Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Gary welcomed everyone, made sure the right people were there, and skimmed through the routine administrative items. “This will be a standard five-two-five transfer operation,” he said. “Five days out, two to harvest, and five days back. Team chief is Bruce Lindsey. Karl Capell is his backup. Stormie Pastorelli and Gabe Morera round out the team.”

  Frank caught Bruce’s eye and they nodded to each other. Bruce was the resident expert on all the colony’s vehicles, and very dependable. Frank still had very few dealings with Capell, who called himself a redneck plumber even though he was dual-degreed in civil and chemical engineering; his work ethic, or lack thereof, had impressed neither Frank nor Stormie, and he was still agitating to unionize the Consortium personnel. Gabe sat next to Stormie, so Frank could not catch his eye. He would approach him in the next couple of days and offer to keep watch on the gardens for him.

  It seemed odd that Capell was made the backup team chief, since he had only arrived in October. But Frank did not think about it long, as Gary continued ticking his way through the briefing items.

  “Bruce, how’s the LVN?”

  “Snapper’s ready to roll,” Bruce said. “Generator’s running in the green, all systems are go. Consumables loading should start tomorrow.”

  “Nothing too volatile, I hope?” Gary asked.

  “Not that I’ll admit to.”

  “Okay, then. Doc?”

  Yvette consulted her datapad. “They’re all fine. Dosimetry and records show they’re all close to the expected radiation exposure for how long they’ve been here, so their biocapsules are fine to last the trip—especially since they’ll have the benefit of the magnetotail half the time they’re out. Stormie’s due for a physical, but we can take care of that when they get back.”

  The group worked their way through verifying everyone’s certifications to operate the LVN—the Turtle. Stormie and Frank were both certified, and their papers were good for another three months, even though their duties usually did not require driving the big truck. Gary and Bruce checked the training records and ensured all the procedures were correct and up-to-date. The team examined the equipment calibration and maintenance records and noted the latest telemetry from the main waypoint—the Halfway House oxygen plant—and the ice plant itself.

  “About ten days ago,” Gary said, “the LICEOM reported that one of its scavenger ’bots crapped out. It stopped transmitting and didn’t return at its programmed time. You’ll be carrying one extra to leave behind, and if you have time you’ll recover the bad one and bring it back for repairs.” From what Frank knew, that was not unusual: about every other trip out, the ice crews delivered as many new robots as were available to the Halfway House and the ice plant, such that gradually the production capacity of each automated factory was going up. The deliveries were sporadic because new robots were not received from off-Moon on a set schedule, but were tucked into other shipments like the EBM equipment. It would be a long time before the colony could rely on robots built locally in its own machine shop and foundry; so far they had only produced a few out of local materials and sometimes out of scavenged parts, on a space- and time-available basis.

  When Gary seemed satisfied that everything from the solar flare forecast to the first aid kit was green, he tried to close the meeting. “Okay, folks, looks like you’re ready for a nice trip. It’s just driving and grunt work, and aside from setting up the new ’bot, nothing unusual. Bag check is day after tomorrow at 2200, and we’ll see you off Wednesday as soon as it’s technically morning. Any questions?”

  Capell raised his hand for a second. He cleared his throat and asked, “Yeah, I was just wondering … how come Bio gets an extra fifteen percent bonus for this run?” A few others in the room muttered and nodded their heads.

  Stormie looked back at Frank. He shrugged, surprised that word of James’s deal could have gotten out so fast.

  Gary consulted his clipboard for a second, then looked at Stormie and Frank as if to say, Look what you got me into. He frowned, and put on his best official voice when he said, “Karl, Ms. Pastorelli is an independent contractor, not a Consortium employee. Collecting supplies has been determined to be within the bounds of her statement of work. However, the negotiation of any additional cost, bonus or not, was handled down below, and is between the Consortium and the Lunar Life Engineering Board of Directors.” Frank raised his eyebrows, and wished he could see Stormie’s reaction at the description of their humble company in such lofty terms. James would find it amusing as well.

  Capell shook his head. His bushy black hair wobbled. “I just don’t think it’s right, is all. These have always been equal shares in the past.”

  Strange that he would reference the past … Frank could not recall if his name had been on previous ice run rosters. He doubted it; there had only been two ice runs since Capell had landed. He pulled out his datapad to check, and almost missed what Capell said next.

  “And I don’t see why she should get extra money when she can’t seem to keep the water supply stable.”

  From behind her, Frank saw Stormie’s jaw clench; she might take that personally. It was true that the total water supply had fallen since the last group of colonists—including Capell—arrived. But Frank was not sure why Capell would bring that up as an issue. It was also true that the reclamation processes were not as efficient as they should be, and Capell himself had not completed his work on improving the water treatment system.

  Frank touched Stormie’s shoulder, but she shrugged away. “Hey, weren’t you supposed to get the new water plant running by now?” she said.

  “You say it like it’s supposed to be easy.”

  His voice had risen, and Stormie’s rose to match. “Maybe if you stayed here and did your job, it would be.”

  Capell held up one hand. “Look—”

  Gary Needham slammed his clipboard down on the table. “That is a topic for another day, people.” He looked at Stormie again, only for an instant. “As for the bonus situation, the transport fee will still be equal shares, based on the mass of ice brought back. Bio’s extra fifteen percent applies only to the hazard bonus.” He wrote something on his paper. “I’ve noted your question, Karl, and you’re free to file a dispute if you think it’s important. After you get back. For now, I think everyone has plenty of work to do.”

  Frank released the breath he had been holding, and noted several other sighs throughout the small room. The next few days would be interesting.

  * * *

  Wednesday, 9 January 2036

  Stormie used the next couple of days to refresh her memory on the technical instructions on ice harvesting and transport operations, with a few hours set aside to pack her kit bag and prep her suit. She left Frank to supervise the loading of air, water, and food into the Turtle. Even though the Turtle was technically big enough for four people, that was debatable if not downright misleading: it would be comfortable for two, cozy for three, and tight for four.

  She showed up for the bag check a little early Wednesday evening. The team swapped bags and verified everyone had the right inventory: Bruce checked Stormie’s bag, and she checked Gabe’s. They piled the bags into one of the big airlocks in the first garage, until they were ready to depart.

  She and Frank enjoyed a leisurely vegetarian meal, after which he surprised her with a rare treat: a bar of dark chocolate.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked. She tried to make it an ordinary question, but her voice betrayed her delight.

  “I arranged for it to be brought up on one of the recent flights,” he said.

  She laughed, and he asked why. “Just the other day I thought about getting flowers and candy.” She forced the smile from her face and asked, in as serious a tone as she could muster, “What are you apologizing for?”

  Frank tipped his head to one side, as if he hadn’t understood her question. She couldn’t maintain her demeanor, laughed again, and kissed him.

  As local daybreak approached, everyo
ne suited up. Stormie kissed Frank again before she secured her helmet and went into the big airlock with the others.

  The exterior lights were close little stars in the night that barely illuminated the lower part of the Mercator Crater wall, and made the mounds of lunar soil over the prefabricated habitats look like piles of Arctic snow.

  The LVN and its trailer sat fifty meters north of the garages and the Gateway; Stormie thought its resemblance to a huge, misshapen turtle might be a little exaggerated. If not for the cab sticking out the front that someone had decided was its head, the thing would look more like a wheeled horseshoe crab than a turtle. Worklights illuminated its shell of shiny, blue-black solar panels. Since they would be driving around the clock for most of five days each way, they would need solar power to keep the batteries charged and themselves alive. Thus they had to leave right around the time of local sunrise, which—she checked the chronometer in her helmet display—was within a half-hour.

  Within the first few minutes inside the Turtle, shucking off her suit and stowing her gear, Stormie wished she were shorter. And even a little thinner. The living/sleeping/eating space seemed impossibly tight; it would be tolerable only so long as one of them was in the cab, driving.

  But it smelled incredibly good. Stormie took a deep breath when she got her helmet off, and it almost made her dizzy. It was the freshest air she’d experienced in months, and she was prone to “testing” the air coming out of every air filter and bioreactor she maintained.

  “What’d you do, Bruce, spend all last week cleaning this thing?” she asked.

  Bruce, who had his helmet off but otherwise was still suited to go forward into the cab, grinned. “Nah. I used to be an auto detailer in my youth.” He shook his head. “Don’t get used to it, though. It won’t last.”

  Stormie took deep breaths, enjoying it while she could. Her brain, long used to blocking out noxious odors, struggled to make sense of what her nose was telling it. She swore she could actually smell the thin plastic of the Turtle’s shell’s inner wall. For a little while she thought she detected the warmth from the lights, but it must’ve been something in the wiring she actually smelled. She gave up trying, and folded herself into as small a package as possible to get some sleep before she had to drive.

  Bruce drove the first shift. As the keeper of the Turtle, he went out on every ice run; it was no secret that he was amassing a small fortune in hazard bonuses. Capell was next in the rotation, then Stormie and Gabe.

  They settled into the standard excursion routine quickly. They took turns driving, four hours at a time, which seemed short until Stormie found out how taxing it could be to wrangle the big vehicle.

  Her first driving shift came after they had passed alongside the 90-kilometer-long Rupes Mercator cliff face. She was a little sorry she’d slept; in the rising sunlight the ridge must’ve looked spectacular, like a miniature version of snow-capped Sangre de Cristos. When they were on their way back, the Sun would be behind the ridge: she guessed it would look more like a line of black teeth, with maybe a little light on some of the edges.

  She took over at the southern edge of Weiss Crater, and took the Turtle up from the flats into more rugged terrain. The rising Sun cast long shadows, generally left-to-right across their path. Lindsey came forward and sat in the jumpseat behind her for the first half hour of her shift; he coached her on keeping her vision a hundred meters or so in front of the truck and making all her maneuvers smooth. It had been a long while since her qualification training, and she appreciated the tips. The control yoke was responsive and had servos that gave her feedback according to what the suspension sensed, but in the end she was sweating not from exertion but from having to concentrate so hard.

  Stormie nursed the truck up into what she thought of as the lunar piedmont—the hills hadn’t yet become mountains, and had a stark beauty under the harsh sunlight. Not the lush, green beauty of the Carolina piedmont where she was born, dotted with cotton and corn fields; more like the barren beauty of the southwestern desert. But less colorful.

  When her shift expired, she had taken them to the southeastern edge of Wurzelbauer Crater. Always one to follow the protocols, she put her helmet back on and climbed through the Turtle’s “neck” back into the shell. In the neck she felt especially vulnerable. The Turtle looked substantial enough from the outside, but it was really quite flimsy—and she, along with everyone else at the colony, had been treated to Van Richards’ tale of the time the cab started leaking air. What a showman.

  Stormie climbed into the shell, and was greeted by the overwhelming smell of oranges.

  Gabe smiled at her, put on his helmet, and went forward to start his shift. Stormie quickly found out he had been nominated, seconded, and confirmed by the others as the expedition cook. The standard food load for this type of trip was intentionally bland: indigestion would eventually foul the air, and food poisoning would be exponentially worse. But Gabe had turned humble ingredients into a minor culinary masterpiece. Bruce handed Stormie a plate of the colony’s farm-raised catfish smothered in a fruity glaze that rivaled anything she had eaten on Earth—and certainly outshone anything she’d had in nearly seven months on the Moon.

  “Why didn’t I know he could cook so well?” she asked.

  “None of us did,” said Bruce.

  “Where did he get oranges?”

  Bruce said, “It’s marmalade, and he wouldn’t tell us. I think he’s got a secret stash.”

  “That’s probably a strategic decision on his part,” Stormie said. “If word gets out, he might find the whole lot of us lining up at his kitchen.”

  “It’s almost too bad that he’s so good,” Capell said. “I kind of wanted you to wait on us, Stormie.”

  “I’ll bet you did. Like Nadia waits on you?”

  Capell bellowed out a laugh. “No—Nadia wouldn’t know a cook pot from a piss pot. But you look like the serving type.”

  “Lay off, Karl,” Bruce said. He picked up his helmet, about to go forward to coach Morera a little.

  “It’s okay, Bruce,” Stormie said. “I’ve learned not to expect any better from Karl and his inbred cousins.” Son-of-a-bitch.

  When she wasn’t driving or sleeping, Stormie worked calculations—respiration estimates, water purification requirements, chemical hazard calculations for the machine shop, and a dozen other things—and queued them up to send back to Frank. After each overflight of the communications relay satellite, she turned on her computer to find that Frank had sent her more work to do.

  As they rose above the Sea of Clouds, the driving became more challenging: even though the route had been driven many times before, they all had to pay more attention to the road and the topography. Still, Stormie took every opportunity during her driving time to watch the bright landscape change as they rolled through it and the Sun moved overhead. She looked forward to the driving, not only because the Turtle’s head stayed cleaner and smelled better than its shell but because it was less of a chore than working Frank’s math problems.

  * * *

  Friday, 11 January 2036

  The most amazing thing about puking in low gravity was how far it went.

  As Van’s stomach contracted again, he weighed that initial assessment against the fact that his convulsions could actually lift him up off the floor. Maybe that was more amazing.

  He’d barely made it to the bathroom at the end of the habitat in the 200 block of D Street before his stomach overrode every command his brain was sending it. In the process, he found that his brain wasn’t sending very good signals to begin with: he badly misjudged the distance to the commode, and underestimated the trajectory of his vomit.

  He was not unfamiliar with this particular misery—it matched in kind and character a misery he had suffered many times in his college drinking days. He hadn’t had it this bad in years.

  He didn’t look forward to cleaning up the mess.

  He wouldn’t want to make anyone else clean it up, though. He would
pay someone to do it, maybe.

  He decided he should probably get a towel and start right away, but his strength failed him. He settled gently to the floor, put his cheek against it and let the cool sink into his face. No, that wasn’t right; heat transfer didn’t work that way. The heat from his face was going into the floor, warming it up and causing a sensation of cooling on his face.

  I must have it really bad now, if I’m lying here trying to figure out heat flux.

  He lay there for what may have been a minute or ten before he became aware of the distinctive swish of someone gliding down the corridor. Awareness of sound triggered a new awareness of smell, and his stomach reacted faster than his brain. Thankfully, he had little left to expel.

  “You too?”

  Van looked up to see Rex Stewart—Navy man, geologist and engineer, self-appointed Preacher Man—looking down at him.

  Van shook his head. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will. Here, let me help you.”

  Van tried to the wave the man away, but his hand was too heavy to lift. That seemed very odd considering where he was.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said again. “I’ll clean this mess up in a little while.”

  Stewart laughed. “Why are all the people around here so stubborn?” He helped Van to a sitting position and leaned him against the wall. It wasn’t as cool as the floor. Stewart said, “It must come from being highly motivated, very competent, Type-A personalities. Nobody can admit when they’re wrong, nobody can admit that they might need a little help. Are you ready to stand up now?”

  “I don’t think so, not right now.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll be right back.” Stewart stepped away, and true to his word he came back in a very short time with a bucket in one hand and clean towels in the other. He handed one towel to Van. “I know, like all the others you’re too stubborn and proud to let me help clean you up. So you can help me by wiping yourself off.”

  Van’s hand was heavy enough when he had nothing in it; now, it was worse. But he managed to lift the towel to his face and wipe the vomit from around his mouth. He was surprised to see that he had some on his T-shirt as well. And his pants. And his slippers.