Luna: New Moon

The rover is lunar utility at its purest: a roll-frame open to vacuum, two rows of three seats facing each other, air plant, power, suspension and AI, four huge wheels between which the passenger frame hangs. Shit fast. Clamped in with her Surface Activity Squad, Marina jolts against the locking bars as the vehicle bounces up rilles, leaps crater rims. Marina tries to calculate her speed but the close horizon and her unfamiliarity with the scale of lunar landmarks gives her mathematics no anchorhold. Fast. And boring. Degrees of boredom: the high blue eye of Earth, the low grey hills of Luna, the blank faceplate of the sasuit opposite her – Paulo Ribeiro, says the familiar tag. Hetty flicks up in-suit entertainment. Marina plays twelve games of Marble Mayhem, watches Hearts and Skulls (a holding episode, as the writers maneouvre the series arc and characters towards the finale) and a new video from home. Mom waves from her wheelchair on the porch. Her arms are thin and blotched, her hair a grey straggle, but she smiles. Kessie and her nieces, and Canaan the dog. And there, oh there is Skyler her brother, back from Indonesia, and his wife Nisrina and Marina’s other nephews and niece. Against a background of grey rain, grey rain cascading from the overwhelmed porch gutter, a waterfall, rain so loud everyone on the porch shouts to be heard.

Behind the blank mask of her faceplate, Marina cries. The helmet sucks up her tears.

A tap on her shoulder. Marina unblanks her faceplate: Carlinhos leans across the narrow aisle of the rover. He points over Marina’s shoulder. The seat restraints allow just enough freedom to turn and take her first sight of the mining plant. Spidery gantries of the extractors reach up from beneath the close horizon. The squad mission is a scheduled inspection of Corta Hélio’s Tranquillity East extraction facility. Moments later the rover brakes in a spray of dust and the harnesses unclamp.

‘Stay with me,’ Carlinhos says on Marina’s private channel. She drops to the tyre-streaked regolith. She is among the helium harvesters. They are moon-ugly, gaunt and utilitarian. Chaotic, hard to comprehend in a glance. Girders house complex screws and separator grids and transport belts. Mirror arms track the sun, focusing energy on solar stills that fraction out helium-3 from the regolith. Collection spheres, each marked with its harvest. Helium-3 is the export crop but the Corta process also distils hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the fuels of life. High-speed Archimedes screws accelerate waste material into jets that arc a kilometre high before falling in plumes of dust like inverted fountains. Earthlight refracts from the fine dust and glass particles, casting moonbows. Marina walks up to the samba-line. Ten extractors work a five-kilometre front, advancing at a crawl on wheels three times Marina’s height. The near horizon partly hides the extractors at each end of the samba-line. Bucket wheels dig tons of regolith at a scoop, moving in perfect synchronisation: nodding heads. Marina imagines tortoise-kaiju with medieval fortresses on their backs. Godzilla should be fighting these things. Marina feels the vibration of industry through her sasuit boots, but she hears nothing. All is silence. Marina looks up at the mirror arrays and waste jets high above her head, back at the parallel lines of tracks, ahead at the ridge of Roma Messier. This is her workplace. This is her world.

‘Marina.’

Her name. Someone said her name. Carlinhos’s gloved hand grasps her forearm, pushes her hand gently away from her helmet latches. The latches: she had been about to open them. She had been about to remove her sasuit helmet in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity.

‘Oh my God,’ Marina says, awed by the absent-minded ease with which she had almost killed herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just …’

‘Forgot where you were?’ Carlinhos Corta says.

‘I’m okay.’ But she isn’t. She has committed the unforgivable sin. She has forgotten where she is. Her first time out in the field and every word of training has fallen from her. She’s panting, snatching for breath. Don’t panic. Panic will kill you.

‘Do you need to go back to the rover?’ Carlinhos asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’

But the visor is so close to her face she can feel it. She is trapped inside a bell jar. She must be rid of it out of it. Free, breathe free.

‘The only reason I’m not sending you back to the rover is because you said, I’ll,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Take your time.’

He’s reading her biosigns on his hud; pulse rate, blood sugar, gases and respiratory function.

‘I want to work,’ Marina says. ‘Give me something to do, take my mind off it.’

Carlinhos’s blank helmet visor is motionless for a long moment. Then he says. ‘Get to work.’