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Running from where they crash- landed on the Moon wasn’t harder than winning control of the Gravity Well.
But it felt like it.
They ran towards the first shelter they could see, dragging their bruised and battered bodies behind them. Some animal instinct screamed at them that the Earth couldn’t get them if they were indoors. Nonsense. Not how anything worked. Complete wishful thinking.
But they deserved a little wishful thinking after what had just happened.
Their ship selves lay wrecked on the lunar surface, and they ran in flesh bodies that were weak and powerless compared to what they had been before.
The Mare Crisium was the worst off, bent and cracked and hard to recognise. She was already injured, always bleeding from that wound, and Luna-Terra had borne the brunt of them sling-shotting the Gravity Well. It was only fair. It was her idea; she and her ship should pay the price.
Krun Macula had collapsed under her own weight. She and Pluto were powerful, powerful enough that pulling on the Well to pull the Moon to pull the entire weight of the Earth was plausible — but not without cost. Not without crumpling into its own Roche limit, falling and falling into itself such that they had to search to find the cockpit release mechanism and pull Pluto from the wreckage.
The String of Pearls was the best off, but that wasn’t much. She could heal, could bend before breaking, but she still was not standing up any time soon.
They ran through the door of a terraformer’s cottage;, the lock opened with a bare thought from Pluto. Of course the door would be unlocked, because they were running from peril and running towards rest, so of course the door would open for them. That’s what should happen, so that’s what did.
They collapsed in a panting heap for a second, caught their breaths, and savoured the fact that however well Luna-Terra’s plan had worked, at least they weren’t dead.
Saturn stood up, wobbled in the direction of the bed, wrapped herself in a blanket, and threw herself onto it in a little burrito of misery.
Pluto fluffed the comforter around Saturn, and slipped under, so she could be sore and sad in relative comfort.
Luna-Terra thought about getting into the bed. She was... tired. More than tired. So exhausted it was hard to feel all of it at once. The adrenaline drained from her body and every limb grew heavier. Maybe it was just fatigue. Maybe it was a change in the gravity. She could never tell.
She peeled herself from the door frame.
Maybe her plan had worked. Maybe not. She had no way to know, not right now. Just had to wait to see how the dice fell, and if one of them rolled off the table. See if the future she had dragged everyone else into was actually worth it, see how much hard work it would take to make it livable.
It was hard to think about resting, about lying still, not with things the way they were. It would just give her space to think. To worry. To toss and turn those anxieties into a writhing storm and steal all the blankets and annoy everyone.
She could sit still and be afraid at the same time — that was what sniping was. But that was a different kind of waiting, a watchful, active one. She couldn’t just shoot the force of the Earth’s gravity. (Even if it would make things much simpler.)
She could sit still and fidget and drive everyone mad, or she could be productive. Easy choice. Productivity felt better too, at least in the short term.
She tore round the house taking inventory. In case everything went wrong and they got besieged, or if they got stuck as the only people on the Moon with no resupply.
Was there a generator? Check. And one she could work, too.
What about food? Plenty of it. Mostly the shelf- stable stuff, but they could live with that. Tins of beans and ravioli, a wholesale tub of peanut butter, and boxes upon boxes of Star Sparkle Cereal (Now With Extra Glittery Edible Glitter TM ).
She kept looking through every cupboard, kept moving to delay the inevitable stillness and the wait to find out what would happen next.
There was a linen cupboard (unsurprising, considering the bed had things on it), with a bonus rickety ironing board. Another cupboard dedicated to video cassettes, divided neatly into educational (“How To Deal With Lunar Tidal Anomalies: A Terraformer’s Guide”) and the blandest, least offensive entertainment possible (can’t let things get too wild in space, can we?).
More pacing. There was a portable gravity meter on the wall, for checking terraforming progress; it was probably going nuts under the combined effect of Pluto’s strong tides, Luna-Terra’s weak tides, and the guaranteed weirdness of Saturn’s tides. But she took it off the wall to check, in the vain hope that maybe she could somehow use it to tell if the plan had worked. (Combined with the cold and heavy dread in her guts that it would show her that her plan was a failure, that she’d destroyed their ships for nothing, that she’d sling-shotted everyone into a pointless future.)
Pluto walked up behind her, and wrapped her arms around Luna-Terra’s waist.
“Hey,” Luna-Terra said. She meant it to sound friendly, maybe a little flirtatious, but it came out flat and distracted. Which was unfortunately true. ( If the local gravity was this, would it mean the mean Lunar gravity was that? And could she turn that into the Earth’s gravity--?)
Pluto didn’t reply. Or, at least not with words, anyway.
She hoisted Luna-Terra up off the ground.
Luna-Terra made an undignified squeaking noise as Pluto dragged her backwards.
Pluto threw her backwards onto the bed, before slipping back under the covers herself. “You are going to rest.” It had none of the playful power her voice usually had, laughter from someone that could crack an asteroid with just a thought. But it had a power behind it nonetheless.
She leaned back against Pluto’s lap. “Whatever you say, boss.”
The burrito of Saturn didn’t respond to the chaos next to her, and kept exhaustedly scrolling through the portable comms unit she’d salvaged from String of Pearls.
Pluto started combing through Luna-Terra’s hair with her fingers, leaving tingling trails along her scalp. She was so soft, so gentle, almost ticklish, but she was somehow also getting knots out at the same time? It was impressive. “We’re going to make it work.” Pluto paused, undid another knot with a flick of her fingers, before working her fingers lower. “You’ll make it work.”
Luna-Terra wanted to say something. Something that didn’t sound like she was taking it too seriously, because someone needed to pick up the slack from Saturn. Something flippant, something an unflappable ace would say on the one last bombing run before the war was over. Something someone would say if they were actually confident it would all work out, something that made it sound like she completely believed what she did. Something that didn’t make it sound like she was staring down what could be the worst future, and realising it could be even worse than she had thought.
But the moment passed into silence.
She slowly melted into Pluto’s lap, collapsing in a puddle of exhaustion and pleasant sensations.
Pluto’s fingers felt like comfort and safety clung to against the odds, ancient humans huddling around a fire holding on tight to what little constant gravity surrounded them. They felt like nostalgia, like the times Pluto had played with her hair as it grew out, became more her and easier to pet with every inch.
--They felt a little like the future, a constant - that no matter how bad things got, Pluto would always be in favour of hair petting and it would always feel nice.
Luna-Terra closed her eyes. Maybe if she slept, she’d find out if it had worked out once she woke up.
Saturn made a startled “Snrk! ” sound, and it broke her out of it.
Luna-Terra opened her eyes and raised an eyebrow at her. She couldn’t see what Pluto’s expression was from her melted angle, but she could feel the petting slow down.
Saturn sort-of-smiled, at least, and seemed more animated than she had been since they’d dragged their sorry selves in here. That was something. “Oh, Mercury’s just freaking out about what’s happened.” She paused to type some more. “I’m telling him that I consider changing the gravitational constant to be an excellent wedding present, and he should be more appreciative.”
The eyebrow rose further, and a smile tickled the edges of Luna-Terra’s mouth. “Is that what you really wrote to him?”
Saturn typed more. “More or less.”
She could hear the smile in Pluto’s voice. “Really?”
“It sounds almost like you don’t trust me. I can’t believe it.”
Pluto sighed, happy and affectionate, rather than exasperated. “I do feel sorry for him sometimes.”
Luna-Terra looked up in Pluto’s general direction. “Yeah, it’s a real rooster guarding the fox house situation.”
“Hey! I am not that bad! And he’s not that weak!”
Saturn shifted in her cylinder of blankets, and if Luna-Terra squinted out the corner of her eye, she could see what she was actually typing.
...it was “I’m sorry.” With punctuation and capitals and no “sorry not sorry” whatsoever.
“Your plan had better have worked,” Saturn mumbled.
“I hope so,” Luna-Terra replied at normal volume.
Saturn flinched at that.
Luna-Terra picked up the gravity meter, and held it up and out to read it better. She had a head for numbers. She had to, to do what she did. Correct for wind and gravity, of the planets she was on and the people she was fighting. She’d even used portable gravity meters before! But she couldn’t quite work out the numbers this time. If the numbers even worked. If you could find the gravity of Earth from a room full of pilots on the Moon. The equations slipped out of her head like water through clenched fingers, memories of academy lessons but not the actual content running through her mind.
“There’s a way to work out the gravity of one thing from another thing, right?” She paused, and she spoke the half-remembered phrases. “The influence of one body on another body--”
Saturn looked up from the comms unit like Luna-Terra was an idiot who couldn’t remember basic physics. (Which— fair. ) “You multiply the archetypical mass of both bodies, divide it by the emotional times the physical distance, and multiple all that by the strength of Gravity.”
Pluto stuck her tongue out, teasing.“Or you can just feel it.”
Luna-Terra did her best to hold that stream of information in her head. “I’m pretty sure only genius psychic wonderchildren can do that.”
Pluto laughed. “Don’t sell yourself short!”
The meter had half those numbers, but it had enough that she could run through the little snatches of equations she remembered, convert and change and converge into an answer, find the force of gravity of the Earth from the gravity in their little room on the Moon.
She barked a startled laugh when she found it. Frantically mentally re-checked her work, because she did not want to be poisoned by the false hope of being right when she wasn’t.
But she was right. She was right.
(Or, alternatively, really bad at math. That would be poetic, if that was the case. As bad at calculating forces as she was at calculating odds.)
Pluto’s hands rested on her scalp, waiting for an answer.
Saturn stared at her.
“9.78665 m/s/s.” She looked at both of them, one at a time. “A change in the hundredths place.”
Saturn breached her cocoon to grab the meter from her. “No way!” Her eyes darted across the screen, and Luna-Terra could see her calculating and recalculating, faster than she herself could. Saturn opened her mouth to say something flippant, but nothing came out. She swallowed those sarcastic words, eyes sparkling with a shimmer of water, like the ice in the craters. “It worked.”
“Things fall 2 millimetres per second per second slower.” A concrete detail that elided the metaphysical implications, but she had to hold onto the concrete details. They’d changed how fast things fell towards the centre. They’d changed something as big as falling, and by an amount you could measure in normal-people units.
Pluto stared out at the closed window blinds, and past them, in the direction of Earth. She closed her eyes. “I can almost feel it. Even from here. From this far away.”
Luna-Terra reached her hand upwards, took Pluto’s hand in hers, two bodies tidally locked and orbiting, even if they were also perfectly still on the same bed. “From this close, too.”
Saturn cackled, and started a flurry of typing. “Revenge is so sweet.”
Luna-Terra closed her eyes. “Victory’s sweeter.”
She hadn’t thought it would be. She’d hoped her maths was right. Hoped she’d pulled the right cards and rolled the right dice and that the right bullet was in the right chamber. She’d thought of what the future might be, the same world, pushed subtly off- axis, but she hadn’t dared to even daydream about the result.
And it was here. She’d made it happen. They’d made it happen.
A change in the hundredths place, in the face of the whole weight of the world.
Two millimetres per second per second slower.