Luna

by Garon Whited

  While I was at it, I wished I could wipe my forehead; beads of sweat were rolling slowly down my face. My back ached abominably, and my shoulders felt like they had grooves carved in them. I could feel my heartbeat in every muscle.

  All I have to say is that squat-thrust lifts are a lot different under field conditions.

  The timer in my suit said I had a couple of hours before my air needed changing. I tried to doze off again and partially succeeded. I napped, on and off, never really sleeping. It was a good way to conserve air, kill time, and avoid burning calories. I was still getting thirsty, though, and would get moreso.

  Air and a place to stay out of the sun? No problem. But the bunker really was a hole in the ground. I made another mental note about temporary structures on the Moon: Life support includes more than just air for three days. A man can die of dehydration in a lot less time.

  Kathy didn’t let me even come close. Long before I was ready to chew my own tongue for saliva, the bunker’s radio relayed her signal on the suit frequency, crackling with static at first.

  “—nnnnkkkkker, kkkkcome in, Maxkkks.”

  “This is blast bunker. I read you. Go ahead.” The signal cleared rapidly.

  “This is the Luna, coming in for a landing. I’m using your radio as a bearing and that stretch of runway near the base as a landmark. I should be coming down near you, so put up the landing net, please.”

  “Say again?” I asked. “You’re coming down near me?” I was surprised, but I reached for a remote control anyway.

  “Roger that.”

  “How in all of Palain’s purple hells are you pulling that off?”

  “Stick your head up and look. You’ll see. But be prepared to duck; I’m coming in hot.”

  I bounced slowly to the entry ramp and up along it. I got the two ’bots with the net moving perpendicular to where the runway layout was planned. Whatever she was doing, it was probably dangerous and tricky. Watching would be simpler than demanding an explanation. I stayed mostly in the shadow of the entranceway and tilted my body back; this gave me a decent view of the ringwall and the sky around it.

  “I don’t see you,” I said. Kathy wasn’t the one who answered.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Hardy? This is Ensign Tsien. I am sorry, but the captain is unavailable while she lands us. Where are you looking?”

  “I’m looking all along the ringwall and in the sky above me. What’s your altitude?”

  “Approximately eleven meters—”

  “Eleven meters?” I demanded, cutting him off. I tilted forward and looked rapidly left and right. Still nothing. “I’m still not seeing you.”

  “Yes, Sir; I know. But if you will turn around, you may see us touch down.”

  It took me a second to process that, and then I turned in place.

  Coming from the opposite direction, a long way off, a hundred tons of beautiful spacecraft was blasting silent flame into the silvery dust of the Moon. A strange plume billowed behind her, rising and falling in perfect ballistic curves, leaving no dust to hang in the air—no air. It was more like a wake than a plume.

  The Luna touched down, blowing dust out in a giant, distorted doughnut until her under-jets cut off. Even at that distance I could see her landing gear jounce to the limit of the shock absorbers. Over the suit channels, I heard people screaming. I hoped everyone was belted in. Then she was bulleting through the dust and leaving speed-blasted furrows behind her. I wondered if the wheels were turning or if Kathy had the brakes locked. The wheels would probably act about as well either way; they were really just being used for drag in the loose particles of the surface. I hoped they didn’t fold under the stress.

  I worked the controls with my thumbs, racing the ’bots across her path.

  The nose jets fired, adding their force to the deceleration of the Luna’s mass. I wondered where they got the fuel. Then I wondered if Kathy could steer; it looked like the Luna was going to miss the net.

  I should have more faith in the Moon’s most dangerous hummingbird. Kathy had some control—the all-wheel steering made the wheels act like poor rudders, but they provided a degree or two of guidance—and she socketed the Luna right between my ’bots. That type of steering is something they never taught in flight school; my deadly darling improvised on the spot.

  The retro jets cut off—out of fuel—well before the Luna reached the bunker. This was actually a good thing. If they’d kept firing, the net would have melted through. Instead, the Luna’s wings clipped the tops off the ’bots as Kathy crossed between them. This cost me my viewpoint and ruined the Luna’s aerodynamics again, but I was prepared to forgive her a few dents and scrapes. The net plastered itself over the nose and leading edges; the cables dragged broad, flat anchors through the lunar dust. With them, the drag on the ship went up by an order of magnitude. She slowed rapidly after that.

  When the dust settled, the Luna was about a kilometer from the bunker and looked like a bird caught in a net. The screaming stopped when the Luna did.

  Marines. Ha.

  “Fill her up, please,” Kathy sang out, cheerfully. “And check the tires while you’re at it.”

  * * *

  I boarded the Luna with Svetlana, carrying her as cargo. A Marine saluted as I came aboard and I returned it. He accepted Svetlana as a prisoner and took her off my hands. Kathy made no comment about her other than to have her stowed in the cargo bay—still in the suit, fortunately. The same Marine took her through the cargo lock. That done, my first order of business was to get a squeeze bottle of water and start sipping.

  Galena was glad to see me. She still looked thin and not too healthy, but she had more color to her face than I recalled. She kissed my cheek.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “For not knowing what it is for,” she replied. “I am sorry about your guns, Max.”

  “It’s okay. I can make more ammunition, and the rails have to be replaced after all that volley fire, anyway.”

  Galena looked at Kathy. “You did not tell him?”

  “I’ve been busy with a landing computation,” she replied. “Max, I’m sorry—I had to jettison the railguns to lighten ship. That’s how I managed to save enough fuel to maneuver and land. Once I emptied the cargo hold, I changed course to orbit the Moon in the opposite direction. This let me come over the ringwall from the other side and far enough from it to still have a shallow glide path. Jettisoning the railguns even left me with enough delta vee to retro a little once I touched down.”

  I must have looked surprised; I hadn’t thought to just toss the guns afterward. I was glad she did, actually; I don’t see how she would have landed safely with several tons of useless mass still aboard. She took my arm and looked worried.

  “You can build others, I know,” she added, “but I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I told her. “I can build railguns. I can repair the Luna. I can even replace the whole ship if I have to. I can’t replace you.”

  She kissed me and didn’t seem to mind I was hot, tired, and sweaty. Then she wanted a full report. I gave it to her and everyone listened. She looked coldly unhappy for most of it, but my unorthodox entry into the bunker raised eyebrows all around the bridge. One of the Marines craned his neck to look out a cabin window, probably at the ranks of construction ’bots.

  “You lifted one of those?” he asked. He sounded doubtful. Kathy didn’t snap at him; I think she was thinking the same thing.

  “Yeah. My shoulders feel like they’ve been beaten with hammers, and my back is stiff as a life sentence.” I stretched a little. “I’ll live.”

  “You’ll get out of that suit and get cleaned up. Wu, look him over once he’s washed,” Kathy ordered. Wu—one of the Marines—saluted. He helped me out of my suit, but I drew the line at helping me shower. He might have. I got the impression that the Marines were willing to do just about anything Kathy—excuse me, “Commander Edwards”—might order. My feisty darling can be hard on people, but she get
s results.

  After the shower, I got some first aid. The ruts in my shoulders were mainly just deep bruises, nothing more. Wu slathered some gel over them and gave me a couple of pills for the backache. He and Tsien worked together to play chiropractor and align my spine again. I felt like Gulliver; I was a foot taller than either Tsien and Wu, and they were playing tug-of-war with me as the rope. But my back made all sorts of crackling sounds while they pulled and twisted and pushed. It hurt, but I also felt a lot better afterward. I was told to stay strapped into a seat and rest for a while.

  Not the best of times for it, though. We got to serious work immediately thereafter. Kathy’s plan was to land near the blast bunker, pick me up, load whatever fuel was available, and blast off for a short flight back to Luna Base. If I’d had more fuel, it would have worked out that way. As it was, the drums I had in the forward supply dump were no more than a sip compared with the Luna’s fuel-guzzling engines.

  “I figure we have about five seconds of maximum burn with our present fuel,” Kathy said, once she looked over her gauges. “That won’t get us very far with the wheels in this dust.”

  “Refigure it,” I said. “Assume we launch at an angle—you pick the angle—and don’t have to worry about dust. Don’t forget to save something for the landing; I don’t want to become a permanent part of the deck.”

  “Oh? And how do you propose to arrange that kind of liftoff? Going to hold the nose up while I twist the throttle?”

  I grinned. “You might ask Svetlana if she thinks I can do it. On second thought, don’t. She’s a prisoner, and I’m sure Captain Carl will want her alive.”

  Kathy pouted a little. I kissed the end of her nose.

  “My plan,” I continued, “is to use the robots. They’ll build you a ramp for launching. The electrics in the wheels can drive us up onto it, and then we can go ballistic. It’ll take a dozen hours, tops, with all the ’bots we have out there.”

  Kathy nodded, thoughtfully. “I’ll do the math.” She started on that while I went out and got the robots moving. I barely had them all started when she called me back inside.

  “Here’s our process,” she began. “We launch up your ramp with a short burn. We kiss our pitch thrusters to bring us level, then blast for base with full power. I keep enough in reserve to fire the belly thrusters and we just hope really hard that we don’t lose the landing gear.”

  “How likely is that?” I asked.

  “When I came in initially, I had it easy. By making my orbital contact a near-tangent, my closing velocity with the ground was only a few meters per second—ten or twelve, something like that. After doing the math, I can tell you we’re going to come down about three times as hard, unless we want to retract the gear and skip like a stone on a pond.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  Kathy gave me a look I recognized. It was the look I gave people when they didn’t know just how stupid their question was.

  “Aside from some severe guidance problems, once we reach what we have of a runway, it’s going to be tough going on the underside of the hull. On the other hand, if we can reach the runway section with our gear down, we can roll. If we absolutely have to, I’m sure you can get a squad of robots to push us the rest of the way as long as we have wheels.”

  “Hmm. Might work. I’ll see about reinforcing the landing gear. I’m not sure how, yet, but I’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to save a little fuel for cushioning the landing.”

  “Good idea. You’ve wrecked the bird twice. We don’t need a third time.”

  She didn’t really hurt me for that, but I groaned theatrically anyway.

  * * *

  The robots took a day and a half to build the ramp to Kathy’s specifications. I spent most of the time inside the Luna, but once the Sun lowered enough to give us some shade from the ringwall, I went outside with a few good men. Kathy wasn’t optimistic about reaching the base intact, so I lightened the load a bit more.

  What did we need the upper cargo doors for? Big, heavy things, each easily big enough to hide a full tractor-trailer rig underneath, and totally unnecessary in vacuum. Well, not totally; when closed and locked together, they added to the structural strength of the centerline. Kathy promised the centerline wasn’t the weak spot for landing, and I trusted her. The doors came off. It wasn’t worth it to dismount anything else; those were the heaviest things that could be removed while the ’bots were building a ramp.

  Once the doors were off, I started carving them up. The landing gear was badly pounded, so I started fixing what I could. I also welded some aluminum strips as fixed-mount shock absorbers. When the Luna pranged into the runway, the metal strips would bend and break to soak up some of the ship’s downward momentum.

  I figured it was better than having our gear rammed up through the deck.

  While we were outside, working on lightening the Luna and reinforcing her landing gear, Kathy had Svetlana in the main cabin. I wondered if that was really safe—safe for Svetlana, that is—but it was Kathy’s ship. It would look bad if the prisoner died by “accident.”

  When I came in, Kathy was sitting in the pilot’s seat and going over her figures again. Svetlana wasn’t on the bridge; I took a quick glance into the lower deck and didn’t see her immediately. I climbed into the co-pilot’s chair.

  “How’s the ship?” Kathy asked.

  “Lighter, and with springs in her shoes. As soon as the guys finish cycling in through the lock, we’re ready.”

  “Good.”

  “By the way, I noticed Svetlana wasn’t in the cargo bay.”

  Kathy didn’t bat an eye. “She can’t stay back there while we boost.”

  “You’ve also got a spot of blood on your cheek.”

  “What?” she asked, startled. She rubbed her hand along one side of her face and got it. She looked at the little smear of red and then wiped it into the thigh of her coverall. “It’s nothing.”

  “Uh-huh. So, what’s for dinner? Or aren’t you hungry?”

  “Silly. One itty-bitty throat isn’t a meal. Besides, I’m eating for two.”

  “Um. You’re kidding, right?”

  I asked because, while I was fairly sure, I wasn’t completely sure. She didn’t answer, but kept on with her preflight sequence.

  “Sweetie?” I prompted. “You are kidding… right?”

  “Of course,” she replied, and her eyes laughed at me. “She’s mostly unharmed.”

  “Mostly?” I echoed.

  “I asked her some questions about the base and their plans to take it,” Kathy amplified. “She didn’t want to answer all of them.”

  I felt something with lots of little cold feet crawl up my spine.

  “What have we learned?” I heard myself ask.

  “They’re civilians with a basic understanding of assassination,” she replied, and all trace of mirth vanished. “Captain Carl may be dead.”

  “He’s too tough to die,” I countered. “We’ll just have to bolt him back together, pump some blood into him, and give him his hundred-thousand-kilometer checkup.”

  “I hope you’re right, Max. Because—” she broke off and looked disturbed. I reached over and held her hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Max… I’m a commanding officer out of touch with superior command. If I felt it needful to summarily execute a traitor, I could, couldn’t I?” She sounded plaintive.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then why didn’t I?” she whispered. “I wanted to. I’ve wanted to kill her for a long time.”

  “Oh, that,” I said, relieved. “That’s easy.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Normal human beings do stuff like that. But you were deliberately designed without our faults, remember? That’s what you get for being a superior being, sweetheart.”

  She blinked at me, startled.

  “Are you seriously saying—”

  “Yep,” I replied, and started t
o strap down for the flight. “I said it before, didn’t I?”

  She stared at me for several seconds.

  “Maxwell Hardy, how in hell am I going to live up to that kind of expectation?”

  I glanced out the window. Stark sunlight harshly illuminated the distant peaks of the ringwall, while the shadow on the ground was night-black and inky.

  “Well, we’re in Hell,” I quipped. “That’s a start. Besides, if you were any closer to perfect, you’d need wings. Oh!” I stopped, pretending startlement. “Wait, you do fly like an angel…”

  “That’s a hummingbird, you overgrown plumber!” she fired back, but she smiled as she said it. “You make it hard for me to stay worried.”

  “Deliberately,” I admitted. “I love you. It goes with the whole husband thing. Besides, you’ve got to fly this heap, and a pilot needs confidence.” She punched me in the arm, then thumbed the intercom.

  “All hands, stand by to lift.” There were shouts of “Ready!” from the lower deck; four of the Marines hurried up the ladderway to belt in. I presumed the other two were strapped down in bunks; I knew Galena was, and hopefully Svetlana was, as well.

  “So,” I asked, looking over the figures, “how far are we going to get?”

  “We’ll be walking for a while,” she admitted, “but I’m more concerned with getting inside the base. What if they hold the airlock?”

  “By ‘they,’ you mean ‘the hypothetical rebels’?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that’s easy.”

  She glanced at me while her hands moved through her preflight sequence. The Luna hummed and rolled, driven by the electric motors until she was on the ramp.

  “Well?” Kathy demanded.

  “Well, what?”

  “How are we going to take the airlock?”

  “You fly the ship,” I assured her. “I’ll get us in.”

  “I should order you to tell me,” she griped.

  “Probably. But it’s a human weakness, this ‘love’ thing. I guess you aren’t perfect, after all.”

  Kathy hit the throttle and we shot up the ramp. The grin on her face might have been from a couple of gravities of acceleration, but I doubt it.