Character Spotlight — Mose

Char­ac­ter Spot­light – Mose
Sev­en­ty-one years old, every class of vehi­cle, and the com­man­der who told Nils the rep­ri­mand no longer applied.

Moon deputy hard sci­ence fic­tion from the trails around Con­rad Station.

He places a man amid­ships, out of sight of the win­dows, and instructs him to close his eyes until he wakes him. Nils Carmike has not slept. The Moon is in the glass and will not leave. Mose Crane’s order is the same four words he has already spent on a rep­ri­mand he has decid­ed does not apply. What I say goes. Nils keeps his eyes shut because the alter­na­tive is not trust­ing the man whose hands are on the lander.

Who They Are

Mose is sev­en­ty-one when he steps for­ward. Chief Astro­naut after the reor­ga­ni­za­tion Yel­low­stone forced on the agency. Near­ly forty years in the suit. Every class of vehi­cle since the Shut­tle. He com­mand­ed the last sta­tion mis­sion before the old pro­gram shut down. When Cy Mac­In­turn­er wants Moon flight three reor­ga­nized, Mose takes it with a guar­an­tee already in his pock­et. What I say goes. Includ­ing the crew.

The pres­sure is the core sam­ple. Land at Shackleton’s rim. Extract ice from a per­ma­nent shad­owed region. A robot rover is stuck on the floor with a core it may not have recov­ered. Den­nis Var­gas wants to dri­ve down, hook up, dri­ve out. Mose cuts it. The mis­sion is the core. Go after the rover, and you risk not get­ting one. Nils splits the dif­fer­ence. A lit­tle riski­er, Mose says, and he wants the assess­ment before he commits.

The rule is one sen­tence. For­get the rep­ri­mand. You stud­ied the PSR retrieval. You are qual­i­fied. He flies the land­ing man­u­al­ly. We are sta­ble, Hous­ton. This is how we do that. Six hours on the ground, then a floor black­er than the stars. Cold­er than Plu­to, he says, and still close enough to a Texas sum­mer that the com­par­i­son feels wrong.

Across the Sequence

In The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries, he is on stage. Descent into Dark­ness is his last mis­sion to the Moon: the guar­an­tee, the amid­ships order, the man­u­al land­ing, the rim. The vignette Com­man­der is the epi­logue — a fall in the dark, a core lost, and Mose send­ing Nils back, any­way. Dri­ve to Hous­ton puts him ear­li­er, on a screen from orbit, a Soyuz off tar­get. He and Lucia are not dead eigh­teen months later.

In Thun­der Moon Tus­sle, he is a liv­ing shad­ow. The drill stuck. Mose fell. Nils dropped the core to catch him, and it rolled out of the lights. Mose called him back. Milt says it plain: it was the ice or Mose. You chose Mose. Nils still calls it his screw-up, the excuse the agency want­ed after Cy had already dumped him. Mose is retir­ing. The weight he car­ried does not become Nils a seat.

In Mask of the Joy­ful Moon, he is not in the room. Gen Miller inher­its a sta­tion whose water argu­ment began with a core on a dark floor and a com­man­der who would not let the rover become the mis­sion. When the tanks run thin and back­up is three days out, some­one still decides which mass to car­ry and which per­son to pull.

The Longer Shadow

What Nils inher­its is the sen­tence, and the debt. What I say goes, said once to close a rep­ri­mand and again to close a man’s eyes. He saved the com­man­der and lost the core, and he will tell that sto­ry, or refuse to, for the rest of the trail. Prospec­tors inher­it the geom­e­try: the ice is in the dark, and the mis­sion is the sam­ple until a body is in the way. Then, the mis­sion is the body. Milt inher­its the argu­ment he can­not win. Gen encoun­ters a Moon where they have already lost that argu­ment, and water remains the rea­son any­one trav­els to the rim.

He nev­er sits in Alex’s Bar. He puts the man amid­ships, anyway.

When the core is slid­ing, and the com­man­der is down, which one is the mission?

Fur­ther Reading

• The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries — “Descent into Darkness”
• Thun­der Moon Tussle
• Mask of the Joy­ful Moon
• Relat­ed site posts: Fron­tier Foun­da­tions — Dark Craters, Hard Tech & Sci­ence — Retriev­ing the Rover, Char­ac­ter Spot­light — Nils Carmike, Fabu­lae Lunae Vignette — Dri­ve to Houston

The Joy­ful Moon is still watching…
and the sto­ries are still being told.
— Torn MacAlester
Still rid­ing the trails with Nils, Gen, and the whole Fab­u­lae Lunae crew
🚀🌕

Stories The sto­ries of Torn MacAlester are sci­ence fic­tion, where the sci­ence is well-ground­ed. I inten­tion­al­ly made any devi­a­tions for spec­u­la­tive pur­pos­es. To main­tain max­i­mum real­ism, I restrict the scope of these deviations. Read More

Articles I write arti­cles of sci­ence fact and sci­ence fic­tion. The arti­cles here span the knowl­edge of mod­ern sci­ence and the spec­u­la­tions of fic­tion. I try to caveat every­thing that is an assump­tion. You will find arti­cles about space­flight, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of alien con­tact, and descrip­tions of tech­nol­o­gy used in my stories. Read More

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