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1.8

21 November


H.S.F Pony Express

Cislunar Space



The Lunar approach and landing were somewhat frightening to Raimy, despite Halladay’s repeated assurance that it was going “nominally,” and was in any case painfully routine. The EOLS capsule (“Earth Orbit to Lunar Surface” or “eeyoll,” if you really wanted to abbreviate) was, for fuck’s sake, pointed nose-down toward the surface of the Moon, which seemed to rush by faster and faster with each passing minute. Raimy wasn’t clear on why the capsule was moving sideways over the terrain rather than simply diving down toward it, but he supposed they were still technically in orbit—just an orbit that would soon intersect the ground.

“You’d better get your helmet on,” Halladay said, retrieving his own from the rack underneath his seat and latching it in place over the suit’s aluminum neck collar.

Raimy didn’t like the sound of that, but he did as he was told, fumbling for his own helmet, and managed to put it on and latch it into place without losing it to weightlessness. It was annoying; he was in excellent physical shape, and he could do the CSPD combat handgun course in his sleep, with a near-perfect score. And yet, his space reflexes needed a lot of work. At least he’d stopped barfing.

Halladay’s suit was the same bulky GS Heavy Rebreather design as Raimy’s, in the same eyeball-searing orange color. Against the whites and blacks and chromes of the spaceship interior, it looked like serious business indeed. Safer than not wearing one, but it also underscored the very real danger they were in.

Raimy told himself: This is nothing. You once swam three hundred vertical meters from the escape lock of a submarine, wearing nothing but a dive skin and a goo suit. But he was in control, then. Not a passenger.

“Your boy Andrei Bykhovski, the defector, had a much rougher time of it,” Halladay said, looking at Raimy’s discomfort with obvious amusement.

“My boy?” Raimy asked, catching perhaps a whiff of racism there.

“Your suspect. Whatever you want to call him. Now that’s a ride I wouldn’t want to take, strapped to that fucking gas lander, oh my God. I wonder what the hell he was running from. Or who.”

“He’s not high on the suspect list,” Raimy said, then silently kicked himself for revealing it to someone who, after all, had interacted with the victim himself. The victim and his spacesuit. In front of three witnesses, in a tiny ship with zero privacy, but still. There were so many people who could have had a hand in Etsub Beyene’s death. People with opportunity and perhaps even means, but no clear motive that Raimy could see. Not yet. But that’s how some investigations were. And yeah, sometimes the obvious motives pointed to the wrong people, and you eventually caught the actual perp without ever figuring out why he did it. Maybe Beyene said something that Halladay didn’t like, or that somebody didn’t. Maybe Antilympus had nothing to do with it.

Still, it was hard to keep his mind on such things, with the God Damn Moon scrolling by above his head. “Are you going to point us right side up anytime soon?” he asked, more nervously than he would have liked.

But Halladay was already doing it, and then, as the ship rotated around to its new orientation, Raimy could no longer see the ground. And that turned out to be actually a little worse, because it let him fear the thing he couldn’t see. His startle reflex was triggered every time the main engine fired, which was often. The acceleration of it (or deceleration, he supposed) pressed him into his seat like the hand of God.

And yet it was also better, because at one point after the engine cut out for the fourth or fifth time, the sense of acceleration continued, and the ship felt oddly quiet, with only the hum of fans and the faint tick-tick of cooling metal, somewhere behind one of the padded wall panels.

Halladay’s running commentary with Shackleton ground control changed character as well. Instead of “Sierra Lima two-five on approach,” or “Sierra Lima two-five requesting ground clearance,” he said, “Sierra Lima two-five reporting zero velocity, zero power.”

And instead of something like “Roger two-five. Sierra Lima Ground reporting clear dropway surface,” the (female, and very British) voice of Ground was saying, “Copy you down, two-five. Welcome back.”

“Did we land?” Raimy asked, hardly believing it.

“Gentle as a kiss,” Halladay confirmed. Then: “Ground, do you have escort for my passenger?”

To which Ground replied, “Confirmed: two students en route from Saint Joe. They should be here by the time you’ve cycled your locks.”

“Roger that. Depressurizing the module now.” Then, to Raimy, “God’s sakes, man, look out the window. You’re on the Moon!”

But Raimy couldn’t see the ground, even when he craned his neck inside the massive spacesuit helmet. “Can I unlatch my safety harness?”

“Sure,” Halladay said, still flipping switches and reading indicators. Apparently, setting down softly on the Lunar surface and turning off the motor didn’t mean he was done piloting.

Raimy was startled by a sort of grinding, gurgling noise, which he had just enough astronautics experience to recognize as the sound of a vacuum pump, yanking the air out of the EOLS and stuffing it back into a storage tank. He could feel the spacesuit stiffening and ballooning around him, and for a moment he felt the same sense of panic he always did as a diver, when the water closed over his head and he had to force himself to take that first critical breath from his regulator. But now, as then, the feeling lasted only a moment, and then he was in familiar territory, breathing normally as the needle of the “external pressure” gauge inside his helmet crept slowly down.

Halladay had told him the cycle would take fifteen minutes to complete, although it could be done much faster in emergencies. But Raimy could see this was one of those asymptotic, diminishing-returns situations, as the pressure dropped by fully fifty percent in the first half minute, and only then started to slow down.

The arm of his suit felt stiff now, like a partially inflated motorcycle tire, but its cunningly designed joints slid and pivoted and rotated so smoothly that he had no trouble moving his hand to the release button at the center of his five-point harness. The glove of the suit was similarly complex; he could feel the pressure inside it pushing his hand out flat, splaying and straightening the fingers, but he could also feel the joint pneumatics pushing in the other direction, so that he easily balled his fingers, with only the pointer extended, and released the harness. It was, in a way, like wearing an articulated steel glove, or controlling a spider robot with one of those thingies that fit over your fingers. He had to give credit to General Spacesuit, because as strange as it was to move in this suit, it wasn’t that strange. He felt like he knew exactly how to do it.

Throwing off his harness was interesting, because he wasn’t in zero gravity anymore, but neither was he back on Earth. No, he was at 0.165 gee, where things behaved almost exactly as though they were underwater. Standing up in his suit was like trying to stand on the bottom of a swimming pool with his scuba gear on and his buoyancy compensator deflated. Totally doable, and not really that alien a sensation.

He took his first step cautiously, and his second with greater confidence, and then he was at the window, looking out at the flat, gray surface of the Moon and, fifty meters off, a portion of a habitat module casting very long shadows down onto the soil.

“You’ll get a better view from the other side,” Halladay told him.

“I feel like the Michelin Man,” Raimy observed.

“Yeah, these suits are balloony in vacuum. Keep you safe from the harsh outdoors, though. It’s very hot in the sun, which never sets here. It’s also very cold in the shade, and as you’ll see, there’s shade everywhere. Without the suit’s circulation system, the shadow of a tiny hill could freeze you to death.”

“Yeah, the guy at GS told me the suit was full of water.”

“That’s right, and a little propylene glycol to keep it from freezing. Your drink tube is hooked up to the same system.”

Raimy hadn’t tried his drink tube yet, but he did so now. It had a beefier version of the “bite valve” you saw on wearable canteens, and the water that came out of it was warm—skin temperature, maybe—and it felt very slightly syrupy against his tongue, and tasted very faintly of salt, or unsweetened Gatorade. It tasted just fine.

The view from the window on the EOLS’ other side was indeed better: he could see more of the moonbase—several different modules, an antenna tower, and some spindly-tall solar panels that absolutely could not have stood up like that on Earth.

“It’s bigger than I expected,” he said.

“Shackleton? Yeah, it sprawls a bit. It’s an advertisement.”

“For Lunar settlement?”

“Yup. It has to include at least one of every different module type, plus a lot of interior space. It’s a lot less crowded inside than Transit Point, I’ll tell you that.”

Raimy had seen the place many times on video, but he realized now it was one of those things like the White House or the Grand Canyon, where photographs simply couldn’t convey the scale of the thing. Any frame wide enough to admit the whole complex would also inherently shrink it.

“I wish we were going in there,” he said. “I’d like to see it.”

“You will on your way out,” Halladay said. “It’s on my itinerary.”

“Oh, are you my return pilot as well?”

Halladay nodded inside his helmet. “Yup, you and the three students. Their stint is nearly up, so they’ll all be heading back to Earth when you’re done with them. Etsub’s body is coming, too.”

Raimy tried not to react to that. Tried and mostly succeeded, but Jesus, whose idea was that? Putting him in a small ship with his three main suspects, plus the victim? He supposed it wasn’t that different than sharing the monastery with them, which was also a bad idea, but kind of inherently unavoidable. Of course, on the other hand, a trip from the Moon back to Transit Point Station cost tens of millions of dollars, and the reentry trip from there back to Paramaribo was only slightly cheaper. Raimy couldn’t expect an endless supply of empty spaceships rolled out for him alone.

“Huh. Okay. Well.”

“Be awkward if one of them was guilty, huh? You going to put handcuffs over a spacesuit?”

Annoyed now, Raimy said, “I really can’t discuss it, Captain.”

But it would be awkward, yes. Raimy’s personal effects included not only his CSPD badge (which of course meant nothing out here) and handcuffs, but also a selection of different sizes of zip tie, in case he needed to get creative. Notably absent was his service revolver, as Harvest Moon, the Antilympus Project, Transit Point Station and the Catholic Church had unanimously decreed that there would be no deadly weapons involved in this venture. Everyone seemed to be presuming that the suspect, if caught, would simply cooperate. And a great many murderers did, yes. But others tried to run, a few tried to fight, and a worrying number went out of their way to get shot by the police rather than apprehended intact.

Raimy wished those people knew that the shot that dropped them had only about a twenty percent chance of actually killing them, and they would simply wind up handcuffed to a hospital bed. Still caught, still guilty, and with injuries that might never fully heal. Modern police training discouraged the old “double tap to the center of mass,” and a standard-issue service revolver these days was loaded with low-grain .38 rubber-coat ammunition. Deadlier stuff could be droned in with a few minutes’ lead time, if the cops were facing a particularly tough customer, but Raimy had never done that. In fact, like most American police, Raimy had never actually fired a shot in the course of his duty. And if he ever did, he’d be aiming for the buttocks or the solar plexus, not the heart.

“How’s the suit feeling?” Halladay asked, after a few minutes of quiet. Not with any real concern—just making conversation.

“Fine,” Raimy said, still looking out at the moonbase, and the gray Lunar landscape around it. “It’s actually . . . It’s somehow stiffer and more flexible than I was expecting. Like the stiffness doesn’t matter. I thought it would feel like the inside of a tire, but it’s more like having a whole stack of tires around your arm.”

“That’s a good way to describe it,” Halladay agreed. “And believe me, these third-gen suits are a big improvement over what we used to have.”

“Well, lucky me.”

Another period of silence. Raimy did not get tired of looking out that window. He was a real astronaut, now, and he was going to get the most out of that.

He saw the helmets first, rising above the crest of a low hill, and by the time he figured out what he was looking at, the arms and torsos had appeared as well.

“I see two people out there,” he reported.

There were no heat shimmers, no atmospheric haze, so the scene looked vaguely fake somehow as the two figures cleared the hill, their orange spacesuits brightly lit on one side and brightly shadowed on the other. Here at the Moon’s south pole, the sun was permanently just above the horizon.

“That will be your escort,” Halladay said. “Let’s switch your radio over to the Saint Joe channel.”

The control was a little knob on Raimy’s left forearm, and had four positions: hmi, private, general, and emergency. It was currently set to hmi.

“Private?”

“Yes. Or general, but then all this chatter will be cluttering up both channels. Private is for the monastery and observatory. HMI is for Harvest Moon business only, which we’re arguably no longer doing.”

“How is Emergency different from General?”

“Higher power, and duplex override. It’ll wake up radios that are turned off, and it will suppress any chatter that might interfere with your signal. Look, don’t worry about it. These all go out over the same frequency—it’s just ones and zeroes on the network.”

Halladay turned the knob on his own suit, and went silent.

Raimy did likewise, and immediately heard a female voice on the channel, saying, “ . . . positive visual contact. Eduardo, is that you?”

“Affirmative, Katla,” said Halladay’s voice. “Sierra Lima two-five is currently depressurizing. You are safe to approach.”

“Roger that.”

“Who’s that with you?” Halladay asked.

“Tobin.”

“Roger that. Hello, Katla and Tobin. I have a passenger for you.”

“Roger that.”

“You need a call sign,” Halladay said to Raimy. “Preferably two to three syllables, so it’s easy to understand. Most people use their first or last name, but I would not recommend using ‘Vaught.’ Too easy to get lost in the noise.”

“Raimy is fine.”

“Roger that. Katla, Tobin, this is Raimy.”

“Tobin here,” said a second female voice. “Hello. Welcome to Luna.”

“Thanks,” Raimy said.

“Hi. Katla here. We’re standing by. Estimated time to hatch open?”

“Four minutes.”

“Oh, bother,” said Katla. “Why didn’t you depressurize on the way down?”

“I used to,” Halladay said to her. “Mayflower still does, but you really kind of have to trust your luck for that. If something goes wrong, you’ve got less time and fewer options for dealing with it. I keep telling her, her precious schedule is not worth someone’s life.”

“Doesn’t a pressurized landing increase the risk of a depressurization injury?”

“Only if we crash really hard. In which case, you know, we’ve got worse problems. So, you know, shut up. You can wait a couple minutes.”

“Roger that,” Katla said. “Brother Michael says ‘love the airlock,’ and I kind of get what he means. There’s a lot of waiting around in this business.”

“Roger that.”

Halladay was silent for a few seconds, then added, in a tone of greater concern, “How are people holding up over there?”

“Oh, about like you’d think,” Katla replied. “Tense. Sad. Jumpy. It’s a lot to take in, and with Bykhovski hanging around, it’s all quite chaotic.”

“No one knows what to do with a defector,” Halladay agreed.

“Or a dead body,” Katla said.

She was obviously Katla Koskinen, the number one candidate for the Female Hydroponics slot at Antilympus. Raimy had seen her on video, of course, and right now he could only see her face through two helmet visors and a triple-paned window. And her voice was somewhat distorted by the radio, but still, she came across as a smooth, confident person. She did not sound tense or sad. Maybe a little bit jumpy. She did, however, sound Northern European. Raimy wasn’t confident he could distinguish a Finnish accent—especially one as slight as hers—but her dossier said she was a Finnish citizen who had spent most of her adult years abroad.

“Roger that.”

As far as Raimy could tell, his pressure gauge was at dead-nuts zero, but the timer over the side hatch was still gamely counting down. Finally, it also reached zero, and a band of gently glowing red around the hatchway switched to green.

“Depressurization sequence complete,” Halladay said. He moved to the hatch and turned its wheel, silently releasing whatever clamps or latches were holding it. The band of light turned white, and the hatch swung outward, revealing a little platform with handrails and ladder rungs leading down to the actual fucking Moon.

“After you, Raimy.”

Raimy did not need to be asked twice. He grabbed his now-inflated flight bag, threw it over his shoulder, and got his butt out there. Then he turned to face the ladder and climbed down, carefully but not slowly. The EOLS capsule sat on top of a fuel tank ten meters tall, so the ladder had thirty rungs on it, which Raimy took one by one. Then one small step, just like Armstrong said, and he was on the surface. For real. Mars might be a daydream, but this was not.

“I’m down,” he said, stepping away from the ladder to make room for Halladay.

Raimy took in a deep breath of spacesuit air, and slowly exhaled it. He had wanted to be an astronaut ever since he was seven years old, obsessively watching NASA TV while crewed spacecraft docked at the International Space Station, and while those crews horsed around in zero gravity. He’d joined the Navy because it was a lot like joining Starfleet, and he’d become a diver and a submariner because he didn’t have pilot reflexes, and that was as close as he figured he’d ever get to being an astronaut. When Dan Beseman had first announced the Antilympus Project, Raimy had gone ahead and signed up, along with a hundred million other people around the world. But he’d actually made it through that brutal first cut that reduced the applicant pool to just fifty thousand. And then like a greased pig he’d slithered effortlessly through the psych evaluation, and the physical testing, and then the second cut. And then he’d gotten some sponsors and actually started climbing in the rankings, all the way to third place, and it seemed like he might actually go the distance. Like he might actually spend the rest of his life under the butterscotch skies of Mars!

But nah. It had always been a crazy dream, and he’d been a fool to let hope get the better of him. Raimy wouldn’t make the first expedition, and if National Geographic’s Tim Long Chang had anything to say about it, Raimy wouldn’t be on the second one, either. And if there ever was a third expedition, Raimy would be in his fifties, and would he really have waited that long to start his life? No. By then, surely, he’d have a new wife and some kids and a riding lawnmower, and anyway some younger, stronger, more charismatic guy would have sidled up and edged into first place. Raimy knew he was good—really good—but on a planetary scale he simply wasn’t the best, and never would be.

And yet, here he was, standing on the surface of the Moon.

He turned to look at his escorts whose spacesuit nametags said k. koskinen and b. tobin. “Hi.”

“Hello,” said Tobin, with a little wave. Bridget Tobin. Raimy had seen her on video as well, but through her helmet visor he would not have recognized her. Space had puffed up both her cheeks and her hair, which was held back from her face with a band of broad white elastic. Her accent was unmistakably Irish.

“I’ve seen you both on video,” Raimy said to them. “And on the leaderboards. I’d guess one of you is definitely going to Mars.”

What he didn’t say—didn’t need to say—was that they were both murder suspects, so one of them might well be going to prison while the other one went to Mars. Except that like Eduardo Halladay, they didn’t really seem have a motive, barring personal grudges he didn’t yet know about.

If his investigation didn’t pan out here on the Moon, he could follow up with Earthly witnesses to find out more about those relationships. It was another way this whole thing was wrong and backwards, because Etsub Beyene had been dead for nearly a week, and Raimy still knew next to nothing. And it would be at least another week before he set foot on Earth again. He didn’t like it. He could almost feel the trail going cold. But it occurred to him that he could ask Tracy Greene to hire a few private investigators, to chase down some of those Earth-type questions in his absence. That could work.

“I’ve seen you, too,” said Bridget Tobin.

After a pause, Raimy told her, “Thank you for not saying it.”

“Saying what?”

“That I’m not going to Mars.”

“Oh, you never know. Truly. Unexpected things happen every day.”

“Eduardo here. I’m coming down.”

“The path below you is clear,” said Katla. “We’re watching.”

Indeed, both women riveted their attention on Halladay as he closed the hatch behind him and clambered down the ladder in his bulky orange suit. It didn’t take him long to reach the bottom.

“Safely down,” he said.

“Copy that,” Katla agreed. “We’ll escort you as far as the Shackleton airlock. Do you need us to stand by while you cycle?”

“Affirmative. There are no HMI personnel currently on EVA, so I’m out here alone.”

“Roger that. More waiting around.”

They followed Halladay toward the nearest module of the moonbase, which included an airlock clearly marked out in black and yellow chevrons. Raimy tried to walk more or less normally, bounding from one foot to the other in the low gravity, but he noticed he was the only one doing that. Eduardo, Katla, and Tobin were all doing a sort of bunny hop. Raimy tried it, and it was in fact easier. It looked rather silly, truth be told, but took less energy and attention to maintain his balance, so he went with it.

Yellow dome lights flashed around the airlock when Halladay opened it up, and extinguished again when he trundled in and closed it behind him.

“I’m in,” he said. “Commencing pressurization sequence.”

“Raimy, you need to stand back from the door,” Katla said. “If it fails during pressurization, it’s going to blow off of there like a cannon.”

“Ah,” Raimy said, hopping out of the way. “Is that an actual safety protocol?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re strict about that?”

Socially, it was the wrong thing to say, given that Beyene’s death might still have been an accident. Beyene was outside alone, which was a definite breach of protocol. And of course Andrei Bykhovski had arrived on Luna in just about the unsafest way possible, which just showed how insensitive Raimy was being. But he was in cop mode now, gathering up information. He wasn’t here to make friends.

But Bridget Tobin answered, “There’s just not much room for error up here, Detective. Etsub shouldn’t have been out there alone. If he’d had an escort, there might have been time to get him to an airlock, or set up an emergency tent, or something.”

“No,” Katla said. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. That air hose was gone. He was dead in sixty seconds. Unconscious after thirty.”

“You seem awfully sure,” Raimy observed. But he knew what she meant. The same kind of thing was true in diving accidents: once the guy breathed water, he was pretty much dead beyond saving, even if the body took a little while to catch up.

“It’s my professional opinion,” Katla said.

And then they were quiet for a while, until Tobin finally said, “You know, Raimy, you don’t need to hang around here by the airlock with us. Long as you stay within fifty meters, you can hop around and throw rocks and stuff. You’re on the fookin’ Moon.”

“I’m here to do a job,” Raimy stated flatly, in his best professional tone.

“Yeah? Well, you’re not doing it right now.”

Thinking about that, Raimy said, “This might actually be a good time to start my interviews.”

On an open channel, he would of course try to stay away from incriminating details. Later on he would question them both privately, to see if their stories matched up; this would be more like the kind of questioning that happened at the actual scene of a crime: What happened? Where were you standing? Superficial stuff, but it provided a framework for more detailed questioning later on.

But Tobin countered, “Aw, don’t be an arsehole. Play around for a minute of your life. How angry will you be, someday on your deathbed, thinking all the things you should’ve done and didn’t? Here, I’ll even come with you. See? Boing! Boing! Look at me go.”

She hopped away, making longer and higher arcs, and then started throwing her hands up and bending her knees, to increase her altitude and hang time. The results were impressive; without seeming to try very hard, and despite the massive spacesuit weighing her down, she got almost a meter off the ground, and spent nearly two seconds in the air. Or in the vacuum, or whatever.

Raimy was extremely reluctant to screw around, when other people were paying hundreds of millions of dollars for him to be here. Also for safety reasons, and because it was undignified, and because Etsub Beyene was dead. But still very tempting, yes.

“You’re going to crack your helmet,” he told her.

“Am I? Boing! Boing!”

“It would take a lot more than that,” Katla observed. Katla, who worried about an airlock door blowing out for no reason.

Tobin stopped jumping and said, “You think people will survive on Mars if they don’t have fun? For the rest of their lives? I’m activating my helmet cam. I’m recording you for the Antilympus feeds. Hello, everyone. This is Bridget Tobin, coming to you from outside Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station. And this is Raimy Vaught, an administration candidate from . . . Colorado, is it?”

“Colorado Springs, yes.”

“Raimy was just explaining the importance of play in maintaining a healthy work environment, on and off the Earth. Isn’t that right?”

There was something infectious about her attitude, and Raimy would indeed have been tempted to jump around with her if she hadn’t switched on her damned camera. But she had, so what he said was, “Ms. Tobin, a man is dead, and I’m here to figure out why. There is certainly a time and a place for recreation, yes, but this isn’t it. Not for me.”

“Oh,” said Tobin, her bounce slowing. “You go and play that card. We loved Etsub, you know. Very close friends, all of us. I’ve been crying every day and every night. But I’ll tell you, that man knew how to have a good time. It doesn’t honor him if we mope around.”

“I’m not here to honor him,” Raimy said, with such seriousness that he sounded like an asshole even to himself. And because he’d already blown his chance to have fun, he went ahead and switched on his own suit camera and said, “I’m here to investigate the circumstances of his death, which are quite bizarre. Where were you when it happened? Turn your camera off, please; this is an ongoing investigation.”

Tobin was silent for ten full seconds, before saying, “It’s like that, is it? All right, I’m sorry. Truly. I’ve never known how to act when someone dies. They don’t exactly teach you that in school. Maybe your school they do. Detective school, or, you know.” She paused another moment, and then said, “It was three o’clock in the morning, sir. I was asleep, and I stayed asleep even when Bykhovski’s emergency call came through. I didn’t wake up until the monks started getting their spacesuits on. There was a lot of shouting and general chaos. Nobody knew what was happening. Bykhovski basically appeared out of nowhere, and he wasn’t really making sense. Not to me, not then.”

“What happened after that?”

“Giancarlo and Michael went outside. Those are two of the monks. And then they came back in, with Bykhovski and Etsub. We still weren’t sure he was dead. Hamblin got Etsub’s helmet off and shocked him with the suit defibrillator. Breathed in his mouth and all that. Bykhovski was just standing around. They were both just filthy, all covered in moondust, which is a carcinogen. It was getting everywhere, and all I could say was, what the hell was he doing outside? Bykhovski had his own helmet off by then, and I was asking him. What was he doing outside? Why was he out there in the middle of the night? This bloke just dropped out of the sky, and I’m expecting him to know what’s happening. I didn’t even ask who he was. It was . . . I’ve . . . You’ve never seen such pandemonium. That’s when I started crying.”

“It was absolute chaos,” Katla agreed. “It took us hours to piece together any sort of picture.”

“Were you also asleep?” Raimy asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Very. But unlike Bridget, I woke up when the emergency message came through. They did a rapid cycle in and out of the airlock, but even so it took a long time to get Etsub inside. I made tea while we were waiting.”

“You made tea?”

“That’s what the monks call it. It’s actually just ground-up roots and caffeine, but I was pressing mugs of it into people’s hands. Here, drink this, drink this. We need everyone alert.”

“Was that a smart thing to do?”

She laughed humorlessly. “In retrospect, no. It only added to the chaos. People were spilling it, and setting their mugs down in random places, and needing to urinate.”

And then Raimy asked one of his least favorite but most effective witnesses questions: “When did you start crying?”

“Not right away,” she answered. “I was trying to get a story out of Bykhovski. Brother Michael and I. When he told us how he got there, Michael’s first thought was that he’d landed on Etsub. He kept asking the question different ways. But that didn’t make sense to me.”

“Why not?”

She paused for a long moment, then cleared her throat and said, “I don’t know. It just didn’t fit. There was no visible damage to Etsub’s suit, for a first thing.”

At that point, Halladay broke in, saying, “Eduardo here. Pressurization cycle complete. Thank you for standing by.”

“Roger that,” said Katla. “Mind if we get on our way?”

“Please do. Nice to see you.”

“And you.”

To Raimy, Katla said, “Can we hold this questioning for later?”

“Of course.”

And Tobin said, “It’s four kilometers to the monastery. If we turn off the cameras, will you bounce a little? For the benefit of your future self?”



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