Luna

by Garon Whited

  “How about an arrestor hook and a cable anyway?” Chuck asked. “One at both ends, for safety.”

  “How about more than one cable?” Li offered. “The first few slow her down, but break away if she’s going too fast to stop.”

  “Nice thought,” I offered, “but breakaway cables can whip. I’d use the hydraulic shock absorber from an aircraft carrier, but this is a lot larger in scale… maybe an arrestor cable attached to the magnetic catapult? We can adjust the field strength on that.”

  Peng nodded. “I like that idea, boss. You can almost get away with a dead-stick landing like that.”

  “Almost. She’ll need fuel for final approach course corrections—not much, though. And there’s still a limit to how hot she can be when she comes in…”

  We were interrupted by the lady lawyer that had tried to argue with the Captain.

  “I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but might I intrude?”

  They looked at me. I shrugged. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”

  “We have not been introduced,” she answered, sliding into the seat across from me, next to Peng. “I am Melinda Wainright.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” I introduced myself and my crew. She nodded at each of us in turn. “So what can we do for you?”

  “I am given to understand that you were marching a prisoner through the halls earlier today.”

  “I’m afraid that much is true.”

  “May I ask why?”

  I considered it for a second. The Captain hadn’t said anything specific about it. All we were really trying to keep secret was a murder—and we had the murderer, supposedly.

  “All I’m allowed to say is that he’s suspected of a crime and is being detained.”

  She smiled slightly. “Without due process,” she added. “Was he read his rights? Has he been given counsel? Or has he been held incommunicado while the tyrant of this base decides what fate to mete out to the poor man?”

  I stared at her. I think everyone at the table stared at her. Some people just don’t want to learn.

  “Ma’am, please excuse me for saying so, but you haven’t the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about.”

  “I think I do. You were seen manhandling Tang Wu earlier today, and now he’s nowhere to be found.” Her voice rose slowly. “No one knows where Emily Jefferson is, and Charlene Reynolds hasn’t been seen for two days, either.” People looked our direction as she spoke more and more loudly. “I think that your precious captain is singling out troublemakers and dissidents to smooth his takeover of the human race!”

  I rubbed my temples and remembered that I was on light duty. Pummeling her for being a moron would be counterproductive. Besides, I was raised never to hit a lady—as long as she remained a lady. But she was flirting with crossing the line.

  “Lady,” I said, “if that’s true, why aren’t you being fed to the recycling plant?”

  “You don’t dare!” she declared, triumphantly. “Now everyone knows I’m on to you. If anything happens to me, it will be proof of your plans!”

  I sighed. “Okay. A couple of small questions, though. Why would he want to take over? So he can get the best synthetic proteins? So he can have the only spaceship we have as his personal yacht? So he can have the best of the uniforms? Hmm?

  “Lady, we haven’t got riches, goods, or services that would make it worth his while. Hell, we don’t even have money! At the moment, we’re stuck with being at least partly communist—‘from each according to his abilities.’ Captain Carl is in charge, because that’s what he’s good at. I, for one, am very glad he’s got it; it’s not a fun job.”

  “So you say,” she countered. “We’ve all seen how he lords it over us, confining us, giving us only enough food to keep us alive. He locked poor Jackson Hommel up, if you’ll recall, after that brutal pilot attacked him! I think this captain is like any other military man—he covets power and control! He wants to rule all mankind!”

  There was an ugly muttering among the others in the messhall. I was saved from an answer by the reverend Wembleson coming through the door in a hurry and making a beeline for me.

  “Commander Hardy,” he gasped, “I need your help, please, immediately.”

  I stood up. “Ma’am, we’ll continue this discussion tomorrow at oh-eight-thirty.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You can raise this concern of yours with the Captain. But right now, something urgent has come up.”

  “I’m sure it has,” she replied, scathingly. “Your fear of being caught in a lie while you defend your dictatorial policies!”

  Chang stood up quietly—he does everything quietly—and circled the table. He’s a small man and she was fairly tall for a woman. She stood up as he approached and they looked each other in the eye.

  “Be quiet,” Chang said, quite calmly.

  “I will not! Everyone needs to know what this madman is doing. He’s trying to take over—”

  “Be quiet,” Chang repeated, “or I will quiet you.”

  She was about to snap an answer, but she looked at Chang before she did. Whatever she was about to say died in her throat. She sat down quietly. I found a new respect for Chang. I made a mental note to check out his personal kung fu with an eye to making him master-at-arms for the base.

  The padre and I hurried out. As we went down the hall, I asked him what was wrong.

  “Do you know Robert Brondike?”

  “Nope. Resident or staffer?”

  “Resident. He’s about to be a former resident.”

  “Oh. He’s dying?”

  “Yes. But he has a last request and Doctor Fleming wanted you there for it.”

  “Me?” We rounded a corner into the infirmary and the reverend showed me into Mister Brondike’s room. He was a bony-thin old guy with skin like worn leather. He had an oxygen tube up his nose and a bunch of sensors beeping.

  Anne was there, holding his wrist. She looked up as we came in. “You’re in time.”

  “What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t want to die in a hole,” she replied.

  “That’s not what I said,” he wheezed. “I said… I said I wanted to see Earth again.” His voice was reedy and weak, but he was very clear. I thought I detected a case of Texas drawl.

  “We can wire up a video—” I began.

  “No!” he shouted, and broke into a coughing fit. Anne did something with a tube and a nasty sucking sound ensued. He subsided after a moment and added, “I don’t want some damned piece of technology. I want to see my home again. Your Captain promised that we could go up on the surface and see it. A lot of others took him up on it. Now I want to.”

  “Anne?” I asked.

  “Julie and Galena took regular excursions to the surface so the paranoids could look at our planet. I nixed his going because of his condition. Now… well, he can survive in a suit long enough to get a good look, at least.”

  “What she means,” he said, testily, “is that I’m going to die anyway. I mean to die looking at what we did to our world. We may have killed it, but it’s still where I was born.” He paused to take a few breaths. “So either help me into a suit or just push me out an airlock. Makes no difference to me; the result’s the same. But she’s right in this much: don’t leave me to die in a hole. I’ll be in one soon enough.”

  I glanced at Anne. She shrugged. “If I take him off the machines, he’ll die. He can live on his own for about an hour, maybe more, maybe less, depending on how much he exerts himself. His cancer has metastasized and he has a lot of secondary problems because of it.”

  He grumped at her, “I told you it’s not treatable. I’ve just been waiting until the damfool doctors would let me die.”

  Anne put on her frozen-faced look. She doesn’t like admitting that she’s helpless any more than I do.

  “As you say. Max, will you need my help?”

  “I’ll bring a suit down and you can unhook him from everything as needed.”

  �
��Fine.”

  * * *

  Martin insisted on coming with us. He brought a space suit down to the infirmary so we could all suit up together.

  “I’m going,” he said. “If that’s all right with you, of course. I’d like to look at Earth again, even if it is on fire.” More quietly, just to me, he added, “And if he doesn’t make it back from this trip, I think I should be along.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. When the doctor admits it’s over, the priest takes a turn.

  Getting into a space suit used to be a lot harder. Back in the early days of space exploration, it involved custom-fitting a suit for an astronaut, complete with forty-eleven inner garments, attachments, and sticky bits. It wasn’t unusual to take a couple of hours to get into it and get everything set up. Now we can do it in ten minutes, with most of that devoted to adjusting the outer suit to make it fit.

  I got into my suit so Martin and Robert could watch how I did it. There’s an inner suit that’s custom-tailored for an astronaut—it’s a “mechanical counter-pressure suit,” a fancy name for a layer that squeezes you like an overprotective mother. It isn’t required, but it’s nice to have if the outer suit springs a leak. Martin and Robert didn’t have them, so I helped Martin into the outer layers of a softsuit so Robert could watch how we were going to do it. With that preparation, he knew what to expect. Anne disconnected him from a couple of machines and we got him dressed quickly. He was very helpful. I set his mix for a much higher oxygen partial pressure than usual and he seemed fairly alert and energetic.

  Just the same, while we didn’t carry him up to the surface, Martin and I didn’t let his feet touch ground more than two or three times.

  On the way up, we were momentarily blocked by a trio of old men and a pair of equally-old women.

  “You, there! What’s this about the captain ordering the arrest—”

  “No time!” I snapped. “Move! Move! Move! Make a hole! Coming through!”

  They got out of the way. Lucky for them; it’s hard to stop once you get going good.

  I checked helmet seals on all of us and cycled the elevator airlock.

  “Radio check. How are you doing, Mister Brondike?”

  He hacked a cough, right into the mike. “Fine,” he wheezed. He didn’t sound fine, but he was a dying old man. We were taking him up to the surface as a last request. If he said he was ready to play rodeo volleyball riding giant alligators, I wasn’t going to contradict him

  The lock opened on the surface. The sun was low, near the horizon, and threw long, pitch-black shadows from every irregularity in the terrain. I led us over to the shadow of the observatory dome to keep us out of the sunlight. This was partially because of radiation, but mainly because it’s hard to get a good look at anything in the sky when the Sun is up—a suit visor polarizes automatically to keep the wearer from being blinded.

  We helped Robert lie down and propped him up a little. Since Earth isn’t directly overhead, we arranged him at an angle so he had a good view. Then we sat down with him and leaned back against the wall of the observatory.

  It used to be a pretty world. I remember seeing it from space and wondering how many of the clouds were storms, how many were just rain, and which ones were fluffy things drifting over some daydreamer’s head.

  Now I was wondering if it was Venus.

  It was a cloud-shrouded world, tinged with a faint, dusty brown. Where it was once a blue-brown marble with swirls of white, it was now a dust-colored marble with occasional flashes of darker brown or dim blue through breaks in the cloud cover.

  I didn’t want to look at it any more. I turned to face Martin. His expression was nothing but sad. He mentioned that he’d come up to see it before. The video presentation the Captain gave prepared people for the worst, but it’s another thing entirely to eyeball it.

  We really screwed up the planet.

  “What’s it like down there?” Martin asked, over the radio.

  I sighed. More bad news.

  “Our astronomy tech tells us there are a lot of greenhouse gases from the nukes and subsequent fires. The planet’s reflecting more sunlight, but what does get through tends to stay—”

  “Max,” he interrupted. I broke off.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not an ecologist. Just… just tell me what it’s like.”

  “It’s getting warmer, and it’s humid—very humid. A lot of water went into the air, maybe from ocean or coastal hits. It’s also overcast, obviously. Some place, it’s probably raining a grey, ashy rain. The coastlines are underwater, or will be when the ice caps do some more melting. It’s a lot more radioactive; background radiation is twenty times what it was. Some places are deadly and will be for a long time. Most of the surface, though, isn’t deadly from radiation; there’s a lot of area, and in the greater scheme of things, fallout half-life isn’t that long.”

  “How long… how long will it be…?”

  “I don’t know. We have no idea, yet. We’ll watch it for a year or two and get a good baseline. Then we can make predictions.”

  I didn’t mention that the Earth was in danger of a runaway greenhouse effect. Nuclear winter my Aunt Sally! Carbon dioxide from detonations and massive fires to add to the already-severe pollution, along with a lot of vaporized water… Venus would still be worse, but unlivable is unlivable.

  “Will we ever go home?” he asked.

  “I won’t. My grandchildren, maybe.”

  He said something, staring up at our wounded planet. It was too soft for me to make it out; I’d bet it was a prayer. I’m not much of a praying man, but I agreed with the sentiment.

  “Mister Brondike? Would you like to go back down, now?”

  He didn’t answer. I nudged his arm to get his attention. When he didn’t respond, I moved to get a better look through his faceplate. He wasn’t blinking. His eyes were open and fixed on Earth. I wasn’t sure what to make of his expression.

  He couldn’t have gone back. Even if we hadn’t destroyed it, he couldn’t have survived reentry. At least he got to see it. Martin and I stayed up with him for a while.

  I’m kinda glad I went up, too. It’s good to keep an eye on the old homestead. At the same time, I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t good to see what had become of it.

  * * *

  Court was convened right on the dot. We held it in the messhall rather than a conference room; Madame Loudmouth would have had a field day with a closed court, called it a “star chamber” and suchlike.

  Captain Carl wasn’t happy with her, but he kept trying to be liberal. Somehow, it didn’t suit him; he made a great totalitarian dictator—as a Captain should be. I think he was uneasy with his decision on our habitat/resident policy. I know I couldn’t have made that kind of decision, but I’m a softie. I admit it. But I don’t think he was satisfied with his solution; he kept thinking about it, worrying at the problem.

  Personally, I think he’d make a good king. It’s something to hope for, anyway.

  Captain Carl sat as judge; there wasn’t anyone else to do it. If we’d had anybody from the judge advocate general… but we didn’t. Instead, as the commanding officer, the Captain got the responsibility.

  Tang Wu was manacled and seated in an open space in front of the judge’s bench. The bench was just a messhall table with a cloth over it. Julie had a table, Anne had another, both facing the bench. Behind them were rows of seats for the rest of the citizens and citizen-applicants, including me. Behind us were the guests. The guests were restless.

  Captain Carl pounded the gavel and court was in session.

  It didn’t take long. Military justice doesn’t. Anne went first and presented the case against Tang. It took a little while; she had detailed evidence. She reconstructed the crime: Tang Wu visiting the victim in her chamber, strangling her, the struggling and scratching, the dragging her to the bathroom, and cutting her throat.

  Behind me, I heard a lot of stirring and muttering and whispering. I wasn’t sure if they wer
e mostly upset, mostly shocked, or just all a-buzz about someone killing someone else. It’s not every day there’s a murder trial… now.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Fleming. We will now hear from the defense.”

  Julie stood up. “Sir, I have conferred with the accused and he wishes to make his own statement.”

  Captain Carl nodded. “Tang Wu, stand and be heard.”

  Tang Wu stood up. He was pale and trembling, but he didn’t sway or stagger. He’d listened when Julie told him about the evidence against him, nodded, and then gone all silent. I was interested in how he was going to react.

  “You’re putting me on trial for a murder,” he said, voice cracking. “We’re all murderers. All of us! We killed a planet—what’s one more? What’s just one more? She was an evil, stinking bitch! Do you hear me?” His fists balled as his voice rose. “She harped on any detail when you didn’t do something right! She made things up, just to put you in the wrong and yell at you! She never said ‘thank you’ for anything! She always wanted anything done in the hardest, most demeaning way she could think up! She hated me! She hated me! She tried to make life miserable, for me and for everyone around her! You’ve heard her! Screeching about her food, screaming about her clothes, bullying and threatening and always, always screaming!”

  Tang Wu was more than trembling now. He was shaking, making the manacles rattle, and his face was turning red as he shouted. “She deserved to die! She deserved it! We’re all murderers! What’s one more, especially HER?!”

  Captain Carl hammered down the gavel like a gunshot. It not only silenced Tang Wu, but it also silenced the swelling murmur behind me. I glanced left and right. The staffers working on citizenship looked less than happy. I could see they all sympathized with Tang Wu, at least a little bit, even as they loathed what he’d done. A few of them looked more than sympathetic. Working for the residents full-time must have been rough.