Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  When she arrived at her room, there was an encrypted data transmission from Chang waiting for her. The message came collect, at the price of one hundred seventy Luna dollars. She stared into the retinal scanner and waited while the information downloaded to her in-room terminal. It was the footage that Chang had shot of Tommy and the Luna City Security officers through the window.

  She reviewed the footage and watched as the three officers in their steel-gray suits surrounded Tommy. She examined his attempted escape and watched as the men hauled him in and escorted him back to the air lock. Tommy was definitely walking on his own the whole time.

  He was alive when Luna City Security had escorted him away from the ruins of Habitat Fourteen.

  The next morning, Marianne read the announcement of Thomas Rubner’s death in the Luna City vlog. As she expected, it claimed that Thomas had succumbed to exposure on the surface of the Moon after hijacking yesterday’s memorial service. It also commended the quick-thinking Luna Network Center for terminating the transmission to Earth, as they were spared the horrifying scenes of Thomas struggling for oxygen as Luna City Security officers tried to save him, but failed.

  Marianne shook her head. That wasn’t what was on the video that Chang sent her. At the end of the vlog, the reporter announced that Thomas’ body was being returned to Earth on the morning shuttle. Although Marianne had only met Tommy a week ago, she felt a sense of responsibility to see him off.

  Even though travel to the Lunar Republic hadn’t been popular for the last five years, there seemed to be an unusual amount of hubbub around the shuttle area this morning. The people all appeared to be leaving Luna City, and Marianne suspected most of them had only been here because of the memorial service yesterday. Their duty to visit Luna City was over, and now they were leaving.

  Thirty minutes before liftoff, the doctor that Marianne had met in the medical center with Captain Hail appeared. He and an assistant wheeled a black, polycarbonate coffin down the concourse to the lower loading dock. As the doctor held the gurney steady, the assistant wrestled the coffin off and into the storage bay. Even in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, Marianne was surprised at how clumsy the job looked.

  The assistant strapped the coffin down and tested that it was secure before taking the gurney from the doctor and following him back up the platform.

  Marianne closed her eyes and said a private prayer for Tommy. When she finished, she wondered what family he had waiting for him when his body returned to Earth. She considered following that story—the children’s grief after both parents had died on the Moon could be a compelling story. However, her instincts told her that the story she was already scratching at here was stronger.

  She had turned to leave when she saw a teary-eyed woman staring at the transport. The woman seemed to be the only other one, other than Marianne herself, that stared at the large bay where Tommy’s body was stored. The transport workers closed the lower storage bay and secured the hatch fasteners. After a moment, the woman headed up the platform and out of the loading area. Marianne caught up with her and introduced herself.

  “I’m quite busy, Ms. Summers,” the woman said. She no longer seemed morose, but angry.

  Everyone seemed busy in Luna City, Marianne thought. “No worries, just a couple of questions. I noticed your grief while you were watching Thomas Rubner’s coffin being loaded onto the transport. Are you any relation?”

  “No.” She then pushed the button on her wrist-phone and said, “Security.”

  “Okay then. A friend, coworker or just an acquaintance?”

  “No.” The woman walked on, facing forward.

  “There must have been some reason you were seeing him off.”

  “Not really.”

  The woman arrived at the Luna City Security office. She stepped past two security men that barred Marianne’s way. Marianne watched as the woman disappeared behind another door that read “Authorized Personnel Only,” turned back once and looked at Marianne.

  As she turned, Marianne saw that the woman looked remarkably like the 3-D image of Tommy Rubner’s wife, Susan P. Rubner, from the holotank display. Her hair was brown now and was longer than it had been in the rotating image. She might have had some reconstructive surgery done to her nose as well. But, the line of her jaw, thin lips and brow ridge looked quite familiar.

  Her nerves were jumping, just as they did every time a story was unfolding. She only had a few pieces so far. First, she had a dead man who had cried conspiracy. Second, a bureaucracy that appeared responsible for his death. Finally, there was a mysterious woman who looked suspiciously similar to the dead man’s wife.

  It seemed unlikely that Susan P. Rubner could still be alive. She was listed on the official casualty records as a victim of the Habitat Fourteen explosion. However, one of her instructors in college had told his class to dismiss nothing. Perhaps the video biography in the museum could clear up her suspicions that the woman she had seen was Tommy’s wife.

  Marianne scowled at the guards and headed back to the museum. The curator remembered her but wouldn’t let her back in for free, so she grudgingly paid an additional fifteen Luna dollars and headed straight for the 2-D monitor and scrolled down to Susan P. Rubner’s biography.

  Remarkably, Marianne thought, Susan’s biography contained few pictures of the woman herself. The coverage on her was brief. During the voiceover about Susan being a talented politician who graduated from Harvard at the top of her class, it showed a class picture. Her small, blurry image was circled. That image was followed by generic images of her home town of St. Louis and narration explaining her accomplishments in state government. She had met and married her husband, Thomas Rubner, a local business owner. Tommy kissing Susan in the wedding picture obscured all but the top of her forehead. Together, they moved to Luna City, where she resumed her work in politics and her husband opened a business on the hub. They had only been stationed at Luna City for a year before the explosion, where she was killed. The image during the voiceover was the ruins of Habitat Fourteen.

  Marianne suspected she knew why there were no clear pictures of Susan P. Rubner in her biography.

  On the way back to her room, Marianne slipped on her visor and telephoned Roy.

  Roy’s first question was, “When are you coming home?”

  “It may take a while. I’m onto something . . . unusual.”

  His avatar frowned. “What is it?”

  “Not over the visor network. I need an upload of the transmission from last night. All the way until it cut out.”

  “There should be an archive available at the Luna Network Center.”

  “No. I need to be more clandestine than that. And, I need you to wire me some cash. Luna City is very expensive.”

  “The network has closed the budget for the Luna City Memorial project.”

  “This isn’t related, not really. Charge it to inves-tigative journalism.”

  “The network doesn’t fund investigative journalism. We contract that out.”

  “Fine, put me down as a contractor.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. You have to have a story to sell before the network will buy it. Not the other way around.”

  “Roy, I can’t investigate this without money.”

  “Then get on the transport and come home.”

  “I can’t do that. There’s something strange going on here. Aren’t you interested in what that is?”

  “No.” Roy’s avatar disappeared as he disconnected from her.

  Marianne yanked off her visor and shoved it back into her backpack. Damn Roy for his narrow thinking, she thought. Something big was going on here, and he wanted her to walk away from it. She couldn’t do that.

  Then she realized that two Luna City Security officers were a couple of meters behind her. Each held a cup of coffee, and they were ca
sually speaking to each other.

  She felt a knot form in her stomach. She had tried to be careful, but wondered what they might have overheard from her conversation with Roy. She headed around the hub and down the joining hallway to her room and paused in front of her door. The two guards didn’t follow her. She exhaled in relief.

  She put her thumb on the door lock but the red light came on instead of the green one. A mechanized voice on the lock announced that she had an outstanding charge of four hundred Luna dollars that needed to be paid before she could gain access to her room. She swore. The amount had to be wrong, even taking into account the charge for Chang’s video that she had accepted and charged to her room.

  She wondered how she would get that kind of money when she realized that she still had her return ticket to Earth. She could trade that in for a refund. And after her investigation was complete, she could call Roy and sell the story for a return fare back to Earth.

  She headed for the spaceport and within twenty minutes had returned her ticket and had her account credited for five hundred twenty Luna dollars. Returning to her room, she finally gained access and immediately went to the communications terminal. A humungous, 3-D video file from Roy was waiting for her, as was a receipt for the two hundred fifty Luna dollars it cost. That explained the extra charge on her room.

  She pulled up the file and cringed when she saw it was unencrypted. She should have warned Roy. She started the video, then skipped ahead to when the Moon segment started. As her 3-D image introduced the victims, she waited for the section where Susan P. Rubner’s portrait played. When she finally reached it, Marianne studied the seven-second segment as Susan’s portrait spun on screen. It started on the left side semi-profile and followed around to her right side. Her hair was short and blonde, in contrast to the dark-haired woman she had met earlier today. Further, Susan’s nose was more pronounced. But it was too much of a coincidence.

  Tommy had insisted he had seen his dead wife and demanded to speak to her. It seemed ridiculous at the time. Now, she was sure the woman she met was Susan P. Rubner.

  That evening, Marianne waited for the woman who was Tommy’s wife to leave her quarters. She hung out at a café on the hub, keeping her eye on the executive hallways. The cup of coffee she nursed had the same recycled taste that all of the potable water on Luna City had, but she couldn’t afford to throw it out. Besides, it would look peculiar if she were sitting in the café without anything in front of her.

  She had cross-referenced the woman’s information on one of the public terminals in the city. She was now going by the name Jennifer Hail. She had married Captain Gerald Hail over four years ago. The woman wasn’t part of the Lunar Republic government and wasn’t active in any clubs or organizations. Marianne was convinced Jennifer Hail could answer many of her questions.

  A man slid into the chair opposite her, blocking her view. Before she could complain, he whispered, “I’m a friend of Thomas Rubner.”

  “Okay,” Marianne answered. She wasn’t sure what the man meant. Was he upset, like the museum curator, and a threat to her, or did he also believe in the conspiracy as Tommy did?

  The man’s eyes darted around the café. His well-trimmed goatee and close-cropped hair were starting to show the briefest of gray hairs. “My name is Branson,” he said carefully. “I know what they did to Tommy.” His constantly moving eyes belied his otherwise normal appearance.

  “What?”

  “He was more interested in confronting his wife than explaining about the conspiracy. Captain Hail had him killed. If only he had stayed on topic.”

  “On topic?”

  “About the conspiracy.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “Follow me,” he whispered.

  Marianne shook her head. “I can’t. I’m waiting for someone.”

  He looked back at the office door she had been watching. “She’s a dead end. Get involved with her, and you’ll wind up like Thomas.” He stood and walked to the doorway, then looked back at her and nodded.

  Marianne pushed away the creepy feeling that this man seemed to know what she was doing and who she was waiting for. Her interest was piqued; if he knew that much, she wondered how much more he knew. She followed him out, tossing her coffee in a recycle container near the door. “What is this—?”

  The man held up a hand, cutting her off. “Not here.” He led her down the main hallway, around the central hub and to the Memorial Hallway and Museum. Along the way, he pointed out construction features of Luna City, specifically the joints in the geodesic domes where the triangular panels joined together.

  When they reached the Memorial Hallway, Branson paid for both of them. Marianne smiled at the curator, but he only scowled at them.

  Branson grabbed her arm, directed her to The Final Moments of Habitat Fourteen exhibit and pressed the play button. “Watch carefully,” he whispered.

  She watched as the dome exploded again. “I’ve seen this hundreds of times already.” She was surprised to realize that she was whispering as well.

  As the bent, severed arm spun toward the camera, he tapped on the screen. “Notice that? Notice that?”

  “Yes.” Conspiracy theorists insisted that an arm wouldn’t stay bent like that while spinning—especially with no wind resistance on the Moon. It defied simple physics. They claimed the centrifugal force would force the joint to extend straight, like a rod instead of a boomerang. Marianne never understood how that strange arm added to the conspiracy.

  The video ended and he pulled her out of the hallway and walked her to Habitat Eleven. He didn’t say a word, but walked so fast that Marianne practically had to jog to keep up. He placed his thumb on the lock of room 11-31 and when the entry light came on, he pulled her inside.

  Branson flipped two switches, one near the door and another across the room. “We can talk now.” He spoke normally, but the harshness in his voice, that Marianne had suspected was caused by his whispering, remained. “What did you notice in that video?”

  The question confused her. “I’ve seen the same video hundreds of times in the last five years. I didn’t notice anything new about it this time.”

  He walked to the edge of his room where a triangular window overlooked the moonscape and pounded on the wall with the heel of his hand. “Do you know anything about how this pressure wall is constructed?”

  “Robots built it. They mix moondust with epoxies and polymers. They build it from the Moon’s surface, up along the dome to the apex.”

  “Yes. The robots that built Habitat Fourteen operated under the version of the program that was used to build this habitat.” He patted on a triangular facet of the wall. “What about this panel? Did they build the sub-pieces and join them together?”

  “No. It’s all built in one big piece. Except for the windows. The triangles are just—I don’t know—decoration.”

  “Exactly. Did you notice the joints between the wall and the windows? Between the facets of the wall themselves?”

  She walked to the wall and rubbed her hand over the rounded bulge between two panels. Instead of a crease, there was a six-inch-thick bulge of material at every joint. “It’s thicker here.”

  “A decorative detail to make it look like a geodesic pattern.” He patted the center of the triangle. “The weakest part of the wall is right here. In the middle of the triangle.” Branson nodded frantically at her.

  He was trying to point something out to her and she felt frustration that he didn’t come right out and say what was on his mind. If the weakest part of the wall was the center of each triangle, then what did that mean to her?

  She recalled the explosion in the video she had just seen and her jaw dropped. She had seen that video hundreds of times and never questioned any part of it. But, she had never seen one of the Luna City pressure walls up close before. In
the video, as the dome exploded, the triangle-shaped shards blasted apart. She could see them in the moments before they were obscured by the vaporizing air. She remembered thinking how beautiful they all looked.

  An explosion would have burst the weakest part of the wall. It would have punched through the center of each triangle in the dome, not along the edges. But, that wasn’t what was in the video.

  “Oh, my God,” she said as a chill ran down her arm.

  The man smiled broadly. “That was a controlled demolition of Habitat Fourteen.”

  Earlier in her career, Marianne had covered the demolition of an old building. A network had hired her for an information piece about how hazardous materials are removed before a building is demolished. She learned that a building didn’t just fall down. Architects designed buildings to remain standing, and a huge amount of effort was needed to overcome that design. Her investigation included a tour of a prepared building, where the demolishers showed her how they had structurally weakened the building in key areas and how they would use an explosive cord called Primaline to cut through the solid steel girders that were over twenty centimeters thick. With weakened joints and severed load-bearing girders, the spine of the building would be carefully severed, and the structure would finally come crashing down. Demolition wasn’t a trivial task.

  Marianne found herself nodding along with Branson. She was starting to believe the conspiracy herself.

  Marianne stared out from the triangular viewing windows at the ruins of Habitat Fourteen. It was the same window where Chang had filmed Thomas Rubner being apprehended, and that made her feel like she was standing somewhere sacred. It had been the last time she had seen Tommy alive.

  Her eyes focused on the plaque. Although it was unreadable from where she stood—behind eight inches of transparent polycarbonate—she remembered some of what it said from the reproduction outside the museum. It was the site of the first act of terrorism on the Moon, and the memorial was a reminder that the Moon is an apolitical territory for all persons of the Earth to share in peace.