Chapter 2

It was while I was doing my inspection that I first noticed a blinking light in the sky indicating a ship. I kept an eye on the light trying to fix its path in my mind since it seemed it was in a strange lunar orbit. When I finished my inspection of the greenhouse, it disappeared beyond the horizon, but I had a pretty good idea of when and where it should next appear. I had the home system set a reminder for me and I went to grab some food and check on the processor and how it was coming on the comet.

Now a good processor was worth its weight in gold, and they were priced to reflect that. In fact, my processor was more expensive than my land grant, my ship, and the cost of all my dwellings. Only the cost of hauling everything up here from earth had been more expensive, but a generous grant from the UN to the first five hundred settlers had covered that cost.

Now you might ask why an intelligent, reasonably good-looking guy in his early twenties would voluntarily agree to go live with a bunch of grizzly men in a very hostile environment. If you did ask, I’d probably growl at you and tell you to mind your own business, but the truth of the matter was that at the time I felt like I had few other options.

I had been engaged to be married and my parents had taken my fiancé out for dinner while I was finishing up my exams. When they didn’t show up, I got worried about them and started calling around, only to have the state police knock on my door to tell me they had been killed. Apparently, my fiancé had lost control of the car after being clipped by a car whose driver was drunk and had crossed the center line. They had gone off the side of a cliff and crashed in the ravine far below. Their deaths had been instant he told me.

I spent a few weeks laying around and bemoaning my life, but I finally pulled it together and got them all cremated and dealt with the few extended family we had and our friends. It was actually one of my college buddies who first mentioned the UN land grants to me. It sounded interesting and that had started me on my path. Between that and my studies in astrophysics and engineering, I was an ideal candidate and was quickly approved. And the next thing I knew, I was on my way to the moon.

One of my first projects had been to integrate my processor and my mining operation. I had enough solar panels that energy wasn’t really an issue but burning through components was a worry. However, I had been able to show that working in the cold of outer space during the lunar night dramatically reduced wear on the processor, so I did most of my mining during the nights, and most of my gardening during the days. Skimming was done whenever I identified an object, I thought I could capture, regardless of the season. There was a reward for dead satellites and debris, a minimum payment per kilo and more for functional components.

When I got down to the processor, it was working away on my comet. Already, the ice had been melted into components of water and gasses, helping to further cool the computer core. Oxygen was released into the atmosphere or stored in tanks buried far underground, while carbon dioxide and nitrogen were pumped into the algae tanks. Trace gasses were separated and stored as well.

Solid components were scanned and added to the ore processing. Comets and meteors were a good source of elements and heavy metals that weren’t abundant on the moon. If I was lucky, I’d find some trace minerals and rare earth minerals that would make for a good profit. I could tell from the preliminary scans that while the mineral content was low, I had found a large cache of water and oxygen, enough to last me for a few years at least. And the trace minerals and rare earth minerals looked quite promising!

There was even one skimmer up here who had found a meteor that was mostly gold, almost two hundred pounds. He had promptly flown his ship into the ocean and retired a rich man. We even had a term for it now, ‘Splashing In’ we called it.

Once I was sure that everything was running smoothly and started to head back up the access ladder, I heard my reminder alarm going off. Climbing a bit quicker, I headed up to my office and trained my telescope on the horizon to see if the ship appeared where I thought it would.

I grabbed the telescope and swung it slowly around, opening the field of view as wide as possible to scan the horizon and in a few moments, I located the blinking red distress signal of the ship. This hadn’t been present before, but I wasn’t surprised as the strange orbit of the ship suggested that it had barely managed take-off and was doomed to crash back into the surface eventually, just how long though was the question!

I made a couple of fixes on it and plugged them into the SatNav to see if it could calculate its orbit with any precision. Once I knew its trajectory and orbit, I could plot an intercept course. Of course, I didn’t know how much it weighed or much about it at this point, but it was so close I could probably lasso it and tug it home safely.

And while the rewards for satellites were good, the rewards for spaceships were quite lucrative. And turning on your distress beacon meant you were willing to pay them, or at a minimum, to forfeit your ship. Even a broken ship was worth a small fortune out here!

I tossed on my suit and headed over to the comms panel, surprised to see that there was still no info from Lunar Base nor from the first team that had set out to check on it. I figured I would swing by there on my way to lasso the ship if I could, just to get a bird’s eye view of what was going on there.

Figuring I would only be gone a few hours, I didn’t do a hard shut down, but I did put things into standby before cycling through the airlock and out to my ship. I climbed in and was happy to see my SatNav had already plotted an intercept that gave me plenty of leeway to get up and on course.

So, running through my pre-flight check twice, and doing a quick system check, I made sure the ship was in good shape after my haul and safety cable encounter. When everything checked out green, I hit the power and with a burst of kinetic energy, I bounced and hit the thrusters. A few seconds later the ion drive kicked in and I started making my way to rendezvous with the distressed ship.

Now you might be wondering why I hadn’t tried to reach them by radio, but that would have been the worst thing in the world I could have done, alerting everyone else in the solar system that there was a ship to salvage. No, I’d keep quiet until I was sure that I could get the ship, then I would contact them and see what was happening. It wasn’t like I could do anything for them until then anyway.

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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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