Luna: New Moon

Carlos built the prototype extractor. I say built, I mean, he hired the contractors, the bots, the quality control teams. He showed it to me and I said no no no, that’s not going to work, that’s not robust enough, that process is inefficient; what about maintenance access? We fought like crazy. We fought like a married couple. Still I didn’t love him. I told Helen this. Over and over and over. I must have driven her mad telling her how stupid and arrogant and obstinate he was but she never once told me to just shut up and sleep with the guy. Because I was crazy about him. He could not have been more different from Achi. She went from friend to lover. He could be a lover but never a friend. The attractions were all different, all wrong, and real real real. I thought about him in bed. I thought about him naked, I thought about him doing something stupid and uncharacteristic and romantic like bending over the schematics to see what this annoying woman was on about and now and then kissing me. I flicked off to him. I think he heard. What is it about attraction?

I’ll tell you where I first kissed Carlos: in a little dome on the Mare Fecunditatis that he built for me. Not even a dome, it was a couple of rover pods bermed over with regolith that we used as a base for the field trials. We broke the prototype down and shipped it from Farside in anonymised crates by BALTRAN, jump after jump after jump so it looked random, yet they all ended up where we wanted them, when we wanted them. Then we ran them out by rover to our little base and our team put them all together, in the ass-end of nowhere, where no one would ever look.

We were burning money like oxygen by now. We had enough left for one field test, one tweak and our VIPs. It had to work. We all huddled in our pod and watched the extractor rumble out across the mare. I fired up the extraction heads, the separator screws. Then I hit the switch on the separator and the mirrors swivelled and caught the sun and turned it on the separator and I burst into tears. It was the greatest thing I had ever seen in my life.

We got our first reading after an hour. I don’t think I breathed once those entire sixty minutes. Gas spectrometer read outs: Hydrogen. Water. Helium 4. Carbon Monoxide. Carbon dioxide. Methane. Nitrogen, argon, neon, radon. Volatiles we could sell to AKA and the Vorontsovs. Not what we wanted, not what we were looking for: that tiny spike on the graph, so much smaller than all of the others. I magnified the axes. We all crowded around the display. There. There! Helium-3. Exactly where we thought it would be, in the proportions we expected. Sweet sweet little spectrograph spike. We were in helium. I screamed and danced up and down. Helen kissed me and then she burst into tears. Then I kissed Carlos. I kissed Carlos again. I kissed Carlos again and did not stop.

We drank cheap VTO vodka all huddled together in our tiny pod and got stupidly, dangerously drunk and then I pulled Carlos into my bunk and we made silent, furious, giggling sex while everyone else slept around us.

We conceived a city in that bunk. Those two pods, that shroud of regolith, over years and decades, became João de Deus.

I didn’t marry Carlos right away. I had to get the nikah right and anyway, after Mare Fecunditatis, there was too much to do. I made the calls to our VIPS and booked the tickets. Return trips, Earth-moon, for six people. Two from EDF/Areva, two from PFC India, two from Kansai Fusion. I had been working them for months; telepresence conferences, presentations, sales pitches. I knew they wanted to escape the US-Russian duopoly on terrestrial helium-3 that was keeping the prices of fusion power high and stifling development. It was the oil age again.

It was our biggest risk. Executives from three of Earth’s smaller fusion companies all arrive on the moon at the same time? Even the Mackenzies could work that one out. The question was when they would move, not if. Our sole advantage was that they didn’t know who we were. Yet. If we could could finish the demonstration, negotiate the deal and sign the contract before Bob Mackenzie loosed his blades, then we could defend the contract in the Court of Clavius.

We put them all up in Meridian’s best hotel. We took care of their Four Elementals. We bought the French delegates wine, the Indian delegates whiskey and the Japanese whiskey too. As I said, we were burning money like oxygen.

The night before we were due to ship the VIPs out to Mare Fecunditatis, Mackenzie Metals discovered us. I got a message from our Fecundity base. Dusters with Mackenzie Metals logos had blown up the prototype extractor. They were destroying the volatile storage tanks. They were coming for the base. They were at the base … I heard no more.