“I’ve almost got it, captain!” Barbie yelled with excitement, and Hannah winced at the screeching in her ear. She hadn’t figured out how to turn down the sound, and the middle of a life-and-death space crisis seemed the wrong time to inquire about volume control. “Going through the last crunch now!”
“Final calculations!” Joey chimed in, his voice bright and eager. “Awaiting computer confirmation!”
“Anything from the October Surprise?” Sid demanded.
Hannah’s heart leapt in her chest. She hadn’t thought there was a chance the rescue ship was still operational, or even communicating. But maybe they’d spotted the Churly Flint on the lunar surface and could report on its condition.
The brief silence that followed Sid’s question told Hannah the unfortunate answer.
“No, Sid. I’m sorry,” Barbie responded at last, her shoulders slumping. “But maybe they—”
“We’ll have to go see for ourselves,” Sid cut her off.
“How long will it take to get there?” Hannah’s voice was a mere whisper over the comms. If anyone heard, they chose to ignore her.
“Got it, captain!” Barbie brightened at her workstation. “No more bugs. All systems checking out.” She glanced over her shoulder at Sid. “I triple-checked everything, just like you asked.”
“Good girl.” Strapped into the command chair just in front of Hannah’s seat, Sid gripped his armrests—the only sign of tension Hannah could see from her vantage point.
Then she remembered the cameras she’d mounted around the cockpit and the production app on her tablet. She thought about defying Rufus by refusing him this footage, but her professional instincts kicked in and she pulled up the app on her screen and checked the feeds from the cameras. Everything looked good.
If they managed to rescue Gary, he would want this footage. It would be an important part of the story of taking down DayLite Syndicate.
“Joey!” Sid called. “How’s our course coming?”
“Locked in, captain.” Joey’s reply was quick and only slightly less keen than Barbie’s. “We’re getting under way now.”
Sid glanced back at Hannah. “This is going to take some time. Maybe you should try to get some sleep.”
Hannah opened her mouth to ask a question, but she wasn’t sure where to begin, so she closed it, and then opened it again. On the video, she probably looked like a fish.
A dying fish, out of water and starving for oxygen. Just like Gary on the moon . . .
Hannah shook her head. “No. Thanks, Sid, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay.”
“Fair enough.” Sid faced forward again.
Hannah’s vision blurred with tears, and she dabbed at her eyes again as she monitored the feeds on her screen.
“You’ll blind yourself with crying if you’re not careful.” Barbie smiled, her face soft and sympathetic.
Hannah nodded. Barbie looked like she wanted to say something more, but an alert at her workstation pulled her focus.
“Captain?” Barbie called. “We’ve got three, no four . . .”
“What is it?” Sid asked.
“Six. It looks like six ships now headed toward the moon,” she said.
“Rescue ships?” Hannah’s heart nearly stilled in her chest. She really had to stop living and dying with every syllable uttered by Barbie and Joey.
“I don’t think so.” Barbie frowned at her monitors. “They’re all on converging courses, headed for Klondike-3. It’s kind of open season on the prospector right now.”
“But they have to go help the Churly Flint, and the October Surprise!” Hannah exclaimed. “Don’t they know they’ll get blown up if they go after the ore!”
“They’re going after a payday.” Joey’s voice was hard.
Sid blew out an angry sigh. “Barbie, please radio the other ships—”
“On it.” Her fingers flew over her keyboard. “Sending out a blanket warning message to all ships in the area. They should receive . . . Now.”
“What does the message say?” Hannah was tempted to release her harness so she could peer over Barbie’s shoulder, but she willed herself to stay in her seat. She wouldn’t do Gary or anyone else any good by getting in the way. “Can you make them do the rescue instead? Don’t they know what’s at stake?”
“Other than tens of millions of dollars in ore?” Joey huffed.
“What are they saying?” Hannah demanded. “The other ships?”
“They’re not saying anything,” Barbie replied. “Oh, but we did just get something from Burt at Stjärna. And, um, it’s kind of nasty.”
“Ignore it,” Sid ordered.
“But, Sid, they’re threatening to terminate all our contracts and hand the Midden over to Kevin.”
“They’ll have to catch us first.”
Joey’s face broke into a wide grin as he bent over his control station. “Space pirates,” he muttered over the comms.
Hannah laughed and then felt the immediate, stupid sting of tears again. She wasn’t normally a weepy person. This whole trip had produced more drama than she’d ever experienced on the ground. Whoever ended up with her footage wouldn’t have to work too hard to create tension and intrigue for broadcast.
Sid glanced back at Hannah again. “We’re going after Dana. And Brett, and Manny, and Gary.”
Hannah’s heart was in her throat, preventing any meaningful response. She nodded gratefully and went back to keeping herself occupied with her production app.
Joey looked up. “But we’re equipped for emergency landings only. If we can’t—”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Sid replied. On the video feed on her tablet, Hannah watched the captain straighten his spine and settle into his command chair.
Gary! Hannah cried silently. We’re coming!
Gary followed the long, loping strides of Manny and Brett as they trekked toward the massive domed structure that was the lunar production facility owned by Star-Merlin Industries. Three Earth-based corporations had plants on the lunar surface, but he’d never seen any video or photos. Besides Star-Merlin, there was Boca Luna and Spark Simple Industries, and their facilities were locked up tight behind legal protests of proprietary processes and technology whenever an ambitious documentary crew came knocking. Aside from the corporate engineers and caretakers, no one had been allowed inside.
And now Gary was about to walk right in. He was getting closer with every bouncing step.
This was the meat of how Star-Merlin and Spark Simple made their money in space salvage, while Boca Luna was production-only and contracted with other salvage companies. Sending reclaimed metal and electronics to a processing facility on the moon meant not having to bring salvaged components safely to Earth or launching re-processed materials back into space to build new craft in orbit. The fuel savings alone were larger than many terrestrial companies’ bottom-lines. The diversion of 400,000 kilometers to the moon was close enough for human supervisors to be sent out to deal with any automation problems without delaying processing by more than a few days.
Or, so Gary had read on Wikipedia when doing pre-production research into space salvage. He’d pitched the idea to Rufus of making a tiny detour to the moon so they could devote an entire Space Junkers episode to a look behind the scenes of the processing part of space salvage. But Rufus had shot down the whole concept as “sausage making”—a tedious tour of a metal factory, without any heroes or villains.
But Rufus wasn’t here. Gary was—and he had cameras.
“Plants like yours, it’s where our Mars ships and other craft are coming from!” Gary exclaimed to Dana as they bounded along. She kept having to remind him to slow his breathing and not waste his oxygen. But Gary’s calm lasted only a few breaths at a time. “It’s literally the future of space flight, and how we’re going to make it work as we expand out from our home planet—”
“It’s not my plant,” Dana interjected. “But I get your meaning. But it’s a delic
ate business yet. It all depends on a rapid rise in space travel, satellites, and the continued commercialization of Earth orbit.”
“And beyond,” Gary added with a smile that was hidden by his visor but obvious in his voice.
“And beyond, sure. But it’s lonely work. My cousin did one of those eighteen-month shifts, and once was enough. Total isolation. Sure, there’s communication with the Earth, with only a tiny delay, so you can still have real conversations with people back home. Sort of.”
“Man, you couldn’t pay me enough to sign up for a gig like that,” Manny cut in. He remained at the head of their lunar caravan, leading the way to the plant that was now little more than a hundred meters out.
“I almost did it once,” Brett said. “The pay was surely tempting. Let’s just say I wouldn’t have had to work again for a good few years, if I didn’t want to.”
“So?” Manny asked.
“Mmm,” Brett grunted. “Nearest neighbor a long, uncomfortable walk across the empty landscape, if there’s anybody home at all. Just didn’t sit right, being surrounded by nothing but machines.”
Dana laughed. “You’ve got something against technology, Brett? You might be in the wrong business.”
“Nah, it’s just . . .” Brett limped along for a few seconds, his labored breathing loud over the comms. “Had a couple, too many nightmares about those Terminator movies while I was thinking about it. Was enough to divert me to space salvage instead.”
“A bonus for us, then,” Dana replied. “Good pilots are hard to find.”
“Good pilot, my ass!” Manny exclaimed. “You’re a goddamn life-saver, buddy. Hell, next time we’re Earth-side, you’ve got ten steak dinners on me.”
“Works for me,” Brett replied.
Manny and Brett fell into an easy banter about condiments and microbrew beers. After a disastrous attempt at a Michael Jackson style moonwalk, Gary had gotten the hang of forward motion across the lunar surface. His pace was even and the height of each bound low enough that the buoyancy of every stride wasn’t triggering motion sickness.
“Good incentive,” Dana said.
“Pardon?” Gary replied.
“For getting away from here,” she said. Brett and Manny continued their back-and-forth over the comms, ignoring their captain. “Focusing on something to look forward to. What’s yours?”
Hannah’s face sprang immediately to mind, and Gary smiled. He felt somewhat guilty that his first thought hadn’t been of his sister and her kids, but they were with him now, too. He had an awful lot to live for, and in that moment—hundreds of thousands of kilometers from home, removed from bank accounts and paparazzi and 24/7 newstainment streams, surrounded instead by an airless wasteland and with nothing in his pockets but an air sickness bag and a couple of beat-up mini-cameras—he counted himself a wealthy man.
Dana read his silence. “We’ll get you back to her. Don’t worry.”
Gary broke into a wide grin. “I’m not.”
They bounced along awhile longer, listening to Manny and Brett’s chatter—which had moved on to sports.
“So, how does it work?” Gary asked as Brett pivoted from baseball predictions to the athleticism of various cricket players. “Being married to the captain of another salvage ship? I’m guessing you’re apart pretty much all the time.”
Dana took a deep breath, audible over the comms. “How does it work? Mostly, it doesn’t.”
“So, why . . . ?”
“We’re competitors,” she replied quickly. “We have different approaches to our work, something that became obvious pretty quickly when we tried crewing together. That was a proper fiasco.”
Brett and Manny’s chatter had quieted, though Gary doubted Dana was revealing anything they didn’t already know.
“How long?” Gary asked.
“Eight years. Can you believe that?” Dana laughed, then turned to Gary. “You’re not recording any of this, are you?”
Gary groaned. It wasn’t the accusation that bothered him, but the reminder that he hadn’t gotten any footage of their lunar journey. Hannah was going to kill him. He considered breaking out one of the cameras and trying to operate it with his bulky gloves on. Instead, he rationalized the excuse he’d give later—he wasn’t sure the cameras would survive the conditions. Mostly, he was grateful for a single experience that was his alone without worrying over whether he was properly framing a shot.
He set aside the disappointment that he wouldn’t be able to share this stroll across the moon with his family. Or with Hannah.
“No,” he said. “I’m not recording any of this.”
“Okay, good.” They walked a few steps in silence. “I suppose we’ll always be married. But space changes everything. There aren’t too many social conventions that’ll survive the stars, I don’t think.”
Gary kept his thoughts on the Mars colony to himself. The producers had been very careful not to mention marriage—or even the controversial assumption of polyamory for getting a new colony off the ground. Related questions from the media went unanswered, and audience queries to DayLite received an auto-response about the exciting new frontier of the Mars colony and vague allusions to establishing the first Martian legal system.
But he made a mental note to talk to Hannah about a segment on interpersonal relationships on salvage crews—not the racy, libidinous coverage Rufus wanted but a thoughtful and probing look at the changing nature of human interactions as people lifted away from their home world.
“But I suppose I might have made Sid a widower today,” Dana said.
Brett and Manny laughed, but Gary stopped cold. They were less than thirty meters out from the production plant and curving around its perimeter looking for an entry.
Dana stopped and looked back at him. “Gary?”
Gary had to remind himself to breathe as his estimation of his odds of survival plummeted. They were so close to saving themselves. Why would Dana make a comment like that? He thought about his nieces and nephews, and his sister—and he cursed Rufus, who would probably find some loophole to protect DayLite from honoring the legacy payments due to his family in the even of Gary’s demise.
Most of all, he thought of Hannah. Her first trip into space was already a disaster. Adding the deaths of the Churly Flint crew would probably destroy her. She was strong, but no one was impervious. She had only just started to open up to the marvel of space exploration—something she, in her position and with her talents, had the unique ability to share with the world. His death would kill that.
“Gary?” Dana asked again, but Gary was still working on getting himself to breathe.
His death would kill more than Hannah’s thirst for adventure. Tears welled as his gaze traveled over the latticed dome that rose up not far from him—smaller than he’d expected, but most of the facility would be underground. Was this to be his memorial?
Gary turned angrily on Dana. “Don’t say that! We’re getting off this old rock. Hannah!”
He surged forward with determination, tripped over his own boots in the one-sixth gravity, and fell promptly on his face. And bounced a few times.
“Gary!” Manny loped toward him, with Brett limping along behind. Dana was the first to reach Gary, and she pulled at his arm and tried to help him up.
“Grab his other arm!” Dana yelled over the comms. “Check his visor! Who’s got a patch kit?”
“Oh, fuck.” In his heavy EVA suit, Gary was useless trying to pick himself up off the dusty ground. He blew out a long, cursing sigh when he saw the smudge on the inside of his visor and tasted the blood trickling down from his nostrils.
“What were you trying to do?” Dana demanded as Manny checked Gary’s suit and helmet for damage.
I have to get back to Hannah, was what Gary intended to say, but it came out more like, “Ah haf ged bag tannaf.”
“He’s okay,” Manny reported. He and Dana hefted Gary to his feet and gave him a few seconds to test his balance before they let him go.
“Of course, we’re getting back.” Dana gestured to the Star-Merlin plant. “It might take some time, because they’re might not be anybody on shift right now. Worst case is that we’re marooned for a little while.”
“Assuming we can get inside,” Brett added. “I’m running low on air as it is—”
“We’ll get inside.” Dana’s tone was sharp and brooked no argument.
“But you said you’d made Sid a widower.” Gary sounded congested, and the center of his face was a throbbing mass of pain.
“Hell, Gary.” Dana chuckled. “I was imagining the mess Sid would make of my outstanding contracts, is all. If I couldn’t get back to work soon enough, my clients would probably take out hits on me.” She paused. “Metaphorically. It was a bad joke. Sorry.”
Gary swallowed more blood. With his helmet on, he couldn’t mop his face or probe his injury to gauge the damage. “I think I broke my nose.”
Brett giggled. “So much for the Face of Space.”
Dana pressed her hand against Gary’s back to urge him forward. “Brett, you know where the door is on this thing or not?”
“I’ve got an idea.” Brett hobbled into the lead. “Let’s just hope it’s pressurized when we get there.”
Hannah was strapped into her passenger seat at the back of the cockpit. She watched—and recorded on multiple cameras—while the crew scrambled to complete a lunar landing they’d never trained for, one their ship wasn’t designed to execute.
“Two hundred meters!” Joey called from his station at the front of the cabin.
“Steady,” Sid replied. Hannah monitored the captain through the video feed on her tablet. The muscles in his jaw twitched, but his voice was steady.
Barbie glanced back at Hannah, and her face was full of anxious concern instead of venom. Hannah stretched her free hand out to offer some comfort, but Barbie shook her off. Barbie bent down over her workstation even though, as far as Hannah could tell, there was nothing for her to do during the landing attempt.
The cabin shuddered with increasing violence, and Hannah squeezed her tablet with one hand and her armrest with the other. The craft surged and dipped and surged again to jarring effect in the gradually increasingly gravity. Hannah reminded herself that she wasn’t on a rollercoaster. Finding herself in the grips of a life-or-death operation quelled any motion sickness.
Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2) Page 16
