by Allen Steele
“Just keep an eye on the scope,” Curt replied, “and let me know if the hopper changes altitude, speed, or course in any way.” He smiled. “And warm up the fantome generator. Time to give it a test.”
VII
From the bubble cockpit of the IPF hopper, Joan watched the small, unblinking spot of light that was the civilian craft she’d trailed from the Straight Wall. It was an older hopper, the sort commonly used by prospectors in more remote areas of the Moon. The fact that it wasn’t heading in the direction of any major settlements led her to speculate whether the two suspects might, indeed, be nothing more than a pair of miners returning to camp.
Yes, they might be only a couple of troublemakers … but she didn’t think so. Something about them was more interesting than that.
A few hundred feet below, the highlands of the Moon’s southern hemisphere stretched out before her as a wilderness of sharp-peaked hills broken here and there by impact craters. Even in the middle of the lunar day, darkness lay deep within their shadows. This part of the lunar countryside didn’t have the comforting serenity of a mare, but rather a more chaotic landscape that had never welcomed visitors. If her quarry weren’t a pair of rockhounds, Joan reflected, they must have one hell of a reason for being here.
She carefully maintained radio silence—it was always possible that her signal could be intercepted, despite comlink encryption—and flew close to the ground in an effort to keep from being spotted. Staying in visual range meant that she might be picked up on radar, but that was a risk she’d have to accept. Joan could only hope that Cain would mistake her hopper for a water tanker on its way to Cabeus.
She had been following the other vehicle for almost an hour when the light above her slowly began to descend. As it did, it grew a little brighter, and Joan realized that it was slowing down as well. The hopper was coming in for a landing. Looking down, she saw the outer wall of a giant crater looming upon the horizon, the terrain surrounding it sprayed with rays of material ejected by some great primordial impact.
Joan didn’t have to check the console map before her to know where they were: Tycho Crater, almost fifty-three miles in diameter, one of the most prominent features of the lunar nearside. The hopper was descending upon it, spiraling downward as it made its primary approach for touchdown.
Joan pushed the stick gently forward, cutting her own altitude in hopes that she wouldn’t be spotted. Aware that she might lose track of Cain’s hopper once it entered the crater’s vast interior, she didn’t reduce her velocity, though, but continued to approach Tycho at the same speed. Never once did she let herself look away from the distant spot of light. Which was why, at just the moment that she got close enough to make out its rotary engine nacelles and tripod landing gear, the hopper did the impossible:
It vanished.
One instant, it was there. The next, it was gone.
At first she thought it was only an optical illusion. Perhaps the craft had momentarily turned in such a way that it didn’t reflect the sunlight. When it failed to reappear, she glanced at her radar. To her astonishment, its blip had disappeared as well.
“What the hell?” Joan’s mouth fell open as she looked first at the scope, then out the cockpit, then at the scope again. The hopper had still been a couple of hundred feet or more above the crater when it disappeared, so that wasn’t an explanation. And even if it was capable of going into stealth mode, it should have remained visible to the naked eye. Perhaps the hopper was somehow able to become invisible … but she’d never heard of any technology that could do both.
The crater wall was coming up fast. Joan pulled back on the stick and throttled up the engines, and the hopper soared up and over the rim. Now she was looking straight down into the crater; it yawned before her as a vast pit, its terraced walls twelve thousand feet deep, so far across that its opposite side disappeared over the horizon. The jagged tooth of the central mountain peak towered from the center, and although the inner walls cast long shadows across the rocky floor, she had a clear view of everything below the approximate point where the hopper had vanished. There was nothing down there …
No. Not quite.
Something glimmered on the crater floor about halfway between the eastern walls and the central peak.
Joan couldn’t make out what it was, but it wasn’t moving, and it appeared to be a little too big to be a hopper that had just landed.
Joan considered breaking radio silence and calling back to report what had just happened, but she cringed at the thought of admitting to Ezra that she’d lost her quarry. She could hear him already when she told him that Rab Cain’s hopper had disappeared like a desert mirage: I don’t believe in phantoms, Inspector. And the IPF never loses its man!
No, she wouldn’t report in until she’d checked every possible clue. So she pulled back on the throttle, twisted the stick down and to starboard, and commenced the right turn that would bring her in for a landing.
The hopper touched down about a hundred yards from what appeared to be an abandoned base: a mooncrete dome resembling an igloo, surrounded by smaller drumlike prefabs. No vehicles of any sort, though, and no signs of life. The windows were dark, and a dish antenna lay upon the ground where it had fallen.
Joan studied the settlement through the cockpit as she zipped up the front of her vacuum suit before going aft to put on her gloves, helmet, and lifepack. While she cycled through the airlock, she buckled her gun belt around her waist. This place was probably what it appeared to be, a ghost hab—there were several like it on the Moon, relics from the first decades of lunar colonization—but Ezra had drilled into her the fact that most IPF casualties occurred when officers failed to take precautions. Always prepare for the unlikely and you’ll never get caught with your britches down. Joan smiled as she tucked her pistol back into her holster. Ezra was probably the only man she knew who could say that and not have it come off as sexual innuendo.
Nonetheless, as Joan slowly walked across the crater to the base, it was clear that no one was here. When she got near, she saw the reason why: one side of the dome was collapsed, with a massive hole at the center of the wreckage. Walking closer, she peered through the shattered mooncrete at the blackened inner walls and twisted ceiling supports visible within. It appeared as if there had been a fire, one bad enough to reach the oxygen tanks of the life support system. The explosion had done the rest.
No telling how long ago this happened, but myriad bootprints on the gray regolith all around the site attested that it was quite some time ago. The bodies of the dead had since been removed, and the hab was visited many times after that, most likely by scavengers. Joan switched on her helmet lamp and let its beam travel across the ruined interior. No, nothing usable remained. All the furniture and fixtures were gone, and gaping holes in the interior walls showed where even the electrical wiring had been ripped out.
Joan walked around the base, inspecting the adjacent buildings. An empty flivver shed, a greenhouse with all its windows either broken or carried away, a power center with an open hatch and drag marks leading across the ground to a blackened spot where a small craft had once landed, evidence to the fate of the base’s nuclear reactor. Vacant stilts resting at skewed angles showed where the solar array formerly stood. The water tanks, of course, were long vanished.
For how long had this place been deserted? She could check the IPF database later to see if there was any record of what had once been here, but only if she was curious. Nothing here gave her a clue where Cain’s hopper had gone. Indeed, the more she thought about it, the more she suspected that he might have pulled a clever move. He’d only pretended to be landing, but as soon as he’d gone invisible—or at least seemed to; she still wasn’t convinced he’d done just that—he’d changed direction and flown away from the crater altogether, leading her to foolishly believe that he’d touched down.
“Randall, you idiot,” she muttered to herself. “He foxed you, but good.” Which was a pity, really. After the way Cain
kissed her hand back at the reception, she might have been interested in him …
No. Not professional. Not professional at all.
There was nothing left to do but report to Ezra, admit what had happened, and receive further instructions. Letting out her breath in a disgusted sigh, Joan turned and began trudging back to the hopper, unaware that hidden eyes observed her from within the ruins she’d left behind.
VIII
Fifty feet beneath the ruins of his parents’ laboratory—the part visible from the lunar surface, that is—Curt Newton watched as Inspector Randall walked away.
She appeared just a few feet before him as a life-size image within a projection cast against the wall of a large, circular room. The ceiling lights had been dimmed, so it appeared as if he was standing before a floor-to-ceiling window, with the crater floor just outside. The image captured by holocams concealed within the ruined hab was so realistic that Curt could have sworn, with just a few bounding steps, he could step through the window, walk up beside the young woman, and give her a tap on the shoulder.
He wished he could. If he’d had any choice in the matter, he would have.
“She’s cute, I’ll give her that.” Otho’s voice came from the darkness behind him. “But she’s not for you.”
“I’m afraid he’s right.” From nearby came Simon Wright’s voice, the same he’d heard earlier but with a mild electronic burr of a vocoder beneath it. “I know how you’d very much like to meet a young lady, my boy, but—”
“I’m not your boy,” Curt muttered under his breath.
“—what you did was dangerous. You and Otho were supposed to go there without being noticed, just two more members of the public. Instead, you got the IPF’s attention. And if it isn’t bad enough that you attracted the tiger’s notice, you stepped on its paw, too.”
“I didn’t step on anyone, Brain. I just kissed her hand, that’s all.” Curt tried not to sound annoyed, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Curt—” Otho sighed. “Screen off. Lights up.”
The image vanished and the ceiling lights came to life. They revealed a round room nearly thirty feet in diameter, its curved windowless walls lined with sliding doors leading to adjacent rooms and passageways. Crowded against the walls between the doors were the consoles and workbenches of a well-equipped laboratory devoted to a number of different disciplines: cybernetics, biotechnology, astrophysics, and xenobiology, among others. At the center of the room, just a few feet from where Curt stood, was a long central table, its chemical-stained surface fashioned from a polished slab of lunar basalt.
Directly above the table, in the center of the ceiling twelve feet above the floor, was a large round window comprised of multiple panes of lunaglass two inches thick. The window was presently closed from the outside by pie-wedge shutters fashioned to resemble a half-buried boulder. When open, the window became a skylight allowing the inhabitants to view the Moon’s eternal night sky … along with Earth, which perpetually hung in sight from the crater floor.
The shutters were closed, hastily shut when Curt had come in for the emergency touchdown. Otho was seated at the table, legs stretched out before him as he watched his friend with curious green eyes. Yet even the android’s gaze wasn’t as strange as that of the lab’s other occupant.
Resting upon the table was a saucer-shaped contrivance about two feet in diameter. Resembling a Chinese wok placed upside down over a serving platter, it had rotary ductfans evenly arranged around its outer circumference. Two small optical scanners that strangely resembled eyes protruded upon elastic stalks from a hemispheric bulge at the wok’s center; other lenses were inset around the bulge. Two multijointed arms, each with its own three-finger manipulator claw, were mounted on either side of the upper shell.
In whole, the machine resembled a drone. It was far more than that.
“It was a mistake, Curtis.” Simon’s voice came from a speaker just below the eyestalks. The fans softly whirred and the machine rose from the table. “I realize that you meant no harm, but Otho and I spent years trying to teach you the necessity of avoiding attention. And now, at just the moment when you needed to be as unnoticeable as possible—”
“Okay, all right. I understand … I blew it!” Turning away from the place where the holo had been projected, Curt threw up his hands in frustration. “I kissed her hand. Big deal. It’s not like I tried to … to…” He stopped to glare at the machine floating toward him. “What would you know about that, anyway?”
Simon halted in midair, eyestalks twisting around to study him. “That’s rather insensitive, don’t you think?”
Curt started to retort before he realized what Simon had just said. Embarrassed, he looked down at the floor. For just a moment, he’d forgotten that, deep within the machine, lay a cell filled with warm broth of oxygenated nutrients that biochemically resembled blood. Suspended within it was a human brain. Dozens of hair-thin wires led from its major lobes and the severed stalk of its spinal cord to the central functions of the machine surrounding it, thus enabling it to see and hear along with the limited ability to move and touch.
This was all that remained of Dr. Simon Wright, once one of the system’s foremost cyberneticists, now a disembodied brain existing in the eerie afterlife that had followed his body’s death from a rare and inoperable form of cancer. Upon his demise, Elaine Newton had overseen the experimental procedure, conducted in this very room by a robosurgeon programmed by her and her husband, that had transplanted the brain of Roger Newton’s mentor from his dying body to the specially adapted cyborg form that now kept him alive.
That was nearly twenty years ago, when Curt was still an infant. He’d never known Simon Wright as anything except the Brain, a nickname he and Otho had given him when they were both still young enough not to realize how callous it could be. Simon didn’t seem to mind, but on occasion he was obliged to remind his best friends’ son that he had once walked like a man.
“Sorry, Simon,” he said. “I forgot again, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but I forgive you.” One of the more interesting features of Simon Wright’s neural interface with his cyborg form was his ability to subtly manipulate the vocoder that gave voice to his thoughts, allowing him to express emotions as well as words. So while the vocoder had a slight buzz—Roger had still been trying to fix this imperfection at the time of his death—Simon’s voice sounded exactly the way it had when it was formed by a human larynx.
Otho cleared his throat. “Look, I know what you did was out of impulse. I might have done the same, if I didn’t give ladies the creeps.” He paused. “Come to think of it, who taught you to kiss a girl like that?”
Curt shrugged. “I saw it in an old movie. Something from the early twentieth century … I forget which one.” He grinned. “Like it? I thought it was kinda classy.”
“‘Kinda classy’?” Otho raised a hairless eyebrow. “Did you get that from the same movie?”
“She’ll remember it, that’s for certain.” Fans whirring softly, Simon floated across the room until he reached the elevated pedestal, upon which he rested to recharge himself. “What’s done is done. Crater sensors indicate that her hopper has just lifted off, so apparently your ruse fooled her.”
“Couldn’t have pulled it off without you and Grag. Speaking of whom…” Curt turned toward an open door leading to a nearby passageway. “Hey, Grag? Are you going to come in here?”
“Right away, Curt.”
Heavy footsteps, muffled only slightly by the threadbare carpet, came stamping down the hall. A few seconds later, an enormous figure walked into the lab: a robot, seven feet tall and constructed of dark gray titanium. While its body was designed to emulate the human form, any resemblance to a living person ended there; its limbs were cylindrical, its chest a solid and featureless mass, its hands knob-jointed and menacingly large. The robot’s face resembled an inverted shovel blade, with a broad forehead and a receding chin; there was no visible mouth, for its voice came fro
m a speaker hidden beneath the chin, and a nose was unnecessary.
The eyes were strange: oval and unblinking, with red lenses that softly glowed from within; they seemed to express emotions that the rest of its face was unable to convey. The robot always looked as if it was regarding the world with wide-eyed wonder, like an oversize child perpetually amazed by everything going on around it.
A representative from the Grag Corporation might have been surprised to find what had been made of one of its Series 320-A robots. That line was manufactured by the Grag factory in Youngstown, Ohio, principally as industrial construction equipment, with the 320-A performing the role of supervisor. This particular ’bot was no mere automaton, though, but something unique and unexpected.
“Nice work, getting the hangar doors open and shut in time.” Curt smiled as Grag marched toward them. “I imagine you had to disengage the automatic controls and go manual.”
“Yes, that’s what I did.” Grag halted a few feet from the table, massive arms dangling at its sides. “Once I disabled the motion-detection sensors and the servos, I was able to open the doors myself and close them again as soon as your hopper was on the landing pad and lowered into the hangar.”
“Yeah, well…” Otho crossed his legs and arms, assuming an unimpressed pose. “Don’t pat yourself on the back too much. You didn’t repressurize the hangar once we were down. Curt and I had to put on our gear again to climb out, and then we had to cycle through the airlock just to come in.”
Grag’s impassive face turned toward him. “I neglected nothing. If I had done as you said, there’s a chance the individual pursuing you might have seen the dust plume being vented through the hangar exhaust port when the regolith scrubbers came on. That would have indicated the presence of an underground facility. I made what I considered to be the prudent choice. I apologize for the inconvenience.”