The First Church on the Moon by JMR Higgs

Author:JMR Higgs [Higgs, JMR]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The Big Hand
Published: 2013-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

18.

Arnopp Hoops settled into the oversized cushioned flight seat at the controls of the lifeboat and pulled the straps down to his chest. They snapped together with a satisfying ‘chunk’. He looked great. He knew he looked great because he could see himself reflected in the monitor screens in front of him. He particularly liked the way that the straps did not obscure the moonbase gun which he had tucked nonchalantly into his flightsuit. As a child he had spent hours playing at being a space cowboy, and now here he was acting out those games for real. He had thought that guarding a prisoner in the ladies’ toilet had been pretty great, but it was nothing compared to this.

He diligently ran through the pre-flight check list. This did not take long, as it involved pressing the ‘on’ button, typing in a destination, and pressing ‘go’. Piloting a spacecraft was entirely automated, and the countless system checks necessary for journeys beyond Earth were done silently in the background by the same computer which ran the music system. A good pilot, therefore, was one who could remember where the ‘on’ button was.

It was still tremendously exciting however, when the lifeboat silently lifted away from the Duck’s Head. Hoops made the noises that a spacecraft taking off should have made, had not those noises been dampened by the work of immensely talented killjoy engineers. “Whooosh!” he said. “Weeeeeeeeee ack-ack-ack-ack-woooooosh!”

This was the first flight of the lifeboat, so it was a relief to discover that it actually worked. Many astronauts still had vivid memories of the Cruise Liner Jalapeño scandal, in which a tourist flight to the moons of Jupiter discovered, too late, that its entire fleet of escape pods were in fact just paintings on the side of the spaceship. The shipyard that had built the Jalapeño had tried to save a few bob and had gambled, incorrectly, that no-one would ever notice.

The Shackleton Lifeboat was a handsome triangular craft that formed the ‘beak’ of the duck-shaped moonbase. It was included in the design, somewhat begrudgingly, after a lengthy and passionate safety campaign by the Pan-European Union of Astro-miners. The PEUAM’s lobbying was relentless, because they desperately needed a lengthy and passionate safety campaign in order to justify their management-heavy union structure. The moonbase included a number of fusion reactors, they pointed out, which converted the helium-3 mined from the dark side of the moon into enough energy to power Asia. Some method of getting the crew away from the base in an emergency, therefore, was not an unreasonable thing to ask for.

After months of negotiation, it was agreed that the base would come equipped with a lifeboat capable of getting the crew into lunar-orbit where, presumably, they could just hang about in relative comfort until someone from the Earth came to collect them. The PEUAM had initially argued that the craft should be large enough to take the entire moonbase crew, but a satisfying compromise was eventually reached after lengthy negotiations and some good food in a nice little hotel in the country.

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