Ragesh looked at his panel. “Radar is still out, the EMP field is too active. Another two minutes before we dare turn it on.”
Roger Smithson turned to Jeff Gaston. “We've gotten a nuke close, so that takes care of the debris cloud. What if we still have a decent sized chunk left after this is over?”
Jeff looked at the screen, willing an image to form in the white noise of the video signal. “Well, sir, it’s going to be one of two things. First, there's a chunk left over and it's going to hit us. We have a second nuke loaded, but we're going to have to throw it pretty soon. Or it could be the debris got shoved out of our way from the intense heating and vaporization of the surface. The debris might continue on to Earth. I'm sure UNSOC will track it.”
“When do we have to launch the second nuke?” asked Smithson.
“The original impact estimate is ninety minutes from now,” said Jeff. “But the sooner nuked, the more time the shove has time to work. But we have to be able to see the object to aim the bomb ejector.”
“All right,” said Smithson. “How about an estimate? Can we launch and then steer it over?”
“No, sir. There's no time to finagle up an engine for the bomb. We aimed the first one like a spitball and shoved it away from us with a burst of compressed air.” Jeff was still trying to get an image to resolve on his monitor
“We've got to do better than this!” said Smithson. “What if we don't get a full three hours warning next time?”
“Chew me out later, sir. The second nuke is being held at T-4 minutes, and I estimate we've got to blast it out of here within the next fifteen or we stand a good chance of getting hit.”
“Understood. What are you looking for in the radar?”
“The main chunk in the center, sir,” said Jeff. “We've either broken it up to rubble or we've shoved it out of an impact trajectory with us. I think we did both.”
“I'm still going to worry about it until we know for sure. What would a ten centimeter chunk of that thing do to us?”
Jeff turned to look at his boss. “At four kps? We get junk bouncing off of us at that speed in the ten millimeter size range all the time. That's the subliminal thudding sounds you hear sometimes. Ten centimeters is ten times the momentum, so, one order of magnitude more energy against fifty meter solid iron walls. Unless there's some kind of seam in the walls that we don't know about, I'd say we're doing okay, boss. Stop worrying. Perseus will be just fine.”
The screen cleared suddenly, and Ragesh cautiously turned on the radar. A rapidly expanding cloud of minute echoes filled the screen. No object was larger than five centimeters, and the cloud was projected to pass quite far behind the Perseus.
“Looks good so far, sir, but I'm waiting on Ben Zabor to give us the all-clear.”
The Commander of the Perseus looked at his Chief Engineer, who was working the controls of the radar as well as the output monitor. The minutes passed slowly. All seven of them. One at a time. Each minute seeming to take longer than the one just before it. A speaker on the panel burped softly.
Benjamin Zabor, the astrogator, announced, “We're clear. Emergency is over.”
###
Commander Roger Smithson picked up a ball-peen hammer and tapped the chunk of Perseus slag, which gave out a surprisingly bell-like tone.
“Nice. Who did this?” asked Roger as the crowd started settling down.
“Lima Donnelly,” said Scott Acevedo. “Said we needed something better than banging a rock on a slab of lunar aluminum.”
Roger smiled his thanks at Lima, who was standing next to Scott. He looked over to his left, where the rest of the combined crews from the ill-fated Mars Expedition and those left alive from the Collins crew were gathered.
“Settle down,” said McCrary in a calm but carrying voice. “Time's running short.”
Roger waited another minute, then formally tapped the hammer on the slag in three precise strokes. “Attention, crews. We have a lot of things to go over, and we need to get them done quickly. Commander Lee?”
Jeng Wo Lee, still significantly disabled from the Event on the Moon, stood shakily in the one-half gravity of the ground floor of the Perseus. His voice was a thin, reedy version of its former self, but everyone knew his condition and kept very still so that they could hear him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you are well aware that I command through McCrary and Peter Brinkley. I have discussed events with them, and they will brief you on our decision now. Thank you.”
McCrary stood up easily as Commander Lee carefully lowered himself into a chair.
“Greetings. Doctors Gullotta and Kumar briefed me. Thanks to this amazing farm, courtesy of the Mars Expedition, everyone's returned to regular health, excepting the most severely wounded from the Event. So, we're ready to begin the final journey to Earth.”
The cheering was so loud, it reflected off the rear wall of the Perseus, returning four seconds later to phase oddly with the continued shouting of the crews.
McCrary raised the hammer and rapped on the slag a half-dozen times, bringing the astronauts back to a semblance of order.
“Enough or this will take forever. Also, hold questions. First order of business: reorganization. The crews of the Collins and the Mars Expeditions will come under a single management structure. UNSOC, which still nominally commands all forces in space, has selected Commander Smithson as overall commander of the Perseus and everyone inside her. Commander Lee is senior, but he has declined on the basis of disability. Commander Standish is second in command, and Peter Brinkley is third. I am the Chief Engineer of the combined crews, but the breakdown of engineering staff will be discussed at another time.
“However, the Commanders gave me the gavel because we really have one main mission in front of us: constructing Emergency Reentry Vehicles and returning to Earth!”
Another wave of cheering broke out, and McCrary let them shout this one out for a while.
Phoenix
Aboard Perseus, High Earth Orbit, May 29 2087, 1157 GMT
“McCrary doesn't need any ERV to get back home,” said Irma Huertas. “All he needs is a face mask and an air tank. He could get there just hopping from rock to rock and flapping his arms.”
Marcel Bossenhagen was not entirely pleased to find Irma on the same work detail. The last time they worked together, she’d cost him a big chunk of his reputation, as well as putting him on the bad list of everyone on command staff. Somehow, though, she came out of it all, if not smelling like a rose, certainly in charge of a big part of Lunar life. He felt like a used tissue.
“The rest of us do, though, so how about you cram it for a while?” he said.
Irma turned shocked eyes his way, was about to respond, but turned away and kept loading chunks of asteroid into the hopper. “Where does all this rubble come from, anyway?” she wondered out loud. “They inflated this while the walls were molten. There shouldn't be anything around.” She gazed around at the inner surface of the asteroid's forward bubble. A lot of it was already under cultivation, green growing things reaching for the center of the cylindrical space, their stems forming a graceful curve owing to Coriolis force. The untouched surface, though, was littered with rocks and debris of all sizes and types.
“This wasn't a purely iron asteroid,” said Jimmy Fields, one of the engineering crew who was assigned to this detail. “So, when they melted the thing, they had to spin it. That meant that when it cooled, the iron tended to migrate to the outside, and the less dense molten rock migrated to the inside. When it cooled, it didn't cool the same temperature all over. Hell, they were shooting liquid oxygen inside to cool it down as fast as they could. So, rather than form a nice smooth surface, parts of the inner wall shattered under thermal stress. So, rocks.”
“Yay, rocks,” said Marcel. “Feel like I'm at the Big House, making little ones out of big ones.”
“Don't knock it—that rock goes through the crushers, then gets spread on the inner surface and feeds us. If nature worked diffe
rently, then the rock would be on the outside and the iron on the inside, and we'd starve to death.” Jimmy looked inside the hopper. “Could you speed things up a little? We need this area cleared and smoothed—this is going to be one of the factory floors for the ERVs.”
“Finally, a goal I can believe in,” said Marcel, reaching for another rock.
“Yeah, well, McCrary's going to get us all killed,” said Irma. A low frequency thudding sound punctuated her words. “There's another chunk of the Moon, and there's a lot more where it came from—all ready for us when we step outside in some flimsy thing. I say, land the Tank.”
Marcel refused her bait this time. Let Irma pick some other sucker for her protests. He just wanted to get back home.
###
“Don't we even get to say goodbye?” asked Lima. “I understand keeping things quiet until we're ready to go, but sneaking off like this is gonna look bad.”
Scott snorted. “So it looks bad. Think about it. How many people do you think want to head back out on a space journey that doesn't lead to Earth? Damned few, I imagine.”
“I'd be pissed, Scott, not so much because I want to go, but dammit, I'd want to be asked, at least!”
“McCrary showed me the numbers. Making the original ERVs took twenty years and thousands and thousands of man-hours. They were still putting in basic stuff like parachutes almost up to the Event! If it was a year earlier, the ERVs would be coffins.”
“Amazingly lucky, in other words,” said Lima, strapping a set of tools into a storage locker. “So, what does it mean?”
“It means,” said Scott, tapping on a computer screen, “that to build another ERV will require about the same amount of work.”
“Thousands of man-hours.”
Scott saved the inventory sheet and spun to face the machinist. “Exactly. Now, we could do one man for thousands of hours, or we could use a lot of people and get it done faster.”
“They'll get in each others' way,” said Lima. “But I suppose McCrary has a computer program to tell him that, too.”
Scott smiled. “And a program to allocate people by skill set, ability, and so forth to the hundreds of tasks that need doing.”
Duane clumped aboard the Tank, swinging the inner airlock door closed and spinning the locking wheel.
“That's why they stuck me here. Afraid I'd mess up the ERVs or something.”
Scott laughed. “Yeah, well, better not mess up Big Thor. We're going to need it.”
Duane stared at Scott. “How much longer before this circus gets on the road?”
Scott looked at his commpad. “Three days. Launch is Sunday morning, 0238 hours. Report here Saturday night, 2200 hours. Comm silence throughout. McCrary will make the announcement after we leave.”
“Yeah, that's what the message said. What gives? Why the mystery?”
Scott sighed. “Am I going to have to go through this with every crewman?”
Lima gave Scott a crooked grin. “Probably.”
###
“Didja hear?” Freddy Howlett, one of the sleepers from the Mars Expedition skidded to a stop in the middle of the recreation area. “One of the beer kegs blew out its bung, and McCrary authorized extra rations! Better get over there before it's all gone!”
The beer keg in question was surrounded by a noisy crowd, with every form of drinking vessel that the crew could scrounge. Some good-natured pushing and shoving around the tap was in progress when a small but audible explosion occurred in the brewing shed.
Sean Pallock emerged, covered head to toe with beer, his hair in disarray. “McCrary!” he shouted. “We're humped! Another one just went.”
McCrary wearily waved his hand. “Drag it over here,” he said, to a resounding cheer.
###
“Bastards,” said Duane as he looked out at the milling crowd around the brewing shed. “I don't believe for a minute that the kegs 'jest blew.'“
“And you'd be right,” said Scott Acevedo, running the motor on the elevator. “By the time 0200 rolls around, everyone's going to be out of commission. Hell, I bet most of them sleep right through the launch.”
“McCrary. He thinks of everything, doesn't he?” said Duane. “Probably even knew I'd say what I just said, too.”
“Chill, dude,” said Bubba from the back corner. “You're resemblin' a cousin o'mine from the sticks. Positive the CIA had speakers in the trees and microphones up everyone's butt controlling what he thought. Keep that up, they be flyin' you back to Earth in a giggle bag.”
Duane snorted. “I'm not that far around the bend. Still, McCrary's a remarkable guy.”
###
Irma was staggering through the brewing shed when the lights went out, a loud thruuuum sounded, and everything lurched forwards. The lights returned to their former brilliance, and scarcely anyone had moved.
Irma thought about finding out what happened, but decided, for once, to leave well enough alone.
The Lunatic Mission
Aboard Tank, The Moon, June 1 2087, 0200 GMT
“Your track is nominal,” said Ragesh from the Burroughs, weightless along the central axis of the Perseus. “Ben's got you on radar, and says you're right in the groove.”
“Fantastic,” said Scott. “Tank out.” He clapped his hands, spun his chair around twice in the microgravity of Earth orbital flight, and let out a whoop.
“Cheery,” said Bubba, monitoring the micropile that provided the Tank with power. He looked in on the special compartment that held the micropile, but everything there was fine as well.
“Power's fine, retros are fine, and what are you so damned cheerful about?” asked Bubba.
“I'm going to the Moon!” said Scott. “A dream of a lifetime.”
Bubba looked at Duane, who shrugged. “You've never been?” asked Bubba.
“Very few in the Mars Expedition have ever been beyond Earth orbit, my Southern friend. In fact, that was the whole point—bring to Mars the aesthetic of living on Earth, not on the Moon.”
Duane nodded. “I remember now. UNSOC thought that the Moon messed up people, made them think in terms of underground habitats. They wanted Mars habitats to be 'regular buildings beneath a regular sun,' or some such rot. Morons.”
Scott agreed. “The same people who are completely unable to understand radiation. It's as dangerous to stand around on the surface of Mars, radiation-wise, as it is on the surface of the Moon, taking into account their distances from the sun. Oh, sure, the meteorite risk is smaller on Mars, it's got a little wisp of an atmosphere, but if you're worried about protons or cosmic rays, you're screwed!”
Bubba leaned forward. “So tell us, Mr. Acevedo, about this lifelong dream of yours to go to the Moon.”
###
“They're away,” said Olaf Skjornsen, monitoring the radar from the Debris Response Center in Germany. “I have Tank in a Lunar injection orbit, with ETA at low lunar orbit of approximately thirty hours, seventeen minutes from now.”
“Very good,” said Lisa Daniels. “If the opportunity presents itself, do pass along the good wishes of Earth.”
“Way ahead of you, ma'am,” said Olaf. “We sent them a squirt thirty minutes ago. McCrary sends his regards.”
“McCrary,” murmured Lisa. “I don't think the Earth can come up with a big enough reward for him.”
“Give him a rest, then give him something challenging, something only he can do.”
Lisa whirled around in her chair to see John Hodges and Celine Greenfield in her doorway.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “Don't sneak up on me like that, especially when everyone's on alert.”
“Sorry, ma'am,” said Celine. “John's right. In the short time I've been blessed to live with John, it seems to me that the best thing you can do for a man is to give him a purpose in life. We ladies already have built-in purposes,” she said, nodding towards the family pictures on Lisa's desk, “but men are always worried about becoming obsolete.”
Lisa looked startled for
a moment, then jotted a note on her screen. “That's really deep, Celine. I feel it resonating in me, and I don't know why. I've got to think about this.
“But that's not why I asked you both here. As you may well know, this is about Garth. UN Intel and Interpol are not one hundred percent certain, but they believe that Garth is on this side of the Atlantic. We know he's gunning for you both, but especially John. If you want, we can fly you back to the U.S. It will just make it that much harder for him to get to you.”
John looked at Celine for a moment, then faced Lisa.
“No. It ends here. We've looked at all the factors, and we believe that taking him on in Germany, at this kaserne, will provide the best outcome, come what may.”
Lisa stared at John. He held Celine's hand and ran his dark fingers across her pale forearm, then across his own. Lisa nodded in understanding.
“Yeeees. Still, the jail terms are so much less here in Europe than in America.”
Celine leaned forward. “Ah, but that's if the case goes to a German court. We don't think it will. Our legal beagle says that we have an excellent chance of getting the case transferred to the U.S.”
“Then why don't you live in the U.S. and take care of him back home?”
“Because if he attacks us on the kaserne, then he falls under Federal law. If we're back in Corpus Christi, for example, then the State of Texas would prosecute the case.”
“Texas still does the death penalty,” said Lisa. She looked at them, and saw John still stroking his dark forearm with a fingertip.
“All right, all right. I understand. Look, folks, do try not to get killed over here, please? I know Security is working with you, John, to make sure that you're ready. To tell you the truth, I hope you plug the bastard on the first shot. At least everyone else can relax. I'll go to bat for you, big time, and you can bet the rest of us will. It's the waiting that's driving us nuts.”
Tears of Selene Page 5
