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3.1
17 November

Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station

Lunar South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


“Charge torpedo one,” said Commander Harb, with all due drama.

Commander Fernanda Harb, a British woman just beginning to form streaks of natural gray in her hair. Not a bad lady to work for, Tania Falstaff thought, but really rather young to be in charge of a moonbase, thank you very much. And Harvest Moon Jumpsuit Yellow was not her color.

“Aye, madam,” Tania said back, with drama of her own, and pressed enter on her touchdesk’s virtual keyboard. “Torpedo one is charging.”

There was of course no torpedo—just a dummy payload sitting in Harvest Moon’s brand-new mass driver. Ten kilometers long and made of eighty percent indigenous materials, it sat twenty kilometers from here, well away from the base, and from the nearby observatory and monastery.

The entire crew of Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station—all eighteen of them—were crammed into the Control Center, jokingly referred to as the Bridge, and the wall displays showed a radar view of the South Polar Mineral Territories, along with radar and camera views of the mass driver itself.

“It’s sure to blow,” murmured Stephen Chalmers, seated at the console beside her.

It was more than an idle speculation; in order for the dummy payload to reach Earth’s atmosphere and burn up as intended, the mass driver’s capacitors had to be charged to a hundred percent and then rapidly discharged, each in turn, to zero. Each of the one hundred iron coil magnets had to carry, briefly, a field of 2600 gauss—enough to shred a motorcar or pull the fillings out of God’s own teeth. There had been nine catastrophic component failures during dry-fire testing, and only three clean fires since then, and that was without the magnetic eddy stresses of an actual projectile in the tube.

Tania shushed him with a glance. This was a proud moment for Harvest Moon Industries, or was supposed to be at any rate, and she’d already bet Stephen twenty quid about it, so what was there to say? Also, they were on video right now, both livestreamed on the HMI channel and archiving to half a dozen video libraries. The volume of Stephen’s voice was low enough she could barely hear it—presumably so the microphones’ filters would reject it as background noise—but anyone with a lip reader app could make a good guess what he was saying. Bad form, that. Also, it was his own work he was disparaging, which would not look good if news of it got out.

“Fifty percent charge,” Tania reported. Then, a minute later, “Seventy-five percent charge.” Then: “One hundred percent charge.”

“Status?” Commander Harb demanded.

“All green,” Stephen assured her.

“Can you be more specific?” Clearly, she wanted all the juice she could squeeze out of this lemon. The news cycles were of course dominated by the murder of Etsub Beyene, barely four kilometers from here, and something as prosaic as a new launch system would not make much of a ripple. But, her tone seemed to say, let’s try, shall we? Let’s fill this moment with as many dramatic words as we can. “Call them out by subsystem, please.”

“Photovoltaics, green, obviously,” Stephen replied. “Charging circuit green, obviously. Capacitors: I have one hundred green, zero yellow, zero red. Induction coils: I have one hundred green, zero yellow, zero red. Payload, green. Aperture magnetic choke, green. Site radar, green. Site camera, green. Area radar, green. Communications green, obviously. My console, built-in test, green. I have zero yellow, any functions. I have zero red, any functions. All functions green, madam.”

“Right,” Commander Harb said, more smartly than strictly necessary. “Ms. Falstaff, are you ready to fire?”

“Aye, madam,” Tania answered. Also with great formality and vigor. She’d been a radar engineer and remote-outpost air traffic controller on four continents, and she’d been told her radio voice was superb, with crisp consonants, and sibilants that didn’t hiss the mic. She’d learned the skills as an aircraftman with the RAF, but she’d gone to Cameroon via Doctors Without Borders, and to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, and jumped from there to HMI when the opportunity presented itself. Two years in Paramaribo and then, much to her surprise, a coveted spot on the Moon itself.

“Ms. Falstaff, fire torpedo one.” Dutifully, Tania pressed control-F.

“Torpedo one away,” she said, before bothering to check if it were true.

The camera views and the K-band site radar were anticlimactic, to say the least. The lights on each coil assembly switched on and off in sequence, one by one, but the whole firing sequence took only eight seconds. There was a hint of a suggestion of a flicker as the payload exited the release aperture, and then nothing. It was like watching a gun being fired, minus the smoke and sparks and definitely minus the bang. The 9 GHz area radar was more encouraging; against a bright, false-color terrain image of the South Polar Mineral Territories (extending from the pole itself to the 85th parallel), the displays showed a little red circle moving upward and north, almost perfectly along the zero meridian line, on a trajectory that would carry it into a very low polar orbit around the Earth. It would never complete its first orbit. A hundred hours from now, it would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

“Trajectory is nominal,” Tania reported. “Torpedo one is on course for grazing reentry.”

She’d installed the radar equipment herself, and customized the software currently generating this display, so her word on the matter was rather definitive. Harb accepted it without comment.

“Payload telemetry also nominal,” Stephen added. “All sensors functioning, no acceleration damage.”

“I see.”

This in itself was a bit of a triumph, as the little dummy probe had to withstand a peak acceleration of 28.7 gee—equivalent to a head-on car crash at highway speed—as it passed through each of the electromagnets. One hundred car crashes, in 8.5 seconds! It spoke to the maturity of Lunar manufacturing, which of course spoke directly to the readiness of Harvest Moon Industries to support a hoped-for wave of colonization. Why, anyone with fifty billion pounds at their disposal could afford their own moonbase as lavish as Saint Joe’s own monastery, and there were dozens of people with resources like that, and hundreds of organizations. So far, they weren’t biting, but Tania figured that was down to nobody wanting to go first.

“This is a momentous occasion,” Commander Harb said, for the benefit of the livestream audience, and for the recordings that would no doubt become important PR assets. Her voice was at once breathy and precise, a staccato of perfectly formed syllables conferring an air of irreproachability to anything she said. “Harvest Moon can now deliver Lunar raw materials to any point in cislunar space, without wasting tons of Lunar-derived propellant in the process. This will drop commodity prices by an order of magnitude, and eventually perhaps by two orders of magnitude, for anything we can supply, which is a long and growing list.”

“Making certain people very angry,” Stephen muttered.

“Shh,” Tania said, although of course he was right. They would soon be seriously undercutting Orlov Petrochemical’s profits on hydrogen, oxygen, iron, calcium, and magnesium. That would still leave Grigory Orlov with monopolies on extraterrestrial carbon and nitrogen and (for now) rare-earth metals, and of course it would lower the cost of the tralphium (or “helium-3”) he fed to his fusion reactors on Earth. Which would lower the price of electricity, which should in theory make everyone on Earth happy. But naturally the Americans and the Russians had denounced the mass driver as a weapon of mass destruction, capable of blasting city-block-sized impact craters anywhere on the Earth’s surface, and the Chinese (with substantial Lunar assets of their own, clustered mainly around the North Polar Mineral Territories) had threatened to bomb it outright. And yet, here they were, up and running.

“The future of humankind,” Commander Harb continued, sounding so over-rehearsed that Tania could barely stand it, “depends on this, and other developments like it, to untether space industry, and space colonization, from their long dependence on Earthly materials. History may well look back on this moment as a turning point, where humans living in space made their first and biggest stride toward real independence.”

“Laying it on thiiiiick,” Stephen mumbled.

“Shh!”

“Thank you for your attention,” Harb concluded, and made a cutting gesture across her throat, letting the AV system know it was time to switch off the cameras. Then, in a more normal voice, she said, “Hopefully somebody pays attention.”

“Things have gotten right crazy, ma’am,” said Puya Hebbar. “People’s attention is divided, for sure. Ours isn’t even the only murder. Someone was killed up on Esley Shade Station as well.”

“Gossip and rumors,” said Commander Harb.

“Well, something’s got them stirred up,” Puya insisted, in her singsong voice, which was actually quite lovely. But although Puya Hebbar was brilliant—a PhD rocket scientist and the head of Launch Services for Harvest Moon—she also somehow managed to be both a gossip and a ditz, with her ear to the door of every rumor mill in the solar system. To hear her tell it, Esley Shade Station had been taken over forcibly by the U.S. Space Force, who still maintained an armed presence on board. And Igbal Renz had used the ESL1 Solar Shade as a giant antenna to make contact with an alien civilization, and was planning a crewed interstellar mission to meet them. Oh, and they were also building antimatter bombs up there, and Renz was up to a hundred other things, and so was everyone else in outer space.

But Commander Harb simply said, “Something has them stirred up, yes. And the Americans, generally.”

“The Americans can smooch me on the arse and buy me dinner,” Stephen muttered.

Tania didn’t bother shushing that, because the cameras were off now, and because yes, the Americans could smooch him on the arse. Harvest Moon wasn’t exactly a British company (it was officially Surinamese, and it hired people from all over the world), but it had British DNA, and the “special relationship” between Blighty and its snotty former colony had never extended past Earth’s atmosphere. Oh, the Americans had gotten to the Moon first and never let you forget it, but where were they now? In low Earth orbit, and at ESL1, out between the Earth and Sun, at the very limits of cislunar space. Maybe they would get to Mars, and maybe they wouldn’t, but meanwhile they were killing each other for the privilege. And the Moon already in British hands, more or less. Also Chinese hands, for sure, but the Chinese didn’t honestly seem to know what to do with the place. Plant flags, fortify positions, all that imperial bullshit. For all their business smarts they had yet to make it pay, and to hell with them, anyway. The Moon was big enough for them to fuck right off.

“Keep tracking the payload, all the way in,” Commander Harb instructed Tania. Then, to Stephen, “Keep monitoring the payload telemetry. We want to know that it remains functional until it burns.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Stephen said. “We’re storing every bit of telemetry, of course, but I’ll keep the simulation running, too, and cut a 3D render of it as we go. Four and a half days—I’ll barely sleep.”

“Nor I,” she said archly.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” said Harb. Not a greeting, but a voice command to the AV system that would put the caller up on screen.

“Good afternoon, Commander,” said the caller, Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian. “I see congratulations are in order.”

Killian was a familiar face around here, but no less odd for that. That look people get, when they’re seventy-nine years old and still stubbornly tearing it up? Bald and wrinkly and stooped at the shoulder, but also tanner and stronger and quicker than you are? That was Sir Lawrence: a sweet old rattlesnake you did not try to bullshit. Although he was truthfully looking a bit pallid today.

“Sir Lawrence, always a pleasure,” Harb said, with just a little edge of sarcasm. Her voice was slower and thicker now, but still commanding, like a sharpened spoon dripping syrup. “The dummy rock is away, yes, on a nominal trajectory. If all goes well, we may begin commercial shipments to LEO by the end of the month.”

“Good, good. If you have champagne, now would be an excellent time.”

“We don’t, sir, but there might be some vodka lying around, or even some THC.”

“Keeping the drug printer busy, then? Well, that’s fine. No harm in it. And how are we doing with the other thing?”

“The thorium mining?”

“No,” he said, “but all right, what’s your update on that?”

To Tania he seemed both cheerful and a bit maudlin, which was also not abnormal. She’d never personally heard him pine for his beloved wife Rosalyn, but his grief for her seemed to infuse his daily life. Perhaps he’d wanted the Moon for her, but she hadn’t lived long enough, and so he never quite seemed to have the heart to take it for himself. He’d never been up here, even once.

Harb, sounding miffed, said, “Well I’ve got two men up at Ingenii Basin, don’t I? The robots are doing most of the work, but we’ll have a kilogram of pure metal by this time next week. It’s quite a big deal.”

“Indeed,” Sir Lawrence allowed. “Orlov Petrochemical will not be pleased, but this means Dan Beseman’s reactor will have fuel, and his township will have heat and light, which should delight him no end. The Antilympus orders are quite aggressive, though. Will we meet them?”

“We will,” Harb said, with more certainty than she ought to.

It had taken Bill and Nigel months to find the right spot to dig, and months more to actually dig. There weren’t veins of metallic thorium—at least, not that anyone had ever found—but along the northwest rim of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, near the Ingenii Basin on the Lunar farside, there were exposed monazite ripples where it made up more than a tenth of a percent of the regolith by weight, and could be sifted out with a sulfuric acid-leaching process that also yielded up small amounts of valuable rare-Earth metals. It was not the largest deposit on the Moon, nor the richest, but as it was “only” fifteen hundred kilometers north of Shackleton, it was by far the most accessible to Harvest Moon Industries. Tania wasn’t technically a geologist or a miner or a metallurgist, but it was impossible to reside here without hearing all about it.

The thorium was wanted for the Antilympus Project—so far the only customer—because they needed reactor fuel to feed the quite substantial power needs of the colony’s startup protocol and get them through that first critical winter. But they needed three hundred kilograms of the stuff! Their launch date was fixed by the laws of planetary motion, whereas the output of any mining operation was subject to major fluctuations. Even the harvesting of ice from Faustini Crater, which was basically a frozen lake half a kilometer deep. You’d think you could just cut it up into blocks and truck them wherever you liked, but of course nothing was ever that simple.

“You sound awfully sure,” Sir Lawrence observed.

“Yes, well there’s a lot of money to be made, and our bonuses are tied to it,” Harb said, “So you can rest assured it has my full attention.”

“Then assured is exactly how I’ll rest,” he said drolly.

Allegedly, Sir Lawrence had been a real hardass in the early days, when he was selling off airlines and record companies, tin mines and gravel pits to finance what everyone agreed was a phenomenally risky Lunar mining venture. Every man on “critical path” projects (and they were overwhelmingly men) was subject to his wrath—at least, when he wasn’t off racing motorcycles or jumping out of dirigibles. Then they were subject to the wrath of his lieutenants, twice as fierce and ten times as numerous. But those days were over long before Tania was hired. It gave her a bit of survivor’s guilt, if you wanted to know the truth, because she’d stepped lightly over the burnt-out husks of a hundred male colleagues to land this plum assignment, and all because, now that things were up and running, Sir Lawrence wanted to pretty up his gender balance. Tania and Fernanda Harb had come up at the same time, and showed up together in all the promotional videos. Puya Hebbar, too, had risen through the ranks with ease, to land in the chair she now occupied. It’s not that they weren’t qualified, because God knew they were, and then some. No one worked harder or longer than the women of Shackleton! But they were also pretty, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that was good for recruitment. And Sir Lawrence had never had a harsh word for any of them. Nor for anyone, really—not in a long time.

“Now about that other thing,” Sir Lawrence said.

“The SLAP?”

Also known as the Shoemaker Lunar Antenna Park—an observatory under construction a few kilometers past the linear accelerator.

“No,” he chuckled, “not that either.”

“Three astronomers on site,” Harb reported anyway. “We’re building the base around them while they work.”

“Yes, I know all that. They’re our first real customers after the monastery—you think I’m not paying close attention?”

“On the contrary, sir, I’m sure you are.”

“I’m talking about the other other thing.”

“Malinkin Base?”

“The same.”

Commander Harb sighed. “You know it’s not a real base they’ve got. Malinkin Shed is more like it. I know you’re excited to have another contract, but they’re not our people out there, so I’ve no real idea what they’re up to. A pair of very self-sufficient civil engineers, is all I know. They don’t call for help much, and they’re not looking to expand their facilities, so until they need transport home it’s not really much of our business.”

Supposedly, with the Marriott Stars Hotel now operational in low Earth orbit—full of well-heeled guests and booked solid for the next five years—Marriott was contemplating an even more lavish hotel here in the South Polar Mineral Territories, with five-star suites built along the inner surface of a buried dome, with a big round window of clear, starry sky at the top center. Those two blokes, Dwight Bratton and Chie Rongish, were allegedly scouting for a spot suitable for such a large excavation.

“Yes, well, it is our business, actually,” Sir Lawrence said, “or at least I’d like it to be. I’d like you to find out as much as you can, without actually coming out and asking them.”

“A bit of subterfuge?”

“Just looking ahead. It appears Marriott may be backing out of the project. They’re white as ghosts over the cost, and when we showed them something within their price range, I swear they turned a bit green around the edges, like a Nigerian flag. They can’t seem to imagine anyone paying to stay in our current production modules, and never mind the students who are doing exactly that over at Saint Joseph’s. But if they won’t listen to reason, I know a company that’s not afraid of a billion-dollar hole in the ground.”

Tania, feeling left out of the conversation, said, “Walt Disney? No, just kidding, sir. You’re talking about us. Our company.”

“Precisely, yes.” He seemed to find her humor wearying. Actually, he looked like he was finding everything a bit wearying today.

Harb looked uncomfortable. “A hotel, Sir Lawrence? Are you sure?”

“Not exactly a hotel, my dear. Let’s just say I’ve got a trick up my sleeve.”

“More than one trick,” she said to him, and not as a compliment. “And more than two sleeves, I think. All right, we shall do your spying, but I won’t let it interfere with paying work, sir, I really won’t.”

“Thank you, Commander. You have my utmost confidence.”

“Indeed.”

She made the cutting gesture again, and then sat down in her chair, as heavily as Lunar gravity permitted.

To Tania she said, “Well, it appears we have our orders. How much do you know about concrete?”



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