MOON
MINER
Remembered Earth Universe
Volume 11
Lunar Series
Book 3
D.W. PATTERSON
Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson
All rights reserved.
First A Printing – September, 2024
Future Chron Publishing
Cover – Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson
Cover Image – Photo 206983251 © Archangel80889 | Dreamstime.com
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Hard Science Fiction – Old School
Human Generated Content
Website: https://dwpatterson.com
Email: d.w.patterson.writer@gmail.com
To Sarah
“I went down to Cape Canaveral for the first time three years ago.
- - -
I walk into the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is 400 feet high, and I go up in the elevator and look down – and the tears burst from my eyes!
- - -
The size of this cathedral where the rockets take off to go to the Moon is so amazing, I don't know how to describe it.”
- Ray Bradbury
TO THE READER
In this story (and most of my stories), if I use a date, I know I am using the antiquated dating system, A.D. I blame this on the book Daybreak – 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton, which I read some time in elementary school (and of which I recently bought an old paperback copy). So, I was imprinted early with that dating system and think it sounds cooler than C.E. No social, political or any other kind of statement is meant.
Science and technology are important to me and I enjoy developing them as I develop a series. However, a problem arises if I have to reintroduce the science and technology in each story as the series progresses. For a reader that has been reading all along the reintroduction must be tedious and somewhat boring. For a reader entering later in the series (and I do like for the stories to stand alone) the lack of explanation could be off putting. So, as a compromise I have included the previous science and technology explanations in a Glossary at the end of this story, it also contains other facts about the series. Probably not a perfect solution, but the only one I could come up with at this time.
Chapter 1
2040 A.D.
Bunker.
So thought Harry Wells about the abode he lived in. Harry had come to the Moon to work for one of the mining companies. Really, it was surface mining and the area was just a few miles from the small settlement of Tima. The Frigoris Mining camp consisted of just three buildings. One of the buildings was for the employees quarters and work area. The employees consisted of six people. Another building, which was for maintenance of the equipment, had a “porch” in front where some light maintenance could be done during the lunar day in a reduced radiation environment. And the third one was a storage building.
When needed, water and food was trucked the five miles from Tima aboard the hauler. An open cab vehicle, the hauler required the operator, actually mostly a passenger as the AI followed the electronically marked path, to wear a full spacesuit.
The mining equipment was mostly teleoperated. The vehicles operated in a combine with each one adapted to a particular task. First came the scooper and crusher, its job was to scoop and breakup the surface regolith if needed. Next, came the separator, the now sand-like regolith was separated into storage bins for solids like basalt, and tanks for gas molecules.
The combine essentially scavenged the Moon's surface for carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, potassium, phosphorous, and the rare earth elements such as rubidium and lanthanum. Thorium could also be found in the regolith and was handled separately from the other elements. It was expected that as the string of settlements grew across the northern bounds of Mare Frigoris, a thorium power plant would eventually be constructed, to provide power to all the current and future settlements in the area.
Finally the basalt of the area was rich in iron oxide, aluminum oxide, and magnesium oxide, three more elements needed for building. Basalt that evaded the separation processes in the rest of the machine was also kept as a building material which could later be made into blocks, beams and the wet slurry that fed the 3D building printers.
Harry was just under five feet ten inches and had light brown hair, cut short and even, which seemed to be the predominant style on the Moon, he also had an even temperament. He had always dreamed of heading “north” to the Moon, but it turned out that his grades weren't good enough to get in on the early rounds of lunar employment. But as more and more people were recruited for longer and longer stays, Harry persisted until Frigoris Mining gave him a chance. It turned out that his duties for the company were more like playing a video game than some science gig, and that was something that Harry was good at.
His job was to remotely operate the mining combine from the operations room incorporated into the same building as his small apartment. Except apartment was a grandiose term to use for his ten by twelve foot single room living quarters. In it Harry slept and groomed and entertained himself until it was time to take the walk down the length of the forty foot long building to operations or the kitchen. And each time he took that walk the building reminded him not of an apartment building or office or industrial building but of a bunker, with its low peaked roof of nine feet.
The modified arch that spanned the building had an internal footprint of twenty-five feet. The length of the building was forty-five feet. On top of the arched roof was six feet of regolith which provided almost complete protection from radiation and most micrometeorites. Both ends had airlocks, with the front one used for normal access, and the back for emergencies.
Harry's shift was just about over. The mining area was only a couple of miles west of him. Sitting in what some classified as east-central Frigoris which was a semi-rectangular area about two-hundred miles long and fifty miles wide with a very irregular border. The entire Mare Frigoris was some eight to nine-hundred miles long and fifty to sixty miles wide and it bent in the middle like a boomerang only not as acutely.
Harry was watching the remote view from the camera mounted on the combine's front chassis. In area being worked the maria was unusually flat, like the Iowa cornfields of his youth. Another similarity was that the combine worked the area like a tractor in a cornfield, up and back tracks shifted only by the width of the “scoop,” which was about forty feet wide.
Then it happened. The combine stopped, an alarm flashed on the control screen. Harry froze at first but then responded, first shutting off the alarm.
Then Janet showed up behind his chair.
“What's up Harry?” she asked.
“Combine has an emergency shutdown. I've started a diagnostics, should know in another minute,” he said.
Harry watched as the AI in the machine ran diagnostic, after diagnostic, and when it finished, no problem was found.
“Well, that's strange,” he said.
“What did it find?” asked Janet, she could not see the screen well.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?” she repeated.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So why's it stopped?” she asked.
“I don't know,” said Harry.
“Okay, figure it out, and let me know, I'll be in the office,” she said.
Harry sat there wondering what he should do next. He had been taught to run the diagnostics and respond to the results, but there weren't any results. If he reached a point where he could not keep the combine running he was to turn to the equipment tech, that would be Billy Vech.
But if the diagnostics shows nothing, what's Billy going to do?
