“Kangaroo,” she says. “I don’t have my tablet. You need to blink up your vitals and read them off.”
I nod, taking slow, deep breaths, and bring up the medical display in my left eye. I recite numbers to Jessica until she seems satisfied. She pulls the water bottle from my spacesuit and wraps both my hands around it. I don’t know why I’m trembling so much.
“Drink,” she says.
I chuckle. “Worst drinking game ever.”
“Stay here and rest.” She stands up and joins Khan and Hong, who are inspecting the compartment.
“Hong? Weapons?” Khan asks.
Hong is prying open hatches and cabinets. “Nothing yet. Probably up in the cockpit to keep prisoners from getting to them.”
Jessica is trying the control panel leading to the cockpit. “Total lockout.” She looks at the cockpit door. “Kangaroo? Can you see through this?”
I switch my eye to scanning mode and check the door to see its composition, and also to check for booby traps. Can’t be too careful when you’re riding in someone else’s spacecraft. Especially when that someone tried to shoot you just a minute ago.
“Looks clean,” I say, standing up.
Jessica steps back toward me. “You need to rest.”
“I’m okay.” I don’t know what was in that bunch of pills Jessica fed me, but they seem to be kicking in now. “Stand back, please.”
I open the pocket—just a small portal—and pull a plasma cutter and safety mask. Jessica grabs them out of my hand as soon as the portal closes.
“Read me your vitals,” she says.
I give her the numbers. “It’s cool. Your magic pills are working.”
She grunts. “All the same. I’m not letting you operate this.” She puts on the safety mask.
“Do you know how to—” I start to say, then stop as she fires up the cutter.
We all stand back as she moves forward and uses the plasma cutter to draw a bright line around the lockpad next to the cockpit door. After she gets it open and sets the cutter and mask aside, Hong takes her place at the lockpad, fiddling with the electronics inside.
“Looks pretty standard,” he mutters. “Think that’ll do it.”
The cockpit door slides open partway. Khan leaps forward, grabs the edge, and wrenches it all the way open. Hong charges through, followed by Jessica, then Khan. I feel a tingle of excitement. I’m sure it’s not just the pills.
After a moment, Hong calls the all-clear. I stagger through the doorway, being careful not to touch the still-red-hot lockpad, and see Hong and Khan sitting in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, respectively. Jessica is standing behind Khan, looking over the navigation console.
“What the hell?” I say.
“Ship’s on autopilot,” Hong says.
“Looks like our friend was flying solo,” Khan says.
“That’s—” I shake my head. “You’re telling me one person rigged up that rock to hit the crater? And was planning to kidnap an entire facility alone, with no help?”
“There might be other ships out there,” Jessica says.
“Agreed,” Hong says. “I’m leaving the autopilot on for now.”
“Are there any clues to who these people are?” I ask. “Where’s the autopilot taking us?”
“There’s no destination programmed,” Hong says. “Just a simple ascent to get us off the Moon.”
“Kangaroo. Did you set a timer?” Jessica asks.
“Set a timer for what?”
“For the prisoner,” Jessica says. “That spacesuit probably doesn’t have more than a few hours of air. We need to pull him out before he suffocates and interrogate him.”
“Right.” I blink a timer into my eye. “Four hours on the clock. We can decide what to do with him then.”
“We should expect our would-be captor’s accomplices to contact him,” Khan says. “Or be waiting for him to report in about us.”
“We probably have a few more minutes,” Hong says. “He was clearly going to interrogate us and get whatever information he could. Then the robots would have to secure us for long-range transport before he could get back to the cockpit and change course.”
“We’ll have to shut down the autopilot then,” Khan says. “If the other ships in this pirate fleet are also stealthed, we won’t be able to contact or locate them by conventional means. Hong, check the flight computer for a rendezvous plan.”
“On it.” Since stealth vessels can’t see each other, they need to coordinate their movements so they don’t run into each other. It’s similar to how underwater submarines operated back in the twentieth century, except they could at least detect each other by underwater sonar. Fully stealthed spacecraft can’t radiate anything or risk being detected by the enemy. More than one warship has gone missing, but never been confirmed destroyed, because we simply don’t know where to look. Space is really big.
A light starts blinking on one of the control panels between Hong and Khan. I point at it and ask, “What is that?”
They both look at the light, then at each other. “Communications?” Khan asks.
“Yes,” Hong says, reaching over to work the controls. “That makes sense. These mercs can’t direct their comms at each other—too much risk of detection—so they’re just broadcasting encrypted bursts. When a burst comes in addressed to a specific ship, the computer auto-decodes it.” The screen above the indicator lights up with some kind of status display. “Looks like a video message. Playing back now.”
The display changes to show a woman’s face in front of a flat gray wall. The face is Gladys Löwenthal’s.
“What the fuck?” I say.
“Scorpion, this is Clementine,” Gladys says, speaking directly into the camera. That is definitely her voice. And her code name.
“What the fuck!” I repeat.
“Friend of yours?” Hong asks.
“I’m at the rendezvous point,” Gladys continues. “Since the news hasn’t reported any major asteroid impacts near the south pole, I’m guessing you were able to infiltrate the objective. I’ll give you two hours to meet me here, then I need to move on.” She pauses and exhales. “But I hope we can do this in person. I hope you’ll grant me the courtesy of doing this in person.” She looks into the camera, and I can’t tell whether she seems angry or sad. “Out.”
The screen goes dark and the cockpit is silent for a moment. Then I hear someone chuckling next to me. I look over and see Jessica starting to laugh out loud.
“You picked a fine time to have a nervous breakdown,” I say.
Jessica wipes tears from her eyes and shakes her head. “Oh, she’s good. That is one crafty old bitch right there.”
“Um, what’s going on?” Hong asks.
“She played us,” Jessica says. “Gladys and her merc buddy. They knew we’d have to investigate an attack on an agency shuttle—”
“An attack on me,” I say.
“Nobody wants to kill you, Kangaroo,” Jessica snaps. “You have far more value as a hostage. Or a live test subject.”
I’m not sure how to feel about that.
“They used a robot—an SKR spider—to attack that shuttle because they knew the agency would come to Clementine for information,” Jessica continues. “I’m guessing the database she sold us is missing some crucial records that would have revealed a few hundred rogue spiders roaming the Lunar surface.”
“Excuse me, sirs,” Hong says, pointing at the screen. “You know the accomplice?”
I give a quick recap of our original mission parameters. “We didn’t know Clementine was working with anyone. We didn’t know what she was really up to.”
“They’ve been planning this for a while,” Jessica says. “All this stealth material must have taken months to procure on the black market. We need to find out who sold them the information on where Project Genesis was located.”
“I’ve got a guess,” I grumble. “It starts with ‘Sak’ and ends with ‘raida.’”
&n
bsp; “Well, I suppose this is our chance to find out,” Hong says.
“Except we don’t know where ‘Clementine’ is,” Khan says. “And I’m guessing our friend ‘Scorpion’ didn’t leave any unencrypted data just lying around his ship’s computer.”
“I’ve been looking,” Hong says, “but so far, nothing.”
“So much for shedding light on the situation,” Khan mutters.
Shedding light.
“I can find out where Gladys is,” I say.
* * *
There’s a lot of information embedded in a high-res vid stream, if you know where to look for it. And I don’t just mean the metadata encoded within the stream, telling you how it was captured and what compression algorithm it’s using. The visuals can actually tell you a lot about exactly where the vid was recorded.
Sunlight contains known frequencies of EM radiation, and the angle of sunlight and lengths of shadows can tell you exactly where on Earth a particular image was captured. The same goes for the Moon. We know exactly which way the Moon will be facing at all times with respect to the Sun. Measuring the intensity of the sunlight and looking at the angles at which shadows fall can tell us exactly where on the Moon this particular vid was captured, assuming it happened just now when the transmission was received.
Oliver loaded up my computer implant with the relevant software a while ago. It’s a straightforward matter to start up the program, tell it what to look for, and run the vid through its processing algorithms. The results come back after just a few seconds.
Looks like we got lucky: Gladys was transmitting from a place with external sunlight coming in through a window, and that flat gray background made it easy for the software to analyze the light intensity. And I had reference images of her face from my earlier mission recordings, which were perfect for calibrating shadow lengths. I overlay the coordinates returned by the software onto a map of the Moon’s surface and look for buildings.
Bingo.
“Mister Hong,” I say, “set a course for farside.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Moon—farside
75 minutes before I give Gladys a piece of my mind
It’s going to take over an hour to get from where we are, hovering above the remains of SDF1, to the location my eye software extrapolated from the vid image. Our destination appears to be an industrial helium-3 processing plant, abandoned for several years according to Lunar building authority records. It’s in an old special economic zone, which nobody cares much about now that the United Nations has standardized intra-Lunar trade across national sectors.
I suggest putting on some music over our commandeered ship’s audio system but am outvoted by everyone else. Hong prefers to fly in silence. Khan and Jessica want to conduct a thorough inspection of the vehicle’s interior and storage compartments without distraction.
After half an hour of unproductive ransacking—well, I’m ransacking, anyway, doing my best to turn over every access panel and equipment hatch I can, while Khan and Jessica are being more methodical and neat with their searches. Hong, probably wisely, limits his search of the cockpit to the computer systems. We don’t really want to damage our flight controls.
Khan’s wrist controls beep out an alarm. “Kangaroo,” she says, pausing her search and motioning for me to stop tearing apart the side of the cargo bay. “Time to do a radio check.”
“Right.” I put aside the hatch I just pried off from above one of the benches and blink my eye to bring up the list of reference pointers to the ships in the pocket right now.
The inside of the pocket looks and acts like deep space, but it’s in a whole other universe, as far as we can tell. And every pocket location is farther apart than we’ve been able to measure, so each shuttle inside the pocket right now is totally isolated. Once I closed the portal, there was no way to communicate with anything inside the pocket. But because these ships are basically in deep space—and if anything goes wrong, they’re looking at a disaster in space, which is always bad—we need to check in regularly to make sure they’re all still doing okay.
“Start with one,” Jessica says, unnecessarily.
“Starting with one,” I say.
I open a pinhole to the first ship. I’m not actually retrieving the item from the pocket, so we just need a small opening to the other side. Technically it could be a microscopic hole, invisible to the naked eye, but it helps to have visual confirmation that I’ve actually established the portal. So I pop open a small portal, just about a centimeter in diameter, with the barrier in place. It glows in midair, roughly level with my throat, about a meter in front of me. I turn so Khan can see that it’s there. Once a portal is opened, it’s locked to my position in space, so when I turn, it turns, always facing toward me.
It still bothers Oliver that this “pinhole radio” trick works at all, since he can’t figure out the physics of it. Science Division knows that once I put an object into the pocket, associated with a particular reference image, the reference is tied to the object, not the location in the pocket universe—which is why the “back door” trick works at all, and why even though each of these shuttles is moving farther away from the pinhole while we talk, I can still close the portal and reopen it later to let them out. I can’t explain it. The pocket just works like that.
Khan works her wrist controls. “Mapalé, this is Khan. Radio check, over.”
The radio crackles, then blasts out a cacophony of sound. It takes me a few seconds to make out two voices shouting at each other: Rich Johnson and Alisa Garro.
“Is it closed?” Alisa asks.
“I think it’s closed!” Rich replies.
“You need to make sure!” A clattering noise erupts from the speaker. Then, in a louder voice, as if Alisa’s moved closer to the microphone: “Calypso, are we clear of the crater? Are we being pursued?”
“Yes, we’re clear,” Khan says. “Out of danger. But—”
“Good,” Alisa says. “We need an emergency exit, right now.”
She’s asking me to pull them out of the pocket.
“Request denied,” Khan says before I can weigh in with my opinion. “We are not in a good position to land your ship.”
“This is not a request!” Alisa says. “Emergency exit! We are bleeding oxygen and we need to land! Now!”
“What happened?”
“Small electrical fire. It’s out now, but life support was damaged.”
“What started the fire?”
Alisa hesitates, then says, “I can’t tell you.”
“Doc, if we don’t know what the problem is—”
“You don’t need to know,” Alisa snaps. “Your orders are to safeguard my project and give me whatever support I require, right? Well, right now we require a portal out of this pocket!”
I see the sides of Khan’s jaw bulging. She must be clenching her teeth. “Wait one.” She mutes her radio and turns toward the cockpit.
“We’re on a pretty tight schedule here,” I say, following her.
She ignores me. “Hong, what’s our ETA to the destination?”
“Forty minutes and change,” Hong replies. “Is there a problem?”
“I need you to find a crater to put down in,” Khan says.
“Is that really a good idea?” I ask, poking my head into the cockpit over Khan’s shoulder. She’s standing in the doorway, probably hoping I would be reluctant to invade her personal space. So wrong.
“They’re losing atmosphere,” Khan says, not looking at me.
“Is there a problem with their shuttle?” Jessica asks.
“Or with Project Genesis?” I ask.
Khan glares at me. “We’re done talking about this. I’m still the ranking officer here, and I’m giving you an order, Kangaroo.”
“Hello?” Alisa’s voice burbles out of Khan’s wrist controls. “We’ve got a situation here!”
“Hong, put us down in the nearest crater with a rim elevation of at least ten meters.” Khan backs ou
t of the cockpit doorway. “Kangaroo, sit.” She points at the co-pilot’s seat.
I look at the chair, then at her. “I haven’t actually flown in a long time.”
Khan glares at me. “I’m not asking you to take the stick. I just need some privacy.” She waves at Jessica. “Doctor. Jump seat, please.”
Jessica moves forward and sits down behind my chair.
“Thank you,” Khan says. “Now the three of you, stay in here while I go sort out Garro.”
“I heard that,” Alisa says over the radio.
“I know,” Khan says into her wrist. She moves out of the doorway, and Hong closes the door behind her.
“Do you want a refresher on piloting, sir?” Hong asks. “This bird’s actually pretty interesting—”
“No, thank you,” I say. “And quiet, please. I’m listening.”
Hong frowns at me. “How can you hear through that door?”
“Implants,” Jessica says.
Hong shakes his head and smiles. “Right.” He puts a finger to his lips and turns back to his controls.
I turn up the gain on my audio sensors and tilt my head toward the cockpit door.
* * *
Khan: “Did I understand you correctly? You are venting atmosphere?”
Alisa: “If you get us out of the pocket and on the ground quickly enough, we’ll be okay.”
Khan: “Is this equipment failure? A malfunction? I can ask Kangaroo if he’s got any repair items in the pocket.”
Alisa: “No, it’s not equipment. I can’t say any more. Just get us out of the pocket and on the ground.”
Khan: “We’re looking for a crater to set down in. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”
Alisa: “Good. I also need you to ask Kangaroo if he’s got any food stored in the pocket. Specifically, anything sugary.”
Khan: “You mean like glucose pills?”
Alisa: “No, I mean like candy.”
Khan: “Candy.”
Alisa: “Yeah. Candy. Chocolate. Anything like that.”
Khan: “What the hell is going on, Doc?”
Alisa: “I can’t tell you anything else.”
Khan: “I can’t help if I don’t know what the problem is.”
Alisa: “I don’t need help. I need some goddamn candy. Just ask him, okay? I’ll bet he’s got some hidden away. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
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