Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company

by Homer Hickam

She winked. “They would, especially if we did. How about it? Let’s say seven p.m.?”

  “I’m likely to be busy.”

  She shrugged. “Your loss. And about your question on whether I like Dr. Medaris? The answer is yes, although I’ve lost a bit of respect for her today. She gave you up. That was foolish.”

  “Well, I suppose she had her reasons,” Crater replied.

  Miss Torricelli put out her hand. “Good-bye, Mr. Trueblood.”

  “Good-bye, Miss Torricelli.”

  Crater hurried back to the jumpcar hangar, finding Crescent and Riley sitting in the lounge. He gave them a wave and then climbed up the jumpcar’s ladder and closed the hatch behind him. “Gillie, what did you find out?”

  The gillie crawled out of Crater’s pocket and perched on his shoulder. The assistant was interested in mating with you.

  Crater blushed. “I meant what did you find out on her puter?”

  Nothing on the assistant’s puter of interest, so I checked the server for messages to Maria Medaris. As I anticipated, they included all of the early information on her kidnapping because she was on the security distribution list. Her name has since been scrubbed, but the previous messages remained. Maria Medaris was kidnapped by a group that calls itself the Trainers. That is with a capital T. They are the group who produced the crowhopper legions.

  “What about her location?”

  Maria Medaris is believed to be in a warpod heading toward the L5 Lagrange point, which is ninety thousand miles distant from and trailing the moon where, once entered, a body will remain in stasis. In other words, it will be perfectly balanced and follow the moon until an outside force on the body causes it to move.

  Crater’s smile was grim. “L5 would be the perfect place to store asteroids to toss at the moon. How do I get there?”

  There are only two types of vehicles that can reach it, warpods and fusers.

  “Where can I get one of those?”

  The gillie frowned, although it had no face. There are no warpods on or near the moon. There are fusers from the last war, but they belong to the Lunar Council and are either stored in lunar orbit or in scrap yards.

  “Is it possible to get a fuser out of a scrap yard?” Crater asked.

  It is possible but difficult. Petro would probably know how.

  “Petro! Of course! He was a fuser captain.”

  Are you done with me? the gillie asked. I am tired and wish to sleep.

  “First, message Petro. Tell him to meet me at the Cleomedes jumpcar hangar.”

  Message sent.

  The gillie climbed into Crater’s chest pocket, then contacted its “Awful Thing” progeny being carried by Crescent. Are you still alive?

  Yes. Are you?

  Don’t be cheeky.

  A million apologies, oh Superior but Somewhat Ancient One. What do you want?

  I want you to know something that in your inexperience you are doubtlessly unaware of. We are about to embark on an adventure. There will likely be mayhem and various disasters that might seem at times close to chaos. Prepare yourself and protect your owner at all times.

  And who will protect you, old slime?

  Your insults wear on me. Be careful, sprout.

  Or what? I am merely expressing my opinion of your status. I thank you for dividing your cells to create me and I honor you as my parent and mentor, but the truth is you are old and, I suspect, somewhat senile.

  Crater’s gillie fumed. I believe I will yet be forced to kill you.

  I believe such an endeavor might prove to be most difficult.

  Both gillies fell silent and made their plans.

  TWELVE

  Maria lay on a zero-g sticky cot, her eyes on the hatch, fervently praying that the demon wouldn’t return. When Truvia floated through the hatch, she was very relieved. She had been moved to a different cabin, this one with a zero-g shower and a working toilet facility. Since she’d been moved, there had been no torturing demon and no gruesome documentaries about the history and folly of the world.

  “Are you well?” Truvia asked.

  “Yes, except for my foot.” The throbbing pain never relented even though, during her last drugged sleep, someone had put a cast on her foot and a splint on the ring finger of her left hand.

  Truvia hooked her slippers in the foot restraints nearest Maria’s cot. “We will soon be at our destination. Would you like to know where?”

  “If you want me to know, yes.”

  “We will be arriving at L5. You know what that is, I’m sure.”

  “One of the libation points about the moon. The one trailing it, I believe.”

  “Correct. A place where nothing escapes without a great deal of energy. It is as much a philosophical as a physical reality, forever trailing in the wake of the moon.”

  Maria summoned her courage. “May I ask you a question?” When Truvia nodded, she asked, “Are you going to kill me? Because if you aren’t, my foot will surely get infected in this cast, and unless you take it off, I will die.”

  “Tell me what you dreamed of when you were a little girl,” Truvia said.

  “What about my foot?”

  “Answer my question first.”

  Maria worked hard to keep the exasperation from her voice. “The usual things,” she said. “I recall I wanted to be a princess. My mother even fixed up my room to look like it was a royal bedchamber. She called me Princess Maria.”

  This seemed to delight Truvia. Her face reflected an odd kind of joy and her green lips curled into a smile, revealing her small, pearly teeth. “Did you like being treated like a princess?”

  “I liked any time my mom paid attention to me.”

  “What do you want more than anything in the world or its moon?”

  “Right now, my foot to be healed.”

  “But what have you always wanted?”

  Maria knew she needed to answer the question honestly, so she did. “To be successful, I suppose. Eventually I would like to be in charge of all of the Medaris family enterprises. After my grandfather passes, of course.”

  “I see. Please summarize what you have learned about humanity.”

  “Based on what you’ve shown me, humans are vile. I get that.”

  “And what of the Medaris family? Is it also vile?”

  Maria reflected. “I don’t think so. I know some people think we’re too powerful, but it seems to me our various enterprises have provided people with jobs and dignity. We also make money, of course. If we didn’t, we couldn’t stay in business.”

  Truvia removed the syringe from its case. “Old fashioned but effective,” she said. “And so much faster than the modern effusions. Roll up your tunic sleeve.”

  “Not again.”

  Truvia raised her eyebrows. “Be good, little princess.”

  Maria rolled up her tunic sleeve and Truvia injected the contents of the syringe into her arm. “This will allow you to sleep.”

  Maria rubbed her arm and sighed a ragged breath. She looked at her awful right foot and knew it was past saving. She would be crippled for the rest of her life, but there was nothing she could do about that. All she could do was try to survive.

  She watched Truvia float through the hatch and then heard her talk to someone outside. “In a few minutes, she will be unconscious,” Truvia said, “but I want her to be screaming when she passes out. Leave her foot alone. I will have enough trouble with the mangling you did as it is. Can you do that?”

  “Oh, please, no,” Maria whimpered. She tried to get out of the bed, but her movements were uncoordinated and her limbs felt detached from her body. The demon climbed inside the hatch and looked at Maria, cocking its head as if puzzled. Finally it floated over, hooked its boots in foot restraints, and took her left hand and squeezed it until Maria screamed. It let it go and she stopped screaming. It grabbed her right hand and squeezed it. Again, Maria screamed but stopped when it stopped. It looked over its shoulder at the hatch as if for help, then scratched its head with a
ragged, dirty fingernail. Then it grunted again and grabbed her left hand. This time it broke her thumb. She was screaming, as per Truvia’s orders, when she passed out.

  THIRTEEN

  Crescent was mildly surprised when Petro arrived at her apartment on time, promptness not being his practice. She had invited him so she could tell him about her coming marriage and a few other things.

  “Absalom is a lucky man,” Petro said. “Have you set a date?”

  “Yes, he is, and no, we haven’t.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a crowhopper wedding.”

  “Nobody has, Petro,” Crescent said, dryly. “I’m the only female crowhopper in existence.”

  Petro grinned. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Well, it’ll be a good one. You gonna wear your armor?”

  “I haven’t decided what I’m going to wear and I didn’t call you over here to talk about my wedding except to let you know about it and also so we could talk about rescuing Maria Medaris. Although I’ve told Crater I’m willing to go along, I think you and I need to agree that we really want to do this. I think going after her will be about the most dangerous thing we have ever done, and I say that with the full knowledge that you were a fuser captain that fought battles with warpods.”

  Petro mulled over her words. “You’re saying if we go with Crater, we stand a good chance of getting ourselves killed.”

  “A very good chance, so we have to do what we can to make our odds of survival better. If you just blindly follow him, he may do something desperate. I’m asking you to use your own judgment and stop him if need be.”

  Petro was not a deep thinker. He was more into action, so it didn’t much surprise her when he said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying, but Crater wants this about as much as he’s ever wanted anything, and since he’s my brother, I’m bound to go along with him. Still and all, I hear you that he tends to go off the deep end when it comes to Maria. I’ll keep a close watch on that.”

  “All right,” Crescent said resignedly. “But I want you to promise me something.”

  “Sure, sister, anything. What is it?”

  “I’m trained from birth to be aggressive in battle. Don’t let me do anything stupid, either.”

  Petro puzzled over her request, then shrugged and said, “All right, Crescent. You’ve got it. Just don’t take offense when I tell you to calm down out there.”

  “I promise.” Crescent rubbed a tension spot on her forehead.

  He studied her. “What’s going on with you? There’s something else. What is it?”

  She straightened and looked away. “Nothing that will interfere with my duties. Now, we need to go. Crater is waiting for us at the main dustlock with the truck. We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”

  The distance from Cleomedes to the Lunar Council Spacecraft Storage, Utilization, and Regeneration Center (SSURC)—a fancy name for a junkyard—was fifty miles. After a three-hour drive, the personnel of the Lunar Rescue Company walked through rows of junked jumpcars and fusers.

  “There’s what we need,” Petro said, gesturing toward an obviously wrecked fuser lying on its side in the dust. “It’s a Spirit-class attack fuser like the one I commanded before taking over the squadron. There’s not a better fighter anywhere. Her weapons are both standoff and dogfight. See those flags on her nose? Each means an enemy destroyed. A killer ship for certain. With the right pilot, nothing can beat this baby.”

  Crater was dubious. “Seems like she’s pretty beat-up.”

  “On the outside. Let’s have a look at her guts.”

  Crater followed Petro up the ramp, Crescent behind them. Petro eagerly subsided into the pilot’s seat while Crater took the right seat. Crescent thought they looked like two schoolboys playing inside a toy rocket.

  “Let’s see if we can fire this puppy up,” Petro said and touched the cockpit viewscreen. He was rewarded with the image of a spinning disc, followed by a vivid display the width of the cockpit. “She’s alive! Got to love those liquid helium batteries! Look at the display, Crater. It’s all pretty simple. Fuel tankage levels, plasma temps, overdrive, throttles, attitude controls, astrogation, and weapons displays. You’ll catch on right away.”

  “What’s that light mean?” Crater asked, pointing at a blinking red light.

  Petro studied the light and then called up the ship puter. “Looks like a mag coil problem on engine number two. Two engines would be enough to get us out to L5. We’d just have to burn them a little longer.”

  “Would two engines be enough if we have to fight our way there and back?”

  Petro thought Crater’s question over. “Let’s go lift the hood.”

  Petro led the way to the engine room. There was no “hood,” but there were hatches that allowed access to the engines. “Each fuser engine has a fusion pod that provides the heat source,” Petro explained. “Super-cold liquid hydrogen is piped in, heated by the fusion pod, and then exhausted through the engine nozzles. It’s a pretty simple concept, but you can see it’s a plumber’s nightmare.”

  “What kind of specs on these engines?”

  “Each engine is rated ninety thousand seconds specific impulse.”

  Crescent recalled her training in rockets. Specific impulse of an engine referred to the integral of the force of an engine over time divided by the fuel mass. Ninety thousand seconds meant a very efficient engine. In comparison, the specific impulse of most chemrockets was around three hundred.

  As the puter had reported, engine number two was not functional. In fact, it was a mess with all of the magnetic coils missing in the fusion pod plus its wiring harness. “We’ll never be able to fix it,” Petro said. “Best thing to do is to replace it. Cost us a pretty penny, though.”

  Petro walked Crater and Crescent through the rest of the fuser. “The living spaces in a fuser are designed vertically,” Petro explained. “Since this one’s on its side, you have to imagine everything turned ninety degrees to get an idea of the orientation in flight. You’ll notice all the hatches have seals. Because these are warships, these hatches are always kept closed during flight. That way, if there is a penetration of the hull, the whole ship doesn’t depressurize. Unfortunately, that sets up a scenario of personnel being trapped between pressurized and unpressurized sections. During the last war, fusers that were damaged that much usually withdrew from the battle and limped home.”

  “Did fusers carry troops?” Crescent asked.

  “There were a couple of troop carriers built, but it wasn’t that kind of war. We mostly fought warpods in space and had no reason to land troops.”

  Petro, with Crater and Crescent following, entered through the engine room hatch into the next cabin and then along a horizontal ladder with handrails. Looking down between the rungs of the ladder, Crater noted two bunk beds welded in the open space along the aft bulkhead. Around the remainder of the bulkhead were three sealed cabins. Petro continued his orientation speech.

  “The aft bulkhead in this section, as in all sections, is actually the floor in normal orientation. To go long distances in the shortest amount of time, fusers accelerate nose-first, then flip over and decelerate tail-first. That explains why everything is laid out vertically with ladders through the center from hatch to hatch. If they’re in no particular hurry, fuser captains don’t do the flip thing. They just accelerate up to a desired velocity and then go into drift mode, the gravity diminishing to zero. That takes more time, but it saves a lot of hydrogen. When we were in dogfight mode during the war, we’d spout off the engines when we needed to accelerate and then just use our directional jets to maneuver. We ran rings around the warpods and their old chemrocket engines.”

  Petro continued. “The open bunks are for permanent party such as mechanics, navigators, and ordnance experts. The closed cabins are for the captain-pilot, the lieutenant copilot, and very important visitors. Note the waste control system closet that everyone shares. It’s a standard zero-g design that works even better wi
th inertial gravity.”

  Petro next led them through a hatch to a room that also had three cabins. “This room is for the astrogator, this one for battle control, and this one to store tools and supplies for the mechanic. Everything appears to be here and intact. Looks like they carried this baby down from orbit with a tug and just plunked it here in the dust.” Petro shook his head. “The waste of war. This lovely little fuser lost an engine and it got tossed.”

  “So if we want this bird, what do we do next?” Crater asked.

  “We buy it,” Petro said, “but they only sell these things for scrap. If they thought we meant to fly it, they’d never allow us to get near it. That’s why I devised our cover story. So let’s go talk to the man.”

  “The man” was in a pressurized trailer parked beside the entry to the boneyard. At the entry hatch, Crescent volunteered to stay in the dust. “I might scare them,” she said, and neither brother chose to argue with her. That hurt her feelings a little, but she was used to it. She sat down on a bench outside. “So, gillie,” she said, “do you know any games?”

  I know all games. Which one do you want to play?

  “How about My Dumb Bosses?”

  I don’t know that one.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m playing it right now.”

  FOURTEEN

  You have the story straight?” Petro demanded of Crater as they climbed out of their biolastic suits and donned tunics from their kits.

  “We’re going to make a war memorial out of the fuser.”

  “That’s right, but why?”

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  “You’ve forgotten? How could you, the smartest fellow I’ve ever known, have forgotten?”

  “Because it’s a lie. I don’t like to tell lies.”

  Petro sighed. “All right, I can see that I’d best do the negotiating. Your engineering brain can’t handle the fine nuances required. How many johncredits is that bag of gold worth?”

  “I’m not sure, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to save it.”

  “You have another source of money?”

  “Actually, I do.”