Tuesday, October 30

83. (In Space.)

I woke up to the sound of arguing coming from the front of the passenger cabin. A woman's voice, in a heavy accent--I couldn't place where it was from exactly, but I've always been bad at that--was knifing through the general murmur of the other passengers. I blinked once, then again, and shifted around in my harness, trying to get comfortable. The other coach passengers were agitated by something. Bleary-eyed, I looked out the port-hole and into empty space; once, the nearness of that cold blackness might have alarmed me, but I'd been to and from the moon so many times at this point that it was just another day's work.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but there's nothing we can do," the steward handling the accented woman replied. At this point, I realized that the ship was not moving. "The captain has received a full-stop order, and we have to wait here until we are given permission to move again. To compensate, the crew has been authorized to offer free drinks from the bar to any passen--"

"I do not want your fucking drink!" the woman yelled, thrusting a finger in the steward's face. "I want to get to my destination on time! It is very important that I get to my destination on time!"

"I understand that, and again I apologize. There is nothing I or any of us can do. If you would, please return to your seat, or to one of the leisure cabins--to the bar, for those drinks, or the observatory deck." The steward bowed in the zero-gravity gracefully, one hand never leaving the support rail as he did so.

"I--" the woman started to shout at him again, but stopped, biting back her words. Seething, she spun around and floated along the length of the aisle using the handholds, and vanished into the rear passenger cabin.

The steward frowned, then retrieved the intercom mic from its holster on his waist. "Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize again for the delay, and assure you that we will be under way as soon as we receive the proper authorization. As you may have gathered," there was a twinkle of friendly mischief in his eyes, "We are now offering free drinks from the bar for the rest of the flight. Please place your order with the nearest attendant of make your way to the bar yourself. As we are inert in space at the moment, you are all free to move about the ship."

"What's a few extra hours," the guy next to me muttered, glancing back at the passage leading to the rear cabin. "It's a goddamn six-day flight. But hey," I don't know who he was talking to--me, I guess, "I'm startin' to feel a little crazy myself, being cooped up here for so long."

I mumbled a response as I unclasped my harness and let myself float out into the aisle. I wasn't about to take the crew up on those drinks--alcohol and space travel did not mix well in my system--but the observation deck sounded pleasant, and there were rarely people there; it was a little frightening.

I floated to the front of the cabin and worked my way towards the top of the ship, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Sure, we had colonized the moon and were building another colony on Mars, but damned if they couldn't keep the air in these ships warm. Soon I was seemingly floating in free space above the ship, drifting around the ovular bubble that formed the observation deck. It was a little disconcerting at first--it almost appeared as if you were outside the ship, as the glass was kept so clean it was almost invisible.

The ship stretched out beneath me, fifty yards long and thirty yards across, pale blue with dark blue lettering indicating the spaceline and model. The observation deck was situated near the front, near the pilots' cabin; from up here the moon was a massive disk of light dead ahead, seemingly motionless (we were, in fact, being pulled along in the gravitational pull between it and Earth, so technically the ship was not as still as the steward made it out to be). It was criss-crossed with industrial and military structures, as well as atmosphere domes and tunnels roofed with thick glass. To the rear, beyond the tail structures and still frighteningly large, was Earth. I was alone on the deck, so I floated towards the tail end and buckled myself to the metal surface; in a matter of moments, I was asleep.

The Lunar colony, in the beginning, was meant mostly as a storage area for one very specific kind of material--nuclear arms. When the great peace treaties were signed, and world-wide disarmament began, mankind was left with a large amount of highly-dangerous, highly-radioactive materials, mostly in the form of weapons. For years we struggled to find a way to completely remove the threat until one enterprising young scientist suggested storing them on the moon--a barren wasteland, where minimal damage would be done in the event of a cataclysmic equipment failure. There were no cities to be destroyed, no crops to be poisoned by fallout, no people to be wiped out, should a weapon of that magnitude be detonated.

Those storage facilities needed to be maintained, so at first they were staffed by a rotating skeleton crew. As years passed, that crew grew and multiplied and spread, soon forming the Lunar colony as we know it today.

I woke up again to voices, but this time they were quiet and subdued, but heated. Whoever it was sounded like they hadn't noticed me sleeping at the far end of the observatory, wrapped up in a dark blanket. There were several voices of both genders.

"Should we tell the passengers?"
"No more than they need to know."
"Are you sure the machine's working? It wouldn't be the first time they've gone on the fritz."
"They're working. We have contact with Earth, but we're getting nothing from Luna Tower."
"Nothing? Define nothing."
"No signal at all--not even silence. They're not broadcasting. At all. Anything."
"Then should we--.... What should we do?"
"Nothing, for now. Earth still hasn't given us authorization to move--we're stuck here."
"The passengers are getting restless."
"Let them, there's nothing we can do."
"Look, everyone get back to work--and get the word out to the rest of the crew, but discreetly. We don't want to start a panic."

There were several affirmatives, and the collection of crew members adjourned their impromptu meeting and went back down into the ship proper. I remained floating in my blanket for a few minutes, then made my way back to my seat and strapped in.

The general atmosphere in the passenger cabin was even more agitated than before; it didn't look like many of my fellows travelers had taken up the offer of alcohol either. I didn't blame them.

And then the woman was back, rocketing up the aisle at a rapid pace, with something clutched in her hand. I couldn't get a good look at it. The steward she had accosted previously made his way into the aisle and started towards her--and then a woman, a different woman, screamed, and there was a flash, and the steward's arm ripped clean off his body and went spinning through the cabin. Panic broke out, people started rushing around.

I lost sight of the woman, but her voice cut through the chaos like a sword. "Sit down and strap in! Sit the fuck down and strap the goddamnfuck in, or I swear I'll fucking shoot you!"

The steward wasn't screaming. I could see him floating towards the top of the chamber, trying desperately to stop the bleeding, surrounded by a cloud of his own blood. The woman's weapon flashed again--someone screamed, maybe someone died, but the crowd shut up instantly. She grabbed the steward by his collar and pulled him down, and shoved her weapon--it looked like a hodgepodge of various mundane items, but clearly it was deadly--into his mouth. "You," she said to the nearest crew member not missing a limb, "Tell the captain to get this ship underway or this bastard's gonna be missing more than an arm."

The crew member--I couldn't see him or her--apparently hesitated. "DO IT!" the woman screamed.

Silence, save for the steward's whimpering around the gun barrel (I was amazed he was even conscious), engulfed the ship. "I have to get to my destination," the woman muttered, "On time. Have to get there on time."

The captain made her way into the passenger cabin. "Miss," she said calmly, "Put down the gun."

"Fuck you. Get this ship moving."

She raised her gloved hands shoulder high, palms forward. "I can't. We don't have the authorization. The ship's computer won't let us move until we get authorization. There's nothing I can do."

"Bullshit!" she yelled, shaking the steward bodily. "Do it or he's dead!"

"Tom's already dead," the captain replied. From where I was sitting, I could see it was true. He'd bled to death. Disgusted, the woman with the gun tossed the body away and took aim at the captain.

"Fine," she said, "Do it or you're dead." Her arm moved, and she wasn't aiming at the captain anymore, she was aiming at one of the glass viewports. "Do it or you're all dead."

The attack came out of nowhere, or at least from where I was sitting I couldn't see it. A large man bulled out of his chair and slammed into the woman with the gun, grabbing at her arm. The weapon flashed once, twice, but the shots didn't hit the ship--the man winced in pain and I knew she'd shot him, but he pushed her hard against the bulkhead, knocking it out of her hand. The captain moved fast, grabbing the woman from behind and wrapping an arm around her neck. The wounded man let go, grimacing--the woman struggled, spinning through the open, zero-gee space with the captain--and struck her head hard against the hard floor.

There was a sickening crack, and the murderer went limp. The captain floated up and away from the body, bleeding from a broken lip. "A doctor!" she called out, immediately--professionally--turning her attention to the man who had helped her. "Is there a doctor on board?!"

I raised my hand.

I'm not a doctor, but I had medical experience from the military--a certified field medic. Twenty minutes later I had the good Samaritan bandaged up and resting on the observatory deck. He slept, drugged at one end; he'd only been shot in the leg, both shots hitting the same general area, and his life wasn't in any real danger but pain was intense. At the other end of the deck the three bodies--Tom the Steward, a passenger who had gotten in the way, and the woman--were lashed to the deck.

"Do you know what's happening yet?" I asked the captain after I had finished tending to her lip. "It's bigger than just this ship, isn't it? There's something happening at Luna Base, isn't there?"

"Jesus," she whispered. She wasn't listening to me, but looking forward at the moon and the structures that marred its surface. "Jesus, look at that."

I looked. It took a minute, and then I saw them--grey-white lines, hardly visible against the grey color of the moon itself, each led by a pin-prick of orange-yellow light.

"Jesus," she whispered again. "Jesus." And then she threw herself down the passage and back into the ship, presumably to get on the radio and warn Earth of what was coming: unprecedented nuclear holocaust.

It takes six days for a transport ship such as the one I rode on that day to pass from the Earth to the moon. This is because it is a leisurely passage slowed for the comfort and well being of the passengers. A missile--a group of missiles, even--could make the trip in a matter of hours, travelling at breakneck speeds through the gap the ship listed in.

I felt the ship vibrating beneath me--we'd been given authorization to move, I knew, to get the hell out of the way. "Whatever it was she was going there to do," the wounded man, awake now, mumbled, "Whatever her role was in... that... I think they pulled it off without her."

He went silent after that. I merely floated there and stared. Soon other passengers and crew members joined us on the deck, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The missiles shot past us, hundreds if not thousands of them, shaking the ship--which jerked around and swung to avoid each one, narrowly doing so. Someone screamed.

We all stayed there, even when the crew told us to return to our seats. Hours later, when the first bright flashes of the missiles hitting home lit up the Earth, I was violently sick. They had no way to stop them--no one ever expected such an attack from our own moon. It was... inconceivable.

I look up at it now, sometimes. It's different. It's amazing how many people here on Luna simply stopped looking up, simply ignored it from that day on.

Monday, October 29

82. (Music.)