Mother Moon Read online

  Mother Moon

  Bob Goddard

  Timbuktu Publishing

  Published by:

  Timbuktu Publishing

  Stables Bungalow, Mill Reach, Buxton, Norwich, NR10 5EJ

  www.timbuktu-publishing.co.uk

  ISBN 978-0-9563518-1-4

  Copyright © Bob Goddard 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of Timbuktu Publishing.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that supplied by the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Cover design and ebook conversion by Zesty Design

  www.zestydesign.co.uk

  Prologue

  In 2015 the European Space Agency produced a short video called Destination: Moon. It reviewed past exploration of our nearest neighbour and set out the ESA’s vision for the future. They are planning an international colony at the Moon’s south pole. The reason? Plentiful water-ice and perpetual sunlight will sustain a permanent research and manufacturing base there.

  All the elements needed for human habitation and space exploration exist in the lunar soil and the depths of the polar craters. The sun shines almost constantly upon the mountains at the poles providing ample power. And gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth. It makes the Moon the best location for developing our onward expansion across the solar system. You can see ESA’s video online here: www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2015/01/Destination_Moon

  But a self-sufficient colony on the Moon could be much more than a convenient stepping-stone for man’s exploration of the cosmos…

  1. Bad News Day

  Moon, 2087: Friday, 7th February

  The day the news broke, Will Cooper was deep inside the cold, dark heart of Malapert Mountain, close to the Moon’s south pole. He was only half concentrating on the spectacular plass production process. The spinning arc of brilliant blue light, dazzling despite his protective face shield, awed him but his mind was elsewhere.

  Another seven months and Cooper would be on his way home from Armstrong Base. His three-year stint with the International Scientific Community On the Moon (ISCOM) would be over. An image of Monterey, California, flickered into his mind: surf crashing on a rocky beach and a girl with dark curly hair. She turned to him with those laughing eyes, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and said, “I’ll be here… waiting for you, Will.” The sweet vision faded leaving him more alone than ever.

  “Ah, Ginny!” he sighed, forcing his concentration back to the vast tube of plass being extruded on the other side of the pressure wall. Who’d have dreamt that Moon dust could be turned into unbreakable plastic glass in the vacuum of the Moon? Or that these whirling electrodes could spin five-metre-wide tubes to form the Moon colony’s surface accommodation?

  His comm’s shrill emergency alarm interrupted his thoughts. Cooper turned away from the plass plant inspection window and touched the screen on his left sleeve to accept the message. He cupped his hand over his right ear to shut out the hum of machinery noise and hear the sound from his tiny implanted speaker.

  It was Nadia Sokolova, Governor of the 297-strong colony. She didn’t look happy. Her vidcast was terse: “Stop what you’re doing and come to my office immediately. Stop what you’re doing and come to my office immediately. Stop what—” He hit the end button to prevent it repeating and confirm he’d received it.

  “Boy oh boy! Who rattled her cage?” he muttered.

  He could see it had been sent to Lian Song, Head of Biosphere; Tamala Ngomi, Head of Personnel; and himself, the Head of Engineering. Now that was unusual. To pull all three department heads away from their duties at the same time, it had to be serious.

  He shouted over the mechanical hubbub to plant technician Daniel Gallagher, “Take over here, Danny boy. I have to go see the Ice Maiden.” He pulled an exaggerated smile as he handed over the face shield then turned and started the loping, slow-mo Moon jog along the grey rock tunnel to the admin centre. Cooper didn’t mind the exercise. It would help slow the onset of osteoporosis and keep his rehab time to a minimum when he got back to Earth in September. Any opportunity to give his wasting muscles and bones a workout in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity was a bonus.

  He punched through the dry, flinty smell of the recycled air with spring-like thrusts from his long legs. His antelope gait was picked up by motion sensors. Background lighting flared to white brightness just ahead of him, then faded to dull yellow a few moments after he passed.

  It was just over a kilometre from the broad cavern, which contained the plass plant and the other manufacturing units, to the tunnel entrance. Thanks to the low gravity, Cooper covered it in under two minutes. It had taken him weeks of practice to master the art of Moon running when he’d first arrived and he’d suffered his fair share of cuts and bruises. Getting up to speed with a ski-jumper stance was easy. It was the stopping in low gravity that proved tricky. Cooper’s first attempts propelled him painfully into the ceiling until he learned to lean back almost horizontally and let his shoes skid along the floor.

  Now, as he approached the end of the tunnel, he put that hard-won technique into practice. At the portal leading to the rest of Armstrong Base, he skidded to a halt to give the mechanism time to catch up. The twin pressure doors clicked then swung open with a sigh.

  It was a further half-kilometre through the plass tube connecting the mountain’s industrial facility with the colony’s main accommodation out on the surface. As he jogged the last stretch he could only imagine the glimmer of Moon rock and dust on the surface outside and the sharp needles of starlight against the coal-black sky overhead. This tube, like the rest of Armstrong Base, was buried under two metres of Moon dust and rubble – or regolith as they called it – to protect against the hostile void of space.

  Governor Sokolova stood behind her desk as Cooper bounced into her tiny office. She looked her usual stern and forbidding self but today there was a darker mood etched on her elegant face. Song and Ngomi were already there.

  “What is it, Nadia?” puffed Cooper, still breathless from his sprint. “Why the panic call?”

  “Please, Will!” her voice cracked. She held her hand up to silence him.

  She looked down at the screen on her desk and spoke quietly, “I didn’t want to believe this information from our ops centre in Darmstadt, but I’m afraid it is true. I have just received confirmation from Roscosmos, Moscow.”

  The Governor raised her face and took a deep breath. “A comet is on collision course with Earth. They say impact will be in six days.”

  There was a momentary silence, then Cooper and Ngomi both started speaking at once.

  “Holy crap!” said Cooper. “Do we know how big it is?”

  “Oh my God! W-where is it going to land?” stammered Tamala Ngomi.

  “And how come this wasn’t picked up by the guys tracking all the asteroids?” asked Cooper.

  The Governor held her hand up again.

  “Will, it’s massive – the nucleus is nine kilometres long. It’s called Comet Santos. We’ve known about it for years and it has never been a threat before.” She shook her head. “They’re saying the Pacific Ocean, Tamala, but with a body of ice and rock that size, it doesn’t matter where it hits. This could be a global disaster.”

  They were shocked into silence again. Then, one after the other, they turned to
look at Lian Song, who hadn’t said a word. The Chinese woman was staring at the floor, her shiny jet-black hair hiding her face.

  “You okay, Lian?” asked the Governor.

  She looked up and they saw tears streaming down her face. The salty water rolled in big slow blobs in the low gravity.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice quavering. “All my country, very, very sorry.” She sobbed and buried her face in her hands.

  “Do you know something about this, Lian?” asked Sokolova. “Something we don’t?”

  Song nodded her head, her hair shaking like a curtain.

  “Then for God’s sake, tell us!”

  Lian Song slowly lifted her face again. She struggled to force the words out. “It… it was a mining mission… to harvest the water and minerals. But something went wrong,” she sobbed again. “The orbit changed and we can’t control it.”

  “We?!” shouted Cooper. “You mean the freakin’ Chinese are responsible for this?”

  In a voice choked with tears and anger, she said, “Yes, the freakin’ Chinese are responsible. Mostly irresponsible. And stupid. Anything you can say, it is true.” She turned and fled from the room.

  Ngomi broke the silence. “I don’t understand.”

  “None of us understand, Tamala!” snapped the Governor. “Except the Chinese, apparently!”

  “But… Lian can’t have known about this for long,” said Ngomi. “I talked with her at supper yesterday and she was fine. She must have got information from her government this morning. It’s not her fault, anyway.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Cooper wasn’t feeling sympathetic. “So the Chinese pushed this comet onto a collision course with Earth just to get their hands on some lousy minerals?”

  “I don’t think they could have,” said Sokolova. “A body this big can’t be steered. Not by any technology we possess. It has a mass of billions of tons, at least.”

  “So… what did they do?” Cooper spread his arms, palms up. “Lian seems to think they are responsible in some way. Typical, half-assed— ”

  “Wait!” The Governor held her hand up again as she stared at her screen. “There’s an update. It says: ‘Heads of governments are discussing ways to mount a mission to deflect the comet.’ So maybe they can do something?”

  “Do what, exactly?” asked Cooper. “Send up a boy scout with a big stick to poke it off course? The only ship capable of reaching this thing in time is our monthly shuttle, the one due to leave Earth with our supplies, day after tomorrow. And we all know who owns that – the freakin’ Chinese!”

  The Governor’s tiny office fell silent for a few seconds.

  “You realise what this means, then?” said Sokolova, raising her eyes to look at Cooper and Ngomi. “There’s a good chance we’re not going to be resupplied next week. And if the worst happens – if they can’t deflect it – then it could be months before they are able to reach us.”

  “Oh my God! We’ll never survive that long… will we?” The Malawian woman stared longingly at the blue hemisphere of Earth visible in the window screen on Sokolova’s office wall. The real-time image, captured by the camera on top of Mt Malapert, showed enough of eastern Africa for her to make out Lake Malawi. “I was due to go home next week,” she whispered, her eyes filling. “Maybe I never will?”

  “Of course you will, Tamala,” snapped Sokolova. “We will all go home. There might be a slight delay, that’s all. I feel as shocked and angry as you do, but if we are going to keep everybody alive and healthy in this little outpost, we need to keep our heads. We need to take stock and make plans to cope with this new situation.

  “So please, start working on what we need to do in case of a delay in re-supply of one month, three months… six months maybe? Just to cover all the contingencies.”

  Sokolova looked thoughtful. “I need to go and speak to Lian – make sure she knows we are not blaming her – and get her working on a revised Biosphere plan. We’re going to need her expertise to expand food production.”

  She checked her screen’s time display. “And we need to announce this to everyone before it appears on the midday news. Be back here with some positive ideas in 45 minutes, please.”

  “We’ll be here,” said Cooper, putting his arm around the shoulders of the weeping Ngomi and leading her out of the office.

  * * * * *

  Earth, 1504

  Yonaton smiled. He knew what was coming next. After one last glance at the compass and the murky brown waters of the wide estuary ahead, he peered around the wooden ship’s wheel and looked down on the purple-robed cleric on the gently heaving deck below.

  “Lord. Oh, Lo-o-ord,” wailed the portly Cardinal, his arms outstretched and face turned up to the cold, cloudy sky.

  “Lord, who brought mankind out of the waters to tame this wicked wo-o-orld,” he intoned, hurling his words over the wooden side of the ship at the wind and the waves.

  “Lord, who sent Kris, your only son, to sacrifice his life while delivering your chosen people from the horrors of the de-e-eep.” He shook the conch shell and crooked staff in his hands, which made his jowls wobble.

  Yonaton stifled a yawn and turned his fur collar up against the chill breeze.

  “Lord, protect us from the evils of this ocean and the devils who inhabit this Satansland, which you have sent us to cle-e-eanse.” The Cardinal’s voice trailed away on a melodramatic down note. A wooden block creaked mournfully overhead.

  “Lord, help us to carry out your will, and return us safely once more to the glory and the purity of Dominion, your promised land.”

  Yonaton looked back at the compass and muttered under his breath, “Oh yes, Lordy Lord, don’t forget the glory and the purity.”

  But the obese Cardinal wasn’t finished yet. “Lord, bless this holy mission and we, your humble ser-er-vants. Give us the strength to…to carry out your wishes.” His voice wavered as if he was losing the thread of his lofty thoughts.

  “If the Lord wills it – SO BE IT!” the Cardinal shouted.

  “So be it!” repeated the assembled sailors, soldiers and churchmen crammed together on the mid-deck.

  “IF the Lord wills it,” muttered Captain Yonaton under his breath, as he shook his head in sad amusement. What a performance, he thought. What a waste of time and effort!

  He was still smiling and shaking his head when he glanced down to find the Cardinal staring at him with a dark and ferocious look.

  Yonaton dropped his smile like a hot coal and gave a solemn nod. But he knew his moment of levity had been spotted. The tall-hatted figure was whispering to one of his simpering underlings, who proceeded to climb the steps to the steerage deck, where Yonaton held the great wooden wheel.

  “Oh, hell’s teeth. Here we go again,” muttered the greying mariner.

  “His Eminence, the High Cardinal of Loming,” the junior priestling barked in an imperious tone, “requests that you attend him immediately, in his cabin.”

  My cabin! thought Yonaton. But he replied, with more than a hint of annoyance, “It will be my pleasure. Just as soon as I get someone else to steer my ship.”

  The spotty youth had already turned with a swirl of his short purple cloak and was clumping his big hob-nailed boots down the wooden stairs.

  The captain scanned the foredeck. Where was Mammed when he was needed? The curly-haired youth – Yonaton’s adopted son – was supposed to be testing the sea’s depth with a lead line, but he had vanished. Yonaton looked up. Ah yes, there he was, with his legs wrapped around the top of the foremast, sitting astride the long sloping yard that held up the huge triangular sail. Again.

  “Benyamin!” Yonaton called to his first mate and cartographer, who was talking to the four crew members on the mid-deck below. “Up here, please.”

  After a few more words with the sailors, Benyamin bounded upwards, two steps at a time.

  “What was that all about, Yonny my friend?” He cracked his infectious lopsided smile.

  Yonaton smile
d back. “Bloody Cardinal caught me sniggering at his sermon. He says I’m: ‘requested to attend him immediately, in his cabin!’” The captain rolled his eyes. “So take the wheel for a spell, please Ben, while I get a lecture from his Eminence!”

  “Hahaha! I swear you’ll get yourself strung up one of these days, Yonny. Where are we headed?”

  “Keep to this side of the estuary. There are sandbanks that could strand us in the middle of this waterway.”

  “I know! I charted it.”

  “Shh,” said the captain, “keep your voice down or you’ll be in as much trouble as me. We’ve never been here before, Benyamin, remember?”

  “Of course.” Ben grinned. “I’ve never seen this place.”

  “On second thoughts…” Yonaton paused to stroke his short salt ‘n’ pepper beard. “Why don’t we sail Pelican right down the middle?”

  “What… and run her aground? On purpose!?” Ben’s smile faded as his eyebrows rose.

  “Yes, why not? We can put her on a sandbank. It’s high tide now, coming up to half-Moon. It’ll be three or four days before the tide is high enough to float us off again. We could do with a day or two to find the Dasony people before the Cardinal’s holy Convertors get their hooks into them.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Yes, let’s do it. Give me just long enough to look suitably chastised, then steer her across to the middle, Ben.”

  With a sigh, Captain Yonaton set off down the steps to face the chief cleric.

  * * * *

  Moon, 2087

  It was 11.49 when Cooper, with Ngomi in tow, returned to the Governor’s office. Lian Song was already there, red-eyed but more composed.

  “Come in. Shut the door please. There’s more news,” said Sokolova, briskly. “As we thought, the Moon shuttle is being prepared for an early launch to intercept and deflect this comet. There are no more details of the mission yet.

  “The back-up ship will be brought into service to resupply us – and take Tamala and others home – but it will be at least three weeks, maybe more, before it’s ready. And if the interception can’t prevent an impact there will be a further delay before it can launch. Nobody knows how long that might be.” Sokolova looked down and shook her head.