1.1
12 November 2052
Orlov Petrochemical Compressed
Gas Cargo Landing Vehicle #14
Lunar Orbit
Andrei Bykhovski had been tied up for sex a time or two, and he had once been in a helicopter crash. His present circumstance was a bit like doing both of these things at the same time. The ground below him was getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer, and he was strapped securely, facedown, arms down, feet down. But instead of a blindfold he had a fogged-up spacesuit visor, dripping with condensation as the water droplets stopped being weightless and started being pulled downward along the clear plastic.
Instead of pillows or flight seat hardware underneath him, he had the metal struts and tanks and pipes of the gas delivery lander, poking up uncomfortably against the padding of his suit like the bars of a miniature jungle gym. And the ground rising up to meet him was the dusty-cratered surface of the Moon, which provided no sense of scale. He’d been strapped to this thing for hours, and he really didn’t know if it could land properly with him onboard, and he also couldn’t tell how close he was to touchdown. Seconds? Minutes? Another hour? All he could say for sure was that there were craters rolling by, getting slowly bigger as they went.
It helped that he’d put himself in this situation. It helped that he was escaping indentured servitude, in search of sweet freedom. It helped that he was an experienced astronaut, with literally hundreds of EVA hours in his logbook. But his oxygen consumption was high—very high—because he was hyperventilating, because this was way more terrifying than he’d allowed himself to expect. He was tempted to lean on the chin switch that would activate his radio on the emergency channel. He was tempted to call for help, but who could help him? What could they do? What would he even say?
Andrei Bykhovski fell from the sky like a tank of cyanogen, like the tanks of asteroid-harvested carbon-nitrogen gas he’d pulled out of the lander a couple of hours ago, replacing them with his own body weight. He fell from the sky cramped and cramping and half-blinded, thinking this was the dumbest thing he’d ever tried, and also quite possibly the last.
And yet, as bad a day as he was having, he was out here for a reason. He had to remember that, while he panted away his oxygen. Had to remember that Grigory Orlov, by refusing paid shore leave for the workers at Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot, while also refusing to accept any resignations, had effectively made serfs of them all. Without breaking any laws! It was intolerable, and somebody had to do something.
Then again, the spasms in Andrei’s back and shoulders were also intolerable. He might almost welcome a fatal crash if it meant an end to this. Would it hurt if he died on impact? Would he even know it happened?
The forehead of his helmet was braced across a metal pipe, which hummed as the rocket engines beneath him fired. He couldn’t see any flame, any gas belching out of them, but he could feel the deceleration, greater now than when it had first kicked on. Ten minutes ago? One minute? Hovering on the edge of panic, all his internal senses were scrambled, except for pain. His whole world was reduced to this crab-shaped delivery lander, or smaller than that, to the bubble of air inside his fogged-up helmet. To the loops of nylon holding his wrists and ankles, too far down, too far stretched. To the growing sensation of his own weight, against a spindly structure never meant to bear it. A structure meant only to support the weight of a pair of gas cylinders, against the weak pull of Lunar gravity.
If this were a dumber craft, his weight—heavier than the bottles he’d removed—would have thrown the trajectory off entirely. But it was smart enough to find its way, though he did run the very real risk of, at any moment, running out of propellant and simply falling the rest of the way to the Lunar surface. And so his whole life was reduced to this one endless moment, waiting in terror.
But then something changed; he saw shapes drifting by beneath him, black and white and yellow and red. Cylinders and rectangles, casting long shadows in the slanting rays of the sun. Could it be? Was this the St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery, three degrees of latitude off the Lunar south pole? Had he arrived?
The structures swelled alarmingly as he dropped toward them, then they rotated out of view as the lander made some kind of automated adjustment, and all he knew was that he was falling fast and decelerating hard, and his breathing was so rapid and shallow he felt in real danger of passing out.
And then he could see streaks of dust kicking out from the rocket plumes, and then he could see a long shadow throwing itself beneath him, and then he was in shadow, and then WHAM! The lander touched down with an impact nearly hard enough to break his ribs.
Gasping, he saw stars, and not the good kind. Beneath him, the lander’s metal webbing crumpled and then, disorientingly, went still.
For seconds, he did nothing. For seconds more, he tried to breathe, and realized the wind had been knocked out of him. Well, that was one way to stop hyperventilating!
He struggled for breath, and finally caught it.
Struggled to free his hands, and got the right one out of its loop, then the left. Struggled to free a leg, and failed, still gasping. Finally got it out, then fished for a knife and cut the other strap free, hoping he wouldn’t slash his suit open in the process. Hoping but not really caring, just needing needing needing to be free of this thing. He rolled off the lander, falling slowly in the Lunar gravity. Came down on his side, and just lay there a minute catching and catching and catching his breath.
It occurred to him that he was alive, albeit barely.
It occurred to him that he was free.
It occurred to him that he was probably one of the first hundred people to land on the surface of the Moon. Number ninety? Ninety-five? Something like that.
He had possibly, probably, just made history. This deed of his could well join the October Revolution and the Boston Tea Party in the Go Fuck Yourself Hall of Fame. Better than the Darwin Award he might have earned instead! Better than simply falling off en route and simply becoming a Very Missing Person. Nobody knew he was here. Probably, nobody even knew yet that he was missing, that he wasn’t onboard Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot at all. Fearing spies and snitches, he’d told no one about his plan.
Then he stopped thinking for a while, and just let himself breathe. Then he thought he should maybe turn that chin switch on after all, and let someone at the monastery know they had an uninvited guest. His suit—a bottom-of-the-line General Spacesuit Light Orbital—had no heads-up display or time-to-depletion meter, but the oxygen dial inside his helmet said just under twenty percent. He was still jittery with adrenaline, and at this rate he had maybe thirty minutes of breathable air left.
A 20/80 nitrox mix, it blew in a steady stream onto his visor, and now that he was no longer facing downward, the fog had condensed into droplets and rolled to the edge, soaking into the helmet’s padding. It was so cold here, he thought the remaining droplets might soon begin to freeze. Nevertheless, through the visor he could see the gray, dusty Lunar surface, and part of a habitat module.
He decided to stand, which proved rather tricky in Lunar gravity, in a suit designed only for weightlessness. On his third try, he got his feet underneath him. He turned on his radio, and heard nothing. No voice traffic, no conversations, no chatter. This was strange to him, because the emergency channel was actually dozens of private and commercial channels all at once, and Clementine was always alive with chatter. To Andrei, radio silence was a rare and disturbing thing. He wanted to call out a mayday, to let someone know he was here and needed help. That he needed to be taken indoors before his air ran out. That he needed a drink of water and a chance to pee. Hell, he needed a lot of things, but some instinct told him to stay quiet and look around first. In space, no one liked surprises, and he was about to drop a duratskiy on the people here.
He turned his body in a wide arc, taking in the monastery and the little valley in which it sat. The sun hung very low in the sky, fully eclipsed by one of the low hills surrounding this cluster of modules, although its position was evident by the light it cast on the edges of other hills. He could see in through some of the habitat windows, and thought for a moment he caught a flicker of movement inside. But no, it was dark in there, with shades pulled down over some of the windows. Through the rest he could make out some shelves and bulkheads, maybe, and some rows of blinking lights. Nothing to suggest this place had a religious function, or any function, really.
Behind the habitats he could see a crew lander of some sort, and a spindly tower, and behind that . . .
Behind that he saw a human figure in a dusty orange spacesuit, bathed in sunlight and climbing down one of those little hills.
Correction: not climbing down, staggering down. The figure held something in one of its hands, like a megaphone or a radar gun, which it presently dropped. The arms went up in apparent distress, as if reaching for something behind the helmet. Reaching and failing. The figure fell to its knees.
“Hey,” Andrei said into the radio channel. In English, which he was pretty sure was the language here. “Hey, buddy. Hey! You distress? Hey!”
No answer.
Andrei had no idea how to run in Lunar gravity, but he scrambled and fell, scrambled and bounced, and finally got into a sort of slow-motion loping gait around the habitat modules and toward the human figure.
“Hey! Hey! Mayday! I have EVA emergency!”
After a pause, a male voice came onto the radio. “This is Sierra Juliet Ground Actual. Who’s on this channel? What is your position?”
Now panting again, Andrei said, “I am outside your habitat. You have astronaut down! Mayday!”
“Can you render assistance?”
“I don’t know his problem. I will bring him to airlock.”
Andrei was certain, somehow, that the figure was male.
“Who is this?” the voice repeated. “Are you from Shackleton?”
“I am Andrei Bykhovski, from Clementine Cislunar. I am refugee.”
Another pause. “Explain that later. What are you seeing? We don’t have any people outside.”
As Andrei approached, he could see a fine white spray emerging from the kneeling man’s bright orange suit’s backpack. Not good.
“Oranzhevyy spacesuit,” he said. “Orange. Orange spacesuit, venting gas. I’m believing person is male.”
No immediate answer. The orange-suited man fell forward onto his faceplate. Andrei skidded awkwardly to a stop, falling forward onto his hands and knees beside the man. He grabbed for him, inspecting the leaking backpack. The gas was venting from somewhere inside the pack, and leaking out through a seam between two plastic cover panels. Andrei didn’t know what to do about that. If this were Clementine, he’d be clipping himself to this man and unfurling a rescue bag to seal around the both of them, but that wasn’t an option here. He didn’t have his tool belt with him. He didn’t have anything.
“Sierra Juliet Ground Actual here. We may be missing one of our students. Etsub Beyene, if you’re on this channel, please respond.”
Then another voice, female: “This is Shackleton Actual, responding to mayday. Can we render assistance?”
“I am taking him to airlock,” Andrei said. “Look out of window, please, and tell me where to go. And how to operate controls.”
There was, unfortunately, no standardization in space, or not enough. The monastery was built by Harvest Moon Industries, and Andrei had experience only with Orlov Petrochemical’s systems, some of which were self-built and some of which came from a different company, Renz Ventures. Even the labels would be in a foreign alphabet, hard to puzzle out in real time.
He flipped the man over and grabbed a fistful of chest harness, thinking to carry the orange suit like a parcel. But it was heavy, even in Lunar gravity, and much bulkier than his own suit, and his space reflexes were adapted for zero gravity and had no idea what to do here. And he was cold. He fell, and fell again. The man was limp now, and Andrei could see right through his visor to his dark brown face, lips moving in a gasp of horror, his bulging eyes filming over with gray. That couldn’t possibly be a good sign. There was no way he was going to get this man into a breathable atmosphere in time.
Still, Andrei wasn’t a doctor, so he got to his feet and started dragging, saying, “I believe man has lost consciousness. I am dragging him.” Looking ahead of him now, at the collection of flat-bottomed habitat modules, he added, “I see airlock. Yellow door, yes? I bring.”
“Acknowledged,” said the voice of Sierra Juliet Ground Actual. “Do you have any idea what he was doing out there?”
“Pointing object at sky,” Andrei answered. “Maybe laser communication device.”
“In the middle of the night?”
Was it the middle of the night shift here? Fine, then, yes, this man had gone outside at night, without a buddy, and apparently without telling anyone. Right when Andrei, an unannounced visitor, was about to arrive? No part of that sounded right. And was it even stranger that an air leak should befall the man at just such a compromising moment? And that he did not call for help when he realized he was in trouble? Something was very, very rotten here.
“Da,” Andrei said. “Is strange. He will tell you all about it when he wakes up, yes?”
But that was blya chush’ sobach’ya, fucking bullshit, because Andrei was looking right into the man’s bone-gray face as he said this, and he knew in that moment with certainty that this man, this student of the monastery, would never inhale another breath.
Andrei was too late—he’d moved too slowly—and Etsub Beyene was dead.
1.2
13 November
U.S. Olympic Training Center
Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
Earth Surface
As Raimy ran past a group of people he didn’t recognize, a woman’s voice called out:
“Raimy Vaught? Can we have a word?”
It took him a couple of seconds to process that, by which time he was twenty meters further down the track. He was running in the field house of the Olympic Training Center, because it was cold and windy and snowing outside, and he didn’t dare risk injury by running on the street. He’d done eight kilometers already, and though he’d been left in the dust by the actual Olympians training with him, he was pretty deep in his personal running zone. But okay, once he’d figured out they were talking to him, he slowed, stopped, and turned to face the group of people. There were three of them, and they were all wearing lightweight jackets that were arguably too warm for the nearly room-temperature air in here, but very definitely not warm enough for the snowy weather outside.
“Can we have a word?” the woman repeated. She was white and blonde, and even from a distance Raimy could see she oozed money from every perfect pore. There was actually something vaguely familiar about her, although the woman and man on either side of her were unknown to him.
His camera drones took an interest, their pea-brained AIs spreading the five cameras out to form an ellipse with himself at one focus and the three strangers at the other. This was not particularly remarkable, as (per his contract) the drones followed him around most of the time, capturing and live-streaming nearly everything about his life. Suspended on streams of ionized air, they were small and nearly silent, though hardly unobtrusive.
“Sure,” he said, walking back in their direction. “Do I . . . know you?”
“We’ve never met,” she said, “but you’re competing for a chance to work alongside me.”
The face clicked.
“Carol Beseman?” Wife of Dan Beseman? Wife of the trillionaire founder of Enterprise City, presently residing in low Earth orbit aboard the H.S.F. Concordia? Technically the owner of Raimy’s camera drones?
“That’s right. It’s nice to meet you, Detective.”
And that was a strange thing for her to call him. It was his rank in the Colorado Springs Police Department, but it had nothing to do with her, and nothing to do with his bid to join the Besemans’ Mars colony. If he were in first place for that competition, she might call him “Colonist,” which was the title afforded to anyone living in space, or planning to. Since he certainly was not winning, though, the applicable title was “Candidate Vaught,” or just “Candidate.”
But why was she calling him anything at all? It didn’t make sense that she was even here, because he was currently number three in the running for the colony’s Male Administrator slot, and only the number one would actually get to fly. Raimy might be determined to play this reality-show contest to the bitter end—it was why he was out running almost every day, or in the police station weight room hoisting barbells—but he only had nineteen thousand sponsors and ten million pledged dollars, and any fool could see that was never going to move him into second place, much less first. Like all of the Antilympus colony’s hopefuls, he was an overqualified human being who looked great on paper, but that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t going to cut it, and on a detective’s salary, he was never going to afford a private ticket into space, either. So the whole astronaut thing was pretty much a pipe dream. Candidate, indeed.
Why would someone like Carol Beseman take time to visit someone like Raimy Vaught? His minor celebrity status would not impress her; the underdogs and also-rans were of no real concern to the project. At best, Raimy was the understudy to the understudy of the man who would actually land in Antilympus Crater.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, stepping up and offering her a handshake, which she politely accepted.
“You’re a certified Navy diver, yes?” said the woman beside Carol Beseman.
“Yes,” he said, shifting his gaze and handshake over to her. “Hi. Raimy Vaught.”
“Hello,” she said. “Tracy Greene.”
Tracy’s skin was darker than Raimy’s own, and there was something hard and impatient about her. The man standing on the other size of Carol Beseman stuck his own hand out and said, “Emil Fonseca, Human Resources. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Hi,” Raimy said. Then, to Tracy Greene, “I was a diver and a submariner, yes, but that was a long time ago.” As his sponsors and followers well knew, he’d gotten out of the Navy as quickly as he could, then gone to law school, become a prosecuting attorney and assistant DA for El Paso County, and then (in a move that confused nearly everyone, including his parents) quit that to join the Colorado Springs Police Department.
“How much total dive time have you logged?” Tracy wanted to know.
“About three hundred hours,” he said. “Not much by Navy standards, but I never had a serious accident.”
“And you’ve had basic spacesuit training,” she said. It didn’t appear to be a question.
“Six hours, yes. As I’m sure you know.” All the serious Antilympus contenders had. Once you hit a million dollars in pledges and passed the basic psych and confinement evaluations, you had to go through two weeks of “astronautics training” (cynically referred to as “space camp”), of which the spacesuit training—scary for many people—was one of the centerpieces. It was all really just an excuse to weed out another seventy-five to eighty percent of the candidate pool before putting the survivors up in front of an audience. Four hundred survivors, initially, and now down to just two hundred ninety. Still too many for the fans to follow in any great detail.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Finally, Raimy said to Carol Beseman, “You live in Oregon, right? You look like you just flew here. What’s this about?”
“How many suspicious deaths have you investigated?” Tracy Greene demanded.
“Too many to count,” he answered honestly. “Dozens, at least. Why?”
Carol Beseman said, “We’ve had a death in the Antilympus program that we’d like you to investigate.”
“A death? Who? One of the candidates?”
She nodded grimly. “Yes. A botanist, Etsub Beyene. Ethiopian American.”
“I know Etsub, yeah. But isn’t he . . .”
“On the Moon? Yes. Studying low-gravity horticulture at St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery. He died in an EVA accident, and we think he might have been murdered.”
“Okay,” Raimy said slowly, taking all of that in. In his line of work, he dealt with death all the time, and liked to think it didn’t faze him, although of course it did. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to die in a spacesuit, during “extravehicular activity.” Tried and failed—his mind playing out a vivid simulation for him: trying to breathe and not being able to. Not like drowning at all—just a sucking emptiness flattening the walls of Etsub Beyene’s lungs together. It must have been awful. “What’s this got to do with me? Am I . . . what am I, a suspect?”
Carol Beseman looked confused for a moment. “What? How would you . . . No, you’re a cop. You’re the closest thing we have to a space cop. Both the Catholic Church and Harvest Moon Industries have agreed to grant us jurisdiction, and your bosses at the CSPD have agreed to a leave of absence without pay. We’ll cover your salary, along with a substantial hazard bonus.”
Raimy frowned. “‘We,’ meaning . . .”
“Myself and my husband, yes.”
“Huh.”
Raimy was momentarily at a loss for words. All of that seemed quite presumptuous—they’d arranged things with his employer before even talking to him? But the distortion field surrounding Dan Beseman’s wealth made almost anything possible. He was a trillionaire—one of the Four Horsemen—rich enough to afford his own robotic Mars colony, and a spaceship big enough to carry a hundred people there.
“To do what?” Raimy asked, still not quite sure he was getting it. Not daring to be sure.
“To investigate a possible homicide,” Carol said, now a bit impatiently.
“On the fuc . . . on the Moon?”
“Yes,” she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
And that was how Raimy Vaught got a ticket to fly in space after all.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
