Chapter 1: It Begins

Definition: Skim - to move or glide lightly over or along (a surface, as of water)

I was sitting in my ship, coasting along on the ride back home. It had been a reasonably productive day, having been able to capture and harness an obsolete Russian satellite that was beginning to have a deteriorating orbit. I had filed my claim and was awaiting notification of its acceptance from the orbital safety committee.

In the meantime, I just had time to kill as I coasted back to my home base on the moon. I had completed my slingshot action a few hours ago, but even with optimal speed, it still took some time to make the trip home.

I checked over the readout again and all ship systems were in the green. She isn’t much to look at, but my ship is my baby, and how I earn my living.

I’ve heard some Earthsiders call it an outer space flatbed truck, and they wouldn’t be far from wrong. There is a rather square cabin and cockpit up front, a long ‘bed’ behind it, and the ion drive engine at the rear. Instead of wheels, she’s got skids on the bottom that we use for landing on the moon.

I thought about the things I would need to do when I got home. The solar panels from the satellite were probably salvageable and I could use the extra boost in power since a stray meteor had damaged my solar array a few weeks back. The other electronics would go through recycling, and if there was any life left in the battery, it would be added to my battery bank that was buried in the ground deep below the lunar surface.

Of course, I could always hope for thruster fuel and compressed gas, but those were rare, especially in satellites that were in degrading orbits.

Just then, a ping let me know that I had a message. I was pleased to see that it was from the Orbital Space Command, or OSC as we called it, granting my claim and paying the recovery fee for the satellite. One less hazard in the heavens had a value and they were happy to pay the few of us who were willing to live out here and do this job.

As I scanned the computers, I realized I had reached the halfway point in my journey. While it still took about a full earth day to cross the distance between earth orbit and the moon, it was a far cry from the primitive ships and the three days it had taken the astronauts of Apollo 11.

Making sure all systems were green, I turned the ship 180 degrees and set the ion thruster to start slowing us down so that we were at the correct speed when we hit lunar orbit.

Ion drives had made space flight possible. They essentially used electricity and a raw mineral ore that was abundant on the moon. While you still needed a launch system to get off the surface, the ion drives made the trip back and forth to earth orbit economically feasible. My little skimmer ship could even survive an earth re-entry, though it would be incredibly uncomfortable, and a water landing was the only way to ensure you survived.

After ensuring everything was set, I knew I had about six hours to sleep, and as I had learned, sleeping when you can pays dividends. So, I leaned back in my seat, inflated my pillow, and settled in until my alarm awoke me.

My little abode on the moon was marked by the array of mismatched solar panels that tracked the sun as it crossed our sky and reflected back to us from the earth. We were in the middle of a lunar night, which lasts for almost 14 earth days, which made even seeing the solar collectors from altitude difficult, though they were angled to pick up reflected light from the earth as much as possible. The fact that it was the middle of the lunar night was the reason I was out skimming. If it were a solar day, I’d be busy working the greenhouse, the ore mining station, or just maintaining the station. We lunars took advantage of the solar day and tended to rest and hope everything worked during the long solar nights when it got really cold outside.

A small red blinking light indicated my landing skid, and I used this plus a SatNav transmitter beacon to guide the ship in. Mostly the computer did the work, I was just here in case something screwy happened that the computer wasn’t programmed to handle, like an asteroid strike, or other human interference.

But today’s landing went smoothly, and after donning my helmet, I activated the pumps to retain as much of the air from the cockpit into the reserve cannisters as possible. When we were as near vacuum as possible, I popped the hatch and climbed out. I then pushed the satellite off the bed and dragged it over to the airlock. I would need to break it down into parts before I could decide what I was keeping, what I would recycle, and what I was willing to sell.

Once the satellite was in the airlock, I secured my ship and shut down my guidance beacon. Then I headed back to the airlock to finish the job of salvaging the parts from my capture.

It had been a good harvest, and the additional solar panels were already generating power from the reflected earth-light and promised to significantly boost power production come the next day cycle. But I was back in my ship today because I had been tracking a comet. While it was near the outer limits of my range, I thought that with full thruster tanks and my ion drive, I could harvest the comet and the valuable minerals that it might contain. I also had a sneaking suspicion that based on its trajectory it was at least partly a comet, which meant it possibly contained gases and water, both of which were invaluable to lunars.

It would take me two days to snag this rock, setting up a slingshot around the moon and hoping that with my ion drive and thruster I could maneuver the rock into a slingshot back toward the moon. I’d run the simulator a few hundred times, varying the weight and composition of the rock and the solar location, and I was successful around sixty percent of the time.

After clearing lunar orbit and setting my intercept course, I settled in for a nap, knowing that worrying about a deep space death wouldn’t do any good at all now.

You see, a deep space death is what we called the death that followed running out of oxygen when you had missed your gravity slingshot and wound up in deep space. While an ion drive could run for weeks and would eventually bring you back, most ships would run out of oxygen long before that happened.

If I miss-calculated and the meteoroid was too big or too heavy, I could say sayonara to my home base and the very valuable land grant I had from the UN. While a lot of land grants had been sold by the UN, most went unclaimed and unsurprisingly, I had no neighbors for miles around. I had even been able to buy a few of the adjoining tracts, making my home base one of the largest settlements on Luna.

But for today it was rest and sleep and let the ship do her job to get me to the rock.

Three days later, I was hyped to be back in my ship and headed home. I had a large rocky comet strapped into the hold and despite having to take a walk to get it secured, I was about to be a very rich man. As you may know, air and water are rare on the moon. While they do exist and we could extract them to some degree from the ore that we mined, losses from air locks and filtration system inefficiencies meant there was always a need for more water and air. Even carbon dioxide was lovely since we could pump it into the algae tanks where it would quickly be converted to oxygen. Nitrogen gas went into tanks as fertilizer as well, and surplus nitrogen was used for thrusters.

My only worry now was could I slow down enough to catch a lunar orbit where I could spend a day or two reducing my speed enough to land. But if I could pull it off, it would be worth burning every last bit of fuel in the thrusters and every bit of air I had used on the walk.

But worrying about it now wouldn’t help. All I could do was point the ship the correct way and set the ion drive on max and hope she held together despite the heavy load.

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A man, nearly broken by loss, lives a solitary existence off planet earth in a small habitat he has constructed on the moon.

Skimmer

Lorn Skye

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