Luna: New Moon

The moon is almost as violent with robots as it is with human meat. Unfiltered radiation eats AI chips. Light degrades construction plastic. The monthly magnetotail, the event of the moon passing through the streaming coma of Earth’s magnetic field, can short weakened electrical circuits and whip up brief but destructive dust devils. Dust. Chief devil of the Tranquillity East samba-line. Everywhere dust. Always dust. It coats struts and spars and spokes and surfaces like fur. Marina moves a finger gingerly over a structural truss. The fuzz of dust moves like hairs to the dance of the electrostatic charge of her sasuit. Over lunes dust grinds, wears, abrades, destroys. Marina’s job is regaussing. It’s simple enough for a Jo Moonbeam and fun to watch. A timer sets the magnetic and electrical reversal and she runs in great bounding moon-strides to the safe distance. The field reverses and repels the charged dust particles in a sudden cloud of silver powder. It is pretty and dramatic and very more-ish. Marina sees in terrestrial, biological similes: an ocean-wet dog shaking its coats; a forest fungus exploding a puffball of spores. The module team is at work even as the dust settles on their sasuits, swapping chipsets and actuators: work robots find hard. Marina’s fingers trace graffiti hidden like heiroglyphs under the dust: the names of lovers, handball teams, imprecations and curses in all the Moon’s languages and scripts.

Boof. Marina gausses off another soft explosion of dust. It should make a noise. The silence is improper. Boof, she whispers inside her helmet. She hears laughter on a private channel.

‘Everyone does that,’ Carlinhos says.

Under the dust are hieroglyphs. Generations of dusters have left their names, their curses, their gods and their lovers on the bare metal in a dozen colours of vacuum pens. Pyotr H. Fuck this shit. Moços HC.

She boofs with every extractor. There are tricks to moon-work. Maintain concentration. The sameness of the terrain, the closeness of the horizon, the uniformity of the extractors, the mesmerising weave on their scoop-heads; all conspired to sedate, to hypnotise. Marina finds her thoughts drifting to Carlinhos running, tassles and weaves and body oil. She shakes him out of her head. The second trick is also a seduction. Not all pressure suits are equal. A sasuit is not a diving suit. There is no water resistance, no air resistance on the surface. Things move fast. Oleg’s head was crushed in training because he made that very mistake. Mass, speed, momentum. Concentrate. Focus. Check your suit reports. Water temperature air radiation. Pressure, coms, network. Channels, weather reports. The Moon has weather, none of it good. Magnetotail, solar activity. A dozen things to check every minute, and still do her work. Some squadmates are listening to music. How do they do that? By the fifth extractor Marina’s muscles are aching. Focus. Concentrate.

So deep is her concentration, so sharp her focus, that Marina doesn’t notice when alerts go off across the public channel as the name above Paulo Ribeiro’s helmet goes red, and then white.

Rafa runs his hands over the burnished aluminium of the landing strut.

‘She’s beautiful Nik.’

The VTO transporter Orel stands bathed in kilowatt brilliance from twenty floodlights. The lifter’s own search-spots highlight hull, thruster pods, the clustered spheres of the fuel tanks, the manipulator arms, the recessed pilot windows, the VTO eagle on the nose.

‘Fuck off, Rafa Corta,’ Nikolai Vorontsov says. ‘She is not beautiful. Nothing on the moon is beautiful. You are such a shitter.’ He laughs like a landslide.

Nikolai is everyone’s idea of a Vorontsov, a wall of a man, as broad as he is tall. Bearded, long hair braided. Earth-blue eyes and a deep booming voice. He amplifies the accent. No follower of the current taste for retro fashion, Nik Vorontsov. Shorts with many pockets, workboots, T-shirt straining over heavy muscles slumping into slack flab. Like all his family, his familiar is the double-headed eagle, with his own personal heraldic device emblazoned on the shield. He is professionally Vorontsov.

‘It’s not how she looks,’ Rafa says, ‘It’s what she is.’

‘Now really fuck off,’ Nik Vorontsov says.

Orel is a moonship. A point-to-point surface transporter. The most expensive and spendthrift means of travel on the moon. The hydrogen and oxygen in the spherical tanks are precious; the fuel for life, not rocket thrusters. It’s the same insanity as burning oil for electricity, up on old Earth. On the moon, energy is cheap, resources rare. People and goods travel by train, rover, surface bus, decreasingly the BALTRAN, the orbital tethers, their own muscle power on foot and wheel and wing. They don’t fly in the cargo pods of moonships.