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1.3
14 November

Peakview Apartment Complex

Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

Earth Surface


“My motivation?” said the man on the video screen. “I think everyone watching this knows my motivation. Unlike Earth, space is infinite. The final frontier! And Mars is a complete reboot; living there provides the human race with a second chance. Or third one, if you count what’s happening on Luna right now, which, okay, yeah. Fair enough. But to be there, right at the beginning of it, is something really quite amazing. Helping to define what that new world is going to look like, and how it’s going to be, um, governed. I mean, the Besemans have already figured out the governance part, for the first few years at least, but, I mean . . .”

The man’s face—Raimy Vaught’s own face—wavered uncertainly.

Unseen, the interviewer asked, “So, a chance to affect the future?”

“Yes.”

“Can you unpack that a little? What’s your reason for wanting to shape the future in this particular way? For your own personal glory? For the betterment of humankind? To make the world—the worlds, plural—conform to your own sense of what they should be?”

“Whoa, hey,” said the man, “I just said, I think people get it. I mean, it’s all of those things to some extent, but mostly it’s the betterment thing. Of humankind, like you said. Yes. In the . . .  frontier.”

Raimy paused the video player, took a sip of cold coffee from the mug he was holding, and sighed. He was in his study, a bookshelf-walled room left over from his days practicing law. He was watching himself on a rollup screen—a short Black man with a shaved head and a weird, self-conscious smile that never seemed to leave his face—and just like every other time, he could barely stand the sound of his own voice. He was really quite bad at unscripted public speaking, and it was just his bad luck to get all the way through law school and into a criminal courtroom before figuring that out. He’d also gotten five years into a marriage with Harriet, who seemed to really need him to speak well, especially when they were fighting. But when it mattered, no matter how clear the thoughts were in his head, they seemed to come out half-assed when he spoke them.

Oh, he could write clearly, and read back what he’d written. He could interrogate people and bark orders and recite theories and read suspects their Miranda rights. Hell, he could even discuss the motives of a criminal suspect with the suspect himself, no problem. But if he had to think on his feet, speaking unscripted as his thoughts occurred to him, it didn’t go as well. Especially with people looking at him. It somehow hadn’t been a problem in the Navy, and not much of one in law school. When he was a prosecuting attorney, though, with lives and justice hanging in the balance, it mattered a lot. And it counted against him even now, in the competition to win a slot at Antilympus Township. He had a lot of relevant skills—really quite a lot—but if he wanted to rake in the pledges he had to look good on video. And he just didn’t.

Ah, well. It broke his heart that he’d probably never see that butterscotch sky, looming above the red sands and black-rock cliffs of Antilympus crater. He was a grown man who’d had his heart broken many times, and he knew how to get over it, but right now he was, at best, still in the “bargaining” phase of the grieving process. As such, he would keep on doing whatever it took to keep the dream alive—the dream of space, the dream of Mars—and he would keep on feeling the bones-deep ache of it, every day. Third place: God damn.

He skipped the video forward, until he found Etsub Beyene answering the same question. Etsub had the kind of profoundly black skin that was rarely found outside of sub-Saharan Africa, and that alone might have marked him as an immigrant to the U.S., even if not for his accent. The accent was quite Americanized, but carried a lilting quality that Raimy supposed was Ethiopian. Raimy had an ear for accents, partly because of the jobs he’d had and partly just because it interested him: where people had come from and where they had lived. You could tell a lot about a person from their accent, and that was true sometimes even if they tried to conceal it. To Raimy, it sounded like Etsub may have come to America as a teenager, and lived here for a couple of decades since.

On the screen, Etsub said, “Motivations are complex, and I’m reluctant to boil mine down to the level of a sound bite. I know you need an answer to your question, though, so I’ll focus on one aspect, which is the idea of bringing life to a dead planet. I find that so profound, I can hardly put it into words.”

“Do you mean terraforming?” asked the offscreen interviewer.

“Not exclusively,” Etsub said. “I’m a specialist in aquaculture, so I’m talking primarily about that. Specifically, growing plants in a medium that didn’t originate on Earth at all. Unlike the Moon, Mars has all the resources living things require, meaning that life on Mars can be made self-sustaining. Terraforming is a part of that, and we’re already seeing some exciting developments there, as I’m sure our viewers are aware. The effects of the MSL1 Magsat on the Martian atmosphere have exceeded even the most optimistic projections, and that’s just one small machine. There will be other surprises, both positive and negative, in our future. But terraforming is a project of lifetimes, or centuries, so if that were my only motivation, I’d have to be a saint. None of us will live to see that even partially completed. But we can make Mars alive inside the confines of Antilympus Township, and all the other towns that follow after it, and that’s more than exciting enough for me to devote my life. More than exciting enough.”

Raimy paused the video again, and checked the project rankings. There were still ten applicants for the one and only Male Administrator slot—down from several dozen at the beginning. Anyone with half a brain could be an administrator, which made that slot one of the most competitive in the whole program. But hydroponics was different; you had to actually know something, and if you were bad at your job everyone could see the dead plants as proof. There was only one Male Hydroponics slot, and Etsub Beyene (whose name had not yet been removed from the leaderboard) was number one in the rankings, meaning he was almost definitely going to take the prize. He was Mars-bound even before he’d traveled to Luna, to study the hydroponics systems at “Saint Joe’s” for six weeks. With that credential under his belt, he’d’ve been unstoppable.

The idea made Raimy sad, then angry. Such a waste. Death was always a waste, and a suspicious death doubly so. A murder . . .  Well, Raimy had been drawn to the legal profession, and from there to policing itself, by a sort of deep, persistent grief that something like murder could exist at all. What gave anyone that right? Nothing. Justice didn’t fix it, or even necessarily deter it, but in an imperfect world, it was the best human beings could strive for.

Drawing another sip from his dead-cold coffee, he hit play again, and watched Etsub nodding in satisfaction at his own answer, unaware that he had, at the time the video was taken, less than two months left to live. Had he made the most of that time? Had he loved someone? Had someone loved him? He didn’t make it to Mars, but he did visit the Moon, and that had to have been exciting. What person could honestly say they’d never dreamed of doing that?

With a jolt of something like fear, Raimy remembered that he was also headed for the Moon. To the place where Etsub had gasped out his last breath. That simple fact made outer space more real to him than it had ever been before—as real as the dark beneath the ocean. In two days, Raimy would be at Spaceport Paramaribo, in Suriname. The day after that, he’d be on a rocket ship blasting into space. And then in orbit, weightless and surrounded by suffocating vacuum. In space, the sun was murderously hot and the shadows were murderously cold, and (as with the ocean deeps) no quarter was given for mistakes or accidents or equipment failures of any kind. And Raimy was going to be up there for at least a week.

Did it mean something, that the reality of it made him nervous? He’d generally been nervous before a dive, too, hanging out in the torpedo tube while they dogged the hatch behind him, and even more so as the tube began to flood. It was only when he was out in the water, swimming under his own power, that training and reflexes pushed the anxiety away. And even then, he’d keep a close, dispassionate eye on the sub, on his own equipment, and on the equipment he was supposed to be servicing or sabotaging. Always looking for the thing that could kill him.

On the screen, Etsub’s face vanished, replaced with that of a frail-looking white woman in her early thirties, bleached blonde by the look of her. Standing on a sunny beach, holding a strand of thick, greenish-brown seaweed while the surf rolled in behind her. She squinted against the sunlight, and the tan outlines on her face suggested she’d rather be wearing sunglasses. Raimy didn’t recognize her, but the captions on the screen said Bridget Tobin: Candidate, Female Hydroponics. 3rd place.

Raimy did recognize her name, as one of Etsub’s fellow students up at St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery. He paused the video and looked at the current rankings again. In the months since this video was taken, Bridget Tobin had moved up solidly into second place for the Female Hydroponics position. Not quite a ticket to Mars, but close. Raimy wasn’t sure how she’d afforded a trip to the Moon or six weeks’ lodging at the monastery, but the gambit certainly seemed to be helping.

Pressing play again, Raimy heard the unseen interviewer ask Bridget Tobin about her motivations, and he watched her reply, in an Irish accent, “I’m a very determined person. Mars is a grander yoke than any human being has ever taken hold of, and quite frankly there’s nobody going to beat me to it. Nobody. It’s quite simple: I’ll do whatever it takes.”

She nodded, also seemingly quite happy with her answer.

Raimy, however, was not happy. He skipped the video back ten seconds, and watched her again, several times.

“I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes.”

And that was the whole problem, right?

News about the death of Etsub Beyene had been kept quiet so far, but the story of the Clementine defector, Andrei Bykhovski, had gone viral, and then pandemic. He was the subject of serious scholarly analysis, and also of jokes and memes and toonlets that called him “History’s first vacuum-back.” Nice. And it bothered Raimy that this now-infamous defector, this Russian refugee, Andrei Bykhovski, was somehow there at the scene when Etsub died. Was alone at the scene, in fact. The only witness, with a story that made no sense. Of course it bothered him, but Raimy’s gut told him that Bykhovski also made no sense as a suspect. Why would history’s first vacuum-back kill anyone, much less the first person he saw, in the safe haven he’d just escaped to? No reason. No motive.

But for Bridget Tobin, and hundreds of others like her, the math was very simple: if Etsub Beyene was in her way, she would do whatever it took. Mars was the biggest prize in history, and the people competing for it were some of the most motivated, most capable in the whole human race.

Murders had been committed for much less. Hell, in Raimy’s own experience, murders had been committed for pocket change and parking spaces, and simple human spite.

What little evidence Raimy had so far was consistent with this theory. “There was an air-line rupture in Etsub’s suit, down inside the backpack,” Tracy Greene had told him in a terse phone call that morning. Some Black women spoke to Black men with a certain familiarity, like they were all members of the same big family. There was none of that in Tracy’s voice; she was all business, and spoke as though Raimy were the twenty-fifth item on a fifty-item to-do list.

“Bykhovski had no tools with him,” Raimy mused, although the way she rolled over him, it was clear she’d only paused for breath, and not to solicit questions.

“It looks like a braided hose failed catastrophically. An antenna wire was routed alongside it, and that failed, too, which shorted out the radio. The monks at Saint Joe’s sent images to General Spacesuit for analysis, but our GS rep says an accident like that is very unlikely, given their quality-control process. Which implies sabotage. We don’t know why or when, or by whom, but I suppose that’s what you’ll be finding out.”

But Raimy, who was on his way to the Moon to interview everyone who’d interacted with Etsub in his last few days, figured he already knew why. And while it was poor practice to develop a theory too early in an investigation, it wasn’t much of a stretch to think his main suspects were all the other contenders for the Male Hydroponics slot at Antilympus. There were only four such contenders still alive and in the running, one of whom was currently resident in Florida, where Etsub’s spacesuit was assembled. One of whom was resident at Transit Point Station in low Earth orbit, which was one of the stops on Raimy’s way to Luna. The third of whom was currently on Luna, at Saint Joe’s. The fourth one lived in Japan, but was so far behind in the rankings that he’d have to commit three more murders, and get away with them, to have a hope of landing on Mars. Raimy felt fine about waiting, and scheduling that particular interview only if none of the rest of them panned out.

No, he had three suspects he liked much better—men with the means and motive and opportunity to sabotage the spacesuit of a rival.

Raimy thought about his own situation. Unless things went really wrong, there would be no need for cops or lawyers in a small, highly motivated community like Antilympus Township. The best he could say was that his experience in both of these jobs gave him a different perspective on the Admin job. Basically, that the two men ahead of him in the queue—the academic bureaucrat and the business mogul—were less grounded in the real world. In fact, he should try to make that point a little better in his online feed! Raimy also rode motorcycles (which was a rare thing in this age), had a pilot’s license (just barely), gardened, practiced amateur meteorology, and spoke intermediate-level French. And although he was no Olympian, he was physically among the fittest of the Male Admin contestants, with a resting heart rate of forty-seven bpm even at the high altitude of Colorado Springs. And he’d been a goddamn diver in the goddamn Navy, for real.

And yet, it wasn’t enough. None of that was enough to overcome the fame and fortune of his two main rivals, and at this point in his life there was very little he could do to improve or enrich himself any further. Going to the Moon had apparently helped Bridget Tobin, and there was of course a chance it would turn out to help Raimy as well. But probably not, because going to the Moon to investigate a murder simply highlighted what a grim, backward skill that really was, in the grand scheme of things. So yeah, if Raimy had the opportunity to sabotage the spacesuit of a rival—world famous billionaire Ian Doerr or world famous astronomer/author/Ivy League dean Tim Long Chang (now the CEO of National Geographic!)—he had to admit he’d be tempted.

And so, with the standard caution to himself about keeping his eyes and mind open, Raimy closed up the rollup, took it off its charging pad, and stuffed it into his flight bag. And with that final item in place, he was officially packed for his journey to outer space.



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