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Absatz 12413 Wörter

Day 333 April Fools day 2056

Vivian woke from her pod and rolled over, she reached an arm out and pulled her notebook from the small shelf and flipped to her last entry from the night before.  She thought about that damn fight about the worms and started to mutter curses when she looked at the date again.  April 1st! 
Today should be the day!  With a sudden leap for joy she burst from her pod, spilling out her thin blankets. She turned in three tight circles as she quickly dressed in her onesie, her hand shot through the hole in her sleeve and she had to slow down and pull it out, then reinsert it, noting that the tear was getting bigger.  She put her booties on and the happy thought crossed her mind that there should be new boots and clothes to look forward to.  
	She climbed out of her small tent and carefully zipped it shut, even in her haste she knew better than to rush the zips and guided the pull closed with both hands then dipped through the air tunnel, through the mud room and into the kitchen.  Ravine was already there and he had an extra mug of radish tea brewed up for her.  
	“Good morning! Todays the day right?”
	“Yep, I’ve been listening to the news and Glen said its all going according to plan and we should have the drop in about 3 hours.”
	“Oh that’s just enough time to make a cake!”  Vivian said.  “Then we can have a little party!”  
	“Sure if you want but there will probably be fresh cake to enjoy too, with real fruit frosting.”  Ravine said.  
	“Oh don’t tease me! You know any fruit will be freeze dried and pack full of preserves.”
	“Which is why its perfect to top on a cake!”
	“So I should make a cake?”
	“Maybe just for the Yums.”  Ravine replied.  “Maybe we can shape the bamboo and leaves into a cake and use it for the photo op later today!”
	“Oh you want to get crafty now, when we have just under an hour to get ready.”  Vivian sighed and slipping an extra squeeze of sweetner into her cup of tea.  She did it with a smooth practiced motion and hoped no one would notice. 
	“Yeah that’s a solid point, I guess we’ll save the cake for my birthday in a couple weeks.”  
	A loud growl pierced the air and Vivian dropped her drink.  The wood mug hit the corner of the counter and bounced of in a crazy arc, spilling red/brown radish tea everywhere.  
	“What was that?”
	“Sounds like one of the Pandas!”  Ravine was already heading out the iris through the wind tunnel to investigate.  
	Vivian followed and found Rory trying to get one of the Pandas out of the bamboo thickets.  “Its Polly, I think she may have broken her leg or something.  I tried to assess it and she roared and ran away.”
	“What how?”
	“I don’t know but her front leg is all twisted at a bad angle and swollen.  Like I said I tried to touch it and she ran!”  Rory sighed as Ravine ran past her.  
	He leapt into the stalks of bamboo and before the Panda could react, he had her lassoed, only she was still in a precarious position where she had half climbed into her pod a smaller ledge where the Pandas could perch and eat the dense bamboo stalks.  There was a pile of broken bamboo stalks, the hard outer layers and bits the Pandas discarded that he had to stumble through to get to her. 
	“Ok, I caught her!” “Careful, don’t let her fall again!” Rory’s voice was sharp with the kind of fatigue that only comes from living on a world that never stops trying to kill you.
“Well, then come help me talk her down.” Ravine cinched the lasso, his movements practiced and rhythmic as he led the Panda toward the nursery entrance. High above them, the Earth performed its slow, silent libration dance, a lazy figure-eight that saw the home world bobbing just above the horizon, currently dipping low toward the jagged Nobile Peaks.
“Maybe she wants some fresh stalks? Or some of those plums?” Vivian turned in a frantic circle, her eyes darting between the Panda and the verdant green of their improbable sanctuary.
“Viv, go get the first aid kit now!” Rory commanded.
Vivian ran, her boots thumping against the reinforced floor as she dodged the chaotic web of umbilical tethers. These thick, insulated veins pulsed with life-support fluids and power, snaking out from the Zeus to feed the 54 individual pods they had painstakingly pulled from the ship’s guts. It was a mechanical nightmare; they had unpacked the pods into a sprawling misconfiguration of vertical rooms and horizontal crawlspaces, all dependent on those tethers to maintain the 294 Kelvin warmth inside against the vacuum outside.
By the time she returned, they had coaxed Polly into the clearing of the bamboo forest. It was a fragile wonderland nestled deep within the Pandemonium Ridge: a small crater-within-a-crater on the Moon’s southern edge. Here, the bamboo reached hungrily for the artificial noon reflected by mirrors on the rim, a necessary trick to keep the stalks growing while the actual sun performed its endless, 360-degree skim along the horizon.
What remained of the Zeus fuselage, all 189 feet of it, was wedged delicately against the steep southern wall of the Pandemonium crater. The bottom was shrouded in permanent shadow, but the top 45 feet poked into the constant glare, catching the sun that circled them every moonth. To the north, the Nobile Masses rose like angry claws, pointing toward the towering Mons Mouton. The great massif stood in the distance like a glowing white wall, a plateau so massive that it dictated their very existence; every moonth, it cast a penetrating, knife-edge shadow over the landscape, plunging the colony into 23 hours of total, lightless cold.
In the last ten moonths, they had managed to disassemble the ship’s internal structure to build their chain of nine-foot silos. It was a convergence of salvaged engineering: some rooms rigged vertically to the crater wall, others lying on their sides linked by wind tunnels and airlocks. Over it all, they had stretched the growing network of inflatable tents that allowed the forest to breathe.
Under the main dome, the air was a delicate chemical dance performed by the scrubbers in the Zeus and the thousands of leaves in the fledgling forest. Each bit of dirt had been meticulously processed, the regolith screened for large jagged shards of precious metals and glasses.  Regolith is some of the most irriating substances in the solar system, the tiny particles of sun baked rock have jagged edges all over it because they have never been broken down or smoothed out by an environment with wind and water and moving weather.  Each speck is sharp and spiky and seeking to strike electrical balance in unpredictable tangents.  Its one of the sharpest hurdles for space travelers to deal with.  Because the regolith is constantly being bombarded by solar radiation without an atmosphere to block it, it becomes electrically charged.  When the sun shines on it the regolith takes a mind of its own and dances in the beams.  When its in the shadow the regolith becomes negatively charged and the cold condenses the particles, metals are cold welded to particles of glass and water.  
	The real Pandemonium happens at the Terminator, the line where the light meets the dark.  Because you have a positive surface right next to a negative surface it creates an electron field that makes the dust dance and leap through the dusk.  
Inside their guardens, each bit of dirt had been scrubbed and watered, the harsh regolith neutralized to hold the substrate for mycelia, mixed with manure from humans and Pandas, they grow edible mushrooms and then finally mix it with vermicompost and more manure until they can grow plants and trees and walk upon it with bare feet.
Using the lasers and electricity from the Zeus, they were able to get about 4% to 13% water out of the moon rock by weight, depending on which shadow-pocket they had mined. This wasn't a simple melting process; it was a high-energy divorce. The "Ice-Crackers" hit the porous rock with concentrated thermal beams, causing the solid-state water to sublimate instantly into steam, which was then flash-frozen into clean canisters.
But the water was only the beginning. The process was a messy, lucrative alchemy. As the molecular bonds of the regolith shattered under the laser-fire, the "Ice-Crackers" performed a secondary feat of electrolysis.
The primary byproduct was Oxygen, which pumped directly into the Zeus scrubbers to supplement the bamboo's breath. The Hydrogen was harvested separately, precious fuel for the thrusters and the thermal heaters that kept the Mylar from shattering.
Beyond the gases, the zapping left behind a slag heap of Old Skool riches. As the rocks vaporized and reformed, they were able to centrifuge out the heavy metals that the moon had been hoarding for billions of years.  The zinc and iron were diverted to the 3D printers in the machine shop to manufacture the fittings for the umbilical tethers, the hinges and fittings and that made things work.  Back on Earth, Gold and Silver were signs of weath, but here they function as vital necisities. Again with the 3D printers the precious metals can be spun into ultra-thin coatings for the external visors and Mylar seams to reflect the brutal UV radiation.
Then there were the trace amounts of rare earth elements like neodymium that they could use to make high end magnets.  Something quite useful in an electrically charged world.  
Once they had squeeze everything they could use out of the local regolith rocks the hot slag was poured into molds with posts and holes just like the little ones we all built spaceships with as kids.   These abyss bricks of sulfer, regolith and the tailings of space debris were just beginning to prove quite useful in all sorts of construction projets. 
But as Vivian stood in the air gap between the garden and the tunnel, she wasn’t thinking about the expensive ice, the oxygen ratios, or the kilos of gold piling up in the slag bins. She was looking at Polly’s leg. The Panda’s distress was a heavy, physical presence, more real than the silver Mylar dome or the incoming delivery finally drifting down from the black sky.

The usually silent Panda was grunting and breathing hard while laying pinned under Rory’s control, he had hog tied her other three legs and put a muzzle on her.  Her right front leg was indeed bent at a terribly wrong angle although there was no blood yet.  
Rory wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “The nursery,” he grunted, bracing his shoulder against Polly’s fuzzy, heaving flank. “The nursery has the large potting bench. We can’t set a bone in the middle of a bamboo thicket.”
Ravine and two other people came to help and together, they hoisted the injured Panda onto a low-slung sled made of bamboo. It glided over the mossy floor of the central corridor, a path lined with aromatic cedar benches that held a slurry that nurtured the young plants growing out of evenly spaced holes.
“Viv, get the slurry ready,” Rory commanded.
	“That’s not what this needs!”  Vivian scowled, she bushed aside several small items cluttering the surface of the workspace then opened the first aid box.  There were the tools she was hoping for, some scissors, scalpels, clamps, grips and cordages, but the supplies of bandages, antiseptic and pain relievers, and rubber gloves were already gone through. 
	“Ravine stay here and help us hold him down.”
	“But I’m supposed to watch the shipment from Earth up at the rim!”
	“This is an emergency and I know you have steady hands, here first we should shave the area to see what we are looking at.”
	“Mik wants Yummy and the team ready in one hour!”  Ravine pulled at his hair in distress, although his face was clean shaven in anticipation for the upcoming moon walk.
	“Let him talk to me about it then, cause I think this is quite serious that one of our three breeding Pandas has a broken leg which if its not dealt with quickly could lead to infection and all kinds of nasty consequences.”
	Viv put her bare hands on the Panda’s leg and gently squeezed.  Polly roared and gnashed her teeth, fortunately Rory had put the muzzle on her.  
	“Hold her down!”  Rory yelled.
	“No, gentle. You can’t force them come on you know this, we all need to calm down a moment.  We need to convince her. Don’t we girl?  You’re a good Panda and we are going to take such good care of you, don’t you worry one bit!”  Vivan put her cheeks against the Panda’s big furry cheeks and squeezed them with gentle reassurance.  
	“We are going to take care of you now, don’t you worry.”
	“Whats going on in here?”  Amilee came barging in with a watering bottle.
	“Get out of here! We have enough to deal with!”  Vivian shouted and lashed out at the sudden interruption.
	“Geeze! What? Excuse me?”  Amilee replied.
	“Look we think the Panda got hurt and we are taking care of her, but give us some space.”  Ravine replied.  “Don’t worry though, we got this.”
	Amilee craned her neck to take in the scene, made a weird laughing noise then left.
	A few minutes later someone else came through, Ravine called him over and asked his buddy Andros to watch the iris and divert others, which was hard to do in a small camp with only three main areas to be for 100 people.

“Its really bad.”  Vivian said as she palpated the paw,  “It feels like it’s broken in at least three places.”
	“Oh no! What are we going to do?”  Rory sighed.  His normally rough and tumble exterior began to crack.  He turned away and then proceeded to pace back and forth in the narrow room that had been their one way ticket from Earth.  
	“We are going to stabilize her and split this.”
	“She was supposed to be ready for the photo op today! Not today of all days!”  Rory roared in frustration and Andros diverted a small group of scientists.