That evening the Russians came back in a terrible mood, as Quentin´s earlier talk of repairs had proven to be prophetic: although they´d spent hours bombarding the fissure walls with directed microwave pulses to melt the crystalline basalt into a hermetic sheet of fused silica, one particular section of rock refused to congeal correctly and kept cracking back open.
Therefore, and despite consecutive efforts at plastering the area over with pieces of debris to plug the hole, no one had managed to completely prevent oxygen from leaking out of their new base.
“Relax, Pavel…” Quentin yawned, having a drink with his meal after such a long day. “It´s probably a vein with a higher calcium content or something. Let´s see what the sample says, and I´ll recalibrate the gyrotron tomorrow…”
“Da, Quentin, da… more work. We know…” the man huffed back, snatching the bottle and pouring himself a tall glass. “But tomorrow you doing last part alone. My back hurts, we need rest.”
“Oh… uh, OK?”
“Your machine, very heavy… Even on moon. And feet have bruise…” Matvey added, inhaling his serving and already looking for more. “Remember, we is not paid.”
“Come on, man… you too?” Quentin groaned. “First the Reverend, now you guys saying I´m treating you bad… I´m sorry I can´t make everything a perfect joyride all the friggin´ time.”
He paused, replaying Lood´s comment for the umpteenth time in his mind.
“And you know, that smart-ass earlier… assistance in any way possible means that if I can help by minimizing the number of pregnant people… or enlisting the aid of my friends…” he gave the Russians a pointed look “Then I´m not reneging on anything. No free lunches… We´re all in this together.”
“You know, we have quote in Russian… Taken what is given, but run from the beatings,”Pavel simply stated, unwilling to pursue the matter any further. “And right now, it feels like beating.”
As Sergei echoed the obtuse sentiment, Quentin saw that the Schwabs were just as burnt out as their Slavic comrades, and stowed his ego for another time.
“Alright, alright… it´s not like you´re anyone´s butler. But I get it, I´ll carry the load from here on out.” he relented, raising instead his glass. “Anyways... forget all that: They´re here! We did it!”
And even though their host´s congratulations fell a little flat due to their exertion, they half-heartedly reciprocated his gesture nonetheless, with a reluctant twinge of pride at the thought of all that they'd accomplished.
The following week aboard the Firmament crawled by, which in truth suited everyone nicely as it provided some sorely needed contrast to their recent excitement… and with only Quentin´s volcano-visits to rhythm otherwise placid days, Lori and Sander spent most of that time goofing off with the Russians or helping their parents around the ship, while quietly arguing about what to do with their secret bunker information, now that the situation had evolved.
Yet ultimately, it didn´t take more than a few of these mysterious comings and goings (coupled with constant talk of fissure repairs and Copland zaniness) to create enough intrigue around the new base, for both teens to want to see things for themselves.
“Doth mine ears deceive me?” Quentin jested, chuckling at the unexpected request as he combed his hair one morning. “Are the Schwab twins really asking for... dare I say it... extra work?”
“Not exactly… But if-”
“Well this must be your lucky day!” he continued, steamrolling through Sander´s tentative response with a sarcastic head-tilt. “It just so happens that we´re still running a little low in the Hydrogen department, especially with our new guests… And I was going to ask the Russians -again- but if you guys can handle it, we might avoid a mutiny after all!”
The idea seemed to interest Lori… and, feeling his plans begin to slip away, Sander fought to stay on track.
“Aren´t the solar cells already like, super full ´cuz we´re sitting in the sun?” he countered, hoping to weasel his way out of the craft without any additional responsibilities.
“Sure, but I´m not going to risk another crater mishap until we have full reserves.”
Sander nudged his sister discreetly, running out of excuses to deny the proposed Water Run.
“Yeah, we were… uh, kind of hoping there was something to do in the base?” Lori explained.
“Ah. And there it is…” Quentin exclaimed, grasping their angle. “Feeling the boredom, huh?”
“It’s n…”
“No, no… hang on, I got something for you,” he persisted, squinting at the mirror as he thought out loud. “Something in the new base… I mean, you can get the resonator out of there. I was planning do that at some point…”
Faced with flustered stares, Quentin tried again.
“The gyrotron. The- look, it's the big machine near the door, that I´ve been fixing the wall with… You can't miss it."
“Didn't Matvey say it was super heavy?” Lori reminded him.
“That big baby... of course it's heavy if you don't use the wheels!” he huffed, batting away the notion dismissively. “They were just propping it up in a weird position, towards the end… Nah, the two of you should manage easy: I´ve been operating the thing solo, every afternoon.”
The teenagers shared a look, debating whether to accept.
“If not, like I said… there´s always the Hydrogen."
“OK, OK... deal.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Sander reached out and shook his hand morosely.
“We´ll bring back the… thing. Are the suits ready?”
After chasing down their parents to announce the departure and, incidentally, ask them for permission to leave the ship, the twins got dressed and descended through the dock, for the first time since the Godsend´s arrival.
The platform came to a halt on a smooth bed of glassy stone, reminiscent of the long-hardened lava underfoot, but it was once they´d cleared the Firmament´s hull that the full scope of their hike hit them: rising in a staircase of dormant volcanic domes, Mons Rümker´s collapsed, central caldera easily dominated the landscape by thousands of feet.
“Woah…”
Wrapped across its highest peak like gigantic pimples, this massive cluster of igneous mounds had at some distant point in time funnelled molten rock into the tapestry of pooled obsidian beneath them… and Lori radioed in to double-check their itinerary.
“I thought you said this place was nearby…” she commented, scanning around for any sign of human activity. “Where are they?”
“You see that ridge, up there? That cuts right in front of the dome?”
She squinted at a bulbous hilltop, midway up the mountain and groaned.
“Hey, it´s as close as I could get us!” Quentin chided back. “You´ll be up there in twenty minutes max… bunny-hop it!”
Tracing their probable route up the sinuous, crusty slope, Sander felt the pit in his stomach grow as it´s elevation progressed.
“Thanks. I know how to walk…” he snapped. “Can´t we just take the rover?
“No way!” the man laughed back. “Super dangerous... Sergei broke the axel last time, so now we walk.”
“But… how are we supposed to bring back your gyrosco-tron?” Sander caught himself.
“No-no-no…” Quentin corrected, fading out for a second. “I guess I wasn´t clear on that: You just have to drag it out front and make some room, I want to keep it up there in case we need it again. And for the next base, too.”
“The next base?”
“Kid, if every ship is filled with the damn Brady bunch, we´ll need a new one sooner rather than later… Alright, call me if there´s a problem.”
Quentin hung up before they could lodge any other complaints, and from his tone, the twins knew it was pointless to insist.
So after one final exhale, Lori gathered her courage and started off, immediately following Quentin´s advice by leaping several yards at a time with each step, to hopefully curtail the trip.
“Wait for me!”
His sister bounced off towards the volcano, and Sander tried doing the same… but quickly paid the price for his prior week´s neglected fitness regimen and tumbled forward, as the moon´s lessened gravity had sapped more of his strength than anticipated.
Stunned by the shortness of breath, Sander wobbled back upright and resumed his ascent at a calmer pace, kicking himself for having been so thoughtless in regard to his self-care.
Yet past the relatively flat expanse that the Firmament had parked itself on, the terrain grew considerably more difficult, with deep seracs splitting an increasingly jagged bedrock into thick, regular columns of solidified magma… and he caught up to Lori.
“Don´t bump me,” she warned, vaulting over the first crevasse apprehensively.
As if crushed by the treads of some giant, celestial bulldozer, the petrified flow had split into roughly symmetrical pillars while cooling, with each slab becoming an exercise in balance and momentum, lest one fall into the cracks.
“My turn…” Sander bounded over to join her.
Mercifully, aside from a distant rockslide near the mountain´s summit that never truly threatened to reach them, and Lori trapping her boot in a deceptively narrow gap, the rest of their trek passed without much fanfare, in a careful series of slow-motion jumps from one immense tile to the other… until the ridge was barely a stone´s throw away.
Here, a boulder had diverted the eruption´s coulee into two different streams, and the twins then scaled the closest embankment.
“Hey. We´re at the ridge…Nobody here…”
The radio hummed back emptily for a few seconds of dead air… then Quentin responded.
“Look at that! You made good time…”
“Yeah where-”
But Lori didn´t need to repeat her earlier question, as Quentin had more directions to give.
“You´re looking at the mountain, OK? So walk left… along the vent, then you´ll see a caved-in part…”
“What vent?” Sander chimed-in, feeling the lactic acid burn in his sore thighs.
“Just- keep your back to the ship, and follow the fault-line at the bottom of the ridge... You´re almost there.”
And sure enough, after trudging closer the twins realized that the crest currently dwarfing them was in fact more of a cliff, born from a deep chasm where the lunar crust had burst open eons ago.
Kicking a pebble towards the depression, Sander watched it ricochet off into the moon´s depths until he´d lost sight, hundreds of meters lower… and his eyes climbed back up the cliff´s greyscale strips of stacked sediment, a little overwhelmed by the colossal ledger of savage, geological history.
Lori on the other hand, had already started a cautious zigzag down the scarp, having finally spotted the unmistakably artificial hue of painted metal in the desolate topography.
Her brother close behind, she skipped across the inclined, gravelly field and slid to a halt, right on the lip of a sinkhole where the tilted substratum had eroded into the cavity below.
As she knelt beside the curved hooks of an extendable ladder that had been nestled between two photovoltaic panels, Lori peered inside of the breach to the pyroduct within… only to discover the sunken remnants of a wide, semi-shattered tunnel that had once ferried scalding lava under the satellite´s surface.
“Gotta be them, right?”
On the other end of the skylight, Sander pointed to the shining diode of an automated airlock, as it glinted back from a cleft in the subterranean conduit´s wall… and the twins prudently descended through the gutted ceiling, rung by rung.
The ground´s uneven concavity sent Lori stumbling as her brother landed in a heap behind her, and they switched on their flashlights in unison to navigate the wrinkly, undulating folds that lined the floor.
“You OK?” Sander asked, swinging his beam down the cavernous shaft.
“Yup… but, this is ridiculous,” she shot back tersely. “Quentin? Hey… is there a simpler way back? That was like, kind of harrowing.”
At this depth, her call was fuzzy and they barely heard Quentin´s reasons for not taking the safer path home.
“... gets easier on the way b-…” he confided. “All downhill… other route takes hours, and… to move the Firmament… side!”
A trampled patch of scuffed, deep grooves trailed off down the cavernous shaft away from the base´s entrance where the Russians had dragged in some of the larger components during construction… and, as they pieced together Quentin´s excuses through a waxing and waning radio signal, Lori hung up.
“OK, screw it,” she muttered. “So, what… do we just knock?”
Her brother wasn´t listening and had kept his light trained on the distant darkness.
“Hey…” Sander began, “do you think whoever made that painting in the bunker… There´s no way someone saw us, right?”
Unnerved by the question, Lori chose to focus on the task at hand and brushed it off, preferring to concentrate on the large, Hebrew markings that had been embossed onto the repurposed airlock.
“I doubt it… that place looked abandoned. Struck me more like some kind of graffiti…”
All around the door where its round frame didn´t quite fit the fissure, some kind of swollen, hardened foam had been applied to fill in the gaps, and Lori waved him over to help.
“There´s no handle?” she demanded, unable to locate it under the confusing, Semitic alphabet.
Reaching past her shoulder, Sander randomly pressed down on what he assumed to be the keypad… which instead sprung the lid of a little compartment, built to house a singular, red button.
“Am I a genius, or am I a genius?” he laughed, beaming incredulously at his sister.
“Lucky guess…”
She pressed it and, as thick pistons rotated the hinged upward, the twins advanced into the decompression chamber´s LED halo, shielding their eyes against the brilliant onslaught. Another button closed the hatch behind them and, in a rush of oxygen, the pressure soon stabilized enough for Sander to unfasten his helmet.
“Green means go!” he noted, spying the safety lamp switch colors… without ever gaining Lori´s attention:
A crowd of pallid Copland faces had gathered on the opposite side of the airlock´s small oval window, to stare hungrily through the security glass.