“How do you have it booby trapped?” I managed to get the leg seated on the bolt and started to twist it back into place.
Curt scowled and shook his head. “I don’t.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Fully and completely.”
“Honest to God.” He crossed himself. “I didn’t have time. In the original plan, I was supposed to go back to it, but I also wasn’t supposed to get sick. Heck, I was supposed to be gone by now. The whole colony was supposed to evacuate. Look—I’ve been trying my best to warn you about the things I set up. That has to count for something.”
I lifted the chair and put it back on its feet. Leaning on the back, I studied him. “It’s not exactly a sign of virtue when it’s self-preservation.”
Curt’s jaw clenched, and he ran his hand over the blanket covering his legs. “I’m not the only one this affects. Like, Garnet won’t survive reentry.”
It took me a moment to find a connection. Garnet was one of the polio patients who had been in the women’s ward with a reedy thin voice because the polio messed with her lungs. Not enough to need an iron lung, but bad enough that she was on oxygen.
“Ah. Right. Altruism.” Though in truth, I had not known Garnet’s condition was that bad.
“Yes. Altruism. This entire space program is basically a eugenics project.” He sat up, leaning toward me as if he could convince me of his righteousness. “You haven’t thought about the people who won’t get to come up here? The people who don’t have the right education because they’re the wrong color? Or the ones whose health is just a little off-nominal?”
I did not scream at him. I did not shout that I thought about that every day, because I had a husband with a heart condition. I had a husband. I did not take Curt’s bait any more than I already had. I waited out the heat, pushing air through my clenched chest, and then I sat in the chair. I bent down to pick up my list of questions from the floor.
“Let’s start with your plan. I want you to step me through what you did.” Eugene had wanted me to start by asking about sabotage that was still pending, but I needed things I could verify before we moved into unknown territory.
He spread his hands. “I want to be up front, before we start, that I’m not giving up anyone else. You get me. That’s it.”
“We decide what’s appropriate.”
He shook his head. “No. This is the deal. I’ll talk about myself and my actions, but you absolutely do not get anything about anyone else. No names. No genders. No personal details at all.”
I shrugged. “You can try. We’ll see how long it lasts. The original plan?”
He sighed, with his lips compressed. “The idea was to make the IAC withdraw from the Moon with a minimal loss of life.”
“Minimal loss.” I raised my eyebrows. “You hit the CO2 scrubbers.”
“Yes. I know. I also tried to warn you about that. I could have ruptured the dome. We were hoping if we did enough small system failures the IAC would order an evacuation.” He gestured at his legs. “Polio wasn’t in the plan.”
“Why did you give Eugene food poisoning?” That was a bluff, because I only guessed it was deliberate.
He didn’t bluster. “I needed him out of the pilot’s chair. I was supposed to make the landing look bad. Make it look like another unsafe rocket.”
I crossed my legs, watching him. “But you snapped it down too hard, didn’t you. Breaking the landing strut was an accident.”
That made him blush, oddly. As if messing up as a pilot was the worst thing he could do. “I’d never landed in lunar gravity and misjudged. It’s not like I could practice it in the simulator. I didn’t plan on getting grounded. That … complicated things.” Curt smiled and it was grim. “But I didn’t lie to you when I said I could fake a misfiring thruster.”
“I need a complete list of the sabotage you set up after landing.” Taking notes with my right hand, on paper on my knee, was going to be a mess. I wanted my clipboard. “Take a minute to think about it while I bring Major Lindholm in.”
Curt watched me as I went to the door and unlocked it. The lock snapped open with an audible click. Shit. I’d been so good about securing it quietly.
Eugene was standing right by the door. He looked from me to the lock and gave me the kind of glare that suggested, strongly, I was going to get a very serious “come to Jesus” talk later. That was fine. It had worked and he hadn’t told me not to lock the door.
“May I have my clipboard, or would you like to take notes?” I smiled at Eugene.
Based on the look he returned, I imagine his sons did not get out of line very often. Eugene held the clipboard out and followed me into the room. I sat in the chair facing Curt again, with Eugene looming behind me.
Once my papers were clipped back into place, I nodded to Curt. “Start talking. List of sabotage.”
“The plan was to set up as many delayed reaction problems as possible for two reasons. It gave me a chance of having alibis when things went wrong and we also figured I had maybe two weeks before getting caught. The more things I could set up at the beginning, the better.”
I leaned forward in my chair, just a little. “That’s not a list. That’s a rationale.”
His jaw clenched. “All right. I swapped out filters in the CO2 scrubbers in all the modules with a fake. I used perchloric acid to make a time delay to disable the dehumidifiers. I added moon dust into the fuel tanks of the BusyBees and rovers. I disabled smoke detectors. I stripped wires to increase the likelihood of shorts.” He looked at me and winced. “I was going for small shorts and I’m genuinely sorry you got hit.”
Doubtful. More likely, he was trying to pull suspicion away from Birgit now that he’d decided to talk. “You’ll need to tell us where you stripped them.”
Curt shrugged and shook his head. “At random, everywhere. Any time I was alone in a room, I’d open the nearest panel and fray things.”
“Continue.”
“I emptied emergency oxygen masks. I’ve punctured the oil drums on the fans, which is taking longer to fail than I expected. There’s a slow leak in the seal of BusyBee berth six. Hoping for a rupture, but it’s being more resilient than I’d like.” He frowned and looked at the ceiling. “I think that’s everything I got to before the nineteenth.”
“The nineteenth?”
“Friday, April 19th. It’s the last day I walked. Kinda remember the date, just a little.”
Here is where I was supposed to feel sympathy for him. I did not. “The list seems incomplete. For instance, you haven’t mentioned the fertilizer you took from The Garden.” Or sabotaging the Lindholms’ BusyBee, or the remote-control fuse, or the jet pack.
“Yeah…” Curt sat forward. “Here’s the thing. We’re still cut off from Earth, right?”
From behind me, Eugene said, “What do you know about that?”
“I know what the plan was when I left. There were two schools of thought in our group. I favored the first plan, which was to try to get the IAC to lose enough credibility that people would stop throwing money at you and start taking care of things on Earth. That didn’t work.” He glanced at me and wet his lips. “So, we’re getting more … direct, in our action.”
I gripped the clipboard, pressing it into my lap. He was trying to piss me off to distract me. This was not how someone with a change of heart behaved or cooperated. This was how someone who had been caught attempted to still cause problems.
Lifting my pencil, I tested the point, watching Curt. “Less commentary. More details.”
“They’ve blown the radio dishes, deorbited the communication satellites, including the two for the Mars Expedition, bombed the IAC, and taken out the power grid for the area surrounding Kansas City.” Curt’s voice was level and matter-of-fact like someone discussing a flight plan. “There’s no one to come to your rescue.”
“Slight miscalculation there. This is the International Aerospace Coalition. The spaceports in Brazil and Europe are still fine.” The Garden was design
ed to feed thousands, and while it was still young, we had six months of stores and only 326 people to feed. It would be difficult, I had no doubt about that. I also believed this group of people could do it. “Even if they weren’t, surviving without the Earth is exactly what this colony is designed for.”
“Sure.” Curt shrugged. “And as long as you’re up here, people on Earth are going to want to come to your rescue. I told my group this would just make ‘saving the Moon’ a project. So what we want is for you to voluntarily abandon the Moon. Minimal loss of life.”
Behind me, Eugene said, “Why the heck would we do that?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Jeremiah 22:3: ‘Thus saith the Lord: Execute judgement and justice, and deliver him that is oppressed out of the hand of the oppressor.’”
“There’s more to that verse than that.” Eugene shot a glance at me. “‘… and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.’ You have shed innocent blood.”
“Verse 13. ‘Woe to him that buildeth up his house by injustice, and his chambers not in judgement: that will oppress his friend without cause, and will not pay him his wages.’ People on Earth are dying and the resources being pumped into this are criminal. For what? The Meteor was eleven years ago. There are still people in North Carolina without running water and—”
“I don’t need your monologue.” I jumped in before they could continue arguing theology. “I just need to know what you did.”
“All right. Then moving to plan two is on your heads. You want a reason to abandon the Moon? Here it is. I wired Marius Hills and the main colony to blow. It’s remote controlled.” He folded his hands in his lap and leaned back against his pillow. “When you regain contact with Earth, if the United States government has not agreed to withdraw from the Moon and funnel money into helping our own people, then Earth First will set off a remote detonation. That’s why I didn’t damage any of the main ships, just FYI. Let me know if you need help planning the evacuation. I already did the preliminary work. You’re welcome.”
In my head, a film played in which I stood up and backhanded him with my hard plaster cast, sending blood in a slow spray across the walls. Curt’s head would snap to the side and I would feel the contact in a jarring sting up through my elbow and to the base of my teeth. Eugene might or might not try to stop me.
Instead, I moved my pencil to the next item on the list. My breath was hot in my lungs but I kept my posture relaxed. “Next question. What instructions did you give Philippus Fourie? Just a reminder, we have him in custody so we’ll be cross-checking your answers. You’re welcome.”
I would be damned if I let this man control me.
FIFTY
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm:
June 1, 1963, 0337—Maintenance order: Overhaul all fans, checking for damage to oil drums.
The pages on my clipboard were covered with notes I had taken as Curt talked. At some point during the hours we questioned the man, Eugene brought in another chair. He sat next to me, occasionally interjecting a question, but mostly just looking intimidating.
As Curt yawned wide enough that his jaw actually popped, I flipped through the pages. “What was Faustino doing for you when he died?”
He was fatigued enough that for a moment his constant slightly cocky mask cracked and I saw what looked like a real emotion. Regret. Curt sighed and lowered his hand. “Nothing. And I wish to God I hadn’t introduced him to the skis.” He looked down at the covers, tugging on them. “Funny, that that’s the thing I feel guilty about.”
“But you did use the skis?”
He nodded. His hair was tousled out of its crisp part, with mouse-brown strands sticking up like old hay. His entire body drooped with fatigue, and I did not think that was an act. “Yeah … Philippus made them, which you already knew, but he thought it was all aboveboard.”
Eugene raised his eyebrows. “Nothing about those skis was aboveboard.”
Curt winced. “You know what I mean. They just liked skiing and thought it was harmless fun.” Stifling another yawn, he said, “Philippus probably told you he helped me move some gear. He legitimately thought it was a work assignment but that we were cheating by using the skis to make it easier.”
That did, actually, match what Philippus had said, although with a great deal more crying. “What gear?”
“Fertilizer. We transferred it out of the lava tube to the jet pack and then I moved it to … a surprise location.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “Sorry. I’m not giving up where the bombs are.”
“Mm … you did already, actually.” Flipping through my notes again, I ran the pencil down the page. I made a random tick mark. “Just circling back, Birgit’s involvement was also ‘innocent,’ you said. Seduced her, et cetera. I didn’t catch how you were going to explain the contents of the coded letter you asked her to translate for you. Just curious, really.”
“She … she liked codes.” Curt looked like he was trying to figure out if I was bluffing about knowing where the bombs were. That was fine. He could enjoy wondering. “Part of the seduction was pretending we were both secret agents. It was like a game of dress-up. She liked handcuffs, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, those can be fun with the right person.” If he thought he was going to shock me, he had been paying no attention. On the other hand, Eugene coughed and lifted his glass of water, so that could have been aimed at our clean-cut leader. “You might remember, in the letter you stole from me, that my late husband mentioned a cat-o’-nine-tails. It’s mink.”
Eugene sprayed water out of his nose. Curt’s mouth dropped open and he went flaming red. I will honestly never understand why men, who seem to spend so much of their lives thinking about sex, get so flustered when a woman discusses it.
I ignored the fact that Eugene was wiping his chin and nose on his sleeve and carried on, watching Curt. “The problem I’m running into is that Birgit already told us about the affair, so ‘I thought it was a game’ would have been a natural thing for her to bring up as a defense.”
Curt shook his head, shrugging. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“All right.” I turned to Eugene, who did not look much less tired. “I’m finished. Did you have any follow-ups or circle-backs?”
He pursed his lips, studying the bastard. “No.”
“Let’s go.” I stood and the room spun around me. It’s not a good thing that I have enough experience at almost fainting that I know how to wait it out. The edges of the room snowed dark ash for a moment and then things steadied. I tucked my clipboard under my arm and turned very carefully to walk out of the room.
When we got into the hall, Eugene locked the door behind us and gave instructions to the astronaut on guard. I waited, with one hand against the tunnel, until Eugene joined me.
“What do you thi— Are you okay?”
“Dizzy.” I am very proud of myself for not lying to him. “I need to eat something.”
He inhaled, nodding, and looked down the hall. “Lounge? I’ll get a tray for you?”
“Thanks.” I straightened, steady enough to go upstairs and grateful not to have to face even the tiny late-night crowd in the cafeteria.
“Anything you … find appetizing?”
“Caesar salad and a rare steak?” I’d meant for that to be a joke since neither was available on the Moon, but the image of Kenneth whisking egg yolk in a bowl came to haunt me. I bit the inside of my cheek and then cleared my throat. “Sorry. Kenneth always … Here, the peaches usually work. Cottage cheese, sometimes.”
Eugene nodded as if we were out together at any normal restaurant and I was placing a completely normal order. “Copy. I’ll run— Or. Or I could use technology and ask someone via the intercom to bring us both some food.”
“Glad we’re both brilliant.” I smiled at him as we walked to the stairs to the lounge. “And in answer to your question, Curt
spent most of the time sowing disinformation mixed with just enough truth to make us check every statement he made.”
Eugene paused to let me precede him up the stairs. “And … do you know where the bomb is?”
“Oh yeah.” I hauled myself up the steps. “It’s still in the BusyBee. The jet packs can’t carry a load. That’s why we didn’t use them after the test. They’re unstable. The footprints Myrtle and Halim saw are him loading the jet pack, realizing the problem, and then unloading it. Stride length is different because he was tired or having the first signs of leg weakness from the polio.”
“Um … And Fourie going out after the quarantine lifted?”
“Retrieving his skis. Curt wants us to think that he’s got the main colony rigged to blow, which is why he wants us to think that Fourie helped with unloading the BusyBee. Three problems there. One. We found the main colony detonator. Two. The aforementioned difficulty with the jet pack. Three. Despite Curt’s efforts to confuse us, the logs give us independent verification that Fourie went to The Garden outpost, not Marius Hills.” I did not remember the staircase being this long. “Also … Curt is not pushing to get moved elsewhere. He’s not worrying about anything happening to the main colony.”
“Just to be clear. The BusyBee is rigged as a bomb in the lava tube that Myrtle and Halim want to explore in … four hours?”
“Yes. Tell them not to go in.” I finally walked into the lounge, squinting against the long shadows of lunar dawn. The brilliant sunlight, even with the polarized glass, was a jarring contrast to the wee hours of the morning. “We’ll need to get … I dunno. Mavis and her team out there to defuse it.”
“That’s not in your skill set?”
I snorted and dropped into a chair. “I was a spy, not a bomber.” Exhaustion threatened to pull me down a gravity well of fatigue. “Oh, and Kenneth doesn’t have a mink cat-o’-nine-tails.”
The Relentless Moon Page 47
