“In China, the decapitation of the Communist Party was answered by the logistical skills of an organization that had been slowly growing in the midst of suppression for some time: the Catholic Church, which elected the Holy Chinese Emperor at the Council of Hong Kong.
“And finally, in the United States, the Democratic president and Republican congress took equal blame from the electorate for failing to prevent the war, and both parties dissolved before the might of the new American Party, which took on the tasks of rebuilding the nation and settling the refugees, but then split into the American and Constitutionalist Parties. So, Mr. Miller, do you consider yourself answered?”
“Uh…yes?” Jeremy said, with a glazed look on his face.
Mr. H’s timer went off. “I appear to have fallen victim to my own tendency to reminisce again,” grumbled Mr. Hybels, looking vaguely disgusted with himself. “I’m not sure whether that’s an asset or a failing in a history teacher. At any rate, well done to our presenters. Or presenter. Bonus points for starting a thoughtful discussion.”
Paul thought that his sister might have fallen over without her crutches holding her up. He looked at Cynthia, who was standing, looking as if she couldn’t decide whether to freeze in place or flee. Kseniya, who was always good at making new people feel welcome, was already walking over and introducing herself.
“I like your outsuit,” she said. “But really, you can take your gloves off during class. It’s perfectly safe. This room is well into the interior of the colony.”
“Yeah,” said Jeremy as he walked by. “Anything that penetrated this far would crush us, fry us, or both.” Kseniya hit him on his broad back, and he snorted.
“Come to After School with us?” asked Kseniya as they walked out into the hall. “We’d all like to get to know you, and I, for one, could use a beer.”
“Beer?” asked Cynthia, eyes round.
Kseniya frowned in a mixture of mock and real sympathy. “You poor girl, where are you from? Even the United States has finally come down off its puritan high horse and lowered the drinking age to sixteen.”
“In most states,” said Paul. “But the Moon makes its own rules.” He tried to sound casual. “Come on, we’ll play some pool, have a few hands of cards.” A general mutter of agreement met this suggestion.
Cynthia looked as though she had just been presented with the dilemma of choosing a family member to sacrifice, but she hesitantly nodded. “Yes. Yes, I would like that—” Suddenly, she broke off. “Oh, no,” she said, looking down at her convirscer. Paul hadn’t even heard it buzz.
“What is it,” he asked.
“My parents’ dome,” Cynthia stammered. “It’s—it’s been punctured.”
“Punctured?” echoed Paul.
“I must go. I must go now,” she said. Immediately, she turned and began loping down the corridor.
“Wait, Cynthia, we’ll help!” said Paul. “Come on, guys!”
Only pausing to check their outsuits, as would be reflexive for any child over the age of six on the moon, the class started after her. They only knew one response to the report of a puncture, and it was the one that had been drilled into them from the moment they arrived on the Earth’s satellite: help your fellow humans.
“Cynthia, wait,” Paul called. But he could hardly blame her. Would he have hesitated, if it had been his parents living in some far-flung, single-family minestead, accessible only by rover? Still, if she outdistanced them and started an airlock cycle, it would take even longer for help to reach her family.
She disappeared around a corner.
“Cynthia!”
Paul gathered both feet under him and leapt in a shallow arc, hoping he wasn’t about to barrel into anyone coming the opposite way. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jael catching up. She had also obviously leapt, and probably before he had. He tucked his feet and bounced off the corner wall, relieved to find himself sailing down an empty corridor. Then his brain caught up with him.
Empty.
Only a pair of Secutors, passing each other halfway down the long tunnel.
Jael, just behind him, swore.
“Well, where is she?” asked Yilong, rounding the corner.
Paul squinted down the corridor. She disappeared. Again. “I don’t know,” he said.
“There ain’t any puncture on the RescueNet,” growled Jeremy appearing behind them. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know,” Paul repeated.
Paul didn’t know whether his mother would be home, but fortunately, she was sitting behind her desk. His heart was still hammering in his chest with the speed of bounding all the way from class. He didn’t know how he looked, but it must have been bad because their mother did a double take when she looked up from her desk.
“Good heavens, what’s got into you two?” she asked. “I thought you’d be enjoying Afters, not looking like you’d seen a dome fracture.”
Paul forced himself to speak slowly. “Well, that’s the thing. Mom, has there been any news of a puncture? On a minestead somewhere, I mean?”
“No, of course not,” their mother said. “You know all those would go out on the Colonet. We might need all the help we could get.”
“Well, could anything…smaller have happened?” he asked, mind racing. “Like, say, an emergency that wasn’t quite that severe, but would look bad to someone who hadn’t lived on the Moon long?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. She called up a screen that hovered in the air. “Anything like that would be logged. The most dire emergency that happened today was another one of my Secutors going on the fritz inside the shipyard again.”
“Same problem as before?” asked Paul.
“Yes.”
“Well, can’t you use Dad’s override transceivers?” asked Paul.
“I tried,” she said tightly. “It still went into Maintenance Mode and went right to the garage.”
Paul gulped. The only conceivable reason for that is either that the transceivers were bad…or that he and Jael had screwed up somehow when they’d installed them. He hoped Mom would ask their father about the first possibility first.
“I need access to the stable security cameras,” he said, rushing straight on.
“Why?” said his mother, her eyes narrowing.
Paul knew he wasn’t going to be able to skate over this, so he launched into the story of what Cynthia had done. “We all volunteered to go with her and help, of course,” he finished. “But she wouldn’t wait, and we couldn’t find anything on the Colonet Rapid Response channel to show that anything had happened.”
“That’s because nothing did happen.” Their mother frowned. “Paul, it sounds to me like your new friend made some sort of mistake—probably tried to dodge her own parents’ curfew and sneak out to Afters behind their backs—and got caught. And then wasn’t honest enough to tell you so. You really should have figured that out on your own.”
Paul hesitated. He didn’t really want to tell his mother that the girl he was looking for had managed to disappear on him twice. It made him sound incompetent or overly dramatic. “But I think she might be in trouble,” he finished, weakly.
His mother smiled grimly. “How much trouble? No, Paul. I told your father already; we are not voyeurs. We have the power to watch what everyone in this colony does, whenever we want to. And the abuse of that power always starts with thinking it’s for people’s own good. Now if you have some reason to believe that she’s being forced or is in actual danger, that’s one thing. But a liar being punished for lying by her own parents is never a bad thing.”
She went back to her office. “I’m going to see if the MARTINet can show me the malfunctioning Secutor,” she said. “Go on back to Afters. Your friends must still be there.
As soon as they got out into the corridor, Paul pulled Jael aside. “There’s something happening here that Mom isn’t seeing,” he said.
Jael nodded. “Never thought I’d see the day when you were the o
ne to call her on it. Why didn’t you tell her?”
Paul rolled his eyes. “You always think that because I never argue with Mom, it’s because I agree with her. It’s not. I just know when I can hope to change her mind and when I can’t. Well, this time I can’t.”
“And…?”
“And we’re going to do something about it because she’s wrong,” said Paul. “Were you watching Cynthia during your presentation?”
“I was trying not to vomit during my presentation,” Jael growled. “I hate public speaking. You were the one pining for not-your-girlfriend.”
“Yes, well if I’m any good at people, she was alternately terrified, sad, and…and something she was desperate to hide in response to your presentation and Mr. H’s lecture. I mean, maybe she lost all her family in the AI War…”
“Too young. And she has parents, she said.”
“Yeah. Well, how does she keep vanishing and reappearing like that? And how is she that fast and sure of herself when she’s been on the Moon only days?
Jael nodded. “So what are you going to do?”
Paul unclenched and clenched his fists. “I don’t know,” he said. “Something had to have been in a position to see which way she went. But I can’t get access to the cameras without Mom’s authorization.”
Jael smiled. “I, on the other hand, can.”
Paul felt his stomach sink to his knees. “You hacked Mom’s passwords?” he whispered furiously.
“No! Of course not. Do you have any idea how secure that system is?” She scanned the corridor up and down. “I’m just going to go to the library and use my access to the Emergency Systems.”
“You can’t do that,” said Paul.
“Um, yes I can,” said Jael. “I have all the passwords. It’s literally my job.”
“I mean you can’t legally do that.”
“Sure I can. My shift’s in two hours; want to bet I can’t find someone willing to give theirs up early for a favor?”
“Fine, you can’t ethically do that.”
“I thought you were ready to defy Mother,” Jael said. “Or was that just in theory? You know, like vacuum: plenty of it with no substance?”
Paul reddened, but he made himself nod. The accusation was just. “Okay, let’s go.”
It wasn’t a long walk to the library. In fact, calling it a library was really stretching things, Paul thought as they walked inside. The entire library consisted of a couple of battered shelves holding an equally battered collection of mostly paperback books that had been donated by Thunderhead’s residents after having been lugged up as carry-on reading from Earth. What the library lent out wasn’t reading material. It lent out private, quiet spaces to read books and view films. Paul checked out a room and waited impatiently while Jael negotiated her favor and logged into the system.
“I’m surprised they even let you into the Emergency Services net from a public terminal,” he muttered.
“Well, it is the Emergency System,” Jael said. “In a real emergency, the convirscers might not work, or a dispatcher might find herself trapped in this section. It’s supposed to be as accessible as possible.”
Jael accessed the records, bringing up a map of the colony. “So here’s Mr. H’s classroom,” she said, touching the screen. “And here’s the fixed cameras.”
“Can you access the Secutor feeds?” Paul asked. “We know there were two of them there.”
“I can, but I can’t.” Jael’s fingers stuttered over the screen. “That is, I could hit the emergency override to tie all the Secutors into the Emergency System net, but that would trigger alarms through the entire colony and put us on lockdown.”
“Yeah, you can’t do that.” said Paul, hurriedly.
“Right. But I do have three cameras right at this intersection,” she said.
She brought up a crystal-clear image of the corridor. “Now when were we there?”
“Class got out at 13:45,” Paul said.
“Right.”
On the screen, Paul watched Cynthia burst into the end of the corridor. She executed a bounce against the corridor wall—a maneuver all Moon kids learned to do before they’d lived here a year, but incredibly complicated for a newcomer—and sprang toward the camera, her effortless lope eating the space. Then she passed from sight under it.
“Okay, where does she go next?” asked Paul. “She is fast.”
“Yeah,” muttered Jael. She brought up the opposite camera and set the correct time. Then she started the replay.
The corridor was empty. A Secutor trundled toward the camera. A few seconds later, another Secutor rolled out from under the camera.
“Where is she?” asked Paul. “Did she go down the T-intersection?”
“That would be a hell of a stop,” Jael whispered. She brought up the camera that faced down the intersecting corridor. They waited. One man walked out of a door, peered down the hall, shrugged, and walked away from the camera.
“So, she’s just gone?” asked Paul, his voice rising in frustration. “That’s impossible!”
“No shouting,” said Jael. “It’s a library, after all.”
“How could we have missed her?”
“Well, let’s see. From the time she disappears, it takes…there we are.” In the original camera’s display, Paul’s and Jael’s images shot out into the corridor, followed by the rest of their friends. “About nine and a half seconds until we show up.”
They reviewed the footage again. The other cameras showed nothing for those nine and a half seconds except what they had already seen.
“So our choices are,” Jael ticked them off on her fingers, “She turned invisible. She tunneled through the floor, wall or ceiling and sealed up the hole. She turned into a Secutor.”
“Or she held really, really still and we all just didn’t notice her,” said Paul sarcastically. “That’s just great.”
“Well, wherever she went, we can’t see it,” said Jael. “That means we just have to wait until we run into her again.”
Suddenly, a thought struck Paul. “Wait. You’re right, we can’t see where she went. But can we see where she came from?”
“What?” asked Jael.
“Mom always says that the reason she doesn’t get many crimes here is that criminals have to have a place to operate from.”
“Cynthia’s not a criminal,” Jael pointed out.
Paul waved this away as irrelevant. “Point is, she has to have a home. If we can’t follow her to there, can we follow her from there? How did she get to class?”
Jael’s lips parted in understanding. “Ah-hah. On it, little brother.”
“Don’t call me little brother,” said Paul.
Jael’s fingers flew over the screen. The view shifted. This time they were looking down the corridor containing Mr. H’s classroom. Jael stepped the time back an hour.
“There we are,” she said, pointing at the cluster of students around the door.
“If we’re still outside, we’re too early,” Paul said. “She came late.”
Jael nodded and stepped the video file forward. The students oozed into the classroom. And there was Cynthia, looking furtively around her, walking toward the room.
“Okay, so she came from the North Hall,” said Jael, and accessed another camera.
Step by step, they traced Cynthia, sometimes through crowds, sometimes alone. Finally, her image stepped back through a familiar, larger-than-average door.
Paul frowned. “That’s the garage,” he said. “How did she get in there?”
“People do go to the garage,” Jael pointed out.
“They do,” agreed Paul. “But not just for fun. You have to have a reason to use a rover, or any other machine, unless you own your own.”
“She said she lived on a minestead. Wouldn’t that make it likely that her family does own their own? Jeremy drives rovers and miners all the time.”
That was true, but something about it seemed off to Paul. Then he tracked it down. �
�But if her family owns her own rover…wasn’t she headed for the terminal when we saw her the first time? Wouldn’t that mean her minestead was somewhere on the monorail line?”
Jael frowned. “Probably. Or she was visiting someone else.”
Paul frowned. That was the problem with real life. It was messy. There were always other reasons, completely random ones, for people to be doing what they did. Contrary to what Sherlock Holmes and other literary sleuths experienced, not everything odd was A Clue. “Okay, call up the garage systems.”
Jael tracked Cynthia back through the cavernous space of the garage, and Paul was not surprised to see that she had indeed emerged from the private rover docking ports. Jael flipped over to the long line of airlocks that led to the ports and watched Cynthia back through one of them.
“Bay 004,” she said, looking at Paul.
Paul blinked, unable to believe what he had heard. “Did you say Bay 004?”
“Yes,” said Jael. “Zero-zero-four. Did I mumble?”
“No,” he said. “Show me the bay interior. In real-time.”
The bulk of a rover obscured most of the view. The registry number was easily visible.
Paul swore. Jael stared at him. “What’s the problem? You can run the plate, can’t you? Don’t tell me Mom has to give you a code for that, too.”
“No,” said Paul. “I can run it. The problem is, I don’t think I have to.” But he took out his convirscer and did it anyway. Then he said another word.
Jael’s eyes widened in appreciation. “I think that’s the most swearing I’ve heard from you in the last two months. Now, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Yeah. That’s Wegerd-Dubrauni’s private bay. And that rover belongs to President Carlewin.”
“Are you telling me Cynthia owns Wegerd-Dubrauni?”
“Of course, not,” snorted Paul. “The question is, does he have a daughter? Or a niece?” A flash of frustration lanced through him, and he gripped his hair in both hands. “Well, that’s my next move blown all to dust!”
The Girl Who Wasn't There Page 10
