Luna

by Garon Whited

  “Destruction of Base property,” and “Attempted Unauthorized Entry,” rated three days on reduced rations and confinement to quarters—i.e., they locked him in his room and only opened the door to shove in one meal a day.

  At least he got a bathroom all to himself.

  “So how did the rest of them take it?” I wanted to know.

  “Very well. Commander Edwards is much more respected. Perhaps even feared.”

  I winced again. “How bad was it?”

  “Well, my boy, I’ll tell you. In low gravity, it looked worse than it was. She bent one of his arms up behind his back, held on to his throat, and literally carried him through the halls to see the Captain. She didn’t actually do any harm to him, but he wailed like a little girl.”

  “I wish I could have seen it.” Every time someone gets to kick butt and take names, I’m flat on my back. Shucks. Well, I had my turn with Yakov, I guess. “So, is he—who was it, by the way?”

  “A fellow named Hommel. Jackson Hommel, I think his name is.”

  “Is he loose, yet?”

  “It happened yesterday, so no. Today and tomorrow are left. We’ll see what sort of attitude he has when he gets out. He was plenty upset, let me tell you! Kept raving about how the Captain had no authority over him, he’s a civilian, he’s not part of the crew, and so on.”

  “He won’t be joining us, not with that attitude. At least, I wouldn’t let him.”

  Martin chuckled again. I got the feeling that he was one of those people who look at the world and find it more amusing as time goes by.

  “Your Captain made that stunningly clear,” he answered. “He said, ‘Mister Hommel, if you think I don’t have the authority to have you summarily executed to preserve the safety the people under my command, I invite you to test me.’ Hommel finally shut up.”

  “Sounds like it was about time.”

  “Quite so.”

  The terminal chimed at me. I excused myself and swung it around to answer it, pressed the thumbswitch on the attached intercom, and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Hardy, I require your presence in room Ee-cee-nine,” said the Captain.

  “On my way, sir!” I released the thumbswitch and got up, carefully. “I’m sorry to cut our conversation short like this…”

  Martin stood up and waved a hand in gentle dismissal. “I’ll be around for a while, my boy. The Moon ceases not in its course for the whims of men. I’ll leave you to your duties.”

  I thanked him as he left. Then I got out of that drafty hospital gown and into a jumpsuit. I could have done it faster, but I didn’t want Anne to put me back in bed for a month. I eased down the corridors to the enlisted housing—the “E” section—and down corridor “C” to room nine.

  The door was locked. I knocked. Julie let me in. The Captain, Kathy, and Anne were also there.

  “Lieutenant Commander Hardy, reporting as ordered, Captain,” I rapped out, and saluted. Captain Carl returned the salute.

  “We have a problem, Commander Hardy. Without touching anything, I’d like you to look around in the adjoining bathroom.”

  Darn plumbing, thought I. I could hear the shower running. I opened the door and went into the bathroom for a look. The room was steamy—the water heaters are electric, right there at the faucet—and it smelled odd. I waved a hand in front of my face and peered through the vapor.

  A body was lying under the stream of water.

  Obviously, this wasn’t a plumbing problem.

  Chapter Twelve

  “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

  —Carl Jung (1875-1961)

  The body was wrinkled, and not from the water. It looked about eighty. I had no idea what her name was. From the way she was lying, I gathered she had been dragged into the shower—her feet hung out over the edge of the shower stall.

  I knelt at the edge of the stall and looked at her more carefully, leaned fairly far over and craned my neck. I was pretty sure that there was a cut across her throat, but it was hard to tell and still stay dry. I left the bathroom and reported my opinions to the Captain.

  While I was talking, someone knocked on the outer door. The Captain nodded to Julie and held up a hand to silence me. Julie answered it and Kiska was there; she handed a camera to Julie and looked curious. Julie gave her a headshake and shut the door without a word. I resumed my report while Anne took the camera and went into the bathroom.

  “So what do we do, sir?”

  The Captain sighed. “This is our first murder. I would like it to be our last.”

  “I’m all for that, sir.”

  “Anne is taking some preliminary pictures. When she’s done, we’ll see if we can arrange ourselves to witness and record as we examine and move the body.”

  And we did. First, we turned off the water. Anne examined the body closely and snapped pictures of everything. Then we wrapped the corpse in a sheet and the Captain and I took it to the infirmary.

  I’m sure we did it all wrong, but we’re not policemen.

  * * *

  “Her name was Emily Jane Jefferson,” Anne began, starting a wall display. The whole of Luna’s citizens were assembled in a conference room to hear her report—meaning just the Luna’s crew and the Tchekalinsky Station people; nobody else had made it to full citizen yet; my boys were still on probation.

  “Ms. Jefferson was ninety-four and was aboard the Liwei habitat for a degenerative bone condition. Frankly, she was lucky to come through the Luna’s orbital burn without breaking anything.”

  Anne clicked on the first slide. “From the process of digestion and the condition of various organs, I place the time of death somewhere around six hours prior to discovery.”

  Click; another slide. “Observe the neck area. As we can see from close examination, there are marks on the anterior and posterior portions; these are consistent with hands attempting to strangle. The shorter marks denote the thumbs. This tells us the assailant stood in front of the victim during the murder.” A new slide clicked up. “This close-up of the throat wound shows that it is not a single stroke; someone sawed through the throat with a blade between four and eight centimeters long after she was dead.”

  I held up a hand. Anne nodded.

  “How do you know she was already dead?”

  “You don’t saw through someone’s throat that neatly when they’re alive; they struggle. These cuts have a pattern consistent with a single sawing run. A live victim would have twisted and turned and tried to get away. Another point is the amount of blood left in the body. If her throat had been cut while she was alive, her heart would have pumped out most of it in the shower. As it is, over eighty percent of her total blood volume remained. I believe she was strangled, dragged into the shower, and her throat was sawn open in an attempt to conceal the strangulation.”

  Anne clicked up the next slide. “Here we have the victim’s fingernails. Note that two are broken. The others appear to have a residue underneath that testing shows to be skin and blood. Most of this was washed away by the hot water, but enough remains to be tested. Sara is gene mapping the samples right now. Sara?”

  “I’ve got them in a culture dish. It’ll be a few hours before I heat up the probe.”

  Anne closed the projector. “That concludes our report.” Anne sat down and the Captain took over.

  “Do we have any comments or questions at this time?”

  I raised a hand. He nodded at me. “I was wondering who found the body.”

  “Her suitemate, a Ms. Charlene Reynolds.”

  “Any chance she did it?”

  He nodded to Anne. She answered, “Vanishingly small. Ms. Reynolds suffers from low-gravity muscular degeneration. She couldn’t exert enough force with her hands to strangle a kitten. She can barely chew solid food. Her residential area was in the one-tenth gee deck of the habitat; even lunar gravity is more than she’s used to.”
>
  “I see. Where is she?”

  The Captain fielded that one. “At the moment, she’s lying in the infirmary under sedation. Finding her suite-mate’s body in their shared shower didn’t do her any good. I’d like to keep her out of circulation until after we find the person who did this.”

  Kathy raised her hand and the Captain nodded. “Why fool around with genetic testing? Why not just line everybody up and check them for scratches? Ms. Jefferson obviously drew blood.”

  “We’ll narrow it down as much as we can,” Captain Carl replied. “We’ll only examine the people that match Lieutenant Fleming’s genetic assessment. Our guests are annoyed and annoying enough without the further indignity of a strip-search. What else?”

  “What do we do with them?” Julie asked. “The guilty persons, I mean.”

  The Captain sighed. “We will convene a general court-martial and try them.”

  “And when we find them guilty?”

  “That is not for me to say at this time. However, I caution you that we may not find anyone guilty. That has not been decided. And I caution all of you—we will not pre-judge anyone. Do not allow your personal opinion to influence your decision in the face of the evidence. I will have neither a kangaroo court nor a star chamber. We will discover the truth in court and we will act accordingly—and in that order.”

  He stood up. We all stood up with him. “Now, Maxwell, return to the infirmary. Anne, I apologize for dragging your patient out of bed before you released him. I remand him to your custody once again. When he is fit for duty, let me know.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “That will be all, people.”

  Anne took my arm and led me to the infirmary. I didn’t argue; I heard the order. Once she had me back in bed, I grumped a little.

  “How much longer am I going to be here? I’ve got things to do.”

  “Probably until tomorrow, unless you’ve done something unpleasant to yourself. You were about ready for light duty anyway, so you’re probably all right. Lie back, take it easy, and hold on to your patience. I’ll be back to look you over in a bit; I’ve got a resident dying in another room and I need to check on him. ”

  “Right.” She left and I tried to be a patient patient. But it’s worse, somehow, when the escape tunnel is almost done than when it’s still got twenty meters to go. The same applied to my escape from sickbed confinement. I wanted out.

  Anne came back and checked me over. She wheeled me down to the examination room and rayed me six or sixty ways, getting a good look at my insides. At last, she told me to get up.

  “All right, I’m authorizing you for light duty. Do not—and I stress this, do not attempt to exercise. If you do anything to work up a sweat that doesn’t involve a sauna, I will personally stick you with the biggest needle I have in stock. Do you understand me?”

  I gulped. “Yes, Ma’am!”

  “And then I’ll tell Kathy that you were very bad and wouldn’t listen to me,” she went on.

  “Uh.”

  “Do we have a meeting of the minds, Max?” she asked. “You are on light duty. Overwork yourself and you’ll get even further behind than you are, because if you screw up my last week of work, I swear I’ll strap you down and take away your terminal until you’re completely well.”

  “Uh,” was my sparkling rejoinder. She folded her arms and looked stern. I felt about ten centimeters tall.

  “Well?”

  I gave in. “Yes, Ma’am. I’ll do my best to be a lazy bum.”

  “Good. Now you may kiss my cheek and hug me to let me know we’re still friends.”

  I did so. She hugged me back and was in no hurry to let go.

  “Anne?”

  “Yes, Max?”

  “Would you really confine me?”

  “In a heartbeat, kiddo.” She stepped back and reached up to ruffle my hair. “I expect to get years and years of use out of you. I won’t have you dying on me at the great old age of thirty-two. Officially, you can be a fool after you have a replacement. Unofficially, you’re my friend. I don’t want to find out what a lunar officer’s funeral looks like until I have to. Besides, black makes me look fat.”

  * * *

  While the medical department had tests to run, the rest of us also had jobs to do. It didn’t help that we knew someone, somewhere, was a murderer. But what could we do about it? Tell everyone and start a panic? The residents were a panicky bunch of unstable old people with a distinct lack of discipline. There would be finger-pointing and rioting in short order.

  Nobody likes to be cooped up with a killer. Including me.

  I focused on my job. Jobs, rather. After all the time spent in transit and in the infirmary, the coilgun was coming along splendidly. Chuck deserved some credit for that; once he got his hands on the robots, their efficiency marks climbed by nearly three percent. That may not seem like a lot to most people, but you have to remember that a lot of experts spent years working with these robots by remote control—and the big concern was getting them to do things without supervision.

  Being a lazy bum—under orders—I suited up and went outside to walk around and inspect. The lunar night was about to end and I wanted to give my magnetic cannon a look-over by eye. The whole thing looked longer in person than it did through a camera.

  The near end, the injection point for the projectiles, was underground. The rings immediately in front of the loading area were not only buried, but set completely in concrete. The path gradually sloped up to a long stretch of rings supported by and set in a concrete roadbed. It looked like the skeleton of a pipe, half-buried along the top of an artificial ridge.

  That ridge required a buildup of a considerable height for the last few kilometers of the coilgun. The good news was that the earth-moving ’bots had a head start. It looked like they would complete the last of the ramp-roadbed for the rings about the same time the construction ’bots were ready to pave it over.

  Beyond that, the rising ridge met the ringwall. One of the first things I did after surveying the site was start a tunnel through the ringwall; a ’bot flattened out a switchback road up to the designated point and started boring into the rock on an upward slant. The hole kept going until it breached the far side. Rings were being placed in it as I watched—positioned, mounted, and sealed into place with aluminum and titanium reinforcing rods, as well as concrete. In not too long, the last ring would be placed at the far end of that hole. That would be the mouth of our cannon.

  It wasn’t something for shooting the whole sky, but it could place a package anywhere along the plane of the Moon’s orbit—including the surface of the Earth. Someday, when I had more time, I might figure out how to build cheap radio controls for thrusters on the ammunition; then we could have some limited elevation for our cannon. But the main control over the point-of-aim would be precise timing and power in the rings to adjust the velocity of our projectiles.

  I drove a moonbuggy down the length of the gunway, just to look it over. It looked good. Really good. I felt a little superfluous, but also a little proud. The boys and ’bots did good with my design.

  Next on my list of things to do, I tackled some preliminary work on the Luna. Mainly, a lot of skull sweat on exactly what I’d need in order to convert our bird. Instead of pumping pure liquefied gases, the fuel pumps would have to be modified to pipe a slurry of powdered aluminum in a fluid suspension into the reaction chamber. That’s rough on a pump, especially at those pressures—as I suspected, the pressure would have to come down, which would lower the overall thrust. We’d still do all right, but we’d need to re-tool the pumps again before we ever landed on Earth.

  Lucky for me, using a handheld computer and a drafting terminal isn’t physically demanding. I also crawled around in the Luna’s access spaces with a micrometer and tape measure. That was a trifle more taxing, but still well within my limitations.

  I hate being on the sick list. I wanted to yank a couple of pumps and work them over. I wanted to get my hands di
rty. Instead, I’d have to explain to Peng and get him to organize a working party. With luck, I’d get to watch…

  Once I had the numbers worked out, I put in a call to the Captain; he told me to stop by and report.

  Well, so much for asking a couple of quick questions. I went inside and changed, then reported as ordered. He let me in to his office and I saluted. He returned it.

  “Sit down, Max. What have you got?”

  “We’re ahead of schedule on the coilgun. Also, I’ve looked the Luna over. I can have her ready for liftoff quicker than I thought; I’m estimating a week after I start taking her apart—I have help, now. But that’s not counting the prep time; I want to get everything I’ll need made, modified, or put together so the changeover goes as quickly as possible.”

  “Carry on with the coilgun’s automated construction,” he replied, “but focus our manpower on the Luna.”

  “Sir? I thought the coilgun had priority?”

  “You’ve been out of the loop for a bit, so it’s time I brought you up to speed.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The Heinlein construction station at L-4 was talking to us.

  The whole network of cable-and-strut-connected modules was habitable again. Heinlein had a head start on everybody in that one of their habitat modules was shut down for repairs when the warheads blew chunks of the planet into vapor. When everything else died, all they had to do was switch everything in that module back on. It gave them a place to go and power to use. Even better, since it was a construction station, they had materials and tools to work with. That was their good luck.

  They also had a lot of OTV’s—Orbital Transport Vehicles. The things aren’t pretty. OTV’s look like a pair of giant golf balls connected by the mutant love child of a hatrack and an octopus. They can’t handle atmosphere, they can’t land, and they don’t have recycling life support. They’re only meant to carry payloads from point-to-point in orbit. But they also have manipulating waldos on the hull and can be very handy—no pun intended—for placing spaceship structural members during construction.