Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  Edward M. Lerner: A Master of Hard SF

  “When people talk about good hard SF—rigorously extrapolated but still imbued with the classic sense-of-wonder—they mean the work of Edward M. Lerner, the current master of the craft.”

  —Robert J. Sawyer,

  Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues

  “Lerner definitely knows how to tell a story.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Lerner’s world-building and extrapolating are top notch.”

  —SFScope

  “Here’s an author you definitely need to check out.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “One of the leading global writers of hard science fiction.”

  —The Innovation Show

  DÉJÀ

  DOOMED

  Edward M. Lerner

  Déjà Doomed copyright © 2021 by Edward M. Lerner. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means—electronic, mechanical, or otherwise—without written permission, except short excerpts in a review, critical analysis, or academic work.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Cover art by Christina P. Myrvold; artstation.com/christinapm

  ISBN: 978-1-64710-028-5

  An imprint of Arc Manor LLC

  www.CaezikSF.com

  To Mom and Dad

  Books by Edward M. Lerner

  Novels

  Probe

  Moonstruck

  Fools’ Experiments

  Small Miracles

  Energized

  Dark Secret

  The Company Man

  InterstellarNet series novels

  InterstellarNet: Origins

  InterstellarNet: New Order

  InterstellarNet: Enigma

  Fleet of Worlds series novels (with Larry Niven)

  Fleet of Worlds

  Juggler of Worlds

  Destroyer of Worlds

  Betrayer of Worlds

  Fate of Worlds

  Collections and Nonfiction

  Creative Destruction

  Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise

  Frontiers of Space, Time, and Thought

  (mixed fiction and nonfiction)

  A Time Foreclosed (chapbook)

  Trope-ing the Light Fantastic:

  The Science Behind the Fiction (nonfiction)

  Muses & Musings

  Contents

  DISCOVERY

  SECRECY

  DUPLICITY

  CONSPIRACY

  DESPONDENCY

  HOSTILITY

  EMERGENCY

  NECESSITY

  EPILOGUE

  DISCOVERY

  Chapter 1

  Knife-edged, as black as pitch, long shadows sprawled across the airless moonscape.

  In any shadow, unseen, dangers might lurk. Massive boulders, single and in jumbles. Scattered rocky detritus. Yawning fissures. Concealed slopes. The treacherous, crumbling rims of ancient craters. In shades of gray and brown and the occasional dark blue, the portions of the lunar surface not in shadow seemed almost as indistinct.

  All experienced in spectral translucence, overlaid on mundane living-room clutter.

  Even where the setting Sun could still reach, temperatures had plummeted. Soon enough, only the crescent Earth’s eerie blue light would shine here.

  A few more minutes, Ethan Nyquist told himself.

  To lunar east, an open expanse beckoned. Beyond the elongated silhouette of his rover, its solar panels tipped backward and vertical to catch the day’s final rays, that gentle slope seemed entirely sunlit. Seemed entirely featureless.

  Almost certainly, that ordinary-looking plain held—and hid—its share of perils. From the rover’s perspective, every rock, crater rim, and rift to the east masked its own shadow.

  Naturally, his path led to the east.

  He had followed, as best he could, the hints of a trace of precious iridium: a hard, dense, corrosion-resistant metal with an ultrahigh melting point. New industrial uses for the stuff kept appearing—and it was far scarcer than gold.

  He had followed the trail—in truth, more of a dotted line—for more than a hundred miles. For six grueling days. For all the sensor readings he had collected along the way across the powdery lunar regolith, not one sample had begun to approach exploitable concentrations. It would be nice to know—before the onset of the two-week-long lunar night—whether, in his most recent detour, skirting a nameless, half-mile-wide crater with sides too steep to enter, he had lost the trail. Because if he could find the source of the traces—if there was a source, if the meteorite that had brought the iridium had not vaporized on impact, dissipating the rare metal in a gaseous cloud far and wide across the moonscape—he would become rich. Very rich.

  That hope was all that got him out of bed most mornings.

  He had time to take another sample, perhaps two, before everything spread out before him was plunged into darkness. No atmosphere meant no twilight, the scant illumination given off by the crescent Earth being no substitute for the setting Sun.

  A wireless remote-control module, little bigger (but more sophisticated, and much securer from hacking) than a game controller sat at an end of Ethan’s messy coffee table. Through that module, with smart spex and a touch-feedback glove, he guided the prospecting rover—almost a quarter-million miles distant—across the Moon. Until the Sun fell beneath the horizon, rendering solar-cell arrays useless. Until his rover went into standby mode, its critical components kept from freezing by a trickle of battery power.

  He was a robot wrangler. A damned good one. The job required attention to detail, fast reflexes, and superb eye-hand coordination—while making no demands on one’s feet. And that was fortunate because Ethan no longer had feet.

  Not unless you counted the little-better-than-peg-leg crap that the VA called prosthetics—and he didn’t. Not since the café bombing in Baluchistan, or whatever that godforsaken corner of the world had taken to calling itself. This week. Ironic to get himself blown up, given that his Army job at the time had had him piloting robotic drones to blow up the bad guys.

  Ethan dragged his thoughts back to the task at hand. Iron, found in sufficient quantities, had value. Irony, like dwelling on the past, was a waste of time. And just then, at least in his leased section of the lunar surface, from which the Sun was about to vanish, he had no time to waste.

  “Forward one-third,” he intoned, gesturing above the control. On his spex, three seconds later, the vista began to change. Creeping up the shallow slope, angling mostly north to south and back again to avoid both the worst of the glare and the rover’s own elongated shadow, an emerald flash caught his attention. With a curl of his fingers, he turned right.

  There! A fist-sized rock sparkled with green.

  “Halt.”

  The rover glided to a stop. “Engage the arm.” Three seconds after painstakingly extending his gloved hand, Ethan’s spex showed the robot’s telescoping appendage reaching out. Its mechanical gripper, mimicking his gestures, opened, then closed, to grasp the green rock.

  Inside the fingertips of his glove, faster and faster, tiny pads vibrated, as—with great care—he took hold of the rock. It felt like … a rock. He turned and flexed his wrist and, fancying he heard the whirr of distant motors, examined the image in his spex. Up close (to the camera, in any event), he held in his “hand” an agglomeration of angular fragments of shattered stone bound together by more stone, melted and reconge
aled. The green sparkles came from bits of volcanic glass also embedded in the mass.

  In geologist-speak, he held an impact-melt breccia. Had it formed under the crash of a meteorite, or from the debris, almost as destructive, splattered by a meteorite? How long ago had the impact occurred? And as one meteorite after another had reshaped this barren landscape, how far had this particular rock bounced and rolled?

  He couldn’t answer any of those questions, nor did he much care. What he did know, and was reminded of every instant he spent prospecting, was that this dead world’s surface was everywhere pockmarked—from tiny dimples to craters a couple hundred miles across.

  The rock he “held” was in every respect ordinary. Ethan made a fist, the glove’s fingertips madly vibrating to represent the force he exerted through the distant gripper.

  Rock shattered. Gravel and dust drifted, in slow motion, to the distant, barren ground.

  “Mineral scan,” he said. At his radioed command, the rover X-rayed the ground; within seconds, its instruments interpreted the reflections. Readouts appeared on his spex. Silicon, of course. The lunar crust was rife with silicates. Iron. Titanium. Calcium. Oxygen ….

  He scrolled as quickly as he dared, until iridium at last made its appearance in the list. A hair over two parts per billion. Not terrific, but twice the average in Earth’s crust. Thousands of times the lunar norm.

  He had not lost the trail.

  Digits in a corner of his spex announced the Sun would disappear in another eleven minutes. The drooping output from the rover’s solar-power unit implied much the same.

  “Pan left,” he ordered, and the distant camera pivoted. He wondered if he could squeeze in one last traverse across the slope. The scene on his spex swept past a cluster of boulders, slumped and pitted, weathered by the endless hail of micrometeorites and by day/night temperature swings that exceeded four hundred degrees.

  His point of view slid past the boulders. Past a surface rippled like an old-fashioned washboard, with each successive ridge casting its own inky shadow. Past the rover’s own tread marks. Past a scattering of pea gravel. Past a crater less than two feet across, its rim edge still crisp. Past—

  Something nagged at him. Something out of place. The merest suggestion of color? Perhaps. Back by the rock jumble?

  “Pan right, slow,” Ethan ordered.

  His visual survey reversed. The diminutive crater. Gravel. Tread marks. The stone washboard. And in a natural alcove, the sheltered space beneath two massive stone slabs that leaned one against the other, where a few rays of the setting Sun managed to sneak through, he glimpsed—

  Reddish orange. On this drab world, the color alone was extraordinary. And so much orange. The blush peeked through a film of dust formed in the slower-than-glacial “weathering” of the rocks overhead.

  “Full opacity,” Ethan said. The living-room backdrop faded from his spex. The distant image brightened.

  The orange-tinged mound, whatever it was, was big. Eight feet or more in length from end to end. Perhaps four feet wide at its broadest. Up to two feet tall, in spots. He tried to attribute a shape, but the thing defied geometry. A central mass with five projections of varying lengths. And from the shortest projection, through the dust, came a golden glimmer.

  A reflection?

  Beyond out of place, Ethan had no idea, no intuition even, what the orange object beneath the film of dust could be.

  With the wave of a hand, he edged closer.

  The object’s shiny end had a gentle, cylindrical curve to it. Slowly, carefully, he started to brush aside its coating of dust. Glove pads conveyed to his fingertips only the slightest hint of vibration.

  Still, at his featherlight touch, the … whatever … crumbled into a fine powder and collapsed into itself.

  But not before Ethan glimpsed, through the dissolving visor, a mummified—and utterly inhuman—face.

  Chapter 2

  Tall and impossibly spindly, the antenna pedestal loomed.

  Marcus Judson rode the basket of a tower crane. The crane was alarmingly tall and spindly, too. On the plain to his left, segments of the antenna’s dish awaited assembly. Each individual curved segment was huge. Together they would make a dish bigger than two hundred meters across—

  Of significance only if and when the pedestal showed itself capable of bearing the steel dish’s weight.

  He had polarized his helmet visor against the glare of ground-level work lights. He had dialed down the public-channel comm chatter. He scarcely noticed the nudges as, under computer control, compressed-gas thrusters dampened the swaying of the passenger basket that dangled at the end of a long steel cable. Snug within the cocoon that was his spacesuit, he managed to forget, sometimes even for seconds at a time, just how freaking cold the lunar midnight was: minus 150°C.

  But what he could not banish from his thoughts, not even for the few minutes of the ride from the crater floor up the half-completed structure (at that, already ninety meters high), was how behind schedule he had fallen.

  At twenty meters off the ground he released the up button on the crane’s control pendant, bringing the basket to a halt. Puffs of gas killed the basket’s renewed sway. “Suit. Headlamps off.” His helmet’s interior peanut bulbs were already off. Without company in the basket to see him, there was no need.

  The world went dark.

  Stars appeared: a magnificent reminder, as though any were needed, that he had a radio telescope to build. Four, in fact, with only the first and simplest one completed. Each ’scope would be unique: an experiment in astronomy and construction using native lunar materials. As attractive as it was to eavesdrop on the cosmos from here on Farside, forever sheltered from Earth’s radio cacophony, budgets still mattered. Budgets would always matter. To send struts and girders by the millions of kilos to the Moon would never be practical.

  Elements of the telescope pedestal manifested themselves as featureless voids in the star field. He kept watching. Nothing happened. He dared to hope—

  Until, after several minutes, his night vision began to kick in and, in unmistakable neon hues, new constellations emerged. Each faint glimmer, splotch, and zigzag—the fluorescing of embedded nanotech strain gauges—revealed yet another weakness in overstressed smart material. He sighed. They still had much to learn about concrete-casting in one-sixth gee.

  Were the defects large enough to eyeball? Marcus put a green dot into the heart of the nearest cluster of defects. The laser pointer was awkward and insecure in his grasp; his fingers, in insulated work gloves, felt about as supple as sausages. Without airborne dust—or air—to scatter light, the laser beam itself was invisible. “Suit. Polarization off and headlamps on.”

  The supposedly stressed area surrounding the green dot looked flawless. Dialing up visor magnification revealed nothing further. Maybe with a brighter light …?

  “Quarter power,” he called to the construction shack. “Center a spotlight on my dot.”

  Only no one responded, and the spotlight remained off. Instead, the structural elements nearest him began to flash, with red light reflecting and re-reflecting from countless struts, braces, beams, and girders. All that flashing and blinking denoted: comm failure.

  He sighed.

  Every lunar outing was a space walk, and you didn’t set foot outside an airlock alone. You just didn’t. But neither could he afford to assign two people to every piddling one-person task, just in case.

  The flash rate doubled.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. The flashing seemed brightest out of the corner of his right eye, and he turned in that direction. Far below, among the scattered glimmers of distant work lights and headlamps, a red light blinked in unison with the nearby dim reflections. Between, as with his laser pointer, the light beam was invisible.

  “Suit,” he said. “Add an IR view.”

  Marcus’s visor now o
ffered a large splotch: his robotic minder. In infrared, the bot’s motors and, more so, its radiothermal power module glowed from waste heat. The bot was widening and smoothing a surface path, using only the tiniest fraction of its capacity to monitor human workers by their body heat.

  He raised an arm, with the tips of thumb and index finger forming a circle and the remaining fingers extended. I understand, the gesture meant. And, I’m okay. Also, that—as intuitive as was this particular hand signal—the days he had long ago spent at paintball had not been wholly wasted.

  The bot’s alert lamp triple-blinked in acknowledgment, then winked off.

  Going without radio was a pain in the ass, but even one helmet transmitter would deafen the radio telescope they had already completed.

  For that first instrument, pressed by Congress to show that a Farside observatory could be built, they had kept the construction simple: a ground-based array of meter-long, steel, dipole antennae—thousands upon thousands of them—precisely arranged across many square kilometers. Buried fiber optics connected those antennae to the base, where shielded electronics integrated the myriads of celestial whispers into something interesting.

  But while the design had been conservative, construction cost was another story. Lunar rocks and regolith provided more than ample iron for steel, but the carbon with which to alloy that native iron had been imported at great expense from Earth. Concrete-based construction would be a boon—if they ever mastered making the mooncrete beams strong and stress-resistant. And if the beams proved themselves able to withstand, year after year, the vacuum, the never-ending radiation, and the big day/night temperature swings.

  A few years hence, once the first carbonaceous-chondrite asteroid arrived to be shepherded into orbit around the Moon, carbon would become plentiful and cheap. Then they could produce all the steel they wanted, whether for massive girders or simple rebar. For many purposes, they might even forgo steel, substituting superlight, superstrong, carbon-fiber composites. And with enough conductive carbon fiber, the big dishes themselves might be constructed without metal.