“Eratothenes Crater is just a hop and a skip from here,” Jake said. “The van would get us there in a couple of hours at the most.”
“But would they leave the bots behind?” Nikki asked. “I really couldn’t find anything to show the bots are still there.”
“Bots, even those for mining operations, aren’t as expensive as shipping them home. I suspect that the Eratothenes Base will be like this one. About all they’ll have taken out is the crew.”
“Do we know that the Eratothenes Base is closed?” I asked. I could imagine stumbling into the base and then having to high-tail it out again.
“I don’t have the inside information,” Jake said, “but based on the amount of surplus gear that’s been hitting the market, I’m welling to bet that none of the lunar bases is operational.”
Nikki spoke, “That certainly fits in with what I heard before I lost my job. The gossip among the rocket jocks was that the moon had been abandoned.”
“So…,” Jake said, ” If we could sneak into the base… and get some bots, we’d be able to get the hydroponics started in a hurry—”
“And then,” I continued, “get the metallurgical plant and mining operation ready to go as well. That would be perfect. I’d like to see if it’s practical to manufacture the anti-grav rods but I’ll need the bots.”
“If we could do that…” Jake said, his voice trailing off.
“There’s about not limit to what we might achieve,” Nikki finished, looking me straight in the eyes.
“ If,” I said. “Building the magnetic furnace and other equipment needed to make the rods won’t be easy. And we don’t even know if the other base has the bots.”
“But if you could build the rods here,” Nikki said, “and then mount a full-scale mining and manufacturing operation if it all looked practical…”
“The sky’s the limit.”
We all thought about it for a moment.
“There are still a whole lot of ‘if’s’ in all this,” I reminded them.
“But we have to have the bots,” Nikki said.
“We’ve nothing to lose,” I said. “Any problem with going over right now to check it out?”
There wasn’t.
Forty minutes later, I met Nikki and Jake at the front air lock. Jake had some spare oxygen tanks and a carbonylon cable wound around his suit. “We’d better replace our suit tanks. Most of the tanks in the van are depleted.”
Jake and I crunched helmets together trying to help Nikki. While we struggled trying not to look too clumsy she slipped off her own tank and replaced it. When we’d gotten all sorted out, we refilled the empty tanks from our suits and carried them with us through the airlock and on out toward the van.
The surface of the Moon is hard to become accustomed to. The Earth is always in the sky. A different side of it, maybe, but always there. Though the sun was setting, it, too, seemed eternally rooted in place. To an Earther, the scene was totally unreal after living on a planet where ALL the heavenly bodies rose and set in twelve hours. It made it seem as if time had stopped.
We unloaded everything from the van which we wouldn’t be needing for our short flight so that we’d have more room for transporting bots or other equipment back from the base (if it was actually abandoned).
Unloading the van was quite a job.
We’d really wedged a lot of stuff into it and getting it unpacked while wearing heavy gloves was no small task. It was a half hour before we lifted off and started traveling up and out of our huge crater. I headed the van toward the north east and the computer took over when it picked up the homing beam from the Eratothenes Base. It was another white-knuckle flight since Nikki had programmed the computer for maximum speed while Jake and I had finished unloading the van.
Maximum speed on the Moon is very fast since you don’t have atmosphere to contend with and you’re keeping your craft as close as is practical to the surface to minimize the chances of radar detection. Because there’s no atmosphere, everything looks closer and especially so when the surface you’re traveling over is comprised of lunar mountains—with their sheer grades—the size of those in the Carpathian Range. We accelerated the first half of the trip and then decelerated the last half, the tops of boulders and mountains whizzing by seemingly close to our feet. It was fortunate that the suites had gloves so the others couldn’t see how tightly I gripped the non-functioning steering wheel from time to time.
Chapter 12
As we neared the crater containing the Eratothenes Base, we came to a stop and “sneaked” up on the complex from behind, just in case it wasn’t abandoned. We kept low and used the mountains-like hills of the area to screen our approach. As we got within several kilometers of the base and had dropped over the crater rim, we hid behind any boulders that were large enough to conceal a floating van.
When we had flown to within a couple hundred meters of the base, Jake pointed from behind me, reaching over my shoulder, “Look at that. Something’s very wrong there. See the crack in the front dome.”
A large, jagged opening stretched across the dome of the control room. “What’s the white stuff on the ground?” I asked. “Paper?”
“Looks like it,” Nikki agreed. “And other garbage from the looks of it.”
“I’m betting the stuff was blown out of the dome,” Jake said. “A sudden decompression that caused the air to push things out as it escaped through the crack there on the side.”
“That’s not all,” Nikki said. “There’s melted plastic down the south side of the dome—along the mining shaft. An industrial laser… But? What? Used as a weapon or something. An accident?”
“Don’t think so,” I said. “The burnt plastic’s in a pattern. Crude letters—reversed—on the wall.
If you were standing inside they would read ‘K F.’”
“Why’d someone do that?” Jake asked.
That was the fifty-four thousand credit question. I had a feeling we were about to find the answer. In the meantime, none of us could think of any code or words that had any important meaning. KF? And why would anyone do such a dangerous thing? They were lucky they hadn’t punched a hole in the mining dome.
I circled the base slowly before landing. Everything looked quiet. “What do you think? Shall we land? I’m not too keen on meeting a crazy with an industrial laser.” I remembered what had happened the last time I’d seen an industrial laser fired. Having my smiling head sitting out in the lunar dust didn’t seem at all appealing, and I figured it had to hurt getting into that sort of condition, even if only momentarily.
“Nothing seems to be going on down there now,” Nikki said. “Nothing’s lit up inside.”
“Let’s land and sit a minute,” Jake suggested. “See if anything happens.”
Good plan, I thought. If someone uses a laser to carve the van into little pieces, we’ll figure something’s wrong. But I also wanted the bots for my project, and I guess greed can overwhelm caution. I didn’t think about the danger for long and brought the van down, settling in front of the main airlock of the base.
“We can’t stay too long,” Nikki said. “We don’t have much spare oxygen for the return trip.”
I wished we’d loaded up a few more spare canisters. We’d planned on picking up spares in the Eratothenes base. Now that didn’t seem like such a wise course of action.
We sat for ten minutes.
Nothing happened.
“I’m going to take a look,” I said. I was tired of waiting for a disaster to happen; it was more nerve-racking than doing something. I popped open the glove compartment of the van and pulled out my Beretta 92-F.