Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  “And just where will we be going?”

  Marcus smiled. “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Chapter 5

  “I’m hurt, I tell her,” Paul Sokolov said, his booming voice filling the Daedalus Base dining/social hall. That was where Main Street broadened into facing alcoves on opposite sides of the “road,” each niche accommodating a mooncrete table and some rickety aluminum chairs. He was deep into his third beer and one of his favorite bar stories. Parts of the tale were even true. “No, wounded. Grievously, undeservedly, unfairly wounded. I tell her, this misunderstanding we had wasn’t my fault. She’d never said anything to me about sisters. But, I says to her, now that I see how important family is to you ….” Methodically, he drained his bottle. He smacked his lips. He leaned back in his chair. Timing was everything. “My bed is big enough for all of us.”

  Of the half dozen people with whom he shared a table, none laughed more appreciatively than Camilla Perez. She was new to the observatory since his last delivery run, and he had only just met her. She was not pretty, exactly, and she was shaped more like a pear than a cello, much less an hourglass, but she was, well, a she. Unattached women remained a rare breed on the Moon, and rarer still on Farside. Of the staff here at Daedalus, Camilla made three.

  He smiled at her. “Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

  Brad Morton shoved back his chair, stood, and reached for Paul’s empty. The African American engineer was the biggest man in the room, perhaps on the Moon. These days he rode herd on robots, not running backs. Morton did not talk much, and when he did speak, it was in a laid-back manner that was just weird for someone his size, almost as incongruous as the Oliver Hardy mustache and the tiny ears. Only the big, bushy eyebrows were sized right for Morton’s big, round face.

  Paul handed over the bottle, smiling. “And most definitely, my friend, thank you.”

  Morton mumbled something as he stepped into the kitchen.

  Beer and booze were not quite illegal on the Moon, because what was the point? As soon as people lived anywhere, a few vices—some would say, necessities—always followed. Still, the polite fiction was that few partook. Alcohol was stored out of the way, and everyone was expected to abstain before venturing outside. Eight hours dry, from bottle to throttle, the mantra went, as if they were fighter pilots or something. Madness ….

  Camilla scooted her chair closer to Paul. “And how’d that line work for you, guy?”

  “I’m schlepping ice and groceries across the far side of nowhere, aren’t I?”

  She patted his arm. “I should be feeling sorry for you, should I? You poor, misunderstood letch?”

  Feel me anyway you want, Paul thought. Also: but later. He had work to do first, and a curiosity itch that needed scratching. Just then, they were the same thing.

  He asked, “So where’s the big cheese this evening?”

  “Marcus? I don’t know. Haven’t seen him in hours.”

  Around the table, the others shrugged or shook their heads.

  Brad Morton emerged from the kitchen, a trio of beer bottles clutched in each meaty hand. He distributed brews around the table. “I heard Marcus took the afternoon off. He’s in his room, not feeling well. A headache, someone told me.”

  Nodding his thanks, Paul picked up a bottle. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  And skeptical, too, because a few hours ago, Marcus Judson—base administrator and, rumor had it, confidant to the NASA administrator herself—had been outside making small talk. That in itself was interesting. Judson was no shrinking violet, but neither was he the type to stand around shooting the breeze. The sudden sociability had seemed out of character even before he had excused himself to dash off to the just-landed shuttle. Even before he had returned, eyes narrowed in thought, toting a package.

  The shuttle was unscheduled. Paul knew, because he made it his business to know. He had learned young that when you talked a lot, people took that to mean you didn’t much listen. He was always listening.

  So: a rush, expensive delivery from Aitken Basin. A package retrieved in person by the head honcho, after an epic fail at nonchalance. Now Judson was sequestered in his quarters, and the big guy here—his effort at offhandedness just pathetic—seemed eager to excuse that.

  Something interesting was going on.

  When he feigned illness, or mechanical problems with his rig, or whatever, Paul expected his performance to be a damned sight more convincing. His handler at Mare Ingenii—what a great name: the Sea of Cleverness—paid real cash money for the smallest item of Daedalus gossip. To track down whatever it was the observatory director wanted kept secret? That info would surely bring in major bucks from Yevgeny.

  Paul clinked bottles with Camilla. “I believe you were about to console me?”

  He could imagine worse diversions while he watched for further strange goings-on.

  Chapter 6

  Valerie Clayburn wiggled and squirmed. However she sat, it hurt her back, but shifting positions sometimes offered momentary relief. Even her new, expensive, super-ergonomic desk chair—one of a kind here at NASA headquarters, or so the CFO had opined before, grudgingly, okaying the purchase—did little enough to help. And Junior was not due for another four months. Another four long months ….

  Call already, Marcus! I have news!

  This invocation worked about as well as had her past eight efforts, or the power of positive thinking to make Super Chair, or her back, cooperate. Or for her body to stop packing on the pounds, bleeding from the gums, or manufacturing hemorrhoids and headaches, all with world-class efficiency. Or even to open a perpetually stuffy nose—snoring herself awake umpteen times a night had gotten old fast.

  Still, as loud as her snoring sometimes got, it would not cross vacuum; on occasion, she saw the silver lining that her snoring did not disturb Marcus. But not so much last night. Not after he had stood her up for the second day in a row.

  Call, damn it!

  To be fair, there wasn’t bandwidth between Earth and Farside for idle chats, and their scheduled window did not open for another few minutes. To be fair, Marcus had a responsible, high-pressure job that might not always accommodate social chitchat.

  Screw being fair! There were always a few seconds and ample bandwidth for a sorry-I’m-very-busy text.

  A coffee mug emblazoned National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a keepsake from her last job, sat on the short file cabinet beside her desk. The mug felt scarcely warm to the touch. She swigged anyway, not remembering till midswallow that the luke-tepid stuff was decaf. Decaf! What was the point? With a grimace she gave the dregs to a potted fern, then returned her attention to the datasheet draped across her desk and the document open in the sheet’s top window.

  Agreeing to sit on Jay Singh’s dissertation committee had seemed like a good idea at the time, and not only for the many favors she owed Freddie Peña, an old friend and also Jay’s thesis adviser. On principle, she wanted to support anyone interested in astronomy—including, as in this case, a computer scientist doing interdisciplinary work.

  Then there was the dissertation topic itself. Asteroids, in their hundreds of thousands, could be elusive devils. They lacked the decency to carry ID tags. Most sightings were but faint and fleeting glimmers as distant, tumbling rocks absorbed sunlight and re-radiated that energy as infrared. Jay believed artificial intelligence could match up disparate sightings of the same rock, made on different dates, even by separate instruments and observatories, better than any existing algorithm. More data points per rock, in turn, would mean better orbital predictions. His results so far were mixed, but Jay was not discouraged. There were, he had assured her, several AI techniques that, singly or in combinations, might make contributions to the task.

  In any event, they would keep on trying. Identify with new tech just one heretofore unknown Earth-threatening rock, and whatever time she put
into assisting Jay would have been well worth it. Meanwhile, he was mastering some astronomy and she odds and ends about AI.

  If only the young man wrote less turgidly ….

  And, once again, she knew she had lost the thread of Jay’s exposition.

  Of pregnancy’s many crappy complications, Val’s least favorite had to be Momnesia. With a sigh and a couple impatient taps, she went back to the start of this first, incomplete draft. Machine Learning and Automated Orbit Determination: New Means of Characterizing Near-Earth Objects, by Jathedar Singh.

  Marcus referred to Jay’s dissertation as Rock? Bye-Bye, Baby! And that recollection again begged the question: where the hell was her husband? Val continued her reading, fidgeting and squirming in her chair, musing all the while about how best to guide her protégé, until—

  Finally! Marcus’s avatar popped into existence over her datasheet. Her ringtone chimed and warbled. Val swiped a hand through his avatar, and there he was.

  His face was drawn, as if he hadn’t been eating enough; the contrast of sunken cheeks with the strong jaw made him seem that much more haggard. The buzz cut still surprised her, no matter how practical short hair doubtless was in a spacesuit helmet. His eyes, a striking cornflower blue, twinkled as always, but dark bags beneath them suggested he had been sleeping even less than she. And he hadn’t shaved in days.

  Talking over one another only made the comm lag more annoying, and they had decided during his first week on the Moon that whoever placed a particular call would start. The few seconds wait was interminable.

  “Hi, hon,” he said at last. “Sorry I missed you yesterday. How’s Washington?”

  “Hi, back at you. Hot and muggy. And don’t worry about it.” Something was going on with him. And that, whatever it might be, was nothing as routine as a pregnancy. He didn’t even realize he had missed two scheduled calls. What the hell was going on? “So, how are things?”

  Another interminable delay. “That’s my line.” He managed a grin. “Say, you had a checkup the other day. I’m so sorry I can’t be there for you. How are you both?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” Because just then she’d be damned if she would bother him with a sore back or any other niggling complaint. Not while—whatever—was going on up there. But she had to believe good news would be welcome. “And Marcus, I can feel”—she stopped herself just in time; for whatever weird reason, he didn’t want to know the gender in advance—“the baby moving!”

  “Damn! I really wish I could feel that. And how’s Simon?”

  “Happy that school is out.” As in, he’d just graduated middle school, a milestone which Marcus had let pass without as much as a tweet. That wasn’t at all like him. She took a deep breath. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Well, uh, we’re pretty busy. Everything takes longer than expected. Just, uh, on the big dish alone—”

  Out with it, she wanted to shout. She told herself pregnancy made her impatient, aware that wasn’t the issue at all. Marcus did not uh. Never, not for as long as she had known him. Combine those hesitations with how rundown he looked? With forgetting Simon’s big day? Protocol be damned, she interrupted. “Bottom-line it, please. What’s the story?”

  Three seconds later, she saw him blink. “Metal. Without tons more of the stuff, and I’m not being figurative, we’ll never get ourselves back on schedule. So, a few of us are going to follow up on some promising satellite observations.”

  “I thought carbon to make the steel was the issue.” Thought, hell, she knew. Iron was common enough on the Moon. Carbon, though, like He-3, was only found in scant traces deposited over the eons by the solar wind. The Russians were strip-mining and sifting cubic kilometers of regolith to gather grams of helium. Sure, in theory, Marcus might find intact chunks of a carbonaceous chondrite beneath the floor of some nearby crater, but what were the chances? If such a rock were buried, satellites wouldn’t sense it and a hand-carried metal detector wouldn’t either. There was a reason NASA had put big bucks into a multiyear mission to capture a carbon-rich asteroid. “You mean carbon, right?”

  “Yeah, uh, I was imprecise,” Marcus said. “Carbon. If we find a local source, well, you know.”

  Well, you know? That was odder than the stray uh. How stressed-out was he? And what was she missing? She kept her focus on the science. “How, exactly, are you finding this carbon?”

  “Um, I had to sign an NDA. Nondisclosure agreement.” His eyes darted … furtively? “Private party. Proprietary algorithm for analyzing multispectral observations. If we do find something, the guy gets a share. And with a proven way to locate carbon on the Moon? He’ll be very rich.”

  “I’ve heard nothing about this at the office.”

  “Uh, you wouldn’t. Won’t. He’s keeping it close to the vest.” Marcus laughed. “I shouldn’t even be saying ‘he.’ ”

  Right. Because knowing it’s a man narrows down the suspects so much.

  “So it boils down to, I guess, that you’re going prospecting.”

  “Uh-huh. In a few days, once the Sun comes up.”

  “In person?”

  “Right again.” He shrugged. “Yeah, I know, on Nearside prospecting is done with bots. That’s not so easy in a radio quiet zone.”

  Do not patronize your radio-astronomer, pregnant/hormonal wife. She tamped down that thought, along with: Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’re exhausted. “Who’s going, besides you?”

  “Donna and Brad.” He shrugged again. “Yeah, I know. A manager, a paramedic, and a mechanical engineer. We sound like the start of a walk-into-a-bar joke. The thing is, we’re all support staff. Our being away won’t have a direct impact on the construction schedule and, in any event, no one here is a geologist, selenologist, whatever the proper term is. There are geologists at Aitken, and more Dirtside. We’ll net one in when we need an expert opinion. But never mind that. The baby’s moving? That’s so great, hon.”

  “It is.” And that also, my dear, is the most contrived change of subject I’ve encountered in many a day. Almost as contrived as you dredging up selenologist. “You’ll be careful?”

  He winked. (Had she ever seen him wink?) “It’s a simple road trip. People take ’em all the time. Still, we’re crazy busy up here, prepping for the excursion and reshuffling the duty roster to keep things on track while the three of us are away.”

  What wasn’t he telling her? “So, these schedule issues, and this prospecting excursion”—wild-goose chase—“to recover. Is this you easing into how you plan to extend your stint at Farside? Because you and I have our own project going, and I’m on schedule.”

  A long hesitation. “I’ll be there with you for the delivery. You have my word.” And another wink. “Just you try not to get too far ahead of schedule.”

  It would have been nice if she believed him. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Hon, listen, I gotta go. Things to do, people to boss around. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  As abruptly as it had begun, the conversation was over. Valerie was left wondering: had Marcus even waited the few seconds to hear her reply? And what the hell was the deal on Farside? And whether it was her raging hormones yet again, or if Marcus had intended to imply: Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

  * * *

  Yevgeny Rudin’s head had just hit the pillow when, from atop his chest of drawers, a trumpet fanfare rang out. Haydn. As his eyes popped open, the spectral time display adrift on the digital wallpaper rolled over to 3:06 am.

  It had been a long day. That morning, he had flown two scientists to assist colleagues at Ice Blossom (even in his thoughts, Yevgeny had learned better than to attempt the proper, Mandarin name), China’s main lunar settlement. The 3800 kilometers from Base Putin, in Mare Ingenii, to the north pole was not quite the longest possible lunar flight—that would have been pole to pole—but it was q
uite far enough.

  While his passengers and their Chinese counterparts consulted about esoteric matters, he’d had ample opportunity to wander around. Chaperoned the entire time, of course, and apologetically turned away from a few closed doors. Merely to see which parts of the settlement his hosts considered sensitive conveyed information of a sort. Information that, the case could be made, he did not need, what with China and Mother Russia being friends and allies these days. He kept his eyes open anyway, if merely for the practice. Knowing that today’s friends would not always be friends. Cognizant that his designated minder, ostensibly a junior technician, was on the payroll of the MSS. The Ministry of State Security.

  Would Moscow respond to the report he would send about this surveillance? Beyond an acknowledgment, or an impersonal request for some further detail, he doubted it. Despite all the State had invested, and continued to invest, on its lunar ambitions, it treated this world as neutral territory—and Yevgeny as all but irrelevant.

  Just as he had been finalizing arrangements for the eggheads and himself to spend the night, Nikolay Sergeyevich had emerged from the Chinese mineral-assay lab. “Finished!” the owlish geologist had declared. (In English: the lingua scientifica they had all spoken throughout the day, to Yevgeny’s unvoiced annoyance.) “I can’t wait to get home.”

  And so back they had flown to Base Putin, another 3800 kilometers.

  Faster than the snippet of music could run its course, Yevgeny banished all thoughts of his too long day. Those few, dramatic measures signaled a communication from somebody aware—and few people fit this description—that pilot was his cover, not his job. Even for them, the melody played only when, this being no commonplace datasheet, the device failed to sense body heat. Had he been dressed, the datasheet tucked into his pocket would have vibrated discreetly to herald such an important contact.

  Yevgeny vaulted from bed (in slow motion, taking care in the lunar gravity not to drive his head into the ceiling) as the trumpet flourish started over. For a vmail or text, the datasheet would not have rung twice.