My heart was pounding too quickly for the five minutes of running we had done. Helen’s arms crossed over her chest.
Eugene fished in his pocket and drew out a handkerchief wrapped around an oblong. He unfolded it carefully. “This had fallen into the underdeck beneath the control console. I only found it because I had the panel off to do repairs.”
He held a battered Swiss Army knife, one of the ones with pliers and screwdrivers. In the end, inlaid in silver, was a beautifully monogramed “F.”
Helen said, “I found The Long Tomorrow. It was in Frisch’s office.”
If we had still been running, I probably would have tripped over my feet and taken a header. Frisch had been resistant to the idea of doing the inventory or even the notion of Icarus being on the Moon at all. But he’d also been living and working on the Moon for years. I could not wrap my head around why he would have aligned with Earth First.
I wet my lips. “I see. Where in Frisch’s office? Just out and easy to see or did you go in and toss it?”
“Toss?”
“Search.” Eugene glanced at me for a moment and then continued the explanation. “She wants to know if you had to search the room or if it was someplace obvious.”
“Ah. I ‘tossed’ it.” She pointed at the knife. “There were three people with this initial who had access to the BusyBee that morning. Faustino, Curtis Frye, and Otto Frisch. I checked all three quarters to see if there were any correlating items as well as Frisch’s office while he was in the LGC. The book was the only item that, to my eye, had significance, but I am acting with incomplete data.”
Sighing, I nodded. “I know. Thank you.”
“The book had fallen under his desk and had a copy of Kenneth’s letter to you tucked inside.”
I turned to her so quickly that the Coriolis effect of the centrifuge room nearly made me fall over.
Myrtle caught me as I staggered. “Maybe we should let you sit down before we tell you the rest.”
“There’s more?” I put my hand on her shoulder. “Of course there is … You’re about to tell me what the letter said.”
“Do you want to sit down?” Helen asked.
“Heck, I want to sit.” Myrtle lowered herself to the curved track. “I live on the Moon because I don’t like 1 g anymore.”
Eugene laughed, but dropped to sit next to her. “You were the one insisting we make her run.”
“And we did. She can run after.”
I was going to strangle all of them for drawing the answer out like this. I sat with my knees drawn up and bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming at them.
Helen knelt in front of me, resting her hands on her thighs, with a beautifully straight spine. “POISON AT HOME GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATING ME.”
“My God. How many vectors are they covering?” I closed my eyes. Whoever Icarus was had shown incredible foresight to plant rat poison at our home, even though I was, by now, doubting that Nathaniel had been poisoned there. It would have been hard to guarantee his arrival, unless Reynard had deliberately lured him there. Even if I granted that, there were easier ways to get poison into the man at work.
“Who are ‘they,’ Nicole?” Helen asked.
I wiped my hand down my face, trying to order my thoughts. If it was Frisch, why was he acting now instead of before we arrived? “I think we have to consider the possibility that Frisch was framed and we’re being played.”
Eugene pursed his lips and studied me. “Because both items were easy to find? I have to tell you the knife was not.”
“It’s also the timing. Creating dissension in the ranks is an effective way to cause disruption. Making us suspect Frisch would fit that nicely.” I ticked points off on my fingers as I went. “Alternately, there could be two culprits and Frisch was a sleeper agent who was waiting on his accomplice to arrive on our ship.”
Eugene stared at me as if I were a problem in a sim he was going to break apart. “Why exactly did the FBI send you?”
Furrowing my brow, I tilted my head and laughed, almost by reflex. Inside, I had gone cold, though, because while Clemons had talked to me about going, and he was clearly cooperating with the FBI, I had not mentioned that to anyone here. “You just told me the FBI was investigating my husband. Why would they send me to the Moon?”
“Kenneth said ‘government.’”
“I hardly think ‘FBI’ is in our key book.” A part of me wanted to stop dodging and tell them everything. Another, completely hateful part of my brain pointed out that if Earth First could recruit a sleeper agent like Frisch, then why not my friends? The Lindholms and Helen had been everywhere Icarus had acted. It was unbelievable, but then that was what sleeper agents did. And I knew Eugene was sympathetic to some of Earth First’s motivations. “All of this is a distraction. Let’s look at opportunity for each of the people you’ve identified, without worrying about motivations. Those are rarely useful as predictors, anyway.”
Eugene turned to Myrtle and Helen. “Will you give me a moment alone with Nicole?”
Myrtle opened her mouth and turned to Eugene. I don’t know what nuances she read in the set of his jaw or the line of his shoulders, but she closed her mouth and stood. “Come on, Helen.”
With only one backwards glance, Helen followed her, leaving me alone with Eugene. He waited until they were nearly around the bend and leaned forward, voice low. “What did you do during the war?”
“I was a WASP. You know this.” The bright finishing school laugh would not serve me here, so I settled for concern.
“Come on…” Eugene pulled back a little, studying me. “The thing I keep coming back to is why Clemons sent you. Why he told you to investigate whatever this is and not me. The easy answer? The easy answer is that you’re white. You have seniority over me. But neither of those get you a security clearance for Top Secret, Classified intel. They don’t teach you words like ‘toss,’ ‘operative,’ or ‘sleeper agent.’ They don’t teach you strategies for disrupting a group. So…”
“You’ve forgotten who my husband is.”
“I haven’t. The first lady of a state doesn’t automatically get clearance.” Eugene wet his lips. “I dropped a ‘bird’ during the war, you know. Only once, because they kept the Tuskegee Airmen segregated, but it’s not the sort of thing a fellow forgets. Bird didn’t look like a spy, which is their job, right? Little slip of a white girl. Blonde and blue-eyed. Very upper-class. Knew German. Knew how to use a parachute. Knew how to send and break codes. Guess where she said she learned it?”
My throat was dry, and swallowing didn’t help. There was nothing I could say here that would fix anything.
His smile was almost sad. “Swiss finishing school.”
TWENTY-SIX
AFGHAN FLOOD TOLL IS NOW 107
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 26, 1963—(AP)—The death toll from the flood in Herat, in western Afghanistan, has risen to 107, the Afghan Red Crescent Society announced today. The flooding is likely to worsen, as reports from the meteorologists aboard the IAC weather space station report that another storm system is bearing down on the battered region. Rainfalls this year are double their previous record.
There are points in your life where you have to make a choice between two loyalties. Sometimes it is seemingly innocuous, like choosing between attending a baby shower or a graduation. Sometimes it is between your husband and your job.
It comes down to value and harm.
When Eugene asked me if I was a spy—when he knew that I was, I had a choice. I could have kept the secrets I had promised to keep and sacrificed his friendship. He was a military man. He would have understood if I’d just said, “I can’t tell you that.”
But I valued him. What harm came from telling the secret? Potentially my career. Potentially Kenneth’s.
What harm came from keeping the secret of the Icarus project? Potentially the lives of everyone on the Moon. If I’d been able to really talk to Clemons, I might have made a different decision.
* * *
I told Eugene to call Myrtle and Helen back and then I took that thin permission Clemons had given me to tell them what “they need to know to do good work” and told them everything. Forty-five minutes later, I felt as wrung out as if I’d been vomiting the entire time. In a way, I had. The floor of the centrifuge room rumbled under me as I sat, knees bent and arms wrapped around them. My audience of three stayed silent after I finished talking.
I truly had been a WASP. I’d been recruited there. And Swiss finishing school … I went to two. One in my teens as a good wealthy socialite. And then a second that was not Swiss and taught very different skills.
Myrtle spoke first, “Does Kenneth know?”
I lifted my head and stared at her. “Of course he does.”
“Some women never told their husbands…”
I shrugged. “I trust him.” Our marriage was strained and compromised in every direction, but the one thing I knew with absolute certainty was that Kenneth had my back. “So … now you know I was a spy. You know about Icarus. What else can I tell you?”
Eugene rubbed both hands over his head. “I’m thinking Icarus has effectively sidelined you—and Kenneth, for that matter. They haven’t done jack shit to us.”
With one hand, Myrtle smacked his shoulder. “What part of ‘visible sabotage’ are you forgetting?”
“If Nicole had been allowed to wear her spacesuit, that would have been her and Frisch.”
“Also, food poisoning.”
Eugene rolled his eyes and then straightened. “No. You’re right. When specific people have been targeted there’s a strategic reason behind it. Nicole and Kenneth to sideline them. The BusyBee sabotage to stop the inventory. Nathaniel because it would have scuttled the program to lose him. So why hit me with food poisoning?”
Helen lifted her hand and ticked off some options. “Deliberate spread of polio. Cancel flight to the Moon. Get specific pilot in place.”
There were easier ways to spread polio and for that matter better diseases to hit us with. The flu was more contagious and had a higher fatality rate. I chewed on the inside of my lip, thinking. “That last one … Why do you think Mission Control picked Michael Lin to step up to copilot?”
“You mean instead of you or Myrtle?” Eugene tugged on his ear, thinking. “Well … she would have been distracted worrying about me.”
Myrtle sniffed. “As if that’s not every day of my life married to a pilot…”
“You’re a pilot too!”
“No. I know how to fly. There’s a big difference.” She shook her head. “What are you thinking about Mikey?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose where a headache was forming. “Do we really need to have this conversation in 1 g?”
“If you’re going to complain about gravity…” Myrtle hauled herself up and stretched her arms over her head, brushing her fingers against the low curved ceiling. “Let’s run and talk. Is it possible that Mikey made Eugene sick so he could get into the cockpit?”
Her voice faded a little as she jogged away from us.
“I hate you.” But I got to my feet and followed. Admit that my feet hurt, even to my friends? I’m still a pilot. “Maybe Curt needed to get into the command seat.”
Helen jogged easily on my right. “To what purpose?”
“I keep wondering if I could have made it look like the thruster was malfunctioning.” I looked over at Eugene as he paced us on Myrtle’s far side. “Could you?”
Eugene cocked his head and nodded slowly. “I could have. Pretty sure.”
“Did it misfire when you were in there?”
He shook his head. “No, but it was also not in a position to help me keep the vehicle stable and I was consciously avoiding it.”
“Damn good flying.”
“Technically, not flying. Grounding?” He shrugged. “But yes, I could have faked that. You?”
I nodded. “Hey, Helen. You were actually in the CM with Curt. What do you think?”
“I was focused on numbers.” As Nav/Comp she would have been working double-time as soon as the trajectories started changing. Her feet hit the track at an even pace while she considered. “Nothing I heard over comms or saw on instrumentation made me doubt that the thruster was misfiring. And then there’s the broken landing strut. That was definitely real.”
“True … But a hard landing could do that.” I tried to picture bringing the craft down in a way that would deliberately break the landing strut. “I don’t think I could do that on purpose. Not reliably.”
Eugene shook his head. “No. Faking a thruster misfiring in vacuum is possible. The moment you touch down … There are too many variables. You’re more likely to tear a hole in the side of the rocket than you are to crumple the strut. And how would you even practice it?”
Grunting in response, I ran next to them feeling every jolt of my feet against the floor through my too-heavy flesh. “If Curt is Icarus, then our problems might have solved themselves, since he’s down with polio.”
Myrtle side-eyed me. “That’s a cold thing to say.”
“She’s right, though,” Helen said. “There has not been an incident in the week since Curt got sick.”
Myrtle said, “There was a power outage.”
“It could have been a timer,” Helen said.
I’d had the same thought myself about the outages and the odd length.
“So maybe his plans are toast, unless he had deliberately infected himself to spread it among—” A sudden memory of candy Easter eggs in dandelions went through me. “Oh, shit. Curt brought those candy Easter eggs up and gave them to people at the church service. What if that was the vector for the polio virus?”
“Is that possible?” Helen slowed for a moment. “If that’s so, then the initial cases would be people who ate the eggs.”
“Not necessarily.” I had learned more about polio in the past week than I had any interest in knowing. “Some people might have been symptom-free carriers. I can ask Ana Teresa … I think I can do that without being too overt.”
“But wouldn’t Curt have vaccinated himself before coming up, if that was his plan?”
She had a good point. If the eggs were the vector, why would he be among the sick? “So maybe it’s not Curt. Maybe the quarantine is stopping Icarus. Trapped in the wrong module for mischief.”
“If that’s the case, when it’s lifted, we’re back in trouble again.”
Our footsteps pounded against the unending hill of the centrifuge room. Eugene slowed a little and then caught up. “You said that document was filled with Bible verses. Which ones?”
“Exodus 32:27, Revelation 16:21, and Exodus 22:24.” I grimaced, remembering the bloodshed and violence of the verses.
“Oof.” Eugene sounded as though he knew exactly what those were, which I suppose wasn’t surprising given that he and Myrtle led a Bible class up here. “Any chance you remember the specific edition it was from?”
“No. Sorry. What are you thinking?”
“I figure the FBI has already thought about this, but the edition can tell you what denomination a person is likely to be and a little about their relationship with God.”
Myrtle looked up at him with a fond smile and then turned to me. “My husband was in seminary before the war and would have made a fine preacher.”
Eugene gave a little smile. “But then I met an airplane. Closer to God than any church gets me.”
“Amen.” I worshiped at that altar myself. Sighing, I said, “Clemons sent a copy of the Manifesto up along with a set of codebooks. But it’s in my CPK bag, which is still on the shuttle, so I don’t know how—”
“The shuttle was unloaded. Day before yesterday.” Helen frowned, probably wondering the same thing I was. Why hadn’t anyone told me? “The luggage is in the port until people can claim it.”
“Frisch knows that the codebooks are in my bag, so I would assume he’s grabbed it.” I jogged, heels jarring against the cu
rving floor. “It will probably be in his office. Can you get it, Helen?”
She shook her head. “Challenging. He’s begun sleeping there.”
“I can get it,” Myrtle said.
“How?” I raised my brows. “No offense, but I used to do this and when someone is present it’s—”
“I’ve got a tool you don’t.” She held up her hand and shifted her inflections just a little, softening the t’s to d’s and adding a touch of lilt. “Put a vacuum in this hand and no one will blink that I’ve pulled a cleaning shift.”
* * *
It took nearly two days to catch Ana Teresa alone. I finally had to deploy the same trick Helen had played on me. I tossed a meal pack at the doctor. “Come on.”
She fumbled it and nearly upended the bin of fabric scraps she was sorting on the counter of sickbay. Snatching the spinning brick out of the air, she stared at it with a vague expression as if she’d never seen one before, which worried me. “Come where?”
“We’re taking a break.” I held up my own meal and waggled it. “Follow me.”
“I need to finish…” She gestured at the fabric.
“No, actually, you don’t.” This was a script I knew all too well, although I usually played the other side. Today, I played Kenneth’s part and walked over, looping my arm through Ana Teresa’s. “That is something you can delegate. In fact, delegating is something you can delegate. But mostly, you need to put food in your body so when you need to be smart, you are not fuzzy from hunger.”
“It will not take long, and I can eat while I work.” But she was letting me steer her away from the fabric at least.
“Point of diminishing returns.” I had her nearly to the sink, but her feet were slowing as we passed the beds set up here. “For example, you’re talking about eating while sorting unwashed clothes that have been wrapped around polio patients’ bodies. Sweat. Feces. Ointment.”
“The ointment is nontoxic.”
“Don’t believe her,” Garnet rasped from one of the beds. She was flat on her back but still managed to pull a grin out of somewhere. “Stuff stings like the dickens.”
The Relentless Moon Page 24
