by Rick Partlow
“Look,” she began in what sounded a lot to him like a preemptive strike, “I know this is a complicated situation: you’re an officer, I’m an NCO, we sometimes work together. If this is going to just be a little fun for now, something we just let go if and when things go back to normal, I want you to know that I’m okay with that…”
Franks interrupted her by covering her mouth with his, one hand on her neck as he kissed her passionately. When he broke the kiss, she slowly let out a deep breath.
“I like you, Tanya,” he told her honestly and simply.
She smiled. It was a very nice smile, he thought. You could get used to a smile like that.
“I like you, too,” she replied.
“Then let’s just see what happens,” he concluded, caressing her cheek with the back of his hand. “Right now, though, we should get a shower---we gotta fly.”
Tanya Manning stood on the edge of a thirty story drop and tried not to look down. At the horizon, the sky seemed blue, but that was an illusion, she knew, due to the refractory nature of the polarizing tint of the dome material. Beyond the dome was the eternal blackness and harsh, glaring sunlight of the Lunar day; but under Roshni Dome was a never-never wonderland of two hundred-meter-tall trees and slender, curving, impossible buildings that could only exist in the moon’s tenth of a gravity.
“Sometimes,” she said to Franks as she strapped on her wings, “I wonder how the hell this place ever got built. It had to cost a fortune and they can’t possibly make that back from tourism, can they?”
“Yeah, well, I read up on this place when I found out we’d be coming here,” he said, glancing over from his own rigging process. “It was supposed to be luxury housing for the engineers and specialists and administrators for the old tritium and silica mines. Three different Multicorps teamed up to build it---it was gonna be called ‘Shackleton City,’ ‘cause this used to be Shackleton Crater.” He chuckled as he pulled a strap across his chest and buckled it.
“Right about the time they finished the dome, the new hydrogen-boron fusion reactors came online and the demand for tritium on Earth went through the floor. The Lunar mines shut down, everyone lost a bundle and this,” he nodded upward at the dome, “was holding forty kilometers across and two deep of a whole lot of nothing for ten years. Then Shahrukh Roshni bought the installation for pennies on the dollar and turned it into an off-Earth vacation-land. His family owned a bunch of genetic research firms in the food production business, and he used their labs to make the trees and animals designed to live in low gravity.” Franks paused to settle his goggles over his eyes, adjusting the strap carefully.
“And since he’d bought the place so cheap, he could afford to make it cheap enough to let everyone have a spot here, from the corporate ultra-rich to guys like you and me.”
He shot her a grin and pressed a control with his thumb, sending the humming snap of a current through the electrically active polymer of his wings that locked them out rigid for four meters to either side of him. “Ready to fly?”
She shook her head and extended her own wings. “Tell me again why this is necessary?” she muttered.
“Because,” he reminded her, nodding out at the group that had launched ahead of them who were already soaring high above the lake below, “this is what young couples do when they vacation here…and it’s a good way to get where we’re going without a whole bunch of tourists seeing our faces.” He laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re scared, Master Sergeant…”
“Fuck you, sir,” she snapped, then threw herself off the platform.
Air grabbed at the wings immediately and she felt herself soaring upward in a feeling that was familiar and yet totally different than her experience using similar wings in training on Earth. And of course, the biggest difference was what happened when she squeezed the grip control in her right hand: the small motor in the light backpack that controlled the wings sent currents through different segments of the material and augmented her own musculature as she flapped hard, feeling the lift from the motion.
She tried to remind herself that she was here on business, and that the events of the day would probably conclude with her in jail and her career in ruins, but all she could think was: no reason not to have fun with it. She brought the wings down straight to her sides and cut the current, sending herself into a dive straight down from her thousand meter altitude, feeling the cool wind rushing through her short hair and tugging playfully at the edges of her mouth. She was falling like a dart towards the surface of the artificial lake and she was low enough to see the faces of the passengers on the sailboats there before she extended her wings their full length and began flapping in long, strong strokes.
She leveled off only meters from the surface of the water and began climbing again, swiveling her head back and forth as she watched carefully for other flyers. She snorted to herself. Drew can stick that in his hat, she thought with some satisfaction. Scared, my ass.
Then she saw a blur somewhere over her left shoulder, just a bit too far out of her peripheral vision to make out what it was, and suddenly a pair of wings swooped by her into a tight loop, whipping through it to come level just above her and to her left.
“This is definitely not better than sex,” Drew Franks yelled to her, grinning broadly, “but it’s a close second!”
“Show-off!” she called back to him, but she couldn’t help laughing. He looked very much the little boy at play.
She flew alongside him at an altitude of around a thousand meters for several minutes, just drinking in the experience, trying to forget for just a while why they were there and what the stakes were. It couldn’t last forever though, and it seemed an eyeblink before the far side of the dome began to loom large before her and she followed Franks in a gradual descent towards well-tended parkland.
Other recreational flyers were landing there, most awkwardly with stumbles and mild crashes but a few with practiced ease. As she and Franks glided in, Manning watched carefully for the technique of the ones who’d landed correctly and tried to emulate them. She flared the wings only a meter from the ground and managed to touch down lightly on the balls of her feet, catching her balance with a few quick steps and somehow managing not to spring back into the air when she misjudged due to the one-sixth gravity.
Franks came down next to her, actually managing to hover for a few seconds only centimeters above the plush grass, the powerful beat of his wings creating a wind that tugged at her hair, before lighting like some great bird of prey. He was still wearing the same child-at-play smile as he pulled off his goggles and began stripping off the wing segments.
All around them, other tourists were doing the same, as dome employees swarmed in and out, gathering the discarded equipment and loading it into automated carts that ran back to what Manning supposed were storage bins for shipment back to the launching stations. As she divested herself of her gear, Manning saw another, smaller group of flyers coming in, circling the field in a tight pattern before each came down in a hover that made Franks’ maneuver look amateurish.
As they landed, she could see that they were all over two meters tall, with skinny arms and legs and almost ridiculously oversized pectorals and lats. She knew who they were…or what they were, at any rate.
Here on the Moon, human-powered flight was a reality for some people: professional athletes and fanatic hobbyists who walked around with upper back muscles bulging from either intense exercise or bodysculpting, or both. They could do this without the motor and the electric currents. The tourists cheated and used the technological crutches and she could tell from the dismissive sneers openly worn on the faces of the men and women landing around them exactly what their opinion was of that technology.
She shrugged them off and stepped over to Franks. “Where to now?” she asked.
“The rental place is this way,” he told her, heading off through a row of topiary sculpted into dancing fairies.
Past the topiary was a grove of impossibly tall and
thin trees, their first branches not appearing until thirty meters up their smooth trunks. Walking among the trees were creatures from a dream, or a fantasy painting: genetically engineered giraffes, modified for one sixth gravity, their necks an incredible twenty meters long, their legs half that length. There were four of the animals, plodding along with a slow-motion grace, idly snatching a mouthful of leaves from the lower branches of the impossible trees.
“Wow,” Manning muttered almost involuntarily, and she could hear Franks whistle softly.
They moved past the trees and finally past the parkland, to a less picturesque part of the domed-over crater where the maintenance and storage facilities were located. Even those were made of buildfoam camouflaged as Lunar regolith, but the illusion was shattered on a regular basis by the opening and closing of access doors and the emergence of battery-powered service carts.
Franks led her to a building that seemed as generic as any of the others, but for an obvious door rather than a concealed one. It slid aside at his push on the security plate and they stepped into the dimmer light of the interior. It took Manning’s eyes a moment to adjust, and when they did she could scarcely believe them. The building had been fairly small on the outside, but inside it she found herself on a broad ramp that ran downward gradually into a broad, low-ceilinged chamber that went on as far as she could see, dug into the floor of the crater.
Dozens of vehicles were parked on the paved surface of the cavern floor, from open-seated, three-wheeled cycles to a couple large VTOL flyers with vectored-thrust chemical rockets. Here and there, technicians dressed in the uniform green shirt and purple shorts of the resort swarmed over the odd vehicle, performing repairs and maintenance. A few other guests were in the chamber as well: over at the far wall, a couple was being fitted with vacc suits; while another pair, already suited up, were climbing into an open four-wheeled groundcar.
“Welcome to the vehicle rental center, Tanya,” an automated---but very natural sounding---voice sounded in Manning’s ear bud. She had to assume Franks was getting a similar message, given the slight shift in the focus of his eyes. “Please step to station one for your suit fitting before we show you to your vehicle.”
Manning expected more of the gaudily dressed employees to greet them at the suit racks, but instead they were presented with a red box lit up on the floor near the racks and a transmitted instruction to “Please step into the red square one at a time to be scanned for your suit fit.”
Franks nodded to her to go first. She shrugged and took up position in the square, a few meters from a motorized rack of vacc suits that ran on an oval track about fifty meters long. She half expected a light or a noise or some other indication she was being scanned, but there was only a few moments of silence and then the hanging suits began moving past her with a hum of electric motors until they stopped abruptly, and the one closest to her extended out from the rest on a telescoping arm.
“Please put on and seal your complimentary vacc suit and then you’ll be shown to your rental vehicle,” the voice said in her ear.
Manning’s eyebrow went up as she looked at the suit, decorated in the same gaudy green and purple as the uniforms of the resort employees.
“Does this come in black?” she asked doubtfully.
“All of our complimentary vacc suits come equipped with chameleon circuits that allow the user to select their own color scheme,” the automated voice replied cheerfully.
“Thank God,” she breathed, pulling the suit off the rack while Franks stepped into the square to be scanned.
“There’s a twelve hour air supply in the suit tanks,” the resort AI’s voice continued in her ear bud as she pulled the suit on and strapped it down. It would have weighed over a hundred kilos on Earth, especially with the life support backpack, but here it felt very manageable. “Once you are sealed inside the pressurized crawler, you may, of course, unseal your suit; however, the vehicle’s airlock will not open unless it receives a signal from your suits that your helmets are sealed.”
Yes, mother, Manning thought cynically. She had spent years in the watch-your-own-ass atmosphere of Special Operations, and it was a shock to the system to be back in the Big Mother, hold-your-hand civilian world.
She sealed her helmet and looked over to see Franks doing the same.
“Now that you’ve both got your suits on,” the voice said, “follow the red icon on your helmet’s Heads-Up Display to your chosen rental vehicle.”
She bit back the snide remark she’d been about to make imploring Franks to kill her now, morally certain that the AI would consider it a threat of suicide and remand her to psych custody. Instead, she just walked beside the Intelligence officer across the expanse of gray pavement, letting him locate the rover while she toyed with the readout screen at the wrist of the vacc suit until she came across the chameleon controls. A slide of her finger and she saw the surface of her suit going from bright green and purple to a dull grey and then darker into flat black.
By the time she looked up, they were walking up on a large, silver-grey, lozenge shaped tracked vehicle, its side hatch open and a ramp extended. She’d half-expected it to be the same ugly color scheme as the suits and uniforms, but the green and purple were only present in a rainbow design on the right rear of the rover. The two of them bounded easily up the ramp, the weight of the vacc suit actually making walking in the low gravity a bit more natural for Manning.
The interior of the vehicle was well appointed, with well cushioned seats large enough to easily accommodate their bulky vacc suits and a full size airlock that took up most of the rear compartment. The inner walls were padded as thickly as the chairs, and everything was in pleasantly neutral browns and greens.
Manning moved to the driver’s seat and Franks fell into the chair next to hers, pulling up a navigation system while she started the rover’s electric motor with a touch of a control surface.
“Please follow the route being projected on your helmet’s HUD,” the resort’s AI instructed. “Your speed will be restricted to 40 kilometers an hour until you reach the vehicle lock.”
Lord Jesus, she thought, grinding her teeth, tell me there’s some way to turn that damned thing off.
“Just get us out of the lock, Tanya,” Franks said, seemingly reading her thoughts. “I’ll take care of it.”
Their route was projected in her helmet and on the front screen of the vehicle as parallel red lines that directed her to take the rover into one of a dozen tunnels cut into the far side of the chamber. The passage was plenty wide enough for the rover---it was a good ten meters across and nearly as high---but she felt an irrational surge of panic at the closeness of the smooth, plasma-carved walls, illuminated only by strips of chemical ghostlight. She wished she could punch the accelerator and get through the seemingly endless tunnel, but she was restricted to a sedate 40kph.
The walls crawled by a centimeter at a time and after what seemed like hours, she could just barely make out a circle of darkness at the end of the tunnel.
Which, she supposed sardonically to herself, isn’t quite as desirable as light at the end of the tunnel, but I’ll take what I can get.
Finally, the dark circle began to grow larger until it had become the shadowed inner hatch of a huge airlock the size of the tunnel itself. The vehicle slowed automatically as the hatch slowly parted in the middle and slid aside, then the rover creeped into the airlock on computer control. Manning switched part of the screen to the rear cameras and saw the lock door shutting behind them and the interior lights began to flash red.
“Lock evacuating,” the computer announced. “Please keep your suits sealed until we confirm vehicle integrity.”
Once the air had been sucked from the lock, the indicators turned green and the outer lock slid silently aside. Manning sighed with relief and pushed the accelerator, taking the rover out of the shadow of the tunnel mouth and off the paved surface onto the rolling dunes of Lunar regolith.
“Wow,” Franks murmured,
looking out the front screen.
Manning couldn’t help but agree. She’d done low gravity training on the Moon, but that had been years ago, and mostly indoors at the old Fleet base that had been destroyed by the last Protectorate attack. She’d never been out on the surface like this…
The grey expanse of regolith extended nearly as far as she could see in front of them, lit bright to almost white where the sun struck it and plunged into total darkness in the shadows of craters or outcropping of rocks exposed in some millennia-old meteor impact. Rising in the east and west were mountain peaks that glittered in the unfiltered sunlight from the dozens of solar collectors emplaced there to provide power for the crater resort.
But what drew her gaze and Franks’ awe-inspired comment was the circle of the Earth hanging in the darkness above them. She’d seen the planet from orbit before, of course, but this was different somehow. Even in star systems light years away, she’d never felt this far from home.
“All right,” Franks said, unsealing his helmet and setting it aside, then pulling his ‘link off the exterior belt of his vacc suit. He set the ‘link on the dashboard of the rover and then set the vehicle’s onboard systems to synch with the device.
Manning brought the rover to a halt and removed her own helmet as she watched him call up the ‘link’s holographic control display, the interface projected just above the compact device. He reached into the interface and pulled out a subroutine, dumping it into the rover’s operating system. He silently monitored the progress of the program then finally turned to her, grinning.
“We’re good,” he said. “I’ve got my ‘link spoofing the security sensors on this bucket. It’ll insert a simulation of a sightseeing course and loop a video recording of us sitting in the car and making ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ comments.”
“What about our helmet computers?” she wanted to know.
“The rover’s systems are synched with them,” he assured her. “We’re invisible unless someone bothers to walk out here and look.”
