by Stuart Gibbs
“I get that, but Nina’s life might be in danger. . . .”
“Millions of humans’ lives are in danger every day. I can’t help them all.”
“This is different.”
“No, it’s not. I am not authorized to alter the fate of any human being. It would be wrong to do so.”
“You altered the fate of Dr. Holtz,” I pointed out.
Zan recoiled from me, like I’d offended her. “Garth Grisan was the one who killed Ronald, not me,” she snapped.
“I know,” I said. “But he still did it because of you.”
Zan calmed down and sighed sadly. “I suppose you’re right. If I had never made contact with Ronald, he would still be alive. Which is exactly why we are now keeping our contact a secret. But even if I wanted to contact Nina, there is a good chance it wouldn’t work. I can’t appear to just anyone. Only those with minds open to it.”
I stopped pacing, intrigued. “What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. As you know, every human is different. For example, some are far more open to new ideas and experiences than others. In a way, I can sense those who are the most agreeable to contact. With you and Dr. Holtz, I immediately knew it would work. With others, I am not sure. And with most, I know it won’t. It’s as though there is a shell around their minds.”
If there was anyone I could imagine with a shell around her mind, it was Nina. “So, you couldn’t even try?”
“It takes a great deal of effort for me to even appear to you. I would hate to expend so much energy for no reason.”
I suddenly had another idea. “If you can sense our minds, then can you at least sense Nina’s right now? You wouldn’t have to appear to her. But you could still figure out where she is, right?”
Zan didn’t answer me for a bit. She seemed to be considering her options. “I don’t know.”
“Well, could you give it a shot? Please? I think she’s in danger.”
Zan sighed. “If it means that much to you.”
“It does.”
“It won’t be easy. And I can’t promise anything.”
“Whatever you could do would be great. Anything at all.”
Zan stood, her eyes locked on mine. And then I felt her leave my mind. For a few moments, her body was still there, but her eyes were vacant, as though her own mind was somewhere else. Then the image of her flickered and disappeared.
I started pacing again, unsure what to do. I hadn’t expected Zan to completely vanish, and now I wasn’t sure when she’d be back.
The SlimScreen in the room chimed, indicating a message over the public address system. “Attention, all MBA residents,” the base computer announced. “The unmanned rocket is en route to deliver Supply Capsule Twelve. Capsule Drop will commence at the Moon Base Beta drop zone in one hour.”
So much had been going on, I had forgotten a drop was scheduled for that day. Although the delivery of a supply capsule wasn’t nearly as momentous as the arrival of a new crew of Moonies, it was still a break from our usual routine. And any break from our dull routine in space was like a holiday back on earth.
NASA was gearing up for construction of Moon Base Beta, which would be significantly larger and far more impressive than Moon Base Alpha (or so they claimed). MBA would serve as the base for some of the construction personnel, but because the MBB site was a mile away, an operations pod had already been erected there so people wouldn’t have to commute. Meanwhile, capsules filled with construction equipment and supplies were arriving every week. Each of these was quite large, holding as much stuff as a moving van.
The delivery rocket wasn’t even going to land on the moon. That would have been a waste of fuel. Instead, Supply Capsule 12 was going to be dropped from a few miles up while the rocket returned to earth. The capsule would then guide itself down to the site, using retro rockets to slow its descent. Since there were no humans in the capsule, the rocket delivering it was a drone. The entire flight was automated.
I paced around my room for another minute, then decided I couldn’t wait for Zan any longer. I had to get back to school. Dr. Levinson would be wondering where I was.
As I was heading for the door, Zan suddenly reappeared in front of me. Her image wasn’t perfect, though. I could see through her. I got the sense that whatever she had done to find Nina had taken a lot out of her.
“Did you find her?” I asked.
“Sort of.”
“Where is she?”
Zan frowned. “It doesn’t work like that. I only know where you are because you let me into your mind. I can only see things because you’re seeing them. I couldn’t get into Nina’s mind. I could only sense she was there. And that there was darkness around her.”
“You mean, she’s somewhere that’s dark?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it only felt dark because of how she felt.”
“So she’s still alive?”
“Yes, but you were right. She’s in great danger. Her vital signs were extremely weak. I don’t think she has much time left.”
“Do you know how much?”
Zan shook her head sadly. “I can’t be sure, but . . . I suspect that if you don’t find Nina in the next few hours, she will die.”
Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
ROBOTS
Just as on earth, many of the everyday tasks at MBA are performed by robots, rather than humans—particularly outside the base. In fact, given the highly technical nature of MBA, perhaps you will find more robots than you are used to. While the robots are extremely helpful, keep in mind that they are also potentially dangerous, with many moving parts and sharp edges. And though some of the smaller robots might look harmless, they are not toys! They serve extremely important functions. To avoid injury, all lunarnauts are advised to avoid touching or handling the robots in any way—with the exception of the moon-base roboticist.
DEAD ENDS
Lunar day 217
T minus 55 minutes to Capsule Drop
Instead of going back to school, I went to look for my parents. If Zan was right, every minute counted for Nina.
I found them with Chang in the control room, examining an image of the blueprints for MBA on the SlimScreen. Daphne Merritt was there too, though she appeared to have something on her mind other than Nina.
“I don’t know what could have happened to them,” she was saying. She sounded unusually stressed out. “I’ve never had anything like this occur before.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Most adults probably would have told me it was none of my business, but Daphne did her best to flash a smile and said, “My robotics logs from the last week have vanished.”
Mom looked at me and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be in math right now?”
“Dr. Levinson gave me permission to leave,” I said.
“For what?” Mom asked.
I hesitated a moment before answering. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth about why I was there—the alien that only I could see had sensed that Nina was running out of time to live—and I’d been in such a hurry, I hadn’t concocted a suitable lie yet. So I went with bending the truth. “I was worried about Nina. I think she’s in serious trouble.”
For a moment, it looked as though Mom was going to say I still ought to be in school, but then she softened. “You’re probably right.”
“We’re doing everything we can to find her,” Dad said. He sounded frustrated with himself, and Chang looked frustrated too. Everyone in the room was extremely intelligent. They weren’t used to not understanding things.
“Have you found anything out?” I asked. “Did you get the text off her watch?”
“I don’t know that we should be discussing this with you right now,” Chang said.
“What could it hurt?” Dad asked. “Dash was the one who figured out who killed Dr. Holtz.”
“Or that he’d even been killed at all,” Daphne added.
“And he’s the one who told us about the text Nina got in the first place,” Mom pressed. “We might as well have another mind on this. . . .”
“All right, I give!” Chang raised his hands in surrender, then turned to me. “The text wasn’t quite as helpful as we’d hoped. It was only someone sending her some music.”
“Music?” I repeated.
Chang tapped on the computer keypad and brought a list of text messages up on the SlimScreen. “NASA gave me authorization to hack into Nina’s personal account. According to your parents, you came back from her room at eleven forty-five last night. This was delivered to her at eleven forty-one.”
He highlighted a text from someone named Charlie. All it said was, “Heard these and thought of you.”
There were two songs attached. One was “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room” by Coronal Mass Ejection, which was Violet’s favorite band. The other was “Gimme Shelter” by an old group called the Rolling Stones. I knew about them because they’d been one of my great-grandfather’s favorites.
“Are you sure this is right?” I asked.
“It’s the only message she received during the time you were with her,” Chang replied.
“Maybe she got another and erased it,” I suggested.
“It wouldn’t matter,” Chang said. “Every communication to and from this base is logged by NASA. Even if Nina erased the message, there’d still be a record of it having come in. But there isn’t. This is all she received within a twenty-minute window.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you’d seen her then . . . well, she didn’t look like she’d only received some music. . . .”
“We know something’s important about this,” Dad told me. “Nina received other texts after this one came in, some of which were very important base business—but she didn’t open any of them.” He pointed to the list of messages on the SlimScreen. After the one from Charlie, they were all marked as unread. The first had come in at 11:47. “That’s not like Nina. It’s as though she disappeared right after Charlie’s music showed up.”
“And then,” Chang added, “this ‘Charlie’ isn’t a real person. It’s an alias someone set up.”
“Have you figured out who?” I asked.
“No,” Chang sighed. “Charlie did a darn good job of protecting himself through encryption. We’ve tipped NASA off, though, and they have people working on it.”
I said, “So, was whoever did this some kind of computer genius?”
“Probably not,” Chang replied. “It’s not all that hard to create a decent alias. I could do it when I was six.”
“But you are a genius,” I pointed out.
Chang laughed. “I’m not any smarter than anyone else on this base,” he said. “Including you.”
I was quite sure he was only being humble. Chang’s IQ scores were rumored to be higher than Albert Einstein’s. In addition to knowing everything about physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, he could also fix anything that broke at MBA and was a world-class pianist.
“Was Charlie’s message really about music?” I asked. “Or do you think it was really about something else?”
“Well, this Charlie actually sent the songs,” Mom said. “We listened to them. They weren’t encrypted files or anything.”
“And no additional files were piggybacked on them,” Dad added. “So we figure the music meant something to Nina somehow. A message of some sort. Only we have no idea what it could be.”
Mom asked me, “Can you be more specific about Nina’s reaction to this text? How was she distracted exactly? Was she scared?”
I thought back to my encounter with Nina the night before. “I don’t think so. It was more like she realized she had to do something.”
“Was she excited?” Daphne asked.
“No.” It was hard to even imagine Nina expressing excitement. Or think of anything she would even be excited about. “She just wanted to get rid of me.”
The adults all looked from one to another, like this might have meant something.
“Have you checked the video feeds from last night?” I asked. There were thousands of cameras around MBA, inside and out. Even in the bathrooms. The only place we weren’t recorded was in the privacy of our residences.
“That was the first thing we did,” Chang told me. “Only there was a glitch. The entire system went down for an hour last night.”
“Every single camera?” I asked.
“Yes,” Chang replied. “Starting a few minutes before midnight and lasting until shortly after one a.m.”
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Chang agreed. “I’ve never really dealt with the cameras before, so I don’t know if them all cutting out like this is common, but the fact that it happened on the same night that Nina disappeared is certainly suspicious. We’re assuming both events are connected.”
“Is there any way to recover the lost footage?” I asked.
Chang sighed. “Maybe. Unfortunately, the two people who knew the most about this system aren’t here. Garth Grisan is back on earth and Nina is missing.”
“Just our luck,” Dad muttered.
“Do you think that all this could be connected to the robots, too?” Daphne asked. “I mean, I haven’t had any trouble with the logs like this the whole time we’ve been up here. And now, the same night Nina disappears and the cameras go down, they get wiped out too? That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“There’s ten million things that can go wrong at this base,” Chang said. “To have three happen at once is easily within the realm of probability. But my gut says they’re probably linked.”
“What’s in the robot logs?” I asked.
“Detailed reports of everything the robots have done each day,” Daphne explained. “For some, like the maintenance bots, it’s nothing much, only a record of where they went and what they did. But for the drones and the surveillance bots, it’s all the data they’ve collected.”
“Patton and Lily were fooling around in the offices last night,” I reported. “Roddy saw them—and they got really upset when they realized he was spying on them. That’s why Patton tried to beat me up. He thought I was spying with Roddy.”
Daphne frowned at the thought of this. “He tried to beat you up for that? I’m glad you stuffed that jerk’s face in the toilet.”
Chang looked at me accusingly. “Patton and Lily were in here? Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“I only found out from Roddy this morning,” I said. “And then I heard about Nina being gone and kind of forgot all about it.”
Chang still looked annoyed about this, but Mom put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “That’s perfectly understandable,” she told me.
Dad said, “So maybe Patton and Lily are the ones who wiped out the logs. And whatever they did might have knocked out the cameras, too.” He looked to Daphne. “Did you find any evidence of tampering on the computers?”
“No,” Daphne admitted. “But someone who knew what they were doing might have been able to hide that.”
“We’re talking about the Sjoberg twins here,” Dad said. “I’m surprised those two can even breathe, let alone hide evidence of hacking a computer.”
“Maybe their dad helped them somehow,” I suggested. “He’s not that dumb, right?”
“You don’t earn a trillion dollars without some smarts,” Daphne agreed.
Mom asked, “What if the Sjobergs were connected to Nina’s disappearance? Like, Nina caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to and they retaliated.” When everyone stared at her, she added, “I know it sounds crazy. But I can’t think of anything more rational.”
“The Sjobergs have been acting very suspicious lately,” Daphne said supportively. “Lars and Sonja haven’t come out of their room in days. It’s like they’re plotting something. And we know they were angry at
Nina for making them stay at MBA when they wanted to go home.”
“Nina didn’t make them stay here,” Dad countered. “There was no room on the rocket to send them back. All Nina did was deliver the bad news.”
“She probably could have handled it better,” Daphne said. “She was awfully blunt with them. I know they don’t like her very much.”
“They don’t like any of us,” Chang pointed out. “And they’re certainly not holding Nina in their room. I searched it myself with Balnikov. Twice. She’s not there.”
“Maybe they’re holding her somewhere else,” Mom said.
Chang blew out a sharp breath, sounding exasperated. “Where?” He brought the MBA blueprints back up on the SlimScreen. “We’ve been poring over these for an hour. There’s no crawl space or anything like that in this building large enough to hold a person Nina’s size.”
“Maybe the blueprints are wrong,” Daphne suggested. “Maybe there’s a hidden space somewhere.”
“And the Sjobergs know about it while we don’t?” Chang snapped.
“Don’t be so testy,” Daphne scolded. “I’m only trying to help.”
Chang rubbed his temples, trying to calm himself down. “I’m not angry at you. I’m frustrated. I can’t make any sense of Nina’s disappearance. It’s completely impossible!”
“Obviously not,” Mom pointed out calmly. “Nina must be somewhere. She didn’t evaporate. So maybe Daphne’s right. Maybe there is a secret hatch or something in the base.”
“Why would there be a secret hatch?” Chang asked, still sounding testy.
“I don’t know,” Mom admitted. “For military purposes, maybe. After all, NASA let the military send Garth Grisan up here without telling us about it. Maybe there are other things they didn’t tell us as well.”
Everyone considered that for a bit. It was hard to believe there could be any hidden spaces at MBA, though. The base was kind of like a boat; it had been built to utilize every last inch of space. When room was limited, you couldn’t afford to waste one bit of it.
I suddenly found myself wondering if my mother was wrong. What if Nina had evaporated—or something like that? A month before, I would have thought this was ludicrous, but now I was friends with an alien who vanished into thin air all the time. Could Nina have been an alien too? I knew she wasn’t a mental projection the way Zan was—Nina had touched me, while Zan couldn’t—but what if she was a more advanced species? Maybe she had posed as a human and then disapparated somehow. Or beamed herself out of MBA, like they did on Star Trek. Yes, it sounded crazy, but I of all people knew it wasn’t impossible to encounter alien life. And Nina being from another planet would go a long way toward explaining her almost complete lack of emotion.