1.1
12 November 2052
Orlov Petrochemical Compressed
Gas Cargo Landing Vehicle #14
Lunar Orbit
Andrei Bykhovski had been tied up for sex a time or two, and he had once been in a helicopter crash. His present circumstance was a bit like doing both of these things at the same time. The ground below him was getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer, and he was strapped securely, facedown, arms down, feet down. But instead of a blindfold he had a fogged-up spacesuit visor, dripping with condensation as the water droplets stopped being weightless and started being pulled downward along the clear plastic.
Instead of pillows or flight seat hardware underneath him, he had the metal struts and tanks and pipes of the gas delivery lander, poking up uncomfortably against the padding of his suit like the bars of a miniature jungle gym. And the ground rising up to meet him was the dusty-cratered surface of the Moon, which provided no sense of scale. He’d been strapped to this thing for hours, and he really didn’t know if it could land properly with him onboard, and he also couldn’t tell how close he was to touchdown. Seconds? Minutes? Another hour? All he could say for sure was that there were craters rolling by, getting slowly bigger as they went.
It helped that he’d put himself in this situation. It helped that he was escaping indentured servitude, in search of sweet freedom. It helped that he was an experienced astronaut, with literally hundreds of EVA hours in his logbook. But his oxygen consumption was high—very high—because he was hyperventilating, because this was way more terrifying than he’d allowed himself to expect. He was tempted to lean on the chin switch that would activate his radio on the emergency channel. He was tempted to call for help, but who could help him? What could they do? What would he even say?
Andrei Bykhovski fell from the sky like a tank of cyanogen, like the tanks of asteroid-harvested carbon-nitrogen gas he’d pulled out of the lander a couple of hours ago, replacing them with his own body weight. He fell from the sky cramped and cramping and half-blinded, thinking this was the dumbest thing he’d ever tried, and also quite possibly the last.
And yet, as bad a day as he was having, he was out here for a reason. He had to remember that, while he panted away his oxygen. Had to remember that Grigory Orlov, by refusing paid shore leave for the workers at Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot, while also refusing to accept any resignations, had effectively made serfs of them all. Without breaking any laws! It was intolerable, and somebody had to do something.
Then again, the spasms in Andrei’s back and shoulders were also intolerable. He might almost welcome a fatal crash if it meant an end to this. Would it hurt if he died on impact? Would he even know it happened?
The forehead of his helmet was braced across a metal pipe, which hummed as the rocket engines beneath him fired. He couldn’t see any flame, any gas belching out of them, but he could feel the deceleration, greater now than when it had first kicked on. Ten minutes ago? One minute? Hovering on the edge of panic, all his internal senses were scrambled, except for pain. His whole world was reduced to this crab-shaped delivery lander, or smaller than that, to the bubble of air inside his fogged-up helmet. To the loops of nylon holding his wrists and ankles, too far down, too far stretched. To the growing sensation of his own weight, against a spindly structure never meant to bear it. A structure meant only to support the weight of a pair of gas cylinders, against the weak pull of Lunar gravity.
If this were a dumber craft, his weight—heavier than the bottles he’d removed—would have thrown the trajectory off entirely. But it was smart enough to find its way, though he did run the very real risk of, at any moment, running out of propellant and simply falling the rest of the way to the Lunar surface. And so his whole life was reduced to this one endless moment, waiting in terror.
But then something changed; he saw shapes drifting by beneath him, black and white and yellow and red. Cylinders and rectangles, casting long shadows in the slanting rays of the sun. Could it be? Was this the St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery, three degrees of latitude off the Lunar south pole? Had he arrived?
The structures swelled alarmingly as he dropped toward them, then they rotated out of view as the lander made some kind of automated adjustment, and all he knew was that he was falling fast and decelerating hard, and his breathing was so rapid and shallow he felt in real danger of passing out.
And then he could see streaks of dust kicking out from the rocket plumes, and then he could see a long shadow throwing itself beneath him, and then he was in shadow, and then WHAM! The lander touched down with an impact nearly hard enough to break his ribs.
Gasping, he saw stars, and not the good kind. Beneath him, the lander’s metal webbing crumpled and then, disorientingly, went still.
For seconds, he did nothing. For seconds more, he tried to breathe, and realized the wind had been knocked out of him. Well, that was one way to stop hyperventilating!
He struggled for breath, and finally caught it.
Struggled to free his hands, and got the right one out of its loop, then the left. Struggled to free a leg, and failed, still gasping. Finally got it out, then fished for a knife and cut the other strap free, hoping he wouldn’t slash his suit open in the process. Hoping but not really caring, just needing needing needing to be free of this thing. He rolled off the lander, falling slowly in the Lunar gravity. Came down on his side, and just lay there a minute catching and catching and catching his breath.
It occurred to him that he was alive, albeit barely.
It occurred to him that he was free.
It occurred to him that he was probably one of the first hundred people to land on the surface of the Moon. Number ninety? Ninety-five? Something like that.
He had possibly, probably, just made history. This deed of his could well join the October Revolution and the Boston Tea Party in the Go Fuck Yourself Hall of Fame. Better than the Darwin Award he might have earned instead! Better than simply falling off en route and simply becoming a Very Missing Person. Nobody knew he was here. Probably, nobody even knew yet that he was missing, that he wasn’t onboard Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot at all. Fearing spies and snitches, he’d told no one about his plan.
Then he stopped thinking for a while, and just let himself breathe. Then he thought he should maybe turn that chin switch on after all, and let someone at the monastery know they had an uninvited guest. His suit—a bottom-of-the-line General Spacesuit Light Orbital—had no heads-up display or time-to-depletion meter, but the oxygen dial inside his helmet said just under twenty percent. He was still jittery with adrenaline, and at this rate he had maybe thirty minutes of breathable air left.
A 20/80 nitrox mix, it blew in a steady stream onto his visor, and now that he was no longer facing downward, the fog had condensed into droplets and rolled to the edge, soaking into the helmet’s padding. It was so cold here, he thought the remaining droplets might soon begin to freeze. Nevertheless, through the visor he could see the gray, dusty Lunar surface, and part of a habitat module.
He decided to stand, which proved rather tricky in Lunar gravity, in a suit designed only for weightlessness. On his third try, he got his feet underneath him. He turned on his radio, and heard nothing. No voice traffic, no conversations, no chatter. This was strange to him, because the emergency channel was actually dozens of private and commercial channels all at once, and Clementine was always alive with chatter. To Andrei, radio silence was a rare and disturbing thing. He wanted to call out a mayday, to let someone know he was here and needed help. That he needed to be taken indoors before his air ran out. That he needed a drink of water and a chance to pee. Hell, he needed a lot of things, but some instinct told him to stay quiet and look around first. In space, no one liked surprises, and he was about to drop a duratskiy on the people here.
He turned his body in a wide arc, taking in the monastery and the little valley in which it sat. The sun hung very low in the sky, fully eclipsed by one of the low hills surrounding this cluster of modules, although its position was evident by the light it cast on the edges of other hills. He could see in through some of the habitat windows, and thought for a moment he caught a flicker of movement inside. But no, it was dark in there, with shades pulled down over some of the windows. Through the rest he could make out some shelves and bulkheads, maybe, and some rows of blinking lights. Nothing to suggest this place had a religious function, or any function, really.
Behind the habitats he could see a crew lander of some sort, and a spindly tower, and behind that . . .
Behind that he saw a human figure in a dusty orange spacesuit, bathed in sunlight and climbing down one of those little hills.
Correction: not climbing down, staggering down. The figure held something in one of its hands, like a megaphone or a radar gun, which it presently dropped. The arms went up in apparent distress, as if reaching for something behind the helmet. Reaching and failing. The figure fell to its knees.
“Hey,” Andrei said into the radio channel. In English, which he was pretty sure was the language here. “Hey, buddy. Hey! You distress? Hey!”
No answer.
Andrei had no idea how to run in Lunar gravity, but he scrambled and fell, scrambled and bounced, and finally got into a sort of slow-motion loping gait around the habitat modules and toward the human figure.
“Hey! Hey! Mayday! I have EVA emergency!”
After a pause, a male voice came onto the radio. “This is Sierra Juliet Ground Actual. Who’s on this channel? What is your position?”
Now panting again, Andrei said, “I am outside your habitat. You have astronaut down! Mayday!”
“Can you render assistance?”
“I don’t know his problem. I will bring him to airlock.”
Andrei was certain, somehow, that the figure was male.
“Who is this?” the voice repeated. “Are you from Shackleton?”
“I am Andrei Bykhovski, from Clementine Cislunar. I am refugee.”
Another pause. “Explain that later. What are you seeing? We don’t have any people outside.”
As Andrei approached, he could see a fine white spray emerging from the kneeling man’s bright orange suit’s backpack. Not good.
“Oranzhevyy spacesuit,” he said. “Orange. Orange spacesuit, venting gas. I’m believing person is male.”
No immediate answer. The orange-suited man fell forward onto his faceplate. Andrei skidded awkwardly to a stop, falling forward onto his hands and knees beside the man. He grabbed for him, inspecting the leaking backpack. The gas was venting from somewhere inside the pack, and leaking out through a seam between two plastic cover panels. Andrei didn’t know what to do about that. If this were Clementine, he’d be clipping himself to this man and unfurling a rescue bag to seal around the both of them, but that wasn’t an option here. He didn’t have his tool belt with him. He didn’t have anything.
“Sierra Juliet Ground Actual here. We may be missing one of our students. Etsub Beyene, if you’re on this channel, please respond.”
Then another voice, female: “This is Shackleton Actual, responding to mayday. Can we render assistance?”
“I am taking him to airlock,” Andrei said. “Look out of window, please, and tell me where to go. And how to operate controls.”
There was, unfortunately, no standardization in space, or not enough. The monastery was built by Harvest Moon Industries, and Andrei had experience only with Orlov Petrochemical’s systems, some of which were self-built and some of which came from a different company, Renz Ventures. Even the labels would be in a foreign alphabet, hard to puzzle out in real time.
He flipped the man over and grabbed a fistful of chest harness, thinking to carry the orange suit like a parcel. But it was heavy, even in Lunar gravity, and much bulkier than his own suit, and his space reflexes were adapted for zero gravity and had no idea what to do here. And he was cold. He fell, and fell again. The man was limp now, and Andrei could see right through his visor to his dark brown face, lips moving in a gasp of horror, his bulging eyes filming over with gray. That couldn’t possibly be a good sign. There was no way he was going to get this man into a breathable atmosphere in time.
Still, Andrei wasn’t a doctor, so he got to his feet and started dragging, saying, “I believe man has lost consciousness. I am dragging him.” Looking ahead of him now, at the collection of flat-bottomed habitat modules, he added, “I see airlock. Yellow door, yes? I bring.”
“Acknowledged,” said the voice of Sierra Juliet Ground Actual. “Do you have any idea what he was doing out there?”
“Pointing object at sky,” Andrei answered. “Maybe laser communication device.”
“In the middle of the night?”
Was it the middle of the night shift here? Fine, then, yes, this man had gone outside at night, without a buddy, and apparently without telling anyone. Right when Andrei, an unannounced visitor, was about to arrive? No part of that sounded right. And was it even stranger that an air leak should befall the man at just such a compromising moment? And that he did not call for help when he realized he was in trouble? Something was very, very rotten here.
“Da,” Andrei said. “Is strange. He will tell you all about it when he wakes up, yes?”
But that was blya chush’ sobach’ya, fucking bullshit, because Andrei was looking right into the man’s bone-gray face as he said this, and he knew in that moment with certainty that this man, this student of the monastery, would never inhale another breath.
Andrei was too late—he’d moved too slowly—and Etsub Beyene was dead.