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1.4
22 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


The next few hours passed in a fog. Raimy wandered through the monastery, looking at everything and seeing nothing. Just mulling the evidence, trying to make any sort of sense of it.

Who, what, when, where, why, how?

Who: That’s the question, isn’t it?

What: Sabotaged Etsub Beyene’s spacesuit, leading to his eventual death. HOMICIDE.

When: Prior to launch. During QC testing? During fitting?

Where: General Spacesuit assembly plant, Cocoa Beach, Florida. Feel pretty good about this part of it.

Why: Open up a slot at Antilympus Township.

How: Replaced a bracket inside the backpack, AND SOMEHOW MAGICALLY CAUSED THE SUIT TO FAIL FOUR WEEKS LATER????

It didn’t make sense, and no amount of rolling it around in his mind seemed to change that.

“Can you analyze the metal?” he asked Purcell at one point.

To which Purcell replied, “I can measure its density and resistivity, and if you give me and Groppel a day or two, maybe permeability, which is an electrical property. But I’m thinking that will not tell you much. There are a million different alloys, and even if you knew which one, how would that help?”

“I don’t know,” Raimy admitted.

“Take it back to Earth with you,” Purcell advised. “Find a lab that can tell you where it came from. But I will tell you, anyone with access to a 3D drawing program can order up a custom metal part, from a hundred different online services. It’s like making a T-shirt, or coffee cup. We’ve even done it here. Our fabrication ability is limited, but I got a special drill bit made, and a plate for attaching the drill press to the printer table. Only the shipping is difficult.”

“Great,” Raimy muttered.

At another point in his wanderings, he came across Andrei Bykhovski, studying in the library.

“I am learning Catholic,” Bykhovski explained sheepishly. “I think seriously about staying on Moon, but this requires permissions and approvals. And who is Andrei Bykhovski? What is Russian Orthodox Church? Harvest Moon will not want my skills, which are different from their skills and knowings. And Catholic will not want me, because this is also different. I think I must become true seeker, or they will soon revoke sanctuary and send me back to Earth. I have risked too much to just throw away. It was not easy to get here! Most people could not do this. I am real spaceman, useful. Is better to live here than die on Earth, I’m thinking.”

“Hmm,” Raimy said. He didn’t know what to think about that, and frankly didn’t care very much at this moment. Right now, the only thing that mattered about Andrei Bykhovski is that Raimy could cross him off the suspect list. Bykhovski had never been to Florida, and while his spacesuit was a GS Light Orbital, GS had not been not responsible for fitting it to Bykhovski’s body. That had apparently happened at an Orlov Petrochemical facility in a place called Baikonur, in Kazakhstan. “Most likely,” CTO@generalspacesuit#com had said, “they just matched him to a size M, let the joints out a little, and handed him some moleskin to cover the spots that chafe.”

So Bykhovski had been nowhere near Etsub’s spacesuit backpack, at any of the times it could have been sabotaged. Neither had Geary Notbohm; he’d been on Transit Point Station the whole time. Neither had any of the monks. So actually, he could cross thirteen people off his suspect list.

Of course, there were thousands of GS employees and contractors who could have done it, but why? They had means and opportunity, but not motive. That really left only three people.

WHO: Anming Shui, Katla Koskinen, or Bridget Tobin.

He jotted this in his notes, and then underlined Anming’s name three times. Raimy didn’t have enough evidence for a conviction, or maybe even a grand jury indictment, but if the suspect pool was down to three people, and he was the one with the most to gain . . . 

“For what it’s worth, I’m taking you off my suspect list,” Raimy told Bykhovski.

Bykhovski simply shrugged. “Okay. I am already knowing I didn’t do.”

And that, right there, cemented it for Raimy. Only a truly innocent man, with truly nothing to hide, would so casually shrug off that particular news.

“Well, good luck with your studies,” Raimy said. “Even aside from the fear of reprisal, I can understand why you’d want to stay here.”

“Is meaningful,” Bykhovski said.

“Yes, exactly. I get that.” And now that Bykhovski was no longer a suspect, and Raimy could suddenly see him as a complete human being, he said, “Things must have been pretty bad at Clementine.”

“Our lives were not in danger,” Bykhovski said, shrugging. “Only freedom. But this is enough reason to escape, yes? We are working, and not benefitting from work, and not free to leave, and not free to complain to any authorities. Someone must do something about this. And so I have. Complaints have been heard everywhere, and Orlov cannot continue doing as they have done. There is no law in space, but Orlov’s assets on Earth are inside of countries, yes? And so, laws will find a way to touch him. This is why I am qualified to be monk: because already I risk my life for my fellow mankind, and succeed. My, how do you call, my character is proved. The rest is only ceremony, and this I can learn.”

“Ah.” Raimy had to agree, that was a hell of a résumé. The monastery would have to be crazy to turn him away. And then, because Bykhovski actually was some sort of metallurgist, Raimy asked him, “Is stainless steel magnetic?”

Again, that shrug.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. How much nickel is in metal?”

“I don’t know.”

Raimy handed him the clamp bracket, which had already tested negative for fingerprints.

Frowning, Bykhovski opened his hand to accept the part. Hefting it, he frowned more deeply. “This is light. Too light for steel. This is, I’m thinking, titanium alloy. Where did you get?”

“This came out of Etsub’s backpack.”

“Oh,” said Bykhovski, handing it back as though it were poisonous.

“It’s not the right part,” Raimy said. “It’s a fake, and it was somehow used to sabotage the air hose and antenna cable. I don’t know how. There were no tool marks in the vicinity, and nothing pushing against it.”

“Oh,” Bykhovski said again. He shrugged a third time, looking uncomfortable. It seemed to be the end of the conversation.

“Well,” Raimy told him, “good luck with your conversion. I have no doubt you’ll make an excellent monk.”

He then resumed his wandering, through the empty classroom and into the dormitories. He found himself standing in front of the room he knew had been assigned to Anming Shui.

Raimy had authorization to search whatever he liked, and he was tempted to simply open the hatch, walk right in, and toss the place. But something stopped him, some instinct of decorum or interplanetary diplomacy. Or even . . . safety? Did he fear a booby trap? Etsub Beyene had died from one, after all. If Anming Shui was responsible for that, then maybe Anming Shui should be in the room while it was searched.

Feeling like he might really be onto something, he opened the hatch into the greenhouse, and stepped into pink light and noise.

“Anming!” he called out.

Three monks and three students looked up from their vegetable trays, their eyes on Raimy.

“Anming, come with me!” Raimy told himself he was shouting to be heard over the blowers, but he just sounded angry, even to himself. Righteously angry.

“What is it?” Anming asked, in a much quieter voice.

“I need to search your room,” Raimy answered gravely. “I need you to come with me.” In the many pockets of his two-piece Antilympus uniform, Raimy had both handcuffs and zip ties. He was prepared to make an arrest if necessary. He was prepared to fight for it.

I won’t turn my back, Raimy told himself. If he tries to hit me, I’ll block it and take him down. If he tries to stab me, I’ll block it and take him down.

Anming seemed an unlikely suspect, and really unlikely to resist arrest. Not only because he was small and bookish and mild, but because where the fuck could he escape to? Nowhere. Even if he somehow got away from Raimy and into a spacesuit and outside the hull of the monastery, what would he do? Walk to Shackleton, commandeer the Pony Express and somehow fly it all the way back to Transit Point? And then what? Nothing. There was no getting away from this.

Still, Raimy was careful not to turn his back.

With the watchful eyes of three monks and two students upon them, Raimy followed Anming back into the dormitory.

He stood by while Anming opened the hatch.

Nervously, his Chinese accent deeper than ever, Anming said, “You want me to step in?”

“Please,” Raimy said. “Then I want you to start opening drawers, and very carefully removing the items.”

“Okay. Just me? Nobody else?”

“Just you,” Raimy confirmed.

There were three drawers set into the space under the bed, and Anming immediately opened the bottom two of these, to show they were empty. He even felt around the front and top of each drawer, with nervous slowness, and Raimy was vigilant for him to pull out a weapon. Which he didn’t. The top drawer contained an extra coverall, in Harvest Moon yellow, and a set of space underwear, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, and an ordinary rollup cell phone.

“Turn it on,” Raimy instructed.

Anming did so, asking, “What is this about?”

“Hopefully nothing,” Raimy told him.

The phone turned on normally, and reported that it had local network access, SpaceNet access, and (surprisingly) one bar of signal strength for the cell phone network back on Earth.

“It’s a space-capable phone,” Raimy said.

“Yes. I knew I was coming here, so I got it. The battery life is not very good.”

“Hmm.” Raimy turned the phone off—all the way off—and pocketed it for evidence. He didn’t have the know-how to search a person’s phone; that would have to be done by a crime lab, once the arrest had been made.

Next, Raimy searched the three drawers himself, and found nothing new. He asked Anming to strip the pillows and sheets and even the thin, waterproof mattress off of the bed. These were dutifully searched, and found innocent.

That left only the material lying in the open: Anming’s phone charger and wristwatch charger, his hairbrush and toothbrush, his sleep mask. A couple of personal effects: a moon rock, a little metal sculpture, and a squeezy-handled spring of the sort that people used to exercise their hands.

“What’s this?” Raimy asked, pointing to the sculpture. It was an atom: three stiff loops of shiny metal wire, each with a spherical dot attached, and each with a little stalk connecting it to a shiny metal nucleus at the sculpture’s center.

“A toy,” Anming said. Then: “May I pick it up? I’ll show you how it works.”

“Go ahead. Slowly.”

“What is this about, Raimy? Did something happen?”

Grimly, professionally, Raimy told him, “You were always the number one suspect.”

“Okay,” Anming said, meekly. He picked the little atom and dropped it into the palm of his left hand, and then just sort of froze.

“What am I looking at?” Raimy demanded.

“Just wait,” Anming said. “It takes a few seconds.”

And then something odd happened: the metal jumped and shuddered in Anming’s palm, the wires and spheres of the atom suddenly folding themselves into the shape of a Valentine’s Day heart. It happened in an eyeblink, and with such force that the whole thing seemed to have been spring-loaded all along.

“What is that?” Raimy asked.

“Just a toy.” Anming set it back down on the metal desktop, silver against enameled white, and after a few seconds it jumped again, jolting itself back into atom form.

“How does it work?” Raimy asked, forgetting himself for a moment and simply marveling. He’d never seen anything like it.

“I don’t know,” Anming said.

There maybe wasn’t all that much to know; the thing had no room for gears or motors or springs or electronics. It was just three pieces of wire.

“Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift.”

“From whom?”

Anming seemed about to answer, but then a look came over his face: startled, then horrified, then guilty. Or rather, caught.

“From whom?” Raimy demanded.

“I don’t know,” Anming answered, in such a way that even a five-year-old would know he was lying. “It came in the mail.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you save the packaging?”

“No.”

“How long have you had it?”

Anming seemed to consider carefully, before answering, “About a month and a half. It arrived a week before I left Shanghai.”

Raimy felt his frown deepen. “Left for where? Paramaribo?”

“No, Florida,” Anming said. “I met my friends there, and we all went to Paramaribo together.”

When Raimy was close to solving something, he often passed through a moment of feeling unnaturally stupid, because he could feel the evidence dancing right in front of his face, but he couldn’t yet make sense of it. This didn’t always happen, but it was often enough to be a thing. And he was definitely feeling it now.

Sensing some importance in this little valentine atom, he picked it up and set it in his own right palm. He kept a finger on it, though—determined to feel it while it transitioned.

“Be careful,” Anming warned. “It’s—”

The warning came a moment too late; like a heart-shaped mousetrap, the thing snapped shut on Raimy’s finger.

“Ow! Fuck!”

Reflexively, he flicked his hand, hard, several times. The thing didn’t budge.

“Fucking, fucking . . . Ouch!”

“You have to let it cool off,” Anming said, with what sounded like genuine concern.

Raimy kept flicking, though, and pawing at it with his other hand, until he finally dragged it off his finger, taking a good square centimeter of skin along with it.

It fell with a ping to the metal decking of the floor, bounced once, sprang back into the shape of an atom, and settled.

“Fuck,” Raimy said, a final time.

“You have to be careful,” Anming said. “I should have warned you.”

“Pretty dangerous toy,” Raimy said.

And then he had it. He knew how Etsub Beyene was murdered.

He pulled the clamp bracket back out of his pocket, carefully, and compared its color and sheen to that of the valentine atom. They were nearly identical. Nearly.

“Tell me who sent that to you,” Raimy said, pointing at the valentine atom.

Anming did not reply. Barely reacted.

“Tell me where you ordered it,” Raimy tried.

Again, no reaction. Anming looked miserable. Scared. Caught.

“You’re under arrest,” Raimy said, fishing now for his handcuffs.

“I know,” Anming said. “I know I am.”

And then he began to cry.


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