Battle Luna

by Travis S. Taylor

  Boom.

  A wall of brilliant, searing light rose up out of the third vehicle in the line and raced toward them as the ground turned sideways. The light picked them up and hurtled them through the manufactured atmosphere, only to slam them down on the soft, lush ground cover just inside the dome’s airlock itself. Pure instinct made Leiko toggle her visor down with her tongue switch as she flew through the air, so her face would be protected from the debris that would follow. Torn, twisted metal and pulverized moon rock rained down on them as soon as they hit the ground. The force of the impact drove the air from Leiko’s stunned lungs, and she lay still while her body remembered how to breathe.

  Next to her, Ryu whimpered. Leiko blinked inside her helmet and gasped. Finally, after what felt like ages, her diaphragm relaxed and she pulled in a great whooshing breath of air.

  It tasted like burnt metal and stone.

  “Ryu,” she said, her voice ragged. “Ryu, I’m here, buddy. Are you hurt?”

  Her visor was covered with dirt, but she didn’t want to retract it just yet, in case there was a secondary explosion or something. She swiped at it with a gloved hand, and that helped a little. She heard Ryu whimpering again, and felt something press against her side as she rolled over and fought her way up onto her hands and knees. Another swipe at her visor didn’t yield better results, so she took a deep breath and toggled it open, then looked out on a scene of devastation.

  Gray lunar dust hung thickly in the air, coating her mouth and nose with every breath. Her ears rang with a high, insistent buzzy sound. It almost sounded like one of her helmet’s speakers were blown, but she could hear Ryu’s whines coming through just fine. She shook her head to clear it and immediately regretted that decision as a sudden, throbbing pain in her skull resulted.

  “Ryu,” she groaned again. The whining intensified, and the body pressing next to her pressed harder. She looked down to see the dog leaning on her, his suit covered in a layer of dust, his own visor completely obscured. She sat heavily down and pulled off her vac gloves, using her bare hands to wipe his helmet clear.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “You’re all right. I’m right here. What the hell happened? An explosion? Oh bloody hells, Ryder!”

  She pushed herself up to her feet, despite her wobbliness and the pain in her skull. Ryu leaned into her, nearly knocking her over. She reached down and wrapped his tether around her hand, using that anchor to steady herself as she squinted into the dust.

  “Ryder?” Leiko called out, coughing. “Ryder?!”

  Ryu snuffled, and let out a short bark that nearly brought Leiko to her knees. She clenched her fist around his tether, and felt him step forward, favoring his right side.

  “Ryu?” she whispered. The dust swirled around her and the Moon threatened to tilt sideways again, but Leiko swallowed hard and forced herself to stay upright. Come on, girl, she told herself. Get your shit together! The dog is trying to tell you something. Figure it out!

  Ryu pulled again with another whine, and Leiko felt herself stumble forward. She managed to catch herself before she spilled onto her face, but Ryu wouldn’t let up with either the whining or the pulling, and she had no choice but to hop along as he pulled her toward the heat where the explosion had been. Her balance had been knocked askew by the blast, but she managed to stay upright until Ryu came to a dead stop and stood, quivering in intensity as he stared at a pile of rubble. He let out a short, perfunctory bark.

  He’s alerting! Ryder!

  Leiko fell to her knees, adding two more sharp pains that ricocheted up into her battered body. But she ignored them and began to pull chunks of debris off of the pile with her bare hands. Ryu, too, came and began to dig, his wide, dinner-plate paws causing showers of little stones to go bouncing and rolling away. Eventually, they heard a metal clang, and Leiko traced her fingers along the edge of what had possibly once been a cowling on the convoy vehicle. She took the best grip she could with her bare hands and heaved, lifting with her legs and her back as it inched upward bit by torturous bit. Ryu continued digging at her side, until between the two of them they created a space large enough for him to get his head and front body into.

  “Get him out,” Leiko grunted, knowing that it wasn’t a command that Ryu knew, hoping that he’d understand what she meant anyway. She heard a lot of snuffling and whining, and then Ryu began to back out, haunches first, pulling a dirty, bleeding Ryder with him. Ryu had found Ryder’s arm and grabbed it with the helmet’s jaw. Somehow, he had managed enough control not to crush Ryder’s bones. At least, she hoped that was the case.

  Somewhere in the dust, Leiko heard voices.

  “Help!” she screamed. “I’ve got a survivor here! He’s hurt! Someone please!”

  Someone she didn’t know and could barely see stepped forward and grabbed Ryder’s free arm as it flopped out of the hole in the debris. Ryu growled softly, but let go and backed up when Leiko gave him the “drop it” command.

  “We’ve got him, ma’am,” a voice she didn’t recognize said. “You can let that go.”

  “How many are missing?” she asked.

  “We . . . we don’t know.”

  “Get Ryder to the medic. Ryu and I will help you find who’s left.” She let the former cowling drop with a clang and scrubbed her hands over her face, then bent down and pressed her face to Ryu’s helmet.

  “Good boy, Ryu,” she said. “Now let’s find the others.”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  Leiko looked up from the hospital bed where she’d awakened. She and Ryu had searched the rubble, finding eleven more survivors buried under the debris and dust from the disaster. That was the last thing she remembered. Best she could tell, she’d passed out after helping to pull that last survivor free. As far as she knew, those eleven, plus Ryder, Ryu and she herself, were the only survivors of over fifty people at Lock 3 that day.

  “Come on, Leiko, I know you’re awake,” Ryder said from the bed next to her. He reached out and pushed aside the curtain that separated them. “Sit your bed up and talk to me. You’ve got to talk some sense into the guys at DomeSec. There’s no way this was an accident!”

  “Why not?” she asked softly. Her ears still rang, though it was getting better. Loud noises tended to cause the ringing to flare up in volume and intensity. “You said yourself that the cab that blew had all the mining demo equipment in it.”

  “Yes,” Ryder said, snorting softly. “But it didn’t have the primers, or any of the other components! We don’t transport them together because we’re not idiots. Someone rigged that cab to explode, and we just got very, very lucky.”

  “Ryder, there’s over thirty people dead. I don’t think we can call that lucky.”

  “We can if the alternative is a couple thousand—like the entire population of Rinehart Dome!”

  Leiko pressed a button on her control pad and the head of the bed angled upward to a sitting position. “What?”

  “Remember what I said right before the blast?” Ryder asked, his bright eyes ringed by lurid bruises. White bandages covered the top of his head and ran down under his chin, and his whole face looked puffy and sore. But none of that seemed to matter to him, so intensely was he looking at her. “That we were running a bit behind schedule?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, I’ve done the math. If we had been running on time, that cab would have blown just as it was passing through the airlock. A blast of that size would have compromised both the inner and outer gates! It would have compromised the entire dome.”

  “What?” she asked again. “But . . . who would do that? And why, Ryder? There’s no motive for that!”

  “There’s one,” he said grimly. “But you might not have heard about it. I only heard myself this morning. The Ueys are here. They’ve already had skirmishes with a couple of the other domes.”

  “Skirmishes?”

  Ryder nodded. “They demanded entry to Hadley Dome and Lunar Village. And fought when they were d
enied. They want something they think we have, but they don’t know where it is.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know. They haven’t come here yet, but with our spaceport, I bet we’re not far down the list. And what better way to get inside than to stage an ‘accident’ and swoop in to ‘help’?”

  “But that would require them to have a man on the inside,” she said.

  “Exactly.” He nodded slowly. “Someone’s playing saboteur.”

  “You know this sounds like a bad conspiracy theory, right?” She tried to raise her right eyebrow, and winced when the movement made her head start to pound.

  “But you believe me.” It wasn’t a question. Leiko let out a sigh, and then nodded slowly, carefully.

  “I believe it wasn’t a total accident,” she said. “I’ll look into it when I get returned to duty.”

  She’d expected that to mollify him. With his easygoing personality, Ryder wasn’t generally one to push. But this time, he shook his head in the negative.

  “That’s not going to work,” he said softly, glancing around before leaning closer to her. “We don’t have enough time. If I’m right, we’ve got to find the saboteur ASAP, otherwise you know they’ll try again, and more people will get hurt.”

  “Can we call them anything else?” she asked, groaning softly as she shifted in her bed. “Perp, or Unsub? I just . . . let’s not get overly dramatic until we have to, all right?”

  “Fine. Unsub, then. As long as you tell me what it means.”

  “Unknown subject. Why’d you pick that one if you didn’t know what it meant?”

  “I like learning new words. Anyway, my point is this: We don’t have time to wait for you to be returned to duty. We’ve got to find the unsub now.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, scrubbing her hands over her eyes. “Let me think about this. If what you’re saying is right, then this individual has access to the components needed to detonate a cab’s worth of explosives. And the knowledge to make it happen. That list has to be pretty small, right?”

  “Knowledge . . . no.” Ryder made a waffling motion with his hand. “A lot of the mining crews have demo experience. Access, though—we keep primers and components locked down pretty tight. And I just did our accountability audit. We’re not missing anything. Haven’t been since I took over the directorship three years ago.”

  She looked at him sidelong.

  “It’s not you, is it?” she asked, mostly joking.

  “What? Shit, no!” Ryder said, swearing for the first time in their acquaintance. “How could you think I—?”

  “Relax,” she said, letting the corners of her mouth lift in a tiny smile. “I don’t. I’m just giving you a hard time. Besides, if you’d had residue from working the explosives on you, Ryu would have alerted—” Leiko sat bolt upright, ignoring the piercing, blinding pain that stabbed behind her eyes.

  “Where is Ryu?” she asked.

  “Your dog?” Ryder shrugged. “I think they took him to the vet. I overheard the nurses talking earlier. He apparently wasn’t happy when you went down. He wouldn’t let any of the medics approach. Luckily, the first of the other DomeSec guys was on scene by that point and he tranqued him.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Which DomeSec guy?”

  “Hollis. The deputy chief.”

  She should have been surprised. With his all-day conference call, Hollis wouldn’t have been in a position to hear the calls on the LMR system. The fact that he was the first guy on scene was weird. She supposed someone could have told him about the emergency, but still, any of the other guys should have shown up first.

  But she wasn’t surprised. Which meant that he’d already piqued her gut’s interest. And the fact that he’d been the one to take custody of Ryu? Well . . .

  “We gotta go,” she said, pushing her blankets down to her waist and pulling the IV tube out of the saline lock they’d put in the back of her hand. She swung her legs to the floor and pushed up to her feet, disregarding the way it made her head pound.

  “What? Why? What happened?” Ryder asked, blinking rapidly as he fought to catch up.

  “You’re right. Something is off, and Ryu’s the only trained explosive detection dog DomeSec has right now. Hollis hates him, and he shouldn’t have been able to get to Lock Three at all, let alone be first on scene.”

  “Besides you.”

  “Besides me. So yeah, something is off. Plus, think about this: Hollis has access to explosives components as well. They’re part of our mine rescue kits.”

  “That doesn’t make him a saboteur!” Ryder protested. Still, he was out of bed and pulling a T-shirt on over his head. Leiko looked down at her own hospital gown and cursed before she saw the skintight underlayer of her vac suit lying neatly folded on the chair beside her bed. She snatched it up and began pulling it on.

  “No, but if he is, and he was near the cab, Ryu will be able to tell, which is why Hollis tranqued him. Think about it. He’s a trained moondog handler. Hell, he trained Ryu. Why would he need to tranq him? We have commands and procedures for when a dog’s handler is incapacitated. If Hollis is the unsub, then he wants Ryu out of the picture because Ryu is a potential vulnerability! If only we had a ride! We need to get to the vet’s ASAP!”

  Ryder stared at her, and then grabbed an LMR from his bedside table.

  “Trans, Director. Need a cab at the hospital entrance. Now. Perfect. Thanks. Director out.”

  Leiko paused in the act of buckling her duty belt over the suit and raised her eyebrows. “That was fast.”

  “When you need something, call a loggie,” Ryder said with a ghost of a grin. “Now come on, they’ll be here in about thirty seconds.”

  Rinehart’s resident veterinarian, Dr. Taketou, had her own office and clinic. It was conveniently located near the animal husbandry compound, where the moondogs and other lunar variants of Earth animals were bred and tested. Unfortunately for Leiko, this put it across the entirety of the dome from the hospital. And while Rinehart wasn’t anywhere near as large as an Earth city, the roads and streets were unusually congested with vehicles.

  “It’s the ‘accident,’” Ryder explained as their driver took yet another detour to avoid gridlocked traffic. “It’s thrown all the timetables off and everything is chaos. If your guy really did do this, I’m going to punch him in the face for that alone.”

  “Warranted,” Leiko said, pushing against the seat to avoid sliding into him and aggravating their existing bruising.

  Eventually, they arrived at their destination. Dr. Taketou’s front office windows were dark, with no sign of movement within. Leiko stepped up to the door and waved her security credentials over the lock. It clicked. She pushed the door open and crept over the threshold.

  Inside the darkened reception area, all was still. Leiko turned back over her shoulder and waved to Ryder to follow her. She laid one finger on her lips to caution him to silence and moved on silent feet to a door emblazoned with the name Candace Taketou, DVM.

  At first, the office itself looked just as deserted. But just as Leiko was getting ready to move on, a low, broken moan drifted out from behind the doctor’s heavy wooden desk. She crept forward just enough to see Dr. Taketou lying on the floor, her white lab coat askew, a trickle of blood flowing from her nose to a puddle beneath her cheek on the carpet. Behind Leiko, Ryder let out a soft gasp.

  “Radio for help and stay with her,” Leiko said lowly. She turned around and grabbed the LMR from Ryder’s slack fingers, then held it up in his eyeline. “Do it, Ryder. I’ll find Hollis.”

  Her friend nodded, his wide eyes locked on the sprawled figure of the veterinarian. But he keyed the LMR’s mic and called for immediate medical assistance. Then he knelt and began to take Dr. Taketou’s pulse.

  Leiko spun and bounded out into the hallway, then back toward the double doors that led to the lab/surgery area. As she approached, she heard a soft, despairing whine.

  She hit the d
oors full force, throwing them wide with the impact of her body. She had just a moment to register the scene: Hollis standing at the operating table, his back to her, loading a syringe from a small glass vial, Ryu lying on his side, his brindle tail and feet twitching as he fought to overcome the fading effects of the tranquilizer that Hollis had used earlier.

  Though mass and power weren’t her strength, Leiko put everything she had into that charge, and she impacted Hollis from his right side, reaching up to knock the syringe out of his hand as they fell to the ground.

  “Get. The. Fuck. Away. From. My. Dog!” Leiko ground the words out between her teeth as she fought to get control of the larger, heavier officer. Despite his initial surprise, Hollis recovered well, grabbing the collar of her suit and using his larger mass to roll and force her down to the floor beneath his weight.

  “Soloway,” he said, giving her an ugly smile. He moved his forearm up to press against her neck. “Why am I not surprised? Ever since you’ve arrived, you’ve been a pain in my ass. You and this damn psycho here. Do you have any idea how excited I was to learn that you were going to be at Lock Three today? Finally, I thought. Finally my problems will solve themselves. Just in time for me to get a fat payout from the Ueys and make my way off this godforsaken rock! Five years of my life, wasted.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave? Why blow up a convoy? Fuck, man, we talked about this!” Leiko asked, grunting as his forearm ground down over her throat. From the corner of her eye, she could see Ryu slowly lift his head. Keep talking, asshole.

  “And do what? Live in poverty back planetside? No thanks. I’m going home, but I’m going home in style. I’ve been killing myself training these stupid dogs . . . thank God for the Mime or whatever it is the Ueys are looking for. I get wind that they’re looking for it, I make a call, drop some hints. Guy asks if I can help them out a little bit, and cha-ching! There’s my chance! St. Tropez, here I come!”

  “So you murdered almost fifty people for vacation tickets?” she gasped. His pressure on her windpipe increased.