The Liability

Chapter 1: Caretaker

"Good morning, Hermite Camp, and welcome back to the only cooking show on the Moon," Erica Conrad said to the empty galley. "Today we are making rocket fuel. For this recipe you will need one crater that has never seen the sun, a few billion years of frozen water, and one robotics engineer who has been left unsupervised for the first time in her career. Let's begin."

She clipped the recorder to the collar of her thermal shirt and squeezed the last of the good coffee out of its pouch. The good coffee had been Ben Rutledge's. He had left it on the shelf with a note in his square, careful handwriting: FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. She had decided that being alone on the Moon for eleven days counted.

"Step one," she told the recorder. "Check on the children."

The plant board came up on the galley screen in a grid of green, amber and the occasional sullen red. Hermite Camp sat on the rim of Hermite Crater, close enough to the Moon's north pole that the sun never climbed more than a hand's width above the horizon. It just circled, day after day, dragging long shadows around the camp like the hands of a clock. The solar masts on the ridge turned slowly to follow it. Below the rim, the crater floor had not seen sunlight in billions of years. It sat at forty degrees above absolute zero, colder than the surface of Pluto, and it was full of ice.

That ice was the whole reason anyone lived here.

Four tracked excavators that Erica called the Crawlers scraped frozen soil off the crater floor and fed it into an oven that baked the water out as vapor. The vapor went through an electrolysis stack that split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Cryocoolers chilled both gases until they turned to liquid, and the liquid went into tanks. Two unmanned cargo hoppers called Mules lobbed the full tanks up to the rim in short, ugly hops, and every few weeks the crew's ascent vehicle carried a load up to Waypoint, the company's fuel depot in low orbit. Ellison Lunar sold that propellant to anyone flying past: survey ships, mining tugs, a university probe on its way to the outer planets. Water from the dark had become the most valuable thing on the Moon.

Every machine in that chain, from the Crawlers to the Mules to the pumps on the rim, needed someone to keep it alive. For six years, that someone had been Erica.

"Crawler Two is sulking," she reported. "Crawler Two is always sulking. It has a bearing that thinks it's a gravel crusher. We will be replacing that bearing later in the program, so stay tuned. Cryocooler bank B is running warm. Electrolysis is happy. The Mules are asleep on their pads, as Mules should be. And the floor tanks are at..." She leaned in. "Ninety-one percent. Look at that. We are a functioning business."

Caretaker day one had been mostly cleaning. The outgoing crew had left the way crews always left, in a hurry and certain that someone else would wipe down the counters. Erica had found a sock in the hydroponics rack, three unlabeled food pouches in the medical fridge, and a note from Zoe Bui taped to the inside of the airlock door. It said DON'T BE WEIRD. Erica had added, underneath, in marker, TOO LATE.

In caretaker mode, most of the camp went to sleep. The main habitat, with its five bunk rooms and its shower and its rowing machine, was powered down to a trickle so the cryocoolers could have its share of the solar budget. Erica lived in the core: the galley, the workshop, the communications room and one narrow bunk behind a curtain. It was supposed to feel cozy. Mostly it felt like living in a closet bolted to a factory.

She did not mind. She liked the factory.

What she minded was the reason she was here.

Three months ago, Ben Rutledge had announced that this would be his last rotation as station commander. Erica had applied for his job the same afternoon. She had more hours on the plant than anyone in the company. She had rebuilt the electrolysis stack after the power surge in her second year, and she had kept the Crawlers running through a season of dust that had chewed every seal on the crater floor. She had been certain, in the way she was rarely certain about anything involving other people, that the job was hers.

Then the psych review had come back. Most of it was dull. One line was not.

Candidate's risk tolerance is elevated beyond operational comfort.

The company had given command to a man from the Earth office who had never been to the Moon. He would arrive with the relief crew. Erica had been given caretaker duty instead: eleven days alone at camp while Ben, the flight surgeon Rina Gupta, the life-support tech Luke Dixon and Zoe flew the ascent vehicle up to Waypoint. There they would meet Concord, the transport from Earth, and Concord would take the four of them home. The ascent vehicle, a squat lander everyone called the Bus, would stay docked at the depot until the relief crew rode up on Concord's next run.

The review had not been signed. It did not need to be. Erica had worked beside Ben Rutledge for six years, and she knew how he wrote. Operational comfort was a Navy phrase. He had flown test aircraft for the Navy before he ever flew for Ellison Lunar, and he still talked like it when he was being careful.

She had never asked him about it. He had never brought it up. They had spent the last three months being polite to each other, which was worse than any fight.

"Step two," Erica said briskly. "Ignore your feelings. Replace a bearing."

She spent the morning on the crater floor without leaving the galley, driving Crawler Two by remote while its camera showed her a gray world lit only by its own floodlights. The bearing was worse than she had thought. She parked the machine, logged it for a hands-on repair, and moved on to cryocooler bank B, which turned out to have a clogged filter. By the time she looked up, the clock in the corner of the screen said it was nearly time.

She pulled on a sweater and went to the window.

The communications room had the best window in camp, a thick triple pane that faced south across the crater. From here the rim mountains looked close enough to touch, bright gray on their tops where the low sun caught them and black below. Above them the sky was black too. It was always black. Erica had stopped noticing the stars years ago, the way people on Earth stopped noticing clouds.

Then a new star rose over the far rim, bright and steady, and moved.

Waypoint crossed the sky every two hours. In a low polar orbit, it passed almost straight over the pole on every lap, and for about twelve minutes it was above Hermite's horizon and close enough to talk to. Erica had watched it hundreds of times. It still got to her a little. Something people had built, racing over a world where nobody had lived before her generation.

She keyed the radio. "Waypoint, Hermite. You look like a satellite."

"Hermite, Waypoint." Luke Dixon's voice was lazy and pleased. "We are a satellite. How's the empire?"

"Crawler Two is sulking and I drank the commander's coffee."

A second voice cut in, deeper. "I heard that."

"It was an emergency, Ben."

"What was the emergency?"

"Loneliness," Erica said. "It's very serious. Look it up."

She heard Zoe laugh in the background, and Rina say something she couldn't catch. Ben said, "Concord's on schedule. She starts her final approach on the next pass. You want to listen in?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

"Then we'll keep the relay open." He paused. "Erica. Don't build anything I'll have to explain."

"I make no promises."

The star slid down toward the northern horizon and was gone, and the radio went to soft static. Erica stood at the window a minute longer than she needed to. Then she went back to work.

Concord was a beautiful ship, if you liked that sort of thing. Erica had seen her twice through the depot's windows on her own trips up. She was long and white, with a crew cabin at the front and a cargo frame behind it, and she flew most of her approach on autopilot. Her pilot this run was Jennifer Payne, who had been flying Earth-to-Moon transports for four years and who had once spent an entire docking pass describing, in loving detail, the barbecue she planned to eat when she got home to Amarillo.

Two hours later, Erica had a sandwich, a squeeze bulb of tea and the relay channel turned up loud. Waypoint rose over the rim on schedule.

"Concord, Waypoint, we have you visually." That was Ben. "You're looking good."

"Thanks, honey, I've been working out." Jennifer Payne's voice was warm and dry, with a soft Texas edge. "Concord is at two hundred meters, closing at thirty centimeters a second. Autopilot has the beacon. Everything's green."

"Copy, two hundred."

Erica listened with half her attention and watched the star with the other half. Somewhere up there, two machines were sliding together at walking speed, guided by software and radar and a navigation beacon on the depot's hull that told Concord's computer exactly where to go. It was routine. It had been done thirty times.

"One hundred meters," Jennifer said. "Closing at twenty."

"Copy, one hundred," Ben said. "Luke, stand by on the docking ring."

"Standing by."

"Fifty meters. Closing at ten. Waypoint, you're gorgeous from out here. Has anyone ever told you that?"

"Constantly," Luke said.

Then Jennifer's voice changed.

"Hold on. Waypoint, you're rotating. Ben, your thrusters just fired. Why are you—"

"We didn't command that." Ben's voice was suddenly sharp. "Luke—"

"Abort, abort, Concord is—"

There was a sound that Erica would hear for the rest of her life. It was not loud. It was a kind of crunch, short and deep, followed by a shriek of static.

Then nothing.

Through the window, the bright star that was Waypoint flickered. For a second, a faint glittering haze spread around it, like dust in a beam of light. Then the star kept moving, the way it always did, down toward the northern rim.

"Waypoint, Hermite," Erica said. Her voice sounded strange to her. "Waypoint, Hermite. Say again. Ben. Say again."

Static.

"Concord, Hermite. Jennifer, do you read?"

Static.

The star touched the mountains and went out.