Tag: pickman's models

Yeah, back to this.

The mural Reithner was illuminating with her headlamp was… well, it was ugly, and there was no getting around it. It didn’t even have the dubious virtue of technical skill; the artist had pounded and smeared it onto the rock wall using whatever materials were at hand. Possibly literally, Tobias thought as he averted his eyes. You can always get brown and red that way.

“That’s… Steelfang, right?” Buckley growled. “The Red Imperial god of death?”

“One of them, yes,” Tobias replied with utter calm. “He’s also sort of their god of farming. That’s why his mouth looks like a scythe, the better to reap his victims. The cult thinks blood makes the grain grow. Give me a good reason not to burn that damned thing off the wall.”

“We do not have incendiaries.” Reithner sounded hot, rather than cold. “Why did we not bring incendiaries?”

The desire in her voice made Tobias get himself back under control. “Right. Douse that light, Lieutenant. We don’t need to see it any longer.” He took a calming breath. “Lieutenant, Buckley, private circuit.” He waited until they both clicked in to continue. “Give me a good reason not to blow the airlock, and leave.”

Airlocks!

The first team was made up of three grenadiers and two Squad members, and when the door opened again, they had the exact same number of people. “There’s power and air, sir, but no people manning the gate,” the Squaddie told Tobias. “No communications network up on the other side, either. My suit couldn’t even find anything to handshake with.”

Reithner had been listening to one of the grenadiers, presumably telling her the same thing. “Nothing from our suits, either. The atmosphere is breathable, but the temperature is at thirty seven degrees.”

“Well, at least there’s no ice — no, wait.” Tobias frowned. “I forgot: your people still use Celsius. You’re saying it’s hot in there?”

“Yes. Blood temperature, in fact.” She sounded incredulous, which was fair, because so was Tobias. Most of Heinlein Base had been shut down and sealed off in order to conserve heat; the other human-occupied outposts had the exact same problem. If this place was that well heated, they probably had power, and to spare. Yet one more reason to investigate, he thought. Not to mention, handle gently.

Airlock!

It was definitely supposed to be a gate. Whoever had put it up had taken doors from the shipping containers up on the surface, including the frames, then mounted them into the rock. There was even a doorsill. The problem was that it was an airlock. Improvised and jury-rigged, but definitely an airlock. That had implications.

Not to mention hindrances. Tobias examined the walls on either side. “I don’t see any communication jacks,” he announced. “No jacks, ports, or plug-ins. Anybody else?”

“No.” Reithner sounded bothered by that, too. If anything, she sounded even more upset than Tobias. “Not even an emergency transmitter. This is a highly unsafe installation.”

“Or they don’t have anybody they want to talk to,” Buckley pointed out. “How far inside do you think we can get with the door closed behind us before we lose signal?”

“Right away.” Tobias had extended his suit’s sensor cable, and was now waving it around. “There’s no EM radiation coming through ahead of us. Once we’re inside, we’re cut off from our bases until we can find a transmitter that’s set up for surface communications.”

“Not gonna lie, sir: that sounds like a great reason to not go inside.” Buckley had gotten more and more darkly sardonic over the last few months, but right now there was no humor in his voice. “They don’t want to talk and they probably don’t want guests. Let’s take the hint.”

Tyranny!

Continue reading 01/14/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

Androids!

The impromptu entranceway to whatever was down below was free of booby-traps, alarms, or even cameras. There weren’t any guards, either, or signs that any had been posted. Theoretically, that suggested that the teams could go in, and right on down.

Nobody was ready to trust that theory. The party descended carefully, using as little light as possible, which meant almost no light at all. It was uncanny just how well Luxboroughers moved through the dark; if asked, Tobias would have told Reithner that they were using prototype DoW low-light vision equipment. She didn’t ask, and the grenadiers might as well have been androids. I wish we had androids, Tobias thought sadly. They’d come in handy right now.

They were never cost-effective for the moon, Asenath reminded him. Androids were better-suited for a stable and forgiving environment. Besides, we do not have the supervisory personnel needed to keep them from accidentally killing people.

Trying to give an impression, without saying it outright.

The tram they were on had started as a stiffened fabric dust-trap, bolted to a single-tracked frame and sporting plastic sheets for doors at both ends. Good for keeping direct sunlight and dust out, and sturdy if you weren’t trying to smash it. 

It was also unpressurized, which was helpful if you needed to have a private conversation. Tobias waved to the lieutenant to get her attention, then offered a communications cable. She accepted it, and jacked in. His HUD lit up with her information, although Tobias knew most of it already. Lieutenant Elise Reithner, FDE. Technician specializing in logistics. No combat experience listed, so why is she leading a half-dozen Euro grenadiers? Them, Tobias could have identified right off the bat, dossiers or no: they were all wearing crowd-control suits, their low-G carbines looked excellently cared for, and every one of them was barely under the maximum mass limits for Lunar service. He wondered how much weight they’d all lost, under the new ration regime. Hopefully, not enough to get them killed…

Reithner’s voice interrupted his thought. “Is there a reason for the operational security, sir?” Tobias noted that her English was excellent, with a tinge of… German, he supposed.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” he replied. “I decided to give you the opportunity to pass along whatever messages General Bruno might have wanted you to transmit privately. So if you’re supposed to save them for the right moment, you might as well do it now.”

Corporal Joe Buckley! Will he survive?

Buckley ended up bringing a half dozen members of the old Luxborough Squad with him. At least, Tobias assumed it was them. They had all showed up wearing shielded vacc suits, the kind where you couldn’t see inside the helmets. The Luna City — squatters? Tobias considered. Colonists? No, they’re leaving with the rest of us — detachment had kept their suits on the entire time, too, waiting outside the main airlock with only a portable auxiliary life support unit to keep them company.

Tobias wasn’t sure if the lieutenant in charge of the squad General Bruno sent over had noticed that the Squad’s unit wasn’t actually recycling atmosphere and power. If she had, she was keeping her mouth shut, which was decidedly a survival trait these days. People tried not to think too hard about stuff that couldn’t be explained. If you did, it might start to make sense without warning, and always at the worst possible moment.

The lieutenant hadn’t commented on the fact that Tobias hadn’t brought any of his own people from Heinlein Base along, either. That was a relief, because his own staff had been somewhat acerbic about the discussion, starting over why he was going. We’ve gone over this before, he had eventually pointed out. I’m the only one with the full set of command override codes, anything involving the Lifeboat is my responsibility, and if there’s something down there? Well, we don’t have many other soldiers left, and the best of them are coming with me. Or did you want Corporal Buckley to be in charge of the detachment? I trust him to do it, but how will the Euros act if there’s… complications?

Worldbuilding!

The situation deserved an ‘oh.’ Shipping containers on the Moon actually looked much like the ones back on Earth, which hadn’t changed much in a couple of hundred years. Back before the end of the world, asteroidal iron and carbon were cheap, and power was virtually free: why not make them out of steel, and use the standard construction templates? You could stack them pretty high and not have to worry about them collapsing under their own weight that way, too. So that was normal.

What wasn’t normal was the way the shipping containers in Subsection D all had their doors ripped off of them at the hinges, and flung to one side. There were gouges and furrows on the ground, too, showing where things had been dragged; all tracks led to the only open container that still had its doors half-attached. Those doors were in bad shape, though, bent in two from the outside in and jammed back against the sides so hard, it looked like they had been hammered in there.

Inside was dark, but not the sort of darkness expected from an airless space without direct sunlight. There was the faintest green-tinged light reflecting off of the ceiling of the container, and the crawler’s primitive ‘brain’ was already using to paint the interior. Passive sensors only; humanity only had a limited number of drones left, and this one had three other jobs to do today. When the drone finally spat a reconstruction of the inside of the container, it surprised Tobias not at all to ‘see’ the ragged hole in the floor taking up the entire back half of the container. Not to mention the fragments of steel wall.

Exposition! And, wow, a joke! It’s a depressingly morbid joke, but still.

Repository 7, Section 21, Subsection D
(Just outside Dōnglǘ Shèngmǔ Base)

The Chinese, Europeans, and Americans had all built their national bases so close to each other to make walking from one to the other a mildly desperate move, instead of a creative way to commit suicide. This had always confused first-timers, since those three factions hadn’t been all that friendly to each other back on Earth, but they soon learned better. The Moon hadn’t been exactly safe even in the good old days. The bases’ relatively close proximity to each other had saved lives. 

There was even a kludged-together triangular monorail connecting the three bases. It had been finished years before the end of the world, and never mind that it had had no official sanction whatsoever. It worked, but it was a kludged-together monstrosity, and these days there wasn’t enough traffic to justify regular use. Tobias couldn’t remember the last time there had been actual in-person traffic, although admittedly he would have only heard about that sort of thing if something had tried to eat the passengers. From what he could tell from the crawler drone, the track was clear from obstructions, so probably something like that hadn’t happened recently.

Abby had joined him in the control room to monitor the drone’s progress. “It’s a shame there’s no atmosphere,” she observed. “A prop drone would’ve been faster.”

“Yeah, Abby,” agreed Tobias. “But why stop there? Just imagine what we could do here if we had a breathable atmosphere, magnetic shield, and unfrozen water everywhere!”

This might end up a stretch goal. Pondering.

“There are some doors you need to not open, Commander.” Rushan Turkel told him. “Some rooms are sealed for a reason.”

Tobias scowled at the woman on the other end of the call. Turkel these days had graduated from being the Qocho Khaganate’s Lunar spymistress to being the Chinese Coalition’s. He was mildly surprised she didn’t have Hu’s job; but then, would she even want it? “This is not a great time to be vague, Rushan,” he told her. “None of us have the time.” He had a very, very horrible thought. “This isn’t leading up to an admission that you have secret reserves, is it?”

“No!” Turkel sounded legitimately outraged at the suggestion, he thought —

I agree, Commander, Asenath whispered in his head.

— but she didn’t look angry at him for making it. There’d been a few groups that had tried to hoard supplies, in the earliest days of the apocalypse. It hadn’t ended well for any of them, but the reaction had almost wrecked the remaining inhabited bases. People just weren’t reacting calmly to things beyond a certain point, anymore. Which was the real reason Tobias supported Hu’s biofeedback classes. Every little bit helped.