He smirked and tipped his chair back, which is dead simple in light gravity. And still just as annoying. I kicked his chair.
Even with my accurate warning, he jumped and overcompensated badly. Faustino’s chair fell backward. I reached for him and his chair back cracked against my cast.
I gasped as a lightning bolt went off in my arm. But I caught him. Granted, he didn’t weigh much more than ten kilos. Still, the moment I pushed his chair upright, I tucked my arm against my body, pressing my right hand to the wrist as if I could stop the throbbing.
“Nicole!” “Are you okay?” “What happened?”
And just like that, my discreet corner in the back became a cluster of people. Luther held out a drinkbag of water, as if that would help.
“Hey! She kicked my chair over.” Faustino wasn’t serious, but I had left my sense of humor somewhere outside the lunar sphere of influence.
“It was that or your balls.” The moment the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Makeshift though this was, it was still a sacred space to the people here. “Sorry—I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”
“Aw…” Faustino gave a one-sided shrug. “No. I’m the one that’s sorry. I shouldn’t have been messing with you, being hurt and all.”
I drew myself up straight. “I’m fine. I caught you, didn’t I?”
“Pilots…” Myrtle stood in the aisle and shook her head at me as if I were a child. “Always the same.”
At the front of the room, Aldrin held up his hands. “Did everyone get communion who wanted it?” He waited a beat. “Great. I guess that’s it, then.”
Curt jumped up. “Um. Friends? Before we go. I’m … I’m new up here, but my family always had an egg hunt, so—so I brought some candy eggs and hid them in the park out there.”
There was nearly a mass exodus, including me, but Faustino waved his hands. “Wait! Closing prayer at least.”
So close. As people settled back into their chairs, Vicky held out my little notebook, which was scuffed from being underfoot. “I think you dropped this.”
“Thanks.” I took it back and tried to appear attentive as Faustino moved to the front.
“Let us close today with a prayer of Thanksgiving.” The rustle of clothes accompanied his words as the small congregation bowed their heads. “O Lord, our Heavenly Father, we most humbly beseech You to grant Your forgiveness through the merits and death of Your Son, Jesus Christ, and through faith in His blood…”
I ducked my head, not to pray, but to update my notes on who had taken communion.
The page was gone.
I riffled through the little book. It was scuffed and pages were bent, but only one was torn out. Around me the rest of the congregation stood up.
“Easter eggs in the park!” Curt’s voice sounded impossibly young and energetic. “And I have a prize for the one who collects the most.”
I knelt, looking on the floor. The page wouldn’t be there, but I wanted it to be. There wasn’t anything terribly incriminating on it, was there? Just a list of names. Not as though I’d written “MY LIST OF SUSPECTS” at the top or anything.
“Everything okay?” Curt stood at the end of the row of chairs.
I sat back on my heels. “Oh, yes. Thank you. I just dropped something in all the hubbub earlier.”
“Can I help?”
I waved him away. “Thanks, it’s fine. Besides you should be out looking for eggs, right?”
He glanced over his shoulder, corner of his mouth dimpling. “That’s the problem with hiding them. I know where they are.” His smile deepened and the damn man got down on his knees. “But hey! You’ve lost something, so that’s kind of like hunting for Easter eggs, right? What are we looking for?”
On Earth, the easy lie would have been that I’d dropped an earring. I didn’t wear them up here. So I went with an almost truth, just in case he actually found it. “A list. I was going to set up a bridge night and had started making a list of potential players.”
“Neat.” He slid chairs aside, peering across the floor. “Am I on there?”
* * *
The Monday after our arrival, which would normally have had me doing a refresher flight on a BusyBee instead had me fighting a typewriter. I pulled the paper out from the glossy black behemoth and glared at it. Somehow, I’d managed to insert the carbon paper backwards. Again.
In theory, acting as Frisch’s secretary made sense …
In practice, even if my arm hadn’t been broken, I was a hunt-and-peck typist. On Earth I had a private secretary. Why would I need to know how to type? Or use carbon paper?
Down the corridor, Danika and Ruben du Preez skip-walked toward my tiny desk with the overconfident speed of new lunar residents. Day one, people went very, very slowly. Day two, they thought they had it figured out. Warning them didn’t make a difference, so now I waited for—
Ruben’s head hit the roof of the tunnel after he pushed off with too much force. The white South African electrician flinched and overcompensated, coming down at an angle against the gently curved wall. Danika was going too fast to avoid him and the couple fell in a tangle of limbs.
I pushed off from my desk, moving with a low lunar lope. When I got to them, I pitched back on my heels to counterbalance and stopped as neatly as if I’d never lived on Earth.
“Are you okay?” I offered my hand to help them up.
Danika rose to her knees, leaning forward to check on her husband. “Well, thank you. At least falling is here softer.”
“Talk for yourself.” Ruben kissed his wife on the cheek and ignored my hand. “There is not an angel who crashed on you.”
“If I were an angel, surely I would have flown.”
“Are we not in the heavens now?” Ruben clambered, carefully, to his feet. He smiled as he helped his wife up. “But we’re doing really well.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Angels. Heaven. They’d been in church yesterday … Might they have written a manifesto filled with scripture?
Danika checked the bobby pins holding her long blond plaits in a crown around her head. “It’s not like the POGO?”
I laughed, shaking my head, and tried to dial my suspicious brain down as I led them back to my desk. “Not so much. This happens to everyone. Just remember that slow is—”
“Fast.” Danika rolled her eyes. “Slow is fast. I know. I keep telling him, but—”
“But I am so excited to here be.” Ruben grinned and then his smile faded. He cleared his throat. “Is the administrator in?”
“I’m sorry, the LCA’s not available right now.” I can’t type, but I know what a secretary sounds like. “Is there something I can help with?”
Ruben chewed his lower lip and shifted his weight. “It’s truly nothing.”
“Then it will be easy to resolve.” I sank into my chair, pulling a notepad close. “Let me guess. You’ve just realized that it’s the fifteenth and you forgot to pay your taxes.”
“What?” Ruben looked completely baffled.
“Taxes in the United States are due today…” I shook my head. The FBI thought that Icarus was American and these two were South African. “Never mind. How can I help?”
Twining her fingers together, Danika winced. “I hate to do this, but…”
“But our country has these regulations. Understand that we don’t have a problem.” Ruben held his hand out. “Truly. But we have to—”
“We have to file a complaint.” Danika swallowed. “The married couple sleeping module is not segregated.”
“We like Myrtle and Eugene. But the South African Aerospace Administration stipulates that we—”
I put my hand flat on my desk and barely avoided slapping it. “There is no segregation on the Moon. This is an international colony and local regulations do not apply here.”
Ruben sighed with relief. “Thank God for that. We just have to…” He waved his hand in frustration.
“We have to make the complaint.” Danika’s cheeks
were pink with a blush. “Can you file it so we don’t get in trouble at home?”
I had no idea how to file a complaint. There was probably a form for that. The IAC always had forms and this one undoubtedly had an acronym. “I’ll see what I can—”
The lights went out. Aside from the luminescent glow of my Omega wristwatch, the corridor was as dark as a mausoleum.
In the silence, Danika’s voice sounded piercing. “Is this…”
The lights came back on.
I winced against the sudden glare. Emergency lights. I’d managed to be staring directly at one when it came on. The battery-powered light was an attenuated yellow and gave a jaundiced tint to Danika’s fair skin.
Ruben laughed uneasily, looking over his shoulder at the light. “Solar power isn’t usually—”
“Shh…” I closed my eyes, as if returning to darkness was useful, and I listened. In the distance, I could hear a murmur of other voices as people tried to figure out what was going on. I could hear them clearly. I shouldn’t have been able to. The constant hum of fans usually masked that with white noise.
We’d lost all power.
EIGHTEEN
NEGROES AND WHITES REJECT INTERPRETATION FOR KINLOCH
ST. LOUIS, MO, April 15, 1963—White and Negro leaders here are concerned because the disorders in suburban Kinloch this week have been widely misinterpreted as race riots. They are particularly disturbed because St. Louis, especially in the decade since the Meteor, has made rapid progress in race relationships. Continued success in this field, they believe, will be important to the city’s prosperity in the coming years. In retrospect, responsible residents of the community attribute the disorders to pent-up frustrations of underprivileged youths who feel that they will be denied the opportunity to leave the planet Earth.
It had only been fifteen minutes. As power failures go, this was nothing. It wasn’t enough time for the temperature to change or the air to become toxic with carbon dioxide, or for me to run out of lighthearted banter designed to distract two new lunar residents.
“Bridge parties give you a lovely chance to get to know people outside of your graduating IAC class.”
Danika was chewing on the quick of her thumb. She blinked when I stopped talking. “Oh. That’s … that sounds pleasant.”
I would bet she hadn’t heard a thing I said and was responding only to the pause. I kept going, as carefree as I could. “Shall we plan for Friday night? I can round up some other couples.”
Ruben looked down the hall at the emergency lights again. “I should try to help.”
I shook my head. “The airlocks will be sealed.” If there had been a breach, there would be a depress alarm. Ergo, there wasn’t a breach, but I felt the absence of my emergency mask keenly. “The electrical engineers on shift will have this under control.”
Danika shifted to picking at her nailbed. “Is there something we should be doing?”
I didn’t even know if the outage was base-wide or just the admin module. Once upon a time, I would have opened procedure manual 49.a and turned to section 137.c, ready to troubleshoot with my teammates. Now … now we had a crew to handle power fluctuations.
Not that we’d had a power failure since very, very early in the colony’s history. This wasn’t a coincidence.
“We are doing exactly what we’re supposed to. Stay put. Don’t panic.” They should know this. It had been covered in their training. “The less we move, the less oxygen we consume.”
“Should we be talking?” Danika’s eyes had grown wide again.
“Why don’t we—”
The lights came back on. The air stirred with a gentle hum. A sigh of relief escaped me, because I had been pretty firmly convinced that someone had taken out the entire power module. I checked my Omega. Sixteen minutes.
What mischief could someone do in sixteen minutes without power?
I stood from behind my desk. “Come on. We can do the airlock check.”
I led them down the hall to the airlock, but Aahana had beaten us there. She was snugging the door against the electromagnet that held it open. She smiled brightly and gestured at the airlock. “Look! My first power restoration. I checked the Delta-v pressure and did a visual confirmation. How did I do?”
“It looks great, Aahana.” I examined the airlock door with false enthusiasm, because the question in my mind was … why was she here? Aahana was a geologist and had no reason to be in the AdminMod. She should be prepping to head out to the South Pole mining outpost. “What brings you here?”
“I was coming to see you. Curt said you were putting together a bridge party, and, well … if it’s not too presumptuous, I adore bridge.”
“Perfect! I’ll add you to the list.” I smiled back at her, wondering if she’d had as much practice as I had at looking sincere. Most people hadn’t. Fishing in my pocket, I dug out a pen. “Oh! Here. Want to sign my cast? In fact, you all should. First broken arm on the Moon. We can all go into the history books together.”
Through this process, I learned that Aahana and Danika were both right-handed. Ruben was a lefty, like me.
And that Aahana had dirt under her nails. As a geologist, that was probably normal.
April 16th
Dear Nicole,
First letters are a mysterious and wonderful thing.
Despite the number of times you have gone to the Moon, without issue, I find myself worrying about every launch as if it were the first. Of course, the fact that this one resulted in an injury is troubling, but I try to console myself with the notion that it is an example of the success of the IAC’s systems. No loss of life occurred, which is surely a miracle given the harshness of the environment. Every possible precaution had been taken and the training of the team paid off when a malfunction occurred—would that those were truly preventable.
Tediously, I must ask you once again to please be careful. Even from here, I can feel you rolling your eyes at me, but please, dearest, I do not want to have to buy flowers for your grave. Listen to the doctors and do as they tell you. Likely, you’ll ignore this plea of mine, so I will keep it short and simply say that I wish you loved yourself as much as I do.
Friday, I’m going ahead with that task we were discussing, which I wish I could delay but some of our friends are suggesting rather strongly that the time is right to do it now. Rather strongly is an understatement. I have received no less than five phone calls this afternoon, urging me to move ahead. So, I’m afraid that I need to ask a favor of you. Can you forgive me for having company when you call home this week? He is quite enamored with what he perceives as the romantic quality of receiving a call from the Moon, so I hope you’ll be willing to talk to him for a bit.
Can you forgive me for that? Home seems quite empty without you. Even Marlowe seems to miss you and wanders from room to room crying. Cats are not as inscrutable as they might seem. Kitten season is starting here and I’ll admit to being tempted to bring one home to keep Marlowe company.
But you will be wanting other news from home. Let me catch you up on Nathaniel’s health. At our last visit, he was in much better shape and spirits, which I attribute entirely to the good care that Hershel has been taking of him. Some of the Astronauts’ Husbands Club members wanted to put together a gift basket for him, but I suggested that we leave his diet to the doctors at this time. They grumbled, of course, but saw the sense in it. I am trying to stop by every time I am in Kansas City. Nathaniel tells me that the doctor has given him permission to return to work for half days after Passover. Good luck keeping him to half days …
Speaking of people who work too hard, and I am not speaking of myself here, did I hear that Eugene was sick during the flight? Tell him that I send my regards and hopes for a quick recovery. Oh, I don’t expect him to slow down, any more than you would. Really, you astronauts are supposed to be the best and brightest, but I find it impossible to believe any of you has a care for your own health. Every night, I look at the clouds and find the glow of t
he Moon through them and think of you. Sending you all my love …
Kenneth
Sixteen minutes. It had been more than twenty-four hours since the power outage and nothing else had happened. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much mischief I could do in sixteen minutes.
I could have poisoned the water supply in that time. I could have fouled the CO2 scrubbers in that time. I could have vented the oxygen tanks in that time.
I leaned over Frisch’s desk and placed Kenneth’s letter on it. “Clemons wants you to check the explosives stores.”
He lifted his beak of a nose beneath brows raised as if for flight. “At the mining outposts?”
“Do we keep them elsewhere?”
Frisch snorted and lowered his head, looking at the letter. He rubbed his forehead as if it hurt. “Does he say why?”
“Not in this.” I glanced at the wall calendar. Four days since we had landed. “Any word on getting my package off the ship?”
“They’re still putting the scaffolding in place.” He lowered his hand, reaching for his tea. “I’ll put in an order to have the explosives inventoried.”
“By whom?”
He’s naïve, but he’s not an idiot. If Icarus was on the Moon, and we didn’t know who they were, then they could very easily lie about the inventory. I saw the realization go through his face and into his limbs as he sagged. Leaning forward, Frisch rested his head on his hands. “All right … The two of us will conduct the inventory.” He sat back and looked at the cast on my arm. “Can you pilot a BusyBee with that?”
“Fortunately, yes. The controls are designed for right-handed pilots.” My control would not have as much finesse as I would like, but it would be acceptable. “When would you like to depart?”
Frisch pulled his calendar toward him and flipped through some pages. Days. He was turning the calendar days into the future. “The rest of this week is packed with meetings and … Gott im Himmel. I think Saturday the twenty-seventh is my next unscheduled day.”
Today was the sixteenth. “With all due respect, there is enough urgency here that clearing your schedule might be warranted.”
The Relentless Moon Page 17
