Ryan was in the lead. The drones let up, and Conn dared to think they were going to make it without getting shot. Ryan crested the hill, Daniels was at its summit and the women scrambled up behind him. As Daniels disappeared over the other side, the hill went away.
It was under their feet, then it was gone, a deep crater in its place. The spray of rock and dirt that blew out over the men was fine, no chunks bigger than a pebble. Conn and Izzy fell, each hitting the crater floor. The hill had been vaporized. Conn saw Ryan had been bowled over by the blast as well. Daniels was helping him up.
“What the hell was that?” Izzy shouted as they scrabbled up the crater wall.
“I don’t know, and the next one might not miss. Come on!”
They cleared the lip of the crater, and lurched toward the Pelorian spacecraft.
Ryan reached the ladder first. He scrambled up and into the spacecraft before Daniels arrived at the foot of the ladder. Conn saw Daniels grab the ladder, ready to ascend, and then she saw him and the ladder vanish.
“Daniels!”
One of the fins of the “rocketship” was gone, too, and attitude jets spurted, trying to keep the craft upright. A ditch had been gouged in the Martian soil past the missing fin.
Another mega-blast. It hadn’t missed.
Conn trailed Izzy. Izzy pulled up and looked toward where the ladder—and Daniels—had been.
“Go!” Conn cried. “We have to keep going!” Izzy broke into a run again. Conn felt like her breathing was labored, for reasons other than exertion.
It was the drones’ turn again. With a ZOT and a new burst of dirt and stone, a drone blast got Izzy in the leg.
She cried out and went down, first to her knees, then on her belly. She skidded a good ten feet, propelled by the force of the explosion. Conn hurried to her. Izzy’s pressure field was intact. Conn needed to know whether Izzy could use her leg. She said she couldn’t. Conn got her to sit up, then helped her up the rest of the way. She supported Izzy with her shoulder, arm around her back.
Peripherally, Conn saw one of the drones waggle and drop to the ground. She didn’t celebrate the drone going inert, she felt a chill. The mega-blast might come again next.
The three-legged astronaut shuffle-ran to where the foot of the ladder used to be. Conn boosted Izzy by the rear end up as far as she could, which was a couple of meters in the low gravity. Izzy grabbed the top of the ladder, which remained, and started pulling herself up the rest of the way.
Conn prepared to leap up after Izzy was clear. She scanned the immediate area for any sign of Daniels. He was gone. Her head was spinning, her heart racing. She was gulping like a fish out of water. She wasn’t getting any air. She tumbled backward, hearing Izzy, far away, shriek “Conn!” She blacked out.
# # #
She came to with a horrible headache. Her breathing bubble and O2 tanks were off, and she was strapped into a comfortable seat. She knew she was on the Pelorian spacecraft. “She’s awake!” she heard Ryan stage whisper, beside her. Just then she experienced the gut-roiling sensation of new weightlessness. Her hair lifted and splayed like tentacles around her head.
“Izzy?” she croaked.
“Here,” Izzy said quietly, from one of the seats in front of Conn. “Thanks to you.”
“Who should I thank?” Conn said.
“Ryan. Ryan pushed past me and went back out to get you. You can thank me for dragging you up into the spacecraft, I suppose.”
“Daniels?”
Nobody said anything.
A decidedly human man pulled himself back from the cockpit to their seating area. Conn was puzzled, until she remembered avatars. This one was fair-complexioned, dirty blond hair, deep-set eyes that probed Conn’s face. Conn looked back for long moments.
“Conn,” Izzy said. “This is—”
“Persisting,” Conn said.
# # #
How many times had an avatar of this Pelorian named Persisting saved her life now? Once on the moon, when she was about to die of hypoxia; once in a television studio, when she was about to be shot. This time. He’d saved Grant’s life, too, getting Conn everything she needed to go get him from Saturn’s orbit.
The Persisting-avatar’s sacrifice in the CNN studio—he had stepped in front of a bullet, taking it in the chest, which killed him—troubled Conn. Persisting had several avatars. One sacrificing himself for her might be the most noble thing anyone had ever done for her. But it might also be because no individual avatar is considered worth a damn. Conn couldn’t accept the latter: each avatar was a person, human in full, just with different software. If Pelorians were so careless of their avatars that they would volunteer to take a bullet, Conn couldn’t have one as her friend. She hadn’t seen a Persisting-avatar since that day at CNN.
“You’ve been monitoring the feeds,” Conn said. That was how Persisting had known to rescue her from the moon.
“Now and then,” Persisting said.
“And your race is obliged to give succor to travelers in space who get in trouble.” His excuse for helping her save Grant.
“You know us well,” Persisting said.
The relief she felt that it was Persisting who had saved them made her giddy. It also made her feel guilty, with Daniels gone. “Why in the world were you bombing the Sidereals?”
“I wasn’t! I didn’t damage anything but rocks and dirt,” Persisting said. “I was trying to get your attention.”
“You’re not very subtle,” Ryan grumbled.
“Maybe not. But it worked!”
Conn told him she’d seen his spacecraft and had known it was a ticket home before he dropped his first bomb.
“What was that blast that obliterated the hill we were standing on?” Izzy asked in Conn’s direction. “Is that what got Daniels, too?” Conn looked at Persisting.
“Their weapon technology is superior to any you’ve yet seen, even the Aphelials’,” he said. “Teleporting missiles. Portable stealth modules. Plug the module into any spacecraft, make it invisible to detection tech. Even the Aphelials’. Gravity guns—I suspect what destroyed your hill and killed your comrade was a low-grade gravity gun.”
“If their weapons are so powerful, why are they hiding on Mars? In caves?” Ryan asked.
“Even superior technology can be defeated by a determined enemy,” Persisting said, “but I suspect that much of the technological development has occurred since they were defeated. The Sidereals as you call them are what’s left over after an assault by the Aphelials on their home world.”
“Like you? The Pelorians, I mean.”
“Like us. Only we're many more than the Sidereals. We found discretion to be the better part of valor, and didn’t put up as much of a fight.”
“Are we OK without one of your fins?” Conn wanted to know.
“It means one less aileron and elevator,” Persisting said—the mechanisms aircraft used to control roll and pitch, Conn knew. They wouldn’t work in space, thus attitude jets. “I used attitude jets on liftoff off of Mars. I’d rather not do it again, but we’re done with atmospheres now, so we’ll be fine. Which reminds me, we’ll be at your moon in sixteen days.”
“Hold it,” Izzy said. “The moon?”
“I can’t very well drop you off at your front door,” Persisting said. “We’re at war, remember?”
“Fly a white flag.”
“It would be dangerous to attempt to land and take off from Earth without all my ailerons and elevators,” Persisting said. “No, friends, we make for the moon! Won’t it be exciting? Two of you haven’t been there yet.”
“How do we get home?” Ryan said.
“That won’t be a problem,” Persisting said, but he wouldn’t say any more.
Izzy turned out to have no more serious an injury than a severely sprained ankle. The drone blast didn’t hit her; she stepped hard and off-balance into the crater it created in front of her. She was lucky. It could have broken her leg.
Ryan. He had pushed I
zzy out of the way to come get her and put her on the spacecraft when she’d passed out. He was the only one with working legs. Still, he hadn’t struck Conn as the hero type before now.
At Persisting’s request, they hadn’t radioed anyone to let them know they were on their way home. Persisting feared trouble from both America and his fellows on the moon if they knew he was helping them.
“But—succor, and all that,” Conn said.
Persisting smiled sadly. “Some of us hew to that tradition rather more than others do.”
He had stocked plenty of (edible) food on the spacecraft, not knowing how long the trip home would take. The hungry astronauts ate very well.
Sixteen days passed quickly, if awkwardly. Nobody mentioned Daniels, but Conn felt his absence keenly, and she suspected the others did, too.
Conn and Persisting only spoke one-on-one a couple of times. She didn’t ask him about his avatar’s sacrifice. She didn't ask him whether each avatar was a precious human life.
Twenty-eight years old, and she hadn’t yet learned to say what she meant to the important people in her life.
# # #
The time came to land on the far side of the moon, inside the Pelorians’ enormous fortress. Looking out the window as the moon scrolled by, Conn felt a thrill and a longing. It would be her fourth trip to the moon, but she would never forget how the satellite entranced her for many years before she became an astronaut. And she would never be anything but excited to land there.
Izzy and Ryan had been skeptical of a side trip to the moon, as she had been. But approaching the surface, they were excited too.
The Pelorians’ mountain-tall force field winked out as they passed through, no doubt winking back into place behind them. Persisting maneuvered them to a shipyard where dozens of spacecraft, many of them “rocketships,” were moored. He landed horizontally, at a downhill angle, the two remaining fins supporting the rear of the spacecraft.
“Stay here. I’ll get your O2 tanks filled,” Persisting said before heading out.
Conn could wait a while. She was back on the moon.
TWENTY-SIX
Girl on the Moon
August 5, 2039
Conn and Daniels had been inside the Pelorians’ fortress before. The six-meter-high walls, forty kilometers square, had been up, but it would be some time before there was a force field. From the inside now, she couldn’t see the force field at all. From the other side, as they approached, there was a sheen spreading from the top of the mountain to the walls, making 1,600 square kilometers’ worth of details below indistinct. From where she stood now, just outside the “rocketship,” all she saw above was stars. Not as many as she’d seen on the moon her first trip, when the sun went down, because there were lights on stanchions at regular intervals inside the fortress, lining a paved road that originated under the mountain and stretched as far toward the wall as they could see.
The mountain dominated the fortress it had been built around. Underneath that mountain, inside an enormous lava tube, lived some eight hundred thousand Pelorians. If the Pelorians who said so were to be believed.
Izzy, whose ankle had improved but not quite healed, and Ryan were awestruck. Conn could read the delight on Izzy’s face, the wonder on Ryan’s.
“How about a tour?” she said. “For Izzy and Ryan’s sake.” She and Daniels had toured the facility before, led by a phalanx of military Pelorians who were not avatars. Three round torsos, nine arms, scaly and scary. She could detect movement in various places in the shipyard; getting a closer look, Persisting was the only avatar in evidence. The rest were their true selves.
“I’m not sure a tour is in the offing, Conn,” Persisting said, in English, directly into their heads. It always made her uncomfortable, especially when they could “think” what they wanted to say to the Pelorian and be “heard” as well. She suspected Pelorians could read minds, beyond just being able to “hear” whatever was in the outgoing message center of a human brain. Persisting had consistently denied it. “Remember how I didn’t drop you off in America because we’re at war? Well, American humans aren’t very popular here, either.”
“If it doesn’t make a difference, couldn’t you have taken us to Earth?” Ryan said.
“It does make a difference,” Persisting told him. “Here I’m not going to be shot out of the sky, or arrested.” His voice had an edge when he spoke to Ryan. They'd been at each other's throats since the rescue. Persisting and Conn were friends, but she wouldn’t have thought Persisting to be the proprietary type.
“What about us?”
“You’ll be fine. No one will act on their revulsion. If you keep to yourselves, no one will even know whether you’re American or not.” He smiled at Izzy. “You’re on the moon! Go explore. Will you be all right on your ankle?”
“I’ll manage,” Izzy said. “Like you said, I’m on the moon!”
Ryan didn’t hesitate: he bounded off down the road. Izzy followed, slower, favoring her ankle. Conn shrugged and hurried off after Izzy.
“Weird to see a road here,” she said when they were side by side.
“It does spoil the effect a little—but not much,” Izzy said, grinning. As they shuffled along and Ryan opened up more distance from them, bouncing and weaving, Izzy signaled her to go to a private frequency. “Persisting: what do you think his motivations are?”
She lied: “I don’t think about it. Just glad for the ride home.”
“He seems nice enough.”
“He always does.”
Ryan had turned back facing their way and was waving his arms. He was probably speaking to them on the regular frequency. The women headed in his direction.
“Do you trust him to get us home?”
“Without a doubt,” Conn said. “I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but he will. Maybe they have a spacecraft that doesn’t look so obviously Pelorian that he wants to take us home in.”
“Then there’s no reason for me not to enjoy myself on the moon?”
She smiled. “None at all.” They switched back to the regular frequency as they caught up to Ryan. He was bent down on one knee, examining something on the surface behind a refrigerator-sized boulder.
“What do you have?”
“Look at this,” Ryan said. “It’s orange. What do you think it is?”
She examined the hand-sized block of orange. Though a fragment, it showed signs of straight edges and right angles. Around them the ground was mottled with birdlike prints left by the Pelorians. “I think it’s junk left over from their building the fortress,” she said. “Or paving the road.”
Ryan looked disappointed. “I guess we’re not really on the moon on the moon, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure we are,” Izzy said. “Look at it. So gray and still. So silent.” Mars had plenty of sounds they could hear muffled by their breathing bubbles. Nothing made a sound on the moon. Nothing moved in a breeze, nothing surprised them with its texture or color—other than blocks of orange detritus.
“Come on,” Conn said. “Let’s find someplace they haven’t been.” Inside a 1,600-square-kilometer area, there had to be many places like that. They struck off perpendicular from the road, walking for ten minutes before she had them stop. No prints. No junk. No lights on stanchions.
Buzz Aldrin had called it magnificent desolation. Conn thought it was like being at the bottom of a lake of silence. Her friends were forming their own opinions, indelible impressions they would return to again and again in their lives.
While the others explored, Conn looked up at the stars. That was more like it—they were spattered on the black sky like a fine spray. No Earth would be visible—that stayed fixed in the sky of the near side. Just void, filled to capacity with pricks of light that could have been stars or galaxies. Or planets. She struggled to pick out constellations from the sea of lights. Mars should be in Pegasus. She couldn’t find the constellation—it must have been on the other side.
Izzy and Ryan
seemed more interested in the surface than the sky. Izzy hopped and Ryan shuffled through a field of boulders, ejecta from asteroid strikes. Or maybe from one, big asteroid strike: the fortress was built out to almost the lip of the five-hundred-kilometer-wide crater Hertzsprung.
They were tourists. Conn should have been delighted. Her first, historic trip, she had tons of work to do, when she wasn’t making Earth’s first contact with an alien race and being the First Woman on the Moon. Her second trip, with Daniels, was short, and mostly involved gathering intelligence on the Pelorian fortress. The third time, she was there to board a spacecraft that would take her to Tethys and Grant.
So she was free to enjoy herself. But she found herself resenting Persisting for letting them go out and play inside this walled-in environment like kids let loose in a park. Whatever Izzy said, this wasn’t the real moon. Conn knew the chances of a fifth trip were remote, but it just wasn't the same.
She found a likely boulder and sat on it, watching Izzy and Ryan explore. They stayed for half an hour, then she rounded them up for the walk back.
When they returned to their “rocketship,” Persisting appeared and made his way to the group.
“My friends,” Persisting began, “I can send you home now. Unless you would like to stay longer.” Conn, Izzy and Ryan looked at one another and shook their heads. “Very well. Will you follow me?”
They came to a hatch in the ground, leading to a set of stairs down. Persisting opened it, and the three filed down. “Wait at the bottom of the stairs for me,” Persisting said. They did, and allowed him to move in front to lead them.
They walked down a long hallway carved out of the lunar strata. They reached a hatch the size of double doors, and Persisting tapped a keypad (low to the ground, at limb level for a “real” Pelorian) and opened the hatch. It was an airlock. Persisting closed the hatch and pressurized the airlock. Then he led them through an identical hatch on the other side, out into the Pelorians’ home. “You can take off your bubbles now,” Persisting told them.
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