by Homer Hickam
Her father spoke first. “You’re the foreman? I am John Medaris Jr., Maria’s father and the son of Colonel Medaris. This construction site is closed. Go back and gather your workers and move them to the landing zone. They will be paid off and then convoyed to Armstrong City.”
Kendatta looked at the stranger claiming to be his boss’s father and then at Maria. “Dr. Medaris, what should I do?”
“Go back to work, Foreman Kendatta. I’ll handle this.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The foreman turned and took a step toward his fastbug but then fell forward, twin geysers of blood spurting from his back. Maria ran to the foreman and turned him over in time to see him breathe his last. When she looked up, the copper-clad freaks had sick smiles on their green-painted lips. The crowhopper who’d shot the foreman stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of his rifle at the base of her helmet. “Shall I kill her too?”
When Maria looked at her father, she was dismayed to discover he seemed to be mulling over the crowhopper’s question.
THREE
On the other side of the moon from where Maria Medaris knelt beside her dead foreman, Crater Trueblood had thought about Maria off and on all morning. As she floated in and out of his mind, it occurred to him that perhaps it was because she was thinking of him, a concept he dismissed as impossible since Crater was a practical man who didn’t believe in such things as mental telepathy, even with minds that had once shared love. Yet, there he’d been, turning Maria over in his head almost from the moment he’d driven the Lunar Rescue Company’s truck into the dust from the twin-domed gambling town of Cleomedes in search of a lost rental bus. There had to be a reason why he was thinking about Maria, but what it might be, he couldn’t fathom. Crater could still imagine her as he’d last seen her, standing there on the ramp of a fuser taxi, her radiant brown eyes shining at him through the dome of her helmet, her lustrous black hair framing her lovely face as she wordlessly asked that he come with her. The odd thing was it had only been minutes before that Maria had finally professed her love for him and had even agreed to marry him. Before he’d scarcely had a moment to enjoy it, his happiness had been swept away when the fuser taxi had arrived, piloted by his brother but dispatched by Maria’s grandfather to bring her back to the world of wealth and power she’d always known. To be with her, he’d come very close to taking that easy step on the taxi ramp, but Crater had instead stayed rooted in the dust, watching her fly away, not because he didn’t love her, but because of the struggling mining community of Endless Dust and the responsibility he felt toward it.
Few knew more about lunar mining than Crater, and after leading a few poor settlers to the little mining town near Adolphus Crater, he meant to see them well established before leaving. And then there was also the matter of Crescent Claudine Besette, the female crowhopper warrior he’d captured during the war, then made into a friend. Crescent still depended on him, and if he’d left her to go with Maria, how would she have fared?
As he thought about it while driving through the dust of the wayback, Crater confessed to himself there was yet another reason and perhaps the most important one of all. If he had gone with Maria, Crater knew he would have been judged harshly by Maria’s family, who would have surely thought of him as a lucky Helium-3 miner who’d caught the eye of a rich woman and was probably after her money. Crater was too proud to let that happen.
After Maria had gone, Crater had stayed in Endless Dust until a broken leg had caused him to be jumpcar’d to Cleomedes, there to recover in the casino clinic. Crescent had joined him there and even found employment in the casino, so when a report arrived from Endless Dust that the miners there were doing well and had even made a profit during the last quarter, Crater had decided to stay put, especially after his brother, Petro, had talked him into the rescue business. “We’re both good at rescuing people, Crater,” Petro told him. “We should make money out of it!”
So now, here he was, steering around craters and rilles, following what he hoped was the rental bus’s tracks (which appeared to be going along a well-worn trail) with Maria drifting across his mind for no apparent reason except foolishness. Even so, he thought about asking his gillie for the latest news of Maria, except sitting beside him in the Lunar Rescue Company truck was Crescent, who made no attempt to disguise her dislike of Miss Medaris. For her part, Crescent was well aware that when Crater got that wistful, faraway look in his eyes and fell more silent than usual and became a little absentminded, he was probably thinking about Maria, scrag her, and the hold she still had on the young man’s heart and head.
After Crater absently ran over a small crater he could have easily avoided, Crescent snapped, “Will you be careful? What’s on your mind this morning?”
Crater blinked and ran a hand through the long, sandy hair that nearly covered his ears. “There is nothing on my mind other than finding those idiot tourists who wandered off in their bus.”
“If it weren’t for tourists and their need to be rescued,” she pointed out, “we wouldn’t have a business. So idiots they may be, but idiots they shouldn’t be called.”
“Then what should I call them?” Crater demanded as he wrenched the truck around a narrow crack.
“Well, you could call them customers,” Crescent replied, “or maybe just people. After all, they just came to the moon to have a nice time and then made a mistake. You’ve made mistakes before, haven’t you?”
Crater grumbled inwardly while still giving Crescent’s comments their proper weight. She was, of course, correct. The people the Lunar Rescue Company generally rescued were Earthians who didn’t know the dangers of the moon, and that didn’t make them idiots, just inexperienced. “You’re right,” he concluded. “And I apologize. I guess I’m a little off kilter today.”
“I’ve noticed,” Crescent sniffed. “Want to talk about it? Or should I say her?”
“There’s no her to talk about,” Crater barked, although he suspected Crescent easily saw through his lie. She was a most perceptive woman, perhaps the result of her training for the battlefield, where to miss something could result in death.
Crescent didn’t press the issue. If it was Maria that Crater was thinking about, she didn’t really want to know. In any case, the Medaris woman was out of Crater’s life forever, and that thought caused her to smile, although anyone looking at her face wouldn’t have noticed. She had been provided few facial muscles by her makers, the infamous Trainers who’d mixed her and all crowhoppers up in their Siberian petri dishes to produce fierce warriors who were also mercenaries for hire to the highest bidder. Crescent was prideful of her crowhopper past, although now her allegiance was to Crater who’d saved her when he could have (and nearly everyone thought he should have) killed her on the spot after her capture in a small skirmish near Moontown. Her execution was soon ordered by Colonel Medaris on a trumped-up charge, but Crater had saved Crescent, and both of them had gone on the run to hide out in Armstrong City. When the crowhoppers invaded the city, intent on capturing Maria for ransom, Crater had plucked her from the invaders, then headed to Endless Dust, the faraway mining town beside Adolphus Crater, there to hunker down and wait out the war. This had proved to be a fine plan until the Colonel sent Petro in a fuser space taxi to pick up Maria and return her to the family. After that Crater had been sad and restless until the Lunar Rescue Company was formed, an enterprise that allowed him to rescue people, even if they weren’t the Miss Almighty Doctor Maria Medaris, her PhD in engineering and stealing a good man’s heart.
Although their truck was pressurized, Crescent and Crater wore biolastic pressure suits in case they needed to go outside. Crater could be stingy about some things, but he invested in the company’s equipment, wanting only the best for work within the “big suck,” as Lunarians called the vacuum of the moon. Biolastic suits were biological skins that kept pressure on their bodies and, along with their bubble helmets, were designed to keep them from having the ailments caused by exposure to a vacuum, the most promin
ent being that of having one’s blood boil, and otherwise having air bubbles lodge in one’s brain and spinal cord, or, in other words, more or less instant death. Wearing the suits was second nature to Crater and Crescent, who spent a good amount of time outside Cleomede’s pressurized domes and underground tubes. Over their biolastic skins, they wore glo-orange coveralls with the Lunar Rescue Company’s logo, the acronym LRC in black letters against a gray circle with a lot of little circles inside representing Luna and her craters. Their boots were also glo-orange, the color that stood out best against the grays and browns of moon dust.
The bus was found at the base of Margaret Thatcher Spire, unfortunately without the tourists inside, although fresh boot prints were evident leading away from the bus toward the towering column, which meant they were probably climbing it. The Lunar Rescue Company had two jobs under its contract, the first to find the bus, the second to bring its occupants back. If they were up on the spire, the second part might prove to be difficult. Using the binocular lens in his helmet, Crater’s fear was realized when he spotted two moving dots about halfway up. The Thatcher Spire was, according to Cleomede’s rules, supposed to be accessible only with expert guides, but the two climbers, based on information from the rental car company and the casino where they were vacationing, had applied neither for a guide or a climbing permit. That meant they were rogue amateur climbers, the kind that often got themselves killed.
Crescent was also peering at the climbers. Since her eyesight was much better than Crater’s, or any average human’s, she advised, “A man and a woman. Their climbing gear looks cheap.”
Crater took note of the car rental company’s motto on the side of the bus: Lunar Geology Rocks. It was supposed to entice tourists to go traipsing off into the dust, which many did. Unfortunately, that meant a fair percentage of them got lost, which at least meant business for the LRC. These tourists, however, were involved in something a little more adventurous and a lot deadlier. Although the moon had only a sixth of the gravity of Earth, Thatcher Spire was plenty tall to kill anyone who fell off its peak.
Crater woke his gillie, who was asleep on his shoulder. “Call Petro,” he said.
After yawning, even though it had no mouth, the gillie sent an unauthorized signal (and therefore free) through the Nero Corporation’s Silverado III lunar commsat to Crater’s partner and brother. Within seconds, Crater heard, “Lunar Rescue Company. Get in a crack, we’ll get you back. This is Petro Mountbatten-Jones. May we rescue you?”
“It’s me,” Crater said. “We found the bus at the base of Thatcher Spire. Looks like we’ve got illegal climbers. Their do4us are turned off and we’re not picking up any suit comm either.”
“You think they don’t want to be heard?”
“People engaged in nefarious activity generally don’t.”
“The rental company’s paying us to find the bus. I’ll give them a call.”
“Yeah, do that, but the second part of our contract is with the casino, and they want us to bring their guests back alive, go figure. I’ll have to climb up there and get them. We don’t want anybody saying we could have rescued them but didn’t. Besides, it might be worth a tip.”
“Do what you think you have to do, brother,” Petro said. “How about Crescent? Is she going with you?”
“No, I’ll go it alone. She can guard our truck and the bus. There’s a lunatic burrow not too far away from here. Those fellows can strip a truck in five minutes.”
Crescent arranged her features into a determined grimace. “If they dare come around, I welcome the chance to teach them a lesson.”
“Don’t underestimate lunatics,” Petro said. “Living in the wayback of the moon takes a special kind, and if they’re not crazy when they start, they get that way pretty quick. And Crater, you be careful too. The puter says there were four climbers killed on Thatcher last year. Every one of them tourists without permits.”
“Don’t worry,” Crater said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“What do you think, Crescent?” Petro asked. “Does he know what he’s doing?”
Crescent made the gurgling sound that crowhoppers make when laughing. “I suppose even Crater can climb a little needle.”
Crater, ignoring Petro’s jibe and Crescent’s laughter, pulled on a harness, clipped on a coil of rope, and strapped on a pack of climbing gear. “If anyone comes around, call me,” he instructed Crescent.
“If anyone comes around, I’ll take care of them and then call you,” she replied while patting the holstered railgun pistol at her waist.
Crater gave her no argument. He was confident that she could handle nearly any situation. Over the years, Crescent had proved to be a capable female, steady under duress, and she could shoot straight too. The only problem with her was that Crater could never quite figure out what she was thinking. There were many levels to her crowhopper mind, or at least he suspected there were, and he guessed she kept hidden many secrets about herself. He thought perhaps she had some affection for him, maybe even romantic feelings if—and that was a big if—crowhoppers had such feelings. As for his feelings toward her, they were complicated, and he wasn’t entirely certain he knew what they were. Mostly, he simply liked her company. For one thing, she knew a lot about a wide range of topics, most recently proven when Crater was pondering a thermodynamics problem. Crescent not only understood the problem, she provided the solution using a series of quadratic equations. That impressed him.
It was time to focus on the rescue, so Crater shunted aside his personal ruminations and trudged up the mound of rubble that led to the base of the spire. The Margaret Thatcher Spire was one of the oddest geological features on the moon. No one knew how it had been created, but the best scientific guess was it was formed by magma from early lunar volcanoes that had squeezed up between two immense basalt layers. The result was a mile-high vertical ribbon of slippery rock that was like a magnet for adventure-seeking climbers, both professional and amateur.
Moving a hundred yards laterally to avoid being hit by rocks that might be loosened by the climbers, Crater started up and for the next hour climbed steadily. When he stopped on a narrow ledge to catch his breath, he looked westerly along the face of the spire to see the Tauruses, a brown ocean of rounded mountains. To the east, he saw the high rim of Cleomedes Crater and the tops of the domes of the Lunar Las Vegas where he lived. Turning around and looking to the south, he could see the steep-sloped Roman Crater surrounded by a dry lake of spectacularly beautiful yellow, brown, purple, and red dust. When he looked up again, he saw the tourists had disappeared over the top.
Using the cracks in the rock for handholds, Crater kept climbing until he crawled over the sharp edge of the summit and got his first close look at the climbers. The rental car company had described them as a woman, forty-eight years old, and a man, fifty-two, both from the same address in Goa, Republic of Central India. They were wearing rental helmets, cheap plaston spheres with accordion-like covers for shade, and white coveralls over one-time use biolastic pressure suits. The woman, silver-haired and petite, was standing and quietly watching Crater. The man, who sported a gray-speckled beard, was lying down. Crater made a signal to the woman to turn on her suit communicator. After fumbling with her chest pack, she found the switch. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Crater Trueblood of the Lunar Rescue Company. Are you the Chandra party?”
“We are,” the woman said. “I am Lady Deepik. This is my servant Mister Ajab, who I fear is having some difficulty.”
Crater knelt beside Mister Ajab and observed his lips were blue, a sign of oxygen deficiency. “Just relax,” Crater said to him. “Gillie, give me a readout of the backpack.”
No telemetry, it said, then crawled off Crater’s shoulder and onto Mister Ajab’s helmet before slipping down to the neck seal.
“Is that a gillie?” Lady Deepik asked. “Aren’t they illegal?”
“Yes, but it knows that,” Crater answered. “Mister Ajab is
not receiving enough oxygen. The gillie is trying to diagnose the problem.”
The gillie burrowed into the neck seal of biolastic cells, then disappeared before emerging inside Ajab’s helmet. Carbon dioxide scrubber fouled, it reported.
The biological scrubbers in pressure suits, especially the cheap ones rented to tourists, were easily fouled by dust. The only fix was to replace them, and the top of Thatcher was no place for that. After the gillie oozed out of the neck seal and climbed back on his shoulder, Crater pulled a spare hose from his kit and made a connection between helmets through the auxiliary ports. Clean air poured in from Crater’s tank and the color was soon restored to Mr. Ajab’s cheeks and lips. He took a deep breath and said, “I believed I was on my way to the stars.”
Crater let him breathe clean air a little longer, then said, “I’m Crater Trueblood of the Lunar Rescue Company, sent to fetch you.”
“Is Lady Deepik all right?”
“I am fine, Mister Ajab,” she said. “But I was so frightened.”
Now that Mister Ajab was temporarily out of danger, Crater allowed himself to vent. “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded. “It’s dangerous to climb up here!”
Mister Ajab struggled to sit up. After Crater assisted him, he said, “Please understand my folly, young man. You see, I thought to bring Lady Deepik to this beautiful spot and ask her a question that has been burning in my thoughts for a very long time.”
“And what might that question be, Mister Ajab?” Lady Deepik asked with some astonishment. “I thought we were only having ourselves a nice adventure.”
Mister Ajab, his eyes wide and pleading, looked at Lady Deepik. “I was your servant for thirty years and then your husband died, leaving you with many debts, and yet I have stayed with you for another ten.”
Lady Deepik studied Mister Ajab, then looked away. “This is true. You have been an excellent servant through good times and bad.”
