by Rick Partlow
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said dryly, pressing down on the accelerator. The rover surged forward, bouncing slightly as they passed over a rise. “Head for the mountains?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Once we get around the other side, we can head for the biomech facility.”
“Wish we could have smuggled in some weapons,” she muttered. “I feel naked.”
“There shouldn’t be any human security,” Franks said with a shrug. “The regs say only automated security. The only humans allowed inside are maintenance inspectors. Besides,” he winked at her, “I like you naked.”
She shot him a bird, but smiled as she did it. “I’m not quite as sanguine as you about what should be and what shouldn’t be,” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong, Tanya,” he told her, “I’m fairly certain that everything is going to be completely FUBAR when we get there. But there’s not much we can do to change it at this point, right?”
Manning looked at him for a moment, shaking her head. “I have to admit, I still don’t get you, Drew.”
“What’s to get?” he wondered. “I’m not that hard to figure out.”
“You come across as kind of an arrogant prick,” she told him honestly, eyes going back to the terrain in front of them. “But I know you’re not. I kind of knew from the beginning that you weren’t, and I definitely know now. And you’re the most competent field officer I’ve ever worked with---I mean, I never had the chance to work with Major Shamir, but I’ve run ops with everyone else. And they didn’t give you The Medal for nothing…so,” she wondered, “why the attitude?”
Franks was silent for a long moment, seemingly considering how to answer her.
“I was pretty young and pretty green when I won The Medal and got bumped to Captain,” he told her. “And to be honest, I look even younger than I am. So, I figured, why fight it? Everyone expected me to be a self-absorbed know-it-all punk…”
“And if that’s what they think you are,” she finished, smiling with the realization, “then they’ll constantly be underestimating you.”
“Basically,” he agreed. He shrugged. “I don’t usually talk about it.”
“It wouldn’t be much of a secret weapon if you talked about it,” she said. “But doesn’t it get old, everyone thinking about you that way?”
“The people that I care what they think don’t think that,” he said quietly.
“So,” she asked, smiling as she tried to lighten things up, “is the constant cheerfulness part of the act too?”
“What’s not to be cheerful about?” he asked her, waving a hand expansively. “I’m a fucking secret agent wandering around on the Moon, doing exactly what I’ve been wanting to do since I was a teenager! Damn, Tanya, aren’t you having a good time?”
She chuckled softly. I could fall hard for this guy, she thought.
“Yes, Drew,” she answered his question. “I’m definitely having a good time.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Not much to look at, is it?”
“Hmm?” Caitlyn Carr grunted, jarred from her reverie by the question.
She looked away from the shuttle viewport with its projection of the Republic Spacefleet Lunar Defense Base and across the aisle at the blue-uniformed Fleet officer who had spoken to her. He was a pleasant-looking sort, a Commander if she remembered her rank insignia correctly, with close-cropped brown hair and dark, earnest eyes.
“The base,” he clarified, nodding towards the screen. “Not much to see from out here, I was saying.”
“Oh,” she said, glancing back at the screen. She hadn’t actually been looking at it: she’d been staring into nothing while she debated yet again whether she’d done the right thing coming here.
Looking now, she had to admit that the officer was correct. Their cislunar shuttle was descending from orbit and was less than two kilometers up, and from there the base looked like a giant mound of newly-turned dirt. Most of the ongoing construction was underground, but here and there she could see heavy equipment crawling around the base, and occasionally a flare of plasma where Lunar regolith was being hardened. The only structure she could make out clearly was the landing pad that was at the edge of a large tunnel mouth leading into the base.
“No,” she agreed with the man, smiling pleasantly, “I don’t suppose it is. But then, it’s not finished, right?”
“I’m Sergio,” he said abruptly, extending a hand across the aisle. “Sergio Cahn.”
She shook his hand politely, feeling her safety restraints tugging at her shoulders. “Caitlyn Carr,” she returned.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, nodding. “I’m here to help with the construction,” he said conversationally, pointing at the castle symbol below the rank insignia on his chest: it meant that he was with the Fleet Corps of Engineers, she remembered.
“Taking quite a while, isn’t it?” she asked. “I mean, didn’t they start almost four years ago?”
“Less than three years ago actually,” he said, a bit defensively she thought. “There was a lot of debate about where to build the base: they couldn’t locate it where the original one had been because the crust is still too unstable from the Protectorate ramships impacting it at relativistic velocities.” He frowned. “Then the Senate wasted months holding up the funding trying to force President Jameson to change his position on…”
“So, politics then?” she surmised, interrupting his tirade, putting a friendly smile on it to soften the blow.
“Yes, quite, sorry,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Didn’t mean to go off on a tangent there. So, what brings you to our little work project?”
“Oh, I’m afraid I’m the enemy, Sergio,” she confided, giving him her cover story. “I’m with the Executive Accounting Office. I’m here to check on budget overruns.”
“Oh sweet Vishnu,” he moaned, closing his eyes with feigned despair. “Not more bean counters!”
“Sorry,” she said, turning up her hands. “Just doing my job.”
“Well, if you get bored running numbers while you’re here,” he said, “give me a call…my name’s in the base directory. Maybe we can grab some dinner.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” she told him, flattered by the interest but also feeling a hint of trepidation: being noticed wasn’t why she was here.
Why the hell am I here? She wondered morosely.
She was following orders, of course…and what had she said to Drew Franks about following orders?
But if I hadn’t come, she reasoned, they would have just sent someone else.
In the viewscreen, the shuttle descended towards the moon base with depressing inevitability.
* * *
“There it is,” Franks commented, nodding towards the starburst glare of the sun off the solar collectors just a few kilometers ahead.
“Why does everyone here use solar?” Manning wondered idly. “Seems a lot more fragile and vulnerable than a fusion reactor.”
“It’s free energy and it’s a lot cheaper to build and maintain,” Franks reminded her. “The defense base uses fusion because they don’t want to lose power if someone blows up their solar collectors, but commercial installations aren’t as worried about that sort of thing.” He pointed to a spot on the map projected on the viewscreen’s HUD. “Take us into the shadow of that ridge. We’ll leave the rover there where it can’t be seen from orbit.”
“A walk on the moon,” she mused, pushing down on the accelerator. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
The rover swayed gently, its suspension absorbing the bouncing from small rocks and rolling dunes as she took the vehicle closer to the edge of the ridge where the solar collectors were located. The grey wall grew quickly in the viewscreen until it loomed over them in shadow-clad malice. Manning slowed the rover, feeling the ride grow rougher as they began encountering boulders that had splintered from the cliff face.
Finally she steered them into a shadowed alcove, coming up h
ard against the restraints a couple times as the rover tilted nearly 45 degrees travelling over debris. She settled into a more level area only a few meters from the rock wall, then looked to Franks. At his nod, she cut the motor and they both unstrapped from their seats and secured their helmets in place.
“Ready?” Franks asked her, hand hovering over the airlock control.
“Good seal,” she responded, giving him a thumbs-up.
He cycled them both through the lock, the noises of the interior of the rover fading as the air was sucked out of the chamber. Once it was gone, Manning could only hear her own breathing inside the helmet as she watched the outer door swing silently downward into a ramp.
“The map says fifteen klicks,” she said, stepping gingerly onto the powdery, yielding surface. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
“An hour, maybe a bit more,” he told her. “We could make it in less, but moving fast in low gravity takes training and experience that neither of us really has; and anyway, I’m not too comfortable about the durability of these commercial suits, so I’d rather not chance a fall in one of them.”
“Let’s get going then,” she said, synching her helmet’s HUD with her ‘link and pulling up the map to the facility.
Her first few steps were tentative as she tried to get used to the mass of the vacc suit matched up with the Lunar gravity and the packed-sand consistency of the regolith beneath her feet. But after a few minutes, she was stepping quickly in small, careful bounds that took her over a meter with each step. She wasn’t even breathing hard, but the pace was eating up ground quickly, and she began to feel comfortable enough with it to actual take a good look around her.
She’d been off Earth several times these last few years, training or running ops on the new colonies accessible through the gates, but this was different somehow. The harsh glare of the sun with no atmosphere to filter it, the shadows that seemed to stream from everything not flat to the ground, and most of all the ever-present glow of their homeworld hanging above them made it seem much more surreal and fantastic. Together with the gravity and the dreamlike motion of their passage, she could almost believe this was some ViR simulation rather than reality.
“You still in there, Tanya?” she heard Franks’ voice coming over her ear bud and realized that he’d called her more than once.
“Yeah, sorry,” she muttered. “Kind of let it hypnotize me.”
She checked the elapsed time in the corner of her HUD and fought back an exclamation as she saw that they’d been walking for over a half hour and covered over seven kilometers.
“Easy to do out here,” he said. “We were just drifting a little to the left.”
Manning saw what he meant: their route was illustrated on her HUD via a pair of parallel lines and they were all the way past the edge of the left hand one. She pushed off with her left foot and headed back towards the ridge that was a few hundred meters away off to the right.
“So Tanya,” Franks said conversationally, “tell me something. I’ve seen your file---your intelligence test scores are higher than mine; and mine are pretty damn impressive, if I do say so myself. You had some college courses and weren’t that far away from a degree. So, why did you enlist instead of trying to go through OCS or even get into the Academy?”
She chuckled lightly, glancing aside automatically even though she couldn’t see him. “You trying to keep me from drifting off again?” she asked him.
“Naw,” he said, still sounding casual. “Just curious.”
“If you looked at my file,” she answered him, “then you know about my father.”
“Captain Manning was a very good officer, from what I’ve heard,” Franks said, and she could hear the cautious respect in his tone.
“He was that,” Manning agreed softly. “He wasn’t a great dad, but he was a great example.” She paused, concentrating on her stride as she had to skip over a rock. “When he died in the Protectorate attack on Fleet Headquarters, I had to…I don’t know, do something, and do it right away.” She shook her head slightly, unconsciously. “I didn’t want to plan, didn’t want to think, I just wanted to do something. You get what I’m saying?”
“I guess I do,” he said, and she could hear a grin in his voice. “I might have had that mindset once or twice myself.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “I enjoyed it: less clerical work, less political bullshit than being an officer. I just did things…even more after I got into Special Ops. I mean, look at Colonel Mahoney, sitting in an office while I’m walking on the moon, sneaking into a secure facility.” Her mouth quirked up at the corner. “What, you want me to become an officer so we can hook up without breaking regulations?”
“Technically,” he mused, “we’re not breaking regulations since we’re not in the same chain of command. But I think you could accomplish a lot as an officer. I mean, do you wanna’ be yelling at trainees in the Spec Ops qualification course when you’re forty and topped out at Sergeant-Major? You’ll still be dealing with politics and clerical work and you won’t have as big a say in making policy as you would if you were a Colonel, which you could be by age forty if you went to OCS now.”
She opened her mouth to disagree by reflex, the same way she had for years whenever her mother had broached the subject, but hesitated. He was dead right about her topping out in a few more years; and even though Sergeants-Major were powerful in their own demesnes, they were still NCOs and would never have the real power that someone like General McKay or Colonel Stark had. She used to think that wasn’t important to her, but something about this whole operation had changed her mind, and she didn’t think it was just her relationship with Franks.
She was used to being the strong right arm of policy; but in Alaska, watching the Homeworld Guard troops bully and kill innocent civilians, she’d felt like a helpless pawn. That was probably why she’d been so ready to jump on this op, despite the risk. The risk…yeah, there was that. It would be hard to attend OCS from prison.
“I’ll tell you what,” she promised Franks, “if we somehow manage to come through all this alive and not in separate cells somewhere, I’ll talk to Colonel Mahoney about OCS.”
“Awesome,” Franks said, actually sounding happy for her. “From the map, I think we’re getting close enough that we should go to EM silence. If we need to talk from here on, we should stop and touch helmets.”
“Roger that,” she acknowledged.
An interminable time passed in silence before Manning could see the reflection of the sun off the white-grey surface of the multiple hemispheres on the horizon. The domes looked impossibly distant, like they would take hours to reach, but in only a few more minutes the structures seemed to rush up to meet them and she was able to pick out the details of the place. An elevated landing platform was built into the side of the largest of the domes: that was where the biomechs were loaded onto cislunar cargo shuttles for shipment to Earth or the colonies.
She headed for the base of the landing platform and in a few hundred meters more, she saw their destination: a recessed emergency access ladder built into the side of the structure. If the facility were manned, this would never work; but the disadvantage of automated security systems was that they didn’t make intuitive leaps. If their ID’s showed they were authorized to be there, the computers wouldn’t wonder why they’d arrived without a vehicle.
As she approached closer, the building grew even larger, much bigger than she’d imagined it would be, looming over her in antiseptic menace. In its shadow, she felt terribly exposed, a prairie dog on the plains watching for red tail hawks. She shook the feelings off and made her way along the packed regolith that lined the edge of the foundation until she was just under the access ladder, the first rung two meters above her head.
She bent down at the hips and launched herself upward, feeling a bit of surprise and alarm as she wound up sailing over a meter past the bottom rung of the ladder. She managed to catch one of the rungs on the way back down, then had to
feel around for footholds before she was secure enough to start moving upward. She had moved up only two or three meters before she felt a vibration in the metal surface of the rungs and knew that Franks had launched himself onto the lower portion of the ladder and was following her up.
She quickly discovered that there were few things as awkward as climbing a ladder in a vacc suit. You couldn’t crane your neck upward or downward, so you couldn’t see either where you were going or where you’d been. Her only view was the dull grey surface of the landing platform’s foundation and the ladder rungs right in front of her face, and she had to work by feel the whole hundred-meter climb.
This thing must not get used much, she thought, or they’d redesign it.
What really made her nervous was the thought that anything at all could be waiting at the top of the climb and she’d never know till it was too late. Still, by about halfway up she’d developed a rhythm that seemed to put her hands and feet in the right place automatically and she tried to concentrate on that rather than the thought of their vulnerability. Finally, she felt above her and her hand landed on a level surface. She scrambled up onto the surface of the landing platform, letting out a relieved sigh as she saw that it was unoccupied by either shuttles or personnel. She glanced back for a moment to make sure that Franks was still ascending behind her before continuing to survey their surroundings.
Across the broad, pitted landing pad she saw the insulated, armored circle of the cargo lock, the retractable collar that could dock with the shuttles folded back into a circular recess that ringed the massive lock. Well off to the side was a smaller, auxiliary airlock about two meters square and it was toward this that she headed.
There obviously couldn’t be any biometric security on an outer lock in a vacuum, so access was controlled by special, secure codes stored on their ‘links. She hit the switch on the control panel to open the outer door and it slid aside automatically upon receiving confirmation from both their datalinks. Franks stepped into the lock beside her and hit the interior control to close the door and cycle the lock.
