They were playing chess on an actual board with carved onyx pieces, to alleviate their boredom. The sensors and displays were automated; there was no real need for human operators to be present. There was hardly ever any problem so bad that a plumber or low-rate electrician couldn’t fix it in an hour or less.
The senior safety officer looked up from the chess board with a malicious grin. “Mate in three.”
“The hell you will,” said the other, reaching for a rook.
Alarms began shrilling and lurid red lights started to flash across several of the consoles. The rook fell to the floor, forgotten, as the men stared goggle-eyed, unbelieving, at the screens. Everything looked normal, but the alarms still rang shrilly.
Running his fingers deftly across the master console’s keyboard, the senior of the two shouted over the uproar, “It’s down at the bottom level. Temp sensors into overload.”
“That’s Humphries’s area,” said his junior partner. “We got no cameras down there.”
Shaking his head, the other replied, “Either the sensors are whacked out or there’s a helluva fire going on down there.”
“A fire? That’s im—”
“Look at the readings! Even the oxygen level’s starting to go down!”
“Holy mother of god!”
The senior man punched at the emergency phone key. “Emergency! Fire on level seven. I’m sealing off all the hatches and air vents.”
“There’s people down there!” his assistant pointed out. “Martin Humphries himself! If we seal them in, they’ll all die!”
“And if we don’t seal them in,” the senior man snapped, his fingers pecking furiously across the keyboard, “that fire’ll start sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the city. You want to kill everybody?”
LUNAR HOPPER
Hoppers are meant for short-range transportation on the Moon. They are ungainly looking vehicles, little more than a rocket motor powered by powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen, both scraped up from the lunar regolith. Atop the bulbous propellant tanks and rocket nozzle is a square metal mesh platform no more than three meters on a side, surmounted by a waist-high podium that houses the hopper’s controls. The entire craft sits on the ground on a trio of spindly legs that wouldn’t be strong enough to hold its weight in normal Earth gravity.
Pancho felt bone-weary as she slowly climbed the flimsy ladder up to the hopper’s platform. She felt grateful that this particular little bird had a glassteel bubble enclosing the platform. It’ll gimme some protection against the radiation, she told herself. She got to the top, pulled herself up onto the aluminum mesh and let the trapdoor hatch slam shut. All in the total silence of the airless Moon.
There were no seats on the hopper, of course. You rode the little birds standing up, with your boots snugged into the fabric loops fastened to the platform.
The radiation sensor display on the side of her helmet had gone down to a sickly bilious green and the automated voice had stopped yakking at her. Pancho felt grateful for that. Either the radiation’s down enough so the warning system’s cut out or I’ve got such a dose the warning doesn’t matter anymore, she thought.
She felt bilious green herself: queasy with nausea, so tired that if there had been a reclining seat on the hopper she would’ve cranked it back and gone to sleep.
Not yet, she warned herself. You go to sleep now, girl, and you prob’ly won’t wake up, ever.
Hoping the radiation hadn’t damaged the hopper’s electronic systems, Pancho clicked on the master switch and was pleased to see the podium’s console lights come on. A little on the weak side, she thought. Fuel cells are down. Or maybe my vision’s going bad.
Propellant levels were low. Nairobi hadn’t refueled the bird after it had carried her here to their base. Enough to make it back to the Astro base? Despite her aches and nausea, Pancho grinned to herself. We’ll just hafta see how far we can go.
Nobuhiko had followed one of the engineers to the base flight control center, a tight little chamber filled with consoles and display screens, most of them dark, most of the desks unoccupied. Still the room felt overly warm, stifling, even with Yamagata’s retinue of bodyguards stationed outside in the corridor.