***You need me because you have a mission and I can help…Wings, I know the Keeper’s here…I can guide you, I can help you. All you have to do is let me--***
“Later—“ He snapped his head sharply, severing the coupler link. At least, that works. Then he closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
The Detachment assembled the next day at 0600 hours local time at Galileo Wing’s crawler garage, with all their gear. Director Ramachandran told them that Farside had one hopper to spare and implied that only some serious arm-twisting by UNIFORCE had made that available.
“Mission parameters were basically worked out with Paris two days ago…outwardly, you’re a seismic survey team,” the Punjabi administrator said. “In fact, I’m adding two of our people to the team to make it look official. You’re making half a dozen ground stops along a path that’ll take you from here at Korolev Crater all the way around to the nearside…in fact, all the way to your last stop the far side of Eratosthenes Crater. This stop will put you down about thirty kilometers northeast of the Tian Jia base. From there you get off. The hopper comes back here. Lieutenant—“ Ramachandran yielded the podium to Winger.
“Right,” Winger picked up the story. “Our mission is recon. We don’t engage anyone or anything unless fired on and then only as needed for unit defense and exfiltration. Got that? Now as soon as Lou there—“he indicated Louis Siobhan, the red-haired hopper pilot standing alongside Ramachandran—“lets us off at Erato, we head west by southwest, right for Copernicus.”
“Excuse me, sir,” asked D’Nunzio, “are we walking the whole thirty kilometers?”
“Negative,” Winger said. “Don’t worry your pretty little buns about that. We use our suit boost…everybody make sure you’re up to spec on yours. We head out low-trajectory, nap-of-the earth…or I should say, moon. We spread out. We zig and we zag…that’s to throw off any sats and drones watching. It’s a sure bet the Chinese have the whole area covered. Once we get over the crater wall, we head for the central peaks and assemble there. Everybody’s got assignments. We’re watching, measuring, digging and probing the whole area around that base. We’re looking for anything that smacks of non-Treaty ops, non-standard, non-regulation stuff. Unusual bot clouds. High thermals. High EMs. Decoherence wakes, indicating quantum systems. “
Buddha Nguyen was forever fondling trinkets and amulets around his neck. “What about ANAD, Lieutenant? Are we sending any swarms in?”
Winger scrunched up his face, knowing the question would come and knowing he didn’t have a good answer. “Major Kraft and the mission rules from UNIFORCE leave that up to us. Q2 wants intel. It’s our job to give it to them. That means we use whatever tools we need to use to gather as much all-aspect data as we can. So, the answer is…it depends.”
The discussions went on for a few more minutes, then Winger called a halt to the briefing. “Save anything else for the hopper trip. Director, how long--?”
“How long is the trip?” Ramachandran rubbed some stubble on his chin. “We’re traveling nearly a quarter of the moon’s circumference…I’d say three to four hours to Eratosthenes, with stops.”
Winger figured it would be like taking scouts on a field trip. He’d call it a success if he could just keep them all from annoying or killing each other.
They rode the crawler out to Landing Pad B. From their approach, Mighty Mite Barnes had a good view of the hopper.
“Looks like a flying bed frame,” she decided.
“Yeah,” said Oscar M’Bela. “With two bread loaves on top.”
The Detachment boarded the ship, found their spots and settled in. The two geos came aboard last, followed by Lou, the pilot. The geos were young, kids it seemed to Winger. Probably grad students doing an internship at Farside. Their names—Banner and Hershey—went in one ear and out the other. Nobody said a word as Lou powered the hopper up and they lifted off. As they banked and headed out across the rubbly floor of Korolev Crater toward her rim walls nearly a hundred kilometers away, Lou cheerfully informed his passengers that the hopper had a nickname.
“Bedbug is what we call her. It’s a long story. She was named in a contest we had months ago at Fiji Island Canteen. I won’t bore you with the details.”
“Thanks” muttered Sheila Reaves. She drew her comm cap down over her eyes and snuggled up with her hypersuit helmet as a pillow.
It was going to be one hell of a long, boring ride out to the jump-off point.
As predicted, Bedbug zoomed low and fast over the undulating craters and gray regolith of the moon for what seemed like hours. They made several short stops, with the geos piling out like kids at a theme park, dropping off quake sondes and seismometers and other gear, while the troopers of Alpha Detachment stretched and yawned and told bad jokes to each other.
They had a meal of sorts half way through. No Q rations here. Ramachandran himself had seen to it that only the best from Farside’s kitchen was made available. Veggie wraps, protein bars, tea, coffee and moonwater were passed around and wolfed down by everyone.
A short nap later, Lou announced that Bedbug was approaching her final stop.
“All hands, your jump point’s coming up…by the way, that big jumble off to your right is Eratosthenes…the crater wall. It’s almost—“
But before he could finish his sentence, the hopper was rocked violently and skewed nearly one eighty around by a blinding flash of light and a strong wave, which shimmied through the hull.
Instantly, Lou dropped his tour guide routine and bent to his panel. His hands worked throttles and controls, flying across buttons and switches on his board.
“What the hell—“ He cycled switches, breakers, and stabbed buttons, cursing as he did so. “Main bus A and B undervolt…no attitude control, thrust dropping…I’m cycling the starter, I’ll try to re-light now--!”
The troopers and the two geos held on tight as Bedbug continued her clockwise roll and yaw, cartwheeling across the craters and hummocks scant meters below. They were losing altitude fast and as the whine of the starter turbos blasted through the cabin, Winger chanced a peak out of a nearby porthole.
His heart leapt into his mouth.
They were headed down, headed down fast and impact was only seconds away, if Lou couldn’t get the rockets re-started.
Bedbug shimmied and shuddered as she spun toward the ground. They were only meters away from impact when Lou was finally able to flatten out their descent, just as the front of the platform struck a small hillock.
The impact sent them spinning sideways. Bedbug plowed into the regolith and rolled over and over and over again, bouncing several times as she gouged out a rooster-tail of dirt. Hull panels and bulkheads groaned from the strain. Her landing legs were quickly sheared off and seconds later, the crew compartment—the bread loaf on top of the bedframe—separated from the platform and was thrown clear. The compartment rolled itself and after what seemed like an eternity of dirt and gear being tossed about inside, the cabin came to rest on its side butted up against the lip of a crater wall. Dust and debris hung in the air for a long time. The compartment outer hull had been breached and air was squealing out in a thin, high-speed stream as it escaped into the vacuum.
There were groans and grunts as hypersuit helmets were quickly sealed. Up front, Lou winced and held his right shoulder. “It’s my ribs…something’s broken—“ he strained out over the crewnet. Fortunately, his own suit had self-sealed and pressurized.
The two scientists—Banner and Hershey—were even worse off. Banner lay on his side, half-covered by part of a seat. His neck was broken. Hershey had severe cuts and lacerations and his own suit wasn’t properly sealing.
Ozzie Tsukota noticed it first. Without waiting for orders, he launched his own ANAD, which quickly formed up a glistening fog inside the cabin. With a few quick pecks at his wristpad, Tsukota commanded his emb
ed into a sealing configuration. The swarm drifted over to Hershey’s suit, to the seam that had been torn and settled like morning fog over the opening. In a few minutes, the air escaping from Hershey’s suit had been pinched off and the geo was moving cautiously to crawl over to see about his colleague.
“Get another patch on that hull breach!” Winger commanded over the crewnet. “Let’s get this place buttoned up and liveable.”
“Where are we?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes. She stole a glance out the porthole, saw low hills on the horizon and watched mesmerized as the dust gouged up by Bedbug’s impact slowly settled around them, like a slow-motion rain.
“Looks like the middle of nowhere,” D’Nunzio offered. She helped several others up.
“Hey, something’s happening—“ it was Nguyen, forward of the others, nearly buried under what was left of the instrument panel. “My embed’s coming out—“ Nguyen sent commands to his own ANAD to stay put, stay in containment, but the tiny master bot heeded no commands and launched itself. “What the--?”
“Me too,” muttered Reaves. The CQE swatted at her left shoulder, trying to keep her own embed from emerging but it was no use.
Half the troopers reported the same thing. Their embedded ANAD systems had somehow become activated and were launching themselves without command.
The air inside Bedbug was soon thick with the swarms, mixing with the clinging dust that was choking everybody.
Winger’s own embed seemed stable but a chime in the back of his head meant the Dana bot was online.
“Yeah…what is it?” he asked in a low voice. “What the hell’s going on around here?
***Reporting strong signals in the area, Wings…quantum signals…can’t get a bearing yet, but the signals are washing out everything…could be the Keeper***
“The Keeper…we’re still a long way from Tian Jia, Dana. How could the—“
***Distance is nothing in quantum comms…you should know that. I’m feeling it too…I’m re-locating to the anterior side of your limbic system now…just give me a few minutes***
“Leave my limbic system alone, Dana…in fact, why don’t you just come out and join the crowd—“
***You mean that…oh, Wings, you don’t know what that means to me…a girl’s got to breathe, you know…a girl’s got to be with her friends***
“Just do it quietly…I don’t want anybody to be creeped out.”