The Girl Who Wasn't There

by G Scott Huggins

  “What was your next move?” asked Jael.

  “I was going to look up who the rover belonged to; then we’d know where she was. I guess…” it sounded overblown even to him, but he plunged onward. “I was almost hoping we’d find something hinky about the registration; then I could go to Mom with actual evidence that she’d have to let me follow up on. But this? Carlewin is almost never on the Moon, so if he is, it’s important. And I sure can’t go to the Momstable asking her permission to stalk down the head of Wegerd-Dubrauni or his dependents.”

  “So you admit you’re stalking her,” said Jael.

  “No!” Paul’s voice reached at least an octave higher than he’d intended. “I’m worried about her. What part of this looks normal to you?”

  “The part where you’re responding very predictably to adolescent surges of testosterone,” said Jael, deadpan. She held up her hands and grinned as Paul drew in a breath to shout at her. “All right, all right, little brother. Sorry, couldn’t resist it. In all seriousness, you’re right. Something here is weird.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about it,” Paul grumped.

  “Of course there’s something we can do about it,” said Jael.

  “What?”

  Jael smiled as though the answer was obvious. “Follow her tracks, of course.”

  Chapter 7

  A Walk Through Ocean Desert

  “Jael,” Paul said. “We just got to the end of the line with that. We can’t follow her tracks.”

  “We can follow the rover’s tracks,” said Jael.

  “Sure, that’s a great idea, Jael. We’ll go back to the apartment, and we’ll ask mom for access to the MARTINet, and we’ll drive a Secutor across God knows how many kilometers just…because. She’s sure to be okay with that.”

  Jael sighed. No one ever listened. “No, little brother, I didn’t say that we should track the rover with a big clunky robot. I said that we should follow the tracks. In person.”

  Paul looked at her. “That’s absolutely insane,” he said. “You want us to walk to wherever the rover came from?”

  Jael shrugged, and said in her most reasonable tone, “Why not?”

  “Mom would never give permission for that, either.”

  “I thought you were done asking her permission,” Jael said. “Make up your mind. Anyway, unlike all the things you’ve been suggesting, taking a walk on the surface isn’t against the law. It’s not even a breach of procedure. Oh, and I’m not suggesting that we do it. I’m doing it.”

  “Like hell you are!”

  “Oh, I am,” said Jael. “It may take a while, but I’m doing it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I do it?” said Paul.

  “Three reasons. Firstly, as you said, it’s stalking if you do it, because you kind of like her, and I think you’ve freaked her out. I’m less threatening. Secondly, you’re going to wimp out as soon as anything comes up and it’s anywhere approaching the borders of legal.”

  “I’m not going to―”

  “And thirdly,” she said, giving her brother her sweetest smile, “you don’t have one of these.” She flourished her Rescue Squad Universal Key.

  Paul’s face hardened. “What are you planning to do with that?”

  Jael rolled her eyes. She loved her brother, but how could he be so thick at times? “I told you before, you have to make up your mind. If we’re breaking the rules, we might as well break them hard. Either Cynthia is up to something, or she’s in trouble, or she’s neither. Those are the only three choices here. If she’s neither, then let’s quit and go home. We’re wasting our time. If it’s one of the first two, then let’s get off our asses and do something about it.”

  Paul looked like he wanted to argue but finally nodded. “Okay, fine. But you’re the Rescue dispatcher. You should be the one staying here. What if an emergency happens?”

  Jael shook her head. “There’s never been a serious emergency while I’ve been on duty yet. You can figure out anything less than that. You have two other team members on duty. I’ll call you on the emergency channel as soon as I get outside. That will shunt any other calls to your teammates. Unless something really unprecedented comes up, no one will think it’s weird that you’re on a call.”

  “For that long?” Paul asked.

  “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that it was someone having suicidal thoughts, that it’s resolved, and that the caller requested confidentiality. Anyway, you’re no faster than me out there on the lunar surface. And I am not giving you this card.”

  “And what if you find something dangerous out there and have to run?” said Paul. “You know, like we did at the landing platform? Who’ll be there to pull you down?”

  Jael ground her teeth. He would bring that up. “I’m being more careful,” she said. “And I won’t go near any landing platforms. Or leave through an airlock next to one. Mom won’t be alerted.”

  “And if something happens that you don’t expect?”

  “Then I won’t get caught.”

  This time it was Paul’s turn to roll his eyes. “Oh, that’s a great plan,” he said. “Nothing ever went wrong with that one. Your plan to avoid being shot is dodging the flechettes. Mom knows a lot of people who relied on that plan.”

  “Yes, well, fortunately I already know her,” said Jael, pretending confidence she didn’t feel. “So I’ll just have to be careful. Really careful.”

  Paul looked like he wanted to argue. Jael knew he really, really wanted to argue.

  “Be careful,” he finally said, softly. “I’ll track you from here.”

  Two hours later, Jael was following the rover’s tracks across the surface of the Moon.

  She’d hit her stride long ago, a tripod gait that was no slower—not much slower, she forced herself to acknowledge—than Paul’s long-legged lope would have been. She wasn’t sure about Cynthia, though. She didn’t know if it was Paul’s besottedness with the girl or the way boys always seemed to think they could be the fastest and strongest and smartest at everything if they just really tried this time, but Jael didn’t think Paul really understood how fast Cynthia was. There was something off about the way the girl moved, almost like she had the opposite of a limp. Like her strides were measured for absolute maximum efficiency.

  “Your blood pressure and heart rate are high,” Paul’s voice sounded over the emergency channel in her ear.

  “Yes, well, they should be. I’m moving pretty fast out here,” she replied, her voice a bit higher than she meant it to be. She throttled a curse. Because she wasn’t lying to her brother. But she wasn’t telling him the whole truth, either.

  The fact was that she’d never been out on the Moon’s surface so completely alone before.

  She looked around at the absolute starkness of the Moon. Dust covered everything, giving the lunar rock a deceptively soft, muted texture. The grayish-brown moonscape rolled endlessly to the horizon, occasionally broken by outcroppings of dark-gray rock and the knife-like blackness of the shadows cast by the gibbous Earth hanging over her head like the Eye of God. A horizon as flat as Earth’s, but utterly unbroken by any trace of humanity. She could believe herself completely alone upon the lunar surface.

  She tried to tell herself that what she felt welling up within her was exhilaration and not terror at being so far from home. She had, of course, been out on the surface before and even out alone. But her parents had always known where she was, and the colony had always been within a casual glance. But now…

  Every step I take is the first human step upon this surface. I am as alone as Armstrong. As Cernan. As Yang. Except that all of them had stayed beside their spacecraft, and their fellow astronauts, or taikonaut-colonists. She was farther from help than they had been.

  Oh, and, she supposed, she wasn’t really the first person to come this far, either. The rover tracks she was following were proof of that. On they stretched to the horizon, only occasionally dodging around an undisturbed rock or a microcrater.

&
nbsp; She checked the time on her outsuit’s helmet display. Two hours. If she didn’t find something in the next hour, she’d have to turn back or face running out of oxygen, not to mention being missed. The excuse of being at Afters was finite. Eventually, her parents would demand to know where their children were.

  The tracks were pointing to the end of a shallow ridge that she thought was perhaps a kilometer distant. Distances could be deceiving on the Moon. That was one thing drilled into all new colonists. On the Earth, near objects always gave you a sense of perspective for how far off distant objects were. But on the Moon, all perspectives faded on the flat, mostly-level plains of dust. Unless you knew how big that rock in the middle-distance was, it could easily fool you. Jael stretched her back and increased her speed. Legs, crutches. Legs, crutches. In rhythm, they ate up the surface of the moon, slowly.

  Eventually, Jael realized what she was seeing in a pattern of what she had at first taken to be a small line of craters.

  “Paul, I’m getting close.” She remembered to call in. That was important.

  “What do you see?” he asked, excitement tinging his voice.

  “See for yourself,” she said, connecting her helmet video to his console.

  She panned her head to the left and then to the right.

  “Holy…” voice trailed off. “Those are rover tracks.”

  “Yup. And they converge with these up ahead. I’d say we’re getting pretty close to Cynthia’s minestead if that’s what it is, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Paul’s voice crackled a bit in her earphones. Even with satellites, and the best antennae human science could devise, solar activity still degraded the radios this far outside Earth’s magnetosphere. “Now be careful. Don’t take any more chances.”

  Than being alone in your outsuit approaching a minestead without an invitation was left unsaid. It didn’t need to be. Jael knew that what she was doing was needlessly dangerous. But if it came to that, being on the Moon at all was needlessly dangerous, and that hadn’t stopped her parents from coming here, or bringing their children. Humanity’s tendency to do what was “needlessly dangerous,” if half of what Mr. H said in history class was true, was probably the main reason it wasn’t still living on the savannahs of Africa as a curiously bipedal ape-variant.

  Jael knew that what she was doing was dangerous. But she wasn’t going to let that stop her from living. She wished her family understood that better. Nevertheless, she slowed as the rover tracks became one large rover track, practically a twin furrow in the lunar dust.

  From where she stood, she could see the track vanish into the distance and then―if she saw it properly―it turned sharply left and vanished behind a low ridge.

  Jael remembered that her mother had said that movement and light were the two things that, more than anything else, drew the attention of the human eye. Jael angled her path away from the furrows toward the ridge. If there was something watching from the other side, she wanted to see it first. She had the huge advantage of expecting something to be there, while her quarry did not, she hoped, expect her to be approaching. She did not intend to give that up.

  Her muscles were burning with a dull ache by the time she finally got to the base of the gently-sloping ridge. As she had suspected, the tracks went beyond it and then turned behind it. Snapping her crutches back behind her, Jael knelt and began crawling up the shallow hill.

  “Did you see something?” Paul asked sharply in her earphones. Jael nearly cried out in surprise. She had forgotten her brother was watching.

  “No!” she growled. “Just using some of that caution you’re always urging on me.”

  “Hmm, she can be taught,” her twin mused mockingly.

  “Teach this,” she said, making a rude gesture at the helmet’s pickup. She resumed her crawl.

  It seemed to take forever, but at last she poked her clear helmet over the crest of the ridge.

  If she had been expecting a Lair of Villainous Moon Nazis, she would have been sadly disappointed. Actually, she was still disappointed, even though she hadn’t really been expecting Moon Nazis.

  “Aaaand it’s an ordinary minestead,” she said. “Nothing sinister or mysterious about it at all.” The 3-D printed dome looked just like any hundred other single-family minesteads that dotted the lunar landscape around Thunderhead like freckles around a giant, sprawling tumor, she supposed, and discarded that image as unnecessarily bleak.

  “Except, why is the President of Wegerd-Dubrauni visiting an ordinary minestead?” asked Paul. “Or alternatively, why does he own an ordinary minestead? Because those are pretty much the options, you know?”

  “Maybe it’s his private getaway?” said Jael.

  “Sure,” said Paul. “And he didn’t spend the extra money on making it look more impressive than any other minestead because he’s saving his billions this month? And even if that were the case, we don’t know what any of this has to do with Cynthia.”

  Jael gave a decisive nod, one that Paul would be sure to see by the way the camera bobbed. “Right,” she said. “You’re right. I’m going down there.”

  “What? Wait!” said Paul, thinking better of his analysis.

  “You’re right, Paul. None of this has solved our mystery. So I’m going down there and checking it out. There aren’t any rovers on the surface, and this place isn’t big enough for a pressurized garage to store one in. I can stay away from the windows. I’m in a blind spot right now. I’m going.”

  She could hear Paul breathing. “All right,” he finally said.

  Jael allowed herself to drift down the side of the ridge, walking on her crutches alone, feet tucked under her. There seemed to be no lights streaming from the few ports in the dome. She knew that the minestead would have been built with at least as much volume below the lunar surface as above it, so the lack of light didn’t mean no one was home. It just meant no one was likely to be looking out the windows right now.

  There was no place to hide on the flat lunar plain so Jael made for the only cover available as quickly as she could―the curving minestead wall―which she needed to reach anyway. As soon as she reached it, she flattened herself against it and pulled a device that looked like an array of suction cups from a belt pouch. She hooked it into her HUD and flipped the sonic sensors on, passive only.

  She listened for quite some time, but her ears heard no sounds being made inside the lifeless-looking minestead, nor did the lines flicker, indicating noise, nor did any image form on her helmet.

  Carefully, she pushed herself out of contact with the dome.

  “Go active?” she murmured.

  “That’s risky,” said Paul.

  “That place is quiet as a tomb,” Jael snorted. “There’s no one home.”

  “That why you made sure you weren’t touching the wall before you called in?” asked Paul. Sound couldn’t travel in a vacuum. But sound could very definitely travel through the surface of the Moon, and through outsuits or walls, or any other solid object on its surface. What Jael had done was only good sense. She started to reply when Paul said. “What if they’ve set an alarm that can detect your detector?”

  Jael forced herself to think rather than reply angrily. Finally, she said, “Maybe, but everyone knows Rescue uses sonic probes. We have to. Spies should have something more sophisticated.”

  She knew Paul was right. Using active sonics—which, like ancient submarine sonar, would send a pulse of sonic energy through the minestead, revealing its spaces and objects—was far easier to detect than the passive sonics which she had been using up to now. Detecting passive sonics was like trying to listen for someone listening at your door: almost impossible. Detecting active sonics was more like listening for someone knocking on your door. If anyone was in there, they might be able to hear her even if they weren’t paying attention.

  “Then what are you going to do if someone is there and they do hear you?” Paul asked.

  Jael fumed. Sometimes she thought of her brother as
a very annoying external conscience that wouldn’t go away and wouldn’t shut up. If it had been just her, she thought, she’d have much preferred to ignore that question and simply trust that she could handle it in the unlikely event it came up.

  Which, she reflected—as much as she hated admitting it—was why it probably was a good thing that he was there. She forced herself to think through the problem. “If that happens,” she finally said, “I’ll just tell them that I’m from Emergency Rescue, and we got a call that we traced to this location, so sorry Sir or Madam that I troubled you, please excuse me because Emergency Rescue is expecting a status update and we really need to make sure this glitch is fixed and doesn’t happen again.”

  After a few seconds, Paul said, “Okay, yeah. It tells them you’re in contact with people and it sounds plausible. They won’t feel threatened if they’re up to something, and even if they do, they know that disappearing you will only attract more attention that they don’t want. Go for it.”

  With permission from Brother Conscience, Jael powered up her sonic probes and send sound waves pulsing through the minestead structure. An interior map blossomed into view on her HUD map.

  “Are you seeing this?” she asked Paul.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Doesn’t look like there’s much to see, though. Looks pretty typical.”

  “So the mystery remains a mystery. Well, onward, then.”

  “What do you mean, ‘onward?’”

  Jael didn’t bother answering since she had long ago decided what she was going to do. How long would it take Paul to figure it out? She pushed herself upright and began crutching toward the minestead airlock.

  “Jael, what are you doing? Jael, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, and you’re being awfully loud,” she said.

  “Then answer me what you’re doing, dammit!”

  “Language, little brother. And your voice is very high-pitched, too. You’ve definitely finished puberty, right?”

  “Jael, you cannot just break into these people’s house.”