Tag: pickman's models

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.

Oh, yeah, there are other factions on the Moon in this situation. I wonder if they’re doing all right up there?

Tobias found the meeting with the leaders of the other two factions to be somewhat… fraught. He took it as a hopeful sign that neither one was ready to simply throw enough people out of the airlock to make the math work, though. That was something.

That was about all. Dr. Hu Mali of the Chinese Coalition was ready to cut the ration levels again, make everybody have biofeedback training from here to the launch date, and try to have the refugees breathe in stages for the entire trip back to Earth. The now-General Lorenzo Bruno had started muttering about ordering his cadre of EU soldiers (plus any volunteers) to hold a ‘rearguard action’ while the Lifeboat took off. That should have come across as far more offensive than it did, except it sounded like Bruno was ready to lead that regiment himself. Still, the other two were still far more focused on surviving the trip back to Earth than they were on how they were going to plan to survive being on Earth. Tobias still envied them. At least they had plans. All he had was a gnawing feeling in his guts at the thought of leaving people behind.

He knew showing that would do absolutely nobody any good. “All right, how about this?” Tobias offered in a lull. “Biofeedback exercises will help us with our supply situation now. The less energy we use, the more we’ll have later. And a militia itself isn’t a bad idea. Not for defense!” Tobias shook his head. “For salvage. We’ve been letting the civilian side do all the gleaning, deciding what to bring in and what to leave out there. Let’s see what the military can do there, all right?”