10
John, with Pete McCord close behind, made his way down-corridor as rapidly as the situation would allow. The moon's gravity was slight, so a relatively small effort should have brought great, soaring leaps, but the tunnel was dark, its ceiling low, and a too-forceful collision could mean broken helmets and busted skulls. They had to compromise. Hurry up... carefully.
Uncertain what lay ahead, John couldn't prepare. He didn't like that. Nine times out of ten, accurate intelligence was half the battle, and he felt blind without it. Five still seemed to be occupied, though, and Brains' hadn't signaled back since their interrupted dinner. Comm block, maybe? All he knew for sure was that someone had tried to shoot them down at launch, and that, very probably, this current emergency was more of the same.
Fifty feet down-corridor, an access door, marked 'Do not enter!' stood halfway open to their right. Seemed like as good a bet as any, so he went on through. Pete followed, keeping quiet and out of the way.
Inside, wall-mounted alarm lights rotated a blaring red warning. No klaxon, though; or else it was drowned out by his own breathing, and the varied rustles and clicks of his survival suit.
Once, Pete took an over-large step and bumped the ceiling, releasing a spate of military-style cursing until John's inspection OK'd the helmet. No visible cracks, and a quick coat of spray-on leak finder revealed no bubbles. Good to go.
Somebody... Linda, it sounded like... came over the comm with,
"Everything all right, over there?"
"Fine," Pete responded curtly. "Clear channel!"
And radio silence returned.
They rounded a bend in the dark passage, which was no longer smoothly machined, but looked rough, and much larger, as though recently gouged out by something very big. About half of the moon station crew stood there, clustered around their commander. With the aid of their helmet lamps, Riley appeared to be leafing hurriedly through some sort of operations manual.
Marking their approach, the white-haired base commander shook his head, mouth tautening. He held up three fingers, indicating a comm channel. John and Pete switched frequencies in time to hear Riley saying,
"...no place for guests. I'm afraid that I really must ask you to vacate these premises, until further..."
"Sir," John cut him off, controlling his own impatience, "I believe we can help, but we need to know what's going on."
Riley, his bushy dark eyebrows lifting, looked over at Pete, who nodded slightly.
"Well... highly irregular... not at all S.O.P., but... very well. We've had a bit of a generator failure... ruddy thing was replaced only last week. Switched over to auxiliaries, but Lord knows how long they'll hold up... and now thedamned drill's run amok."
Worse yet, according to the station's computer, the robotmole was headed up and out, toward the crater rim. Once it breached the last few feet of rock, half the moon base would experience explosive decompression. They'd tried overriding the drill remotely, but to no avail. Something was blocking their signal, and the monster chewed on, heading for hard vacuum.
"I've ordered the blast doors sealed," Riley continued calmly, "To save whatever we may, and we've a crack team having a go at the main generator..., but it might be just as well for you lot to lift off, while you've still time."
"Actually, Sir," John replied, starting past him, "My family's company manufactured that drill. I think I may be able to stop it for you."
"Well. That's all right, then," the commander responded, evidently relieved to have found plan 'B'. "Have a care, though, won't you? Diced astronaut would be most difficult to explain, come quarterly report time."
"Yes, Sir," John replied, seriously. Then, needing to deliver a warning..., but secretly..., he added in French, "look out for thrown shoes."
Recalling that Riley was a bit of a linguist, he hoped the base commander would make the connection (French 'sabot' equaled wooden shoes, as long ago thrown by angry workers into their machines, causing sabotage.)
Philip Riley's blue eyes widened slightly, and then he nodded.
"Very good, Mr. Tracy; footwear noted. Carry on."
Warning delivered, John proceeded down-shaft, Pete close at his heels. The walls of the tunnel glistened with sealant, sprayed on by the robot drill to keep the bore hole from collapsing. The stuff gleamed wetly in the light of their helmet lamps, making the tunnel look like a giant digestive tract. It was sticky, too, allowing John and McCord to pick up their pace a bit. Around them, the tunnel walls and very air began to vibrate. And, sure enough, the tunnel had changed direction, doglegging back around, and decidedly upward.
Pete tapped at his arm, holding up two fingers. John switched comm frequencies again, to hear,
"What d' you figure?"
"Someone's seized control of the drill. Remotely, would be my guess, and they're planning to drive it out through the crater wall. Only way to stop it is to get in and shut it down by hand."
Pete chewed on this in silence for a moment. Then,
"Not that it's worth fifty cents at the beer hall..., but I wonder why? I mean, c'mon, what the hell? We're a bunch of damn US astronauts trying to reach Mars. Who'd want to..."
He trailed off, for they'd reached the runaway drill's slimy, churning dust cloud. Beyond it, their quarry gnawed inexorably away. From behind, the big, multi-tracked vehicle looked a lot like the Mole, only smaller, and much slower.
It was black and yellow, with a giant red 'Tracy Aerospace' logo stamped on the back, just above the rear maintenance hatch. Focusing on the accusatory logo, John shook his head.
'Great. That'll be a lawsuit.'
In the low billions, probably. Better stop the thing as quickly as possible, he decided, and limit the damages; not to mention save his own life, and everyone else's.
Quickly retrieving a bit of non-standard equipment from his belt, John handed the startled mission commander a pistol. God bless Grandma's foresight.
"Keep watch," he said, "and let me know how close we're getting to the crater rim."
McCord accepted the weapon.
"You sure you know how to shut that sonuvabitch off?"
John smiled a little.
"No, but I'll figure something out when I get there. I'm good at that."
"Yup," Pete replied facetiously. "I love this job. 'Join the Navy, see the world', my ass!"
But he posted himself for a clear view of the tunnel, anyway, gun firmly in hand. John sped off after the rampaging, two-storey drill. Rocks and dirt shot backwards at him in great, roaring streams. Keeping precisely to the middle, he was able to avoid being struck, mostly, though he did get tremendously dirty. Something pinged against the top of his helmet, but too far back for him to see whether anything had cracked. Just have to keep going, and hope for the best, he supposed.
The gummy surface substituted well for full gravity, allowing him almost to run. As crushed gravel and sealant jetted past, John caught up with the lumbering drill. There were four sets of tank-like treads, top, bottom and both sides, gripping the tunnel walls and driving the robot mole blindly forward. Several scalloped indents in its hull allowed excavated, crushed rock to be hurled aside and back, while valuable ores and minerals were reserved inside. Small, high-pressure sealant nozzles swept the walls and floor, stabilizing the newly dug cavern with fast-drying cement. So far, so good, but how to get in? The thing wasn't meant to be accessed this way, while in operation.
He'd have to clamber up the lower tractor tread, vault to the access hatch, pop it open, and climb within, John decided. After that...? Well, the Mole had an emergency cut-off switch up front, and he was willing to bet a whole bunch of lives that its little brother did, too. Taking a deep breath, he darted forward.
Meanwhile, at the spacecraft maintenance bay, Roger Thorpe had climbed his way to the controls of a crane far larger than anything possible on Earth. The final reconfiguration schema had been input months before, by mission control. All he had to do was access the system, and get things rolling. They probably hadn't planned it to be quite so rushed, but then again, Houston hadn't figured on sabotage, either. No one had.
As he took his place in the operator's seat, the Marine hit buttons and flipped switches like a maniac, one eye on the instrument panel, one eye on Endurance, stretched out on the bay floor like a sleeping griffin. And then, to the blare of klaxons and the cyclops-stab of alarm lights, things began to happen.
At his command, giant clamps emerged from the ground and affixed themselves to her forepart; section A, command and habitation. Robotic crane arms extended from the walls and ceiling with great, creaking groans. To his right, a louvered door, nearly as vast as that in the Vehicle Assembly Building, clattered resoundingly open.
He'd simulated the process countless times, but seeing it actually happen... Roger felt like a kid on Saturday morning, watching a Japanese "Transforming Robot" cartoon.
Section C, consisting of the P-Bar engines, main cargo bay, and a magnetic fuel bottle containing the world's entire supply of anti-protons, rumbled through the door on an immense tractor, and out to the bay.
Twenty sets of crane arms seized the long, cylindrical ship segment and began maneuvering it into position, as further arms unlocked section B, the Earth-side flight assembly. Section B was lowered gently into a deep holding pit, to await their eventual return.
Motors rumbled, servos whined, steam hissed and spat, filling the assembly bay with thunder and vibration. Feeling rather like the sorcerer's apprentice, Roger began humming. More buttons, and section C was rotated, then lowered. It was like watching giants play with a skyscraper. Houston called in, demanding to know why he'd initiated the reconfig six whole hours ahead of schedule. Mindful of Pete's orders about radio silence, Thorpe gave them the briefest possible reply,
"Stand by, Houston," and kept working. He didn't see the figure rising slowly along a nearby cargo lift until far too late. There were two bullets. One pierced the material of his right suit arm, the other cracked his helmet.
Roger had a good head for trajectory. Despite the savage, burning pain in his arm, and a sudden headache, he had a good notion whence the shots had originated. Picking up the only thing handy, a twelve-pound adjustable socket-wrench, he flung it as hard as he could, in a flat, frisbee-style spin. On Earth, his missile would have fallen short, which was probably why the guy didn't duck. Too bad for him. One end of the spinning wrench caught and shattered the gunman's faceplate, sending him tumbling off the cargo lift.
For just an instant, Thorpe slumped over the controls, hearing over and over Linda's warning about falling asleep at his post. Then, (Marines went down hard, when they went down at all) he pulled himself together, let the suit plug the bullet hole,and got back to work.
At the warehouse, Cho and Linda had a bit of a job climbing into their power suits. They were large and bulky, like bright yellow, two-storey robots with seats, instead of heads. They were operated with joystick and pedal controls, with big actuators providing super-human strength, angular motion and force sensors to keep them stable, and advanced bio-cybernetic capability.
Linda strapped in, as she'd done so many times in simulation, and keyed the suit on. A flat, transparent heads-up display emerged from the side wall of her open cockpit, showing distance to target, estimated mass of cargo, approximate gravity, atmospheric density and about a dozen other things. No stereo system, but the fog lights were a nice touch.
Working the controls like a pro, Linda turned her giant machine, saw that Kim Cho, too, was suited up and ready to go. Now, for the warehouse itself, some fifty feet to the rear.
"All set, Doctor?" Linda asked her friend.
"After you, Doctor," Cho replied, actually getting the suit to execute a courtly bow and flourish. Linda grinned. She had to have practiced that maneuver on the simulator, when no one was looking.
"Cute," she called over. "The world's only multiple PhD holding astronaut-comedian."
She'd have patted Dr. Kim's mechanized back, but the suits had an in-built collision prevention system to keep their operators from staging 'robot fights'. They started forward across the storage bay, the walk feeling entirely natural, except for the height, and the booming reverberation of their footfalls. Sensory attachments to their gloved fingers allowed fine manipulation of the power suit's barrel-sized hands. When Linda extended a forefinger, so did the power suit, pressing an oversized button on the warehouse wall.
As the metal doors rattled aside, Linda heard a sudden spate of cursing over the comm. It sounded like Pete.
"Everything all right, over there?" She asked, suddenly worried.
"Fine," he snapped back. "Clear channel!"
Linda glanced over at Cho, who shrugged, the power suit mimicking her gesture with a low, growling whine. Over channel 4, she said,
"He would summon or warn us away, if there were need, Linda."
Bennett nodded, then headed for a stack of truck-sized crates. Food and water first, she decided, then medicine. But all at once, something flickered redly in her peripheral vision. A single brilliant, specular flash, and the suit's left knee seized up, lasered into sudden immobility. She almost toppled, catching herself at the last instant with one huge, splayed robot hand. His quarry crippled, the gunman showed himself. Climbing atop the crates, he took aim once again, for the operator, this time.
From behind, Linda heard the rapid, pounding thud of running footsteps. Another red beam winked on, but Cho lifted her suit's arm in a great, fisted arc, and brought it crashing across the piled crates. Several tons of supplies thundered to the warehouse floor at their feet. As for the gunman, swift application of her suit's plasma-laser both knocked him unconscious, and hurled him to safety.Dr. Kim, it seemed, was not to be taken on lightly.
"He will not trouble us again for some time," she announced, after a quick scan. "But we should be quick, anyway."
"Gotcha. Gimme a second... McCord, Thorpe," Linda called out, breaking silence once more, "Watch yourselves, we've got..."
"On top of it, Doc, thanks." Pete replied. "Stick to the script."
By which he probably meant, 'Keep loading supplies'.
Linda nodded, though he couldn't see her, and struggled on with the task, bum knee and all.
'Houston must be going nuts!', she fretted, reaching for a crate marked, Protein powder: chemically stabilized.
Not as simple as it sounded... The tread rumbled slowly upward, each linked, clanking subsection emerging from the dusty floor to vibrate and clatter its rough way to the robot's undercarriage. John took hold of an ascending tread section and rode it up, reaching for another, and then another, still. It was like scrambling his way up a slow escalator, only louder, and dirtier. If his helmet comm was working, he sure couldn't tell. Too noisy.
From the top of the tread to the bottom of the access ladder lay a smooth, handhold-less space of about twelve feet. John matched steps with the clanking treads, eye-balled the distance, then jumped. A little too hard, actually. One sixth gravity again, dammit. No harm done, though, beyond a rather rough collision with the third rung.
"A hundred and fifty feet, Tracy." Pete informed him, barely audible. Contact of sorts, though weak and staticky.
John redoubled his efforts, skimming up the ladder toward the black-and-white striped hatch. He got there, keyed the little door open with a family access code, and hauled himself inside the robot mole. The cut off switch lay forward, most likely; toward what would be the cockpit, in the IR version.
"Hundred and twenty."
The interior was a grinding nightmare of homicidal moving parts. Pistons, gears, belt and particle drives, some sort of screaming turbine and lots of pulsing hoses. John compared what he was seeing to his memorized internal diagram of the Mole. Similar..., but far less roomy, and clearly not meant to be navigated whilst in action.
Thinking at once, 'Shit', and 'Well, at least it'll be quick,' he began crawling his way through blistering hot metal. And damn glad to be wearing that insulated lunar survival suit, too.
"Hundred and ten."
The diagram in his head was two-dimensional. He had to allow for that, as well as shrinking the distances, and dumbing-down the technology. ...And he still almost put his hand down on a whirling gear shaft.
"One hundred feet to crater rim."
Regular 'Little Mary Sunshine', Pete was. Full of joyful tidings. A bad spot came up, where he had to ease his way between two thudding pistons, while still ducking low enough to avoid having his head torn off by a vicious drive belt.
'Ike,' he thought, visualizing his engineer friend's thin, twitchy face, 'I owe you a goddam black eye.'
"Ninety feet, Tracy."
'...and love you, too, Pete.'
He came to an even tighter squeeze, a narrow opening between counter-rotating drums. Placing hands and feet on opposite wall surfaces, he might sort of flatten out and do a horizontal crabwalk between them, but not with the helmet on. There just wasn't room. Well, he'd never figured on living forever...
A quick button press and sideways twist unlatched the helmet. He set it carefully aside, on what he hoped was a stable surface, then arranged himself as he'd visualized and began a careful traversal of the whisper-thin gap. He moved only one limb at a time, and concentrated fiercely on not sagging. If he dropped or rose even a little bit, he'd be shredded like coleslaw.
"Eighty feet."
There was a Tracy cousin from Kansas, a few generations back, who'd fallen into a threshing machine and been torn to bits. As he cautiously inched his way between the whirling, sparking drums, John wondered whether he was about to become an equally gory object lesson in Tracy family history.
'I mind back to Cousin John, up there gadding about on the moon back in '65... Got hisself tore up something awful by that rock crusher, didn't he, Maw?'
At last, after what felt like a hundred years of cautious inching, John slipped gratefully out from between the keening drums, and peered forward.
Damn.
No place to go. Thanks to the worst possible placement of the drill's pulverizing apparatus, the way was blocked. The unit was designed to lift up and out of the way when not engaged, but that didn't help him much, now. He could just glimpse the cut-off switch, through the slim interstice between rumbling pulverizer and battery unit...
'What the hell. Worth a try. Father doesn't exactly build these things to last.'
He took hold of the guidance system's secondary battery pack, and jerked it out of its cradle. Receiving a sudden error message, the dim little guidance computer fell into the electronic equivalent of a dead faint. The back-up systems crashed like dominoes, triggering a lock-up that halted the robot mole about twenty feet from frigid, airless death. Thank God forbusiness-sense, and planned obsolescence.
John slumped against the warm bulkhead for a few moments, letting about sixteen tons of tension leak slowly away.
'Two black eyes,' he decided, and at least one busted-in tooth. Then, just a little wobbly, he started back.
Pete met him at the rear hatch, peering anxiously within for signs of life. His relieved expression, when John finally clambered into view, was priceless.
"You look like hell," John commented drily, as though he'd been down the lane to the mailbox.
"Yeah, well... you'll have to forgive me," McCord replied, giving him a hand out of the drilling machine. "Some of us are human."
John shrugged.
"Timid, huh?" Then, "It wasn't that bad. Crawl through..., disconnect a battery pack. One, two, and out."
"If you say so." McCord handed back the gun, choosing not to comment on its presence, or to ask how John had gotten it past the security checks. Some things were better left alone.
They jumped down to the tunnel floor, the descent noticeably slower than it would have been on Earth.
"Let's get back to Thorpe, and the girls," Pete told him, preparing to signal a 'fall back'. "Something Linda said awhile ago makes me think they've had some trouble."
He wouldn't radio Houston, though; not yet. From this distance, realistically, there was nothing mission control could do but order an abort, and that was the last thing the Ares III crew wanted.