Helium3 - 1 Crater

by Hickam, Homer

  “A biolastic suit, for certain,” Crater muttered. “But a better one than I’ve ever heard of. Five flechettes penetrated a suit and none leaking? Amazing.” It was also amazing that a man with five flechettes in him was still alive. Apparently, the crowhoppers were shooting the man with their rifles set to their weakest setting. Crater supposed it was a type of torture.

  The gillie transmitted the signal from the man on the ground. “Is that the worst ye can do, ye ugly creatures? Why, that ain’t nothin’ to me. I’m a moon mountain man, by Joe!

  I can shoot straighter, jump higher, cuss worser, fight longer, smell badder, and spit farther than any man on the moon! My maw were a collapsed lava tube and my pap were a volcano!

  My brother’s the dust and my sis is a roller! My wife’s a crater, my kids are Helium-3!”

  “Shut up, old man,” one of the crowhoppers croaked. “Nothing you say is going to help you. You will die today.”

  “Death ain’t nothin’,” the tied-up man retorted. “It’s how you die. Watch me, boys, and learn somethin’!”

  Pegasus walked around the rocks and looked at Crater.

  “What?” Crater demanded. “We can’t do anything about this.”

  The horse kept looking at him until Crater felt ashamed.

  He checked his rifle, clicked it to its lowest setting, rethought that, clicked it to its middle setting, then climbed aboard Pegasus.

  Crater didn’t know why, but the horse made him feel not only brave but almost foolhardy. He faced two crowhoppers, bioengineered Earthian killers. What would the outcome be?

  Surely disaster.

  Yet he was not afraid.

  Crater clamped his legs tight against the sides of the great horse, the material flowing around his legs, steadying him.

  “What kind of horse are you?” he asked. Then he knew the answer. It was on the vidpin, after all. Pegasus was a warhorse.

  “All right, boy,” Crater whispered. “Let’s ride.”

  The horse made a shrill sound—an angry whinny. Then Pegasus flew down the hill in great leaps, reaching the crowhoppers in what seemed to Crater no more than a few bounds.

  Crater rose up in the saddle and pulled the trigger of his rifle, and one of the crowhoppers fell. The other crowhopper raised his rifle to fire, but Pegasus soared over him, circled behind the truck, then turned and, though Crater scarcely believed it was possible, leapt completely over it. Caught by surprise, the crowhopper fell beneath Pegasus’s hooves, never to rise again.

  Crater jumped off the horse and ran over to the bearded man. He knelt beside him. “Sir, are you all right?” Crater asked, though five flechettes sticking in him told their own story.

  When Pegasus nickered, the man’s eyes fluttered and then opened. “Ah, Pegasus,” he said. “You came back to save me, eh?

  Good horse.” The man smiled at Crater. “And who are you, boy?”

  Crater untied the man and told him who he was and why he was there. The man sat up unsteadily while Crater held his shoulders, giving him support. The flechettes had no doubt bled him. “I’m Ellis Justice,” he said. “And this is my horse, Pegasus. I work for the Deep Space Suit Company. My job is to visit heel-3 towns and demonstrate our wares, which are suits of all kinds, space suits, dust suits, fabric ECP suits, and the latest BCP suits. Pegasus is along to demonstrate the amazing capabilities of our new biolastic material. He also gives rides to the children of these places. Or at least that’s what we did until these ruffians killed me. Who are they?”

  “Crowhoppers, Mr. Justice, Earthian mercenaries. But what did you mean they killed you? Your suit has sealed.”

  “One of the flechettes entered my right lung. It was the first shot. It was before they slowed their rifles down.” As if on cue, a pink froth escaped Justice’s lips and his eyelids fluttered. “Take good care of Pegasus, will you? He is a dear friend, though he was once a warhorse with the Alabama Irregulars.

  His previous owner told me he was feared by every man and horse who ever faced him, but since he’s been with me, he’s been gentle as a lamb and patient with children.”

  “Gillie,” Crater said, “is it true what Mr. Justice says about his lung, and is there something to be done?”

  The gillie crawled off Crater and onto Justice’s neck, then disappeared into the helmet seal, reappearing inside. Justice, though apparently dying, was delighted. “A gillie, by golly! But it’s illegal!”

  “It knows,” Crater said, and then to the gillie, “How did you do that?”

  Gillie cousin to biolastic microbes. Gillie fool them into thinking gillie all the same. But these are different from Moontown biolastic microbial sheath. Much stronger. Much meaner.

  “These are different,” Justice confirmed, then hacked and coughed some before speaking again. “State-of-the-art, just put on the market for long endurance. Put it on, you can leave it on up to six months. Pegasus has one, and except for the plaston girdle along his hindquarters that needs cleaning every week or so, and the need for food and water, he could run along on the moon for months.”

  The gillie climbed next to Justice’s lips. “I think it wants to go into your mouth,” Crater said.

  Justice didn’t look pleased at that prospect, but he still opened his mouth and the gillie wriggled inside. Justice gagged, then relaxed. A few minutes later, the gillie reappeared out of Justice’s mouth carrying, though it had no hands, a flechette that was dripping blood. Repaired tear in his lung, it said, then put the flechette down and worked its way through the neck seal, reappearing on the other side.

  “That thing’s a wonder,” Justice said and drew a clear breath.

  “Status report,” Crater said, as if what the gillie had done was normal. The truth was he was in awe.

  The gillie said, Lung function good, biolastic sheath holding.

  Nickering softly, Pegasus walked up and allowed Justice to stroke his nose. “Thank you for coming back with help, old friend,” Justice said.

  “Maybe we ought to get you out of the dust, Mr. Justice,”

  Crater suggested. “And pluck out these other flechettes.”

  “Just help me up.”

  Crater helped Justice to his feet, noticing as he did that one of the crowhoppers was moving. It was the one he’d shot.

  When Justice noticed the crowhopper too, Crater said, “I had the rifle on midpower so it wouldn’t kill.”

  The gillie said, Crowhopper suit leaking. Death in twenty minutes.

  “Can we take it inside your trailer?” Crater asked, but Justice threw off Crater’s arm, staggered over to the crowhopper, picked up the creature’s rifle, and aimed it at its heart.

  “Mr. Justice, don’t!” Crater cried.

  Justice glanced over his shoulder. “Stay out of this, Crater.”

  He turned back to the crowhopper. “Answer me quick and I might let you live. Why did you attack me?”

  The crowhopper’s eyes were filled with hate. “Questions we had to ask you,” he grunted.

  “You shot me, old son, and you tortured me, but you didn’t ask me any questions. Better come up with a better answer.”

  “First we decided to have our fun.”

  “Torture is fun?” Crater asked.

  The crowhopper turned his head toward Crater. His eyes almost had weight, like two slimy worms crawling on Crater’s face. “You want to hear about that heel-3 camp we were in the other day? Killed ’em all, we did. Oh, that was fun, boy. You should join us. We’d show you how much fun it can be when nothing means nothing.”

  “What was the name of the town?” Crater asked, fearing the answer.

  “Something Japanese. Nekko? Yes, that was it.”

  Nekko was a small Japanese heel-3 camp south of the lunar equator near a lava flow that was the shape of a cat, thus the name. “Did you say you killed everyone?” Crater asked, his voice turning to a near whisper.

  “Not all at once. We played around first.”

  The shock on Crater’s face se
emed to surprise the crow-hopper. “What’s with you, boy?”

  “He’s not a veteran,” Justice said. “He don’t know war, what it’s like, what creatures like you are bred to do.”

  “Well, old man, I’m not the worst of the lot, I can tell you that.”

  “Where’s your base?” Crater asked.

  “We don’t have a base. We travel on our spiderwalkers, take sustenance where we find it.”

  “But you have to come from somewhere,” Crater said.

  “I’m getting tired of answering your questions,” the crowhopper replied. “Name, rank, and serial number, that’s the ticket. My name is Henri Vallemarte, my rank is private, serial number is echo seventeen eighty-one—or used to be when I was in the Legion. You’re not going to get another word out of me.”

  Justice shot him, the rifle reset to full power, and the crowhopper died, quivering in the dust.

  Crater was aghast. “What did you do that for?”

  “When he said he wasn’t going to talk anymore, I believed him.”

  Using the rifle as a cane, Justice stumped toward the trailer. “Let’s go inside. We can talk there.”

  Crater looked at the dead crowhoppers and sensed that everything was changing from what he’d always believed to be true, and it was not for the better. The horse came over and pushed him in the back with his nose, then crowded in, demanding attention. “What about Pegasus?” Crater asked.

  “He comes inside too. I know he’s itching to smell you.

  Come on. I promise you’ll like what’s going to happen next.”

  :::

  TWENTY-ONE

  Crater couldn’t imagine that he’d like anything much for a while. He was far behind the convoy, and if he didn’t catch up, he was going to miss the Cycler and fail the Colonel. He’d also promised to look after Maria and, though he’d had the best of intentions, he supposed he could be accused of abandoning her. There was also a dead trucker buried miles behind, a woman who’d just wanted to race, a race Captain Teller had blamed on him. There was also a dead crowhopper out in the wayback not too far from the Dustway Inn, three dead Umlaps—the king, Hit Your Face, and Bad Haircut—and now there were two more dead crowhoppers plus a report of a destroyed heel-3 town down south.

  All the death and destruction was a great drag on Crater’s morale. He was also in the company of a man who didn’t mind killing other men, not to mention a giant warhorse who could pretty much fly. Well, that last one wasn’t so bad. Meeting Pegasus was marvelous, but everything else about the convoy was a scrag shambles.

  He told the gillie to keep watch, though he doubted it had the strength to do much, and left it outside on the truck, then helped Justice inside. Pegasus followed up the ramp. When he saw the interior of the trailer, Crater almost forgot the misery of his situation. It was amazing. Once through the big airlock, there were three sections, a set of complete but compact biolastic dustlocks made of the finest lunasteel, Justice’s sumptuous quarters, and Pegasus’s stall. Justice was suddenly feeling faint, so after opening the hatch for Pegasus and seeing him inside his domicile, Crater helped Justice remove the flechettes and take off his coveralls.

  After sitting down in the biolastic removal dustlock, Justice waved Crater away from the shower handle. “Not for me, Crater. I’ll keep my biolastic sheath on. It’s good for another four months and I can scarcely feel it. Just remove my helmet by pushing that button at my neck. Ah, there you go. See how the helmet comes right off? The microbes at the neck are programmed to dissolve when a small current at a precise phase passes through them. They come back together when the helmet goes on. Pegasus’s helmet works the same way. Go unburden him, if you will. He won’t mind getting loose from his gear.”

  “This truck is amazing,” Crater said.

  “My own design, bucko.”

  Crater climbed out of his ECP suit, put on some coveralls he found in a cupboard, and went inside Pegasus’s quarters.

  Taking off the horse’s helmet was as easy as removing Justice’s, and Pegasus gave him a thank-you nicker.

  After Crater removed Pegasus’s armor, the horse pushed a large dome-shaped button on the wall with his nose and was rewarded with a bucket of green pellets. He quickly had his huge head deep in the pail.

  Going back to see how Justice was doing, Crater found him sitting in an easy chair in his quarters, having limped there from the dustlock. He looked ill, his face as gray as the dust outside. “Blood poisoning from the flechette, maybe,” Justice said, coughing. “Your gillie can’t fix that by crawling into my lungs.” He pointed to a white cabinet. “Some antibiotics in the medicine chest with injectors. You ever injected anybody?”

  Crater admitted he hadn’t, but promised to give it a try. The injector had a place to press, and when he did, a reader on the wall played a vidpix of how to use it. Crater watched intently, then, as instructed, wiped down Justice’s shoulder with an alcohol swab, also thoughtfully provided by the medicine chest, and pressed the injector on Justice’s shoulder. It emptied itself and Crater tossed the spent injector into a waste bucket.

  “Most likely got pneumonia, too, from the blood in my lungs,” Justice said. “But I guess I can make it for a few days.”

  “I was heading for Aristillus,” Crater said. “You can travel along.”

  “West to east? I was going east to west.”

  “I guess things have changed for you, Mr. Justice,” Crater said.

  Justice thought that over. “I suppose they have. With crowhoppers on the moon, they’ve changed for all of us, I suspect. Looks like we might have to dig up the tomahawk, do battle with those old creatures. But all right. If you don’t mind our company, Pegasus and I will tag along.”

  “Tell me about the crowhoppers,” Crater said.

  Justice leaned back in the chair. “I first saw them in my rearview mirror whilst they were trying to sneak up on me on their spiderwalkers. Fought ’em when I was with the Irregulars so I knew what they were. I didn’t have anything to fight them with so I had no choice but to stop. They didn’t want to come inside—maybe they were afraid I’d ambush them—so they ordered me and the Peg out.

  “They knocked me around a bit, then got interested in Pegasus. One of them said he’d race the other, him on Pegasus, his buddy on his spiderwalker. They were just having a good time. But Pegasus fooled them when he ran off into the dust.

  They shot at him and may have nicked him. Not sure.”

  “They shot him twice,” Crater said, “but his suit held.”

  Justice lit up in a grin. “He wears a suit of the latest design by my company. Of course it held. It’s designed to hold.”

  Getting back on track, Crater asked, “What did the crowhoppers want?”

  “They never said, except I heard them talking to each other and gained they were looking for someone on a truck convoy. I guess I was a diversion. Maybe they thought I’d seen the convoy. I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is if you hadn’t come along, I’d likely be dead and so would poor Pegasus, who clearly has taken a shine to you. Children he’ll let ride on his back with no complaint, but most men, he’s pretty particular. Now, tell me what you’re doing out here and let’s see if we have common cause.”

  Crater told Justice most of it, in a shorthand way, and Justice smiled at the end of the tale. “I know Captain Teller.

  A tough fellow, not too bright or imaginative, but honest, and honest goes a long way out here in the wayback. You’ll learn a few things from him if you pay attention. One thing for certain, he’ll like to hear what a brave scout he has, charging those two crowhoppers like you did.”

  “All I did was hang on to Pegasus,” Crater said.

  “You did more than that. You shot one of ’em. That was some great shooting. But why did you have the rifle on half-power?”

  “I didn’t want to kill anybody.”

  Justice closed his eyes for long enough that Crater thought he’d perhaps fainted, but then he opened them and
said, “Crater, these crowhoppers are on the dustway to kill. That’s what the people who made them designed them to do. They got no heart or souls neither. You get mixed up with one, you got to kill it. In war, it’s okay to kill a man as long as that man’s going to kill you if you don’t. But anyway, crowhoppers don’t qualify as men. Do you understand?”

  “I think so, sir. I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  Justice nodded as if he believed he’d convinced the boy, but he knew better. He’d seen lots of boys like Crater on Earth, unable to kill a man even though there was a war going on all around them. Those boys never lived long. He worried about Crater, then sensed there might be more to the boy than he showed. At bottom, the boy probably had a lot of sand. He was all by himself in the wayback of the moon, after all.

  “Say,” Justice said, “how’d you like to try one of our new suits?”

  Crater thought that was a splendid idea, and an hour later—after some measuring—he was wearing a Deep Space special biolastic suit. When he touched his arm, it felt as if he had nothing on at all. “This is amazing,” Crater said.

  Jumpcar in sight.

  Crater had nearly forgotten about the gillie left outside on watch. He snatched up the helmet Justice provided, pulled on his coveralls and boots, and went through the airlock. He saw it immediately. A jumpcar was hovering on its jet about a mile away, its triangular fins a hundred feet above the ground.

  Then, it began to rise until the flame from its engine had turned into a sparkling star, then disappeared altogether.

  “I saw it on the monitor,” Justice said when Crater came back inside. “Crowhoppers, I suppose, looking for their fellows. They saw them, probably, and went off to make their reports to whoever brought them to the moon. We’d best get on to Aristillus before they come back.”

  “I’ll hitch my fastbug to the motorbarn,” Crater said, then got busy. Within an hour he had accomplished the task, made sure Justice was comfortable, that Pegasus was fed and watered and his stall cleaned—Crater’s work in the grease traps was good training for that—and began to drive the motorbarn.