EXILE
Chapter 20

“What’s up, Audrey?” Audrey Manning started when she heard the voice, startled out of a little daydream. She turned away from the canteen window, and saw that it was Sally Witherspoon, the youngest convict in the female colony. Small and blonde, Sally’s physical appearance was deceptive, for it was only her youth that had saved her. Angered by the imprisonment of her parents on fabricated tax evasion charges, fifteen-year-old Sally had assembled an old-style fertiliser bomb from the ammoniated nitrates that her father, a farmer, had held in bulk storage. The bomb had successfully demolished a local police precinct station, along with numerous police and CSA staff. Still a minor, she was not able to receive the death penalty. Instead, she celebrated her sixteenth birthday in the female lunar penal colony. Now, in a rest shift, she had come down to the convicts’ canteen area, to find Audrey gazing out of the window into space.

“Oh, Sally! Hi. Nothing much, really. I was just watching the shuttle come in. Look, there it is.”

“Full of guys, huh?”

“Yes. More muscle to be eaten by the works.” Audrey sighed. “Honestly, Sal, I can’t see why they should have such a high death rate. Oh, I know they do the heavy work, but they can still work safely.”

“From what I hear, they do, Audrey. Some do themselves, others go ballistic and end up in orbit. Where is it, did you say?”

“Over there - that long, bright star. D’you see it?”

“Uh, yeah, yes, I do!” Sally bobbed up and down in excitement, a sharp contrast to the solidly lean figure of Audrey, only in her mid-thirties but already a sister-figure to Sally. Together, the two women watched the shuttle approach. Presently, the long light took form, and they were able to make out the basic outline of the shuttle as it entered lunar space, skirting the horizon and arcing around to approach the female colony, officially known as Quadrant Five. Watching it approach, Sally turned to Audrey. “How can you tell where it’s heading? It seems like it’s heading towards us, not the guys. They’re over in West Tranquility, and there is a crater ray and a couple of basalt ranges between us, about ten kilometres.”

“Sure, Sally. But this is a routine approach. He’s actually descending in a slow spiral, about a hundred kays in diameter. He’ll turn behind us, and then make his final approach.”

Sally watched, thinking. “Audrey, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but you seem to know a lot about the shuttles. How could you know all that, up here?”

Audrey remained silent for a minute before answering, but to the window. She didn’t turn to face Sally at all. “My brother is a shuttle pilot. He used to do the moon run, but he was lonely. Just before my husband was shot, Roger, my brother, was transferred at his request, to the Earth run. As far as I know, he’s still going back and forth from Chicago to the platforms.”

“And you’ve had no contact?”

“I’m a convict, remember? No contact, no civil rights. Hell, I suppose he’ll let me know somehow if anything major happened. All he really needs to do is to speak to any of the women that he shuttles up on their way here.” Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ Findɴovel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“But we haven’t had anyone new for months.”

“True.” Audrey thought for a moment. “You’re right. You know, Sally, I’ve been keeping an eye on the shuttles for some time now. You know, just daydreaming, thinking that Roger might be flying one. They’ve actually flown a few more cons down to the guys than normal, recently. They’re either boosting numbers, or a few have pegged out recently.”

“What do you reckon, Aud?”

“Both, really. Janet and Cheyenne went over to the Q’s last week to survey a job. They said it was huge. They’re building a new quadrant, a massive cylinder, multi-levelled with its own spaceport. Virtually self-contained, only sharing the air and water lines with the main colony.”

“Cheyenne as well? I thought that only Janet ever went over.” Janet Thompson and Cheyenne Lasquez were convict bio-engineers, who maintained and developed permanent environmental systems. Currently, there were two systems, one for each colony. Each system contained the hydroponic farms and the habitat recycling units that processed the air and waste materials, water included, using vegetable biomass and engineered bacteria to purify and refine. As well as making sure that the units remained viable and maintained a continuous excess supply of oxygen and water, the women developed any new systems as needed.

“Yes. This one is apparently a from-scratch job. Up to now, Sally, Janet has only ever gone over to either repair their system, or to expand it as the base expanded. I was surprised, too, when Cheyenne was assigned. I know that they were expanding - they always are.”

“So, what about this project? Pretty major?”

“Yup - look, there it goes, final approach. Not long before it lands.” The shuttle passed almost directly overhead, with sporadic bursts of helium fire jetting out from different combinations of the thirty-six microjets that were spread over the shuttle surface. Computer operated, they responded to the central autopilot to keep the shuttle on course, and at the right velocity. Locked into the base telemetry system, the shuttle was guided by a broad array of radar beacons that covered an area of several thousand square kilometres of the lunar surface. In response to the guidance system, the shuttle’s jet network worked to make a continuous series of small corrections. To the women watching below, it had the appearance of a scattered starfield blinking randomly as it glided silently overhead.

“It looks so, so menacing, y’know? It’s big, and seems to move so slowly, and silent. I suppose it’s that silence that gets to me.”

“I know,” Audrey replied. “It delivers convicts to the rest of their lives, to a place never meant to have life, only death, and then it takes away the product of their labour, the stuff that they die producing.’

“Tough shit, huh?”

“Yeah. Janet had a good look around, anyway. Seems that they’re making the new quadrant to house civilians.”

“What?! Colonists?”

“The first paying settlers. It even has recreation centres and viewing domes planned. The male colony has developed all of the quadrants that it needs to operate and fulfil all functions, like mining, medical, maintenance and construction. It seems that this is the start of phase two of the lunar project. The new one will only share air and water until their own system is fully functional, and then all contact with the rest of the colony will be closed to emergency status only.”

Ahead of them, the shuttle disappeared in the distance, passing over the low range of hills that lay between the two colonies. The show over, the two women turned from the window and slowly walked back across the canteen towards the door to the quadrant’s axial gallery. Laid out like a huge dumbbell, the quadrant had two cylindrical units set into the rock, connected by an axial gallery nine hundred metres in length, off which various units were joined. One end unit was a copy of the male colony’s Quadrant Seven, and, like Quadrant Seven, housed the administration, guard house and infirmary.

At the other end was the business unit of the colony, Quadrant Three. A vast structure, most of the quadrant was at the surface. Designed as a honeycomb of cells, each had a double-glazed plexiglass roof, beneath which racks of hydroponically grown vegetables thrived in a carbon dioxide-rich, light-bright environment. The harvested vegetables were, in some cases, processed and exported back to Earth. But traditional vegetables were in short supply. Many cells grew grain, others the protein gel that was familiar to all in space. Other cells grew a variety of algae, lichen and orchids, all of which were harvested for the raw drug compounds that they produced, the vegetable pharmacology being of a much higher standard and purity that the synthetic equivalents.

In terms of surface area, Q3 had more than the rest of the two colonies combined. It provided all of the food for the female colony, some specialised food products for the men, all of the drugs for both colonies and some for Earth, and a low, but increasing percentage of the Earth’s phenomenal food budget. The honeycomb structure was for both strength and safety - should a meteorite strike damage some cells, they would be sealed, saving the rest of the cells. A total compromise of quadrant integrity would devastate both colonies. Below the cells lay the maintenance workshops, housing the hydroponic system pumps and nutrient mixes. These were all controlled by a central computer system that tailored the nutrient, gas and water feed to each cell’s contents, in addition to controlling, via micro-louvres in the cell roofs, the light levels in each cell. Also below were the facilities for processing the produce from above, packaging, extracting, recycling the biomass.

The main axial tunnel was classified as Quadrant Five, and it was approximately half-way along that Audrey and Sally entered from the convict canteen. Opening off the hallway were various hab-spaces, some housing the ninety-odd convicts and their thirty guards, others housing surface structures that were used to develop new technology for lunar habitation and permanent environments for human life. There were at any one time five civilian scientists at the colony, supervising the research and the operation of Q3, with much of the actual work performed by the convicts, trained as technicians after their arrival.

As one of the senior, more trusted convicts in the colony, Audrey Manning had been given, by the warden, the responsibility of supervising new arrivals, getting them settled in to the routine of prison life, and making sure that they were adequately trained for the different workloads that each convict faced during their term. As a result, Audrey became something of a big sister to not only Sally, but to many of the convicts. Yet, in contrast to this role, she was a loner, not forming any strong relationships with any other convict. Despite this, both convicts and prison staff warmed to her, and the resident scientists were more open to her about the nature of their research programs and their details than they were to other convicts.

This was due in part to Audrey having been a university research associate before her life conviction for the murder of three policemen in a shoot-out that went horribly wrong. Walking out of a bar one night with her husband, she had had the misfortune to be wearing colours that were similar to those that police detectives had been told that a Freedom Movement agent would be wearing. The first shot had shattered the glass front of the neighbouring shop, a gun dealer. Tom didn’t know who had fired, neither did Audrey. Almost by reflex, he spun around and grabbed the first weapon that came to hand, a pump-action shotgun. Seemingly as an afterthought, he grabbed with his free hand a box of ammunition. By sheer luck alone, it was the right loading for the shotty.

The couple crouched low, hiding behind a late-model sedan, probably belonging to someone in the crowded bar that they had just left. The first shots had hit without warning - as did the second volley. Knowing only that they were shooting to kill, Tom slipped automatically into combat mode. As a nineteen-year old, he had served in the Marines in the bloodiest engagement since the Hong Kong territorial war of twenty sixteen. Fourteen months of daily white-of-the-eyeballs firefights had instilled an instinctive response to well-aimed gunfire. Pulling Audrey down close to him, he used the car as a barricade. The rapidity of the shots told him that his opponent was using a modified high-speed automatic, a direct descendant of Colonel Uzi’s masterpiece. The accuracy of the shots could only happen at close range, ten metres or less. In the few seconds that he assessed the situation, Tom loaded the shotgun with eight cartridges, full load. He waited for the shots to stop -not showing himself, they would be reloading. One of them, anyway. Time to draw them out. Crouching down, he looked under the car, and could see, across the street and behind another car, three pairs of legs. With the quiet agility of cat, he lay himself down on the pavement, took aim, and fired, two cartridges in close succession. Both shots hit home, bringing two men down to the pavement. As they fell, Tom pumped another cartridge into the chamber, and fired. The agent on the far side who wasn’t hit saw the head of his leader erupt in a chunky spray of blood, bone and brains. The shot that followed a second later missed his partner’s head, hitting him instead in the lower abdomen. In those two seconds, the agent’s reactions had carried him over the bonnet of the car and to the side - the target was down, he was up and safe, as his partner howled over his destroyed testicles. He took his time, his feet off the ground. He knew that the target was watching feet - if his weren’t visible, he wasn’t there. If he had known that his target was not only the wrong man, and innocent man, but his platoon sergeant from a generation ago, he might not have been so keen, so coldly mechanical about his drive to silence the other man’s gun. His gamble paid off, for the third shot destroyed only the paint on the fire hydrant behind him.

Standing with his feet on the fenders of two cars, he crouched, and aimed at nothing. The target was there, but hiding - she had someone with her, and who was doing the shooting? Not her, but the man, the target too, now, by association. He lined up the car in his sights, waiting. Tom listened. He knew that he had hit one, probably two. The groans of one of them could be heard with crystal clarity in the still evening air. He could hear Audrey breath shallowly, rapidly, next to him. Good. He checked the gun - loaded and ready to go, still warm. Grabbing a stone from the gutter, he tossed it over his shoulder, the stone hitting a car near by. No shots. Either he had hit three (unlikely), or the gunman was clever. But how clever? Turning to Audrey, he mouthed “I love you”, and before she could react he spun around and up, firing a volley of shots at the car. Blackness.

The man drew his line, knowing that the target would fire at the car next to him. He had the advantage. Without warning, the target erupted like a deranged jack-in-the-box, pumping his shotgun faster than he had thought was possible. He had only ever seen one man capable of firing like that, and the recognition came too late, in the same instant that his reflexes fired the single shot, the 0.44 magnum’s slug that carried off the top of the target’s face and head. In that instant, the last microsecond of Tom Manning’s full, distinguished life, his former cadet recognised the only man who had earned his respect, but never commanded it. And he killed him before he could stop himself. His bellowed shout of anguish mingled with that of the new widow, behind the car. In his shock, he froze for an instant that proved fatal, for as Tom spun he released his weapon. In her fury, Audrey grabbed it before it hit ground, leaping up as she did so. In her years with Tom they had shared their passion for skeet shooting, and the split reflex aiming worked without prompting, pulling her arms around and up to fire at the tall clay pigeon across the road. Like the clay targets, his head disintegrated, cutting off its scream in a cloud of blood and clotted tissue, crimson pieces of bone rattling down on the bloodied paintwork of the two cars. Topped no longer by a head but by a ragged, bloody pulped mess, the policeman’s corpse dropped backwards, collapsing on the wet concrete with a slapping thud.

Hearing a click, Audrey dropped to a crouch as, turning, she saw one of the other policemen trying to aim his service revolver at her. Driven by the fury of her loss, she pumped another cartridge into the chamber, and squeezed off another lethal round. Kill or be killed. A groan told her where the last man was; seconds later he, too, was free from his pain. Audrey stood, shocked. In thirty seconds, her life was over. A cop-killing widow. Turning, she saw people spilling out of the bar to follow the shots, and stopping short in front of the carnage. The two beat cops who were checking i.d.s in the bar came out, and at first sight drew their revolvers, shouting at Audrey to drop her weapon. With nothing else left, she let the hot shotgun fall to the concrete, and let herself be arrested. With three police dead, being found the only survivor, and holding the smoking gun, was enough to seal her fate. At that time the female colony was about to be populated, and there was a cease on capital punishment. Otherwise, she would have been dead for certain.

The whole sequence of events came crashing back to her as she entered the bleak, grey corridor with Sally. She often replayed these events in her mind, wondering if there was some way that it could have happened differently. As with all of the earlier times, she realised not. She was a victim of circumstance, and there was no way back. She had pleaded guilty and gone willingly, as there was no chance of her ever regaining her happiness, the life that she had shared with Tom. In a way, her life sentence on the moon was the therapeutic total break that she needed. Here, she could be useful, and had nothing back on Earth to be concerned about; no lost career, family or friends.

As the two women turned towards the laboratory units that opened onto the gallery down closer to Q3, Sally broke the silence. “How much did Janet and Cheyenne learn when they were over there?”

“About what? Men, or their missions?”

“Well, what they’re working on, what’s happening on Earth.”

“News?” Audrey laughed to herself. “A bit. Not too different from the crap that the prison news service delivers. If ever censored propaganda had a home, it’s here. Those guys are just on the receiving end. Still, they did hear some things of interest, but not a lot of dirt-side hearsay. We know about the new public quadrant being built. But, that has a cost that must be met.”

“Yes, so?”

“Well, as well as stepping up construction, they’re boosting the mining operations, with extra crews on shift.”

“Where are the extra guys being housed?”

“One of the shuttle’s brought in extra portable modules, to house them on site. Overall, the men’s base has been expanded more than ten percent during the last two months.”

“Sounds pretty major.”

“Yup. And we get the flow-on, with extra demand on the cells for food, and the textile units for uniforms and synthetic walls. The flexi-plas is being used to wall semi-permanent surface structures. The geo-lab is developing new lunacrete that has no degassing, and thereby no porosity. This is a major all-round push, Sal, and we’re in the middle of it.”

“But why? What’s it all for?”

“Simple, Sally. We’re the brains and brawn of the first real giant leap in humanity’s work with the moon. We’re looking at a permanent, self-sufficient city and industrial base to house at least several hundred, to begin with. Now that both bases can survive on their own, the push is on to expand and to build on our foundations. Some changes are heading our way.”

Sally didn’t reply, silently thinking about what Audrey had told her. One thing was certain - their supposedly routine way of life as labouring prisoners would not remain untouched by events and plans on Earth. More than ever, they were now the means to an end.

Their walk brought them to the genetic laboratory where Audrey worked. As Sally was the most recent newcomer, at four months residence, Audrey had no new people to train, and so she was assigned a routine workload. Parting company with Sally, she entered the laboratory, glancing briefly at the view of the Earth in the window above.

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