Apollo's Outcasts (11 page)

Gordie nodded, and I glanced at the hatch. "Are we going to need to put on suits?" I asked.

Yeah, it was a dumb question. I should have known better. Nicole only shook her head, but Billy wasn't nearly as forgiving. "You kidding?" he asked, his mouth curling into a sneer. "You'll never wear a suit...you're too retarded."

The cabin temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, the abrupt silence broken only by Nina's angry hiss. I didn't respond, but only because anything I might have said would have insulted Eddie. But just as Billy had marked me, I marked him.

That's one I owe you, pal
, I thought.

Gordie coughed into his fist. "Anyway...let's get aboard the ferry before we lose our landing window. If you will follow me..."

Without another word, he reached into a ceiling net and retrieved his duffel bag, then pulled himself through the hatch. Billy followed him, but Nicole stayed behind to help the passengers. Although I was the closest to the hatch, I lingered in the LTV after I pulled down my bag, letting the others go first. I told myself that I was being courteous, but the truth of the matter was that I wanted to stay with Nicole. Melissa must have figured this out, because she smirked and rolled her eyes as she moved past me. Hannah gave me a sour look, but didn't say anything.

With Nicole bringing up the rear, I pushed myself through the docking collar into the ferry cockpit. Two pilots were seated at wraparound consoles on either side of a floor hatch. The pilot barely looked up at me as I came aboard. "Go on through," he said, waving me to the hatch. "Nicole, close up behind you."

"Aye, skipper." She turned to swing shut the LTV hatch. I pushed myself across the compartment until I was through the floor hatch. On the other side was a vertical access shaft, its walls lined with
rungs, leading straight down the center of the turret. At the bottom were two horizontal hatches, one on either side of the shaft. Gordie was hovering in the hatchway of the one to the left, and I saw Billy's legs disappear through the hatch of one to the right.

"In here, Jamey," Gordie said, and I was only too happy to obey; I didn't want to have to ride down with Billy. I followed Gordie through the hatch and found myself in one of the ferry's two passenger modules. Its five fold-down seats were similar to the LTV's; not nearly as well-cushioned, but at least they were equipped with safety harnesses. They faced a pair of rectangular portholes. Nina and Eddie were already strapped in, their bags tucked into ceiling nets above their heads, when I took the seat next to them. Gordie put away his bag and mine, then waited at the hatch, and a minute later Nicole entered the module.

"Saved a place for you, kiddo." Gordie waved her to the seat on the other side of mine. "Did you button up the LTV?"

"Of course." Nicole pulled herself into the seat beside me and fastened its harness. "I also shut the LTV hatch, so don't worry about..."

Three bells rang from a ceiling speaker. Gordie had just enough time to strap himself down next to her before there was a sudden jolt. Eddie yelped in alarm and Nina hastily took his hand to comfort him. Through the portholes, I caught a glimpse of the LTV gliding away.

"You're leaving the LTV here?" I asked. "Aren't you afraid it's going to crash?"

"Nope." Gordie shook his head. "It's in a stable parking orbit...at least for the next nine months or so, which is about how long it'll take gravity to pull it down. But it won't be there that long. By then, it'll be refueled, restocked, and sent back to Earth with another load of passengers." He shrugged. "Maybe even you guys...although I'm not sure I'd count on it."

"You think it's that serious? I mean, what's going on back home?"

Nicole looked at me. "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what? We haven't received any messages since we left."

"My fault," Gordie said. "I was under instructions to maintain radio silence when we rendezvoused with the
Cernan
. We needed to keep ISC ground control from knowing exactly where we were and who was aboard."

"What's happening back there?" Nina asked.

"A lot." Nicole let out her breath. "President Shapar made a statement saying that President Wilford was murdered by a Chinese assassin who'd managed to sneak into the White House..."

"They're claiming the PSU is behind this?" Gordie asked.

"Uh-huh. She said the Secret Service shot and killed the assassin, but not before he got to the president. She also said that the Secret Service and FBI think he wasn't acting alone, and so she's ordered the military to take control of the Capitol and instructed federal marshals to apprehend anyone who may be involved."

Including my father
, I thought, even though I knew that he didn't have anything to do with President Wilford's death. "What about his family?" Gordie asked. "His wife and daughter...did they say anything about them?"

Nicole was quiet for a moment. "They're in protective custody," she said at last. "The Secret Service has taken them to some undisclosed location where they'll be safe."

"That's a lie," Nina said.

I stared at her. Sure, she he was smarter than a girl her age ought to be, but how would she know that? Yet she seemed utterly positive in what she'd just said.

"How do you...?" I began.

"Look at the Moon!" Eddie yelled. "We're falling!"

Through the portholes, the Moon had become a flat landscape slightly curved at its ends, its mountains, rills, and craters rushing toward us. "No, we're not," Nicole said, and a second later we heard the muted rumble of the ferry's main engine. "We're just on primary approach, that's all."

"We won't crash, Eddie." Nina clasped her brother's hand a little
more tightly. "See? The rocket's firing. We'll be landing in just a little bit."

"Um...yeah, that's right. Nothing to worry about at all." Nicole glanced at me and silently mouthed a word:
slow?
It wasn't the word I would have used, but I nodded and she winced. "Sorry about Billy," she said quietly. "What he said, I mean. He can be a jerk sometimes."

Sometimes? So far as I could tell, being a jerk was a full-time job for him. "Hasn't changed since he made Second Class, I see," Gordie murmured, folding his arms across his chest. "I would've thought Luis would've straightened him out by now."

"Yeah, well..." Nicole shrugged. "Mr. Garcia's been working on him. I think that's why he sent Billy and me on this mission...to give us an assignment with some extra responsibility." Then she smiled at me. "You and your friends are in the hands of the Rangers." She pointed to the patch on her shoulder, and I noticed the inscription at the bottom. "'Failure is not an option'...that's our motto."

"The Rangers?"

"That's what they call Lunar Search and Rescue." Gordie said. "They do a lot more than just that, though. Sort of a team of all-purpose troubleshooters...including defense, if it ever becomes necessary."

"If you mean taking on Moon Dragon, that'll never happen." Nicole shook her head. "The PSU isn't bothering us and we aren't bothering them."

She sounded confident, but I wasn't so sure. If President Wilford had been assassinated by a Chinese agent, then it sounded to me like another war with the Pacific Socialist Union was inevitable. The China Sea War was before my time, but I'd learned in history class that it had ended only after the Third Treaty of Saigon brought an end to Taiwan's bid for independence and gave China permanent territorial control of the island. Relations between the PSU and the rest of the world had been frosty ever since, but at least neither side was back to sinking the other guy's ships. Reactionaries like Lina Shapar
were aching for a rematch, though, and President Wilford's death might give them the excuse they wanted.

Another prolonged rumble from the main engine caused me to look out the windows again. The Moon was very close; the ferry was no longer gliding above its surface, but appeared to be in vertical descent. "We'll be down soon," Nicole said, then glanced at Nina and Eddie. "You might want to check your harnesses. The pilots usually give us a smooth ride, but the landing might be a little bumpy."

It didn't occur to me until then that, over the past few minutes, I'd been gradually feeling just a little heavier. Not nearly as much as I did on Earth, but nonetheless the weightlessness I'd experienced over the last three days was going away. When I experimentally moved my legs, though, I had no trouble bending my knees or wiggling my feet. Sure, this was only one-sixth Earth gravity, but still...

"You're not going to have any trouble walking." Gordie had noticed what I was doing. "No more than Nicole does, or Billy either."

"Why would he...? Nicole began, and then she stopped to stare at me. "Oh, my God...are you the one? The one who was born here, I mean?"

I nodded. It didn't seem like such a big deal, yet Nicole was astonished. "Oh, man," she breathed. "We'd heard you might be coming up, but I didn't know..."

"Yup. That's him." Gordie's grin couldn't have been any wider. "Jamey Barlowe...the man, the myth, the legend."

My mouth fell open.
"Wha-a-a-a-t?"

Anything else Gordie or Nicole might have said was forgotten in the next instant. The ferry's main engine fired, louder and longer than ever before, as a vibration passed through the spacecraft and caused the deck the tremble beneath my feet. Lunar gravity, distinct but not uncomfortable, pulled me into my seat. I gripped the armrests and watched through the windows as the rocky grey terrain rose up from below. A quick, hard jolt, and then the engine noise abruptly ceased.

We had landed on the Moon.

If you go outside on a clear night toward the end of the month, you can see the Man in the Moon. He gapes at you with a wide-eyed expression that can be interpreted any number of ways--surprise, jollity, disbelief--and his mouth is open as if to laugh, scream, or simply say hello. And if you have a good pair of binoculars, you can look to the right side of his mouth and make out a small dimple on his pock-marked face. The mouth is Mare Nubrium, and the dimple is Ptolemaeus crater--pronounced "toll mouse," with a slight
ptt
sound at the beginning--the remnants of an extinct volcano partially filled by lava flows. In the upper right side of Ptolemaeus is a smaller crater, Ammonius, which was formed by an ancient meteor impact.

That's where Apollo was located.

When NASA sent the first men to the Moon, no one seriously thought they'd find anything other than rocks, rocks, and more rocks. For a while, that seemed to be the case; people thought the Moon was just a big ball of dust and stone, an interesting place to visit but where no one in their right mind would want to live. After the final Apollo expedition in 1972, nobody returned to the Moon for more than fifty years. What was the point of colonizing a dead world?

However, when geologists examined the samples of surface dust--or regolith, to use the technical term, since it's essentially powdered rock that doesn't contain the organic compounds that define soil--brought back by the Apollo astronauts, they discovered that the Moon wasn't as useless as first believed. The regolith contained ilmenite--a compound of iron, titanium, silicon, and oxygen--that could be extracted and used to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. Robotic probes sent in the early 21st century confirmed the presence of thorium and phosphorus; these rare-earth elements had become
strategic resources in the 21st century, particularly since the countries in which they were most abundant tended to have dicey relations with the United States. And the discovery of subsurface ice in the south polar craters showed that the Moon had the resources to make inhabitation possible.

But the bonanza was helium-3.

An isotope that comes straight from the Sun itself as a by-product of the fusion reactions that causes the stars to shine, He
³
is carried across space by the solar wind. Because most of it burns up in Earth's upper atmosphere before it can reach the ground, it's very rare on our world. There's no air on the Moon, though, so He
³
is relatively abundant there, particularly in the equatorial regions where it resides within the regolith as a thin layer.