Chapter Five: A Lunar Leap
Between the news about Alice and the pressure to pack for two months in one night, Dawn forgot about the Huangshan Mountains on her screener. She forgot about the news reports of Drogan, the simultaneous thrill and fear of his yellow eyes on the screen. All she could focus on were thoughts like how many shirts? Which belt will actually keep my pants up if I have to run? Should I bring my fuse-gun or will they arm us? What about body armor? It was three in the morning before she flopped on the couch at last with a glass of sangria. With the projected sun in the mountains on the screener behind her, she hardly noticed something so trivial as time.
“Here’s to the last night I can call myself Earthlocked,” Dawn toasted an invisible drinking partner. “Too bad I’m a glorified tourist,” she sighed. In place of her parents, who hadn’t returned her calls, she told her spectral drinking companion. Alice… Dawn cursed the name in her head. “Damn Awesome Winner… Now. That’s what Dawn stands for.” She downed the rest of her sangria and put her head back on the couch. It was in that exact position that she awoke, to the same simulated light of the Huangshan Mountains, ten hours later. “What time…”
Dawn jumped when her watch told her she’d overslept. She still had a hundred things to pack, and not enough hours until eight. In the furthest fringe of her mind, she knew that no volume of time would be enough. No volume of jam-packed space in a bag would be enough. Nothing could really prepare someone born on humanity’s homeworld for leaving it behind. Nothing could lift that veil between science fiction and science but the first step from a ship to the surface of a new planet. Still, Dawn crammed her last few hours with cramming bags full of stuff. Stuff for every far-fetched scenario. Unlike the Arcadia’s pilot, she was human, after all.
“This all must be… overwhelming,” said Miller.
“No, not really,” Dawn lied. She did her best to keep her shoulders rigid, eyes away from Captain Miller. She wouldn’t let anyone see just how full of wonder they were, sweeping the surface of her shrinking planet. “This is what I spent years training for.” Dawn watched the cityscape of Shanghai miniaturize through the translucent floor. It became just one tiny part of the fields, forests, and mountains that made up her home country of China.
“Sure, I was just the same,” said Miller.
“You were a WCC SkyLine pilot?” Miller nodded.
“Went through the academy just like you did. I told everyone around me it was just what I thought it’d be. I acted unimpressed, on my first Lunar Lift. And the whole time I was one juicebox sip from pissing myself,” he laughed. “Went on to have an… interesting career as a WCC Admiral in an outerworld contingent.” He paused long enough for Dawn to shoot him a curious glare. “Surprised? Probably the only reason Marcus didn’t repossess the Arcadia and assign it a new crew. He needs me. And he needs Howard,” Miller’s eyes wandered to the entranced technician, whose face was shameless inches from the edge of their Lift Pod.
“There’s… no one else from Wellsworth that can fix up the Arcadia?” said Dawn.
“We’re going to the outerworlds. Life is new there, and barely pulling through with the help of technology that was only perfected a few years back. A brain like Howard is the lifeblood of trips like this. Besides, watch this,” Miller whispered. He cleared his throat to adjust his tone to one of honest curiosity. “Howard, these Lunar Lifts fascinate me to no end, but I’ve already forgotten what you told me earlier about how they work.” Howard’s answer came instantly, without so much as a glance back at Miller. It was automatic.
“The moon’s revolution makes a conventional elevator to the Lunar Launch Pad impossible. Companies like Wellsworth circulate massive clouds of nanomachines in Earth’s orbit. They remotely condense these nanomachines into tunnel-shaped structures which emit waves of pressure and energy-
“Like the SkyLine?” Dawn broke in, and broke the spell Howard was under. He turned to eye her from the very corner of his vision, lips twitching.
“Just like the SkyLine. Lunar Pods are made of fusion materials with extreme magnetism. In this thing, we’re a pebble in a cosmic slingshot. Different times of the month, companies activate these temporary SkyLines at Lunar Lifts around the planet. Trips that used to take days with fuel combustion alone take minutes now,” Howard went on without a breath. Dawn felt her face getting purple just listening to him.
“Wow,” was all she could manage in the face of such intense, raw knowledge.
“See? There’s only one Howard Carver. So Marcus needs him,” Miller chuckled, “My question is… why you?” He waited, watching Dawn for any sign of a tell. What he got was an honest
shrug.
“You and me both,” she admitted, much as it annoyed her. Her eyes sunk to her shoes for a brief concession of self-pity. “I’d rather a different mission, where I could actually fly the ship. But… you don’t exactly get to choose your first mission.”
“No, you don’t,” Miller conceded.
Dawn wandered to the cylindrical wall of glass that enclosed their Pod. Through it, rings of sapphire energy rippled by. A tunnel of pressure and energy projected by nanomachines, Dawn marveled at Howard’s explanation. All so companies like Wellsworth can rake in credits. She watched China melt into the greater body of Asia, and then Earth. At the end of a thousands-of-feet long, shimmering blue stick behind them, was the blue marble she’d grown up on. At the end in front of them was a growing hunk of gray stone. The lunar cities glimmered silver across its dimpled craterfields. Man’s attempt to compete with the stars splayed out above Howard, Miller, and Dawn. Butterflies collided in her chest and collapsed in a sickening, but riveting heap. Now, for whatever reason, I’m a part of it.
The glass door of their pod slid up. A breath of brisk air, nothing more temperate than she’d known on Earth, whisked back Dawn’s curls. She thought it’d be colder. Her lips had a mind of their own, and spread too wide to contain her sparkling teeth. She lifted a foot from the inside of a steel pod that had left from Shanghai. It touched down on a dull clay cobblestone. Part of her had expected the untamed, lifeless top-sediment she’d seen in so many textbooks. But then, humans had been industrializing the moon since before her grandfather’s time. She had expected something more like the outerworlds. This was so… civilized. Dawn took her first step into the great beyond, the surface of the moon. It was somehow much like her home and nothing like it at once.
The winding road from the Lunar Pod Landing led them through an array of glowing towers. Without the reflection of a true atmosphere to compete, every structure seemed to glow against the darkness of space. It wasn’t quite black. Not since the revolutionary implementation of terradomes. Where once humans were confined to space station walls off of Earth, now they were free to roam inside miles-wide bubbles of safety without special gear. Dawn always figured her academy lessons would seem less like a fairy tale after she saw the tech of her studies in practical application. The truth was the inverse. She meandered between Howard and Miller towards a city in the void of space, on the desolation of the moons. The climate was about as bitter and unforgiving as a mild fall day. The fact that she knew about terradomes - spaces of safe atmosphere, pressure, and gravity maintained by cold fusion nanotech - hardly kept her grounded. This was magic.
“Dawn,” Howard called when he noticed her lag behind.
“Yeah,” she muttered and stumbled after him. She made it another ten paces down the rocky cobbled road before she lost herself again. “Woah.”
“Launch City straight ahead,” Miller smiled. He felt much of what Dawn felt, just beneath the hard coating of exposure. “Through the Lunar Gardens.” He took the lead of the group into a bustling crowd that seemed to explode from nowhere. Then Dawn noticed the tunnels all around. They teemed with bodies coming and going. Here, their cobbled road crossed paths with countless others. Some of them twisted around to tunnel entrances. Others wound outwards, to the high hedges and orchard gates that enclosed the area. Dawn knew there were farms in the lunar terradomes, but she’d never pictured anything so ornate as courtyard topiaries and high spaded fences.
“Are you a fisherman?” Dawn poked at Miller, who was smirking in wait for her inevitable question.
“Because I really know how to bait someone?” Miller teased. Dawn crossed her arms in silent retort. “I’m sorry! It’s not often I get to give a tour of these places to someone who hasn’t seen them a hundred times. That wonder you’re feeling… it never goes away. It just becomes a part of you,” he laughed. Dawn’s pouting could only compete with her curiosity for so long.
“Alright, I give. What’s with the Lunar Gardens? I knew they tilled the ground for farms here, but this…” Dawn lost her words when someone called out over the crowd. She may not have understood the language the man spoke, but she knew his tone. A limited-time offer- he was selling something from a street cart, along with a hundred others. She, Miller and Howard were fording through the middle of a lunar bazaar.
“These were farms. The first, as a matter of fact. Before terradomes, they were greenhouse-style. The families that moved to the moon first made their living as farmers just outside Launch City. They were geniuses, really. It was much cheaper to buy from plots just outside the city than the import them from Earth, so everyone did it. Profits become trust funds and, before you know it, you have yourself a wealthy lunar class. You can see their mansions if you squint over the hedges,” Miller explained. Dawn nodded throughout as if she could actually digest it all as she heard it.
“So these stands,” she had to shout for Miller to hear her over the rush of commerce, “They still sell their crop out at the street here?”