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1.22

18 December


Peakview Apartment Complex

Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

Earth Surface



As it turned out, Raimy never did go back to the Colorado Springs Police Department. The story of his narrow escape from a blown-out airlock had gone viral, and then pandemic, and by the time he touched down on solid Earth he was fielding interview requests from dozens of talk shows, and product endorsement requests from Innotex, the manufacturer of the goo suit that had—twice, now—kept him alive in deadly environments.

He found it difficult to say no to any of these—especially the ones with free travel and even cash offers attached—and so he was kept busy for weeks, flying all over the world.

None of this seemed to affect his Mars rankings—most likely because he still looked like an idiot on camera. A highly accomplished idiot, perhaps, but he rarely volunteered information, and he answered questions with a jumble of sentence fragments that only the most talented interviewers could make him feel good about. And he always looked nervous, and always sat or stood like he had anal beads up his butt, and why the hell should the Antilympus sponsors shell out their own personal hard-earned money for that? He didn’t expect them to. It was all good.

In good humor, he actually told all this to one of his final interviewers—Howard Glass from Mars Today—in what proved to be his most authentic video appearance of the whole run.

“It’s not a skill I’d need on Mars,” he’d joked, “but it’s a skill I would need in order to get there.”

“I see the predicament,” Glass responded. “I hope you don’t mind my agreeing, but you really do need some help. You should hire an image coach.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Oh, very much so. Very much so, yes. I don’t use one myself, but they’re very common among media personalities, and especially among aspirants. And the world is full of aspirants, isn’t it?”

“Is that what I am?” Raimy asked.

“Isn’t it? This is getting pretty far afield, but let’s go with it. It’s clearly something you need if you’re going to keep trying, which it sounds like you’re on the fence about. Just take my advice, and don’t try to cheap out on it. Coaches are like lawyers; the good ones are worth a lot more than they cost. Who knows? Their influence may already be playing a decisive role in the Antilympus competition.”

Raimy thought about this for a few days afterward, but finally took the advice, and hired a woman who charged more for an hour of her time than Raimy earned in a whole day at CSPD. But she prepped him for the Innotex commercial, which happened at the end of his talk show run and actually went quite well indeed. He looked and sounded better than he ever had, and of course the product spoke for itself.

“It’s not something you ever want to need,” Raimy told the cameras, “but it’s not something you ever want to be without.”

That message seemed to resonate, and so once its paid placements had run out, the ad lived on for a time, boosted along by viral sharing not only among firefighters and space enthusiasts, but also divers, spelunkers, coal miners, natural gas workers, and anyone else who worried about suddenly running out of breathable air.

And so Raimy’s fifteen minutes of fame got extended a little longer.

It still didn’t really help his rankings, but that was fine, and to his surprise it did result in more offers to travel to outer space. Did he want to spend a week at Transit Point Station, training people in his survival techniques? Could he spend the week after that at the Marriott Stars, shooting some TV commercials for them?

He said yes to both things, barely pausing to check how much they were offering to pay him, because of course the travel costs would be in the high tens of millions of dollars, and he’d be happy if a thousandth of that landed in his pockets. And as it turned out, they were offering a bit more than that.

So he cleared his schedule and was preparing for another trip to General Spacesuit, to get fitted for something a little lighter and more flexible than a moon suit.

He was packing for the trip when his rollup chime announced an incoming video call. He’d been fielding a lot of these, lately, and didn’t think much about it as he pulled the thing off his nightstand, unrolled it, and answered. Only then did he remember he was dressed in his plain old Earth underwear.

“Hello?” he said, angling the phone up toward his face.

“Good morning, sir,” said an old white man with a gruff British accent. “Do you know who I am?”

Raimy didn’t for a moment. And then he did, but couldn’t believe it. And then, after staring for three whole seconds, he blurted out, “Lawrence Edgar Killian?”

Raimy’s mind couldn’t quite take it in, but somehow his mouth went right on speaking. “What can I do for you this fine afternoon?”

Killian chuckled at that. “I seem to have caught you in the middle of something, Mr. Vaught. Is this a bad time?”

“Not especially,” Raimy said, with a kind of calm now settling over him. He was in Bonus Round, and the world was full of surprises.

“Well, then, may I call you Raimy?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Please call me Lawrence, and I mean that. Now, I understand you used to race motorcycles. That’s something you and I have in common. I’m also a deep-sea diver, though not as accomplished as you. Sir, I’d like to start by saying how impressed I am, that you managed to survive that airlock incident. You displayed quick thinking, and quick action, under a level of duress most of us will thankfully never experience.”

His accent was odd. Not upper-class English, or at least not completely so; there was a regional working-class lilt at the back of it that Raimy figured was a holdover from Killian’s parents. Too, his voice had coarsened with age, becoming slow and grainy and blurred in a way that transcended ethnic and national origins. A citizen of old age.

“Thank you,” Raimy answered sincerely. “I regret I wasn’t able to save Anming Shui.”

“Oh, goodness,” Killian said, without judgment, “if you had tried to do that, you wouldn’t be alive to have this conversation with me. This is partly what I mean about quick thinking. The American Navy must train its people very well indeed. Either that or you’re a born astronaut, which is fine, too. I’d like to thank you for solving this crime.”

“Not well enough or soon enough,” Raimy said.

Killian tsked at that. “Once again, Raimy, Mr. Shui’s death was not your fault. He could have exonerated himself and laid the blame on Katla Koskinen at any moment. But he chose not to. Love is a funny thing, isn’t it? Even knowing she’d betrayed him, he held his tongue. She must have had quite a hold on him.”

“Yes. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

“And if not for your unlikely survival, she’d be guilty of three murders and still on her way to Mars. One wonders how many bad actors might be in space already. Of course, some would say I’m one of them.”

Which was an odd thing to say because Killian had never actually been to outer space, and of the Four Horsemen, he also had the gentlest reputation. Igbal Renz was a drug addict and a womanizer. Grigory Orlov, a straight-up robber baron. Dan Beseman was tone-deaf in his determination to make Mars his own, and Raimy was among the people who half-expected him to declare himself King of Mars once he got there.

But aside from a flair for the theatrical and (in days gone by) for the physically daring, Sir Lawrence seemed harmless enough. A sweet old man, ten years a widower and still wearing the ring.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Raimy told him. And then, because he was in Bonus Round and had nothing to lose or gain, he added, “Opinions vary, but I’ve always kind of liked you.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Killian said, sounding genuinely flattered. “Because I’d like to offer you a full-time job. On the Moon.”

Raimy, who was done turning corpses over in the rain, and who was not going to Mars and was not romantically involved with Bridget or with anyone else, simply shrugged and said, “I accept.”



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