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3.2

22 November


Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface



“What have we learned?” Commander Harb asked pointedly.

Tania Falstaff and Puya Hebbar were both in the mess hall, sipping Saint Joe’s brown tea and trying to unwind from another long day. Harb had stepped into the beam of one of the overhead lights, casting a broad shadow across them both, and Tania thought, not for the first time, that they needed better light dispersion in these modules. Harb was looking at both of them, but the question was aimed at Tania: what have “we” learned about the activities at Malinkin Base?

The mass driver’s test projectile had burned up on schedule yesterday, so this was now her primary concern.

But it was Puya who answered: “Ma’am, do you remember that nuclear rocket engine I told you about?”

Harb seemed annoyed. Puya was only here to get the mass driver working, and now that it was operational, she could pretty much go home anytime. She only reported to Harb in the sense that Harb was in charge of the moonbase; they were actually peers who both reported directly to Sir Lawrence. “The thorium-steam thing?”

“Thorium-hydrogen-oxygen, yes,” Puya said, undeterred. Her voice quick as a bird, and conspiratorial. “I’ve been running simulations that seem to confirm my hunch, that we can get at least double the specific impulse of our best chemical rockets. Which means we can plausibly run stratospheric ‘scoop’ missions from here to collect nitrogen and CO2 directly from the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Harb paused, her expression shifting from annoyed to thoughtful. Nitrogen and carbon were two things you really needed on the Moon. Two things not found here, and fiercely expensive to ship up from Earth. Orlov Petrochemical had stepped in to fill this void, supplying gases refined from asteroidal rock, but it was proper expensive nonetheless. And with Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot having paused its shipments, and generally showing signs of being an unreliable supply hub, Harvest Moon could not afford to rely on them exclusively. Not to mention Grigory Orlov was a pig and all that.

“How much nitrogen?” Harb asked.

Puya shrugged. “Not sure yet. Hundreds of kilograms at the very least.”

“From one robotic mission?”

“Right.”

“How much ice do you have to throw away for that?” Tania asked. She was an engineer and space traffic controller, not a propulsion expert, but it didn’t take a propulsion expert to see the key issue: Puya’s hypothetical engine—the one she’d been talking about for weeks, when she was supposed to be fixing the mass driver—would “combust cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen over a subcritical bed of proton-baked thorium.” So if you were going to use it to collect gases from Earth, you were really just trading mined Lunar ice for those gases. And ice also had a value, and so did thorium, and the labor of Harvest Moon personnel.

“I haven’t fully worked out the economics yet,” Puya admitted, a bit self-righteously. Then, to Harb, she said, “With your permission, I’d like to pull a couple of my engineers up here to start building some experimental prototypes.”

“Using what for thorium, dear?” Harb asked, her voice now pointed again. “We’ve promised Dan Beseman our entire output for at least the next twelve months, and as Sir Lawrence has already pointed, out, that’s quite an aggressive target. Nor, as the Americans and Russians have made quite clear, can fissionable materials be shipped up from Earth in such quantity, which precisely is why we’re supplying it to Beseman. I’m afraid your request is completely out of the question. Of course, it’s not me you should be asking.”

“Professional courtesy,” Puya said. “Obviously it’s up to Sir Lawrence.”

“Who is no fool,” Harb said. “He’ll tell you to come back to Earth and build your prototypes there.”

A bit sullenly, Puya said, “The engine only works below fifty millibars’ pressure, and best in full vacuum.”

“Then find a vacuum chamber, or build one. You may be unacquainted with the cost of housing you here at Shackleton, but I am not, and neither—I assure you—is Sir Lawrence. It’s a very promising idea, and I’ll follow your progress with great interest, but it’s not a project I will willingly host at this time. Now, the EOLS capsule parked outside will be departing in three days’ time, and I should like very much for you to be on it.”

“Is that an order?” Puya asked.

“A request.”

“Hmm.”

Puya stewed, but said nothing more.

To Tania, Commander Harb said, “You’re the one I came here to speak with. Can you please—”

Just then, a noisy knot of people entered the mess hall module from the adjoining workshop. One was Huntley Millar, the EVA crew chief. Another was Eldad Barzeley, a physicist—really a sort of weatherman for solar radiation—who’d come up from Earth to help with the mass driver. And last there was Stephen Chalmers, electrical engineer, whom Tania had slept with on several occasions, and might do again.

The three of them looked across at Harb and Puya and Tania, decided they didn’t like the look of things over here, and laughingly sat down at a table of their own, far from whatever they thought was going on. On the very far side of the room, four of the technicians sat together (or perhaps “huddled” was the word), having some sort of quiet, intense conversation of their own. There’d been a lot of quiet, intense conversations lately. Still, the mess hall was a double-wide barrel vault—the largest module HMI had ever manufactured—and it had three tables stretching down its length. Seating for up to sixty people, in theory—more than triple the number currently on site. So yes, the room was large enough to afford some privacy if you wanted it.

“Can you please,” Harb continued, “give me a very brief synopsis of your findings with regard to the men at Malinkin? I have a call with Sir Lawrence in an hour, and he’s quite interested. I do trust you’ve been discreet?”

“As a fox in suburbia,” Tania assured her. “I called them to see if they needed anything, and they said no, and so I asked them what kinds of supplies they were using most quickly, and they said food, which is not surprising because they’re running on stored rations. But we don’t sell food, so I asked if they needed batteries or anything like that, and they said no and then basically hung up on me. So, undaunted, I called again two days later, and finally got them to talk. I want you to know, I resent being put in that position. I didn’t sign up for Esley Shade Station, now, did I?”

With its heavily female-skewed gender ratio, Esley was widely rumored to be one giant harem for its owner, Igbal Renz. And whether that was true or not, it was a useful metaphor, and Harb would know what she meant. She’d asked Tania to handle this because, when dealing with a trio of lonely men, a woman simply had a better chance of getting a result.

Harb said, “No one asked you to flirt with them.”

“Didn’t have to,” Tania said.

There was, of course, no escaping from her femaleness here. This was true in any male-dominated environment, but it was particularly true in this remotest of outposts. Harb had enough of a commanding presence to override gender entirely, but for Tania (and probably for Puya, too), all talk was flirting, whether she liked it or not. She felt quite sure even Brother Michael noticed a pair of tits when he saw one.

However, in actual fact, Tania wasn’t especially put out by any of it. Having spent three years in testosterone-drenched Antarctica, she’d come to the Moon with a very clear idea what the social dynamics were going to be like. And when she accepted this little spying assignment, both she and Harb knew exactly what she was agreeing to. Tania was pretty much just taking the piss out of Harb because she could.

Sitting down beside Tania and lowering her voice, an exasperated Harb asked, “So what did you learn from these randy young men?”

“Well, they’ve found a crater they quite like, with a feature called a graben, which I gather is some kind of ditch, surrounded by deep fields of dust. Apparently, the thought is, they can inflate a plastic dome in the graben and then cover it with Lunar concrete, and then simply bulldoze regolith over it and form additional concrete layers as they go. They’ll need a lot of equipment and a lot of water to accomplish this, so it’s good for us in any case.”

“Or a drain on our resources, if we end up taking the project over. I’m not sure quite what Sir Lawrence’s interest might be in all this, but I confess I fear the worst.”

“That we’ll soon be in the hospitality business?” Puya asked.

“Yes, and growing too quickly in the process. We’ve years of hard work ahead of us as it is, but a project like that could really muck things up. One thing I’ve learned: you can’t do everything at once, but I suppose time will tell what Sir Lawrence intends. Ms. Falstaff, did you happen to get a location?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

Harb nodded. “Well, then. Mail me some satellite images—the highest resolution you can find—and we’ll see what the big man makes of it all. It wouldn’t surprise me if these civil engineers were on the Harvest Moon payroll by the end of the month.”


“It’s bollocks,” Adam Richter was saying to his crew, on the HMI private channel. Well, not his crew, exactly, but he liked to think the three of them—and others—looked up to him as a kind of role model. “Pushing back our return dates and stretching out our Earthside time. Bollocks.”

They were outside in one of the fabrication huts, putting the last few bolts into the outer shell of a hab module that would, in a few weeks’ time, be a kitchen. It was hard and painstaking work, and although Adam wore a sweatband across his forehead, and although they were sheltered from the sun in here and the outside of his suit was at something like minus fifty Celsius, sweat was nevertheless finding its way into his eyes, as it often did by the end of a four-hour EVA shift.

“We know all about what they’ve done,” said Blake Myneni.

He sounded weary with the topic, which annoyed Adam. The Astronaut Technicians—twenty in total, of whom ten were presently on Luna—did all the actual work around here. Shackleton was, first and foremost, a factory, where rovers and habitation modules and linear accelerator magnets were constructed in hard vacuum. This meant a lot of time in spacesuits, and thus a lot of blisters and bruises where it inevitably rubbed or dug into you. The Astronaut Technicians were all supposed to be on six-month rotation—three on Luna, three on Earth, three on Luna, and so forth. But the Management bastards, in their infinite wisdom, had, earlier this year, gone and made it four-and-four, without asking, without warning, and without any increase in pay.

“I’ve got blisters on my bruises, and vice versa,” Adam stated, flexing his arm in an attempt to demonstrate. They would know what he meant; the elbow joint of these suits was a notorious chafing point. “Four months is too long to be at this sort of work, even in Lunar gravity. And what am I supposed to do with an extra month back home? Hug my father? You wouldn’t say that if you’d met him.”

“We know all about your bruises,” Blake assured him. The other two, Jerry and Merv, grumbled and nodded within their helmets, without really specifying with whom they were agreeing.

“All right, well, let’s get these tools put away before we get back inside. Do not leave them on a metal surface.”

“Yes, sir,” Merv said, rather mockingly.

In fairness, Adam was not, in fact, in charge. Nobody was; the EVA crew chief, Huntley Millar, had gone inside two full hours ago, leaving the rest of them to finish up. But still, if you left a tool in the wrong spot, it could sometimes just randomly vacuum-weld in place, for reasons that had never been properly explained to Adam. And then you could sometimes pop it off with a chisel, and sometimes you had to drag a vacuum torch over and cut it off, damaging both the tool and the surface in the process, and he did not want to get blamed for that again.

So they put their tools away, and then slogged back toward the airlock, their weary steps somehow heavy in the low gravity.

As they passed the portholes in the mess hall, Adam looked inside, as surreptitiously as possible. Commander Harb and her hens clustered at one end, and on the far end by the hatchway into the workshop, Crew Chief Huntley Millar sitting with a pair of ed-you-cayted males. Stephen Chalmers was a snot-nosed engineer several years younger than Adam himself, and Eldad Fucking Barzeley was a dok-torr of some fancy thing. They were not bad men, Adam judged, just as Harb’s bunch were not bad women. But they did spend rather a lot of time indoors, yeah? They made four times his salary for half the work, and thought it was just fine. It was not.

“I hear the workers are striking up on Clementine,” Merv said.

“Be a wonder if they weren’t,” Jerry opined.

“Yes, yes, and Igbal Renz has made contact with aliens,” Blake told them snidely. “If you paid as much attention to your torque settings as you do to Puya Hebbar, you’d have less rework, and fewer rumors in your head.”

That stopped conversation for a bit. The men looked down at their boots, just trudge-trudge-trudging across the regolith.

“She likes me,” Merv finally said.

“She likes everyone,” Blake said, dismissively, as he checked the pressure bleed valve and opened the airlock’s outer hatch. “Wha’d she want with a bloke like you? Now, you get on a rotation with Laura . . .”

There were only two female Astronaut Technicians, and Laura Koble was one of them. The other, Cassey Murrain, was into girls, and married besides. But Laura had a firm rule about dating coworkers, and a bristly manner toward anyone who tried to get too chummy. Adam felt her pain on this, and didn’t like the lads talking that way behind her back.

“Let’s have none of that,” he said firmly.

“Yes, sir,” Merv repeated.

That stopped the conversation again. There were really only so many things to talk about up here. Adam looked over his crew—good men, all—and judged it time to bring them in on his news.

Once they’d repressurized and hosed off and were getting back into their indoor clothes, and were no longer speaking on an open radio channel, he said, “I’ve got contacted by the union.”

That got their attention. All three of them looked up.

“What union?” Blake wanted to know.

“Plumbing Trades Union,” Adam told him. “They’ve asked if we’d think about joining up.”

“We’re plumbers, then?” Merv said, jamming his slippers down over his enormous and vaguely misshapen feet. “I’ve got an associate’s degree, and four hundred some EVA hours. I can assemble electromagnets with my eyes shut, literally. I’ve done it.”

“What’s some plumber know about our problems up here?” Jerry asked. “Not much, is what I’m thinking. We need our own Astronaut Technicians’ union.”

“Well, there isn’t one,” Adam said.

“Well, there should be,” Merv spouted back. “We should start it.”

“Oh, complicated,” Blake said. “There’s a lot of laws to follow, to prove you’re not just, you know, shaking people down. A lot of paperwork.”

“On Earth there’s laws,” Merv said. “Here it’s just people. Workers and management. Us and them.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said, vaguely.

They all sat there on their benches, scratched and bruised and bone-tired, reluctant to get up and enter the moonbase proper. Right here, right now, they were among fellows who understood each other’s plight, without explanation. Adam actually had been a plumber at one point in his life, which was maybe how the PTU had got ahold of him. He had then become a welder because the money was better, and then—in a strange turn of events—an underwater welder for the UK Docks Tyneside. And then, in an even stranger turn, an astronaut for HMI, and still not yet to his thirty-sixth birthday. Each man had followed a strange path to this place, and between the four of them they knew more about building things in outer space than any PhD ever could.

“We could just talk to Commander Harb,” Adam said, in a thoughtful tone.

And they all had a good laugh at that.


Across the mess hall from Harb and Tania and Puya, Stephen Chalmers was asking Huntley Millar, “How are the technicians doing?”

Through the portholes, he’d watched four of them walk by outside, and something in their manner had deepened his sense of concern. The technicians used to cycle through on three-month rotations, but since the naval blockade of Suriname earlier in the year it had all stretched out by a month. This made perfect sense from a management standpoint: it cut transportation costs by twenty-five percent, and also simply reduced the logistical risks associated with defying the ITAR nations. Unfortunately, HMI was basically ignoring the technicians’ grumblings about the extra work, which seemed to be increasingly problematic.

Of course, Stephen was here on a twelve-month rotation, and that had gotten pushed out to fourteen months, which he also wasn’t happy about. And over those fourteen months he would rack up nearly as much EVA time as the techs did in their four, which ought to count for something. But yes, Stephen did spend most of his time indoors, either in the workshop or simply sitting at a keyboard.

“They stopped eating lunch with me a few months ago,” Stephen added, “but lately I’ve been getting some outright dirty looks.”

“I as well,” said Eldad Barzeley. Barzeley was only supposed to be here for three more days, but there was a possibility he could get bumped off of his flight as well, depending on what Puya Hebbar and that homicide detective ended up doing.

“Yeah,” Millar said. “I spend as much time outside as they do, and on a much longer rotation, which I think helps their morale a bit, but I’m not really using my hands most of that time. Not putting my back into it, as Adam Richter would say. I tell you, if I got to send one guy home early, he’d be the one.”

“There’s rumors of a labor strike at Clementine,” Stephen said. “We should be paying attention to that kind of unrest, a hundred percent.”

“I agree,” Millar said. He held a hand up, looking upward through spread fingers into one of the ceiling lights. “I’m doing everything I can.”

“Are you, though?”

Stephen, who had himself been on the receiving end of “professional management” and its casual abuses, wasn’t so sure.

“What are you getting at, exactly?” Millar asked.

Stephen said, “For a start, imagine yourself in their shoes. I know you work shoulder-to-shoulder with them, but imagine if you had their pay structure.”

“Don’t tell me what to think,” Millar said mildly, but with an edge of that same blue-collar hardness.

Well, yeah. Millar had his own problems, Stephen was sure, just as Eldad Barzeley must. But Stephen himself had taken some big knocks that nobody here knew anything about—he had once been fired from a company he’d started himself!—and that kind of thing never really left you.

“No offense intended,” Stephen said, also mildly. “But if it’s a problem for them, it’s a problem for all of us.”

Back in graduate school, Stephen had gone by the nickname “Edison,” because he’d invented a new type of light bulb. Unlike LEDs, the Magnetic Induction Illumination Device took in alternating current directly, and produced a full-spectrum illumination without a hint of flicker, while converting an astonishing 99.3 percent of input power into visible light. The utility lines that fed it were more wasteful than that. At the urging of his advisor and with the help of the university’s tech transfer office, he’d filed for worldwide patent rights and formed a corporation. Then the venture capital money had found him (really not the other way around), and he’d let himself be demoted from CEO to Chief Technology Officer. And he’d been content, working in his well-equipped laboratory with a team of skilled researchers, and occasionally flying to exotic locations like Johannesburg and Macau and Shenzhen to explain the technology to interested parties. But then came the board of directors—old money types from Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard Business School. And then, just when things were starting to go really well—just when Magnetic Light was breaking ground on an actual factory, on British soil no less—they’d suddenly informed him they were eliminating the CTO position and “moving to a more production-orientated business model.” And suddenly, just like that, old Edison was out of a job.

And then—then!—they’d created “a new class of specially priced voting shares, with liquidation preference” that had diluted Stephen’s own shares into oblivion, leaving him with essentially nothing. Even if they sold the company, he would not see a penny of the proceeds until those bastards had sucked out the first billion pounds for themselves, if there were even a billion pounds to be had.

“Imagine the proceeds of every fourth month have been taken from you,” Stephen said. “Just for a moment, stop rationalizing and just feel that.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Millar asked, a bit defensively. “No laws are being broken.”

“No?”

It might be true, but that was hardly the point. It might have been true of what happened to Stephen, too. He’d been enough of a twat to believe those Old Boys were his friends—that they were cheerfully inducting a new member into their little millionaire’s club. But no, they were squeezing him like a grape, fermenting his juice and then drinking it right in front of him without really thinking much about it. Naturally, their version of events sounded rather different: Stephen was immature and difficult. Stephen’s actual contributions were minor and early, and it was his team that had really invented the thing. Stephen’s technical missteps had burned up millions, and yet Stephen also spent too much time peering into an oscilloscope to understand how the business actually worked.

Some of that might even be partially true, but did it matter? Human beings were entitled to profit from their own ideas and labor. Taking that away from them—even in small measure—was so inherently wrong that he’d thought even the most flint-hearted members of the investor class could see it. Stephen’s misfortune was no different than anyone else’s, who’d ever been swindled and then told it was fine.

“There’s also karma to consider,” he said.

“Karma is not a thing,” Barzeley said. “Studies find no evidence for it.”

“Then they’re looking in the wrong place,” Stephen told him.

When Stephen was gone from Magnetic Light, the Old Boys had flown the company straight into the ground, because they didn’t even know that additional technical problems would inevitably crop up in the shift to production. They didn’t know that some off-the-shelf idiot couldn’t simply step in and do all the millions of things Stephen had done to bring the company and the product into existence. So they crashed and burned, and although they walked away unscathed, protected from consequence by their wealth, Stephen felt sure that their pride and reputations had suffered a wound or two. Other members of the Old Boy network would be a bit less willing to trust them in future, and deservedly so. They deserved to fail, and so they had.

Meanwhile, Stephen had lost his house and his car, along with his starry-eyed innocence. He had not deserved that, so maybe Barzeley had a point. But still, he felt increasingly guilty, that he was just standing by while HMI shook the coins out of its astronauts’ pockets.

When things went south for him, he’d still been young enough to start over. He took a shitty apartment and a shitty job at Harvest Moon, which had eventually led to his managing their magnetics R&D lab, which in turn had led him here to the Moon. Nobody here called him Edison, or cared about what had happened to him in his past. His staff at Magnetic Light had also gotten screwed—their shares worthless, their long hours chucked down the drain—and he knew that kind of thing happened to frontline workers all the time.

But did it really have to happen here? Did Stephen really have to let it?

“We need to raise this issue with the commander,” Stephen said.

“I have,” Millar assured him. “Repeatedly.”

“We need to do more,” Stephen insisted. “If Sir Lawrence won’t increase their bonuses, we should be offering them a portion of ours.”

“Hold on, now,” Barzeley said, looking alarmed. “That’s half our pay you’re talking about.”

“Nearly half,” Stephen agreed. “A portion of that. But hear me out: we bring that offer to Harb, she’s going to pass it up the chain, and it’s going to shame Sir Lawrence, and he’s going to do the right thing.”

Truth be told, Stephen wasn’t at all sure of this. Sir Lawrence was well liked by nearly everyone who worked for him, but there could well be an Old Boy lurking back there behind that kindly mask. Even an Old Boy might do the maths and determine that the right thing would cost less in the end, but that assumed a certain degree of rationality. Stephen wasn’t at all counting on that happening. He was simply trying to get Millar and Barzeley on side for this. If he were going to do the right thing, he didn’t want to be doing it alone.

“And if it doesn’t?” Barzeley demanded.

“If it doesn’t,” Stephen said, “then at least we’re doing the right thing. Someone has to. These blokes’ workload really has increased, and they deserve to be compensated for it.”

“They do,” Millar agreed, with a visible show of reluctance. “It’s not fair if that has to come from us, but the situation’s already not fair. How big a percentage are we talking about? Covering their losses would be . . . hard.”

“Even a symbolic amount would mean a lot,” Stephen said confidently, “but I’m thinking we give up twenty percent.”

“Ten,” Millar suggested.

“Fifteen,” Stephen said.

“But these jobs are glamorous,” Barzeley said. “And the men are replaceable. I like Adam. I like all of the men, but each of them has a million others waiting to replace him. I could get higher pay myself, yes? I could build reactors for an energy company. I could buy and sell real estate for a profit. But Lawrence Killian has chosen me as his solar radiation guy, his space weather guy, and I get to come to the Moon for a while. So I accept the deal, as they did.”

“Your deal hasn’t changed,” Stephen said. “Theirs has.”

“Well then perhaps we should be focusing on recruitment. Aren’t they always saying we need more women up here?”

“I’ve brought that up, too,” Millar said. “And I don’t think it’s exactly news to Harb. But it isn’t that simple. Half my guys were underwater welders or underwater concrete masons in their past life, and the other half were mechanics in deep-shaft mining operations, doing the kind of work a robot simply can’t. There aren’t a million qualified applicants for these jobs. There aren’t two dozen. And do you know any females in those occupations who want to try something even more dangerous and less comfortable? Because I don’t. And the women who are qualified get snapped up by Renz Ventures, who pay a lot better, or they’re competing for Mars, which apparently is a lot more attractive. If I get some more solid female candidates, believe me, I’ll hire them, but that still won’t address the issue Stephen’s talking about.”

“No, it won’t,” Stephen agreed. “And Jesus wept, even if we’re absolute bastards, it’s still not in our own personal best interest to cheese these blokes off any worse than they already are. What would happen if there was a strike here at Shackleton? Not generous bonuses for you and me, I’ll tell you that. But a small gesture can go a long way. With your permission, Millar, I’ll go talk to Harb right now.”

“Hmm, maybe not right now,” Millar said, nodding over to where the three women sat, talking very seriously about something. “But if you see an opening in the next couple of days, then I suppose so. Are you on board, Barzeley?”

Barzeley looked uncomfortable. He’d only been on the Moon a couple of months and would hopefully be leaving in a few days, and Stephen was not clear on exactly where he’d come from or what his deal was. There were plenty of places in the world where people who worked with their hands were very openly looked down on by people who didn’t. Twenty-first-century England at least pretended to not be one of those places, but Barzeley seemed perfectly comfortable drawing a salt line between the officer and enlisted classes, so to speak. Stephen didn’t like that one bit, but he had to work with the tools at hand, even if they were tools, so to speak. But perhaps Stephen’s argument had struck home, or else Barzeley had simply succumbed to peer pressure, for although he frowned and looked displeased, he nodded.

“Yes, all right. Let these poor men have their share.”

Choosing to ignore the condescension in Barzeley’s voice, Stephen said, “Right, then: a stand for basic human decency. And trust me, I do sincerely hope Sir Lawrence doesn’t call our bluff.”



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