Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The rille was small — only twenty or thirty yards wide, its walls deep-cut. Henry had picked it out from old low-orbit Apollo photographs. In the low sunlight, with the regolith’s tan sparkle, its eroded walls looked like a small mountain valley, she thought, somewhere above the snow line.

  “There,” said Henry. He pointed along the rille. “You see that?”

  She looked where he pointed. A few hundred yards along, the rille terminated; but she could see a kind of bridge of rock beneath which the valley continued, as if it entered a tunnel.

  “What is it?”

  “A lava tube. Our salvation. I knew there had to be one here. Maybe we can live through this after all. Come on. We haven’t much time.”

  This was Henry’s latest plan. She thought it was crazy. But she had to admit, now she’d slept on it, the idea of sacrificing her life without trying was less appealing than ever.

  So, with Geena clinging on to Henry’s hand, watching they didn’t foul the tubing that joined them, they loped back to the Rover and began to unload it.

  He fell inexorably from the empty lunar sky, every minute dropping five thousand feet and covering sixty more miles, the shadows lengthening as he rounded the curve of the Moon.

  He must fly down the visible face of the Moon, all the way to the south, before landing. His altitude would drop steadily, sixty miles, forty, twenty, ten. He imagined his trajectory unwinding, a smooth curve shaped by gravity, kissing the surface of the Moon at just the point he intended, fifty miles short of the place he intended to deliver his nuclear weapon.

  He was still flying at orbital speed — three thousand miles per hour, about Mach Five — and he would keep up those speeds, accelerate in fact, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Nobody in history had ever flown so fast, so low, not even Geena.

  Certainly nobody had tried to achieve a touchdown at such speeds. And yet that was what he must attempt, today.

  Through the tight portholes of his Soyuz, he caught glimpses of the surface of the Moon. It was a spotlit bombing range under a black sky, fleeing under his prow, fresh craters and basin rim mountains and undulating mare plains crowding over the close horizon with an unwelcome eagerness.

  His view was completely sharp, of course. There was no cloud, no layer of muddy air, to obscure his view; and at times he would lose his sense of altitude. At such moments he turned away from the windows and trusted to his instruments, his infallible electronic senses, and to the precise mathematics that had guided him here.

  And now, as Arkady flew further south, a new series of mountains — a ring of them, folded and eroded — came shouldering over the horizon towards him. They straddled the Moon, as if striving to block his further progress towards the Pole.

  This was, he knew, the mountainous rim of the great South Pole-Aitken Basin: the huge impact crater which straddled the South Pole of the Moon, the largest and deepest such crater in the whole of the Solar System, a walled plain as wide as the Mediterranean Sea.

  His Soyuz, like a little green bug, flew over the immense, eroded shoulders of the rim mountains. The mountains stretched before him and to either side, obviously ancient, colourless as plaster-of-paris models, a five-thousand-mile-long ring of shattered and folded Moonscape.

  He checked his clock. Fourteen minutes to his touchdown. He was still seventy-five thousand feet high, with almost a quarter of the Moon’s face still to traverse; yet he was already inside the great Basin.

  The land beyond the rim walls was revealed now. It was battered and scarred even beyond the norm he had come to expect for this small, ancient, rocky world, every square inch of it crowded with craters and rubble. The biggest craters here were major complexes in themselves, huge and eroded, many miles across, their giant flanks punctured by smaller, brighter newcomers.

  In the shadows of the mountain ring, there were places where the sun could not have shone for a billion years — perhaps the coldest places, Arkady thought, in the Solar System.

  It was there that Henry predicted water droplets from Moon-smashed comets would collect, snowing once into the shadows, and forever lying still. And it was there that Arkady must descend.

  Ten minutes left. Fifty thousand feet: as high as he had flown, above Earth, before his first flight as a cosmonaut. And still he dropped, five thousand feet per minute, his descent as steady as ageing, and the fleeing Moon rose to meet him, as inexorable as death itself.

  His controllers at Korolyov were silent. There was, it seemed, nothing more to say.

  And now, as the land fled beneath him, at last — for the first time, and utterly unwelcome — he felt the brush of fear.

  The lava tube was maybe ten yards wide. Its entrance was strewn with rubble, evidently cracked off of the roof. When she shone her helmet lamp into its depths, it extended further than her beam could reach.

  “Good grief,” she said. “It’s long.”

  Henry was moving into the tube, stepping carefully over the rubble-strewn floor, pulling their shared hoses behind him. To Geena, he was just a silhouette before the elliptical puddle of light cast by his helmet lamp.

  She was forced to follow, reluctantly.

  She was spooked by this place.

  Of course she was being illogical. There could be nothing here to hurt her, not so much as a lunar rat. Nothing, in fact, had walked here since the tube’s formation, perhaps a billion years ago.

  But even so…

  “Look how sharp the rocks are,” Henry said. “No meteorite weathering here. Watch your step, Geena; this stuff could cut your suit to ribbons.”

  “And you watch out for the damn hosepipe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, the tube is bigger than I expected.”

  “Well, this is the Moon. The last time I was in a lava tube was Hawaii. A couple of miles long… The lava on the Moon flows much more freely. That’s why you have the maria, great frozen puddles of the stuff. This tube might be ten miles long, maybe more.”

  “Henry, help me with this damn shelter. If we don’t recharge our packs in the next couple of minutes, we’re screwed anyhow.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Henry. He loped across to work with her.

  When they had the shelter set up, they crawled inside.

  They sat there in their EVA suits, fully pressurized, within their grimy inflatable shelter, sheltered by the rille lava tube, talking by torchlight.

  Geena said, “How long before we see anything?”

  “Maybe three hours after the detonation. The math is chancy.”

  “That’s a long time to wait.”

  “Not so long.”

  “Tell me a story, Henry.”

  “I don’t know any stories.”

  “Tell me this is going to work. How much water is there at the South Pole?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But the Moon is old, Geena. Enough time for a lot of volatiles to collect in the cold traps, where the sun never shines. Water and carbon dioxide. My models suggest there might be the equivalent of a thousandth the mass of a large cometary impactor, delivered by one process or another.”

  “I’ll give you your thousandth,” she said. “So what?”

  “Geena, a thousandth of a comet — if you melted it — could cover the Moon in water to a depth of a metre or so. A thousandth of a comet would contain enough carbon dioxide to form an atmosphere.”

  The fans of her suit whirred patiently. She was sitting on a folded-up blanket, her suit stiff; now she came a little closer to him, as if seeking the human warmth trapped inside the layers of his suit. “So how come Prospector detected so little?”

  “Because it’s logical. A working-out of the laws of physics. Solar System processes. It has to be there hidden in the deep regolith.”

  “Right. And your nuke is going to melt it all.”

  “Oh, no.” He sounded surprised. “Don’t you get it? To melt all that ice would take the energy of…” He thought about it. “Maybe ten times Earth’s whole nuclear ars
enal.”

  “So how is the bunker-buster going to work?”

  She could hear the grin in his voice. “Judo.”

  Suddenly, she felt weary. She just wanted done with all of this, all these schemes and plans, one way or the other.

  She closed her eyes.

  “You’ve got to be a believer,” he whispered gently.

  Arkady checked the controls set out before him. There were instruments and switches for the main systems, a TV screen, and an optical orientation view-finder set up on a small porthole next to the panel; there were orientation controls on his right, and manoeuvring controls to his left. His small laptop, with its weapons controls, was fixed to the couch to his right.

  For the nuclear device, he had rigged a simple dead man’s switch. If possible, he would set the timer after a careful emplacement. But if power was lost, the device would detonate anyway.

  His craft was prepared, and the weapons it carried.

  He closed his hands around the joysticks that controlled the spacecraft’s systems. There was no computer program to control what he was going to attempt, with this poor Soyuz; he must lead it perhaps to its destruction himself.

  He was ready.

  Two minutes left. Just ten thousand feet now. The Moon ground fled beneath him, flattening, bellying up towards him.

  His descent was actually very shallow — just ninety feet in every mile, much shallower than even a civilian airliner. His path, in fact, was almost tangential to the Moon’s surface. But his speed was gigantic. The pocked ground fled beneath him, like a scarred runway in the last few feet of a descent.

  One minute.

  Five thousand feet up, and he was still sixty miles from his goal.

  The land seemed to flatten further, the close horizon receding.

  And then he flew past the flank of a round-shouldered lunar mountain, grey, pock-marked. Its shadowed far side was limned by a graceful, powdery curve of sunlit regolith, and its summit was lost above him.

  As soon as he perceived the mountain, it was gone, lost behind him, as unreachable as his childhood.

  Twenty seconds. Less than two thousand feet. The craters ahead were foreshortened to ellipses, pools of shadow in the sunlight, flattening.

  He flew into shadow, and he could see no more.

  And so, in darkness, Arkady — still moving at a mile a second, sitting up in his couch — hit the surface of the Moon.

  Arkady’s life, the success of his mission, was utterly dependent on Henry’s theories.

  At the moment of touchdown — the instant at which the rounded belly of the Soyuz impacted the lunar dirt — two things happened.

  First, the attitude thrusters beneath Arkady’s feet fired on full strength, lifting Soyuz away from the regolith. The thrust was sufficient to hold eighty per cent of the Soyuz’s weight up from the surface; the actual depth of contact ought to be no more than a few inches. Other thrusters fired intermittently, to keep the craft upright, stop it tumbling.

  Second, the Star Wars laser fired from the craft’s nose.

  If this South Pole crater was indeed a frozen lake of water, dusted over by regolith, then the laser should blast-melt a shallow furrow, a canal of glowing steam, utterly straight ahead of Arkady. The liquid water — persisting for a few seconds before boiling away — would lubricate the ferocious contact between the hull of the Soyuz and the ancient ice.

  The Soyuz would shed its orbital speed in friction with the water, and — sliding home like a baseball player coming to a plate — would come to a gentle halt, with barely any fuel expended.

  That, at any rate, was the theory.

  A hundred seconds and it would be over, one way or another.

  Arkady was thrust forward against his chest restraints. The impact was violent, spine-jarring, harder than he expected.

  The Soyuz groaned like a tin can. The craft rattled and jumped, as if some giant were battering its hull, the vibration so violent he could no longer see the instruments. The deceleration should be less than one and a half G, but it was a long time since he had been on Earth, and it was in any case the vibration that was shaking him to pieces.

  …But the craft held. The cabin lights flickered, but stayed bright.

  The pressure, the noise and vibration, continued. He struggled to stay upright, to keep breathing. His ribs ached, and there was a greying around the rim of his vision.

  He heard a series of jolts and bangs: that was the solar panel wings, the optical sighting system periscope, perhaps the rendezvous antenna on its stand, being ripped off the hull. His craft was being stripped down to its basics by this brutal passage.

  In the first ten seconds, hardly any of his velocity gone, he covered ten miles, scouring across the Moon’s shadowed surface.

  But the seconds wore on, his heart continued to beat, and the structure of the craft was still holding. He allowed himself a grin. This rattling Soyuz was a tank, ploughing resolutely through the lunar ice; the Americans” tin-foil Apollo would not have lasted a dozen yards!

  He caught glimpses of the Moon, fleeing past his window: dune fields lit up by a red, spectral glow, obscured by sprays of steam. The glow was his own, he realized: it was the hull of his Soyuz and the dirt of the Moon, turned red hot by his spectacular arrival.

  He must be a wonderful sight, raising parabolic plumes of glowing spray and steam to either side, as he cut his geometrically straight line across the surface of the Moon. If the Moon were tipped up a little more, in fact, on Earth they would even be able to see, with the naked eye, the gash he must cut in the surface.

  Twenty seconds, seventeen miles covered; thirty seconds, twenty-four miles…

  His velocity was dropping, then, almost as planned. Yet the ride grew no less violent, the shuddering dips and bangs of the craft no less pronounced. Sometimes the bangs were very severe, as the Soyuz hit some inhomogeneity in the ice.

  Suddenly the deceleration increased, and he was thrown with fresh vigour against the restraint straps. But he had been expecting that; as his velocity reduced the Soyuz was sinking more deeply into the lunar ice, digging in, braking him more rapidly.

  Now a full minute had elapsed since that first jarring touchdown, and, by God, he was still breathing. Just ten miles to go, and his speed must be no more than Mach Two, and falling…

  He had of course broken all land-speed records in the process of this landing. And, whatever the outcome, he would become the first human to die on another planet, the first to create a myth on this world without history, without monuments. Let them engrave that on the statue they would build to him, on Leninski Prospect!

  Seventy seconds, eighty; forty-five miles, forty-seven. The shuddering of the craft, the howling of the metal scraping on poorly-lubricated ice, all of it seemed to him to be smoothing out and reducing. The vibration now was much diminished, and he was even able to read his instruments.

  Ninety seconds. Another lurch, a plummet downwards, another savage bite of deceleration.

  Now the attitude thrusters had cut out, and he would complete his final glide unpowered, the Soyuz ploughing ever deeper into the ice of the Moon.

  Ten more seconds. The Soyuz slowed in violent lurches, and Arkady was still pinned forward against his straps. But he felt exultant. It had worked, by God! His speed was now no more than a couple of hundred miles per hour, and he began to believe, cautiously, that he might actually live through this. He would be a Russian cosmonaut, alive on the Moon, even if for just a few minutes or hours… It would be glorious!

  As its speed dwindled, the Soyuz dipped forward, and it started to slew sideways, as if skidding across an icy runway. The cloud of steam that had obscured the front rendezvous port cleared, and Arkady, for the first time, was able to see ahead.

  And, he saw, there was something in his way.

  It was a sheer cliff face; perhaps it was even the central mountain of the South Pole crater, or a foothill of it. So big, whatever it was, it filled half the universe.

&
nbsp; Disappointment surged, overwhelming his fear.

  He reached out to the laptop. He held his gloved finger over the destruct button he had configured.

  He allowed himself a moment’s sweet regret at this misfortune, for it was a beautiful plan, and it had worked, all but this final detail.

  He thought of Lusia, and Vitalik, and Geena.

  Near enough.

  He pushed the button, and he brought the light of the stars to the shadows of the Moon.

  6

  Watch the Moon.

  It was as if the message ran around the battered planet.

  Watch the Moon. The satellite shone down on its parent, as it always had; but now the air of Earth was murky with ash and smoke, its night side glowing bright with fires and volcanism, the infernal light of Earth bright enough to banish the Moon glow…

  Watch the Moon.

  That was what Henry had told Jane to do, in the last message she got from him, via NASA.

  It was 4.00 a.m., nearly dawn, when she woke Jack. They dressed quickly, and went to stand in the middle of the lawn, at the rear of this rental house in Houston, that Henry had fixed up for them. Snow crunched under their feet: snow like Moon dust, snow in late Texas summer.

  Jack walked silently, withdrawn. But that was okay. All he had seen in the last few weeks was going to take some silent time to take in, and she was determined he was going to get that time; even if she couldn’t give him anything else but that.

  The weather was shot to pieces around the planet, but this August cold snap was unprecedented, it seemed. But the air was still laden with moisture, a damp ghost of summer humidity, so much clear ice had collected everywhere.

  Ice whiskers had clustered together to make a carpet as thick as snow on the roads and structures. The drivers on the freeways were very cautious, and seemed to be baffled by such phenomena as ice on their windscreens. De-icer seemed unknown here; Jane felt a little contemptuous, like a Swede mocking British attempts to cope with a few measly inches of snow. The roads were gritted, but with what looked like beach sand. The bridges on the freeways were iced up, pretty deadly, and the traffic was crawling and scared. It was easy to skid as you came off the freeway around those right-angle turns.