He reached into the breast pocket on his pajama top and pulled out a folded paper. It was torn from the newspaper our local press office generated from an aggregate of news back on Earth. “Can we talk about this?”
I looked down at the page he handed me. GOVERNOR’S WIFE CLAIMS TERRORISTS RESPONSIBLE FOR HUSBAND’S DEATH. I swallowed and wet my lips. “What aspect?”
“That you think I’m responsible for…” He waved his hands at the lights. “This.”
I handed the paper back to him. “Why would you think that?”
“Let’s see … One of the incidents you cite in the article was our landing. So the controller was either screwed up ahead of time, or someone did it mid-trip, or it was faked. Two of those scenarios mean me, Mikey, Helen, or Eugene. I was the pilot when we set down.”
True. That was the reasoning we had used as well. Was he going to talk about how impossible it was? “Could you have faked it?”
“Sure. I was a test pilot. Half of what we did was getting aircraft to fail on purpose so we could figure out recovery techniques.” He twisted his head again. “Could you come around front? It’s hard to see you.”
True, which was useful. On the other hand, it was also hard to see him. I walked around and watched my shadow from the emergency lights. I kept the shadow of my head just below his chin, which gave me a clear view of his face and left the emergency lights in his eyes. “It will be easier if I understand your goal here.”
He sighed and drummed his finger on the arm of his chair. “Trying to help.” He pointed at the lights. “The way blackouts are getting more frequent, I’m wondering if your saboteurs are trying to run things down.”
“Possible.” I let him see me sigh. I pursed my lips in thought and deliberately cocked my head as I considered him. “What would you do if you were me? In this scenario?”
“I wouldn’t believe a damn word out of my mouth.” He squinted against the light. “How do I change that?”
If he was Icarus, he was very, very good. I might not be firing on all cylinders, but I felt more alive in this moment than I had since Nathaniel had called from the hospital and said my name. I let the moment stretch and unfold, giving him silence to fill.
He waited me out.
I didn’t take the bait. I just smiled and got back behind his chair. “I promise, I’ll think about what you’ve said.”
* * *
Eugene towered over me, hands on his hips, and I felt very, very small, as if I might disappear under the conference room table. “I told you not to talk to him.”
The other people in our group studied the architecture, a map, or their nails. Helen made a note in her log. None of them were helping me. I tried to keep my spine straight, but honestly, how had I thought that Myrtle was the scary one? No—it wasn’t that he was angry—Eugene was disappointed in me.
I lifted my chin. “That is why I disengaged from the conversation as soon as I could.”
“No. You did not. The moment he asked you to wheel him out of the room, you could have used that,” Eugene pointed a finger at my cast, “as an eeeeeeasy reason to say no. You made a deliberate choice.”
I bit my lower lip. I had reported to Eugene the moment I got Curt back into his room. I didn’t even pick up the reading glasses. “I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m aware of the possibility that I’m being manipulated. But now that it’s done, what do we do with the information?”
“What information? That he knows you’re investigating the sabotage? That’s not news.”
I sighed. “That he’s raised the question of batteries and power supply. Assume he’s Icarus. There’s something he wants to happen with the power supply that he can’t do. If he’s not, then he’s right that the frequency increase might be an attempt to drain our batteries.”
Helen frowned over her notebook. “Then why not have it occur for longer than sixteen minutes?”
“I have no idea.”
She kept working, occasionally scribbling a line of numbers.
At the table across from me, Myrtle sat with her ankles crossed, studying the map of the Moon. “Why don’t we run both scenarios. Halim and I can take the ‘Curt is innocent’ scenario.” She looked up at her husband. “You and Nicole can work ‘Curt is Icarus.’”
“There’s another option.” I picked at the edge of my cast. “Do you know what a presumptive is?”
“No,” Halim said.
“Rather than trying to get him to confess, we presume he is an enemy agent. In this scenario—” The lights cut out again. “Goddammit.”
Moments later the emergency lights snapped on and we were all looking at our watches. Halim lifted his gaze to look at me. “So how long does it take to drain the emergency batteries?”
“Approximately ninety minutes, depending on draw.” So I’d retained something useful during my time reading manuals. “Helen, how many power outages…”
She held up a finger to silence me. With the other hand, she scribbled a line of text on one part of the page and then jumped to another to jot a figure down. “I need a map of Earth.”
Eugene moved. He disappeared out the door at a run that was long and low.
Helen shouted, “And a ruler!”
“Got it,” came from the hall.
The rest of us stayed completely still while Helen did her Nav/Comp thing. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, watching her compute. The four minutes it took Eugene to run two doors down to his office, grab a map, and run back might as well have been spent waiting for a launch. We were that tense and hyper-aware.
I heard his footsteps easily without the fans running. A moment later, he grabbed the doorframe to change his vector state, swinging into the conference room. Eugene arrested his forward momentum with a hand on the table and slapped an atlas and a ruler down next to Helen.
She half-glanced at him and saw us staring at her. “It’s a satellite.”
“A satellite…” Myrtle straightened. “They’re bouncing a signal here.”
Eugene’s eyes widened. “A signal for what? From where?” His gaze dropped to the map. “I’ll keep quiet and let you figure that out.”
* * *
Sixteen minutes later, the lights were back on, and Helen had requested two additional reference books. Without being asked, Myrtle had acquired a yellow legal pad, which she’d offered to Helen by means of sliding it next to the logbook she was working in. Helen switched to it as seamlessly as if it had always been there.
She drew a circle on an enlarged map of the United States. “Kansas. I can’t get more detailed with the materials on hand, but deductively it is almost certainly Kansas City. Get me a list of satellites and their orbits and I can tell you exactly which satellite they are hitting.”
“But you think it’s not Lunetta.”
She shook her head. “Lunetta has a different orbital pattern.”
Eugene leaned on the table, looking at the map. “Do you know why?”
Cracking her neck, Helen leaned back in her chair and stretched. “Why sixteen? Yes. That’s how long the satellite is in line of sight, which tells us that they have a single base, as we thought. If you want to know what they are sending up on that signal, I cannot tell you.”
“You mean, besides ‘turn the power off,’” Eugene said.
“There are more efficient ways to do that, if they have a man on the Moon. The power failures started two days after landing, before the polio epidemic struck.” She looked back at the notes she scratched and grimaced. “I think we’ll get one more outage today and four tomorrow. Regardless of intent, that will be more than enough to drain the emergency batteries.”
Eugene steepled his fingers together and bent his head with the tips pressed to his mouth. Not quite praying, because his eyes were open and squinting in concentration, but working the problem in his own head. “All right … We can address the lights by pulling backup batteries out of storage and swapping them in key places. We’ll hook the emergency generators up to life supp
ort for the main dome. I’d give a lot to stop the blackouts from happening.”
From deep in the recesses of my mind, an idea scratched. Something related to satellite protocols. I grabbed the manual I’d been reading from a previous iteration of the lunar base and flipped through the pages, trying to jog the idea loose. It didn’t feel like something I’d read recently, though. It felt like something I used to know.
“Is there a copy of the first manual for the lunar base?” I stood. “Never mind. It’s in the library.”
Eugene lifted his head. “Say you have something for me, Wargin.”
I hesitated because it was something I only half-remembered from when I’d been one of six people up here. That information had been scraped away and overlaid by new iterations of the base. “I want to look at the original specs for the RPDAs.”
“Remote Power Distribution Assembly…” Myrtle shook her head. “That’s just referring to moving power from a central source, though.”
“Now, yes. But they also contain one or more RPCMs, which used to mean ‘Remote Power Control Modules.’” My heart was beating a little faster as talking dragged that old information kicking and screaming into the forefront of my brain. Of our group—in fact, of the people on the Moon currently—I was the only one who had been stationed in the very first iteration of the lunar base. “Part of the contingency plan was that Kansas Ground Control could assume remote control in case of catastrophic failure. The trigger was a power failure, which caused the system to look for a satellite signal from Earth.”
I saw them get it, with the intake of breath and a settling in as they got ready to deal with the ramifications. All of us thinking about that box in Midtown of legacy systems, which were still linked in for redundancy.
I wanted to get to the library to look at that manual. I wanted to be remembering wrong. “I think … I think they can assume remote control over every aspect of the base—not just power.”
FORTY
AIR FORCE STUDIES SCOPE OF MISSION IN SPACE PROGRAM
By JACK RAYMOND
Special to The National Times
KANSAS CITY, May 26, 1963—The Air Force has undertaken a series of studies of its future that could conceivably lead to dramatic new missions in space or to a sharp reduction in its present roles and missions.
At this stage, it can be reported, the Administration is by no means convinced of the necessity of some ambitious nonmilitary space proposals. The studies were prompted by the changing character of air-weapons technology and Government strategy for nuclear weapons. But an important impulse for the reassessment was the Denley Administration’s belief that as resources on the planet dwindle, America must establish dominance in space.
The studies have been named Project Forecast. They have been compared with the famous report “Toward the Stars” that was drafted by a team headed by Dr. Nathaniel York and his wife in the days after the Meteor struck a decade ago.
The difference between that earlier report—ordered by then-President Brannan—and the one now in preparation, however, is that a mood of global cooperation prevailed then. Now the mood is that of a service approaching a fight for existence. No publicity has been given the new Air Force studies, which were ordered quietly May 6 by President Denley.
The air in the conference room, with a gaggle of engineers drinking coffee and arguing across freeze-dried donuts, had grown stale hours ago. My ass was sore from having been in the same chair since that morning. Eugene sat at the head of the table, with his hand on his chin, listening to the chief of every systems department and the lead engineer on the Moon hash out what needed to be disconnected and in what order.
“If you take out water circulation at that stage, we’ve no way to reject waste heat.” Christian Godfrey, lead electrical systems engineer, had the sort of perfect British voice that makes it clear he had gotten the ever-living shit beaten out of him in boarding school.
“What about the EETCS?” I asked. The Early External Thermal Control System had existed just for the first six months of the colony, before we got the permanent external thermal control system assembled. I would have killed for my own copy of the first manual for the lunar base with all of my notes scribbled in the margins, but flipping through the library copy had helped jog my memory. “Parts of that were repurposed for the PVTCS loops, right? Is that something we could use as a patch?”
“Perhaps. See here … Our lunar backrooms are quite good, but as I have iterated before, I would feel significantly safer if Kansas ran this as a simulation for us,” he protested. Again.
Eugene lowered his hand. “I told you the parameters at the start. We cannot ask Kansas for help without alerting Earth First that we have found their backdoor. If you raise this one more time, I’ll ask you to send your assistant in to take your spot.”
“I am making a statement about my comfort level, which translates directly to a process you would like me to sign off on. If you simply want people who will say yes, then you’re courting disaster.” The pasty white man wet his lips and shot a glance at me. “I do not think hysterical panic serves us.”
“Hysterical?” I could have killed him with my fountain pen. He only lived because I didn’t have one on the Moon. “What a fascinating word choice.”
Eugene did that thing where he tipped his chin down just a little and his face hardened, but it was the only movement he made. “Your assistant is Mavis Davis, am I correct?”
“I— Now, see here…” He glanced around the room, looking for support, but the other engineers had suddenly found their notebooks very interesting. “I would be irresponsible if I did not voice my concerns.”
“Five times in the space of two hours over a parameter I explained at the top of the morning.” Eugene checked his watch and held up a finger. “You have thirty seconds.”
“To explain everything that’s—”
“No. Until we lose power again.” Eugene pointed to the door. “You’ll want to get to the other side of the airlock to Midtown before that happens. I suggest running. Twenty seconds.”
He ran. Twenty seconds after that, we lost power on the schedule Helen had predicted. A little over sixteen minutes after that, Mavis joined us and we had no more troubles with “hysteria.”
Also, I was absolutely right about the EETCS. Sometimes, it pays to be old hat.
* * *
As much as we wanted to hurry, there is a difference between efficiency and rushing. “Slow is fast” applied to every aspect of the space program. So we spent all of Sunday hashing out exactly how we were going to pull the legacy systems offline.
Monday morning, Mavis Davis—whose parents must have been delightful people—leaned out of the legacy Remote Power Control Module. She was a broad-shouldered woman with a deep Tennessee accent and a wicked understanding of all things electrical. “Nicole? Can you take a look at a label for me? I think it’s legacy even for the legacy system.”
“Sure.” I had been parked by the RPCM just in case something like this turned up. We’re supposed to document everything, but there’s best practices and actual practices. For instance, I probably would have forgotten to eat breakfast this morning if I hadn’t been working with Eugene, even though I know better.
I squeezed past her into the space and followed the beam of her flashlight to a rack of equipment in the bottom of the module. I brought my own flashlight up and squinted at the label in question. Sighing, I slid my brand-new reading glasses down from the top of my head and the handwritten label popped into focus.
VRCS—Do Not Decouple Without Authorization
My brain sent up a flare that this was familiar, except … I had no idea what VRCS was. It took staring at it for another second before I stiffened. The upstroke of the V, the specific curve of the S, the slightly too broad u. Those had been on the library card for The Long Tomorrow as part of faux Vicky Hsu’s name. I could be mistaken, of course, because both were small sample sets, but given the context, I was not taking bets on bei
ng wrong. I backed away from the device and kept my face relaxed as I turned to Mavis. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh.” She knew enough about the situation to understand this might be bad.
It was. On two fronts. With everything going on, we had never followed up with Frisch about the book and how it had gotten into his office. That was bad. But what was worse was that Icarus had been in the RPCM and I had no idea what this thing was that he had installed.
I eased out of the RPCM and slid my glasses back onto the top of my head. “I’m calling Eugene. Don’t do anything to it, but do look to see what it would take to uninstall it.”
* * *
Eugene followed me back to the RPCM, head down as he listened to me brief him on what we’d found. Both of us were moving fast enough that we were having to lean into our momentum. People saw us come out of the tube from admin and got out of the way.
He checked his watch. “Helen says we have another blackout in two hours—assuming they keep to schedule today. You think that’s the thing they’re using to kill the power?”
I shook my head. “I genuinely don’t know. I thought they were exploiting the satellite link.”
At the RPCM, Mavis’s team clustered around the door. One man had schematics unrolled on the floor next to the module. Another woman leaned in the door with Mavis, nodding earnestly. A third electrician was positioning a large rolling tool chest; he looked around as we came up and tapped Mavis on the shoulder, gesturing to us.
She extricated herself from the RPCM, flashlight in hand, and stood to greet us. “We can take it out. It’s a radio.”
I wanted to shout “don’t touch it” even though I knew they would not have. All the same, my heart felt like it was a misaligned engine oscillating in my chest. “Is it wired into comms?”
She shook her head. “Into the EPS.”
The Relentless Moon Page 37
