Helium3 - 1 Crater Read online

  Advance Acclaim for Crater

  “Long-haul trucking on the Moon . . . with raiders, romance and a secret mission . . . High adventure on the space frontier.”

  —KIRKUS

  “Crater shows what it would be like to live on the Moon: to work there, to struggle and to triumph. A fine piece of work by Homer Hickam.”

  —BEN BOVA, AUTHOR OF LEVIATHANS OF JUPITER

  “Readers will be caught up in Homer Hickam’s thrilling novel of life on the moon! Plenty of twists and an admirable, spirited hero in Crater who takes us on an adventure filled with intrigue and excitement that leaves us wanting more.”

  —DONNAVANLIERE, NEW YORK TIMES & USA TODAY BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE GOOD DREAMAND THE CHRISTMAS SHOES

  CRATER

  CRATER

  A HELIUM-3 NOVEL

  HOMER

  HICKAM

  © 2012 by Homer Hickam

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hickam, Homer H., 1943–

  Crater : a Helium-3 novel / Homer Hickam.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the twenty-second century, sixteen-year-old Crater Trueblood, who mines the moon for Helium-3 to produce energy for a desperate, war-towrn Earth, undertakes a deadly mission that could mean the difference between life and death for every inhabitant on the moon.

  ISBN 978-1-59554-664-7 (hardcover)

  [1. Moon—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H5244Cr 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011051931

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 QG 5 4 3 2 1

  TO AMI MCCONNELL

  Contents

  PART ONE: MOONTOWN

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART TWO: THE CONVOY

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  PART THREE: THE CYCLER

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  :::

  Part One

  MOONTOWN

  The little mining village of Moontown, set deep within the lunar Alpine Valley, was bathed in the bluish glow of a vast and sinuous river of stars flooding across a black velvet sky. On the Helium-3 scrapes to the west of the settlement, the miners of the Medaris Mining Company’s third shift trudged toward the dustlocks, their bobbing and weaving helmet lights shooting bright spokes across the gray dust, silicate flakes caught in the beams sparkling like diamonds.

  Two miners remained behind on the slope of the scrape designated eleven north. Clad in the red coveralls of explosives experts, they were working feverishly to prepare the next section for blasting before the shift was over. Nitro Ned, the leader of the team, smacked the black box he was holding and took a long second to control his anger. It had been a frustrating day. Even though the blue banger foreman had made several mistakes, including a failure to move the belt line in a timely fashion, the shift had worked twelve sections when the average was eight. Everyone was worn-out, including Nitro Ned. He just wanted to get to the dustlock and go home to his sweet wife and two daughters.

  “What’s wrong, Ned?” the assistant asked. She was a puterbride turned miner who called herself Unlisted Sally, thus following the tradition of many citizens of Moontown who adopted nicknames, sometimes to hide their past but often to simply renounce all ties with Earth, their lives begun anew at the gritty mining outpost in the wayback of the moon.

  Ned smacked the box again and said, “I told the blue banger we didn’t have time to check this section before the end of the shift. Now this scrag pulsor’s gone belly-up.”

  The pulsor was an ultrawide band unit, designed to let its operator peer through the dust to see what lay below, especially basalt boulders called rollers. Rollers, if blown up by a detpak— as the explosives packages were called—could turn into what their names implied, rolling boulders that careened down the slopes, some big enough to crush machines and miners.

  “I’ll get another pulsor,” Sally said.

  Ned shook his head. “Naw, you’d have to drive all the way to the maintenance shed. By the time you got back, the first shift would be coming through the dustlock and we’d have to wait until they were all through before we could get inside. We’ll have to use the sticks.”

  “The sticks” were six-foot-long lunasteel rods designed to penetrate the dust with a hard thrust. Sally followed Ned to their truck to retrieve them and drop off the dead pulsor. She examined one of the pointed rods. “Do these things really work?”

  “Use ’em right, they’re better than pulsors,” Ned grunted, and demonstrated by plunging a stick into the dust. “Rollers aren’t usually more than a few inches deep. If they’re here, we’ll find ’em.”

  Sally tested her stick. It entered the top of the dust easily, then jammed. “You got to push harder,” Ned said. “Give it all you got. See? I penetrated five, six inches that time.”

  Sally tried it again, this time pushing the stick in deeper. “I guess it should work,” she said, though her voice betrayed her uncertainty.

  “Sure it will. Come on.”

  Ned led Sally back to the section and the pair began jabbing the dust. Ten futile minutes later, Ned, breathing hard, stopped. Pushing the stick into the dust again and again was not easy. He looked around and saw the last of the miners from his shift entering the dustlock. The miners for the next shift were probably already lining up to enter the other side. Ned made a decision. “There’s nothing here but dust,” he announced. “Let’s call it a day.”

  Sally wasn’t certain they’d done a thorough job, but Ned was her boss. Not only that, her back and her head hurt. She longed to get out of the sticky gluelike biolastic material that coated her body. Her helmet also had a bad air delivery valve. All day she’d felt like she was half suffocating. Still, she felt compelled to ask, “Are you sure, Ned? We clear it, they
’ll blow this section without checking again.”

  Nitro Ned was already halfway back to the truck. “I know these slopes like the back of my hand. This ain’t roller geology. We’re done.” He called up the foreman’s frequency on his helmet communicator. “Bossman, our last section’s ready for detpaks. We’re coming in.”

  The section foreman came back. “Hurry up. The next shift needs this dustlock clear.”

  The blue banger didn’t have to tell Nitro Ned and Unlisted Sally twice. They tossed the dusty sticks in the back of their truck, stirred up its fuel cells, and raced, headlights blazing, down the slope and across the dust-laden flats.

  :::

  ONE

  Crater Trueblood was right where he wanted to be, and Petro Mountbatten-Windsor-Jones was right where he didn’t want to be—although neither opinion mattered because both of them were right where they were. That was in converging lines of first-shift Helium-3 miners making their way through the busy corridors of Moontown toward the dustlocks that led to the scrapes. There was a hint of butterscotch in the air, the fragrance of the day. There was also piped-in martial music, appropriate to soldiers marching off to war, or, in this case, heel-3 miners off to do battle with the dust.

  Like the other miners in the line, Crater and Petro were dressed in standard tube clothes of tunics, leggings, and plaston boots. Crater’s tunic was a careful gray, his leggings the standard black, his boots an ordinary beige. Petro’s tunic was an exceptional red, his leggings a unique diamond-patterned blue and white, and his boots a rare purple. Crater—at sixteen going on seventeen—was small for his age, just over six feet tall, while Petro, just turned nineteen, had topped out at six feet, five inches, an inch taller than the average adult born and raised on the moon. Lunar gravity did not compress the human backbone like the heavier pull of the Earth.

  Fifteen minutes, the gillie on Crater’s shoulder said while watching Petro with an amused expression, difficult since the gillie had no eyes.

  “Your gillie is making faces at me,” Petro accused.

  “It has no face,” Crater replied.

  “It is also illegal.”

  “It knows that.”

  There were signs and arrows in the corridor pointing this way and that to the various hatches that led to the neighborhoods, dustlocks, foundries, tank farms, warehouses, depots, maintenance sheds, and company offices of the town. Crater and Petro didn’t need directions to anywhere. They intimately knew every tube and hatch, having explored them all at one time or another while growing up in the tiny town beneath the dust.

  Unlike Petro, who was scowling at anybody and everybody, Crater smiled and nodded to every miner he encountered as well as the tubewives and tubehusbands, many with their children out and about on their errands at the company store or the company doctor or the company dentist or the company chapel. Crater, by his very nature, was friendly to the core of his being. He had gentle eyes that saw things always in the best possible light and a sweet, round face, unmarred by worry lines. When people saw him, he made them feel better just for being who he was, an orphan who never complained and who worked hard at his job on the scrapes.

  Petro, slogging along behind as if every step he took was a great inconvenience, saw life a little differently. He saw Moontown as gray and uninspiring. He saw the work outside as hard and boring and the pay far too low. He saw Crater differently too. Crater was a sweet kid, that was true, but if he was ever going to get anywhere in life, he needed to toughen up and recognize that not everyone was as nice as he was. As his friend and sort of older brother, Petro took Crater’s education in the realities of life as one of his main goals. Accordingly, he called out to Crater’s back, “We are better than this, Crater. We should turn around this instant, pack our bags, and be off to secure our fortunes in Armstrong City, perhaps even on Earth. And—will you please stop and listen? What are you now—sixteen?”

  Crater sighed and turned around. “Almost seventeen. Come on, Petro. We’re gonna be late.”

  “So what? Think of all the times we’ve been early. You’ve been working on the scrapes for three years, right?”

  “I started on my thirteenth birthday so it’s almost four.”

  “Almost four and you’re still a scragline picker, the lowest of the low!”

  Crater never knew what to say to Petro when he was in one of his “get out of town” moods, which seemed lately to be more and more often. Although they weren’t related, he and Petro had been raised together and he thought of the older boy as his big brother. He didn’t like disappointing Petro but just couldn’t help it. “I don’t want to leave Moontown,” he said. “Anyway, what’s wrong with being a scragline picker? Somebody’s got to do it.”

  Petro lowered his head in mock despair. “Why I even bother to talk to you is a mystery. Look, Crater, don’t you get it? The deck’s stacked against us! You’re an orphan and what am I? Yes, yes, I’m the Prince of Wales and all that, but no one will make me King of England anytime soon.”

  “If you left, wouldn’t Q-Bess miss you?” Crater asked, referring to Petro’s mother, who was also Crater’s guardian and the manager of the Dust Palace Hotel.

  Petro allowed a sigh. “This is not about my dear royal mater. Yes, of course, she’d miss me. Who wouldn’t? But look, brother, this is about me and you. I am quite simply the best poker player on the moon, and I aspire to take my talent elsewhere and empty the pockets of those who should know better. You speak a dozen or more languages, you know math to the doctorate level, nobody can beat you in physics and chemistry, and you’re an ace mechanic. Yet, with all that knowledge packed into your little brain, all you want to be is a heel-3 miner.”

  Crater couldn’t disagree with the truth. “A heel-3 miner is a fine profession,” he said. “I’m proud to be one.”

  “Stay here and rot, then!" Petro spat. “Just as soon as I save enough johncredits, I’m heading to Armstrong City where I will board a Cycler, play cards on the game deck, and win some big money off those rich tourists who fly here to see hicks like you.”

  The bank account as of three point two seconds ago of Philip Earl Thomas Reginald Osgood Mountbatten-Windsor-Jones aka the Prince of Wales aka Petro Jones amounts to thirty-three johncredits and seventy-two bits, the gillie said.

  “I have a cash flow problem,” Petro confessed, then glared at the gillie. “What are you doing crawling around in my bank account, you ugly blob of slime mold?”

  “It is a bad gillie,” Crater said, then spoke to it. “Don’t ever hack into Petro’s account again.”

  The gillie shrugged or would have if it had shoulders, which it didn’t. “Into your holster,” Crater commanded.

  The gillie did as it was told, sliding into the holster on Crater’s left arm, but first it said, In ten minutes, you will be late for work.

  Crater, glad to end the unsettling conversation with Petro, turned and hurried through the tubes, pulling the older boy along as if caught in his wake.

  To go outside onto the scrapes, Crater and Petro first entered a dustlock that contained rows of gray lunasteel lockers. Inside each were hooks and hangers for their tube clothes and also a helmet and a bio-girdle, sanitized and placed there by the dustlock crew. Petro came in, flung open his locker, stared with distaste, allowed a contemptuous sigh, then stripped bare, tossing his tube clothes on the deck, and began to strap on the bio-girdle, which provided him another chance to gripe. “Putting on this nasty thing every shift is yet another affront to my royal dignity.”

  “It is not nasty at all,” Crater calmly replied. “It’s a wonder of design and function that takes care of waste products throughout the day. As for your royal dignity, if you had any, you’d pick up your clothes off the deck and hang them in your locker. Recall the Colonel’s rules on neatness.”

  Petro didn’t like the Colonel’s rules on neatness nor, for that matter, any of the Colonel’s rules. As far as he was concerned, Colonel John High Eagle Medaris, the high and mighty owner of t
he mine and everything else in Moontown, made up his rules as he went along, every one of them meant to wring the life out of life and eliminate all possibility of fun. Recently, the Colonel had decided to remove all electronic games from the Earthrise Bar & Grill because a single miner—just one!— had been late to work and was found playing at one of the machines. Still, the old man couldn’t stop the card games Petro organized. A deck of paper cards was the one unstoppable force in the universe.

  Petro picked up his tunic and leggings and hung them in his locker, tossed in his boots, then slumped down on a bench and contemplated his toes, which he despondently wiggled. “If history were fair, I would be sitting on a throne, not a lunasteel bench in a smelly dustlock in the wayback of the moon.”

  “Count yourself lucky,” Crater offered, hoping to cheer Petro up. “People here like you for what you are, not what your title is or was.”

  Petro snickered. “Since they would be bowing and kowtowing to my every wish, I would prefer that they like me for my title.”

  Crater decided to stop responding to Petro. There simply was no more time for meaningless talk. He finished strapping on his bio-girdle, then made certain Petro’s was also properly affixed. A misaligned bio-girdle meant an awkward, uncomfortable day. Petro had managed to accomplish that feat a few weeks back, which meant not only a mess for the dusties but also that he got to quit early. Crater still wasn’t certain if Petro had done it deliberately.

  A scraper driver named Lonesome Larry came through the hatch and spotted Petro. “I have twenty johncredits riding on you in the race tomorrow, your royal dopiness,” he said. “I hope your noble duff is ready to plunk down in a fastbug and race.”

  The fastbug race was held during the annual celebration known as Arrival Day. Petro had won the race twice before in machines Crater had fashioned out of junk and old parts. “Oh, I’m quite ready, Larry, my man,” Petro said. “I’ll win it again too.”