“Wait,” I said. “Can they turn around if they haven’t lit their nukes yet?”
The tech looked perplexed at my question. “Possibly. I wouldn’t really know.”
I grabbed Monica’s arm, “We have to get to flight ops. Make ‘em call that thing back!”
Monica gently took my hand off her arm, “I’ll take you to flight ops if you really want to go there, but they can’t call that shuttle back. Once it left the hangar, it was committed. It’ll be setting down on the lunar surface in about an hour and a half.”
She led me over to a couch and laid me down with my feet on her lap. The return of blood to my head cleared my head.
“So now what?” she asked.
I thought a minute, then said, “Can you get that flight tech back over here? See if he’ll show you the names on his manifest. We need to confirm Jonathan Teach was on that flight. Then find out if they check off the names of debarking passengers down on the surface.”
While Monica was talking to the flight tech, I called Lijuan. “Can you send me a list of upcoming shuttle flights going down to the surface?”
“I’m going to have to call you back on that one—the captain is here ordering his fire crew to force the door.”
“Christ on a crutch! Let me talk to him. They need to get a robot to open that door. There could be a bomb—”
There was a loud boom over the comm link. A full minute went by while I waited for Lijuan, wondering if I was ever going to hear her voice again.
“You called that one, boss.”
“Monica and I are on the way back. Gimme what you know.”
“There was an explosion from the hideout as one of the fire crew attempted to force the door. Captain’s orders.”
“Casualties?”
“Looks like the fire crewman… Nothing left of him. Maybe a couple of other crewmen. Too much smoke to tell for sure. I think the engineer. All gone.”
“What about the captain—was he hurt?”
“No, he was back here with Mak and me and the fire crew chief.”
“Good. I was hoping to save that pleasure for myself.”
“Get in line. Mak’s trying to keep the fire crew chief from killing him.”
* * *
“Stone!” the captain shouted. “I’m going to have you in irons! Look at the shambles your murderous incompetency has made of my station!”
I ignored him, no mean feat since he was shouting in my ear. I made my way over to Lijuan, “Where’s Mak?”
“He’s helping the fire crew. What’s left of them.”
The captain grabbed me by the arm and continued shouting. He’d really lost it. Spit was coming out of his mouth and getting all over my face—something I can’t stand. I grabbed his lapel with my good arm and shoved him against the bulkhead, my casted arm across his throat.
“Shut your fucking spaghetti-hole, Captain!” I had my mouth pressed close to the side of his face so my snarl would penetrate all the way to the middle of his pea-brain.
Then I dragged him over to ground zero, stopping when I found a human leg lying on the floor. It had a fireman’s boot on the end, the rest of the leg was bare up to the stump just above the knee. I forced the captain down onto his knees to look at it.
“This used to be one of your crewmen, Captain. This is all that’s left of him! This is what happens when your people don’t follow my instructions because of your goddamned orders! I warned them there would likely be a bomb in there. Goddamn you, you… sanctimonious sonuva bitch! I warned them!”
I guess I didn’t realize how rough I was getting with the captain—I practically had his face mashed into the bloody leg. Mak came up and pulled me away from him.
The captain got to his feet and dusted off his tunic. He looked around at the silent faces of the fire and security crew. His voice was cold and stony. The fact that he had finally angered me seemed to calm him.
“Take this man into custody.”
Nobody moved.
Then he shouted, “That’s an order! Take this man into custody!”
I shook myself free of Mak’s grip and approached the security men. Then in my calm voice I said, “As the on-site legal representative of SpaceCorp, I am relieving Captain Nation of his command. Please escort him to his cabin where he shall remain under house arrest until further notice. Post a 24-hour guard outside his door.”
One of the security guards let slip a smirk but quickly wiped it off. The guards were big guys. One of them got on each arm of the captain, lifted him up and walked him toward his quarters, his comical feet kicking the air.
“This is mutiny! I can have you executed!”
Mak looked at me, “You better sit down, boss. Before you fall down.”
“Just steady me, Mak. I need a look in that room.”
* * *
A day later, we were gathered in the war room, it being the only place big enough to hold all of us. Hank Larson’s head and shoulders were on the big wall monitor while he cross-examined my decision to arrest Captain Nation. Chief Ciccolella was auditing the meeting from a smaller inset on the monitor. Samantha King, captain of Einstein, was also conferenced in via another inset on the monitor.
“Where is Captain Nation right now?” Hank Larson asked.
“In his quarters, sir. House arrest,” the Chief of Security said.
“Chief Rogers, in your professional opinion was Detective Stone’s action necessary?”
“Uh, as someone who was on the scene, I would say it was. Yes, sir. Very necessary.”
“Who is running the station right now?”
“First Officer Boswell, sir.”
“Boswell… where is he right now?”
“Uh, her. First Officer Boswell is a woman. She’s on the bridge, sir.”
“Okay, Sam, can you speak to Detective Stone’s competency on this case?”
“Yes, I can. He is more than competent. I’d say bordering on prescient.”
“Was his decision justified?”
“I can’t speak to that since I wasn’t there. I defer to the senior officer on the scene, Security Chief Rogers.”
“Rogers? Can you attest to Detective Stone’s competency?”
“Yes sir. Detective Stone’s orders to leave the door intact for a robot to breach was very sound. Captain Nation’s decision to force the door almost resulted in a hull breach and many more lives lost.”
“Any idea where the killer got that much high explosive on a space station?”
I jumped in at this point. “It wasn’t high explosive, sir. He rigged a fuel-air device, probably got a small supply of LH2 and then rigged something to mist it into the room. Then a tiny spark and you’d get a blast that, as Chief Rogers described, could have resulted in a hull breach. If the perpetrator’s hideout had been another deck closer to the outer hull... Well, we were damned lucky.”
“Detective Stone, where is the perpetrator now?”
“We believe he is on the Lunar surface.”
“Has the Lunar surface commander been notified?”
“He has, but in the excitement he was not so informed until after the shuttle landed and her passengers debarked. I’m told that whereas embarking passengers are carefully screened, the same is not true of debarking passengers.”
“Can’t they just round up this Teach fellow from their general population?”
“No, sir. No one by the name of Jonathan Teach ever arrived. He boarded the shuttle—we think—but he never got off. He seems to be able to change his identity at will. Probably the finest hacker I’ve ever seen. Anyway, we don’t know what name he’s going by right now.”
“What steps is the surface commander taking to contain the killer?”
“Nuthin’, I hope. I told him to sit tight until we get there. I need the perp to think he got away. For now.”
“And when will you get there?”
“I’m hitching a ride in a few days on an LH2 shuttle to reconnoiter. Meanwhile, the regular surface shutt
le is going to take my team and some special equipment down a week from now.”
“Can’t we scramble a shuttle to get you down faster?”
“We could, but that would arouse suspicion. We need him overconfident. We need him to think he got away.”
“You have a plan?”
“Yes, sir.”
When I didn’t elaborate, he grinned and asked, “Do I get to know what it is?”
“All due respects, sir, but I’d rather you did not. Communications up here are less than secure.”
“You don’t even trust our laser link?”
“I get the idea of a laser link and it sounds really snazzy, but this guy is scary smart. If he wants to, he can crack any system we have. Our best defense is covertness. I’m kinda worried we may have said too much already.”
“Have you told anyone else the nature of your plan?”
“My team—Monica, Mak, Lijuan, Rogers. And I gave Captain King a heads-up, but no details.”
At the mention of Monica’s name, Larson’s face brightened.
“Hi, Monica!”
“‘Lo, Hank!”
“Are you good on Detective Stone’s plan?”
“I am.”
“Sam, how about you?”
“I’m cool, sir.”
“Then if there is no other business, I suggest we adjourn and let Detective Stone get on with it.”
As the room emptied, I heard Hank continuing the conversation with Sam and Chief Rogers, “We need to get Boswell patched in to discuss what to do about Captain Nation. Chief Ciccolella, you stick around too. We need more than a security force on the stations. Twelve stations up there with a thousand-odd people on each one—hell, it’s time we had a police force.”
“And a legal system, sir.” Chief Ciccolella said. “This business of hanging felons from the nearest yard arm is a bit dated.”
I heard Hank’s laugh as I walked out the door.
Outside, I caught up with Monica. “You know this Hank guy?”
“Yup.”
“I never met him before.”
“He’s good people.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Crew Cabin of an LH2 Shuttle
Monica helped me get settled into the jump seat on the LH2 shuttle. Like the shuttle I rode up here, LH2 shuttle cockpits are evacuated. I guess they figure with all that LH2 there’s no sense adding an oxidizer to the mix. Hangar areas on all stations are also evacuated for the same reason. We figured riding jump seat on an LH2 shuttle was the quietest way to get me down on the surface.
When she was done strapping me in, she put two of her gloved fingers against her face mask and made a kiss with her lips, then pressed them against my facemask, “Don’t take this personal—it’s just for luck.”
I grinned back at her. “It’ll be our secret.”
Then she left. She was some classy dame.
It had been a week since Teach had escaped on the passenger shuttle. That was a blessing for me, albeit a trifle frustrating. We thought we had captured all his murder apparatus, but I was still worried that devious bastard would think up some new way to off somebody while we were up here screwing around on the station. On the other hand, at least my head was clear. I had also quit seeing double, and had regained most of my balance. The flight surgeon had taken my cast off and injected me with some kind of fancy stimulus hormones to make the break heal faster. I had full and pain-free use of my left arm again. Meanwhile, I had spent several days boning up on lunar surface operations. I figured the more I knew about what they did down there, the better off I’d be to trip up our perp before he found his next victim.
LH2 shuttles are kind of like oceangoing tankers back when Earth had oil that needed ferrying around. They are topped by a cockpit that seats three—a pilot, copilot, and the flight engineer. The flight engineer spot had been obsoleted some years ago by automated flight control software, but they left the seat in just in case. I was the ‘just in case’ this trip.
Below the cockpit was the gigantic LH2 tank, 100 meters long. It has a zero-loss system so they don’t leak gaseous LH2 into the hangar deck. I know, ‘gaseous LH2’ is an oxymoron, but that’s what everybody calls it.
Underneath the LH2 tank—which they also use for shuttle propellant—sit the twin solid core nuclear thermal rockets. Solid cores are old technology, but they work fine for the Moon’s one sixth gravity, so SpaceCorp still uses them. Stick the nukes inside a beryllium shadow shield to keep the gamma rays pointed away from you and you’re good to go. Well almost. You still need a folding tripod landing gear at the lunar surface.
Takeoff from the station was pretty simple. The whole contraption is lying on its side secured to the hangar deck. When it’s time to go, the hangar deck floor is raised flush with the outer hull surface. At the right moment—timing is everything in space travel—the shackles are released and the shuttle flies away on a tangential trajectory away from the station. Once it’s about a hundred klicks away they light the rockets for the descent trajectory to the lunar surface.
“Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” I said.
The copilot turned around and tapped his mike switch.
“Sorry.” Did I just say that with a hot mike?
I would have liked to look out the window to admire the view on the way except that there were no windows. The pilot and copilot shared a giant monitor with lots of graphs and surface plots. They didn’t give me anything. Not even a toy steering wheel with a plastic horn that wouldn’t work in the vacuum. So, I went over my plan one more time.
Down on the surface, Commander Higgins was going to meet me an hour after touchdown. That would technically be around midnight except that it never gets dark at the lunar south pole. The idea was to give the regular crew a chance to clear the area and convince anyone who was watching that there were no passengers.
Once on the ground, Higgins and I would take the tunnel trolley to a separate barracks used by one of the special 6-man crews that was currently out prospecting for Helium-3. I read that Helium-3 will be important for fusion power someday, if they ever find rich enough ore. The important thing is that the barracks is far enough away from the rest of the water works gang so they can’t see what we’re up to. Hopefully Teach, or whatever name that asshole was going by now, would not be able to spot me and clop me on the head with his pry bar again.
A few days later, Monica and the rest of the crew are supposed to bring down a small genetic sequencing device. Higgins told me there was a small room off to the side of the mess hall where we could set up our ‘screening lab.’ Rogers and a few of his men would shunt people from the chow line into the lab for a simple little test. Nothing more than a cotton swab inside the cheek and then you could go eat your meal in peace. Lijuan, dressed up like a flight nurse but with gloves and a face mask, would check badges against a roster of the people as they made their way in to the mess hall.
The story we would circulate was that Human Research had found a genetic linkage between a particular mineral found on the Moon and a rare form of virulent cancer. I was going to say contagious but Monica shot me down on that one. “Everybody knows cancer is not contagious. Tell them it’s curable but only if we get to it in time.” ‘Curable if gotten to in time’ That works. So anyway, ‘SpaceCorp is now ordering all lunar surface crew to undergo genetic screening.’
We anticipated two possible outcomes of this little scam. The first possibility was that Teach would be unaware that we now had his DNA on file and would just go quietly through the genetic screening. Once we had positive ID—maybe fifteen minutes after sampling—we’d just grab him inside the mess hall while he was eating. We set the probability of this outcome at less than ten percent.
The second possible outcome was that he would figure the cancer story was bogus and that we were out to nail him with the DNA we got off my knife. He would then avoid the mess hall and attempt to stow away aboard the next shuttle heading back to Borucki since that was the station that housed all
lunar surface workers. Mak and a few of Rogers’ men were maintaining continuous surveillance on all outgoing shuttles to try to catch anyone sneaking aboard. If that happened I would attempt to board the shuttle and apprehend him. Truth be told, Monica is better suited than me to bring the guy down, but as a civilian deputy I couldn’t ask her to do that. This was going to be on me. Besides, if things went sideways in the screening room, we needed somebody there who could handle herself.
It was a good plan. If Teach was on the Moon, we’d either flush him out or starve him out. Yeah, if Teach was on the Moon. We are gonna be so fucked if he’s not.
PART III
Chapter Twenty-Three
Passenger Area
Landings on the lunar surface are always done in the traditional vertical fashion. There is a large concrete pad—actually a regolith surrogate for concrete—in the bottom of a nearby crater. The crater walls keep detritus from the landing rockets from spattering structures and/or people that don’t take well to high velocity debris.
A gantry collected the pilot and copilot as soon as the hatch opened. I bided my time after they left with my suit plugged in to the umbilical for O2 and heat. They rode the gantry down to a tunnel system that is evacuated for the first hundred meters. Then they went through an airlock and entered a passenger area much like the ones on the space stations. At that point they could remove their helmets and gloves. There are no suit lockers at the surface colonies. People can be miles away from the passenger area and suits are best kept nearby should there be an impact or other form of structural breach.
An hour after the regular pilot and copilot left, the gantry returned for me. On it was the lunar surface commander, Henry Higgins. He seemed like a likeable chap from what I could tell through his helmet visor.
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