Lunar Descent (32 page)

“Uh-oh is right.” Peterson took the tubes from his hands and placed them back in the rack. “If it makes you feel any better, I took a second batch from the secondary ice pack. The particle concentration and turbulence came out close to normal standard. But that second pack, as you know, has nowhere the volume of the primary pack. It's been treated only as a reserve supply. Are you catching my drift so far?”

“I'm afraid I am.” Riddell turned and looked at the bar-graphs displayed on the computer screen. “What do the monitors have to say?”

Butch leaned against the back of the chair, looking down at the floor as she absently reached under her braids and kneaded her neck with her hands. Again, it was an undeliberately sexy pose on her part, but right now Lester was hardly in the mood. “I could go into gross detail,” she continued, “but I'll cut right to the chase and spare you the geophysical gobbledy-gook. The computer confirms everything that's in those tubes. The permaice is drying up, Les. In fact, we're close to rock bottom.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Tell me about it.” She sighed, shook out her hair, and looked straight at him. “The primary well … my best guess is that we'll be able to come up here one more time for some of this dishwater. Maybe two trips if we stretch our consumption. If we open the second well and start using the reserves, we've got somewhere between eight and twelve months' supply. Fourteen or fifteen months max if we tightly ration it. Then we're bone dry. Kaput.”

Riddell took a deep breath and let it out. He looked down and found himself gazing at her breasts, which seemed to surge against the tight fabric of her undergarment; he could see the coffee-colored areolae of her nipples through the cloth, and he felt his face growing warm. Hell of a time to be noticing
that
. He glanced away from her again. “Are you sure?” he asked, then quickly shook his head. “No, no … if you say you're certain …”

“I'm going to dump all the files onto a disk and take them back to Descartes for analysis,” Butch said. “Maybe I'll come up with something different, but I wouldn't bet on if I were you.” She hesitated. “To give you a straight answer, though … yeah, I'm pretty certain. And I might even be sugar-coating my last guesstimate. Counting the reserves, I'd realistically give it eight or nine months, tops.”

“Terrific.” Lester watched as she sat down in the chair again and began to save the files on a CD-ROM diskette. This was a potential disaster; he should be more upset than he already was. Besides that, he had more things to do outside before they left Byrd Station.

Yet, in spite of all that, he found that the thing he wanted to do most of all was to linger in the control module with Butch Peterson. Great. Makes a lot of sense. Here's a man crawling out of the Gobi desert on his hands and knees, deliriously gasping through his parched throat, “Sex … sex … sex.…”

“When you go out there,” she continued, not looking away from her work, “you better tell Joe to top off the water tanks in the cargo module. We're going to need every drop we can get. Once the well starts going empty, there's going to be some boil-off, so we might as well grab it while we can.”

“Okay. Sure.” Lester hesitantly laid his hands on the back of her chair, looking over her shoulder at the screen and fighting the urge to take one of her soft braids and gently unravel it between his fingers. “Uh … you need any help in here?”

She shook her head. “No, that's okay. I'm just going to do this and download the current data from Hawking, then …” She stopped, and then half-looked over her shoulder at him. “What's the matter, Lester? Never seen a woman in her BVD's before?”

Lester felt all the blood in his face rush down to his feet. He coughed uncomfortably. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Guess it was kinda obvious, wasn't it?”

Butch favored him with a sultry half-smile. “Doesn't matter to me. Not as long as you don't get any funny ideas.”

Lester laughed … then, impulsively, he extended his forefinger and stroked the back of her neck. Peterson moved her neck out of the way, the smile disappearing from her face. “Like that one,” she said. “If there was a cold shower available, I'd suggest that you go take one.”

Riddell hurriedly removed his hand.
What the hell's gotten into you, pal
? he admonished himself.
The lady doesn't want or need this
. “I'll … um, go help Mighty Joe with the rest of the, um …”

“I'll be out in a few minutes.” Her tone suggested that she had already forgiven and forgotten—at least for the time being. Lester turned and headed for the anteroom. Damn, he thought. And I would have loved to see how she gets back
into
her suit.…

“Okay, boys and girls, strap yourselves in and we'll be getting out of here.” Still wearing his hardsuit, although he had removed the helmet and gloves, Mighty Joe Young gave his seat harness a final cinch, then reached out to the dashboard to power up the LRLT. Next to him in the co-pilot's chair, Lester automatically picked up the clipboard and pushed back a couple of pages on the checklist. “Don't need to worry about that,” Joe said. “We've only been here a couple of hours, so everything's still configured for flight.”

Lester raised an eyebrow as he replaced the clipboard in its slot. “Not exactly regulation, is it?”

Joe shrugged as he ran through the prelaunch routine of pressurizing the fuel tanks and arming the engines. “Maybe not, but it gets the job done just the same.” He scratched at his beard and grinned at the general manager. “Don't fret. When you fly with me, you're flying with the best. But if you want to be helpful, you can double-check the cargo module to make sure she's clamped on nice and tight.”

“Oh, Lester
always
wants to helpful,” Butch Peterson said from the passenger seat behind Joe. “Isn't that right, Les?”

Lester shot a wary glance at her, which made Peterson giggle; Mighty Joe looked first at Riddell, then glanced at Peterson's reflection in the Plexiglas canopy in front of him. The scientist was hiding a wicked smile behind her hand, and the GM was pretending to study a status board on the right side of his seat. The flight compartment of the LRLT was about the size of a two-door economy car; very little of what went on inside could be kept a secret. Joe was about to make a comment, but decided to let it pass. Something had happened between the two of them while he had been loading the rest of the water into the LRLT's tanks … but whatever might or might not have occurred, it was none of his business.

“The module's secure,” Lester said, ignoring Butch's jab. “Pressure nominal. No leakage.”

“Okay then.” Mighty Joe switched the electrical system from
BATT
. to
MAIN
, reset the guidance computer to
MAN
., toggled on the auto-sequence launch program and watched as idiot lights on the fuel tanks flashed from red to green. A low hum swept through the tiny cabin, signaling that the fuel tanks were pressurized; the VTOL thrusters and main engines were armed and ready. Through the windows, he could see the lights of the station reflecting off the modules and the tall, cylindrical tower of the well pump; around them rose the steep, dark walls of Byrd Crater. Joe couldn't wait to get out of there; despite the lights and the man-made artifacts, this had to be one of the most depressing places on the Moon.

He studied the flatscreen between him and Lester, then put his left hand on the attitude-control yoke and his right hand on the parallel throttles. “We're going for a ten-second countdown on my mark. Y'all set? Okay. Mark … ten … nine … eight …”

The Grumman LRLT-105 was a hybrid vehicle, a mutant among spacecraft. Too unstreamlined for effective use on Earth or Mars, not powerful enough for translunar orbital operations yet too powerful for short-range missions, it was principally designed for long-range operations which would take its four-person crew from one side of the Moon to the other. Long, slender and flat, the LRLT had a pressurized crew compartment in the front-including an aft-deck compartment containing four bunks and a miniature lab for extended missions—a double-truss strongback in the center which contained the separable, multifunction cargo module, and an oversized engine compartment in the stern, all of which was perched on four extendable landing legs. In short, it was a lunar version of the standard space shuttle design; although fuel-hungry, it was capable of transporting people and equipment on extended sorties into the hinterlands.

Normally, the LRLT flew above the lunar surface, skimming the tops of craters and mountains alike; hence its nickname “crop-duster.” For supply missions between Descartes Station and Byrd Station, though, the standard flight profile was more exotic. The LRLT rose into vertical ascent, using the VTOL launch thrusters on the underside of its hull; when the craft had climbed to proper altitude, the pilot would tilt the nose slightly upwards, then simultaneously disengage the VTOL's and kick in the main engines. It was a difficult maneuver, but it would boost the LRLT into a suborbital arc which would take it thirty miles above the lunar surface and sling it around the limb of the Moon, matching gravitational pull against engine-thrust to send the crop-duster toward its targeted destination. It wasn't the smoothest of rides, either—those who experienced an LRLT slingshot often compared it to a ride on an amusement park tilt-a-whirl—but it effectively reduced the flight time for translunar missions from several days to a handful of hours. So a return trip from Byrd Crater to the Descartes plateau was a relatively quick journey, if all went well.

From the instant that the red warning lights flashed across the engine status board, less than a minute after the VTOL thrusters were cut and the big Pratt & Whitney main engines were engaged, Mighty Joe knew that everything wasn't going to go well.

“Heads up,” Young said as the spacecraft lurched and the lights went from green to red. “We've got a problem.”

“Hmm?” Riddell had been looking out the window during the takeoff and ascent, admiring the crescent Earth rising above the curving horizon. As an annunciator sharply buzzed, his eyes darted to the co-pilot's station. “What's going on?”

“We're losing velocity,” Joe snapped, “Damn if I know why, but we are.” He hurriedly slapped off the alarm, disengaged the autopilot, and grabbed the yoke. He glanced at the digital altimeter and felt his heart freeze. The LRLT's ascent had stopped at 27.4 nautical miles; as he watched, the numbers suddenly switched to 27.3, then 27.2, then 27.1.

“Losing altitude, too,” he said, more calmly than he himself could believe. His eyes swept across the gauges, searching for the problem. “What the hell is …?”

“We're
falling
?” From the back seat, Butch Peterson's voice rose on a high-pitched note of panic. Looking past their shoulders, she could see the horizon slowly climbing into view again. “You mean we're going
down
?”

“No shit, lady. I gotta be jinxed or something, I dunno.” Mighty Joe's gaze landed on the flatscreen above the engine throttles, where a red warning bar was strobing above a line of cryptic numbers. “Aw, damn,” he hissed as he checked the readout. “I was afraid of that. Loss of IPS ratio from the mains. We're overloaded in the cargo module.”

“What does that mean?” Peterson demanded.

“Means we shouldn't have topped off the water tanks,” Lester said. “Too much mass aboard for us to reach escape velocity. The mains can't handle the extra load.” He immediately reached for his panel and flipped back the candy-striped cover above the emergency cargo-module jettison. “Okay, let's fire the pyros and …”

“
Cut it out
!” Mighty Joe's right hand slapped Lester's hand away from the switch. “This is my ship and nobody touches a thing without my say-so!”

“But if we ditch the load …”

Mighty Joe shot an angry look at Riddell. “The water's too valuable for us to dump,” he snapped. “You said that yourself. And we're not out of options yet.” He snapped a set of toggles on the engine board. “Brace yourselves,” he commanded, grabbing a smaller pair of throttles below the main engine sticks. “I'm cutting in the auxiliary thrusters. Three … two … one …”

Lester and Butch barely had time to grab the armrests of their seats before Mighty Joe yanked down on the auxiliary thruster bar. The spacecraft shuddered like a drenched dog shaking off water. The altimeter stopped at 25.2 and the horizon steadied in the windows … then, slowly, the LRLT began to ascend again. “Okay, there we go,” Joe whispered. “Climb, baby, climb.
Climb—
!”

There was a loud
bang
! and a violent impact which felt as if they were in a car that had been rear-ended by a Mack truck; several alarms went off at once as the LRLT suddenly careened sideways. “Sweet fucking Jesus!” Joe shouted. “Not
again
!”

His hands were all over the controls, simultaneously cutting off the auxiliary thrusters, silencing the alarms, grabbing the yoke and struggling it back into trim. Lester heard Butch scream behind them. He didn't look back because he couldn't; he was transfixed by the sight of the lunar landscape, which had now tilted sideways and was rushing up at them. “What happened?” he shouted.

“That fuckin' asshole Yuri gave me a fuckin' piece of bullshit auxiliary fuel pump, that's what happened!” Mighty Joe was fighting the yoke. “Look at the fuckin' board! The bastard blew and took out one of the fuckin' main fuel cells with it. Fuck, fuck,
fuck
—!”

Lester glanced at the console. Yep. Everything that Joe had interpreted from the myriad dials and readouts was true. “I guess that means we're fucked,” he murmured.

“Couldn't have said it better myself, pal.” Mighty Joe glanced again at Lester. “Don't even think about jettisoning the cargo module now. Won't do us any good. The angle is all wrong, and I don't want to risk the chance of that thing taking out the engine pod altogether.”