I gripped the handrails to control my ascent up the ladder to the lower passenger deck. I rose just high enough to get a peek and check things out. There was nobody on this deck. Fifty empty plush reclining chairs. Any one of these seats would have been a hell of a lot more comfortable than my cabinet, but I knew the stewards check all passenger areas before liftoff. If I were caught, they'd have aborted the flight. That would have caused one hell of a commotion.
I'd read the manifest, there were only eight passengers on this flight, which was odd. The low head count meant fewer people were needed for the flight prep. A fully loaded flight would've made it easier to get lost in the crowd, but flights loaded with vacationers headed for a hotel stay on the moon were weeks away. I couldn't stand to wait any longer. This was my chance, there was no turning back.
I pushed off and soared up the ladder to the next deck. It was configured as a gym. I suppose if you're on a three-month flight to Mars you'd need a gym, but it's a waste of space for a trip to the moon.
I felt the thrusters engage. I braced myself against a wall to keep myself from falling over. It was a long hard acceleration burn. This was not some rich tourist with his friends out for a joy ride. No wasting time orbiting Earth three times for sightseeing. This was going to be a fast trip. Fine with me, I'd wasted enough time. The sooner I get back to Luna, the better.
I slowly made my way up the ladder to the First-Class deck. The seats were wider and the windows larger. I spotted a male steward. He was tall, thin with neatly slicked back black hair. He showed no emotion as he distributed drinks to the passengers. There are two rows of seating arranged in a circular pattern. I counted six people wearing slate gray flight suits. Two others wore black suits with red piping around the neck and shoulder seams that made them look more official than the men in gray suits. The manifest said the passengers were employees of the Yuldashev Hotel Group.
I knew from my training and loading several flights that the deck above First-Class was filled with environmental systems and other functional equipment. Above that is a ladder through a central chamber leading to a double height activity deck where passengers can have fun experiencing weightlessness, beyond that is the flight deck. These six passengers stayed in their seats. Nobody went to play weightless games.
I did my best to keep myself scarce during the flight. I did make use of a comfy chair on the lower passenger deck, but I never let myself get too comfortable. I had to hide from the steward in the bathroom twice during the fourteen-hour flight. Nobody caught me and put me in handcuffs which I expected would happen if discovered, although I had the distinct feeling my presence was known.
Maybe I was paranoid. I guess I expected to get caught. How could I imagine pulling this off without being found out? Somebody on the ground must have figured out they had an extra passenger on the flight. Even though I deleted my name from the work schedule, the crew saw me working. They would have counted the flight prep crew, then double and triple counted when they came up one short. I generally keep to myself, but was I that invisible to my co-workers that no one noticed?
I was going to get caught, there was no way to avoid that. No one arrives on Luna without Commander Harding knowing. I'll deal with the consequences; I just need to see her again.
-------------------------------
The Cruiser landed in a vertical position. The airlock for the passenger compartment was located on the lower passenger deck, one hundred twenty-five feet above the surface of the moon. A door in the faring opened, lowering like a large metallic flap becoming an elevator platform. The elevator would go down to the surface allowing a pressurized rover to drive onto the platform, then rise again to the airlock. The passengers would remain seated until the airlock was open and secured.
I hid behind the passenger seat closest to the airlock. As soon as the indicator light on the door turned green, I rushed to open the door and scramble to the rover driver's seat. I felt a presence behind me, turned around and saw that thin snooty looking male steward standing outside the airlock. Even after a fourteen-hour flight his hair was still perfectly slicked back.
"Welcome to Moon Base Alpha," I called out walking to the airlock. The steward looked at me strangely. I hoped it wasn't a look of recognition.
"We didn't expect a driver, the rover is self-driving," he said sternly.
"Well, you can thank Commander Harding for that. He didn't want our special guests to arrive without a proper greeting. The manifest says only eight passengers. Seems odd for such a large ship. Most cruisers coming in are hauling freight. Did you know these things can deliver up to one hundred fifty tons of cargo? A forty-five-foot shipping container fits in the cargo bay with room to spare."
The steward stood staring at me.
"So just the eight then?" I asked.
I helped seat the passengers. Then made my way back to the driver's seat.
I always feel shaky this high up knowing that a single plate of aluminum and a couple thin cables are holding the rover high above the surface. Good thing there's no wind on the Moon, one big gust and well, I don't want to think about it.
The airlock sealed with a whoosh and the ready indicator on the front panel glowed green. "Locked and loaded," I announced.
I turned in my seat to greet my passengers. "Howdy, I'm Frank. I hope you all had a nice flight. Please stay seated for the short ride down."
I checked out the woman. She had confidently moved through the rover to ride shotgun. The black flight suit she wore fit nice and snug, nary a bump or out of place bulge could hide in that suit but from the look of her she needn't worry. Her face is thin and drawn, maybe the hair bun at the back of her head was pulled too tight. This woman is not a frumpy scientist. She isn't shy either. Most people sit in the rear seats when they have a driver. Not this one, she went right for the passenger seat.
"I'm Astrid. My associate is Garrick," she said in a matter of fact tone. She didn't bother to introduce the other six passengers.
Astrid, that's a nice name for a woman in space. Astronomy, asteroids, Astrid. It fits, but Garrick? Who the hell names their kid Garrick? Maybe they couldn't decide between Gary and Rick, or Eric and Gary so they came up with Garrick, weird.
"It's oddly beautiful," the woman said looking out the windshield.
"It's a cold, silent world framed by the never-ending blackness of space, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else," I said.
The rover jostled as the elevator started downward. I hate that feeling, hanging precariously, tethered in space. I never did well on roller coasters either, they're a pukefest if you ask me.
"It's so stark, gray everywhere you look," said Garrick behind me.
"It might bug you for a while. It takes a while for the brain to adjust to the absence of color. After a few weeks of gray, it will blow your mind when you see bright colors," I said.
"It's an undulating gray desert," the woman said thoughtfully. "A new frontier ripe for the picking," she added.
"There's Mon's Malapert, one of the highest elevations on the South Pole," Garrick said pointing at the mountain to the south.
The rover slowly descended the exterior of Star Cruiser to the moon's surface.
"Look part way up the mountain, you can see the your hotel domes stretching across the mid-levels of Malapert," I said motioning to the mountain where a large dome, the lower two thirds constructed of dark gray blocks was topped with a glass roof reinforced with aluminum supports was flanked on both sides by smaller domes stretching across the shoulder of the mountain looming over the base below. I was impressed. Our construction team made huge progress while I was gone. I marveled at the wide tube built with the same dark blocks stretching from a dome at base level up the mountainside to the massive center dome. Nearly the entire northern face of the slope below the new structures was covered in terraced rows of solar panels.
The elevator platform bumped on the hard landing pad and a safety wedge at the front of the platform lowered to make a ramp. I switched the rover to manual drive and pressed the accelerator pedal lightly moving the rover off the platform.
I drove swiftly along the sintered regolith road. I'd like to say I could hear the motor whine as I accelerated but sound waves don't travel in the vacuum of space. I could feel the vibration though. I waited for my passengers to ask about the road we were driving on, but they didn't.
It's funny how quickly people take things for granted as if the moon always had paved roads. Raw regolith is nasty stuff, dusty abrasive micro grains of pulverized rock that clings to everything. Sintering regolith into roads started as experiments using microwaves under small rovers to heat the moon dust into a solid mass. It was slow cumbersome work. Today we have large graders with big blades to smooth the regolith. Behind the blade are plates of magnetrons that melt the regolith with powerful microwaves to a depth of nearly two meters followed by massive rollers to press and smooth the goo as it hardens.
I took a closer look at the woman. I didn't stare at her in a creepy way, I took a good look. She had a nice complexion. Her smooth skin was pulled tight though, maybe from plastic surgery, but her flesh looks fresh, not dry, and haggard like people who've been on Luna for a while. She looks like some Asian mix. Her nose is flat, and her eyes have a chinkyness to them. Her skin is light, almost white but isn't, maybe she's been tanning, hard to tell. Not fully any kind of Asian I've ever seen. Not Chinese, I don't think; maybe second or third generation Asian mix.
I turned to look at the guy. He looks fit in his tailored flight suit. He has thick dark medium length hair. His complexion looks more Asian than the woman, but he has blue eyes. That's freaky. After a fourteen-hour flight this guy has more facial hair that I could grow in a week. The only part of his face not covered in thick black bristles is the outline of a scar that runs from the from the right side of his mouth down across his chin. Kinda cringy if you ask me.
The six men in the back rows also looked Asian. Some of them had moustaches that made them look Turkish. I was never good at this; hell, they could be members of a Mexican Mariachi band for all I know.
Most of the scientists who arrive at the base are anxious to get working right away. Many of them have two-week missions so they're on tight leashes. They need to run their experiments and get results or lose their funding. Those suckers are stressed out before they get started. Then, there's guys who are hired to work for a six-month cycle, they're more relaxed. They're here to do the real work of building a sustainable living environment, hired to run building bots, setup new equipment for gas extraction or they're running the mining rigs. Those guys aren't as intense.
I don't know what the story is with these guys. I know they work for the hotel company. They look intense for hotel workers. They arrived on their own Cruiser, so they must be important.
I guess it doesn't matter who they are or where they are from. Everyone would know soon enough. When you arrive at Moon Base Alpha you check in with the Commander at base HQ. That's where I'm headed.
The new hotel complex on the mountainside was built with a grand reception hall, restaurants, a cocktail bar, event rooms, meeting rooms, and a low gravity recreation hall. The central dome and east wing are the hotel. The west wing will be used for additional base housing and science labs.
The Yuldashev Hotel Group, a foreign corporation nobody'd ever heard of paid big bucks to fund construction. Builder bots have been crawling all over the shoulder of that ridge for more than a year keeping every excavator, extractor and block former busy supplying materials for the build.
The complex will be a huge improvement for stressed out scientists on missions who still work and live in inflatables or rover habitats. They'll have a place to get some real food, not the reconstituted slop served in the base galley, stretch their legs, and mingle with the rest of us space pioneers. Hell, life on Luna might finally get livable.
Just imagine, a frickin hotel on the moon. Soon we'll be invaded by space tourists, can you imagine. This place is going to be a friggin' zoo when untrained idiots start showing up on base. Tourists bring money, when they return home and tell their friends, more will come. There will be opportunities for all kinds of new business.
I pressed the brakes to slow the rover to make turn where a crane worked to install a huge lighting system. I looked at the pressurized cab of the crane. "Is that Smitty?" I mumbled as I waved. The man in the crane waved back.
"Everybody's friendly on Luna. Looks like we're installing lighting around the landing pads so ships can land when it's dark. Moon Base Alpha is located at the South Pole because we have more daylight than other places on the moon, but we still have a few dark days every month. The only place that never loses sunlight is the peak on Malapert Mountain."
My guests point and chat quietly about the sights. This place must look very unusual to them, like an old Buck Rogers TV show. I suppose I'd better be a good host. I don't want word getting back to the Commander that I was impolite.
"As you can see as you look across the landscape, there are several mission habitats. Some are vacant used once and left behind, but many are occupied with groups conducting science experiments. We've got all kinds of habitats. Inflatables, structured modules, rover habitats and landers. There have been hundreds of missions. In the beginning each mission landed with their own habitat. Now days, many are reusable, but if you ahead look at the base of the mountain, you'll see we've been building permanent structures from formed regolith blocks. That's Moon Base Alpha, it's where we're headed. Hey, you could offer tourists a tour of old landing sites and their habitats. People will pay big money for a tour like that."
I pressed the accelerator and felt the rover jump forward. My friend Gus, the base mechanic likes to drive fast. He modified the rover to move much faster than the pokey twenty-eight miles per hour that's standard on rovers. The rover sped along a dark narrow ribbon of road that cut a smooth path across the uneven dusty moon regolith toward Mons Malapert.
"What are those strange umbrella structures?" Astrid asked.
"They're nuclear power reactors. The guts are buried. The umbrellas are for cooling," I answered.
"They aren't large. The umbrellas look only about ten feet in diameter. Not at all what I'd imagine for nuclear reactors," said Garrick.
"Each one produces twenty Kilowatts from an internal Stirling Engine. It's some sort of regenerative heat exchanger. We call them Krusty's for Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling Technology."
"I count twenty umbrellas. That couldn't be enough to power for a growing colony," Garrick added.
"There are several Krusty farms that supplement solar panel arrays," I replied. I noticed the Astrid nod slightly to Garrick. "There's a large farm on the hill to power your hotel, so no worries."
The rover sped past a road building rover paving a new road across the dusty moon surface.
"For some reason, I thought we'd see men hopping around in EVA suits like the Apollo astronauts," Garrick said.
"Maybe your hotel can offer hopping around in EVA suits as a tourist attraction. Like the good old days on Luna," I said.
"It seems you are quite familiar with the workings of the base. How long have you been here? Aren't mission lengths restricted?" Astrid asked.
"They are. I just rotated back. Now that we have protective structures, radiation exposure is significantly reduced. We're inside most of the time. Bots do most of the work. These days you rarely see anyone working outside," I explained.
The rover scooted up a slope on the sintered road as the cratered, pock marked surface of the moon slipped past. Once the terrain leveled out, the rover came to a junction.
"That road take you up to your hotel. The road goes all the way to the peak of Mons Malapert rising more than sixteen thousand feet above the lunar surface. We turn here and head to the base."
Garrick turned his head to look at the mountain peak. "Lots of antennas up there."
"Yup, antennas, electronic telescopes, an interferometer and what not, they've always got experiments running up there," I explained to my guests.
"Malapert is a key location. The near constant sunlight, proximity to mineral resources, thick workable regolith with high concentrations of oxygen and hydrogen, uninterrupted visibility to Earth, multiple pads prepared for landings and launches. There is boundless opportunity for those with vision to exploit all that is here," Astrid said.
Dang, she said that with a touch of maniacal enthusiasm. I guess it takes a healthy dose of ambition to open the first hotel on the moon. I'd better get these folks to HQ so they can meet the Commander.
"It sounds like you know a lot about our location. Would you like a quick tour of the base before I drop you off at HQ? You'll see for yourself how we are using Luna's resources."
Astrid turned her head and smiled at Garrick. I glanced at him long enough to see a knowing twinkle in his freaky blue eyes.
"We are quite familiar with the base and its resources. It would be criminal for us to build the hotel without understanding everything," Astrid said.
As the rover approached the base, the road widened.
"You can study maps and drawings, but there's nothing like seeing the real thing with your own eyes, like the sintered pad that surrounds the base, it looks like a big parking lot, but it was built like this to mitigate the dust allowing us to around outside the domes if needed without getting dirty walking through regolith, but it makes getting around in a rover easy as well."
The rover drove past the new dome with the large tube running up the mountain. This new dome has a large an enormous airlock sticking out the front of the dome that arriving tourist must pass through upon arrival in the name of safety. The spacious Arrivals dome connects to the HQ dome.
I imagined myself auditioning for my new role as tourist guide. Tourist visiting the moon wouldn't want to come all this way to be cooped up in that large dome. They'd want to get out and see the sites. I'd try to get my old job back, but times are changing, a man needs to look to the future and new opportunities. The base was in full view now. It was my chance to make a good impression. I went for it.
"Welcome to Moon Base Alpha," I said loudly in my tourist guide voice. "The base got its name from an old British science fiction TV series; SPACE:1999. In the show they had a base right here at Malapert. The heart of the base is a series of interconnected domelike structures. The domes are constructed using formed regolith blocks. Those blocks are covered with two meters regolith that is sintered in place, then a second layer of blocks are laid to cover the dome providing eight feet of protection against radiation, cosmic rays, wayward meteorites, and the extreme cold. Domes are arranged, five domes in a circle, we call them Quints. Is that too much information?"
Astrid looked at me with wide eyes. I couldn't tell if she was amazed or annoyed. She didn't say anything, so I decided to continue.
"The domes have a walled corridor that follows the curve of the dome and are connected by airlock tubes. The labs or work areas are behind the wall so people walking past don't cause disruption. Most domes have living quarters on an upper level, so you sleep where you work.
Larger airlock tubes link the quints for extra safety. If you were to view the base from above it looks like a chain of interconnected circles. If any structure has a system failure, like getting struck by a meteor and loses its pressurized environment, crew members can quickly move to an airlock or into another dome. Safety is paramount. The moon is an unforgiving place. The average outside temperature is 200 degrees Kelvin, that's minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But hey, it can get up to minus 10 K on a sunny day. You still can't go outside without a full EVA suit. If you don't freeze to death, you'll suffocate long before the radiation can kill you."
I looked at Astrid again. She was staring straight ahead looking irritated.
"Don't worry, I was winging it. I can do better. Tell you what, I'll work up a script. You can approve it. Your hotel guests are going to love my base tour. I'll offer a fair price and we can split the proceeds."
Astrid didn't reply.