Murder on Moon Trek 1

by Diane Vallere

  Head smack. Of course, he was in coveralls and not a uniform. Security wouldn’t want to advertise their presence, especially not after what happened to the previous Moon Units. I’d read something about this somewhere.

  I pulled my finding tool out of my personal belongings and cross-referenced the information back to the BOP in my center console. I found what I was looking for in a footnote on the page about the first trip made by a new Moon Unit.

  Until the ship is cleared for departure and has passed the breakaway point into the galaxy, security personnel will remain in utility gear. Regulation uniforms are required for all other ship crew at all times. Additionally, throughout the moon trek, security is not to rely on any of the ship’s wards for supplies. They are beholden to the safety of the ship only.

  In doing my research on Moon Unit 5, I’d learned that in the past, security had developed loose loyalties to different departments and neglected others, and that had been the downfall of Moon Units 1-3. The truth about what had happened to Moon Unit 4 was kept tightly under wraps and remained a mystery despite how often I hacked into their chat room to read their security logs.

  It was the physical that tripped me up, and all because my dad was from Plunia so my biological makeup came with a few challenges. Nothing I hadn’t figured out how to handle by now.

  The ward doors slid open, and a medical crew stepped inside. Doctor Edison, the ship’s resident physician, led the team. Behind him was a pretty woman in a blue uniform that matched his own, followed by two men in standard gray. Gray was for flex crew members, trained to manage a variety of positions on the flight. Blue was for the medical staff (the uniform colors corresponded to their related codes, Code Blue meant medical, and the medical team wore blue.) He glanced my way, and I pointed to the body under the dressing gown. “The body is under there,” I said. “He’s the second navigation officer. Neptune confirmed his condition.”

  Doc pulled the dressing gown back from the body and ran a couple of standard tests. A series of whirs and buzzes and beeps sounded while his nurse assisted. After a few minutes, Doc stood up, capped the end of the nozzle that he’d used to take a sample of the inside of the officer’s cheek, and handed it to the woman. Doc turned to me.

  “What did Neptune tell you about him?”

  “He didn’t say anything. Neptune didn’t even want to tell me his name.”

  “Why did you want to know his name?” Doc looked suspicious.

  “He was one of us. It seems right.”

  “Neptune was following protocol. Who told you he was the second navigation officer?”

  “I’m in charge of uniforms. This officer is wearing a red shirt, and red shirts go with ship navigation. There’s are two black bands around his left cuff, so he was second in command, not first. And the ship was able to depart from the space station, so he couldn’t have been part of the main crew or they would have noticed he was missing from his post.”

  “Neptune didn’t tell you any of that?” he asked.

  “No. Neptune didn’t say much of anything.” As I stood in front of the doc and his assistant, I became aware that they were staring at my bare purple arms. I wrapped my arms around my body, but there was no covering the exposed flesh.

  “You appear flushed. Are you feeling okay?” He stepped toward me and lifted his vital signs scanner.

  “I’m fine,” I said, stepping backward and out of range. “I was shaken up when I found the body and got a little warm.”

  Doc looked from my arms to my face. “What’s your name?”

  “Sylvia Stryker. Second Lieutenant.”

  “Stryker.” He thought for a moment. “Come to the medical ward after your shift ends. I’d like to give you a physical.”

  Alarm bells sounded in my head. “I thought all of our physicals were conducted before departure,” I said, carefully avoiding the truth about my own results.

  “Lieutenant Stryker, you’ve been in contact with a dead man. I won’t know what killed him until I give him a complete workup. You don’t look all that hot yourself. It’s my duty to make sure the crew stays healthy.”

  I wished I knew more about Lt. Dakkar, his background or his reason for being in the uniform ward. I wished I knew whether or not it was possible to catch something from a corpse. It was too late for that now.

  “Every person on this ship has had a physical to clear them. I doubt he was sick, but I’m going to check his records and see what I can find out from an autopsy. In the meantime, I would request that you not mention this to the ship’s guests. The captain has made it clear that a lot is riding on the success of Moon Unit 5, and the last thing we need is to create a panic. Do you hear what I’m saying, Lt. Stryker?” Doc Edison asked. “Until we know more, the details surrounding this man’s death are not to be discussed.”

  “Of course. Confidentiality is understood.”

  The men in gray moved the body from my bench to a cart. They left the dressing gown over his face but draped him with a black blanket that covered the rest of him. The doors swished open, and the team departed as efficiently as they’d arrived. As soon as the doors swished shut behind them, I packed up my finding tool and put the BOP back onto the cabinet shelf where it was routinely stored. I reset the call button and locked the plastic dome into place on top of it, and then turned my attention back to the inventory closet. Previously neat stacks of uniforms sorted by size and color had been knocked out of place when the body had fallen out and were now in messy heaps on the floor.

  “That’s just great,” I said. “Maybe I should have said I was a stowaway. At least that way I could avoid the humiliation of the physical and I wouldn’t have to refold all these uniforms.” I kicked the pile in front of me, and the stack fell over. “This whole thing was a huge mistake. I should have just stayed on Plunia and mined ice with my mom.”

  I scooped a pile of uniforms from the floor to the cabinet and scanned the room for a surface to use for folding. Just getting this inventory back into organization was going to take the better part of the day. “Stupid Sylvia,” I muttered to myself. “This is your punishment for thinking you could get away with sneaking on board the ship. Sooner or later somebody’s going to find out you’re not supposed to be here.”

  I heard a noise behind the open cabinet door. Slowly, the door swung toward me, exposing a skinny pink alien girl who peeked out from behind it. She grinned at me in a manner so friendly that if she was a threat, I was the queen of the galaxy. She held both hands up in front of her. Her palms were dirty, as was the skin around her mouth. She looked like she’d picked a Plunian potato straight out of the ground and eaten it, dirt and all.

  “I won’t turn you in. I promise,” she said. “But I do want to know how you managed to make it look like you belong here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re like me! I mean, I’m like you! I mean, I’m a stowaway too.”

  3: Pika the Stowaway

  Before I could say anything to the grinning alien girl in front of me, I heard the ward doors slide open. When I spun around, I was facing my boss.

  Yeoman D’Nar was a tall, thin woman with golden blond hair, glowing skin, and legs that made her uniform barely the acceptable length without requiring alterations. She was only about five years older than I was, which meant she graduated from the space academy before I’d entered, but her legend was still fresh in the halls. She’d accomplished a lot in a short amount of time, and while it would have been easy to attribute her success to her looks, that very thought went against everything I wanted to believe regarding equal opportunity. I’d told myself she was the closest thing I’d have to a role model on the ship, but now that we were face to face, I could tell both her glacial attitude and penchant for pearly blue nail polish would be problematic when it came to finding commonalities between us.

  “Lt. Stryker, you are in violation of the uniform code. I can’t believe you would commit an infraction this soon in the moon trek. Do you know what would
happen if one of our passengers saw you like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that, all purple arms and perky breasts. The Moon Unit is a family ship. It’s a good thing the doctor reported you to me. If you went out of this ward like that, Captain Swift would have to be notified.”

  We must have passed the breakaway point. The temperature in the uniform ward had dropped, and so had my body heat. I glanced around the room, looking for Pika. Surely the presence of a stowaway on board would be a bigger issue than my wardrobe infraction?

  “Yeoman, did you see someone when you came in? Someone pink?”

  “Don’t try to distract me. You were hired aboard this ship to perform a simple task. Manage the uniforms for the crew. I’m both insulted and disappointed that on our first day of travel you would make a mockery of your department.”

  “I’m not making a mockery of anything.”

  “And the condition of this ward is appalling.” She pointed at the piles of uniforms, her pointy blue fingernail jabbing at the air. “Get these uniforms off the floor and back into that closet. I’m going to have to declare this ward off limits until you are back to ship standard. And if anybody—anybody!—finds out about this, you are going to be held personally accountable. I know the space academy trained you better than this.”

  I tried to remember what information I’d put on the application that I’d uploaded into the ship’s database when I first learned the original uniform lieutenant had broken her leg and wouldn’t be able to make the moon trek, but I couldn’t. Everything about me being on this ship was the culmination of a carefully thought out plan. The events of the day were far too random to fit neatly into my expected organization.

  The press surrounding Moon Unit 5 had stressed how the ship would run like clockwork. That the crew had been trained to make the trip to Ganymede, the largest of the moons that orbited Jupiter, and back in seven days. Ganymede had once been covered in ice, but a team of renegade meteorologists determined to regulate the weather had found a way to harness the sun’s heat and not only melt the ice, but establish a protective gaseous layer of oxygen around the moon, making it one of the galaxy’s most desirable destinations.

  The ship’s publicity department had gone out of their way to overcome the criticism that had lingered after the trouble with the first four Moon Units. The corporation had been out of service for the past ten years, and nobody had expected them to start running again. And here we were less than twenty-four hours into our journey and I’d found a body, been charged with a wardrobe infraction, and discovered a stowaway.

  It was a darn good thing I’d memorized the Book of Protocols.

  “The BOP makes allowances for uniform modification based on extreme changes in temperature and emergency situations. I admit that I did not seek out approval first, but while assisting both ship security and the medical staff with the discovery and movement of a dead body here in my ward, my uniform tore. I modified the garment before it became more damaged and plan to repair it when my shift ends. I take full responsibility for my decision.”

  Yeoman D’Nar’s eyes flashed. She seemed angrier about my very plausible (and true!) explanation than she’d been over the discovery of the infraction in the first place.

  “Where are your sleeves?”

  I pointed to the floor under the bench.

  She crossed the room and picked up the fabric, studied the seams where I’d torn them from the body of my garment, and then crumbled them into a wad and set the ball of fabric on top of my cabinet. “I expect that uniform to be in pristine condition when you report for duty tomorrow. You are to go directly from your shift to your quarters and not leave for the rest of the night. That is non-negotiable. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Yeoman. I understand completely.” I understood that she had just given me an acceptable reason not to go to the medical ward when my shift was over. Inside I smiled. To her, I forced my face into a serious expression to match her reprimand.

  “Good. Now get this ward back up to standard and notify me when you’re done.” She spun on the heel of her gravity boots and left.

  As soon as the doors swooshed shut behind her, I closed the closet door and faced Pika. She was still grinning. “You’re not supposed to be on the ship. You’re going to get in trouble. We’re going to have fun!”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I’m Pika!”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m a Gremlon. I hitchhiked from Colony 7 to the space station and snuck on board. Where did you come from?”

  There was something joyful and likable about Pika, but as soon as she said she was a Gremlon, I knew I had to be careful.

  Gremlons were an alien race that mostly lived on Colony 7, not because space travel was all that hard to come by these days, but because their overwhelming sense of trickery was more important to them than loyalties. The Gremlon usually found employment in the entertainment industries. They were colorful and wild and exuberant. They were tons of fun to be around, and the more successful of them had found ways to parlay their wild side into performances that people paid to see. But because they had no sense of how far was too far, they often ended up in trouble. More than half of the prisoners in the Plunian jail system were Gremlons. Colony 7 was the one place where their trickery was the norm.

  “I don’t know what you think you heard, but you probably misunderstood me. It’s been a stressful morning.”

  “Yes! Because you found a dead guy in your closet and then the giant made you hot and then the doc said he wants to probe you. Space probe! Watch out! And then the mean lady with the crabby face made fun of your outfit.” Pika acted out everything she said, shifting from limp arms hanging by her sides to illustrate the dead officer to raising her arms above her head to represent Neptune, the giant. She scrunched up her face to imitate Yeoman D’Nar’s angry expression. It was like watching a one-woman show. I didn’t want to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself. In thirty seconds, she’d captured the highlights (and lowlights) of my morning.

  “What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do?” She slapped the tips of her fingers against my forearm in a blur, not hurting me but causing a slight stinging sensation.

  I stepped backward and held my hands up. “I’m here as the uniform lieutenant. I’m going to do my job.”

  “But you’re not you’re not you’re not,” she said.

  “Why do you say everything three times?”

  “Because it’s funny!” She jumped out from behind the closet door and bounced back and forth from one foot to the other, making goofy gestures with her hands.

  “It won’t be funny if you make so much noise that they come in here and catch you.”

  “Us.”

  “You.”

  “Us.”

  “You. I have a cover story.”

  Her face fell and the small pointy ears atop her head wilted slightly. Don’t be a fool, Sylvia, I told myself. It’s an act. But the longer she stayed sad, the more I needed to cheer her up again. “Fine. Help me get these uniforms folded and back into the closet. And here,” I said, holding out an extra small gray general crew member uniform, “put this on so you don’t stand out so much.”

  Her ears perked up, and she grinned again. I had a feeling Pika’s “help” was going to be minimal.

  I looked around the rest of the uniform ward. Now that the body was gone, the ward looked like I’d expected. Utilitarian-beige walls. Orange carpet. Locked emergency cabinet on the back wall next to a ten-key pad to gain access. Every ward on the Moon Unit held emergency equipment. Only first officers had the passcodes.

  Pika pulled on the uniform and skipped in circles around the ward while I folded the inventory. Every once in a while, she stopped and put her hands on her hips.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Plunia.”

  Plunia had been “discovered” about three hundred years ago even though we
’d been in existence far longer than that. Massive overpopulation of Earth, the third planet from the sun, had led to space exploration in the solar system. Soon enough, those explorers discovered that the planets that revolved around the sun were only a fraction of what existed in the universe.

  When those explorers reported back that the Plunian atmosphere was similar to theirs, earthlings started moving in. No one had anticipated the newcomers, and there’d been a war. But the realities of how vast the universe really was, and how little everyone knew about it, forced odd partnerships. Earth was still out there, somewhere closer to the sun than was comfortable to me, but entire pockets of their scientific community had established labs on other planets. Medical breakthroughs came from collaborations between Uranians and Saturnians, and everyday checkups were conducted by a full body scan created by a former airline security agent who found work on a dwarf planet.

  Pika considered my response. and then resumed skipping. A few minutes later, she stopped. “What are your parents?”

  “Plunian and earthling.”

  She thought about that for a moment and skipped some more. Her questions were direct and seemed to come from a place of pure curiosity, and I found it easier to drop my guard and answer truthfully than try to come up with lies. I’d been so worried about accidentally letting someone learn I didn’t belong that it felt good just to be honest.

  “What’s your mom do?” she asked, this time not bothering to stop skipping. I’d gotten most of the uniforms off the floor, and Pika’s path was less obstructed.

  “She’s a dry ice miner.” Ever since the advent of commercial space travel, scientists had been looking for ways to make the Kuiper belt livable. Ice mines on Plunia, Pluto, Mars, and Neptune helped solve the problem because they produced oxygen. Mills that purified the ozone made formerly uninhabitable planets habitable.

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s in jail.”