The biggest advantage of self-publishing is that you can bypass the content gatekeepers of agents, editors, and publishers, and interact directly with your audience.
Self-publishing's biggest weakness is the same thing. Without traditional publishing's layers of quality control, self-publishers can push out anything to market, no matter its quality.
In an ocean of self-published books, how can readers discern what to read? One of the answers is giving free previews. That's what I've done by posting excerpts of Tendrils to the Moon in this space. It's also why I'm going to post the first 3 chapters for your previewing pleasure. This amounts to slightly less than a quarter of the book, and withholds a major development in the fourth chapter that moves the rest of the story.
Concordantly, I have increased the free sample size that is available to download at Smashwords to 25 percent. You'll have to buy a copy or join my mailing list to read the rest of the book. Enjoy!
Chapter 1. Rendezvous
Seven hundred kilometers above the Earth, a transparent, six-sided figure rotated freely around its inner diagonal.
“Prism,” Connor said.
“Correct,” a female voice responded, synthetic yet warm. The spinning, incorporeal figure vanished and a new one took its place in the laser light field.
“Cone,” Connor said.
“Very good.”
The figures came in rapid succession as the geometry drill continued, and the boy’s answers grew to a fever pitch. “Pyramid. Hemisphere! Cylinder!!”
He caught the attention of the Betelgeuse pilot and navigator, seated nearby. “Isn’t that baby stuff for a boy his age?” the pilot whispered, not wanting his doubts about the boss’s son to be overheard.
“He’s showing off,” the navigator replied. “Why do you think he’s not taking his lessons in his room?”
The artificial intelligence seemed to agree that the questions were too easy. “Let’s try something harder,” it suggested.
A new hologram appeared, a truly bizarre thing. Each vertex adjoined four edges, not three. Connor stuck out his finger to arrest the object’s rotation, studying it intently. Half of its 24 faces were trapezoids, the other half squares. He was stumped.
“Cube,” he guessed. His voice boomed with confidence, as if he could dupe the AI with bravado.
“Incorrect. That’s all right, try again.”
“Tesseract.” The answer came from another: a smaller, younger boy with curly, chestnut-colored hair and pale, freckled cheeks.
“Correct,” the AI said. The younger boy grinned triumphantly.
“Lucky guess,” Connor said.
“It wasn’t a guess,” the younger boy replied.
The pilot and navigator snickered.
“Check this out.” Connor thumbed a switch on the hologram.
A crude animation of the inside of a tunnel appeared. Connor reached into the light field, fingers throwing up long shadows, to take control of a small spacecraft, which he guided through a sort of gauntlet as the tunnel narrowed randomly.
“Can I try?” the younger boy asked after watching for a minute.
“After I crash. Then you can have a turn,” Connor said.
The boys were heedless of what was going on the flight deck around them. The Betelgeuse crew were preparing the ship for docking, moving to the slow pulse of a homing signal that sounded throughout the ship, a most welcome sound in the 3 days since they had departed Earth. The homing signal came from the flotilla, a corporate space station in geostationary transfer orbit around the Earth, and planned staging area for the first permanent lunar colony.
“Should be able to see it now, Mr. Sheridan,” the pilot called out.
Wayne Sheridan disengaged from the conversation he was having with one of the technicians and floated forward into the cockpit. He peered through the quartz glass window that half-ringed the ship’s nose, his sharp, recessed eyes scanning the starry darkness above Earth.
“Starboard side, coming up behind us,” the navigator said helpfully.
Sheridan pressed his temple to the window’s titanium frame and squinted down the length of the ship. Still unable to see the flotilla, he fetched his camera with 75x optical zoom from a nearby stow point and looked through the viewfinder.
“Ah,” he gasped upon recognizing the faint, grey lines of the small city, peeking out from behind the ship’s torus, rising out of the hazy blue of Earth’s upper atmosphere. “Looks like metal shavings at this range.”
“What is it, Dad?” Connor said, abandoning the game and putting his nose to the window.
Sheridan turned the boy’s head and pointed at the flotilla. “Do you see it? That will be our home for the next few weeks.”
“Then we go to the Moon?” the boy asked hopefully.
“Then we go to the Moon.” He stowed the camera. “Have we made contact yet?”
“Not yet, Mr. Sheridan,” the navigator answered, holding out a wireless headset. “We thought you would want the honors.” A self-promoter his entire adult life, Sheridan was never one to shy away from a historical moment.
“You thought right.” He took the headset. “Mr. Ames, I want you on the call, too, please.”
“Yes sir.”
Montgomery Ames, the ship’s second-in-command, big, lean, and red-haired, donned a headset.
Sheridan started to speak, but stopped when he realized his voice wasn’t coming through the headphone speaker. He frowned, and the navigator reached across him and jabbed a button on the control panel. The homing beacon went silent and the headphone came alive with static.
“FL41, FL41, this is Wayne Sheridan, proprietor of the Betelgeuse, inbound private vessel. Port of call Belize City. Requesting clearance to dock. Over.”
He paused 20 seconds. There was no reply, aside from the crackle of static.
“FL41, FL41. This is Betelgeuse, incoming private transport. Do you read? Over.”
A female voice responded, muffled, as if buried under a thick blanket. “FL41 to Betelgeuse. Having trouble hearing you. Be advised a solar flare’s been scrambling our comms since yesterday. Point your dish toward the station for better reception. Over.”
Sheridan nodded to the navigator, who entered a command on the control panel. An electrical impulse traveled to the antenna mounted on the aluminum hull. The navigator flashed him a thumbs up.
“We’re transmitting directly at you, FL41.”
The operator’s voice came through more clearly. “That’s better, Betelgeuse. How many personnel are onboard? Over.”
“We have 10 crew, including myself, and 18 dependents.”
“Do you have anyone with a medical situation?
“No.”
“Any weapons such as tactical explosives, firearms, or long, double-edged knives onboard? Over.”
Sheridan’s breath quickened. Ames shrugged. He hadn’t expected the question either.
“Negative, no weapons,” Sheridan said.
“Stand by, Betelgeuse.” A soft thump indicated the operator had silenced her transmitter.
Sheridan sighed and reviewed the crew’s faces. They wore puzzled expressions.
“We’re civilians, not soldiers,” the pilot said. “Why would they ask if we have weapons?”
“For the same reason you checked your guns with Wyatt Earp when you rode into Tombstone,” Ames noted with a chuckle.
Sheridan covered his mic so the people on the flotilla couldn’t hear him. “The flotilla isn’t Tombstone, Mr. Ames. There must have been a misunderstanding. Someone brought incendiary devices for excavation on the Moon and didn’t tell anyone—something like that.”
“Maybe she can tell us,” the pilot suggested.
Sheridan uncovered his mic. “FL41, your last question… Is there a problem we should know about? Over.”
The operator came back on. “Just standard procedure to ask, Mr. Sheridan. You’re not the first to comment on it.”
“Whose procedure, I wonder?” Ames thought aloud.
Sheridan shrugged. None of them knew much about the structure of civil order on the flotilla. Sheridan had assumed it wasn’t necessary, for the same reason that a group of boys didn’t formalize the rules of a game before they started. It was best to allow order to spawn organically and let honor and peer pressure hold everyone accountable.
The operator spoke. “Clearance to dock granted, Betelgeuse. Leave this channel open and clear so we can reach you at any time. We’ll be at perigee in…”
“Sixteen minutes, 11 seconds,” Sheridan said, reading the telemetry data off the longwave receiver.
“Correct. Please observe a 1-meter per second relative speed limit within 1 klick of the flotilla. Over.”
“Got that?” Sheridan asked. The pilot and navigator nodded. Sheridan glanced at Ames. “Am I missing anything?”
“Expectations for the boarding party,” Ames whispered.
Sheridan sucked in a breath. “Acknowledged, FL41. Will you have a boarding party ready when we dock? Over.”
“One step at a time, Mr. Sheridan. We’ll go over it when you’re inside the perimeter. Over.”
“Thank you, FL41. Betelgeuse out.” He flipped his headset to Ames. “Yes, thank you very much, you mindless apparatchik.”
“What do you make of that?” the navigator asked, clasping his hands behind his head. “They ask us for everything but our cholesterol levels, then clam up when we ask them something.”
“I don’t know, Reuben,” Sheridan said, rubbing the pad of his thumb over his stubbled chin. “It wasn’t the warm reception I was expecting, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe they’re peeved because we’re late,” the pilot said.
Ames cleared his throat. “Mr. Sheridan, if I may, I’d like to talk to you about the boarding party—”
Sheridan interrupted him. “One step at a time, Mr. Ames. Didn’t you hear her?” He addressed the pilot. “Are the systems checks complete, Ashwin?”
“Yes, Mr. Sheridan,” the pilot said. He had a high forehead and earnest features to go with a complete lack of pretense. “We don’t have a reading on the fuel levels, but that’s expected when you’re carrying liquid propellants under nominal pressure in zero gee. A sustained thrust before we fire the engines should settle the fluids in the tanks and give us a reading.”
Sheridan blinked. He disliked receiving more information than he asked for. “Can we assume we have enough fuel, Ashwin?”
“Yes sir, guaranteed.”
“Good. Mr. Ames, move non-essential personnel down to the torus, please.”
“Including myself, Mr. Sheridan?” Ames asked.
Sheridan considered his subordinate. Had he been too harsh? Yes, he had been too harsh.
“No,” he said. “Join us in the cockpit for the burn, and we can have that talk you asked for.”
Ames jacked into the public address circuit. His voice boomed throughout the ship as he spoke into the mic.
“All hands, clear the flight deck. Cockpit crew only on the flight deck. Main engines set to fire in…” He clocked the telemetry data. “…14 minutes. Repair to quarters, secure loose items, and strap in. I repeat, secure loose items and strap in. Fourteen minutes until main engines fire.”
He put the headset down and flipped a switch on the console. Ultraviolet light flooded all compartments on the ship.
“Come on, Jeremiah. Come on, Connor.” Ames grabbed the younger boy by the arm.
“Dad, it’s my turn!” Jeremiah whined, fighting Ames’s grip and reaching for the hologram.
“Later, son,” Ames said firmly. “You’ll have time to play games after we dock.”
They moved aft toward the torus ladder, using low, round rungs placed in the bulkhead to maneuver their bodies in zero gee. Jeremiah yanked his arm away from his father and floated headfirst through an open hatch set in a revolving circular track. Halfway down the shaft the boy tucked in his legs, grabbed the ladder, and somersaulted using his own momentum, a trick the other children had shown him.
Ames started down the ladder feet first, feeling more of his weight with each step. He landed on both feet in the bottom of the torus shaft, which uncoincidentally due to the torus’s revolution had a centripetal force equivalent to the Moon’s gravity. It would be brought to a stop soon, as the Betelgeuse needed a stable center of mass before firing its main engines.
Ames’s head swam, his inner ear slow to react to the altered state of gravity. He held onto the ladder for a moment, waiting for the sensation to pass, then followed his son through the clockwise hatch.
The torus included a lounge, parlor, kitchen mess, maintenance modules, and separate suites for the crew, their families, and Sheridan’s large family. All told they had more children than they had crew. It was unlike any combination of personnel in Ames’s experience. For him, it added to the pressure on him to succeed. These kids, and their parents, were going to be the first people to live off-world, to make a way for future generations to follow.
Ames squinted under the caution lights, which lent everyone’s green flight suits a neon outline. The crew and their spouses were securing the quarters for the orbital burn. Some helped the smaller children strap in. A family that had been eating at the mess table stowed their plates and utensils in the washbasin.
He stooped low to speak in his Jeremiah’s ear. “Don’t cause any trouble.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Jeremiah skipped across the concave floor to join the other young children. Ames watched him strap in next to his big sister, then surveyed the rest of the scene. Satisfied things were in order, he climbed back up the ladder.
He joined the pilot, navigator, and Sheridan as the only people left on the flight deck. Behind the main console and the flight instrument panel were four chairs arranged like the four corners of a square. The pilot and navigator occupied the two chairs in front. Ames buckled into the chair next to Sheridan.
“They’re ready,” he said.
“Excellent,” said the navigator, Reuben. He was thin and white-haired, and although he was the ship’s oldest passenger, he had a youthful personality that meshed well with Ashwin’s, his son-in-law. They had been flying commercially together for many years.
“Stop and lock the torus,” Ashwin said.
Reuben got on the PA circuit. “Torus stop in 10 seconds. All hands brace.”
“On my mark, 4 minutes, 30 seconds till main engine burn,” Ashwin said. “Two, one—mark. Delta minus 2,306 meters per second. Turbopump 2 in engine 2 green on electric and hydraulic.”
Reuben smirked. “Our problem child may have found religion.”
“One-hundred-twenty percent Earth gravity of acceleration sound good to you?” Ashwin asked.
“One point two gee, sounds good to me,” Reuben said in a lilting voice. His eyes flitted up in their sockets as he made the calculations in his head. “What’s that, Ash, 200 seconds to match speed with the flotilla?”
“One-ninety-six, but what’s 4 seconds between friends?”
“Could be a crashed ship and a whole lot of dead people,” Ames cracked.
Reuben laughed. “Three minutes, 30 seconds.”
Behind them, the heavy gears of the torus mating assembly clanged solidly against each other until the hatch was still.
“Torus stopped and locked, Ashwin.”
“Very well.”
As they continued to chatter, Sheridan stared forward, not listening but deep in thought, tapping his feet on the floor.
“What were you saying, Ames?”
Ames twisted in his seat to face Sheridan. “My guess is at some point they’ll isolate the crew to a single part of the ship while they inspect it. I want to stay with them when they do.”
Sheridan smirked. “Why? Don’t you trust them?”
“No less than I trust anyone else on a contract. We’re in a fluid operational environment now. Circumstances can change, and people’s objectives with them.” He pointed at the radio receiver. “The operator’s questions prove it. Don’t take for granted that our interests and theirs align perfectly. They’ll surely make the same assumption about us.”
“I’ve known the leaders on this expedition for most of my career, Mr. Ames. We’ve been working together for years to make this happen. We have the same goal. All of us.”
Ames nodded slowly. “I’m asking you to prepare for the possibility that may not be the case all of the time.”
Sheridan pinched the bridge of his nose, a quirk that was triggered when something upset or frustrated him. On any given day that could be a number of things, so Ames didn’t worry himself about it.
“I hired you for your expertise in these matters, for my strengths lie elsewhere,” Sheridan acquiesced, his voice measured. “Request granted.”
“Thank you.”
“Two minutes,” Reuben announced. But for the constant hum of the electronics, the flight deck was quiet. There was nothing to do for the moment but wait.
“When we’re free of our connections to Earth, hopefully we’ll dispose of that part of our nature,” Sheridan said pensively.
“Which part?” Ames asked.
“The fighting, Mr. Ames. The conflict. We’ve watched it play out our entire lives. Nations, tribes, religions, ethnic groups.” He jabbed a finger emphatically into his armrest. “History has been the same wars repeated by different players since the beginning of time. To break with the past, to evolve as a species into something better… that would be a welcome change.”
It was the kind of sentiment Ames expected to hear from someone who had been raised in the mansions and private schools of the global bourgeoisie.
“You’re talking about the survival instinct, Mr. Sheridan. I don’t see how we evolve past that without dying out.”
“That’s because you lack vision.” Sheridan smiled ruefully and looked away. “But I don’t blame you for that.”
Ames bit his tongue. Sheridan had spent his whole life chasing after the dreams of his youth, failing and succeeding—mostly succeeding—achieving what so many couldn’t do, things that were supposed to be impossible. Despite being similar in age, in that moment he felt much younger than his boss. Or was it older? Sheridan retained much of the youthful idealism that Ames had lost in 24 years in the Service.
“Look alive. Thirty seconds until main engine burn,” Ashwin said over the PA circuit. “Directional thrusters, Reuben. Forward 20 percent.”
A force like an invisible hand pushed them gently into their seats. Ashwin focused on the instruments in front of him.
“Fifteen seconds, Ash,” Reuben said, eying the countdown clock.
“Oxidizer level nominal. Same on fuel,” Ashwin relayed. “Open coaxial valves.”
Reuben waited a beat. “Lines pressurized.”
Ashwin leaned forward and placed his hands over two large control knobs. “Four, three, two…”
They felt every bit of their weight—and then some—as Ashwin throttled the turbopumps from stationary to thousands of revolutions per minute. The hydrazine mixed with oxidizer in each engine’s combustion chamber, igniting instantly. A dull roar like a distant waterfall vibrated the hull. The distal weight of the torus caused the lateral and aft support struts to groan. The spacecraft, 42 meters from stem to stern, actually shrank a few centimeters, as its 450-tonne bulk settled on top of the colossal force propelling it mercilessly forward.
Ashwin spoke over the din of the engines. “Directional thruster cutoff.”
“Done,” Reuben said.
A dial indicating their relative velocity fell rapidly from 2,300 meters per second. The ship’s guidance computer had control now.
“Plus 15 seconds. Board’s green,” Ashwin said, reviewing the flight instruments. “Little heat in the combustion chamber on engine 1. Coolant flow is steady.”
A sharp clank on the bulkhead caused their heads to snap upward. “What was that?” Reuben croaked.
A small, dark object like a hockey puck caromed past them, pulled down the ship’s long axis by the gravity of the burn.
“It’s the hologram the boys were playing with,” Ames said.
Sheridan cleared his throat, his face reddening. Ashwin and Reuben chuckled and faced forward to monitor the burn.
In the interval, a voice came through the receiver, different than the one before: male, Oriental, and idiosyncratic. “Ahoy, Betelgeuse! That’s a beautiful ship you have there, I must say. The person who built her should be commended. Over.”
Sheridan recognized the voice. He reached across his body and took a headset off the main console.
“Credit in this case goes to the man who commissioned her. The ship builder was out of his depth.”
The man cackled. “I suppose my aversion to turning down a challenge isn’t the virtue I thought it was.”
Sheridan laughed. “How are you, Zeke? Are you having much fun out here without me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it! It has been hard, though, on account of you all being the last ones to arrive at this—what do you call it?—shindig.”
“Zeke, it’s not a ‘shindig’ until I show up.”
“Okay, Wayne.” There was a smattering of background noise, indistinct voices talking over each other.
“They’re kicking me off the air. I’m glad you’re here finally. Find me when you come aboard. There’s a lot to talk about.”
“I will.” Sheridan looked askance at Ames with a smug air, as if the friendly call proved the excess of Ames’ vigilance.
“One-hundred-fifty seconds,” Ashwin called out. “Engine 1’s looking better. Yellow condition on turbopump 2, engine 2. Cavitation’s back.”
Reuben looked over the gauges. “It’s within tolerance.”
“Just,” Ashwin said, shaking his head.
“Calm down. We’ll get it looked at after we dock.” Reuben’s head snapped forward. “Hey, get ready! Engine stop in 6 seconds! Three, two, one—”
“Oxidizer stop, fuel stop, nitrogen purge,” Ashwin narrated as his hands moved nimbly over the flight controls. He counted out two beats, allowing the nitrogen gas to flush out the remains of the volatile propellants and cool the engine. “Idling turbopumps, nitrogen stop.”
The rattling of the hull dissipated, restoring the ship’s regular static hum to dominance. They buoyed in their restraints as their velocity plateaued.
“New delta plus 4.5 meters per second,” Ashwin reported.
“Tack us toward the flotilla,” Sheridan said. “Slowly.”
Ames and Sheridan unbuckled their restraints, while Ashwin and Reuben remained seated. Ames turned off the caution lights, which brought the pale yellow fluorescents up to full brightness. The men rubbed their eyes.
“FL41 to Betelgeuse, do you read?” It was the same operator as before, all business.
“Go ahead,” Sheridan said.
“Got your docking procedures, Betelgeuse. Come round to 5.1 degrees pitch, 218.8 degrees yaw. Use manual thrust, no more than a meter per second. Dock at androgynous lock two—that’s alpha 2—next to the homing beacon, center-left of the station. Over.”
“I need a reference plane,” Reuben said, punching the numbers in the guidance computer.
“What reference plane are you using, FL41?” Sheridan asked.
There was a delay in her response. “Sorry, Betelgeuse. I haven’t guided a ship into port in so long that I had to ask a colleague. Use the plane of the ecliptic for zero degrees roll and pitch. Over.”
Reuben scrunched his aged face, then entered a few more numbers in the guidance computer and leaned back in his chair. The directional thrusters fired and the stars in the viewing window shifted. The flotilla now filled the window. Sidelit by the Sun, it was a mass of diverse structures grafted onto an asymmetrical, three-dimensional grid. It looked misshapen, off-kilter; the 14 other ships were docked on the edges, leaving the center mostly hollow.
“We see it,” Sheridan said to the operator, looking through the camera’s viewfinder again.
He passed the camera to Ashwin, who passed it to Ames after he’d had his fill. At 75x magnification, the details were too much to take in. Red and white navigation lights glittered across the huge structure. An antenna array stuck out near the north edge. Closer to the middle reared a huge shape like a piston. A nodule stood on the end of the piston, with “A2” stenciled on the side.
“After hard dock, a cleaning crew will board you to sanitize the ship,” the operator said. “When they’re done, a medical team will administer vaccinations. Over.”
Ames released the camera, letting it drift in zero gee, and heaved a sigh.
“That won’t be necessary,” Sheridan said, giving Ames an apprehensive look. “All our shots are up to date.”
“It’s for your own health, as well as the health of the people on the flotilla,” she persisted. “In such tight quarters, it wouldn’t take long for a bug to get around and infect everyone.”
No kidding, Ames thought. That wasn’t in dispute. What was in dispute was the Betelgeuse’s autonomy, which their mission partners clearly had a more relaxed attitude about.
To avoid raising a ruckus, Sheridan yielded. “Okay. Also I’d like to put in a service request for someone to look at our number two engine.”
“I’ll add your request to the queue, but it’ll take awhile.”
“Nothing I can do about that, is there? Anything else?”
“That’s all. We’ll see you soon.”
“Betelgeuse out.” Sheridan removed the headset and plucked his camera out of the air. “You’re not the trusting type, are you, Mr. Ames?”
“Trust is the most valuable currency,” Ames said. He rolled his heavy shoulders, willing the tension to leave his body.
“Take it easy,” Sheridan said, turning his gaze to the viewing window. “We’re one team now. And these people are going to be the last friends you make.”
Ames had expected the lines among the crews to blur on this expedition, especially once they settled on the Moon. No single crew could specialize in everything. They would have to meld into one.
Until that time, there needed to be some degree of separation and accountability. It frustrated him that Sheridan assumed they had already reached that point.
“How long before we dock?” Sheridan asked.
“Just a few minutes,” Ashwin said, peering down past his feet through a small window. On the other side of the window was an angled mirror that gave an unobstructed view through the center of the docking mech in the nose.
“Range 500 meters,” Reuben said. “Watch your speed, Ash. She told us to keep it under a meter per second.”
Ames scoffed. “What’s she gonna do, ticket us?”
Ashwin flicked his wrist, giving the directional thrusters a spurt, to slow their approach.
“Activating Soft Capture System,” Reuben announced. He flexed his fingers around a joystick on the dashboard, twisting it left, then right. “Full range of motion. You cast the bait, Ash, and I’ll reel her in.”
***
Sheridan watched the flotilla slowly, ever so slowly, come closer, its knobs, spires, and spiny modules creeping toward the Betelgeuse like the poison-barbed tendrils of a Portuguese man o’ war—and they were its prey. Sheridan had been stung once by a man o’ war while on his father’s yacht in the Bay of Biscay. The raised lines they left on your skin lasted longer than the burns they inflicted. “That’s so you won’t forget, so you won’t repeat the same mistake,” his dad had said.
“I’ll clear the forward airlock,” Sheridan said.
A portal in the floor behind them led into a long, narrow passageway called the vestibule. At the end of the vestibule was the forward air lock, which joined to the docking mech in the ship’s nose. Another, shorter vestibule and airlock were behind the torus mating assembly; that airlock opened into the airless cargo bay.
In the forward airlock, Sheridan re-stowed the pressure suits and rebreather rigs that had come free during the burn and hermetically sealed the inner hatch. It took less than a minute to evacuate the 600-millibar atmosphere out of the chamber, which was standard throughout the ship. It was equivalent to living at 4,200 meters altitude on Earth, roughly the height of the Tibetan Plateau. What the air lacked in density it made up for in oxygen richness. The ratio of nitrogen to oxygen was 2:1 instead of Earth’s normal 4:1.
The tip of docking port, barely a meter across, came into focus. Sheridan chewed his lower lip. He should have been happy to make it this far, but the endgame of the expedition was still a long way off. The Moon colony was the subject of stories that captured his imagination as a boy. Soon, it would become reality. He knew he needed rest, but there were a thousand details that needed sorting, starting with the deconstruction of the flotilla itself. All of its parts were designed for reuse in some form or fashion as part of the colony.
“One hundred meters,” Reuben called out.
Sheridan returned to the flight deck. “When we soft dock, I want you two to go to your quarters and stay there until it’s time to come out.”
“Yes sir,” Reuben said.
Ashwin nodded. He hadn’t blinked since slowing the ship’s advance to a half-meter per second. He stared down through the small window between his feet, lining up the docking mech with the center of the docking port.
“Forty meters,” Reuben said. “You’re drifting up, Ash. Adjust your pitch point-four degrees down.”
“Okay.”
Parts of the flotilla moved past the viewing window, sporadic windows giving off circles of striking light. The nearest spacecraft loomed off the starboard side, shorter and stouter than the Betelgeuse, which wasn’t surprising, considering the sleek aesthetic Sheridan was aiming for.
Sheridan’s eyes were glued to the window. The docking port was so close now that it was obscured by the ship’s tapered nose. “Fifteen meters, Ash. Looking good.”
Ashwin nudged the joystick, giving the thrusters a quarter-second burst to slow the ship down even more. The sight post bisected the lock perfectly.
“Discharging static buildup,” Reuben said.
A bolt of electricity arced between metal rods on the flotilla and Betelgeuse. The lights on the ship dimmed for an instant, then came back up to full brightness.
Sheridan reminded himself to breathe, and filled his lungs with air.
“Four meters, 3 meters, 2…”
The shrill screech of metal on metal came from the nose of the ship. Ashwin gave the thrusters a final spurt. The scraping sound ended anti-climactically with a weak thud. Reuben pulled a lever next to the joystick to latch the SCS legs into place.
“Soft capture,” Reuben said.
They waited a moment, listening for any sound that could be the telltale sign of a failure. A small, green light on the control panel lit up.
“We have a seal,” Reuben declared.
Ashwin exhaled and wetted his dried-out eyes. “Smooth like butter.”
Reuben clapped him on the shoulder. “Rich people eat butter, Ash. For us it’s margarine.”
“For you two, I’ll open my stores,” Sheridan said jovially.
Ashwin and Reuben unbuckled their restraints and went down the ladder, leaving Ames and Sheridan in the cockpit. It was quiet once again.
“I’ll do the talking,” Sheridan said.
He led the way into the vestibule and entered the command to pressurize the airlock. The compressor motor spun up and air rushed in, silently at first, then with a faint whir.
On the far side of the airlock, the sliding doors in the docking mech retracted. The cleaning crew, dressed in full-body nylon suits, entered laboriously through the narrow portal, three, four, five of them. They carried what looked like a full laundry bag and a bottle of chemical cleaning fluid. One of them waved through the porthole-hole style window in the inner door.
Sheridan returned the gesture. He smoothed the front of his green polyester flight suit and checked Ames’s feet to see where he stood, then positioned himself half a step in front.
The inner door budged open, and a short hiss of air signaled the equalization of pressure between the spacecrafts. The cleaning crew emerged from the airlock and gathered in the end of the vestibule.
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sheridan,” the one in front said. The team leader. He had a broad Australian accent, discernible through his breathing filter.
Sheridan nodded. It occurred to him he could parlay his reputation to speed things along. He peered in the man’s clear faceplate. “Have we met before?”
“No sir, I think I would remember.”
“What’s your name?”
“Shaun.”
Sheridan smiled congenially. “Shaun, our first contact.” He shook the team leader’s hand, his fingers unable to circumscribe Shaun’s thick gloves.
“Welcome to the flotilla, sir.”
“Thank you.” Sheridan clapped his hands and rubbed them together vigorously, an important man eager to get to work. “I’m sure you’d like to get started. With your blessing, I’ll take my leave now so I can get out of your way.”
The cleaning crew started to part for him, but Shaun raised a hand.
“Hold on. Sorry, Mr. Sheridan, but you have to be vaccinated before you go onboard, and that can’t happen until we sanitize the flight deck.”
“Ah,” Sheridan said. “That won’t take long, will it? We’re the last ones here and there’s a great many things to do.”
“Of course we’ll work as quickly as we can, Mr. Sheridan. As you know, swabbing a ship this size can take up to 4 hours.”
“Of course,” Sheridan said, his smile fading into a crooked smirk. He was already thinking of what he could busy himself with while he waited with the rest of the crew. As usual, sleep was the furthest thing from his mind.
He nodded in Ames’s direction. “Colonel Ames here would like to be present while you’re onboard, if you have no objection.”
Shaun registered at Ames’s bulky figure. He faltered, and he chose his words carefully. “No objection, Mr. Sheridan. May I ask why?”
“Security protocol,” Ames said, coming forward so he stood shoulder to shoulder with Sheridan. Together they filled the vestibule.
“Not that I’m accusing you, but did you think we’d willingly let you have your run of the ship while we backed ourselves into a corner?”
“All the others did. We’re not adversaries, Colonel Ames.”
“It would give me peace of mind,” Ames said.
Shaun dithered, as if weighing their request against some other silent argument in his mind.
“He doesn’t bite, although he can be a bit gruff,” Sheridan said smoothly. “Colonel Ames is the ranking member of my staff. I take his recommendations seriously.”
Shaun looked at his team. “Anyone have a problem with that?” The others murmured in the negative. “Right, then,” he said, turning back to face him and Ames.
“I’ve moved the rest of my staff and family to their quarters.”
“Good. We’ll do the quarters last.” Shaun glimpsed at Ames expectantly.
Sheridan got the hint. “Right. I’ll leave you to it, then.” He met Ames’s assertive gaze before returning to the flight deck and propelling himself down—or along, in zero gee—the torus ladder.
He arrived in the lounge. “It could take 4 hours to sanitize the ship, so get comfortable,” he said.
They already were. The younger children giggled and tumbled weightlessly through the air. Ninety degrees up the torus, in the parlor, four men played cards, dealing and folding creatively. And the wives’ and mothers’ overlapping conversations blanketed everything with a high-pitched buzz.
“Anyone sick, nauseous?” he asked. A muted chorus of nos answered him. He slid into a bench between his second and third wives, squeezing his knees under a low, narrow table to stay put. He muttered to himself about the time they were losing with this sanitization routine. He picked at a loose thread in the upholstery.
“Something bothering you?” wife number three asked. She was the prettiest but by far the least perceptive of his wives.
“No. Nothing.” He took her hand in his and squeezed.
Connor rushed over to where they sat. “Dad, did you bring my tutor?”
“You’re what?”
“The hologram,” the boy’s mother, wife number two, translated for him.
“Oh. No, Connor. Sorry.”
“Can I go get it?”
“There are people working up there. You’ll have to wait until they’re finished.”
Connor pouted and stamped his foot clumsily. He lifted off the floor and bumped his head on the ceiling.
Sheridan glanced around the lounge, discomfited by his son’s immaturity. He placed both hands on his shoulders to calm him. “Why don’t you play with the other children, Connor?”
“They’re boring!”
Sheridan groaned and pinched his nose. Next to him, wife number 2 chuckled. “Just like his father,” she said.
He cast a threatening eye at her. “How do you know what I was like when I was 11?”
“Because you’re like that now, and you haven’t changed since I’ve gotten to know you,” she said, laughing behind her hand.
“Mmm,” Sheridan intoned. “Would you care to distract your child, mother?”
To his relief, Connor withdrew to where the other children were gathered, a new idea to pass the time rooting in his young mind.
“Hey, guess what?” he announced grandly.
“What?” they replied.
“I bet Jeremiah can’t hold his breath longer than Garreth.”
“Yes I can,” Jeremiah said, rising instantly to defend his honor.
“So what if he can’t, Connor?” one of the older girls said.
“But I can,” Jeremiah insisted, louder than before.
“In space whoever can hold his breath the longest lives,” Connor observed sagely.
“I can hold my breath for 2 minutes,” Jeremiah boasted, although he had never timed himself.
“I can hold my breath for 3 minutes,” Connor bluffed. The other children gaped in wonder.
“That’s a lie, Connor. You can’t hold your breath 3 minutes. No one can,” the same girl said.
Connor shouted. “Yes, I can! I do it all the time.”
“Let’s go,” Garreth said to Jeremiah. “I can hold my breath longer than you.”
“We’ll see about that!” They set up facing each other and began taking in deep breaths to oxygenate their lungs.
Across the lounge, Sheridan watched his son manipulate the other children for his own amusement, and smirked. Just like his father.
***
“That was tricky, Mr. Sheridan calling you colonel,” Shaun said.
He had removed his mask, as had the rest of the sanitation team, after a scan of the ship’s environment revealed no threatening airborne pathogens. They were very young, teenagers probably, legal adults who had yet to learn enough skills to merit a less menial assignment—more valuable to a Moon colony for their immediate interest in procreation than for their productivity. Learning on the job, Ames appreciated that. You had to start somewhere.
Shaun was a few years older, however. He had a rough, handsome face and bushy brown hair. An orange Sun in splendor above a banner flying “Apollos” in Gothic script was inked on the side of his neck.
“I suppose it’s more fearsome than my name alone,” Ames said.
They floated in the cockpit, looking aft, watching the cleaning crew scrubbing every square inch of the flight deck with rags that gave off pungent fumes. Ames had cranked the air recyclers to full blast to keep the breathing mixture fresh.
“How long have you been out, sir?” Shaun asked.
“Five years. Two of them with Sheridan. You?”
“Just got out in January.”
One and done, Ames thought sadly. Volunteer armed forces were full of them.
“Any overseas deployments?” he asked.
“I deployed twice to low Earth orbit as an E-4.”
“Really? What was your job?”
“Special vehicle maintenance.”
Ames raised his eyebrows. If Shaun had been assigned to low Earth orbit twice as an E-4, he must have graded at least in the 95th percentile among his peers. That kind of talent usually was fast-tracked to senior NCO or officer candidate school; that had been the case with every flight chief who had served under his command.
One of the cleaning crew brought Shaun the hologram device. Shaun turned it over in his hand, cursorily examining it, then passed it to Ames, who dropped it in a mesh bag above the dashboard. There were over a hundred such stow points on the flight deck.
“Why’d you leave the service?” Ames asked. “And what are you doing here if you didn’t like it?”
“Oh, I enjoyed the work well enough, but the regimen wasn’t fit for me. I went in more for my dad’s benefit than mine.”
Ames could relate. He’d gone into the Service because it’s what his father and brothers had done, and what his father’s father and brothers had done, and so on. Their reasons were mostly patriotic, but for him, it had turned into a career that felt less fulfilling than it should have, in his opinion.
“You picked the wrong field if you want to avoid a military-style regimen,” Ames said. “So are you where you want to be now?”
Shaun shrugged. “The other crews are a lot more laid back than you realize. Even the ones with vets.” He jerked his thumb toward the airlock. “It won’t be so easy pulling rank out there, Colonel. We have two retired admirals.”
Ames snickered, letting his guard down. “I didn’t take orders from navy brass before, and I don’t plan to now.”
***
After the cleaning crew swabbed the flight deck and all the crawlspaces free of bugs, a doctor and two nurses came aboard and set up a vaccination queue in the aft section of the flight deck. One of the nurses, a delightful, pugnacious old woman named Serena, with big, round hips and puffy white hair, lamented that they didn’t make spacefaring vessels for women her size.
“Roll your sleeve up, my dear, so I can stick you,” she said, presenting a long, thin needle.
She was French, but her accent was a French-English hybrid that was common among Frenchmen educated in the old Commonwealth. Ames rolled his left sleeve up to his shoulder.
“I hope this doesn’t hurt,” she said, as if he had never had a shot before.
“Doesn’t it always hurt?” he said. She must have been able to tell that the needle made him squeamish.
She dabbed alcohol on his upper arm. “Oh, sure. But I think you won’t want to see much of me after I stick you with this, and I don’t know if my fat arse can fit through the docking mechanism a second time.”
Ames’s jaw went slack with astonishment—when he felt the needle bite into his flesh. He flinched in surprise and looked down at his arm. Serena had already pulled the syringe out.
“You’ve been doing this a long time, haven’t you?” he said, looking at the tiny mark the needle left on his skin.
She smoothed a small bandage over the mark. “About as long as you’ve walked the Earth, Mr. Ames.”
“Those years are fewer than you think,” he said. “I’ve spent a quarter of my career and one-eighth of my life in LEO.” He kept his sleeve rolled up for the next nurse, who prepped him for a second shot. “How long have you been on the flotilla, Serena?”
“Since the beginning. Almost 5 months.”
“Then you must know the reason for these vaccines.”
A little bit of light drained from her lively brown eyes. “Aye. The first epidemic affected—oh, I would say seventy people. Cellulitis, of all things.” She chuckled and shook her head. “That was 3 months ago. The second one was the common flu, and we only had to quarantine fifty people or so that time. One little boy developed pneumonia and we lost him.”
Ames pursed his lips at the sobering news. It depressed him to hear about the death of any child. “I’m sorry. How old was he?”
“Six years old. Do you have children, Mr. Ames?”
He nodded. “I have two.”
“How old are they?”
“Twelve and nine.”
“Ah! My two oldest grandchildren are 12 and 9. You’re brave to bring them along.”
Ames held his breath as the second nurse stabbed his arm with the second vaccine. “Am I? Sometimes I think the brave thing would have been to leave them and the wife at home.”
“And why’s that?”
Ames shrugged, asking himself why he was opening up to this woman within 5 minutes of meeting her. He had not even shared that nugget of doubt with his wife.
The second nurse passed Ames to the doctor for his third and final vaccine. The doctor had him roll up the sleeve on his other arm.
“I was afraid to leave them again,” he answered. “I missed so much of their lives already, especially Miranda, the oldest. Birthdays, first steps, learning the alphabet…” His voice trailed off, lost in the sweet memories made bittersweet by not experiencing them firsthand.
Serena smiled. “And now that she’s 12, taking a shine to boys.”
Ames scoffed. “Never. Not my little girl.” He clenched for the third and final shot, and exhaled when the doctor’s needle punched through his skin.
“Growing up doesn’t stop, Mr. Ames,” Serena said. “Not even when we grow old.”
He rolled down both sleeves, now slightly wrinkled below the elbows. “That doesn’t mean I can’t control it. Shall I send up the rest of the crew and passengers?”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
Ames motioned for Shaun and his team to follow him down the ladder. At the bottom of the shaft, he opened the counterclockwise hatch, revealing the terminus of the hallway that started in the lounge on the other side.
“Start here,” he told Shaun. “The last suite before you hit the public spaces is Mr. Sheridan’s stateroom and private quarters. Try not to disturb anything.”
He stood aside to make way for Shaun’s team, who entered the first cabin in the families suite and started scrubbing. Ames floated around the torus and checked each cabin to make sure they were empty. He stopped between the parlor and the lounge, where chaos reigned.
“All right!” he shouted, getting their attention. “Everybody back out onto the flight deck. Form a line on your way out. Parents, stay with your kids. There are some nice people upstairs waiting to give you shots.”
All the children groaned and a few started crying.
His wife Phyllis grabbed his arm. She was towing a semi-hysterical Jeremiah behind her. The boy had inherited his father’s fear of needles. “What shots?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Apparently there have been a few epidemics on the flotilla since more people started showing up.” He lowered his voice. “One of the nurses said they lost a 6 year-old boy to pneumonia.”
Phyllis touched her forehead. “Wonderful. I’ll need your help to keep Jeremiah still.”
“Yeah.”
He moved past them to his daughter, Miranda. She was 3 years older than her brother, not quite a teenager, but acting more like one all the time. “We don’t have to worry about you, though, right? Tough as nails.”
She rolled her eyes. “Right.”
He kissed the top of her head and made a scene of extracting his head out of the mop of tangled, reddish hair. She resembled him also, in that respect.
“Reel in the net, honey. You might accidently catch a whale.”
“Ha, ha,” she said, and stuck her tongue at him. Phyllis gave her a hair tie and she arranged it in a pony tail.
It took an hour for the doctor and nurses to give everyone their shots, then they packed up their gear and left. Shaun and his crew were still at work in the quarters, so Ames held an impromptu meeting while everyone was gathered to go over the standards of common courtesy that he expected them to hold themselves to while on the flotilla.
He also explained the rules for bringing guests onboard: no more than one guest per crew; accompany guests at all times. He split the crew and their spouses into groups based on 6-hour cycles of rest, ship watch, and “shore leave.” Unless the work schedule called for it, he wanted no more than half the ship’s passengers to be on the flotilla at a given time. He didn’t bother assigning Sheridan to a group, as he knew he would do whatever he wanted anyway.
Some of the children who’d been in the front of the vaccination line were getting listless, so Ames wrapped it up. He was starting to feel a little punchy himself.
He felt a tugging on his elbow and looked down. “Yes, Connor?”
“Do you know where my tutor is?” the boy asked sweetly.
“Tutor?”
“The hologram,” Sheridan clarified.
“Oh.” Ames reached for the stow point above the dashboard. “Should be in… here…” The bag was empty.
“Where?” Connor asked.
Ames’s eyes roamed over the nearby stow points. “I’m certain I put it here.”
“You’re sure you put it in that bag?” Sheridan asked.
“I put it right here. The sanitation team found it and gave it to me, and I put it here. Someone must have taken it. Hey, Jeremiah?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Did you take Connor’s hologram?”
The boy shook his head emphatically. “I didn’t take it.”
“Can you help him find it, please? It must be around here somewhere.”
He noticed Shaun and his team come out of the torus shaft with the look of people glad to have just completed an unpleasant task. They moved forward along the flight deck, exchanging pleasantries with the crew. Ames stopped them before they reached the portal.
“Hold on a minute, Shaun.”
Shaun stopped and steadied himself on a rung. “Something wrong, Colonel?”
Ames spoke loud enough to cause the crew nearby to stare. “One of the boys is missing something: a small, black hologram device. You didn’t happen to see where it went, did you?”
It took Shaun a moment to realize he was being accused of something. “No, Colonel. I wouldn’t.”
“What about your team?” Ames asked.
Shaun smiled disarmingly. “If they did, they’d have more to fear from me than you.”
His smile withered under Ames’s stolid expression. He looked at the teenagers who comprised his team, Sun tattoo deforming on his twisting neck. “You blokes take anything that didn’t belong to you?”
“No,” they said. They subtly tightened their formation, as if defending against an attack from all sides.
Shaun’s head swung around, his face hardened. “Now what, Colonel?” The warmth was gone from his voice, which fell dead in the heavy silence that now filled the flight deck.
“Monty,” Phyllis whispered in Ames’s ear, and for a moment he saw himself as she and the crew must see him. He felt a sudden revulsion as the scandal he was creating burst into clarity on his conscience. He had to defuse the situation as quickly as possible.
He spread his hands, palms up. “Sorry, Shaun. It’s been a long day. Don’t worry about it. It’s my mistake. Thanks for all that you’ve done.”
Shaun’s eyes flickered, first at Ames, then at Sheridan. Then he relaxed. “No sweat, Colonel. See you around.”
He continued toward the vestibule, guardedly, and the crew parted to let him and his team through.
As soon as they were gone, a half-dozen parents took to scolding their children, promising swift punishment if they found out it was him or her who had taken the hologram device. Sheridan whirled to face Ames.
“I know, I know,” Ames said, preempting criticism. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sheridan. I guess I’m more tired than I’ve been letting on. I think I’ll head below and take a nap.”
“Good idea, Mr. Ames,” Sheridan said, nodding archly. “We could all use some rest, I think.”
“Except for those assigned ship watch,” Ashwin said. He floated between him and Sheridan and proceeded to the cockpit.
Connor clung to Sheridan. “Dad, what about my tutor?”
“Ask your friends to help look for it,” Sheridan said, stalking off. “I can’t be bothered right now.”
Ames waited for the crew to disperse, wishing he could become invisible. Phyllis glared at him with those soft, discerning blue eyes that let him know he had made a mistake yet didn’t make him feel terrible about it. Thank you, he mouthed.
You’re welcome, she mouthed back.
He looked again at the stow point above the dashboard. He pressed the bag flat to the bulkhead with his palm, confirming it was indeed empty.
Chapter 2. Flotilla
Sleeping in zero gee always produced in Ames the strangest dreams.
He stood in a crater on the Moon, without a pressure suit, and he wasn’t alone. Something on the barren desert—some dark, amorphous force—had captured his wife and kids. He himself was a child, though, about the age of his son. The dark thing wanted water, or it would drain the blood from his family’s bodies. All he had to do was provide a cup of water, and it would set them free. Could he manage a simple cup of water? Such a little thing, a small container made of glass or plastic, filled with two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. But water turned to steam in a vacuum, and there were no pressurized containers available in the dream.
Ames found himself scrambling hopelessly in the negligible gravity, unable to procure the water and unable to kill the dark thing. The realization that he was not only a failed astronaut, but also a failed husband and father, hit him emotionally like a ton of bricks. The dark thing’s mouth started to close over Phyllis’s neck. Ames saw his childlike visage reflected in its gleaming teeth.
Say goodbye, Monty-boy. You’ll never see your family again.
He startled awake, arms reaching straight out from his body. In the semi-darkness he noticed the kids’ beds were empty, restraints twisting above the narrow mattresses.
“Where are they?” he said.
“They’re playing,” Phyllis whispered soothingly. He became aware of her hand on his chest.
He sighed and let his head fall back. His undershirt clung to his sweaty back and his throat was dry.
Monty-boy, he thought with a shiver. He hadn’t been called that since grade school.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I was awake anyway.”
He swallowed some spit and cleared his throat. “Remind me later to revolve the torus. I can’t get any rest like this.”
She studied him. “You kept saying something about water.”
“Please don’t remind me.”
Water. Air. Food. Shelter. All of life’s essentials were commodities where they were headed. The logistics of the expedition had preoccupied Ames since Sheridan hired him on; not even his dreams were safe. The only thing they had in abundance was time, yet even that felt like a burden. They knew, technically, how to survive on the Moon, but no one was really sure how they were going to live.
“You know, when I was deployed overseas, there were so many times I wanted you and the kids with me,” he said. “And now that you’re here, I almost wish you weren’t.”
“We’re here because this is the best future for us,” she said.
When Sheridan had offered Ames the job, he and Phyllis had talked it over, and over, and over again before he accepted. He knew this was the best decision for his family, but he didn’t feel it, not like she did.
“You believe that?” he asked, wanting to be convinced.
“I do. And it’s because of the amazing things I’ve seen you do, and the amazing things I’ve seen Mr. Sheridan do.”
He turned over, pulling against the bed restraints to face her. He slipped his thick arms around her waist and pulled her warm, soft body closer. The kids were gone. There was no reason they couldn’t…
“So why can’t you sleep?” he asked.
She hesitated. “Oh, just thinking.”
“Come on, don’t be coy. Thinking about what?”
The outline of a smile on her face showed. “Having a baby.”
He scoffed. “It’s a little late for us, isn’t it?” They were both on the wrong side of 40; he was closer to 50.
“Not technically.”
Ames blinked, processing her words and expression. He felt alternating waves of elation and dread.
“You’re pregnant?!” he cried out.
She nodded.
“Wha—? How?!”
She giggled. “Do I really need to explain?”
He shook his head, jogging his brain loose of the shock to retake control of his tongue. “I mean how do you know?”
“I’m 10 days late. I’m never this late.”
“Ten days? That’s before we left for Belize City.”
He was trying to remember their last days on Earth, to pinpoint where and when they became pregnant, as if in search of evidence that would disprove pregnancy. It was no use. The stress of uprooting his family from all they knew, as well as making the final preparations for the longest deployment of his life, immersed the last few months in a blurry fog.
“Maybe it’s menopause,” he suggested.
“It’s not menopause,” she said firmly. She cuddled up against his big frame. “Aren’t you happy?”
“Well, yeah. Terrified, too. Happy and terrified. I—I knew some of us would be having kids, perpetuating the race, you know. I just didn’t think it would be us us.”
“Me neither.”
Ames’s mind reeled as the fact of their new situation dominated his mind. This changed so much, but most of all it raised the stakes of their commitment to the expedition. “When do we tell Sheridan?” he asked.
“I don’t think he needs to know. Let’s make it our little secret for now.”
They held each other for a few minutes. They heard the laughter of the children playing in the lounge, their voices carrying around the torus.
“There’s something else,” she said.
“Don’t tell me. Twins?”
“God, I hope not. No, it’s Jeremiah. He told me after that little scene on the flight deck that he took Connor’s hologram toy.”
Ames groaned. “And you didn’t punish him?!”
“He thinks you’re going to kill him. That’s why he told me instead of you. All he knows of you lately is fear.”
“If he’s taken to stealing, maybe a healthy dose of fear is what he needs.”
“Monty, listen to me.” She held his head in her hands, forcing him to be still and look at her. “If you want this mission to succeed, you need the crew to trust you. You need me and the kids to trust you. Get it? That scene on the flight deck earlier can’t happen again. What I’ve seen from you lately isn’t the leader I know you can be. You need to be that man. You have to be. You can s-start by repairing your relationship with Jeremiah.” Her voice trembled at the end.
“I hear you,” he said, admonishing himself. “I’ll work on it.”
Phyllis was right, as usual. He needed the crew’s confidence, lest they lose their belief in the mission and start to passively undermine it. He knew this from experience, but he’d lost the application of it somewhere along the way. Life was simpler in the Service, when he kept the work and family spheres of his life separate—and, frankly, when Phyllis did most of the heavy lifting with the kids.
The kids were older now, and he knew he could do so much better with Jeremiah than the job he was doing—or not doing—now. On top of that, he’d never felt more distant from Miranda, his firstborn, who was at that awkward crossroads of childhood and adolescence. How time flew! He had fallen into a routine of nurturing Jeremiah and Miranda that seemed to work for them and didn’t demand a lot. Maybe nurturing wasn’t what they needed from him anymore, and he needed to try something else. Or maybe a different kind of nurturing was called for. Who knew?
Moments of self-doubt like this made him wish his mom was still alive to talk to. She handled him and his brothers with such strength and grace, which he had only starting to appreciate after she died.
“Jeremiah’s not going to get off easy,” he said.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, nuzzling his chest.
“What did you do with the hologram?”
“I gave it to Connor. He doesn’t know Jeremiah took it.”
“Okay.” Ames rubbed his eyes and started to loosen the bed restraints. “I guess I’ll talk to him now.”
“Talk to him later.” Phyllis pulled him back into bed and entwined her limbs with his. “Your wife needs you.”
***
Since Sheridan was in his 30s, he normally didn’t sleep more than 4 to 5 hours per night, or in the same room—let alone the same bed—as his wives. He was too distracted to sleep at all now. He felt tired in his body; he felt tired behind his eyes; his mind, though, would not be still. There was work to do, and it was not in his nature to entrust it to others.
He crossed the lounge on his way to the ladder. Four children played while Rosco and his wife, seated at the mess table and sipping electrolyte pouches, kept a watchful eye on them. The novelty of zero gee had not yet worn off for the children. They hopped around the bulkhead, slapping a fuzzy tennis ball back and forth.
Other than that—notwithstanding the ship’s omnipresent hum—it was quiet. Ashwin and his new wife were canoodling in the cockpit. Everyone else was either asleep or roaming around the flotilla, reuniting with old colleagues. The community of talent he and the mission partners pulled from was small. Most of their hires were separated by no more than three direct associations.
Through the docking mech was a large, rectangular vestibule, like the one on the Betelgeuse, but bigger. On the other side was a nondescript, circular passageway that ran perpendicular to the vestibule. Grease smeared the wall near the joints between the assembled sections. A dotted red stripe ran the length of the passageway, identifying the striped side as the floor, to encourage people to talk and work together like they would normally on Earth—or the Moon, perhaps. Sheridan couldn’t remember whose idea that was in the planning phase, just that the mission partners had agreed to it quickly.
He glimpsed his ship through a window and paused to admire it. The fuselage had the highest length-to-width ratio, 7:1, of all the ships on the expedition, and was one of only two with a torus. Less than 4 meters wide, it circumscribed a perfect circle around the fuselage. The aft support struts angled down from the torus to meet in a circular assembly behind the cargo bay, forming the edges of a hollow pyramid around the ship’s middle third. The torus shaft, extending from the flight deck, was frozen, like the minute hand of a broken watch.
Indeed it felt like time itself had stopped. Where is everyone? he wondered, looking left and right down the passageway. Should he just start walking—floating, rather—and hope he stumbled by luck to where he needed to be? Over the hum of air recyclers and electronic circuitry, he could feel human voices, but their direction eluded him.
It was another minute before someone finally came. “Good afternoon, Mr. Sheridan,” the woman said cheerfully, shooting through the passageway, her body straight like an arrow, facing the dotted red stripe.
“Good afternoon,” he replied.
The expression puzzled him. It was out of place in this highly elliptical orbit around Earth, where technically “day” was almost constant. He remembered another decision the mission partners had made in the planning phase, to use Greenwich Mean Time as a standard until they arrived at Grimaldi Crater on the Moon. He had fought that one, arguing for a timekeeping system that suited them, not one that originated on Earth.
“Say, where might I find Ezekiel Parham?”
She caught a rung and reversed direction, drifting back toward him. “Did you check aboard the Nebula?” she asked.
“I don’t know where that is. We’ve just arrived.”
“Follow me. If we don’t find him, I can take you to someone who does know where he is.”
“Thank you.”
He followed her through the maze-like structure. They encountered forks in the path every so often, first turning right, then staying straight. There were no recognizable reference points other than x, y, zed coordinates posted at every junction. They helped Sheridan to visualize where he was in the flotilla, but this information was worthless, since he knew where nothing was. If there was an emergency and he had to act swiftly, he would be at a loss.
“Are there maps to this place?” he said, half-joking.
She laughed. “There’d be no point. Every week something changes.”
They passed another fork. Sheridan slowed down to look left, right, up, down. There was no one. He felted increasingly unsettled. Where were the people? They were on an expedition to the Moon. The flotilla should have been crawling like a disturbed anthill.
“Is everybody asleep or what?” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked over her shoulder.
“I came aboard 5 minutes ago and you’re the only person I’ve seen.”
“There’s a common area in the center of the flotilla,” she said, seemingly unaware that anything was amiss. “It’s not much farther.”
Sheridan sighed. He would have to be content with not knowing the answers to his questions for awhile. They angled up and then right again into a broader corridor that was over 200 meters end to end. There were other people moving along the corridor, and a greater number of people gathered in a wider area up ahead.
They entered a wide, bowl-shaped room, featureless but for two squat tables and a series of light projections on the south wall. One projection showed live environmental statistics of the flotilla, while two others played Earth-based news broadcasts with no sound.
Sheridan’s face pinched in disdain at the jerky, street-level images of the latest conflict to break out in Europe. The images could have been from Budapest or Vienna or a dozen other cities. They were all the same to him because they all had problems stemming from the same symptom: people; people too beholden to their interests to see their common humanity. Not like the people here, he thought, looking around the large room with a swell of pride. The best of the best that mankind had produced had finally had enough.
“It’s Wayne Sheridan!” someone called out. Sheridan spotted a trio of men moving in his direction. They were waving over some others.
Sheridan was used to getting this kind of reception. He had lived in the public eye for decades, and he found that his biggest fans were young adults, mostly in their 20s and 30s, to whom he had always been sort of a rock star.
“Thank you, again, miss,” he said.
The woman looked at him questioningly. She saw her colleagues beginning to surround him, and she understood. She waved and went on her way.
A small, motley mob pressed in around Sheridan. They gave him a hero’s—no, a savior’s—welcome. They hugged him, kissed him, shook his hand; those who were stuck on the periphery settled for touching his clothing.
“About time you got here, Mr. Sheridan,” one man said. “You’ll set them straight!”
“Better late than never,” Sheridan replied, pumping the man’s fist twice.
A young woman tugged on his elbow. “We are going to the Moon, aren’t we, Mr. Sheridan?” she asked.
“You bet we are!” he shouted. She and some of the other women squealed with glee.
This was more than Sheridan expected. What’s gotten into them?
Merry shouts of “speech” rang out. He shook his head half-heartedly. He couldn’t turn them down, not when they viewed him as a patron saint of sorts. The expedition never would have come together without his leadership and promotion.
He raised his hands, palms facing down, to placate the throng. “I couldn’t help observe on our way in,” he began in a stentorian voice—they quieted down—“that I have not seen such a filthy, despicable, wretched collection of lost souls as I see before me now.”
Cheers and laughter went up. “Filthy! Despicable!” they echoed drunkenly.
He waited for their mirth to die down. “When I first laid eyes on the hovel you desperate lot now call home, I was tempted to turn around and go back to that sewer I climbed out of.”
More cheers and laughter. They were eating it up.
“Whoever’s responsible for bringing this sorry bunch together should be put up against a wall and shot!”
The man in front pointed his hand, which was in the shape of a gun, at Sheridan. Sheridan clutched his breast above his heart, miming a fatal wound. Their excitement was infectious. Due to the weight Sheridan voluntarily carried on his shoulders, he had not let himself feel the unencumbered joy that showed on these people’s faces.
He pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind. His audience was waiting.
“Seriously, folks, I’m glad to finally be here, to be with you all, to join you on our mutual journey to live better than we ever did on Earth.”
There were a few whoops, but mostly sobered applause.
“It feels like I’ve spent my whole life trying to get to this point in time, standing in the largest space station the world’s ever seen, made of pure desire, pure will, surrounded by the best and brightest that mankind can produce.”
He paused to let them soak in his praise. “The private aerospace industry has come a long way since I first dipped my toe in it, early in my career. When I created my company and devoted it to the purpose of putting a man on the Moon for the first time in the 21st century, I was the butt of mockery from people too bound up in conventional wisdom and fear to realize… that the wait was over!—that the technology that we thought was still a hundred years off had already arrived!”
“That’s right!” someone shouted. There was scattered applause. His impromptu speech had the attention of everyone in the commons, including those who came in by chance while he spoke.
“Even when I personally planted the flag of peace in the lunar mare,” Sheridan continued, miming the action of jabbing a flag pole into the dirt, “there were naysayers. ‘It means nothing if you don’t stay there,’ they said. ‘It doesn’t count if you rely on Earth for your resources.’ Two years ago, when we came together to form a team, to accomplish what one man could not—a group of people who decided, corporately, that the impossible can be done—still, the naysayers grumbled. Where are they now?”
He pointed symbolically at the bulkhead under his feet. “Stuck down there, filling the ether with doubt, keeping their fellow men stuck down there with them. And us? We’re up here, riding the wave of history.”
More clapping.
“I want to thank each and every one of you. By virtue of your being here, you have selflessly pledged your lives to the future of mankind. A future of our choosing, instead of a future dictated to us by our so-called mother planet. A future free of artificial divisions and poverty and constant conflict. A future of unlimited possibilities. To the mare of the Moon. Later, maybe, to the volcanic tunnels under Alba Mons of Mars.”
Their reaction was more muted than before. Some people looked at each other with bewildered expressions. Sheridan was able to pick out a few utterances from those closest to him.
“So the plan’s not changed, then?”
“You heard him. If anyone knows for sure, it’s him.”
Sheridan decided to wrap it up before he lost them completely. “I’m truly blessed to be here, surrounded by you all. Thank you for being part of something special. Our names will be written in the history books of our descendants…” He spied Zeke moving quickly across the commons toward him. “Let’s make history and be the best versions of ourselves. Let’s go to the Moon!”
He clapped his hands, cuing them to do the same. Most of them did not. In fact, many of them looked more perplexed than ever. Disconcerted by the lackluster reception, he almost pulled the man in front aside to ask what was wrong, but Zeke caught his eye first, slithering through the dissolving crowd toward him.
“Inspiring, as usual, Wayne,” he said, grinning.
“I’m glad someone thinks so,” Sheridan said. He reached forward to shake hands, but his colleague grabbed his forearm and pulled him into a hug. They embraced awkwardly. Zeke was not the hugging type.
“How are you, old friend?”
“Fine, Zeke. I wish I could say the same for my ship.”
The ship builder’s eyes intensified. He took the well-being of his creations personally. “The Betelgeuse? What’s wrong with her?”
“Engine trouble.”
Zeke wiped his hands together. “Take it up with the subcontractor, Wayne. I don’t build engines. I just install them.”
“Well, maybe you could take a look, anyway.”
“I will, if I can find the time.” Zeke gestured grandly. “You can imagine how busy it is around here!”
Not busy enough, Sheridan thought. “Do you have the time to show me around?” he asked.
“Of course! What would you like to see first?”
***
Ames had a few hours to kill before his watch started, so he told Miranda and Jeremiah to wrap up their handball game and meet him on the flight deck. They were going to go on the flotilla and explore.
The flight deck was dark, with the only light coming in through the window from the stars and the blue Earth, most of it in shade, some 30,000 kilometers away. The stars were solid pinpoints of white and off-white; they didn’t twinkle when viewed from space.
Ashwin was showing Brittany, Reuben’s only daughter, the instruments for the ship. They had recently wedded. Being married to a crewmember was Sheridan’s only condition on crew bringing adult non-crewmembers on the expedition. Brittany had a simple mind and depended on her father, who was a widower and had no relatives to care for her. Ashwin, a bachelor in middle age, had known Reuben for years and agreed to marry her, so she could come along. It was the most selfless act Ames had ever known anyone to do.
“Hey, Ash, Brittany,” he said, ambling into the cockpit. “Mind if I join you?”
Ashwin combed his fingers through Brittany’s short dark hair. The oils from his hand lent her pixie cut a dull sheen. He acknowledged Ames, but otherwise he didn’t move.
“We don’t mind, Mr. Ames.”
“You missed a partial eclipse,” Brittany said, in her high, scratchy voice that was grating only to those who didn’t know her.
Ames looked a question at Ashwin. “The Earth passed in front of the Sun,” he explained.
“Oh,” Ames said. “That’s okay. I’ll catch the next one. What’s our orbital period? Ten, eleven hours?”
Ashwin nodded.
“Ash said our incineration is too high right now for a total eclipse. Right, Ash?”
“Inclination, not incineration,” he corrected her. “Yes, that’s right. On this plane, we won’t see any total eclipses until August. We’ll be long gone by then.” He propped himself against the bulkhead and focused on Ames. “Are you feeling better, sir?”
Ames didn’t miss the subtext of the question. “Right as rain. I would kill for a hot bath, though.”
Ashwin smiled. “That’s something I’ll miss.”
“Rain or baths?” Ames asked.
“Both, I suppose, but I meant baths. I don’t expect I’ll bathe the way I used to back home ever again.”
“I like your confidence,” Ames said.
Brittany looked at Ashwin. “Is that because you don’t want to go back to Earth?” she asked.
“One part of me wants to go back, because Earth has always been my home,” Ashwin ruminated. “Another part of me doesn’t want to go back, because that would mean we failed.”
The only place we’re going if we fail is the hereafter, Ames thought fleetingly. “In my experience, success is more frightening than failure,” he said.
“How’s that?” Ashwin asked.
“Failure signals the point at which you can stop trying. There’s comfort and relief in that.”
He held one hand flat and level with his chest, and the other level with his eyes. “When you succeed, you feel the burden to maintain that level of effort. But you know in your bones you can’t maintain it forever.”
“What goes up must come down,” Ashwin said.
“Not out here,” Brittany said, looking out the window. Ashwin laughed.
“What else will you miss about Earth, besides bathing?” Ames asked.
Ashwin snickered. “How much time do you have?”
After a reminiscent pause, he smiled. “I’ll miss driving with the windows rolled down. What about you?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask. I’ve seen so much of Earth, from the ground and from space. It’s hard to separate the good from the bad.”
Ames racked his brain. “I’ll miss letting my kids outside to play.”
“I expected you to say you would miss your country,” Ashwin said.
Ames tittered. “I suppose I’ll miss it, but it was never my country. Nor was it my dad’s.”
Ashwin looked at him thoughtfully. “I’ll miss the beaches.”
“Campfires,” Ames said, “and hiking in the mountains.”
“The feeling of rain on your skin.”
“Non-cultured meat.”
“I’ll miss puppies,” Brittany said. “And kittens,” she added.
“Dad.” Ames spun around. Miranda was there with her brother. “We’re ready to go.”
“I’m coming,” Ames said. He winked at Ashwin. “See you later, Ash. Don’t think too much about home, okay?”
He joined Miranda and Jeremiah in the forward vestibule below the flight deck. “Why don’t you lead the way, Miranda?” he suggested.
She did, turning left once they reached a round passageway. Ames was tall enough to push against one side of the passageway to plant his feet on the other side. His kids, however, weren’t. Miranda solved this by stepping lightly around the circular bulkhead, using her forward motion to keep her soft-sole shoes on the wall. The resulting sight would have been amusing if Ames didn’t have to discipline his son; her skinny legs tracked the passageway’s circumference, while her head was stationary in the center.
Not wanting to be outdone by his sister, Jeremiah started to mimic her helix-like run, but Ames stopped him before he could pull away.
“Walk with me, son, I want to talk to you for a minute.”
Jeremiah was subdued and, for once, obedient. He expected this moment of reckoning would come and thought good behavior would earn him a lighter sentence.
Ames put a hand on the boy’s shoulder to help him stay on his feet.
“Are you making friends yet?” he opened casually.
“Yeah,” Jeremiah said.
“You seem to be on good terms with Jackie and Garreth.” They were the other boy and girl who Miranda and Jeremiah had been playing handball with.
Jeremiah was ambivalent. “They’re okay. They’re little kids, though. I miss my old friends.”
Ames felt a pang of fatherly regret. He remembered how high his friends ranked in his life before leaving for the Academy—and that was with two brothers.
They followed Miranda around a corner. “Garreth’s less than a year younger than you,” Ames pointed out.
“Yeah, but he can be annoying sometimes.”
“Okay. What about the older kids? Like Connor.”
Jeremiah shrugged. “He’s okay.”
Ames smirked. Verbose his son was not.
He glanced ahead and saw his daughter shrinking in the distance. “Slow down, Miranda. You’re getting too far ahead.”
She slowed her pace and waited. A man coming from the other direction moved around her. Ames nodded cordially as the man moved past.
“Do you want to tell me anything?” he asked Jeremiah. “About Connor?”
There was a long pause. “No,” he said.
“About Connor’s hologram?” Ames asked leadingly. He leaned forward to look Jeremiah in the eye. The boy said nothing. He thought pretend ignorance was preferable to confessed guilt. He was wrong.
Ames pushed his shoulders back. He hated this part.
“When you do something bad, son, more bad things happen. Often you try to hide it and you dig yourself in a deeper hole. That’s twice that you’ve lied to me about stealing Connor’s hologram. Do you know what happens to people who are caught stealing in space?”
“I didn’t steal it,” Jeremiah said defensively. “I borrowed it. Did Mom tell you I stole it?”
Ames stopped. He made Jeremiah face him. “Forget what she told me and listen. You made a mistake. You made it worse by lying to me twice when I asked you directly about it. Twice,” he repeated, and counted each incident on his fingers. “One time when we were on the ship, and again just now. I expect better of you.” He waited for a response.
Jeremiah hid his face. “I only borrowed it,” he mumbled.
Ames tilted Jeremiah’s chin up and cocked an eyebrow threateningly. “Are you sure you want to lie to me a third time?”
Jeremiah shut his eyes, which were beginning to tear up. “No.”
“Are you sorry for what you did?”
“I’m sorry,” Jeremiah said, barely above a whisper.
Ames returned his hand to the base of Jeremiah’s neck and they continued down the passageway, slower than before.
“I accept your apology,” Ames said. “Tell me, son, do you understand now that what you did was wrong?”
“Yes,” Jeremiah muttered.
“Did you understand it was wrong as you were doing it?”
“Yeah,” he drawled, less certainly. He must have thought Ames was bullying him at this point.
His voiced cracked. “I said I was sorry.”
“I’m trying to teach you something, Jeremiah. Pay attention. When you feel what you’re about to do is wrong, don’t do it. Your instincts will steer you true.”
They walked along for a minute in silence. They rounded another corner.
“So… am I grounded?” Jeremiah asked hesitantly.
“Do you want to be grounded?” Ames said, interested in his reaction.
“No,” Jeremiah said after thinking about it.
“That’s what I thought. Your punishment will start when we get back to the ship. You won’t leave the family quarters for 3 days, except for meals and to use the bathroom. One day for stealing, two days for lying to me twice. And no, you cannot read your books while you’re punished.”
Jeremiah groaned loudly. He was thinking about what he would do with himself for 3 days, with just his thoughts to keep him company.
“Do you want to make it 4 days?” Ames asked.
Jeremiah clamped his mouth shut. Ames patted him on the back. “Remember, you control how much we have to punish you.”
Ahead of them, Miranda started to round another corner, but stopped and instead looked up. “Dad, come look!” she shouted. She kicked the wall and levitated into the passageway above.
Jeremiah looked up at him with longing in his eyes.
Ames softened. “Go ahead. Don’t forget your punishment starts when we get back to the ship.”
“Yes!” The boy’s legs coiled under him like a spring and propelled him like a shot from a gun after his sister.
Ames quickened his pace so he wouldn’t lose them. The upper passageway expanded to form the floor of a spacious room full of people. He stopped next to Miranda and turned a full circle, looking around him.
“Impressive,” he said to himself.
And wasteful. There was a reason you didn’t find many large, enclosed spaces like this in space. Perhaps it had a psychological purpose. The room had the feel of a village square, a normal setting a person in abnormal circumstances may find comfort in.
He spotted the young man with the Sun tattoo on his neck sitting at one of the squat tables, conversing with colleagues.
“Stay here,” he told Miranda. He left the kids where they were, gawking at the new people and strange faces.
Shaun noticed him approaching and stood up. He cut a strange figure—by Earth standards—in his form-fitting flight suit. He had skinny thighs and a broad chest, a common body type for anyone who’d spent a long time in zero gee, as Ames knew too well. When returning to Earth from LEO deployments, it took months for him to regain his conditioning, especially his leg strength and lung capacity.
“You’re looking a smidge brighter,” Shaun said.
“It’s a wonder what a few hours’ sleep can do,” Ames said. “I didn’t realize how much I needed it.” Ames shook his hand and said discreetly in Shaun’s ear, “I’m sorry for accusing you earlier.”
“No need feeling low about it, Colonel. We all get a bee up our bonnet now and then. Did you find what was missing?”
Ames glanced at his son. “We did, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s water under the bridge, then.” Shaun gestured behind him. “Are those your kids?”
Ames waved them over. Miranda nudged her distracted brother and they joined them.
“Jeremiah, this is my friend, Staff Sergeant Shaun.”
Shaun scoffed. “Come off it, mate. You can call me Shaun, kiddo.”
“Okay. Shaun,” Jeremiah said warily. He wasn’t used to grown-ups inviting him to address them by their given names.
“And my daughter Miranda,” Ames said, moving to the side, as the girl was hiding behind him.
“Hi,” she said softly. She looked down and tucked a loose strand of hair that was hovering in front of her face behind her ear.
“Were you in the Service like my dad?” Jeremiah asked.
Shaun crouched next to him. “I was, but with some big differences. We’re from different countries, so we had different bosses. I was in the RAF, and he was in the WAAF. And while I was an enlisted man, your daddy was an officer.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I could tell people like Shaun what to do,” Ames said. “Not officially, at any rate.”
“Did you fight against each other?”
Shaun gasped in mock outrage. “I wouldn’t dream of picking a fight with your old man! It wouldn’t be fair.”
“He means it wouldn’t be fair to me,” Ames said.
Shaun straightened. “Dads often underestimate their strength, Jeremiah. They may get soft on the outside, but on the inside they’re like Superman.”
Ames chuckled and crossed his arms. “What’s the lay of the land?”
“Well, we call this area the commons. If you’re out of the loop or just bored brainless, this is the place to get plugged into whatever’s going on at the moment. On the other side of that wall is the operations center. You’ll find at least two crew in there at all times. We draw straws for that privilege. Ten-hour shifts is the norm.”
He pointed down the passageway that they had just come out of. “That way’s north, for reference.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. “No public lodgings or facilities. Everyone eats and sleeps with their crewmates. Protocol for visiting other spacecraft is up to that craft’s owner. There’s not much more to it than that.”
“Who’s crew are you on?” Ames asked.
“Mr. Sarchette. Nice bloke, for a billionaire.”
“Is he? I only know the name.”
“Tell you a quick story, Colonel. The day after I out-processed from the RAF I was waiting for a transport back home. Mr. Sarchette shows up in the Corsica and docks at the only docking port 10 minutes before my shuttle ride arrives. Just a quick stop to resupply, because he’s on some crazy civilian operation to start a Moon colony. While he’s loading his ship he talks to my squadron commander, who recommends me for a job, and Mr. Sarchette gives me a contract on the spot.”
“That’s a good commander. What’s his name?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Barney Wallace.”
“Barney Wallace,” Ames echoed, searching his memory. “I think he was a captain when I was stationed at Vandenberg. Royal detachment, obviously. Not in my chain of command.”
“I bloody hope not.”
They watched Jeremiah chase manically after Miranda, the children exploiting the large, open space for their entertainment.
“What’s the chain of command?”
“Nothing so formal as that. Collectively the mission partners make decisions for the flotilla, what little there are. Crew answer to other mission partners as a first among equals, I’d say, but our ultimate responsibility is to the man we’re bound by contract to.”
So we’re not all on the same team yet, Ames thought. “What happens when they have disagreements?” he asked.
“I can’t recall that’s ever happened. They often meet over there, behind the operations center.”
Ames looked in the direction Shaun pointed and clicked his tongue. “If that’s not a testament to their secrecy, I don’t know what is.”
Shaun narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Think of it this way,” Ames said. “Can you imagine 15 wildly rich, wildly successful men with different backgrounds agreeing with each other on anything?”
Shaun blushed. “No, Colonel. I can’t.”
***
“This is the oldest part of the station,” Zeke said.
Sheridan looked around. The passageway looked no different than all the others. They had been zigzagging around the flotilla so much that he was thoroughly lost. Their first stop had been the operations center. Next they had visited Zeke’s private spacecraft, the Nebula, the “envy of the galaxy,” as the accomplished ship builder put it.
“I wasn’t here for it, but I’m told as soon as the first people to arrive built and pressurized this area, they blocked off half the real estate for the agriculture module. The first growing season is almost over.”
Sheridan stopped at an airtight door with a window that was smeared with fog on the inside. “So that’s what you’ve been up to,” he murmured.
“Sorry?”
Sheridan cleared his throat. “I was wondering how you grow crops in zero gee.”
Zeke gestured at the door. “Would you like to see?”
He shrugged. “Why not.”
Zeke opened the door and motioned him in. Sheridan emerged into a bright, warm room, about twice the size of the commons in the flotilla’s center. He could taste the stink of human feces carrying heavily in the warm, damp air. The room was set at an angle to the passageway outside, indicated by the painted red stripe on the upper-right wall. Rounding about so his feet touched the “floor,” Sheridan saw along the lines of the walls to the back where a clear plastic divider, damp with condensation, rustled gently in the soft air currents. Long racks of crop shelves, staggered like short, steep staircases, formed narrow aisles running the length of the larger section of the room. The entire bulkhead on one side consisted of a thick, Plexiglas window to let in natural light. As he should have expected, it looked a lot like a greenhouse.
A short, buxom woman wearing a lightweight rubber suit and a rubber cap was inspecting an instrument shelter set up in the middle of the module. After making them wait, she approached them, holding out two caps identical to her own.
“So your scalp doesn’t absorb moisture,” she said curtly.
Sheridan and Zeke looked at each other and pulled the caps down over their heads.
“Therese is Israel’s foremost horticulturist and hydroponics expert, aren’t you, Therese?” Zeke said, moving next to her. He spoke a little louder than he needed to.
“Was,” she replied, without irony.
“I tried hiring Therese to my crew but Becker got to her first.”
Sheridan smiled thinly. Judging from Zeke’s tone, he suspected an enmity had recently arisen between the two, possibly an aborted romance.
“Becker’s always had good taste,” he said.
He went around them and entered an aisle of cucumbers. He breathed through the long sleeve of his flight suit to mask the intensifying smell. The crop shelves moved slowly about a diagonal frame via a pulley system so that each shelf had a turn in the sunlight coming through the window above. Per the designs that Sheridan had familiarized himself with, the crop shelves were broad but shallow. The roots didn’t need to be physically strong because they bore less weight—no weight, now; they only needed to have a large surface area to draw water.
What was new to the design were the clear tubes that attached to the underside of each shelf. They came together to make one large tube that ran through a hole in the floor.
“You vacuum-seal the soil pan?” he asked Therese, who had been following him.
He pinched the foul-smelling soil that filled the nearest crop shelf. It was moist and stuck to his fingers.
“How do you keep it from leeching water from the soil?”
“The flotilla acquires a negative charge each time we pass through the ionosphere. We transfer the charge to the silica,” Therese explained.
She ran her hand along the bottom edge of the shelf. “Water vapor feeds between the silica and a membrane coated with a hydrophobic material. It gives the water droplets a positive charge.”
“Attracting the water to the soil,” Sheridan surmised.
Therese nodded. “The membrane allows the dry air to pass through it. You just have to make sure the silica is uniform around the edges of the box so it seals the water vapor in.”
Sheridan scrutinized the crop shelf some more, applying the little bit of engineering knowledge he had to what he was looking at.
“The water bonding with the soil doesn’t prevent the roots from drawing water?”
“No, the roots draw nutrients from the silica,” Therese said. “They have the same charge.”
“And that presents no problems for plant health?”
“So far.”
“Very good.” Sheridan flicked his fingers, and specks of dirt and fecal matter floated through the air.
He nodded at the plastic sheet. “What’s in there?”
“Cuttings. They need more humidity to regrow their roots. We just took the second set of cuttings of tomatoes and peppers.”
“What are the yields?” he asked.
“We won’t know until we harvest the crops. Some species are already maturing—”
Sheridan talked over her. “How much biomass from everything that’s planted and growing, Therese?”
Her eyes flitted upward as she processed the math. “Four tonnes total biomass.”
“That’s it?” Sheridan said, not hiding his displeasure. “Assuming the average person consumes half a kilo of produce per day, that’ll feed 100 people for half of a harvest cycle. We need to feed 400 people every harvest cycle.”
“I’m aware of the nutritional requirements.” She said this while scowling—not at Sheridan, but at Zeke. “We’re just getting started, and space is limited.”
“She’s done a fine job, hasn’t she, Wayne?” Zeke said, his stilted, sanguine tone clashing with Sheridan’s slowly building frustration.
Sheridan frowned. “Yes, considering the conditions she’s not prepared to work in.” He waited for a response, but it didn’t come. “Will you excuse us, Therese?”
She looked relieved be dismissed. “Yes. I have work to do anyway.”
She floated past them and paused at a beveled post set in the wall. She turned a squeaky crank that jutted from the post. A shudder went through the module as it rotated slowly so the Sun was directly over the windows. She ducked behind the plastic sheet, leaving them alone.
“Well, what do you think?” Zeke said.
“I think this an unnecessary capital investment for just one crop season,” Sheridan said bluntly.
“Not really. Everything’s reused. The water waste is half a liter per day, if that, and a portion of the oxygen you’re breathing—”
Sheridan interrupted. “I know it’s practically a self-sustaining system, Zeke. I studied the blueprints for the better part of a year. My point is this wasn’t supposed to be built here. Why spend resources on the agriculture module when we’re going to take it apart and relocate it to the Moon?”
Zeke spread his hands. “Really, did you expect them to just sit on their hands while they waited for you to get here? Some of us have been on the flotilla for 5 months! Can you blame them for wanting to beta-test the new tech?”
“Yes, I can!”
Sheridan swiped at a cucumber plant’s leaves, causing the supple green vine to sway. He glimpsed Therese watching them through the water-beaded plastic sheet. She looked away and continued working with the cuttings.
“We’re outfitted to transport seedlings, not mature plants,” he said. “How do you propose we move 4 additional tonnes of food to the surface of the Moon? I don’t have the capacity for that. Do you know who did?”
His voice was picking up volume and pace. He didn’t care. The seriousness of this deviation from the plan demanded a serious reaction.
“And how are we going to move the crops to the colony while keeping their roots in contact with the soil?” he went on. “If we can’t, they’ll die. This vacuum-sealing system is ingenious, but it doesn’t look like it travels well.”
“We still have plenty of unused seedlings,” Zeke stated calmly.
“That’s not the issue!”
Sheridan rubbed his sinuses, which felt like they were going to explode through his forehead. He took a deep breath to calm himself.
“Did no one raise these questions when Becker and his people decided they were going to deviate from the plan?”
“In fairness to Becker, he didn’t join the flotilla until around the time I did,” Zeke said. “We weren’t here for those talks.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “So there were talks,” Sheridan said.
Zeke swallowed. “Yes.”
“Well, how did they proceed?”
Zeke chose his words deliberately. “There’s an idea going around that maybe we won’t relocate the crops to the colony.”
“And what, pray tell, would we do for food on the Moon?”
“Naturally, we’d put that on hold.”
Sheridan felt faint. He steadied himself against the bulkhead. “For how long?”
“Indefinitely.”
The puzzled looks on the men’s and women’s faces when Sheridan spoke about settling the Moon flashed before his eyes.
“This… idea,” he said, biting off each word lest it unleash a string of obscenities, “how many people endorse it?”
“I can’t say.”
“How many of the mission partners endorse it?” Sheridan rephrased.
“More than half.” Zeke’s mien was grave. He knew what he was saying. He was saying the expedition, for all intents and purposes, was over.
Sheridan’s face and ears felt hot. He spoke, his voice a tick above a whisper. “Damn you, Zeke. You knew about this, and you kept it from me. You buttered me up with this tour. You brought me here. You thought showing me a few heads of lettuce would change my mind about going to the Moon.”
“Wayne, that’s not it at all—”
“How long has this been going on? How long have you known?”
Zeke sighed. “About 2 months.”
Sheridan gasped. He looked for the exit. He had to get out of there. He needed some time by himself to process this.
“Wait, Wayne.” Zeke moved between him and the hatch, blocking his path. “I don’t expect you to change your mind in one day. It took me weeks after I got here to figure out this is the best course of action. If you’ll just listen—”
Sheridan shook his fist at him. “I didn’t come all the way out here just to bob around the Earth. Now get out of my way!”
He edged around Zeke and shoved the door open. It swung out into the passageway and crashed against the wall. He ripped off his rubber cap as he made his way down the passageway.
Zeke called after him. “If you won’t listen to me, listen to the others! Hear us out!”
Sheridan stopped at the nearest junction, unsure of which way to go, his mind trying to decipher the coordinates on the wall. The navigational challenge of returning to the Betelgeuse gave him pause enough to consider Zeke’s proposal. A meeting of the minds didn’t sound like such a bad idea. If they had grown complacent and lazy, he could talk some sense into them. Maybe he could eke out a majority, and the rest would fall in line for the sake of unity.
He felt hope rekindle inside him. The expedition wasn’t completely lost, not yet.
He whirled around. “Okay, Zeke. Round them up, and we’ll have a chat.”
Chapter 3. Rebellion
“Mom!” Jeremiah yelled, his voice carrying across the commons. He abandoned pursuit of his sister, shot past Ames and Shaun, and all but tackled Phyllis to the ground.
“Be careful, son!” Ames roared. Jeremiah ricocheted off his mother into Connor, who trailed her coming out of the north passageway. “God help me if I kill that kid.”
“It’s fine,” she said, grimacing and clutching her abdomen. She inclined her head toward Connor. “I brought someone with as much energy for him to play with.”
Ames touched her arm in concern. She shook her head and pushed his hand away.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to get you. Your watch on the Betelgeuse starts soon.”
She looked warily at Shaun. “This is a familiar face.”
“I’ve seen uglier,” Ames quipped, putting her at ease. “Shaun, this is my wife Phyllis.”
Shaun took her hand in his and kissed it. “Always a pleasure to meet a colonel’s wife.”
“This one’s trouble I think,” Ames said.
Phyllis made a show of looking Shaun up and down with a critical eye. “He’s not old enough to be a threat to you, dear.”
Shaun smarted. “Goodness sakes, you yanks are vicious.”
Ames gave himself to laugher, letting the levity of the moment buoy his spirits.
“What do you mean your husband has to go on watch?” Shaun asked Phyllis, after things had settled down.
“Monty likes to think he’s still active-duty in the Service,” Phyllis said, patting her husband’s chest sympathetically. “He posted a watch so there’d be someone to defend the ship round the clock.”
“‘Defend the ship’?” Shaun looked Ames’s way like he was crazy.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Ames said judiciously, “but this is an operational environment.”
Jeremiah skidded to a stop next to them, breathing heavily, cheeks flushed with exertion. “Dad, Connor wants to go explore. Can I go?”
Ames considered saying no. He was still upset about Jeremiah knocking down his mother, and he feared the trouble the boys could get into if left unattended. Miranda could go with them, but she would view such a responsibility as punishment. Mired in indecision, he looked to Phyllis for help.
“Do you remember your way back to the ship?” she asked.
“Connor says he does.” Before they could cross-examine him further, the boy took flight down one of the passageways that intersected with the commons.
Ames shook his head in exasperation. “Don’t ever have children, Shaun.”
“I have no plans to,” Shaun said.
“Neither did Monty, until he met me,” Phyllis said, gazing absently across the commons. Ames followed her eyes, which were on Miranda. Some teenage girls had drawn her into their circle.
“You’ll change your mind. You’re young, still.”
“Thank you for reminding me of that, Mrs. Ames,” Shaun said.
A figure passed in front of Miranda, advancing straight for them with a determined look on his face. It was Sheridan. He looked harried, and a shadow darkened the area around his eyes.
“This isn’t good,” Ames muttered, bracing himself for the worst.
Shaun stood to the side as Sheridan drew near. “I’m going to meet with the mission partners in a few minutes,” he said, without preamble.
“Is something wrong?” Ames asked.
Sheridan seemed to consider how frank he should be in Shaun’s presence. “I can’t talk about it now. Stay put. I may need you when this meeting is over.”
He continued on his way, disappearing down a narrow passageway that went behind the operations center.
“What was that about?” Phyllis said.
“I don’t know,” Ames replied. “I’ve seen him like this before and it’s usually when something goes wrong.” He looked at Shaun. “Is something wrong?”
The young man fidgeted. “I’m under orders not to tell you, but I suppose there’s no point in hiding it any longer. Some of the mission partners have been thinking about canceling the Moon mission.”
Ames groaned.
“Can they do that?” Phyllis said.
Shaun shrugged. “Nothing’s official yet, but it’s been an open secret of sorts around here.”
Phyllis looked at Ames. “Did Mr. Sheridan know about this?”
He shook his head. “There’s no way. He wouldn’t have let it stand for one minute. He would have taken action.”
“Looks like he’s taking action now, God help him,” Shaun said.
Ames glimpsed several mission partners arrive by different passageways in the commons and convene briefly with members of their crews. They then proceeded behind the operations center, in the same direction as Sheridan before them.
“On the contrary,” Ames said anxiously, “I think it is they who’ll need God’s help.”
***
It took a little while to spread the word to all 15 mission partners. Some of them had to be roused out of bed, but they came promptly and, knowing Sheridan had called the meeting, they didn’t have to guess what it was about.
They met in an electrical room next to the operations center, the only space big enough that could hold all of them and that offered privacy. As the mission partners arrived, Sheridan greeted each one as if he were a long lost brother, ignoring his heart, which screamed at him that a contingent of these men had deceived him and betrayed their common purpose. But he needed allies and he knew he wouldn’t get them if he acted standoffish. He also sought to establish the meeting as his initiative, hopefully earning the deference of the weaker-willed among them.
One of the men was Dmitri, who’d made his riches prospecting for natural gas off Africa’s east coast. He walked through the door yawning broadly, sallow skin drawing tight over the bones in his face.
“Dmitri!” Sheridan embraced him. “Thanks for coming, my friend. I’m sorry I interrupted your nap.”
“Your thanks and apologies are wholly unnecessary, Sheridan,” Dmitri said. “I haven’t put together 4 straight hours of sleep all year. Disturbances are commonplace on the flotilla. If it wasn’t you, it’d be something else. You’d know that if you lived here more than a day.”
“This isn’t a disturbance,” Zeke said. “Wayne called this meeting to hear us out on the status on the expedition.”
“And to be heard,” Sheridan added. “Hey, are we all here? Let’s get started, shall we?”
The men arranged themselves in a horseshoe around Sheridan. He took note of who was standing with whom and where the foci of social authority were.
“I’ll start off by saying what a privilege it is to join you out here, gentlemen. Now that we are all here, phase two of the expedition has drawn to a close. I know I’m not alone in my excitement to have made it this far. This space station is a grand achievement, but it’s important to remember its function. It is a bridge between the Earth and the Moon. I repeat, on the Moon lies the culmination of our efforts. Our job is not finished, gentlemen.”
His voice dropped an octave, taking on more of an edge. “I’m troubled by rumors that some of you are considering staying behind on the flotilla. Now, during planning you had many concerns about the next phase of the expedition. I remember, because I had concerns, too. But we worked through them and I thought those concerns had been addressed.”
He paused. “But apparently they weren’t. The purpose of this meeting is for us to hear each other’s thoughts so that we can move forward with unity of purpose. The Grimaldi Crater colony is a condition of my crew’s employment, as well as a condition on my right to employ them. It’s in their contracts. I’d forfeit my responsibility to them to change my mind now. They deserve better than uncertainty at this juncture.”
Some of the men exchanged guilty looks.
“Let’s hear it,” Sheridan said, opening the floor to anyone who wanted to take it. “Where is this doubt coming from?”
“I’ll go first, since it started with me, I suppose,” a Nordic man called Gunnar said. His company was the world’s second-largest producer of semiconductors. He moved closer to the middle of the room.
“The first of us to arrive, Dmitri, Sarchette, and me, directed the construction of the southeast corner of the flotilla—back when there was no flotilla, you see. We knew that job would fall to us because we were scheduled to reach geostationary transfer orbit before anyone else did. The horticulturist on my crew was performing daily tests on the seed stock to ensure they were staying healthy. They weren’t. If I recall, about a third of the seed stock was rotting. Is that right?”
“It was a third,” Dmitri confirmed.
“Yes, a third. Well, a third of a half, if we include the seeds Becker was bringing. So we talked about it, the three of us and my horticulturist. We decided to use the materials we had on hand to save the ailing seeds by planting them.”
“Losing 16 percent of our first-generation crop before we even landed on the Moon would have been a huge setback,” Dmitri added.
“Did you consider that moving them from where they are now would produce the same result?” Sheridan said.
“The same result with a reduced impact,” Dmitri replied smoothly. “On the flotilla, we can procure whatever we need from Earth anytime. At the Grimaldi Crater site, it’s quite a different story.”
“Only in your mind,” Sheridan fired back. “Getting from here to the lunar surface requires only a quarter of the delta-v used in getting from the Earth’s surface to GTO.”
“Regardless, that’s how it went,” Gunnar said with finality. He fell back into line.
Sheridan’s eyes swept the room. “We haven’t heard from you, Mr. Sarchette. Is that how it went?”
Everyone looked at the tall, plump man on the other side of the room. Sarchette raked a hairy knuckle over his prodigious jowl, which was scarred from numerous skin cancer removals.
“Gunnar’s man seemed certain the seeds were showing signs of rot,” he said vaguely. “I wasn’t convinced we had anything to worry about, but he’s the expert, so I deferred to him. I would have liked to wait for Becker’s woman—what’s her name?”
“Therese,” Becker said.
“That’s it, Therese. I’m more familiar with her work and would have liked to wait for her to get here so we could hear her opinion.”
“That was still 2 months off,” Gunnar said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Yeah, why didn’t you bring it up then?” Dmitri said, quick on the trigger. “Awfully convenient for you to voice your doubts now.”
“I did bring it up then,” Sarchette said.
“You barely said anything at all. You missed half the meeting because you had your hands full with your mistress.”
Sarchette turned red, and a few men chuckled.
Sheridan spoke. “A decision like that shouldn’t fall to three men out of fifteen. All of us should have had a chance to weigh in. Even after you made the decision, you should have informed us, so we could adjust our plan.”
Sarchette’s head bobbed obsequiously. “We should have. You’re right.”
“I don’t recall ever setting standards for a quorum in situations like the one Gunnar described,” Becker said.
“We can talk about it another time,” Sheridan said. “We’re all here now, aren’t we? Continue, Gunnar.”
“There’s not much more to it, Wayne. My horticulturist devised a system to stabilize the soil in zero gee, and the yields are promising.”
Sheridan gaped incredulously. “And that was enough to convince you all to give up on the Moon?”
“That’s not what convinced me,” Chien said. The Hong Kong native had a lined, weathered face, jet black hair and a rich baritone voice. It was rumored he was distantly related to the premier of the new regime in Beijing.
“Like you, Mr. Sheridan, I’ve long dreamed of putting a colony on the Moon and establishing a hope for mankind beyond a fallen world. But too many here have lost their will that I feel it is not wise to go on.”
Several heads nodded in agreement.
“Look, Sheridan,” Dmitri said, cutting to the chase. “I understand that you see the flotilla as a bridge to your Moon colony. I get it. But some of us have been living here a long time already. This is the largest space station man has ever built. Now that it’s here, it’s not so easy to tear it down and start over, you know?”
Sheridan had figured the final argument would come down to him and one other man. In that moment he pegged Dmitri as that man.
“But it is easy,” Sheridan said. “These walls are fiberglass. These cables are copper wire. You can rearrange them in any configuration you want, wherever you want. Gentlemen, must I remind you what we all agreed to come out here to do? There is a greater goal on the horizon!”
Dmitri shook his head. “With all due respect, there are opportunities here that you’re not seeing.”
“Enlighten me,” Sheridan said, crossing his arms over his chest. “To be sustainable the colony has to produce something. In Grimaldi Crater we can utilize resources in situ. We can extract oxygen for power, air, and water. We can use the lunar regolith as the soil base for the crops and to make masonry. I could go on. Tell me, what can the flotilla produce in the emptiness of space?”
“Tourism, for one.”
“Tourism,” Sheridan deadpanned. He looked at the others, daring them to defend this notion. Merriman, an entrepreneur in fiber-optic applications, shook his head in what appeared to be disgust.
“Let me get this straight. You uprooted your lives, dragged your employees and their families into space, to start a hotel?”
“This space station can be a commercial gateway to the solar system,” Dmitri said. “Space travel is getting cheaper all the time. Soon there will be hundreds of people every year headed for the Moon, Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt, wherever.”
“But if they followed your way of thinking, they might decide they like it here so much that they want to stay. What will you do then?”
Dmitri didn’t have a quick answer to that.
“I’ve never been convinced we should stay,” Merriman put forward. “Perhaps my view is colored by the tragedy that befell one of my crew. When they finished grieving, he and his wife told me they wanted to stay on my staff. They told me their son didn’t die for nothing. I know for sure they didn’t mean this space station. They meant the colony.” Merriman braced his back. “It would dishonor that boy’s memory to decide this is far as we come and we’ll go no further. That’s all I have to say.”
Sheridan nodded somberly, but his heart leapt for joy. It was a more effective argument than he could ever make.
“He’s right,” Sheridan said, after giving Merriman’s story a moment to sink in. “There’s nothing for us here, gentlemen. Nothing compels me to stay. If this is as far as we come, we’ll end up risking very little in this endeavor. For little risk there is little reward. Others for whom that level of risk is acceptable will copy what you’ve done, but they’ll do it better. They’ll build a better hotel.”
His eyes flitted to Dmitri, whose face clenched in anger. “If we stick to our original plan, however, we’ll be years ahead of the competition. Our colony in Grimaldi Crater will be the only game in town. For accomplished men such as yourself, throughout your careers, it has never been a question of will, but ability. Now that we have the ability, you have lost the will!”
He studied their faces one by one, daring a challenger to come forward. None did.
Zeke, standing in the corner of the room, spoke for the first time since the meeting started. “You make some good points, Wayne. Why don’t we take a break, discuss these issues with our respective crews, and pick this up later—”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Dmitri said, talking over him.
Sheridan cocked his head to the side. “I don’t?”
“No one here signed on the dotted line to uproot their lives, as you put it,” Dmitri said. “That may be your motive, but it’s not ours. We’re not zealots.”
Sheridan smiled inwardly. He sensed that he was winning them over and that Dmitri, as the leader of the opposition, sensed it as well and desperately wanted to gain back the ground he had lost.
A wise tactician would not have risen to take Dmitri’s bait. A wise tactician would have brushed the attack aside and agreed with Zeke to recess the meeting, cashing in his winnings. But Sheridan knew this about himself: He was no tactician. He was prideful. He wanted the closest thing to revenge that he could get. He wanted Dmitri, who now personified the opposition, to hurt.
“I’m glad you bring that up, Dmitri,” Sheridan said. “Does anyone have a copy of the memorandum of understanding that we all signed 2 years ago?”
Chien reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a worn, folded sheet of paper. Sheridan snatched it from him and read loudly: “We, the undersigned, pledge—” He skipped down to the relevant paragraph. “—to establish permanent residency at an agreed-upon location on the Moon for no less than one Earth year or until said residency receives international recognition, in the interests of exploiting the available resources to sustain life, liberty, and the commonwealth of men.”
He pointed at Chien. “The meaning is clear, is it not?”
“A lawyer could poke a thousand holes in that memo,” Dmitri said. “It’s not legally binding.”
“Forget the legal binding. I’m asking why you signed it.”
“I already told you,” Chien said, his face locked in an unreadable expression.
“To establish a hope for mankind, wasn’t it? A noble calling. Worth pursuing, wouldn’t you say?”
Sheridan pivoted to face the other side of the room. “Zeke, why did you sign it?”
The ship builder looked exhausted and sad. “Wayne—”
“Indulge me, Zeke. Why did you sign it?”
“I signed it because I wanted to build high-tech spacecraft that could land on the Moon,” he said wearily.
“Do you want to see them land on the Moon still?”
“It’s not about what I want at this point.”
“Of course you do.” Sheridan moved on to the next man. He was getting carried away, but he didn’t care. “Mr. Sarchette, why did you sign it?”
The portly man looked surprised to be called on. His eyes shifted rapidly in their sockets. “For the challenge, for fun.”
“You relish the challenge, do you? What’s changed between then and now?”
Sarchette searched his mind for an answer.
Dmitri cut in. “This is preposterous! Enough with this inquisition—”
Sheridan shouted him down. “Don’t worry, Dmitri, I’m coming to you next.” He refocused on Sarchette. “Well?”
“I-I don’t know,” he stammered.
“You should know. You’ve had 5 whole months to think about it.”
Sheridan didn’t offer his theory explaining the mission partners’ change of heart—sloth and cowardice, he suspected. A public accusation like that would raise their hackles and cost him support, though. He needed them to address their faults, if they were indeed faults, on their own terms.
“Dmitri,” Sheridan said, “why’d you pledge yourself, alongside me and Chien and Zeke and Sarchette and everyone else, to this expedition?”
“I don’t have to answer that. My reasons were good enough for me. That’s all that matters.”
“I see. They were good enough then, but they’re not good enough now?”
“That document is not my death warrant,” Dmitri growled. “If you want to march straight to hell, Sheridan, be my guest, but don’t expect the rest of us to go along with you.”
Sheridan let Dmitri’s angry response resonate in the men’s hearts. He had them right where he wanted them.
“I have a secret I want to share with you,” he said, smoothing out his voice. “Part of the reason I took so long to join you out here is I had to get my affairs in order. You all know me. My life’s an open book. I am—or was—the president of three different companies. I served on the boards of a dozen others. I had offices in five continents. At the end of the last tax year, 92,000 people worked for me. As of 3 days ago, I no longer hold those titles. When we left Earth, I gave up controlling interest in all my companies and removed myself from all oversight.”
Someone whistled.
Sheridan continued. “My net worth was north of $22 billion. I had 11 houses and a Greek island. When we left Earth, I gave power of attorney to my lawyers, who liquidated everything and spread the proceeds to various causes and organizations. It’s all gone, gentlemen.”
“What did I tell you? A zealot,” Dmitri said under his breath, yet loud enough for everyone to hear.
Sheridan ignored him. “Do you know why I did it?” He clinched his fist in front him, imparting his words passionately. “I believe so deeply in what we set out to do—” He held up the memorandum in his other hand. “—that I gave away everything that didn’t matter to that goal. I would much rather have nothing to go back to than let this expedition fail.”
He paused, elated, feeling in every fiber of his being that the end of this rebellion was near. “I don’t think you need to go back to your crews to discuss the issues that have been brought up tonight. You already know what the right thing to do is.”
He nodded in Dmitri’s direction. “If we can’t be unanimous, I propose a plebiscite to decide once and for all what we’re going to do. I’ll accept whatever the majority decides.”
He glanced at Zeke, who stared back at him, dumbfounded.
“You want to vote? I thought we were just talking,” Becker protested.
“I know where I stand. I don’t need to hear any more of this,” Merriman said.
“Me neither,” Dmitri said gruffly.
“We don’t have to vote now,” Zeke said. “If you want—”
Becker waved his hands. “No, no. Mr. Merriman’s right. Let’s do it now and get it over with.”
No one else protested the call for a vote. Sheridan ripped the memorandum into 15 pieces and handed them out.
“Secret ballot. Two choices: stay or go.”
Chien had the only pen. He recorded his vote first, cupping the back of the paper in the palm of his hand, then passed the pen to the next man. When the pen came to Dmitri and Merriman, they did not hesitate. Most of the other men did, appearing to weigh the pros and cons in their minds a final time before registering the fate of the expedition on a small, wrinkled shred of paper.
The pen came to Sheridan and he wrote “GO” in neat, capital letters. He handed the pen to Zeke, who was the last to vote. Sheridan watched him intently. The ship builder tilted his head down and shut his eyes. His lips moved, but Sheridan couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he lifted his head and wrote down his choice.
Sheridan couldn’t help himself; he followed the movement of the pen in Zeke’s hand. It lifted three times from the paper, tracing four distinct letters. His heart sank through his stomach and crashed on top of his bladder. His skin felt clammy, and his heartbeat throbbed at his temples. Zeke, his closest friend in the whole bunch, voted against him. Had he overplayed his hand?
“I trust you with tallying the votes,” Dmitri said, handing Zeke his ballot. The others did the same. Sheridan gave Zeke his ballot, not realizing he had wadded it up.
Zeke returned Chien’s pen, and he glanced between Sheridan and Dmitri. “You’ll accept what the majority decides, even if it’s eight to seven?”
“Yes,” Sheridan croaked.
His confidence was absolutely shot. How could Dmitri have won? he wondered. Why would a majority of them elect to stay? Why would any of them elect to stay? It was unthinkable to him, impossible. The persuasive case he had made was sound.
Zeke took a moment to tally the votes. He grouped the ballots by type into either hand, counting silently. He exhaled and raised his head. “Ten votes for stay, five votes for go.”
“Oh!” Sheridan moaned, collapsing inward in shock. He felt a burning sensation in his chest; for a second he thought his heart would burst.
He skimmed the faces of his peers. None of them looked pleased. It was impossible to tell who had voted with him and who had voted against him.
Ten votes for stay! Surely there had been a mistake.
He reached for the ballots. “Can I see?”
“Those are confidential,” Dmitri warned.
“Shouldn’t they be destroyed? I think that’s how the parliaments do it,” Gunnar said.
The group mumbled assent. Sheridan didn’t hear them. “Please, Zeke, can I see them?”
“It’s ten to five, Wayne,” Zeke said, his tone sympathetic.
The other men, without further ado, started to file out of the electrical room.
“I won’t apologize for the result of the vote, Sheridan,” Dmitri said, lingering behind. “Or for what I think is right. You don’t lack commitment, I’ll give you that. But you’ll find not many people share with you that level of commitment. The Gospels say to count the cost before an undertaking. What happened today was an accounting of the cost. You need the right people to complete the vision in your head. We’re not those people.”
“I guess you’re not,” Sheridan said.
Dmitri touched his arm. Sheridan shrank away. Dmitri snorted and let his hand fall to his side.
“In due time you’ll see this was the best choice. You’ll come around. Until you do, we’ll hold you to your word.”
“All of a sudden that means something?” Sheridan said.
Dmitri scowled and left. Only Sheridan, Zeke, and Sarchette remained.
“I wish I’d said more to help you, Wayne. It could have made the difference,” Sarchette said regretfully. “I’d follow you to the Moon if it was just the two of us.”
Sheridan barely heard him. He was in a daze.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Zeke said. “But between you and me, Wayne, you sold me, too.”
He handed one of the slips of paper to Sheridan. He flipped it over. On it was scrawled “GO” and below it, Zeke’s initials, “EP.”
Sheridan sniffed and ran the back of his hand under his watering eyes. He was already quantifying his losses. The money wasn’t his first thought. He could always make more; it was what he was good at. Rather, the loss he more strongly felt was time. How long would it take to pull together another expedition, after this fiasco? It could take 10 years to get back to this point, with a more trustworthy group and stronger guarantees for cooperation. He would not make the same mistakes next time.
In 10 years he would be pushing 60 years old. That wasn’t too far past his prime, was it?
What really stung was how he’d lost them, how confident he’d been. He should have known better. Dmitri had been lobbying them for months, working against him. Sarchette and Merriman probably had been on his side all along. He’d convinced Zeke, but they had a decade-long friendship to build on. The fifth man he didn’t know. One true, bonafide convert out of 14 men. It should have been all of them!
Sarchette’s words hit him with a crisp clarity. If it was just the two of us. The idea was ludicrous, crazy even, but intoxicating. Its very existence goaded him, like a pretty girl in his orbit whom he didn’t have the nerve to ask on a date, back when such things posed great difficulty to him. He felt butterflies in his stomach, the thrill and the urgency that usually attended a scientific breakthrough, a radical reorientation of nature’s rules. But this breakthrough was more motivational than scientific.
He looked up at Sarchette’s heavyset figure, eyes ablaze. “You would, huh?”
***
“Here he comes,” Ames said, seeing Sheridan come out of the electrical room.
The crowd in the commons had thinned out considerably over the last hour, as “night” had turned to “midnight” on the flotilla, according to the clocks onboard, which were set to Greenwich Mean Time. Shaun had left them some time ago.
Sheridan signaled to Ames, who left his wife and daughter’s side to meet him, so they could talk one on one.
“Go back to the ship,” Sheridan said, keeping his voice low. “We’re leaving.”
“Why? What happened in there?”
“Our mission partners have decided they’re not going to the Moon. They’re staying here, on the flotilla.”
Ames bit his lower lip in frustration. “That’s been the rumor out here. It’s true, then?”
“I’m afraid so. I tried to talk them out of it, but only Mr. Sarchette came away from the meeting still committed. We’re going to undock and regroup. Then we’ll come up with a plan.”
“Wait a minute. What kind of plan?”
Sheridan blinked. “To start a Moon colony.”
“You’re not serious. With two ships and two crews?” Ames said doubtfully. “It was challenging enough with fifteen of each!”
“I’m not afraid of a challenge.”
“The expedition’s over, Mr. Sheridan. You must see that.”
“Not for me.”
Ames considered his boss. He was sweating and his pupils were dilated, fight-or-flight instinct affecting his decision-making.
In the Service, Ames had seen plenty of airmen fail their assigned tasks. Many times he had deliberately set up competent men to fail just to see how they handled it. He did this because he found that reaction to failure was a better metric than competence for predicting a long, successful career. In men’s reactions to failure, rashness was the worst trait one could exhibit.
“Mr. Sheridan, I can tell you’re upset. This upsets me, too. Please don’t let emotion get the better of you, least of all now.”
“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Ames. I’m not one of your green recruits. Do you think I haven’t faced dire setbacks like this before? I’ve had to build up my companies from nothing twice. You know what I learned during those trials? Never, ever doubt yourself. Do you doubt my abilities?”
Ames set his jaw. He felt at odds with himself, loyalty and rationality engaged in an evenly matched tug of war over control of his actions.
“I wouldn’t have brought my family along if I did,” he said.
“Good. Go back to the ship. We depart in an hour. If you’re late, I won’t promise that I’ll wait for you.”
Ames looked over his shoulder at Phyllis. “Go back to the Betelgeuse, honey. I’ll catch up.”
“What about Jeremiah and Connor?” she said, her voice edged with concern. She couldn’t hear everything they had said, but their tone communicated enough.
Ames palmed his forehead. He had forgotten about the boys. They could be anywhere.
“I’ll find them. You go on ahead.”
“Okay.”
Phyllis left and Miranda followed, glancing worriedly back at her father.
“Connor’s here?” Sheridan asked.
“Yes, somewhere. Jeremiah’s with him. Don’t worry, I’ll track them down.”
He paused to make sure Phyllis and Miranda were out of earshot. “There’s something else. My wife is pregnant. She just told me today. It’s early yet, but she’s certain. I won’t continue the expedition without a good doctor on staff.”
Sheridan’s demeanor softened. “I wouldn’t ask you to. I think there’s a doctor on Mr. Sarchette’s crew. I’ll check for you.”
“Thank you,” Ames said, sighing.
“Cheer up, Mr. Ames. We’re going to the Moon, and you’re going to be a father again. This may end up being the greatest day of your life.”
Maybe. Maybe not. Ames only knew that life’s circumstances were not supposed to change this rapidly. His carefully managed and ordered life suddenly had many balls in the air. He didn’t like it.
“Are you sure we can’t wait until tomorrow?” he asked. “We could use the time to convince more people to our side. It would increase our chances of success exponentially.”
“I was tempted by that too, Mr. Ames. No, I fear continued argument would only weaken our resolve, not theirs. We should leave while the crew is still united.”
The crew, Ames thought. How many of them would stay on now that they were virtually on their own?
He looked away, buying himself a moment to let his mind work. Night-vision cityscapes had replaced the scenes of urban warfare on the Earth-based news feeds projected on the far wall.
“I think you should allow the crew to stay here if that is their wish,” he said. He waited expectantly for Sheridan to protest.
“That could put us in an awful bind,” Sheridan said.
“Trust me, it’s better to let them leave peacefully now than plant the germ of resentment that leads to a revolt in the future.”
Sheridan thought about it. He pinched his nose.
“I’ll make an announcement before we get underway. I’ll give them a choice, but I’ll do my best to convince them to remain on the crew.”
“I don’t care what you promise them, as long as they and their families are free to choose.” Ames turned to go, but Sheridan caught him by the elbow.
“For what it’s worth, you were right about where men’s real loyalties lie. I was foolish to think this expedition would make better, more selfless people of us. I won’t make the same mistake again.”
Ames knew it was as close to an apology as he would get. He wondered if Sheridan included himself in his assessment, or if he still believed he was chasing after this colony purely for the improvement of mankind.
“We were both right,” he replied. “I just happened to be right this time.”
They parted ways. Sheridan headed through the north corridor back toward the Betelgeuse. Ames split south where he hoped to find Jeremiah and Connor.
***
“I wonder what’s in here,” Connor said for the umpteenth time.
He grabbed the door handle set into the curved wall of the passageway. Like the other doors he had tried, it wouldn’t open.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Jeremiah asked, hovering behind him.
He looked around at the passageway, which was identical to the last one, which was identical to the one before that. They hadn’t seen a grown-up in what felt like forever.
“We’re not lost,” Connor said. “I know exactly where we are.”
Jeremiah had his doubts. “Which way to the ship, then?”
“Why do you want to go back there?”
“Because I’m hungry. And tired.”
“Stop being a baby.”
Connor gave up trying to open the door and floated through the next intersection to try the next door. It was locked, too.
Jeremiah plodded after him. “We’re like rats trapped in a maze.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Jeremiah stared at the three numbers on the wall at the intersection. “Hey, do you know what these numbers mean?”
Connor briefly registered the numbers. “They’re serial numbers. They’re on everything.”
“I think they’re a secret code. Like on a treasure map. I’ve seen them before.”
“Treasure map? That’s kid stuff, Jeremiah.”
“I mean a map to get back to the ship.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Connor proceeded to the next door. It pushed open at his touch. “Hey, it opened!”
Jeremiah turned and saw the older boy go through the door. As he drew near, the light inside went out. He stuck his head inside timidly. The light from the passageway didn’t penetrate much into the room. A low, mechanical hum came from within, and the air was warm and dry.
“Connor?”
Jeremiah reached into the room and felt along the wall, looking for a light switch. As soon as he found it, something grabbed his arm and pulled him into the room. He screamed as he flipped over and his back slammed against what sounded like a bass drum.
Connor was laughing hysterically. The light came on and Jeremiah could see the older boy, clutching his belly and leering at him.
“That wasn’t funny, Connor!” Jeremiah yelled.
“You screamed like a little baby,” Connor said between peals of laughter.
“Stop calling me that.”
He righted himself and looked around. The room was small, less than 3 meters square. Big metal boxes like furnaces occupied each corner. Pipes led from each one across the ceiling. Six pipes were bundled together and disappeared into the bulkhead between the room and the passageway.
“I wonder what these things do,” Connor said, tapping the flat face of one of the one metal boxes. It boomed hollowly.
He grabbed the edge of the metal sheet, which featured a gap between the two flat sides, and started to pull.
Something Jeremiah’s dad said echoes in his mind. When you feel what you’re about to do is wrong, don’t do it.
“I don’t think we should be in here,” he said.
“The door was open. Help me pry this loose.”
“Let’s get out of here, Connor. Let’s go back to the ship. I’m hungry.”
Connor ignored him. He planted both feet on the box and pulled on the stiff metal sheet with all his strength. The side of the sheet bent and slipped through his fingers, dislodging the pipe sticking sideways out of the top of the box. Connor tumbled to the floor.
Jeremiah laughed as Connor sat up, rubbing his head. At the same time the box came alive, whirring faintly at first, but gradually getting louder. Jeremiah felt the air move, swirling toward the open end of the pipe.
“You broke it!” Jeremiah cried over the churning air.
He dove toward the end of the pipe, which was about as wide as his head. He had to brace himself against the box to keep from getting sucked in.
“Help me fix it, Connor!”
He looked about the room. Connor was gone. He realized if a grown-up found him like this, the damage to the metal box and the pipe would be pinned on him. His dad would kill him. He let go of the end of the pipe and kicked at the wall he stood on, flying out the hatch against the rising tide of air. He shut the door and caught up with Connor three intersections later.
“That was a close one,” Connor said, letting himself drift freely around the passageway while he caught his breath.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Jeremiah scolded. “I think you broke it.”
“Yeah, well, the door was open.”
“I want to go back to the ship, Connor. Do you know the way or not?”
“Sure.”
Connor surveyed each of the six passageways judiciously: up, down, left, right, forward, back. “This way,” he said finally.
“You idiot, we just came that way,” Jeremiah said. He was dismayed to find out that they were truly lost, but he also relished the opportunity to insult the older boy.
“Which way do you think we should go, genius?”
Jeremiah clocked the set of numbers on the wall. All the numbers were different from, but close to, the last set of numbers he’d seen.
“We need to go north. I think I heard one of the grown-ups say that.”
Connor looked at him blankly. “Which way’s north?”
“I think these numbers can tell us.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. Like I told you, it’s this way.”
A light went off in Jeremiah’s head. “Hold on! I think I know how to find our way north. If those are three-dimensional coordinates, we just need to find the hallway where the first number stays the same and the second number goes up.”
Connor wasn’t as far along in his geometry lessons as Jeremiah. “How do you know that?” he asked.
“I learned it! Come on. This intersection is marked 6 and 10,” Jeremiah said, reading off the first two numbers.
He selected a passageway at random and went as far as the next intersection, excited to put his theory to the test. Connor stayed behind. The next intersection started with 5 and 10.
“This way’s west!” he called out.
Connor said nothing. Jeremiah went back and veered left in front of the older boy. The next intersection’s first two coordinates were 6 and 9.
“This way’s south!” Jeremiah cried triumphantly. He pointed back in Connor’s direction. “Hey, you were right. That is the right way. That’s north.”
Jeremiah again drifted past Connor, who hung back. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked. He stopped and looked at him. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s stupid, Jeremiah,” Connor said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“What do you mean? It’s math!”
“I say we go this way,” Jeremiah said, pointing down a different passageway.
“I told you, that’s east. I heard the grown-ups say our ship was in the north wing, or something like that.” He pointed north again, as if repeating this simple gesture would override Connor’s obstinacy.
“This is the right way,” Connor asserted. “Are you coming or not?”
Jeremiah didn’t want to be alone, but he was also tired and hungry and he knew he would get to the ship sooner if he went north.
“I’m going this way,” he said. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
With that, Jeremiah set off on his own, ticking off the x and y coordinates at each intersection: 6 and 11, 6 and 12, 6 and 13. Each set of numbers confirmed in his mind that he was heading in the right direction.
He looked back. Connor had given in and was following him. Jeremiah stopped and waited.
Connor pointed east again as he neared. “We need to go this way.” There was bitter anger in his voice. He was probably mad that Jeremiah, 2 years younger than him, had shown him up.
Jeremiah rubbed it in. “You’re just saying that. You don’t care which way we go. You just want to be in charge.”
He turned around and kept going.
“You’re going to get us lost!” Connor yelled, hustling after him. His voice took on a guttural, sinister quality. “I’m older than you. We need to go the way I say.”
“You’re just a kid like me. I’m telling you, it’s nor—”
He didn’t finish, as Connor speared him in the belly, knocking the wind out of him. They crashed into the concave bulkhead, and Connor wrapped his legs around Jeremiah’s waist.
“Get off me!”
“Big baby. Don’t know anything,” Connor muttered spitefully.
Jeremiah had no leverage to use his legs, so he flailed his arms. Connor caught hold of Jeremiah’s right wrist and twisted, then placed a hand between his shoulder blades and pulled.
Jeremiah gasped as white-hot pain shot through his shoulder joint. He felt the socket bend in a way that it was not supposed to bend.
“Ah! Stop, that hurts.”
“Shut up,” Connor said calmly. He pulled harder.
Jeremiah took a deep breath and screamed as loud as he could. Connor startled and his grip loosened. Jeremiah somehow planted one foot on the wall, used that leg to pivot around, and landed a closed fist he’d made with his free hand on Connor’s ear. Connor wailed, holding his head, and retreated.
Suddenly, Jeremiah felt a large hand grab him by the scruff of his neck.
“What’s going on here?” Ames bellowed.
A wave of relief washed over Jeremiah—until he saw his father’s rage. Then he felt fear and panic all over again, a flurry of emotions.
“He started it, Mr. Ames!” Connor said.
“Shut up! No I didn’t!” Jeremiah said. “He hit me first, Dad. I swear.”
“I don’t care who struck first. Why were you fighting?”
Jeremiah’s words tumbled out, mixing with Connor’s into an indiscernible stew. Ames couldn’t understand either one of them.
“Quiet, both of you! We need to get back to the ship. Can you handle that without making a racket?”
“Yes, Mr. Ames,” Connor said.
Tears flowed down Jeremiah’s cheeks. His dad looked down at him. “Can you handle that, son?” he asked. Jeremiah nodded.
His dad shoved him down the passageway, continuing north. “Come along,” he called after Connor.
***
It took Ames 10 minutes to find the Betelgeuse, and he kept a firm grip on Jeremiah the whole time. They would have gone in circles if Connor hadn’t spotted Sheridan waiting for them at the junction nearest to the ship.
“Took your time, didn’t you?” Sheridan said crossly as they headed for the docking mech.
Connor went ahead of them, reaching his father first. “We got lost. Jeremiah started acting like a big baby and—”
“I did not!” Jeremiah yelled.
“Enough,” Ames said, twisting his son’s collar tightly in his fist. “I have no patience to deal with your tantrums now.”
He waited on the flotilla side of the docking mech for the boys to board the ship ahead of him. They drifted through the forward airlock and shut the inner door.
“Go to your room, son. We’ll discuss punishment later.” To Ames’s relief, the boy obeyed without argument.
Sheridan spun the crank to seal the hatch, then evacuated the air. “What happened?” he asked.
“They were fighting when I found them.”
“Oh.”
Sheridan looked uncomfortably at his son, noticing for the first time his tousled hair and tear-stained cheeks. He was not known for being a hands-on parent, to put it mildly.
“You’re grounded too, Connor,” he started.
“But Dad, he started it!” the boy started to protest.
To Sheridan’s credit, he stood firm. “I don’t care. Go to your room. Now.”
Connor groaned and followed in Jeremiah’s footsteps.
“I assume we’re the last ones?” Ames said.
“Yes, everyone’s accounted for.”
A green light next to the hatch indicated the airlock was clear. Sheridan banged the bulkhead with his fist. “Separate, Ashwin!”
“Yes sir,” Ashwin said from above.
The arms on the docking mech retracted and a burst from the directional thrusters pulled them away. Two people appeared as silhouettes in the small window on the flotilla side. They stared at each other across the slowly expanding gulf of space. The Betelgeuse may as well have been a million klicks away.
“There are a doctor and nurse on Sarchette’s crew, in case you’re still wondering,” Sheridan said, watching the docking port recede into the patchwork of the flotilla.
“That’s a relief. Did you issue the ultimatum to the crew?”
“Yes. They elected to stay.”
Ames’s brow furrowed. “All of them?”
“Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Ames. I made sure they knew what the right choice was. I put the crew together myself. Do you think I filled every vacancy with people who are disloyal?”
They turned and headed along the vestibule.
“Given your past record of choosing partners for this expedition, I would have said yes,” Ames said.
“Touché.”
On the flight deck, the whole crew was present. Ames and Sheridan drifted forward into the cockpit to look out the viewing window.
“Range 100 meters,” Reuben reported.
“Look,” Sheridan said.
In the distance, visible through the lattice pattern of the flotilla’s passageways, another ship, shaped like a whiskey jug, had also undocked from the flotilla and was drifting away. They knew without needing to be told that it was Sarchette’s ship, the Corsica.
“You’re short on friends,” said the woman standing next to Sheridan, as she too peered out the window.
Ames processed the strange voice slowly. He started upon seeing the strange woman, who held a leather satchel case in one hand. Her presence wouldn’t be more surprising if she was a little green alien.
“Who is this?!” he exclaimed.
Sheridan did a double take. “Therese,” he said, astonished.
“What’s she doing here?! How did she get past—?” Ames cut himself off and flushed crimson. It was he who was supposed to be on watch for the last hour.
The corner of Therese’s lips curled upward. “I snuck onboard. I want to join your crew.”
“What about Becker?” Sheridan asked.
“I’m voiding my contract with Becker. We agreed to start a colony on the Moon. I cannot work for a man who takes commitments from others and then refuses to honor his own.”
Ames could not believe what he was hearing. “You’re not going to let her stay, Mr. Sheridan?” It was half-statement, half-question.
Sheridan raised a hand to silence him. He spoke to Therese. “You should be aware of the added dangers this expedition entails now. We lack many essentials.”
“That’s why I brought this.”
She released the clasps on the satchel bag and unfurled it, revealing hundreds of bulbs, vines, and seedlings in small, freeze-dried containers.
“I have potato, sweet potato, eggplant, tomato, spinach, squash, pole beans, cucumber, pepper, and others,” she said. “You have the will, I have the way, as they say.”
Sheridan’s eyes widened. “Where did you get those?”
She refastened the clasps on the satchel case. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” Ames interjected. “Mr. Sheridan, if she stole those seedlings, we have to disavow her. We can’t be connected with a crime like that.”
“What if she did steal them?” Sheridan said. He looked at Ames, eyes burning coals of anger and lust. “If she did steal them, what is she taking from them that they haven’t taken from me a hundredfold?”
Ames was indignant. In military jurisprudence, theft above the Earth’s atmosphere was equivalent to attempted murder. The high cost of transporting goods created an artificial scarcity in space, meaning everything people possessed was a life-essential commodity. When you stole from someone, you effectively were murdering them. Ames counted himself fortunate that he never had to court-martial a man for theft. Here it was happening right under his nose, and Sheridan was asking him to condone it.
It was all going so wrong so quickly.
“That’s not how the law sees it, and that’s not how they’ll see it, either,” Ames said, pointing out the window at the flotilla.
“It doesn’t matter how they see it,” Sheridan said. “To administer justice, they have to catch us. They’ve already demonstrated their reluctance to leave their precious space station.”
A staunch silence filled Ames’s ears. He was acutely aware of ten pairs of eyes on him, watching to see how far he would take his disagreement with their boss, the man whose mission they had just rededicated themselves and their families to.
Ames lowered his voice. “We have time before this gets serious. We go back to the flotilla, we drop her off, we make things right.”
“What is right?” Sheridan said airily. “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must. Thucydides.”
Ames whispered, “Is that how you intend to run things on this ship moving forward?”
Before Sheridan could formulate a response, a male voice came through the longwave radio receiver, high and tense. “Betelgeuse, this FL41. What are you doing? You’re drifting away. Over.”
Everyone on the flight deck watched the receiver motionlessly, as if trying to hide from the voice coming from the flotilla.
“Betelgeuse, what’s going on? Do you have an emergency? Please respond. Over.”
“We need to respond,” Ashwin said. “If we don’t, they’ll assume we’re in trouble and send a rescue.”
Sheridan reached for a headset, handling it as if it was made of glass. He paused before putting it on and looked at the faces of the crew. His eyes rested on Ames.
“Can you think of a way this can work without her, without seed stock?” he asked.
Ames gritted his teeth. “If you let her stay onboard, you will burn every bridge you have with those people. There’s no going back.”
His words seemed to puncture an undissolved packet of doggedness in Sheridan’s bloodstream. He pulled the headset down over his ears.
“FL41, this is Wayne Sheridan. Don’t be alarmed. We’re fine. Over.”
A new voice came on. It was Ezekiel Parham, the ship builder. “Wayne, what are you doing? You agreed to abide by the majority’s decision. You and Sarchette… have you lost your minds?”
Sheridan positioned his finger over the radio kill switch.
“Farewell, Zeke. When you’re ready for the Moon, we’ll be waiting for you.” He swallowed. “Don’t have too much fun without me. Betelgeuse out.”
He flipped the switch, and the radio link went dead.