Wildcatter

When a lunar miner goes outside the system, he finds his customers are even more outside the law.

Anthony checked the time when he heard dust rattling off the wall of his habitat. Dmitri was arriving just when he’d said. His transport’s rocket exhaust was blowing the dust off the landing pad.

Waiting for the airlock to finish cycling had Anthony almost dancing with excitement. This would be the first visitor since he’d taken ownership of the mine eight months ago. His feet twitched enough to bounce him a few inches into the air. That didn’t take any effort in lunar gravity.

The inner door swung open, revealing a Russian-model space suit. The helmet popped off. “Hello, Anthony.”

Dmitri looked 50ish, with a short black beard, trimmed to keep it clear of the helmet ring. His eyes were an icy grey. They didn’t match his smile.

Anthony returned the handshake. It felt firm, even with the spacesuit glove restricting the movement of Dmitri’s fingers. “Welcome, Dmitri. Thank you for coming. I’m glad someone’s finally breaking the boycott. I owe Russia thanks for that.”

“Ah. I must have been unclear on radio. This is not approved mission for my government. I am acting for myself only.” The Russian accent inflected the speech, but it was clear enough for Anthony to understand it all.

“Oh.”

The airlock began cycling again. Dmitri hadn’t mentioned bringing anyone else along—but he hadn’t said he was coming alone. He might have needed a pilot for the transport.

“I wish to make generous offer for thorium ore you have produced. For fifteen hundred kilos, you will receive, first, one million Swiss francs in account free of money laundering restrictions, which will be turned over to you.”

The airlock door opened. Another Russian space suit came in.

“Second, two hundred SkyCoin. I understand you already have crypto wallet. Those coins will be transferred directly.”

The second Russian spacesuit removed its helmet. The face revealed was female. Beautifully so. Shining blue eyes. Blonde hair in braids wrapped around her head. Anthony couldn’t help staring, until he forced himself to look back to Dmitri.

“And third, Svetla, here, who will remain with you.”

Anthony looked back at the woman. No, it wasn’t just that she was the first woman he’d seen in most of a year. She was honestly gorgeous. He glared at Dmitri. “What is this? Are you offering her as part of the deal? That’s—that’s trafficking!”

The Russian man shrugged. “It’s not good for man to be alone. You said you’d had no visitors on radio. Svetla will be good for you.”

“Well, I’m not taking a slave in trade. And that’s not enough currency for what the ore’s worth here on the Moon.”

The smile dropped from Dmitri’s face. It left him looking not angry, but as if he was feeling no emotions at all.

The woman stepped forward. She put a hand on Dmitri’s shoulder. “Dmitri, darling, let me have a word with the man. Step into the other room for a moment so we can speak privately.” She waved at the airlock.

Her voice was sweet as honey. Maybe that was the loneliness. But her English was better than Dmitri’s. Maybe better than Anthony’s. The trace of Russian accent was mixed with the formal British diction of whoever’d taught her.

She stood there, wearing a practiced smile, until the airlock door thudded closed. Then she glared at Anthony. “Durok! Take the deal. Dmitri doesn’t have enough propellant to take me and the ore back to Leonov Station. If you won’t let me stay, he’ll pop my helmet and leave me dead outside.”

That was as horrifying to Anthony as the original deal. “Oh. Then I won’t make a deal with him at all!”

“Can you win a knife fight with a bratok? A, what, mafioso?” She looked him up and down. “Do you have a knife? Do you have any weapon?”

“I made a pneumatic dart thrower to threaten ships landing without my permission. It’s outside.”

That made her opinion of him visibly drop. “It’s not doing you any good in here. Take the deal.”

“It’s not enough cash.”

She said, “Ask for more crypto.”

Anthony struggled inside. “All right.”

Svetla went to the airlock and opened it.

Dmitri stepped into the room again. “We have deal?”

“I want five hundred SkyCoin,” said Anthony.

That brought a hard glare from the Russian. Anthony wasn’t much for staring contests. But he was angry enough over Dmitri’s plan to enslave or murder the woman he stood up to it.

After a few moments, Dmitri said, “Four hundred fifty SkyCoin.”

Anthony considered pushing back. But that might be all Dmitri had. “Deal.”

“Good!” The Russian had taken his gloves off in the airlock. The handshake this time squeezed Anthony’s knuckles painfully.

Dmitri produced a flask. “Let us celebrate!” He gulped down some of the contents.

Anthony took it in turn and drank more carefully. He expected vodka. What he swallowed seemed to be pure ethanol. He managed to force it down without gagging or sputtering, but his expression still made Dmitri laugh.

“Keep it! You need practice.”

Transferring the money took some work. Not the crypto. In only a few minutes Anthony received an email with his updated balance. But the Swiss bank account required a video call to Earth to speak to the account manager.

His ‘emergency survival access’ to the MoonLink satellites allowed him up to an hour of video a week. Anthony suspected it was MoonLink’s protest of the boycott, or just trying to keep him tied to them as a future customer when they were allowed to take his money.

The Swiss banker was accustomed to playing games with accounts. She didn’t believe the call was from the Moon until Anthony dropped a stylus. Her eyes tracked it as it slowly fell past his face.

“Well. I was going to complain to our service provider about the lag on this call, but I see it’s not their fault.” After that she handled the transfer smoothly.

Dmitri and Svetla politely turned their backs as Anthony typed in his new password.

Then he was officially a millionaire, though he couldn’t spend it on anything he needed.

All three of them suited up to transfer the ore to Dmitri’s transport. In Lunar gravity, they could handle the five to ten kilo bags easily. Balancing the ore in the hold so it wouldn’t tip the transport over took longer than loading it.

Dmitri graciously waited until the two of them were back in the habitat before igniting the rocket engine.

They helped each other take off their spacesuits. Not being familiar with the designs of each other’s suits, the help was limited to “Tug here, please.” To Anthony’s relief, Svetla wore a standard cosmonaut jumpsuit under the spacesuit.

The habitat had lockers for a dozen suits. Svetla’s fit neatly into one. Once that was dealt with, they faced each other in awkward silence.

Anthony broke it. “I know Dmitri thinks he sold you to me. But I didn’t buy you. I don’t own you. I will never make any, um, personal demands of you.”

He flushed and looked around. Svetla’s expression remained calm. He continued, “That said, just staying alive here takes a lot of work, so anything you can do will be appreciated. I don’t know how much technical skill you may have, but some of the work is unskilled and I can teach you how to do some other stuff.”

Svetla flashed just a hint of a smile. “I have a degree in chemical engineering, and a few year’s experience in laboratory.”

“Oh! Yes, that’s very useful. Um—Dmitri didn’t act like you were an engineer.”

She shrugged. “I thought I was being hired as an engineer. The national agency thought they were hiring an engineer. The station manager thought he was receiving an engineer. Dmitri and his fellow bratva thought they had a better use for me. The manager was in no position to defy them.”

“Oh. Um. Did you—defy them?”

Her face went stony. “Bratva control whores in Moscow by addicting them to heroin. I am addicted to oxygen, which makes me easier to control. I defied him some, was punished, and now I am here.”

The horrors implied by that were nothing Anthony wanted to talk about. “Well, there’s plenty of oxygen here. More than we’ll need.”

Svetla changed the subject. “So this is what you stole from NASA?” She waved about the habitat main chamber.

“I didn’t steal it. It was abandoned. I salvaged it. NASA ordered us to leave the site and issued an abandon in place order for all the equipment. We’d been prospecting here for three months, saw signs of a major lode, but the new administration didn’t want us mining. They pulled the plug on the project. I stayed here and went freelance.”

“I see. And you’ve found enough thorium to fuel a reactor, once it’s purified.”

“There’s plenty more. If I had time to keep the digging machinery maintained there’d be tons of it. And I should be able to smelt it, but again, there’s only so much time.”

“How much time does life support take up?”

“Air and water, not much. I produce oxygen as a by-product of the aluminum smelter.”

Svetla nodded. She likely recognized the highlands around the habitat as being aluminum-rich rock.

“There’s an algae tank for cleaning CO2. I distill my wastewater for drinking and bathing water. I have a potato garden I set up after NASA left.”

“Is that all your food?” she asked in a worried tone.

“No, it’s to supplement my rations. NASA had five weeks’ worth of food here for a crew of twelve. That’s my vitamins and protein. The potatoes are extra calories.”

Svetla did the math. “So you had seven months of food left, plus the potatoes. And I have cut that in half.”

“Eh. Wasn’t your idea. So this room is the first one the prospectors set up. It has the tool benches, computers, analysis gear, and so on.”

He led her through an airlock, opening both doors at once. On the other side was a room the same size, but less cluttered.

“This one we set up a couple of months in. Never did do much with it under NASA. I’ve been using it for my new projects. There’s the potato garden. Water still. Storage tanks for water. Oxygen I store outside, except for an emergency tank. That’s the shower. There’s the door to the mining—”

“Shower?” interrupted Svetla.

“Yeah, NASA makes us do sponge baths, but I have a fair amount of water, and spare pumps, so I set up a shower.” He pointed to a object which looked like one of the storage tanks, but with a door.

“I’ve also only had sponge baths. May I borrow your shower?”

“You live here now, of course you can use it whenever you want. Let me show you the controls.”

The most important control was the emergency stop button for when your face was covered with water. The water pressure was adjustable. It could go high enough to be dangerous. But the temperature was fixed. “If you want it hotter or colder we can rewire it, or figure out a way to have two settings.”

“We can worry about that later. If you could be kind enough to wait in the other room?”

Anthony did. There were some sites where he’d posted requests for spare part deliveries. He updated them with higher rewards. So far no one had been willing to offend the consortium of governments by delivering to him. He’d thought having actual thorium would be enough for someone to break it.

He kicked himself for not negotiating terms with Dmitri before the thug flew out here. He’d been too excited by the thought of the boycott breaking and, yes, having a visitor. The mafioso might have brought some of the parts he needed if Anthony had the sense to ask up front.

It’s not like the guy would mind stealing from Russian government supplies. It seemed to be his business.

The worry that Svetla had found a way to drown or break her neck in the shower crept up on him as time went by. He’d certainly slipped plenty of times in there, which was why there were six grab bars welded to the inside of the shower.

But there was no way he’d risk the embarrassment of barging in on her naked after making the ‘you’re not my sex slave’ speech. She probably thought he was just posturing to look good and would be making demands of her in a few days. Like hell he would.

The airlock opened. Svetla came in, wearing her jumpsuit. “Bozhe moi, Anthony, you are a genius. This is the cleanest I’ve been since I left Earth.”

He flushed. “There was nobody here to tell me I couldn’t do it.”

Her hair caught his attention. She hadn’t braided it yet. It hung down the front of her jumpsuit in a river to her waist. Svetla was running her hands along the length of it, trying to squeeze out more water.

It was distracting.

Best to focus on getting her up to speed on the habitat. “When you’re ready to suit up again, I’ll show you the outside facilities.”

She braided the hair still wet. Suiting up went smoothly. Anthony studied her suit. It looked new. No sign of wear. Which was good, because he had zero replacement parts for it.

Their footprints had been blown away by the exhaust of Dmitri’s transport. The landing pad was bare rock, blasted clear by NASA when the prospecting expedition came out here. A ridge of rock separated the pad from the other facilities outside of the habitat.

“This is the aluminum smelter. That was NASA gear. I have to shovel the slag away every couple of weeks. Solar arrays, of course. Also NASA. This is a solar dynamic generator I built as a backup.”

“You had the material for a generator?”

“It’s all aluminum. A big polished reflector to concentrate sun on the heat exchanger. I don’t have a motor for it, so I shift the reflector by hand twice a shift. The generator is aluminum wires. There was enough iron in the smelter slag for magnets. I use aluminum oxide for the insulators. The working fluid is oxygen gas.”

“Living off the land.” Svetla sounded impressed.

He led her around another ridge. “This is where I’ve been experimenting with smelting thorium ore. No luck yet. I don’t have any of the materials they use for it on Earth, so the research I’ve done hasn’t been useful. All of my experiments mostly just get me hot ore.”

“I may be able to extract something useful from your slag pile,” she said.

Right. Chemical engineer. That could be useful here. “Great. Let me know what you need.”

He led her through a flat patch. They couldn’t see the habitat from here, but he pointed out the outcrop the outer room of the habitat butted up against. “Here’s my other experiment. It’s going better than the thorium smelter.”

They looked at the waist-high cylinder. The top half was a mass of wires and tubes.

“What is it?”

Anthony grinned, not that she could see his face. “I’ll show you.”

He picked up the gadget, positioning it so the bottom was angled away from the habitat. He made sure Svetla was behind and to the side of him, then pressed a button.

“POP” was the sound he heard through his gloves. The gadget pushed him up and back, sending him almost back to the habitat. He’d practiced this enough to land on his feet.

Svetla spat a string of Russian words. They weren’t on the list of one hundred ‘Russian Words for Emergency Operations’ NASA made Anthony memorize before their parting. She shuffled her feet, turning between looking at Anthony and the patch of bare rock where the regolith had been blasted away.

“A rocket engine?” she asked in English.

“Yep. Oxygen and aluminum as propellants.”

“That—how does that work?”

Anthony cheerfully explained his invention. “It holds a tank of liquid oxygen and another of fine aluminum powder. The aluminum tank pops out a spoonful of powder, then seals tight. Some liquid ox is squirted in, which goes gaseous in the vacuum and blows the powder around. The sparkplug ignites them. There’s an excess of oxygen. Some burns the powder, heats up the rest, and it all blows out the nozzle. Then the combustion chamber goes to vacuum and the cycle resets.”

Svetla absorbed this. “It doesn’t fire continuously. It pulses.”

“Yes. My hopper design has an array of them. So the thrust averages as they cycle.”

“I’m going to want to look at that design.”

“I’d be happy to share it—come nightfall. We have sixty five hours of sunlight left. I want to focus on energy intensive work while we have it.”

“Yes, of course.” She kept staring at the prototype rocket. “You have figured out a way to live off the land. Everyone minimizes their flights because fuel has to be brought from Earth. If you can make a practical version of that, we’ll have unlimited transportation.”

“Maybe. I’m just trying to find a way to visit a base so I can trade my stuff.”

“Won’t the boycott prohibit that?”

NASA was angry enough over him quitting that they’d insisted every other Lunar outpost promise to not deal with him. “I’m hoping some of the crew will be willing to do some off the books trading. It’ll be easier if they don’t have to check out a transport and be logged as visiting me.”

“I’ll hope so, too.”

They went back into the habitat.

“While we’re suited up,” said Anthony, “let’s go see the mining tunnel.”

He led her through the inner room, then through an airlock to a tunnel cut in the stone. “We have air in here. Just oxygen. My nitrogen supply is dwindling. But it’s easier for the machinery.”

“You’re not worried about fire?” she asked.

“Not for the mining equipment. The main problem for that is overheating and hydraulic fluid leaks. The fire hazard is the batteries. They use a hexafluorophosphate electrolyte, so they’re in a separate compartment with a lever that opens it to vacuum.”

“Bozhe moi. Why are you using that?”

“They were printed at Armstrong Base. The consultant’s trade study said that calcium-ion batteries were the most efficient in terms of mass brought up from Earth.”

Passing through three air tight curtains brought them to the working chamber. There’d been scattered traces of thorium in the tunnel walls, but here was the real lode. The grinding machine was inactive. Anthony checked the readout. “Overheated. No leak this time. Let’s gather up what it has before starting it up.”

Piles of thorium oxide dust—mixed with all the other minerals found in this rock formation—lined the wall where the grinder was tasked to work.

A stack of bags, a broom, and dustpan sat by the entrance. He handed a bag to Svetla and began sweeping up the powder on the floor. He used short, gentle strokes to ensure it wouldn’t fly all over in the low gravity.

“Isn’t this a little low tech for radioactive material?” asked Svetla.

He stayed head down, focused on the sweeping. “It’s not that radioactive. When we have some purified ingots, then we’ll need to shield them. I’m sure NASA would’ve had a fancy conveyer belt with an automated packaging system, but we don’t need that. We just need to not inhale any of it.”

Once he’d packaged up the bag of dust, he said, “There’s a gadget outside to do a rough sort on this, just separating the thorium ore from the other minerals. I dump the rest on the slag pile from the aluminum smelter. Step on out, you don’t want dust on you when the grinder starts.”

He pressed the big black button. It started up again and began chewing a layer of rock away. Powder sprayed out and fell to the floor.

After passing through the curtain and resealing it, Anthony did a quick cleaning of their suits. Normal regolith could be a health hazard if inhaled. The thorium ore was much more toxic.

Back in the inner room, he pointed out the battery compartment. “Just yank that lever and it rips a hole in the outer wall, dumps the whole thing to vacuum.”

“What do we have for backup power?”

“A half hour of capacity in a lithium battery brought from Earth. That gives us time to shut everything down, wrap up in a thermal blanket, and hope it doesn’t get too cold before dawn.”

“I see. So we’re not just depending on the food. If we lose the batteries, that could kill us.”

“Eh. There’s a bunch of other critical failures. I’ve used up most of the spare parts. The electronics parts. Anything mechanical I can make a replacement from aluminum. But there’s about four electronic boards that’ll kill us if we take an extra cosmic ray. We’d lose the life support or electrical system. Either would be fatal. That’s why I added another layer of sandbags on the roof of the habitat. I’m not worried about cancer. I’m trying to protect the electronics.”

Svetla absorbed that in silence.

“Sorry. It’s not as safe as you might have thought.”

She laughed. “It’s better than being with Dmitri. Let’s get a bite to eat and then do some work.”

It took a few days to work out their new routine. Anthony detached one of the folding cots in the outer room and moved it to the inner one as his bunk. That way they could have privacy for their sleep shifts.

He certainly wanted privacy, and she didn’t object.

Divvying up the chores wasn’t hard. He wound up still processing sewage for the potato garden, but he’d been doing it already so it didn’t make his life worse.

The MoonLink connection saw more use as Svetla researched how to break down thorium oxide to the pure metal. She spent more time outside, trying to extract other elements from the slag pile. Anthony didn’t pry into the work, after an initial conversation that left his head swimming with ‘plagiocase,’ ‘ilmenite,’ and ‘pyroxene.’

No one was willing to take a million Swiss francs to deliver a set of spare parts and rations.

The potatoes appreciated Svetla’s presence. They needed all the carbon dioxide and fertilizer they could get.

When night fell, the two of them did a detailed review of Anthony’s hopper design. She’d had enough mechanical engineering classes to check his work. It looked like it would fly. How safely it would fly worried them both.

The performance was marginal. Svetla pointed out the one hundred and eighteen second specific impulse he’d calculated assumed complete combustion. “I doubt you’ll get over a hundred seconds.” That still let the design reach Armstrong Base with more than two tons of payload. Though the payload number included the crew.

The flight control system was the scariest part. It turned individual rockets on or off as needed to steer the hopper. Which, given the delay between the FCS flipping the switch and the next firing of the rocket, risked going out of control if the delays were too long. If the hopper started spinning, there was no way it could recover with such a clumsy control system.

“Are you really wanting to fly this?” asked Svetla.

Anthony shrugged. “If it comes down to starving, freezing, or flying, I’ll fly.”

When the design was as good as they could make it, he went back to machining parts for the rocket engines. It would take at least a couple of months to build the hopper, half the time he’d expected before Svetla took over some of the chores. All the chips from machining went into a bin to be ground up as fuel powder.

A shift went into making four improvised pistols powered by high-pressure oxygen tanks. The darts weren’t as dangerous as bullets, but a hole in a spacesuit would be lethal. Svetla had no objection to carrying her pair. She didn’t like the thought of another visit from Dmitri either.

Two months went by. Productivity improved. Having more time to work on their projects let them get ahead. Two sets of eyes made maintenance checks better. The mining grinder went from working an average of four hours before tripping a breaker or starting to leak to twelve hours.

Svetla avoided coming within arm’s length of Anthony. He cooperated with giving her the extra personal space. He wasn’t sure if that was normal Russian standoffishness, or her personal history. Either way he was careful not to crowd her.

It some ways the avoidance made it easier for him. If she was constantly bumping into him he’d have a harder time keeping his imagination under control than he already did.

When the next lunar night fell, Svetla took over the computer for a long series of chemistry simulations. When it finished, she turned to Anthony. “I can smelt the thorium. It’ll be ninety to ninety-five percent pure.”

After a moment, he said, “That’s great, but I get the feeling there’s some bad news to go with that.”

“There is always bad news. I will need to use the battery electrolyte to make the catalyst.”

Anthony thought about that. “Most of what we do during the lunar night is optional. We can stop using the tools, no showers, even turn off most of the lights. But most of the battery charge goes to the heaters. If we give up half the batteries, it could get cold here.”

“I was afraid it wouldn’t be practical,” she said.

“I think we can make it work. Cold won’t kill us. There’s some things I can do to minimize heat loss. And . . .”

She cocked her head at him, waiting for him to continue.

“We’re running out of time. Food is low. There’s multiple critical components I’ve run out of spares for. I think it’s worth a cold night to get some trade goods. If we just play it safe we’re dead for sure. We should try it.”

That drew a smile from her. “How pessimistic of you. I’ll make a Russian of you yet.”

Anthony chuckled. “That’s my American optimism that we can make the smelter and hopper work.”

That night shift he made as many components of the hopper as he could. The rocket engines and control system were complete. He was down to creating the ribs of the vehicle’s structure.

Sunrise was announced by a brightening of the habitat’s lights as the solar array took over from the depleted batteries. Anthony and Svetla sprang up from their seats and set to work.

The first step was suiting up. Draining the electrolyte from the batteries was a nasty job. They didn’t want to whiff any fumes of the hexafluorophosphate. The toxic fluid went into aluminum flasks he’d cast for another project months ago.

Once sealed, Anthony helped carry the flasks out to Svetla’s outside experiment area. It was full of pipes and containers to hold the chemicals she was working with against the vacuum. An aluminum parabolic reflector stood ready to focus enough sunlight to heat her reaction vessel as much as she needed.

She set to work. Anthony would have loved to watch her—he didn’t understand the chemistry but her command of the crystals and powders was amazing—but he had his own work to do.

The main structural members of the hopper were already laid out on the landing pad. He needed to weld on the ribs, then the landing gear. That would elevate the square deck enough for him to install the rocket engines underneath. When they were done, he’d set up the control runs on the top side, cover them so the cargo wouldn’t abrade them, and build a bench for the pilot and engineer.

It was a lot of work for the two week lunar day. They were pushing themselves, trying to get as much work done as they could before giving up and going in for some sleep. Anthony needed to remind himself to do all the routine maintenance. He shut down the grinder. Svetla had plenty of ore to smelt. They wouldn’t need more unless they had a successful trading run.

Eighteen hours before sunset, Svetla called him over to the smelter. Four ingots sat on her working table. They were dull grey, not much different from other metals but darker than the pale ore. “At least ninety-two percent pure, as well as I can tell from this set up.”

She was exhausted. He could hear it in her voice. But she was also proud.

Anthony hefted one in his spacesuit glove. About half a kilogram. “Outstanding. That’s something they’ll trade for. We may survive after all.”

“I should stop the run and start preparing for night.”

“No, you keep smelting. We’re going to want as much as we can offer to make them trade with us. I’ll handle the prep.”

There were nine ingots at sunset. Anthony helped her shut down the smelter, decanting reagents and catalysts into their own flasks.

They unsuited in the outer room, but then shut it down. There’d be no computer time this lunar night. Sveta carried her cot into the inner room. Anthony salvaged sheets and blankets from the unused cots. It was going to be a cold two weeks.

The inner room was actually warm near the water storage tanks. Anthony had reworked the solar dynamic generator to be a simple water heater, and run all the water through until it was near boiling. Some jugs held their drinking water for the next fourteen days. There wouldn’t be washing water.

Once they had everything in the inner room, Anthony began piling sandbags of lunar dust against the door to the outer room. He’d already put a pile against the door to the mining tunnel. They’d be sealed in this room until dawn, and hold as much heat as they could with them.

The lights were scaled down to one over the potato garden. There was a table against it where they could pass the time. Anthony thought it would be a great time to catch up on his reading, if his book collection wasn’t all electronic.

Svetla sat down across from him. She wore two blankets over her jumpsuit, covering her head. “It is going to be a long night,” she said with a wry smile.

Anthony nodded. He’d figured out early on that she wasn’t the type to share the story of her life. There had been some exchanges of college and childhood anecdotes over meals, but he still didn’t know much about her. He didn’t want to pry. She’d been interested in the stories he’d shared, and encouraged him to talk more, though that might have been politeness.

“I figured we have to do something to pass the time,” he said, putting a box on the table.

She nodded, her face blank.

“I heard Russians like chess, so I took some time away from the hopper.” Anthony turned over the lid to show it was marked in an eight by eight grid.

“Oh, I haven’t played in years.” She pulled a pawn of each set out of the box and hefted them. “Black is titanium?”

The color difference was because of the rough finish rather than the properties of the metals, but it was enough to tell them apart. “Yes.”

“You can play white first.” She set up the pieces quickly.

Anthony had reviewed the rules and strategies of the game before they shut down the computer. It wasn’t enough. She trounced him in eight moves. He set up the pieces again. “Your turn to play white.”

She removed one of her rooks before making the first move. The handicap let him last longer. By the fourth game he was actually understanding the strategy of the game. He used his extra rook to beat back her attacks, prolonging the game until they were both tired enough to turn in.

They took turns using the curtained privy, then climbed into their beds, wrapped in two or three blankets each.

“Good night, Anthony,” she said.

“Good night, Svetla. Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

When they woke, she donned three blankets, he put on two, and they resumed the games. Anthony won the third. She flashed him a smile. “Good. Now I can work harder.”

It took five more games until he won again. They began alternating wins and losses. She’d sometimes win two or three between Anthony’s wins, but he was making her work for it.

The long lunar night became a mix of sleep and chess. The intense concentration of the game kept them from thinking about the cold, the limited food they could eat unheated, and the risk of something going wrong.

At last Anthony won three games in a row. The next time Svetla set up the pieces, she kept both her rooks and took off a knight. He gave her a broad grin. “I thought you were starting to go easy on me.”

“No. You’re learning. Slowly, but you’re learning.”

It took six losses for Anthony to realize he’d built his tactics around the one rook advantage and now he needed to rethink his approach to playing. The next dozen games were shorter, as he experimented with new strategies and Svetla taught him their flaws.

Then he tried using his knights as a team, and forced her to a draw. By the time only forty hours were left in the lunar night, he was winning a third of the games.

But the batteries were almost exhausted. The light over the potatoes was so dim it wasn’t doing the plants any good. The temperature in the habitat was a miserable seven degrees Celsius. Anthony worried that it might drop below freezing before dawn, which would kill some of the potatoes. Hopefully the garden boxes would retain enough heat for some of the tubers to survive, which would let him plant a new crop.

Anthony and Svetla retreated to their bunks. The chess pieces were cold enough their fingers were going numb. It was time to cocoon until the Sun came back.

It was impossible to tell how much time was passing. Everything with a time readout except central life support had been shut down. To read it from the life support console, Anthony would have to get out of his bunk, spilling carefully hoarded warmth. He’d have to live with only checking when he made a privy run.

At less than twenty hours to dawn, Anthony was shocked to find his teeth chattering. He wiggled in his cocoon, trying to generate warmth from motion. He rubbed his hands over his arms. He ate a ration bar preserved against this moment.

It didn’t work. The chattering stopped, gave him a few moments to hope it was gone, then returned. He hoped at least Svetla couldn’t hear it.

The habitat was silent except for the air circulation fan, running at its lowest setting. That was drowned out by the rustling of Svetla extricating herself from her tangle of blankets. Hopefully she just needed the privy.

Her footsteps came toward him. A carefully suppressed daydream popped out of the back of Anthony’s head. He held still.

One of the metallic survival blankets landed on top of his bunk. Svetla tucked it tightly around his head and torso with quick pokes. “Can you breathe okay?” she asked.

“Yes. Thank you. Won’t you be cold?”

A chuckle. “Russians are used to cold.” She walked away.

Anthony silently vowed to return the blanket if he heard her teeth chatter. Then he stuffed away the daydream of the two of them sharing body heat to survive the crisis. He’d read too many of his sister’s romance novels.

The lights turning back on woke Anthony. As power surged into the system, the heaters came back on with a hum. The two wildcatters had a warm breakfast then suited up.

Svetla went back to work at her smelter. Their plan was to bring as many ingots as they could to whoever they traded with. Anthony focused on his hopper. It should only need a couple more shifts to finish assembly. Then they’d test it.

The last step was installing a set of nozzles at each corner of the square platform making up the body of the hopper. They’d spray oxygen gas to keep the hopper pointed the right direction. Anthony hoped they’d have enough force to counter the irregularities from his makeshift rockets.

He stood staring at the hopper, looking for a place where he should add a part.

“Are you all right, Anthony?”

He jumped at her voice, springing a few inches off the Lunar surface. “Yes. I’m—I’m done.”

She chuckled. “We don’t say that much, yes. What’s the next step?”

“Test flight.”

“We’ve been out here for eleven hours. Let’s get some sleep and do that fresh.”

He let her herd him inside, where he fiddled with the computer rechecking the performance and trajectory calculations. After a couple of hours of that, Svetla forced him to eat a meal, then sent him to bed.

The next shift he walked around the hopper, verifying no meteors had struck it since he’d finished. He jumped on board. Svetla followed after.

He turned to face her. “Look. I know you want to be part of the trading trip, but you don’t need to be on board for the flight test. We can recalibrate the weights later.”

The tone of her voice was calm. “A rocket crash is a better death for a cosmonaut than starving alone.”

“All right.” The bench on top held them both. Seat belts were the only safety equipment on board.

The first flight was barely even a hop. He set the thrust for one fifth of a ‘g,’ more than Luna’s one sixth g gravity.

The exhaust blew away the regolith which had drifted onto the landing pad since Dmitri’s visit. The corner jets were keeping it level.

The front left jets were working harder than the rest. That meant the hopper was unbalanced. Anthony’d prepared for that. A pair of iron weights hung on wire loops, one left-right and the other front-back. He slid the loops until the hopper’s center of gravity was centered over the thrust from the rockets.

The rockets started with a synchronized “POP” – “POP” – “POP” as the group A, group B, and group C engines fired in their turns. The sound was conducted through his tush and spine as they pressed against the bench. In moments the pops began to blur as each engine’s cycle time varied a bit. In a minute it was an undifferentiated roar.

“Sounds like making popcorn!” Anthony shouted.

She didn’t answer. He realized she might not have heard him over the noise.

He cut the thrust to one eighth g. The hopper slowly descended. They felt the bump as it landed. Anthony shut down the engines.

“We’re alive,” said Svetla.

If she’d sounded surprised, he might have taken it as an insult, but it sounded more like a simple statement of fact.

“Yep. Let me top off the propellant levels and we can go for a real hop.”

The next test flight was a 1g burn followed by coasting up to two kilometers altitude. They’d fall straight back down with a 1g burn for landing. That would test what they needed to know for the trading mission.

That assumed that if the flight control system could handle bringing the hopper back to the same point it started, it could handle landing four hundred kilometers away.

The launch was more of a shock than Anthony expected. He’d grown up in 1g, but he’d been on the Moon for over a year. For a moment it seemed like his head was going to crush his spine into his hips. Then his body adjusted and he was fine.

The coast to apogee—no, aposelene, Anthony corrected himself—took three minutes. Plenty of time for sightseeing. They could see all around them in theory, though the spacesuits were cumbersome enough to limit them to just what was in front. The stars were blocked by the sun filters of their helmets, but the surface was illuminated by the near-noon Sun. They were high enough to see Mare Crisium. He triggered a gentle burst from the attitude thrusters, putting them into a one revolution per minute spin. The Moon’s terrain was gloriously displayed for them.

Svetla gripped his hand tightly. “Fear of heights is not a problem for cosmonauts, because we are tucked into tiny boxes with smaller windows and can’t fall. This is something we could fall off of. Or so the back of my brain thinks.”

“Your seat belt is fastened. I checked.”

“That comforts the intellectual part of my mind.”

He squeezed her hand back, not able to think of anything comforting to say.

Mare Tranquillitatis came into view as the hopper kept turning.

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Anthony agreed.

Then their view was only of the rugged hills surrounding the mine as they descended. The 1g burn wasn’t nearly as bad when they knew what to brace for.

“Another successful test flight,” declared Svetla.

“Yep. Time to set up a deal.”

The thorium prospecting expedition had been pushed by Dr. Prazeres, head of the reactor team at Armstrong Base. He wanted to expand it for both production and research. According to the news feeds Anthony monitored, he still had the job.

MoonLink supported individual texting accounts. Anthony sent a message.

‘Hello, Dr. Prazeres. How are you? And how is your reactor?’

The response came in only minutes. ‘Anthony! You’re alive! I’ve been worrying about you. I’m fine, we all are here. The reactor is as good as it can be with the miserable support the bureaucrats let me have.’

‘Would you be interested in some 90% pure thorium ingots?’ He accompanied that text with a picture he’d taken of the first eight ingots laid out on Svetla’s working table.

‘Good God. You found the lode? You refined it? How?’

‘Yes, yes, and it’s a long story. Would you be interested in trading for them?’

‘Absolutely. I don’t think I can get authorization for a trip to you, sorry. Our CH4 is low.’

‘Not a problem. I can come to you. Here’s what I need.’ He attached a list. Electronics boards, electrolyte, lots of food (preferably dehydrated), hydraulic fluid, and a few other things.

‘I think I can get that. Let me talk to some people. Hold on.’ The physicist’s next message came two hours later. ‘I’ve twisted some arms. You’ll get your list. When will you come out here?’

Svetla’s breath was warm on the back of Anthony’s neck as she read the text. “We’ve won,” she said.

‘I’ll be there in twenty hours. Let me know which pad to land on.’

‘Will do. This is going to do wonders for my research, thank you.’

“Yep, we have a deal.” Anthony would’ve leaned back in relief but he didn’t want to bump into her. “That buys us six months, maybe more. And sets a precedent for breaking the boycott.”

“We should celebrate.” She had as wide a grin as he’d ever seen on her.

“We should. But all we have is—” He waved at the flask Dmitri had left.

“Not something to drink before piloting, yes. But . . .” She poured two cups of water, then added a few drops from the flask to each.

They lifted the glasses to each other. “Zdorov'ye!”

He offered, “To teamwork!”

Svetla smiled. “Partners!”

And that emptied the cups.

The thorium ingots were placed in aluminum boxes before being loaded onto the hopper. That was enough to capture the alpha particles which were their main emission. As for the minor emissions, they’d be less of a radiation hazard than the cosmic rays they’d endure on the flight to Armstrong Base.

Despite trying to secure the boxes as symmetrically as possible, Anthony had to hover the hopper while he adjusted its center of gravity again. Then he initiated the flight control program and they were off.

The view was tremendous. This time they were skimming over the surface, viewing a constantly changing set of hills, then bursting out over Mare Tranquillitatis.

“There’s Armstrong Base,” he said. “See it?”

“Yes, I see the solar arrays. And the main habitat dome.” Svetla was having an easier time with the view. She didn’t need to clutch his hand this time.

Their assigned pad was right next to the ‘garage,’ a dome which served as a big airlock where vehicles could be repaired. The flight control computer’s calculated course was off by a hundred meters, but Anthony managed to put in some offsets to let them land almost on target.

Four of the twelve ingots went into a rucksack Anthony slung on the back of his spacesuit. The rest he and Svetla carried in their arms. Two suited figures stood in the garage. A tarp-covered tractor was off to one side. A blast of oxygen blew the dust off their suits before the garage closed and pressurized.

Everyone took off their helmets.

“Hello, Anthony,” said Dr. Prazeres. He looked slightly grayer than a year ago, but his wrinkles were no worse. Maybe it was true about Lunar gravity being better for aging.

“Thanks for having us here, Doctor,” said Anthony.

The other American astronaut was Diana Riddington. She was staring at Svetla. Not angrily but . . . Diana never violated fraternization regulations, or even flirted, but she was the prettiest woman at Armstrong Base and expected this to be acknowledged by everyone.

She was pretty. But not in Svetla’s class.

Anthony continued, “Hello, Riddington. I’d like you both to meet my partner Svetla Koltsov, a refugee from Leonov base.”

If Diana chose to interpret that as something other than business partner, that was her problem.

Svetla met the stare with a gentle smile, and side-stepped to stand closer to Anthony.

“Well, I brought some testing equipment,” said Dr. Prazeres. He gestured to a table half covered with laboratory gear.

Anthony and Svetla piled their boxes on it. Prazeres went to work. “Yes, this is thorium. They’re ranging from eighty-eight percent pure to ninety-five. Very good. I can work with them.”

“Could you give me a list of the purity for each ingot number?” asked Svetla. “I’d like to compare that to the tweaks I made in my process.”

“Of course.”

As the physicist fussed with the ingots, Diana led Anthony over to some covered pallets. She peeled back the wrappings. “Here’s the trade goods you requested. The food is mostly the dehydrated emergency rations. Nobody wants them.”

“That’s fine. I’d rather not haul water back home.” Anthony reflected on the word he’d used. Was the mine habitat ‘home’ for him now? Well, he didn’t plan on leaving it any time soon.

He picked the pallets up and stacked them by the outer door of the garage. Svetla and Prazeres were talking about the chemicals she was using for smelting. He waited until they reached a lull. Then he took off his rucksack and extracted the last four ingots. “Would you like to trade for these as well?”

“Oh, you conniving bastard.” Dr. Prazeres sounded amused. “What do you want?”

“Lots of things. We’ve covered what I need. What do you have to offer?”

“Suppose we don’t offer anything? Are you just going to bring that metal back with you?”

“Sure. The Indian base has a reactor. The Chinese might have one, they’re not saying either way.”

“Right. Give us a minute.” Prazeres drew Diana away for a low voiced conversation.

Svetla leaned over to whisper to Anthony. “I see why you thought he’d be willing to violate the boycott. He’s starved for more material to experiment with.”

He just grinned.

In twenty minutes Diana returned with a box and two helpers carrying other boxes. Anthony acknowledged the one he knew and was introduced to the newcomer. The newcomer seemed to have questions, but wasn’t willing to ask them in front of the others.

“Let’s see if this is worth four bars of thorium,” said Diana. “You’re probably using the same toothbrush you had a year ago, so two toiletries kits. Some special soaps, including my own scented ones.”

The last comment was accompanied by a glare at Prazeres. Svetla leaned toward Anthony for a moment, pressing her shoulder against his arm. He remembered how glum she’d been when the last of the soap from her overnight bag gave out after a month.

She continued, “The last of the freeze-dried food. Some better quality rations. Some official NASA-issue astronaut ice cream, which has to be better than anything you have been eating. Another jug of electrolyte.” She listed more small items, most of which would be useful at the habitat, none of them exceptionally valuable.

Anthony put an ingot on the table. “That’s worth one.”

Dr. Prazeres frowned. “How about this? I’ll collect another ton of food for you. You can pick it up in three months if you let me have those ingots now.”

“I agree that’s a fair deal, Doctor. But how can I trust the food will be here? NASA didn’t have a chance to intervene in this deal. But with three month’s planning they’ll know about it.”

The physicist chewed on his lip. “I have professional colleagues with Congressional connections. I’ll ask them to have Congress revoke the boycott of you. I’ll write every one of them within twenty-four hours.”

Anthony placed the three remaining ingots on the table. “Thank you, sir. I agree.”

He held out his hand. Dr. Prazeres shook it.

The NASA crew donned their helmets to help carry everything out to the hopper. Balancing the cargo wasn’t easy given the variety of sizes and densities. As Anthony was rearranging things, Diana asked, “What the heck is this thing propelled by?”

Anthony answered, “Oxygen heated by a thorium reactor.”

“Bullshit!” snapped Prazeres.

“Yeah. But wait until I get my patent application in.”

That drew a laugh from the helpers. They returned to the garage.

As they fastened their seatbelts, Anthony leaned over to touch his helmet to Svetla’s. He didn't want NASA eavesdropping on this conversation. “If you want to stay here, they’ll probably believe any story you tell them. Might even give you a ride to Earth.”

The pause before she replied felt long to him. “No, I don’t trust them. I don’t think they can protect me from the bratva. And I’m sure they know you well enough to spot lies I tell about you. Let’s go home. I have work to do.”

Once the garage door was closed, Anthony put the hopper into a hover. The attitude control jets flared with white puffs of oxygen. He frantically pulled on the weight loops to adjust the center of gravity. Thankfully, the cargo was loaded well enough he could keep the hopper under control.

Then he pressed the button for the ‘Home’ program and one gravity of acceleration kicked him in the butt.

When the popcorn roar subsided, Svetla asked, “Do you think Prazeres can break the boycott?”

“Hmmm. Probably not by passing a law. But if some senior NASA bureaucrat is dragged in front of a Congressional committee and yelled at for interfering with private enterprise, they may give up on it.”

“I see.” She paused. “Were you serious about selling thorium to India and China?”

“Yes. I figure we should offer the next batch you smelt to them. I don’t have personal contacts there, but if we can find someone willing to talk to us, they may make an under the table deal like Prazeres.”

She laughed. “I’ll be the first person to visit all four lunar bases.”

“I think it’s five, now. Our place should count.”

“Yes.”

Anthony thought some more. “Once the boycott breaks—officially or not—we can enable trade between the bases. I’m sure everybody has an excess of what someone else needs. We can transport it now. Take a small cut, or even a cash fee, and we’ll be in business.”

“Plus license fees from your patent on the aluminum-oxygen rocket.”

“You’re right. Oh, that’s what I should do with the Swiss francs. Hire a patent lawyer. I bet your smelting process is patentable, too.”

Then the hopper fired up the engines for their landing. They hauled their new supplies into the habitat.

Anthony looked over the pile. “I guess the priority is getting the batteries back to full function, but it’s a hundred and fifty hours to sunset. We can take a break.”

“Uh-huh.” Svetla pulled the package of soaps out of its box. “My priority is a shower. Want to scrub my back?”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.