Chapter 16: The Human Resource

Two weeks flew by. With every day that passed, Moon Base One changed.

Six massive nuclear reactors roared to life from cold storage, their cores humming with heat and light. Factories that had been silent for years shuddered and started up again.

The Base’s power use hit ten gigawatts, that was as much energy as a city like New York. But New York had millions of people. Here, that power was for just fifty thousand souls.

Most of that energy went to heavy industry. The train lines ran at full speed, twenty-four hours a day.

High-speed trains hauled tens of thousands of tons of raw material from the mines: titanium, uranium, iron, and methane harvested from the deep ice. Within hours, these raw rocks were processed and put back into the factories.

Watching the colony come back to life, Jason felt a deep sense of pride.

But running a colony wasn’t just about power and ore. The hardest part was the people.

People are messy. Among the fifty thousand survivors, there were saints and sinners, geniuses and fools, workers and parasites.

Jason had to bring them all together. He used every trick he knew to give them hope and point them in the same direction. To do this, he used his enhanced brain. He memorized the name and file of almost everyone on the base, changing how he led each person.

Even for a superhuman, sorting through all that social information was tiring. But he had no choice. Survival required unity.

However, one group was a problem: the criminals.

The worst rioters had been killed during the first crackdown. But that left a gray area, people who were guilty, but not bad enough to face a firing squad. There were nearly a thousand of them.

Every pair of hands was needed. With the population so low, killing them all was a waste. But letting them run free was dangerous.

Jason called a special meeting to decide their fate.

“We have two types of offenders,” Jason told the room. “First, the convicts who were already in prison before the world ended. Second, the people who committed crimes during the chaos after Earth died.”

“We don’t have time to write a new constitution,” Jason said, his voice hard. “We need a plan that is simple, harsh, and fair.”

“Justice needs a balance. We reward good work to encourage people, and we punish bad behavior to stop the criminals. Only by balancing these can we stabilize the base.”

The convict laborers were always a touchy subject. The base needed them for the dangerous jobs, but they were trouble.

“A lot of the original convicts didn’t join the riots,” an engineer spoke up. “They stayed at their posts.”

“I have a friend in maintenance. He’s a convict, killed a man in a bar fight ten years ago on Earth. But since he’s been here? He’s been a model worker. During the blackout, he worked forty hours straight to fix the air scrubbers.”

“These men have been tested,” the engineer argued. “I think the ones who stayed loyal should be forgiven.”

The group agreed. A clean slate for the loyal workers.

The second group, the looters who stole supplies during the panic. They were given work sentences. They kept their freedom but had to do extra shifts and dirty jobs to pay back what they took.

The last group, the violent rioters who survived the purge but lost all their rights. They were locked up and forced to do hard labor under guard.

They couldn’t be killed; the colony needed the muscle. But facing extinction meant human rights were a luxury they couldn’t afford. No one felt sorry for them.

The meeting ended quickly. Legal details were a problem for the future. Today, they just needed order.

Ping.

A message popped up on Jason’s screen. It was from his assistant, Lily.

“Captain, the trial for the rebel leader Calvin is at 2 PM. You need to be there.”

Jason sighed. He had just finished one meeting, and now he was late for a trial. This was his life now.

“Calvin,” he muttered. “I have to go.”

Lily was Dr. Roman’s adopted daughter. She was a brilliant physicist, barely twenty years old. With the physics experiments stopped, she had moved into administration.

She was a machine. Jason thought he worked hard, but Lily worked harder. She didn’t joke and didn’t socialize. As she put it, “fun is a waste of energy.”

When Jason walked into the makeshift courtroom, the jury was already seated. It was made of forty important people,,engineers, doctors, and officers.

Since there were no written laws, they used a tribunal system. The jury decided guilt, and their sentence was final.

The bailiff brought Calvin in.

The cult leader looked rough. His face was swollen, probably from the guards handling him roughly, but his eyes were clear. His mind seemed sharp.

The room watched him with hate and awe. The cult following had grown since the apocalypse, and even some of the jurors were believers. To some, he was a terrorist. To others, a prophet.

“The court is in session,” the judge, a senior military officer tapped his gavel. He read the charges.

“Defendant, do you have anything to say?”

Calvin stood in the dock. He ran a hand through his messy hair and looked around the room calmly.

“I know what you want to hear,” Calvin said, his voice steady. “Yes. I admit it. I killed them.”

“After Earth was destroyed, I used the chaos to kill Administrator David Sen, General Bohr, and Director Kashiville. I also ordered the execution of several mid-level managers.”

A gasp went through the room. They hadn’t expected him to be so blunt.

The jurors whispered loudly. Sen, Bohr, and Kashiville had been the three leaders of the Base, the heads of Administration, Military, and Economy.

Their deaths explained why the Base had fallen into chaos so fast. Calvin hadn’t just led a riot; he had cut off the head of the government.

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