spaceopera

J’ai lu récemment le dernier roman de David Bry, Échos stellaires, publié aux éditions Fleuve. Et pour une première incursion dans le genre de la SF, on peut dire que c’est réussi. Même imparfait, le roman nous embarque dans une aventure trépidante sur plus de 500 pages, où souffle le vent de la révolte.
Retrouvez mon avis complet sur le blog: https://yuyine.be/node/1353

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[Livre reçu en service de presse, avis non rémunéré.]

The thing about a base on the moon is that everyone underestimates the amount of support the Earth provides. Even with a so-called sealed environment, there is considerable support provided by the outside.

So when they established the first moonbase, it was very short lived. To be fair, it was only really intended as a temporary establishment, but it only lasted just over one and a half times the design life. Which for a NASA project is abysmal. So 36 months after being established, it was abandoned. The next one, an ESA project, lasted about the same.

The third was a Chinese military one. It was meant to be permanent, but they abandoned it after two years because of the cost of resupply.

The fourth one was an attempt at a lunar hotel. It lasted three months before the company running it went bust, and a joint NASA/ESA rescue mission had to be sent to bring the staff home.

The fifth one was a genuine attempt at colonisation, headed up by a multi-billionaire. They were well funded, and established a large semi-underground city space. Several hundred people moved there. Most of them died there. The oxygen plant worked, the CO2 scrubbers worked, but the small population did not have enough depth in skills to keep it running safely. Eight people survived the catastrophic cascade that destroyed the biome and the containment. Only seven of them made it back to Earth. The last one remained behind to manage the launch of the one remaining earth-return ship.

The sixth and seventh ones followed similar patterns, at great loss of life.

This cooled the idea of a permanent moon base for several decades.

Eventually someone tried again. This time it was an international consortium of space agencies. Their objective was to try and determine what would be needed for any sort of permanent non-terrestrial colony.

The answer was shocking to everyone.

Over thirty thousand people ended up needed to provide the required depth of skills. And for each of them approximately two hectares of wild space was needed, in addition to the farmed areas.

What was the extra space for? It provided sufficient complexity to the support biomes to ensure that they could not easily go into a systemic collapse. It provided for pollinators to breed, for detritus processors to grow, and all the millions of little things that were needed for an actual ecosystem.

It took them nearly thirty years to build it. And it remains the only one that Earth has ever successfully built.

The Selenites, as they call themselves, have, however, built two more as their population has grown.

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We were on a deep survey run out towards the far edge of the Orion Arm that Earth is in, so yeah, we were a long way from home. We're just come out of jump, and were recalibrating our sensors, when the collision warning alarm went off.

We had sealed our suits, and were reaching for the controls when the impact happened. Whatever hit the ship got us in the crew quarters. Fortunately we were all on the bridge at the time.

Marcelo went aft to investigate, and a few minutes later we heard him scream, so we went after him like idiots. We found him backed up against the wall, a hexapod advancing towards him - all sharp claws and spines. When we entered, it turned towards us, so we backed out of the common area. It ignored Marcelo, and followed us.

Now I know what you are thinking, why didn't we shoot it. Simple. We were a survey ship. Yes, we had some small arms, but they were kept in a locker near the gravraft. Heck, the ship itself only had a single turret with a couple of popguns.

So, we backed out, and it followed us - but it is not a big ship, and it was not long before it cornered us.

It pulled a rectangular object out and some sort of cylinder with odd grips. Then, before I could do anything, it was right in front of me, and pushed the rectangle against my suit, and did something with the cylinder. Then it turned around and went back into the the object that collided with us.

The thing that had crashed into us reversed course , leaving a three meter wide hole in the hull.

Marcelo made it back to the bridge with a rocket pistol, but it was all over by then.

We sealed the bridge and repressurised, then opened our suits. The outside cameras showed the other craft just sitting nearby. We looked at the rectangle, and it appeared to be some sort of tablet with markings on it. Some of the markings matched the ones on the craft that hit us.

We puzzled over this for an hour or so, then another larger craft turned up, and opened up comms. That was when the one that hit us left.

It took us a while, but we figured out that they were offering to tow us to a repair yard in the next system. Not having any other clue, we sent an image of the tablet, almost instantly, they had tow lines attached.

Marcelo had been sitting thinking for a while but spoke up once we were underway. "Ceinwen, Dargh? I think that thing was giving us its insurance details."

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Thanks to @Steveg58 for the inspiration.