by Stuart Gibbs
Only Zan had said that she sensed Nina was in trouble. If Nina was a fellow space alien, wouldn’t Zan have known? Or perhaps she had known, but had chosen not to tell me.
“Fine,” Chang said curtly. “Maybe there is a secret hatch somewhere. Frankly, I don’t have any better ideas. But to find it, we’ll have to measure every inch of this base and compare that to these plans. If there are any differences, then we’ll have a lead as to where the secret space might be.”
“That’ll take a lot of time,” Dad said.
“We’ve got a base full of people willing to help,” Chang replied. “And now we finally have something productive for them to do. I’ll pull everyone off their projects and get them working on this.”
“We’ll start with the mess hall,” Dad said, putting his arm around Mom.
“Thanks,” Chang told them, then turned to Daphne. “Run some security tests on your computer. If you find any evidence of tampering, let me know.” He stood and headed out the door. “Dash, come with me.”
I did as ordered, following him into the air-lock staging area. “Need me to help measure?”
“You and all the other kids. Go tell everyone school is canceled for the rest of the day on my orders. Why don’t you guys start with the gym?”
“Sure thing.” I started toward the rec room, but Chang caught my arm.
“Dash, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
Chang knelt before me so we were eye to eye. “Your parents were right about you earlier. You’re a really smart kid, and you sometimes pick up on things other people don’t. Even though this base is full of brilliant scientists, I trust your ideas as much as any of theirs. So if you come up with anything that you think is important—or even odd or strange—anything at all that could help us figure out where Nina is, come tell me right away, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Thanks.” Chang hopped to his feet and headed into the science pod. Normally, he was a proud person who walked with his head held high. Today he sagged, looking angry and frustrated.
I was flattered to hear how highly Chang thought of me—but it was disconcerting to see him so upset. After all, Chang was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. If he couldn’t figure out where Nina had gone, what chance did the rest of us have?
Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
EXERCISE EQUIPMENT
It might seem counterintuitive to think that exercise equipment, which is designed to improve your health, could actually cause injury or harm. However, a great number of injuries on earth happen while exercising or playing sports. You will be working out at least two hours a day in order to counteract the deterioration of bone and muscle mass caused by the moon’s low gravity—and any of the equipment can be dangerous if used improperly. In particular, lunarnauts are advised to utilize extreme caution when using the virtual-reality enhancements for any of these devices. Furthermore, the tension bands, while a necessary substitute for physical weights, have great potential for injury if allowed to snap back into anyone’s body or face.
Lunarnauts should follow the same basic safety procedures when working out on the moon that you would on earth: Warm up before strenuous exercise, don’t overexert yourself, be careful when competing in any sort of physical competition against a fellow lunarnaut—and remember to stay properly hydrated.
While all this may sound dangerous, do not be daunted. If done with proper care, exercise can be safe and great fun. In fact, the least safe thing you could do on the moon would be to not exercise at all!
SENTIENT NANOBOTS
Lunar day 217
T minus 37 minutes to Capsule Drop
“I know what happened to Nina!” Roddy cried suddenly.
We were with Kira in the gymnasium, taking measurements of the room for Chang. Violet, Inez, and Kamoze were there too, although they were only playing with all the exercise equipment. My parents had broken the news to them all that Nina was actually missing, not playing hide-and-seek, but none of them seemed too bothered by this. They hadn’t put together how dire Nina’s situation was—and no one felt any good would come of explaining it.
I fired the laser from a measuring device along the exterior wall between the emergency backup air lock and the corner. “What happened?”
“She wasn’t human,” Roddy said proudly.
I turned to him, startled, wondering if he also suspected she might be an alien. “She’s not?”
“No,” Roddy declared. “She was an amalgamation of sentient nanobots.”
“You’re an amalgamation of sentient nanobots,” Violet repeated, and then all the little kids laughed.
“Ha, ha,” Roddy sneered at them, then turned his attention back to Kira and me. “I’m serious. This is completely plausible.”
I checked the measurement the laser had given me—thirty feet—and compared it against the measurement in the digital copy of the blueprints on a tablet computer. The numbers matched. So far, every measurement I’d taken had matched the blueprints perfectly.
Roddy launched into an explanation, even though Kira and I hadn’t asked for one. “You know what nanobots are, right? Incredibly small robots. Well, there’s a top secret project at NASA to develop nanos that can work in sync together. If you had enough of them, they could take any shape they wanted to, then form a hive mind and behave as a single unit.”
Kira stared at Roddy. “You think Nina was a robot?” I would have expected her to immediately dismiss this theory as idiocy; instead she sounded surprisingly intrigued.
“No,” Roddy told her. “I think she was a billion robots. A nanotechnology prototype. NASA sent her up here to test her out. Then she must have malfunctioned or something and all the nanobots scattered, which is why we can’t find any trace of her now.”
“Where’d the nanobots go, then?” I asked.
“They could be anywhere,” Roddy replied. “They’re so small, you wouldn’t be able to see a thousand of them if they were right in front of your nose. They could even be in your nose and you wouldn’t know.”
“Eeeew!” Violet shrieked. “Snot robots!”
To my astonishment, Kira actually seemed impressed by Roddy’s idea. “Wow,” she gasped. “That’s amazing.”
Roddy seemed equally surprised that Kira had given him a compliment. He flashed her a wolfish grin. “Of course it is.”
Kira said, “I know in the past I’ve accused you of having some really stupid theories, but this one is different.”
“Really?” Roddy asked.
“Yes,” Kira said. “This one is incredibly stupid. It’s like a hundred times dumber than any of the others. I didn’t even think that was possible.”
Roddy’s face fell as he realized Kira had only been leading him on. “It’s not that stupid.”
“It is,” Kira told him. “Remember your stupid theory that aliens created spray cheese? This nanobot theory leaves that one in the dust.”
Roddy sat on a rowing machine, making a point of not working anymore. Not that he’d been working much to begin with. He’d mostly been lurking near Kira and trying to impress her. “Fine,” he said. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what happened to Nina?”
“Someone bumped her off,” Kira said, without even thinking about it.
Roddy laughed obnoxiously. “Right. And you think my robot theory is stupid?”
“No one has ever built a cloud of sentient nanobots,” Kira told him. “That’s sci-fi silliness. But people kill each other all the time. In fact, it’s even happened here at MBA already. So why couldn’t it happen again?”
I glanced at Violet and the other little kids, worried about them overhearing this conversation. They seemed to have lost interest in us, though. Instead they were busy trying to jump rope with the elastic tension bands.
I started to argue that Kira’s theor
y was wrong, as I knew Nina was still alive. But then I caught myself. In the first place, I couldn’t explain how I knew Nina was still alive without mentioning Zan. And second, just because Nina was alive didn’t mean someone hadn’t at least tried to murder her. After all, Zan had said Nina was in desperate shape with extremely weak vital signs. That could have been the result of an attempted murder.
Roddy was shaking his head, determined to argue against Kira’s theory himself. “There’s only twenty-four people here. The chance of there being two murders in this small a population is infinitesimal.”
“Maybe not,” Kira countered. “This is a really cramped place and we’re all stuck with everyone else, whether we like them or not. Everyone’s getting on each other’s nerves all the time here.”
“That’s not true,” Roddy said.
“Oh, no?” Kira asked. “You and your brother can’t go five minutes without fighting each other.”
“That’s different,” Roddy sneered. “All brothers fight.”
“Well, you’re probably fighting ten times more here than you would back on earth,” Kira told him. “Because you can’t get away from each other. And that’s the case with everyone else here too. There’s arguments all the time.”
“There are not!” Roddy argued.
“You’re arguing with me right now,” Kira pointed out.
“I am not!”
“Are you even listening to yourself?” Kira asked.
Roddy clammed up, trying to figure out how to argue his point without arguing.
Before he could try, I said, “Kira’s right. There’s been a lot of tension up here lately.” I’d noticed it well before Kira had pointed it out. Even though everyone at MBA had been selected in part because they got along well with other people, we hadn’t all been getting along as well as NASA had assured us we would. It seemed that everyone was always annoyed at someone else, if not two or three other people. Myself included.
Kira flashed me a smile, pleased I was backing her up. “And Nina’s probably involved in more arguments than anyone else, except the Sjobergs. People actually liked Dr. Holtz, and he got killed. Nobody likes Nina. I’ll bet half the base wanted her dead.”
“Whoa,” I said. “It couldn’t be that many. . . .”
“The Sjobergs don’t like her for sure,” Kira said. “That’s four right there. And she and Balnikov didn’t get along either. They’ve been arguing ever since he got here.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. Only a few days after Dr. Balnikov had arrived, Nina had chewed him out for how untidy he kept his workstation in the science pod. He’d responded by calling her something in Russian that my parents refused to translate for me. Things had gone downhill from there.
“That’s only five,” Roddy said.
“I know Dr. Kim and Dr. Alvarez were angry at her for something the other day,” Kira said, ticking people off on her fingers. “And she got all over Dr. Goldstein about the greenhouse not producing enough, so Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Iwanyi were mad at her. Chang certainly has issues with her. And while I’m at it, I’m pretty sure all of our parents do too.”
Roddy sat up, offended. “Are you saying you think my parents killed Nina?”
“I’m saying there’s no shortage of suspects,” Kira explained. “Everyone here had problems with her. Even Daphne, and she’s the nicest person ever. This didn’t necessarily have to be a murder that someone plotted ahead of time. Maybe Nina got on someone’s case about something and they got upset, and next thing you know, Nina’s dead.”
I glanced back at the little kids again. They were still jumping rope, oblivious to the dark turn our conversation had taken.
“Hey,” Roddy said, looking at me accusingly. “Nina got on your case last night. And no one ever saw her again after that.”
“I thought you said this murder theory was stupid,” I told him.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” Roddy warned me. “That’s exactly what I’d expect the murderer to do.”
“Dash didn’t kill Nina, you nitwit,” Kira said.
“How can you be so sure?” Roddy demanded.
“Because he was with me at the time she disappeared. We were up late last night playing cards.” Of course, this was a complete and total lie, but Kira probably realized it was easier than telling the truth.
“Oh,” Roddy said, sounding disappointed. I couldn’t tell if he was upset that I wasn’t the killer or because Kira had been playing cards with me and not him. Whatever the case, he’d apparently fully bought her argument that someone might have killed Nina. “One thing, though. If someone did murder her, where’s the body?”
“They got rid of it,” Kira said confidently.
“How?” I asked.
“Out there.” Kira pointed out the emergency air lock, toward the surface of the moon. “Think about it: If you killed Nina, you couldn’t just leave her there, right? Because the moment anyone found the body, they’d know she’d been murdered. And they’d probably be able to figure out it was you, because there’s security cameras up the wazoo here and there aren’t that many possible suspects, with us being trapped here and all. But suppose you ditch the body? Then no one knows it’s a murder. Instead everyone thinks it’s a missing persons deal.”
“Ditching the body wouldn’t be that easy, though,” I pointed out.
“Well, it wouldn’t be that hard, either,” Kira countered. “Carrying the body wouldn’t be a problem, because it wouldn’t weigh that much here. So the killer goes down to the control room, shuts down the security cameras . . .”
“How?” I asked again.
“Beats me. But they know how. Then they grab Nina’s body, suit up, and take her out the air lock. It’s no big deal if Nina goes outside without a suit, because she’s dead already. Then the killer carries her off somewhere and buries her in one of the big fields of moon dust.”
“Yeah!” Roddy agreed excitedly, really on board now. “There’s plenty of space to do that. That’s all there is out there: space. And it’s not like there are millions of people around to stumble across the body. And it won’t decay out there, so there won’t be any smell.”
“Not that we could smell it out there anyhow, because we’re always wearing space suits,” Kira chimed in.
“There’s no buzzards or rats to sniff it out,” Roddy said. “There’s no police dogs to track it down. Honestly, you could probably put a body out there and it could be centuries before anyone stumbled across it. Millennia, maybe.”
“And meanwhile, the killer gets away free,” Kira concluded. “It’s the perfect crime.”
I had to admit, her theory made sense. It certainly explained Nina’s absence better than anything I’d come up with. Plus, Kira was also right that, out of everyone at MBA, Nina was the person who seemed most likely to get bumped off—except for the Sjobergs. At one time or another, everyone had been angry at her for something. It gave me the willies, but I could imagine that, in a high-pressure place like MBA, someone might have snapped and killed Nina on the spur of the moment. Or at least, they’d attempted to kill her—and then left her for dead out on the lunar surface.
Even scarier, I could also imagine that someone might have plotted her murder ahead of time.
Any one of the Moonies Kira had said were upset with Nina might have felt their lives at MBA would be easier with her gone. And the Sjobergs certainly loathed her as well. I wondered if there was anyone with an even bigger grudge against Nina that I didn’t know about.
“We ought to tell Chang about this!” Roddy exclaimed. “He’s the second in command. If there’s a killer on the loose, he should know about it.”
“That’s a good idea,” Kira said.
For a brief moment, I wondered if it was. It suddenly occurred to me that Chang himself had a motive for wanting Nina dead: control of Moon Base Alpha. He and Nina had been the only ones who knew he was the second in command. Now, with Nina gone, he would likely end up in charge.
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p; I didn’t say anything, though, because I felt bad about even thinking that Chang might be the murderer. Although the truth was, Chang was an extremely strong man with a serious temper when pushed. I’d only seen it surface a few times, but when it did, Chang could be a very scary person.
“Okay,” Roddy said, hopping off the rowing machine. “I’m gonna go find Chang!” He hurried out the door without waiting for Kira, even though the murder theory was her idea.
But then, Kira didn’t make a move to follow him anyhow. Instead she turned to me and said, “Man, I thought we’d never get rid of him.”
I stepped back, surprised. “You mean, that was all an act? The whole murder theory was bogus?”
“No. It’s totally possible.”
“Then why aren’t you telling Chang about it? Roddy’s going to take all the credit.”
“Big deal. You really think Chang hasn’t thought of this himself?”
“He didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Yeah, because he didn’t want to freak you out. We’ve already faced one psycho killer here.”
I wondered if Kira was right about that. The idea of Nina being murdered didn’t seem that obvious to me. Frankly, I was a little disturbed that Kira had thought of it—and worked out the details so well. It seemed she had a darker streak to her personality than I’d realized.
Kira peered out the gym door to see if anyone was around, then signaled me to follow her. “C’mon. Let’s go do some real investigating.”