Life on the Fron­tier – Survive
What the prospec­tors real­ized the day that Tilly didn’t check in
Lunar noir hard sci­ence fic­tion: jus­tice is per­son­al, and back­up is three days away.
The prac­tice starts as a roll call.
An alarm cuts Alex’s Bar. Peo­ple move for Hab D. The cel­lar fills. Phones come out. Names get read. John­son. Vol­berg. Richards. Mas­ters. Var­gas. Some answer. One does not. Tilly Mas­ters is south­west of the tow­er after a KREEP out­crop, and the call will not con­nect. Behind a moun­tain, off the net, the station’s first tool is already used up.
The Practice
In one-sixth grav­i­ty a closed habi­tat does not save you by exist­ing. It saves you if you are inside it when the par­ti­cles arrive.
A CME warn­ing trav­els at light speed. The worst pro­tons do not. Con­rad has on the order of eight min­utes. The cel­lar under Hab D, the water stacked over it, the foam on the hatch — that is the geom­e­try. Out­side that mass there is no mag­ne­tos­phere worth the name and no air thick enough to stop a hun­dred-MeV pro­ton. Doc’s num­ber, once the detec­tor climbs, is not a brief­ing. Over four thou­sand pro­tons per square cen­time­ter per sec­ond, and ris­ing. If some­one is not in a shel­ter, they are dead.
The check-in is how the sta­tion finds out who is already out­side the geom­e­try. A phone that rings inside Conrad’s tow­er net is a per­son who can still be count­ed. A phone that will not con­nect is a per­son behind rock, or over the hori­zon, or sim­ply not hold­ing the hand­set. Vargas’s hab is clos­er to Tilly’s ground. That is why Del tells Alex to call Var­gas sec­ond. Range is a phys­i­cal fact. So is the mountain.
Tilly did the next avail­able thing. She saw the rad sen­sors go wrong and ran for crater shade. Twen­ty min­utes. Far too long. Shade is rock between the body and the Sun. It is the same rule as the cel­lar, only poor­er. She is still alive when Nils gets a retrans­mis­sion through — Milt, in Lon­don, warm­ing a GNR anten­na so four hun­dred thou­sand kilo­me­ters can car­ry a voice to a woman behind a hill. She answers. Then she stops answer­ing. That is the prac­tice at the edge of the net: you use the tow­er, then the neigh­bor hab, then Earth as a relay, then a crawler on the South Road with Doc in the seat and extra shield­ing that had to be pulled from under a grate because the mass in the floor was in the wrong place for a blast com­ing from the Sun.
How Peo­ple Use It
Nils buys the next move. He is the one who knows Tilly has been work­ing south­west for weeks, who knows she is an inde­pen­dent like him, who will not wait for Lunadyne’s east-coast offices to fin­ish being late. He treats Sur­vive as a call list and a crawler, not a slogan.
Del accepts the count. Thir­ty peo­ple in the area does not mean thir­ty peo­ple in the cel­lar. He is miss­ing five. He wants names. He wants Var­gas to try the clos­er tow­er. He is still the sher­iff. The pro­to­col does not run through a warrant.
Doc accepts the med­ical end of the same rule. She silences the cel­lar so she can hear Tilly. She rides the road that gets rock­i­er the far­ther south it runs. Rule One, as Nils will say lat­er, is an agree­ment not to let each oth­er die if you can help it. Doc going is that agree­ment in a suit.
Prospec­tors use it on each oth­er. Mia, Den­nis, Ter­ri, Richards — the argu­ment in the bar after­ward is not poet­ry. Jane Mas­ters arrives from Earth because the fam­i­ly can­not afford the loss and because she intends to replace her sis­ter on the claim. Richards calls her an ama­teur. Nils cuts it off. Every­one in the room was an ama­teur once. Rule One has one word. Find the next thing that threat­ens life and reduce it. That includes Jane. That includes Tilly, if they can swing it.
Cor­po­rate vis­i­tors and Earth-side offices do not buy it until some­one makes them. They talk over the hum. They assume the warn­ing reached every­one. They assume “out­side the net” still leaves time. Tilly’s twen­ty min­utes is what that assump­tion costs. Inde­pen­dents work beyond the tow­er because that is where the KREEP and the con­tracts are. The offi­cial chan­nel is built for the habs. Sur­vive is built for the peo­ple the habs can­not see.
Gen learns the short ver­sion lat­er, on the work­ing Moon, not the tourist one. Nils makes her say it until it is mus­cle. Sur­vive. Then the rest: no unnec­es­sary EVAs, the crawler is your life. The extra rules exist because Con­rad and Gor­donville can fool you into think­ing the net is the whole Moon.
Frag­ile Trust
The trust is pro­vi­sion­al. It does not assume the machine will hold, or that the sher­iff will be sober, or that Earth will arrive.
Offi­cial law at Con­rad is thin. Del can lock a drunk who tries to open a hatch to vac­u­um. He can­not cov­er every inde­pen­dent south­west of the tow­er, and Coal Co nev­er sat clean­ly inside his juris­dic­tion. After the strike he is still the name on the logs and less reli­able than the badge. Peo­ple adjust. An emp­ty chair would be clean­er. They do not have one.
Back­up is three days away. That is trans­porta­tion, not a radio delay. A voice can bounce off Alas­ka and reach Tilly in sec­onds. A hos­pi­tal can­not. The mar­gin is the cel­lar, the neigh­bor hab, the peo­ple will­ing to take a crawler into a dying storm, and the shared rule that you do not leave a name unan­swered because the paper­work is still on Earth.
What the prospec­tors real­ized the day Tilly didn’t check in was not that the Moon is dan­ger­ous. They already knew that. They real­ized the check-in is the law they actu­al­ly have. If the name does not answer, the next threat is already run­ning, and the only ques­tion left is who will spend their own mar­gin to reduce it.
The Joy­ful Moon is still watching…
and Rule One is still one word.
— Torn MacAlester
Still rid­ing the trails with Nils, Gen, and the whole Fab­u­lae Lunae crew
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