EXILE
Chapter 21

The shuttle flight had taken something close to one and a half days - Abe wasn’t too sure, as there was no way to measure time. There was no clock, no instruments at all, only meal breaks that were on demand, not to any schedule. Neither were there any windows to study Earth, sun and moon positions. Just mindless ennui, barely more exciting than solitary confinement. The conversation had dried up before it had begun - the cabin’s occupants floated weightless in their harnesses against the cabin walls. Mostly, they just slept, and it was by sleep that Stein tried to measure time.

After he woke from his second long sleep, Stein felt uneasy, something wasn’t the same. Only when he was fully alert did he realise what had changed - gravity. For the first time in many hours, he could feel a downward drag. Not a pull so much as a sense of up. His head actually felt like it was at the top of his body, not aimless. The shuttle was still moving, but he could feel many odd vibrations through the wall and floor, start-stopping in an irregular sequence. They felt similar to the ever-present rearward vibration of the main engine. Abe reasoned that their journey would soon be over. They were close enough to the moon to feel its albeit weak gravity, and what could only be the web of micro-thrusters were firing to keep the shuttle on course to a target that was no longer the moon itself, but a landing pad one hundred metres square.

With that conclusion, Abe settled in, despite some inner excitement at knowing that he would soon be walking on the moon’s surface. Neither did he wait for very long. Less than thirty minutes after he had woken, the rear engines stopped. Bob Catry, the prisoner facing Abe, spoke quietly. “Looks like this is it, guys.” Abe glanced at him, eyebrow raised questioningly. Bob was one of the late arrivals to the shuttle from the remand unit, and Abe knew nothing about him except his name. No-one else spoke, waiting for the landing. When it came, it had nothing of the impact that some may have expected. The rear engines dead, the thrusters beneath their feet could be felt. The floor levelled, and the bursts from the lateral jets gradually died away, before the belly-jets faded altogether. They had arrived, and for the first time in hours, the shuttle interior was still, and silence hardened the air like steel, underscoring the apprehension of the convicts.

In the cockpit, Major Zac Jacobs ran through the shuttle run-down procedures with his co-pilot, Captain Brian Cohen. As they busied themselves with flicking switches and repeating what the other had said, with plenty of “checks” and “confirmeds” sprinkled through their chat, Captain Vladimir Pushkin, the shuttle payload-communications specialist, established radio contact with the colony customs crew. Confirming their identity, the customs officer extended the pressurised, telescopic docking port on its wheeled carriage from the lunacrete pillbox, across the pad towards the shuttle. A small laser unit on the port scanned the shuttle, searching for the optical return beacon above the shuttle entry port. Locking onto the beacon, the laser guidance unit steered the docking port outwards towards its mate with pinpoint accuracy.

Inside the cabin, the convicts were standing in two tense rows, their nervousness increased by the machine silence, their breathing and emotions amplified by the stillness of the cabin. Senses fully alert, the expectation of anything but nothing was broken by the sudden clanking shudder from the rear of the cabin, a metallic thud that sent a single tremor through the superstructure, jarring their over-sensitive nerves. Within seconds of the silence returning to the cabin, the cockpit door was opened, and the pay-com entered the cabin. Vlad Pushkin lightly stepped down the aisle between the two rows of men, not bothering to acknowledge them. His job was not to be sociable, but to ensure the safety and the security of the craft. If they wanted someone to be nice to them, he reasoned, the Space Unit should employ flight attendants, like those who worked on the sub-orbital passenger services dirtside.

At the rear of the cabin, Vlad opened the pull-down terminal, and logged into the airlock circuits. He had a positive reading on the docked units, with each of the several clasp sensors around the rim of the shuttle hatch engaged. There was positive gas pressure on the hatch surface, telling him that there was no longer a vacuum outside the hatch. With the docking complete, he triggered the opening of the outer shuttle hatch. With it open, Vlad measured the pressure of the inner airlock space. Satisfied that there was no loss in air pressure, he opened the intercom circuit, and spoke briefly with the customs officer, matching data and readiness to open to full access. He then folded the terminal, and moved to the hatch, opening it with one well-practised movement of his arm, his hand gripping the transverse locking bar.

Stein felt a puff of crisp, cold air that seemed cleaner and clearer than even the purified air of the platform. The shuttles were always held at a pressure lower than that of the lunar bases, so that the base air would always push into the shuttle as a precaution against pressure leaks. The pay-com had disappeared into the hatch, from which Stein could barely hear some voices talking. The pay-com never returned. Instead, one of the base’s guards entered, and passing the convicts, took his position outside the cockpit door. The two guards that had made the return journey freed themselves from their harnesses, and then moved down the row, freeing the convicts from theirs. Free to move, the convicts were told to make their way, one at a time, out of the shuttle and on into the base. The far side clear, Stein was the first on his side to leave the cabin. Stepping lightly in the slight gravity, he bobbed up and down like a ping-pong ball above a ventilation shaft outlet. Uneasily, he found his feet and moved slowly, cautiously in the cramped cabin space, yet he still managed to lose his balance and bang his head on the wall. Stein entered the airlock, and then left the shuttle for the plasti-steel concertina of the docking arm. The floor beneath him was made of inter-sliding leaves of a light alloy, giving a gripped, flat floor that was independent of the concertina walls of the tunnel.

A surprisingly low-tech touch in the most advanced artificial environment ever created, a nylon rope was strung along each side of the short tunnel to act as hand-grips. Gaining confidence after his first steps in the shuttle, Abe strode slowly down the tunnel, never once reaching out to the ropes for support. At the end was another airlock transition port, the design twin of the unit on the shuttle behind him. Passing through it, Abe entered a large hall, and was immediately shepherded into a large elevator. With the other travellers and their guards, the elevator closed and took them downwards. How far, Abe didn’t know. The doors opened into a new space where a small group of convicts waited with their guards. Only a few of the convicts were from this shuttle - the rest were obviously old hands - that much was evident from their confident body language, and the economy of their movement. Stein, he thought to himself, meet your new family.