Tears of Selene

by Bill Patterson

  “Power-wise, we've got more than we could ever need for the next couple of decades. Even if we started running low on thorium, we could always cannibalize the nukes and run off of them for another few decades.”

  “How much thorium do we have, given our current rate of consumption?”

  Duane scratched his head. “It's kinda hard to figure, really. We're still running with the same load of thorium that we had when we rounded the sun. But Ivan's run some numbers, measuring the Xenon-135 production rate, and we think we'll need to change out the fuel load in another twelve to twenty months. We really dragged down the fissile percentage in the salt when we ran the engines shaping our final orbit. We're not going to do that kind of maneuvering again, so for the foreseeable future, our biggest drain is the lasers.”

  “That's not really an answer,” said Scott.

  Duane shrugged, minutely lifting him off the chair. He idly pulled himself back down by nudging a knee under the control desk. “Like I said, it's hard to figure. I think Ivan wants us to top back up to a full load of U-233, then really measure how long it takes for the fuel to be used up.”

  “That's going to take years, wouldn't it?”

  “Sure. About ten I'm guessing before the accumulation of waste products starts ruining the neutron economy in the main loop.”

  Scott peered at Duane. “So who's going to babysit the reactor for that long?”

  Duane laughed. “You mean, 'who's going to be stuck up here for ten years,' don’t you?”

  Scott just looked at him, reaching up with a hand to stop a slight drift in his position.

  “Not me, that's for certain!” said Duane. “I'm headed back down on the first ERV that will have me.”

  “Then Ivan.”

  “Don't forget the sleepers. We've got some backup operators in the horde.”

  “Yeah. I've been cataloging the ones that I'd trust in Engineering. You've got a list?”

  Duane laughed. “Me? Hell no, that would smack of management. Do too much of that and I'd get stuck up here, in charge. I leave that kind of headache to Niall.”

  “Got a point,” said Scott. He tapped a part of the structure, spinning his body around his local vertical.

  “Before you go,” said Duane, then he waited for Scott to spin back to face him. “If you really need that data, I'll get with Ivan and Niall and see if we can come up with a better set of figures. I do know this—even without cannibalizing the bomb cores and running the reactor off of uranium, we've got five full changes of thorium fuel and fluoride salt stashed in the aft chamber. At a minimum of ten years per charge, count on at least fifty to seventy-five years of power. We better get space cleared of debris in that time, get some more people upstairs and whoever's staying back down to Earth, otherwise, it's going to be a well-lit, warm, and sterile death up here.”

  Scott tapped the structure again before he replied. “Thanks. I'll pass it on to the Commanders.”

  Duane settled back in his chair. He was still certain that he was going back down. But now a nagging voice in the back of his head started asking about the ones who were staying behind.

  ###

  There was a nagging voice in the back of Garth's head, too. This one kept asking him if Celine and John were clinking mugs of bier while they were downing sauerbraten and spätzle and laughing at the thought of poor old Garth Wakeman in prison. Well, that scenario stopped when Garth crashed out of the prison and made his way to the port of Charleston, South Carolina. He’d kept one step ahead of the law in the two weeks since his escape, living off the land and the occasional dumpster.

  The voice never stopped goading him. In his dreams, Celine and John went to harvest fests in some local town near that UN kaserne, drinking and dancing, while the sun went down early and they eventually staggered to the safety of the guarded compound. He lay in the gutter of a cobblestoned strasse, his sacrum shattered, his legs in a split and his scrotum a mass of ruptured testicles and blood as they staggered past him, laughing, their eyes and hands and lips only for each other.

  Worst still, his cherished memories of Celine, eyes closed in bliss as he once rode above her, destroyed when she cried out 'John' as they peaked together.

  Again, Garth wrenched himself awake.

  John Hodges would die in prolonged agony if Garth had anything to say about it, and he was determined to have a say in it.

  He heard an unexpected noise and kept perfectly still while the grinding and pounding of machinery continued on all around him. These semi-robotic cargo vessels basically ran themselves. Stowing away on them was practically suicide, though. They had emergency crew facilities, but no food or water was aboard. With crossings running over a week, the usual stowaway would be dead of thirst long before the pilot crew came aboard off the coast of Belgium to tow the freighter in.

  Garth was not your usual stowaway. His clothes were worn but serviceable and fit right in with his role as freighter crewman. He had an identity disk and a currency card, courtesy of Sanchez and his crew on the outside of prison.

  He smiled inwardly at his first meeting with Sanchez’ gang. Julio had provided him with all the recognition codes and drops he needed. Eduardo, his contact, was astonished that he wasn’t Hispanic, but had somehow survived being in the same cell as Sanchez. The bundle of clothing Eduardo provided was the right size, and Garth had stripped out of the prison clothes and into the worn denim in under thirty seconds flat.

  Garth delivered Sanchez's encoded messages to Eduardo and turned to leave.

  “That's it?” asked Eduardo.

  “I'm not going to be delivering an answer,” said Garth. “I think you understand why.”

  Eduardo snorted. “Of course not,” he said. “I meant the tag.”

  Garth was nonplussed. “The tag? You mean from the prison?”

  “Yeah. I don't know how you managed to get this far, but I bet you didn't go on the highway.”

  Garth looked at him for a few seconds. “You must think I'm crazy. Everyone knows that the highways are filled with electronics. I figured they'd be able to strobe an RFID chip like a prison tag. I just dug it out as soon as I could.” He rolled up the left arm of his shirt and pointed to the healing cut on his arm.

  “Smooth move. Know where you’re going?”

  “Europe,” said Garth. “I want to get out of the States for a bit.”

  “You're not going to fly, and I don't see you rowing the Atlantic.” He pondered for a few moments and snapped his fingers. “Robot freighter. Only thing that makes sense.”

  “So?” Garth was trying to look over both shoulders at once. “Get to the point, I've got to keep moving.”

  “So you're off to Charleston. You’re thinking to hop one in the harbor. They're fully rigged with electronics, dude. We found out the hard way. Jump on one without their RFID, and the Coast Guard's going to dig your ass out of whatever compartment you're wedged in before you get a hundred kilometers away. Maybe they drop you overboard two or three times until they finally get you secured on their ship. Things happen, you know? Some of our guys never came back, but then again, they weren't good swimmers either.”

  “You don't scare me—I can swim just fine. So I've gotta find someone with a chip in Charleston. Thanks for the warning.”

  “I can send you to our guys. Smooth the path.”

  “What the hell for? Why would you help me?”

  “One of Sanchez' messages. Said to help you get far away from here. Rogers died and the Nazis are blaming you. We don't need a war with the Nazis, so you're getting the best. We want to make sure you don’t come back.” Eduardo shook his head. “Sanchez hates the Nazis. Helping you escape is his way of sticking it to them.” Eduardo scribbled on a scrap of paper. “See this guy, give him the same codes you used on me. He'll fix you right up.”

  Garth nodded, then casually strolled out of the alley and off towards the tracks. Sometimes the train engineers would let a walker swing aboard. Charleston was only a hundred kilometers away
. With luck, he could be on a ship within a week.

  ***

  Garth woke from his light doze as a flashlight beam swung around the storage compartment where he had holed up. From the perfectly smooth motion, he was certain that it was a drone-mounted camera light. He looked around. Too many obstacles—no drone was going to get close to his hiding place. He waited until the light went out and the odd noise faded away.

  Well, now the game gets interesting. Drones increased the danger of discovery. Garth went over his past actions in his mind. No, he was certain he did everything Eduardo's contact in Charleston Harbor recommended.

  That man was a goldmine of information. He routinely went back and forth to Europe on the ships, smuggling whatever Sanchez' gang wanted moved. Sometimes, he went just for fun.

  Garth was amazed at how easy stowing away was, once you knew all the tricks in order to get away with it successfully. The RFID chip was only a part of it. Rigging a solar still on the deck in the surveillance cameras' blind spots was another. Food was the easiest—if you liked granola bars. Your body wouldn’t even think of scurvy in a week, unless you forgot to take a bottle of supplements along with you.

  Dozens of things to remember, equipment to baffle the electronics aboard the ship, gear to drag aboard. Garth thought all the help was getting a little too convenient.

  “Why are you helping me?” Garth asked the shorter man.

  “Compadre, it is you who are helping me!” the man exclaimed as he puttered around his shop, picking up odd bits of gear and packaging it, stopping to scrawl instructions on brown packing paper. “See, the gang, they need to ship something out of here. But I promised my mother that I would stay in Charleston. She's in the hospital, her heart. Muy dificle, be in hospital and in la agua, si? Then the answer to my problema comes walking in the door. You have to get to Europe, I have to get this to Europe. Problem solved, no?”

  Garth listened closely to all of the man's instructions, tips, and stories. In the end, the man had helped him get aboard the freighter, both of them dressed as port inspectors. They got on and off, singly and together, so many times that anyone watching would have no idea when one of them remained behind.

  Under the man's guidance, Garth rascalled the intruder network so that it broadcast only normal signals while feeding the real output to a terminal Garth monitored from time to time. There was nobody else aboard.

  The drone faded. Now what?

  It was a real puzzler. If he got out of his hiding spot and started wandering around, he just increased the chance that he'd run into that live drone.

  He shook his water bottle. Getting empty. He looked at his watch. Sixteen fifty. The sun should be getting pretty far down in the sky. Time to make his move.

  He had to empty the solar still, refill the reservoir with seawater, and get a position fix on his GPS while there was still light. He grabbed his spare water bottle and the stun gun and slid carefully out of his hiding spot.

  John Hodges better build up his strength. He better not die too quickly and rob me of my revenge.

  Bird In The Hand

  Aboard Perseus, High Earth Orbit, May 8 2087, 1745 GMT

  “You're out of your mind, you know that?” Duane looked from Scott Acevedo—his nominal boss—to Bubba Cranford. Bubba trained under Vito Von Schaik to be a relief reactor operator for Moonbase Collins. “You escaped that deathtrap, just barely rebuilt your health, and now you want to go back?”

  “Well, I wouldn't go that far,” said Bubba. “But seein' as all y'all haven't seen the Collins reactor, seems to me jest right to do a lil trainin' afore we drop back down.”

  Duane pointedly looked behind him. The three of them were alone in the shelter. “You might not realize this, but let me point something out to you. I'm gonna be in the seat right behind you during reentry—nothing's going to stop me from going back to Earth.”

  Bubba looked over to Scott for assistance.

  “Duane. It's a simple run. Out to the Moon, land, fire up the reactor and the Works, manufacture some specialty gear, fling some stuff over here to Perseus. We'll fling ourselves back here and do the same aerobraking maneuver that the others did, except the Tank will be filled to the gills with special stuff that Perseus doesn't have—like more carbonaceous chondrite asteroid.”

  “I thought the one they had was mined out,” said Duane.

  “We're going to fly a close orbit around the Moon before we land. With all the impacts, there's bound to be more methane seeps where old asteroids have been buried. If not, well then we've got a problem.”

  Duane cocked his head to the side. “I don't understand.”

  “We've checked the inventory. We can make exactly one set of parachutes for one ERV with the textiles on board. We've got no more asteroid to make more textile. It will take three or four craft to get all of us down. We need to go back to the Moon to get more raw material.”

  Duane stared from Scott to Bubba and back. “No.”

  Bubba nodded his head. “Yes. Before you ask, we can't salvage anything y'all used out in the Asteroid Belt like that mylar balloon. That aluminum spray screwed it up. So we have to go get fresh.”

  “But why me? I have nothing to do with the Collins' systems. There are, what, three or four operators in hibernation? Send them.”

  Scott looked around, leaned in, and lowered his voice. “The Commanders aren't too happy with the skillset of the sleepers who are the backup operators. But if a certified operator from the awake crew went with Bubba here and created a how-to manual for Mighty Thor, well, that would set their minds at ease a lot more.”

  “Mighty Thor's a whole lot bigger than the reactors y'all used on your ships,” said Bubba. “The tech is about the same, but Thor's got some quirks from operating in one-sixth gravity. I know how you feel, Mr. Bebeau, but I'd be much obliged if y'all would come with us.”

  “Ivan,” began Duane.

  “Is not coming,” said Scott. “Commanders' request. Both of them. Neither is VonShaick. Doctor's orders in his case.”

  “Vito didn't eat his grits,” said Bubba. “Still a bit shaky.”

  Duane stood back up, fists balled. Then his shoulders slumped. “How long until we go, and how long are we going to be there?”

  Scott nodded slightly. “We're looking at about two weeks until we go. We have to transfer some of the nukes back aboard the Tank, clean it out, refurb it. We're also going to be bringing some seeds and nutrients out with us, so if a future sky crew decides to stay out there a bit, they'll have enough food variation to delay any deficiency diseases.”

  Bubba clapped Duane on the back. “Doncha worry, man. Ain't nobody flyin' back to Earth afore we get back.”

  ###

  “There's no doubt,” said the UNSOC Security Chief, “Garth Wakeman has escaped jail and was last seen in the port of Charlestown, South Carolina.”

  “He's coming over here,” said Shep. “He's obsessed with his ex-wife Celine Greenfield.”

  “Damn, I was hoping we were done with this crap,” said Lisa. “How did he do it?”

  “Took me a long time to dig it up, those folks down South don't like Yankees poking their noses in, and it's for damn sure that they're not going to say anything when a German cop tries sleuthing around.”

  Lisa snorted softly. “Bubba hooked you up, didn't he?”

  Shep looked at her. “Bubba?”

  “He's on the Perseus now, but he was one of the Collins crew. I was stationed with him for a year once. What a charmer. Remind me to tell you the story of grit bushes sometime.” Both of the men stared as the head of UNSOC laughed out loud for a few moments.

  “Uh, yes, ma'am. Bubba got us the help we needed. He had a friend who worked for the Department of Corrections. Their latest theory is that Garth somehow switched RFID tags with someone else who had trustee privileges. Once out, the trail goes cool, but it appears that he had help from some Hispanic criminal gangs.”

  “Weird,” said Shep. “Media is filled with sto
ries of how the gangs run prisons. I've never heard of one gang helping someone not of their demographic.”

  The Security Chief coughed significantly. “How he got out doesn't really matter. How he's going to break in here is much more important. We're already increasing security and going over our defenses.”

  “Good,” said Lisa. “Keep me informed, Chief. If you can use him, Shep has some personal interest in this matter.”

  The Chief looked him over. Shep took the scrutiny for a moment, then said, “Let me work out with guards. I'll show you just how well I can hang with the tough guys.”

  The Chief shrugged. “I'd rather not—it's a bad precedent. But if Commander Daniels here says take you, I will.”

  Lisa stood, indicating the end of the meeting. “Tell you what, Shep will brief me, and that should give you more time to work on defenses. I'll brief John Hodges and Celine Greenfield myself. We know he's going for both of them, so make sure you have a last-ditch defensive position for them.”

  “Will do, ma'am. Mr. Daniels, if you'd follow me?”

  Shep turned to Lisa, smiled, and gave her a little wave as he followed the Security Chief out of her office.

  ###

  “I don't know why you'd think it would be just three of us in the Tank,” said Scott. “There's no way we could get Collins back up and running with less than ten men.”

  “Who else are you dragooning back to the Moon?” asked Duane.

  “Not saying,” said Scott. “Mostly because I haven't done any dragooning yet.”

  Duane stopped so suddenly that he drifted away from his handhold aboard the Tank. “You have volunteers?”

  Bubba laughed long and hard in the channel. “Ain't no way anyone's gonna volunteer, 'specially when most of them are figuring an angle to get on the first ERV back.”

  Duane looked from one spacesuited figure to the other, the rest of his body pivoting minutely to balance out the torque of his swiveling head. “Yeah, I'm just gonna shut up now. Sooner done, sooner home.”