April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (28 page)

Note: Original repair inspected 11/17/2081 -  No significant visible wear.

The binder had about 300 pages of such notes. Heather could see the big rovers were as complex to maintain as a shuttle.

"Would you like another sandwich?" Heather offered. The work was much more physical than she was used to but the Russian lady seemed used to it and perhaps she could eat more. Heather was sure she'd get sleepy if she had a very heavy lunch. She had a food service pack with roast beef and turkey breast with rye or whole wheat for them to assemble sandwiches themselves and various condiments and garnishes. Katia had seemed particularly fond of the sweet pickles.

"No," she declined, looking tempted, "that is kind of you. I have to ask – do you people always eat this well or are you making a special effort to impress me?"

"This is pretty much what we would eat at Home. I'm sure there is going to be a period after we have our community started that we will have less variety. It is after all about a third cheaper to import things to LEO than the moon. But once we have enough tunnels under pressure to have room for hydroponics and some dirt gardening I expect to have fresh salad things and vegetables. You can't grow your own tomatoes or strawberries under lights in your apartment in North America," she said, frowning.

"It's illegal without a grower's license and certification and inspections. We're not going to let that sort of foolishness start here. I'm sure things like meat or fresh fruit will be expensive for a long time. Even dwarfed and forced to fruit four times a year trees take a huge volume. I don't know if we will ever produce things like our own wine or honey. But neither do we intend to be poor. I certainly hope we can afford to import a few luxuries."

"You folks are so
optimistic.
" She seemed like she wanted to say more but held back.

"We can save some time with the fuel cells," Heather informed her, getting back to business and bringing up a subject she had been avoiding for awhile until she got a sense what sort of person the Russian lady was beneath the surface. She went back and brought a small case foreword that she had brought in when they stopped for lunch. It was about the size of a carry on airline bag and she opened it and lifted one of the two identical units inside out and laid it on the deck.

"This is a replacement for the fuel cell system. We won't need it and since it is inside the pressure hull it will give us a nice bit of recovered cubic in the back of the cabin." The tiny assembly had a sealed module like a refrigerant pump and another smaller sealed unit attached by wires and tubing inside an open rectangular frame. There was also an insulated tank with a heavy threaded cap. The engraved tag riveted on the external framework by the filler cap said – " Add minimum 98% Heavy Water to fill line only." Another tag by a pipe fitting mounted on the frame said – "Must be open to hard vacuum during operation."

Katia looked at this dubiously. The fuel cell battery was the main power for the rover, assisted by solar panels. It was about the size of two big footlockers – say three cubic meters – and the fuel tanks on the outside of the hull were probably twice that volume. This unit by contrast was about the size of the small cooler pack that held their lunch.

"Does this connect to the existing external tanks then?" she inquired.

"No this
is
the fuel tank now," Heather said tapping the tank with the filling instructions. It was about two liters if the insulation was not overly thick. It wasn't because it had heating coils inside to protect it from freezing.

Katia finally stopped looking at it as a whole and read the tag. She looked back at Heather with a strange look on her face. "This is a hydrolyzer then?" she inquired, tapping the small case on the bottom of the heavy water tank with an index finger.

"Right," Heather agreed.

"And this…?" she leaned a little further and tapped on the larger sealed unit, but couldn't make herself articulate what she thought.

"Is a deuterium fusion reactor with an integral energy storage device," Heather explained deadpan. Katia seemed to believe her.

"I guess I was out of line complaining about your having the ballistic clothing if you have this sort of thing to share with us Loonies." That was the first time Heather had ever heard a moon resident call themselves that. She had thought it was an insult.

"I have to be honest with you, Katia. We've shared other things but this is a sealed unit. We have shared it by giving a few to use, but the actual design and how to make them we haven't shared. If you open one of the sealed units they're supposed to go 'BOOM'. Of course my suit liner is just a gift too. We haven't been told how to make them. Fair is fair I guess."

"Proprietary – I can understand why. Still just having the use of it would be a valuable asset even without manufacturing rights. I thought about what Demetrius said and decided over lunch I'll help you mount weapons. There is an area on this rover where we had a similar system mounted, that I removed before delivery," she admitted. "There are conduits for control systems and power in place that should make mounting pylons for your little birds easy. But do you feel comfortable with me knowing as much as I will learn about your weapons by helping install them?"

"Sure, no problem, the little missiles are actually based on a Russian anti-armor weapon we reverse engineered anyway and the big ones you still won't have anything that would tell you how to interfere with their command or guidance. You aren't working with the software."

"And you don't have a similar system to mount on flatbed rover? Katia asked innocently.

"No but we have another item to mount at the front of the deck on that rover if you want to help with that. I got the impression Dima was giving you a lot of leeway to decide when you are done. The French might even have it unloaded by now if you want to take a peek at it."

"I just might if it is within my ability. I'm just a mechanic, basically, with enough electrical and computer ability to get along with support for mechanicals. Don't expect me to deal with exotics."

"No, this is an old mature system," Heather assured her. "I've already reworked the electronics for lunar conditions and the systems you would deal with are straight forward electro-mechanical. I bought a surplus Bofors 57mm auto-cannon," Heather finally revealed.

"Damn!" Katia exclaimed heartfelt. "Don't you people ever do anything
subtle
?"

* * *

Four days later they stood back and looked at the second rover they had designated the 'A' machine sitting with the turret for the cannon sticking up from the front of the deck. That put it almost in the middle of the rover and left a pretty good expanse of clear deck behind for hauling freight. Even in lunar gravity they had to pull help off the other crew to lift the tube into place and fasten it down. The original turret they left Earthside as too heavy to lift into orbit without spending a fortune. It had been much stealthier also with flat facets angled sharply to each side and tilted back like a chisel. The rover made no effort at all to have a low radar cross section so that would have been wasted.

 Instead they had a slightly tapered wall rising from the deck and a hemispherical dome on top of the tapered cylindrical section. Two hatches opened to the rear to allow service and reloading. The servos were upgraded to a finer pitch to take advantage of improvements in both the accuracy of the LPS establishing their location and reduced variation in muzzle velocity and projectile weight with the newest ammunition.

The outside was covered with segments of the ceramic armor they could make from regolith. In this batch they had added a quantity of punch press scrap Heather had noticed and bought up at one of the fabricators they employed. The junk was about four millimeter thick titanium alloy sheet in crooked triangular pieces a bit smaller than her palm. Those internal pieces, randomly oriented, should help break up anything capable of penetrating the ceramic.

The white dome of segmented covering and the long snout of the barrel protruding over the low slung rover looked very much like a tank. Heather decided she wanted the rover to be run past whenever they had a foreign ship sitting on the pad. It wouldn't hurt for the grapevine to spread word around that they looked like they had teeth.

* * *

"Johnson, you scare me," Heather called on the com. "Are you going to bust up my rover driving like a maniac?" On the big thin screen hanging in front of her, the icon that depicted the rover speeding away to the north was much further along than the other rover icon following a similar path to the south. The topo overlay showed the southern rover if anything had smoother ground to cover.

"Just like a boss," Johnson called back. "Why aren't you more concerned I might hurt myself if I crash this thing?" he asked.

"How about me?" his partner Julie protested. They ignored her.

"The way you're strapped in you'd have to slam right into a mountainside to get hurt. But if you roll over a rock you can't clear and flip that thing over we didn't get all that many spare parts with it," Heather answered.

Katia mumbled agreement. She was done with her assembly of the rovers and just waiting a shift to see they functioned well before calling for a ride home. If there was a problem with them before they laid out the main cross roads and perimeter she'd see what she could do. But if they rolled one end over end from sheer carelessness it would be complicated getting authorization to help with that and buying and transporting major repair parts. She wished Heather was a little more emphatic in her command style.

When they looked right at the icon the screen added the information beside it that the rover was traveling at a bit more than sixty kph. Heather had been watching for several minutes and Johnson had never slowed below fifty. For one brief rush he'd taken it to eighty kph which terrified her just watching the dot creep along on a map. She never wanted to personally experience that velocity in a rover.

 The one time she had driven it she had felt comfortable at a bit more than twenty kph. And that had been following tracks in the regolith someone else had already laid down. Johnson was flying over virgin ground, his plow blade dropped just enough to skim a visible flat in the soil. The bottom edge was tilted back hard so it would ride over any unexpected rocky outcroppings or seams instead of catch. The suspension was extended as far as it would reach to lift the underpan for clearance. She did want the road he was roughing out marked as quickly as possible, but they could not afford any major mishap with the equipment either.

Heather and Katia were sitting in their temporary command center – four connected moon huts  with a radio mast to keep everything line of sight. The huts were just inside the west corner of a twenty kilometer square rolled forty-five degrees from the north south orientation. The perimeter of that diamond had been plowed a bit more carefully than the straight roads to the compass points that were now being plowed from its corners.

Each of those roads would extend over a hundred kilometers and  then they would turn and plow an outer perimeter road as close to the highlands as the operator felt comfortable operating the rover. Once all four extensions were laid out and the perimeter defined she would worry about dividing off the individual ranches within.

They were concerned some bright boy at another base would see what they were doing and decide to drop in and try to stake out a claim on their plain before they could fully mark out their own selections. That would be a tremendous thorn in their side if someone had an outpost right within their community or forced them to display hostility to keep someone out.

"I just had to swing around a crater," Johnson informed her. "It took me a couple hundred meters off to the east to clear it, so there is a jog in the road." The bump in his line was visible on the map overlay.

"Don't worry about it," she insisted. "You'll probably have to do it several times. When we go back and build a real road with a base we can decide if we want to level it or keep the jog. I'm not sure how wide the final easement will be either. For a major road like these four I'm thinking four hundred meters."

"You're not cutting that off the edge of the ranch are you?" Johnson asked worried.

"No, we'll lay out the full sized parcel starting from the edge of the easement," Heather assured him. Johnson, like many of her employees, was being paid mostly in kind with a ten kilometer square plot and wanted every centimeter of it. He had already asked it be on the very edge of their community facing on the road that would extend toward the American's base.

God only knows what business venture he had in mind. It might be a long time before there was traffic between communities. Heather didn't anticipate the bases controlled by Earth governments would be thrilled to see them setting up housekeeping. In fact she was pretty sure they knew by now and were discussing what to do about it.

"Don't forget to stop and put a survey stake at the end of your run before you start on the perimeter," Heather reminded him.

"Not to worry. I'll get that in place within the centimeter," he assured her. That would be right on the central meridian that divided the face of the moon. If it was off it would be a mess later reconciling the legal descriptions with reality. No sense repeating all the mistakes that had been made on Earth laying out land sloppy and in a hurry. They had no excuse with much more accurate equipment and easier to use too.

The ten-kilometer square at the center of these four cardinal roads was centered as accurately as they could lay it on the zero meridian and the lunar equator. It would serve as a location for Jeff's proposed beanstalk. The surrounding plots of land bordering on the center would be specifically dedicated. One tract for a university, one for public services such as security and another for a hospital. One even for a park although they would have several of those on the perimeter as well and a dedicated historic monument around where two Surveyor spacecraft had touched the Lunar surface well before any human foot. Surveyor six which soft landed then lifted off again and set back down successfully when that had been a new and difficult feat. Also number four had impacted when it failed on final burn and left several pieces of wreckage to be preserved. Jeff wanted to put an elevated boardwalk in to keep tourists from trampling the site.