by Homer Hickam
Potato guns built on Earth were simple. Usually made of polyvinyl tubes to form a combustion chamber and a barrel, the guns used hairspray or ether as a fuel to propel a potato at high velocity. They were just toys and Crater had never built one, there being a serious lack of oxygen in the lunar vacuum to cause the hairspray/ether to combust, but he knew about them and now had built one of his own, only deadlier than any on Earth.
Crater’s version had two lunasteel water pipes welded together to form a combustion chamber and a barrel. Piercing the combustion chamber was a valve to receive a puff of welding tricetylene and another valve to receive a puff of welding oxygen. The spark in the chamber was provided by two wires leading from a do4u battery pack into the chamber. The artillery round was a dense core sample of nickel suffused with gold drawn from the asteroid. Though the slug felt light in the lunar gravity, it still had considerable mass. It would be enough, Crater hoped, to cause damage to a spiderwalker.
His cannon was set up inside the hopper of the crusher. Aiming was simple. Using the well-equipped machine shop in the chuckwagon, Crater had welded a stand for the cannon so that it could be raised or lowered by turning a hand crank. He provided the muscle to aim it. Crescent’s job was to load the cannon and feed the mixture of gases into the chamber. Maria served as a sniper, armed with a rifle. The Apps set up around the parked vehicles in case a walker broke through. Ike was in the chuckwagon, still sitting in his chair, his hands on his knees and looking straight ahead.
While waiting for the arrival of the walkers, Crater charged up the crusher’s fuel cells. He and Maria were just finishing the folding and stacking of the solar panels when the first walker appeared, creeping around a hill that led into the funnel. A black-armored crowhopper rode atop, reining in his walker and waiting until several more of his fellows came up alongside him.
The sight of them gave Crater serious doubts about his plan. Although partially controlled by their riders, spiderwalkers were also automatons, able to make decisions on their own. They had sharp steel fangs and, when in battle mode, snapped their jaws and lunged toward anything they sensed was organic. Tales of battle against spiderwalkers were rife with the amputated arms, legs, and heads of infantry trying to fight them.
Eight spiderwalkers crept up and stopped at the lake’s edge, their riders sitting astride them and apparently studying the situation. They were talking amongst themselves—Crater could see that by the way they turned their helmeted heads toward one another. One of them had three white stripes on its helmet. He called Crescent’s attention to it.
“Their ranking decan,” Crescent explained. “Much like a sergeant in a human army. I see no evidence of officers. They were either killed at Armstrong City or, more likely, weren’t sent on this raid. Officers are expensive.”
The gillie, which was in one of Crater’s breast pockets, climbed out. Crater, glad to see it, said, “Gillie, hack into the communicators on those spiderwalkers and link Crescent, Maria, and me in.”
Gillie will comply, the gillie said.
Crater, Crescent, and Maria next heard the harsh, guttural voices peculiar to the Legion speaking in their Siberian-based language. “We should turn back,” one of them was saying. “They must have a secret weapon or they wouldn’t have stopped.”
“Shut up, Carillon,” another said.
“That is the decan who just spoke,” Crescent advised.
“Carillon,” the decan said. “Advance.”
“By myself? This is not wise.”
“Is it wise to die? I will kill you within five seconds if you do not follow my orders.”
Carillon apparently believed the threat because a spiderwalker left the others and approached the nickel-gold lake. The cannon was loaded, but Crater decided to wait until the walker started across. On its first step, the walker’s leg slipped out from under it, lurching to one side. When it struggled to stand, another leg slipped until it was splayed out on the slippery surface. Its rider, presumably Carillon, was thrown off.
The crowhopper decan laughed. “What’s wrong, Carillon? Did you feel a need to kiss the moon?”
“Shoot it, Crater,” Maria urged. “Now, while it can’t move.”
“Let’s watch and see what happens,” Crater replied. “Maybe the walkers won’t be able to get across and they’ll retreat. Anyway, I’m not certain of my aim. I’m not even certain if this cannon is going to work!”
Maria fell silent. Once more she sensed how doomed they were.
::: THIRTY-SEVEN
Carillon tried to get to his feet. His spiderwalker was also trying, but every time it put a foot down, it slipped again. Carillon felt as if his back had a bull’s-eye on it. He could see the tube on the crusher. It was some sort of heavy artillery. He started to crawl back to shore.
“Another step, Carillon, and I will shoot you down,” Decan Flaubert said. “Get back to your walker and change to friction pads. All of you do the same. Now!”
Absalom, Lucien, and Dion dismounted and opened utility lockers on the sides of their robotic beasts and took out square-shaped foot pads that snapped onto the pointy feet of the walkers. The other three riders were veterans, eager to get into battle, and soon had the pads on. The three youths were slower. They were literally shaking in their boots.
Carillon, crawling to his walker, opened up the locker and took out the friction pads. As soon as he’d attached one of them to a foot on his walker, it stomped down and rose up on that side. Another pad on the other side and it lurched upright.
That was when the cannon on the crusher fired. The round fell short but ricocheted into the thorax of Carillon’s walker. Trying to get purchase, it threw its legs around and one of them struck Carillon in his helmet. He screamed a silent scream, then fell limp.
“Is Carillon dead?” Lucien asked, his eyes wide.
“What is that weapon?” Absalom cried. “It will kill us all!”
“Be silent!” Flaubert commanded. He leaned forward, squinting at the big machine and the tube that projected from it. “It can only fire one projectile at a time,” he concluded. “No tactics required. Just straight ahead should do.” He waved his hand forward. “You know the drill. Deploy and destroy.”
The three youths looked at each other, waited until the veterans walked their walkers forward, then followed. They stamped onto the nickel lake, crept around the wounded walker and poor Carillon, then skittered ahead. Another round was punched out of the strange cannon. It hit one of the veterans in his chest, stripping him out of his saddle and flinging him away. The riderless walker lurched away from the group, then stopped when the cannon fired again and struck it in its head. The cannon fired yet again, the slug ripping headlong through the pincers and head of another spiderwalker. It fell forward, its rider flung to the hard surface and then crushed when the walker rolled onto its back, its legs wriggling toward the black sky.
The third veteran ran in from the flank and rose up in front of the crusher, its feet catching the edge of the hopper. A hail of flechettes at close range dispatched its rider. The spiderwalker, its front legs dangling into the hopper, stopped and waved its head around, its fangs snapping. Then one of the humans jumped on its back. He knew something of spiderwalkers, that much was certain. He opened a utility hatch and turned the walker off, then dismounted and slid and slithered back to the crusher. The cannon fired again, its round tearing out the guts of the disabled walker.
Lucien turned around first, then Absalom, then Dion. They urged their walkers off the lake past Flaubert, who hurled curses after them. When they got to shore, they sped up, not slowing until they’d turned the corner of the hill, out of sight of the deadly cannon.
Flaubert caught up with them. “Cowards!”
The three looked back at him. “We had no chance,” Lucien said.
“We are Legionnaires. We always have a chance!” Flaubert rocked back and forth in his saddle. “I will show you how to fight. Follow me and watch a warrior at work.”
&n
bsp; They crept behind their decan, then stopped at the edge of the lake.
“Life is death! Death is life!” Flaubert yelled, then sent his walker at full tilt along the edge of the lake and up the side of the hill that formed part of the funnel. Midway, the walker leaped and fell on top of the crusher. The humans manning the cannon fled but Flaubert didn’t follow. The legs of his walker were entangled in the cannon mount. He shook his fist at the humans as they got in their vehicles and sped away.
Absalom, Dion, and Lucien carefully crept across the lake, reaching the crusher just as Flaubert’s walker pulled its last leg free. The decan looked at them. “You three are the sorriest excuses for Legionnaires in the history of the Legion.” He let that sink in, then said, “It was no coincidence that you and Carillon had mechanical difficulties with your walkers at the start of this operation, was it? No, of course not. I should have killed you and put an infantry troop on your walkers. They couldn’t have been any worse.”
He drew his rifle from its holster and swung it in their direction. “One more act of cowardice from one of you and I will kill all three. Do you believe me?”
“Yes, Decan!” they chorused.
Flaubert started to laugh, then pointed behind them. They turned around in their saddles to see what was so funny. It was Carillon—alive. He staggered up to Lucien’s walker and hung onto its leg. “I did my duty, Decan!” he yelled.
Flaubert nodded. “Yes, you did, you cur.” He pointed at the crusher. “Get in that thing and drive. We will catch these humans and crush them under its tracks.”
“One of them isn’t human,” Carillon said. “It is a Legionnaire. I could see it clearly. Only smaller.”
“You are hallucinating, idiot,” Flaubert said. “Get in the crusher, I said. Do it now!”
Carillon hesitated until Flaubert aimed the rifle at his head. “On my way, Decan!” he shouted, saluting and clicking his heels.
::: THIRTY-EIGHT
They’re coming after us!” Clarence yelled. “And they’ve got the crusher!”
Crater, driving the chuckwagon, looked in the rearview screen and saw Clarence was right. Maria in the fastbug was in the lead, then the chuckwagon and the truck and trailer. They rolled down a valley pocked with large craters toward a low hill. Crater was thinking in terms of making a stand and for that, he needed high ground. Then he saw a whitish streak several miles away. “Maria, do you see that white dust off to the north? Turn toward it.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Maybe salvation. Don’t drive across it. Go up ahead of it.”
“Roger, wilco,” Maria said and put the hammer down on the fastbug, catching vacuum across craters and rilles. She skirted the streak, then stopped on the other side. Crater followed her tracks. “May I help in any way?” Ike called from his chair.
“Not now, Ike,” Crescent answered.
“I am here to help.”
“I know. Take it easy.”
The gillie suddenly spoke up. I am sick, it said.
“I’m a little busy right now, Gillie,” Crater said.
I am very sick.
“Hush, Gillie,” Crater said.
Crater stopped the chuckwagon beside Maria. He and Crescent got out and stood beside her. The truck soon roared up and the Apps got out too.
Gillie is really, really sick.
“Hush, Gillie.” Crater turned to Crescent. “Will they attack us head-on?”
Crescent considered the terrain, then said, “Yes. I think so.”
“They’d better,” Crater said.
The crusher came first, the spiderwalkers using it for cover.
“Is this the end?” Jake asked. “If it is, my people would like to pray.”
“Pray like it’s the end,” Crater said.
The Apps bowed their heads. “Our Father, Who art in heaven . . .”
The crusher clanked onto the white dust and rolled toward them. Then there was a puff of dust and the crusher disappeared, dropped into a yawning abyss.
The Apps rushed up to see. “The white dust was a skim over a collapsed lavatube,” Crater explained. “I’ve seen them before. Almost fell into a few.”
Maria looked across the chasm and said, “This isn’t over. There are still four walkers left.”
“They’re withdrawing,” Crescent observed. “Or at least three of them are. Now the other one is too.”
Crater felt the gillie move in his pocket. “Are you still sick, Gillie?”
The gillie crawled out. Not sick but busy.
“Busy doing what?” Then Crater felt something else move in his pocket. He reached inside and plucked out the thing that was moving, but what he held between his thumb and finger was confusing. It looked like the gillie, only smaller. “Gillie, what is this?”
The gillie said nothing.
Maria laughed and said, “Congratulations, Crater.”
“What for?”
“Your gillie just had a baby.”
Crater stared at the two gillies. “Gillie? Is this true?”
The gillie on his shoulder said nothing although it looked proud, even though it could look no way at all.
::: THIRTY-NINE
The convoy continued westward through the squat hills and piles of primordial rubble between the Ariadaeus and Hyginus Rilles. The land was riddled with collapsed lavatubes, some no bigger than a truck wheel, others miles long and thousands of feet deep. Maria took the fastbug and zipped ahead to scout out a safe route. Before she climbed aboard the fastbug, she asked Crater for the baby gillie, but Crater suggested maybe it needed some raising by its mother or father or whatever the gillie was. Besides, both gillies seemed the same. When one spoke, so did the other, saying the same thing. They were literally on the same wave-length. To give them both time to recuperate, he put them in the chuckwagon refrigerator. Neither heat nor cold seemed to bother gillies so he figured they’d be safe in there and whatever was supposed to happen would happen without interference.
“I still want first dibs on the new gillie,” Maria said. “When do you think it will be ready?”
“I have no idea,” Crater confessed.
“It’s mine,” she said. “Don’t forget that.”
The way she said it reminded Crater that Maria was, after all, a member of the Medaris family and used to getting her way.
On the third day after the lavatube had swallowed the crusher, the convoy rolled up to where Maria stood beside her fastbug, its wheel stuck in the dust. “Looks like you found a miniature lavatube,” Crater said, trying not to laugh.
Maria’s scowl quickly shut him up. Salvaging the moment, Crescent said, “I think I’ve finally found a job for Ike.”
Some minutes later Crescent and Ike, whom she had dressed in a pressure suit, exited the chuckwagon. “I have never been outside, Missus,” Ike said. “Will I be able to breathe?”
“You’re breathing now, aren’t you? Don’t be afraid.”
“I want to help.”
“Good.” Crescent retrieved a shovel from the exterior tool-box of the chuckwagon and led Ike to the fastbug. She handed him the shovel. “Dig it out.”
Ike stared at the shovel, then looked at the sunk fastbug wheel, then started digging with enthusiasm. “Take it easy, Ike,” Crater said. “You don’t have to wear yourself out.”
“I am helping,” he said.
“Yes, you are, but don’t kill yourself doing it.”
Ike slowed down. “Like this?”
“Like that. Very good.”
While Ike helped, Crater asked Jake what he was going to do without the crusher. “If we have to, we will crush the rock by hand,” Jake replied.
“You Apps are stubborn,” Crater said, which made Jake grin and nod in agreement.
After the fastbug was freed, Crater inspected it and, as he feared, found its axle broken, which was, he supposed, at least better than it being bent. A busted axle he could weld but a bent one he doubted he could straighten. With Clarence’
s assistance, he used the mobile welder from the chuckwagon to weld the axle back together. After a test drive, he brought the fastbug back to Maria. “It should hold,” he said wearily. “But I think you should slow down.”
“If we don’t hurry, we’re going to be in the dark,” she pointed out.
“The shadow’s going to catch us anyway,” Crater replied, looking aloft and shielding his eyes from the sun.
For the next two days, they journeyed in the sunlight, reaching the plain called Seething Bay. Then a fuel cell on one of the trucks began to overheat. Deciding it was about to die, Crater disconnected it, leaving one cell to push the truck along. The Seething Bay surface, which was white and fine grained, was especially hot. Crater could even feel it soaking into his boots, the biolastic sheath unable to fully compensate.
The shadow caught them just as they passed the Flammarion peaks. It wasn’t completely dark as the blue glow of the Earth lit up the plains and hills but it was decidedly colder, which was a relief from the heat. Crater was starting to feel good about their chances. The radar remained clear.
Near the crater Palisa, which was within sight of the walled rim of the polygonal-shaped crater Ptolemaeus, the biofuel cells in all the vehicles started to show signs of distress. Crater called Maria and told her it was time to halt the convoy. They would stop for twelve hours so the cells could rest.
Maria turned around to rejoin the convoy. When she arrived, she saw Crater and the two App men working on the vehicles. The App women were posted as guards, one on a small rounded hill, one along the track they’d made. She studied the situation, then sought out Crescent. “Did you organize the defense?”
“I did.”
“If you look over toward that hill,” Maria said, pointing at a tall peak, “you will see it is a better place to put a guard than that low hill.”
