“Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.
This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.
Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.
“Where’re we goin’?” Pancho repeated.
“You’ll see,” Dan grunted.
Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs.
“Okay, all set,” she whispered.
“How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.
The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”
Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.”
The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.
“Don’t the security cameras have a recording loop?” Pancho asked. “Once they see Sis’s dewar is missing, they’ll play it back and see us.”
“That camera’s going to show a nice, quiet night,” Dan said, leaning hard against the big dewar as they trundled along. “Cost me a few bucks, but I think I found an honest security guard. She’ll erase our images and run a loop from earlier in the evening to cover the erasure. Everything will look peaceful and calm.”
“That’s an honest guard?” Pancho asked.
“An honest guard,” Dan said, panting with the strain of pushing, “is one who stays bought.”
“And I’ll put an empty dewar in your sister’s place,” George added, “soon’s we get this one settled in.” Pancho noticed he was breathing easily, hardly exerting himself.
“But where’re we takin’ her?” Pancho asked again. “And why’re we whisperin’ if you got the guard bought?”
“We’re whispering because there might be other people in the catacombs,” Dan replied, sounding a bit irked. “No sense taking any chances we don’t need to take.”
“Oh.” That made sense. But it still didn’t tell her where in the hell they were going.
They passed the end of the catacombs and kept on going along the long, dimly-lit corridor until they stopped at last at what looked like an airlock hatch.
Dan stood up straight and stretched his arms overhead until Pancho heard his vertebrae crack.
“I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,” he muttered as he went to the hatch and pecked on its electronic lock. The hatch popped slightly open; Pancho caught a whiff of stale, dusty air that sighed from it.
George pulled the hatch all the way open.
“Okay, down the tunnel we go,” said Dan, unclipping a flashlight from the tool loop on the leg of his coveralls.
The tunnel had been started, he explained to Pancho, back in the early days of Moonbase, when Earthbound managers had decided to ram a tunnel through the ringwall mountains to connect the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium.
“I helped to dig it,” Dan said, with pride in his voice. Then he added, “What there is of it, at least.”
The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the cost of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct.
“I’ve ridden the cable car up to the top of Mt. Yeager,” Pancho said. “The view’s terrific.”