“I know. Dad. And I’ll make sure to make you glad you brought me,” she said, cutting him off before he could say any more. He seemed like he wanted to add something, for a moment, but instead just nodded sharply and returned to his work.
She would make him glad he’d brought her along.
* * *
Fred was already looking at the airlock door before Patrick arrived. He’d pulled the panel, and hooked it up to a tablet from his duffel bag of tricks.
“What happened to it?” Patrick asked.
“Hmmph? The door?” Fred said. “Dunno.”
Patrick paused. He wasn’t used to that. Fred never admitted defeat. He was the go-to man on all problems and defects with the domes, and there was always plenty to keep him busy. Patrick had seen him worry at a problem for hours, wrestling it into submission.
“Look, see?” Fred said. He flicked a button on his tablet. The inner airlock door snapped open. He flicked the button again, and the door closed. “Works fine.”
“Fred, I have video of that door not opening during a medical emergency. I watched two engineers try to make that panel function, and neither of them could get the door open. Now you’re saying it fixed itself?”
“No, boss. I’m saying there was nothing to fix. It wasn’t broke,” Fred said. He fiddled with the tablet a bit more. “But look here.”
Patrick looked over his shoulder at the tablet screen. Fred was reading the log of computer activity on the door. There, right near the bottom, he could see the activation entry from when Jacob and Carmen went out. And below that? There was another entry, which read that someone had attempted to access the door, but it had been unable to comply due to an air leak in the inner hatch.
“So there was a malfunction, then,” Patrick said. “An air leak?”
“No, boss. I checked the door over. No leak now.”
“Someone fixed it?”
Fred shook his head. “I checked the camera log, too. According to the camera, nobody messed with the door at all.”
Patrick paced over to the door and checked the seals himself. Everything looked as it ought to. The material was worn, too. Used. You could tell if there was fresh sealing material added to a door. It still had that shiny black look, and this stuff was matte.
“What the hell happened, Fred?” Patrick was tired of playing guessing games.
“My best guess is it was a computer error, boss. Maybe a random bit of cosmic ray flipped a bit in the program, or something.” He shrugged.
Patrick thought about that a moment. Radiation could impact computers, sure. It had happened tons of times, since the early days of the space program. Nothing new there. If the right chip was hit at the right moment by the right bit gamma particle, a single flipped bit could work some nasty bugs into a computer program. But something still bothered him.
“If it was a random bug, how did it get fixed?” Patrick asked.
“The door’s equipped with self-diagnostic systems,” Fred said. “If it saw an error, it would run a self-diagnostic test. And if the test came back without error, that ought to over-ride the error result. It looks like it was just really bad timing, boss.”
“Well, it’s working now. Let’s get out there and see if we can get that electrical system back on line.”
“You mean I get to go play with wires that already fried that kid, right?” Fred complained.
“Yup. You know you love a hot wire,” Patrick said, grinning.
“Oy,” Fred replied.
They were both old hands. It didn’t take them long to get suited up and outside. Once they were both out of the airlock, Patrick tested the doors to make sure they were going to be able to get back in again. No problem. The doors cycled and opened without a hitch. Whatever the bug in the system before, it was gone now. That was good enough for him. Fred was already over by the new dome’s breaker unit, so he went over to join him.
“How’s it look?” he asked over his radio.
“These breakers are mostly fine. But this one,” Fred said, pulling it free, “is a melted mess. Must have shorted. Don’t worry, I brought a spare. I’ll swap it out.”
Patrick stood back a bit and let the man work. Fred was good at his job. The last thing he needed was someone hovering so he’d have something else to grouse about. Patrick went over the details of the accident in his head.
The wiring was installed to the new dome, but something had been faulty, and power wasn’t getting through. That was probably the fault of the bad breaker. So Carmen got the engineer to go try to fix it. The bad breaker shorted when he tried to pull it, and he got zapped. Then they tried to go back in and a random error had the door malfunction at a bad time. It seemed like he could probably put this issue to bed. The problems were both solved, and nobody had any lasting injury. Even that engineer Jacob would be OK by tomorrow, and probably more cautious in the future.
He shook his head. He was just worried over nothing. Or maybe overthinking the whole thing because his head was turned by a pretty face. Except she wasn’t just a pretty face, was she? He smiled at the thought. No, Carmen had spunk, and spine. He admired that.
The repair didn’t take too much longer. Fred popped the broken one out, set a new one in, and flipped a few switches. “That should do it,” he said.
Patrick called the central dome on his radio. “Fred says he’s fixed the electric in the new dome. Can we verify?”
“Lights are on,” came the reply.
“Thanks. We’ll be right back in.”
He went to the airlock door and pressed the control panel, half expecting that it wouldn’t work and he’d have to walk all the way out to the ship. But it functioned fine. Whatever the bug was, it seemed to have corrected itself. He’d have the crew keep an eye on the door for a while, but they couldn’t afford to take it out of commission and really do a full tear-down, not while they only had two airlocks. They really needed a third. It was something he was going to have to add to the list of things to get from Earth.
The manifest for this trip was a disaster. Oh, they’d gotten everything the good Doctor Rosa had asked for, and enough food supplies to keep them all in business for a year. But he’d asked for new surveying tools, more instruments to explore the surface of the moon and learn more about its geography. He had sensors out all over the surrounding area, and they were getting simply awesome data back, but he needed more sensors and better computers to process the raw data into something usable.
Instead, they sent him the materials to add three more domes to the base. He didn’t understand it. They were only using the space they had at about half capacity. Three more domes would be useless, wasted space. So he had three huge cargo bins sitting in storage, because he was damned if he was going to waste everyone’s time putting up new domes that nobody was going to use anyway.
He was used to the bureaucratic bullshit, at this point. Nothing new to find that he’d only gotten half the things he asked for, and was sent a pile of crap someone else thought he ought to need instead of the things he actually needed. He’d take care of it in his office later – put the list of things he needed in the next shipment order, along with a terse letter to the guys on Earth responsible for making sure those lists were filled. If they kept sending him more crap he didn’t need, he was going to end up having to put up one of those new domes just to store the unnecessary crap. In the meantime, they’d run out of parts for things they actually needed.
Predictably, the thought of running out of parts brought his mind back around to Carmen again. She was obviously still upset with him over the incident on the ship. He wished he could undo that – find some other way. Hell, maybe he could have used one of those new domes to store the guy in quarantine here on the moon. But he hadn’t known he had them until he was already here. And besides, he’d seen videos of how the people sick with this virus died. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t pleasant, and he was pretty sure he’d done the man a favor by putting an end to it for him in a quick and rela
tively painless manner.
But it wasn’t like he could just explain all that to Carmen. So what could he do that would win back her trust? He found himself wanting to do that with an intensity that surprised him.
Chapter 5
CARMEN LOOKED UP from her work. She stared, watching the machine chug away at the samples they’d carefully prepared. One of those samples might be it – might be the cure that saved millions from the virus. She had to work at not holding her breath, and looking around the room she could tell she wasn’t the only one. Lab techs and doctors alike were hovering, waiting for the results to come back.
There wasn’t much work to do until they did come back. The most likely result was that all their samples would be failures. And that was OK. It was expected. They’d analyze the failures, learn from the data they collected, and try again.
But the idea that they might just win the lottery and break the virus on the first try was like an attractive nectar, and they were all trapped.
“That’s enough of that,” Doctor Rosa said, his voice sounding firm without being unkind. She broke her gaze away from the samples – her Dad was looking at them all with a smile on his face. She had to grin back. He’d been through this process many times before. He knew precisely how they all felt. But it would be hours before those samples were ready for analysis, and they were all wasting time staring at them like it was a pot of water getting ready to boil!
“I want you all to get out of this lab,” Doctor Rosa said. “You’ve been working very hard. Go read a book. Catch a nap. Eat something. Bathe,” he said, looking pointedly at one of the male lab techs who’d gotten a little shaggy over the last three days. “There won’t be any results for at least six hours. Come back then.”
One by one, everyone began filing out of the room. They all looked a little dazed to Carmen’s eyes. She knew how they felt. There was life outside this lab? After spending so much of the last three days working in here, it almost felt like she’d forgotten about the outside world. She was determined to work harder than anyone else, though. It was the only way she could earn her place here.
“You too, Carmen,” her father said in a chiding tone.
“Oh!” she said. “I’d meant to stick around and help you out…tidy up, if nothing else.”
“There’s nothing left to do, Carmen. Go. Rest. I am sure you can find something to occupy you outside this laboratory for six hours.” He patted her on the shoulder. “You’ve done well. Now rest, because we have more work to do again soon. I need you fresh, and sharp.”
Carmen stood up. “OK, Dad. I’ll be back later, I guess.” She felt as dazed as her co-workers had looked. She set down the tablet that she’d been working on and headed for the door. Six hours. What to do? It was still morning, as the base went. Everyone used Eastern Standard Time here, to keep it simple. She’d only been on shift for a couple of hours, so she wasn’t at all tired. There were a few books she could read…
She hadn’t eaten much at breakfast, and it was heading toward lunch time. An early lunch might be nice. She worked her way around to the dining area. It was really an entire dome, at this point. Carmen had heard that they’d only started with a small space here for food prep, but in preparation for the expanded crew they had cleared out an entire dome for food storage, prep, and eating. Now they had enough tables in place to seat about half the total personnel compliment on the base.
The room was pretty empty as Carmen came in, though. A couple of women from the lab were sitting in the corner, chatting. Carmen took a bowl of stew from a smiling woman working the food line.
“Gracias, Elspeth,” she said.
“De nada,” the woman replied, still smiling. Carmen smiled back. It was hard to keep a smile off your face around that woman, and she had rarely skipped meals since arriving on the moon, as a result. That, and Elspeth gave her a chance to practice her Spanish, which was otherwise getting rusty.
She took the stew and found a seat at an empty table. The two women looked deep in conversation, and Carmen felt loathe to intrude. Instead, she pulled out her pocket tablet and took her father’s advice: she opened a book she’d only just barely started reading, and tabbed to the next page. While she read, she took bites of the hot stew.
One down side of eating in lower gravity: you were limited in what you could prepare and eat. Crumbs and such would eventually fall back to the floor, but things tended to scatter. So thick meals like stew were among the easiest things to prepare and serve. Luckily, Elspeth was a wizard with her meals, and knew the recipes for more sorts of stew than Carmen had even heard of before coming here. Every meal was delicious, which made up for the lack of variety in texture.
She dug into the novel as she ate. It was a romance novel, set some four hundred years ago. A private preference, these books, but she enjoyed the diversion and fantasy. Plus, on her tablet, she could read whatever she wanted and no one else could see what she was reading.
“Carmen. Good to see you.” The voice came from right behind her, and made her jump. She turned, setting down the tablet, and found herself looking up into Patrick’s face.
She inhaled sharply. He was close – had he been reading over her shoulder? She’d let herself get distracted. How long had he been standing there?
“May I?” Patrick asked, gesturing to the chair next to her.
Carmen nodded, and he slid into the seat. Now their eyes were at the same level, and she found she couldn’t break her stare away.
“So I heard the lab is making progress?” he asked.
Shop talk. He wanted to know how the cure was coming along. She could do shop talk… And why did she feel a pang of disappointment? “Well, it’s just the first test,” she said. “It’s unlikely to give us what we’re looking for. There’s probably still a lot of work to be done.”
Patrick nodded. “But until the results are in, you’ve got some free time, right?”
Where had he heard that? “Yes,” she replied cautiously.
“Listen – I know you wanted to spend some more time outside,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea for some of your crew to get certified in the suits and lunar vehicles, and get some experience out there. I’ve got to do a survey run for the next couple of hours, and I was wondering if you’d like to come along?”
Carmen blinked. Was this the same man who’d all but ordered her not to step outside again? Where was this coming from? To be fair – he had said something about not going out without admin permission. If she went out with the base commander, she supposed that ought to qualify! She realized she was staring at him open mouthed, and looked down at her watch quickly.
Still more than five hours before she was due back at the lab. Plenty of time. She looked back up at Patrick and shivered.
“I’d love to. I have to be back in the lab in about five hours, though,” she said.
“That won’t be an issue,” Patrick replied.
She found herself watching his face. He was so expressive right now, so excited. Nothing like how he looked when he locked his face down. She really appreciated these moments all the more for how rare they seemed to be.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. The stew was about done, so she picked up the bowl and brought it over to the kitchen.
“We’ll take one of the hoppers. I have four survey stations I need to check out.”
“Hoppers?” she asked.
“Come see,” he said with a grin.
Burning with curiosity, she followed him around the ring of domes. Two domes down, they were in a section she hadn’t explored yet. It had been so hectic these past days – there just wasn’t any time to go wandering.
“What is this place?” she asked. It was obviously a research lab of some sort, and pretty well appointed. It wasn’t bio-research, but she recognized tools for geology, chemistry, and there was plenty of gear here that she’d never seen before, too.
“It’s the home of my pet hobby,” Patrick explained, making an expansive ges
ture with his arms. “It’s where we work to better understand the moon.”
“You do research here?” she asked.
He stared at her for a moment, a quizzical look on his face. “Yes. That’s why the station was built here in the first place, you know.”
She hadn’t. It wasn’t something she’d paid much attention to, beyond hearing bits and pieces in the news about how things were going on the one and only very expensive lunar station. It made sense that there was research going on here, but – if she was honest with herself, she hadn’t expected Patrick to be one of the people doing it. She’d had him pegged as a pilot, administrator type. She needed to re-assess her preconceptions!
And damned if that didn’t make him seem twice as sexy.
“Come on, I’ll show you the Hopper,” Patrick said. She followed him through the room, and down a short hallway. At the end was something that looked a bit like the hatch on an old submarine, hanging open. He grabbed the rail at the top and swung himself through.
Carmen followed a bit more tentatively, not really sure what she was going to bang into if she went too fast. She realized as soon as she crossed the threshold that she’d entered a vehicle of some sort. The space inside was a sphere of transparent material with two seats, both side by side and facing the front. A broad control console rested in front of the seating. Looking through the glass, she saw thrusters attached to the body of the thing, outside the dome. And landing gear.
“It’s like a little spaceship?” she asked.
“More like a submarine designed to operate in low or zero gravity,” Patrick replied. “Come sit down, and I’ll close the hatch.”
She sat. He pulled the hatch in behind her, and turned a wheel, locking the door into place. Then he took his place in the seat next to her. Patrick flipped a series of switches, and the console came to life.
Galaxia Page 29
