Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  Jesus! What did the FSB not know about him? Then scarier implications hit home: that the FSB had been watching him. They must have decided, after the PS-1 incident, that he was with the CIA. Which, in a manner of speaking, Marcus was.

  “As long as we’re being so candid, I have another question. Your colleagues are talented people, because who else gets to the Moon, but why bring them? I mean, specifically them?”

  “Candid?” Yevgeny shrugged. “Very well. It is a reasonable question. The short answer is, we had no more to go on than the public, not very credible, explanation for your excursion.”

  We? More Russian spies, perhaps. Asking about them would likely be unreasonable. “And yet, doubting the cover story, you still brought along a geologist.”

  “There was the remote chance you people weren’t lying.”

  “Yeah, well. Anyway, you understand now why Donna is in my party. If I could have recruited a doctor or biologist without raising eyebrows, I would have. Brad’s along to keep all our gear running. It was a long drive here, and it’ll be a long drive back.”

  “Ekatrina accompanied me for a similar reason. In case we ended up staying.” Yevgeny’s eyes tracked the women as they approached the lava tube. “Which, as it happens, we will.”

  Same reason as Brad, Marcus took that. “And Ilya?”

  “The shuttle still had an unoccupied seat.” Yevgeny smiled. “Where but Base Putin are fusion experts the personnel available in surplus?”

  And was it just happenstance that, before university, the burly, gruff physicist had served two combat tours in a paratroop regiment sent into Ukraine? “Where, indeed?” Marcus said.

  Chapter 13

  “I’m about convinced,” Judson burst out, “that folks Dirtside are seeing neither the forest nor the trees.”

  It takes all kinds of trees to make a forest, Yevgeny interpreted, unclear how the proverb applied. His eyes remained fixed on the uneven slope he and Judson were surveying. Plodding forward, sweeping a magnetometer from side to side, Yevgeny took a moment to recall the relevant American adage. “And what forest do you suppose they overlook, down below?”

  “How difficult this is.” Judson slipped on some loose stones, sliding downhill a meter before he regained his balance. The fiber-optic cable Yevgeny had scavenged from the shuttle’s stores was long enough to keep them connected. “How constrained we are by what few supplies we could carry. How much more we could be discovering, while instead they have us marking time. There’s an alien facility behind that airlock. Almost a week after coming across it, we have yet even to try opening the door. Surely there are greater wonders inside than one mummy.”

  The mummy, FSB biologists conceded, of which handheld X-ray gear could never reveal more than tantalizing hints. But to do a proper CAT scan would take moving the body, and Dirtside no one, FSB or CIA, would yet take responsibility for as much as touching it. “Is a bit of waiting so bad?”

  “I believe we passed ‘a bit’ several days ago.”

  In point of fact, Yevgeny agreed. More by the hour, he fantasized about ways to provoke sufficient Chinese or European curiosity to prod his superiors toward action—without, of course, actually tipping off those foreign powers. So far he had nothing.

  If only someone, ideally an American, would stumble into the damned corpse. Alas, that was fantasy, too. A scant meter belowground, lunar temperatures held steady at about minus thirty degrees. The alien body rested deep within the lava tube, remote from the surface’s temperature extremes. This mummy appeared well preserved and sturdy. A swift kick with a heavy boot might only dent the damned thing.

  Yevgeny said, “Nevertheless, we shall wait awhile longer.”

  They reached a small, young crater punched right into the ancient trough they were surveying. Judson unplugged his end of the cable, hopped inside, then reached for the magnetometer. Yevgeny handed it down. After a thorough sweep, Judson shook his head.

  For all the masses of metal they had found—the alien airlock, something like rebar within mooncrete tunnel walls, and much of the new mummy’s vacuum gear—their surface search had yet to reveal a single artifact. As if to taunt them, they encountered several splotches, ranging in size from saucers to platters, where something had been reduced over the ages to metallic dust. Perhaps half had traces of iridium discernible to their lone mass spectrometer.

  Judson jumped out of the crater and reconnected the cable. They resumed their search pattern, now with Judson operating the magnetometer. His hunched shoulders radiated aggravation.

  “Why the impatience?” Yevgeny asked.

  “You mean, aside from intense curiosity, the work piling up back at the observatory, and worrying who else might drop in on me? My wife is pregnant. I’d like to get Dirtside before the baby is born.”

  “Congratulations.” This would be the American’s first child, although by all accounts he and his stepson were close. As for getting home before the baby is born, what about Valerie’s pregnancy complication? It was hard to imagine Judson uninformed—or callous—enough not to care. Had he put her condition out of mind for the sake of the mission? “When is the baby due?”

  “It’s kind of you to pretend.” Judson laughed. “And if the FSB does know my baby’s gender, keep that to yourself, please. I want to be surprised.”

  When did spies not want to know everything? Not for the first time, Yevgeny wondered if Judson was what he claimed: a technocrat drafted into a sensitive endeavor. There was no use asking. If Judson were a deep-cover spy, he would also deny it.

  Also not for the first time, Yevgeny found himself liking the American.

  “As frustrated,” Yevgeny said, “as I am with Dirtside delays, I prefer to look on the bright side.”

  “Which is?”

  “As long as we are out here, our superiors cannot offer us any more helpful suggestions.”

  “That is a bright side,” Judson said. “But as for the delay, I blame them all the same.”

  Maybe that was even true. Again, Yevgeny found himself liking the man.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes on the treadmill had no discernible effect on Val’s tense muscles. A hot shower, the massaging jets beating down on neck and shoulders, did no better. What had begun, however vicariously, as an adventure had become, in equal measure, house arrest.

  At first she had had plenty of company. To anyone watching, they were a cable guy, a handyman service hauling away old furniture, and carpet installers. Her visitors did all that, to one degree or another, but mostly they equipped the house with discreet security sensors—and a fiber-optic link the local utilities knew nothing about.

  Acknowledging defeat, she returned to the house’s once and future third bedroom. Since before she met Marcus, that spare room had been a guest room. A few months hence, it would become the baby’s nursery. Now, it was her command center: the one place in the house hardwired to, well, she did not know where. Just as she did not need to know how the fiber-optic cable emerging from the guest-bath drain had made its way to the house—robots crawling through sewers, she imagined—or where the link’s remote end terminated. But that slender cable, with an Agency app on the biometrically keyed datasheet she had also been provided, gave her secure access to Marcus and the Agency.

  Tyler assured her she did not need to know the details. Doubtless he was right, and there were many more things she did need to learn. She dried her hair, got dressed, and went back to her studies.

  Her latest reading assignment, downloaded to the Agency datasheet, was the “operational protocol” governing her access to the prospector bot. Or, anyway, the protocol that would govern it. She kept telling herself the Sun would climb high enough in the lunar sky to strike the bot’s still west-facing solar panels. Eventually. And tempted as she was till then to buy imagery from commercial lunar satellites, she desisted. The CIA would be watching.

/>   Back to her homework. Some Agency analyst had gone on and on, thinking to anticipate every circumstance under which anyone operating the bot had to be ready to have it play dead on a moment’s notice. Her mind just did not function that way. Carl Sagan once said that the Universe might surrender her secrets reluctantly, but always fought fair. That’s the way scientists thought. That was how her mind worked. She just didn’t get all this deception and misdirection.

  Case in point: down the hall in Marcus’s and her bedroom, voices droned. Daytime shows streaming unwatched to a muted TV would have sufficed to mimic a bored, bed-bound patient. The mandated precaution had seemed ridiculous. Who would hack the cable company to know what she was, or was not, watching?

  That skepticism turned out not to matter. After a single day alone, she unmuted the television for hours at a stretch. The murmuring voices were company.

  Enough! she decided. Enough dry text and enough isolation. She put through a secure call to Ethan Nyquist. He picked up on the second ring.

  Even before his big lunar discovery, Ethan had seldom ventured outdoors. (So, anyway, Tyler had related. She had not asked how or why the spy knew. It would have verged too close to asking what and how he knew about Marcus and her. Val was pretty sure she didn’t want to hear that.) Ethan’s face was pale, almost pasty. From what she could see—his camera was zoomed so that only head and shoulders, and none of the wheelchair, showed—he was thin, almost gaunt. Scrawniness and a crew cut made his broad forehead all the more prominent. In the background, soda cans and dirty dishes festooned every visible flat surface.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey. How are you doing?”

  “Busy.”

  “How’s your weather? It’s hot here.”

  “Busy.”

  Fine. Theirs wasn’t a social relationship. “I need some pointers on the bot.”

  “No, you don’t. Not yet, anyway. It won’t start charging for another few days. Once it does, we can’t do anything with it but look.”

  As the Agency protocols had made all too clear. And also why she doubted he was too busy to talk. “But the bot can do more.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve used telepresence bots, but only the tourist models.”

  He scratched his nose, grimacing. At her or the itch? “Not the same.”

  Uh-huh. Not even close. Lunar tourist bots were cheap and expendable: low-to-the-ground, their only instrumentation cameras for rubbernecking and lidar for gauging distances. Prospector bots were larger and heavier, with much higher centers of gravity, and heavily instrumented. Tank-like tracks propelled and steered them. A forelimb like a giant, motorized corkscrew served as the primary drill. The other forelimb—many-jointed, with a complex gripper—was its general-purpose arm. “I thought I’d rent one for practice. Hundreds of miles away from your bot, of course. If I have questions …?”

  “There’s an online manual.” He managed a fleeting smile. “That’s a joke. Yeah, I’m available if you have questions. At least till the spooks start sharing with us.”

  Her impression was that the spooks did not have much new to share. Marcus either, for that matter. He didn’t complain, but it was obvious he was climbing the dust-coated walls of his inflatable shelter, chomping at the bit to unseal the alien base.

  Just as she was bored enough to fret about mixing metaphors, even if only in her own mind.

  “Once I’ve gotten the hang of driving one around, I intend to get into its other systems.” Of which such bots had several. The general-purpose arm, with its six degrees of freedom. Its rack of interchangeable attachments: gripper, crusher, secondary drill. The sample-vaporizing laser. The mass spectrometer. Spare parts, for limited remote self-repair. However much of the onboard software the bot company revealed to renters—or the CIA had extracted. “Any advice where to start?”

  “The arm. The thing of it is ….”

  He had trailed off as a doorbell rang. On her end. “Sorry, Ethan, I need to get that. Otherwise I’ll have EMTs breaking down my door in minutes.”

  “Damn the injustice,” he said. “Caring neighbors.”

  So she had not, quite, lied the other day to Simon; instead, she had been prescient. She suspended the comm link, locked the datasheet, and galumphed downstairs. The front-door peephole revealed a bespectacled, elderly lady, forehead furrowed with worry. Great. More guilt.

  Putting on her best tired expression, Val opened the door, just a crack. “Hi, Helen.”

  “Are you all right, dear? You look peaked.” Her hands beneath mismatched potholders, Helen raised a covered dish. “Italian sausage and peppers. You need to keep up your strength. But it’s turkey sausage. You won’t want to put on too much weight.” Pause. “May I come in, dear? Do a load of laundry for you, or something?”

  The house was spotless and the hamper empty. That was from boredom—would the Sun never climb high enough in the sky over Humboldt Crater for the bot to recharge?—not nesting instinct, which ought not to hit for months. But a clean, uncluttered house did not jibe with bed rest. And if she had suppressed boundless nervous energy to leave some clutter behind? Tyler did not want anyone without a clearance inside the house.

  Val accepted the covered dish, warm even through potholders. It smelled delicious. “I appreciate the offer, really, but I’ve got everything covered. There’s a service coming in to do chores. Marcus insisted. In fact, they’re coming by this afternoon.” Because any unanticipated opening of a door or window signaled Tyler’s people to check on her and to re-sweep the house for bugs. (And who could blame them? Of course, the McNallys had bought the house next door—a good decade before Marcus moved in—just waiting to spy on him.)

  Helen sniffed. “I can’t believe that husband of yours hasn’t cancelled his trip.”

  He’s on the freaking Moon, Val thought, not a few miles up the road in, say, Baltimore. “Lewis and Clark were gone for three years.” Marcus’s tiresome obsession with Lewis and Clark trivia might for once come in handy.

  “Three years?”

  “Uh-huh.” Of course the two captains had been unmarried, like most of their men, a detail that did not buttress Val’s argument. “I should go lie down.”

  “Well, if you need anything ….”

  Upstairs, the soap opera had ended, the daytime talk show that followed opening with applause for its host. “Of course, I’ll call.” Val raised the casserole dish in salute. “And thanks for this.”

  “I mean it, dear. You look very tired. It’s okay to take a nap, you know.” Helen winked. “Sleep while you have the chance.”

  “I just have things on my mind.”

  “I mean it. Sleep while you can.” Finally, Helen turned and left.

  Only, Val knew, she couldn’t sleep. Not with her thoughts racing a mile a minute. Not with so many questions on her mind, and matters overhead at a standstill. Not until Marcus—who, she felt certain wasn’t the holdup—found a way to get things rolling again.

  * * *

  Another day (in the sense of twenty-four hours). Another two-man slog across sterile lunar landscape. Ambling down a gentle, boulder-strewn slope, Yevgeny felt they had the process down to a science. Too bad it was such an unproductive process. He said, “It could be worse.”

  “It could be raining.” Marcus responded, laughing. “Not going to happen, except possibly rocks. That would be bad.”

  Marcus? Yevgeny attributed that unspoken familiarity to wanting to come across as allies. His … what? adversary? rival? competitor? opponent? remained Judson in the updates ceaselessly demanded from Moscow. “No, the weather was not on my mind. You could be in your shelter, me in my shuttle, working out new ways to report having nothing new to report.” And to not imply that it was Dirtside direction that kept them hobbled.

  “That would be worse. Ditto deflecting more of the ‘helpful’ advice that keep
s coming.”

  It seemed they had much in common. “What did you expect to find when you set out?”

  “Honestly? Not much. The way the body spotted in the alcove crumbled, it had to be ancient. Anything on the surface would’ve turned to dust long before we came looking.” Marcus sniffed, from allergies rather than disapproval, Yevgeny guessed. Back to the Apollo missions, some people had had such reactions to lunar regolith. “Still, I hoped to find more.”

  “And so you have. How do you explain the aliens you did find?”

  “I don’t. Not yet.”

  “Hold on.” The handle vibrated in Yevgeny’s hands, the signal strong even through his gloves. Ekatrina’s clever retrofit to the Americans’ magnetometer obviated the need to stare at the device’s readout. Now they got nothing done in half the time. “Some metal. Do you see anything?”

  Marcus aimed his portable ground-penetrating radar unit. Its display showed a faint, irregular blotch. They had encountered dozens like it. “Metal-dusted regolith over gravel, if I were to guess, and I’ve become something of an expert.” Kneeling, he scooped some dust into a sample vial. Using one of the compressed-nitrogen canisters Brad Morton had fabricated, Marcus gingerly blew more of the powdery regolith to the side. “Looks like gravel.” He grasped a piece between finger and thumb. “And if this isn’t gravel, I’ll eat it.”

  “A step up from your taste in pizza.”

  “Heh.”

  “Seriously, Marcus, about the aliens. We found another. We found an airlock. What does that do to your theory?”

  “Blows it out of the water?” Marcus stood. “These guys wear pressure suits. Obviously, they aren’t Moon natives. They have legs and sturdy skeletons. They didn’t evolve in water or a low-gravity environment. You would think they’d have found Earth more hospitable than the Moon.”

  Russian experts felt the same. “Maybe the facility here was an observation post.”