Moonrise

“Aircraft,” Doug said.

“Automobiles!”

“Houses,” Doug added, gri

“All by using nanomachines for manufacturing,” said Joa

“Masterson Corporation could become the biggest, most powerful company in the solar system.”

Joa

His cheerful grin didn’t shrink by a millimeter when he heard her doubts. “But don’t you see, Mom? This will show everybody that nanotechnology works! It’ll knock the opposition flat!”

“And it will save Moonbase,” Joa

“Right!”

If it works, Joa

BALLISTIC VEHICLE 1

The liftoff wasn’t exactly silent. When the rocket ignited Doug could feel a surge of vibration in his bones that rumbled in his ears almost like sound. Still, the lack of thundering noise made Doug feel slightly eerie. And of course the thrust he felt was minuscule compared to a Clippership liftoff from Earth.

The excitement of the previous night’s conversation with his mother hadn’t worn off, exactly. The thought of going out to capture an asteroid and then using its carbon to build Clipperships out of diamond still tingled in the back of Doug’s mind. But that was for the future. This flight to the Moon’s south pole was now.

He had spent an hour in the main airlock, big enough to accommodate full-sized tractors and dozens of people, prebreathing the oxygen-nitrogen mixture that they would be using throughout the expedition. Moonbase ran on ’normal’ air: almost eighty percent nitrogen and twenty oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor, all at 14.7 pounds per square inch, almost exactly like the clean dry atmosphere of a desert region on Earth. The surface suits still worked at five psi, with a 72/28 ratio of oxygen to nitrogen.

Moonbase safety regulations called for prebreathing the spacesuit mix for an hour before going outside, to get the excess nitrogen out of the blood stream and prevent the bends.

Now, strapped into the bare metal seat in the ballistic lobber, his suit buttoned up tight, Doug felt weird as the rocket engines blasted them off the floor of Alphonsus in almost total silence.

The lobbers were modified versions of the transfer spacecraft that shuttled passengers and freight from Earth orbit to the Moon. There was nothing aerodynamic about them, since they never flew in an atmosphere. They were utilitarian assemblies of silvered tankage, rocket engines, bulky cargo containers, pressurized perso

Doug felt the rockets’ vibration through the metal frame of the vehicle; it was almost sound, like a thunder so distant and faint you wonder if you’ve heard anything at all. The spacecraft rose quickly enough; Doug could see through the transparent bubble of the passenger pod the slumped mountains of the ringwall whiz past and then nothing but the darkness of space. But there was hardly any palpable acceleration, none of the heavy forces that pushed you down in your seat when you lifted off from Earth.

And then all sense of thrust disappeared. The vibration ceased, too. Engines have cut off, Doug knew. We’re coasting on a ballistic trajectory now, like an artillery shell.

His suit helmet cut off his view of Bianca Rhee, sitting beside him. There were four others crowded into the plastiglass bubble of a passenger module, plus Bre

“How do you like it?” he asked Bianca.

Her voice in his helmet earphones sounded strained. “If I could walk, I’d do it.”

Doug laughed. “This is a lot easier than walking. And safer.”

“It’s the free-fall,” said Bianca. “Makes my stomach want to turn inside out.”

“Well, try to relax. We’ll be back on the ground in about half an hour.”

“Can’t be too soon.”

The spacecraft tilted forward a few degrees, enough so that they could look down at the cratered mountains sliding below them, dwindling as the lobber headed for the peak of its ballistic trajectory. Bianca groaned aloud.

“Isn’t that Tycho?” Doug said, tapping a gloved finger against the plastiglass canopy. “Over there, near the horizon.”

The crater was unmistakable: big and sharp, with bright rays of debris streaking out of it for hundreds of miles. One of the newest big craters on the Moon, Doug said to himself. Not even a billion years old.

“Tycho,” Bianca said, awed. “Wow, I’ve never seen it so close.”

“It’ beautiful, isn’t it?” said Doug.

“Sure is.”

She leaned over until her helmet visor was touching the canopy’s plastiglass. Doug knew that Tycho marked the midpoint of their half-hour flight. He hoped it would keep Bianca fascinated long enough to make her forget about barfing.

Foster Bre

Killifer took a wire from one of the pouches in his spacesuit’s belt, plugged it into an access port in the side of his helmet, then plugged the other end into the similar port in Bre

“Smooth liftoff,” Killifer said.

If Bre

“Right”

Killifer dutifully called the second ballistic craft as he checked the instrument readouts for the two unma

“No problems. Just like four te

“Te

“That’s where the term Lobber comes from, Foster. These ballistic birds go like a te

Bre

“I used to, a little,” said Killifer. “Back when I was in California.”

The memory ached in his gut. Nanotechnology had not expanded much in the eighteen years since he’d been forced out of the field. Still, he told himself, I could’ ve been an executive, a rich man, a leader in the field. I could have taken Cardenas’ spot when she left the corporation. Instead, here I am, a quarter-million miles from anything worthwhile, second-in-command on a loony expedition to the ass end of nowhere. With Joa

Deftly, Bre

“No one’s ever set foot on that territory,” Bre

Killifer grunted. He was still thinking about his younger days in California.

“We’ve only begun to explore the Moon. There’s a whole world waiting for us to put our bootprints on it,” said Bre

Killifer smiled inside his helmet. “Wasn’t this expedition your idea?”

“It certainly was,” Bre