Moondust

by Gemma Fowler

  ‘Route calculated.’

  The wheels of the scrambler inflated, ready for the low-gravity conditions outside.

  Aggie revved the fans and accelerated out onto the open surface.

  The glowing red beacons of the border flashed before her, pulsing their eerie red light over the rocks.

  Beyond them, the rugged terrain spread out into the darkness of the waiting night-cycle. The black, marker-pen perfect shadow of the approaching night slashed the landscape in two, edging slowly towards the base. From where Aggie sat, it looked as if the grey tundra was being swallowed by the endless black void above.

  In the distance, the jagged peaks of the canyon gave way to sheer cliffs that caught the waning light of the sun on their ragged edges. As she entered the black of the night-cycle, she couldn’t see further than the scrambler’s small headlamps. They made ghostly pools of pale violet light on the ground, illuminating everything a few metres ahead.

  With a buzz, Celeste’s systems fizzed and died.

  She was alone now.

  Everything she’d been through in the last two weeks – the Angel, Rix, her fight with Seb, Celeste, meeting Danny – suddenly overwhelmed her. In this dark, quiet, alien place, miles away from her home on the base, her emotions were heightened. But so was her determination. Whatever she found at the end of tonight’s journey, Aggie felt a sense of relief that it would mean an end.

  With tears rolling down her cheeks, Aggie gritted her teeth. She was going over the border.

  No more secrets.

  She smiled. It took her by surprise, but suddenly, she felt strangely free.

  Night-Cycle 01

  Aggie steered the scrambler through the boulder field that skimmed the edge of the great Far Side canyon. She drove slowly, still getting used to the controls. The fat wheels kicked and spun on the rocky ground.

  As she travelled further into the landscape of the Border Sea, Aggie felt as if she was lost in a rocky forest. The clean black shadows cast by the dipping sun made navigating incredibly hard. If it wasn’t for the sweeping rim of the Goddard Crater in the distance, she could well have been turning in circles.

  Finally, though, Aggie found a trail through the rocks wide enough for a bigger vehicle. She caught her breath. Broad tyre tracks appeared in the dust. From the width and depth of the tread she guessed it must have been a loader, one of the stout, eight-wheeled trucks they used to carry heavy loads across the faces.

  She followed the tracks along the edge of the canyon, where they multiplied until the surface below her was churned like a freshly ploughed field. The amount of activity astounded her. A cold, clammy feeling started to spread inside her; she was close, she must be.

  Aggie stopped the scrambler suddenly. Its wheels churned the surface dust, making it plume around her. She had no idea what she would find at the end of the tracks, but now she was sure she would find something. Something big. With any luck, her tyre tracks would be too muddled up with all the others for anyone to figure out where she’d gone, but the dust trail from the scrambler would give her away from a mile off.

  Something heavy settled in Aggie’s stomach. Lunar Inc. was hiding something out here. This was real.

  Heart hammering, Aggie hopped off the seat and dragged the small trike into a gap between the rocks. Her hands slipped and cramped as she tried to gain purchase in her huge spacesuit. After a few minutes she stood back and admired her work. No one would see it unless they were looking.

  Moving about in the Moon’s low gravity was always tricky, but the wardrobe proved to be surprisingly flexible. Aggie bounced over the rocky ground like a flat stone on a lake.

  As she skimmed along, Aggie noticed the surface vibrating beneath her boots. She stopped and placed a thickly gloved hand against the nearest rock. The fingers visibly shuddered – something was making the ground move here, and from what she could tell, it was getting worse with every step. Aggie knew the Far Side was geologically unstable, they were taught that in the Academy, but to shake constantly? Surely that wasn’t right.

  She went around a large rock and found herself bathed in a dull violet glow. Aggie edged towards the gap and dropped to the floor. She was at the top of a sheer cliff. Before her, she could see nothing but the glittering stars disappearing into the violet halo somewhere below. She crawled forwards, as close as she dared to the edge of the drop, and peered down into its bright depths.

  Her breath caught in her throat. They couldn’t, she thought desperately. They just couldn’t.

  There was no ground after the cliff. The whole surface was cut away, a great black mouth set horizon to horizon in the shape of a mocking smile. It was as if the Moon’s fragile shell had cracked in half and caved in. An abyss that shook in the grips of an endless moonquake.

  The size of the thing made Aggie dizzy. She stumbled back and steadied herself on a boulder. But, as her eyes adjusted, the shock only grew.

  It was a mine. Another mine.

  A great, ridged machined wedge had been ripped from the surface, revealing raw, glistening lumite flesh. Even in the darkness she could see its purple hue, illuminated by a million lamps winking through thick clouds of sparkling dust.

  ‘The quakes,’ Aggie muttered.

  This open-face mine was easily three times the size of the entire base, and much, much too deep. The Moon was only a fraction of the size of the Earth, its geology complex and still mostly not understood. Aggie was no geologist, but even she could see the damage that had been done. The Far Side of the Moon had been replaced by a glittering hole. No wonder the quakes were getting worse.

  After a while she shakily got to her feet and edged towards the road that zigzagged down the edge of the fissure. As she got closer, the violet glow of the lamps began to move. Aggie blinked, then, with a gasp, realized what they were. People. Thousands of them. She could just make out their shapes through the dust. They were wearing old suits like the one she was wearing now, picking at the glistening lumite with small, manual drills.

  To the left of the expanse she could make out the white outlines of buildings, small and hexagonal, clustered together in haphazard bundles. Large metal sheets made tent-like structures around them where miners sat in small groups, their suits covered in so much dust they were hardly visible against the surface itself. The whole thing looked like something she’d seen in her history books. Like a refugee camp during the wars, or the old coal and diamond mines of another, long-lost era. In the dangerous lunar conditions it was barbaric.

  This was what Celeste had meant.

  This was what she had to see.

  For a long time, Aggie just stood and stared. She wished it was just another one of Celeste’s nightmares, she wished that she would simply wake up. But it was real. She was stunned. What could have possibly driven them to . . .

  Aggie thought back over the last few weeks; the problems with the lumite quotas, cell recalls, missing shipments that Rix had seemed so angry about, the fact that G Face was nothing but rock, just a show . . .

  The lumite. It was running out.

  Aggie looked at the colossal mine below her. How long had they known? How long had they been secretly mining the Far Side? Months? Years? Always?

  Aggie looked again at the spots of light, moving slowly in the black, and an immense grief gripped her. Where had all these people come from? What had they done to deserve this fate? Lunar Inc. was so proud of the way it treated its prisoners – but this? How could Rix do this?

  Shock and despair boiled over into to anger at the thought of the evil, smiling commander.

  She had to tell Adam, or anyone. What Rix had done on this hidden side of the Moon was truly unforgivable.

  But she couldn’t just go back, could she? Even her own godfather would have trouble believing this. Celeste was right, you needed to see. She needed evidence, proof.

  Aggie slid further down the steep cliff and skidded to the edge of a rounded outcrop that faced the area of tiny buildings. Now she was closer
, she could see that they weren’t buildings at all. They were habs. Ancient inflatable habitats – life-support units from the very earliest ventures to the surface. Some of them must have been fifty years old. They all bore the scars of years of use, many were dented, all were coated in dust and debris and scattered around the site with no regard for any kind of planning or formation. She squinted and read the letters on the hab closest to her. ‘PHOENIX EXPEDITION’ was written boldly beside an older version of the Lunar Inc. logo. It matched the one emblazoned on the suit she was wearing.

  As she crept even closer, a commotion to the left of the Phoenix hab caught Aggie’s attention. A woman dressed in a grey Lunar Inc. overall was dragging a prisoner out of the hatch by his feet. She must be a guard on this secret Far Side mine. Grey wasn’t an Infospectrum colour, it would camouflage them perfectly as they travelled out from the base.

  Aggie watched, heart in her mouth – she’d never seen a guard act like this before. The old-fashioned airlock sent dust ballooning out around them as it closed, making it hard for Aggie to see clearly. The guard threw the misbehaving prisoner to the ground and stamped on his helmet. The crack as the Plexiglas shattered reached even Aggie’s ancient comms. She let out a little cry as she watched the man struggle in the dust, desperate for air. How could the guard do it? What had the prisoner done to deserve that? Aggie guessed that here, the desperate prisoners needed more than buzzers to be kept in line.

  Happy with her work, the guard stood back, arms folded, as the dying prisoner writhed around at her feet. Slowly, the other inmates and guards gathered around. They just stared, either too scared or too desensitized to do anything but watch.

  With a horrible sick feeling, Aggie knew that this was her chance. The prisoners were distracted. She felt as shallow and callous as the guard, but with a deep breath she stepped out from the shadows and bounced into the dust cloud and into the mine.

  Inside her ancient suit, Aggie was sweating at such a rate that the moisture vent system couldn’t deal with. She didn’t know what to do. All she’d thought of was what she’d find here. She didn’t begin to think about what she’d do once she’d found it. Now, here she was, walking into the middle of an illegal mine on the Far Side with no comms and no weapon. She activated her sun visor and prayed that with that and the dust, her identity could be kept concealed.

  Night-Cycle 01

  Aggie skimmed the edges of the crowd as the dying man continued to thrash about, alone on the ground.

  The prisoners had begun to disperse, not bothered in the slightest by the fact that a man was dying before them.

  Aggie moved away quickly. She didn’t want to look. She knew what the pressure of exposure to the lunar surface could do to a human. She’d seen the films during her training lectures at the Academy – a warning to any person who felt they didn’t have to adhere to the strict overall policy on the base – she didn’t need to see it in real life.

  Still, there was obviously something about her behaviour that was gaining her some unwanted attention. One by one, the prisoners’ heads turned and watched her as she bounded through them, the only person moving in a sea of filthy statues.

  As she made her way into the mine, the old comms unit in her suit started to spit out white noise. There were too many frequencies operating here, it was impossible for the ancient suit to focus in on one channel. The constant scratching hum was disorientating. She stumbled, her balance was all over the place.

  ‘Hey!’ A voice penetrated the fizz. ‘What you doing?’

  Aggie turned, but couldn’t identify the speaker in the crowd of heads around her. The guard had now turned and was talking to someone on her comms.

  ‘Hey,’ the voice said again, ‘you’ll get picked. Watch out.’

  Aggie looked again, but the comms in the old suit were so bad the voice could be coming from anyone.

  She gazed around in confusion, then saw a prisoner staring right at her. ‘You’ll get picked,’ the voice said again, more urgently this time. Inside her suit, Aggie frowned, she couldn’t reply, could she? She’d be recognized.

  ‘They’ll pick you,’ the voice shouted again. Aggie flinched. ‘You’ve got to go the other way.’

  Desperately Aggie gestured to her ears, trying to tell the prisoner that she couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Hey, hey. Calm . . . down.’ The prisoner stepped forwards. ‘They’ll . . .’

  ‘Who’s that? Who’s clogging the comms?’ An angry voice rang clearly in Aggie’s ears. Modern comms equipment. It must be the guard. Aggie froze.

  ‘Sounds as if whoever it is wants to volunteer.’

  ‘Frag,’ Aggie heard the prisoner mutter. He reached up and flicked her mirrored sun guard up. Aggie’s hands flew up to her head, but she wasn’t fast enough. ‘No!’

  ‘Earth below,’ the prisoner shouted over the fuzz and flicked the visor back. Aggie was terrified. He’d seen her face now. He knew who she was.

  A murmur of confused, distorted voices began to infiltrate the white noise.

  ‘Who said something?’

  ‘The guard, you denk. Shut it or she’ll think it was you.’

  ‘Which stupid clagger’s ass spoke up, then? He’s in for it now. I’m getting outta here.’

  ‘Wait for me. A day lugging clag is better than getting to be a canary.’

  Then one voice rose shrilly above the others: ‘I didn’t say nothing! I swear!’ It was a man’s voice, but he sounded young. ‘Get off me!’ he shouted.

  More guards were running towards them now, homing in on the gaggle of bedraggled prisoners that huddled under one of the metal canopies. The guard who had killed the man by the hab held another man in her hands. She was shouting something, but they were too far away for Aggie to make it out.

  Aggie watched the prisoner struggle away from the guard’s grip as she pulled him out towards the cliffs. He didn’t have the strength to compete with the guard’s exo.

  There was a gust of air, and Aggie turned just in time to see the hab’s doors open. The prisoner who had seen her shoved her inside.

  The shock of being thrown into the hab stunned Aggie. The lights blinked from red to green to white, and a slow beep indicated the airlock was repressurized.

  The prisoner released the clasps on his helmet, lifted it off his head and stripped away his bulky torso unit.

  ‘What the frag are you doing here?’

  Aggie’s heart stopped.

  No. It couldn’t be. It was impossible.

  ‘Danny?’ she exclaimed.

  The prisoner stood beside her in the tiny space.

  For a few moments they stood in silence. The dust and dirt that marred his face made his grey eyes flash. Despite feeling scared and awkward, Aggie was relieved.

  ‘You?’ he whispered, as if he didn’t believe what he was saying. It was the first time she’d heard his voice outside the tinny helmet comms. And seen him without overalls and a helmet. He had dirty blond hair, and broad shoulders under his sweat-soaked T-shirt. Stubble mixed with the glittering dust on his face.

  ‘But, how did you . . .?’ she managed, suddenly overwhelmed by the situation, by him. She felt light-headed and her heart started to beat so loudly she worried Danny could actually hear it. ‘They took you away. To the Pen . . .’

  ‘That’s what they told all of us,’ he said, staring at her with a mix of confusion and intensity.

  The airlock was so tiny that no matter how she positioned herself, Aggie was touching him. Brushing the back of his hand or forearm; not a glove or overall; his skin. Danny took his eyes away from her and began to release the inner airlock. Still dazed, Aggie followed him into the hab.

  One of the hexagonal walls was completely buckled in, its ancient computer systems spilt out of broken panels; the exposed wires and motherboards being given new leases of life as washing lines for tattered clothing. Bunks had been slotted into every available space. Aggie counted eight that she could see, each piled high with dusty equipment, cloth
es and ripped ration packs. The low violet lighting hummed above the beds and only served to make the place look grubbier. It smelt of feet and sweat and the surface. It was truly awful.

  ‘Won’t they find us?’ Aggie said, pointing to the airlock.

  ‘They’ll be distracted, we’ve got time.’

  Aggie kept her back to the walls. Danny was a prisoner. He was FALL. She was protected on the base – but here? This could be a trap.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked, gesturing to the mine outside the airlock doors.

  Danny sat on one of the bunks and looked up at her. ‘I think you know.’

  Aggie shook her head. It couldn’t be true. This was a nightmare. It had to be.

  ‘Just sit down.’ Danny gestured to the thin bunk opposite. Trembling, Aggie sat.

  Their knees were touching in the tiny, cramped space.

  Danny looked her right in the eyes. ‘This is your legacy, Aggie,’ he whispered. ‘This is what the Angel really stands for.’

  Aggie drew back. The heavy feeling in her stomach was starting to pull her down now. She shook her head. ‘No.’

  Danny’s jaw clenched. ‘What else do you need to see?’ he said tightly. ‘The mine itself? The people working themselves to death in the darkness at the pit? Or the ones dying of radiation poisoning in the med hab? I know, what about that poor clagger out there with his head spilling out of his helmet? Is that enough to make the Angel of Adrianne see what her precious Lunar Inc. has done?’

  Aggie felt tears prickling the corners of her eyes.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No one knows.’ Danny grabbed a battered medi-kit box from the bed and began to toss it between his hands. ‘Apart from us.’

  Aggie looked at him. His grey eyes burnt bright in the murky darkness.

  ‘FALL knew about this?’

  Danny shook his head. ‘Not this. We couldn’t even imagine . . .’ His shoulders relaxed a little and he sighed. ‘We knew something, but we couldn’t prove anything until we had someone on the inside.’