Moon Shot

by J. Alan Hartman

  “Come on!” I shouted to Henry Senior. “We have to get out of here!” Kat quickly moved to him and helped him to his feet. She looked at me. “Get him out of here and close the door,” I told her. “I’ll get Junior. Open the door when we get there.”

  Henry Junior was leaning against the back of the sofa, trying to pull the pair of knives from his shoulder. “Leave them,” I told him as I reached him. “We can get them out once we’re safe.”

  I guess he disagreed, as he pulled out Kat’s knife and sank it behind my own shoulder. I let out a yell and socked him in the jaw and he went down. I got behind him, lifted him by the chest and dragged him to the door. I kicked it with my foot and the door opened. I pushed through and Kat closed the door behind us. It was just in time, my ears were ringing with decompression and my breathing labored.

  I dumped Henry Junior face first on the floor. His cry of pain reminded me that my knife was still stuck in his shoulder. That in turn reminded me that Kat’s little pin-sticker was still stuck in me. I craned my head to look at it. I tried to reach it with one hand and then the other. I couldn’t but I did find out there was a fair amount of blood leaking from the wound. What with the champagne, losing blood and the decreased air in the Dome Room, I was starting to feel woozy. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

  “Taking it easy, are you?” I opened my eyes and tried to focus them on the person standing in front of me. Straight blond hair, high cheekbones, nice figure.

  “Hi, Myshka.” I held up my hands, smeared with blood, and nodded to where her knife stuck out the back of my shoulder. “Guess I was wrong about that little knife of yours. Turns out it can do some damage after all.”

  Kat said something, but I didn’t hear it. I let my knees bend and slid down the wall until I was seated, and then I passed out.

  * * *

  “Ouch!”

  “Hold still, you big baby.” Kat’s face floated inches from my own. She bit her tongue in concentration as she removed the stitches from my shoulder. It was two weeks since Henry Junior had stabbed me.

  “I told you, I don’t mind going to the Medi-Shack.” I winced as she pulled a short length of stiff suture through my skin.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” countered Kat. “Why waste good credits when I can do it for free?” She picked up a pair of sewing scissors and made another snip. “Besides, this way I get to see you without your shirt.” She looked at my face and gave a knowing smile.

  I put my free arm around her and was trying to think of a good rejoinder when there was a quick knock on my office door. “Come in,” I called with a sigh.

  It was Langley, the Compton butler. He showed appropriate tact by looking the other way as I slipped my shirt back on and Kat patted her hair and tugged at her clothes.

  “Yes, Langley?” I managed to say with a semblance of dignity. Kat just giggled.

  Our visitor held out a plastic envelope.

  “Mr. Henry Compton, Senior,” he made certain to emphasize the designation, “asked me to deliver this and to convey to you his appreciation at your willingness to keep the recent events sub rosa, as it were.” I accepted the envelope and took a quick look inside. I looked at Kat and raised my eyebrows. She took the envelope and looked inside. Her eyebrows were as good at rising as mine. I turned back to Langley.

  “Please convey my thanks to Mr. Compton,” I said. Langley gave a short bow and turned to leave.

  “Langley,” said Kat.

  He turned back. “Yes, Doña Svoboda?”

  “How is Henry Junior?”

  Langley paused as if searching for an appropriate answer.

  “Mr. Henry Junior has left for an extended stay at Lunar Colony Five in order that he may recuperate from an unfortunate accident involving knives and an antique firearm. It is unlikely that he will return to LC3 for a very long while.”

  “And Frankenstein and The Spanish Nun?” Kat asked.

  “The book, obviously mislaid, was found this morning in Mr. Henry Junior’s quarters and will be returned to the Compton Library.” With that said, Langley nodded once, turned and left.

  Kat moved to face me. She looked into my eyes. Her own eyes were smiling. “Now, what were we talking about?” she asked.

  I showed her.

  Downhill Slide

  By Jeff Howe

  Six weeks and I’m off Uphill duty. Six weeks to an automatic promotion and sweet, sweet dirt under my feet for good. The mantra brings me even less comfort than usual. Right now all I have to look forward to is investigating another murder on another lifeless rock.

  I sneeze blue-gray powder into a starched linen handkerchief. The pilot pokes her smooth, hairless head down from the flight deck and waves to get my attention. Her voice crackles over the intercom. “We’ll arrive at Ceres in half an hour. Are you all right, Detective Ba?”

  “Just getting the dead nabots out of my sinuses.” I wiggle the handkerchief as proof. “They’re better than motion sickness, but not by much.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” The pale cyborg returns to her duties. The luminescent green vision sensors on her face and hands—calling them eyes imbues them with a humanity they no longer deserve—remind me of the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Tara. Perhaps the resemblance explains why she’s so personable, despite having replaced a third of her body with equipment. More likely it’s because out of eighty million tons of cargo, my capsule is the only container that can hold up its end of a conversation.

  Now that we’re in range for real time updates, I check the case log again. One change: the sole suspect is in custody at the company’s Ceres facility. Otherwise the details remain the same as when they plopped me in a life-support capsule and shot me off Phobos Station on a fast freight.

  I peruse them like a playbill. Cast of characters: the vic, Mr. Xuan Ling O’Connor, the lantern-jawed manager of a mining operation inside 789803 Marion, an asteroid chock full of rare earth elements; the perp, his petite mineralogist wife, Eliso Espinoza, the only other faintly human being on the rock. The usual cast of thousands mills about in the background, in this case robots and AI-controlled drones, the actual means by which big chunks of rock become ship-fulls of ready-to-process powder.

  O’Connor sent out a distress call from an inspection pod forty-two days, eight hours, fourteen minutes ago. I play the recording again in the hope I hear a clue I missed the previous sixty times.

  “Any team, please assist! My pod is disabled—I’m near the entrance to shaft twelve. The drive is out. I’m…God, no, Lise! Don’t…”

  A woman’s low laugh through a loudspeaker, a noise like a swarm of angry metallic bees, a scream, static. The beam from a plasma induction coil traced across his one-person pod from a few meters away. The resulting pool of melted metal and scorched polyceramic contained just enough DNA for a positive ID.

  Open and shut, especially since she’d confessed, a recording I’d reviewed even more. With a Bodhisattva’s composure Espinoza detailed her actions: sabotaging the drive, lying in wait, scattering most of her husband’s mass into a cloud of ionized particles. She held out only when it came to motive, but that’s not why I was here.

  I was here because she was lying.

  Every record on the Marion mine’s computer confirms she lay comatose in their mender from two days before to three days after the murder, the result of an encounter with the business end of a robotic extractor. The rock came very close to being unmanned that week. A caretaker team showed up when they took Espinoza into custody, but the vagaries of claim law mean they can’t mine again until the investigation concludes. Thus my presence. The company hates downtime.

  Twenty-nine minutes and forty-eight seconds after the pilot’s announcement, a soft, broad thud tells me we’ve snugged up against the tower at Ceres. The hiss of pressurization seeps through the walls of my capsule. Soon the pilot floats down to release me. She’s as naked as me, her skin the color and texture of a Praxiteles statue. My own dark, less vacuum-f
riendly skin could use a shower, although the smell of bottled air drowns out my scent. I pluck out wires and hoses, then stretch for the first time in two weeks.

  “Welcome to Ceres Station One.” Her smile is warm in a disinterested way. “New arrival?”

  “I’m almost a regular, actually. Customs still on level four?” A nod. I refrain from telling her she was the pilot for two of my seven previous visits. Cyborgs get testy when you remind them of the memory edits. More fleshy types probably do too, assuming you can figure out who they are. I unpack my uniform, dress, and pull myself up the access tube.

  Astarte Johnson, not quite two meters of local company constable, awaits me at Customs. “Good to see you again, Chris. Even if you only visit because you have to.”

  I grunt, then remind myself it’s not her fault I’m here, and unlike me, she can’t leave when the case is closed. Along with a handful of maintenance staff, we board the ShuttleVator for the drop to the surface, 1800 kilometers below. “Still distilling that degreaser you call vodka?”

  “You seemed happy enough to polish your GI tract with it.”

  “Sheer desperation. Unlike my pilot, I can’t depend on the company to clear my head after a sensitive assignment. Your hooch was a handy alternative.” Her stuff tastes fine. After all, they produce millions of tons of grain and the purest water in the system here. But she does soak gun parts in it.

  “I aim to please. How are Steve and the kids?”

  “Lovely. Counting the days.”

  “You’re welcome to call them from my quarters. I get free bandwidth I never use. You could, ah, clean up there too.”

  Polite but observant: that’s Astarte. “Thanks. I believe I’ll take you up on the offer.”

  * * *

  The SV slows as we hit the GravUp field at the surface. We descend past level after level of hydroponic farms, their robot tenders oblivious to our passage. Father Piazzi would no doubt be happy to learn his name became prophetic: the goddess of the harvest and her 800 human residents feed half of humanity.

  In Astarte’s shower I scrub the stink of space travel off me, then don my ever-pristine uniform again, thankful for whoever invented Impervion back in the 2020s. I send reassurance homeward. My smile will reach Steve, Berina and Qamar in about twenty-four minutes. Astarte waits on the far side of the link, furtively tidying, until I’m done.

  The moment I log out she passes me a shot of Ceres’s finest. “In case you want to get a head start on your selective amnesia. Although they shipped us a new mem editor last month. No wires, the latest and greatest. Fits in a hygiene kit.”

  “Thanks. I prefer your personal touch.”

  Her drink’s gone already. “About the case—you’ll want to talk to Espinoza first.”

  “Are you asking or suggesting?” I sip and my gut doesn’t spontaneously combust, so I toss back the balance.

  “Predicting.” She clears her throat. “She’s due for arraignment and summary trial in six days, as soon as the circuit judge’s ship arrives.”

  I almost cough up the vodka. “The log didn’t mention a trial date.”

  A shrug. “This came down an hour before your ship docked. He’s dead. She confessed. The company wants to move things along.” The expression on my face puts her on the defensive. “They’re willing to drop the charge to negligent homicide, give her eighteen months of wrist-slap on Vesta and blame a bad recirculator. Too much Oh-Two, she got loopy.”

  “Ignoring her unconscious state at the time.”

  “She says she hacked the records.”

  The resignation in her voice doesn’t deter me. “Hacked. Good way to describe a bot shearing your hand off. If she’s getting the one-way ticket to Pleaville, why call me in at all? To put a pretty face on it?”

  Astarte runs a long sienna finger around the rim of her glass. “You are attractive.”

  “Fine. I’ll go a round with Espinoza. Maybe she’ll swoon when she lays eyes on me and talk in her sleep.”

  * * *

  There’s a class of woman who can make even a paper jail jumpsuit look good, and Eliso Espinoza is its valedictorian. As I open the holding cell, she’s lying on her back on the white plastic slab bed, her bobbed hair a dark corona about her head, her darker eyes staring somewhere between the ceiling and forever. I introduce myself. She leans on an elbow.

  “I thought I’d answered everyone’s questions.” Her contralto teases at arm’s length. The log said she’d been a cabaret singer, good enough to pay for her undergraduate degree.

  I picture her leaning on a piano in her current attire. “I’m not everyone. Your plea deal reeks, but verdicts aren’t my business anyway. I’m more of a truth person.”

  “You’re a company meter maid. Your business is what they tell you.” The words deserve a sneer, but her face and tone stay impassive.

  “When they tell me to leave, I will. Until then I get to be selfish and ask whatever I want. Like, why are you so happy to take the blame for your husband’s murder, given you were swaddled in MediJel at the time?”

  “I changed the timestamps and audit trails on the medical records. I’m clever like that.”

  “Clever but inconsistent: most people don’t set up an alibi and then confess. Why the change of heart?”

  She yawns. “Conscience got the better of me.”

  “Not the oxygen level?”

  “A contributing factor, I’m sure, but the air filters didn’t pull the trigger. I killed my husband, Detective Ba.” She lies on her back again. “And I’ll do my time. Leave me be.”

  Cagey. I chew my lower lip and invent something to put her off balance. “If you two weren’t the only ones on the rock, I’d say you were covering for someone.”

  A trace of smile pulls at her lips. She sits up and curls her feet under herself. “Are you married, Ba?”

  “I assume that’s more than a crude pick-up line.” I remove my left glove to show the titanium band.

  “I may be a killer, but I’m never crude.” Her eyes probe. “Your spouse lives on Earth? Children?”

  Sometimes questions are the best answers, so I encourage her. “All of the above.”

  “They should stay Downhill. Real people should never live out here, no matter what the law says about mining rights.” She stands, her gaze still locked on mine. “Space has a way of finding weakness, Detective. A fissure in a hull, a brittle gasket, a corrosive half-truth: here, all failure is catastrophic.” Her freshly grown hand twitches. She lowers her eyes at last. “Earth grants people the ultimate luxury.”

  “Being?”

  “Gradual decay.”

  I nod. After almost three years on Uphill rotation, I can disagree with nothing she says. She turns away and brushes back her hair. A neural interface sits behind her left ear. The case log didn’t mention any augmentations. “One more question, Ms. Espinoza. Before your assignment, did you love your husband?”

  “Before our assignment, I didn’t know what love was.” She’s a million miles away again. “I only learned after it boiled off into the vacuum.”

  * * *

  I requisition a two-seat Ripper to visit the mine. Astarte agrees, on the condition she drives, and I’m happy to defer. The surplus military ships are touchy.

  The trip to asteroid Marion takes a day and a half of the five I have. En route Astarte and I chat, joke, flirt, sleep, the usual cycle for space cops in transit. We try a few shared sims, but they lost any allure for me after tac training. I watched too many partners get virtually blown apart too many times.

  The caretakers are company types who muster tolerance for our visit, no more. I ignore them with equal cordiality and inspect the crime scene, the mender, the happy couple’s quarters. I run a finger down the lip of their sleep chamber. “Dusty.”

  “Extractor residue. The stuff gets everywhere.” Astarte waves her hand over a black plastic cone and a small holo of Espinoza and O’Connor pops up. A winter scene loops: they embrace and kiss on the Great Wall, snowfl
akes spotting their hair. If they weren’t in love, they were doing a fine job of fooling each other.

  While Astarte refuels, I head to the control room. The caretakers are playing old-school chess on a roll-up board. Perhaps they’re not hopeless. “I require access to the AI.”

  The younger one squints over his pieces. He has mate in three if he wants it. “Company didn’t say anything about cops searching the frame.”

  “They shouldn’t need to. Detective Lieutenants and up get plenipotentiary warrants on assignment. As a Detective Inspector, I can search a suspect’s soul, on the off chance they have one.”

  The elder yawns and stands. “Don’t worry, Marcus. I’ll make sure the mine doesn’t blow up.”

  I smile. “Please do.”

  He pulls a flat cable terminating in connectors the size of my pinky from his pocket and plugs it into the console. The other end slips in behind his left ear. His breathing slows. “Okay, I locked down base maintenance. Poke around all you want.”

  Under his watchful supervision I meander through five years of mine records. I need to find three things. The first is easy: Espinoza had an NI placed in her skull a year ago, on her own dime, to make data analysis faster. A direct hookup to the prospector bots looking for veins speeds the process, I’m sure. If that’s the real reason she got one, I’m a wind-up feelbot.

  The second takes a little longer. The work log shows O’Connor’s time creeping up during their assignment, from just over fifty percent of waking hours—normal for new mine crews—to not quite ninety the last few months—abnormal by any standard. He slept less too. By the final month he was hooked into the AI, supervising the drone teams, twenty hours a day.

  The third requires the bureau’s Sudo access. My minder raises an eyebrow.

  “You do know how to snoop, don’t you?”

  “I suppose you never check out user AINI profiles?”

  He grins, not guilty in the least. “In public?”