Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1) (5 page)

Jacob! “Can we go see how Jacob is doing now?” Carmen asked. She wasn’t even quite sure where the sick bay was, although she was pretty sure she could look it up on her tablet.

“In a minute,” Patrick said. “I want to go talk to your father, first. Come with me, please.”

His tone said it wasn’t a request. She followed.

Her father saw Patrick as soon as he came in. He must have heard something of the commotion down the hall. “Mr. Wynn, so good to see you. We have a problem here…”

“Please, call me Patrick. I’ve heard about the power problem. I’ve got a man working on a temporary solution right now. You should have power within a few minutes.”

“Oh?” Doctor Rosa said. “Excellent! You have my thanks.”

“Sir,” Patrick said.

“Yes, was there something else?” Doctor Rosa asked.

“Your daughter brought word to one of the engineers about the issue, and the two of them went outside to solve the problem. He’s down in medical, unconscious. She’s unhurt, but could have been. I’d appreciate it if you would brief your staff,” he said with a pointed look at Carmen, “not to take any more trips outside without direct authorization from central control. We’d like to make sure everyone remains as safe as possible during their stay here. The moon is not a safe place.”

Her father gave her an intense stare. Not a glare, perhaps, but a serious look. He pursed his lips. “Yes, I will. I assure you, Patrick, my staff will not be breaking your rules again.”

“Thank you, sir. Now if you’ll excuse me, I wanted to go check on out injured man,” Patrick said.

“Very good. Do let me know if he is all right? I’d be happy to come help…” Doctor Rosa said.

“We’ve got an excellent trauma guy, Doctor. Ex-Special Forces. Thanks, though.”

Patrick turned to go. Carmen went to follow him, but her father caught her hand in his. She turned, and this time she could read the disapproval in his eyes.

“I need you here in the lab please, Carmen,” he said.

With an effort of will, she managed to not roll her eyes. It was going to be a long day. “OK, Dad. Patrick, let me know how Jacob is, please?”

Patrick looked back over his shoulder at her. “I will,” he said. He flashed a smile – was that sympathy she saw there? Whatever it was, it vanished as quick as a flash and the stern mask settled back into place.

P
ATRICK GROWLED under his breath
. That woman was going to drive him around the bend. First she was in the wrong part of the ship – which reminded him, he needed to change the damned password on the ship’s locks. Then she saved the day by trapping a man whose presence could have killed everyone aboard. If she hadn’t been there it might have been a disaster, which made it hard to fault her for being in the wrong place! But then she yelled at him for doing the hard but right thing and spacing the virus victim.

And now this! Yes, the power issue was a serious problem, and yes, it needed solving right away. So instead of coming to him for a fast solution, she went to one of the brand new junior staff, batted her eyelashes at the kid, and got him to take her on an unauthorized walk outside that almost got him killed.

She was seriously going to drive him space-happy. And getting her out of his head? Impossible, at this point. He could still feel where her hands had been wrapped around him, where she had pressed up against his back for the Segway ride. He’d enjoyed that ride a lot more than he should have.

He passed Fred in the hall. “Give me a holler over the radio when the job is done,” he said.

“Will do, boss,” Fred replied. “Almost through, just got to run the power cord down the hall.”

“Good,” Patrick said. “Got another job for you, after.”

“Yer kill’in me, boss.”

“Not yet,” Patrick said with a grin. He hopped back on the Segway and sped off down the corridor for medical. Real medical, not this new lab the doctor was setting up. That place made him nervous, frankly. I mean, he knew they were going to set up an airlock inside the lab, and that all the work with real virus would take place in there. And intellectually he knew that finding a cure for a virus meant you needed to have some of the real virus around. But having the stuff on the moon made everyone jittery, and he wasn’t immune to it.

He reached the medical bay. They had an excellent trauma unit here. They needed it. It was two days to get someone back to Earth, so if anything bad happened out here that they couldn’t stabilize in place, the person died. Accidents happened. The moon wasn’t a playground, and people got hurt. So he’d pushed for getting the best equipment possible, and they had an amazing guy running the show.

David MacInness was just a nurse practitioner, not even a ‘real’ doctor. But he had fifteen years in the US Special Forces as a medic before retiring to go back to civilian life. Life outside the military hadn’t suited him. When the call came for medical personnel with trauma practice to go into space, he’d jumped in with both feet. David went out on the first run with Patrick, Amy, and a handful of others. All the rest of the original crew had died or moved back to Earth. They were the last three.

Patrick jumped off the vehicle and stepped into the bay. There was only one patient right now. Nobody else was sick, just the kid he’d rescued. Jacob, that was what Carmen had called him. And it looked like he was going to be OK. He was awake and chatting with David, anyway, so it looked good.

“What’s the prognosis, doc?” Patrick asked.

“The patient will live,” David replied. “I want to keep him in here overnight, just to be sure. That was a nasty jolt he got. But everything checks out so far.”

“I feel OK to get back to work, sir,” Jacob broke in. “Really.”

“No, time for that tomorrow,” Patrick told him. “Listen to the doctor’s orders.” He wanted to as what made him think he could take a suit outside without authorization. But it was clear from the kid’s face that he knew he’d screwed up badly. Ripping him apart in front of other people wasn’t Patrick’s style. Best to save that chat for later. “We’ll talk in my office tomorrow morning, once you’re out of here.”

That was enough to make the kid wince and blanch at the same time. Patrick kept a stern straight face, and David managed to do the same. It wasn’t the first time someone had come out here and gotten into trouble within a day of arrival, after all. So long as the trouble wasn’t fatal, it was usually a good learning experience.

“I’m sorry I screwed up, sir,” Jacob said quietly.

“You’re alive. Let’s keep you that way,” Patrick said, clapping him on the top of the shoulder. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

Then he headed back out again. Time to link up with Fred. There was something really odd about those malfunctions. Jacob was a newbie to space, but how the hell had he gotten a jolt like that changing a breaker? It didn’t make sense. It should have been an easy out-and-back-in job. And then there was the airlock in the central dome. It had failed, failed so badly that nobody could get it open from the inside to pull Carmen and Jacob back in.

Now random failures happened sometimes. But two, close together like that? It struck him as odd, and worth checking out.

* * *

C
armen helped
her father empty crates of fragile supplies and place them into shelving units. She had to be careful. The light gravity made moving things trickier than usual. She was used to seeing something and assuming its weight before she lifted it, and everything here weighed less than it looked.

Her father also hadn’t spoken to her since Patrick had left. She waited until the other staff were a little ways away from them before trying to speak with him.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I was trying to help.”

He stopped messing with the machine he was calibrating and looked up at her. “Carmen. Of all the people out here on this mission, I count on you the most to be mature, solid, responsible.”

“Thanks?” she said, not sure where this was going, but she had a bad feeling in her gut.

“Don’t thank me. Live up to that expectation. You had no business being out there and you know it,” he said.

She winced. She did know it. But at the time, she’d been honestly trying to help as best she could. “I’m sorry, Dad.” What else could she say? She felt horrible. Her father was in the middle of the most important work of his life – maybe the most important work anyone alive was doing. She wanted nothing more than to help him achieve it. She knew now that she should have gone to Patrick in the first place. The man was clearly making her father’s project his top priority. He’d bent over backwards to get her and Jacob back inside safely, and then turned around immediately to fix the electrical issue as soon as he heard about it. If she’d just gone right to him, Jacob would never have been hurt and the power would have been fixed that much sooner.

She still couldn’t get over how cold he looked, when he cycled the lock and put that poor man into space. It haunted her. Even more so now that she’d been around him more, since it didn’t fit with what she’d seen of him since then.

“You know that people are saying I only brought you to keep you safe,” her father said, breaking her away from her thoughts of Patrick with a jolt.

Carmen sucked in her breath. She
had
worried people might be saying such things, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the truth. Sometimes, truth hurt. Carmen realized that she desperately didn’t want to know what he was going to say next. If he’d really brought her out here just to get her out of danger, then it would be more than she could bear. She was smart, damn it! And good at her job. All she needed was a chance to prove that.

“I know. Dad. And I’ll make sure to make you glad you brought me,” she said, cutting him off before he could say any more. He seemed like he wanted to add something, for a moment, but instead just nodded sharply and returned to his work.

She
would
make him glad he’d brought her along.

* * *

F
red was already looking
at the airlock door before Patrick arrived. He’d pulled the panel, and hooked it up to a tablet from his duffel bag of tricks.

“What happened to it?” Patrick asked.

“Hmmph? The door?” Fred said. “Dunno.”

Patrick paused. He wasn’t used to that. Fred never admitted defeat. He was the go-to man on all problems and defects with the domes, and there was always plenty to keep him busy. Patrick had seen him worry at a problem for hours, wrestling it into submission.

“Look, see?” Fred said. He flicked a button on his tablet. The inner airlock door snapped open. He flicked the button again, and the door closed. “Works fine.”

“Fred, I have video of that door not opening during a medical emergency. I watched two engineers try to make that panel function, and neither of them could get the door open. Now you’re saying it fixed itself?”

“No, boss. I’m saying there was nothing to fix. It wasn’t broke,” Fred said. He fiddled with the tablet a bit more. “But look here.”

Patrick looked over his shoulder at the tablet screen. Fred was reading the log of computer activity on the door. There, right near the bottom, he could see the activation entry from when Jacob and Carmen went out. And below that? There was another entry, which read that someone had attempted to access the door, but it had been unable to comply due to an air leak in the inner hatch.

“So there was a malfunction, then,” Patrick said. “An air leak?”

“No, boss. I checked the door over. No leak now.”

“Someone fixed it?”

Fred shook his head. “I checked the camera log, too. According to the camera, nobody messed with the door at all.”

Patrick paced over to the door and checked the seals himself. Everything looked as it ought to. The material was worn, too. Used. You could tell if there was fresh sealing material added to a door. It still had that shiny black look, and this stuff was matte.

“What the hell happened, Fred?” Patrick was tired of playing guessing games.

“My best guess is it was a computer error, boss. Maybe a random bit of cosmic ray flipped a bit in the program, or something.” He shrugged.

Patrick thought about that a moment. Radiation could impact computers, sure. It had happened tons of times, since the early days of the space program. Nothing new there. If the right chip was hit at the right moment by the right bit gamma particle, a single flipped bit could work some nasty bugs into a computer program. But something still bothered him.

“If it was a random bug, how did it get fixed?” Patrick asked.

“The door’s equipped with self-diagnostic systems,” Fred said. “If it saw an error, it would run a self-diagnostic test. And if the test came back without error, that ought to over-ride the error result. It looks like it was just really bad timing, boss.”

“Well, it’s working now. Let’s get out there and see if we can get that electrical system back on line.”

“You mean I get to go play with wires that already fried that kid, right?” Fred complained.

“Yup. You know you love a hot wire,” Patrick said, grinning.

“Oy,” Fred replied.

They were both old hands. It didn’t take them long to get suited up and outside. Once they were both out of the airlock, Patrick tested the doors to make sure they were going to be able to get back in again. No problem. The doors cycled and opened without a hitch. Whatever the bug in the system before, it was gone now. That was good enough for him. Fred was already over by the new dome’s breaker unit, so he went over to join him.

“How’s it look?” he asked over his radio.

“These breakers are mostly fine. But this one,” Fred said, pulling it free, “is a melted mess. Must have shorted. Don’t worry, I brought a spare. I’ll swap it out.”

Patrick stood back a bit and let the man work. Fred was good at his job. The last thing he needed was someone hovering so he’d have something else to grouse about. Patrick went over the details of the accident in his head.

The wiring was installed to the new dome, but something had been faulty, and power wasn’t getting through. That was probably the fault of the bad breaker. So Carmen got the engineer to go try to fix it. The bad breaker shorted when he tried to pull it, and he got zapped. Then they tried to go back in and a random error had the door malfunction at a bad time. It seemed like he could probably put this issue to bed. The problems were both solved, and nobody had any lasting injury. Even that engineer Jacob would be OK by tomorrow, and probably more cautious in the future.