“So you’re proposing that you rage in and—”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m proposing that I go in cold, saving the rage until the right point. He’ll know it’s there. The potential danger of setting me off, that’s the motivator.” I tilted my head and kept my voice level and reasonable. “I’ll give you a list of questions before I go in. I’ll include a passphrase for the rage moment. If it’s not there, then you know I’ve gone off script and you pull me out.”
Eugene stared at me, but I could see the idea starting to kick around in his head. He hadn’t said yes, but I’d opened the door to the possibility.
I smiled, aiming for the right degree of self-aware dry humor. “Heck. If you have to pull me out kicking and screaming, Curt will see you as a savior and that bond will increase the likelihood he’ll talk to you. So, even if I lose it, it’s still a win-win.”
“Unless you kill him before I get in there.”
“Flatterer.” I shrugged. “You can frisk me for weapons before I go in.”
“I’m not sure you need weapons. Don’t— I see you. Don’t try to push this right now.” He put his hand on the door. “Let’s go punch a filing cabinet.”
* * *
Eugene let me join him when he called Helen to get her update on checking the coordinates near The Garden. He hadn’t said anything else about my suggestion and I knew better than to push. My right hand ached from slamming against the filing cabinet and that small finite pain made quantifiable sense. I knew why it hurt. I knew how long it would last.
The control was seductive. It was probably not a safety valve I should reach for often.
Speaking of control, I had picked up a packet of crackers on the way to talk to Helen. It wasn’t a lot, but I was disproportionately proud of myself for doing it. And equally ashamed that I was just breaking a cracker into smaller and smaller bits as Eugene caught her up.
When he was finished, her voice crackled on the line with awful static as she began her report. “The coordinates were not an impact site. They pointed to the landing site of Artemis 17, which I feel that I should have caught, but looking at old missions did not occur to me.”
I had been on that mission. It had been me and Terrazas with Elma orbiting above us as Nav/Comp. What had we done that would make someone go out to visit the site? I started running through the list of experiments and mission goals, trying to drag something—
“Oh, shit.” I put the bits of cracker down and pushed the packet away. “I was on that. We were testing a jet pack.”
“I remember that.” Eugene sat forward. “I was jealous because I wasn’t out of training before they decided not to build more of them.”
“The design was questionable, and the rovers worked better for most things. We left it on the surface. Is it there? Six legs spreading out for stability around a middle backpack. Looked like a spider?”
Helen was quiet and I could imagine her replaying her visit. “No. I did not see that. What I did note were parallel lines leading away … I think they are ski tracks. They intersect with and are obscured by the rover path between The Garden and the cargo ship landing pad.”
Eugene massaged his forehead. “Just one set of ski tracks?”
“Multiples. Too overlaid to count.”
Even without getting the coordinates from the coded message, if Curt had known they were sending him to retrieve the jet pack, he could have figured out where from publicly available information.
Eugene looked at the ceiling. “I am ready to have some answers instead of endless questions.” Sighing, he closed his eyes. “All right. We know Curt has a coconspirator. There were two sets of footprints at the Marius Hills site. Helen … you’re at The Garden. Can you look at the logs to see if any of the skiers were out there?”
“I already came to the same conclusion when I saw the ski tracks and have looked.” Naturally she had, because Helen was the kind of casually brilliant person who thought playing two chess games simultaneously was fun. “The day the quarantine lifted, Philippus Fourie is logged as arriving at The Garden on the morning shuttle and returning on the afternoon one. He was not scheduled for work that day.”
Eugene ran a hand down his face and sighed heavily. “Naturally.”
I almost knew the name but could not quite pull it to the front of my brain. “Who?”
“Remember the South African guy in comms that day? The one who didn’t like me being administrator?”
I dragged the moment forward out of my memory and saw the guy sitting hunched behind his copy of Popular Mechanics trying not to wilt under the force of Eugene’s gaze. “Blond guy? Wide-set blue eyes?”
Nodding, Eugene looked like his teeth hurt. “Construction. PhD in material sciences from University of Cape Town. He’s the guy who made Faustino’s skis.”
“Well, shit.” Admit an easy, known guilt to draw attention away from the larger one.
“So there’s a jet pack, a missing BusyBee, explosives, and a fully mobile bad actor loose in the colony.”
“Curt practically told me…” I groaned and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “When he was talking about a decaying orbit for the BusyBee he said, ‘But how would I get down?’ The jet pack would do that.”
Eugene shook his head. “Why would he tell you?”
“I don’t know.” Taunting me? Bragging? Trying to warn us because he was having second thoughts?
Helen’s voice slowed, becoming more precise. “I have just done some back-of-envelope calculations. There is nothing to prevent the BusyBee from being launched at a later time with the same parameters. It would only delay the crash date.”
Eugene clenched his fist on the table, light bandage stretching across the knuckles. “We’ll pick up Fourie. Get him locked down. And Wargin…” He looked across the table and my pulse sped up in anticipation. “You get to talk to Curt.”
FORTY-NINE
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm:
June 1, 1963, 0112—Entering the fifth day without contact. We’ve apprehended Philippus Fourie and have him confined in an office under guard. I am authorizing Nicole Wargin to question Curtis Frye and I take full responsibility for this choice.
“I was joking about frisking me.” I faced the wall down the hallway from the converted office where Curt was being held. My arms were outstretched, with a clipboard in my right hand and a partial tube of applesauce in my left.
“I wasn’t.” Eugene was methodical and impersonal as he ran his hands down the sides of my legs. “I know your sense of self-preservation is null and void right now, so let me be very clear. Your actions will reflect on me because I am making the judgment call that you are stable enough for this.”
“I am.”
“You are not stable.” Eugene stood and came around to my front, checking my pockets, bosom, and rib cage area as if I were a mannequin. “I am trusting that you are stable enough because I have damn few options. I’m not going to make threats, because I don’t think you care right now. Am I wrong?”
It took me a moment to swallow. “No, sir.”
“So what I want you to hold in your head is that I am a Black man and if you hurt Curt, or let him hurt you, it will all come down on me. People won’t know that you were a spy in the war. What they’ll know is that a Black man ordered a white woman—a grieving widow—into a dangerous situation. They’ll wonder what sort of ‘savage’ would do that. Do you copy?”
“Copy.” A different form of grief and rage pulled my shoulders down. He was right and I knew exactly how that would play. “Yes, sir.”
Eugene stepped back and held out his hand. “Clipboard.”
I lowered my arms, frowning. The clipboard was an important prop.
“If you hesitate to follow any order, I will take it as a signal that you are unreliable.” He did not move his hand or issue the command again, just looked at me with an unflinching gaze.
I handed him the clipboard.
�
��Good job not asking why.” He tapped the edge of the aluminum board. “You can’t take weapons in.”
I knew better than to protest. Partly because he was not going to tolerate any pushback from me, and partly because I had thought about what the edge of a clipboard could do to a windpipe.
He removed the notes from the clipboard and held them in one hand. “Confirm the passphrase for the ‘rage’ moment?”
My voice was so level it hurt. “You bastards murdered my husband.”
Eugene nodded. “And the next parameter?”
I was allowed to improvise, but he didn’t trust me to not get carried away, which was fair. “I am not allowed to use profanity except that phrase, in order to demonstrate to you that I remain in control.”
He held on to the clipboard, but handed my scripted list of questions back to me. “If you don’t get him to talk, that is not a failure. Physical harm to either of you is. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Finish the applesauce.”
I wanted to make a crack about how Eugene had become my Space Dad, but I was pretty sure he had no sense of humor at the moment. I unscrewed the lid and transferred the tube to my right hand to squirt some of the grainy sweetness into my mouth. It had gotten warm in my hand and was more like unflavored pie filling than anything else. It had enough liquid in it that it didn’t cling to the roof of my mouth and was easy to swallow.
Mostly. I could feel each mouthful drop into my stomach and lodge there. Eugene waited, looking just over my shoulder so he wasn’t staring at me while I ate. He was still watching me out of his peripheral vision, and I resented that even as I knew he had to.
I managed a half-dozen swallows before my body sent a warning wave of queasiness.
Yanking the tube away from my mouth, I stared at the wall, breathing through my nose. When I swallowed, the back of my throat was burning and sour. Eugene’s gaze shifted to me. He waited.
I closed my eyes and tried to wait for the queasiness to pass. Shit. “If I finish this, I’m going to throw up.” I managed to sound as if I were reporting on engine trouble. “I’m sorry.”
“All right.” He sighed and fabric rustled as he shifted his weight. “Nicole…”
“Please don’t be kind.” Opening my eyes, I tried to cap the tube and fumbled the lid, dropping it. I didn’t curse, to demonstrate that I had control of my brain, if not my fingers. “We want me to go in cold, so I don’t want to start crying yet.”
“Noted.” He snatched the lid off the floor and held out his hand for the tube. “I’ll be right outside the door.”
I’m not sure if that was to reassure me or him. Or to warn me. Probably the latter. He led me down the hall to the room where we were holding Curt. Eugene stepped to the side of the door. I held up my hand to get his attention. It had occurred to me that he needed to see me put on the mask so he would believe I was at least starting off in control.
I gestured at my face and mouthed. “Watch.”
He cocked his head, brows coming together in a question.
Looking away from him, I took a slow breath and deliberately thought about finding Kenneth’s letters buried like part of his corpse. I used the memory of pain and rage to shift my posture forward. My fingers curled toward my palm, not quite into fists. My head tilted down, pushing forward with just a touch of aggression. The animation in my face bled out on the floor, leaving an expressionless facade.
I said I was letting Eugene see me put on the mask, but it was probably more accurate to say I was taking it off. I’d been pretending to be human for him and that was not, at all, what lay under my skin.
Pivoting, I opened the door to Curt’s room. The lights were off inside. The hall light sent a shaft of amber slicing across his bed. He opened his eyes, blinking at my silhouette in the doorway.
I stepped in and reached to the side, flicking on the overhead light.
“Nicole?” Curt rubbed his eyes and pushed up in the bed with his arms. “What time is it?”
In a room without a watch or clock, there was no way to judge the passage of time. He could have been held for a day or a week and the only thing to let him know the difference would be the weakness of his own body. The urge to piss or shit. The urge to eat.
I pulled the door shut. Leaning against it, I watched Curt and very deliberately put my hand on the lock. “I found the letters.”
He frowned as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “Letters?”
“It took some doing, but I convinced Eugene I was calm enough to be the one to question you.” Very gently, I twisted the lock, easing it home without a click. “He’s standing right outside. For your safety.”
Curt’s gaze dropped to my hand on the lock. Just for a moment, I saw his pupils flare as he understood that he was locked in with me. “Okay … I see a problem with that.”
I pulled the room’s one chair away from the wall and set it down facing him. Leaning forward, I rested my hands on the back of it. “He even frisked me to make sure I didn’t have a weapon.” I rocked the chair forward on its front legs, getting a sense of the balance. It was plastic with aluminum legs, like most of the other chairs in the colony. “You know how I found my husband’s letters? The Easter eggs.”
He watched me testing the heft of the chair. It didn’t have a lot of mass, but it had plenty of hard edges.
“I wondered, why would you go to the trouble and expense of bringing up candy eggs to hide in the dandelions.”
Curt was very good at looking confused and a little frightened. The latter was probably a real emotion that he was trying to use to mask other reactions. “Because it was Easter? Also, I was the new guy and figured I could bribe people into liking me.”
As if he had not spoken, I lifted the chair again, flipping it over. It was an elegantly simple design with a single six millimeter bolt going down into the main shaft of each leg. Just twist to the left to unscrew it and voila, a club. “How’s your mom, Curt?”
“Well, there’s no way for me to know, is there. Even if you didn’t have me locked up in here, last I heard, we didn’t have contact with Earth.” His posture was fairly relaxed, but the vein in his neck was beating visibly now. “Or has that changed?”
“Does she still like soap operas?” I unscrewed the chair leg, watching him.
“Lives for them.” He pulled a pillow around into his lap as if he were fluffing it. If it were me, that pillow would either be a shield or hiding a weapon. “She’s going to be pretty worried because I missed our weekly call.”
“You know the soap operas are what gave you away, right? Should never have told me that you and your mom talked about Guiding Light. But it was such a good opportunity to get in a dig about my husband. Derail me a little.” I got the leg off and laid the rest of the chair on its side on the floor. “Drop the pillow off the side of the bed.”
“Oh, come on—”
“You bastards murdered my husband!” My throat hurt. I slammed the chair leg on the mattress, right next to his foot.
Curt couldn’t flinch away from the club. He stared at the chair leg resting on the mattress a centimeter from his leg. He’d have felt the impact on the covers. He’d have heard the hard slap of it, even if it hadn’t made a sound that would travel outside the room.
He was breathing fast now. I set the chair leg down gently on his right leg. “Drop. The. Pillow.”
The fans whirred as he hesitated.
I raised my right hand, with its makeshift club, not taking my gaze off his face. I snapped a smile on, full grin with a painfully cheerful voice. “Funny thing. I was a spy in the war, basically doing your job. Get in. Make people like me. Cause chaos. Did that come up in your briefing for this mission?”
If I brought it down now, it would slam into his ankle.
“Curt. Darling. I have nothing to lose. Are we clear? You took everything I actually cared about. You took my one reason for going through life as if I were a good and decent person. The way I fig
ure it, you weren’t planning on still being here when the sh—stuff hit the fan. If you were on an actual suicide mission, you wouldn’t have tried to warn us about the things that might be fatal to you. You still have a sense of self-preservation. I don’t. So you’re going to drop the pillow and then you’re going to answer my questions.”
The vein in his neck pulsed like he’d been running. A bead of sweat made its slow way down his temple. With an almost audible snap, the resistance drained out of his body. He shook his head, shrugging. “What the hell … This will be easier.” Curt dumped the pillow off the side of the bed.
It hit the floor with a hard metallic thump.
“Easier than what?”
“Than trying to warn you about pending problems without getting caught as the person who caused them.” His smile was bleak. “Tricky. And you’ve been slow on the uptake.”
“Curious. You set up a series of disasters and then … I’m to understand you had a change of heart?”
“Polio changed things. Yeah.”
I pulled the chair leg away from him and walked back to the chair itself. “I’m going to ask a series of questions. You’re going to answer them fully and completely.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with your husband’s death.”
The entire room went red and hot. I clenched the chair leg so hard that my fingers cramped. Only by stopping completely. By holding my breath. By planting. Only by freezing myself was I able to keep from driving the chair leg into his temple.
Eugene had been so right to tell me I wasn’t allowed to have a weapon. My hands were shaking with the flood of adrenaline as I knelt to screw the chair leg back into place. This was why I had a script. I laid the folded paper on the floor and wished I had my clipboard.
“Where is the BusyBee?” The leg slid off the bolt and I had to pause.
“If you found the letters, then you have the codes, so I’m going to assume you already found the BusyBee and are testing me.” He sighed and leaned back to rest his head against the wall as if he were exhausted. “You’ve got the coordinates. There’s a lava tube close to that, which connects to The Garden. If you give me a map, I can draw the route to the entrance.”
The Relentless Moon Page 46
