, he simply didn’t like her. Why that was, she had no idea, but she’d sensed it her entire life. Growing up, it seemed he always went out of his way to belittle her accomplishments or anything she wanted to try. Nothing was ever good enough. Her mother tried her best but she was weak and never defended Maria or even herself. There was a palpable tension in the house anytime her father was in it. He would blow up over the smallest pretext and go storming around, even getting violent. Once, he’d pulled from the wall a display case that was filled with glass figurines her mother had collected from around the world. They were all smashed to bits and he never apologized. “I don’t apologize,” she heard him say once. “It is a sign of weakness.”
When her mother lost her life in a boating accident, her dad had not mourned her, at least as far as Maria could tell. Maria sat back and put her hand on her belly. Whenever she thought about her childhood, her stomach hurt. She was relieved when her assistant came in with a reminder that she was already late to join the committee formed by Armstrong City businesses to save the old Apollo landing sites. Called ARC for Apollo Restoration Committee, its charter was to assess the landing sites and make recommendations to save and restore them in perpetuity. Today they were visiting the Apollo 12 site.
Maria pressed her thumb to three decision papers on her reader, approving one, rejecting the others, then grabbed her flight jacket and hustled out of her office. Her secretary, a fussy little man, followed her into the street outside the Medaris Enterprises building where her fastbug waited for her. “One more thing, Jarvis,” she said as she climbed into the four-wheeler. “Check in with the Colonel. Provide him with the minutes of my meeting and let him know where I’ll be for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Should that include your post-meeting discussion with your father?”
Maria thought about that, then said, “No. I’ll talk to him about it myself.”
“Yes, ma’am. Have a nice flight.”
Maria nodded her thanks, pressed the accelerator, and drove toward the landing field where her corporate jumpcar was kept in a private hangar. On the way through the narrow backstreets, she thought over her latest encounter with her father. She loved the man—he was her father, after all—and tried hard to understand the resentments he’d built up over the years. She knew instinctively that it was his frustration with his own father that caused him to be petty and vindictive toward her and her mother. But was that a reasonable excuse? Maria knew it wasn’t. She would forgive him as best she could, but she wasn’t going to forget he had a streak of cruelty a mile wide. She would stay wary around him and, if need be, she would fire him. He could go whining to the Colonel if he didn’t like it. Somehow Maria doubted that would happen.
Her jumpcar was a beautiful burnished copper, a color that was proving to be very popular with the customers of the Medaris Jumpcar Company. It was an innovation she’d started, allowing customers to pick from a myriad of colors, even combinations of colors. It made the setup a little more complex in the factory located in Armstrong City’s north maintenance shed, but it was worth it. That was another thing she and her father had clashed over—basic black and silver had served them well for decades. Why confuse things by offering a rainbow of colors? “Because our customers like colors,” Maria explained to him while he rolled his eyes. Even the simplest of all sales techniques escaped him: give the customer what he wants.
Her party of three committee members was waiting for her. She pulled up beside them and got out. “Sorry to be late,” she said. “My meeting went a little longer than planned.”
She led them to the ramp up to the jumpcar entry hatch. Amy Bandas of the Lunaradar Company, Lauralei Osinski of Floridamoon Sports, and Jessica Gaskin, Armstrong City Lunar Optics, took their seats in the passenger compartment while she climbed into the cockpit and turned on the control console. The panel lights burned brightly, then automatically dimmed to her preferred level. She called up the puter and went through the checklist, then called the hangar crew. “Ready for rollout,” she said. Within seconds, the big inner hangar doors swung open and the mobile pad trundled into the airlock. Once inside, the inner doors swung shut, the air was bled out of the
chamber, and the outer doors were swung open. Perfectly synchronized, the mobile pad crept through the doors into the dusty vacuum. When it was in position, the pad stopped and Maria called up Armstrong Control.
“You have clearance,” came the crisp reply.
“Roger that, and thank you,” she said, then looked over her shoulder. “All ready?” she asked her passengers, and received nods and thumbs up from them.
“Okay, baby,” Maria whispered while putting her hand on the throttles. “Let’s show them what you’ve got.”
Flames spurted at the base of the jumpcar and it rose majestically as Maria nudged the throttles with the base of her hand, holding the g-forces to a minimum. Below, Armstrong City receded, its three huge domes glittering in the sunlight. At five miles altitude, she lowered the nose and aimed it westward. The Sabine and Ritter double craters slid by to the north. Ahead lay a tortured crater field that marked the approach to a relatively small lava field known as Sinus Medii, which had the distinction of being the closest feature on the moon to Earth.
A light on the panel flared, followed by the voice of Armstrong City Control. “High Eagle One, be advised that you need to shift southwest immediately. Recommend a vector of one hundred and twenty degrees.”
Maria switched to the secure channel. “Armstrong City, why the course change?”
“Military situation, Miss Medaris. You should be fine if you’ll fly a hundred miles south before continuing to your destination.”
“Understood,” Maria replied and began her turn. She made it as smooth as she could so as to not disturb her passengers. A glance at the map display confirmed her suspicion. The only thing north of her was the dustway, the road the Helium-3 convoys used from Moontown to Aristillus and, ultimately, Armstrong City. A military situation there likely meant a convoy was being ambushed, and if that was so, the nearest military force was the Medaris Irregulars, the company of militia the Colonel maintained in Moontown. The Irregulars were likely in battle, and that meant the Colonel and other Moontown citizens were too.
