A little prequel story to "Space Girls" written for Advanced Creative Fiction Writing in Spring 2018. It's inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's "The Black Pits of Luna" and Saki's "The Interlopers".

When I presented it to the writing workshop, of course, we started the discussion with its strengths. The first person who spoke up gushed about how much she liked it, and since she was the only one I really cared about impressing, that was nice. And then they went on for a bit and then the professor said "Anything else?" and no one said anything else, and usually when he says "Anything else?" and no one says anything else he just moves on to the criticism portion, but this time he looked through his notes first and said three more things he liked about it. For example, that it starts in the middle of the action instead of setting it up. That's called in media res and is used to great effect in the openings of most Star Wars movies, though they have the advantage of an opening crawl to provide context. Then we did the constructive criticisms, and the professor kind of defended me from some of them, which I took to mean he liked it a lot. Someone would say "I don't understand..." or "It was confusing how..." and he would be like "That's in there, he explained it like so..." I left that class feeling really good, let me tell you.

Lunatics: A Space Girls Story
​By C. Randall Nicholson

Jane Padgett thought for a moment that the slow motion of the lunar rover flipping upside down – not through the air, but through where the air would have been if there had been air – was merely a trick of her traumatized perception. Beside her, Chantelle Anderson, the last person in her class or the galaxy she had wanted to partner with, stopped trying to wrestle the wheel away from her and just screamed something she couldn’t hear. She decided to pretend it was “Jane, stop this crazy thing!”

She quickly remembered the gravitational circumstances, however, and relaxed as the ground came up to meet them. It probably wouldn’t hurt a bit. Indeed, the rover hit, bounced, and rolled five more times before coming to a rest upside down with her and Chantelle sprawled on opposite sides.

Jane struggled to her feet first and tried not to topple over for two reasons. The low gravity she could tolerate, but she hated this ugly orange spacesuit, hated how it reminded her that her awkward teenage body wasn’t all growing at the same rate. Chantelle had taken great delight in pointing out, as if she hadn’t noticed, that it was loose in all the wrong places and tight in all the wrong places. Its arms in particular ended at least six centimeters before hers. She had hoped the helmet, at least, would be opaque enough to obscure her acne, but no luck there. And the visor didn't wrap far enough around it to show much of her blonde hair, the only feature that didn’t make her self-conscious, but what could you do?

The moonscape was as dry and dead as a human skull Jane's parents had excavated – a darker shade though, and far bumpier and more pockmarked, as if the skull had been dipped in soot and dropped on the ground and shot at with a BB gun. It sent a chill down her spine, even though the sun's rays hitting this side of the moon made the temperature outside her suit at least 100 degrees Celsius.

Chantelle got up a moment later, swaying like a disabled ship in a meteor storm. Her red bangs swished above her green and currently rage-filled eyes. From the way she moved her lips and gestured with her arms and fingers, Jane inferred that she was still yelling about something. Jane pointed to her wrist radio to indicate the frequency she had set.

Chantelle paused, walked over to look at it, set her own radio to the same frequency, and resumed yelling with audio this time. Jane picked out the relevant nouns and verbs from among the superfluous curse words and got the message.

“Not my fault,” she said, putting up her hands. “There’s a problem with the steering. Look, I’ll show you.” She knelt down beside the overturned rover and pushed on the steering wheel. The other variety of wheels, sticking up where the air would have been if there had been air, listed to the left even as she pushed the other way.

“Of course there is now, you stragging idiot,” Chantelle said. “The whole thing’s busted up. Stupid Mrs. Havelock making me let you drive! You couldn’t follow fifty other people and you somehow managed to hit the only sizable rock for kilometers around! I’m actually impressed. But I’m still gonna kill you.”

Exasperation drained Jane of the capacity to be scared of threats. These harsh words exemplified Chantelle's usual self, but at least she now had an understandable reason for being upset. Jane could live with that. “I told you it's not my fault,” she said, though she also wondered at Mrs. Havelock's prudence. Their teacher, like most adults, usually turned a blind eye to bullying, but she did try to give Jane a break now and then for being a good student, and after this maybe she would think twice about that in the future. Jane brushed that worry aside. “Look, it’s fine. We’ll just flip it over, keep an eye on the steering and catch up to the class before they even notice we’re gone.”

“Oh yes? And which way should we go, Copernicus?” Chantelle gestured at the moonscape around them.
Jane looked at it and felt a lump in her throat. Their rover had left unmistakable prints as it bounced, and beyond that must have also left tracks for them to follow back, but so had every other vehicle that had come through this area in the last twenty years or so – including several of the exact same model of rover. No rain, no wind, no animals had come through to erase them. They created a mismatched grid pattern that would take days to unravel.

“I suppose,” Chantelle continued, “you happened to track the positions of the stars as we were moving?” She tried to facepalm, but her helmet thwarted her. “Well, at least let's tell them we’re lost. Mr. Briggs, Mrs. Havelock, my idiot partner got us lost!”

Jane swallowed. “Er.”

“What?”

“Haven't you noticed we can't hear them, or vice versa? We're not set to the tour frequency anymore.”

“What?”

“See, I got curious and started sampling the lunar radio stations, but they were all just playing the same crap as they do on Earth. So then I found a silent frequency so I could experience the moonscape the way it was meant to be experienced. If it was meant to be experienced at all, I mean, which is debatable since humans didn’t evolve here, but –”

“And you made me switch to your frequency instead?” Chantelle sputtered.

It would only have taken a few minutes of trial and error to find the correct frequency again, but Jane wasn’t concerned enough to worry about it yet, and saw no compelling reason to explain it. “You weren’t on the right one either, were you? Mrs. Havelock would have heard you screaming at me as we veered off course. Then again, she’s so used to it she probably tuned it out.”

“I was listening to the 'crap' music,” Chantelle said with a sniff. “I’ve got no interest in rocks. So now they can’t hear either of us, and we’re screwed, thanks to you, you stupid –”

“They’ll notice we’re gone,” Jane said. “Mr. Briggs will send someone to get us, Mrs. Havelock will yell at us a little, we'll tell her it was more educational this way, and we'll be fine. Until they get here, I’m going to savor this moment!” Jane started to skip, bounding even higher than the rover had bounced, and sang: “Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon! I sure hope my legs don’t break, walking on the moon!”

“Jane Padgett,” Chantelle said, with the air of one not trying very hard to control her temper, “you sound like a bull moose having an aneurysm in the middle of his mating call.”

Jane stopped bouncing and made a face at her. “Last time it was an elephant,” she said, “so I guess I’ve improved.”

“Don’t keep practicing.” Chantelle reached into a pocket of her suit and removed the leaves and the lighter she had smuggled onto the rocket. She fancied herself quite the hipster. She couldn’t actually use them on the moon, as it turned out; if she tried to smoke inside the airtight bubbles of Luna City she would face a two thousand galactar fine, and of course if she tried to smoke out here it would be the last thing she did. She flicked the lighter anyway and stared at the flame, a small blue globe clinging to its precious fuel source in the vacuum and low gravity. She snorted, rolled her eyes and put the items away again.

“Where’s your sense of wonder?” Jane said, throwing up her hands. “You and the rest of the Philistines who didn’t want to come on this trip! Boring, they said! We’re on the stragging moon! Luna, if you’re pretentious. How can you not be excited?”

“I guess these rocks remind you of the ones in your head.”

“I’ve never been offworld before. I mean, technically I have, since I was born on Mars, but I don’t remember it at all. And it never really registered in my brain that I am now, that I’m here, until this moment now when I saw this sight…” Jane gestured around. “The craters, the rocks, the... other craters...” She sighed. “But why am I talking to a Philistine who can’t appreciate it?”

“I’d appreciate it more if you’d shut up.”

Jane sighed and walked back over to the overturned rover, propped herself up against it, and sat down, smirking because her bottom would leave an imprint in the dust for millennia to come. She smirked again, because of course the computer system in Luna City would notice when their rover failed to return, and the tracking beacon would lead a search team in a beeline right to them. Chantelle had been busy talking to McKenzie and Darcy when Mr. Briggs, the tour guide, had explained that, and Jane saw no compelling reason to tell her.

As long as they were stuck together for a while longer, though, she decided it would be worthwhile to see if she found her tormentor any more amiable without her cronies nearby. “Tell me, Chantelle,” she said, “why are you so unkind to me?”

Chantelle cocked her head in disbelief. “Have I really failed to explain that in terms your feeble little brain can understand? You’re weird, you’re annoying, and you talk on and on about your weird obsessions and other stupid things that nobody else cares about.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard,” Jane said, “but what’s the real reason? Why do you act like all that is a personal attack on your honor? Let me guess, you have self-esteem problems?”

“Shut up,” Chantelle said, and turned away from her. “If you'd just shut up, all the time, I wouldn't have a problem with you. Your goofy looks are less annoying than your personality.”

“I have self-esteem problems too, but you don’t see me becoming a monster. Trouble at home, then? My parents don’t love me either, don't even acknowledge me most of the time, but you don’t see me becoming a monster.”

“I’m warning you, Jane,” Chantelle said, still facing away. “Drop it.”

She was still holding onto her pride, Jane figured. She had a reputation to uphold and was afraid to risk it even with no one else around. “Right then,” Jane said, “we’ll start with less personal questions. Is it true you dye your hair every morning with fresh hamster blood?”

Chantelle turned around and took a step toward her. “What?”

“Just curious,” Jane said, deciding that this avenue of discussion was an unhealthy one to pursue. “Never mind.”

“I will kill you if you keep pissing me off,” Chantelle said as she took another step forward. “You think I’m speaking figuratively, but I’m not. I’ll kill you and take your oxygen tank to improve my own miserable odds on this stupid dust ball.”

Jane switched tactics. “Relax. We can last out here for hours as long as no lunar wolves show up.”

Chantelle frowned. “Lunar wolves?”

“Like arctic wolves, but lunar.”

“There’s no native life on the moon, you freak. I know that much.”

“Who said they were native?” Jane leaned back and folded her arms behind her head. “It all started, as these things often do, when a government-funded scientist had a stupid question. If wolves were on the moon, would they howl at Earth? So she built a laboratory on the outskirts of Luna City and started breeding wolves. And then some even bigger idiot thought hey, why not modify them to survive in a frozen vacuum and eat rocks with teeth as hard as diamonds? Without taking away their hunting instincts or taste for meat? None of that research group survived.”

“I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am,” Chantelle said.

“No?” Jane said. “Ah, well, you can’t blame a girl for aaaaah look out!”

“What?” Chantelle spun around so fast that she lifted a meter off the ground.

“Ahahahahahahahahaha!” Jane forced herself to stop laughing so as not to wet her suit, and also because a less than amused Chantelle now loomed right over her. She had known this prank was unwise, and yet the seductive siren song of revenge had been too strong. Still worth it, she decided.

“Get up, you fool,” Chantelle said. “Face me like a real woman.”

“Fine, fine, whatever, I was just kidding, sheesh,” Jane said, hopping to her feet. She gestured at the spot where she had sat. “Would you look at that? Maybe I haven’t made a good impression on you, but –”

“Aargh!” Chantelle lunged at her. Jane sidestepped and she flew past and face-planted into the ground, too surprised to catch herself.

“Ahahahahaha!” Jane said, doubling over. “Now do you understand the gravity of the situation? Did you forget that it’s only seventeen percent of Earth’s? You’ll need a little more finesse than –”

Chantelle grabbed her ankle, pulled her to the ground, and climbed on top of her, pummeling the entirety of her suit and helmet with fists. She yelled, “You – think – you’re – funny – but – you’re – not!”

Had the girl gone mad, or was she just mad, Jane wondered. In any case, she found herself flailing to defend herself, churning up dust and ruining her artwork, although none of the blows had hurt yet. Chantelle showed no sign of letting up and would probably keep her pinned here until they both died. Jane craned her head, fumbled around to pick up a nearby rock, and hit Chantelle with it as hard and as many times as she could, startling the latter enough for Jane to push her off and get to her knees.

“Let’s try to behave like civilized people,” Jane said, but Chantelle lunged at her again and grabbed her by the throat. “Hey, wait, your oxygen tube’s got a leak!”

“Nice try,” Chantelle said, but her gaze followed Jane’s for a second anyway, and she screamed.

“This is bad,” Jane said. “This is really bad.” She knew that one of the pockets in each of their suits contained tubes of polymer to make repairs in exactly this sort of emergency, but – she looked at the dial that indicated Chantelle’s oxygen supply and noted that it wasn’t moving too fast. Chantelle was too panicked to register that fact and Jane saw no compelling reason to tell her. Someone would find them any minute, and Chantelle could just worry until then for all she cared.

“What do I do? What do I do?” Chantelle screamed, flapping her arms like a person on fire who had never learned the correct procedure to deal with being on fire.

“Calm down,” Jane said, her mouth twitching a little, hardly able to believe her luck. “Don’t breathe too hard, don’t exert yourself too much… and don’t speak unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Chantelle stared at her. Jane stared back, her face a mask of sobriety. Chantelle sat down next to the rover, hugged her knees to her chest and stared off into space. As long as she stayed there she would be fine.

“Right, where was I? Ah yes.” Jane leaped as if she could touch the stars. “We could walk forever, walking on the moon! We could live together, walking on, walking on the moon!”

Chantelle’s eyes pleaded with her to stop, but she didn’t until she had finished the song and made seven circuits around their general vicinity. At that point she paused to have a break before deciding on the next one. “Fly Me to the Moon”, made famous by Sinatra, or Ernie’s “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon”, or Roxette’s “The First Girl on the Moon”? It was a tough call. She landed on the other side of the rover from Chantelle and looked up.

She had looked up plenty of times since the landing, of course, but only for a moment at a time. She had been so focused on being here on this alien surface, which was incredible enough, that she hadn’t taken in the rest of the neighborhood. Now it held her transfixed. The stars, for one thing, no longer twinkled as their light filtered through an atmosphere. They looked as bright and dead as this satellite, creating a sense of timelessness, conveying some sense of the age of the universe. The sun in particular, the largest by far, looked like an old friend seen with fresh eyes. But something else had her attention.

Earth. Terra, if you were pretentious. A solitary infected teardrop in a sterile, airless laboratory. It emerged as if from a sea of ink, its bottom third or so obscured by darkness, the rest a luminous swirl of white, blue, brown and green, like four flavors of melting ice cream coming together. These and a half dozen other metaphors raced through Jane’s mind in an instant. She felt compelled to share this with somebody, even if that somebody was the last person in the galaxy she wanted to have anywhere near her. “Chantelle,” she said. “Look!”

Chantelle turned her head to look for a second, rolled her eyes, and looked away again.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Tell me it’s not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Imagine, from this distance you can almost forget that it’s full of lying and wars and rape and murder and poverty and disease and famine and pollution and natural disasters and mindless TV shows and… space spit, now I’m depressed.” She sighed. “Well, it’s beautiful, is all I’m saying.”

“If only it could say the same for you,” Chantelle said.

Why did she even try? Jane fell silent and continued to gaze.

It was beautiful but, she realized, it wasn’t home. She lowered her gaze to the empty lunar desert once again and this time realized that she could never be any lonelier here than on that blue planet. True, most of its inhabitants didn't treat her like Chantelle or McKenzie or Darcy, but they weren't exactly tripping over themselves to be her friends either. Her parents hardly ever stopped working long enough to remember that they had a daughter. She was almost as likely to get positive attention from these rocks.

And what if she did die here after all? Maybe the authorities would have enough respect to leave her body right where they found it, perfectly mummified, never decaying, finally at peace. And maybe her soul would go somewhere it fit in at last.

Alarmed at where these thoughts were going, she pushed them back down where they belonged. The lack of sunlight, or rather the lack of an atmosphere to trap the sunlight and brighten the sky, was getting to her already. She reminded herself that things would improve after this setback and she needed to think rationally. Why hadn’t anyone come to get them yet? How could no one have noticed their absence? Even if she really was that invisible, a thought that saddened but didn’t surprise her…

She decided to flip through the radio frequencies. “Mrs. Havelock? Mr. Briggs? This is Jane Padgett. Do you read me?” Nothing. “Mrs. Havelock? Mr. Briggs? This is Jane Padgett. Do you read me?” Another crap music station; she skipped past it.

Chantelle watched her with a questioning look. Jane ignored it until she came back to the frequency she had been on and Chantelle asked, “What are you saying? Why did you keep flipping through? They’re coming, aren’t they?”

“I can’t reach them,” Jane said. “I don’t understand. We can’t be out of range already, can we? Unless…” A horrible thought occurred to her.

“Unless what?” Chantelle demanded.

“Unless they’re back in Luna City, and they’ve all turned their radios off and taken their suits off to talk like normal people, and there won’t be another tour until tomorrow… because of spoiled, jaded Philistines like you, I might add, who think this place is boring and make tourism less profitable than it was five years ago. Granted, most schools wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise, but still –”

“But they’ll notice we’re gone,” Chantelle said. “They have to.”

“They probably want you gone,” Jane said. “I would. It’s me they’re not noticing… but if they’ve reached the city, the computer should have told them they’re a rover short, unless…” A terrible thought struck her. “I’m, ah, going to check the beacon.”

“The what?”

“Get up,” Jane said, ignoring the question, and without waiting for Chantelle to comply she grabbed the rover’s frame and pulled it upright with ease. On the floor between the seats she found the access panel Mr. Briggs had told them about, with the little tab that enabled her to pop it open. And inside – “Oh, space spit.”

“What?” Chantelle demanded.

“The tracking beacon isn’t lit up,” Jane said. “It must be broken. No, wait.” She would have snapped her fingers if the suit’s gloves had allowed it. “I told you there was a steering problem. It must have been due for repairs. They turned off the beacon and took this rover out of the system, because it wasn’t supposed to be used…”

“Tracking beacon? System? What? If it wasn’t supposed to be used, then why did they give it to us, genius?”

“Because someone, somewhere, made a stupid mistake,” Jane said. “And thanks to them, no one was notified that we’re missing, and even if they notice, they won’t be able to trace us. Why can’t I turn it on manually? There should be a way to turn it on manually. This is stupid. NASA would never have stood for this incompetence.” She looked at Chantelle, who was paler than she’d ever seen her before, and had another horrible thought. “Hang on,” she said, and retrieved the polymer from her suit. She flicked off the lid and moved toward Chantelle with it.

“Get away from me!” Chantelle jumped to her feet and scrambled backward. “What do you think –”

“I’m trying to fix the leak, you moron! Hold still!”

“If you can fix it, why didn’t –” Yet Chantelle, perhaps desperate at this point, fell silent and obeyed. Jane squeezed on a liberal helping of the polymer. Hideous stuff, like fossilized macaroni and cheese, but it got the job done, solidifying in seconds.

“There,” she said. “How much air do you have left?” Even as she asked, she looked at Chantelle's dial and saw that it pointed into the red. Half an hour left, at most.

Chantelle saw it too. Her mouth fell open a little.

Jane didn’t dare look at her own. It had to be much fuller, of course, but wouldn’t do her any better if they were stuck out here for as long as it was beginning to look like they would be. Chantelle would die much faster – her own fault, of course, since she had chosen not to pay attention to the safety instructions and then she had chosen to attack and force Jane into self-defense – and yet, Jane couldn’t help feeling guilty again. She had some culpability in this, to be sure. Perhaps she should have been less annoying.

Chantelle’s green eyes seemed as wide as the planet above them. “Jane,” she said in a whimper so pathetic that Jane felt her heart disintegrate like a comet. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
Jane would have expected a thrill at seeing her worst enemy humbled like this, but it never came. If either of them died, future field trips would be out of the question. Future generations of schoolchildren would never have this opportunity. They would become even less excited about space travel. Jane couldn’t let that happen. She told herself that was the reason for her sudden guilt. Surely it was the only rational reason.

She muttered, too low for Chantelle to hear, “My life would be a lot better if you did.” Louder, she said, “You’re not going to die. Nobody is going to die. Not today, I mean. Look, I told you the rover’s still working; we just have to find our way back somehow. Let’s see.”

She looked around; every direction still looked almost the same. In one direction there was a spindly rock spire that they may have bounced past, but she couldn't be certain. She noted the direction its shadow was pointing, and tried to remember the direction of the shadows they had passed on the way here. She came up empty. She followed its trajectory up toward the sun, then let her gaze drift back over to where it had been a few minutes ago.

“Earth. That’s it. I didn’t notice it while we were driving, so it must have been behind us. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. But it’s worth a shot.” She jumped into the driver’s seat. “Come on.”

Chantelle didn’t look reassured, but slid into the passenger seat next to her. The rover was still activated, and Jane noticed that a little red light had started blinking on the dashboard. “Low Battery” read the label underneath. Chantelle saw it too, and closed her eyes.

Jane set off as fast as it would go, about a hundred twenty kilometers per hour, and noticed right away that the steering problem had gotten worse since the crash. It forced her to hold the wheel all the way to the right to keep from veering off in the opposite direction, letting off just a bit here and there to avoid craters, and even so the vehicle drifted off course by degrees over the next few minutes. Eventually she had to stop, get out, and push it to face the correct – or at least what she hoped was the correct – direction before starting off again.

“We’re making good time,” Jane said, hoping she sounded convincing. “Don’t worry.”

Chantelle stuck out her bottom lip.

They passed by several mountains that Jane may have remembered seeing, or may have been confusing with similar mountains from earlier. Darkness threatened to swallow them as they passed through the shadows, barely staved off by the rover's twin headlight beams, and she felt a chill each time as her suit's cooling system that had been fighting against the extreme heat struggled to compensate quickly for the sudden reduction of it. Beside her, Chantelle's teeth chattered.

“So, Chantelle,” Jane said as they emerged from one of the shadows and another rush of heat swept over her, “I know you can't talk much, but I'll ask again and if you'd be so kind as to tell me in thirty words or fewer – why are you so unkind to me?”

Chantelle didn't speak. Jane looked at her. She looked back at Jane, her face blank, and then she raised and lowered her shoulders in a shrug that lasted several seconds.

“It's just the thing to do, is that it?” Jane continued. “Because, you know, I'd appreciate very much if you and your friends found a different hobby. I have feelings and stuff, and my life is difficult enough without you psychologically abusing me all time, okay? I can suggest several alternatives. I know you hate my obsession with old Earth culture, but have you ever heard of these things called 'stamps'? They had cool little pictures on them and some people used to collect them. If you'd like to give that a try, I'm sure you could find some on eBay.”

Chantelle rolled her eyes.

“I'm into old stuff because of my parents, I guess,” Jane said. She was aware that her captive audience couldn't likely care less about any of this, but Chantelle would just have to deal, and maybe it would even take their minds off their plight. “They're anthropologists. Not that they ever share their interests with me, but I guess it kind of rubbed off. I don't go as far back as they do, though. Mostly the twentieth century onward. Lots of cool stuff. You should give it a chance, you know? We could pick up a pet rock for you right here... hey, that one looks friendly.”

Chantelle pantomimed shooting herself.

Jane realized that she was still being annoying and not helping her case, but she didn't know how else to approach it. She had something else to worry about now anyway. “Space spit, gotta stop and recalibrate again. Just a sec.” She stopped the rover, climbed out, and pointed it back toward Earth. They couldn't afford these delays.

She got back in and started off again. This time, the rover went only a few meters before it stopped on its own. The little red light went out. Jane pushed the ignition button again, and again, and again. Nothing.
Jane stared at the black sky for a precious moment and bit her lip. “I… probably shouldn’t have left it running the whole time we were waiting.”

She expected, and knew she deserved, for Chantelle to go ballistic on her. Instead, Chantelle just started to cry.

“Stop it, you’re making carbon dioxide!” Jane said. She hesitated, but she only saw one thing for it, though the thought made her queasy. “Get on my back.”

Chantelle gave her an understandable look of disbelief.

“Do it!” Jane snapped, and Chantelle complied without a word. She was as light as a toddler on Earth.

“Funny,” Jane muttered as she looped her arms around Chantelle’s legs, “I usually want you to get off my back.”

She jumped. She jumped farther than she had while singing, farther than she ever had bothered to try. Now her jumps were devoid of joy, fueled by urgency, like a grasshopper pursued by a frog. At the apex of each one she could see for kilometers around – the same moonscape, the same mountains, the same craters, the same rocks, the same tracks, the same stars. She tried not to think about any of it, focusing only on the planet in the sky. Of course it never got any larger.

She jumped for several minutes until she thought her legs would explode. Then she screeched to a halt, leaving twin furrows and churning up a cloud of dust that obscured her vision for a moment, and looked 360 degrees around herself.

More craters. More rocks. More mountains. More tracks, but other than that, no sign of civilization or humans whatsoever. It was enough to drive a person mad. They should have been able to see the lights of Luna City by now, or at least a bit of traffic. How could they have gotten so far away from it in such a short time? Or were they going the wrong way now after all? It no longer mattered why. The time to rectify the situation had nearly run out. She had turned out to be worthless after all, and now the better future she dreamed of would be cut off permanently by her failure.

“Lunar wolves!” Chantelle said. “Look, Jane, lunar wolves!”

“What are you –” Jane turned her head and followed the trajectory of Chantelle’s finger. Of course there were no wolves, just dead moonscape, and somehow that alarmed her even more.

“Look, on the ridge!” Chantelle said, jabbing with her finger to emphasize the point. “Lunar wolves, like you said!” She had started to breathe harder than Darth Vader, and not out of fear, not anymore.

“Shush!” Jane said. “I’ll take care of them. Save your breath, literally!”

“They’re going to mince us with their teeth, Jane,” Chantelle said. “Isn’t that… what’s the word… ironic?” She started to giggle like the cartoon chipmunks that were one of Jane's guilty pleasures.

“For zark’s sake, stop talking, Chantelle!” Jane said, but at the same time she realized the futility of it all. The rest of her reluctant companion’s life could be measured in single digit minutes. She saw no point in hurrying anymore, but neither did she see any other alternatives.

“Will you sing me a song, Jane?” Chantelle whispered in her ear through their helmets, batting her eyelashes.

“This is hardly the time for –” Music! Ah yes, the radio! She had forgotten all about it! She decided to go through its frequencies again, silently pleading that by now someone, anyone had noticed their absence. “Mrs. Havelock? Mr. Briggs? Mrs. Havelock? Mr. Briggs?”

Music, music, silence, silence, silence, music – wait, what was that? She moved back to it. “–g are you? Jane? Chantelle? Where –”

“Hey, it’s Jane! We’re right here, Mr. Briggs!” Jane shouted. She had never heard a more beautiful sound than his voice, at least not since she’d listened to Sarah Brightman the other day. “How are –”

“Jane! Jane Padgett!” He sounded flustered. How long had he been calling them? “Where’s ‘here’? We’ve sent out two dozen drones and rovers looking for you! Where are you? Why isn’t your beacon working?”

“I should ask you the same thing,” she said. “We’re facing Earth. That’s all I know. It’s beautiful, by the way.”

“You’re uninjured? Enough oxygen? You’re both all right?”

Before Jane could answer, Chantelle released her grip and slumped to the ground, her eyes shut and limbs akimbo, the rise and fall of her chest barely discernible to the naked eye. In this condition she looked like a sleeping angel, almost impossible to hate, giving no indication of her typical behavior while conscious. Why was she so unkind while conscious? Her secret seemed as likely to come out now as ever.

Jane swallowed. “No to all of your questions. Do you have extra air supplies?”

“Of course, but –”

“And a medical facility that can fix pretty much anything except being dead, right?”

“Well, yes, but –”

Jane switched her radio off. She needed to think through her options, and fast, without distractions. Though death held little fear for her, she certainly wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself for one of the people who made her life not worth living – was she? But although she had looked forward to being rid of Chantelle, she hadn't wanted it to happen this way... A compromise, she decided. They would both survive or both not. Maybe a drone had already spotted them, and if it hadn’t, maybe this wouldn’t work, but… she decided not to think about that. Her parents were probably still too wrapped up in their digging to notice if she never came back home.

The drones, she knew, couldn't detect body heat through the insulated suits and against the high temperature on this side of the moon, so they relied on light and motion. They had finely tuned long-range sensors on all sides, but sometimes they were briefly obstructed by mountain ranges or rock formations. Like Chantelle's earlier, her helmet now thwarted her attempt at a facepalm. How could she be so smart yet such a scatterbrain? Of all the things she could have forgotten after paying such close attention, the signal flares in the rover were not the most ideal. No time to hate herself for that now, though.

She knelt by her unconscious tormentor, rummaged in the pocket where Chantelle had put the lighter, and took it back out. With her other hand she grabbed the connection locus of her own oxygen hose. Unable to believe herself, she pushed the sliding lock mechanisms in opposite directions with her fingers, took and held a deep breath, and yanked the hose out. With that disconnected it took mere seconds to slip the entire tank off her back and start swinging it in a circle, her hand clamped around the free end of the hose to keep as much air in as possible.

Faster and faster she swung it, like a yo-yo, except that it didn’t get tangled around her fingers. When it had reached a steady momentum and her lungs felt like they were full of hot coals, she activated the lighter and touched it to the end of the hose as she let go.

Starved flame shot up its length like a bolt of lightning into the tank, which exploded and sent a beautiful streak of fire at least twenty meters across the sky. With no air resistance it spread out and dissipated in the blink of an eye, creating a display that was impossible to miss.

At least that was how it had played out in Jane's mind. What actually happened was that the lighter's flame flared up a little for just a moment as the tank soared away, very much intact. Jane found herself feeling too lightheaded to care about her latest failure or ponder her woeful misunderstanding of the laws of physics. She flopped backward with a gasp, and decided this was as good a time as any to take a nap of her own.


***


It was Jane's first time waking up in a bed she didn't recognize, a sterile white one in a sterile white room as dead-looking as the lunar landscape. She let out a yelp of surprise that made the sterile white robot beside her jump back and throw its four hands up.

“Easy, easy,” it said in a low, soothing masculine voice. “Hold still. The nanobots are almost finished repairing your minor brain damage.”

Jane expected some quip about how she had no brain to damage. She looked around and saw Chantelle in an identical bed on the other side of the robot, still asleep. “Obviously this can't be heaven, if she's here too,” Jane muttered.

“This is Luna City Medical Center,” the robot said, gesturing at a sign on the pressurized door that spelled out rules of conduct and forbade any non-patient organics from entering. “Our drones spotted you just in time to intervene in your attempted suicide. When you're done here, I can tell you about our counseling services.”

“Sacrifice, not suicide,” Jane corrected, trying to sit up. She still felt too weak.

“Most peculiar,” the robot said. “Hold still. Save your strength. This other organic is a friend of yours, then?”

“No,” Jane said. She noticed that her suit, other than her helmet, was still on. The robot had injected the nanobots through her neck.

“A stranger you took compassion on?” it continued.

“No, she hates me and the feeling is mutual,” Jane said. “But I figured her death would put a damper on your little operation here, and then I figured if I couldn't prevent that, you may as well get two deaths for the price of one. That's all.”

“That can't be all,” the robot said. “Your face shows some concern for her.”

Taken aback by this gratuitously intrusive doctor, Jane didn't know how to respond for a moment. “Who are you going to believe,” she said, “me or my lying face?”

“Your face also shows that you don't want to talk about it,” the robot said, wiping off a needle-less syringe with a damp chemical rag. “Very well. Patient confidentiality and all that, though; my vocabulator is sealed. Anyway, when I'm finished with you both, I'll take you to rejoin your class.”

An hour later Chantelle had awakened and Jane had returned to her senses, such as they were, and the robot had kept its word. Mrs. Havelock was too busy yelling at Mr. Briggs to notice the girls come in to the mess hall where the students were gathered, another environment as sterile and drab as the one they had just left. Jane wondered if it would kill them to have some colors around here. The other kids looked at her and Chantelle with wide eyes and murmured, but seemed too awed to approach them, as if they had returned from the dead.

The robot left. Jane looked at Chantelle, and knew she would never get a chance like this again, a chance to make the rest of her high school career easier. She extended a gloved hand. “Truce?”

For a long moment Chantelle looked at the hand as if it might strangle her of its own accord. Then her face softened and she opened her mouth to speak.

“Chantelle!” came the voice of McKenzie Hicken, one of the cronies who always followed her around. The other, Darcy Stewart, trailed behind her as they approached. They had partnered up for the rover drive earlier before Chantelle got a chance to grab one of them.

“We’re so sorry we left you alone with the Loser Queen,” Darcy said, giving Jane a contemptuous glance and turning away. “Poor dear, you’re lucky you didn’t die of boredom.”

“Was she as annoying as ever?” McKenzie asked.

Chantelle stood frozen. Then her mouth closed, and then it opened again. “Of course,” she said. “I wish I’d left her out there to die. The only thing she’s good for is to fertilize dead soil like this miserable rock.”

Now it was Jane's turn to let her mouth fall open.

“But let's not waste any more time on her today,” Chantelle continued. “Come on, I'm starving.” She turned in one swift motion and walked into the crowd toward a vending machine. The other two laughed and followed, raising their middle fingers behind her. Chantelle didn't raise hers, but that was small comfort.

Jane’s stomach churned. Who knew what tomorrow would bring? Maybe it would have been better if she had died. It remained to be seen whether her life had improved at all.

But, she realized as she contemplated the events that had brought them back here, she was still a hero, and nobody could take that away. A space hero. Like a normal hero, but in space. She liked the sound of that.

“Jane!” Mrs. Havelock said, rushing up to her with Mr. Briggs and several students trailing behind. “How could you run off like that? We were worried sick!” She embraced Jane, an uncharacteristic gesture of affection that the fear of lawsuits would have dissuaded her from under normal circumstances. “I'm impressed with your ingenuity, though – but why didn't you just use the signal flares?”

Before Jane could answer, Mr. Briggs let his words spill out like an oxygen leak, his mustache quivering on his pale sweaty face. “Jane, that was a very brave thing you did, I’m so terribly sorry, we wouldn’t have had this happen for the world, heads will roll when we find out who let that rover back into circulation, please don’t sue us, we’ll give you a lifetime pass to all the tours and facilities including the casino when you’re older… er… that is…” He paused for breath and bit his lip. “Do you think you ever will come back?”

Still in Mrs. Havelock's embrace, Jane only had to think about that question for a moment. She knew it had to be her imagination, but she felt as though she had variously grown and shrunk into the suit already. She hardly noticed her earlier discomfort.

​“You can count on it,” Jane Padgett said. “And that will just be the beginning.”


​Main Page: Short Stories by C. Randall Nicholson