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1.6

18 November


H.S.F. Concordia

Low Earth Orbit



Raimy shouldn’t have been surprised that the pill-shaped hatchway opened straight through into Concordia’s bridge. The Mars ship was docked nose-down to the top of Transit Point, and the nose was where the bridge was located on every spaceship he’d ever heard of. Still, it was weird to swing through and see Dan Beseman, the trillionaire, strapped into the pilot’s seat and working touch screens right beside Raimy’s head.

“Hi,” Beseman said, absently and without looking up. “You must be our detective.”

Beseman was facing down toward the Earth, and Raimy’s sense of direction did a little flip-flop so that “down” was the direction Beseman’s feet were pointing. He fought back a moment of queasiness.

“I’m Raimy Vaught. Do . . . I shake your hand?”

“I would say so,” Beseman agreed, now looking Raimy in the eye. “I paid half the cost of your passage. How do you do?”

“A little motion sickness, but otherwise fine,” Raimy said. “Working the case.”

They shook hands. Beseman’s handshake was firm, but not too firm, about like Raimy’s own. A lot of cops and businessmen were given to what Raimy called “cop handshake,” which involved grabbing the other person’s hand too close to the fingers and then squeezing too hard. The result was not only borderline painful, but also made the victim feel like they had somehow screwed something up. Like they could not fully master even something as simple as a handshake. It was a dick move, and spoke (Raimy believed) to some inherent insecurity on the part of the perpetrator. Beseman didn’t seem to need to assert himself that way.

“How’s the coffee?” Beseman asked, nodding toward Raimy’s squeeze bottle.

“Not bad,” Raimy said, and almost meant it.

“I see you’re in third place for the admin slot,” Beseman said. “That’s impressive, considering the size of the initial applicant pool. You’ve got a lot of interesting experience.”

“Thank you,” Raimy answered, and was disappointed that he couldn’t keep a touch of resignation out of his voice. He should be lighthearted and casual right now, as he was recording for posterity, and maybe also being recorded by cameras here on Concordia. Or else he should be deadly serious, out of respect for Etsub, or splitting the difference somehow.

“Am I on livestream live right now?” he couldn’t help asking. He wanted, as best he could, to control his image and messaging. His own glasses were in record mode, and Geary Notbohm wasn’t wearing any, but still he might be live on the Antilympus feeds right now. With several 24/7 vidstreams to feed, the Antilympus Project fell back on a lot of live video from here. Weirdly, the streams also carried a lot of content from the Marriott Stars Hotel in low Earth orbit, which had nothing to do with Mars but which had also been built by Enterprise City LLC, and so had some of the same design DNA. Also videos from Spaceport Paramaribo.

“Right now?” Beseman said. “No, I don’t think so. They’re showing an exterior view of the ship on the main feed, and launch videos on the secondary. Our subscribers seem to have a bottomless appetite for launch videos. Especially the ones carrying material up here to Concordia, which happens almost daily.”

“The ship’s not built from extraterrestrial materials,” Raimy said. It was something he knew—that anyone closely following the project knew—but here and now it still surprised him, that such a large structure would be shipped up, piece by piece, through the gravity and atmosphere of Earth.

Beseman seemed to take his meaning, and said, “We’re certainly doing our best to use as many Lunar and asteroidal materials as possible, but the factories of Renz Ventures and Harvest Moon are still pretty limited in the range of goods they can produce, so about a third of the total mass comes from Earthly suppliers. Mostly ones we own or control, but there are some outliers. A surprising amount of stuff from Germany and Sweden, for example. You can find out more on our website, if you’re interested.”

“Thank you. I might do that.” Then: “It’s really quite a pleasure to meet you in person. This whole project is your doing. I feel . . . I mean, I’ve seen you on TV so much . . .”

“I understand,” Beseman said. “Truthfully, you have me at a disadvantage. All I know about you is what it says in your project dossier.”

“Ah. You don’t follow my feed?”

A dumb question, but Beseman answered without apology, “There are still hundreds of feeds, Mr. Vaught. I don’t even follow the leaderboard. Also, my attention is easily split, so I try to stay away from certain kind of distractions. You probably know something about that.”

“Excuse me?”

Beseman snorted, looking him over. “You’re a fidgeter, much like myself. Also, you’re barely forty years old, and you’ve already had three different careers, and you’re trying out for a fourth.”

Raimy wasn’t sure whether to be offended or what. He was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by the Navy Recruit Training Command when he was nineteen, and had declined medication or biofeedback for it.

“Hell, son,” the psychiatric corpsman had said to him at the time. “Half the people come through here got issues of one kind or another. Navy’d be out of business without ADHD. But it won’t go in your record.”

No one had ever mentioned it to Raimy again, and he himself had never breathed a word of it, even to his parents. Even to his ex-wife, or the four serious girlfriends he’d had over the course of his life. Back in the twenties and thirties it had been fashionable to talk about brain problems and brain medications in public—even in places that kept an indelible, searchable record. But the privacy pendulum had long since swung the other way, because that information really did get misused by employers and advertisers and amoral artificial intelligences. So on the occasions when Raimy thought about it at all, it was with vague embarrassment, as if the diagnosis were a personal failing. To have Dan frigging Beseman call him on it, on video and in front of Geary Notbohm, rocked him a bit.

“Oh, relax,” Beseman said, seeing his expression. “You’re among friends. Heck, you and I might be coworkers in a couple of years.” He took a breath, seeming to realize he’d overstepped. Then he looked around and spread his arms, showing off the cockpit of his spaceship, which everyone knew doubled as his office when he was off the Earth’s surface.

“I’m guessing you’ve seen this before,” he said. “Does it look different in person?”

“Bigger than I thought,” Raimy said.

And that was true; there were four seats in here, but they were spaced farther apart than Raimy had imagined, and the windows were bigger—looking down the tower of Transit Point Station to the round Earth below. Raimy refused to feel vertigo. The largeness of the cockpit actually helped with this, especially when he steadied himself on a grab bar.

The cockpit’s manual flight controls looked about like you’d expect, but the touch screens all around them were larger and more numerous than seemed necessary, or wise. The place looked almost as much like a stock exchange as it did a spaceship. And Dan Beseman was smaller than expected—probably ten centimeters shorter than Raimy, and twenty kilograms lighter—which just made the cockpit seem that much bigger.

“It’s roomy,” Beseman agreed. “Eight of us will be awake the whole trip, and that sense of interior space is vital. We also need a nice, broad aerodynamic profile for entry into the Martian atmosphere.”

The cockpit of the interplanetary ship was, of course, also the cockpit of the landing craft that would actually detach from the ship and carry a hundred people down to the planet’s surface. People were increasingly accustomed to space-built spaceships looking un-aerodynamic, but the front third of Concordia looked like a classic conical space capsule, scaled up to gargantuan size.

“Of course,” Beseman went on, “we also need to keep the mass budget very tight, so this is literally as big as we can make it and still meet our launch window. It’s as big and as small as it can possibly be.”

“Everything is optimized,” said Notbohm.

“Yeah,” Beseman agreed. “Totally. People ask why it’s taking so long to build. That’s why. Some component design comes in a bit too large or a bit too heavy, and either it goes back to the drawing board or else everything around it needs to be adjusted.” He paused a moment, and then said, “I know you’re on the clock here, but would you like to see how the controls work?”

That answer was obviously yes, so Beseman spent the next five minutes showing Raimy the basics of interplanetary piloting, and then another five showing him the landing and relaunch sequences. The explanations were quite complicated, and yet also vague and contradictory in places, because of course Beseman was an Administrator, not a Pilot. Still, Raimy envied him. He got to sit here every day, playing astronaut.

Then the absurdity of that thought caught up to Raimy. He envied a trillionaire who had his own private space program and his own private Mars colony? Really? The Buck Rogers stuff was obviously reserved for the people who could afford it, and who were quite accustomed to other people’s envy. If Raimy ever got to Mars, it would be to work his ass off, and in the meantime he was only here because he had a job to do. Also paid for by Beseman.

“Can you give me the same tour you gave Etsub Beyene?” he asked, perhaps a bit rudely. “It’s important for me to retrace his steps.”

“You think he left a trail of clues?” Beseman asked.

“Yes, sir, I do. Everyone does, and if someone killed him, then their trail intersects with his, probably multiple times.”

“Ah. And you follow it right to them.”

“Exactly. And it’s not like there’s a whole world of possibilities, either. Beyene passed through a series of choke points, where his position was known and his activities were memorable in some way. Maybe ‘trail’ is the wrong word; everyone involved has got a story. Or, you know, I’ve been thinking about it almost like a pyramid, that gets narrower the higher you go.”

“With a tiny little monastery at the top,” Beseman mused. He seemed to think that over for a couple of seconds, then finally said, “Well, good. You know your business. Now, this has been a nice break for me, talking to you, but I’m actually quite busy here, and if I remember it was Geary who gave Mr. Beyene that tour. Geary? Would you mind?”

“Not at all, Dan.”

Raimy felt another jolt of envy at that, because Notbohm was on a first-name basis with the head of the Antilympus Project. Living on board the same space station! And yet, he was still only second in line for that Hydroponics slot. Which told Raimy that the guy now in the number one slot, Anming Shui, must be really impressive. Raimy had toyed with the idea of interviewing Shui by video link, along with other suspects, just to get an idea of their general character, but had decided against it. For one thing, it went against CSPD regulations to ask murder-related questions over a remote audio or video link, and although Raimy wasn’t here on CSPD business, it still seemed a good policy Second, and more importantly, the information content of a face-to-face chat was so very much higher, and he wanted to keep his suspects in the dark until he could make that happen.

“Well, come on,” Notbohm said, kicking off toward the hatchway at the back of the cockpit.

Raimy followed, looking around at everything, and honestly unsure how much of his curiosity was driven by Etsub Beyene, and how much by self-interest. In Colorado Springs he let his attention wander wherever it liked, with some confidence that the information he was taking in would, sooner or later, “feed the monster” and help him solve whatever case he was working on. Here and now, though, he couldn’t entirely trust his own motives. Maybe Carol Beseman had made a mistake in selecting him for this job. But even if that were true, here he was, de facto. Etsub and his family deserved justice, and it was only imperfect Raimy Vaught who could find it for them.

First stop on the tour was the flight deck, where the other four acceleration chairs were located. There were no controls in here, other than a couple of video screens and a climate control console, but the walls were all storage lockers, so it was less roomy in here, even though the outside of the ship was actually wider at this point. You could see the conical shape of the landing craft in the shape of this room, which visibly widened toward the back end (or bottom end, when it was sitting on the planet’s surface, or its top end, relative to the Earth right now).

“Flight deck,” Notbohm said. “Where the Flight Medical and Flight Engineering teams sit during acceleration events. Up there”—he pointed back toward the cockpit—“is for Dan and Carol, and the two pilots.” He laughed, then added, “They serve no function up there, except owning the ship. They save the second-best seats in the house for themselves. Must be nice, ah?”

“Yeah,” Raimy agreed. Then: “Did Etsub do anything here? Did he sit in any of the seats? Work any controls?”

“He had the same tour I’m giving you. You may sit in a chair if you like, but Etsub Beyene did not. I did not observe anything suspicious during his time here, and quite frankly, his spacesuit was never onboard Concordia, so no one here could have tampered with it.”

That irritated Raimy, who said, “Let me worry about the investigation, all right? I don’t know which details are important here, and neither do you. Did Etsub talk to anyone while he was on the ship?”

“Other than myself and his fellow travelers? Only Dan and his assistant. All of the shipwrights were otherwise engaged.” He paused a moment, then said, “Do you have what you need here? Shall we continue?”

“Please.”

Notbohm then led him into a wider, more obviously tapering chamber, with eight . . . oversized bunk beds? . . . ringing the walls in an octagon pattern. Four were open and empty. Three were closed off by sliding fanfold doors. One stood open, and had a sleeping bag stuck to one surface, and various documents and photographs, mirrors and mesh bags stuck everywhere else.

“Crew quarters,” Notbohm said. “Each cabin is three meters by two by two, except the outer wall is curved, following the contour of the hull. In microgravity that’s a lot of space. It’s actually larger than my own cabin on TPS, which is itself quite roomy. In here”—he pointed to the central area, between the cabins—“there will be a kind of fold-out surface that can be used as a table or work area.” He pointed to other features: “That’s the toilet room. That’s the shower room. Both operational, as of last month. This makes the ship a lot more independent of the station, although it will be quite some time before Concordia has its own solar arrays. A treadmill will be mounted here, and a trampoline there. You’d strap into these with bungee cords, if you understand.”

“It looks a lot more finished than I’ve seen it,” Raimy said, although he was admittedly way behind in following the progress of the ship’s construction.

But Notbohm simply said, “The interior is coming together more quickly, now that the plumbing is in place, and the outer hull sealed around it.”

“Ah. And what did Etsub do while he was in here?”

“Nothing,” Notbohm said. Then, after a moment: “Actually, that’s not quite true. One of his female companions, Katla Koskinen, said something to him, and he pushed her slightly. In a friendly way, it seemed to me, but she didn’t like it.”

“In what way didn’t she like it?”

“Well, I suppose she seemed to be in a not very good mood. But their male companion, Anming, said something to her, that apparently made her feel better.”

“You don’t recall what they said?”

“I didn’t hear it over the sound of the air vents. They weren’t speaking loudly.”

“I see. And what did the other woman, Bridget Tobin, do at that time? Anything?”

“Nothing that I can recall. You should understand, these four people were clearly friends. They hovered close together, and spoke mainly to each other, as friends do. Does that help?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Next they entered a long, narrow, cylindrical tunnel lined with small doors. Notbohm said, “This is the forward cargo hold. These hatches open up into sixteen different airtight compartments, all of which have much larger hatches on the ship’s exterior. Everything is accessible from outside and in, and each compartment is capable of serving as an airlock in emergencies.”

“What kind of emergencies?” Raimy asked, thinking of submarine escape drills and other risky diving ops.

“Well, for example, if the lander comes down in the wrong spot, and a hundred people have to camp out while the rovers shuttle them to Antilympus. Or if there’s a survivable crash, or an unforeseen weather event.”

“I see.” Raimy tried to digest that information as a cop, not an astronaut. “And no emergencies have happened?”

“Not yet.”

“So, what kinds of things are stored here?”

Notbohm thumped a fist against one of the doors, which sounded like the lid of a metal ice chest. “At the moment, not very much. A reactor without fuel, a rover without engines. Some inflatable emergency shelters. Spare parts for some of the ship’s more critical components.”

“Ah.” Raimy had seen one of those shelters during his training, but hadn’t really understood what it was for.

“Eventually it will hold a year’s supply of food, along with each passenger’s spacesuit, clothing allotment, and personal effects.”

“They don’t wear their spacesuits in transit?” Raimy asked, surprised. The passengers, all ninety-two of them, were supposed to be placed in “squirrel hibernation” while still on the Earth’s surface, and not revived until they were safely on the surface of Mars. That made logistical sense—basically treating them as cargo, rather than as ninety-two bored, hungry generators of carbon dioxide and poop. But he’d always imagined them buttoned up safely in their suits, protected against sudden decompression.

“They don’t,” Notbohm agreed. “You’ll see.”

The next chamber was taller and wider than the ones before it, and very clearly a work in progress. The white walls, though covered in brackets and pipes and bundles of brightly colored cable, held only a single rectangular box, its longest axis projecting out into the room like a coffin. Three technicians hovered around the box, barely looking up as Raimy and Notbohm floated into view. They were all wearing khaki pants, and two of them—both female—wore matching jackets, zipped partway up over pale, pastel-blue T-shirts. The third technician—male—wore the T-shirt without the jacket.

These were Antilympus uniforms. Raimy’s was clean and new-looking, but on these three technicians the garments were streaked with ground-in dust and lubricants, and had a faded, many-times-laundered look about them. Like they’d been lived in, and worked in, for months. With another quiver of jealousy Raimy realized these were probably three of the lead candidates for the four Engineering slots. Already here on the job, cementing and locking their lead. Who could touch them, when they were already here? By implication, Raimy’s own losing position was probably locked in as well. He didn’t have the resources to buy his way in, or the skills or the charm to convince other people to buy it for him. And yet, he did know that some of the leaderboard positions—maybe even engineering positions—were held by men and women of modest means. It wasn’t out of the question for them to reach Mars. Just, perhaps, out of the question for Raimy himself.

“Hibernation pod,” Notbohm said, pointing at the box. “Obviously there will be a lot more of these in the future. This one is the prototype. Second-generation prototype, actually. When the techs are happy with it, they’ll turn it over to the medical team, and when they are happy, Dan and Miyuki will begin ordering the components for the other ninety-one.”

“Miyuki?”

“Dan’s assistant. That’s her,” he said, pointing to one of the women, who looked up and smiled briefly, before returning to the conversation she was having.

“That’s very hands-on,” Raimy observed, surprised that a trillionaire, or even a trillionaire’s assistant, would be involved in that kind of day-to-day minutia.

“Indeed,” Notbohm agreed. Then to Miyuki he said, “Do you mind if I open it for him?”

“No, go ahead,” Miyuki said, looking up again. She seemed to notice Raimy for the first time. “Oh, you’re that detective. Ranier Vaught?”

“Raimy.”

She pushed off gently from the hibernation pod, drifting toward Raimy and Notbohm. “Sorry, we get so many people coming through here. I’m Miyuki Ishibashi. Very pleased to meet you. I’m glad you were able to drop what you were doing and go all the way to the Moon for us.”

“It seemed important,” Raimy said.

“Yes. That poor man.”

She reached out to grasp Raimy’s hand, which had the secondary effect of arresting her motion.

“Did you know him?” Raimy asked.

“Only from his video feeds,” she said. “I didn’t know any of them—the ones on the Moon right now, I only met them very briefly. But I admire what they were trying to do. It’s not the easiest journey, and that monastery can’t be a very comfortable place to stay.”

“Have you ever been to the Moon?”

“Me? No.”

“You sound disapproving,” Raimy said.

She responded with an impatient half-smile. “Of the Moon? Perhaps. I don’t think it’s any secret I’m a Mars chauvinist. It’s a better place, isn’t it, for some lucky few of us to finish out our lives. Maybe you. Maybe me. Maybe Geary, here.”

Probably you, Raimy thought. Almost definitely.

“Indeed,” Notbohm said again. Then he pointed at the cubicle, which on its long sides was bare metal covered in tubes and wires, and on its short end was transparent, with a shiny brass handle. “These pods will be shipped up from Earth in groups of eight, each with a sleeping passenger inside, and locked into their places along the wall. Once the ship is landed and docked at Antilympus, the medical team will open the drawer . . .”

The two engineers got out of Notbohm’s way, deferentially it seemed, and hovered back along the wall where the hibernation pod was attached.

“Thank you,” he said to them, a bit absently, then pulled on the brass handle, which not only folded down the transparent door, but also rolled out a metal tray, like you’d see in a morgue. “ . . . Which provides access to the body. The, uh, patient, or colonist. Any in-flight medical anomalies can be treated right here as they happen, but most people will remain in their pods until after landing. Revived a few at a time and sent to their apartments in the township, to begin their new lives. You see? A very convenient way to travel, for those lucky enough. And yes, the cubicle is airtight, and locks automatically in an emergency condition. So it’s all quite safe.”

“Wow,” Raimy said. At the time he’d signed up for the program, these details were still TBD—to be determined. Now it seemed like things were falling together quickly. More quickly than necessary, if the flight itself was still three years away.

As if reading his thoughts, Miyuki Ishibashi said, “Our goal is to have the ship and crew all flight-ready at least twelve months before the Hohmann transfer window opens.”

Then, at Raimy’s blank look, she added, “When Mars is aligned for a minimum-energy transit.”

“Ah.” Raimy knew it was a nine-month flight, and knew it was only possible every twenty-six months. Now he knew there was a special name for it. Probably a good word for him to know, although he’d just gone on video record showing his ignorance of it.

Pointing at the hibernation pod, he asked the two of them, “What did Etsub think of this thing? He was going to climb inside one and hibernate all the way to Mars. Did he share any feelings about that?”

“Excitement,” Miyuki said.

“Healthy caution,” Notbohm added.

“Yes,” Miyuki corrected, “cautious excitement. He figured he was really going, so he wanted to know everything. Not just the equipment; he wanted to know everything that was going to happen between now and launch. He asked a lot of questions about the boost engine’s fueling process.”

“Like what?”

“Like how it was going, and why it was taking so long.”

“And why is it?”

“To push a ship this big with chemical rockets,” Notbohm said, “takes a lot of chemical. We receive fuel and oxidizer shipments from Clementine every week, and still it will be another six months before even just the lander is fueled. Twelve months beyond that for the interplanetary booster itself. And that’s assuming steady production from Clementine, which is frankly showing signs of labor unrest. You know about the defector?”

“He’s one of my chief suspects,” Raimy said, although that wasn’t strictly true. Raimy had still not come up with a plausible scenario where that made sense.

“Ah, yes. I expect he would be. But surely he’s . . .” Notbohm’s voice trailed away for a moment, probably remembering that he, too, was still a suspect. “Well, I’ve never met the man.”

After a pause, he resumed with, “HMI just got its mass driver online, so if their testing continues to go well, we might actually start receiving propellant shipments from Luna as well, possibly in just a month or two. That’s quite exciting, and not something we’d anticipated in our mission planning. If it works out, we may be able to pull the fueling schedule in slightly. But that also depends on many factors.”

“And if you make that schedule, the ship will just be parked here in orbit, fully fueled, for a whole year?” Raimy asked.

He realized this was actually pretty good video he was taking. He’d been an Antilympus candidate for eighteen months, and had beaten out a horde of competitors to get this far, but it was only the primary and backup candidates who got actual flight training, and even for them most of that training was still in the future. So there was a lot Raimy didn’t know. Probably the same was true for his viewers, so asking cop questions might just be good journalism.

“More than fully fueled, in fact,” Notbohm said. “There is excess fuel and oxidizer in the tanks—what we call ‘margin’—to account for minor leaks and course changes. Specifically, we have ten percent margin in each of the booster’s tanks, plus a little bit we call ‘residge,’ which is what remains trapped in the plumbing after the engines have shut down. That’s about one percent of the total. The lander has twenty percent margin and about 0.5 percent residge. Fortunately, landing under the influence of gravity makes it easier to squeeze out those last few drops. But in another sense it will be less than fully fueled; there’s something called ‘ullage,’ which is the dead space above the propellants in the tank. It is very difficult to fill a tank more than about ninety-eight percent full, and in zero gravity it’s best to plan for about ninety-five percent. So, the tanks need to be oversized by that amount.”

“Interesting,” Raimy said, meaning it. But then, more suspiciously, “I thought your background was in hydroponics.”

“My background is in plumbing for aerospace applications, including hydroponics.”

“Ah.”

“The tour stops here, by the way. That hatch”—Notbohm pointed at a round door in the center of the room’s far end, which was itself a large circle—“leads to a service tunnel through the center of the fuel tanks, which can be used to access certain components of the landing engine. But it’s tight in there, and there is nothing to see. And past that point is an airlock. The interplanetary booster and the aft cargo hold are not accessible without a spacesuit. Etsub Beyene did not go back there, so I assume you also will not. But I will take you if you like.”

“It sounds like that would be complicated,” Raimy agreed, “and unnecessary. I appreciate the offer, though.”

“I’m happy to cooperate,” Notbohm said.

Raimy then asked, “What did Anming Shui do on this tour? How did he seem?”

Jealous, perhaps? Murderous, perhaps?

“Just quiet,” Notbohm said.

“Yeah,” Miyuki agreed, “I didn’t really get much of a read on him. Good English, but a really bad accent, and a quiet voice that makes him hard to hear.”

“Hmm. And the others?”

“Both women seemed quite distracted,” Notbohm said. “Though I couldn’t tell you what about.”

“I see. Thank you.”

After a pause, Miyuki asked, “Have you developed any theories about what happened to Etsub?”

Raimy shrugged. “Too early to say. I’m still retracing his steps and gathering information, which can be a slow process.”

“The evidence you need is on the Moon,” Notbohm said confidently. “Not here. But speaking of retracing steps, there is something you may want to replicate: when he was here, Etsub Beyene climbed inside that hibernation pod. Are you claustrophobic?”

“I spent three years onboard an attack sub,” Raimy told him. And then, when Notbohm looked back at him with incomprehension, Raimy added, “That means no, I’m definitely not.”



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