Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company

by Homer Hickam

  The sheriff hesitated, then said, “The council is also asking why you took four racks of nuclear-tipped missiles this morning.”

  The Colonel raised his head. “Nukes? Did we take nukes?”

  “No, sir, we didn’t. That wasn’t us.”

  “Who would steal nuclear missile racks that would only fit in a fuser?”

  “Maybe it was the same somebody who recently bought a fuser from the Lunar Council boneyard and then stole their tug.”

  The Colonel leaned back. “Crater Trueblood.” He pondered the situation, then said, “Is there any way to track the tug or the fuser Crater stole?”

  “Ordinarily yes,” O’Neil said. “Both have puter generated squawks, but since we were alerted to Crater buying the fuser and taking the tug, my team has been using ground-based dishes and lunasats with no joy. Our assumption is the squawk boxes were disabled even though they were designed to be hack proof.”

  “Crater has a gillie that can hack almost anything. What time did the puter say he stole the nukes?”

  “About the same time the asteroids destroyed the fuser fleet.”

  “Then Crater should be safe.”

  “No way to tell. There was time for him to orbit before the asteroids struck.”

  The Colonel allowed a sigh. He’d always liked Crater, and even though he’d tried to kill him several times, it was never personal, just business. Now maybe Crater was off to rescue Maria even though rescue of Maria for the Colonel was now unfortunately secondary. Something else had to be done, something even more important than his beloved granddaughter.

  The sheriff lifted his cap and used a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his bald head. “Colonel, we’ve also heard from the people at L5. They say they are through waiting. Either you announce your retirement immediately and put Junior in charge or they will destroy Armstrong City and Cleomedes. They also said they have your money, and that’s confirmed, sir. All your liquid assets are gone, probably to secret accounts in banks on Earth.”

  The Colonel waved his hand in dismissal. “I can always make more money.”

  The sheriff hesitated, then said carefully, “They also sent pictures of Maria.”

  The Colonel started and hit both palms on his desk. “Good grief, man! Let’s see them!”

  The sheriff clicked his do4u, bringing up the photos of Maria on the Colonel’s giant vidscreen. It showed her lying on a filthy cot, her foot black and broken. Another click showed her crushed foot close up. The next two showed her broken finger and thumb.

  The Colonel leaned forward, his hand to his mouth. When he began to weep, the sheriff and the engineer glanced at one another and shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

  The Colonel had never wept so openly, and he was certain it was because he was old, even though the lower gravity of the moon allowed humans to live longer than on Earth, longer, that is, if they could avoid breathing the dust or getting run over by a loader or swallowed up in a hidden rille or any of a thousand mechanical, chemical, or geologic killers always ready to murder the unwary living in a radiation-soaked vacuum. What could an old man do when all his young pilots, quick to answer his orders, had been killed? But then the spirit inside him rebelled against that kind of thinking. And something else too. There was a secret he needed to hide, that he must hide.

  “There’s one fuser left,” the Colonel said. “It may be damaged but it’s armed.”

  “Yes, sir,” O’Neil said, “but we have no way to get up to it. The space taxis that would have lifted us to the fusers were destroyed too.”

  The Colonel rubbed his forehead, trying to think. There was something knocking around in his head that he was trying to remember. Something about Crater and orbital ops . . . Then he remembered at least part of it. He turned to his engineer. “Tony, when Crater worked in our labs, didn’t he propose a novel way to get into lunar orbit? You remember that?”

  “Yes, sir. I studied every one of his proposals to see if they were worth anything commercially. It was the usual stuff. Using rail cannons and the like. And jumpcars.”

  “Jumpcars?”

  “Why, yes, sir. We talked about it when I brought his plan to you. We laughed about it, don’t you recall? It might have worked but it didn’t make any sense. I think Crater made a theoretical calculation just for the fun of it.”

  “Call it up on the puter.”

  The engineer keyed it in and a holographic screen appeared, hanging in midair. The title of the paper was Jumpcar Staging Engines to Orbit. It was a dry, technical paper, typical of engineers, but the Colonel was also an engineer and he was soon absorbed in Crater’s calculations and predictions. “Astonishing,” he said as he reached the end of the paper.

  “But completely theoretical,” O’Neil pointed out.

  “And a lot nuts,” the sheriff added.

  The Colonel pressed the intercom button. “Trudy, get me Riley Bishop. She’s one of my pilots.”

  “Riley Bishop? Let me check the personnel file. Ah, here it is. Jumpcar Pilot Riley Bishop left your employ six months ago.”

  The Colonel frowned. “Really? Where’d she go?”

  “Says here she has her own jumpcar business.”

  “Track her down and get her here chop-chop!” the Colonel brayed, then clicked off the intercom. “She’s one of the best natural pilots I ever had. How did I ever let her get away?”

  “She asked you for a raise, as I recall,” the sheriff said, “and you told her maybe in a few years.”

  “Did I?” He hit the intercom button again. “Trudy? Tell Riley I’ll triple whatever her usual fee is!”

  The Colonel sat back in his chair while the engineer frowned a dubious frown. “Those laws of physics, sir, also apply in this situation. Crater’s study is less than persuasive. The odds of it working I put at something like nine to one.”

  “Look, Colonel,” the sheriff said. “Isn’t it best at this point to give Junior what he wants?”

  The Colonel stared at the sheriff, then touched the intercom on his desk again. “Trudy, call all the Medaris family members who are officials in my companies. I want to have a vidcon with them in an hour.” He clicked the intercom off. “I will announce my retirement and notify them that Junior is taking over. In less than an hour, that information will be all over the moon and Earth. Sheriff, call L5 and tell Junior he’s won.”

  “That’s good, sir,” the sheriff said, relieved. “Retirement won’t be all that bad. And you can take your time and plot your revenge.”

  “Sheriff, you’re an idiot,” the Colonel growled.

  “I know that, sir. I only meant . . .”

  “Stop and think. I retire and Junior flies down here and takes over the family business. Do you think the rest of the family is going to just roll over? They’ll tear him to pieces. And what happens when the truth gets out about what’s at L5 and how it got there? An asteroid from L5 killed hundreds of men and women at the Tombaugh telescope site! More of them wiped out the Lunar Council’s fuser fleet! When the Lunar Council figures this out, it will put together a coalition against Junior and there will be war, a war that will probably bring in forces from Earth. This is a bigger disaster than me losing control over the family business. This could end up with tens of thousands of people dead. We have to stop it before it goes any further.”

  “But how?” the sheriff asked.

  “We go to L5, blow up the station, kill these people, and be done with it.”

  “What about Maria? She’ll die too.”

  The Colonel rubbed his eyes. “Blast you, Sheriff. Don’t you think I know that? We’ll try to rescue her, of course, but . . . well, I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  The sheriff gulped. “I understand, sir.”

  The Colonel hit the intercom button. “Trudy, have you talked to Riley Bishop?” he demanded.

  “Yes, sir. Just off the do4u. She’s on her way.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir.
”

  “I didn’t mean you. By the way, I’m reassigning you to the company store. Your replacement will take over in the morning.”

  There was a short silence on the intercom before the woman replied in a trembling voice. “What did I do wrong, sir?”

  “Nothing. I’m just tired of you,” the Colonel said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Maria, to her surprise, was allowed to wander the station at will. As she went about, she met crowhoppers, all of whom treated her with deference. Some even bowed to her. When Maria found a porthole on the lower ring where she could see the moon, Truvia walked up and stood beside her. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “I was wondering how the horde got here.”

  “Two robotic fusers, both equipped with catch baskets for the smaller asteroids. Maneuvering rockets were attached to the big ones and propelled them here. Your father, appointed by your grandfather, supervised the building of this station and the stocking of the horde. To do both, he used Umlap labor and captured warpods.”

  “So after he’d finished his assignment, Junior realized he could use it for his own purposes.”

  “Yes, after Carus and I talked to him when he made a trip to Earth.”

  “How did you get to him?”

  Truvia smiled. “We didn’t have to. He was looking for us, not to talk but to kill us. The Colonel, you see, sent teams to Earth to destroy the Legion. Your father was on a team that captured Carus and me. After we were tortured, Junior questioned us. Gradually, he came to trust us and told us about the horde at L5. That was when I explained to him how he might use it for his own ends.”

  Maria looked at the Trainer. “What’s your relationship with my father?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I think we will be married someday.”

  Maria smiled. “Sure you will. I can just see him waltzing in to a Medaris family party with you on his arm! There might be some heart attacks.”

  “You can be cruel,” she said.

  Maria gave a short laugh. “You ordered a demon to crush my foot and break my fingers. That’s cruel. I’m just giving you some straight girl talk.”

  “I fixed your foot and your fingers.”

  “How did you do that, anyway?”

  Truvia brightened. “Would you like to see?”

  Maria’s curiosity overcame her dislike of Truvia. “Of course.”

  Truvia beckoned Maria to follow her and led the way into the inner core and down to the lowest tube. In a cabin that had only a little gravity, Maria beheld a bank of puters and a long, doughnut-shaped tube with bundles of cables wrapped around it. Beside it was another machine, this one looking like a steel coffin. Truvia pointed at the tube. “We call it the Variable Cell Analyzer, or VCA. For best results, we have in our database all of the cell structures of the patient at their chosen age. In other words, if you were twenty-five and always wanted to be that age, you’d subject yourself to the VCA and then a record would be made.

  She pointed at the coffin-like box. “After you got older and wanted to be twenty-five again, you would enter this three dimensional cellular printer—we call it a 3DCP—that essentially removes cells that are different from your optimal. For instance, fat cells around your midriff. It also modifies other cells to make an exact duplicate.”

  “Are you telling me these machines are a fountain of youth?”

  “I suppose so. It’s an unscientific name, but for the lack of a better term, that might work. For instance, how old do you think I am?”

  Maria appraised her, then said, “Your early thirties.”

  Truvia smiled. “I’m seventy. Your father doesn’t know that. Don’t tell him!”

  “So before you crushed my foot, you stuck it in the VCA and made a reading?”

  “Actually, all of you from head to toe. We put your crushed foot in the 3DCP and it fixed everything back the way it was.”

  Maria studied the VCA and the 3DCP. “Look, Truvia, you’ve got your faults, mass murder being one of them, but let me give you some advice. You want to be worth about a trillion dollars? Set up shop right here in good old L5. Millions of—shall we say ‘mature’—women will pay to come here and get run through these machines.”

  “But we wouldn’t have any of their youthful information in our files,” Truvia pointed out.

  Maria shot her a disbelieving look. “I don’t think that’s a problem. Look at that fine, trim waist you have and your, ahem, otherwise fine endowments. Are you trying to tell me those were your original specifications? Come on, Truvia. You based yourself on somebody else, didn’t you?”

  “Perhaps,” Truvia said with a secret smile. “Shall I show you another part of our clinic?”

  “Why not?”

  Truvia led Maria back into the tube and into an adjoining cabin, this one lined with plaston boxes, tubes leading in and out of each of them. Immersed in a clear liquid were what appeared to be embryos in various stages of development. “Our latest design,” Truvia said proudly. “These are Legionnaires, crowhoppers as you call them, who will be smarter, stronger, and able to endure extreme heat and cold even better than our old designs. We’re also experimenting with birthing what appears to be normal humans but with biolastic skins resistant to vacuum. They might also have lungs that are able to produce their own oxygen. It would be an entirely new creature.”

  “Are you telling me you’re making moon people who could live in the vacuum without wearing suits and helmets?”

  “Don’t you find that exciting?”

  Maria felt a bit dizzy. The incubator room stunk of a variety of harsh chemicals, but it was the incredible possibilities of the creatures in the vats that was making her woozy. “Better get some fresh air,” she said.

  Back in the ring, Maria leaned against the wall and tried to breathe away the noxious fumes and the dread she felt. “What’s the overall plan here?” she asked. “It’s more than the takeover of the Medaris family business. I see that now. I just don’t understand what it is.”

  Truvia gazed through the viewport. Both the Earth and the moon were in view. “Were you impressed with the history lesson we gave you on the vileness of the world?”

  Maria shuddered but tried to keep her tone light. “Sure. The human race has done some bad things, but . . .”

  “What if we could start over?” Truvia’s green eyes seemed to glow with an inner flame. “What if there was a new world where a new kind of people could live and prosper while the old world was cleansed?”

  This time Maria couldn’t hide her disgust. “Truvia, you’re creeping me out!”

  The Trainer spread her arms expansively as if she were embracing the universe. “Why so? There have been numerous extinctions on Earth. What if there was another one and the people of the moon were prepared to repopulate it? Think about it!”

  “I am thinking about it! You’re talking about killing billions of people!”

  The Earth was just a sliver on the edge of the viewport in the revolving tube, and then it disappeared, leaving only the moon. Truvia pointed at the gray, cratered planetoid. “There is our new world, Maria. We will populate it with people of our own design and they will worship the founders of this new society as if we were gods. We will create a royal house.”

  Truvia turned to Maria and caressed her shoulder before dropping her hand away. “Do you recall what I first told you about Trainers? I said we were born in a petri dish, our genes manipulated to make us extremely intelligent, to have a commanding presence, and yet be subservient. For all our advanced brain power, we live to serve.”

  Maria discovered she was trembling in both fear and an unexplained excitement. “Who are you serving now?”

  “It could and should be you.”

  It was the last thing Maria expected to hear. “Me? In what way would you serve me?”

  Truvia’s eyes softened and her lips trembled. “Our King Raleigh and Queen Porella were members of the Medaris family. You are their great-niece.”

&nb
sp; Maria’s breath caught in her throat. “Are you talking about my great-uncle Ralph and his wife, Portia? They were killed in a plane crash. That’s what the Colonel told me.”

  “He lied. Ralph and Portia Medaris became our royal house. The Colonel set them up to make the Legion.”

  Maria’s head was swimming. “My grandfather is responsible for the crowhoppers?”

  “Indeed he is.”

  “Does Junior know about any of this?”

  “No. He thinks all this has been done so he could take over the family business. The wheels are turning, Maria, that could end with you on top. All you have to do is accept our offer to be our queen.”

  “What wheels are you talking about?”

  “To be precise, a very big asteroid.”

  “In L5?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “Where is it aimed?”

  Truvia seemed to be making up her mind about something, then said, “I will tell you this much. The reason I crushed your foot and broke your fingers and then fixed them is because I wanted you to understand how to rule.” She made a fist. “You must first have a fist of iron.” She opened the fist to show her palm. “While appearing to be benevolent.” She closed her fist again. “And then when your enemies expose themselves, you crush them!”

  Maria resisted the urge to call Truvia batscrag crazy to her face. “I’ll try to remember that,” she promised. “Iron fist, benevolence, crush my enemies. Got it. But where did you say that asteroid is aimed?”

  As if sensing Maria’s true opinion, Truvia’s expression turned to disappointment. “Your choice is a splendid life as our queen or an ignominious death. And that choice must be made in hours, not days.”

  “Fine. I choose to be queen. Now, tell me. Where is that asteroid aimed?”

  “Earth, of course,” Truvia replied with a coy smile.

  “But they’ll see it! They have to. There are telescopes watching the sky.”

  “By the time they see it coming, it will be too late. The Earth is in disarray. It’s the perfect time to make this strike.”

  Maria took a moment to put it all together. “Very clever, Truvia. You’ve got everybody focused on the family business, but it’s control of the Earth and the moon that you’re really after.”