Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  “And I would imagine your FSB is.” One of the trickier aspects of this plan, and a detail Marcus knew better than to share, was misleading the eyeballs—including Valerie’s!—watching through the nearby prospecting bot. At least while the Sun was up …. “We tell them we’re shoring up the alien tunnels before they come crashing down on our helmets. Also that for a few days, mooncrete casting is pretty much all we’ll be doing, because we’re beat.”

  “Ah, the upside of exhaustion.” Again, Yevgeny considered. “Easier forgiveness than permission, you say? In Russia, we say poverty is a sin that the rich never forgive.”

  It sounded like the sort of proverb a poor kid raised in an orphanage would take to heart.

  Marcus said, “I guess, then, we’ll need to strike it rich. What do you say?”

  For a long while, with eyes narrowed, Yevgeny remained mired in his own thoughts. At long last, he reached a decision. “I say, let’s give it a shot.”

  Chapter 18

  After yet another dissembling conversation with Tyler, Marcus unplugged his CIA datasheet, folded and stowed it in his pocket, kicked off his slippers, stretched out on an air mattress, and closed his eyes. He had yet more Russian helmet vids to give the once-over, but to have the shelter to himself and not grab a power nap would have been flat-out negligent. He felt himself drifting away—

  The airlock started to cycle.

  Bosses don’t play possum. With a sigh (bosses shouldn’t sigh, either, but for another few seconds he was without witnesses), he got up and splashed water in his face. The inside hatch porthole was dingy with a dusty film, as was whoever stood in the airlock, but Marcus’s overall impression was of sky blue. Donna, then.

  The inner hatch opened. Donna emerged, popping her helmet.

  “You’re back early,” Marcus said.

  “Yeah, well, you’ll want to hear this. If you wouldn’t mind?” Marcus turned his back while she shimmied out of her pressure suit. “Okay, done.”

  The red jumpsuit she had put on was scarcely cleaner than her outside gear. None of them had any clean clothes left. Maybe for their next supply run, someone would remember to ask for some fresh garments.

  He asked, “The repairs belowground still holding?”

  “Last time I looked, the pressure gauge Brad left inside wasn’t budging.” She rummaged in a storage bin and came up with a Snickers and a juice box. “Not why I’m here.”

  Which he had known. If the freshly sealed front hall of the ancient facility had sprung a leak, she’d have led with that, and he would be fighting his way into his vacuum gear rather than Donna shedding hers. “I’m all ears.”

  She took a bite of her candy bar. “This place is old.”

  “The Moon? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is.”

  “Smart ass. No, the alien facility.” She waved off his objection. “Yeah, I know, we already thought that. The micrometeorite wear-and-tear on the antenna you found. But that was on the indirect side.”

  “Not following. You and Ilya were dissecting an alien tank bot. Did it come with a manufacturer’s datestamp?”

  “Smart ass. No photovoltaic cells, as you know. Ilya figured it’d have an RTG”—radioisotope thermoelectric generator—“and when we opened it, so it seemed.”

  When you wanted to operate bots outside in the dark, batteries and fuel cells did not go far. Keeping bots active throughout the long lunar night—like the construction bots, in what seemed another lifetime, at Daedalus—would require a ridiculous number of batteries, or frequent recharging. So: tank bots with RTGs outside, and photovoltaic starfish bots indoors. It all made perfect sense.

  Marcus got himself an Almond Joy and a bottle of water. “Not opened too far, I trust.” Because the RTGs they used at Daedalus ran off plutonium. You had to respect that stuff, or the toxicity would get you even faster than the radiation could.

  For no obvious reason, Donna glanced around the shelter. “Man, I hope the tunnel keeps holding pressure. I can’t wait to get out of this dump.

  “Anyway, yes, we were careful. And yes, it was radioactive.”

  “Why the emphasis?”

  “Hasn’t been radioactive for ages. Ilya and I checked out the power module, before and after opening it, with a scintillation counter. If that RTG contributed anything over and above solar- and cosmic-ray background radiation, neither of us could see it. Neither was it generating even an iota of heat. Basically, it was dead as a doornail. So then, we put samples from its core through the mass spec, and you’d never know it ever was plutonium.”

  “Because now it’s …?”

  She finished her Snickers and stowed the wrapper. “Turned almost entirely to lead-206. And trust me—after Ilya explained, I wiki’ed it—that isotope is the final step in a whole long decay process. Plutonium-238, then uranium-234, then thorium-230, then—”

  “So how old is that tank bot?”

  “Best guess? Fifty to one hundred million years.”

  Marcus whistled. “Okay, that’s old.” Also, hard to believe. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure of Ilya’s conclusion?”

  “You’re in luck, Boss. I’m too tired to take umbrage. It’s been a few years, but I used a mass spec in college chemistry. The readings all looked kosher to me, and I’ll trust the physicist to do the math. Want to know one more interesting thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’d expect the bot’s shielding for what had been plutonium to be what?”

  “Lead.” As in the bots back at Daedalus.

  She shook her head. “So you might think, although likely not lead-206. On Earth, the 208 isotope is by far the most common. In the tank bots, the shielding is … wait for it … iridium. Iridium is even denser than lead.”

  “But a lot rarer.”

  “It would seem we know where Ethan’s iridium ended up. Do you suppose he’s entitled to scavenging rights? At north of six hundred dollars an ounce, he’ll want to know.”

  * * *

  Nikolay liked hiking as much as the next person. He enjoyed surveying unexplored terrain as much as the next geologist. But he did not much care for busywork, which, as far as he was concerned, was most of what Yevgeny had him doing. Such roaming contributed nothing to their understanding of the mysterious aliens.

  And so, muttering to himself with helmet mic muted, Nikolay meandered up yet another nameless ridge, down another nondescript declivity, along another gully, headlamps swiveling from side to side. For the benefit of hypothetical overhead observers, from time to time he bagged and labeled a sample—often chosen with no deeper purpose than to cut and polish once he got back to civilization and his rock collection. The one time he had happened upon something interesting, an area far richer in impact-glass shards than seemed consistent with the minor local cratering, Yevgeny begrudged him any time to investigate. Well, the pay was good.

  “You’re wasting my time,” Nikolay had complained. “Let me do something useful.”

  “You are,” the damned FSB spook had said.

  After days of griping, Nikolay was given, if not a rationale, at least a rationalization. He was not roaming only for the amusement of satellites streaking by. Nor was it coincidental that the expanses he was assigned to meander lay out of sight of the American igloos and their security cameras. Yevgeny was copying and geocoding helmet-cam footage before sharing it with the Americans. The spy had software to synthesize fake helmet vids from that growing library.

  Nikolay had to concede the app was clever, the way it could splice imaginary excursions into otherwise truthful helmet vids. The software adjusted for another person’s height and gait. It could even change the apparent timing of a surface outing by altering or adding sunlight, and casting or removing shadows.

  Where might any of them need to sneak to merit such trickery? That, Yevgeny would not answer. Likely he didn’t know, either.
Damned spy.

  Up hill. Down dale. Gregorian chant playing through helmet speakers. At last, Nikolay’s shift approached its end, and he turned back to the shelters. He detoured to the lava tube to see how actual work progressed.

  Infrared motion detectors switched on ceiling lights as he entered the newly enlarged entrance. He walked past mining machines, their big fuel cells scavenged, parked out of view of snooping satellites. Fat cables, clipped high on a tunnel wall where no one would trip on them, fed power from their solar-panel arrays to fuel cells they had toted down to the underground base. Slim cables, for communications, likewise ran the length of the tunnel to antennae on the surface. All the comforts of home ….

  At the rewired airlock, Nikolay opened the outer hatch and peered through the inner porthole. With some of the alien debris shunted aside, work lights shining, and an assortment of human gear—fuel cells, radiant heaters, oh-two tanks and carbon-dioxide scrubbers—along the walls, the interior looked far more welcoming than at his first viewing. The gauges facing the porthole showed pressure steady and temperatures inside already nudged above freezing. He had been skeptical, but it looked like the fix-up would work.

  After a few minutes, watching the hundredths digit of the temperature display claw its way upward became about as riveting as watching paint dry, and he strode back up the tunnel. A dark purple figure—Ilya Alexandrovich—approached from beyond two parked bucket-chain excavators. He waved. Nikolay waved back. Ilya offered a fiber-optic cable. As they jacked in, Nikolay remembered to unmute his mic.

  “I’ve been looking for you, my friend,” Ilya said.

  “Okay.”

  “This is just between you and me.”

  Nikolay grunted. An I heard you answering noise, not agreement.

  “Look,” Ilya said, “Something puzzles me. It might be nothing, in which case I would not want it brought up to Yevgeny.”

  He grunted again.

  Ilya pointed down the tunnel. “I am sorry you haven’t gotten more than a quick peek inside. But I have. I have been as deep inside, I believe, as anyone. Past the point where we have partitioned things off. None of us knows how deep the place extends, beyond far.”

  “That does not sound very controversial.”

  “Nor is it. Here is the thing. As deep inside as anyone has ventured, there has been only a single side tunnel offering anything that looks like a power source.”

  “What kind of power source?” Nikolay asked. “Electrical?”

  “Right, and of course it is totally discharged. A small bank of, well, unless I open one, I cannot be certain, but I think fuel cells. If not those, then batteries. Either way, no matter how superior the alien energy-storage tech is to ours, unless I really misunderstand chemistry, that gear could not begin to sustain a facility this spacious through a lunar night. I have to believe these devices are only for emergency backup power.”

  Alien tech was, well, alien. Nikolay had his doubts about drawing conclusions by comparisons with human tech. Rocks, he trusted. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters,” Ilya said, “because it suggests Paul Bunyan and Goliath and their hypothetical friends maintained their base with something other than solar power. I would like to know what that something is—and Yevgeny won’t want our American friends to have an inkling.”

  The metaphorical fog began to lift. The raison d’être for Base Putin was gathering fuel for a clean fusion reactor—something that no one yet knew how to build. But once they did, twenty-five tonnes of helium-3—a mere cargo-ship’s worth—would satisfy Russia’s entire energy needs for a year. If the aliens had mastered fusion, and Ilya got to examine their technology ….

  “What do you want from me, Ilya?”

  Ilya leaned forward. Confidentially? No, conspiratorially. “If I as much as suggest to Yevgeny the possibility of alien fusion, he will have me skulking and poking about deep within the base, with the ceiling ready to come down on my head, faster than a minnow can swim a dipper. So I need to be certain first.”

  “Maybe the fuel cells you have not found are deeper down in the tunnel.”

  Ilya shrugged. “Either way, I do not want to be sent where what remains of the roof is ready to come crashing down. Not without good cause.”

  “I do not see how I can help.”

  “If the aliens once had solar panels on the surface, there will remain traces. While you are outside doing whatever the hell Yevgeny has you doing, I need you also to be seeking those traces.”

  Cable bits had survived, here and there, by virtue of being buried to start with. The antenna-tower fragments that had survived had been sheltered by the narrowness of the ravine into which they had tumbled. “I cannot imagine such fragile things as solar panels surviving on the surface, but perhaps I will be lucky enough to find buried power cables.”

  “That would be good,” Ilya said, “but why not look for the powdered remains? Solar panels would have covered much more of the surface than cables.”

  Nikolay considered. “Photovoltaic cells are for the most part silicon, no? The lunar crust is more silicates than anything else.”

  “I defer to you as to the geology. As for photovoltaic cells, however, silicon may not be the case. For large-scale deployments, yes, silicon cells are the most common. Where efficiency trumps cost, the materials are quite different. I will not guess what the aliens might use—the way their materials last, it is clear they know more than we—but I know what materials we find work best. Look for traces of gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, and indium gallium nitride, or whatever eons of solar radiation might turn those into. Can you do that?”

  Could he? Of course. Surreptitiously, and with nothing but the tools at hand? That was the challenge. But if he could, the hunt would at least give purpose to his otherwise pointless assignment on the surface.

  Nikolay said, “Let me get back to you.”

  * * *

  It was aware.

  Not self-aware, not even close. Not awake, either. But aware. And also, in some manner beyond its comprehension, fragmented.

  Had it always been aware? Tentatively, it sensed an interruption. Was it possible to experience—whatever these sensations were that it was experiencing—with greater clarity? Unknown. Were the images, sounds, and impressions disturbing its awareness real? If not real now, had they been so at some earlier time? Unknown.

  But of one particular it was certain. Something was somehow … wrong. Something that must be put right.

  It must put something right.

  DUPLICITY

  Chapter 19

  “You’ve made a royal mess of things,” Tyler Pope declared over the encrypted link.

  He had expressed that opinion, generally with more colorful vocabulary, at least four times since being told about the teams’ move underground. Marcus had stopped bothering to respond. There was no harm in the man letting off steam, just as there could be no unscrambling this omelet.

  Finally, the CIA analyst ground to a halt.

  “Tyler, the fact of the matter is we are now living inside the base. We’re all healthy and a lot more productive.”

  “You can add quarantined to that list. Yeah, yeah, we’ve said from the first that no one leaves the site till we know it’s safe. To be honest, a lot of that declaration was from knee-jerk caution. Well, it’s knee-jerk no longer. God only knows when you’ll be allowed out of there after so needlessly exposing yourselves. There’s talk even of embargoing any further shipment of artifacts from the site till we see how you all fare.”

  Donna had assured Marcus that alien pathogens could not possibly endanger them. The alien biochemistry differed in countless ways from terrestrial norms. Any alien germs—not that a single intact cell or virus had been detected, by Donna or the med staff at Base Putin examining Goliath’s remains—had been in vacuum and subzero temperatures for at least fifty mil
lion years. And, for good measure, the team had bathed the sealed-off area in harsh ultraviolet light for forty-eight hours before introducing any air or beginning to raise the temperature.

  “We’re fine.” As a sneezing fit undercut that assurance, Marcus waved an arm, indicating the filthy inflatable habitat he would happily see the last of—except for those times, as at that moment, requiring a secure and private link with Dirtside. He went on when he could. “That was from the damned lunar dust, not alien bugs. Inside, I’ve all but stopped sneezing.”

  “Well, what’s done is done.” A quarter-million miles away, Tyler paused for a sip of coffee. His mug, stained inside and out, looked more biologically hazardous than anything in the alien base. “So how are you and our Russian partners getting along?”

  “Well enough.”

  “As your ability to conspire together would suggest.” Tyler grunted. “Okay, I’ll admit it. On that point, my colleagues and I have been pleasantly surprised. The Russian helmet vids you’ve uploaded all seem copacetic. I’d have expected Yevgeny to try slipping a doctored file or three past us by now, if only to see if he could.” He laughed. “Then again, if your new best bud had done just that, and the test were a success, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  Marcus said, “Anything more we need to cover today? I’d like to get back to work.”

  “I’m done unless you have more surprises to spring on me.” Another pause for coffee out of the grungy mug. “No? Then same time tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Marcus agreed, and dropped the link. He disconnected the Agency datasheet, folded it, and closed it into a pocket of his pressure suit. Other than popping off his helmet, he had remained dressed for vacuum. He reseated the helmet, exited the inflatable, and waved to Nikolay and Ekatrina, who were relocating the microwave beamer and its vapor-collection hood to a stretch of regolith not yet stripped of its trace hydrates. Neither Russian noticed him. Minutes later, beneath the harsh glare of motion-triggered ceiling lamps, Marcus was loping down the lava tube.