Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1) (4 page)

“Medical emergency at the central dome airlock,” she called. She hoped someone would come running. Jacob was going to need treatment, fast, and she still didn’t know her way around well enough. Where was the medical bay? If his heart was stopped by that burst of electricity, where was the nearest defibrillator?

“Roger, help is on the way,” came a reply over her radio.

Carmen exhaled in relief. She’d never been so glad to hear another voice. It was her fault Jacob was out here in the first place! She’d never be able to live with it, if anything happened to him because she’d been in a rush.

She reached the airlock, and touched the panel. She felt it buzz under her fingers. But the red light above the door didn’t change. Was it cycling? It ought to be ready for them, still in a vacuum state. Why wasn’t the door opening up?

Again and again, she pressed the panel, frustrated. The door wasn’t opening. She looked inside through the window, but everything looked normal. The inner door was closed. Even if the airlock had refilled with air and had to cycle that out before opening, shouldn’t it have finished that by now?

Then she saw faces inside. They went to the panel beside the door, and…nothing. She could see them working on something on the inside door, and then one of them was talking over a radio, saying something she couldn’t hear.

This wasn’t good. They couldn’t get the door open!

“Airlock doors are frozen,” someone said over the emergency channel. “What’s the nature of the medical emergency?”

“Electrical accident,” she said. “Victim is unconscious. Not sure if he is breathing or not.”

“What does his cardiac monitor say?” the voice asked.

Cardiac monitor? The suits had cardiac monitors? Where was the display? She set Jacob down – if his heart was stopped, it had already been a couple of minutes, and he was running out of time, fast. She searched his suit. Where was it?

“Carmen.”

This time, she knew the voice. It was Patrick, the captain from the ship. Oh, she was in so much trouble now. She could hear it in his voice. With her luck, he’d want to space her, too.

“Yes?” she replied.

“The readout is on the wrist computer. Same display that controls the radio. Press the heart icon on his wrist,” he said.

She did as he said, and a medical display popped up. The suit was monitoring breath rate, heartbeat, oxygen level, radiation exposure, and body temperature. And thank god! Jacob was still breathing, his heart still beating. Slowly – but it was a nice, steady beat.

“He’s still breathing,” she said.

“Good. Now hang tight, I’m on my way to you.”

How, she wanted to ask. But she held her tongue. He seemed pretty calm. No sense antagonizing him. Actually, she admired that calm. She’d seen plenty of people who fell apart in a crisis, and she couldn’t stand it. She was in her element hip deep in the middle of a mess. She’d worked more emergency rooms than she could count, in the few short years she’d been a doctor. Chasing viral epidemics left one in hot zones way more often than not. And her dad was getting on in years – he’d started relying on her as his eyes and ears.

She remembered calling one now-ex-boyfriend from a clinic in Israel, once, where she was tracking a possible Ebola outbreak. He’d asked what all the noise in the background was. When she’d calmly replied that the area was under a rocket attack, he hadn’t believed her. So she took video. He completely freaked out. She broke up with him shortly after.

There was something very unattractive about people who couldn’t handle themselves when things went bad.

She felt a vibration, and looked up. Something was coming over the dome! She looked more closely and realized it was a person, in a space suit, with some sort of flying setup. A thruster pack. That had to be Patrick on his way to get her. He wasn’t just coming around – he was flying over to her.

He jetted over her, setting down a few feet away. The blast from his landing kicked up huge plumes of dust, and she covered her face with her arm instinctively at first, before remembering that the suit mask would keep the dust away from her eyes. His suit was the same as hers, but the thruster pack on his back looked like a huge turtle shell. It was clearly heavy, too. In the low gravity they could carry a lot more, but she’d already learned that the additional mass made moving with a heavy load difficult. That thruster had to weight about as much as Patrick did himself, but he took slow, careful steps toward her and never lost his balance.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He picked up Jacob’s body, hefting it over a shoulder. It was a lot of weight, and he did wobble getting Jacob into position. But he managed. “What happened?”

“Electrical burst from the breakers,” she said, pointing at the offending machinery. “Knocked him out.”

“We’ll take care of him first. Then I’ll get someone out here to look at the problem,” he said. “Now, I need you to stand on my feet.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I can’t hold him and hold you and still steer this thing. I need at least one hand free to control the thruster pack. So I need you to stand on my feet and hold on tight to me. You OK with that?”

“Yes,” she said. Gingerly, she stepped up onto his suited feet. The boots were reinforced, though, and she remembered that she weighed almost nothing out here. She wasn’t going to hurt him. Hanging on though – to what? She reached around his side – there was a handle on his hip. She grabbed on to that with her left hand, and then slipped her right hand up under Jacob’s still form. She wrapped those fingers into the spacesuit fabric as best she could.

Standing on his feet, she was as tall as he was. They were almost nose to nose, only the glass of their helmets dividing them. And why was that thought making her pulse race even more than thinking about flying?

“Hold on tight,” he said. “I won’t fly high. If you lose your grip, keep your feet down and knees bent. Don’t forget, you can fall from a lot higher here than you can on Earth.”

She nodded. He looked down at his wrist, which had some sort of display she’d never seen before. It looked like it must be an interface for the thruster. Then he did something with a control in his hand, and they…

…were…

…flying!

“Ohhhh!” She couldn’t help exclaiming. This was amazing! She looked down, watching the domes slide by underneath them. Patrick wasn’t feathering the thrusters, the way he had coming to get her. It looked like the extra weight was pushing them hard. But it was working. They sailed up, and then straight toward the ship, still sitting a short distance from the domes.

“Why the ship?” she asked.

“There will be unloading equipment nearby. We can use one to haul him to medical. Fastest way.”

All too soon, they were sinking toward the ground, raising huge plumes of dust as they approached. Carmen would have happily continued flying out there for much longer – but Jacob was still in danger, and she still needed to figure out something to save her father’s samples. Maybe Patrick would help with that, after all?

He brought them down right in front of the ship’s crew airlock. Carmen stepped off his feet and got out of the way as he cycled the airlock and hauled Jacob inside. She followed him in. A few seconds later, and the lock was done filling with air, the inner doors open, and crew were there, taking Jacob off his shoulder and pulling the spacesuit off Jacob as fast as they could move. Patrick unlocked the thruster pack from his back and undid his helmet.

“How is he?” Patrick asked.

“Breathing. We’ve got a cart ready to haul him to medical.”

Carmen undid her helmet and took it off. She bit her lip. Jacob looked so pale, lying there. If he was badly hurt…!

“Go, get him moving,” Patrick said. The crewmen had a stretcher already waiting. They lay it on the floor next to Jacob, rolled him to his side, and slid it beneath him. Then they were off, carrying him away.

Once they were gone, Patrick whirled on Carmen. “What the hell did you think you were doing out there?”

“I–”

“You’re not rated to be outside. Have you ever even been in a suit before? You sure as hell had no clearance for it. I’d know, because you’d have had to get it from me.”

Carmen struggled out of the top half of her suit. “The power was out in my father’s lab. I went to get help, and Jacob said he couldn’t go fix it without a second person.” She shrugged. “I was a second person.”

Patrick groaned, putting away bits of his own suit. “There are rules here, Carmen. For a reason. This place can get you killed in a hurry if you’re not careful.”

She slid out of the bottom half of the suit. “Dad’s samples,” she said, remembering. Maybe Patrick could help her out? He’d been pretty sharp in a crisis just now.

“Huh?”

“Dad’s virus samples are losing refrigeration. I don’t know how much time is left, but…”

He was already moving, leaving her behind in the airlock. “I need an electrician in the hall for the new dome, stat. No, I don’t care what else you’re up to right now, Fred.”

Carmen shoved the bottom half of her suit back into the suit locker and chased after him. He was headed down the ship’s corridor fast – making tracks for the main cargo bay.

“Just like that?” she asked.

“Just like what?” he replied. “Right now, your father’s work is the most important thing going on up here. Nothing takes priority over that. Come on.”

The cargo area was mostly emptied out already. They’d unloaded pretty quickly – there had been a lot of big cargo containers in this space! Patrick swept past all the work still going on and headed for the big airlock doors, which were sitting open. Carmen almost stopped in her tracks when she saw them, but managed to keep going. She felt a stabbing pang of guilt whenever she thought about the man she’d trapped. The man Patrick executed without looking like he even cared. Seeing the scene of the incident brought back bad memories.

He wasn’t waiting for her, though, and she wasn’t about to miss whatever was happening next. She’d see this through.

The airlock was connected to the domes by a long tube made of stretchy material. When the ship wasn’t here, it was tucked back in against the dome. That first dome was all storage area, anyway, so it made for a quick unloading site. When the ship docked, they ran the tube out to the cargo doors, connected it, and opened the side of the ship up to facilitate unloading. It was an awesome setup. But the ship landed a good ways from the dome for safety – five hundred feet or so. To get back and forth quickly, they used machines like forklifts for the heavy lifting, and Segway devices for people who needed to get back and forth fast.

There was only one Segway sitting on this end of the tube. Patrick hopped on, and looked back at Carmen.

“Get on,” he said.

She gingerly stepped up behind him. This was just like stepping on his feet and hanging on while he flew through the air, right? She put her hands on his hips, and he started the Segway down the passage – fast! She quickly realized her grip wasn’t tight enough, and slid her hands forward around his waist to hang on tighter. That forced her to press her entire body up tight against his.

Totally like the space suit trip. Except that this time there were no suits between his back and her front. Or her hands and his abs. She could smell him through the ship-suit he wore, the faint scent of sweat after being stuck in the space suit a while. She wondered what she smelled like and wrinkled her nose at the thought. She was already starting to daydream about showers. You couldn’t shower in zero gravity, of course. But water was rationed out here on Luna, so no showers here even through the gravity would have made it possible. There was water though. And soap. She’d be able to get clean maybe, once all this was over.

They were almost through the passage by the time she’d gotten done daydreaming about being clean again. He slowed down as they reached the dome and went inside. This first dome was packed with stuff just shipped up from Earth. She guessed a lot of it was probably food. They’d sent a lot more people along than usual. The lunar base was generally a tight knit team of a dozen or so men and women. Her dad had over a dozen people just on his research team, and that meant they’d sent along tons of support staff too. The population of Luna had quadrupled overnight. It was a lot of extra people to feed and house.

“You can relax a bit now,” Patrick said, intruding on her thoughts. Carmen realized with a start that she hadn’t relaxed her grip even after he’d slowed the vehicle down. She eased her hands back to his hips again, shifting her weight back so that that was their only point of contact.

They sped around the ring of domes until the reached the passage out to the new research lab. A heavyset man with a bushy beard was standing there, a duffle bag in one hand. Carmen guessed that had to be the Fred that Patrick had spoken to on the radio.

“No power to the lab you said, right?” Patrick asked her as he pulled the Segway to a stop.

Carmen hopped off. “Right.”

“I hooked those lines up myself, boss,” Fred groused. “They should be working fine.”

Patrick looked down the hall into the lab. The lights were all off. People were moving around inside using flashlights and portable lanterns to see. He cocked an eyebrow at Fred.

“OK, OK!” Fred said. “I can see it ain’t working.”

“We’ll need to run a temporary conduit down the passage,” Patrick said.

“That’s against regs,” Fred replied, a warning note in his voice.

“So is messing up Doctor Rosa’s chances of finding a cure. You know how many people will die if we have to ferry more virus samples out here?” Patrick said.

“No?” Fred replied, his tone saying the word like it was a question.

“Me either,” Patrick said. “But too many. Put the conduit in.”

Fred dumped his duffle on the floor with a long suffering sigh and began digging around in the contents. Soon a couple of enormous cables had been unearthed from its depths, and he was hauling them over to a big socket in one of the walls.

“Fred’ll take care of it,” Patrick said to Carmen. “We’ll have power on in a few minutes.” He didn’t tell her that the power would already have been on if she’s simply come to him with the problem in the first place, but she could see it in his eyes. And it was true. Maybe she should have taken the problem to him in the first place, instead of going to Jacob.