Sunstorm ato-2 Read online

  “So has most of the human race since June, I would think,” Siobhan said dryly.

  “Astronauts are outside the Earth’s air and magnetic field. So they aren’t shielded as they would be on the ground.”

  Siobhan waved her phone around to show Perdita the cabin. Big enough to hold eight but empty save for herself, it had hefty walls whose thickness was revealed by the depth of the window sockets. “See?” She thumped the wall. “Five centimeters of aluminum and water.”

  “That won’t help if a big one hits,” Perdita pointed out. “In 1972 a massive flare erupted only months after Apollo 16 returned from the Moon. If the astronauts had been caught on the lunar surface—”

  “But they weren’t,” Siobhan said. “And there was no such thing as solar weather forecasting back then. If there was any risk, they wouldn’t let me fly.”

  Perdita grunted. “But the sun is restless now, Mum. It’s only four months since June 9, and still nobody knows what caused it. Who’s to say if the forecasters have any idea what’s going on anymore?”

  “Well,” Siobhan said a bit testily, “that’s what I’m going to the Moon to find out. And I really had better get on with some work, dear …” With expressions of love, and after sending regards to her own mother, Siobhan closed down the call. It was a mild relief to break the connection.

  Of course, she suspected that Perdita’s real problem with her mission wasn’t safety at all. It was jealousy. Perdita couldn’t stand it that her mother was here, not her. With a sense of guilty triumph, Siobhan peered out of the window at the looming Moon.

  Siobhan was a child of the 1990s. The first human landings on the Moon had been finished two decades before she was born. She had always looked on the relics of the Apollo missions, the grainy footage of fresh-faced astronauts with their flags and stiff pressure suits and impossibly primitive technology, as a symptom of the madness of the vanished Cold War years, up there with the UFO craze and missile silos under Kansas cornfields.

  When at the opening of the century a return to the Moon had been floated on both sides of the Atlantic, Siobhan had again been distinctly unimpressed. Even as a science student it had seemed to her a jobs-for-the-boys project dominated by aviators and engineers, a bid for power and wealth by the military-industrial complex, with science goals a fig-leaf justification at best, just as manned space travel always had been.

  But the rediscovery of space exploration had captured the imagination of a new generation—including her own, she admitted—and had progressed faster than anybody had dreamed.

  A new fleet of Apollo—like space vehicles was flying by 2012. Though venerable Soyuz craft still toiled to and from the International Space Station, the brave, flawed space shuttles were retired. Meanwhile a flotilla of exploratory rovers and sample-return missions had been dispatched to the Moon and to Mars, as well as more ambitious unmanned missions farther afield, such as an extraordinary swords-into-plowshares venture, yet to be fulfilled, to use an antiquated weapons system called the Extirpator to map the whole solar system. Siobhan knew the science return from these missions had been good, though the solar system wasn’t her field of study—but it was galling that most people didn’t even know of the existence of the great cosmological telescopes, like the Quintessence Anisotropy Probe, whose results were fueling her own career.

  While all this had gone on the American and Eurasian manned space programs had gradually merged—and in 2015, under many flags, human footsteps had been planted on the Moon once more. By 2037 humans had maintained an unbroken tenancy of the Moon for nearly twenty years, with around two hundred colonists in Clavius Base and elsewhere.

  And just four years ago the first explorers aboard the spacecraft Aurora1 had reached Mars itself. The hardest cynic couldn’t help but cheer the fulfillment of that ancient dream.

  Her mission was grave: at the politely worded command of the Prime Minister of Eurasia, she was tasked with finding out what was going wrong with the sun, and if Earth faced any prospect of a repeat of June 9. But the upshot was that she, Siobhan McGorran, child of Belfast, in a four-legged bug of a craft that looked like a beefed-up version of those old Apollo lunar modules, had been projected into the lunar sphere. How marvelous, she exulted. No wonder Perdita was green with envy.

  ***

  A door opened at the head of the cabin. The shuttle’s Captain came swimming through and slid into an empty seat. With a soft word to Aristotle, Siobhan closed down the softscreens arrayed around her.

  Mario Ponzo was an Italian. Aged about fifty, he was surprisingly tubby for a space pilot, judging by the healthy mass that strained at the stomach panels of his jumpsuit. He said, “I’m sorry we haven’t had time for more of a chat, Professor.” His accent was tinged with American, a relic of Houston, where this native Roman had trained at the NASA space center. “I hope Simon has looked after you well?”

  “Perfectly, thank you.” She hesitated. “The food is rather tasteless, isn’t it?”

  Mario shrugged. “An artifact of weightlessness, I’m afraid. Something to do with the body’s fluid balances. A tragedy for all Italian astronauts!”

  “But I slept better here than anytime I remember since I was a child.”

  “I’m glad. Actually it’s the first time we have made the run with just a single passenger—”

  “I guessed that.”

  “But in a way it’s oddly appropriate, for Vladimir Komarov’s last flight was also solo.”

  “Komarov?—oh. For whom the shuttle is named.”

  “That’s right. Komarov is a hero, and for the Russians, who have many heroes, that’s saying something. He flew the first mission of their Soyuz spacecraft. When its systems failed during reentry, he died. What makes him heroic, though, is that he got aboard that bird almost certainly knowing how bad the faults of his untested ship were likely to be.”

  “So the shuttle is named for a dead cosmonaut. Isn’t that bad luck?”

  He smiled. “Away from Earth, we seem to be evolving different superstitions, Professor.” He glanced at her blank screens. “You know, we’re not used to secrecy up here. It’s not encouraged. We all have to work together to keep alive. Secrecy is corrosive, Professor, bad for morale. And I’ve never known anything like the blanket of silence that has descended around you and your mission.”

  “I sympathize,” she said carefully.

  He rubbed a chin coated with three days of stubble; he had told her that idiosyncratically he would not shave in space, to save the inconvenience of clippings drifting around the cabin. “Not only that,” he said, “the comms links between the Moon and Earth are notoriously narrow. A bottleneck. If I wanted to prevent sensitive information leaking out onto the global nets, the Moon would be a good place to put it.”

  Of course he was right; the ease of securing discussions on the Moon was a prime reason for her journey, rather than bringing lunar-based experts to Earth. She said, “But you know that I’m an envoy of the Eurasian Prime Minister herself. I’m sure you understand that the security restrictions to which I’m subjected come from much higher levels than me.” So don’t probe, she added silently. She turned back to her blank softscreens. “And if you don’t mind—”

  “More studying? I think it may be a little late for that.” He glanced out the window.

  Her view of the looming crescent Moon was gone, replaced by a mottling of deep black and glowing pale brown that slid past the window.

  Mario said softly, “You are looking at Clavius Crater, Professor.”

  She stared. Clavius, south of Tycho, was a basin so huge that its floor was convex, pushed out by the curvature of the Moon itself. As the shuttle descended she began to resolve smaller craters on that tremendous floor: craters of all sizes, craters overlapping craters down to the limits of her visibility. It was a strange, ripped-up landscape, like a Great War battlefield perhaps. But there, just emerging from the shadow of the wall, she saw a fine line, a shining thread of gold laid over the Moon’s gr
ay floor. That must be the Sling, the new electromagnetic launch system, still incomplete but already a mighty rail more than a kilometer long. Even from here she could see that human hands had touched the face of the Moon.

  Mario was watching her reaction. “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?” And he left the cabin to prepare the descent protocols.

  10: Contact Light

  Clavius Base was built around three big inflated domes. Connected by transparent walkways and subsurface tunnels, the domes were covered over by Moon dust for protection from the sun, cosmic rays, and other horrors. As a result, seen from above, the domes seemed part of the lunar landscape, as if they had bubbled up out of the gray-brown regolith.

  Shuttle Komarov landed without ceremony half a kilometer from the main domes. The dust it kicked up fell back with disconcerting speed onto the airless Moon. There were no pads here, just many shallow blast craters, the scars of multiple landings and takeoffs.

  A transparent walkway snaked up to the shuttle’s lock. Escorted by Captain Mario, with her smart suitcase rolling behind her, Siobhan took her first footsteps in the Moon’s dreamy gravity.

  Her first glimpse of the Moon, slightly distorted by the walkway’s clear, curving walls, was of a gently rolling surface. Every edge was softened by the ubiquitous dust, the result of eons of meteoritic churning. It looked almost like a snowfield, she thought. The shadows were not the deep black she had imagined, but softened by the reflected glow of the ground. She shouldn’t have been surprised: dark as it was, the light reflected from this lifeless soil was, after all, the Moonlight that had shone over Earth since the great impact that had shaped the twin worlds in the first place. So Siobhan was walking in Moonlight herself. But this bit of the Moon was littered by surface vehicles, fuel tanks, escape bunkers, and equipment dumps; it was a human landscape.

  ***

  The walkway terminated at a small blocky structure. Siobhan and Mario rode the elevator down to an underground tunnel. Here an open cart mounted on a monorail awaited them. The cart was big enough for ten, she realized, the shuttle’s full complement of eight passengers plus two crew, and their baggage.

  The cart slid into silent motion.

  “An induction drive,” Mario said. “Same principle as the Sling. Endless sunlight and low gravity: the physics behind this little electrical cart might have been invented for the conditions of the Moon.”

  The tunnel was narrow, lit by fluorescent tubes, and the fused-rock walls were so close to the cart she could have reached out and touched them—and in perfect safety, for the cart’s speed was little more than walking pace. She was learning that away from Earth, caution ruled: everything was done slowly and deliberately.

  At the end of the tunnel was an airlock, and what Mario called a “dustlock,” a small room equipped with brushes, vacuum hoses, and other devices to clean spacesuits and people of electrostatically clinging Moon dust. As Mario and Siobhan hadn’t been exposed to the surface, they were able to cycle through this quickly.

  The airlock’s inner door was marked with a large plaque:

  *** *** *** ***

  WELCOME TO CLAVIUS BASE

  U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS

  She read on down a list of contributing organizations, from NASA and the U.S. Air and Space Force to Boeing and various other private contractors. There was also a rather grudging acknowledgment, she thought, of the Eurasian, Japanese, Pan-Arabian, Pan-African, and other space organizations that had put up more than half the money for this American-led project.

  She touched a little roundel that was the logo of the British National Space Agency. In recent years the British had discovered a genius for robotics and miniaturization, and the machine-dominated period of renewed lunar and Martian exploration earlier in the century had been the glory days of the BNSA and its engineers. But that period had been brief, and was already over.

  Mario caught her eye and grinned. “That’s the Americans for you. Never give anybody else credit.”

  “But they were here first,” she pointed out.

  “Oh, yes, there is that.”

  The inner door slid open to reveal a short, stocky man waiting for her. “Professor McGorran? Welcome to the Moon.” She recognized him immediately. This was Colonel Burton Tooke, USASF, commander of Clavius Base. Aged about fifty, with a severe military crew cut, he was a good head shorter than she was, and he flashed a disarming gap-toothed grin. “Call me Bud,” he said.

  Siobhan said goodbye to Mario, who was returning to his shuttle, “where the beds are softer than anything in Clavius,” he claimed.

  Bud Tooke led Siobhan up a flight of stairs, easily negotiated in one-sixth gravity, to the interior of a dome. They walked along a narrow roofless corridor. She could see the dome’s smooth plastic some meters above her head, but the space beneath was cluttered with walkways and partitions. Everything was quiet, the lights subdued; nobody was moving, save Bud and Siobhan.

  She said softly, “It seems rather appropriate to arrive somewhere as mysterious as the Moon in silence and twilight.”

  He nodded. “Sure. You’ll soon be over the Moon-lag, I hope. It’s actually two A.M. here. The middle of our night.”

  “Moon time?”

  “Houston time.”

  She learned this was a tradition dating back to the days of the earliest astronauts, who had timed their epic journeys by the clocks of their homes in Texas; it was a pleasing tribute to those pioneers.

  They reached a row of closed doors. Above, a small neon sign glowed pink: it read CONTACT LIGHT. Bud opened a door at random to reveal a small room, and Siobhan looked inside. There was a bed that could be folded out to become double, a table, chair, and basic comms equipment, and even a small unit containing a shower and lavatory.

  “Not quite a hotel. And there’s no room service to speak of.” Bud said this cautiously. Perhaps some VIP visitors threw tantrums at this point, demanding the five-star luxury they were used to.

  Siobhan said firmly, “I’ll be fine. Umm—contact light?”

  “The first words spoken on the Moon, by Buzz Aldrin, at the moment when Apollo 11’s lunar module first touched the surface. Seems appropriate for our visitor quarters.” He shoved her luggage into the room, where her smart suitcase, sensing it had completed its own journey, opened itself up. Bud said, “Siobhan, I’ve set up the briefing you asked for at ten A.M. local. The participants have all been brought here—notably Mangles and Martynov from the South Pole.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Until then your time is your own. Take a break if you like. But it’s about time I took an inspection tour of this dump. I’d welcome your company.” He grinned. “I’m a military man; I’m used to sleepless nights. Anyhow, I need an excuse to have a good look at everything while nobody’s about to distract me.”

  “I should really work.” She glanced guiltily at her self-unpacking luggage, her crushable clothes, and rolled-up softscreens. But her head was already too full of facts about the sun and its storms.

  She studied Bud Tooke. His square shoulders filling his practical, unmarked coverall, he stood with his hands behind his back, his face friendly but expressionless. He looked like a classic career soldier, she thought, exactly as she’d preconceived the commander of a Moon base to be. But if she was to get through this assignment, she was going to have to rely on his support.

  She decided to take him into her confidence. “I don’t know anything about the people here. How they live, the way they think. A tour might help me find my feet.”

  He nodded, apparently approving. “A little recon before the battle never hurts.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that …” She begged fifteen minutes to unpack and freshen up.

  ***************

  ______

  They walked briskly around the perimeter of the dome.

  The air was laden with an odd smell, like gunpowder, or burning leaves. That was Moon dust, Bud said, making the most of its f
irst chance in a billion years to burn in oxygen. The architecture was simple and functional, in places decorated by amateur artwork, much of it dominated by contrasts between lunar gray and the pink or green of Earth life.

  Clavius’s three domes were called Artemis, Selene, and Hecate.

  “Greek names?”

  “To the Greeks the Moon was a trinity: Artemis for the waxing Moon, Selene for full, and Hecate for waning. This dome, which contains most of our living areas, is Hecate. Since it spends half its time in twilight that seemed an appropriate choice.”

  As well as accommodation for two hundred people, Hecate contained life support and recycling systems, a small hospital, training and exercise rooms, and even a theater, an open arena sculpted from what Bud assured her was a natural lunar crater. “Just amateur dramatics. But very popular, as you can imagine. Ballet goes down well.”

  She stared at his shaven head. “Ballet?”

  “I know, I know. Not what you’d expect from the Air Force. But you really need to see an entrechat performed in lunar gravity.” He eyed her. “Siobhan, you might think we’re just living in a hole in the ground. But this is a different world, down to the very pull of it on your bones. People are changed by it. Especially the kids. You’ll see, if you have time.”

  “I hope I will.”

  They passed through a low, opaque-walled tunnel to the dome called Selene. This dome was much more open than Hecate, and most of its roof was transparent, so that sunlight streamed in. And here, in long beds, green things grew: Siobhan recognized cress, cabbages, carrots, peas, even potatoes. But these plants were growing in liquid. The beds were interconnected by tubing, and there was a steady hum of fans and pumps, a hiss of humidifiers. It was like a huge, low greenhouse, Siobhan thought, the illusion spoiled only by the blackness of the sky above, and the sheen of liquid where soil should have been. But many of the beds were empty, cleaned out.

  “So you’re hydroponic farmers,” she said.