1.5
17 November
Transit Point Station
Low Earth Orbit
Raimy and Ling waited in the docking module for about ten minutes, and Raimy nearly lost his guts a couple of times there. He didn’t, though, and finally Lieutenant Commander Geary Notbohm came back in with a mesh purse containing a plastic-wrapped bundle of blue paper bags, a squeeze bottle of what looked like orange Gatorade, a portable urinal, a handful of moist towelettes, and an orange-and-silver bundle the size of a rolled-up towel.
“Your flight to Luna leaves tomorrow afternoon,” Notbohm said, in his maybe-Swiss accent. “Ordinarily someone would assign you a bunk in one of the guest barracks, but in cases like this we recommend you spend the night in the docking module, or in the ship that brought you.”
“Not in my ship,” Ling said.
“You know, I spent four years in the Navy, mostly underwater,” Raimy told them both. “Never got seasick once.”
Notbohm nodded at that. “I’m aware of your record, yes. Nobody is blaming you or thinking less of you, and I will try to ensure these details are not made public. Your subscribers and sponsors need never know. This just happens sometimes, randomly, even to people not prone to other forms of motion sickness. Unpredictable. Nevertheless, the inner walls of this module are ceramic, so there is not much damage your stomach can do. You understand?”
“I do, yes. But there’s no need for a cover-up.”
“Well, you of course may broadcast whatever you like, but unless your drones are designed for zero gravity, they will not be capable of controlled flight here. You may need to stick them on surfaces, or simply rely on your glasses. I think they will not fly properly on the Moon, either, although I could be wrong.”
To Ling, Notbohm said, “Your flight plan says you depart in four hours. You have free run of the station until then. You know your way around, yes?”
It seemed to be a joke; these two knew each other, and Raimy knew the modules of Transit Point Station were arranged in basically a double straight line, pointed downward at the Earth. Learning your way around would take all of five minutes, and Ling had probably been here dozens of times.
But what Ling said was, “Thanks, but I need to keep an eye on my passenger. I’ll hang around here for a while.”
“Very well,” said Notbohm. “No need to say anything if you change your mind.”
To Raimy he said, “How should I address you? Candidate? Detective? Mr. Vaught?”
“Raimy is fine.”
“Ah. Well, Raimy, as you and I are colleagues I would ask you to call me by my name as well, but it happens that everyone on this station calls me Commander Notbohm, or Lieutenant Commander if they want to be proper. So I think that will do for you as well.”
“Got it.”
“When you’re feeling better, you can come find me, but I do strongly recommend you wait until after the night shift. We keep the same time as Suriname, and when we dim our lights, this will help your body adjust. You will likely feel better in the morning.”
“Okay,” Raimy said. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. The situation was mortifying, and potentially harmful to his competitive ranking, and he pretty much wanted to hide anyway.
He wasn’t so sure he liked Lieutenant Commander Notbohm as a person. In Raimy’s experience, that level of condescension was rarely compatible with, for example, drinking a beer together, or talking about personal issues. But he had to say, Notbohm had twice left him unsupervised, and seemed comfortable in his role here at the station. He probably wasn’t a bad leader, as such things went.
“Try to keep your head still,” Ling told him, after Notbohm had gone. “Also close your eyes, or look at something close up, like your hand. This sleeping bag”—he fetched out the orange-and-silver roll, and stuck it to the wall with a square of Velcro and a piece of tape—“can help arrest your movement if you set it up. Also better if we opaque this window.” He moved to the porthole and flicked a switch, whereupon the “downward” view, toward Earth, was replaced by a blank whiteness, like a sheet of paper. “You may not notice it right away, but these things should help. Do you want a couple more SAS patches? It sometimes helps if you put them on the inside of your wrist.”
“Fine,” Raimy said, and was then jealous of the effortless grace with which Ling flicked and floated his way back through the docking hatch and into the SLEO capsule.
“We could grab some of theirs from sickbay,” Ling called back over his shoulder, “but it would be a bit rude. I’ll be on the ground by midnight, and a refurb crew will stock up all my consumables before this ship flies again.”
He rummaged in there for a minute, not quite silently, and then reappeared. “I mean, you’ve already got a whole pack of their barf bags. Somebody’s going to have to pay for that.”
“Mmph.”
Raimy’s first thought was that a package of paper bags couldn’t be anywhere near as expensive as a chartered jet, but then his second thought was that he shouldn’t be so sure about that. He really didn’t understand the economics of space travel. He knew some things were shockingly cheap these days, and others remained shockingly expensive, but he didn’t really know which was which. And did it really matter? He would either make it to Mars or he wouldn’t, but either way he’d spend almost none of his own money, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make a difference. He did know one thing: space was too expensive for people like him. Never mind a trip to the Moon; just a ticket to low Earth orbit—say, a night at the Marriott Stars—would cost him three years’ salary.
And yet, here he was. Here he was.
The next thirty minutes were consumed with Raimy wrestling his way out of the bulky spacesuit, stowing it in a locker apparently built for this purpose, retrieving his flight bag from the capsule, and putting on his Antilympus uniform. He then applied the two medicated patches to his wrists, threw up a couple more times, and finally unrolled the strange little sleeping bag Ling had Velcroed to the wall.
“I thought zero gravity was supposed to be relaxing,” he complained.
“First day is always worst,” Ling assured him. “You know when you move to a new house? Don’t know where anything is or how it works? You stagger around for weeks, bumping your head and wondering where you’re going to get groceries and haircuts. Space is like that, but the basic physics are also different. It’s pretty exhausting. If it helps, I’ve spent a total of almost four months in space, and most ways it’s still harder than being on the ground.”
“Why would that help?” Raimy asked, rhetorically. Then, changing the subject, he said, “Would you mind if I recorded you on a glasses cam? For vidcast to my sponsors?”
“Sure, I guess. Try not to throw up.”
“Right.”
Raimy got out his glasses, held them in front of his face, and started recording.
“This is Raimy Vaught, coming to you from Transit Point Station. By now, most of you are probably familiar with the . . . unfortunate circumstances that brought me here. Rather than belabor any of that, I thought it would be fun to ask my pilot some questions. Meet, uh . . .”
Shit.
“David Ling,” Ling said. “Harvest Moon SLEO pilot, first class.”
“The yellow launch suit is a giveaway—that’s Harvest Moon yellow. Ling is heading back to Earth in a few hours, so he’s not even bothering to take the suit off. Right now he’s nursing me through a bout of motion sickness, which is embarrassing, because he doesn’t seem to be suffering at all. Ling, how many times have you been to space?”
“Oh, I think this might be my twentieth.”
“Amazing. It’s so routine, these days. And you like your job?”
“Immensely.”
“Okay. Good.”
Raimy had planned this poorly, and was already almost out of things to say. Struggling, he tried, “I keep looking at that emergency locker over there.”
“Um, okay.”
“Trying to figure out what’s in it. I know I’m supposed to be closing my eyes, but . . .”
“You’re excited. That’s okay. It’d be weird if you weren’t.”
The locker was across from Raimy, and transparent, and said emergency across the top and bottom of the door, in big white letters hemmed by red-and-white-striped banners. If the airlock blew out or the module sprung a leak, Raimy knew he would probably die. Like being in a submarine at depth, there really might not be very much he could do to save himself. But the fact that there was an emergency locker at all implied that, in at least some scenarios, there were possibilities.
He said, “I see an aerosol can, a goo suit, a length of parachute cord with carabiners at both ends, some kind of metal tool, and, I don’t know, first aid kits and Mylar blankets and stuff.”
Ling seemed suddenly interested. “How do you know what a goo suit is?”
“Navy,” Raimy answered.
“Were you a fireman?”
That was what the goo suit had been invented for: escaping from burning buildings. It was basically a ring of solid Nomex with a clear polyimide bag rolled up inside. You slammed it down over your head and let it shoot a sticky, expanding gel around your neck and shoulders. Assuming that didn’t kill you, the bag would then inflate, and a little regulator would give you, like, two minutes of decent air to breathe.
“No,” Raimy said. “I was a diver. We were testing the concept for a submarine escape drill.”
“Oh. Wow. I didn’t realize they worked underwater.”
“They don’t,” Raimy said, with a laugh. “I mean, none of us died, but the concept never did get approved. As far as I know, we were the only ones to ever try it. I didn’t realize they worked in space.”
Ling chuckled and said, “They don’t. They generate less than a hundred and fifty millibars of overpressure. That’s not enough to damage your lungs, but even filled with pure oxygen it’s also not enough to breathe. You’d lose consciousness pretty quick.”
“Oh. That sucks. Why is it even here?”
Ling snorted. “Makes people feel better? Weight is paramount onboard a spacecraft, but stations like this just sort of accumulate artifacts, the longer they sit. The new airlocks are all built like this—a dozen copies of that same exact locker. Some of that stuff could save your life, I guess, if you had a buddy with you, but mostly I think it’s just superstition. There are all kinds of misconceptions out there. Some people think your body would explode in the vacuum of outer space, which it wouldn’t. Some people think you can hold your breath, which you can’t. To answer your question about the emergency supplies, I think there’s a basic tool kit in there, with screwdrivers and duct tape and such. That big metal thing is an airlock wrench. The spray can is standard-issue patch gel; you spray it on leaks and it expands in there and hardens. I suppose it might be the same stuff as the goo suit. Didn’t they teach you any of this in your flight orientations?”
“No. Not yet. I mean, Concordia doesn’t fly for another three years, and most of the passengers will be in hibernation the whole way. Also I’m, you know, not even a backup at this point, so I’ll probably never get the real flight training.”
“Hmm. That’s heart-wrenching. You put in years of work, just to land in second place?”
“Third, actually.”
“Huh. Man. Well, my advice is, don’t get yourself in vacuum at all. You don’t want to pin your hopes on any of that stuff. The good news is, when you’re EVA in a spacesuit, you’ll always have a buddy, and when you’re indoors . . . Well, if you’re indoors and there’s a serious decompression event, you’re probably going to die.”
“Yeah, I know. But at least I’ll have company.”
Ling scoffed at that. “Is that a Navy thing? I don’t know what you’re used to, but if there’s a leak, try to be on the correct side of the hatch, before they’re all sealed. On a station this size, decompression accidents tend to be of the ‘slow leak’ variety, in which case, just do what you’re told and you’ll be fine.”
“Hmm. Good advice.”
Raimy had never been in a serious naval accident; the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter, decrepit as it was, had never sprung a leak or run aground or struck anything harder than a fish. But he’d trained extensively for underwater emergencies, and that training put the fear in you, sure enough. And he’d been in more than his fair share of close calls while diving. None fatal, thank God, but all of them potentially so. And that kind of thing really put the fear in you.
He added, “I’m sure this will all be very interesting to my viewers.”
And then Raimy came up empty; for a moment he was unable to think of another question, and by the time the next one did occur to him, he was gripped with self-doubt. The ethics of what he was doing were debatable, because even though he tried to keep a firewall between his publicity activities and his homicide investigations, they did inevitably bleed together, if only in the minds of the people involved. By now, everyone knew why Raimy was here. And on the heels of this came the certainty that he must look awfully stupid in this video, as he so often did. But he had to have something to show for his time here, so he powered through with another few minutes of questions, reassuring himself that he had all night to cut and edit the thing to his liking. Damn it, Raimy had been a good diver and a good student and a better-than-mediocre prosecuting attorney. When he’d put in his time as a CSPD patrolman he’d been good at that, too. Not great, perhaps. but what did it even mean, to be a great patrolman? He’d made detective just as soon as it was administratively possible, and that was really, in a lot of ways, the perfect job for him. He didn’t aspire to be a damn video journalist, so why was his whole future hanging on his ability to do exactly that?
Focus on the job, he reminded himself. Focus on the victim. Find out what happened.
“Thank you,” he said to Ling, and switched off the camera.
An hour after Ling and his capsule departed, Raimy’s home in the docking module was visited by a little Asian dude whose nametag said d. nguyen, who came to replenish his Gatorade and carry away his used barf bags.
After introducing himself as “Dong,” the man—dressed in a jumpsuit of the same eyesore-red as Geary Notbohm—unfurled a white plastic garbage bag and started collecting up the waste.
“Why are they all on the same side of the module?” Raimy asked, pointing to where the barf bags were all clustered, up against the same wall where Ling had hung his sleeping bag. “That’s the side away from the Earth, isn’t it? I tried letting my car keys float in the center of the module, but after about half an hour they’d settled against that wall. Why are things falling ‘up’?”
“You brought car keys to outer space?” Nguyen asked, in an accented voice that was about the right pitch for such a small man.
“Force of habit,” Raimy said. “They were in my pocket when I stuffed the uniform in my bag.”
Nguyen (whom Raimy’s inner thirteen-year-old couldn’t bear to think of as “Dong”) let out a chuckle at that. “Yeah, force of habit. How much we do from habit, hah? I wish force of smartness was half as strong. Your question: things fall ‘up’ on this side of the station because it’s the high side of the boom. Higher than the center of mass, so orbiting a little too fast for the altitude. Centrifugal force is flinging your stuff outward. Slow, but yeah, a little mosquito-fart acceleration adds up over time. We call it gravity gradient. Same thing on the bottom end; stuff falls down, toward the Earth.”
With no sign of disgust, he put Raimy’s barf bags in the trash bag and tied the whole thing shut.
“What happens to them now?” Raimy asked.
“They go in a trash balloon.”
“Oh. And what does that mean? What happens to the trash balloon?”
“Gets detached from the station when it’s full. We lower it on a thousand-meter tether, and drop it off the end. Gravity gradient gives it a nice kick, and atmosphere does the rest.”
“It burns up?”
“Eventually. Decaying orbit, maybe a couple months. Dropping trash balloons also raises our orbit a little, which saves on propellant, so your barf is actually helping us.”
Nguyen seemed about to leave, but then he said, “I’m not just the janitor here, you know. I handled that guy’s spacesuit, the one who died. Didn’t open the backpack, but I helped him in and out of it. Helped him stow it. Just thought you should know.”
“I didn’t say anything about a backpack,” Raimy noted carefully.
“Didn’t have to,” Nguyen said, with a funny little nod. “Everybody knows. Everybody’s talking about it. Air hose in the backpack, probably sabotage. There’s lots of people on this station could have got to it. You going to inspect the thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you want to look for tool marks. GS don’t leave tool marks when they put the thing together. Somebody pries it open, you’re going to see scratches where they did it. Tell you what kind of tool they used.”
“I know what tool marks are.”
“Heh. Yeah, I bet you do. I bet you know a lot of things. Sad to see you up here, people getting murdered and such. Things are getting weird, you know. There were deaths up at Esley Shade Station, too. Hush-hush, no investigation.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Raimy said.
“Other weird stuff, too,” Nguyen persisted. “I seen a stealth spaceship once, like a lens passing in front of the Earth. Not quite invisible, but man. Close enough to throw a wrench at it. I was out in a spacesuit at the time, about crapped my diaper. I wrote a report. Who’s up here with stealth spaceships? Cartels? Chinese? It don’t make sense.”
“I wouldn’t know about that either,” Raimy said. “Did your partner see it?”
“No partner that day. Emergency repair, big hurry. But it happened.”
“No, I believe you,” Raimy said, meaning it. The Navy was full of strange sightings that nobody ever could explain. Maybe Nguyen had seen a stealthed spaceship and maybe he hadn’t, but he saw something, or he sure wouldn’t have put his credibility on the line by filing a report.
“About that backpack,” he said. “What kind of sabotage should I be looking for?”
“Heh. Tool marks. You want a metal-braided air hose to fail, you’re going to have to nick it. The braid is made of little wires, right? And if they fail when the hose explodes, the broken ends will look stretched, like taffy. You might need a microscope. But if they’re nicked, you’ll see a flat end, cut through. Tell you right away if it was an accident.”
“Huh. Okay. Why are you telling me this?”
“Why not? You want to catch the guy, right?”
“Yeah. I do.”
And that was all the two of them had to say to each other.
After Nguyen was gone, Raimy spent an uneasy night alone in the docking module. There was the occasional bustle of people passing by in the corridor, and of course Raimy had network access, so he could look at all his usual incoming feeds and post some short updates to his outgoing ones. So he wasn’t really all that alone. But with no spaceship docked on the other side of the outer hatch, he was uncomfortably aware of being almost completely surrounded by the vacuum of space.
Ling’s pep talk had been sobering, but in some ways it was a familiar sensation, not really all that different from being on a submarine. In fact, in some ways it was actually safer, because the pressure difference was much lower. At operating depth, the inward pressure on a submarine hull could be thirty atmospheres or more, and if you sprung a leak and lost buoyancy, that pressure would climb until it crushed the hull like a paper cup. All hands lost in an instant, their mortal remains plummeting forever into the dark and cold. By contrast, the air pressure pushing outward on the walls of this module was only about 0.5 atmospheres. And yes, it really was possible for a space module to leak without failing explosively. So he was aware of the danger with a professional sort of nervousness, without being afraid per se.
And yet, he was in here by himself, sick and dazed and out of his element. Notbohm had good reasons for leaving him alone in here, but he also couldn’t shake the idea that there was something punitive about it, almost as though he’d been thrown in the brig. He was, after all, here to determine if anyone on board was a murderer who needed to spend the rest of his or her life in prison, and he definitely got the feeling Notbohm resented it.
“What is the expression, rise and shine?” Notbohm said by way of greeting, with the blue-white light of “morning” streaming in from the hallway. “Did you sleep?”
“Some,” Raimy told him. “Not much. I talked to one of your men for a while, though.”
“Is your stomach feeling better?”
“Maybe halfway better,” Raimy admitted. “But I’m well enough to work.”
“Would you like breakfast?”
“Ugh. No. Maybe later. The truth is, I’ve never been much of a breakfast eater. Lunch is my big meal.”
“Ah. Well then we’ll be sure you get a good one. Nutritious and easy to digest.”
“I would love some coffee, though. Do you have that here?”
“We do,” Notbohm said, “though I’m afraid it’s only instant. Will that do? On a rough stomach?”
“It will, thank you.” Fortunately, coffee had never been rough on Raimy’s stomach, and he could definitely use the pick-me-up. He wasn’t crazy about instant, but what else could you expect on a space station? “I take it black.”
Nodding, Notbohm pulled a rollup from one of the many pockets in his eyesore-red jumpsuit. Without bothering to unroll it, he pressed a button and spoke into one end, saying “Notbohm, here. Paul, if you’re still in the galley, would you please bring a bulb of black coffee to Dock Five, please?”
The words rang out on a loudspeaker, apparently station-wide.
“Oh, Jeez,” Raimy said, “you don’t have to—”
“It’s no trouble,” Notbohm insisted. “We were told to give you everything you needed, and I intend just that.”
“Well, thank you. In the meantime, I’d really like to retrace Etsub’s steps, and those of his spacesuit.”
“We will do that,” Notbohm said. “Would you like to start with the H.S.F. Concordia?”
Raimy’s heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t exactly forgotten that Dan Beseman’s Mars ship was docked to Transit Point Station, just a few modules away, but in the press of other business he’d put it out of mind. Other than glimpsing it through the SLEO’s front window on the way in, Raimy hadn’t honestly expected to get to see the thing.
“Etsub visited the Mars ship?”
“He did. All four of them did. You don’t follow their feeds? Beseman is quite accommodating when any of his candidates are onboard. We can go right now, if you like.”
The sheer excitement of that did wonders for Raimy’s motion sickness. However, he chuckled and said, “After coffee.”
Soon, a young man appeared in the hatchway, wearing what Raimy now figured was Transit Point red. He was Caucasian, about thirty, with a beard and bun that seemed out of place here. He moved with confidence, though, slinging his body through zero gee like he’d been born to it.
“Coffee,” he said, holding up a dark-colored squeeze bottle.
“For our guest,” Notbohm said, nodding sideways toward Raimy, who accepted the bottle gratefully. After a quick, tiny sip to test the temperature, he took a long pull on it, and felt immediately more human.
“That all?” the young man asked. Amusingly, the nametag on his jumpsuit actually said p. young. He seemed happy enough to help, but Raimy got the distinct impression that fetching coffee wasn’t in his job description.
“Yes, thank you,” Notbohm said.
And just like that, the kid was gone.
“Shall we?” Notbohm asked.
Without bothering to answer, Raimy kicked lightly off the wall, floating headfirst out into the hallway, where he awkwardly turned his body and arrested his motion with his feet. Well, mostly arrested, and with a lot of arm-flailing. The movement barely made him queasy at all, though, so he figured he was finally starting to adapt.
TPS’s “hallway” or “tower” or “boom” was long, composed of modules that also had other purposes, so that when he looked “down,” in the Earthward direction, he could see bunk beds and equipment racks fading off into the distance, for more than a hundred meters. The sight made his feet tingle with acrophobia, but his stomach and his inner ear held firm.
In the other direction, “up,” the station was shorter and more functional, with staggered docking-module hatches on the walls, leading up toward a big hatch at the hallway’s end, or the tower’s top. Rectangular, with rounded corners, like you’d see on a submarine.
In a real sense, Mars was on the other side of that doorway.
“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath.
“I see you know the way,” Notbohm said, amicably enough. Then, seeing the look on Raimy’s face, he added, “Someday, perhaps, you and I will have berths on that ship. Not this time, I think, but maybe when it comes back.”
To that, Raimy couldn’t help saying, “Unless Anming Shui also gets murdered. Then you’re all set.”
Notbohm seemed offended at that, which was hardly surprising. Needling suspects was impolite, but could be effective in getting guilty people to reveal themselves. Raimy didn’t think it particularly likely that Notbohm had done the deed, but old habits died hard.
“I understand you have a job to do,” Notbohm said with some irritation. “I understand I am a suspect for this crime. I understand protesting my innocence means very little to you or your investigation. But please do not speak to me like that on my own station. We’re cooperating, but please do not undermine my authority in the exercise of yours, hmm?”
“Fair enough,” Raimy said, but did not go so far as apologizing. “Are you leading the way?”
“You go on ahead. You appear quite eager.”
Raimy didn’t need to be told twice. Switching on his glasses cam, he found a grab rail and launched himself, with more enthusiasm than skill, toward that pill-shaped portal.