Lunar Colony VI

by A Keuser

  Eri started to say something, but Nala cut the comm and glanced around her apartment. Lilies were the flowers of death – or so Eri said…. Yet whoever had left them did so while she slept. They’d had ample opportunity to kill her.

  Someone was playing with her. The sooner she found out who, the better. Flowers in hand, she left her apartment and stalked down the corridor, weaving her way through the colony and into the hydroponics lab.

  Jessica Franque looked up with a smile. “I thought I’d be seeing you soon. Partner Dendrond was very… adamant about finding out everything she could about lilies. Are these the offending beauties?”

  “They are. And unless lilies have the ability to disappear and reappear at random… someone’s been placing them in my apartment to mess with me.”

  “That doesn’t sound like fun. My sister had a stalker in college.” Jessica washed her hands and dried them before reaching for one of the flowers. “The guy was a creep and didn’t do enough homework. Apparently he didn’t connect her weekly karate sessions with her ability to knock him on his ass when he tried to grab her.”

  “Let’s hope this little flower is enough to tell us who we’re dealing with.”

  A commotion at the door to the lab pulled their attention toward the far wall. Nala and Jessica shared a look and waited.

  Eri helped up the woman she’d knocked over and walked into the room without further commotion. “Now, what is going on?”

  “As I was just about to say,” the botanist said, “this is not something we would have grown in the colony’s hydroponics bays or in our soil farm. They serve almost no purpose whatsoever. We do grow flowers, but with the limitations of our bays… they have to be useful.”

  “Could someone have grown it in a pot in their apartment?”

  “It is possible. They would need the proper lamps to assist in photosynthesis, and they would have to have gotten the soil from us… though I can’t recall anyone coming in to ask for it.” Jessica smiled at them and added, “There is an archaic language of flowers, meant to be used in old British courting rituals… I don’t remember most of them… but the orange lily has stuck with me for its oddity.”

  “It’s a flower of death,” Eri said.

  “In some circles, yes. I should think they adorn many a grave marker on Earth, as well. But specific to the language of flowers, an orange lily meant hatred.”

  “So by both of your meanings, someone hates me and wants me dead. Lovely.”

  Jessica made a humming noise in the back of her throat and looked at her questioningly. “I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s given out soil. You might consider checking the intake logs. All of our possessions are scanned and evaluated. If someone had flower bulbs in their kit, it should have shown up in a search.”

  She addressed those words to Eri – who had the clearance – and received a nod in turn.

  Nala moved toward the door, but Eri caught her by the arm and immediately let go. “You might consider being more careful now that we know what we know.”

  “But we don’t know anything really,” Nala said. “If they want to kill me, why didn’t they do it when they were in my apartment last night? Or the night before?”

  The door from the corridor opened, interrupting her. A small man slipped in, his head bowed as he hurried forward in a loping shuffle.

  She didn’t remember his name, but he was one of the sanitation workers who ghosted about the colony, silent as the void. When he stopped, he stared at her boots a moment before forcing himself to look her in the eye.

  She waited, and he finished muttering to himself as Nala started to grow impatient.

  “You’ll need to see this.” His gaze slid to Eri behind her. “And you too, Partner Dendrond.”

  Somberly, he led them through the halls and down through the colony. Nala hesitated when he led them past the guards to the core room.

  Their guide stopped but didn’t look down. With his head turned away, he pointed over the railing and closed his eyes. His mouth was tight with distress.

  Nala looked over the edge and immediately recoiled. The bodies below were lifeless and all too familiar. Steeling herself, she moved back to the rail and looked down.

  Kiln and Sharpo lay in a tangled heap at the bottom of the core, their clothing charred and torn. Their lifeless faces turned upward, unseeing eyes locked on her.

  “No. This doesn’t make sense. I saw them get on the transport myself. They’re off-moon and they aren’t scheduled to come back for another three days.” Nala’s quiet words echoed inside the chamber.

  Eri grimaced beside her. “Until we get the bodies out of there and do a DNA match, nothing is for certain.”

  Their janitorial guide shivered and swore. “I’ve eaten lunch with Sharpo most every day since I got here…. If that’s not him, I’d be scared to find out how he came to wear his face.”

  “It’s them,” Nala said.

  Station security was late to the scene, but they bustled them out and took statements in an efficient manner. And when they were done with her, Nala stepped out into the corridor, fell back against its curving wall and sank to the thin carpet.

  “They were supposed to be on leave,” she said, unsurprised when Eri sat next to her.

  “We’ll find who did this. And we’ll make them pay. This gives us more information. That is only going to help us catch them.”

  “No,” Nala said with a deep breath. “They’re telling us they can get at us no matter where we are; that nothing is safe. They can get into my apartment, they can kill two men we knew to be offmoon and they can leave them in the most heavily guarded part of the colony. Their scare tactics are working.”

  Nala stood in the center of the Partners’ council chambers with her head down, her eyes fixed on the floor and her mouth clamped shut. Around her, the four women argued over what needed to be done. Even Eri threw her opinions into the fray, though Nala had begun to think of her as a quiet oddity amongst the partners.

  Their hush was sudden and Nala’s mind replayed the sight of her dead colleagues without the din to drown out her thoughts. Snapping brought her attention back to the women in front of her.

  Chadha stared at her, annoyance visible in the set of her lips. She was the sort of woman from whom the phrase "terrible beauty" had come. Her dark eyes traced over Nala before she finally looked away. "The events of the past three days have been regrettable."

  "How long have your people been missing?" Turan asked.

  Swallowing the vile lump in her throat, Nala turned her attention to the questioning partner. "They weren't missing. I watched them get on a transport myself. They were on leave, due back in three days. If they hadn't been found, I wouldn't have thought anything was wrong until they failed to return."

  "You watched them leave?"

  Nala didn't respond. She wasn't about to repeat herself. "We should contact the port on Earth; see if they ever made it to the planetary surface."

  "Unfortunately, the outages yesterday have left our communications array inoperable. We might be able to contact Lunar Seven."

  Eri glanced at her, a confused moue contorting her face, but Nala couldn't ask her what was wrong yet.

  "Then we will have to do our own reconnaissance." Elodie picked up the tablet that had rested at her side and tapped through a series of commands. The lighting dimmed and one wall flared to life. "When did they leave?"

  "Four days ago."

  A few more commands and the wall screen flickered before blurring with static.

  "What's wrong?" Chadha asked.

  "I don't know." Elodie thrust the tablet at Nala. "Fix it."

  Taking the tablet, Nala glanced through the strings of code and reset the parameters. She tapped in commands but received nothing back. Another string of commands told her why.

  “The outages and the transfer to the aspersion hub caused all nonessential systems to wipe and reboot. It’s a standard command procedure from the era when the colony was built… t
he updates should have superseded the directives though.”

  She angled the tablet away and tried three more back door hacks she shouldn’t know and still nothing. The records… their backups, had been wiped entirely.

  As the others discussed the fault in the system, Nala leaned closer to Eri and said, “This is just one more nail in the coffin.”

  “You’re unfortunately correct.” Stepping forward, Eri cleared her throat and waited for the other three women to quiet down. “Nala has brought up a startling point. The bombs in the skywalk, the power failure, the deaths of her crew and now this security feed wipe… they lead her to believe – and I have to agree – that there is a connection, an end goal we don’t know yet. We don’t have enough information.”

  “Our lives would be easier if we weren’t in the middle of security shifts,” Partner Turan said testily.

  Nala knew they meant Boudri. Any changes to staffing meant upheaval of schedules and shift rearrangement.

  “We need to do a full personnel sweep,” Eri said, glancing over her shoulder at the other three partners. “If two of our denizens have been killed, there is a risk to others as well. It is our duty to the colony to be sure we’ve done our due diligence.”

  “Can you do that? Can you do it here?” Chadha looked at Nala and she swallowed heavily.

  Under normal circumstances, she would have said no. She wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, but the aspersion hub gave her more freedom of access.

  She nodded and said, “I’ll need Partner Dendrond to act as second clearance.”

  Chadha’s gaze bounced between them, her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Do it, divide up the sectors and send them to us so that we can get through them more quickly.”

  Nala went to the hard line console and pulled the keyboard from its cubby.

  “How much focus does this need?” Eri asked as she punched in her authorization code.

  “Until I get the information back? Not much.” Nala glanced at Eri, her rigid posture was fraught with worry.

  “Good, we need to talk about that communications issue.”

  “I kind of think there are more important things than me suiting up and getting out there to fix the antenna array right now. It’s at the top of my list though.”

  “I’m not asking you to fix them. I’m concerned. We can’t send out, but Ethan Boudri contacted you.”

  “Transmitters and receivers are on different channels. Also, Ethan messes around with private comm gear in his spare time. He claims he didn’t have the aptitude to go into that sector, but I think he went for the job that required less training and got him a stunner.”

  “Regardless, when we’re done with this, I want you to look into it. Something about that call didn’t sit well with me, and this just adds to it.” Eri waved her hand in frustration.

  The computer let out a trill signaling its completion, and Nala began dividing up the sectors, sending them to the partner’s tablets. Directed to a seat, Nala finished separating the sections as Chadha spoke.

  “We’ll do a full count first.” Chadha directed the others as she pulled her own portion up.

  She turned her attention back to her sector. Ten minutes later, they had a head count of seven hundred and fifty six. Chadha and Elodie exchanged a grave look. They were missing five.

  Turan glanced from the numbers to Nala. “Do a second sweep of the medical sector. Someone could have been in an isolation tank. Their signature wouldn’t show up if they’re in a therapy session right now.”

  Nala ran a double sweep of the sector and they quickly did a check of the numbers against those found the first time through.

  They were the same. Silence descended around them and for the first time in her tenure as the Colony’s maintenance chief, Nala saw true fear in the eyes of the women around her.

  Turan looked at them gravely. “We need to get out there and do an actual search of those sections where people could hide.”

  Elodie swallowed audibly before saying, “or where someone could hide more bodies.”

  Chadha took charge, dividing up tasks and directing them down the lift as a group. Tension was high, voices were low.

  As they descended, Nala keyed a command to her scan program. She only had access without overrides because of her control of the aspersion hub. She had a feeling Chadha wouldn’t be happy if she knew she was abusing privileges. The program would search for discrepancies – something she hoped it wouldn’t find.

  Two security guards met them as she and Eri stepped out on level two. Together, the four of them made their way toward the core. Its shielding would keep the scans from detecting heat signatures, and its lack of regular use made it an ideal hiding spot.

  Nala did not want to find any more bodies. The guards took point as they neared the sealed hatch. One pulled her stunner while the other turned the heavy wheel release.

  The space was, thankfully, empty.

  “Do a second sweep,” Eri said, and then added, “just in case.” From her bag, a melodic trill announced the completion of her program. She flipped through the data while they walked. Movement didn’t register unless it was sudden, and so there was not much in the way of changes… but the fourth scan stopped her dead in her tracks.

  She looked at the scans taken ten minutes apart and flipped back and forth between the two time signatures.

  "There," she said, stabbing at the screen as Eri looked over her shoulder. "There were two full heat signatures, and now there’s one full and.... a body loses a degree and a half of body heat each hour after death.”

  “Get to robotics lab four,” Nala said to the guards. “Now. Someone’s dead or dying.”

  Nala followed behind the two guards, her focus on the nearer of the two. Her gray braid swung against her back as she ran, reminding Nala of an antique grandfather clock’s pendulum.

  They stopped in the dim corridor outside the lab and the guards motioned for them both to move back. Hand signals were exchanged, the door breached, and Nala waited for any sound. None came until one of the women called out the all clear.

  With her heart in her throat, Nala stepped to the doorway ahead of Eri and smashed her lips together to keep from crying out.

  In the center of the room, the murderer sat on her knees, her back turned to the body that lay on the floor. In one hand, she held the knife she’d used to slit his throat; her fingers were stained red. In the other hand, her fingers were caged loosely around a single, snow white lily.

  One guard kept her stunner trained on the petite woman as the other cautiously swooped in, her boot treads dragging blood across the carpet. The woman put up no fight.

  "Justice for mother moon." She spoke the mantra of the Face, her voice a rasping threat as they hauled her away. For a moment, her eyes lit on Nala and there was recognition in the murderer's eyes.

  Nala watched her go with a sinking dread. She’d never seen the woman before in her life, but it was clear she knew who Nala was. With a past as muddy as hers, that could mean trouble.

  Eri sent the other guard off in search of help and stood beside her, calm and composed. "We'll only have a few minutes before the sweep team gets here. They should have been by now, but with everything going on, we're all running a little slow. Make this as quick as you can, I shouldn’t let you in there at all."

  With the room cleared out, Nala stepped in and walked a wide circle around the stain on the thin deck carpet. She looked away from the body, the bloody line across his neck. She didn’t even know his name.

  Lives lost here were from mistakes made in labs or on the lunar surface. There hadn't been a murder since an ex con had infiltrated the construction crew of Lunar Colony Two. Now they had three.

  Swallowing the disgust she felt, Nala searched the perimeter for any signs of explosives. There would be a sweep team through in a few minutes, but if she found it first - and if it was another one of hers....

  She stopped, guilt hitting her like the full weight of gravity.
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  Eri wrapped her arms around her shoulders. "Take some deep breaths, okay?"

  Frustration welled in her eyes and her tears cascaded down her face in large droplets. She wiped away the tears and turned her attention back to the room. It was staged. A murder scene from whatever play the killer was acting out. The lily lay on the carpet, dotted red with fingerprints.

  "We can't do anything more here.” Eri said. “Come with me and we'll see what that woman knows. It may be nothing, but it could be enough to get us out ahead of whatever she's done before we caught her."

  "But we didn't catch her."

  Eri's brow furrowed and she cocked her head to the side. “We didn’t?”

  "She was waiting for us, like this was all part of her plan," Nala explained. "I hope we aren’t playing into her hand."

  They waited outside the door as a sweep team, including Angela, arrived. The incendiary specialist balked at the blood on the floor and glanced at Nala with a fear that reminded her of just how much they had to lose. She knew Angela would be making a trip to the nursery as soon as she was able.

  “The lily was a message,” Eri said quietly. “She knew it would be you who would find her.”

  “How?” Bitterness laced Nala’s words. “If this is some recompense for my past sins, why are others the ones being harmed?”

  “Maybe,” Angela said moving into their private bubble as the medical crew stepped in to remove the body, “this is her going off the deep end when she wasn’t able to kill you in the skywalk.”

  “No.” Eri’s denial was sudden and harsh. “This is not Nala’s fault. It is that woman’s fault. No one held her hand and drew it across that man’s throat.”

  Angela’s jaw twitched. “I wasn’t implying it wasn’t her fault. I only wondered if she wasn’t in panic mode because her original plan failed.”

  Shaking her head, Nala said, “She was calm – serene. She wasn’t even upset she’d been caught.”

  “If that’s the case, I need to do another full bomb sweep. I don’t trust anything anymore.” Angela hurried away.

  If this was her fault and anything happened to Angela’s daughter, Nala knew she would never forgive herself.