2. A History

When Peter was six years old, he loved the Moon with the fierce, uncomplicated passion that only children possess. It was a vast adventure land that most children never got to play on, a huge ball of dirt which was his for the taking---his, and his little sister Angie's. Back then, the Moon had smelled like nothing at all, which delighted him in a way that Earth's overwhelming cocktail of scents never could. The recycled air of the station carried only the faint metallic tang of the scrubbers and the warm, safe smell of home. When he pressed his face against the observation windows, the glass was always cool against his cheek, and he could feel the vibrations of the massive life support systems humming through the walls like a mechanical heartbeat.

She was only three when the family first arrived and she did not remember much of it, but he recalled pushing her stroller up to the window of their father's office and pointing out the landmarks they could see from there--the sharp-edged craters that looked like bite marks against the gray regolith, the distant peaks that caught Earthlight and threw it back like broken mirrors. Peter knew she loved it too, even back then when their parents told him that she was too young to know the difference. Angie would clap her tiny hands at the sight of Earth hanging above them, that blue-white marble suspended in the star-drunk void, and he'd whisper stories about the oceans and forests they'd visit someday.

The sounds of those early years still echoed in his memory: the gentle whoosh of air recyclers, the distant clank of mining equipment, his father's booming laugh carrying down the corridors. Everything had felt permanent then, safe in the way that only a child's world could be.

His father had been the kind of man who made permanence feel like a personal guarantee. Captain James McDonnell---"Big Jim" to the miners, "sir" to everyone else, and "Dad" only to Peter and Angie, a privilege he never let them forget---had built the Hive into something that functioned less like a corporate outpost and more like a small, eccentric town. He knew every miner by name and most of their families by reputation. He remembered birthdays. He settled disputes over card games with the same careful attention he gave to engineering failures, on the theory that both, left unaddressed, had a way of becoming catastrophic. Peter had spent his entire childhood watching his father hold things together through sheer force of personality and had assumed, in the way that children assume things about their parents, that this was simply how the world worked.

It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to understand that his father had been doing something genuinely difficult, and by the time he understood it, he was trying to do it himself and failing in ways his father never had.

The best afternoons of Peter's childhood were the ones when his father would knock on the door of whatever corner Peter had claimed as his current headquarters --- a supply closet, a maintenance alcove, once memorably the underside of the cafeteria's steam table --- and say, with complete seriousness, that he required the assistance of his senior advisor. This was the role Peter had appointed himself at age seven, after a solemn negotiation he no longer remembered the details of but was fairly certain he had won on points. His father would lay out whatever problem he was turning over, such as a personnel conflict, a supply shortage, a communication from Mizmo HQ that required a diplomatic response, and listen to Peter's analysis with the same focused attention he gave to his actual department heads. He never talked down. He pushed back when Peter was wrong, which was often. He said "good point" when Peter stumbled onto something useful, which was occasionally, and he meant it every time.

"You have to actually listen to people," his father told him once, when Peter was about twelve and had made some withering assessment of a miner's complaint that he was now too old to remember and too embarrassed to reconstruct. "Not for what they're saying. For what they're afraid of. Those are different things, and the second one is always the one that matters."

Peter had written it off as adult mysticism at the time. He thought about it nearly every day now. Fond memories were all he had left, though, because he did not love the Moon anymore. The transformation had been gradual at first, then sudden and brutal when his father died. Now it was an empty, ruthless place that he longed to leave, without really imagining that he ever could. The same silence that had once enchanted him now felt oppressive, a vacuum that swallowed sound and hope with equal hunger. Where he'd once seen adventure in the stark landscape, he now saw only the harsh indifference of a world that could kill with a single system failure, a single moment of carelessness. The day the emergency klaxons had screamed through the station while his father lay dying in the medical bay, Peter had finally understood what the old-timers meant when they called space "the long dark." It wasn't just an absence of light---it was an absence of mercy.

The Moon remembered everything and forgave nothing. Every scar on its surface was permanent, every mistake carved in stone for eternity.

He had not moved anything in the office. That was the truth he hadn't admitted to anyone, not even Sam, who would have understood and said something insufferably kind about it. Fourteen months since his father died, and the small globe of Earth still sat in the same spot on the desk's left corner where his father had kept it. It was a gift from Peter's mother on their tenth anniversary, back when she was still alive and the family was still a unit rather than a set of siblings trying to remember how to be one. The engineering schematics his father had been reviewing the week before the accident were still filed in the wire tray to the right of the monitor, because Peter could not bring himself to refile them without reading them first, and every time he started reading them he had to stop. His father's old-Earth-style ceramic coffee mug (cracked along the handle, a faded cartoon of Earth on one side and the words BEST CAPTAIN ON THE MOON on the other, a gift from Angie at age nine when she thought that was funny) sat in the top right drawer because Peter had put it there in a moment of weakness three days after the funeral and had not yet figured out what to do with it.

The office smelled like his father still, faintly, underneath the recycled-air smell that coated everything on station. Or maybe Peter was imagining it. He had given up trying to determine which.

He was sitting at his desk in his father's old office, studying the small globe of Earth in front of him. The weight of command had settled around his shoulders like a lead blanket over the past year, and some days he could barely remember the boy who'd once pressed his nose to the observation windows in wonder. Earth was actually hanging somewhere over his left shoulder at the moment, a fact he knew as certainly as he knew the time. The station's rotation was as predictable as his own heartbeat.

He was spinning the globe with one finger, watching the painted continents blur into a smear of blue and green, when he caught himself and stopped. His father used to do that. Spin the globe when he was thinking, the same absent, one-finger rotation, and Peter had inherited the habit so completely that he couldn't always tell anymore whether he was doing it because it helped him think or because it made him feel, for a few seconds, less alone in the room.

He looked up when Sue barged in, her expression already promising trouble.

"NMSMO is sending another inventory for us to do." She used the station word for the National Moon and Space Mining Operation, "Mizmo," and Peter almost smiled. His father never allowed that low-brow slang into his executive suite. He shook his head. "Next transmission is scheduled for 1600 hours standard."

"No, I mean now. By fax. In the main office, I saw Angie baby-sitting it with Li."

Satellite fax was cheaper than the laser, just a lot slower. What Peter did not understand was why they bothered, when it was already 1340 by the clock. They could have waited two hours for regular transmission. He spun the globe with a finger. "Angie's got it, then. She knows what to do."

Sue was truly International: a French Canadian with the temper of a Latina. She claimed her great grandmother was Cuban, and with her thick eyebrows and womanly hips, Sue was convincing enough to be believed. Peter loved watching her walk, coming or going it did not matter, but he hated when she set her hands on those fine hips and raised her expressive eyebrows at him.

"Are you just going to sit there?"

He refused to return her stare.

"Captain Peter Franklin McDonnell, are you just going to sit there?"

"What should I do? March over and rip the report out of her hands?"

Sue opened her mouth to answer, but Peter raised a hand. "No, Sue. No. We know what this means, that they are crunching the numbers on their side and that's all. It will just cause a big row for nothing." He motioned for her to sit down. After a moment, she gave in and sat in one of the executive leather and wood chairs across the desk from him. It was a handsome, traditional office for a risky, high-tech enterprise, and it never looked right to those who grew up on the station. It was the fact that it was his father's own office that kept Peter in it, more than the furniture which, to him and others, was Earthy and exotic.

"Peter---" Sue started, then stopped and chewed her lower lip.

"Everyone's worried. I know."

"You are the leader now. All the miners are gone, it's just us. You are going to have to make a decision here, whether Mizmo likes it or not."

"It's not Mizmo I'm thinking of."

"Angie," said Sue with a heavy sigh, leaning back into the chair.

"She's got a point."

"She's not the Executive Captain here!"

"She could be, she's as well trained as I am and everyone knows it. Look, whatever we do, we are going to have to do it company-wide and everyone is going to have to work together. The less I do to pull things apart the better."

"It doesn't matter what you do, Angie has already pulled things apart. It's your job to put them back together." Sue stood up. "You know I'm on your side."

Peter templed his fingers and closed his eyes. "We don't need 'sides.'"

"Well, you got 'em." Sue walked out.