Rich Man's Sky Page 19

  Near the center she could now make out a darker spot, through which no sunlight was visible at all, with a bright spot hovering in front of it.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Derek pointed. “That’s the Hub section of the Shade, which is totally opaque. That’s the station, which is covered in lights. It’s too small to actually see from here, but that’s where it is.”

  “Huh.”

  “Look, you can come back here and gawk when the hibernation deck is taken care of, but those colonists need to be ready to leave the ship when we dock, or we’re gonna get charged for their oxygen. I shit you not.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. Take it up with accounting. Now . . .”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Barely awake herself, Alice went back into the passenger cabin and studied the vital signs of all six women: B.Powell, P.Figueroa, J.Schmidt, M.Aag, N.Rostov, and S.Batra. All of them, regardless of their natural coloration, all had gray-blue skin and cyanotic lips and core temperatures of eight degrees Celsius—the exact air temperature of the passenger cabin itself, like the air inside a deep cave. They could easily be mistaken for corpses, if not for the LED monitors sitting next to their heads, showing nonzero blood pressure, and heart rates between five and ten beats per minute. That was a lot less than Derek’s bear hibernation at roughly twenty bpm. When Derek was back here he looked basically alive, though perhaps comatose. Waking him up was a fifteen-minute procedure, and he was conscious for the last minute or two of that.

  This was different. Alice hoped things were going to go smoothly here, but the medical professional in her disapproved of the cavalier way this very deep hibernation was being used. She knew it was used for cancer patients and heart patients, and she also knew that about five percent of the time, people really, actually didn’t, wake up. That probably didn’t apply to healthy volunteers, but still, “not lethal” was hardly the best starting point for something like this. And yet, these women had all agreed to it, along with pregnancy and other invasions, as part of the cost of getting to space. Hell, they probably would have agreed to it even if they knew for a fact that they had a five percent chance of not waking up.

  With relief, Alice took the first step toward waking them all up, which was to turn the cabin temperature up to twenty-two degrees Celsius. Derek had pumped Alice full of thermoregulation agents, so her core temperature and even her extremities were theoretically fine, but she was sick of the cold tomb air back here. Sick of cold air against her skin! Of course, while it would only take a couple of minutes to warm up the air, the actual surfaces of the room would take longer, and the colonists’ bodies, left to their own devices, could take many hours to reach even room temperature. They needed several different kinds of jump start, which Alice presently began.

  She started by turning off the drip feed of hibernation drugs and replacing it with the revival mix. By itself that would also take hours to have any effect, since their bloodstreams were all moving so slowly. So next she turned on the bed heaters and cuff heaters, and started massaging the patients’ legs—beginning with Maag and working her way through all of the others. Then she turned on the brain stimulators, located in the forehead strap of each woman, that would instruct their brains to instruct their bodies to warm up and come back to life.

  Then she waited around for a little while, watching the vital signs creep up until the women began to look alive. Maag got there first; with her skin pinking up, she began to snore. From there, things started to happen more quickly, as the drugs were able to enter her system and work their own obscure magics. Alice removed and stowed everyone’s goggles and hearing protectors, and then she shone a penlight into one of Maag’s eyes, and noted a normal dilation response.

  “Quit it,” Maag said.

  Then, a few seconds later, “Where am I?”

  Maag’s eyes were still closed, and she looked about ninety percent asleep, and still felt cold to the touch.

  “You’re coming out of hibernation,” Alice told her, though she suspected Maag could neither process nor retain that information.

  She busied herself with the other patients for a while, until Maag said, more clearly, “Am I falling?”

  “You’re in zero gravity, onboard the L.S.F. Dandelion.”

  “Am I tied up?”

  “You’re restrained to a surface, yes.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Uh-huh. We need to warm your body up slowly, so we don’t cause complications.”

  Maag was silent for several minutes, and then asked, “Where am I?” Still without opening her eyes.

  “I’ll come back in a few minutes,” Alice said.

  Pelu Figueroa had begun showing signs of life, and so had Bethy Powell, and Alice needed to adjust their feeds and turn off their neural stimulators, and meanwhile Maag had opened her eyes and was taking in the scene around her, trying to piece together what the hell was going on.

  “Alice? Alice Kyeong?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Holy crap, am I thirsty.”

  Soon the place was erupting like a nursery school: “I’m cold!” “I’m thirsty!” “I need to pee!” Alice had her hands full dealing with all of it, coaching these confused human beings through the stages of the awakening process.

  “Is there something around my head?”

  “Yes, there’s a strap. Do you want it loosened?”

  “I want it off!”

  The whole thing was similar enough to Maroon Beret field medicine to seem familiar, and yet different enough to feel like a real shit show for which she was not trained or prepared. It was no wonder Derek had wanted a copilot to handle this for him.

  Alice couldn’t release them all at once from their restraints, and Maag had already freed an arm and was using it to free her other arm, and was at risk of damaging equipment in her not-quite-there mental state, so Alice announced that she was going to release the women one at a time, and they would each need to wait their turn. That seemed to work, at least for the moment, and so she helped Maag free herself, and then she did the same for Pelu Figueroa.

  “I need to change,” Pelu said. “I feel like I’ve been in this underwear for way too long.”

  Alice knew the feeling. There were no laundry facilities onboard the ship, so during her awake times she had quickly used up both sets of her own space underwear, along with both pairs of socks, and she was forced to wash them in the lavatory sink and dry them on an air vent. The results were imperfect at best. Still, it was better than sleeping in a ditch, and she was running out of patience, so she told Pelu, “Wait until we get to Esley. Then you can shower and change.”

  Alice didn’t know if that was true or not, but she could hope. At the Marriott Stars, each guest cabin had included a shower—a clear tube you closed over yourself, with a jet of water at one end and a sucking drain at the other. It had a filter somewhere inside it, so it kept recycling the same fifteen liters of water over and over again (“like a dishwasher,” the pencil-mustached porter had said), and after about six minutes you pretty much stopped feeling like you were getting any cleaner. But it was still pretty good. Nothing like that had been available at Transit Point Station (she supposed they used washcloths instead), but ESL1 was a much bigger facility. Bigger even than the Marriott Stars.

  While Pelu and Maag went back to use the bathroom, Alice freed Bethy and Jeanette, and then Nonna and Saira. Then she heated up six bulbs of coffee, told everyone to stay put in the passenger cabin and not screw around, and then finally, finally opened the hatches to the cockpit, went up into it, and closed the hatches behind her.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Always a good time,” Derek agreed.

  More than three hours had passed, and in the Dandelion’s oversized rearview mirrors, Alice could no longer see the Sun or the edges of the Shade. Only the blankness of the opaque Hub, and a complicated mess of structures that Alice recognized as ESL1 Shade Station. Like an oil refin
ery in a trailer park, covered in white and orange floodlights, it hovered an indeterminate distance from the Hub, and really quite close to Dandelion. The navigation panel said the station was 1.5 kilometers away.

  “Are we there?” Alice asked.

  “Not quite. Another half hour.”

  “We could use the ACS thrusters,” Alice suggested. ACS stood for attitude control system, and referred to the assortment of small chemical rocket nozzles distributed around the ship’s hull, to permit it to change orientations in a controlled manner, or to make small adjustments in speed or orbit. In theory, there should be more than enough oomph in there to close this gap in a few minutes.

  “Nah,” Derek said. “I haven’t touched ACS the whole trip. Xenon does not come out of my pay, so I’m going to use it all up.”

  Alice could grasp what he meant; there were four separate ion thrusters on the aft of the ship, and by adjusting the thrust levels between them, Derek was slowly, carefully steering the ship. By manual control, apparently.

  “All the way into dock?” Alice asked. As a rule, she tried not to be impressed by fancy flying, but it had never occurred to her such a thing was even possible.

  “Yes,” he said, “all the way into dock.”

  He paused for a thoughtful moment and, without taking his eyes off the radar display, added, “This ship is probably going to be dismantled soon. These ion tugs made sense when everything had to be lifted off the Earth. A lot of sense. But there’s no xenon in space, and with Clementine Cislunar selling rocket fuel . . . Hell, they’re delivering rocket fuel to specific orbits, on demand. So yeah, it’s only a matter of time till Iggy wants new ships.”

  “But you’ll fly those, too, right? Chemical rockets, zoom zoom?”

  “Yeah. I will. It won’t be the same.”

  And that seemed to be all he wanted to say.

  3.3

  20 April

  ✧

  St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

  Shoemaker-Faustini Plateau

  Lunar South Polar Mineral Territories

  My Dearest Father Bertram,

  You have asked for an account of the arrival of our eight new brothers. “New” of course in the sense that they haven’t previously dwelt with Saint Joseph upon the Lunar pole, not that we do not know them, for we lived together a year and more as you know upon the lava flows of Craters of the Moon National Monument, in Idaho, to prove our minds wouldn’t snap under the strain of this, our lifelong exile from the boredoms of a planet already 3.5 billion years inhabited.

  I miss you, Bert. I wish you were here to experience these things, requiring no narration save your own internal monologue. But as that’s not the case, I relent and narrate for you.

  On this particular morning there was some uncertainty about the arrival time of the brothers’ lander, for there is now enough traffic around Luna that Lunar Orbit Traffic Control (operated by Harvest Moon Industries) can call an “orbit hold” and make you go ’round again afore you burn your deorbit retros. Also there was work in need of doing, and since the buddy system requires we not go outside alone, Brother Puke was forced to join me, though he had little love for the task, and business of his own to attend indoors, and called me a pain in his neck, which was true and generous enough. For my own generosity, I declined to point out that from this day forward he’d be able to fob such duties off on someone junior, still excited to be here in any capacity.

  Outdoors we went, to retrieve the stuff of life: water from a Harvest Moon autonomous truck, and methane and nitrogen from an Orlov Petrochemical autonomous lander. This first was a little clown car of a vehicle, barely larger than a bicycle trailer, loaded with two barrels of melted icy treasure hauled over from one of the man-tended but not full-time-staffed mining outposts. Call them moonbases Curly and Moe, in craters Shoemaker and Faustini, respective. When I think back on how I used to let the water tap run back on Earth (I nearly said “back home,” but we both know that ain’t correct), I shudder to think how much these two barrels cost His Holy, for all of that vast mineral wealth—worth more than gold and diamonds wrapped in cocaine—flows through these hands of mine and offends the oath of poverty I took with great conviction. To drain the barrels, I attached a pair of hoses from the outer wall of the main service hab: one to pump the water out, and one to replace it with pure oxygen ballast so the transfer didn’t take forever and all the energy in the universe. Ironic that this other stuff of life should be the cheapest ballast we have for sacrifice, but water is not a compressible or expandable material, and must be displaced by something, and as we have noted, the Moon is forty-five percent oxygen by weight. It’s the hydrogen that’s precious here, of which water is only eleven percent, but this complaint you’ve heard before. Could I have used a sealed screw pump I’d’ve drained these tanks easily with no ballast at all, but that’s a complaint Harvest Moon has also heard before. Apparently, these centrifugal peristaltic pumps are far easier to build and maintain in the Lunar environment, and do not vacuum-weld themselves into inoperative junk. And so, yes, I pumped oxygen into the barrels to replace the water, and let my offended oath go hang itself, for such is life.

  It took near thirty minutes to drain the first tank, and another thirty to drain the second, and when that was done I hit the THANK YOU button and sent the little clown car back to its robotic masters at Curly or Moe. With Purcell’s assistance I stowed the hoses and then set about the morning’s second task.

  Orlov Petro’s methane comes with its own Lunar lander, a crab-shaped contraption roughly the size of a lumber cart, carrying three tanks of compressed methane—our source of both hydrogen and carbon for the CHON chow fabricator, the chemical synthesizer, and the drug printer—and three of nitrogen, which is not only raw material but also a preferred component of good breathing air, as an anitrogenic atmosphere raises the risk of fire and explosion and is really not great for the human body on a long-term basis; and also my nitrogen-fixing plants would starve, alas, for nitrogen is also fiercely costsome, being nearly ten times the price of the methane.

  Brother Puke (or Purcell the Porpoise, if you prefer, for he sometimes laughs like one) helped me unwrench and unload the tanks from their secure holders and carry them to the service hab. We disconnected the corresponding empties and replaced them one by one with Orlov’s fulls, carrying the empties back and securing them on the lander. For a nominal fee we could actually keep the lander and strip it for parts, or melt it down as raw material, for it’s made of asteroid stuff and actually less valuable per kilogram than the consumables it transports. However, His Holy has purchased no such stripping or melting equipment for Saint Joe, nor any manufacturing of significance. Nor does he intend to, so far as I know, and so these landers would simply pile up as landfill. Instead, the crab retains a quantity of methane and oxygen sufficient to blast it back to Clementine. I set the timer for this (a good old-fashioned spring-loaded dial, like on a dishwasher when we were young), so that we would not be charged for keeping it, and so it would blast off at Vatican Midnight when we were all asleep.

  I thought about scoring some marks on it with a screwdriver, for it has pondered me more than once whether this same lander cycles back and forth on our behalf, or whether there’s a whole fleet of which we get a random pick each time. Harvest Moon buys this same methane and nitrogen from Orlov Petro, as does the Chinese base on Luna’s opposite pole, so one does have to wonder how the logistics logic out. Transit Point Station and Marriott Stars are both Orlov customers as well, although one suspects they have no need of landers per se, and are thus likely on a different delivery route.

  (Iggy the Rake makes his own gases, by the way, though not to sell, and Orlov buys his spaceship components and habitat modules from Renz Ventures. Danny Beseman buys from both and sells to no one, except dreams to the dreamers, which don’t come cheap, although one supposes the exact same charge could be leveled against His Holy. The only difference, my love, is whether one dreams of dwelling in Heaven
or upon the face of Mars, which is a kind of Heaven for unbelievers too savvy to upload to the Immortal Cloud—a scam which stirs me to rare anger, I’m afraid. At any rate, this monk would love sometime to chart what ends up where, and from what starting point, that all these trillions should so enrich just four men born of Earth.)

  As luck would have it, our work was completed timely, for not two minutes after I set the launch dial there came upon the radio a voice, calling out, “Sierra Juliet Zero Niner on approach.”

  To which my correct reply is always, “Roger that, Zero Niner. Sierra Juliet Ground Actual requesting ETA.”

  The pilot, a Harvest Moon functionary, answered, “Sierra Juliet Zero Niner estimating touchdown in five minutes, twelve seconds.”

  Sierra Juliet is pilotspeak for Saint Joseph of Cupertino Monastery, as opposed to Sierra Lima, which abbrevs yon Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station, whose warnings we also get. Zero Niner meant this was the ninth inbound crewed flight to land this site, and also that the pilot was cool, as are they all. That nothing else was said meant that nothing else was expected, for all was nominal and good. More than mere courtesy, these exchanges warn the unwary to clear the drop zone, for a landing jet can kick up silent bullets of Lunar gravel with terrific kinetic energy, to travel sometimes many parabolic miles before impact.

  In theory a General Spacesuit Heavy Rebreather is proof against such gravel impacts, but the better part of valor is to retreat somewhere safer, which in our case was the airlock. Unpressurized but with the outer hatch closed, it was fortress enough for this or any purpose, for in add to radiation it’s designed to withstand the impact of stone soccer balls at interplanetary velocity.

  The airlock offers three portholes facing three different directions, and without knowing precise where the lander would touch down, I chose one at random to crowd in front of, and Puke chose another, and we waited the couple of minutes until the lander appeared.