Part One Chapter One
“True leadership isn’t about exerting power; it’s about inspiring others to believe in themselves and each other. It’s about lifting people up, not standing above them.”
—Jonas Seaborn, THE LUNAR CHRONICLE, FIRST PIONEERS
They were pasty, ground-dwelling creatures, moles eking out an existence beneath the lunar surface in the subterranean maze of the Olympus Moonbase. Scurrying along its regolith-meshed corridors, they hid in secret chambers.
“Come now. Moles?”
It’s what I feel like these days.
Athena’s voice, the ThinkLink companion, was an ever-present murmur in her mind. More friend than machine.
Commander Xanthe Waters breathed a sigh of relief when she reached the Atrium, with its retractable roof that now lay open, revealing the vast, star-studded sky. She stretched her arms wide and craned her neck upwards, seeking a moment of surrender in the expanse above.
They called it a sky, but it wasn’t really a sky. Just the impossible blackness, the foreverness of space. She knew a lot about space, but the facts didn’t stretch the mind enough to contend with the immensity of the great void, the great yawning celestial kraken that would swallow them whole one day.
“You’re really wound up today, aren’t you? Krakens?” Athena prodded, with a synthesised tone of concern.
Maybe. But krakens are scary. And so is space.
Xanthe had grown accustomed to Athena commenting on her thoughts over the last few weeks. It was friendly and familiar, though sometimes it seemed like the A.I. took the ragged edges of her thoughts and held them against a grindstone. Athena sharpened her thinking and pulled her back from her tendency to wallow. Most of the time. Some days needed a good wallowing, and today had “wallowing” written all over it.
They should be home soon, Xanthe mused, the thought of her crew coaxing a smile onto her troubled face. Her crew.
Her friends.
She imagined the roar of the tumble back through the atmosphere, and the wrenching slam of gravity. Then they’d be back on Earth. With sunlight and trees and wind and grass and rain and oceans and life.
Or that’s what she imagined for Earth’s better future. It was still hot and wretched in most places. Inland was all but inhabitable. Coastal towns laboured with swamped infrastructure and climate refugees. But a tendril of hope for regeneration clung to the crevices of Xanthe’s mind.
Her heart strained with longing for the umpteenth time.
Athena, have you got a read on their location?
“They’ll be entering Earth’s atmosphere in two hours.”
Show me.
The schematics of the journey lit up her retina display. Two blips, the Saturnia and the Minerva, neared the soft blue curve of Earth.
Any word from the Lunar Commission?
“Just the same response: a meeting will be scheduled soon.”
Xanthe’s thoughts shifted to Aryanna Sharif, Chair of the Lunar Commission, billionaire entrepreneur, and now – thanks to Athena’s digging – suspected political terrorist. Xanthe dreaded the interaction with Aryanna. The woman was a walking viper with a face like a porcelain plate.
What was her game plan?
Aryanna’s latest decisions seemed wildly out of kilter with the Earth Alliance campaigner Xanthe had once admired. Even with Athena’s help, Aryanna’s motivations were slippery as fish. Aryanna had forgiven Lincoln Ellison’s space cowboy antics that led to the Gateway and Artemis crew’s demise, but Xanthe couldn’t. Nine lives had been lost, and her crew had nearly been killed too.
Xanthe left the Atrium, sealing the door behind her. She walked the perimeter hallway to check each of the accommodation wings that spun like rays from the central sun of the Atrium: Griffin, Siren, Pegasus, Cerberus and the Centaur wing, where she, Jonas and Troy had their quarters.
Each wing had berths for twenty, waiting for future residents. Intended originally for scientists, tourists and climate refugees, they were now destined for helium-3 miners. Xanthe shivered. Proud as she was of this remarkable base they’d designed and built, these dim underground corridors were more tombs than homes. Empty berths waiting to close in on bodies, like a catacomb she’d visited long ago at a winery estate, run by a monastery.
Several hundred years of past attendant monks lay interred beneath the church and cellars, in dark, stone crypts. When she’d visited, there had been a more recent inhabitant added to their midst, his name freshly chiselled not six months previously. The sickly smell of death caught at the back of her throat, a call from the dead, still grasping at life.
She shook off the morbid musings and paused to check the water flow to the plants lining the corridor of the Cerberus wing. Though the rooms felt like empty pits, corridors devoid of people, they hummed with life. She said a silent prayer of thanks to Xavier and Madison, who had worked tirelessly to fill their underground warren full of productive plant life.
Xanthe continued her tour of the Atrium perimeter, forcing herself to jog, hard as it was in the magnetic moonboots and exo-suit that mimicked gravity. She needed to stay strong and keep up the muscle mass and blood flow to ensure a quick recovery when they were back Earthside. Whenever that might be.
Her legs strained and her heart pounded as she pushed herself to a run. She pulled up outside the SimRoom, Troy’s pride and joy. The chamber was equipped to mimic scenes anywhere on Earth, from moonlit beaches to seedy night-time bars. The stimsuits and nasal stim sensors made it so damn real.
It had been a while since Xanthe had come for a break. She favoured the reconstructed VR experience of Sydney from before the tsunami. The Sydney of today was a rough, ramshackle place with its abandoned, flooded high-rises and shanty towns crammed with tsunami survivors and climate refugees.
With Sydney Reimagined, she loved watching the sunrise over the old harbour, the kiss of water against the docks, the sting of salty sea air. A simpler time. She craved getting back to it.
The fitness room was tucked in beside the SimRoom and here she found Jonas with a VR headset, practicing his martial arts, sweat soaking his shirt. Thank goodness Serena had managed to fix the water pressure and filtration system before they left for Earth. They could shower and launder clothes. So much better than dry-frying them with UV rays. UV killed bacteria and odours but never felt clean the way water did. Xanthe loved the ritual of soaking her garments, rubbing the fibres together and rinsing out the dirt.
She marvelled at the closed ecosystem they’d designed and were able to live in now, on this otherwise inhospitable lump of rock hanging off the skirts of the wild, luscious blue orb that was their home planet. Washing clothes felt like they had a blood transfusion from Earth, pulsing in the watery veins of their small, vulnerable habitat.
Jonas sensed her presence and pulled off his visor.
“Xanthe,” he said as he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “Any news?”
“They’ll enter the atmosphere in just under two hours. We’ve got a few things to cover off before then. Join me and Troy in the comms room once you’re done here?”
“You bet. Did Troy get the oven fixed?” Jonas grinned.
“You know he’s terrible with electronics. You shouldn’t mock him.”
“He insisted! I even offered Volkov’s help. But Troy said, ‘An oven isn’t brain surgery’ and he would work it out.”
“I’m glad his brain surgery is better than his tinkering with appliances.” Xanthe rubbed the back of her neck, remembering the procedure Troy used to plant Athena in her cortex.
Jonas watched her wordlessly.
“Where is Volkov now?” she asked.
“Charging in the vehicle bay. We’re going to overhaul the regolith processor tomorrow to see if we can amp up the helium-3 harvest.” Jonas grabbed a towel slung over the squat machine and wiped his face to soak up the rivulets of sweat. “The sooner we have a full load of helium-3, the sooner we can ship Earthside.”
Xanthe pressed her lips together.
“What? Xanthe, what is it? I know that look.”
She tilted her head and rolled her shoulders. “I’m not sure Aryanna will go for our recommendation. She wanted Lincoln Ellison up here running the show. And given the conflict Earthside with China, I would say there is no chance of letting Colonel Jin take over operations. It’s just too much leverage to give to the Chinese.”
“So, if you don’t fly us back – and by ‘you’ I mean Athena – who will fly the Pinnacle?”
“Maybe Chan-Juan.”
“Colonel Jin’s Deputy? No way he’s letting one of the only three humans in their base head home. Especially as Chan-Juan and Hàoyú are together. If she goes, he goes.”
“Leaving Colonel Jin alone at Red Star,” Xanthe added with a grimace.
“Apart from his half dozen Dopplebots,” Jonas said.
“Still, Dopplebots aren’t a great replacement for human company, are they?”
Jonas stopped rubbing his sweaty arms with the towel for a moment. “I don’t know. I kind of enjoy Volkov, even if he is a patronising toad.”
“But it’s not like Volkov can really understand what’s going on with you, emotionally.” Xanthe raised her eyebrows and tapped her chest.
Jonas puffed his own chest out. “He gets it enough, I suppose. What about Athena? Does she ‘get’ you now that she’s inside your brain all the time?” He waved a hand at her head and reached for a water bottle perched on a nearby bench.
Xanthe paused and considered the evolving interactions with Athena. Could she really call it a relationship? “She certainly can tell when I’m having a ‘moment’.”
“What do you mean?” He took a swig of water, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“She can sense and regulate my biological responses to emotional thoughts.”
“Whoa. Cool. Is that how you stay so calm?”
“That’s part of it.”
Jonas paused, then sat down on the bench to pull on his moonboots. He didn’t like to sweat in them while working out as they were too hard to clean. “But still, maybe you’re right about Dopplebots, Xanthe. Modulating biochemistry is not really ‘getting’ you, is it? Athena can’t make you feel seen, heard and valued. The way, say, Troy might.”
Xanthe blushed. “No, Athena is not Troy. Nor you. Nor any of the crew. But she is…something.” She patted Jonas on the shoulder. “Get cleaned up and I’ll see you in the comms room.”
“Roger that, Commander.”
Xanthe smiled warmly at him and headed down the corridor.
#
Jonas watched her leave, slim shoulders shot through with tension, muscles stringy and hard. She’d changed with the ThinkLink. He often caught her muttering to herself – or rather, to Athena. The A.I. was supposed to help with focus, but Xanthe seemed more distracted, often staring with glazed eyes. Presumably, she was watching something on the retina display.
Jonas wiped his face with the towel, then stretched one deltoid, then the other. His body still felt strong, even after nearly a year on the Moon. He worked hard at staying fit, wore the moonboots religiously to work his legs, pounded the treadmill, ran through the station, turned resistance up to max on the workout station and completed his martial arts routine day after day.
Still, he knew parts of him were atrophying. His heart had lost muscle mass despite the workouts, the bone density readings were in range but on the lower end and his metabolism was changing too. The freeze-fried bananas were definitely a no-go for him now.
He shut down the fitness room and headed for a shower. No rest for the wicked. Not when there were just three of them, plus Volkov, to get things done on a Moonbase built for one hundred.
Just him, Xanthe and Troy.
Xanthe and Troy. The romance had finally swept the commander out from behind her professional blockade. She trembled a little when Troy, the damn pants man, sauntered into her vicinity. Her iron core went to goop.
Jonas thought he would be okay as the third wheel, but truth be told, he was a little lonely. He already missed the banter with Xavier, the taunts with Serena, and even the weird tension with Madison. The others had a lot to go home to, but he had nothing but the scorn of his never-impressed parents, Don and Jenny Seaborn.
Here, on the Moon, he had a chance to prove his mettle and take command at some point. What was a little loneliness in the glorious pursuit of achievement?
I’ll be fine.
He smiled, willing that encouragement to filter through to his heart as he shed his clothes and they drifted to the floor. He stepped into the shower to cleanse his body and mind.