Artemis

My positioning was perfect. I’d cut into the wax reservoir without nicking the coolant lines nearby. I didn’t care about the health of the coolant system, but I didn’t want the harvester to call home about a coolant leak. The small daub of wax that fell on me wouldn’t be enough loss to worry the harvester. At least, I hoped not.

I pulled a pressure valve from my duffel. I’d bought six of them from Tranquility Bay Hardware the day before (one per harvester and two spares). Standard pressure connector on one side, three centimeters raw pipe on the other. I jammed the connector into the hole. I’d done well on my cut—it was a snug fit. I fired up the torch again (with the same oxygen-crazy ignition mix as last time) and grabbed a rod of stock aluminum. I needed a strong, airtight seal around the valve.

I’d done a million valve installations with Dad as a kid. But never in an EVA suit. And unlike the cut, this time I was melting stock metal to make a seal.

If I screwed up, a blob of molten metal would fall on me and bore a hole straight through my suit. Holes in EVA suits are bad.

I got as far to the side as I could—if I screwed up, maybe the Aluminum Droplet of Doom would miss me. I got to work and watched the aluminum puddle grow. The droplet trembled along th

e weld site, then finally seeped upward into the crack above it. My heartbeat returned to somewhere near normal. Thank God for surface tension and capillary action.

I was careful, and took my time. I worked around the valve slowly, trying to keep my body from being directly underneath. Finally, I finished the deed.

I’d installed a pressure valve into the wax reservoir. Now it was time for the dastardly part of my plan.

I attached the line from my welding oxygen tank to the valve and cranked the flow to full.

Sure, the reservoir was full of wax, but there were gaps. And believe me, when you blow fifty atmospheres of air into a pressure vessel, it finds the gaps. Once the tank equalized with the compartment, I very carefully closed the valve and disconnected the tank line.

I slid out from under the harvester. I watched it for a second to make sure the damn thing wasn’t about to move. I don’t like making the same mistake twice.

The scoop crunched forward, grabbed a few hundred rocks, and dropped them in the basin. It reached down for another bite. Okay, I had time to climb aboard.

I hopped on the nearby wheel and hoisted myself onto the frame. I reached the breaker box and opened the little door. Inside, it was just like Trond’s harvester’s breaker box, with the same four lines connecting to it. Not a surprise—they were the same model. Still, I unclenched a little upon seeing it.

Harvesters have breakers all over to stave off electrical problems, but the last line of defense is the main breaker. All power runs through it. It’s the “fuse” that protects the battery.

I pulled a homemade contraption from my duffel. It consisted of two jumper-cable clamps on thick-gauge wire, which led to a high-voltage relay switch. The relay was wired into the buzzer on a battery-powered alarm clock. Simple as that. The relay would trip when the clock’s alarm went off. Not exactly rocket science, and it sure as hell wasn’t pretty, but it would work.

I connected the positive and negative poles of the main power line with my contraption. Nothing happened, of course. The relay was open. But once the alarm went off (set for midnight that evening), the relay would close and the battery would short out. And the short would bypass the breaker box entirely, so the normal fail-safes wouldn’t work.

When you short out a 2.4 megawatt-hour battery, it gets very, very hot. Like, extremely hot. And it’d be sitting in a sealed reservoir full of wax and compressed oxygen. And the reservoir was an airtight compartment. Let me give you the math on that:

Wax + oxygen + heat = fire.

Fire + confined volume = bomb.

(Bomb + harvester) ? 4 = 1,000,000g for Jazz.

And it would happen long after I had safely returned to town. They could look as closely as they wanted at the video footage, they wouldn’t know who I was. And I had another trick up my sleeve….

I checked my arm readouts. I had to hope Svoboda’s device worked as advertised. He’d never failed me before, at least.

Back in my coffin, the device Svoboda had made for me would be powering up. I affectionately named it the “alibi-o-mat.” I’d slotted my Gizmo into it before I’d gone on this little adventure.

The alibi-o-mat poked at my Gizmo screen with little probes that had the same capacitance as a human finger.

It typed in my passcode and started surfing the internet. It brought up my favorite Saudi gossip websites, some funny videos, and a few internet forums. It even fired off some emails I’d composed in advance.

Not the perfect alibi, but it was pretty good. If anyone asked where I was, I’d say I was at home surfing the internet. Hardly an uncommon thing to do. And the data logs from my Gizmo and the city’s network would back that up.

I checked the time. The whole procedure—from attaching the hammock to installing my harvester-killing-device—had taken forty-one minutes. This was doable! I’d make it back in plenty of time! One harvester down, three to go.

I crawled back under the now-doomed harvester, collected my gear, and crawled back out. All the while I was careful not to get crushed by the giant wheels. Even in lunar gravity the harvester was heavy enough to squish me like a grape.

I assumed the next harvester would be a hundred meters away or so on some other edge of the collection zone. But instead, it was three meters from my face. What the hell was it doing there?!

It didn’t dig. It didn’t load. It just “looked” at me, its high-resolution cameras re-focused slightly as I stood up. It could only mean one thing: Someone at Sanchez Aluminum had taken manual control of this harvester.