10. You Hacked the Deathstar?

Peter had checked the rigging three times before he committed to what he knew he was going to do.

It was not subtle work. Whoever placed it had aimed at the wheel well, where it would read as a fuel system failure if it destroyed everything else, which it had. For a Mizmo tech investigation, it might have passed. For someone who had spent his life watching engineers hold stations together with whatever came to hand, the wiring was obvious. He had approximately ten seconds in the cab to think through what he could do to escape, then the loader took a slight turn on the driveway. Running on instict, he jumped out and watched it trundle on up the road until the explosion, silent and ghastly, vibrated through his boots.

Now he had the kind of time that a few seconds did not prepare him for.

He wedged himself into the lee of the rock formation with the tanks braced against him, keeping the oxygen exchange working in the cold with as minimal a feed as he could manage without suffocating himself. The cover was not generous. If the Wadi's cameras had caught him bailing (and they might have; he had dropped off the blind side, but was not certain how many cameras were watching), the Ranchers knew exactly where he was. He watched the dome. There was movement inside, the low-level kind that meant people in conference and not agreeing, and none of it was moving toward the exterior locks.

They had three locks for that dome. One was visibly damaged by shrapnel, but two were still operable, if a little ways away on the backside.

He tried the comm at the fifteen-minute mark, got nothing, and quickly worked out why. Too many ridges, wrong angle, no convenient satellite to bounce off of. The Deathstar was in range, but he knew Nigeria was on paid time and no-one shared on paid time. Probably not jamming, though he had spent the first fifteen minutes fairly certain it was jamming, because the alternative was that no one was looking for him and everyone thought he was in pieces a few dozen meters down the road.

Angie would be good at his funeral, he had to give her that. She was good at public occasions when she had notice; she could be warm and polished when she chose. She would say something about his dedication to the crew and being his father's son, and by the time she was done half the room would have forgotten the two of them had not exchanged a civil word in months. She was better at the public version of grief than he was.

Whether she would come for him specifically, and not just for a stranded crew member, was a different question. He was not sure he was being fair to her in asking it. He was also sitting on a rock in the dark with diminishing oxygen, and fairness had its limits.

There had been four of them, once. Big Jim filling every room he walked into and apologizing to no one for it. Their mother, who had loved the Moon and then loved it less and then stopped loving it entirely and gone back Earthside before Peter was old enough to understand that some people only had a place in them for so long. Him, learning systems. Angie, fighting everyone about everything and earning every concession she ever got. Four people who ate dinner together in the station canteen and argued about cargo manifests and whether there was any point watching Earth news when it was always seventeen minutes out of date.

Then the family unit ran down, the way things always did. His mother's tolerance for the Moon. His father's tolerance for the suits in Admin. The filtration system's tolerance for whatever the Ranchers had done to it. His and Angie's tolerance for each other. He was not naive enough to think they had been a particularly close family in the end. He just had not thought noticed how far gone it was until his father was dead and his mother was an email address and his sister was three corridors away and impossible to reach.

He did not follow his father’s memory further into the dark. There was a finite amount of air in the tanks, and grief was a known waste of oxygen.

He missed Sam. Sam had spent six months carrying the weight of the old man's death alongside him without being asked, and it was only sitting on a rock with a half-empty tank that Peter understood what that had cost, and what it was worth. Sam did not do stupid things in general, except for people he loved, and Peter was on the shorter list. Smart money said Sam had been sensible when the truck went up. Peter put his money there.

He missed Cookie's dark humor and the engineers who kept things running on spite and ingenuity, and Li, who had survived real underground emergencies and come out the other side without losing his nerve, and Sue, who pushed him when he needed pushing and covered for him when he needed covering and never made him feel small for needing either. He missed the station rats, who had grown up alongside him in the same cramped corridors and still looked out for each other with the reflexive loyalty of people who had never had the option not to. He missed all of them, including Angie, especially Angie, which was a complicated feeling because she was still alive and approximately seven kilometers away and he did not know if the distance was currently getting smaller.

He was betting on her. He had set the LMS-7 contingency on the assumption that she would be the one standing in Central when things went wrong, and she was good at standing strong when things went wrong. He was betting she would send someone across the crater for him too, because the alternative was running out of options along with the air.

He watched the dome. The lights in the operations pod were brighter than they had been. Two shapes he had been tracking joined by a third now, doing something near the interior side of the main lock. He watched them for a long moment and decided it was repair work, because the alternative required the Ranchers to know he was alive, and he had been careful about the cameras. He chose to keep believing that.

The cold was winning. The suit's thermal rating was designed for a climate-controlled cab, and he had been sitting on a rock for forty-five minutes; Li would have a word for the gap between those two conditions, probably several, and none of them flattering. He settled the tanks more firmly against his back.

He was running the second tank's numbers when he felt it through the rock: a faint transmitted vibration from the road bed, something heavy and rolling a long way out. He held still and let himself be certain before he moved. The dust cloud came up past the first ridge bend, and in it, the rectangular silhouette of a loader.

He looked at the dome. The three shapes in the operations pod had not moved. The lock indicators were dark.

The loader slowed well short of the Wadi's sightline, leaving the exposed ground between rock and road for him to cross himself. He measured it. Forty meters of open ground in clear view of anyone at the southern dome face. He looked at the dome once more.

He went anyway.

The low gravity made it a strange bounding lurch, each stride too long and too slow. From the dome he would look like a man with all the time in the world. He covered the forty meters without looking back, because looking back would not change anything, and it would slow him down.

The loader lunged to a stop, kicking up dust, as soon as he was in view. It was the same open-cab model as the one he had driven over, and he did not know who was suited up and steering until he turned the comm back on.

"Good to see you!"

"Hey Captain! Welcome aboard!" The driver waved, and motioned him towards the back of the truck. Peter recognized the voice of Jacob, the lead materials sort supervisor.

"Good thing you know how to drive!" Peter finally bounced up to the cab and hung outside of it for a moment, reaching in to shake hands—with the suits on, it was more like shaking ‘paws’—with Jacob.

"Angie was fighting me for it, but I got more hours than her, damnit. Go on!" Jacob motioned towards the cargo again. Peter hopped around to the back and saw two suited people in the back, hanging on to loose tie-down straps. One bounced forward and gave him an awkward, padded hug. She motioned for him to go to channel three.

"Damn you! I thought you were dead!" Angie finally yelled at him, making his headset squawk with feedback.

"I love you too."

"Yeah, I know, but let’s keep it clean around your sister," Sue broke in, waving from her perch in the box.

"Whatever, Sue." Angie sighed. "Although she’s the one who figured it out, Peter. We hacked into the Deathstar and she’s the one who saw your getaway. I gotta give her that."

"You hacked into the Deathstar?" Peter paused getting in.

"It wasn’t my idea—"

"Shut up, Sue! No, it wasn’t her idea. But yes, we did. My call." Brother and sister stood for a moment in the truck bed, looking at each other through reflective lenses.

"Don’t worry about it, Angie. We’ve got bigger problems."

"Sam shut the still down, and everyone is working 100% on the LMS-7 evac plan. The engineers re-ran Mizmo’s numbers, too. Hell, Cookie is welding something, I think." Angie handed him a spare oxygen tank and showed him how to clip to a spare tie down strap while she talked.

"That’s a frightening thought."

"Wasn’t my idea either," Sue laughed.

"You could’ve just sent Jacob, you know," said Peter as the truck began its slow turn back towards the station. His comment was met with stony silence, which he took for sentimental self-consciousness. "But hey, I’m glad you didn’t. It’s great to see both of you. I was worried for that last thirty minutes."

"Some things came up; we weren’t really ready to mount a rescue operation," said Angie, waving her free hand airily.

Peter looked towards the front of the truck, as if he could see the station on the horizon. "This launch is going to be tight, even with everyone on the same page."

"No one’s happy about this, Peter. It’s not like the LMS-7 transformed into a state-of-the-art orbital while you were gone.

" Sue appeared to shrug inside of her suit.

"As long as we hit that window, I really think we’ll be fine," said Peter, forcing on a confident grin.

"Ya, for more reasons than one," Angie answered vaguely. Peter tried not to dwell on what she meant.