The Dark Side

by Anthony O'Neill

  It didn’t go completely to plan, of course. One of the men—the Japanese—was surprisingly quick to react. He somehow managed to slither away and hide so effectively, somewhere within the warren of rooms, that he couldn’t be found anywhere. So in the end the droid just sabotaged the fuse box and left all the airlock doors open, trusting that depressurization and loss of oxygen would account for him. And then he simply walked way.

  And here he is now, four days later, steering the Dark Side Tours rover along the floor of the Sea of Moscow. For as long as possible he drove in sunlight on the western side of the day-night terminator, to extract as much solar energy as possible for the VLTV’s batteries. But he could not keep heading off-road indefinitely, and eventually he steered back onto the maintenance path and allowed the night to overtake him. He drives presently on hard track in full dark, and will do so, he expects, all the way to Purgatory.

  But now the VLTV is straining. He cannot quite understand why, and has no relevant memories to draw upon, but the vehicle is not moving as fluently as it did when the original driver was behind the wheel. The droid wonders if it’s malfunctioning. He wonders if it’s up to the task, if the temperature plunge has had some terrible effect on it, and why everything made by humans is so hopelessly inefficient.

  He stops the vehicle for a few minutes, inspects the control console, and rummages through the compartments for an operations manual. Nothing. He continues on his way for a while, experimenting with different gears and speeds, but the groaning sounds continue. He decides the VLTV is unreliable and he will replace it as soon as possible, even if that means killing someone. Failing that, he will have the vehicle repaired, and then kill the person who repaired it.

  He reaches the northern coast of the Mare Moscoviense, passes through a rift in a crater rim into the highlands, and drives for another three hours in complete darkness. He passes between boulders the size of forty-story buildings, and under cliffs a thousand meters high. And just when it seems his vehicle is about to grind to a halt, he sees something remarkable in the sky.

  It’s a giant Christian cross, huge and tan-colored, just hanging in the air to the east. It’s at least twenty meters high and made of low-albedo lunar bricks. It’s mounted just high enough to catch the last rays of sunlight, while everything underneath is swamped in darkness.

  To the droid, who finds in his memory similar images of religious iconography, it represents a sign of human presence—and a promising new possibility. He steers the faltering vehicle to the right and enters a huge depression in the landscape.

  When he is two hundred meters distant his fading headlamps make out a habitat, much larger than any building he’s seen since leaving Seidel. It’s mound-shaped and thickly shielded with regolith. There appear to be other mounds connected to it, along with a greenhouse. And in front of it is a graveyard—perhaps twenty undecorated crosses the same color as the one in the sky.

  Leaving the headlamps on, the droid opens the airlock and works his way out of the vehicle. He stands for a minute in the darkness, scanning the area with his night-vision sensors. But he discerns no other vehicles of any kind. Even the dust in the graveyard is smooth and footprint-free. He steps forward and inspects the names on the headstones.

  Jacob Zook.

  Miriam Schrock.

  Samuel Graber.

  Sarah Lengacher.

  He walks through the graveyard to the front door. He sees no cameras above the airlock. But there is a window set into the door itself at eye level, and through this he can see the inner airlock door. Beyond that he can make out fluttering light. It looks like candlelight. The droid decides he will ask the strange people of the cross for assistance. But he’s fully aware that the mangled corpses in the VLTV might prompt some awkward questions. So he goes back to the vehicle and drags them out—all seven of them.

  There’s an open pit on the edge of the graveyard and a shovel nearby. The droid dumps the busted and bloodied bodies into the pit, one atop the other, stamps them into place, and then covers them with lunar dust. He smooths the surface with such finesse that a casual observer might never realize there had ever been a disturbance at all.

  Then he replaces the shovel and returns to the habitat door. There’s no button or buzzer, so he starts knocking—pounding, loud enough to wake the dead—as the headlamps of the VLTV finally give out and he’s swallowed completely by Nocturnity.

  35

  AT THE MORNING CONFERENCE Justus assembles everything discovered about the previous day’s four victims: Kit Zachary, the prostitute Charlene Hogg, the pimp Dexter Faust, and the tousle-haired killer Jet Kline. There have also been two other murders in Sin in the last thirty-six hours, which ostensibly are unrelated, though Justus rules nothing out. Including the victims of the Goat House bombing, it adds up to nine homicides in forty-eight hours. Justus has experienced worse on Earth, during a gang war in Vegas, but the cops in that case—the good ones—were energized by the lawlessness, and for weeks they buzzed around the city high on caffeine and righteous indignation.

  In the PPD, however, the prevailing attitude still seems to be that everything will fall into place if everyone just waits long enough. Occasionally the officers seem to be aware that they’re not feigning enough enthusiasm, resulting in some tepid displays of determination, but overall the performance seems to have exhausted them. They’re like actors who can no longer be bothered memorizing their lines. And Justus is like a beleaguered stage director working from a completely different script.

  Nevertheless he ends the conference by issuing assignments. He wants the origin of the blade that Jet Kline used to kill Dexter Faust. And the source of the crystal meth found in Kline’s pockets. He wants statements from all the prostitutes operating out of Cherry Poppins, and a list of all their clients for the previous two days.

  In truth he doesn’t expect much in the way of results, even assuming that any genuine information isn’t filtered before it gets to him, but effectively he’s putting on a bit of show, a diversion with one end in mind. Which comes when he addresses Grigory Kalganov.

  “And you,” he says, “I want you to go to the Revelation Hotel—see what you can find.”

  As if on cue the Russian frowns skeptically, so Justus sets him straight.

  “That’s right—the pimp Faust told me his girls picked up high-profile customers there. So I want you to grill the staff there, all of them—any problem with that?”

  Kalganov frowns again, so Justus doesn’t spare him.

  “And I could do with a little less attitude, okay? Least you can do is pretend to be interested in your duties, like everyone else here. Get me?”

  He’s speaking in a loud voice but not overdoing it. While staring meaningfully into the Russian’s eyes. And in the end it achieves its purpose—everyone in the squad room gets a minor rebuke, enjoys the humiliation of a fellow officer, and misses the real intent of Justus’s order. But the Russian doesn’t.

  He sniffs, looks at Justus with narrowed eyes, and says, “The Revelation Hotel.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  An hour later Kalganov is at the reception desk of the Revelation with one eye trained on the mirror. When he sees Justus pass through the lobby behind him, he immediately wraps up his interview and follows the lieutenant down a corridor and up some stairs, and minutes later the two men are sitting in one of the hotel’s so-called speakeasies.

  “Are these things reliable?” Justus asks.

  “Rooms are rooms,” says Kalganov, settling into his chair. “It is people who are unreliable.”

  “Well, you can rely on me,” Justus says. “But you already know that. You wouldn’t have whispered in my ear if you thought otherwise.”

  “You were nearly killed, is what I hear.”

  “What about it?”

  “I just wonder how you know you can rely on me?”

  “I don’t. But you’ve been scowling at me from the start, haven’t you? You never even tried to hide your
feelings. That mightn’t mean shit, of course, but to me it gives you credibility.”

  Kalganov has a smile so thin it doesn’t even qualify as a smirk. “You know, I think there is only one way to know if you can trust me, Lieutenant.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “If I get killed—by accident—a day after talking to you.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “I hope so too.”

  Justus examines the Russian’s face. His eyes seem permanently squinted and pouched, he’s got stubble that would blunt a razor and wrinkles as deep as cracks in cement. He looks, in short, like a man who’s lived in hard country, seen terrible things, and surrendered any capacity for surprise.

  “You’ve been in the PPD for eight years, is that right?”

  “Eight years, nine, I do not count.”

  “And you’ve never been promoted?”

  “I do not expect to be, Lieutenant.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I have never liked playing games.”

  “But you’re playing one now—you realize that? By tipping me off? By sitting here with me?”

  Kalganov shrugs, sucks on his lips. “They have a saying where I come from, you know. The rooster’s philosophy: Moyo delo prokukarekat’, a dal’she—kvot’ ne rassvetay. ‘My job is to cry cock-a-doodle-doo—and after that, I do not give a shit.’ ”

  “You don’t look like a rooster to me.”

  “No, but I do not try to change the world either. I look the other way when I have to, which is many times around here, and I do not stick my beak where it is not wanted, which is many places around here. It is another Russian proverb: Men’she znayesh’—krepche spish. ‘The less you know, the better you sleep.’ ”

  “So what happened? What made you speak to me yesterday?”

  “I started to lose sleep.”

  “Guilty conscience?”

  Kalganov gives his quasi-smirk again. “You know, many years ago I worked in a morgue. In a place called Yakutsk, in the Sakha Republic. You would not have heard if it.”

  “I’m ashamed to say I haven’t.”

  “It is a place more desolate than the Moon. And every month I would see bodies brought in, the bodies of native tribesmen—Yakuts, reindeer breeders and hunters. Young people, some of them, boys and girls. The most healthy people in all Russia, and they were dying for no reason. So there were autopsies, many secret autopsies. Because they said they wanted to find out why these tribesmen were dying. But they never did find out. And the bodies kept coming in, and the autopsies kept being performed. Many, many autopsies. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  Justus thinks about it. “The bodies were being mined for their organs?”

  “The tribespeople were being killed for their organs. Because the Yakuts did not drink or smoke, because they did not inhale pollution, because they did not ingest pesticides, because they drank only spring water. Top-quality goods. The best organs in the world. And if an oligarch in Tyumen desperately needs a kidney, do you think he asks where it comes from?”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. Of course I did nothing. The wise cricket keeps to its hole. And who was I anyway? A morgue attendant? What could I do? Report it to the police? When the police were part of it? No, I was mute as a fish. But it stayed with me—the experience. Svovey teni ne obgonish—‘You cannot outrun your shadow.’ And it changed me in the end. It changed me very much.”

  “It made you a haunted man.”

  “Oh no.” Kalganov’s smirk now looks like a grimace. “It made me a worse man. A much worse man. Because . . . do you want to know what I did? Back in Sakha?”

  “Not really.”

  “I started killing Yakuts too. I worked for the men who were murdering them. I went out and hunted them down as well—the tribesmen. I shot them. I gassed them. That was how I outran my shadow, Lieutenant. Because you cannot see your shadow in a world of darkness.”

  Justus, chilled, feels like a father confessor. “The world of darkness led you all the way here, to Purgatory?”

  “It did. And close enough to death to see that there is something worse than dying—and do you know what that is? It is seeing your own shadow in complete darkness. In the middle of the night. It is seeing the darkness all over again, in a different place. Everything I thought I had outrun. I hope you understand.”

  Justus suddenly remembers the expression on Kalganov’s face when Chief Buchanan ran through the story of the cult in the isolated compound—the one that was wiped out when their air filters were supposedly sabotaged. And a terrible possibility occurs to him.

  “It happened again,” he says. “Didn’t it?”

  Kalganov looks at him, eyes even narrower than usual. But he doesn’t say any more. He lets Justus knit the facts together.

  “The Leafists, the ones that died right here in Purgatory—they were killed too. For the local organ trade. Because they were in perfect condition, unpolluted, premium goods . . . and because no one would care.”

  Kalganov nods grimly. “You are not dumb, Lieutenant. The cult was invited here for a reason, that is true. And they were allowed to live here for a few years while their bodies adjusted, that is true also. But I must correct you. These organs, they are not good for people from Earth—they are too big—and do not often end up in the organ trade.”

  Justus thinks about it. “They were used for locals, then—the billionaires, the mobsters—they were cultivated for that reason . . .”

  Kalganov shrugs. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe . . . ?”

  “Maybe they were used for gangsters eventually—that I do not know. But I do know that their organs were originally meant for one man. For one man and the members of his expeditions.”

  “For Brass?” Justus says. “For Fletcher Brass?”

  “For him and the others. There is much radiation in space, is there not? And solar fluxes that make pacemakers and other devices malfunction? So the pure organs, they were to be held in storage, in case transplants were needed on the trip to Mars.”

  Justus thinks about it some more. “But if that’s true, then why were the Leafists not killed more recently? Closer to the launch date?”

  “I think that Brass did not care to wait, in case something went wrong. And he needed a new kidney anyway. So it was easy enough to put the other organs on ice.”

  “And they’re still on ice?”

  “In the spaceship, in lead-lined freezers. Ask to see them, if you dare.”

  Justus shakes his head—it’s breathtaking. “But that’s genocide. It’s a crime against humanity.”

  “That’s for the World Court to decide—if it can.”

  If it can. Justus remembers the murky waters of Purgatory’s legal status, and all the rumors of secret deals with world superpowers . . .

  “How many people know about this?” he asks.

  “Enough people know.”

  “How many have proof?”

  “I do not know. What is proof?”

  “Does QT Brass know?”

  “Ask her. But my guess would be yes.”

  Justus’s mind is racing. “And is it possible that Fletcher Brass is eliminating the people who know too much?”

  “I would say no, Lieutenant—there are too many people who know too much, and he cannot kill them all.”

  “But if everyone knows . . . and if the world finds out . . .” Justus remembers QT telling him about the maximum-security penitentiary. She said it was the reason her father was trying to frame her. So is that it? Is she building the penitentiary to hold her own father? For crimes against humanity? If you give it enough feathers you can make anything fly.

  Kalganov looks at him with amusement. “You are wondering about Fletcher Brass and his daughter—if all this is part of the war between them.”

  “Do you know?”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Do your colleagues know?”

 
; “Some of them, I suppose. But me—I’m just that cricket in its hole. But I will say this, Lieutenant. Both of them, Mr. Brass and his daughter, have a thousand ears and a thousand eyes. They both have connections everywhere, even in the PPD. They are each as big and dangerous as the other.”

  Justus nods. He has to admit he’s wondered about QT—if she’s even more devious than her father. “What about my appointment, then?” he asks. “To the PPD? Do you know who authorized it?”

  “Is that important?”

  “I’d just prefer to know.” The lists supplied by QT showed only that his entry into Purgatory had been officially signed off on by Otto Decker. Which could indeed be true—Decker was nominally in charge of the Office of Law Enforcement at the time—but there’s no way of verifying it now.

  “I know only that it came from very high up,” Kalganov says. “And when this happens, I look the other way. I ask no questions. Just as you should not ask too many questions—not if you want to live. And that is my final warning to you. As someone I hope you can trust.”

  “I’m too deep now.”

  “It is not too late. You can pull out.”

  “I won’t be pulling out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t.”

  Kalganov pauses but seems strangely impressed. “Then you are a stubborn man, Lieutenant. But it will not save you. Nothing will save you. They will come for you in the end. And this time they will do more than splash acid on your face.”

  Justus does his best to shrug it off. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he says—it’s the best he can do.

  The two men get to their feet and shake hands. Kalganov’s palm, Justus notices, is cracked and leathery. The Russian seems to read his mind.

  “Formaldehyde,” he explains. “From the morgue.”

  “Then it seems both of us,” Justus says, “have gotten a little too close to acids.” And Kalganov actually cracks a smile—the first time Justus has seen anything like it.

  But by the time they’ve reached the door it’s completely faded. “One last thing,” the Russian says. “About Fletcher Brass and his daughter. About their place here in Purgatory.”