Helen rested a hand on my back. It was as if the weight of her hand pushed the tears over the rims of my eyes. I closed my eyes, trying to tell myself that seeing me weep would drive home my words. Tears were a useful manipulative tool. I clenched my jaw and breathed through my nose and tried not to let myself descend into anything uncomfortably maudlin.
At the front of the room, Halim tapped the whiteboard. “All right. The Satellite Communications and Tracking department has come up with a plan to link the way stations’ comm systems together so they can be used as a relay network for the two closest outposts, The Garden and Marius Hills. This is the flight schedule and assignments for getting those teams out there.” His marker squeaked on the board. “You’ll note that all flights, even on BusyBees, must now have a Nav/Comp in addition to a pilot. Any flights to the South Pole also need a copilot, since that route does not have way stations as navigation beacons and you’ll be flying by dead reckoning. I want two eyes on the instrumentation and landmarks at all times. Questions so far?”
“Circling back to the communications with Earth.” That sounded like Mary Marguerite Harding. Darn good pilot. Glass artist who I’d been trying to get work from for the gallery. Levelheaded as only a mom can be. “Just as a point of information. Are we sitting tight or sending a ship to Lunetta?”
“Both. Sitting tight initially. If the problem is on their end, we won’t be able to do anything to help them fix that. It’s a three-day transit from Lunetta, so if there’s information they need us to have, it makes more sense for them to send a ship to us.” Halim capped his marker. “But we’re also going to prep a flight for a free-return transit to Earth if we don’t hear from them within the week.”
Free-return transit. It was a wonderful thing about orbital mechanics. We could aim a flight with enough precision that it would reach a planet, loop around it, and the gravity assist would fling it back to its origin. That had been the plan with the first lunar mission, in case the engines malfunctioned; the crew could have looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
I saw the men and women in the room get it. I saw the tension come back. They were pilots and Nav/Comps and understood exactly what a free-return meant. The only reason to plan that for a trip to Earth was if you thought there might not be a place to dock.
FORTY-SIX
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm: May 30, 1963, 0941—Three days without IAC contact. South Pole outpost reports being in good condition. We are maintaining regular shuttle flights to the Pole as well as The Garden and Marius Hills.
When dawn hits tomorrow, the engineering and astronaut departments will begin setting up a visual flight path to the South Pole to make that route safer without the navigational satellites.
Two days after I gave Helen the coded letter, I left the centrifuge room, sweaty and still breathing hard from my required 1 g exercise time. I was damned if I was letting Ana Teresa keep this cast on me one day longer because I wasn’t putting a gravity load on it. If I’d been disciplined about it in the first place, it might not have rebroken when I got shocked.
As I pushed the door open, Eugene was reaching for it and we had one of those moments where we both startled at the sight of the other.
I was still calibrated to Earth gravity and jumped too high, catching my crown against the doorframe. “Gah!”
As I landed, he steadied me. “Sorry. You okay?”
I nodded, keeping my hands down instead of rubbing the spot the way I wanted to. I didn’t want him to worry and it didn’t hurt that much. “What’s up?”
“We decoded it.” Helen stood behind Eugene, with a folder in one hand, picking at the skin of her thumb with her other.
“Let’s go upstairs.” Eugene had a fresh bandage on the knuckles of his right hand and the “flesh” tone stood in garish contrast against his medium brown skin.
I followed them up to the lounge. “No Myrtle and Halim?”
“I’ve got them on flight duty this shift.” He didn’t even check his watch. “She’ll be back at 17:30. Helen says this shouldn’t wait.”
Helen said, “I’ve only given Eugene big picture. I wanted you here for the details.”
I did not like the sound of any of this or the bandage on Eugene’s hand, which had not been there last night.
As we came out into the lounge, the nighttime lunar landscape lay around us in a silver-blue vista with the Apennine mountains forming a lighter black against the ink of the sky. A moment later, the lights from the landing field and a wide bank of external work lights threw dozens of stark shadows across the colony.
They blinked on and off in a rhythmic sequence spelling “APAF” in Morse. Three days, and we still couldn’t reach Earth, but we could at least try to let them know that we were All Present and Accounted For. Assuming someone had turned the orbital telescope on us, or really any telescope that could see through the clouds. Sometimes the ones in Hawaii and Australia had a clear view of the night sky. Clear enough to see this message flashing in the dark of the Moon.
All Present and Accounted For.
Please, please tell us that the same is true back home. Because my mind is cruel, it reminded me that Kenneth was not present. He was accounted for, though. I blinked the sting back in my eyes and followed Helen to one of the card tables set up in the lounge. She sat down and laid the folder on the table.
Eugene pulled a chair out for me. I was still sweaty and too keyed up to sit. When I shook my head, he shrugged and sat next to Helen.
I leaned over their shoulders to peer at the folder.
Helen pulled out a map of the Moon, with two areas circled on it. One near The Garden, the other near Marius Hills. She set a neatly printed translation beside the original grease-stained copy. “The document is in three parts. The first and second parts caused the most trouble, because it was impossible to get a fitness check on it in any of our three target languages. We eventually realized we should be including numbers in our trials and it resolved into a flight plan.”
Resting a hand on Helen’s shoulder, I leaned forward studying it. Thrust, burn times … “For a BusyBee, it looks like.”
“That was my assessment as well.” She tapped the page. “Given this and the launch position listed, a pilot would be able to set a BusyBee into a decaying orbit that would crash into the main dome. If it was launched at the time listed, that crash will occur in two days.”
Eugene flexed his right hand, the bandage wrinkling as he moved.
“However, the launch time was after both Curt and Birgit contracted polio, so it is possible the flight did not occur. If so, it is within the realm of possibilities that the starting coordinates tell us where the BusyBee is parked.”
“I would very much like some good news.” Eugene wiped his mouth and looked from the translation to the map of the Moon. “This is near Marius Hills, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I have a flight plan ready to go.”
“And if it’s not there?” I was still frowning at the pages. “Can we do an intercept course if it launched?”
“Possible.”
Eugene nodded. “Work that as a contingency when we’re through here. Anything further on this section?”
“Not at this time.” She flipped the page to reveal three short lines. “Here we have a different set of coordinates. These are west of The Garden within an easy drive by a rover. I’ve compared this location with our big map and it is in the region we searched for the BusyBee; however, none of us documented anything of note.”
“Huh.” Eugene rubbed his chin, still looking at the page.
“The impact.” I stepped around them to lean on the table so I could face Helen. “You mentioned an impact during the second blackout.”
“Ah … Interesting thought.”
Eugene’s brows came together in confusion. “What impact?”
“When you and Myrtle were doing the inventory on…” Helen flipped some pages in the folder and consulte
d her notes. “On Saturday, April twentieth, Luther Sanchez told me that the ground telemetry station at The Garden recorded an impact, but couldn’t triangulate specifically where because Artemis Base was offline.”
I nodded. “That was a week after landing and only a day after Curt came down with polio. If—and I realize I’m making suppositions here—but if someone launched a supply dumb drop, they would have done it before they knew he was sick. That could be the impact.”
Eugene squinted one eye as he studied me. “So, you think this might be something that could survive a hard landing, sent out but not retrieved?”
“Or perhaps retrieved. Birgit didn’t hit the paralytic phase until Monday, the twenty-second.” I gnawed on my lower lip, looking at the map of the Moon and desperately wishing that I didn’t have a cast on my arm. “Or it’s a trap.”
Eugene leaned back in his chair. “So … let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that they set up a trap in the middle of nowhere on the Moon, which we would only learn about by finding a secret letter by accident in the sandwich line, in order to get … which two of us out of the way? ’Cause only two people fit on a rover, so it can’t be all of us.”
I held up my hands. “Hey. My role here is to be the paranoid one and I like to think I acquit myself admirably.”
He snorted and turned back to the pages on the table. “Last section?”
“Gossip.” Helen turned the page. “The target language turned out to be English and the page contains socially damaging information on a number of different people within the IAC.”
I reached past Eugene to tap a name. “Not gossip. Blackmail.”
Florina Morales—spacesuit technician—Husband recently promoted to project lead. Gambling debts.
I cocked my head, staring at the page. Turning over reasons that I might have given this sort of incriminating text to someone if I had been Icarus. To frame her? To get help with translation? And why would you need that if your own people had sent it to you? “Assuming Birgit is lying about not being able to decode it, then she would have a lever to use on Florina, which would get her access to a suit.”
If Icarus had contacted Florina, she could tell us who she prepared an off-schedule suit for, when she did, and how long they were out on the surface. It was really the first time that I felt like we’d gotten out in front of Icarus.
Eugene nodded. “All right. Order of operations. Wargin, take the list of people and check to see if Icarus contacted them. I’ll send Myrtle to Marius Hills to check the BusyBee launch site. Helen, you’re on the potential drop site. Pick the copilot you want to go with you and we’ll arrange to clear their schedule.”
“I am comfortable flying solo to there.”
Eugene made a flat negation with his hand. “No one flies solo. Not until I’m confident that we’ve cleared every trap Icarus has left for us.”
* * *
The donning room hummed with the first shift coming back from Marius Hills or The Garden. Sweaty astronauts and colonists shucked out of their IVP suits chattering about the nothing sorts of things you discuss at the end of the day.
Florina Morales stood at her station by donning stand 6 conducting a post-EVA inspection on one of the colonists’ suits. Her hands were graceful and sure as she assessed the seams and closures for tears or degraded material. She looked up as I approached and her gaze dropped to my cast. Florina narrowed her eyes as she straightened. “Do not for a moment think you will convince me to let you into a suit.”
I laughed. “No, thanks. But I’m supposed to get the cast off next week, so we can discuss then.”
“Hmph.” She removed a glove. One of her dark curls escaped its ponytail and bobbed by her cheek. “And you are here … just to visit?”
I bent down to pick up a wrist mirror and hung it on the wall. “I have a question, but it’s a bit sensitive. Have a more private place to talk?”
She paused with the thermal garment folded back away from the glove. “I do not like this class of questions.”
“Fair. I don’t like asking them.”
Florina glanced around the room and then jerked her head toward the back. “Come on. The fans in the shop are loud enough that someone would have to be on top of us to hear.”
The workshop behind the donning room was a clean industrial space dominated by a large table surrounded by women doing suit repair and maintenance. Sure, parts of the suit were sewn on a machine, but the gloves required such precision work that it could only be done by hand. Any spare bit of fabric or wrinkle felt like it turned into a rigid piece of wire when the suits were pressurized.
Florina set the helmet and Hard Upper Torso down on a workstation with her back to the table of stitchers. “So?”
There were many ways to approach this. I could ease into it. I could try to shock her by making an accusation about off-schedule suit use. Or I could simply ask. We wanted her as an ally, so I chose the closest to honest route that I could. “Has anyone tried to blackmail you to let them use suits off-schedule?”
Her brows came together in surprised confusion. “No … Blackmail me how?”
I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Information about your husband’s gambling debts?”
Florina’s face paled. “No.” She grabbed my arm. “He just got the promotion. Please. He’ll get it sorted out.”
I rested my hand on hers. “I’m sure he will. It’s okay. The debt isn’t what I’m interested in.” Her pupils were dilated with fear. In that moment, I realized Birgit might have told the truth about at least one thing. She hadn’t been able to decode the letter. Or, she just hadn’t approached Florina. I asked anyway. “No one has tried to put pressure on you?”
She shook her head. “He’s a good man. He’s just … For an engineer, you’d think he would be better with balancing a checkbook.”
I recognized the terror she felt for her husband. She would do anything for him, but I didn’t think that she had done anything. The desperation was the wrong shape. It was the fear of a potential future, not of something she had done.
I squeezed her hand again. “I won’t tell, but you can use me as the bad guy if it’ll help you get him into shape.”
She laughed and then sobered. I saw the sympathy coming before I could stop her. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind.” I looked at the floor and did not cry. “He was the love of my life.”
* * *
Four days without contact from Earth. I rounded the corner to Eugene’s office and nodded to his secretary. She was an efficient Black woman who attacked the keys of the typewriter as if it had personally offended her.
She looked up and gave me a brief nod. “He’s in.”
I pushed the plastic sheeting of his office door aside. Eugene had a cup of coffee steaming on the desk and was scowling at a report, massaging his forehead.
“Careful, or your face is going to stick that way.”
He snorted, and marked his place on the page. “That will be the least of my problems.” Eugene turned to a thermos sitting next to the pressure kettle. “Coffee?”
“Depends. Is it poisoned?” I settled in the chair opposite his desk.
“Depends.” He grabbed a coffee mug and poured. “Am I going to like whatever you’re about to tell me?”
“Depends.” I leaned back in my chair. “I’ve talked to everyone on the Icarus list. None of them have been contacted. Not by Birgit. Not by Curt. Not by anonymous note.”
“Huh.” Eugene frowned and handed me the cup, correctly remembering that I took it black. “You believe that?”
I nodded. “All of them panicked when I brought up their potential blackmail lever. But when I asked if anyone had pressured them, none of them gave any sign of having been contacted.”
“You sure? I could see scenarios where they were lying.”
“There was no overt extra confusion about why I was asking. No regressive motion. No feigned disinterest. No self-soothing
by, say, plucking at their collar.”
Eugene shook his head. “Regressive motion? Self-soothing? Why did I even raise the question?”
“A question I ask every time I try to demonstrate competence.” I winked over my coffee mug.
Sighing, he picked up his own mug and turned it in his hands, staring into the milky depths. “So Birgit was telling the truth when she said she couldn’t translate it. Presumably Curt couldn’t either. Any thoughts on why they would have a coded message but no key?”
“Some. Nothing I’m happy with.” I took a sip of the gloriously bitter brew, with all the tannins and complex chocolate and nut layers that you could ask for. I’m not much for food, but can be a real snob about beverage. “One. The key was in their quarters, and if we search, we’ll find it. Two. Curt translated it and gave it to Birgit to frame her. Three. One of them translated it, but didn’t need to blackmail anyone. Four. They translated it but polio hit before blackmail opportunity. Five. Neither of them is Icarus.”
“Come on … one of them has to be. How else did they get the letter?”
I raised my forefinger from the handle of the coffee mug. “Birgit said Curt passed her notes. He says he didn’t. What if there’s a third party that is pretending to send her notes from Curt who also left the message ‘to Vicky’?”
“Occam’s razor.”
“So you’re saying the simplest thing is that Birgit is Icarus with Curt?” I shook my head. “If they were, they would have coordinated a story that wouldn’t incriminate the other. That’s not the case.”
Eugene drummed his fingers on the desk, gaze dropping back to the report. “Kansas is dark.”
The Relentless Moon Page 43
