This one had.
I checked my dozer. It wasn’t in any great risk. I gave it half my attention while the other half was drawn into this drama. It had been five years since the Moon killed anyone. The understanding was that anyone on that lander was there because they wanted to be there. Hell, if Jer and I had a choice, we’d be on that lander. I’d still swap with the people on it. They had a problem. In a minute or two, it would be solved.
The minutes started to stretch. Radars that swept the final approach were redirected to cover a wider search. Someone posted a fuel remaining readout. Landing time became a widening band around the ever-lowering estimate of remaining reaction mass. Jer and I watched without saying a word. Jer lit up all the old monitors we’d retired when I got the helmet, putting different readouts in their windows. Seismic was in the center; if the shuttle hit hard, that would be our first report. Radar, time remaining, somebody’s mad search for a boarding list for 503, lots of things was going on. Jer cycled through most of them, selecting the ones we should monitor. We watched, hardly breathing.
The pessimistic estimate of fuel on board came and went with no seismic report. The middle one passed, too. Had they managed to abort to orbit? Could they be found up there, rescued? That might be worse than hitting hard. There was a slight blip on seismic before the optimistic fuel guess hit bottom.
“I think they’re down,” Jer said as someone in Traffic ventured the same guess.
“Where?” I was echoed from a dozen different stations.
Jer just shook his head. “I don’t know,” came from a monitor. “Seismic?”
“We have an event. It probably was them… ah… landing. It’s pretty faint. We’ve got a circular error of probability over twenty miles wide.”
“Where’s it centered?”
“Right over Diana Base.”
“Shit,” was a grownup’s comment. Jer and I echoed it.
“Why’s it so weak?” I asked.
Jer shook his head. “Maybe they hit light. Maybe they hit glancing. Maybe the rock they hit or some rock between the recorders and them doesn’t carry sound so well.” Jer shrugged. “The seismic stations weren’t designed to locate crashes.”
“What do we do?” I bet a lot of people were thinking that.
Jer just shook his head. “There’s nothing you and I can do. If someone sends your dozer out to search, you go. Otherwise, I guess you move rock.”
I checked. Yeah, I was ready to dump this load into the hopper. I did, then turned the dozer back out to find another bit of Moon. While I did that, I did a full maintenance review. D-4 was as ready as she could be.
“Help us. Can anyone help us?” A girl’s voice came from one of the commercial channels. Her portable computer’s camera must have lost its auto-focus. She was a blurred image in the near field. I tried to make sense of it.
“She’s in a spacesuit!”
Jer ran a filter program. Yep, a girl in a pretty pink spacesuit; the helmet had an expensive starburst logo on it.
“Who is this,” came an urgent voice.
The first name I didn’t get. The second was known through out the world. Her Dad could afford to send her to camp on the Moon. Hell, he could damn near afford to buy her the Moon.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. The lander did all kinds of crazy things before we hit.”
“Is your hull breached?”
“A guy had his face plate smashed. He’s dead.”
“Stay on line. Help is on the way.”
“I’ll try.” And her signal vanished.
“Where’d she go?”
“It was a miracle her computer survived as long as it did,” Jer muttered, rewinding the scene. “Where are you, kid?” he asked the monitor.
“They can track the signal.”
Jer waved at the monitors. “They’re trying. They only have three relay satellites. Only one was overhead when they got her message.”
“So?”
“So, the cell phone on her computer could have been anywhere within one hundred and fifty miles of Diana Base.”
“Oh. That’s no help.”
“Yeah, but maybe this is.” Jer had pulled up the backdrop of her picture. It was in focus. Through a rip in the lander’s skin two mountains stood out. One had a pair of craters half way up it that almost looked like eyes. The other had twin peaks of equal height.
“Seen those before?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I, but we’ve got an awful lot of rover video. We can limit the search to twenty miles of Diana base.”
“Forty,” I said. “You don’t know whether her camera was aimed in or out.”
“Fifty it is.” He did a quick search on our database of pirated rover video. “Looks like we got most of that ground covered. I can do a simple match, easy code with no risk I’ll blow it, but we’ll need a lot of computer power. Do you think you could….”
“Ask my folks!” That would mean telling them what we’d been doing. Where we had it stored! Everything! “What about your folks’ computers? They’re not home.”
“Our home computers are lame. I’ll use them, but your Dad and Mom’s are the real power here. Beside yours.”
D-4 was headed out. It wouldn’t need a baby sitter for a few minutes; I raced down stairs. “Mom! Dad!” I shouted. “We have to talk. It’s a matter of life and death–and this time, it really is.”
Even with that for an opener, it took a while. I had to drag Mom out of her office down to Dad’s shop. Whose daughter was lost on the Moon got the kind of sad parent nods I expected. Then I took a deep breath and told them how Jer and I might be able to save her.
Dad nodded. “Good approach. I wondered why the house system took so long to cycle from winter to fall this year. Should have suspected it was a full disk.”
Mom’s eyes just got big.
Dad headed upstairs, Mom and me following. He didn’t juggle Jer’s elbow, just looked over his shoulder, lips tight and his mouth getting smaller as he chewed on his lower lip. Finally Dad nodded. “Good code. Download a copy of what files are where. Honey, network speed is going to be a problem here,” he told Mom. “You set up a schedule for shipping the files over the net. Things will work faster if all the files a computer is processing are on it when we kick it off. I’ll go see how much disk space I can create on each system.”
“Yes, love.” Mom headed down stairs without even a glance back.
No matter how long you live with people, you will never guess what they’ll do next.
For the next hour, I went back to moving regolith. The search centered on the other side of Diana base. The main assumption was that the shuttle had lost attitudinal controls but the pilot had succeeded in steadying things down and used the last of his fuel to land them somewhere in the approach path, so most of the search units were there. Dad and Jer agreed that since it had stayed up past its usual fuel limit, it had probably kicked itself up and gone long. The gentleness of its landing bothered both of them. Mom biased the search for long and I edged my dozer out as far as I could put it.
“Dozer D-4, join the search. Swing wide and search to the south. A map appeared on my heads-up, a blue-hatched area marking out a large chunk of landscape to the south and east. I wanted to go west. But I could go south for a while.
“I will proceed down Claudette Valley and cross over at pass 4R.”
“Do it.”
I did it as slow as I dared. “Jer, I’ve been drafted into the search.” I showed him where. All he did was frown. “Mom, can you speed it up any?”
“No, honey, the poor ’puters are chewing as fast as they can.”