SOLAR STORM: Moon Base Delta, page 1
SOLAR STORM
MOON BASE DELTA
BOOK 1
GERALD M. KILBY
CONTENTS
Readers Group
1. Lunar Gateway
2. The New Lunar Accord
3. Pompodur Rossen Adarok
4. There Goes the Bonus
5. Heliophysics
6. A Lot of Frying Pan
7. Time is of the Essence
8. Carrington Event
9. Not Going Anywhere Soon
10. Fallout
11. Containment
12. LOP-G
13. MASTERM
14. No Good Options
15. Luna
16. Incarceration
17. Datasphere
18. Kessler Syndrome
19. Opportunities
20. SINO
21. Codes
22. Spider
23. The Waiting Game
24. Time to Get Out of Dodge
25. Desperate People
26. This Is How It Starts
27. Hitchhikers
28. Change of Plan
29. Space Division
30. New Reality
31. Traversing Tranquility
32. Gotta Go
33. Intelligence
34. Access Granted
35. Survive Some More
36. Decision Made
37. Moon Base Delta
38. Crazy Is Good
39. Xilinex
40. AI Core
41. DAO
42. The Better Deal
43. Just the Beginning
Author’s Note
Also by Gerald M. Kilby
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
LUNAR GATEWAY
When word came to the crew of the maintenance ship Aurora that they had less than four hours before the next burst of solar radiation hit them, there was a collective groan of protest. It was bad enough that they were embarking on a very delicate survey operation of the old Lunar Gateway, a very unsound hunk of space history, but having to do so during yet another bout of high intensity solar activity just added to the stress that the crew were already feeling.
And nobody was feeling this stress more than Renton Hicks, the youngest and latest addition to the engineering crew—just fresh out of training and his first time in space. He had departed from Earth only five weeks earlier and had been assigned to this ship as a junior engineer. Now his excitement at finally being able to fulfill his dream of working in space was being severely tested, as the harsh and dangerous realities were becoming clearer with each new solar flare alert.
Captain Mackenzie Arnold, a brash no-nonsense Aussie, had sensed the young man’s building anxiety and had been at pains to assure him that this level of solar activity was rare.
“It’s not always like this,” she counseled. “You just picked a bad time to join the team, right slap bang at the peak of solar activity.”
She was referring to an eleven-year cycle where the sun’s magnetic field completely reverses its poles, and midway through this cycle is a time of increased solar activity—the solar maximum.
“Granted, this one’s a tad rougher that any of the others I’ve ridden through,” she added. Though, she then went on to assure him that they were in no real danger—they always got plenty of warning, and even if you did get zapped by solar radiation, it was never as bad as people kept making it out to be.
This went someway to allaying Renton’s fears. The captain was a veteran after all. Someone who had come up at the tail-end of the third wave of lunar colonization, some twenty-five years earlier, around the time he himself was born. She had pretty much seen and done it all since then—and lived to tell the tale.
Yet, since departing their lunar orbital base less than a week ago, the crew of the maintenance ship had had to hunker down inside the most protected section of their vessel on nine different occasions. Each time for longer and longer durations. Renton was no expert on astronomical events, unlike their Systems Analyst, Alice Tyler, the second-youngest member of the crew, who was utterly fascinated by each solar flare and subsequent coronal mass ejection. To Renton, it seemed like these events were becoming more frequent and intense, not less so. Still, no one else seemed quite as rattled as he was by the constant flaring, so he’d best get a handle on his anxiety and move on with the job.
“Coming up on the space station. Four minutes to intercept.” The voice of the flight officer, Yuna Djinn, reverberated through the operations bay of the ship, kicking Renton out of his worrying, back into the here and now. He glanced up at the primary monitor and watched for a moment as the maintenance ship drew in closer to the ancient Lunar Gateway space station. He considered the term, space station, to be a rather grandiose moniker for what was just a few tiny cylindrical modules connected together via rudimentary docking ports, all of which was completely dwarfed by their own ship.
“I can’t believe people actually lived and worked in that thing.” He threw this observation out for the general consumption of the other crew.
“You gotta remember that thing, as you call it, is over ninety-eight years old,” Alice replied, while still concentrating on a data readout, her hands gesturing over the surface of the interface.
“We’re talking the real early days, Renton,” Matteo Cristoforetti, the second-most senior engineer on board piped in. “The very first space station in lunar orbit, where it all started. Nostalgia is the only reason they still have it up here.” Matteo relaxed in his seat. Like Renton, he had nothing to do until they actually started the drone survey. “It’s a piece of history that they’ve spent an absolute fortune on maintaining.”
“It’s a lost cause, if you ask me,” said Becker De Havilland, the crew’s Chief Engineer. “It’s been stripped bare of all useful tech, so it’s got zero function other than being a symbol for the old space agencies. When it goes, it will be the end of an era.”
Renton, being so young, had no great attachment to this artifact of human space history and struggled to understand why it had attained such a mythic position in space history. True, it’s where it all started, where the first wave of colonization began, but the time and resources needed to keep it from crashing onto the lunar surface hardly seemed worth it to him.
Yet he was reminded of an old power station cooling tower that had dominated the skyline back in his small hometown. The story went that when it was being built, most townspeople objected to this ugly industrial blight being foisted on their pretty little town. Public protests grew and several of the leaders were elected to the town council on this single issue alone. But it was all to no avail, if the townspeople wanted a stable and reliable electricity supply then this was it. Eventually pragmatism won out. But as a compromise, it was agreed to give the tower a candy-stripe paint job in an effort to mitigate the sheer brutal ugliness of it.
And so, over time, it became part of the landscape, this candy-striped tower, and the new generation that grew up with it couldn’t imagine the town without it watching over them. When the power station eventually became too old and too inefficient to operate, it was decommissioned and the great plumes of water vapor that had poured forth from its gaping maw ceased forever. Yet the structure remained, and since it was a municipal facility, public discussions had to be conducted on how best to utilize the land that would now become available. Needless to say, this lasted for decades and the town council found itself in the unenviable position of having to maintain the crumbling tower, patching up the masonry, and giving it a new paint job every so often, since by now it had embedded itself in the cultural fabric of the town.
It had even become a favorite vista for local artists whose work adorned the walls of local cafes and bars, some of whom adopted it as a logo or theme. Its image also became part of the town’s public relations efforts, being introduced into most of the promotional paraphernalia that was pumped out every year for the annual orchard festival. Peak love was reached when townspeople started wearing the t-shirt.
But time and entropy finally caught up with the aging structure and moves were gaining momentum to have it demolished. News of the impending destruction of the town's beloved tower invoked a furious reaction, and for the second time in its life, public protests were called. In an ironic twist, the children and grandchildren of the very people who had wanted it demolished all those years ago, now protested for its salvation. It had become a totemic symbol for the people and its loss would rip the very soul from the town.
In the end, it survived. It was now the centerpiece of a recreational park. Its lower flanks were a climbing wall, its upper levels a cafe and observation deck that afforded people spectacular views across the valley. People flocked from miles around to experience it. It was where Renton himself had spent many a happy day with his friends.
As he readied the survey drones for deployment and instigated the initial visual scan of the old station, he could see the parallels between this aging piece of space history and the beloved town tower. This artifact had also become totemic in the minds of many who lived and worked on the Moon’s surface and orbital platforms. It had been faithfully orbiting the Moon for over ninety-eight years, even though its functional life ended more than sixty years ago. Since then, it was kept in orbit by continual maintenance, most of which consisted of patching up the aging hulk. The Federation of International Space Agencies—FISA—had hoped to keep it going until the centenary celebrations, but the truth was that they simply couldn’t afford it anymore—and things had moved on. As FISA’s dominance in lunar colonization had faded so too did the symbolism of the Lunar Gateway. Their budget was stretched to the limit and something had to give, so it was agreed that the old Lunar Gateway would be decommissioned. The question now was—how this should be done?
They had a number of options. The first, and technically the easiest, was to let it crash-land on the lunar surface. But it had an unusual orbit, a near-rectilinear halo orbit, bringing it around 3,000 kilometers from the lunar north pole at its closest point, to over 70,000 kilometers from the south pole. A lot of surface infrastructure had been built up along the track of that orbit so simply letting it crash-land was fraught with potential problems. While coming down on a populated zone was statistically unlikely, there was still a sizable chunk of lunar landmass that various other agencies and organizations had laid claim to. If it came down in a sector not controlled by FISA, then this had the potential to be a political nightmare, at best. At worst, they could be sued out of existence.
The other option was to strap a booster to it and send it off into deep space, never to be seen again, assuming it was structurally sound enough to take the stresses without disintegrating and raining space junk down on the lunar surface.
However, at the last moment, the Dizzy Corporation arrived with a proposal. They were in the process of building a theme park in the northern quadrant of Amundsen Crater and wanted to investigate the possibility of salvaging the Lunar Gateway by towing it over to one of the orbital shipyards, dismantling it, and bringing it down to the surface bit-by-bit where it would be reassembled and form the centerpiece of their new Space History Museum. What’s more, they would even pay for the structural survey to be conducted to assess the feasibility. FISA jumped at the offer.
Up on the primary monitor, the crew could see the survey drones exit from the underbelly of the maintenance ship and make their way over to the old Lunar Gateway. They soon began to orientate themselves into a preprogrammed configuration and start to run passes along the length of the structure. With each pass, they would look deep into the molecular fabric of the station and build up a detailed picture of the internal structure of the metal struts and beams that held it all together. From this, the crew could then accurately calculate what stresses this ancient space artifact could support. But all this would take time to accomplish—approximately twelve hours, give or take.
Renton glanced at the solar radiation alert timer, ticking down from 3:47:00. By the time it hit zero, the crew would need to be hunkered down in the storage bay, as per the safety regulations. It would be at least a two-hour wait before they could exit again. For the captain, and some of the other crew, it was just more wasted time, time they couldn’t afford if they wanted to claim the bonus offered for hitting the project completion deadline.
Yet this was not Renton’s primary concern. What occupied his mind most was the repair job he had done on drone Five. He prayed it would hold up and the machine wouldn’t start glitching again. Because if it did… well, he didn’t want to think about what might happen.
CHAPTER 2
THE NEW LUNAR ACCORD
Selene Mene, Associate Director of FISA, sipped an early morning coffee in the comfort of her accommodation suite on board the Axial Luxor, a luxury orbital lunar hotel with a vaguely Egyptian theme. It had been block-booked in its entirety to host what many described as the most significant international symposium since the Antarctic Treaty back in 1959. Its objective was to redraft the sections of the old Outer Space Treaty of 1967, dealing with the Moon, and produce an agreed legal framework for future exploration. It was to be called the New Lunar Accord. But Selene was under no illusions as to the real intention of this high-level conference, which was to carve up the lunar surface between the main power blocks that had established a significant presence up here and grant them dominion over its resources. In her mind, it was more akin to the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, which significantly redrew the map of Europe—and to the victor went the spoils.
For well over a century, Earth’s space agencies and corporations had expanded the human footprint out into space, and nowhere was this expansion most evident than on the lunar surface. Yet all parties had been operating under a very rudimentary treaty whose signatories had envisioned it as a framework for the exploration of space not the exploitation of its resources, particularly by private corporations. Several ad hoc additions had been made to it over the years, but these were really just sticking plasters—and even then, not everyone that mattered had signed up to these. Something had to be done, things could not go on as they were. What was needed was some legal clarity for all interested parties. And so, after many stalled attempts, the first major revision was being undertaken.
Selene gestured at the large wall monitor, which was currently displaying a real-time image of Earthrise from the lunar surface. This was now overlaid by a series of icons representing all the documents produced from yesterday’s sessions. She waved her hand, flipping through each folder until she came to an executive summary that had been produced by her team while she slept. She brought it up on screen and took a bite of the freshly baked almond croissant that had accompanied her room-service breakfast. It tasted surprisingly good, but then again, this was a five-star hotel. She took another bite and began to scan the document.
She was disappointed to see that several of the breakout sessions had been postponed due to these damned solar flare alerts. It seemed that the Sun God was angry with all the meddling humans and was doing its very best to disrupt proceedings. She sighed.
Of the nine sessions that did go ahead, SINO—an aggregate of Chinese and affiliate national space agencies—only showed up for five of them, which was an improvement on the previous day. They were really dragging their feet, and very reluctant to engage with anything outside their own interests. And even then, most of the people they had on these breakout sessions had zero authority to make a decision. It seemed to be just an information-gathering mission. Still, they were here and engaging on some level—progress was being made, even if it was hellishly slow. Selene would take that, for now.
The most active and professional of all the parties involved in the talks were the corporates, particularly mighty industrial conglomerate, Xilinex. They were well prepared, well briefed, had the best people, and enthusiastically engaged with everything. Which is not surprising since they had most to gain out of a successful conclusion to the New Lunar Accord. As Selene digested the summary document, along with her almond croissant, she could see their ultra-professional fingerprints all over yesterday's sessions. Of the ones that had concluded, all topics that were discussed concluded favorably for Xilinex. She sighed again.
An alert flashed on screen. Selene gestured to open up a camera feed from the front door of her suite. It was Nicci Anderson, her assistant, ready to take on another day. Selene gestured again to let her in.
Nicci glanced up at the wall monitor as she entered the living area. “We’ve another solar flare alert for today. Long one, two hours.”
Selene nodded then pointed at the breakfast trolley. “Help yourself, I’ll never eat all that. I’ve told them a hundred times, just coffee and a croissant is more than enough.”
