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1.21

13 November


U.S. Olympic Training Center

Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

Earth Surface



As Raimy ran past a group of people he didn’t recognize, a woman’s voice called out:

“Raimy Vaught? Can we have a word?”

It took him a couple of seconds to process that, by which time he was twenty meters further down the track. He was running in the field house of the Olympic Training Center, because it was cold and windy and snowing outside, and he didn’t dare risk injury by running on the street. He’d done eight kilometers already, and though he’d been left in the dust by the actual Olympians training with him, he was pretty deep in his personal running zone. But okay, once he’d figured out they were talking to him, he slowed, stopped, and turned to face the group of people. There were three of them, and they were all wearing lightweight jackets that were arguably too warm for the nearly room-temperature air in here, but very definitely not warm enough for the snowy weather outside.

“Can we have a word?” the woman repeated. She was white and blonde, and even from a distance Raimy could see she oozed money from every perfect pore. There was actually something vaguely familiar about her, although the woman and man on either side of her were unknown to him.

His camera drones took an interest, their pea-brained AIs spreading the five cameras out to form an ellipse with himself at one focus and the three strangers at the other. This was not particularly remarkable, as (per his contract) the drones followed him around most of the time, capturing and live-streaming nearly everything about his life. Suspended on streams of ionized air, they were small and nearly silent, though hardly unobtrusive.

“Sure,” he said, walking back in their direction. “Do I . . . know you?”

“We’ve never met,” she said, “but you’re competing for a chance to work alongside me.”

The face clicked.

“Carol Beseman?” Wife of Dan Beseman? Wife of the trillionaire founder of Enterprise City, presently residing in low Earth orbit aboard the H.S.F. Concordia? Technically the owner of Raimy’s camera drones?

“That’s right. It’s nice to meet you, Detective.”

And that was a strange thing for her to call him. It was his rank in the Colorado Springs Police Department, but it had nothing to do with her, and nothing to do with his bid to join the Besemans’ Mars colony. If he were in first place for that competition, she might call him “Colonist,” which was the title afforded to anyone living in space, or planning to. Since he certainly was not winning, though, the applicable title was “Candidate Vaught,” or just “Candidate.”

But why was she calling him anything at all? It didn’t make sense that she was even here, because he was currently number three in the running for the colony’s Male Administrator slot, and only the number one would actually get to fly. Raimy might be determined to play this reality-show contest to the bitter end—it was why he was out running almost every day, or in the police station weight room hoisting barbells—but he only had nineteen thousand sponsors and ten million pledged dollars, and any fool could see that was never going to move him into second place, much less first. Like all of the Antilympus colony’s hopefuls, he was an overqualified human being who looked great on paper, but that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t going to cut it, and on a detective’s salary, he was never going to afford a private ticket into space, either. So the whole astronaut thing was pretty much a pipe dream. Candidate, indeed.

Why would someone like Carol Beseman take time to visit someone like Raimy Vaught? His minor celebrity status would not impress her; the underdogs and also-rans were of no real concern to the project. At best, Raimy was the understudy to the understudy of the man who would actually land in Antilympus Crater.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, stepping up and offering her a handshake, which she politely accepted.

“You’re a certified Navy diver, yes?” said the woman beside Carol Beseman.

“Yes,” he said, shifting his gaze and handshake over to her. “Hi. Raimy Vaught.”

“Hello,” she said. “Tracy Greene.”

Tracy’s skin was darker than Raimy’s own, and there was something hard and impatient about her. The man standing on the other size of Carol Beseman stuck his own hand out and said, “Emil Fonseca, Human Resources. Pleasure to meet you.”

“Hi,” Raimy said. Then, to Tracy Greene, “I was a diver and a submariner, yes, but that was a long time ago.” As his sponsors and followers well knew, he’d gotten out of the Navy as quickly as he could, then gone to law school, become a prosecuting attorney and assistant DA for El Paso County, and then (in a move that confused nearly everyone, including his parents) quit that to join the Colorado Springs Police Department.

“How much total dive time have you logged?” Tracy wanted to know.

“About three hundred hours,” he said. “Not much by Navy standards, but I never had a serious accident.”

“And you’ve had basic spacesuit training,” she said. It didn’t appear to be a question.

“Six hours, yes. As I’m sure you know.” All the serious Antilympus contenders had. Once you hit a million dollars in pledges and passed the basic psych and confinement evaluations, you had to go through two weeks of “astronautics training” (cynically referred to as “space camp”), of which the spacesuit training—scary for many people—was one of the centerpieces. It was all really just an excuse to weed out another seventy-five to eighty percent of the candidate pool before putting the survivors up in front of an audience. Four hundred survivors, initially, and now down to just two hundred ninety. Still too many for the fans to follow in any great detail.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Finally, Raimy said to Carol Beseman, “You live in Oregon, right? You look like you just flew here. What’s this about?”

“How many suspicious deaths have you investigated?” Tracy Greene demanded.

“Too many to count,” he answered honestly. “Dozens, at least. Why?”

Carol Beseman said, “We’ve had a death in the Antilympus program that we’d like you to investigate.”

“A death? Who? One of the candidates?”

She nodded grimly. “Yes. A botanist, Etsub Beyene. Ethiopian American.”

“I know Etsub, yeah. But isn’t he....”

“On the Moon? Yes. Studying low-gravity horticulture at St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery. He died in an EVA accident, and we think he might have been murdered.”

“Okay,” Raimy said slowly, taking all of that in. In his line of work, he dealt with death all the time, and liked to think it didn’t faze him, although of course it did. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to die in a spacesuit, during “extravehicular activity.” Tried and failed—his mind playing out a vivid simulation for him: trying to breathe and not being able to. Not like drowning at all—just a sucking emptiness flattening the walls of Etsub Beyene’s lungs together. It must have been awful. “What’s this got to do with me? Am I . . . what am I, a suspect?”

Carol Beseman looked confused for a moment. “What? How would you . . . No, you’re a cop. You’re the closest thing we have to a space cop. Both the Catholic Church and Harvest Moon Industries have agreed to grant us jurisdiction, and your bosses at the CSPD have agreed to a leave of absence without pay. We’ll cover your salary, along with a substantial hazard bonus.”

Raimy frowned. “‘We,’ meaning . . .”

“Myself and my husband, yes.”

“Huh.”

Raimy was momentarily at a loss for words. All of that seemed quite presumptuous—they’d arranged things with his employer before even talking to him? But the distortion field surrounding Dan Beseman’s wealth made almost anything possible. He was a trillionaire—one of the Four Horsemen—rich enough to afford his own robotic Mars colony, and a spaceship big enough to carry a hundred people there.

“To do what?” Raimy asked, still not quite sure he was getting it. Not daring to be sure.

“To investigate a possible homicide,” Carol said, now a bit impatiently.

“On the fuc . . . on the Moon?”

“Yes,” she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

And that was how Raimy Vaught got a ticket to fly in space after all.



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