Helium3 - 1 Crater

Advance Acclaim for
Crater

“Long-haul trucking on the Moon . . . with raiders, romance and a secret mission . . . High adventure on the space frontier.”

—
K
IRKUS

“Crater
shows what it would be like to live on the Moon: to work there, to struggle and to triumph. A fine piece of work by Homer Hickam.”

—B
EN
B
OVA
, A
UTHOR OF
L
EVIATHANS OF
J
UPITER

“Readers will be caught up in Homer Hickam's thrilling novel of life on the moon! Plenty of twists and an admirable, spirited hero in Crater who takes us on an adventure filled with intrigue and excitement that leaves us wanting more.”

—D
ONNA
V
ANLIERE
,
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
&
USA T
ODAY
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF
T
HE
G
OOD
D
REAM
AND
T
HE
C
HRISTMAS
S
HOES

CRATER

CRATER

A HELIUM-3 NOVEL

HOMER
HICKAM

© 2012 by Homer Hickam

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version
^®
,
NIV
^®
. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Publisher's Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hickam, Homer H., 1943–
    Crater : a Helium-3 novel / Homer Hickam.
       p. cm.
 Summary: In the twenty-second century, sixteen-year-old Crater Trueblood, who mines the moon for Helium-3 to produce energy for a desperate, war-towrn Earth, undertakes a deadly mission that could mean the difference between life and death for every inhabitant on the moon.
  ISBN 978-1-59554-664-7 (hardcover)
  [1. Moon—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.
  PZ7.H5244Cr 2012
 [Fic]—dc23

2011051931

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 15 16 QG 5 4 3 2 1

TO AMI
M
C
CONNELL

Contents

PART ONE: MOONTOWN

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

PART TWO: THE CONVOY

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

PART THREE: THE CYCLER

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

READING GROUP GUIDE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

:::
Part One
MOONTOWN

T
he little mining village of Moontown, set deep within the lunar Alpine Valley, was bathed in the bluish glow of a vast and sinuous river of stars flooding across a black velvet sky. On the Helium-3 scrapes to the west of the settlement, the miners of the Medaris Mining Company's third shift trudged toward the dustlocks, their bobbing and weaving helmet lights shooting bright spokes across the gray dust, silicate flakes caught in the beams sparkling like diamonds.

Two miners remained behind on the slope of the scrape designated eleven north. Clad in the red coveralls of explosives experts, they were working feverishly to prepare the next section for blasting before the shift was over. Nitro Ned, the leader of the team, smacked the black box he was holding and took a long second to control his anger. It had been a frustrating day. Even though the blue banger foreman had made several mistakes, including a failure to move the belt line in a timely fashion, the shift had worked twelve sections when the average was eight. Everyone was worn-out, including Nitro Ned. He just wanted to get to the dustlock and go home to his sweet wife and two daughters.

“What's wrong, Ned?” the assistant asked. She was a puterbride turned miner who called herself Unlisted Sally, thus following the tradition of many citizens of Moontown who adopted nicknames, sometimes to hide their past but often to simply renounce all ties with Earth, their lives begun anew at the gritty mining outpost in the wayback of the moon.

Ned smacked the box again and said, “I told the blue banger we didn't have time to check this section before the end of the shift. Now this scrag pulsor's gone belly-up.”

The pulsor was an ultrawide band unit, designed to let its operator peer through the dust to see what lay below, especially basalt boulders called rollers. Rollers, if blown up by a detpak— as the explosives packages were called—could turn into what their names implied, rolling boulders that careened down the slopes, some big enough to crush machines and miners.

“I'll get another pulsor,” Sally said.

Ned shook his head. “Naw, you'd have to drive all the way to the maintenance shed. By the time you got back, the first shift would be coming through the dustlock and we'd have to wait until they were all through before we could get inside. We'll have to use the sticks.”

“The sticks” were six-foot-long lunasteel rods designed to penetrate the dust with a hard thrust. Sally followed Ned to their truck to retrieve them and drop off the dead pulsor. She examined one of the pointed rods. “Do these things really work?”

“Use 'em right, they're better than pulsors,” Ned grunted, and demonstrated by plunging a stick into the dust. “Rollers aren't usually more than a few inches deep. If they're here, we'll find 'em.”

Sally tested her stick. It entered the top of the dust easily, then jammed. “You got to push harder,” Ned said. “Give it all you got. See? I penetrated five, six inches that time.”

Sally tried it again, this time pushing the stick in deeper. “I guess it should work,” she said, though her voice betrayed her uncertainty.

“Sure it will. Come on.”

Ned led Sally back to the section and the pair began jabbing the dust. Ten futile minutes later, Ned, breathing hard, stopped. Pushing the stick into the dust again and again was not easy. He looked around and saw the last of the miners from his shift entering the dustlock. The miners for the next shift were probably already lining up to enter the other side. Ned made a decision. “There's nothing here but dust,” he announced. “Let's call it a day.”

Sally wasn't certain they'd done a thorough job, but Ned was her boss. Not only that, her back and her head hurt. She longed to get out of the sticky gluelike biolastic material that coated her body. Her helmet also had a bad air delivery valve. All day she'd felt like she was half suffocating. Still, she felt compelled to ask, “Are you sure, Ned? We clear it, they'll blow this section without checking again.”

Nitro Ned was already halfway back to the truck. “I know these slopes like the back of my hand. This ain't roller geology. We're done.” He called up the foreman's frequency on his helmet communicator. “Bossman, our last section's ready for detpaks. We're coming in.”

The section foreman came back. “Hurry up. The next shift needs this dustlock clear.”

The blue banger didn't have to tell Nitro Ned and Unlisted Sally twice. They tossed the dusty sticks in the back of their truck, stirred up its fuel cells, and raced, headlights blazing, down the slope and across the dust-laden flats.

:::
ONE

C
rater Trueblood was right where he wanted to be, and Petro Mountbatten-Windsor-Jones was right where he didn't want to be—although neither opinion mattered because both of them were right where they were. That was in converging lines of first-shift Helium-3 miners making their way through the busy corridors of Moontown toward the dustlocks that led to the scrapes. There was a hint of butterscotch in the air, the fragrance of the day. There was also piped-in martial music, appropriate to soldiers marching off to war, or, in this case, heel-3 miners off to do battle with the dust.

Like the other miners in the line, Crater and Petro were dressed in standard tube clothes of tunics, leggings, and plaston boots. Crater's tunic was a careful gray, his leggings the standard black, his boots an ordinary beige. Petro's tunic was an exceptional red, his leggings a unique diamond-patterned blue and white, and his boots a rare purple. Crater—at sixteen going on seventeen—was small for his age, just over six feet tall, while Petro, just turned nineteen, had topped out at six feet, five inches, an inch taller than the average adult born and raised on the moon. Lunar gravity did not compress the human backbone like the heavier pull of the Earth.

Fifteen minutes
, the gillie on Crater's shoulder said while watching Petro with an amused expression, difficult since the gillie had no eyes.

“Your gillie is making faces at me,” Petro accused.

“It has no face,” Crater replied.

“It is also illegal.”

“It knows that.”

There were signs and arrows in the corridor pointing this way and that to the various hatches that led to the neighborhoods, dustlocks, foundries, tank farms, warehouses, depots, maintenance sheds, and company offices of the town. Crater and Petro didn't need directions to anywhere. They intimately knew every tube and hatch, having explored them all at one time or another while growing up in the tiny town beneath the dust.