She almost didn’t care about that. She was thinking of quitting astronautics altogether, picking one of the Settlement worlds or a habitat and getting the hell out. It wouldn’t be exploring new star systems, true, but at least it would be a frontier, of sorts.
She didn’t understand the people on the Earth or the Moon anymore. The crazies were taking over. The evidence was right in front of her. She looked intently at the huge habitat floating in the darkness. The Purps had come off Earth, taken over this place and the old Tycho Penal Colony—and the United Nations actually recognized the Purps as a legitimate government.
Dianne had her mind made up. If she could not have the stars, she wanted to get out to somewhere, to a place, a world, that would at least be new to her. But could she live in a habitat, a tin can in the middle of space? To one of the Settlement worlds, then. Mars, or Titan, maybe. Perhaps the Asteroid Belt. If she could even get that far in the middle of a recession.
Dianne Steiger checked the Pack Rat’s main panel again and sighed. All was well. Far too well. Nothing for her to do. Transorbital burn in ten minutes. The Rat knew that with far greater accuracy than she did.
The ship lit engines and made the transorbital burn with perfect precision, shut down, and left Dianne to continue stewing in her juices. Not much longer, she told herself. Not much longer at all.
Chelated Noisemaker Extreme glanced up at his external monitor. Good-bye to the Pack Rat. There she was, a small dot of light ten degrees across the sky from the gleaming bulk of a nearly full Moon, a skyful of familiar old stars glowing warm and bright between them. He glanced down and checked his Moonside comm board. All green. All comm channels to the Moon operational. He’d have to do something about that, or catch hell from his boss.
But not just yet. The view was too pretty. The Pack Rat’s acquisition strobes blinked on and off, giving Frank an easy visual sighting. Good for Dianne. A lot of the astros didn’t bother with ac-lights anymore, especially the ones who flew into Purple space. He sighed and shook his head. There was something wrong with a world where so many people worked so hard to do the absolute minimum. Not as if the Purps were much help.
Chelated did a lot of the traffic control duty, but he was mainly a radio tech, responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat more or less in contact with the outside universe. That “more or less” was a key part of his job description. If things got too bad, he had to struggle to bring them up to spec. If, on the other hand, communications got too good, it was his job to degrade them. And he was, of course, expected to randomize the situation at times. Keeping things off an even keel was an important part of the Purple philosophy.
Even if the duties of the job were a bit strange, Chelated—known as Frank Barlow in his pre-Purple life—was skilled in his profession. That was what made him a Noisemaker Extreme—and earned him a bit of suspicion from the more purist Purples, who disapproved of any ability.
But that didn’t matter. Chelated (or Frank, as he still secretly thought of himself) loved radio, electronics, and communications gear for themselves. In the post-K-Crash world, there were few positions for a man of his skill. He had come to the Naked Purple Habitat simply because there was no other place he could get a chance to practice his craft. He saw it as a bonus that he was allowed—even required—to try all the crazy things the other comm centers never permitted.
Still, he found the place a bit disturbing. But then, he would have been worried about himself if he ever got used to these people.
He felt the need to talk to someone and keyed the radio link open again. “Hey Dianne, you still on the feed?”
“Still here, Frank,” her voice said from the overhead speaker. “What’s up?” Chelated was about to reply, but the view through the monitor caught his eye again.
Some sort of flash of light overwhelmed the camera for a moment before it recovered. A chance reflection of the Sun off some polished surface, no doubt. The image came back at once. But there was something wrong. Chelated frowned and looked harder.
No, it was okay. Dianne’s ship was still there, against the broad background of stars. Stars? That was nuts. The Moon should be behind the Pack Rat. An alarm began to bleat, and he checked the system. The Earthside links were okay, but all the Moonside commlinks were out. Every last one of them.
Frank looked to the external view again. A numbing horror began to take hold of his gut.
The sky was all wrong. The Moon wasn’t there anymore.
And those weren’t the right stars, either.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shock Waves
Lucian Dreyfuss was one of the few permanent Lunar residents who actually witnessed Earth’s disappearance.
Mostly, it was the tourists who saw it happen. At any given moment, there were thousands of tourists up on the surface, in suits or in the view-domes, seeing the Lunar sights, such as they were. The locals never went topside.
Lucian worked as a space traffic controller in his regular job, and shepherded tourists on the side when money was tight—as it usually was with Lucian. At least it was a view-dome tour today. Dealing with a gaggle of tourist in shirtsleeves, oohing and ahhing at the gray landscape from inside a bubble dome, was infinitely preferable to riding herd on a bunch of neophytes bounding about the surface, all of them merrily trying to kill themselves by finding the flaws in supposedly idiot-proofed pressure suits.
Not even the Sun could hurt them here. Outside the dome, a large occulting disk on a specially built tracking arm followed the Sun around the sky, putting itself between the dome and the Sun at all times, thus keeping the Sun’s disk safely hidden from the dome’s interior. Outside the dome, the Moonscape was brilliantly lit: the dome itself was in permanent shadow. Lights glowed around the edge of the dome floor, providing just enough illumination to keep the turistas from tripping over each other.
But dome or surface, morning tours were always a bit much for Lucian. He was a night owl, used to the night shift at Orbital Traffic Control—and the night life at the casinos. He glanced at his watch. Just before 1000, Universal Time. Of course, this crowd was fresh off the ship. Most of these grounders were probably still on their local times. God only knew what time of day it was for them.
Lucian was on the short side with a wiry, athletic build. He put in a lot of time in the gym, determined to fight off the typical Conner’s tendency toward pudginess. His face was narrow and pale, with a reddish brown crew cut. His eyes were slate gray, penetrating, serious, passionate.
He looked out over the landscape. At the moment, his eyes showed nothing more impassioned than boredom. Maybe the landscape was awesome, but the natives—the Conners, as they called themselves—had seen it all before. None of them bothered to go up to the surface without a good reason. After all, the Lunar surface didn’t change much. Or at all. The tourists never seemed to understand that attitude.
Lucian spotted a somewhat overfed matron looking around the dome, giving every person a once-over, no doubt cataloguing each by accent and clothing. She frowned, spotted Lucian, and came over to him. A Mrs. Chester, he remembered. He knew what she was going to ask even before she opened her mouth.
“Tell me, Mr. Dreyfuss,” she asked. “Why do so few natives came up to look at any of the sights? I’ve been on tour here for a week now, and the only locals I’ve seen aboveground have been the tour guides. The vistas are so lovely. Why don’t you all come to look at them?”