Designated Driver

By Sean Monaghan

On the Moon, Sam's workaday job as a lunar rover driver takes its toll. Most days he just plain feels taken for granted.

Of course, some days can be different.

Some days things go wrong. Days like that, you want someone like Sam behind the wheel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Triple V Publishing
• Release date: Dec 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215198858

Sean Monaghan

Award-winning author, Sean Monaghan has published more than one hundred stories in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and in New Zealand, where he makes his home. A regular contributor to Asimov’s, his story “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles”, set in the art world of Shilinka Switalla, won both the Sir Julius Vogel Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Poll Award, for best short story. He is a past winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Award, and the Amazing Stories Award. Sean writes from a nook in a corner of his 110 year old home, usually listening to eighties music. Award-winning author, Sean Monaghan has published more than one hundred stories in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and in New Zealand, where he makes his home. A regular contributor to Asimov’s, his story “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles”, set in the art world of Shilinka Switalla, won both the Sir Julius Vogel Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Poll Award, for best short story. He is a past winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Award, and the Amazing Stories Award. Sean writes from a nook in a corner of his 110 year old home, usually listening to eighties music.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The steering toggle jerked under Sam's hands as he tried to relax. The toggle was a two-handed unit, mounted on a gimbal. Like a regular steering wheel, with the top and bottom thirds of the circle sliced off, fitted to a lever. Aluminum, covered with a thin sheath of fractionally aerated blue polyethylene.

Back home, back on Earth, he had a '32 Mustang. One of the ones that came with the default setting on active driving rather than self-driving. Some of the guys he hung out with on weekends had put in a steering 'wheel' a little like the toggle--no top or bottom. It was all about showmanship and nothing about driving. For a sports car, you needed the whole wheel.

And Sam liked to drive.

But for a crusty old rattling lunar rover trundling along at eleven miles per hour, a toggle was just fine.

The little cockpit pressed in on him. All glass and struts. He had to take real care when he stood so as he didn't bump his head. He kept a print photo of Susie, his three year old, tucked into the edge of one of the panes. The manufacturers had placed specific clips around the struts for just that purpose. No sense in having roughneck drivers damaging the seals when they jammed in pictures of family, or worksheets, or snackpacks

The interior reeked of gunpowder--as if every grain of moondust hung ready to be packed into a shotgun shell.

The motors hummed along quietly, but transmitting that subtle vibration through the toggle and the floor. Six big electric motors, one on each wheel, plus a supplemental.

People way smarter than Sam had designed this thing. All the motors connected through a complex transmission so that the drive remained even. The motors were modular and could be removed at any time for refurbishment. The vehicle could run on just three.

Technology.

The rover's interior volume was pretty tiny. When there were four of them using it--as designed--they had to back into corners and contort their limbs at odd angles to allow each other to get by.

Sam peered ahead, out across