Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  His hands were all over the controls, simultaneously cutting off the auxiliary thrusters, silencing the alarms, grabbing the yoke and struggling it back into trim. Lester heard Butch scream behind them. He didn’t look back because he couldn’t; he was transfixed by the sight of the lunar landscape, which had now tilted sideways and was rushing up at them. “What happened?” he shouted.

  “That fuckin’ asshole Yuri gave me a fuckin’ piece of bullshit auxiliary fuel pump, that’s what happened!” Mighty Joe was fighting the yoke. “Look at the fuckin’ board! The bastard blew and took out one of the fuckin’ main fuel cells with it. Fuck, fuck, fuck—!”

  Lester glanced at the console. Yep. Everything that Joe had interpreted from the myriad dials and readouts was true. “I guess that means we’re fucked,” he murmured.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself, pal.” Mighty Joe glanced again at Lester. “Don’t even think about jettisoning the cargo module now. Won’t do us any good. The angle is all wrong, and I don’t want to risk the chance of that thing taking out the engine pod altogether.”

  Lester glanced at the altimeter—14.5 nautical miles and falling like a rock. “But if we lose the module …”

  “And I’m telling you, it won’t make any difference.” Joe was hauling back on the yoke; his words came out as a taut growl. “We could get screwed even worse, ’cause the sucker could whiplash back and nail the tanks. Trust me on this one, man. We’re going down, with or without the module.…” He had both hands wrapped around the yoke now. “I’m not out of tricks yet. I can still use the VTOL thrusters to put us down easy.”

  “Easy?” Lester shook his head. “Don’t shit me, Joe. I used to be a pilot, too. I can tell you right now …”

  “You want to try flying this thing, Les? Huh? You want me to hand this ugly fuck over to you?” Mighty Joe didn’t look at him; his eyes were locked on the controls. “Tell me now, ’cause we’re about to make a ditch.”

  Riddell didn’t say anything. It had been many years since he had piloted a moonship down on his own … and, he had to admit to himself, he had never brought in a wounded bird, not even in his military career. And he had seen Mighty Joe bring home a crippled tug, just a few weeks ago.…

  “I guess I’m going to have to trust you,” Lester said reluctantly.

  “Damn straight, bubba.” Joe didn’t move his eyes from the console. “Now make yourself useful and give us a Mayday.”

  Riddell could hear Peterson crying in the rear seat. Poor woman thought she was about to be splattered across a mile of the Moon. There was nothing he could do for her now, though. Lester pulled forward against his harness to reach across Mighty Joe’s arms to the communications board; he switched on the radio as he tugged the neglected communications headset up from his neck. “Mayday! Mayday! This is LRLT One-Three-Zero. Mayday! LRLT One-Three-Zero from Byrd to Descartes, we’re going down at …”

  He quickly checked the little screen on the navaids computer. “Fifty-eight degrees north by nineteen degrees west, estimated crash point …”

  “Don’t say crash!” Mighty Joe snarled.

  The superstition of pilots. Lester wasn’t about to argue. “Estimated touchdown north-northwest of Aristotle Crater.” Even as he said that, Riddell was counting their blessings; at least they were over a flat mare region, the Sea of Cold. If they were going down near the lunar north pole, this was the best place; better, certainly, than having to ditch in either the heavily cratered region north of Aristotle or in the Caucasus Mountain chain to the south. “This is LRLT One-Three-Zero, Mayday. Do you copy? Over.”

  Through the canopy windows, he could see the darkened moonscape looming closer. The gyroscope ball on the main console had steadied evenly between the white and black hemispheres, showing that Joe had flattened out the LRLT’s angle of descent, but the altimeter said that they were a little less than a mile above the Moon. The black pit of a giant crater swam past them, looking like a shark’s mouth reaching up to snap off their legs. Then, as a stretch of rugged hills was passed, the low flatlands of the Sea of Cold appeared before them. Christ, he thought, if the relay comsats are down …

  LRLT One-Three-Zero, this is Descartes Traffic. The unruffled voice of the traffic control officer sounded like that of an angel. Mayday received and understood. Crash point at fifty-eight north by nineteen west. Have you landed? Over.

  Lester almost broke into laughter. “No, dammit, we haven’t landed!” he shouted. “We’re going down!” He caught himself. Don’t lose your shit, pal. “Acknowledged, Descartes,” he said as calmly as he could. “We haven’t landed yet. Bring emergency assistance to …”

  Riddell was suddenly thrown back in his seat as Mighty Joe kicked in the VTOL thrusters. The LRLT’s nose pitched upwards and Peterson screamed again; she was past the point of panic.

  “Hang on kids!” Mighty Joe shouted. “It’s going to be a bitch!”

  Through the windows, Riddell could see the dark maw of Aristotle Crater in the far distance, across the gray volcanic plains of the Sea of Cold. He thought to look at the altimeter again, but all of a sudden he didn’t want to know. What the fuck did it matter? They were going down hard and fast; who cared about the specifics at this point? In his ears, static was breaking up the comlink: One-Three-Zero, do you … krrk … repeat, this is Descartes … krrrrkk … do you copy?…

  Mighty Joe was snapping more toggles as he held the yoke tight in his left fist. “Landing gear extended!” he hollered. “Lights on!” A bright swath of light swept out before the cockpit; gray dust, unsettled by the thrusters, swam before the cockpit. “Emergency beacon on! Hang on … hang on … okay, here we go!”

  Lester stiffened in his seat, grabbed the armrest with all his strength, and sucked in his breath … and still it felt as if the crash would never happen. Hey, he thought, maybe it’ll be a soft landing after all. Maybe we’ll just …

  The LRLT hit the ground and he was thrown forward against his harness, the wind knocked out of his lungs, as the crop-duster skidded along the hard, ancient pumice. It felt as if the current Golden Gloves champ had nailed him in the solar plexus. As a tunnel of darkness closed in around him, the last thing he heard was the sound of alarms, rending metal, Butch screaming, Mighty Joe howling “Fuuuuuuuuuuccccck …!

  And that was it. He didn’t have a chance to know whether he had lived or if he had died.

  The Moon Moths (Interview.5)

  E. Quackenbush “Quack” Lippincott II; former Skycorp Chief of Lunar Rescue Operations.

  Look, son, let me tell you … if there was a group which was more maligned and neglected up there, it was the LSR team. You know what they used to call us?

  (Nods) Yeah, that’s right. The Moon Moths. Because we were supposed to be uselessly flying around, doing nothing at all. That used to piss me off. It even got on our official mission patch. (points to a framed embroidered patch on his office wall) See that? A stupid-looking moth circling the Moon. I mean, I got used to people quacking around me when I was a kid, only because that was my name and my granddaddy’s name and because I kinda think it’s cute and so does my wife … but you know how much shit we used to get about having mothballs?

  ’Course you don’t. But I’ll tell you right now, Al, nobody ever called us moon moths to our faces when we came out to save their low-rent behinds from the middle of nowhere. We got our share of respect when the time came. But that still didn’t make up for the fact that the LSR team was the most underrated operation on the Moon … and if not by the other moondogs, then at least by the goddamned company.

  Let me give you some background first, okay? Skycorp didn’t have an LSR team in place at Descartes until pretty late in the game, well after Byrd Station and Hawking Observatory were established. Nobody in Huntsville thought there was any real need for search-and-rescue operations. The logic—if you want to call it that—was that since most surface EVA’s took place within a short distance of the base, if someone got into trouble all anyone had to
do was radio a distress call back to MainOps and they could send out a rescue team. And since there were emergency solar-flare shelters scattered within ten miles of the base, complete with transmitters and foodsticks and all that stuff, all anyone had to do was duck into one of those things. So Skycorp thought they had it covered. (imitating a stuffy executive voice) “Lost? Nobody gets lost on the Moon. They just get misplaced.”

  (Laughs) Now that’s your typical brand of Huntsville logic, because anyone who’s actually been on the Moon can tell you that search-and-rescue up there is no easy matter. But Skycorp managed to get away with it for a few years, and even though a couple of people actually died while lost close to the base … like that that writer-guy, Sam Sloane, back in ’16 … just because there were no Donner expeditions the company thought they could get away without a permanent search-and-rescue operation. They claimed it wasn’t necessary, but the fact of the matter is they just didn’t want to spend any money on search-and-rescue.

  Then Hawking Observatory was built out on the farside and, sure enough, it was only a matter of time before people got lost out in the sticks where there weren’t any convenient shelters. As it happened, one of the construction teams which was establishing the VLF array got stranded all the way over on the back one-eighty. Their LRLT broke down … it had a major computer breakdown and it just wouldn’t leave the ground … and seven men and women were almost asphyxiated before anyone found them. Kinda like a ran-low-on-the-air sort of thing, y’know what I mean? A couple of them lost fingers and toes to frostbite when the cabin heater died, but at least they managed to get out of there alive. The company might have ignored that incident as a fluke, but then the survivors had the gall to sue Skycorp for negligence. And it was negligence, I can tell you that for a fact. I was on the volunteer team that went out to rescue them, and we had to play it entirely by ear because there were no company procedures for us to follow.

  Anyway, after these guys won a few million dollars in court, the bright lads in Huntsville decided that it was time to establish an LSR team at Descartes. Not full time, mind you … we still had other jobs to do at the base … but it became part of our contracted job descriptions that we were on-call for search-and-rescue missions. So every year, the company was obligated to have at least five persons on permanent standby at Descartes Station as an LSR team … four with Air Force, Navy or Coast Guard training, along with the chief physician.

  Even then, we had to fight every fiscal year for continued funding. Practically on our own, too, because that goddamn useless union of ours wouldn’t back us up. I mean, it’s no secret that ASWI was in the back pocket of the space companies, and since Skycorp considered lunar search-and-rescue to be “non-cost-effective,” we had to take it upon ourselves to beg for the stuff we needed. Extra medical supplies and specialized computer software wasn’t any real problem, but do you know what a hassle it was to get Skycorp to send up a third LRLT and a dedicated ambulance module? We almost had to threaten to sic the Vacuum Suckers on the company’s board of directors before Huntsville finally contracted Boeing to build the third LRLT and the module. I swear, we had to make veiled threats about slashing the tires of Rock Chapman’s Porsche to get us everything we wanted, that’s how bad it was. (laughs) It was a good thing he didn’t drive a Ford or we might not have had a bargaining chip.

  Seriously, though, it was almost as difficult to get the company to install emergency long-range homing beacons on the rovers and LRLT’s until we pointed out to them that, without such equipment, it was difficult as hell to find a craft which had gone down in the boonies. I mean, even if the lost crew is in radio contact with the LSR team, you can’t count on someone among them knowing enough about basic astronomy to give you a stellar fix on their location … and don’t talk to me about following tire-tracks, because that might work only if they’re close enough to the base that they’ve taken a rover or a truck. And if the vehicle got lost in a place where there’s lots of tracks, forget it pal, you’ll never find ’em that way.

  How often did we …? (laughs) Mr. Steele, I won’t try to con you about how frequently we had to go out. We were fortunate on that score. Search-and-rescue operations were rare enough that we often went for months before we got the call to go beat the bushes. When it happened, though, all you could do was hope that the lost party had enough air and battery power to last them until you showed, that their homing beacon was switched on, and that maybe—just maybe—they had sent out a reasonably accurate fix on their proximity, such as their geographic landmarks so that we could find them. Every time, man, it was touch-and-go. Touch-and-go all the way. You just made it up as you went along, that’s all, no space hero stuff. Each time we went up we made sure we had enough coffee and sandwiches to keep us going, because it was rarely a matter of just flying out to Butthole Crater and finding someone on the first try. I mean, I used to be in the Coast Guard, and tracking down someone on the Moon was almost as bad as trying to locate a life raft on the high seas.

  The big difference is, shipwreck victims on a life raft in the Atlantic have an unlimited supply of oxygen. Nobody in a wrecked spacecraft on the Moon has that sort of resource. Each time we went on a mission, I was always scared that we would get there (holding up a thumb and forefinger just slightly apart) … just a little too late.

  But it never happened to us. Not once. Somehow, by God’s grace, we always managed to find our people. (chuckles) At least before they started losing their fingers and toes, at any rate.

  16. Specter

  Lester unfolded the tripod of the last of the three portable lamps, knelt, and carefully placed its legs on the ground. Standing up again, he extended the three-foot bar, made sure that the lamp was balanced on the rocky soil so that it wouldn’t tip over, and gave the Plexiglas dome on top a clockwise half-turn. Bright light sprang from the lamp, illuminating a circle about fifty feet in diameter; the cone of light almost reached that cast by the second lamp, placed near the port bow of the LRLT, and the first lamp, which was on the other side of the main engines.

  He stepped back and looked over his work. The lunar transport was now encircled by a ring of lights that could not be mistaken by the Moon Moths for subsurface outgassing, the transient phenomenon that sometimes provided natural sources of illumination on the lunar surface. As long as night prevailed on the Sea of Cold, the lamps—which were carried in the equipment bay for routine EVA work and now served as the equivalent of highway flares—could be clearly seen by another LRLT which might fly over the crash site.

  Darkness would not remain in this area for very much longer. Lester turned and looked south, past the nose of the LRLT where it had buried itself in the ground. Beyond the horizon, the first light of the rising Earth was just appearing; the distant rim of Aristotle Crater was already touched by a thin silver glow. Aristotle was only a few miles away. Looking at it, Riddell again felt relief. The crash had been rough—both he and Mighty Joe had been knocked cold by the impact—but at least they hadn’t slammed into the crater wall. Such a crash would have surely destroyed the LRLT; all three of them would be crushed, burned corpses by now if that had happened.

  “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” he murmured to himself.

  Pardon? Butch Peterson’s voice said in his earphones. What was that?

  “Nothing. Just thinking aloud.” Butch didn’t say anything, and Lester added, “Something they always say to you in flight school, usually just before you make your first solo. How are you making out in there?”

  Well … He heard her sigh over the comlink. Joe says the left side of his chest still hurts, so I think he’s definitely got a cracked rib or two. I’ve given him some Demerol and made him lie down in back, but he keeps wanting to come up here.

  “Tell him to lie down and shut up,” Lester said. It appeared that Mighty Joe had been the only one of them to suffer serious injury. The pilot had been wheezing and complaining of stabbing chest pains from the moment he had regained consciousnes
s, but if it had been anything worse than broken ribs, they would have known by now. If Butch had shot him up with Demerol and put him in one of the bunks in the aft cabin, that was the best they could do for the time being. “What about the radio?” he asked.

  Negative. I’ve tried the voice bands and also the data-relay frequency, to shoot back the stuff I got from the station just in case we—She stopped herself abruptly.

  “Don’t even think about it, kiddo,” Lester said. “We’re gonna get out of this, don’t worry.” He thought for a moment. “Ummm … keep working the frequencies, and if that doesn’t work, see if you can get Joe to tell you where the circuit-breaker panel is located. Maybe the transponder augered out when we hit. Ask Joe, he’ll tell you what to do.”

  Sure, Les. Butch didn’t sound very encouraged. At least she was over the hysterical fit she had thrown on the way down. When are you coming back in?

  “Gimme a few minutes,” he replied. “I want to check the cargo module and make sure it survived. Keep the channel open if it makes you feel better. Okay?”

  All right. Sure. There was another pause. Ahh … just one more thing, she said hesitantly. I gotta go.

  “Huh? You want to go EVA?”

  No, no, I don’t want to do that. More hesitation. I mean … I gotta go. You copy?

  “Aw, hell.” Lester shook his head in his helmet. There was a standard-issue spacecraft head located in the aft cabin, just beyond the bunks where Joe was lying. Like all zero g toilets, it operated by univalve suction attachments which drew urine and feces back into a septic tank; normal gravity-dependent toilets didn’t function in spacecraft. However, in hopes of preserving the life of the batteries, Lester had shut down all the noncritical functions of the LRLT. That included the toilet, which depended upon a power supply just as much as the computers. Funny how certain bodily functions tend to creep up on you at inopportune times, he reflected.