Moon Base Star Map Draftsman I: Federation War

“Passengers, we are about to enter lunar orbit. For your safety, please do not move around the cabin, and please fasten your seat belts.” The gentle female voice came over the radio. Dawn Lucius opened his eyes; his eyelids felt as heavy as lead, and he could barely keep them open. A soreness came from behind his eyes, piling up into a stinging sensation at their corners. Dawn Lucius rubbed hard along the top of his eye sockets, and his vision gradually returned. Dawn Lucius turned his face to look toward Rodney Cruise and Kenny Jr. Clooney: Kenny Jr. Clooney was still sleeping, and Rodney Cruise was staring at the screen device in his hand, looking at something. As he looked at the screen device in his hand, his face was as calm as a sea without waves.

Dawn Lucius raised his left hand to his eyes, and the flexible screen that encircled his hand automatically lit up, displaying the glowing numbers 2 and 5 on a silver-gray background: the temperature inside the ship, which didn’t feel overly cold or hot even with only short sleeves on his body, like one of those drowsy afternoons between summer and fall on Earth when one forgets which season it is. The bottom of the screen also showed a row of small characters, a minus sign followed by 270, which was the temperature in outer space; no carbon-based life could survive in such an environment.

Dawn Lucius raised his wrist, and when the screen tilted to the left, he slid over to the second screen from right to left. The photo showed him with a big smile. At that time, the moon base construction had officially been launched, and he had designed the lunar orbit, which was one of the proudest medals of his life. A month before the launch, Dawn Lucius was the most famous person on the whole network. He took the opportunity to invite his father to the ceremony, but his father told Dawn Lucius that the moon was too far away and he did not want to go to a place without water. Dawn Lucius described to the old man the magnificent beauty of the lunar orbit, and the old man stared at the book in his hand and said, “Quite good, go. Come on.” Dawn Lucius knew he wasn’t reading the sentence from the book; he was just giving a perfunctory response like he always did. Dawn Lucius still remembers the day of the launch ceremony. He was laughing and crying; he felt like a bee with a broken wing in the old man’s garden, unable to fly up.

Dawn Lucius flattened his wrist and tilted it to the left, and the screen filled with a smiling face, its gums all showing. His name is Stacean Lucius. He likes to look in the mirror, likes blue toys, likes to put his shoes neatly in place before going to bed, and also likes doughnuts, the kind covered with a layer of chocolate. He also likes to introduce himself, especially when he goes out with Dawn Lucius. He says, “My name is Stacean Lucius, which means made of stars and oceans. Do you want to make friends with me?” Dawn Lucius is his friend. When Dawn Lucius left home during the day, he and his wife kissed him goodbye, and Stacean Lucius stood quietly at the door waiting for his dad, clutching the model rocket in his hand and staring at the floor tiles, as if he had learned something since his last birthday. Dawn Lucius walked up to him and squatted down to hug him, smelling the hair above his ears; his skin smelled slightly of sweat. Stacean Lucius clung tightly to his dad’s neck, his fleshy little palms anxiously gripping back and forth. He deflated and asked, “Daddy, why are you going there?”

“How did you say goodbye to him?”

“Me?”

“How did you say goodbye to him?” Rodney Cruise pointed to Dawn Lucius’ left hand.

“Ha, I told him about my mission.” Dawn Lucius glanced at the smiling face on the screen again.

“Mission?”

“Right.”

“You told him you were going to the Kuiper Belt?” Rodney Cruise asked, amazed.

“No, I told him I was going to pick a star for him, that the star was far away and I needed to go in a spaceship to get it. I told him the star was blue, and he happily let me go.”

“That simple?”

“So simple!” Dawn Lucius turned his wrist outward and the screen went off automatically.

The seats began to fine-tune backward as the shuttle boats flew diagonally into the intended orbit. Centrifugal force pulled the passengers to the left, half of their bodies clinging to the seats. Dawn Lucius looked out the window. The lunar orbit was as busy as a food court in the morning, with delivery trolleys going in and out. The busy trolleys in lunar orbit at this time were U2 shuttle boats, melon-shaped, five stories high overall, and used specifically for transporting supplies. The U2 shuttle boats were unmanned, and they were loading supplies onto another ship two hundred stories high. This was the Knight. The ship’s forward section was bullet-shaped, borrowed from the design of the Harmony train on Earth; the main warehouse in the middle of the hull bulged outward and could carry two thousand tons of supplies; there were three engines with the same parameters at the stern of the ship, which, when ignited, could accelerate the Knight to four hundred kilometers per second at most.

The shuttle boats continued to orbit the Moon with their passengers. The AI was reducing the orbital diameter, and they flew into the orbit of the Lunar Communication Satellite Group, an orbit with over a thousand artificial satellites floating around the Moon; they always stay in the same position relative to the Lunar Base to ensure smooth communication. Dawn Lucius felt the squeeze of the chair on the left side of his body becoming smaller; the shuttle boats were visibly slowing down. Above the passengers’ heads, in the upper right corner to be specific, a lonely ship was floating. The hull was fifty stories high, with a triangular bow over the rectangular hull, and the stern was composed of a matrix of eight engines of different sizes. When the eight round and rectangular engines spouted blue tails, this ship could fly at a speed of 10,000 kilometers per second. This was the Home ship, and a lot of its internal equipment still needed technical testing and perfecting. According to the moon base briefing, the dormancy chamber had been successfully tested. The Home ship’s mission is to go to the Centaur system to find a new home; the Centaur system is the closest neighboring star system to the solar system, and the journey is at least 4.22 light years.

The shuttle boats continued to fly forward, and their radius of revolution around the moon kept shrinking. The craters smashed into the moon by meteorites hundreds of millions of years ago were clearly visible, their rims as sharp as craters made by drops of water in flour. The shuttle boats were about to fly out of the dark side of the moon. Sunlight, wrapped in a large number of radiation ions, burned the moon’s outline into a silver color, and the closer to the edge, the brighter the silver. As the shuttle boats flew forward, a white spacecraft floated into the passengers’ eyes, its head resembling a round hat, its hull a fifty-story cylinder pierced by a doughnut-shaped combination capsule, its stern a slightly thicker rectangle with three horizontal rows of circular engines, and the combination capsule just a third of the way to the stern. This was the Dawn ship, with a maximum flight speed of three hundred kilometers per second. According to everyone’s guess, the shuttle boat’s passengers would board the Dawn ship in the near future, and they would be the ship’s first pilots. The passengers sitting by the aisle half stood up, their eyes straining forward, eager to get a detailed look at this ship.

“Passengers, due to the upcoming ignition test of the Dawn ship, we are delaying our entry into near-moon orbit to avoid a collision.”

As the female voice on the radio finished her announcement, the passengers could feel the pressure on the left side of their bodies lessen, proving that the shuttle boats’ orbit was no longer shrinking but remained at its current altitude. No one spoke up about this discovery, and no one took their attention away from the window and the Dawn ship. “It’s moving, it’s moving,” someone shouted. The first part of the Dawn ship that moved was the combination capsule. That donut-shaped combination capsule was fixed to the ship by three cylinders, and at that moment, the donut was slowly turning. Then, one of the engines in the middle emitted a white mist, just like the water vapor from the spout of a kettle when boiling water in winter. The difference was that the kettle on Earth would make a whistling sound, while the sound from the Dawn ship’s engines could not reach the passengers’ ears, something the passengers did not wonder about, because there was no medium for sound transmission in space.

“Commander Cruise, what’s that rotating part for?” someone among the passengers asked.

“Artificial gravity.” Rodney Cruise glanced at Dawn Lucius, whose original aerospace graduation design was this idea.

“Artificial gravity?”

“Yes, we all know that the main reason the earth has gravity is that it rotates. For the combination pod to have gravity, it needs to rotate at a certain speed to produce centrifugal force, which is equivalent to throwing people outward, toward the floor, so that it has the effect of artificial gravity.” Kenny Jr. Clooney proudly explained.

“What? It can just generate gravity?” Another voice came from the passengers.

“It’s not generating gravity, it’s simulating gravity.” Dawn Lucius added.

“Man-made equipment cannot produce gravity like the Earth’s, but we can simulate gravity. In this combination cabin, the most critical thing is not the rotating part, but the design of the balance system inside.” Kenny Jr. Clooney looked at Dawn Lucius as he said this. He may not have noticed that he had raised his voice, and the passengers beside Dawn Lucius were taken aback.

“Oh, I see, so what’s the use of this device?”

“The medical team at the moon base has a reliable report on the changes in humans in prolonged weightlessness, and two of the conclusions are important. One is that prolonged weightlessness causes humans to have reduced judgment and negative emotions arise seventeen times more often than in an Earth environment. The other conclusion is that in long-term weightlessness, the proportion of humans suffering from heart disease rises by twenty-two percent, so humans cannot be active in weightlessness for a long time.” Kenny Jr. Clooney went on to explain.

“What is the balance system?”

“Quite simply, let’s say you’re inside a spinning washing machine, and the balancing system is there to keep you from feeling like you’re inside a spinning washing machine.” Kenny Jr. Clooney may have been understating it, but Rodney Cruise knew how much Kenny Jr. Clooney’s balancing system had impacted aerospace engineering.

“Look, Dawn ship .......” The passenger from earlier shouted.

The white water vapor began to turn blue, and the Dawn ship then moved slowly forward. “Long live the Dawn ship.” “Long live the Dawn ship.” “Long live the Dawn ship.” Some of the passengers in the shuttle boats clapped their hands and some shed tears. This was a big milestone for the moon base; at the very least, the front page of the news in the solar system for the next two weeks would be all about the Dawn ship. After moving some distance, the blue haze of the engines slowly disappeared, the reverse deceleration engines at the other end of the engine array began to fire, the white haze grew, and the Dawn ship was stationary in lunar orbit. The force of the chair squeezing the left side of their bodies gradually increased as the shuttle boats accelerated and slid into near-moon orbit, and the moon base became clearer and clearer. Sunlight could not reach here; this was the back side of the moon, that is, the dark lunar surface.

The structure of the moon base is easy to understand. Overall it is a sphere, half buried in the moon rock and half exposed above the ground. To avoid long-term exposure of the inhabitants to radiation-filled outer space, the living space was built only underground. The outer layer of the hemisphere exposed above the ground is a circular light network, with tens of thousands of palm-sized lights glowing blue and illuminating the entire moon base. Under the light network there are several large launch towers, used to propel large objects into lunar orbit. Take the Dawn ship: its hull was forged in one piece, and the fifty-story hull took almost six years to complete.

The artificial intelligence of the shuttle boats turned on the direction adjusters on the bow of the ship, and the shuttle boats’ engine was aimed at the ground as they continued to hover downward. Above the designated location, the engine’s jet power began to decrease, and the shuttle boats began to fall under the moon’s gravity. Close to the ground, the engine’s reverse propulsion increased. The passengers first felt a burst of overweight, followed by a slight weightlessness. When the PA system went off, the passengers knew that they had successfully landed.

The shuttle boats stopped, but the artificial intelligence did not immediately open the hatch. Getting off shuttle boats on the moon is not as simple as getting off a plane on Earth. The shuttle boat landing area is still exposed to outer space, and if humans go out without engineering suits, within a minute the extremely low temperature will freeze every cell. What’s more, the deadly space radiation can break apart the genetic chain in a minute. A lunar rover came from the open space, carrying the disembarkation channel toward the shuttle boats. After a sound of metal clanking and locking outside the cabin, the announcement system prompted the passengers to go to the disembarkation door. When the door opened, the passengers lined up and walked into the lower-oxygen-concentration channel inside. The moon’s gravity is only one-sixth of Earth’s, and Dawn Lucius’ steps were slow. When he tried to go a little faster, he felt like a puppet on a string, shaking wildly in the air.

The terminal lobby is not like those on Earth; there are no glass vaults, and the terminal is forged of carbon-based steel to withstand the impact of meteorite particles. As you walk out of the passageway, you are greeted by plants in the terminal lobby that look like Earth’s scattered anemones, lyre-leaved ficus, money trees, and turtleback bamboo, but are as tall as a thirty-year-old white birch tree. When plants live on a planet with weak gravity, they are free to grow upward without the restraint of gravity. These plants are expensive to maintain, and artificial intelligence monitors their growth and regulates the plants’ moisture and temperature. The passengers continued to follow the blue strip of lights with arrows. There were several pools on the hard concrete, the water as clean as the warm current of the Atlantic Ocean, and colorful tropical fish swam and played in the blue, unaware that they had changed planets.

“Haha, these fish are fake, the whole pool is a hologram.” There was a newcomer among the passengers, a chubby space cadet selected for an internship after graduation, who stepped on the screen with his foot and spoke excitedly.

“To ease the homesickness of the people working at the base, the design recreates a lot of the Earth’s environment, but keeping animals here is still impractical.” Kenny Jr. Clooney said to himself.

“Where are we going now?” The fat passenger asked.

“Go to the living quarters.” Kenny Jr. Clooney pointed to the gate a short distance away, consisting of two heavy metal doors that require pre-registered visitor privileges to open.

“Why is the base built here?” The fat passenger quickly caught up with Kenny Jr. Clooney and continued to ask. “I mean, is there any basis for the location of the base?”

“Because there is raw material here.”

“Raw materials?”

“Well, the main materials used to build the ship weren’t shipped from Earth; they were forged here.” Kenny Jr. Clooney explained enthusiastically.

“Is the base built on top of a pile of iron?” The fat passenger opened his mouth wide, happy as a child. “Did I guess right?”

“Haha, that’s pretty much it.” Kenny Jr. Clooney was infected by him, and there was a burst of laughter from the passengers.

“And what exactly does that mean?” The fat passenger asked after him.

“We explored the largest crater at the south pole of the moon back in 2015, and it had a piece of metal buried underneath that was at least as big as three hangars. Later, when we built a base on the moon, we chose this crater, which is the lunar base where we are now.” Kenny Jr. Clooney spoke with his index finger pointing upward, drawing a circle in the air.

When the group arrived at the gate, the panda on the wall to the left of the door frame spoke. “Welcome to the moon base. The system is verifying your login information.” It was a robot with a pre-programmed bio-login system, and after it spoke this sentence there was no other action, and the door did not open. The fat passenger looked around. What he did not know was that the system had already checked their bio-information in the database, and once the information met the login requirements, the door slowly slid open to both sides. The fat passenger poked his head in and found that the other side of the door was not what he thought it would be. His face fell and he followed the others into the white box. Following the voice prompts, each passenger stood in the designated position, and after the login camera scanned the crowd’s information, the doors on the wall opened and the passengers walked into their own separate rooms, where they first needed to take off all their clothes so that the disinfection system could disinfect their whole bodies. Then they put on brand-new work clothes and came out of the rooms, and the crowd arrived at the entrance to the living area of the moon base.

The moon base living area is circular, and the square in the middle is the entertainment area. Anything found in a commercial complex on Earth can be found here: aromatic coffee, vanilla ice cream, beef ramen with floating cilantro, hot soup dumplings; delicious things can be bought at any time, twenty-four hours a day without closing, and the robot chefs are always waiting for their customers in the back kitchen. But the round square does not sell clothes. The moon base assigns different work clothes for different jobs, and everyone needs to wear work clothes except during sleeping time and activities. Also, the moon base still prohibits drinking strong alcohol. At the Spring Festival New Year’s Eve dinner and at major ceremonies, each person at the base has the right to receive a glass of low-alcohol wine, but these drinks are prohibited from changing hands, though the person receiving the right can choose to give it up. If someone is found trading alcohol, he or she will be disciplined with a demerit.

It was close to 12:00 p.m. when the passengers entered the round square, and the living quarters switched to Earth’s night mode, as quiet as the street scene when you walk out of a movie theater at night. Rodney Cruise led Dawn Lucius and Kenny Jr. Clooney, who boarded a four-seat tour bus that crossed the plaza, drove out of the entertainment district, and after a short drive in the residential area, drove into a dark tunnel. Lucius hated the darkness, and he kept looking at the time on his wrist screen. After five long minutes, the tour bus stopped in front of the door of a conference room with blue lights. The sign on the door showed that the conference room was in use at this time. The biggest question about this trip to the moon was the mission itself: what was the mission, and who had arranged it? Late at night in the conference room, who was waiting for them?