Lifeline (8 page)

Chapter 11

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 10

“All right, guys, this isn’t going to be like working on
Orbitech 2.
Don’t get cocky on me.” Clifford E. Clancy surveyed the five space-suited engineers crowded in the base airlock chamber.

“Tomkins wants us to bring back everything that isn’t welded to the
Miranda’s
hull. That includes the power pile, if it isn’t too hot. We’ll be taking both six-pack rovers out, so we’ve got plenty of room. Any questions?”

Clancy left his channels open, but waited only a beat. His people were never too shy to ask questions. They had worked well enough together on the massive
Orbitech 2
construction project.

“Okay, folks, let’s go sightseeing.” Clancy activated the airlock that opened out to the Moon’s stark surface. A faint hiss indicated that the last of the trapped air had out-gassed. Behind them, the mound that covered the base entrance looked like any other hillock in the lunar wasteland.

Clancy much preferred the broad, shining girders and massive wheel of
Orbitech 2,
the most glorious man-made object in the solar system. By contrast,
Clavius Base
seemed a bunch of tunnels for ground squirrels to hide in.

Clancy heard only breathing on the comm-links; he couldn’t see any expressions behind the gold-mirrored faceplates. Something was definitely wrong if his people weren’t ribbing each other. “Teamwork communication,” he always called it—the informal, friendly attitude that turned them into a real team instead of a bunch of workers with the same job assignments.

He had thought that giving the crew a chance to go outside and get away from the base might let them work off some steam. Clancy himself wanted to see space again, even if it was only overhead and not the full 4 pi.

He could take only five out of the two hundred construction engineers transferred down from the L-4 site. But it gave at least some of his people a chance to do something worthwhile. And the salvage operation would provide a new story for the daily ConComm broadcast. The rest of the crew could watch and stop twiddling their thumbs for a while. After all, they were a construction team—not a bunch of “Lunatics” like the other Moon colonists.

Clancy began a low whistle into the comm-link, a tune his grandfather used to sing to him. After a faltering start, the others picked it up over the communication channels.
Hi ho, hi ho! It’s off to work we go!
They even seemed to march along with the tune. Clancy allowed himself a grin. Silence broken. Mission accomplished.

Outside the base, Clancy led his salvage crew out onto the pressed gravel walkway. They followed the path to the two six-pack vehicles sitting on the fused-rock parking area. Stars wheeled overhead, burning with a brilliance that seemed enhanced against the heavy lunar shadows. Still nothing like the awesome drowning sensation of open space, though—here, the ground gave him a frame of reference.

Two weeks ago, they had been up sealing the framework of the second industrial colony, floating by themselves, watching blueprints turn into reality. And then they had all been ordered to return to
Clavius Base
, to cool their heels while Orbitechnologies Corporation and its consortium of European investors worked out the details to shuttle the crew home. With world tensions heating up, the main contractors thought it best to back away, to hold their breath and wait a few weeks. Clancy hated to see the big project brought to a standstill. He had kept everything close to schedule up until then. What did Earth politics have to do with the peace and silence of L-4?

He’d had a very narrow view of things before the War. Now
Orbitech 2
was going to be on hold for a lot longer than a few weeks.

Clancy sniffed inside his helmet. Dirty socks.
Why does this suit always smell like dirty socks?
No matter how much he cleaned, rubbed, and soaked the tape-wrapped phenolic, he couldn’t get rid of the smell. It had never bothered him out in the “open air” at L-4, working and living in the suit eighteen hours every day of the week. A person could get used to nearly anything after that much time. But once he’d been stranded at
Clavius Base
with the rest of the engineers, he began to notice it.

At first he ignored the smell, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t there, that he’d get used to it if he wore his suit more often. But it didn’t work. Probably psychosomatic. And if he didn’t watch out, somebody would send him to a shrink. Psychiatrists! He didn’t trust scientists who couldn’t give hard answers.

The gravel path swung hard to the right, bringing them out of the curtain of shadow and into sunlight. His visor darkened instantly, reflecting half of the unpolarized light away from his eyes. Suddenly, the shadows all around them looked like a bottomless black maw. He could read the fluorescent letters of the crew members’ names across their chests.

“Homann and Wooster, come with me. The rest of you take the other six-pack and follow. Shen, you drive today.”

“Right, boss man,” she answered.

“There you go, Cliff, making points with the ladies again.” Homann’s Arabic accent was barely noticeable.

Shen snapped back, “Open your faceplate, Petey, and I’ll give you a big fat kiss!”

The others snickered, and Clancy felt another thread of relief. Banter. He liked that they could tease each other.

All of them knew they might never get off the lunar surface.
Clavius Base
could just about support itself with its five hundred permanent members; but with the extra two hundred engineers who had been unexpectedly recalled from
Orbitech 2,
the Moon base was in just as bad a situation as any of the Lagrange colonies.

One by one, they swung up into the lunar rovers, stepping onto the overinflated wheels. Clancy scooted into the driver’s compartment in front of the passenger seats, three in front, three in back. Behind the passenger area a wide cargo platform made the vehicles look like old flatbed trucks created with giant Tinker toys.

Homann and Wooster strapped into the seats behind Clancy. After the other three had climbed aboard the second six-pack, Clancy gave them a thumbs-up. “Ready to roll?”

Shen’s voice came over the comm-link. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

He reached down and pressed the starter. The rover shook, and Clancy let up on the regulator, easing the six-pack into motion. Like a child’s overgrown play vehicle, it lurched around the boulders and sinks on the crater floor, heading out.

After they had left the low markings of
Clavius Base
behind and begun to work their way across the lunar surface, Clancy switched on the Doppler guidance system. He entered the coordinates for the crash site, then trusted the rover’s computer-driven radar to take them there.

Across the great flat sea of the crater glinted the six-mile track of the railgun—the mass launcher that hurled lunar material to the collecting stations at L-2. Under normal circumstances, the rock would be routed off to its rendezvous at L-4 for smelter processing into construction material for
Orbitech 2.
During peak periods, the mass launcher operated continuously, throwing five buckets of rock per second away from the surface, accelerating the material above the Moon’s escape velocity so that it would drift precisely toward the catchers in space.

Now, though, the mass driver looked empty and alone, an archaeological relic glinting against the deep-black sky. The single mass launcher had provided the material for all the colonies—
Orbitech 1,
the
Aguinaldo,
the Soviet
Kibalchich,
and most of
Orbitech 2.
Now everything had been mothballed. Before long, the delicate laser gyros and velocity regulators of the induction motors would lose their calibration, making the mass launcher useless.

As they left it behind, Clancy wondered if he should let some of his people work on the mass launcher, just for something to do. They might find it interesting—heck, he might even be interested himself.

He scanned the horizon, which always felt too close, with the Moon’s radius being only a third of the Earth’s. It all seemed wrong when it looked like you could throw a rock over the edge of the world. And because the horizon was so close, surface detail seemed to leap out at him, even at the guidance system’s cautious speed.

A light blinked on the console. “This is it,” he announced. “Shen, I’ve got it about two hundred yards in front of us.”

“Can’t see a thing but shadows,” she answered.

“This is it. I remember.”

Three days before, Clancy had pulled Duncan McLaris out of the
Miranda
’s wreckage. He had helped to chisel away Stephanie Garland’s mangled and frozen-hard corpse from the cockpit. He had retrieved the body of McLaris’s daughter inside her overlarge space suit.

It had been just dumb luck that the rovers had found the crashed shuttle-tug as soon as they had—in time to save McLaris before his own air ran out. Out on the broad and jumbled lunar surface, with its incredible shadows and too-bright sunlight, finding anything so small was difficult.

He saw a glint of reflected sunlight out of the corner of his eye and manually steered to the right. The six-pack bounced, jarring everyone in their seats as they made a straight line for the site. Shen followed in her rover.

When they grew close enough, Clancy flicked on a battery of flood lamps. The ruins of the
Miranda
stood like a haunted house in the rocky desolation.

Clancy spoke into the comm-link. “All right, everybody. Careful. I don’t want to have to explain any stupid accidents to Tomkins. Homann, you and Wooster spiral out from the wreckage and comb the surface. Keep going until you’re about a hundred yards away—I want to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

Who knows what we’ll need if
Clavius Base
is going to survive?

Clancy slowed the rover to a halt several yards in front of the shuttle-tug. Twisted metal rose from the dusty lunar surface. Pencil-thin beams of graphite composite jutted from the craft, balanced weirdly in the low gravity. Crushed and shattered crystal covered a large patch on the ground, along with remnants of viewports, astrogator lenses, and infrared sensing equipment. Smears of light from the rover vehicles, along with glare from the Sun and draping pools of black shadows, made the scene look like an overexposed photograph.

Moving stiffly in his suit, Clancy climbed down from the six-pack and jumped the last few feet to the ground. He hit the crumbly surface and bounced another step toward the
Miranda.
The others moved after him like extras in some absurd water ballet.

Homann and Wooster bounded away from the six-pack with recklessly long strides. The Lunatics constantly nagged the engineering crew about the hazards of low-gravity jumping—how even with the lower gravity, they still had a full amount of inertia to deal with. All the workers had seen videos of what happened when faceplates cracked: burst eyeballs, ruptured blood vessels, the dark brown powder of blood streaming out of nostrils and ears, boiling and freezing at the same time, and the awful mummy-like desiccation that set in before an hour passed.

But good people got tired of incessant warnings—safety was their own responsibility, and in the isolation at L-4, they knew the dangers of horseplay. They didn’t need a mother hen.

Homann jumped too far, let out a distressed yelp at the apex of his flight, and landed unsteadily. A few Arabic expletives sputtered across the open comm-link channel, but he recovered himself. With a smile, Clancy noticed that the two men began to move about more carefully, spiraling away from the crashed shuttle-tug.

Clancy stood in front of the wreckage. The tug’s outer hull had been split by the stress of the crash and twisted into three main sections. Clancy stared at it, imagined the shuttle the way it had been, picturing how all the pieces fit together. He rebuilt it in his mind, reconstructing the accident in reverse.

“Shen, take your team and start peeling everything off the outer structure. Some of the ceramic skin plates might be worthwhile, and the precision interlocks are more sophisticated than anything we can make here. Be sure to get the circuit boards in the navigation computers. Let me duck inside and make sure the structure’ll hold up before you guys follow.”

“Yes, sir.” Shen’s usual flippant comeback seemed to have been quelled by the sight of the mangled vessel. She had not been part of the initial rescue team.

Clancy picked his way through the ragged opening where he had found McLaris. He placed his hands on the jagged metal edge, careful not to damage his suit, then lifted himself into the craft.

Deep shadows filled the interior. The floodlights from the two six-packs could not reach inside; no atmosphere reflected the light. Only one of the self-illuminated indicator panels glowed, still showing ALARM status.

Through a gaping hole in the main viewing window, he could see a carpet of stars. From his backpack, Clancy removed two trouble lights and set them up, illuminating the chamber. Multiple glares bounced off the floor and walls, like luminous ghosts.

Clancy preferred open space and vast distances with nothing to get in the way. He liked to be able to look in every direction and see infinity. Isolated, the
Orbitech 2
site had seemed to hang at the center of the universe itself. But this place felt like a coffin.

He came to the spot where McLaris had been lying. A broken piece of sharp lunar rock jutted through the floor only a foot away. McLaris had been lucky.

Clancy squeezed through a crushed piece of the bulkhead and the floor. The trouble lights shone on a dry brown stain, darker than the gray lunar dust. Kneeling, Clancy ran his finger through the dry powder. He’d found Stephanie Garland there, as mangled as the
Miranda.
The captain always goes down with her ship, right?

But McLaris had lived. He had to cope with the death of his daughter. Clancy had seen the little girl’s last expression, and he would be haunted by it for the rest of his life, but McLaris would have to live with his imagination, and the knowledge of what he had done.