And then Fields feels himself being lifted off the floor. And carried like a doll across the room. And propelled headfirst toward the wall—only to halt a few inches from the bricks.
“Never bang your head against a wall,” he hears the droid snarl in his ear. “Bang someone else’s.”
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Fields’s skull shatters and he passes out.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
06
LIEUTENANT DAMIEN JUSTUS IS used to asking questions. He’s used to deference from other cops. And he’s used to the sight of dead bodies.
What he isn’t used to is feeling so completely out of place. Or receiving so much unconditional deference from cops he hardly knows. Or viewing bodies that have been blown apart by a bomb blast.
“Damien Justus,” he says, shaking hands with a photogenic Italian.
“Officer Cosmo Battaglia,” the officer returns.
“You in charge?”
“Until you showed up,” Battaglia says, without a trace of resentment.
“Okay.” Justus turns to the death scene. “Tell me what we got here.”
“Three people. Two men, one woman. They were posing for photographs when—vaboom!—the feed tanks here exploded.”
“The feed tanks for the goats.”
“That’s right.”
“What was in the tanks?”
“Nutrients, that sort of stuff.”
“Do feed tanks often explode on the Moon? Spontaneous combustion? A barrel of fertilizer igniting all by itself?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So you suspect foul play?”
“I’ll leave the official suspicions to you, Lieutenant.”
“Uh-huh.” Justus doesn’t like it. He can see—and feel—the other cops looking at him. Which shouldn’t be unusual, especially since the acid attack, except that there’s something disconcerting about the way they’re looking at him. As if they’re enjoying all of this. As if they’re showing off for the new guy. Look what we see every other day in Purgatory. Decapitated heads, severed limbs, dead goats—and you thought you had it bad back on Earth!
“Any idea who the victims are?”
“All three were from the Department of Agriculture,” says Battaglia. “A secretary, a consultant, and a professor. See that head with the pointed beard, the one who looks like the devil?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That belongs to Otto Decker, the agriculture scientist.”
“The professor?”
“Sure. Real good at his job too. Or at least he was.” Battaglia actually sniggers.
Justus nods and looks around. They’re in a wing of the Agri-Plex, a vast underground food lab connected to Sin by tunnels. Some of the wings are given over to high-yield crops. Others contain hydroponic fruit and vegetables. There’s a wheat field as big as two football stadiums, a rice paddy, a “wethouse” for aquaculture, a crowded livestock facility, and a slaughterhouse.
Battaglia notices him looking and offers, “This section is new—that’s why they were taking photos.”
“Goats are new on the Moon?”
“Mountain goats. Eat anything. Live in low pressure too, so that saves a bit on overhead. And they pay out big.”
“How so?”
“Milk. Cheese. Yogurt. Soap. Whey. Protein. You know.”
“Uh-huh.” Justus thinks the officer is unusually well informed. And it feels surreal, talking about goat farming over three mutilated bodies in this strange chamber, with its padded ceiling and ultraviolet lamps. And grass underfoot. And alpine flowers. And bumblebees. And sky-blue walls with painted clouds, like an old-fashioned movie set. Not to mention the goats themselves, unsettled by all the activity, springing forty feet into the air, actually crashing into the roof—that must be why it’s padded—and gracefully dropping down again. Except for all the gore, it’s like something out of a Saturday-morning cartoon.
Dash Chin sidles in. “Over here, Lieutenant—the photographer. He saw everything.”
The photographer is a little Arab guy who looks shaken up. He’s sitting on the edge of a water trough, quivering, gasping, checking his camera, gasping some more.
“You with the Tablet?” Justus asks.
The photographer looks up. “Yeah.”
“Up for a talk?”
“I can—I can talk, yeah.”
“How’d you come to be here?”
“A—a photo shoot. Otto D-Decker’s office.”
“They arranged it?”
“They announced it.”
“Opening the new goat farm?”
“That—that’s right.”
The photographer isn’t making eye contact. Which could be read as shifty, though Justus prefers to read it as shock.
“Then tell us what you saw.”
“I was—I was setting up a shot. The professor and the other two were tipping grain out of one of the feed bins, and . . . and . . .”
“And there was an explosion.”
The photographer gulps. “Yeah.”
“You saw the people blown apart.”
“Yeah.”
Justus has already noticed bodily matter on the man’s jacket. “How close were you, exactly?”
“About—about fifteen meters.”
“Did you see anyone strange? Anyone who might have set off the explosion?”
“No—no.”
“Do you think the explosion might have been natural?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“What about the feed tanks—were you the one who directed the victims to tip the grain out?”
“Me? No. No. Why do you say that?”
Justus ignores the question. “So Decker and the others, they just went over to the bins and you took a photo?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s when one of the barrels blew up.”
“That’s how it happened.”
Justus retreats for a moment. There’s nowhere in the place to be alone—it’s about a half-acre in size, and treeless—but he needs to gather his thoughts, difficult though that is when there are goats springing around like jumping beans. And cops still glancing his way with smug expressions. And three human bodies dismembered on the ground. And Dash Chin clinging to him like a remora fish.
“What do you make of it, sir?”
Justus shrugs. “This chamber, it’s usually under low pressure, is that right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Officer Battaglia said something.”
Chin seems impressed. “That’s why mountain goats are good for the Agri-Plex—they can live in low-pressure environments. And bumblebees too.”
Justus thinks that Chin, like Battaglia, is remarkably well informed. “What about the people who come in here, then—farmhands or maintenance teams—they enter in low pressure, that right?”
“They would, sure.”
“In spacesuits?”
Chin laughs. “Don’t think so. They’d just get depressurized a little and come in, probably in masks—you know, to keep out the fertilizer stink.”
“Uh-huh.” Justus can smell the stink now. And he imagines someone entering the chamber in a thick mask—in disguise, effectively. Someone setting up a bomb and hiding, waiting to activate it. “The farmhands, are they monitored?”
“Not sure.”
“Have them rounded up anyway.”
“You think it could’ve been one of them?”
“Won’t hurt to question them. And we’ve got an FRT here, have we not?”
“ ’Course.” Chin says it with a chuckle, as if he hasn’t got much respect for the local Forensic Response Team.
“Then they should be here already. We need to know what sort of explosive was used.”
“No problem.”
“There could still be shoeprints in this dirt. Shoeprints can be as good as fingerprints.”
“Yeah, ’course.”
“Get that photographer to take some more photog
raphs. Everything—before there’s any more disturbance. He can charge it to the department, or to me if necessary.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And then we need to think about a motive.”
“Any ideas, sir?”
“I need to know more about the victims first.”
“Well, you’re in luck there,” Chin says. “I mean, I’m not sure about the two others, but Professor Decker—he’s about as big as they get here in Purgatory.”
“That right?”
“He was one of the first big fish that Brass reeled in when he started bootstrapping this place.”
Justus thinks about asking what crime Decker committed on Earth but decides against it. “An agriculture scientist.”
“Can’t live on the Moon without ’em. Virtually everything we eat here—everything that’s not imported, that is—grows thanks to him.”
“And that makes him big here? Because in my experience, people don’t care much where their food comes from.”
“Well, there’s that. And then there’s the fact that he’s one of Brass’s main men—one of his most trusted advisers. He was part of the Brass Band, in fact.”
“Uh-huh.” By “Brass Band” Chin means Brass’s trusted inner circle—a secret order of knights loyal to the king.
“Decker was a real mover and shaker here,” Chin goes on. “You could almost call him—well, I dunno—vice president of Purgatory.”
“I thought QT Brass was second in charge.”
“Well, on paper. But paper doesn’t always tell the full story, does it, sir?”
Justus is starting to think that this murder investigation—the first case of any importance that he’s supervised since arriving in Purgatory—has suddenly become bigger than he ever expected. And bigger, for that matter, than he feels capable of dealing with. But by necessity he swallows his misgivings.
“So what do you think, sir?” Chin asks. “Still reckon it might’ve been an accident?”
Justus sighs. “Just secure the scene properly. And get those farmhands in. And Forensics. And I want the names of everyone who works on this goat farm—make that the whole Agri-Plex. In fact, anyone who’s come near this place in the past month. And anyone in Purgatory with a history in explosives manufacturing—even if it’s just firecrackers.”
Chin grins. “Sure thing, sir. You know, can I say something?”
“Say it.”
“I sure like the way you operate, sir. There’s no bullshit with you.”
Justus thinks Chin is starting to sound like that fan-club reporter from the Tablet. “Just get to work,” he says, vaguely annoyed.
When Chin departs Justus takes another look at this weird goat farm on the far side of the Moon: The dead bodies. The cops glancing his way. The quivering photographer. The goats shooting around like popcorn.
And it’s hard not to get the feeling that something isn’t right. But Justus has never trusted anything as unreliable as feelings, so he heads back to Battaglia to ask more questions.
07
INSOFAR AS JEAN-PIERRE PLAISANCE lives on the Moon, he too is a lunatic. He’s also a killer. In his hometown of Menton he once killed two sailors during a drunken bar fight. In those days Plaisance was a huge man, a bodybuilder who’d served for three years in the Foreign Legion. He was nicknamed the Valet de Carreau—the Jack of Diamonds—because his torso was covered in diamond-shaped tattoos. Naked, he still looks like a harlequin.
But Plaisance was not considered dangerous enough to earn an OWIP igloo in Gagarin Crater. In fact, he was not considered very dangerous at all. At his murder trial in Nice the presiding judge acknowledged the sincerity of his remorse, accepted that he was under the influence of alcohol when he committed the crime, and even agreed that he had been needlessly provoked by the sailors. So when it came to the sentence the same judge, being something of a self-appointed recruiter for CNES (the French space agency), suggested that Plaisance’s skills as an electrician made him an excellent candidate to serve out his time on the Moon.
In the last six months of his fourteen-year term—seven years had been deducted for good behavior—Plaisance was with two other prisoners in Korolev Crater, signposting hazards with beacons and reflectors, when an especially powerful wave of galactic radiation from the Kuiper Belt struck Farside, by coincidence on a day when the visual warning systems were malfunctioning. Though they felt nothing other than a vague queasiness, and saw nothing apart from bright flashes at the corners of their eyes, the three men were as good as dead. Three hundred rems of radiation blasted through their bodies in one minute—the equivalent of ten thousand simultaneous chest X-rays.
Of course they were closely monitored afterward, given the best available medication, and most of their major tumors were eradicated as soon as possible. But the cell-structure damage was just too extensive: Plaisance’s two colleagues from that fateful day, three years ago, have already died. Plaisance himself is gaunt, hairless, half his former size, and has less than four months to live.
But he is not bitter. He doesn’t blame the system. He doesn’t blame the Moon. He certainly doesn’t blame God. And he continues to work as an electrical maintenance man. Because he doesn’t know what else to do. Because it’s better than brooding. In fact, Plaisance plans to keep working right up until the day of his death, and figures he will one day perish all by himself, somewhere out there on the lunar surface. And when that moment comes he plans to muster his last reserves of strength to crack open his spacesuit and release his soul to the heavens—hoping desperately that he’s redeemed himself enough, in the eyes of the Lord, that the offering is not spurned.
Currently he lives mainly at the CNES quarters at Schrödinger Base. He also enjoys frequent stopovers at a number of European Space Agency shacks in the southern hemisphere. His job is to repair the substations that transmit power and communications via cables across Farside. He also maintains the first-aid caches that border the maintenance roads; if necessary, he will perform work on the radar arrays as well. At his disposal he has both a pressurized vehicle for long-range traverses and an “open-air” LRV for shorter journeys. He prefers the LRV because it spares him the hassle of airlock procedures.
Plaisance has presently set out from Shack 12B at Lampland with a full toolbox, a heavy load of photovoltaic cells, half a dozen cold clamps, and a supply of liquid nitrogen. It seems yesterday’s solar flare, not unlike the burst of galactic radiation that rewrote his destiny, has done more damage to Farside’s fiber-optic-cable grid than anyone predicted. Power in some quadrants is down. The north-south comm line is out of action completely. Reflectometers at Mons Malapert have pinned the probable damage to within 450 kilometers, so Plaisance’s job is to isolate the problem further and make the appropriate repairs. He suspects the junction boxes at Pirquet Crater—more exposed and out of date than practically anywhere else on the Moon—and figures he can make it there in four hours, perform a diagnostic, take the appropriate actions, then sidetrack to Shack 13A for replenishment and vehicle recharging.
Plaisance is an exceptional LRV driver. He is equally at home on hard-packed roads, unofficial trails, or—as now—naked lunar surface. He whisks across dust and stones and fragmented rock. He races up and down slopes. He trundles across cracks and craterlets. Sometimes the LRV soars into the air like a dune buggy. Sometimes its wire-mesh wheels churn out rooster tails of dust. Occasionally, scything down slopes, he changes direction dramatically just as the vehicle seems certain to flip over. In short, he can make the LRV do things that would have less experienced drivers spinning out of control or plunging into craters. He can drive at speeds that would have other people—particularly visitors from Earth, unused to the extreme clarity of vision and absence of air resistance—absolutely terrified. And he loves it. Because it gives him a sense of value. And because it offers a further feeling of redemption.
The sun is currently low and unmoving on the western horizon. The shadows are long and remorselessly bla
ck. This makes even the smallest pebble visible but can also conceal dangerous fissures and sometimes even pits. Plaisance knows this territory better than anyone, but even so he has his relevant senses—visual and instinctive—on highest alert.
Then he spots something. One of his special skills, acquired unconsciously over his years on the Moon, is his ability to read the terrain like a native tracker. This used to be child’s play: The dust on the lunar surface was predominantly virginal and any disturbance had a good chance of staying that way indefinitely. But since the advent of human colonization the great volume of human and vehicular activity has agitated the surface beyond recognition.
Nevertheless a fresh print will be visible for a long time, even if it’s on top of existing wheel and tread tracks. And what Plaisance sees now, with his eagle eyes, are the footprints of a human being. More accurately, the shoeprints of a human being. Heading northeast, right there on the lunar regolith, like the tracks of a businessman in wet cement.
Except of course that they can’t be from a human being. Nobody walks on the lunar surface in business shoes. So Plaisance brakes. He brings the LRV to an abrupt halt, and gets out for closer inspection.
No doubt about it. Shoes, good ones, of above-average size. Judging by the deep impressions, Plaisance guesses that the wearer weighs about 110 terrestrial or 18 lunar kilograms. Such figures are common on the Moon—microgravity allows people to carry excess poundage with aplomb—but Plaisance knows immediately that these prints belong to a robot. They have to. He’s aware too that there used to be a highly secretive robotics lab in Seidel Crater, to the southwest. Once, the legend goes, an experimental android escaped from the lab and was found, a week later, lying facedown in JVC (Jules Verne Crater) with a mouthful of dust. There are other stories about another droid, a combat model, that’s still hiding out there somewhere, killing anyone who crosses its path. But no one really believes that, because droids don’t kill.
The Dark Side Page 4
