Mario was watching her reaction. “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?” And he left the cabin to prepare the descent protocols.

Clavius Base was built around three big inflated domes. Connected by transparent walkways and subsurface tunnels, the domes were covered over by Moon dust for protection from the sun, cosmic rays, and other horrors. As a result, seen from above, the domes seemed part of the lunar landscape, as if they had bubbled up out of the gray-brown regolith.

Shuttle Komarov landed without ceremony half a kilometer from the main domes. The dust it kicked up fell back with disconcerting speed onto the airless Moon. There were no pads here, just many shallow blast craters, the scars of multiple landings and takeoffs.

A transparent walkway snaked up to the shuttle’s lock. Escorted by Captain Mario, with her smart suitcase rolling behind her, Siobhan took her first footsteps in the Moon’s dreamy gravity.

Her first glimpse of the Moon, slightly distorted by the walkway’s clear, curving walls, was of a gently rolling surface. Every edge was softened by the ubiquitous dust, the result of eons of meteoritic churning. It looked almost like a snowfield, she thought. The shadows were not the deep black she had imagined, but softened by the reflected glow of the ground. She shouldn’t have been surprised: dark as it was, the light reflected from this lifeless soil was, after all, the Moonlight that had shone over Earth since the great impact that had shaped the twin worlds in the first place. So Siobhan was walking in Moonlight herself. But this bit of the Moon was littered by surface vehicles, fuel tanks, escape bunkers, and equipment dumps; it was a human landscape.

The walkway terminated at a small blocky structure. Siobhan and Mario rode the elevator down to an underground tunnel. Here an open cart mounted on a monorail awaited them. The cart was big enough for ten, she realized, the shuttle’s full complement of eight passengers plus two crew, and their baggage.

The cart slid into silent motion.

“An induction drive,” Mario said. “Same principle as the Sling. Endless sunlight and low gravity: the physics behind this little electrical cart might have been invented for the conditions of the Moon.”

The tunnel was narrow, lit by fluorescent tubes, and the fused-rock walls were so close to the cart she could have reached out and touched them—and in perfect safety, for the cart’s speed was little more than walking pace. She was learning that away from Earth, caution ruled: everything was done slowly and deliberately.

At the end of the tunnel was an airlock, and what Mario called a “dustlock,” a small room equipped with brushes, vacuum hoses, and other devices to clean spacesuits and people of electrostatically clinging Moon dust. As Mario and Siobhan hadn’t been exposed to the surface, they were able to cycle through this quickly.

The airlock’s inner door was marked with a large plaque:

*** *** *** ***

WELCOME TO CLAVIUS BASE

U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS

She read on down a list of contributing organizations, from NASA and the U.S. Air and Space Force to Boeing and various other private contractors. There was also a rather grudging acknowledgment, she thought, of the Eurasian, Japanese, Pan-Arabian, Pan-African, and other space organizations that had put up more than half the money for this American-led project.

She touched a little roundel that was the logo of the British National Space Agency. In recent years the British had discovered a genius for robotics and miniaturization, and the machine-dominated period of renewed lunar and Martian exploration earlier in the century had been the glory days of the BNSA and its engineers. But that period had been brief, and was already over.

Mario caught her eye and grinned. “That’s the Americans for you. Never give anybody else credit.”

“But they were here first,” she pointed out.

“Oh, yes, there is that.”

The inner door slid open to reveal a short, stocky man waiting for her. “Professor McGorran? Welcome to the Moon.” She recognized him immediately. This was Colonel Burton Tooke, USASF, commander of Clavius Base. Aged about fifty, with a severe military crew cut, he was a good head shorter than she was, and he flashed a disarming gap-toothed grin. “Call me Bud,” he said.

Siobhan said goodbye to Mario, who was returning to his shuttle, “where the beds are softer than anything in Clavius,” he claimed.

Bud Tooke led Siobhan up a flight of stairs, easily negotiated in one-sixth gravity, to the interior of a dome. They walked along a narrow roofless corridor. She could see the dome’s smooth plastic some meters above her head, but the space beneath was cluttered with walkways and partitions. Everything was quiet, the lights subdued; nobody was moving, save Bud and Siobhan.

She said softly, “It seems rather appropriate to arrive somewhere as mysterious as the Moon in silence and twilight.”

He nodded. “Sure. You’ll soon be over the Moon-lag, I hope. It’s actually two here. The middle of our night.”

“Moon time?”

“Houston time.”

She learned this was a tradition dating back to the days of the earliest astronauts, who had timed their epic journeys by the clocks of their homes in Texas; it was a pleasing tribute to those pioneers.

They reached a row of closed doors. Above, a small neon sign glowed pink: it read . Bud opened a door at random to reveal a small room, and Siobhan looked inside. There was a bed that could be folded out to become double, a table, chair, and basic comms equipment, and even a small unit containing a shower and lavatory.

“Not quite a hotel. And there’s no room service to speak of.” Bud said this cautiously. Perhaps some VIP visitors threw tantrums at this point, demanding the five-star luxury they were used to.

Siobhan said firmly, “I’ll be fine. Umm—contact light?”

“The first words spoken on the Moon, by Buzz Aldrin, at the moment when Apollo 11’s lunar module first touched the surface. Seems appropriate for our visitor quarters.” He shoved her luggage into the room, where her smart suitcase, sensing it had completed its own journey, opened itself up. Bud said, “Siobhan, I’ve set up the briefing you asked for at ten local. The participants have all been brought here—notably Mangles and Martynov from the South Pole.”

“Thank you.”

“Until then your time is your own. Take a break if you like. But it’s about time I took an inspection tour of this dump. I’d welcome your company.” He grinned. “I’m a military man; I’m used to sleepless nights. Anyhow, I need an excuse to have a good look at everything while nobody’s about to distract me.”

“I should really work.” She glanced guiltily at her self-unpacking luggage, her crushable clothes, and rolled-up softscreens. But her head was already too full of facts about the sun and its storms.

She studied Bud Tooke. His square shoulders filling his practical, unmarked coverall, he stood with his hands behind his back, his face friendly but expressionless. He looked like a classic career soldier, she thought, exactly as she’d preconceived the commander of a Moon base to be. But if she was to get through this assignment, she was going to have to rely on his support.

She decided to take him into her confidence. “I don’t know anything about the people here. How they live, the way they think. A tour might help me find my feet.”

He nodded, apparently approving. “A little recon before the battle never hurts.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that …” She begged fifteen minutes to unpack and freshen up.

***************

______

They walked briskly around the perimeter of the dome.