Creations (27 page)

“Maybe he figured if we were stupid enough to believe it, others would be too. Stupid enough to pay for it as well.”

“That’s not really enough to go on, Max.”

“It makes perfect sense to me. Do you remember how Oliver chose that office right next to the terminal room, when we first arrived? It can’t be a coincidence. Everything fits — my boss mentioned the threats in that call, she mentioned the fact I hadn’t told Gillian yet — anyone listening in would have known just how to hurt me the most. And if they could access UCLA servers, which whoever sent that message to Gillian must have done, they could get hold of the full set, every threat I’d ever been sent. The day we had that meeting about the nav system, that time during the rains: that was when Gillian went, she’d already gone by the time I got home. Oliver must have known what was waiting for me the whole time we were arguing with him.”

Safi wasn’t yet convinced, but seemed to be taking it seriously. “Okay, it’s possible I guess. And remember, the Prospectors weren’t the only project running on the island. There are all sorts of secrets tied up in that place.”

“Maybe he’s done it before, other places he’s worked. It would explain how his career got so far, ‘knowledge is power’, and all that.” The image of Oliver Rudd moving from job to job bugging every place he worked was easy to visualise for Max. It seemed to fit. “I’ll bet UCLA is one of those places too. That’ll be how he got the scans of those letters, if he left himself a backdoor. And the address he messaged Gillian from too.”

“You know, it could even explain that Anna Liu woman contacting you when she did as well. If she was the one buying the information off him, she would have needed another informant once Oliver had left.”

“You’re right, it fits everything. Oliver and Anna Liu, what a partnership.”

“What a loser more like. Nothing to contribute, everything to gain. Still, he’s gone now. We don’t need to worry about him
anymore.”

“Is there any chance he’s got his hands on the technology though?” Max had a sudden image of Oliver passing the techniques they were so desperate to protect to anyone who wanted to buy them.

“No, he left before we knew how to crack the problem, before you brought Doug on board. And that bug wouldn’t have helped him once he’d left; he’d have to be within half a mile of the place to pick up what it caught. As far as he’s concerned we’re still tying ourselves up in knots trying to do the impossible.”

“Good. Because if he’s as deceitful as he seems then I’d hate to have him know we got it working.”

“I bet he’d be kicking himself if he did.”

“Yeah, but not for long. It’s what he’d do after that that worries me.”

“I wonder if we should tell Victor? See his reaction?”

It was certainly tempting. “No, I think I’d rather let him sweat.”

Max tried to get some sleep after that, once Safi had reminded him to strap in first. It was difficult though after what he’d just realised. He sat in silence, mulling over the likely sequence of events while everyone else on board slept.

The Earth was a lot smaller in the window when they passed the halfway point, and the Moon was already dominating the view on the other side. They were heading for a point just off the edge of the Moon’s disk, and once they got there, just five minutes’ worth of thrust from the vehicle’s engines was all they would need to slow them into lunar orbit.

In the end only half an hour separated the orbital injection from the de-orbit burn that would send them dropping to the surface, but that time was still enough to watch the whole lunar landscape pass by, sixty miles beneath them. It looked like light grey plaster to Max and only the sharply defined shadows showed the true shape of the ground with its rounded hills,
mountain peaks, and circular craters. Each pass took them straight over Mare Crisium, their eventual landing ground, and every time they went over Max struggled to see some sign of the base. He couldn’t see it at all until Safi pointed out a tiny smudge of darker land near the eastern edge. It wasn’t the base itself, just the disturbed soil extending almost a mile around it, where over a decade of human activity and traffic had stirred up the dirt. Only in complete darkness could the base be seen directly, when its lights were no longer swamped by the sun.

Three orbits later they got the signal to descend and make their approach. The engines were fired once again, but this time they wouldn’t stop until they were on solid ground. The craft began to slow, and as the speed that was keeping it in orbit vanished, it started gradually to fall toward the Moon. At first the engines were fired along the direction of motion, purely to lose speed, but as the descent rate increased the craft pitched over toward the vertical and began to support itself on its own thrust. Max had a clear view of the ground as their orientation changed, until finally they were upright, moving slowly forward at almost constant height. He still had no idea how high up they really were, until suddenly the ground came into focus, and what had looked like a two-dimensional pattern of light and shadow became a real, three-dimensional landscape. Then the first man-made objects appeared, red and white open-framed towers way below them, holding the dishes and antennae that were guiding the landing craft in. He tried looking ahead through the pilots’ forward-facing windows, but it was hard to make anything out so he turned back to the side instead, and suddenly the base was there, all two square miles of it, safely isolated from the landing site by a good mile of empty ground. A few blasts from the control jets stopped the craft’s forward motion, and then it settled slowly downward, kicking up dust with its exhaust. The landing was a perfect one, gentle and almost silent, and as the engines were shut down for the final
time, the dust clouds outside immediately settled to the ground as if nothing had happened.

“Okay folks, we’re here,” one of the pilots said. “One sixth gravity, so don’t bang your heads when you get up.”

They vented what little fuel remained out into the vacuum, then once the tanks were safely dry, a truck from the base arrived to tow them over to the docking ports. The ride seemed to take ages, but Max spent the whole time studying the base as they drew closer. He’d seen it on television so many times that he knew pretty well how it was laid out, but as with everything on this journey, seeing it with his own eyes was different. Safi was leaning over him to look outside too, pointing out the structures that she remembered from her last visit.

“Those are the original modules off to the left there. Can you believe they’re built out of sandbags? The inner layer is airtight, but all they did was bag up the dirt and pile it over.”

“Everything’s built underground now, right?”

“More or less, yeah, they’ve got decent earth moving gear nowadays. You can pretty much guess the age of each module by how far down they managed to sink it. Lunar soil is a good radiation shield if it’s thick enough, but it takes a lot of digging.”

In fact the most recent additions were just vague mounds of soil, sheltering the labs and living quarters inside.

“How do people cope without windows?” Max said.

“There are viewing areas spread around. You wouldn’t want to spend your whole time in unshielded sunlight though. It’s pretty harmful if you get too much.”

Finally the tow truck got them as far as the base. The docking adapters were like large pressurised tunnels, articulated to swing out over the landers and clamp onto the hatch at the top. They heard the attachment taking place, followed by a faint hiss of air as the pressures were equalised. Then one of the pilots opened the hatch from inside and grinned up at someone above him. “Welcome to Crisium.” Max heard a voice say.

Climbing the vertical ladder through the hatch was easy with one sixth of his normal weight, once he’d passed his bags up ahead of him. Then the six passengers were led along the tunnel and into the reception area. There were no large open spaces inside the base, just a network of cylindrical modules laid on their sides but the lighting and colours had been designed to make them seem as open and airy as possible. Even so, it wouldn’t be a place for the claustrophobic.

The docking tunnel led into another tunnel, then eventually to a meeting room where they were given a safety briefing by a base representative. Most of it was common sense — no open flames, no toxic chemicals — and Safi probably knew it backward, but she listened intently nonetheless. Then, eventually, they were allowed through into the main body of the base.

They came out into a corridor, one of the main thoroughfares of the settlement, with people passing by almost continuously. Down at one end they could see one of the viewing areas, with a small crowd gathered up against the thick glass staring at the low grey hills to the east. Most of them were dressed casually, in jeans and t-shirts, drinking coffee out of plastic cups. If it wasn’t for the view outside they could have been anywhere. Safi immediately ran over to join them and pressed herself up against the large window.

“Just the way I remember it,” she said, as Max joined her.

Ever since Max had set out on this trip he’d seen people doing nothing but stare wide-eyed at the scenery, and he’d done it enough times himself. “Magnificent desolation”, was the term one of the old Apollo astronauts had used, and it still fit this scene of undulating ridges and crests, cold and barren but captivating in its stark beauty. He wondered whether a day would ever come when people got bored of these sights and started to take them for granted. Safi, at least, certainly hadn’t.

“There should be someone here waiting for us,” she said,
looking round. “A friend of mine from when I was here before.” She scanned the faces in both directions, then suddenly stopped and smiled at a man standing off to the side. He was tall, with long messy hair and a dark grey beard, and he was smiling back at her broadly.

“Safi, my old friend,” he said with a heavy accent. “How are you?”

“I’m good, Ariel,” she said as he walked over to her. “Just fine.”

They hugged for a couple of seconds, then he took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. Max saw him mouth the words “You okay now?” and Safi nodded rapidly. He must have known her around the time of the accident, Max guessed. She would have left soon afterward.

“Let me introduce you,” Safi said. “This is Max Lowrie, excuse me,
Dr
. Max Lowrie, we’ve been working together lately. And Max, this is Ariel Zamir. Ariel is a permanent resident here, he runs the transport and life support infrastructure and he’ll be helping us with logistics.”

Max figured Ariel was Russian from his accent. He was lean, but strong looking in spite of it. “It’s good to meet you,” Max said, holding his hand out. Ariel however just looked at Max, scanning him up and down as if weighing him up. He eventually did put his own hand out, though he seemed reluctant to do even that, then briefly shook Max’s before turning to face Safi instead.

“I’ve got some space for you in one of our hab modules,” he said. “Not luxury, but good enough for a week or two.”

“That’s fine, we can live rough if we have to,” Safi said.

“Follow me then,” he said, setting off down the corridor with Safi beside him. Max followed up behind, wondering if he’d imagined what had just happened.

“When can you get us out to site five?” Safi said.

“Tomorrow afternoon, I should have a rover ready by then. Does your friend here do EVAs? Or is he just another tourist?”

“No, but he can learn. You’ll be okay in a spacesuit won’t you Max?”

“Sure,” Max said. “As long as it’s eight-hundred millibars or above. I don’t want to spend more than an hour prebreathing.”

That was the limit of Max’s knowledge on the subject but it was enough to catch Ariel off his guard. He looked round quickly at Max, seemingly surprised that he knew anything at all about spacesuit function and design, then looked him over again, more warily this time. “That’s okay then,” he said cautiously, and continued walking.

Max and Safi were given bunk beds in a module close to where Ariel worked. The beds were narrow and hard and the space was limited, but the designers had done all they could to fit as many comforts in as possible. The water from the dispenser tasted metallic however, and the shower could only be used once every six hours, though Max had decided to use both facilities as little as possible. He knew enough about how the recycling system worked in this place, and where it got its raw materials from.

He spent the first few minutes unpacking the things he’d brought then he settled down on the top bunk to relax. Ariel appeared a few minutes later and took Safi to one of the rest areas to talk. This time he hardly even looked at Max, it was as if he simply wasn’t there. Max, however, decided against saying anything; he would ask Safi what the problem was another time. Instead he waited until the two of them had gone, then looked round for something to read or pass the time with. On the table next to the bunk was the old NASA document Safi had shown him back at the airport. He reached over and picked it up.

More than a dozen page markers were inserted into the report at various points, all neatly stuck in with their coloured tabs protruding at perfect right angles. The pencilled notes that filled the margins were similarly neat and precise, in spite of the tattered state of the rest of the book. One section seemed to have
received more attention than any other however, and that was the one titled “Applications”: the potential uses for fleets of replicating machines, both on Earth and off it. And as Max read both the text of the report and Safi’s comments beside it, he could almost begin to see why she was pushing the subject so hard.

Mining and manufacturing on a scale never dreamt of in human history was, it appeared, merely the most trivial of the possible applications. Terraforming of whole planets could follow if required: the manipulation of entire planetary climates and atmospheres to turn lifeless rocks into Earth-like habitats. Self-replicating space probes — the wave of exploring machines Safi had described back on the island — those would be even easier. And finally, even stellar-scale macro-engineering projects such as Dyson spheres could become a reality, the constituent materials of whole solar systems, processed and assembled to form habitable surfaces completely surrounding their parent stars.