Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  And another tidal wave struck. Pride and joy at her little boy growing up. Pride and sadness that Simon did not need her as much, or at least not in the same way, as he once did. Resentment at his secretiveness, alloyed with certainty that it wouldn’t abate, if ever, for years. Crushing sadness about Keith having missed yet another milestone of their son’s life. And utter terror—where had that come from?—another son might grow up without his father.

  “Mom, I have to go,” she managed to get out.

  “Get some rest,” Mom said. “I mean it.”

  “Bye.” Val sagged against a cabinet, her mind still racing. She told herself the panic was all raging hormones and old memories, that Marcus was just busy. But it wasn’t that, not entirely. Because the memories were not so old. She and Marcus had only just met four years earlier, when he almost gotten himself killed retaking the powersat from terrorists. Now Simon’s secretiveness only reminded her of Marcus keeping secrets—because, plain as the damn pregnancy zit on her nose, he was. The prospecting jaunt never made sense, not even if it had stayed close to Daedalus Base. Since she had begun tracking the convoy, it had trended westward with the rising Sun. Another few days, at this rate, and the three vehicles would come round to Nearside!

  No matter these many churning thoughts and feelings, somehow she was hungry. Starving. For two. She got the pizza box from the fridge, and started on a leftover slice, cold. Marcus wouldn’t tell her what he was up to and, as far as she could tell, the NASA higher-ups either did not know or were in on … whatever … with him. Not knowing was driving her crazy.

  But maybe she could find out more about what was going on.

  Her datasheet remained draped across a kitchen counter. She googled lunar robot rental. Five companies rented radio-controlled bots, three for prospecting and two for tourists. She would have preferred a prospecting bot: they were rugged and well endowed with instruments. Alas, of the few prospecting bots even available, not one was within a thousand klicks of Nearside’s eastern limb. She was disappointed but not surprised: prospectors leased their bots long term, going back and forth over whatever territory they felt had potential.

  Tourist bots were another story. For sightseeing, one crater or mare or mountain range was often as good as another. Only sunlit tourist bots were in demand. Why rent a bot that was not just idle, but powered down?

  With the new moon still two (Earth) days away, Val had her pick of dozens of tourist bots. Based on the meandering path taken by Marcus and his convoy, she put a deposit on several of the easternmost bots idled within “tropical” latitudes.

  As soon as the Sun rose—and Marcus’s caravan, as her gut insisted it would, made its Nearside appearance—she would set the closest rental unit rolling his way.

  * * *

  “What’s special about this region?” Yevgeny muttered to himself. Even alone, in the privacy and (almost) certainty of a bug-free environment, thinking aloud was sloppy. But putting puzzles into words was the best way to clarify matters. At least his mind worked that way—usually. With this puzzle, he had no hypothesis, much less an answer.

  His gaze shifted, every several seconds, among topographic maps at several scales and hi-res images from the most recent satellite passes over the same territory. However and wherever he looked, he saw only bleak lunar landscape. This terrain looked no different to him than anyplace else Judson and crew had stopped to survey.

  “Is anything special about this area?” he tried.

  He had no answer to that question, either, except by inference. Every stopover until now had been, at most, a few hours: in Earth terms, a day or so. Now, in a nameless depression not quite ten kilometers across, just outside the much larger Humboldt Crater, barely crossed onto Nearside, the Americans had again made camp. They had been at this location, so far, for more than eighty hours. But no matter how long Yevgeny combed through the satellite imagery, he saw only more of the same surveying and assaying they had performed at earlier sites.

  The single novelty in the area was a prospecting robot. Judson’s ostensible mission was prospecting. A quick search confirmed Yevgeny’s suspicion: a significant region surrounding the robot was subject to a mining claim. Interesting. More interesting was that the claim had been filed scant days before the CIA had made contact with Judson.

  Alas, while the existence of the claim was in the public record, the identity of the claimant was not. Only a cryptic code was on file. For several minutes he toyed with asking colleagues in Moscow for help, before deciding that could wait. If a network intrusion were detected, it might tip off the CIA that their operation had been compromised.

  Of course, the occupational hazard of spies was seeing conspiracies in everything. Perhaps Judson and company, after much fruitless wandering on their own, had cut their losses by partnering with the unnamed prospector. It made a type of sense, but Yevgeny did not believe it for a moment. He indulged himself with one more mutter.

  He studied the maps of the Humboldt Crater area. He reexamined the satellite images. Back. Forth. He stood, stretched, paced. He looked at a holo lunar globe, the roundabout path the Americans had taken highlighted in red.

  And then it struck Yevgeny: perhaps the Americans’ path only seemed circuitous. As a pilot, he saw terrain as something to be flown over and not as an obstacle. Farside was all craters, a topographic mess. Suppose Judson had aimed all along for the site where he now camped. For ground vehicles, was the journey indirect?

  “Vlad, can you plan driving routes between two points on the surface?”

  “Yes,” the AI said, “given appropriate parameters. On- or off-road? How optimized? I can solve for shortest time, shortest distance, with an upper bound on the distance permitted from the closest emergency shelter, maintaining line of sight to—”

  “How do you accommodate terrain features?”

  “By vehicle type, when characteristics of the vehicle are specified, otherwise by assuming a standard lunar tractor.”

  The mysterious convoy had three standard tractors, but would a tanker or a trailer in tow be more constraining on rough ground? On slopes? Through narrow valleys? It took lots of back-and-forth with the AI, estimating the mass and center of gravity of the cargo each tractor likely carried and towed, but after an hour Yevgeny had an answer—with, Vlad calculated, more than ninety-six percent confidence. Given the scarcity of Farside roads, the volume of water commandeered from Paul Sokolov, and the long list of items withdrawn from Icarus’s inventory records in the run-up to the Americans’ departure, Judson had driven the fastest practical route to where he now camped. But no amount of introspection nor of Vlad’s analyses could answer the question now foremost in Yevgeny’s thoughts ….

  Why was the CIA interested in that remote spot?

  Chapter 10

  In the harsh glare of lunar dawn, a quarter klick to the north of Ethan’s quiescent robot, Marcus surveyed yet another uninteresting expanse of regolith. With care he positioned metal stakes, then strung twine between stakes to define a grid. A half klick to the east, Brad walked another grid toting their portable mass spectrometer. A half klick to the south, Donna drilled random boreholes in an area they had gridded earlier.

  Every bit of it—maddeningly—for show.

  “Focusing on one small spot the moment you arrive,” Tyler had insisted, “would only draw attention to that spot. Going straight to the bot would do the same. After the effort you made on the road to not draw attention to this area, why put it at risk now?”

  How about because they were exhausted from the trek, exhilarated at its completion, and consumed with curiosity?

  “Typical concentrations of iron,” Brad radioed. “Typical lack of carbon. Nothing noteworthy.”

  “Copy that,” Marcus radioed back.

  At least on Nearside they could use radio. And locate themselves with exquisite accuracy using lunar GPS. And behold, overhead, the g
orgeous object that was Earth, at that moment at almost full phase. But none of that got to why they had come!

  “Donna? How are things with you?” Marcus radioed.

  “Boring,” she responded. From tone of voice, she intended the word more as a pun than as a complaint. Days after their confrontation, she had cooled off. Larry’s arm had needed surgery. Her retrieval by, and to, Daedalus would only have postponed that procedure. And Tyler had made good on Marcus’s promise to get someone with EMT training assigned to Daedalus to backfill for Larry.

  “Hah,” Brad offered.

  “Indeed,” Marcus agreed.

  And the three of them lapsed, once more, into silence. They could not talk, except inside the igloo, about anything important. It did not matter that no satellite-borne camera had the resolution to show fiber-optic cables. Clustering within tether range of one another would just prolong this stage of playacting—and that, none of them could bear. Not after coping with an even dozen mechanical breakdowns along the way. Not after the shock and terror of a meteor shower striking not a kilometer in front of them. Not after a week, and counting, on sedatives to get any sleep, alternating with caffeine to stay awake and get anything accomplished. Stress? Circadian rhythms hosed by the unending sunlight because, around and between the solar cells that dotted its outer coating, the igloo was translucent? Donna guessed some of both. Brad did not give a shit which. Marcus only wanted, desperately, eight hours of uninterrupted sleep—and afterward to find something.

  For the benefit of their imaginary eavesdroppers, Marcus said, “Okay, guys, about dinner tonight ….”

  * * *

  Valerie flitted about the house, multitasking. Washing, drying, and folding laundry. Straightening. Nuking and distractedly eating a frozen dinner, then ordering a bunch more. Listening to an audiobook Jay had recommended, about whole brain emulation. (WBE seemed to be the next step in artificial intelligence after neural nets, digitally mimicking not only swarms of neurons but also the complex neural pathways naturally occurring in an actual brain. A rat brain, in the current state of the art, and a small part of the brain, at that, but still. Crazy stuff.)

  Keep busy enough and the house felt merely empty, not lonely.

  Every four minutes the datasheet lying open on the living-room coffee table gave a chirp. Sometimes she even managed to hear the signal over the droning narration of the AI book. When it happened, she would dash in, glance at the big wall display, and jiggle the joystick.

  Her bot rolled along an undulating straightaway alongside the gently curving rim wall of Legendre Crater. There it was early morning; every little rock and dip declared itself with a long shadow. As long as her bot continued toward north-northeast, its shadow fell to the left without impeding her view forward.

  She texted Marcus, who had gone silent—again. He didn’t respond. She texted Simon, who at least replied. An emoji was better than nothing. She gave up on the AI audiobook for the night. She swapped texts with an exercise buddy, not that she remembered when last she had made it to the health center. Maybe they should get coffee sometime, Ada proposed. Val agreed, but begged off setting a date.

  The datasheet chirped again.

  The bot moved toward Humboldt Crater at little faster than a power walk. Ten kph was the top speed onboard software allowed—and then only while a person monitored the terrain ahead. Let five minutes elapse without touching the controls, and the bot reverted to its autonomous pace of three kph. She found that infuriating, when terrain maps showed the way forward all but flat as a pancake for the next twenty klicks.

  Her joystick connected to the Internet through a datasheet; a bit of code to send zig-left, zag-back-right commands every not-quite-five minutes would be child’s play. But the mega security deposit she’d had to put down on the bot stopped her. The day before, while she had been at work, her first bot had managed to trap itself in a nameless little crater. Until Armchair Excursions happened to have someone in the area to lift it out, that bot would not be going anywhere but in tight circles. Thankfully, the company assumed responsibility for mishaps occurring in autonomous mode. But the switch to this backup bot had left her farther from Marcus—because he had set up camp on Nearside—than when she had begun. After one more wiggle of the joystick, she stood to wrestle clean sheets onto the bed.

  The doorbell rang.

  She peeked out the front-door peephole. In the puddle of wan light cast by the porch lamp stood someone she had not seen since the powersat crisis: Tyler Pope. Her heart skipped a beat as she flung open the door. “It’s about Marcus, isn’t it? Tell me he’s okay.”

  The CIA analyst did not even blink. “He’s fine. May I come in?”

  “Give me a minute.” She started to close the door.

  “I’m quite familiar with your bot rentals.”

  She felt herself staring.

  “May I?” She backed up. Pope followed her inside and closed the door. After an index-finger-to-the-lips silent warning, he took something like a fat stainless-steel pen from a suit-coat pocket. Making his way methodically around the living room, he moved the device past table lamps, wall sockets, air-conditioning vents, painting frames, and furniture. His gadget buzzed and hummed twice, but its tip glowed a steady green. “Okay, we’re clean.”

  “You thought my house might be bugged?”

  “Trust me, Valerie. This is nothing like what you’re imagining.”

  “You have no idea what I’m imagining.”

  Pope grinned. “I’m pretty sure it’s not this.”

  On the big wall display, the bot’s-eye view had, yet again, slowed to a crawl. “My first bot didn’t ‘happen’ to trap itself in that steep-walled little crater, did it?”

  Pope shook his head. “That’s kind of why I’m here. The agency doesn’t want people watching Marcus and friends, so we’ve been monitoring all bots in the vicinity. Alas, you didn’t stop when you lost the first bot. Left to yourself, it seemed, you would just keep trying.”

  Damn straight, I will. “What’s this big secret and why are you telling me now? And why didn’t you just rent all the nearby bots yourself?”

  “You were suspicious about the expedition, and resourceful enough to have tracked them to Nearside. I need to know what you suspected, what you learned, and how. Other people might follow the same clues.”

  Other people. “Russians?”

  Pope maintained a poker face.

  She sat on an end of the sofa, gesturing for him to sit, too. “Okay, I suppose I see why you didn’t rent scads of tourist bots. A big change in rental patterns might have been noticed. And if you didn’t rent them across Nearside, you risked drawing attention to that specific area.”

  “So we concluded. Now please explain what made you suspicious, and suspicious of what, exactly, and how you’ve investigated.”

  She filled him in. “I’ve been cooperative and more than patient. It’s your turn. What do you have Marcus doing, and lying to me about?”

  “I will explain, and not just so you’ll quit playing at Nancy Drew. It hasn’t happened yet, or I’d have found a bug here—or in your office, which I had swept before popping by this evening—but anyone who gets curious about Marcus’s expedition will also monitor his wife. You can’t keep poking around, Valerie, and you can’t tell anyone what I’m about to share. Understand?”

  “Not just. You said, ‘not just so you’ll quit.’ ”

  “Yeah.” Pope leaned forward. “I don’t have a whole lot of lunar experts at my disposal. I suspect you can help.”

  Valerie’s interest in the Moon began and ended with Farside Observatory, the better to explore the much more distant objects that did fascinate her. If Pope did not get the degree of specialization among astronomers, she saw no reason to disabuse him. “What is it, exactly, that I can’t imagine?”

  Pope explained.

  He could not have be
en more right. She would never have begun to imagine this.

  * * *

  The painstaking labor of surveying, gridding, sampling and geotagging, and assaying a large expanse surrounding Ethan’s robot was all but complete. Marcus kept telling himself it had not all been for nothing. They had validated Ethan’s discovery of iridium—the regolith all around was sporadically tainted with the stuff—if never quite at exploitable concentrations. Some iridium splotches were laced with lead and iron; others (and the pattern, if any, eluded them) were not. But even assuming that these metallic traces counted, the team had yet to uncover any evidence of the aliens larger than, well, traces. As for the heap of mummy dust, Donna and her microscope had yet to spot as much as an intact alien cell. Without basic lab gear like a chromatograph, she refused to hazard a guess—and frustrated Dirtside biologists backed her up—about alien biochemistry.

  As for anything larger than the microscopic? Nada. Their handheld ground-penetrating radar unit had added to their knowledge that beneath the dust-choked surface lay … rock and more dust. Fat lot of good all the rushing about and secrecy, the exhaustion and the duplicity, had done anyone.

  Crating yet another regolith sample as, to his left, Donna and Brad did much the same, Marcus thought, Enough. Time, huge day/night temperature swings, and an unending sleet of micrometeorites had long since turned to powder anything ancient aliens might ever have left on the surface. That the lone figure in its alcove had endured? It was a marvel. And now it, too, was also dust. Nothing on the surface. Nothing within reach of radar ….

  “Guys,” he radioed, “I’m on a break.” A sanity break. “You know that lava tube on our topo maps? I’m going to take a look.”

  “Shotgun!” Donna called.

  “I didn’t know you had an interest in caves,” Marcus said.

  “I have an interest in a change of scenery, plus you shouldn’t go caving alone. Brad, care to come along?”