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CHAPTER 1:
The Moon and the Desert

George J @spacefan
Any news on the astronaut injured on the Moon?

USSF Public Information Office @SpaceForceOfficial
@spacefan, US Space Force is unable to comment at this time.
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ChirpChat, January 2039



Glenn Armstrong Shepard drifted in and out of consciousness. He really had no way of knowing if he was dreaming or actually seeing and hearing his surroundings. He saw white—white walls, white ceiling, people moving around him, all in white. There was a strange lack of depth to it all.

The next moment he was watching the dragonfly crash. The trainer reminded him of a Wright Flyer—a biplane with a fuselage of tubing and wire, just . . . longer, with wings three times the size of the Earth-bound original and reaction-control rockets for training on the Moon. This one had to be a dream; he was the pilot.

He watched himself struggling to control the unstable trainer. The right wing of the Dragonfly began to lift, so he corrected the tilt by firing the control thruster on the left wing. The burn was too long. Instead of coming level, the left wing rose even higher than the right had. The nose was starting to lift as well.

It was surreal, how he was both watching the imminent crash, and part of it at the same time. He vaguely heard Mission Control telling him to “stay in his lane.”

“He’s going to lose it,” he heard himself saying into the dedicated channel to Mission Control. “How the hell is he supposed to fly this in Mars’s atmosphere if he can’t hold it steady in vacuum with half the gees?”

“Pilot. You need to eject.” He heard his own voice coming over the comm.

“I . . . can . . . control . . .” he grunted through gritted teeth.

He heard himself scream, and everything faded to black.


Glenn was drifting, his viewpoint changing as he directed his attention to his surroundings. There was a female doctor preparing an operating room. She was dressed from head to toe in a white isolation garment. He couldn’t see features, but he felt he knew this person.

Female. Tall and thin, mid-forties, long brown hair, pale skin like most of the people on Moonbase who ignored the mandatory hour-a-day “grow lights” which substituted for sunlight. He couldn’t see any of that, but her voice triggered memories.

He knew her.


“L.I.S.T.E.R., we need to set the bay for hyperbaric oxygen, with pressure at twenty-two PSI and oh-two at thirty percent. In preparation, we need a Level One hard decon. Double check the pressure seals right now, give me hard vac and two-hundred thousand lux UV B and C sterilization for ten minutes, then prep for hyperbaric conditions.”

An artificial voice replied. “Acknowledged, Dr. Barbier. Closing shutters and pumping down to hard seal.” The thick transplas portholes into the procedure room darkened, and there was a thrum of air pumps. “Decontamination commencing.” The pumps stopped, and the faintest glow of light was visible through the darkened ports. After ten minutes, the glow reduced and there was a slight hiss of air. “Argon purge commencing.”

Hyperbaric therapy was common in the treatment of decompression sickness and “the bends”—caused by air bubbles in the blood—and had been in use since divers first ventured into the deep ocean. It was also useful as a follow-up for astronauts whose spacesuits lost pressure; however, as a medical treatment, it had risks. High pressure oxygen should be the perfect healing environment; unfortunately, too long an exposure would cause seizures. The counter argument was that pure oxygen would speed the healing process and could prevent the need for amputating badly damaged limbs.

Yvette waited for the rescue crew to bring her one-time colleague, friend, and former lover into the sickbay facility on Moonbase. The reports had mentioned burns and a crush injury, and complications from those injuries involved heightened risk of infection and lack of blood flow to the affected limbs and even organs—especially in the reduced pressure environment of the lunar surface suits. Thus, she’d elected to sterilize the medical bay by exposing it to vacuum. It was easy enough to do on the Moon, easier still in this location right on the edge of Moonbase’s pressure dome. Once her patient arrived, the increased pressure and oxygen concentration would force Oh-Two directly into his tissues no matter how badly damaged the circulation. She would need to balance the atmospheric pressure to gain the maximum benefit of oxygen penetration to his damaged tissues and keep her patient stable until she could figure out the extent of his injuries.


The visitor standing in the hatch to the med bay had two stars on his collar, but the doctor was just too tired to care about his rank. Besides, she was a civilian. There wasn’t too much he could do to her if he decided she was insubordinate.

“How is he, Doctor?” the two-star asked.

“He’s a tough S-O-B, General.” Yvette Barbier stripped off an outer set of gloves, then pulled down her mask and face shield to rub at her eyes. There was a lot of blood—on her scrubs, gloves, mask, and hair net, but the shield had protected her face and the wisps of blonde hair on her forehead. “There’s no way he should be alive, and frankly, I’m not sure that he should remain so from the point of view of the Hippocratic Oath. Keeping him alive may well cause more harm than good. Both legs are crushed below the knees. One leg has a fracture above the knee while the other has a partial fracture—what we call a ‘green-stick break.’ His entire left side is burned. Even if he keeps the arm, the healing from that is tricky, and he’ll probably lose it to circulatory failure. The heat damage is severe, even on top of the burns.”

“So. Bad, then.”

Yvette looked up and stared angrily at the commander of the Space Force contingent at Moonbase. “General, he was breathing superheated steam mixed with glycol. The only thing that saved him was when his suit vented—but then he was in low pressure. At this point, I don’t even know if he can breathe without a ventilator.” She sighed and slumped in her chair. “It would be a mercy to just turn it off. I checked for a DNR, but I don’t see one in his file.”

A Do Not Resuscitate, or D-N-R, order was common among active Space Force members. The theory was that anything in space that didn’t kill you instantly might as well have done so anyway.

“Oh, he’s got an advanced directive, alright. You’re not going to like it, though.”

“Why?”

“It reads simply, ‘Rebuild me. Bionics if necessary.’ It goes on to say that as long as heart, lungs and brain are functioning, he volunteers for prosthetic augmentation.”

Yvette was shocked. “Is that even possible?”

“We can rebuild him; we have the technology. He even offered a trust fund to pay for it.”

“Oh, God.” Yvette closed her eyes and whispered. “God, how I wish you didn’t.”


Glenn was awake this time. At least, he thought he was. The room still had the flat, two-dimensional effect, and it extended to sounds as well. Things seemed . . . flat and muffled, but he was pretty sure he was actually there this time and not floating around.

Yvette had done something to turn off the nerve impulses which carried pain. He still had a vague sensation of his body—he could feel the temperature-regulating fabric relieving the heat from his burned skin, there was air movement on the right side of his face, but his whole left side felt dull, flattened. He knew he was talking with Yvette, but the first part of the conversation was a blur.

Oh, right. “I can’t do it, Glenn. There’s too much risk,” she’d told him.

“Amputation will stabilize me until they can get me back groundside. You know wounds don’t drain properly in low-gee,” Glenn countered. His voice was raspy and barely more than a whisper; frankly, it was amazing he could talk and be understood with the bandages covering his face. The hyperbaric oxygen had prevented more damage from the burns, but his airway had already suffered from inhaling heated contaminants. “Waiting only risks gangrene and losing the rest of the legs. It will make fitting a prosthetic that much tougher.”

“Stop it! You know I can’t do that. You’ve always known.” Yvette turned away with tears in her eyes. “Why couldn’t you have had a D-N-R like a sensible person? You can’t live like this. I can’t stand to watch you die by inches. I won’t do it.”

“So, you want me to die just like . . . well, I’d snap my fingers, except, you know . . . the bandages,” he growled.

“NO! I don’t want you to die, but I can’t watch you live in agony. You think you’re okay now, but that’s just the nerve interrupter. When that gets turned off, it will be either a life of drug addiction or pain.”

“There are other possibilities.”

“That’s what you said, but there’s less than five percent possibility that it will work.”

“I know a doctor. Martin Spruce. His technique pushes that up to fifty percent.”

“For your legs, sure. But your arm? You’re probably going to lose that. Your skin, your face, not to mention eye and ear, are so badly damaged that you have to keep pushing that probability until your luck runs out.”

“I have to try.”

“Listen to yourself! You can’t even talk above a whisper from the inhalation burns. I took an oath to ‘First, do no harm.’” She let out a sob. “Letting you live like this is more harm than my conscience can bear. I’m taking myself off your case.”

“Fine then. Call Dr. Spruce. Get him up here, or get me down there. I’ll have to go back down to Earth anyway, so might as well get me prepped and on my way, then you’ll never have to deal with me again.”

“I know,” Yvette sobbed.

* * *

Yvette was sitting at a workstation just outside the intensive care module. The monitors said he was asleep, recovering from anesthesia. Through the observation window she could see him lying on the treatment table, unmoving. A white drape didn’t quite cover his body, but was held suspended so that it didn’t touch the burned skin while still providing protection and a token amount of modesty. Drainage tubes connected to the stumps of his legs and left arm were connected to pumps to compensate for the lack of gravity-induced drainage.

She turned away from the window and picked up her tablet to leave, when multiple alarms went off. She looked back through the window and saw Glenn tense up and start to convulse. By the time she could get through the isolation door into the room—ignoring her own protective garments—he lay very still. The heart monitor showed a wiggling line instead of regular—or even irregular—heartbeats.

“L.I.S.T.E.R. Code Blue!” she shouted. Convulsions meant she’d made a mistake and the high-pressure oxygen was affecting his brain. Seizures were often caused by brain swelling, and the effect on his heart meant the swelling had affected the brainstem. She would have to act fast—faster than assistance could arrive.

The heart monitor was connected to an automated defibrillator. Electric shock would overcome fibrillation—uncoordinated “vibration” of the heart muscle—and hopefully restore a semblance of a heartbeat. The problem was that she needed to do other things: administer drugs to reduce swelling, reduce the strain on the heart, check his breathing, blood pressure, electrolytes and more. However, if the AD fired while she was touching Glenn, the transmitted shock could cause burns at best, or at worst, stop her own heart. This would have to be timed carefully.

Her heart told her she was doing the right thing, even if her medical training said otherwise.

When he eventually awoke, she would need to be elsewhere, and once he left for Earth, he would be gone. But for now, she would do everything she could for him, even if he could never know.


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