Zero-G

by William Shatner

  It was a bouncy ride that, Lord suspected, preceded an even bouncier ride.

  A pocket hatch at the top slid open. Outside, Lord saw a small satellite dish on the outside of the tube. It was fixed in the direction of the dark side, no doubt scanning for intruders as it transmitted signals from Saranya or Diego.

  It would be very difficult for someone to get to the lab unseen, Lord thought. Yet somehow, someone had.

  There was a familiar, unwelcome tightness at the bottom of his throat. The bumping, jostling ride seemed to be happening to someone else. The lunar landscape sped by unnoticed. Sam Lord was grieving for the team and doing what he had done too many times on too many military sorties: praying for the return of a missing comrade. His eyes turned in the direction of Earth. Just a sliver was visible above the horizon, a fuzzy brown blob seen through the green panels and amber visor. But out there was the battlefield, a place where brave souls had flung themselves against an unknown menace. Unnoticed, he threw them a small salute.

  “. . . know that I was the main suspect when Dr. May’s findings were reported missing,” Diego was venting. “How could I not be? But I did not, would not sabotage a colleague. Argue? Yes. Loudly? Yes again. Thievery? Never—”

  “Enough,” Lord said firmly. “Just stop talking, Dr. Diego.”

  At that moment, the mood in the buggy shifted. The two scientists were reminded that the man traveling with them had two sides. One was affable, disarmingly human. The other was the leader of Zero-G.

  The rest of the ride passed in silence, a silence so deep Lord hardly noticed their transit to the dark side of the moon. Diego was directing the vehicle toward a wedge-shaped construct on the terrain’s surface.

  To Lord, it looked like the low-slung entry to a vintage backyard bomb shelter. He had seen one at the age of six, when he ventured away from summer camp in the Adirondacks; it made an impression because it was also the first time he’d seen the business end of a rifle and learned to read the word trespassing, in combination with the word no.

  As the scientist prepared to park beside the entrance to the underground lab, Lord surveyed the new location, which was closer to the moon’s north pole than any other habitat.

  The sky was matte black. The lab was partly blocked from the sun, making the shadows around it long and unusually elongated. There was no secondary light source: the lab was blocked completely from the sight of Earth, and the lack of reflective earthshine made the environment seem even more alien and unfriendly.

  The scientists got out and Lord made his way from the buggy unaided, though it was more difficult climbing out than it had been going in. He came around the vehicle and watched as the other two loped their way to a heavy door, about twenty feet from where they’d parked. The reason they hadn’t come closer was that dust kicked skyward by the tires still hung in the sky like ashes stirred from a fireplace. The scientists maneuvered around it; they didn’t want any of the particles to get inside the lab or their sensitive equipment.

  Access required a plug-in from either of their ICs. Dr. May leaned forward as if she were praying. The door opened without a click, there being no atmosphere to carry any sound.

  Saranya entered, followed by Diego. The woman turned back.

  “You’re not coming in with us?” she asked over a private channel.

  “No,” Lord said. “I want to look around. Unless you don’t feel safe . . . ?”

  She looked back at Diego. “He knows you’re out here. I think I’ll be fine.”

  “I agree,” Lord said. “I have about what, ninety minutes of air left?”

  “Yes, though we shouldn’t be more than a half hour,” she informed him.

  “I’ll be checking the security systems,” Diego said. “Diagnostics should tell us if anyone tried to circumvent them.”

  Dr. Diego’s remarks, and especially his tone, sounded a little like a peace offering. Lord accepted it with a gracious nod.

  As soon as the scientists were safely inside and the door sealed behind them, Lord surveyed the area. The surreal aspect of the lunar surface notwithstanding, he didn’t see the densely pocked and cratered area as a landscape, he studied it as a crime scene.

  Lord turned completely around, keeping his eyes near the ground. He saw no tracks, no bootprints, only little areas of darker-colored dust—the residue of previous visits where the tire-sprayed particles had eventually settled.

  Lord walked in long, comfortable strides, traveling in a large circle around the lab entrance. Moving on the moon was like walking on a giant trampoline, he decided. You got a lot of bang for each step, a lot of distance, and it was easy if you kept moving; you only had problems when you trusted the terrain, or your Earth- or station-conditioned sense of traction and torque, too much.

  He made two full circles around the base. Both circuits produced results. On the first, he noticed sparkles in the dust. Crouching easily, he sifted his gloved fingers across the surface, only to find several shards that didn’t flake away when he shook his glove. He looked closely at the hard, clearly artificial particles. They were glassy, almost metallic. He glanced over at the door.

  Construction artifacts, he decided. Pieces made elsewhere must have been sandpapered out here to fit.

  Old tread marks seemed to confirm that: heavier construction vehicles had come out here from Armstrong. But they hadn’t been out here recently. Darker dust from the buggy had settled on those too.

  He looked for other material that didn’t seem to belong, other geology that had been disturbed. He found a rock someone had picked up and studied: next to it was the hole it had been lifted from, then dropped beside. That probably happened during the initial geological survey of the area. He spotted what looked like a diamond gleaming in a shadow but was probably a particle of ice; there was a skidmark beside it, suggesting it had been blasted from some other locale and ended up falling here. He saw what at first looked like holes made by two legs of a tripod planted in the dust. Bending and digging at one hole with a finger, he discovered that they were tiny sinkholes atop small cracks in the crusty lunar surface.

  Not the kind of terrain you can drag a branch and leaves across to cover your horses’ hooves, Lord thought, remembering a trick old Isaiah Lord used to use.

  Lord decided to circle wider, see if there was a position someone could have used to spy on the facility, possibly hijack electronic data. He turned to his IC. No recent reported thruster activity in the area. That was why he didn’t see blast scars in the regolith.

  Yet someone did this, he coached himself hard. Someone cracked the high-security lab.

  As he neared the door of the lab, Lord stopped in mid-stride. Something gleamed dully above. Tilted out and away from the roof of the structure, toward the partially exposed sun, he saw the antenna that received data from the facility’s neutrino detector array. The detector array was made up of helium-cooled germanium crystals and located in a dark lava tube not far away. Lord’s eyes came back down in a straight line from the antenna to the buggy. He checked the tracks of the vehicle. Without wind or water to erode them, they were a permanent record of every trip ever taken to this place. They followed a roughly identical route, where the terrain was flattest, and the buggy always stopped in roughly the same place.

  “Only two people with access?” Lord said with sudden realization. “You SOB!”

  “Excuse me?” Dr. May said.

  Lord turned to see that Saranya was emerging from the lab entrance, Diego close behind her.

  “Just thinking out loud,” Lord said. “Did you get everything you needed?”

  “I did,” Saranya replied, indicating her IC with a gloved hand.

  “I took my work as well,” Diego added. “We basically—”

  “That’s nice,” Lord cut him off, “but we really shouldn’t be discussing this. The Man in the Moon may have ears.”

 
The trio got back into the buggy, Diego once again driving, Lord standing behind May. They circled the outpost to face in the opposite direction then sped back the way they had come. Lord wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if Diego were going out of his way to hit small craters and jostle the craft. Soon they were back on the well-traveled path and the lunar trail smoothed.

  “Cut the antenna to the base,” Lord ordered.

  Diego recoiled slightly. “Why?”

  “What happens in the buggy must stay in the buggy,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time. Just do it.”

  Diego looked at Saranya, who nodded. The scientist pushed a button that was hardwired into the vehicle’s comm. The button went from blue to red. The buggy was now a cone of silence.

  “Who has access to this vehicle?” Lord asked as he gripped the roll bar and looked down at them.

  The two scientists shared another glance before Saranya looked up at Lord.

  “That’s the second time you’ve used the word access since we came back,” she said. “Why? What did you find?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “My investigation, my questions,” Lord replied. “Answer, please?”

  “Technically, anyone who works in the vehicle bay,” Saranya replied, a touch of indignation in her voice. “It isn’t quarantined from the other vehicles. There isn’t room. But the bay is monitored—”

  “Images can be altered, sensors can be short-circuited, false data can be inserted,” Lord said. “Science isn’t always grand theories and large breakthroughs.” He raised a mental finger and brought up data on his IC. “Armstrong personnel roster says vehicle bay access is held by you two, the ERB crew, two specially cleared security guards, a medic, and a pair of general-purpose technicians, one of whom doubles as a custodian.”

  “Also Commander Tengan and Lieutenant Commander Jørgensen,” Diego added. “You’ll want to add them to your police lineup.”

  “Thank you,” Lord said. Once again, he overlooked the man’s tone. “Apart from the assembly crew that built the lab, no one comes out here, is that correct?”

  “It is,” Saranya said.

  Lord checked his IC again. The last survey mission in this region was sixteen months earlier and forty-seven miles away. That left him with the bay crew.

  He brought up the seven names with vehicle access. NASA had thoroughly vetted all of them. One, however, had an interesting pedigree—interesting to someone looking for a good man who might be persuaded to do the wrong things for the right people.

  Lord’s silence weighed on the occupants of the buggy like the atmosphere of Venus.

  “Might I ask why you are inquiring about these things?” Saranya said in a more solicitous tone.

  “I was just getting to that,” Lord said. “Either of you could have stolen the data from inside the lab. But if you had, the file would not have been incomplete. Not unless you wanted to sabotage the Chinese and kill countless people, which I doubt. That leaves a dozen suspects . . . plus one.”

  “One?” Saranya asked.

  “Your buggy is always parked in the same spot,” Lord said. “It’s close to the door but just far enough so the dust will stay outside.”

  “We know all of this,” Diego said. “What don’t we know?”

  “The question is what don’t you realize?” Lord corrected him. “The buggy stops and stays directly opposite the data link to your neutrino detectors. That technology is operating all the time, always open to the interior of the lab.”

  This time, the silence was generated by the two scientists as they caught up to Lord—then sped ahead. Ras Diego turned back briefly. For the first time he looked at Lord with something other than mistrust, disdain, or impatience.

  “Those are pure research detectors, looking at the neutrino flux from deep space sources, but—”

  Saranya was right with him. “We’ve been working on manipulating that flux with the neutrino lens,” she said.

  Lord didn’t follow but that didn’t matter. All he needed was the bottom line, when they got to it. Listening to them was like hearing a game of science badminton.

  “Our tests have been progressive,” Saranya plunged on, talking more to Diego than to Lord. “We’ve been trying successively more advanced stages of the magnetic lensing technique—”

  “And those disturbances would register on the lab research detectors, which would broadcast them in uncoded transmissions to the antenna,” he said gravely.

  Without realizing it, Diego was driving with increased urgency. That, plus his voice, told Lord the scientist was suddenly very concerned, perhaps realizing for the first time the scope of what had been unleashed.

  After a moment, Saranya continued. “It wouldn’t take an expert—well it would, actually; that’s exactly what it would take, but only to understand the big picture—to figure out the specific means by which we were causing those disturbances in our progressive tests. The neutrino flux passes through everything . . .” The woman’s breath came faster with her mounting concern.

  “Leaving an unmistakable and highly detailed fingerprint pulsing from the lab,” Diego said.

  “But they did not get the safeguards because those weren’t complete,” Saranya said, finishing the exchange.

  “And they wouldn’t have realized,” Diego said.

  “How is that possible?” Lord asked. “Wouldn’t someone on the receiving end have noticed there was no off switch?”

  “Oh, there’s an off switch for the bursts,” Saranya said, “just no added safeguard for the container that holds the off switch. We had not yet finished testing those physical structural tolerances. It’s like trying to invent a lightning rod when you’ve never seen lightning. The Chinese did not understand that a tech patch was being built to protect the system.”

  “A ‘tech patch,’ ” Lord said. “You make it sound so simple, so innocent.”

  “It was never that, but it was pure,” Saranya said defensively.

  The woman stared at Diego through their tinted visors. Then she turned back to Lord.

  “I apologize for everything and also for my manner, Sam— ”

  “We both do,” Diego agreed. “I’m . . . impressed by what you did out here. No, I’m humbled.”

  “Thank you,” Lord said, “but save it for later. Right now I want the subject heading for the file I’m going to send to my superior, something he’ll understand.” Lord added, “Me too.”

  Saranya said bitterly, “Without realizing it, we left the back door wide open. We’ve been broadcasting our ‘secret’ research loud and clear for months, minus the emergency brake.”

  TWENTY

  SPACE WAS GLORY. But space was also damnation. It was an endless plane to which most human beings aspired, yet one in which survival was an inhuman trial.

  Ed McClure endured both extremes as he waited for the end to come. He still had some power, the glow of the controls told him that, but he was afraid to use any of it. He didn’t know if the module’s self-­defense system was as sensitive as it was relentless. For all he knew, just sending an IC broadcast would bring on a new rain of sunfire. He tried to use loaded software but most of that was linked to the FBI database. All his IC gave him were stored holo-images from his past, from birth to a party at the Scrub just a day before.

  The irony was rich—his life passing before his eyes. He shut the pictures down. He preferred staring into the face of his killer: a dimly seen module hidden behind a shifting, glittering fog composed of what appeared to be gas, liquid, disintegrated structural matter from the Jade Star, and, most likely, frozen bits of fellow spacefarers and their ships.

  At least there were no further attacks from the Jade Star’s self-­defense system. The SimAI was obviously programed very crudely, very basically to target only mass or density—like an iron-rich space rock—and unfamiliar electronic signatures
. In space, what else was it likely to encounter?

  The sled was drifting slightly from the hit it had taken. Stars were still visible and through the fog of debris he dimly saw some of the module that had attacked him. It was bent away from the rest of the now-contorted space station, like the forward duck in a migrating flock.

  There was no activity around the Chinese space station, meaning that either their own ships and spacewalkers were damaged—or else they had been grounded, the big bosses fearful of the rogue self-­defense module. Lights were still on, there were still functioning systems, though it was impossible to tell what they were.

  Well, when the end is near I’ll risk an ion attack and report the meager intel I’m gathering.

  PD Al-Kazaz might even give him the FBI Medal of Valor, posthumously. His mother would like that. He knew just where she would hang it too. Next to the Eddie McClure photo gallery, from Cub Scout to Special Agent.

  Thinking of the end, McClure wondered if his suit’s air supply would give out before he collided with the cracked, damaged space station. If it weren’t so morbid, he’d place a bet: calculations, imprecise and rapid, told him he’d suffocate. That was probably a good thing, since he didn’t want to perish in a vacuum.

  The thought of dying in the sled made him shiver. He suddenly felt claustrophobic inside his suit, as if it were his coffin. At least he wasn’t six feet under. He was two and a half million feet up. That was—unique, at least.

  I’m up here with the angels, he wanted to tell his pastor father. There were tears in his eyes as he thought, If you’ve got any pull, I sure wish they’d show themselves.

  McClure’s low-level panic caused his hand to twitch impulsively toward the controls. He thought that maybe one sudden burst of the engine would take him far enough, fast enough, to escape the white-light executioner. But even as he thought that, his rational mind rejected it as suicide. The module’s defenses would pile on at this distance, especially with nothing but him to shoot at.