The Moon Saloon.

Doug Groundsmith stumbled his way into the empty Moon Saloon with a half-year’s beard on his face and a bottle-and-a-half hangover on his head. He wore a tan tunic and black trousers. Casio, the owner, wasted no time lining up two ceramic tumblers full of pitch on the counter between her and the stool he aiming for. “Cornbread, hon?” she asked, sliding the plate down beside the coffees.

Casio wore a pale yellow jumpsuit, except for the design on the back that read “Moon Saloon.” As for the saloon, it was a general cafeteria that also served alcohol. It ran purely on the tab system, with all payments moving through an individual’s sponsoring organization.

“No ma’am,” Groundsmith said as he grabbed the stool for support. “No, I’m a gingerbread man.”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” she asked, taking the plate of cornbread rockets back to the cutout and swapping it for one half-full of little gingerbread moonmen arrayed in a circle. She set them down next to the second coffee even as Groundsmith emptied the first. “Bad out there?”

As he studied the icing on the cookies, he said, “It ain’t the work. It’s that damned commute!” He picked his man and bit off an arm. He grunted his approval.

Groundsmith had stepped out from a six-month jeep ride the day before, and he hadn’t bothered to shave yet. That would have gotten in the way of the night out he’d promised himself from lift-off a full two years in the retro. Six months out, six back, and the one between doing what his mentor had called “pulling the universe’s teeth” on a rock falling in the dark between nothing and more nothing, out past Mars. It was easy work if you didn’t mind the where. Great pay. And the where had a night sky any time you cared to look without all the bustle of the moon. But the coming and the going? The endless days of waiting? The universe could keep it.

Across the room, a voice called out, “Lots of people call me a moon rat, but I’m actually a gingerbread woman, myself.” Not quite empty, after all.

While swallowing another gulp of caffeine soup, Groundsmith turned his head to look at Sam Crater. He already knew from the voice, but he wanted to be sure. She sat upright in the booth, wearing a silver robe with sleeves that stopped along her forearms. “Heya Sam. How’s this lump of green cheese been treating you? Still working for Solar Mining?” The Solar Mining Commission was the earth-based regulatory body for all offworld mining within the Sol planetary system.

“You know I’m a lifer, Doug. You don’t have to ask to be nice. What I’ve got to ask you isn’t going to be.”

Doug glanced back at Casio, who was talking to her cook through the wall. She hadn’t reacted, which likely meant she didn’t know, either. “Can I get another pour, over at her table?” he asked. She had already grabbed the coffee pot’s handle.

The walk from the stool to the booth was much less taxing, but not turbulence-free. The poisons in Groundsmith’s blood had been diluted by the water that carried the caffeine that had caused his blood vessels to tighten. As he sat across from Sam Crater, she gave it her best try to smile.

“Where, and how long?” Doug Groundsmith asked.

“We don’t know, and we don’t know,” she said. “If you want me to guess, I still don’t know and I’d guess a half-year—plus commute of however long it takes to get to I-still-don’t-know-and-can’t-guess-where.”

“This your last?” Casio asked as she set the tumbler down.

“Thank you. One more, and a bowl of grapes if you have some,” Groundsmith said to her without taking his eyes off of Sam.

“It’s not more mining, at least,” she said as Casio went to get the grapes. Casio called back as she walked, “It’s still the damn commute.”

Groundsmith chuckled and said, “I like the mining, damn it. She nailed it. I can’t stand that incessant between, which I have barely escaped!” He wanted to ask the obvious question: what was the job if not mining? But somewhere in the sloshing chamber, a couple of little seafarers started yelling at their neighbors, and Doug Groundsmith had a pretty good idea of the ask Sam was being bashful about. A recovery job.

He worked on the surface of asteroids, mining. It was called pulling teeth because they didn’t break rocks off using explosives or chisels or saws. They applied high heat directly to the face of the rock. Once it was hot enough to soften, they would cool the face and yank on the cool end to remove the metals directly. The pull would cause the rockbound tail of the metal to stretch out, and once hardened the whole thing looked a lot like a freshly pulled tooth without the blood.

If it wasn’t mining to be done, it was something else on the surface of some low-gravity, no-atmosphere body somewhere in the solar system. It was something that required experience, professional experience that the commission would pay a premium for. The next question wasn’t what—it had to be a lost ship. He chose the question more carefully: “Why me? I’m tired. I need a rest. Why me?”

“Because it’s your ship. It’s the Tarantula,” Sam said with a look of surprise on her face. Here eyebrows stood away from her eyes like she still couldn’t believe it, much less explain it. Behind the counter, Casio cursed as she reached for the mop to clean up the coffee she’d spilled all over the floor. “The emergency radio from it, at least. We assume the ship is there with it. We don’t know where it is now, but the signal’s data matches your registration.”

“So what? It’s obviously not my ship. My ship is in the hangar a kilometer from here. It’s an anomaly, but it has nothing to do with me.”

“There’s more to it. This wasn’t a fresh signal. The data was found in some earth archives, from the early 21st century. Caused a stir in SETI circles at the time, but it went dead days after it started.”

“My registration is ten years old, when I went solo. My ship is 20 years old. Again, I don’t see what this has to do with me. When was it found? How long have you—has the commission—known?”

“Eight months. We wanted to wait until you got back to tell you.”

“Tell me what!?” Doug Groundsmith asked. “You must have something besides a blip of data in some old system?”

“The data was of an audio recording of the emergency call, not the raw radio data. But the call—it’s not just the automatic mayday. It had a voice message appended to the loop. You—it’s you.”

Sam Crater brought Groundsmith to her office at the commission station and gave him the full briefing. A university historian writing an article about early passive SETI efforts. Looking through old data. A trove of archived radio signals in a lost format, a sister who liked to mess with obsolete compute. They looked Groundsmith up, once they heard his message.

Old articles. “Who is Ground Smith?” It had taken twice as long for the data wizards of the early 21st to decode the signal as it had taken the historian’s sister to redecode their storage format. Back then, the main theory was that some amateur radio types had created an elaborate hoax. Bounced the signal out and back, somehow. It got forgotten.

She played the audio for him. Following the squeals that represented the Tarantula’s ID, he heard himself from a hundred years before he was born. “This is Groundsmith. Send help.”