An escalator took me from the security check-in station up a level to the expensive-looking front office for the Melange Mining Corporation, with huge anhydrous glass windows overlooking the dark lunar plain outside. A human secretary told me to follow the green guidelights to Personnel.
John Jones was working behind the front desk.
“Jones?” I asked, surprised to see him. He’d mentioned working as a clerk for Melange’s admin department during the up-Stalk trip to Midway, but I’d not expected to run into him here. In fact, he was supposed to have been seconded to Humanity Labor, an odd factoid I still hadn’t figured out.
“I’m Jones, yes, sir,” the clone said. He seemed scrunched in on himself, almost as though he expected physical abuse.
“You’re not the Jones I met on the Beanstalk a few days ago, are you?”
“No, sir. You most likely met one of my…brothers. I am Philemon Jones.”
“Which one? What’s your serial ID?”
He looked terrified. “Please, sir. Those numbers are restricted information, and not for public dissemination! You can refer to me simply as ‘Phil.’”
“Actually, Phil, I’m not the public,” I told him, flashing my badge. “Harrison, NAPD. I need to find a clone, Mark Henry 103.”
As I studied him, I realized that he wasn’t a perfect duplicate of the Jones I’d met. The face was a tad longer, a little leaner. But differences in diet could explain such trifling variations.
I reminded myself that their fingerprints would be different as well. There are always unique differences in how a given genome is expressed.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” He typed for a moment on a virtual keyboard, bringing up blocks of data on a transparent display hanging in the air between us. “That Mark Henry is currently outside. Mine Seven, Pit Three. Shall I have someone bring him in?”
I was about to say yes, when I noticed the spy-eyes high up in two corners of the room. There’d been heavily armored guards outside the personnel department, too, and at the tube-train station below. Besides that, if Henry was guilty he might flee. A skyhopper could put him anywhere in Heinlein in an hour or two, and then I might never run him down.
“Maybe I should go see him.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll assign you a turtleback, sir.”
I’d heard of them before, but not worked with one. Turtlebacks were another brand new offering from the sorcerers’ labs at Jinteki—Homo vacuo operae—roughly “Vacuum-working man.” The one assigned to me stood just one meter tall, and he looked like he was wearing a turtle shell, hence the nickname. His head was almost invisible inside the shell’s embrace; two tiny, deeply recessed eyes peered out at me from the shadows. His arms were long, slender, and had skin like black leather. Like the hocas I’d seen at Midway, he had legs and feet that doubled as an extra set of arms and hands, but they were articulated in such a way that he could walk on them okay, especially in low gravity. I doubted that he’d get very far in one-G, though.
A turtleback didn’t need a spacesuit. The shell and leathery skin protected him from solar radiation, cosmic rays, and extremes of heat and cold. The eyes, protected by thick, transparent membranes from ultraviolet radiation, could dilate wide enough to pick up infrared light. I learned later that he had a large space under the shell that held a pressurized air reserve, and respirocytes in his bloodstream that let him hold his breath for over an hour. He could speak in any atmosphere, but out on the surface, I was told, he could only speak with a special mask that included a built-in radio; normally, turtlebacks communicated with one another through sign language.
“Take Captain Harrison to Mark Henry,” Jones told it…him. “T90 Number 5, seven/three.”
“Oh-gay,” the odd little being said. “I aib ib Darlie.”
Evidently, its throat and mouth weren’t well-adapted for speech. I couldn’t even see its mouth. Jones explained that it had just told me its name was “Charlie.”
Him…him. I was having trouble thinking of it as a him.
Jinteki, I thought, is really pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.
Of course, they wouldn’t see it that way. Clones, whether they looked like John Jones or a turtleback, weren’t human.
A human technician helped me into my surface suit. It was lightweight and flexible, with a UV-opaque bubble helmet—not much protection for a long stay, but it would serve for an hour or so on the harsh lunar surface. It was bright orange in color—presumably to make it easy for a rescue team to spot me if I wandered off and got lost.
I didn’t intend for that to happen.
I checked the external equipment pouch and made sure I had an intercom jack.
Charlie led me out through an airlock onto a transport pad elevated some twenty meters above the dusty gray surface. We clambered onto a minihopper and, with Charlie at the controls, lifted into the black, empty sky.
The minihopper was designed to carry two passengers and a pilot, and was for short-range flights only—say a couple of hundred kilometers. It was powered by bursts of meta-heated steam fired from a quartet of big, white water tanks beneath the open platform, where I clung to the guardrail for dear life. The view was…dizzying.
Most people, when they think of mining the Moon, for some reason imagine shafts deep beneath the surface. Some lunar water comes from deep veins, of course, but the helium-3 is all found on the surface, in the very top half-meter or meter or so of regolith. The actual mining involves strip-miners like the T90: big, bulldozer-type machines on multiple tracks that scrape up the top meter of regolith, suck it down through an enormous maw, and channel it to a hopper trailing behind. When the hopper gets full, it decouples from the strip-miner as an empty one takes its place, and runs itself to the nearest surface conveyor—moving belts that can run for many kilometers across the surface until they reach the processing intakes of a converter. For the past four billion years, helium-3, blasted out from the Sun, has been falling on the lunar surface. We scrape it up now at a ratio of a hundred million to one—one hundred million tons of regolith refined to produce one ton of helium-3.
Even at that, it’s cheaper and easier doing it this way than trying to recover it from wells on Earth, or waiting for radioactive tritium to decay. But Lord, you should hear the Greenies moan about how we’re defacing the pristine lunar environment.
I’m all for environmental consciousness Earthside. The best thing that ever happened to our battered little home world was our starting to get industry off the surface and into space. Someday, Earth might even be healed again, with life in the oceans and green rain forests.
There’s precious little green on the Moon, however. None at all, in fact, except for the hydroponics units and botany domes. The surface is a sere, blasted, empty, barren waste, with dust so fine it gets into machinery and spacesuit seals with appalling ease, and temperatures that swing from minus 153 to plus 107 Celsius in time with the four-week cycle of day and night. In the permanently shadowed spots, temperatures can hover around minus 230. The only life here is us, inside the domes or underground, or working on the surface. So…so what if we’re strip-mining the place?
I tried to enjoy the view. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, but the minihopper was tiny and open, and we were sailing a good hundred meters above the surface at a considerable clip. A safety harness was attached to my suit, but I gripped that safety rail so tightly that my fingers ached.
The area already mined was billiard-ball smooth and a very dark gray in color, like graphite. Earth hung directly overhead, in half-phase, at the moment, looking down on the Indian subcontinent, with the sprawling coastline of eastern Asia picked out of the encroaching darkness by the soft glow of the megapoli. The sun washed most of the stars from the sky, though I could see a few of the brighter ones despite the glare.
And everything was deathly silent. I could feel the vibration through the metal grillwork of the platform against my boots when the steam jets fired, but in hard vacuum they d
idn’t make a sound.
Eventually, we began to descend. I felt something hard pluck at my sleeve, looked down, and my guide pointed. A T90 was working a kilometer up ahead.
Some of the newer strip-miners have enclosed, pressurized cabins and airlocks. T90s still leave their drivers exposed to vacuum and hard radiation, with just a thin awning of aluminum foil stretched above the driver to keep the direct sun off. That’s one reason, I suppose, the big mining corps like using clones instead of humans. The open units are cheaper, and clones, well…they’re expendable, aren’t they?
This one was surrounded by a vast cloud of dust thrown up by its operation. Lunar dust has a consistency similar to fine talcum, and in one-sixth of a G it falls quite slowly. Worse, everything, including the surface itself, tends to build up a static charge that makes the dust hover—when it’s not making the stuff cling to every available surface, like space suits, visors, and machinery.
There was a hopper landing pad behind the driver’s station, and Charlie skillfully angled us in and down for a landing squarely on the big white crosshair painted there.
The operator saw us coming and put the machine into idle. He was waiting for me as I stepped off the platform and onto his rig, wearing a once-white space suit coated from helmet to boot with graphite-gray dust.
“Mark Henry 103?” I asked. They’d given me his channel back at the dome.
I saw him start. “Who are you?”
“Captain Harrison, NAPD.” My badge couldn’t project a holo through my suit. He’d have to take my word for it, or accept the word of my e-ID. “You’re wanted for questioning concerning the murders of Roger Dow and Robert Vargas. I’d like you to come with me.”
“I don’t know anything about that!” I could hear the panic edging his voice over the radio.
“Nevertheless, I need to ask you some questions.”
“Where…back at Melange?” The panic level went up a notch.
“Here will do for now.” I reached into my external pouch. “I have a jack.”
I wanted to question him without being overheard. Melange might have offed Dow because he wanted to get rid of clones, which would have meant more expense for the corporations. Radio wasn’t good; even at low power, the signals might be picked up by receivers on the T90 or even by communications satellites in lunar orbit, and relayed back to corporate headquarters. I was pretty sure that Charlie might have a receiver tucked away inside that shell of his, too.
I plugged one end of the jack into the base of my helmet, and let Henry plug the other end into his. The intercom cable was shielded, and would give us privacy. In the old days, you were supposed to be able to do the same thing by touching helmet to helmet, but I understand that never worked all that well because plastic laminates tend to absorb and muffle sound. Intercom ought to be safe enough, however.
“Your radio off?” I asked.
With a gloved finger he depressed a key on his chest pack. “Yes, sir.” His face, peering out through a visor grimy with streaked, gray dust, appeared terrified. “But I can’t talk for long. They will see my radio is off, and come check on me.”
“This’ll just take a couple of minutes…and I’ll square things with your employers. Okay?”
A jerky nod.
“We have both vid and electronic data records of you going to the High Frontier Hotel on the twenty-third. You left about an hour later, catching a ferry back to the Moon. Would you care to tell me what you were doing at that hotel?”
“I was…I was doing an errand.”
“What kind of errand?”
“I’m not supposed to tell. Sir…I could be in terrible trouble if I tell!”
“You could be in terrible trouble right now if you don’t,” I told him. “What was the errand?”
“I…I had to take a suitcase to the hotel.”
“That’s all? Just take a suitcase? Who’d you give it to?”
“No one.”
“You took it to a room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah. What was the room number?”
His eyes closed behind the visor. “Room Sixteen.”
A new piece of the puzzle! Room Sixteen was two down from Dow’s room…and that explained why we hadn’t found the suitcase.
“Did you see what was inside the suitcase?”
“Captain Harrison, please…don’t make me…”
“You can tell me here, or you can come with me to the station and tell me there. Which will it be?”
“Look…if I tell you…I need protection!”
“You want me to arrest you?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Look…I was told to do…things, and I was told not to tell anyone about them. I was told that if I did, I would be…retired.”
“I see. Well, for the time being, at least, you are officially under the protection of the New Angeles Police Department, okay? I’ll see about getting you into protective custody once I see how well you answer my questions. Understand?”
Again, a jerky nod.
“Did you see what was in the suitcase?”
A nod.
“What was it?”
“A Huong-Zhen regolith beam laser tunneler, Mark V, Mod 2,” he said. “I was told to go into the equipment locker at Alpha Prospecting and take one, and a charged battery, from their storage unit. That was…on the twenty-first.”
“Go on.”
“They gave me the suitcase. It was big enough that I could put both the battery and the tunneler inside, but they had to be broken down separately. They arranged special clearance for me so that the suitcase wouldn’t be scanned at the ferry terminal, and put me on a flight to the Beanstalk. I was told to take the suitcase to the High Frontier, to Room Sixteen, open it, and assemble the laser and battery pack.”
“Who was in Room Sixteen, Mark?”
“No one.”
“No one? You’re sure?”
“The room was empty, Captain Harrison. I was told it would be…”
I sighed. “Okay. What did you do with the laser, then?”
“I left it on the bed, as I’d been instructed.”
“And the suitcase?”
“I left that in a corner.”
“As you’d been instructed?”
He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Mark…who gave you all of those orders?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“You’d never met him before?”
“No, sir. Never.”
“A human?”
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
“Fairly tall. Thin. He wore a black uniform, and had a gun, a pistol of some kind in a shoulder holster. Oh…and he had facial hair. A beard…”
Bingo! Mark Henry’s mystery contact was either Robert Vargas or Frank Hodgkins. Both had beards; both wore black uniforms and carried weapons as part of Humanity Labor’s ad hoc security force.
Someone had been handling Mark Henry, playing him like a fish on a line.
If Vargas, someone higher up had already taken steps to clean up after themselves.
I wanted to get Henry back to the safety of a police station and have him look at some file photos. If someone had killed Vargas to keep him quiet, Mark Henry must be on the death list as well. Why, I wondered, had they left him alive this long?
“You think you would recognize this bearded guy if you saw a photo of him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“I was supposed to call him ‘Mr. Green.’”
What bothered me most now was the fact that the investigation had just gone in a most unexpected direction. Vargas or Hodgkins…they were both muscle, employees of Humanity Labor and probably Human First, as well, and they hadn’t struck me as being all that bright. Why the hell would they murder Dow, one of their own, the guy who was pushing to eliminate clones and bioroids from the work force, which was what both organizations wanted most?
More, why would the
y want to murder Dow in such a spectacularly bloody fashion?
None of this made sense.
I decided to change tack. “Do you know a bioroid named Eve 5VA3TC?”
Henry nearly fell off the mining rig’s deck. I reached out, a stab of movement, grabbing his arm to steady him. His other hand grabbed my wrist, and for a moment I felt just how strong the genetically enhanced muscles of a worker clone were.
“You okay?”
“Y-yes. Thank you.”
“You know her?”
“Please, sir. She had nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it!”
Eliza Manchester must’ve been right. Henry had had some sort of a relationship with Eve.
“I’m not saying she did. But I know she was in Dow’s room just before he was murdered. And she saw…something.”
“You…you’ve spoken with her?”
I nodded. “She’s been taken in for safekeeping, Mark. She’s okay.”
“They…they wanted to make it look like she did it,” he said. “I’m sure of that now! But she didn’t do it!”
I noticed a red light flashing on the cab control panel. Henry saw it, too. “They’re calling for me. They know I have my radio switched off.”
“Let them call. Did you know Eve was there that night?”
He gave a miserable nod. “Yes. I knew she was with…him.”
“She’s a sex gynoid,” I said. “She gets rented out to all kinds of guys. Gals, too, I suspect.”
It was hard to tell, but it looked like tears were streaming down the clone’s face behind his dirty visor. “I…I know that! But we had something special! I know we did!”
“Suppose you tell me the whole thing.”
It was the old, old story, but with a somewhat new twist. Clone meets bioroid. Clone loves bioroid. Clone scrapes together enough money to bang bioroid, and then wonders why she won’t give him the time of day when he doesn’t have any more money.
They don’t actually pay clones at Melange Mining. They issue electronic scrip for personal use in the corporate commissary and store. But there was, Henry told me, something of an underground economy going, where humans exchanged folding green for certain items with a high resale value. Rocket motor parts. Static discharge circuits. Moon glass artwork. Even moon rocks, for sale to collectors Earthside. It had taken him a long time to collect enough money to buy a night with Eve. Then, later, “Mr. Green” had given him money for several more evenings with her, at Tranquility Home and at Freetown.
Android: Free Fall Page 17
