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LUNAR ASYLUM

star

Martin L. Shoemaker


My balls itched.

I didn’t tell Rita. She stared out at Tycho Crater as the hangar dome slid open for the crawler carrier hauling the transport from the Arch. Her eyes were agog. Me, I’d gotten bored with the surface a decade ago while on excavation teams. And no matter what the designers promised, my suits always itched.

I had transferred to the tunnel farms because I was ready for some routine; but that day I had volunteered for even more tedium: working for Bader Security, processing refugees from the Grand Nation of the Celestial Arch, also known as GNCA in these parts.

The crawler moved at a walking pace up the long stretch of regolith to the hangar. Perched atop it was a stubby Arch transport full of refugees. The last one had held sixty, packed nearly on top of each other. I wondered how many this one carried.

The crawler approached, and I gave one more visual inspection. “Crawler Five, Mosley,” I said. “Clearance confirmed.”

The crawler pilot transmitted, “Mosley, we have confirmation from the door sensors.”

I tugged on Rita’s elbow, and we backed inside the hangar. She said, “Where’ll we put them?”

I had no answer. The sixty refugees from Pad Four were crammed into the quarantine center. The tram from Tycho Under had broken down, and we had no details or repair status. The refugees were about to get really friendly. I hoped Traffic Control would give us a break after this.

But it was no more in their hands than mine. The Arch was shipping refugees as fast as they could load them, trying to stave off famine as Skvrsky’s Blight swept through their grain stores. Their entire economy rested on Pan-Asian migrant farmers. Now the farmers couldn’t even feed themselves. The Arch had invoked emergency rescue protocols to send refugees to the Lunar cities, and to every station in orbit.

The crawler halted, and the hangar started shuttering. I shook my head. This would upend everything at Bader Farms. And we were lucky: we were already turning out kilotons of food for sale Downside. We could feed the refugees; but I wondered about some of the stations.

“We’re up!” Rita said, heading to the lift. I followed to where a belt rose up and down a shaft, grabbed a loop sticking out from it, stepped into another below, and let the belt carry me up.

When I stepped off, Rita was heading down the gantry to the transport’s hatch. A suited figure stepped out, checked gauges, nodded, and lifted his visor. The hangar was at forty percent pressure, sufficient for normal operations.

The man turned to Rita. “Pilot Meng reporting,” he said in a thick Chinese accent. He was on the tall side. His expression betrayed nothing. “I am delivering forty-seven refugees.”

Rita answered, “Lieutenant Masters, Bader Security. Welcome to Tycho.” She checked her comp. “Your manifest says forty-four.”

Meng nodded. “We had three late arrivals.” For an instant, his professional demeanor cracked, betraying a hint of compassion. “I found room for them. They were hungry.”

Rita looked back at her comp and frowned. “It’s not like we have details on most of the refugees anyway. Your records leave much to be desired.”

“Not my records,” he answered. “I’m just the pilot. May my passengers disembark?”

“Permission granted,” Rita said. Meng opened the airlock.

I expected difficulty. Gravity always matters. The one-sixth Lunar g is bad for a Downsider. It makes them prone to stupid errors. The Grand Nation of the Celestial Arch was a classic O’Neill design, two cylinders spinning every three minutes to produce forty percent Earth-normal gravity. Archer instincts were just as bad as a Downsider’s. Worse, they were used to Coriolis effects. On Luna, they tended to correct for spin that isn’t there. I expected bruises.

But I didn’t expect a squat, dark-haired man in dirty coveralls bursting out of the airlock. As Meng stepped back from the hatch, the man sprang into the air. “Whoa!” I reached for him.

If he was puzzled by the gravity, he didn’t show it. Before I could grasp an arm, he kicked off from Meng’s helmet and over the gantry rail.

Rita hit her comm. “Medic to the hangar floor!” Even on Luna, falling can be fatal. He would hit at ten meters per second.

I ran for the lift, grabbed the down belt, scrambled down the moving cable. Could I catch up with him? Catching him would mean broken bones for both of us, but he’d survive.

But when I looked up, I saw that his leap had taken him to the transport’s hull. He clung to handholds and climbed down toward the crawler.

“Stop!” I shouted. He didn’t stop, he just looked down at me and scurried around the hull. If I had to climb up there and get him, we would exchange words.

On the far side of the transport, he started straight down, fast; and as he did, he called down, “Asylum!” He was still gasping “Asylum . . .” when he dropped to the deck and wrapped his arms around me.


“Tycho Traffic Control, come in.” I was met with silence. I looked over at the hangar chief, Hyun Sung. “How long have they been out?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t had a reason to contact them.” She glared at our guest. “You’re making a lot of fuss for one panicked refugee.”

“I’m just trying to pass the buck,” I answered. “He won’t talk to me, and we don’t have authority to grant asylum. Let the bosses deal with this.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “Please, you must protect me.”

“‘Must,’ nothing,” I answered. “We’ve got a hundred people in a facility equipped for thirty. We’ve got communications down, transportation down, and we’ve got you climbing a ship like a goddamned monkey. You won’t tell us your name or your problem, just that you want asylum. Maybe I’ll just take you back with the others and forget I ever saw you.

His eyes widened. “No! That’s where they—” But he stopped, mouth clamped tight.

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. “And why are you afraid of them?” I leaned closer. “For somebody who wants help, you’re sure uncooperative.” I took a deep breath, trying to calm down. “Go ahead and wait. When I get through to the bosses, you’re their problem.”

Just then, the control room hatch chimed. Sung tapped a button on her console, and the face of the Chinese pilot appeared. “Can I help you?” Sung said.

“You have one of my passengers,” the pilot said. “I must confirm his condition.”

“He’s fine,” Sung said. I moved to stand out of the pickup. “I’ll vouch for him.”

“That is not proper procedure,” the pilot said. “I must inspect the man.”

I nodded, and Sung said, “I’m keying you in now.” I backed off to a corner.

When the hatch opened, the pilot stepped in stiffly. He walked up to the man, grabbed his arm, and shouted, “Why did you do that?” The man glared sullenly at him, but said nothing.

The pilot turned to Sung. “This man has broken seventeen safety protocols. He is under arrest.”

I cleared my throat and stepped out from the corner. The pilot turned as I said, “That was in Bader Farms jurisdiction, not on the Arch.”

The pilot glared at me. “Bader Farms has no jurisdiction. You’re a corporate entity, chartered under the System Initiative. You have no authority here.”

I itched to reach for my sidearm, but I restrained myself. I stood casually as I said, “Free Luna has a differing opinion on jurisdiction, but no one believes the Arch has authority here.” I nodded to the stranger. “He’ll answer to Bader Security officers.”

The pilot frowned. “I don’t have time for this, Bader Security.” He looked at his comp, then turned to Sung. “How soon can you refuel my ship? We have more evacuations.”

“We’re working as fast as we can,” Sung answered. “You’ll be topped off in eighty-three minutes, and we’ll tow you out as fast as the hangar can depressurize.”

The pilot nodded. “Thank you, Chief. My apologies for being abrupt. I shall have to explain all of this to my superiors when I get back to the Arch.” He glared at the stranger, then exited.

I turned to Sung. “That’s it? He didn’t even check ID?”

“He had visual pickups built into his flight suit,” Sung answered. “Full facial and biometric recognition. He knows who we have here.”

“No,” the man said, breaking his silence at last. “If he knew, he’d have never left.”

I shook my head. “You can’t spoof bio-facial.”

For the first time, the man didn’t look grim. He gave a slight smile as he said, “With enough time and enough access, you can spoof anything.”

The man had a point. Especially for someone who looked more European than Asian.

“You?” I said. “A migrant farmer?”

“I’ll explain to your bosses.” He seemed more assured now. “Get me to them without alerting anyone else. The risk is too high.”

“The risk to whom?”

He peered closely at me. “You. Your bosses. Maybe half of Earth-Moon space.”

I fumed. “Don’t pull that ominous shit with me. Give me a name or I’ll take you back to quarantine with the rest of the fucking refugees.”

We locked eyes. He was determined, but I’m just plain stubborn. Finally he blinked. “I’m Dr. David Skvrsy, and I’m formally claiming asylum.”

That made me stare. “Skvrsky? The man who sequenced the Blight?”

He slumped into the chair, burying his face in his hands. Then he looked up and said, “No. The man who synthesized the Blight.”

I looked over at Sung, and her eyes were as wide as mine. Then I looked back to the man. “Explain.”

“I can’t.” He winced. “Let me talk to a geneticist. I can make them understand.”

I crossed my arms. “I told you, Doctor, we’ve got no trams or comms. Explain it to me. The news streams said you sequenced the Blight and are working on a retro injection.”

“Of course they say that! That’s the big ‘surprise’: the Arch will announce a miracle cure after the Blight has served its purpose.”

“Purpose?”

He waved his arms, taking in the hangar. “Look around! The Arch is dumping their undesirables, and humanitarians on Luna and Earth are taking in all their problems.”

“Wait . . . Go back to where you created the Blight.”

Skvrsky sighed. “I designed the vector. My allele injector nanos.”

I nodded. “Automated CRISPR. Precision injection of alleles into chromosomes.” His eyes popped. I gave him a smug grin. “Farmers study genetics.”

Skvrsky nodded. “My apologies. I assumed . . . If you know my work, you know it was controversial. Everyone feared it might be misused.” He lowered his eyes. “They were right. They were all right.”

“All but the Arch.”

He nodded. “They offered me a microgravity lab, funding, and personnel. I was so blinded by my vision. I believed they had the perfect containment mechanism. I needed to insert detectable base pairs at precise points in specific gene sequences. Their suggestion was to work with wheat, which they had in abundance, and to inject genes that would prevent germination.”

My jaw dropped. “The Blight.” Skvrsy nodded somberly. “And it accidentally leaked?”

He slammed his fist on the desk. “It intentionally leaked. I told you: this was deliberate. They wanted to devastate their wheat crop.”

“That’s crazy!” I said. “Their whole economy depends on wheat.”

“Bah. The Blight let them purge most of their itinerant farmers, make them your problem. They’ve upended the agriculture industry, putting the Earth-Lunar economy into a spiral. And they made secret market investments to take advantage of that.

“And look at the other effects! Since no one understands the Blight, all orbital crops are taking a beating. Grain markets are being manipulated. Those exports they certify as clean all go to China. People are hungry across Asia, but not in the Central Kingdom.”

“They still have to feed themselves.”

“They can,” Skvrsky answered. “They have enough stores for their reduced population—a much more homogeneous one, all Chinese immigrants—and enough robot farmers to maintain the crops. Any time they need more food, all they have to do is stop spreading the allele injectors.”

“This is crazy . . .” I said. I looked over at Sung. She was busy punching at her console, but she glanced up at me and frowned. “No one could plan a conspiracy this big and keep it secret.”

“Big?” Skvrsky chuckled darkly. “The Arch has a population of millions. They maintain air and water down to the milliliter and segment each individual into a specific societal niche. Big is what they do.” He glanced at the hatch. “And they plug leaks. Like they’re trying to plug me.”

“So you fled.”

“At first I played along. When the Blight was revealed, it was obviously my injectors loaded with mitosis inhibitors. They didn’t try to hide it. They explained: they would use the Blight to reduce the food supply then promote me as the lead investigator for a cure; and when time was right, I would become a hero for eliminating Skvrsky’s Blight. I could retire in luxury.”

“You went along with that? Fucker!”

He leaned forward and glared at me. “I could go along or I could have an ‘accident.’ You don’t know what it’s like there. Official Truth is not to be questioned, no matter what you remember, what you see. The only way to stay alive is to accept the Truth unquestioningly. Learn to be part of it.”

“To be complicit.”

“To stay alive! Corpses can’t fight back.”

I looked quizzically at him. “You’re fighting back?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” He took a breath. “I accessed systems they didn’t realize I was aware of. There’s always an underground, if you know where to look.”

I eyed him. “How did you escape?”

He shook his head. “You don’t need details. Records were altered so the automated systems wouldn’t recognize me. I acquired forged credentials and got on a refugee transport. But . . . I was followed, I think. Arch authorities scanned the identification chips of every refugee on the transport. That’s why I’m begging you to get me out of here!”

I glanced over at Sung, but she shook her head. I answered, “We’ll get you out as fast as we can. With no comms and no trams—”

“You think that’s a coincidence?”

“What else could it be?”

“Saboteurs! Use your head! You think all those refugees have been properly vetted, and there were no Arch spies among them?”

I wanted to answer confidently, to reassure him that no one would slip through our screening.

But then I remembered Meng, the Chinese pilot, saying that three refugees had boarded at the last minute, without time to vet them. The authorities had checked identities on the transport, yet they hadn’t turned up these stragglers? Impossible . . . unless they weren’t supposed to turn them up.

He had a point. Who might be prowling the Free Cities right now, hacking into communications, spying on operations? Maybe spreading the Blight?

I rose. “All right, I’ll get you to the bosses.”

At that moment, an eerie squeal echoed from the ventilation shaft, like a machine screaming in pain. That ended in a loud clank, then silence. No soft whisper of the air management system in the background. Real silence.

Then with a distant boom, the lights went out.

“What the hell?” I drew my pistol and backed away from the desk. Skvrsky had made me paranoid, and I didn’t want to be an easy target.

The darkness lasted only a second before dim emergency lights came on. I looked to the control console and saw Hyun Sung frantically working. “Sung?”

“Busy!” she said, never taking her eyes off her console and her flashing fingers. “Internal comms are down,” she said. “Look around, report back to me. Make it fast.”

I turned to Skvrsky. “Doctor, let’s get you to cover.” The control room was tiny, just the console, a couple of desks, and a lavatory. I grabbed his arm and pulled him to the lavatory hatch. “Lock the hatch, cycle it, and stay put.” I opened the hatch—like all Lunar hatches, it had a dedicated power cell precisely for emergencies like this—and pointed to a viewscreen. “If you see anyone but Sung or me, don’t acknowledge you’re here.”

“Understood,” Skvrsky said. He stepped in and cycled the hatch.

That left me to do some reconnaissance. I headed toward the exit hatch, asking Sung, “Anything specific?”

She shook her head. “Eddie, it’s not good. Videos, motion sensors, comms . . . They’re all down. This wasn’t accidental, too many simultaneous failures. They probably shut down the air to kill Skvrsky by asphyxiating everyone. But they didn’t consider that when the air shuts down, nearly every hatch in the facility becomes a pressure seal. They’re as trapped as we are.”

“They’ll die right along with us.”

“They just might be fanatical enough to do that, Eddie. Skvrsky’s right, you don’t understand the culture. But they may have an escape plan. They had time to prepare. Be ready for surprises.”

I nodded. Most of the hangar facilities were subsurface. The control center was on Level I. The refugees were on II.

Somebody had attacked power and air on III. They would be hard to reach—and would have a hard time getting up here.

That assumed there was only one operative. I couldn’t know, so I crouched low as I cycled the hatch open.

But not low enough. I felt the round rip through my left bicep before I heard the shot. I cried out in pain and fell backward, trying to roll; but the agonizing fire in my arm wouldn’t take weight. I flopped flat on my right side, pistol arm pinned. I needed to get to cover. But I couldn’t think, not with the agony . . . and the pressure of my suit’s automatic tourniquet constricting. I pushed over onto my back, and the pain in my arm intensified. My eyes got blurry, spots fading in and out. I stared at the hatch and saw it sliding closed.

But not fast enough. A figure stood in it, pistol out. I raised my weapon and fired. The kick knocked me into unconsciousness . . . 


Sung leaned over me. “Eddie, can you hear me?” I managed a moan. “Eddie, the tourniquet’s holding. I’m pumping in null plasma.”

She shouldn’t worry about me. “Console . . .”

“Locked up. I’ve got my AIgents working on it, but there’s nothing I can do right now. Besides, you asshole, you were bleeding out.”

“Bleed . . . suffocate . . . What’s the diff?”

“Bleeding’s a hell of a lot faster. Now wake up. The null-P should be hitting you soon.”

And it was. My head was clearing. I rose up on my right elbow, but my left arm was useless and numb from the tourniquet. Sung had zipped off my sleeve and was applying a pressure bandage to my bicep, replacing one sopped through with red. “Wow . . . I bled a lot . . .” Then I remembered why. “Did I get him?”

“From that angle? In shock? Hell, no!” Then she smiled. “But you made him retreat, gave me time to draw my piece. I got him.”

“Nice work . . . Who was he?”

“He wore a farmer’s coveralls.”

I nodded. Even that hurt. “Son of a bitch!”

“Sorry,” Sung answered. “Need some painkillers?”

“No. The null-P is doing its job. I want to stay clearheaded so I can get these bastards.”

“Eddie, you can’t! Your—”

“No choice. Can you reach anybody else?” She shook her head. “I can’t run your AIgents, so you have to stay on that. Somebody’s gotta stop these fuckers, and I don’t see another choice.”

She frowned. “Eddie . . .”

“I don’t like it either.” I glanced at the lavatory. “But if Skvrsky’s right, we’re at war, and only the three of us know it. This is bigger than you and me, even bigger than Skvrsky. The bosses have to know. With the patching you did, I’ll live, right?” She nodded. “Well, I ain’t waiting around. I’m taking the fight to them.”

This time as the hatch slid open, I stayed beside the opening, hunched low. I glanced out to see a pool of blood seeping from a corpse. I edged my pistol around the corner and peered through the comp scope on my wrist. There was no one in sight. The man had been strong and fit. The bullet had shattered his lower right ribs. Not immediately fatal. Any compatriot could’ve saved him, but they hadn’t. He was alone.

I checked the scope again before I reached out and tugged on his sleeve.

I swear the shriek I uttered, as the strain aggravated the bicep wound, was manly. Manly or not, I got the corpse inside, swiftly sliding the hatch shut. I switched my scope to X-ray and swept it over the body.

For a farmer, the man had a lot of subcutaneous implants: three comps, a camera, and a magnetometer. Also two ident chips, one in each palm, allowing him a different identity scan for each hand.

From his pockets, I pulled out four knives and two pistols. The man had been loaded for trouble. If Sung hadn’t acted fast, we’d all be dead now.

He should’ve set off every metal detector in the ship. The authorities had to know he was on board. And the pilot . . . But Meng had told me about three unidentified refugees on board. If he was part of some conspiracy, he could’ve kept his mouth shut. Wouldn’t that have made more sense?

Skvrsky’s story rang true, the accidents were too coincidental, and the hole in my arm was persuasive. I was worried. I was a former miner turned tunnel farmer turned rent-a-cop. I could handle myself in a fight, but I was in over my head.

I turned back to Sung. “Could someone have sabotaged power and air remotely?”

She shook her head, pointing at her console. “The indicators say physical sabotage, not hacking. Somebody had to go down there.”

“And it all happened too fast for that man to get back up here. He couldn’t have done that and shot me.”

Sung stared at her screen and said, “No, not even through the construction shafts.”

“The shafts? I should’ve thought of those.” The main shaft ran directly from the control center down to the air and power plants; but there was no power to the belt, and I had no functioning left arm. I would have to scale the ladder, which was normally easy in one-sixth gravity. One-armed, in pain, it would be torture.

Sung had managed to zip my sleeve over the pressure bandage (with only a few screams from me). With air recirculation still offline, I wanted a reliable source of oxygen, and that meant my suit. She had over-pressurized the sleeve and sealed it at the shoulder, turning it into a makeshift splint that mostly immobilized my arm.

I jounced down the ladder to the air plant’s hatch. Then I activated the display panel and looked out.

Three technicians lay on the floor. Two had been shot in the head. The third looked like she’d taken a double gut shot. There was no one in the immediate vicinity, but I couldn’t see the rest of the air plant, nor the power plant next door.

I wasn’t going to solve any problems sitting there. I cycled the hatch open and thrust my pistol in to search the angles.

The machines in the adjacent chamber were beyond hope. Rent shards of metal were strewn around. Giant, twisted vanes lay on the floor. Air recirculation was dead. CO2 would build up, and eventually everyone would get massive headaches before drifting to sleep. Permanently.

But I still believed the assassins would try to escape. One had come hunting Skvrsky in the control center. This one had disappeared. Were there others? I was still thinking about Meng’s three . . . 

I hurried under a nearby desk. Now my scope could see the hatch to the outer corridor. It was open. The saboteur had left.

I cautiously made my way to the hatch. The control panel had been forced open, and someone had jumpered the lines. The saboteur was somewhere beyond.

I stuck my pistol through the hatch, waved it left, waved it right—and stopped. Almost beyond the curve of the corridor was a lift hatch. A man with his back to me, working on the panel.

I was weak, and I was hurting; and although undeclared, we were in a goddamned war. I wasn’t stupid. I sighted in the pistol, let its computer lock onto his center of mass, and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession. The man fell. If he wasn’t dead, it wasn’t for my lack of trying.

I needed rest. I backed against the wall, turned, and scanned with my weapon, activating its motion detector. Unless I stopped it, it would fire upon anything that moved. Then I leaned back, breathing heavily. The suit showed my pulse running high but steady. I was keyed up, but I wasn’t going into shock again.

Nothing came around the curve. The man in the corridor never moved. I was, briefly, safe. It was time to get moving.

I cautiously walked out to the body and bent down to inspect it. Besides the same gear as his partner, the corpse carried a toolkit in a pouch, as well as some sort of electronic device with a button and two lights: one blinked steadily, the other flickered.

I pushed the button, and the two lights went solid green. I heard a comms carrier and saw my helmet status lights indicating messages. But that lasted only a moment before the first light went back to flashing green, and the second resumed its flicker. As soon as the flickering resumed, comms traffic stopped again.

I held the button down, but nothing changed: some sort of reset cycle, and then comms cut out.

It would take all day to figure out how the box worked; but it took only seconds to drop it on the floor and kick the shit out of it until it was nothing but splinters.

The comms came back on for good. The first signal I heard was Sung. “Eddie, you got comms back up!”

I sighed. “That’s the only good news. Three air techs are dead, and the air plant’s useless.”

“Damn!” she said. “CO2 is already climbing. I can release emergency O2, but we won’t have enough air for a hundred for long.”

“You have surveillance back online?”

“I can try emergency power, but most internal surveillance is still down.”

“Can you cycle through the cameras?”

“Checking . . .” She paused. “I can route power to one camera at a time. Where should I check?”

I looked at the elevator hatch beside me. The man had been going up. But to where?

“They’ll need suits. Check the suit lockers on I.”

A few seconds later, Sung shouted, “Yes! One’s breaking into the lockers now, getting three suit boxes.”

“Three in his team. I’ve accounted for two. He’s the last. I don’t suppose we have power to the lifts?”

She paused. “Damn!”

“What?”

“I switched to the power plant. Two techs dead, the system wrecked. The generator was fast work, an explosive.”

“Shit! That’s not coming back online.”

“Nope. Not—Damn! While I was checking the power plant, number three disappeared.”

“Follow him!”

“Stop distracting me! There he is! Pushing a cart to V-Lock 3.”

“V-Lock 3. Got it.” The vertical locks let personnel cycle up into the hangar when it was depressurized.

I pushed the button on the elevator hatch. Again I had to climb. If I thought climbing down was a challenge, up was a nightmare. Each rung I had to lean forward, let go, reach up as fast as I could, and grab the next rung before I tumbled backward. Several times I had to wrap my good arm around a rung so I could “rest.” The whole time, my left arm bounced stiffly out like a heavy balloon. Every third or fourth bounce would go wrong, and I would wince from the pain.

It seemed like hours to reach Sub-Level I. My comp said it had been a little over seven minutes, but that wasn’t how it felt.

When I reached the top, I cycled the hatch; but my useless left arm wouldn’t let me pull myself into the corridor beyond. If the pain made me let go, I would fall two stories. I might not break a bone, but I’d have to start the ascent all over again. Even more injured.

I had to make the leap. If Skvrsky could make the leap he did, I could do this. I was a Loonie.

I turned sideways on the rungs, bent my legs, and held on with my good arm. Then I leaped across the gap and through the hatch, tumbling. My flopping arm smacked the hatch frame, and I yelled, but I was through.

V-Lock 3 was visible from the elevator shaft, and vice versa. I had to keep moving. I scrambled awkwardly into a crouch, and I scrabbled around the curve, away from the V-Lock.

No shots rang out. I leaned against the wall and breathed heavily as I stuck my pistol around the corner for a check.

The corridor was empty save for two sealed suit boxes—plus one unsealed and empty. The saboteur was already in the V-Lock.


I chose V-Lock 5 to stay out of sight of 3. The big dome was divided into storage pads. A half dozen transports could park there, a dozen if they were small. Each pad had a complicated gantry and lift system to let the crawler pull in a spacecraft and then roll back as the craft was lifted and berthed.

The hangar was still pressurized. Sound waves would propagate. I clung to the legs of a local hopper as I worked toward the center of the hangar. There was a saboteur in there somewhere—unless he’d already made his way out onto the surface.

I boosted my audio gain, hoping to hear movement; but I hadn’t expected two voices arguing in Mandarin. One was Meng. I couldn’t place the other.

As Sung had promised, the Arch transport was still on the crawler for refueling. I saw the pilot standing on the gantry near the hatch, looking down toward an unseen voice near the base of the craft. Despite the language barrier, I could clearly tell the second voice was barking commands. He expected to be obeyed.

The pilot, on the other hand, was stubborn. He was resistant, and the commands just smashed upon and flowed around him like a rock.

And he was a great distraction. While the argument preoccupied the saboteur, I maneuvered between the berths and toward the transport.

Suddenly the pilot shouted, “Bader Security, he’s coming your way!” I ducked behind a service cabinet as gunfire rang out; but it wasn’t aimed at me. I heard a cry from the gantry, followed by a thud as the pilot fell to the metal platform.

The next few minutes were tense but silent: two men carefully positioning to kill each other. I caught a flash of metal once, followed immediately by three shots as I pulled my hand back to safety; and I darted in a new direction, behind the hull of an ore carrier.

Then I looked up at the carrier and remembered Skvrsky’s climbing act. Even with my lame arm, I could scale the hull, take myself off the playing field to where I could see what was going on. Easy, right?

It was torment! My left arm flopped uselessly, and it was all I could do to keep from banging the hull and drawing attention to myself. But eventually I reached a safe perch ten meters up, where I could look down.

And more importantly, my pistol could look down. I turned it to motion sensor mode, trusting that the saboteur and I were the only remaining motion in the hangar.

I didn’t even realize when my pistol locked on target. I saw the motion of the man just before I felt the kick of my sidearm and heard the crack, followed by the splintering sound of a helmet shattering, and a skull exploding inside it.


Meng leaned back against his hatch, a wrench in his hand. He managed a weak smile. “Bader Security . . . How do you say? ‘Took you long enough.’”

“I had to find a first aid kit. Hold still.”

There were no diagnostics in his suit. I had to strip him out of it with my good hand to get to the big spreading shoulder wound. I slipped on a portable autodoc, and it fed me readings and instructions.

Meng would live. “Let’s get some pressure on that,” I said. “It’s going to hurt.”

“What about . . . bullet . . . ?”

I shook my head. “It was a soft round, meant to fragment. I don’t have the skill to get the pieces out. Let’s just stop the bleeding and get you some null plasma.” I started to work as I continued, “What were you arguing about?”

“Wanted me to launch . . . He would drive crawler to the pad, and we would leave.”

“You thought he was crazy, so you refused.”

“I thought he was GNCA security, and I told him to fuck himself.” My eyes widened, and he grinned through the pain. “We are not blind, Bader Security. We see the preparations. We see through Official Truth. The leaders want war, and us behind it. You can find the real truth if you know where to look. They prepare for war, and some of us want nothing to do with it.”

“So you didn’t know what he was up to, but you still said no.”

“He was state security. That was enough. I decided to take a stand.” Then his grin widened. “I should make an asylum claim. Will your people accept it? I can throw an Arch transport into the deal.”

I grinned back, and then tightened his pressure bandage. “I’ll put in a good word for you. But first we need to get help. A hundred people need air and water. And I’ve got news to deliver.”

“Good news?”

I shook my head. “Awful news. The war has begun.”

And my balls still itched.


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Framed