Pancho was heading for the Moon’s south pole when the news of the
She was flying in a rocket on a ballistic trajectory to the Astro power station set on the summit of the highest peak in the Malapert Mountains. Taller than Everest, Mt. Dickson’s broad, saddle-shaped summit was always in sunlight, as were its neighboring peaks. Astro workers had covered its crest with power towers topped by photovoltaic cells. The electricity they generated was carried back to Selene by cryogenically cooled cables of lunar aluminum that ran across the rugged, crater-pocked highlands for nearly five thousand kilometers.
For the few brief minutes of the rocket’s arcing flight southward, the handful of passengers hung weightlessly against their seat restraint straps. To her surprise, Pancho actually felt a little queasy. You’ve been flying a desk too long, girl. She thought about how the future growth of the Moon would almost certainly be in the polar regions. Water deposits were there, she knew, and you could build power towers that were always in sunlight, so you got uninterrupted electricity, except for Earth eclipses, but that was only a few minutes out of the year. It was a mistake to build Selene near the equator, she thought.
Back in those days, though, it started as a government operation. Moonbase. Some bean-counting sumbitch of a bureaucrat figured it’d be a couple of pennies cheaper in propellant costs to build near the equator than at either polar region. They picked Alphonsus because there were vents in the crater floor that outgassed methane now and then. Big lollapalooza deal!
As the rocket vehicle fired its retros in preparation for landing at the Astro base, Pancho caught a glimpse through her passenger window of the construction already underway at Shackleton Crater, slightly more than a hundred kilometers distant. Nairobi’s found the money they needed, she told herself. She had followed their progress in the weekly reports her staff made, but seeing the actual construction sprawling across the floor of Shackleton impressed her more than written reports or imagery. Where’s their money coming from? she asked herself. Her best investigators had not been able to find a satisfactory answer.
She had brought one of the new nanomachine space suits with her, folded and packed in her travel bag. Stavenger had even supplied her with a nanofabric helmet that could be blown up like a toy balloon. Pancho packed it but firmly decided that if she had to use the softsuit she’d find a regular bubble helmet to go with it.
There was no need for a space suit. Once the ballistic rocket touched down, a flexible tunnel wormed from the base’s main airlock to the ship’s hatch. Pancho walked along its spongy floor to the airlock, where the director of the base was waiting for her, looking slightly nervous because he wasn’t entirely sure why the company’s CEO had suddenly decided to visit his domain.
Pancho allowed him to tour her through the base, which looked to her a lot like most of the other lunar facilities she had seen. It was almost entirely underground; the work on the surface of maintaining the solar cells and building new ones was done by robotic machines tele-operated from the safety of the underground offices.
“Of course, we’re not as luxurious down here as Selene,” the base director explained in a self-deprecating tone, “but we do have the basic necessities.”
With that, he ushered Pancho into a tight, low-ceilinged conference room that was crowded with his senior staff people, all of them anxious to meet the CEO and even more anxious to learn why she had come to see them. The conference table was set with sandwiches and drinks, with a scale model of the base sitting in the middle of the table.
There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so Pancho remained standing, munched on a sandwich, sipped at a plastic container of fruit juice, and chatted amiably with the staff—none of whom dared to sit down while the CEO remained standing.
At last she put her emptied juice container back on the table. As if on signal, all conversations stopped and everyone turned toward her.
She grinned at them. “I guess you’re wondering why I dropped in on y’all like this,” Pancho said, reverting to her west Texas drawl to put them at their ease. “It’s not every day that the chief of the corporation comes to see us,” the base director replied. A few people tittered nervously.
“Well,” said Pancho, “to tell the truth, I’m curious ’bout what your new neighbors are up to. Any of you know how to get me invited over to the Nairobi complex?”
SELENE NEWS MEDIA CENTER
Despite its rather glitzy title, the news media center was little more than a set of standard-sized offices— most of them crammed with broadcasting equipment—and one cavernous studio large enough to shoot several videos at the same time.
Edith Stavenger stood impatiently just inside the studio’s big double doors, waiting while the camera crew finished its final take on a training vid for the new softsuits. A young woman who actually worked a tractor on the surface was serving as a model, showing how easy it was to pull the suit on and seal its front.
Many years earlier Edith Stavenger had been Edie Elgin, a television news reporter in Texas, back in the days when the first human expedition to Mars was in training. She had come to the Moon as a reporter during the brief, almost bloodless lunar war of independence. She had married Douglas Stavenger and never returned to Earth. She still had the dynamic, youthful good looks of a cheerleader, golden blonde hair and a big smile full of strong bright teeth. She was still bright-eyed and vigorous, thanks to rejuvenation therapies that ranged from skin-cell regeneration to hormone enhancement. Some thought that she had taken nanomachines into her body, like her husband, but Edith found no need for that; cellular biochemistry was her fountain of youth.
She had served as news director for Selene for a while but, at her husband’s prodding, semi-retired to a consultant’s position. Doug Stavenger wanted no dynasties in Selene’s political or social structure and Edith agreed with him, almost completely. She clung to her consultant’s position, even though she barely ever tried to interfere with the operation of the news media in Selene.
But now she had a reason to get involved, and she waited with growing impatience for the head of the news department to finish the scene he was personally directing.
The young model took off her fishbowl helmet and collapsed the transparent inflatable fabric in her hands. Then she unsealed her soft-suit, peeled it off her arms and wriggled it past her hips. She’d be kind of sexy, Elgin thought, if she weren’t wearing those coveralls.
At last the scene was finished, the crew clicked off their handheld cameras, and the news director turned and headed for the door.
“Edie!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you’d come up here.”
“We’ve got to talk, Andy.”
The news director’s name was Achmed Mohammed Wajir, and although he traced his family roots back to the Congo, he had been born in Syria and raised all over the Middle East. His childhood had been the gypsy existence of a diplomat’s son: never in one city for more than two years at a time. His father sent him to Princeton for an education in the classics, but young Achmed had fallen in love with journalism instead. He went to New York and climbed through the rough-and-tumble world of the news media until a terrorist bomb shattered his legs. He came to Selene where he could accept nanotherapies that rebuilt his legs, but he could never return to Earth while he carried nanomachines inside him. Wajir soon decided he didn’t care. The Moon’s one-sixth g made his recovery easier, and at Selene the competition in the news business was even gentler than the gravity.
As they pushed through the studio’s double doors and out into the corridor, Wajir began, “If it’s about this
“Accident?” Elgin snapped. “It’s a tragedy. Seven innocent people killed, one of them a baby.”
“We played the story, Edie. Gave it full coverage.”
“For a day.”
Wajir had once been slim as a long-distance runner, but years behind a desk—or a restaurant table —had thickened his middle. Still, he was several centimeters taller than Elgin and now he drew himself up to his full height.
“Edie,” he said, “we’re in the news business, and
