by Neil Clarke
I’d found an image in the base Britannica that haunted me. An Ice Queen. A woman’s face, pale-white skin glistening, icy blue eyes downcast, framed by a mass of silver hair. She wore a crown formed of ice-crystal shards. DuPree helped me copy the life-size image to the chest of my suit. We framed it in part with stark black lines.
“Suits you,” DuPree said, when we were done. So far, no one else had said a word.
Three floodlights illuminated the glistening icicle in its cradle. More light on anything that I’d seen since I arrived. The ice rocket stood roughly the size of an old German V2. The larger hydrogen tank sat atop the LOX tank, both on top of the engine assembly.
Three thin spars ran up the sides with rings around the tanks, providing some additional integrity to the stack. Feed lines melted into the tanks connected them to the engine. The clever idea was to make the payload—the ice—double as the fuel tanks. No need for an expensive and time-consuming development of a metallurgical facility to make metal tanks.
“Does this whole thing really work out cheaper?” I asked.
DuPree made a verbal shrugging noise. “We haven’t tried both ways, so I guess we’ll never know, will we? I don’t worry about it. It’s just a job.”
Under a minute.
“It gave America a moon colony,” I said.
I heard the rancor in DuPree’s voice. “No, it didn’t. We got a mining operation and a supply base, with some corporate manufacturing. This isn’t a restaurant. It’s a fast-food joint.”
Thirty seconds.
“And we got twenty-six days to serve up one-hundred-twelve tons of water.” DuPree continued. “Seven more icicles. And LTC doesn’t care squat about anything else. Neither does that prick Garver.”
“Everything goes well, we’ll be done by Christmas,” I said.
The countdown hit zero. “Here we go,” DuPree said.
There was no swirling water vapor around the rocket, but I saw ripples of refraction at the base as the engine caught. The rocket began to rise, slowly. Moving out of the floodlights it became hard to see, just the barely visible flame of the burning hydrogen.
“I expected it to take off faster,” I said.
“These things are right on the edge in terms of performance envelope. It’s got just enough oomph to make orbit and do the circularization burn on the other side.”
The rocket was climbing faster, beginning to arc over. At two thousand feet it emerged into the sun, a tiny sliver of light. A second later the sliver seemed to blossom into a snow globe of twinkling points.
“God damn it!” DuPree said. “You jinxed that one, you and your If everything goes well. “
“Wha—”
“It shattered. Christ, couldn’t you tell? God’s pendulous nuts!”
I heard a click in my headset. “Selene Station! Zender here. You in line of sight yet?”
“Copy, Rockefeller Base.”
“We just blew a load.”
«0 * JJ
Say again.
“Your ice delivery will shortly be scattered on the ground a few miles from here.”
Garver joined the conversation. “When can you send up the next one? Schedule’s getting tight.” He sounded as if he’d stay calm through the Second Coming.
Posey took her time responding. “Will get back to you soonest on revised schedule.”
“Copy. Selene Station out.”
Posey’s voice filled my headset. “Base meeting. In the mess hall. Now.”
DuPree turned toward the lock. “Hope you’re happy. Now you get to see Posey pissed.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We forget about celebrating Christmas.”
7 DECEMBER 1979
“Kerrigan!”
I looked up from the book I’d been reading. Something by John MacDonald. Posey stood in the open door of my quarters.
“What?”
“Talk. My office. Now.” She turned and hurried down the corridor.
I hesitated, then followed. As far as Rockefeller Base went, Posey wasthe Corporation. Management, personnel, records, everything. She was loud, overbearing, remote and twitchy enough make anyone uneasy. Since we lost the icicle two days ago, she had gotten worse.
Posey was already seated behind her desk by the time I got to her office/ quarters. By moon standards, it was spacious.
“Close the door,” she said, as I entered.
I did as told and took the chair opposite her. I didn’t ask permission first.
“What’s between you and Garver?” Zender asked without any preamble. She was still wound-up from the icicle loss.
“What do you mean?”
“You stopped in on him before coming down.”
I saw no point in trying to deny it. “Garver and my father go back. I stopped by to pay respects.”
“And I’m Marie of Romania. Everybody knows you were a cop. I think you’re still a cop. What does Garver have you sniffing around for?”
I rubbed my forehead. The skin was getting dry and itchy from the canned air. “I was a cop. A federal marshal. Now I’m a LTC Operations Technician. A tinker in a space suit.”
“Once a cop . . .”
“Bullshit. Some people hang on to the past. I don’t.”
“I tried to ship you out of here, after that icicle blew up. Garver blocked it.”
“Like I said, he’s a friend of my old man. They go way back to the Navy during the War.”
Posey leaned forward. “Look. I know something and you know something, but you don’t know everything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know what they found in that icicle that we delivered just before you came down.”
“Scuttlebutt says it was a body.”
She stared at me for a time, then sighed and gestured over her shoulder at a hand-drawn Gantt chart on the wall. “All right, play it that way. The right side of that chart is One January, Kerrigan. Two January doesn’t exist. Got it?”
“Works for me.”
Posey’s eyes flicked from side to side. She looked over my shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry if I came down hard just now. I’m under the gun here.”
I kept my face neutral. “I know that.”
She nodded and leaned back in her chair.
“The Corporation promises me six drills. I get three. They promise four loaders, I get two. I have to melt that water before I can pour it. That takes power. A lot of power. And I have to crack some of that water for fuel and breathing air. That takes more power.”
Posey was on a rant. I held on for the ride.
“They promised me five SNAP reactors. I got three. They promised a megawatt of solar arrays. I got two hundred kilowatts and I didn’t want them. A reactor’s easier, more reliable, but some senator’s got a friend who makes photo-voltaics. That’s why half the lights are never turned on.”
She drew a ragged breath, close to the edge. “They promised a crew of sixty. I can barely hold on to thirty. They projected a launch failure rate of three percent. It turns out to be more like ten percent. I’m running low on engine assemblies and there’s no time to get more. I have to have Odyssey fueled to go by January first. I have a crew on the edge of mutiny. I’m accused of sabotage—” I interrupted. “You?”
“I’m in charge, I get the crap thrown in my face. Garver would just love to have a scapegoat to hang a failure on now, wouldn’t he?”
“Why would he do that?”
Posey paused to cough. “Listen good, Kerrigan. A place like this, you don’t keep secrets long. You snoop around anymore, I’ll find out. I don’t trust you, so don’t get in my way.”
“Or what?”
She stared at me, maybe realizing she’d said too much. She waved her hand in dismissal. “Get back to work.”
I walked out and closed the door. Posey had been on the Moon since the base was completed. Three years plus. She coughed a lot, almost as much as Jake Kadar. It’s was a wonder she hadn’t gone wa
lkabout.
15 DECEMBER 1979
“Fireworks?”
I stood outside the habitat, out of sight of others. I had the small transmitter Garver had given me jacked into my suit comm plug. It worked on a frequency only Garver would receive. When I spotted the point of light that was Selene Station rise in the south I called him. The signal was weak but clear.
“They’re being loaded on the truck now,” he said. “Be down in four hours with a support technician.”
“Whose brilliant idea was this?”
“A certain fifteen-term Congressional bacterium,” Garver said. “The Representative thought it would be wonderful to celebrate the New Year and Odysseys departure with a fireworks festival on the Moon.”
If I could have slapped my forehead I would have. “Do the corporate big shots think it’ll be visible from Earth? Will it even work?
“They’ll work; oxidizer is self-contained. The plan’s to set them off just as Odyssey breaks orbit and to televise it from Selene Station. A royal sendoff.” Garver paused, continued. “Keep your eyes open, Laura.”
“And my suit closed.”
“Anything new?”
“Posey’s calmed down, but some of the others are getting nervous. DuPree asked me yesterday why I keep walking off behind the habitat.”
“And?”
“I told her I like to take a leak in private.”
A static growl. “Keep an eye on her. The other newbie, too. I haven’t been able to find out much about Mr. Anderson and when I don’t know something it bothers me.”
I saw an ellipse of light on the ground in front of the airlock and drew back a bit. “Tom, someone just came out, probably DuPree. We’re scheduled to do the final checkout on the icicle before they tank it up.”
“Anything on her?” Garver asked.
“Y’know, she seems all right. But they said that about Ted Bundy, didn’t they? He seemed like such a nice guy.”
The station was moving across the sky. “Laura, I know I told you to get to the bottom of the Leatherman thing, but first priority is Odyssey. Check that; it’s the only thing. The rest of that water has to get up here, period.”
“We’ll get it done, straw boss. There are some real beefs down here, but most of the crew know the score.”
“You sound almost happy. Getting moonstruck?”
“The place grows on you. You know, like athlete’s foot.”
18 DECEMBER 1979
There are advantages to being in a small place, having good hearing and going through police training.
I was in the small galley adjacent to the mess hall on my turn at KP, scraping dishes and loading them in the industrial dishwasher.
All the comforts of home.
The mess room was empty save for two men sipping coffee at a corner table. Anderson and Kadar. Sound didn’t carry well in the habitat’s low pressure and they spoke in near-whispers.
But as I said, there are advantages. I heard most of what they said.
“Timing’s everything. “
“.. . a statement. When you brace .. . before ship is overhead. . .”
“.. . a dummy. Only one shot. . . go off with a . . .”
“For maximum effect make sure .. .”
“.. . yeah, box is marked.. .”
I heard chairs slide, then footsteps.
“Later,” Anderson said.
And they were gone.
One shot. Maximum effect. Box is marked.
Time to take a walk in the dark.
I suited up for my next shift two hours early and turned through the north lock, out on the surface nearest the supply dump for those materials that could stand the cold and vacuum.
Where are the fireworks?
If you wanted to smuggle up some sort of explosives, where better than in a shipment of explosives?
I skip-walked the hundred yards to the dump, regretting the need for my helmet lamp. Once there, I faced five hundred square feet of identical shipping containers with no discernible order.
I flicked off the lamp before I turned around, looking for any signs of movement or light behind me. Nothing. So I turned back to the scattered crates, flicking on the lamp and stood in the limp-armed stance I’d learned to minimize effort, as I began to examine the nearest crates.
Paranoid me. Thirty seconds later, I cut the lamp, turned to see if anyone was there. Still nothing, so I returned to my study of the crates.
A minute later, some sixth sense made me turn again, just in time to be hit hard in the shoulder. If I hadn’t turned it would have been my helmet. I took two staggering steps back and fell, landing on my hip.
I raised my arms and hit the chin switch that turned my headlamp to full intensity. A suited figure loomed over me, some sort of bar grasped in a raised gauntlet.
What to do?
Lying on my back in the suit, I wasn’t even sure I could stand up unassisted. The figure swung the bar down in a full arc.
Block it.
I let it land, taking the blow on one arm.
Grab the bar.
I grabbed the bar with my free hand. I pulled as hard as I could, rising a few inches as my attacker lost footing and toppled onto me.
My breath was coming hard and fast. I could feel the rush of adrenaline pushing me to act. I kept my grip on the bar and shoved my attacker up and to the side.
Roll over.
I pulled the bar free and jabbed it down, levering myself onto my chest. One deep breath and I pushed down as hard as I could, rose to a precarious angle and almost fell back again before I got the bar in place, using it like a cane.
The figure on the ground struggled to stand up. Whoever it was, they’d donned an unmarked suit, so I had no idea who had attacked me.
See how the bastard deals with a cracked faceplate.
I heard a thin whistling and suddenly felt cold and light-headed. I raised my arm and saw the cracked gauntlet ring, vapor streaming out.
Damn it! Get inside.
I reached down, increased my oxygen flow to maximum and turned, skip-walking as fast as I could to the airlock. My attacker would have to wait. Staying alive came first.
19 DECEMBER 1979
I blamed the suit failure on embrittlement from the cold. No one questioned me; metal can react strangely at those low temperatures. Only my attacker and I knew the truth, unless someone had given orders to the attacker. I tried to ignore that thought. I was getting as paranoid as Posey.
The bright point rose above the horizon. “Tom?”
“Here, Laura. Talk to me.”
“Right. No questions until I’m finished.”
I stood behind a boulder slightly taller than I was with my back to a wall of rock. Nobody would sneak up on me again. I laid out the events of the previous day quickly.
“The fireworks were in the pressurized storeroom. I chatted up the tech. Turns out it wouldn’t be too good to keep them cold and in vacuum for very long.”
“So.”
“So this morning I snuck in to give the stuff a quick look-over.”
“And?”
“I know a bit about weapons but I don’t know zip about fireworks. Most of the stuff looks like stubby mortars. There’s racks of them, some singles, what I guess are leveling gadgets.”
“Maybe there’s nothing there,” Garver said.
“No. Nothing screams ‘wrong’ that I can tell, but there’s something here. Whatever it is, I figure there was time to hide it somewhere else.”
“Anything more?”
“Anderson and Kadar volunteered to assist the technician in the setup. Posey announced she’s having an emergency bubble put up so the crew can watch from the surface. That was news to most of us. A bubble?”
“I heard about it,” Garver said. “Another brilliant idea from the Corporate PR people. Show miners walking around in shirtsleeves on the surface. Arthur Clarke and all that. The Future.”
“Right. Maybe helmet off, but no one here is stupid enough to
actually shuck their suit and trust a plastic bag.”
“Careful, Laura. You’re going native.”
I ignored him. “How high will fireworks go on the Moon?”
“Why do you—oh. I see where your headed. I’ll find out.”
“Okay. Anything new on Posey?” I asked.
“Just what I told you. She volunteered for the Moon. Before this, her career path was flat. She’s got a hefty bonus coming once we launch.”
“I suspect that you do, too.”
Garver didn’t answer right away. “You’re right, I do. But then you’ve got a lot riding on it, too.”
21 DECEMBER 1979
I walked into the mess hall just after midnight, hungry even though the main course smelled like microwaved cardboard. DuPree was already there, sitting at a table by herself. Kadar and Anderson were at a corner table, conversing quietly over coffee. They were now a work team, but they seemed to be everywhere together recently.
I could feel the tension and excitement within the space, shared it without reserve. Another icicle was scheduled to go into orbit today, our fifth since the accident. Just three more to go.
Four weeks on the Moon had changed more than my attitude. My gait was steadier, more sure-footed. And the dark beyond the walls didn’t bother me as much as when I first arrived. I ambled to the buffet and picked up a tray. Meatloaf, instant potatoes, what appeared to be green beans. They looked wilted.
SSDD.
I was even getting tired of DuPree’s garden goods.
I loaded my tray, turned and nodded at Kadar, then settled in across from DuPree, who had her nose buried in a book. As I sat down, Kadar said something to Anderson I couldn’t make out, then he got up and left, leaving his cup on the table.
Anderson stood, took both cups to the dirties tray and then drew a fresh cup of coffee. He walked to our table. “Hey, mind if I sit down?”
DuPree looked up long enough to grunt. I gestured at an empty chair. He sat and sipped his coffee.
I tipped my head to the door Kadar had just exited. “You two get off shift early?”
“Naw,” Anderson said. “Posey moved us to your shift. I got to suit up in a few minutes. Icicle launch at 0630, you know, I’m helping with the final plumbing checkout.”
It was the most he’d said to me in four weeks.
