Helium3 - 1 Crater (15 page)

“How's my fastbug?” Crater asked.

“I towed it back,” Petro said. “It's bent a little and the paint's scratched, but otherwise it's fine. Don't let anybody ever say you don't know how to bolt a vehicle together. But now my truck's sick. Wheel bearing, I think.”

Crater rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Captain

Teller. “We'll need to fix Petro's truck before we can go anywhere.”

“Seems to me you ought to rest,” Teller said.

“I'm fine, Captain,” Crater replied.

Teller gave Crater a thoughtful look, then said, “All right.

Go get what you need from the inn's store and I'll use the Colonel's chit to pay for it. You can use tools from the chuckwagon, just put them back where you found them.”

Teller addressed the drivers. “Gentlemen, the bar is hereby closed. We leave in four hours. I suggest you get some rest.”

Irish spoke up. “We ain't going nowhere, Captain. We didn't sign up to get murdered out here.”

“There's no vote on a convoy. You'll do what I say or you'll end up like Klum.”

“And who's gonna look after Klum now?” Irish demanded.

“Poor man there with a broken arm.”

“The innkeeper's wife set it,” Teller said, “and injected some bone bugs in him. His arm will knit in a few days.”

“It don't keep it from hurting like scrag, Captain,” Klum complained. “I'm going to sit right here and wait for the next convoy heading back to Moontown.”

“That's fine, Klum,” Teller said. “But what if that crowhopper comes back?”

Klum had no reply. He just looked sour. “You're gonna get yours someday, Captain,” Irish growled.

“Anytime you're ready, Irish.”

Irish stared hard at Teller but there was no fight in him.

The other drivers hastily drank what was already in their glasses. Teller was going to get his way.

Crater went off with Petro to see about the wheel bearing while Teller had another talk with the innkeeper. He didn't like it when the man confirmed Crater's description of the invader. He wasn't likely a lunatic but probably a real crowhopper. God help them all, but what was such a creature doing in the wayback of the moon?

Teller wearily climbed back into his ECP suit. When he went outside through the inn's auxiliary hatch—the main one welded shut until it could be repaired—he saw that Crater already had Petro's truck jacked up. Teller went over and stood beside the ruined antenna. It wouldn't help him make the call, but at least he knew there was a clear view of the comm sats.

He tapped in the necessary request, linked up with two comm sats, and chose the one that cost the least. The main operator at Moontown answered the call, then switched him over to the Colonel. Teller explained what had happened in as few words as he could manage. “Understood, Jake,” Colonel Medaris said.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I'm going to follow that crowhopper, have a look around.”

“I need you to get your convoy to Armstrong City on time.”

“I will, sir. Don't worry.”

“How's Maria?”

“She's fine. A remarkable young lady.”

“And the boy?”

“He's raw but he's doing his job well enough.”

“I need him to get to Armstrong City on time too.”

“If the rest of us get there, I guess he'll also get there, sir.”

“Then get there. And on time, do you hear?”

Teller heard and signed off, then walked over to where Crater and Petro were working. “I'm going on scout with your fastbug,” he told Crater.

Crater, his hands holding the new bearing, looked over his shoulder. “That crowhopper could still be out there,” he said.

“That's why I'm going.”

Petro stood up. “I'll go with you.”

“No. Crater needs you more than I do.” He nodded to the electric rifle Crater had leaned up against the truck. “But keep that thing handy. And next time, shoot to kill. Its neck is its most vulnerable spot.”

Before Crater could answer, if he had an answer, Teller walked to the fastbug and stirred up its fuel cells. Before he began his scout, he allowed himself a brief moment to savor once more the idea of this being his last convoy, that perhaps at the end of it, he would join his wife and children in a little cottage tube within a vineyard dome. There, they would live a long, happy, productive life.

But then Teller shook off such pleasant thoughts. In the holster on his belt, he had a moontype nine-millimeter pistol, designed to work on the moon utilizing low-powder vacuumsealed cartridges to decrease its recoil. The crowhopper was a threat to his convoy and was out there somewhere. He intended to find the creature and kill it.

:::
FIFTEEN

I
t was a simple matter to follow the tracks of Crater's fastbug and Petro's truck. After Teller reached the rille where Crater had wrecked, he could also follow the splayed footprints of the spiderwalker that led southward. He'd seen a few of the war machines before and they gave him the creeps. With their eight legs, they moved almost like the real thing, and when they hopped and came down on an enemy with their hideous pincers snapping, they were terrifying.

Teller followed the tracks across a crater field and then across a plain of exposed basalt toward some rounded hills. After a few miles, he saw where the spiderwalker had stopped and another spiderwalker had joined it. A chill went up his spine. Two spiderwalkers meant certainly this was no lunatic he was following but some kind of military operation. He could tell by the boot prints that the two drivers had gotten off their machines, then remounted because the dual tracks of the two spiderwalkers continued on, still southward. Teller studied the horizon and then drove to the top of a small hill, got out, and switched on the binoculars in his helmet view port.

A few miles away, more or less—distance being difficult to judge on the moon even for an old hand in the wayback like Teller—he observed a black dot that didn't appear to be a regular feature. He got back in the fastbug and drove until he found a crowhopper lying sprawled on its back beside a spiderwalker.

The tracks showed that the other spiderwalker had continued on. Teller inspected the crowhopper, which appeared to be dead, then stripped it of its armor and saw it was wearing a standard ECP suit. Teller pulled off the crowhopper's helmet.

Its eyeballs were just blots of blood and its ears had bled out.

When he turned the helmet over, Teller saw there was a small hole in the back. It looked as if a laser had bored through it.

Teller searched the thing for any identification, but there was nothing. He took a few pix with his helmetcam. The thing— Teller couldn't bring himself to think of it as a man—was normal-size, not the giant Crater had described. After stripping off its ECP suit, Teller saw it had a myriad of tattoos on its body. One of them said “Kill them all.” Another said “Death is my trade.” There were more such phrases, all praising death, doom, and destruction. The artwork included terrible and fantastic beasts, blood dripping from their fangs and lips.

There was little else to see. Teller took more pix of the creature, then tossed the armor and the bloody helmet in the fastbug and drove back along his path. Along the way, he felt as if he were being watched, but though he stopped twice to look over his shoulder, he saw no one, just the moon . . . the beautiful, deadly moon.

:::
SIXTEEN

A
t the inn, Teller showed Crater and Maria the pix he'd taken, the armor, and the pierced helmet of the dead crowhopper.

“It's not the one who attacked me,” Crater said. “The armor's too small.”

“What could punch through a helmet like that?” Maria wondered, picking it up and pushing her finger through the irregular hole. It just barely fit.

“Nothing that I know of,” Teller answered. “A battle-laser makes a much bigger hole. Maybe some kind of new weapon.”

Crater was anxious to hear if there was any sign of the gillie but Teller told him there wasn't, though he'd looked around the spiderwalker. Crater kept reminding himself the gillie was just a biological machine that couldn't really think or feel. Still he said with a mournful tone, “I hoped it would get away.”

Teller's reply was disdainful. “Even if it did, it's full sunlight, Crater. It would die out there.”

“A gillie can take full sunlight,” Crater replied. “It's always exposed when I'm on the scrapes.”

Teller seemed hesitant to suggest another possibility.

“Maybe that crowhopper killed it. From what you told me, it'd be plenty mad at it. You can kill a gillie, can't you?”

“I suppose so,” Crater admitted. “I never thought much about it.”

Petro strolled over. “Before we drive another mile, Captain,” he said, “the other drivers and I want to know where we stand.

You need to tell us what's out there.”

Teller glared at Petro, then said, “Tell the drivers to meet me in the lobby.”

When Teller joined the drivers, he noted there were more than a few of them with expressions of contempt. Still other faces were blank, impossible to read. Teller preferred the ones he could read to the ones he couldn't. A man with a blank face was a dangerous man. The others could be watched and handled.

“I've talked to the Colonel so he knows our situation,”

Teller said. “I followed a spiderwalker track and after a while, two of them. Not too much farther along, I found a dead crowhopper. There was a hole burned in the back of its helmet.

That's all I know.”

Klum, his broken arm in a sling, stood up. “Look, Captain, we need to get on back to Moontown, get ourselves armed guards, then try this again. It's crazy to go on.”

“Your opinion is noted, Klum, and it will be given the weight it deserves,” Teller said. “How's that broken arm, by the way?”

“It aches and those little critters the innkeeper's wife put inside me give me the heebie-jeebies.”

“You'll be healed and able to drive in a week,” Teller said.

“For now, you're riding with Mutt. He needs his rest, being the delicate creature that he is, so he may pay you something when you're able to drive for him.”

The drivers chuckled at Teller's lame attempt at humor, then Irish spoke up. “Captain, it's clear you've decided we're going ahead. I'm going to wear my suit with my helmet on from here on, and I recommend that's what we all do so we can get out of our trucks in a hurry.”

“That's fine, Irish,” Teller said. “Any driver wants to follow your suggestion, I've got no objection. Just keep in mind most suits need refurbishment every one thousand hours. Keep an eye on them. All right, gentlemen and ladies. Mount up. We need to get across the moon.”

Crater had asked for permission to drive Petro's truck for a while, just to be certain the new wheel bearing was turning properly. Maria took the lead in Crater's fastbug, since it was faster than hers, and Teller brought up the rear with Maria's fastbug in tow behind the chuckwagon. “I'll need to go a little slow at first,” Crater told Teller.