Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  I heard an explosion! Rusty shouted. Is everyone okay down there?

  “I got it, leggo!” Joe yelled in Annie’s face. He pushed himself forward again, directing the nozzle toward the fire. It was almost smothered, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. “Get topside now!” he shouted at Annie.

  Suddenly the mid-deck lights went out; an instant later the rose-red emergency lights kicked in on their batteries. Main A and B off-line, Rusty said. His voice was almost ironic in its calm. We’re on backup. What’s …

  “Okay, okay!” Joe shouted back. “Goddammit, Noonan, get up the ladder and lemmee handle this!” He held the nozzle on the frost-blanketed service panel as Noonan scrambled for the ladder. When the fire extinguisher’s blast petered out and the pressure-gauge hit the red zone, he tossed it aside, reached into the bin and yanked down the icy circuit-breaker bar, just in case the automatic circuit beakers Rusty had flipped in the flight deck hadn’t done the job. He then kicked off the deck and swam for the ladder.

  Before he went up, though, he stopped and reached up to the ceiling for the cradle’s unlocking lever. One hard yank and the ceiling hooks that held the nylon net unlocked; the Spam-can hung free, still loosely wrapped in the webbing. A necessary precaution, if he was going to do what he already suspected would have to be done.

  It took only a sharp heave on the rungs to propel himself up into the flight deck. He almost collided with Annie as he shot through the hatch; she yelled an obscenity which Joe ignored as he pushed her aside and clumsily dove headfirst for his seat. “Get that hatch fastened down!” he shouted back at Annie.

  “Calm down,” Rusty murmured. He was bent over the main console, his eyes twitching back and forth over the myriad readouts and dials. The flight deck was dimly lit by the red emergency lights and the blue glow of the dashboard screens, but as Joe buckled into his seat, the compartment was suddenly awash in the bright white glow of sunlight. Glancing up, he saw the Sun rising over the limb of the Moon; they were over the western terminator now. “What’s going on down there?” Rusty demanded.

  “Dye-bomb in the Spam-can,” Annie said. Her voice was hoarse from shouting. She had shut the mid-deck hatch and dogged it, and was now hauling herself back into her seat. “Banks use ’em to mark cash heisted by bank robbers.…”

  “Yeah, except this sumbitch shrapneled and nailed the main busbars. Lucky shot … or whatever you wanna call it.” Joe reached up to pull down the bill of his Gatorama cap, only to find it missing entirely. It must have been knocked off down there. Fire in the mid-deck, dye-bomb in the Spam-can, his ship on auxiliaries, and now, on top of that, he had to lose his lucky cap. Somebody was going to pay for this shit.

  “Never mind that now,” he said. “What’s our current status, Rusty?”

  “Backup electrical is copacetic, fuel pressure is nominal,” Wright replied, “but I don’t know how much longer we can hold it, hoss. We’re a hurtin’ puppy.”

  “I hear you. Mid-deck temperature?”

  “Up a bit. Two hundred degrees above nominal. Could be external, though. Fuselage heating.” Rusty glanced at Joe; their eyes met and both men silently shook their heads. The tug’s sensors would have compensated for the move into daylight again. Joe might have only extinguished part of the electrical fire; even as they spoke, more of the busbars could still be burning, deep within the pressurized part of the mid-deck. If that hypothetical spark were to reach the fuel tanks …

  “Want to go for an abort?” Rusty asked. He reached out and flipped back the safety cover from the MAN. ABORT switch.

  “Uh-uh,” Joe snapped. “Belay that shit. I say we go for a blowout on the mid-deck.”

  “Blowout?” Noonan shouted. “Are you out of your—?”

  “Shut up, Annie!” Mighty Joe didn’t even glance in her direction. He locked eyes with his co-pilot. “Abort or blowout. That’s the choice.”

  The abort procedure meant that the lower hull of the Dreamer would be jettisoned from the tug, and the upper stage’s emergency DPS, located beneath the main crew compartment, would be fired for a crash-landing. There were two big problems with that idea. First, the emergency descent system had only enough fuel for a low-altitude abort; it was designed primarily for takeoff emergencies below twenty-five nautical miles, and the Dreamer was almost fifty miles above the Moon’s surface. A crash-landing, therefore, might not be survivable; the fuel supply would be exhausted long before they made it to the ground. Second, they were still no closer to Descartes Station than the eastern edge of Smyth’s Sea, thousands of miles away from the base. Ditching there, assuming they could survive the landing, would put them out in seldom-explored boonies—not a good place for a rescue mission.

  On the other hand, deliberately blowing out the pressurized mid-deck meant that the fire would be extinguished once and for all. That was for damn sure; hard vacuum is the ultimate fire-stopper. It was also a dangerous maneuver, known to astronauts as a feasible, not-in-the-book option which could be successfully accomplished, as it had been on a few legendary occasions—if the craft’s fuselage survived the trauma. There had also been a couple of instances in which an emergency blowout had resulted in the rupture of the crew compartment, and the guys who had been through that hadn’t lived to tell anyone about the experience. Also, the reaction from the sudden blast could put the craft into a hell of a delta-V, potentially putting them in something akin to a uncontrollable spinout by an aircraft on Earth. Again, lunar pizza. But there wasn’t enough time for any of the Dreamer’s crew to get into their hardsuits, and they were flat-broke when it came to other choices.

  Rusty knew the risks of both procedures. He nodded once, then flipped the safety cover back over the ABORT switch.

  “Okay, then,” Joe rasped. “We’re going for a blowout.” He reached up and snapped back the four toggles which would arm the emergency pyros on the mid-deck cargo hatch. An alarm began to howl, unnecessarily warning them that the mid-deck was still pressurized.

  He looked back over his shoulder at Noonan. Annie was pale-faced, but strapped in tight; she grimaced and gave him the thumbs-up. “Get us out of this alive,” she whispered, “and I swear you’ll get the sex of your life out of me.…”

  No time even for a comeback; right now, he could have cared less if Noonan had promised him an orgy with her sister, her mom, and all her cousins. He turned back to his console and laid his finger on the FIRE toggle. “All right, gang,” Joe said, “here goes. Three … two …”

  He didn’t bother to reach the bottom of the countdown before he snapped back the toggle. From below the flight deck there was a hard, loud BANG!! and the Beautiful Dreamer suddenly rocked sideways as if an angry god had drop-kicked them over the gates of Hell. Through the windows he saw the curved, pitted horizon veer sharply to the right, and as he grabbed the attitude controller and fought the son of a bitch, he heard Rusty shouting …

  “Mayday! Mayday! Descartes, this is Delta Tango One-Two-One, going down! Mayday—!”

  Jesus Christ, Mighty Joe silently prayed as his craft hurtled toward the Moon, get me outta this one.…

  10. Heroes Are Hard To Find

  The Harrison Schmitt—or the Beautiful Dreamer, Lester reminded himself, if one cared to acknowledge its rechristening—had come down in a boulder field about three hundred yards east of Descartes Station, not far from the landing pads. It had not been a smooth landing, although the crew had managed to walk away from the tug; the starboard landing gear had settled on a trunk-sized rock, causing its main strut to buckle. Beautiful Dreamer was therefore in a lopsided position, listing sharply to the right. One look at the tug and Les knew that the spacecraft would have to be cut apart, its upper and lower stages dismantled by mobile cranes and hauled back in sections to the base, before anyone could even begin to make the tug flightworthy again.

  Terrific, he thought. First day on the job, and somebody totals a spacecraft. I can’t wait to report to Huntsville about this one. Sure, Les, no problem. Big Mac ha
s an assembly line in St. Louis already geared up to build you another tug. Just as soon as the insurance companies cough up the $600 million it takes to make the things, and NASA’s Commercial Spaceflight Review Board gets through reaming us. No sweat … Arnie was going to have a duck when he heard about this.

  Some of the rescue team was siphoning the remains of the tug’s fuel into a tank on the back of a rover. From what he could make out from their cross talk on the comlink, there was not much LOX left in the tanks; the tug had landed with little less than a minute’s worth of fuel to keep it in powered flight. Other moondogs were wrenching down the Spam-cans and loading them onto another couple of rovers. Lester carefully shuffled around to the tug’s starboard side—he didn’t trust himself yet to try hop-skipping, at least not until his lunar reflexes returned—and gazed up at the mid-deck cargo hatch above him. One of the two hatch doors had been all but completely sheared away by the explosive decompression the pilot had deliberately caused. It hung from its bottom hinge like a barn door that had been torn down by a stampeding bull. Inside the hold, he could see the moving lights of the rescue team’s helmet lamps as they prowled the grounded spacecraft.

  Riddell glanced at the trio of rovers parked around the base of the Dreamer. Off in the distance, he could see a fourth rover trundling toward Descartes Station, taking the tug’s crew back to the base. They had been laconic when they had emerged from the tug and climbed down the ladder, unwilling to answer questions with anything more than noncommittal monosyllables. Les shook his head inside his helmet. They’ll talk eventually, he thought. But not before I murder the sumbitch pilot for bringing his ship back in such sorry-ass condition.

  But he still had to give credit to the sumbitch for having the foresight not to attempt a landing on one of the landing pads. Given the condition of his craft, he could have lost control and crashed into the base itself, possibly killing dozens of people. Better to ditch in a boulder field than to take that sort of chance. Smooth flying, indeed. Lester had to admire the guy—what’s-his-name, Young—for keeping his act together in this sort of emergency.

  If, indeed, there had been an emergency …

  Mr. Riddell, you should come up here to see this. The voice in his headphones belonged to Tina McGraw. The security chief had come out to the crash site with the rescue team. She was inside the Dreamer with a couple of moondogs, at her insistence. I want to show you something.

  I’m sure you do, Lester answered silently. “Okay, I’m on my way,” he said aloud, heading for the ladder which had been unfolded from the fuselage.

  He climbed up to the open flight deck airlock hatch, feeling the familiar chafing of the hardsuit’s rotary joints against his skin. Inside the tug, he found the mid-deck ladder and climbed down into the cargo hold. Portable lamps had been hung from handholds along the ceiling and bulkheads, casting a shadowy glare over the compartment. The torn nylon remnants of the payload cradle hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss on the trees in the Georgia bayou; the cradle itself had been ripped away by the sudden decompression of the cargo deck.

  Lester stopped to look at an open service panel; blackened power cables showed where the electrical fire had erupted, apparently from an uncontained short circuit. A rescue worker with a 35mm camera was kneeling in front of the panel, taking pictures of the ruined busbars. When he stood up, Lester noticed how tall the moondog was; he glanced at the ID tag clipped to the front of his suit’s overgarment. The badge read “Samuels, A.T.,” but when the moondog turned around, Lester recognized Tycho’s face through the unpolarized faceplate of his helmet.

  “Umm … How’s it going there, Tycho?” Lester asked, feeling a little uncomfortable. It was only a couple of hours earlier that he and the huge moondog had nearly come to blows in the mess hall.

  Tycho gazed impassively back at him. Not bad, he rumbled into Lester’s headset. How’s it going yourself?

  Lester shrugged, although the gesture was meaningless inside the hardsuit’s carapace. “I’d rather be somewhere else, to tell the truth,” he answered. “Hey, if any of those pictures turn out right, let me know. We’ll make ’em into postcards or something.”

  Tycho smiled a little. Yeah, proper, he said and turned back to his work. Score another small victory, Lester thought. Maybe I’ll get somewhere with these guys yet.…

  Mr. Riddell …

  “Yeah, hold on. I’m coming.” The general manager turned toward another hardsuited figure in the cargo deck. “Tina, I thought I told you to call me Lester. I don’t know how they do things at the Cape, but up here everyone works on first-name basis.”

  We’ll discuss protocol later, if you don’t mind. McGraw was standing next to the shredded remains of the cradle. Notice that the cradle’s missing.

  Lester sighed. “Gee, Tina, the cradle’s missing. If you hadn’t pointed that out to me, I might have never noticed.”

  Her helmet turned toward him; he could see her thin-lipped face through the faceplate. Look at the way the nylon’s been stretched near the ceiling hooks, she said. Something was in the cradle when it was jettisoned.

  “Uh-huh. Like your hijacked Spam-can. Sure, Tina …”

  She scowled at him. I see that you’re still unconvinced, she said tightly. Then tell me why the pilot opted for a dangerous maneuver like a sudden decompression. I don’t see why he didn’t use his fire extinguisher instead.

  Lester looked around at the empty fire-extinguisher bracket. “Looks to me like he did,” Lester said. “It probably went out the hatch along with everything that was in here.

  McGraw looked unconvinced, but before she could repond Lester went on. “Do you know anything about electrical fires? Let me tell you, they’re a bitch to contain, especially when you’ve got one in a pressurized cabin. They spread fast, and if you don’t knock ’em out in a hurry they can get worse. This one”—he pointed toward the service panel Tycho was photographing—“was not far from the inboard reserve tank. If it had hit the tank, this tug wouldn’t be here now and we’d be combing through the wreckage somewhere out in the boonies, trying to find what was left of the crew.”

  She pointed at the empty bracket. Then why didn’t the fire extinguisher work?

  “Oh, it probably did work. But if I had been the pilot, I would have wanted to make sure, too, and nothing puts out an onboard fire like blowing the hatch. Sure, it’s not prescribed in the manual, but any pilot working for Skycorp will tell you about blowing the hatch. Oldest trick in the book … or not in the book, rather.”

  Lester shrugged again, surprised at himself for defending the pilot’s actions when he himself was ready to kick the guy’s butt. Maybe it was a reaction to McGraw’s warm and ingratiating personality. “It’s dangerous as hell,” he added, “but at least you can be certain you’ve knocked out your fire.”

  Then the stretched nylon …

  “How the hell should I know?” he said. “Sudden decompression does weird things. Guys the size of Tycho over there have been sucked clean out through holes no larger than their heads. When Young blew the hatch, it must have been like a hurricane in here.”

  He batted at the dangling fabric with the back of his hand. “You said that Skycorp put a dye-cartridge in their Spam-can, rigged to explode when the thing was opened. Okay, where’s the dye?”

  Because they faked an emergency! McGraw snapped back at him. The frustation was plain to see on her face. They managed to make it look as if an electrical fire had occurred, then jettisoned the canister! The blowout sucked the dye out of the compartment! Okay? I just told you how they did it! And then there’s the radio beacon we monitored at MainOps. We picked up a signal. You’re the GM! Now what are you going to do about it?

  Looking at McGraw’s face, Lester saw again what kind of law officer he was dealing with: the overeager cop, the fanatic type usually found in small towns, hanging out in patrol cars late at night near the only stoplight in the village, waiting for someone to fail to use their left turn-signal even if it’s thr
ee o’clock in the morning and there’s not another car in sight. Lester had met the type before; New Hampshire was teeming with them. McGraw was hungry for a bust.

  “So what about the beacon?” he replied with what he knew was maddening calmness. “You used 103.5 kilohertz. That’s not an uncommon frequency. It could have been cross-feed from just about anything this tug normally uses in its telemetry with TRAFCO. Hell, it could have even been a stray signal from one of our own satellites, or even from an Earth comsat.”

  Get off it, Riddell, she shot back. You know what’s going on here.

  “No,” he replied evenly, “I don’t. Want to tell me about it? I mean, you’ve been so open about everything else so far, so why stop now?”

  McGraw stepped closer, as if by reducing the distance between them she could make her voice more clearly heard over the comlink. I’m going to swat these guys, she hissed. Are you going to help me, or are you going to get in the way?

  Holy shit, Tycho muttered, it’s Quick-Draw McGraw.

  Lester suddenly remembered that they were on a common channel; all the moondogs in close range had been able to eavesdrop on their exchange. Scattered chuckles, only barely subdued, came over the comlink. Everyone recognized the reference to the old Hanna-Barbera talking-horse sheriff whose visage—as Lester’s childhood memory suddenly reminded him—bore a vague yet uncanny, ludicrous resemblance to the face of his new security chief. Tycho, he said to himself, you’ve got a rare sense of humor.

  The comment hit home with McGraw; the scowl on her face deepened and she looked ready to throw a punch at Abraham T. Samuels. Lester was barely able to restrain his own instinctive smirk. Better defuse this quick; he pointed to his helmet and held up three fingers, signaling McGraw to switch to another comlink channel for privacy. She complied; when she had switched to Channel Three and there was silence in his helmet again, Lester went on.