He squirted me in the face with the water.
“What the fu—”
“Keep your eyes open. And look into the stream.”
I did as instructed. It was hard at first, but the sheer relief at having the dust rinsed out kept me going. Then he sprayed my clothes, arms, and legs.
“Better?” he asked.
I shook my head to clear water off my face. “Yeah, better,” I said.
Our ad-hoc wet T-shirt contest would protect me from any further discharges. At least for a while. Of course, dust collected on me and became a disgusting gray mud. I wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests, but at least I was comfortable.
Next step: I had to dig the fill material out to expose the pressure sensor and, more important, to get at the inner hull.
I pressed my finger to my earbud. “Svoboda and Dad: I’m going to be digging for a while. I’ll call back in a bit.”
“We’ll be here,” said Svoboda.
I cut the connection. “Give me a hand digging this out,” I said.
Dale held up a shovel. “There’s two kinds of people in this world: those with EVA suits, and those who dig.”
I snorted. “Okay, first off, if we’re doing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I get to be Clint Eastwood, not you. Second off, get your lazy ass to work and help me!”
“I have to be ready to drag your sorry ass back to the rover if things go wrong.” He held the shovel out to me again. “Accept your inner Eli Wallach and get digging.”
I groaned and took the shovel from him. This was going to take a while.
“We’re running behind, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
—
Right around that time, Bob was being a pain in the ass, as usual. But this time he was doing it for me instead of to me. I wasn’t present for any of this. I was busy digging dirt out of a wall. But I heard about it all later on.
Sanchez Aluminum owned dedicated train tracks from the Aldrin Port of Entry to their smelter. Three times a day, the train loaded up twenty-four employees and headed out to the facility. The short, one-kilometer trip only took a few minutes. They switched shifts, and the previous shift returned to Artemis on the same train.
I’d timed my little heist to coincide with their shift change. But I was running behind. I needed to be inside the facility before the train got there. And I still hadn’t cut the inner hull.
The Sanchez workers conglomerated at the train station. The train had already docked and its hatch stood open. The conductor pulled out her Gizmo scanner in preparation to take fees for the ride. Yes, Sanchez Aluminum charged Sanchez Aluminum employees to ride a Sanchez Aluminum train to the Sanchez Aluminum smelter. Your basic 1800s-style “company store” bullshit.
Bob walked up to the conductor and put his hand on her scanner. “Hold up, Mirza.”
“Problem, Bob?” she asked.
“We’re doing a freight-airlock leak inspection. Safety protocols say no one can operate another airlock in the port while that’s in progress.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mirza said. “It has to be right now?”
“Sorry. We detected an anomaly and we have to run the test before tomorrow’s lander.”
“For chrissake, Bob.” She gestured to the assembled crowd. “I’ve got twenty-four people here who need to get to work. And twenty-four more at the smelter waiting to come home.”
“Yeah, sorry. The test ran long. We thought we’d be done by now.”
“How much longer?”
“Not sure. Ten or fifteen minutes, maybe? I can’t make any promises.”
She turned to the crowd. “Sorry, folks. We’ve got a delay. Get comfortable—it’ll be around fifteen minutes.”
A collective groan arose from the crowd.
“I’m sure as hell not staying late to make up for it,” one worker grumbled to another.
“Sorry about this,” Bob said. “Let me make it up to you: I’ve got three tickets to the Artemis Acrobats show at the Playhouse. They’re yours. Take your husbands out and have a good time.”
Mirza’s face lit up. “Wow! All right then. All is forgiven!”
A ridiculous overpayment, if you ask me. Those tickets cost 3,000 slugs each! Oh well. Bob’s money, not mine.
—
After an eternity of digging and a great many profanities, I finally cleared out the dirt in the hull compartment. I flopped onto my back and wheezed.
“I think you invented new swearwords,” said Dale. “Like…what’s a ‘funt’?”
“I think it’s pretty clear from context,” I said.
He loomed over me. “Get up. We’re way behind and Bob can only delay the train for so long.”
I flipped him off.
He kicked me. “Get up, you lazy fuck.”
I groaned and got back to my feet.
I’d found the compartment’s pressure sensor during the “dig a hole to China” phase of the operation. (Yes, that idiom still applies on the moon. I felt like I’d just dug a 384,000-kilometer hole.)
Our little “fool the pressure sensor” game had worked till now, but as soon as I breached the inner hull, the pressure on our side would go up to Artemis Standard. Then the sensor would say “Holy shit! Twenty-one kPa air! There’s a hole in the inner hull!”
The alarm would go off, people would freak out, and the EVA masters would come take a look, and we’d get caught. Dale and Bob would get drummed out of the guild, but I wouldn’t live long enough to see it, because loyal Sanchez people would have stabbed me in the face.
Oh? You don’t think a bunch of nebbish control-room nerds would do something like that? Think again. Someone at Sanchez tried to kill me with a harvester, remember?
The sensor itself was a metal cylinder with a couple of wires attached. The wires had a fair bit of play, which was handy. I pulled a steel can with a screw top out of the duffel. I’d modified it earlier for just this purpose by putting a little notch in the lid.
I put the sensor in the can and slid the cabling into the notch. Then I screwed on the lid. After that, I put six layers of duct tape over the point where the wires entered the lid. I didn’t feel great about that part. Only an idiot relies on duct tape to maintain a pressure seal, but I didn’t have a choice. At least the higher pressure would be on the outside so the tape would be pushed against the hole.
“Think that’ll do it?” Dale asked.
“We’ll know in a minute. Take us up to Artemis Standard.”
Dale tapped his arm controls. Of course Bob’s rover could be controlled remotely. If it was a luxury feature, Bob’s rover had it.
Fresh air echoed down the inflatable tunnel, and my ears popped with the slight pressure change.
I watched the can intently. The tape over the hole bowed in slightly, but otherwise held. I pressed my ear to the inner hull wall.
“No alarms,” I said. I called Svoboda back.
“Yo!” said Svoboda. “Criminal Support Team ready and waiting.”
“I’m not sure I like that title,” said Dad.
“I’m about to make the inner hull cut,” I said. “Any last-minute advice, Dad?”
“Don’t get caught.”
I flipped my mask down. “Everybody’s a comedian.”
I got to cutting. The inner hull was the same as the outer hull: six centimeters of aluminum. And just like the outer hull, the cut only took a couple of minutes. This time I beveled the cut so the plug would fall outward instead of in. I didn’t have a choice on the outer hull, but as a rule I prefer flesh-boilingly hot metal to fall away from me.
I waited for the plug to finish its slow fall to the ground, then peeked inside.
The factory floor was a large hemisphere full of industrial machinery. The smelter dominated the center of the room. It stood a good ten meters tall, surrounded by pipes, power lines, and monitoring systems.
I couldn’t see the control room from my vantage point. The smelter was in the way. That wasn’t a coincidence, by the way. I picked that part of the hull specifically because it was in a blind spot. No matter how absorbed the staff might be with work, it’s unlikely that twenty-four people would all fail to notice a flaming hole in the wall.
I poked my head through the hole to get a look around. Without thinking, I put my hand on the edge for balance.