The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  The camera image zoomed in on the crushed helmet. The crew finished sliding the rigid body from the cylinder, a tight fit. They weren’t being particularly careful.

  “We’ve got to get that ice melted and in-tank,” Garver said. “Sorry if they’re screwing up your crime scene.”

  “My crime scene?”

  “You’re the only cop I’ve got.”

  I shook my head. “I went out there as a favor, Tom, gave you my professional opinion, but I’m not a marshal anymore.”

  “I know. I did my research,” Garver said, taking up his pipe. “You got laid off fourteen months ago.”

  “I got fired.”

  Childs had done a real smear job, made sure my name was deeply buried in the mud. I hadn’t even been able to get a private security job, at a time when companies were begging for former cops.

  That was why I’d taken the moon job with LTC. They were so desperate they’d hire almost anyone.

  “Want to get back at Childs?” Garver’s hands seemed to move on their own accord, as he packed tobacco into the pipe.

  “How could—”

  “I know people who owe me favors,” he said.

  “But—”

  He waved away my words. “I always do my research, I know what he did to you. You handle this for me, you’ll be back on Earth. Full benefits, your jacket cleared. If that’s what you want.”

  I felt as if I’d been pushed off safe footing into deep water. My father was a cop, his father before him, too. Working law enforcement had been the only thing I’d ever wanted, had ever done. Having to deal with the loss of my badge, not being able to land another law enforcement job, almost killed me.

  “You okay?” Garver asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Suck it up, kid, my father used to say.

  “You want your job back?”

  “Yeah.”

  Garver nodded. “Five deaths in two years in orbit. All verifiable accidents. The surface rate’s been higher, but that’s mining for you.”

  He tapped the screen with his pipe stem. “But this . . . this was no accident and the notion of murder pisses me off no end. I want to catch whoever did it. Even more I want to get my hands on whoever thinks he can mess with my schedule.”

  “Has there been other sabotage?”

  Garver frowned. “Four times I’m sure of. Others, maybe. I don’t run the show down there, so I don’t see all the paperwork. There’s been money lost, project down-time and injuries. Never murder, though.”

  “Could it have been the Russians?” I asked.

  “Naw. The military types on Selene Station watch the Reds pretty close. Besides, they’re way too busy with their own Mars ship down in low-earth orbit.”

  He glanced at me. “You see it?”

  I knew what he wanted to hear. “Ugliest thing I ever saw.”

  Garver nodded. “It’s different design philosophy. Brute-force but proven tech. They don’t have nuclear thermal engines, so it’s LOX-hydrogen for the trip out. Hypergolics for the ride home, dump everything and land in a couple of Soyuz capsules.”

  He paused to try to light the pipe. The match went out before it caught.

  “Why did we go with nuclear engines?” I asked.

  Garver shrugged. “Hell if I know, I’m not that kind of engineer. The way I hear it, nukes increase specific impulse, so you use less fuel.”

  He struck another match without success.

  “And building the ship here in low lunar orbit cuts even more reaction mass, compared to LEO,” he said. “No cryogenics means simpler tankage and so on. Mining metals and water on the moon’s cheaper than fifty, sixty Saturn launches to LEO. It’s all supposed to save time and money.”

  “How’s that worked out so far?” I asked.

  Garver grinned. “Who can say? Will American free enterprise beat the godless Communists? Not my department. My job’s to make sure this crate’s in shape to leave orbit New Year’s Day.”

  He paused and drew a breath. “What were we talking about?”

  “The miners,” I said.

  “Yeah. Old story. Work conditions suck. They don’t get paid enough, don’t get to go home enough. They want a union.”

  I remembered growing up in eastern Kentucky coal country, watching my friends’ fathers come home from work too tired to scrub the blackness from their skin before they fell into bed. Seeing retired miners, old men before their time, slumped on dilapidated porches next to green bottles of oxygen. Appalachian astronauts.

  “Will they get a union?”

  Garver fiddled with his pipe, not looking at me. “Someday,” he said. “We can’t afford one now.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  He spread his hands. “Laura, I sympathize with them. My old man was shop steward for his ship fitter’s local at the Philly Navy Yard during the big war. He built the ships and I was a swabbie sailing on one of them.”

  This time he looked me in the eye. “Pop could sing The Internationale as well as Debs, but he knew there was a war to be won. Just like now, except the war’s cold.

  “I hate having to act like a company asshole, but I’ve got a fast ship to build and I’m sending it in harm’s way. I’ve got to know if there’s more trouble coming at me from the Moon.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Go down there. Poke around and stir the pot. Find out who’s screwing with me. I don’t care what you have to do. Just fix it. I’ve got thirty-six days until launch.”

  Garver glanced at his wristwatch.

  “Speaking of time, let’s get you back. Drop’s three hours and . . . twenty-seven minutes.

  “A scheduled truckload. Six engines, you and a guy named Anderson. I expect you know him from the training classes. They’re expecting you, know you used to be a cop, but they know you’ve been through training, too.”

  “Understood.”

  He studied me for a moment. “Schedule’s tight, but I can give you a little time to think it over.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t need to think about it, Tom. I’m in.”

  Garver grinned. “I like a woman who knows her mind.”

  “So let’s get going,” I said.

  He rubbed at his crew cut. “Just one thing—”

  “Go on. I don’t bite.”

  Garver shook his head. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  I raised my hand, palm out and fingers up. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  He shook his head. “Look, I’m old school. My pop taught me to take care of women, years ago before ERA became the law.”

  “I said I’d be all right.”

  “Don’t get your Irish up,” he said. “Just be careful.”

  I laid my hand on his shoulder. “You sound like my old man. It’s sweet.”

  “Make fun of an old man all you like, but I mean it. I’ve read your jacket, Laura, know what you’ve done. I’ll bet you’re hell-on-wheels. But so was Leatherman, the other cop I sent.”

  He glanced at the monitor. The camera remained focused on the stove-in helmet. I tipped my chin toward the image. “That was Leatherman?”

  “Yeah.”

  He struck another match and sucked on his pipe. It wouldn’t catch. He tossed it at the desk, where it bounced back. He grabbed it without looking. “I don’t know why I bother with that thing. Keeping it lit in zero gee’s a bitch.”

  I checked my harness one more time. The soles of my feet tingled. My stomach fluttered.

  Getting ready to take a no-frills ride.

  Another suited figure stood opposite me, focusing on the harness, too. Around us, six recovered ascent engines had been strapped to the open platform of the landing truck, flaring expansion nozzles almost touching.

  No pressurized cabin, no flight couches. No one who’d done the drop before to hold our hands and tell us not to worry. America’s Lunar Technologies Consortium didn’t spend a dollar when a penny was enough. I know Armstrong and Aldrin lan
ded standing up, too. They had walls, though, but LTC had studies that said walls were unnecessary mass.

  Someone with a nasty sense of humor had named the truck, marked it in big, red letters sprayed on its side. Thumper.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of other things.

  The ride up to earth orbit came to mind. Six men and women crammed into a stripped Apollo capsule like stacked bodies in a morgue, going into space in a claustrophobic can. In Low Earth Orbit we had transferred to the cislunar tug for another two days to lunar orbit.

  As I waited, I wondered if I’d signed up on the wrong side once again. When I did academy, it all looked black and white. You were either a good guy or a bad guy.

  These days, it seemed the only thing I’d ever done, all those years as a cop, was keep the folks who didn’t have a dime from taking one from those that did.

  Got to pay the bills, kid, my father used to say. Maybe so, but I wasn’t sure anymore if I cared for the cost.

  I checked the telltale on my oxygen. Like the truck, the suits were simplified. No sophisticated adsorption canisters, no complex rebreathing circuit, just a six-hour tank of air.

  Four, now.

  “Thumper, Selene Station here.”

  Below, the lunar landscape slid by. I let the other rider respond. A thirtyish fellow. Anderson. He’d proven during training he loved the sound of his own voice.

  “Go ahead, Selene.” Anderson again.

  “You all ready for de-orbit burn?”

  “Damned straight.”

  I answered in the affirmative, as well.

  “Copy four, Thumper. Go for DOB. Ignition, thirty seconds.”

  I closed my fingers around one of the grab bars welded to the engine cowling and counted to myself. The truck’s engine fired when I reach onethousand-thirty-one.

  Not bad.

  My feet pressed against the grated floor. I set my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering in time to the vibrations. I felt the roar of the engine in my bones. My stomach fluttered again at the return of gravity. I counted down on the thirty-second burn. The engine cut off on the mark.

  “Thumper,; Selene. Burn nominal. Powered descent initiates in fifty-seven minutes at two-hundred-thirty nautical miles from Rockefeller Base.”

  “Copy, Selene.” Anderson again.

  I took in the view.

  We had just under another hour of standing ahead of us, watching the moon roll beneath as we fell toward the surface in a long computer-planned arc following the terminator around the Moon. At the end, the truck would make its final powered descent into the darkness of the polar crater that sheltered America’s Rockefeller Base.

  I should be scared, I knew that. I stood on an open, free-falling platform sixty miles up, loaded with heavy equipment. The LTC preventable-accident record sucked vacuum, too.

  It didn’t matter.

  I had gotten used to the view by now, and I loved amusement parks. The roller coasters and rail slides. The free-fall drops. I figured to enjoy every second on the greatest thrill ride any engineer had ever imagined.

  I was facing in our direction of motion. As we came over the south pole I was watching the approaching horizon over the edge of the platform as the earth rose; bright, half full, distant, stunningly beautiful. I hummed the opening notes of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

  “What’s that?” Anderson asked over the suit link.

  I didn’t bother to explain. “Music from a movie,” I said.

  An hour later and fifty thousand feet above the surface, two hundred-thirty miles up-range from target, the engine flared to life again, slowing us.

  At ten thousand feet, the landscape below barely crawling by, the truck pitched over to a near-vertical attitude. I saw our destination, a crater filled with darkness.

  At three thousand feet, I caught sight of the lights outlining the bull’s eye layout of the buried habitat. At seven hundred feet, I spotted scattered equipment and the base’s junk pile in the lessening shadow near the east rim wall.

  Suited figures moved about, here and there. A rover rolled toward the rim. Landing beacons flashed a rhythmic red, west of the habitat. All so familiar, so ingrained in my memory from training films and countless photographs it seemed as if I had come home.

  But it felt as if we were coming in too fast.

  My hands itched for a steering wheel, the old passenger’s dilemma. There wasn’t any. Either the computer did the job or it didn’t. If it didn’t, Anderson and I, the ascent engines, too, would become part of one more shattered monument to Mankind’s reach for the planets.

  The engines would be missed the most.

  In the end, the truck slowed, hovered for a moment and sank to the lunar surface without incident, just as it had many times before. The engine shut down. Two suited figures skipped to the truck, began to check the cargo. They ignored us.

  “This is Rockefeller Base.” A woman’s voice.

  As opposed to, say, Detroit?

  “We hear you,” Anderson said.

  “You two can come on inside any time you like,” the woman said. “I’ll meet you at the door.”

  I unhooked my harness, released the straps that held my duffel and the small equipment case Garver had provided me. I slid between the bells of two engines and stepped to the ladder.

  Anderson arrived first. He began his climb down without even a glance at me. He paused at the last rung. “Watch this last step, Kerrigan,” he said. “It’s a lulu.”

  He dropped his duffel, let go the ladder and fell slowly the last few feet to the surface.

  “Asshole,” I whispered.

  I forgot the common band was always on.

  Anderson scooped up his duffel, turned away from the truck. And as he skip-stepped toward the habitat, he showed a gloved middle finger over his shoulder.

  I hiked to the habitat, almost catching up with Anderson, taking care with the low-gravity gait they taught us in training. A skip-step that had looked strange in demonstration, in the films we’d seen. It worked well enough in practice. Weight isn’t mass, they endlessly reminded us in training. Take your time.

  The loose regolith in this area had been sucked up long ago as aggregate for the sulfur concrete used to build the habitat, so I didn’t kick up any dust and left no footprints as I moved toward the rounded gray mounds that were the dormitories and common spaces of the base. Poured tubes half-buried in the floor of the crater. No windows, no exterior lights, except twenty-fourinch tall, green-neon script letters that blinked out WEST ENTRANCE above a rectangle of light. It was a nice touch.

  Further to the west, I spotted the adit to one of the rim-wall mines, marked by a red neon arrow, pointing down. Someone had painted ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE in man-high red letters on the wall above the arrow.

  As I closed on the entry lock, I passed collections of skeletal equipment. High chain-link fences, topped by razor-wire with access through a locked gate, surrounded some of them. Pharmaceutical plants. The fences kept the riff-raff out.

  As we reached the habitat, the broad glass door beneath the sign swung open and a suited figure stepped out. The left leg and the right arm of the suit had been painted in an intricate, colorful pattern. A swirling band of red, blue and green crossed the torso at an angle, intertwining flowers, just like a complex tattoo inked upon a naked body.

  Within the blossoms, I made out a name. ZENDER.

  “Welcome to the Moon, folks.” The same woman who had called them at the truck. “I’m Posey Zender, LTC personnel liaison. You can call me Posey. Wipe your feet before you come inside.”

  I returned the greeting. Anderson waved and moved inside.

  Beyond the door, the airlock was a revolving drum, not too different from a darkroom safe door, except with gasketed edges, and made of plate glass, like the front door to some New York City office building. Anderson was already inside, moving like a man looking for the can.

  “This lock made me nervous, when I first got here,” Posey said
. “But it’s safe. Cheaper and easier than a pressure lock. Fool-proof, too, with fewer complex parts. Cuts down on repair time overhead. LTC figured if you have all the oxygen you need, conservation isn’t a necessity. It just takes a long, hard push.”

  I kept my mouth shut and marked the lock as a place not to spend much time near. It might be fool-resistant, but I’d seen too often that nothing ever was completely fool-proof.

  Beyond the lock, Anderson headed for a glass door to the habitats. He’d hung his plain-white suit in one of the twenty-five glass-faced lockers that filled the ten-feet-wide habitat section. About half the lockers contained vacuum suits. Most of them had been painted in some fashion.

  Not all were as colorful as Posey’s suit, but each carried some sort of statement from of its owner. A full-body skeleton. The alien from that Sigourney Weaver movie a couple years back. Flags of all sorts. Daffy Duck chased by Marvin the Martian.

  “What’s with the suits?” I asked.

  “It’s called freedom of expression,” Posey said. “Everybody gets free rein to paint their suit anyway they like. There’s always a couple extras at each lock.”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  Someone will help if you want. Any ideas?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Whatever. Find a locker, stash your suit,” Posey said. “This is only temporary. I’ll get you a locker closer to your work assignment, once you’re settled in.”

  I found a vacant locker, focused on removing my suit and wiping off its surfaces. Posey did the same. She turned out to be rail-thin, a forty-something, horse-faced woman with close-cut russet hair. She wore a green jumpsuit with a name patch over her heart.

  Out of the suit, the tube felt chilly. It had a grungy look to it, too. Not overtly dirty but edge-worn, as if someone had been working on it with a dull file. Sounds bouncing from the concrete walls. The expanded metal floor had a hollow echo. The lights burned dimmer than in the trainer, half not even working. A glass door closed off the tube at the far end. A second airlock would have been nice. A scrolling, lighted sign above the door showed time and date. 1320 26 November 1979.

  Posey headed toward the door. “C’mon. Let’s get you settled in. You go to work tomorrow.”