Moonstruck

this stinking habitat already. Alright enough for now. I clearly need some sleep.

22.4.2101

Yes I did. Ten hours of sleep and a solid day’s repair work later I feel much more optimistic. We will be fine. I will be back on Earth this time next week and maybe next time I am rotated up to the LHabs there won’t be a potential catastrophic failure of life support systems to address. This is what you get when UNASA lets the lowest bidder build a structure on the moon apparently. Yay Capitalism. At least tomorrow is a Field Day. That always brightens my spirits. Sabrina needs help mapping one of the grids, D.X.6 I think, so Fran and I will tag along as mech support. Neither of them is qualified on the T90 and they think they might need it to excavate some samples. Meanwhile, time for a nightcap (mmm instant powdered decaf coffee….) and an episode of Pals to fall asleep to. That Jimmy Tribbyammy gets me rolling every time. Ah if only I could have such success with the ladies. I’m more of a Ron Gailer type though and no one up here is impressed with another engineer! We are a dime a dozen on the moon.

23.4.2101

What a WILD day. Maybe I do have a mysterious allure. Sabrina laughed at all of my bad jokes! Her giggles had me beaming all the way back to LHab 7, even if they did make me drive the rover. I don’t think Fran felt the same way. They need to lighten up. Or maybe we just need to spend less time together so I can work on some new material. With all of the time we spent together fixing messes up here, they have probably heard my jokes several times over. In any case, it was a nice change of pace to see what was on the other side of the Mare.

We met in the airlock at Earthrise 18. Fran and I had gathered all the tools we thought we might need but Sabrina frowned at the pile and threw half of them out. She kept the T90 of course.

“We are only going to be gone a few hours, and this is the newest vehicle. We are hardly likely to need a coupler or a vapor bypass any time soon. We will need extra space for the rock samples you pull out with this thing,” she said. It made me a little nervous to be so far from the Hab without a few of the things she thought we didn’t need but Fran didn’t seem to mind. They are hard to read sometimes though. Maybe they acted cool about it to impress Sabrina. Either way, Sabrina made the right call. The rover ran like a dream and we found some great new meteorite samples for the rock jocks to study! Some of the ones Sabrina wanted took all three of us to load. I slipped a piece of one of them in my pocket as a souvenir. Ya never know when you will need a new paperweight around here.

Boy the views around that crater never stopped stunning us.  Even if the Habs have their issues, I never get tired of seeing the surprising variety of moonscapes around them. And it almost always chokes me up to see the little blue-green pearl hanging in the distance above us.  Besides us LHabbers, every single human that ever lived, every single human experience - they all happened on that tiny dot. It looks so fragile from here.

After pulling in one of the weirder shaped samples I have found with the T90, I spotted a shadowy feature in the wall of a wide crater and pointed it out. They didn’t seem too interested. Sabrina had never been out this far and wasn’t sure what it might be. Complex caves aren’t exactly endemic to a heavenly body that has never seen an ounce of limestone, but it sure looked cave like.  We mapped its location as best we could for future study, then Sabrina noted that it was time to head back. Those two slept almost the whole way. Maybe next time we can swap. I’m beat. Not even gonna try to get a Pals episode in. I could barely finish this diary entry!

Six more days til Earth time, hopefully several more of them can be like this one.

25.4.2101

I don’t think I have ever missed a day of journaling on my lunar assignments! I have a lot to cover about what happened over the last few days. I can barely type, I’m so excited. And nervous. Too early to tell yet. Let me start at the beginning though.

The first sign that yesterday would consist of more than just tightening nuts and bolts came just after lunch. One of the geologists burst into our ready room and made a beeline straight for me. She caught me with only one boot on and demanded to know exactly where I found that little meteorite. I had dropped the piece that I had pocketed into her sample review tray to see what it might be made of. I told her I wasn’t exactly sure, we had grabbed a bunch, and Sabrina had all the map info.

“I know,” she said. “But no one can find Sabrina.”

That didn’t feel good to hear. LHab 7 is not very large - you could search it exhaustively in less than an hour. And the next closest LHab is probably two days by rover, maybe two hours by jump ship but we only had one of those and everyone would have heard it leaving.

“Uh, have you asked Fran?” I suggested.

“Fran? Why would we ask them?” she replied, furrowing her brow and glancing around the room. It was Fran’s regularly scheduled day off so I didn’t think much of it when she didn’t show this morning. I said as much, then replied, “Well they came with us yesterday too.”

“Well that sure wasn’t reported in the logs,” she said, shoving her pad in my face. One of her bony fingers tapped on the line where it showed the route planned for our mapping expedition the day before. Only Sabrina and I were listed. That certainly didn’t meet safety or accountability protocols.

We hurried to Fran’s quarters but no one answered. That geologist, Mila, called up to the base commander to override the lock and we confirmed that Fran wasn’t home when it opened. I think I have only ever seen Commander Green out of her office twice in all four of my rotations to the LHab. Only something big would pull her away from her meetings with earthsiders.

“Have you checked the rover bays?” I asked. “What’s all this excitement about a moon rock for?”

“It’s not a moon rock. It’s probably a meteorite - something that fell to the moon’s surface eons ago and has just been sitting there in the dust until you unbelievably lucky dimwits stumbled on it yesterday. Nothing of its composition has ever been seen around here.” Then she smiled to herself and I think she mumbled something like Milalite? Like she was going to name it after herself or something? No way. I found it. If it was going to be called anything it would be Emmalite. That has a better ring to it anyway.

By the time I was through daydreaming about my eternal geologic fame we had arrived at the rover bay and sure enough, we were minus one rover.

“There were no scheduled roves today,” Commander Green said, frowning and harrumphing. Goddess forbid anything ever happen spontaneously around that woman.

“Well there is now,” Mila said, then turned to me. “Emma, get suited up and show me where you went. Sabrina never filed the map either. Be ready for a full shift.”

This was where the fear started to creep in.  A short rove was one thing. Few, if any, LHabbers had ever spent more than a half shift away from a Hab. If we left then and had to explore beyond where we went the day before, we would be pushing some of the life support limits of the rover and our suits. I turned to the Commander to protest, but she was already nodding and saying something about the vitality of the mission and proving our value to the shareholders. Ooh boy there was no arguing with her on that one. I geared up.

I suppose on the bright side Mila drove the whole way and I even got a nap in. It wasn’t much of one though since she woke me right up and demanded that I pay attention, but it was enough to help me react quickly when it mattered later.

We found the rover soon enough. They had left it outside the cave. Mila couldn’t stop staring. There are plenty of collapsed lava tubes on the moon, and countless craters with unique geologic features, but nothing like this. I thought it looked like it had clearly been excavated, but that was of course impossible. 

“This has clearly been excavated,” she said.

“What? Impossible,” I replied.

She pointed out marks on the wall that could only have been gouged out by some mechanical process. No natural lunar process ever formed such perfect smooth grooves. And nothing humans had ever brought to or built on the moon could have made it.

It got weirder inside.

Squiggles covered the walls. Maybe writing? Nothing like anything I had ever seen on earth, and way bigger. Or art work? But it seemed too regular and repetitive. One thing was certain - we wouldn’t have an issue with funding any more.

“Uh Sabrina, lower the carbine loader,” I heard Mila say and turned around to see Sabrina decidedly not lowering the loader. Mila had her hands up and Sabrina had it pointed directly at her. That was not a piece of equipment you wanted to be on the business end of.

“Sorry but the market for Saurian artifacts is way too big to let UNASA in on it. Earth has been picked over but the moon is flush with them. You would understand if I had time to explain,” she said, shrugging, then discharged it directly at Mila. I didn’t stick around to see how much of her was left, but it couldn’t have been much. I don’t think anyone has ever run that fast in a moonsuit. In my panic I almost forgot all about Fran. They almost took my head off with a clutch wrench at the cave entrance but misjudged my speed and reflexes. I barely ducked in time, and they smashed it into the wall instead.  

I leapt clear over their rover to get to mine, with both of them hot on my heels. I heard the carbine loader discharge again but from a distance it is far less effective. Thankfully we had left our doors open in our haste to explore the mysterious opening and I dove in, cranked it on, and spun out. They tried to catch me in theirs but they never had a chance. Pretty sure I was just part of the first lunar car chase, though who knows if that little stat will hit the history books. 

I left them in my moondust and didn’t take my foot off the accelerator til I spotted the LHab. Commander Green and some of the other big wigs took my debrief and by then a day and a half had passed. Not sure how much they believed but they did send out several more rovers to investigate. I devoured a meal and passed out. It is the middle of the night now and I have been hearing jump ships land for hours. Earthside time can’t come soon enough for me. And what the heck is a Saurian?

26.4.2101

Security is all over LHab 7 today. Jump ships came in from LHabs 6, 8 and 9 all night. There almost isn’t room for everyone.  Sabrina and Fran haven’t shown up yet, but there have been some rumors of an unauthorized lander being spotted on the horizon.

The only thing I was able to find about Saurians is that it is just a word to describe lizard-like creatures. Not sure what kind of moon iguanas might have left an artifact for them to sell, or who would buy that kind of crap. You can sell people anything I guess, with a good enough marketer. Modern snake oil salesmen I guess.  

I went back to the geo lab to grab my sample from Mila’s desk. Sure enough it still sat right there on her microscope.  She had some pretty far fetched notes about it. Supposedly it hadn’t been a meteorite at all, but some kind of fabricated metallic substance. None of the tests on it could identify what kind of metal it was formed from, however. 

Apparently, it hadn’t landed on the moon after all. It had damage around its edges that showed evidence of explosive damage. She speculated that it might have been part of a wall or door that blew outward. She seems to have thought it might have been part of a structure? Like a door to that cave maybe? That portion and the floating incredulous question mark doodles had been scratched out in her notes, however, when the carbon dating data came back on the burn marks. Most of that report escaped my understanding, but I could read the final estimate - 65 million y.o. Or Years Old.  65 million? Really? Someone needs to check their lab equipment.  Anyway, it’s my day off so I guess I’ll binge some Pals. 

27.4.2101

Earth here I come! They bumped up my ship-out date to clear room for some incoming personnel. This will be my last entry about this rotation. It has certainly been an interesting one. After watching way too many episodes last night, and probably having a few too many bottles of Lars’ literal moonshine, I went down a rabbit hole trying to plan out what I was going to do back home. It will be nice to be able to be outside again with just a filter mask on instead of a full moon suit. Maybe I could check out that museum that is preserving the last coral reef? Doesn’t look like I’ll get a chance to take that other vacation I had been thinking of with the water wars still dragging on over there. Maybe it was just the moonshine talking but I’m not usually this depressed about returning to the ol blue green marble again. I wonder when I’ll get my next rotation up here and when they will start building more of these again. Maybe it isn’t so bad not to worry about nuclear war for a while.

Here’s a sad thought. Did you know that the face of Earth can change so drastically that if all humans ceased to exist down there today, it would only take a million or so years for continental shift, volcanism, storms, weathering, and decay to wipe out all evidence of our existence? There would be nothing to show we ever occupied any space down there. Like, at all. Our entire civilization would be forgotten. Skyscrapers will crumble and be buried and reformed into some kind of sedimentary rock or something. Earth will continue earthing, but we might be the dusk of humanity, the way things are going. Pretty depressing to think about, but also pretty nice to have a LHab around to make sure we keep on keepin on.

Oof that’s enough moonshine. A couple more episodes of Pals and I’ll be done with Season 23. See ya next time looney moonie!