“Could be,” said Bubba. He glanced at the panel—there was no pressure on the other side of the hatch, just like at their bunker. He waved at Travis, who held the locking bar down and spun the locking wheel. They tugged the hatch, latching it open.
Their suit lights swept the bunker and the by-now-familiar scene of devastation greeted them. The ShelterCans were tumbled about, again, as usual. They moved them, one by one, to their bases, but did not try to set them upright.
“Hey, this one seems full!” called Travis.
Bubba almost fell in his haste to get over to the battered cylinder. It was heavier.
“What do we do?” asked Travis. “Do we crack it open?”
“Good question. First, let's see if someone is awake in there.” He looked around, picked up a length of aluminum channel, and tapped on the ShelterCan with it.
“Wish I could put my ear on it,” grumbled Travis. “Or have an external mike that was worth a damn. Wait! Feel that?”
There was the faintest feeling of tapping from within. Travis opened his mouth to shout, but closed it. Bubba hid his smile.
“No air, Trav.” He put his helmet on the cylinder and shouted, “Are you in a suit? One knock for yes, two for no!”
They felt one faint tap through their gloves.
“We're going to open you up! One tap for OK, two for no!” Again, the single tap.
Bubba motioned to Travis, who had already rigged a length of piping and a fulcrum. It took them some scrambling, but the hatch eventually popped open and the occupant sat up.
“Wait, you're Ashley Boardman, right?”
“Yeah. Help me get out of this thing!”
Travis and Bubba helped her out and brought her up to speed. Another aftershock rippled through the bunker, as if to punctuate their predicament.
“So, there's just the three of us?” she asked.
“So far. Hey, what are you doing here anyway? I thought you Ops Center folks were over on the other side of the station,” said Travis.
Ashley glared at him, but didn't answer. Travis was about to repeat his question, but Bubba grabbed his arm.
“Hey, Trav. Did we check all of the ShelterCans?” Through the visor, he shook his head at Travis and held his eyes in a fixed stare. His tongue probed the inside of his cheek three times. Travis widened his eyes as comprehension hit.
“Uh, no. I've done those four, got two left.”
One of the other ShelterCans disgorged Peter Brinker, and the other one, Lori Minelli. Peter checked on both of the women, then grabbed Travis and Bubba by the arms and walked them over to the far end of the chamber. Slicing the air across his throat, the three of them turned off their radios and held their helmets together.
“I would appreciate it if this remained between the five of us,” said Peter.
“What remained between us?” asked Travis. “I don't know nothing.”
“Peter, I think we've got more important things to deal with here,” said Bubba. “Buy me a drink when we get out of this, and I don't know nuthin' about all y'all.”
Peter nodded, his face reddening under the reflected light from the other suits. He turned away and flipped his radio back on.
“We've got some more bunkers to check, folks. What say we get to it?”
Travis and Bubba looked at each other and shrugged. It really didn't matter who was in charge as long as someone took the reins. As Moondogs, they were well used to being on the receiving end of the order. Peter was a nice sort. Lucky son of a bitch, too.
They left the bunker, strode to the end of the corridor, and looked at the heap of regolith that blocked their way to the rest of the station.
Chrysalis
UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, June 17 2082, 1932 EDT
The dust cloud was blinding, reflecting nearly all of his suit lights back at him. McCrary ducked behind the forklift and waited. In the temporary atmosphere, the dust swirled in the eddies of hot oxygen. The same gas transmitted a distant clang back to McCrary, surprising him. He had anticipated total silence. With a shuddering that he could feel in the soles of his feet, one of the rocks at the very top, nearly invisible in his suit lights, canted away from the cave and began its slow tumble down the outside talus slope. The same opening served to suck the oxygen out of the cave and into space. The sound died and the dust cloud disappeared.
“Finally, something went right,” he murmured. He carefully clambered up the unstable rock pile, and was able to fit between the top of the pile and the roof of the cave. It took some nerve-wracking wriggling, but he slipped under the top of the cave mouth to stand atop the pile of rock, but on the outside of the cave. He stood about ten meters above the Lunar surface, and surveyed the site of Moonbase Collins.
The station had originally started as a series of inflatable shelters. They were large, easily thirty feet high. Unmanned missions had brought bulldozers to the site. Powered by solar energy, with a pony-sized thorium-powered nuclear reactor charging the batteries during the long lunar night, the remotely controlled bulldozers scraped off the regolith.
The Works began as a cargo capsule, outfitted with a continuous solar-powered roaster for the regolith. From the spoil scraped up by the bulldozers, fine soil and pebbles swirled up the feedscrew and into The Works. There, the oxygen was baked out of the soils, with recovery of Helium-3 an added benefit. The oxygen was compressed, cooled by pipes kept in permanent shadow, and the liquefied gas stored against the arrival of the first crews. Once their shelters were soft-landed by remote-control, the first pioneers arrived.
The colonists unrolled the bag-shaped shelters in the deep trenches, and inflated them with the regassified oxygen. As the shelter took on its final shape, the oxygen in the inflation gas combined with the raw resin in the glass fiber outer shell, hardening it.
Once the first shell was set up, the colonists placed the second bag within the first, unrolled it, and filled it in the same way. Five times, five layers of resin-impregnated glass cloth made up the walls of Moonbase Collins. Outside, the trench was slowly filled in with the slag remaining from the primitive roaster that was making their oxygen.
When the shelters were completed, they were buried underneath a cap that was never less than three meters thick of processed Lunar soil. The shelters themselves had cured to become multi-ply airtight plastic in the unrelenting ultraviolet rays of raw sunlight. Interior frames and pressure bulkheads were fitted to the structure so that the entire wing was split into a number of pressure-tight structures. Four wings were created in this manner, all joining at ninety-degree angles with a central hub. McCrary smiled as he remembered those times. He and Angus Turley were bunkmates in that first load of colonists. They were nothing but grunts making the Moonbase a reality. Hard work, danger at every turn, crappy food, and the occasional equipment failure, but they loved every minute of it. Turley was dead now, killed in a freak asteroidal impact event some two years previously. McCrary looked over towards the entrance to the central cavern, remembering the day they exploded the first nuke on the Moon.
The hub that connected every wing was excavated deep inside the Lunar bedrock with a specialized micro-ton yield nuclear bomb. The nuclear excavation device, designed to generate an incredible amount of heat and as little radioactive fallout as possible, did a fantastic job at vaporizing hundred-meter diameter bubbles in solid rock, while leaving behind residual radiation that was easily controlled.
The NED, as UNSOC termed it, elicited howls from environmentalists all over the Earth. They were convinced that the fireball from the explosion, almost invisible from Earth, would cause the Moon to crash into the mother planet, or cause some kind of extreme EMP effects, or make frogs mutate through increased radiation.
Now that he thought of it, McCrary had to admit that the shock pulse from NED's detonation was far less than any of the current aftershocks still twitching the Moon. A carefully calibrated shaped charge vented the cavern shortly after NED's explosion, releasing the radioactive v
aporized rock plume into space. After two weeks, most of the prompt radioactivity had ceased, and the cavern was ready for its liner.
McCrary carefully picked his way down the large pile of rock, intent on gaining the valley floor. The lining of the central cavern was nearly as controversial as the original creation. He snorted with disgust. People could be so blind sometimes.
Pictures of the apparatus during its Earth-side testing, spewing clouds of vaporized lead into a mock cavern, almost caused the Collins project to be canceled. People actually showed up with horrific images of deformed children, accusing the UN of trying to poison the children of the Moon with lead fumes. The UN countered, showing exactly zero children and no pregnancies among the colonists. The professionally aggrieved pointed out that lead was a heavy metal poison, and lead was most harmful for growing children, and here was lead vapor being deliberately used to line tunnel walls. The UN must be trying to poison babies. The UN realized that they were never going to win, and went ahead and launched the equipment anyway.
Actually, it was incredibly elegant. With its low boiling and vaporization point, a well-designed heater and blower could vaporize lead, spray that cooling lead vapor to fill every nook and cranny in the main cabin, and, at the same time, increase the shielding from solar radiation and from the radiation of the original nuclear explosion.
The cavern was where all of the communal facilities were located, and the highest concentration of ShelterCans were to be found in the Center. It seemed the best place for McCrary to start looking for survivors.
McCrary looked carefully at the Collins. The Center required a sophisticated decontamination system before entry was even allowed to the interior. Between the almost certain loss of power and possible structural damage, McCrary had no desire to be trapped in the decon system. The bright red color of the outermost ply of shelter material caught his eye off to his left. He carefully walked over to the only spot of color in the endless gray and white, with pools of absolute darkness thrown in for good measure.
The little bastards, he thought. He wondered how the dust content of the automatic sweeper robots kept increasing in the weeks before The Event. Engineers were sneaking in and out of the back door instead of taking the officially sanctioned center door. This time, their rulebreaking might actually save him.
He stepped inside the airlock, and hit the cycle switch.
Refugees
UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, June 17 2082, 2200 EDT
The band of refugees increased steadily as Travis, Bubba, and the threesome moved along the wing towards the central cavern. As the numbers increased, the speed at which Moondogs searched the various bunkers increased. Soon, they cleared the southwest wing.
“Now what?” asked Travis. “We've got about forty here.”
“Hang on,” said Bubba. “Let's see what Peter does.”
Peter was waving his arms over his head, and had set his suit lights to 'strobe'. When everyone had turned to face him, he stopped the flashing, held both hands by his helmet as if listening, then flashed the lights three more times, indicating radio channel three.
“Everyone on?” he asked, then laughed. “Silly question. If you can hear me, raise your left hand.” Soon, all hands were raised. “I am Peter Brinker, Lunar Ops Controller. Is there anyone here who outranks me?”
“Horst Nygaard.” Horst made his way forward. “Assistant Chief Engineer. Anyone else?” Nobody else stepped forward. “Peter, you're doing a hell of a job. I would prefer it if you continued. Reason: I see that Engineering is going to be too busy to sleep for the next, oh, year. So, if you would keep command and leave me free to do the Engineering, I would surely appreciate it.”
“Objections?” Peter slowly spun to see all of the rescued.
Every senior officer agreed with Horst Nygaard: Peter was doing a terrific job, and they had their own departments to run. “Done. Horst, I appreciate it. Feel free to gather your engineering forces if you think you need them.”
Peter divided the rescued into four teams of ten, and sent them to the other three wings, with one team remaining to search the central cavern. Again, Travis and Bubba were on the same team.
“I can't believe we've not had a casualty yet,” said Travis.
Bubba looked at him in disgust. “Now you've done it.” Sure enough, in the very next bunker, they found a ShelterCan that had been speared by a piece of I-beam. The freeze-dried blood looked pitch black in the vacuum, and Bubba had to swallow twice before he could work the metal piece out of the victim. In a community as small as Moonbase Collins, everyone knew everyone else.
“A real shame he had to go this way,” said Travis. “Anzel was a great poker player. His wife is gonna be real upset.”
“Yeah,” said Bubba. “I think we better leave him in here and seal the door. If we find others, we'll carry them here as well.”
***
Frank Maleski grabbed onto a door frame as the floor rippled underneath him. He quickly scanned his surroundings, looking for big heavy things that could fall on him. He was in Executive Country, where many of the senior staff had their offices, looking for survivors. Jimmy Fields was poking around in the ancillary spaces nearby. Neither one of them had been in this area before, and so they weren't too sure where the ShelterCans were normally stored.
That there were ShelterCans here was not in doubt. McCrary was not one to be awed by the trappings of rank or command. There would be at least twice as many ShelterCans in Executive Country as there were people assigned there.
“Got one!” called Jimmy over the low-powered radio in his suit. “I think I need a hand here.”
The handle would not move on the door. Worse, when tugged, a whitish gas blew out of the crack where the doors sealed.
“I got a bad feeling about this,” said Frank. He put his helmet up against the doors and shouted, “Is there anyone there?” twice.
“So, what do we do?” asked Jimmy.
“What we're paid to do, Jimmy. Hand me the drill.” Frank drilled a couple of holes at the top of the ShelterCan doors. Fog boiled out.
“Hey, that's not supposed to happen,” said Jimmy. “You're only supposed to get gas in there if you aren't in skintights.”
“I know,” said Frank. Or if you've got a shattered helmet.
The fog quit blowing out after a minute or so. Frank tried the handle—the door opened easily now that the pressure was off. He took one look inside and slammed the door closed again.
“Phone it in, Jimmy. Ms. Lange didn't make it.”
“Should I double-check you?” he asked.
“Trust me, Jimbo—you really don't want to. Her faceplate shattered.”
Jimmy gulped once—Frank could see the convulsive movement of Jimmy's larynx through his helmet—and made the call. Frank, sure of where he was now, kicked in the door to the Station Commander's office, saw the beam laying across the top of the ShelterCan—denting it inward—and shouted into his radio for backup.
***
“One-two-three-Hop! One-two-three-Hop! One-two-three-Hop!”
Like all radio calls, it was impossible to locate where it was coming from, but Horst Nygaard looked around anyway. Coming out of Executive Country, a group of four spacemen were hunched over a space-suited form, cradling it in their arms, and bunny-hopping very quickly towards Sick Bay. Horst punched up his radio and alerted Sick Bay to expect a VIP patient.
Horst didn't get in the way or ask for an explanation. The news would travel rapidly regardless. He watched as the airlock to Sick Bay opened, and a figure pointed a suit light at him, then made beckoning motions. Horst wasted no time.
Horst barely had his helmet off when he heard the voice of Doctor Kumar.
“Horst? C'mere. It's Commander Lee.”
“Here, Doctor. How can I help?”
“Don't come closer. Commander Lee's in extremely critical condition. I need you to limit entry here to just the worst off. I almost didn't get to see Commander Lee because a
bunch of folks with simple sprains were in the way. Figure out something, will ya? Far as I know, you're senior.”
“Will do, Doctor. Who brought in Lee?”
“Those guys. Take 'em with you when you go. They're in the way.”
Horst motioned to them. “Get over to the airlock, bring your helmets.”
There was some grumbling to Horst's command.
Horst hustled them to the exit.
“Look, let's get out of here and back outside. We'll talk by intercom, OK?”
***
Linked up, they looked like modern-day members of a chain gang, though it was just intercom cable linking one to the other. They weren't too happy about their treatment in Sick Bay.
“Kumar threw us out, wouldn't tell us anything!” said Jimmy.
“Hang on there, Jimmy. Tell me about Commander Lee,” said Horst.
“Frank Maleski and I were searching for survivors. Uh, Ms. Lange didn't make it. Then he started yelling for backup. I get in there, and he's holding up the Commander's helmet. 'Get the barf valve,' he said, and I triggered it—the blood inside was right at Lee's lips—and the air pressure in the helmet blows the Commander's blood all over the floor, but the helmet clears out. I look at the telltales—Commander had a pulse and the O2 was OK, but he's cut bad somewhere, and the helmet started filling up with blood again. Then these two show up, and we haul ass to Sick Bay.”
Horst held up his hand. “Thanks, Jimmy. Frank, anything to add?”
“Nope. Looks like the ShelterCan took a big whack from something, just not sure what—Commander's office was filled with girders and stuff. Commander never said a word, but he had vital signs, so it can't be too bad, right?”
Horst shook his head. “No idea. Did you finish Executive Country?”
“No, we were running the Commander in.”
“Jimmy, Frank, go back and keep looking. You two, bring Mrs. Lange's ShelterCan down here. We're going to start a collection point for the deceased.
Come In, Collins (Riddled Space Book 2) Page 3
