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1.4
17 November

Transit Point Station

Low Earth Orbit


“I didn’t kill anyone,” a pale-looking man said to Raimy as he floated through the hatch into Transit Point Station. Seriously, the very moment he floated through.

“Later,” Raimy said, and reached clumsily for a grab bar. Closing his eyes for a moment, he just tried to work on his breathing. He was wearing a vomit-stained spacesuit with the helmet off, and his face was a sweaty sheen of quivering weightless droplets.

“I know I’m on your list of suspects,” the man said, in a sort of generically European accent. Swiss, Raimy thought.

Despite himself, Raimy glanced up.

“You’re Geary Notbohm?”

“I am, yes. First officer of this station, and very definitely not a killer.”

Raimy tried to care about that, but his stomach and inner ear were having none of it. He was falling, damn it. The room seemed to tumble around him. There was a porthole window in this docking module, through which he could see the little capsule that brought him here, with the blue-white Earth scrolling slowly behind it. Far enough away that it didn’t look like “the ground,” but like “a planet.” The very idea made Raimy’s feet tingle with something close to panic.

“I’d leave this one alone for a while,” said the Harvest Moon pilot who’d brought Raimy here, whose name was Ling something or other. D. Ling, according to the nametag on the outside of his suit. He came through the hatch behind Raimy, also wearing a helmetless spacesuit. Also covered in vomit—not his own.

“Good lord,” said Geary Notbohm, looking the two of them over. “Difficult flight?”

“Uneventful until about twenty minutes ago. Fucker’s got two SAS patches on his neck and can’t stop puking.” To Raimy he said, “Nothing personal, buddy. You never know who’s going to get it bad.”

Raimy nodded, then immediately regretted it. SAS stood for “space adaptation syndrome,” aka motion sickness, and the patches were medicated Band-Aid discs stuck to the skin below his ears. He wasn’t sure what was in them, but he could feel it blunting his mind and senses, while doing nothing at all for the nausea or vertigo.

“I had a hard time, too, my first trip up,” Geary said, in a kind but weary voice. “Don’t go anywhere, please. Don’t leave this chamber. I’ll go get you a package of barf bags.”

And with that, he kicked off from a grab bar and vanished through the docking module’s hatch, into the station’s main corridor.

“Get some disinfecting wipes, too!” Ling called after him. Then, to nobody in particular, “Jesus Christ. I wasn’t even scheduled to fly today.”

“Sorry,” Raimy told him, for about the twentieth time.

“Not your fault,” Ling said, “I’m sorry I called you a fucker.” He moved to look out the porthole, blocking Raimy’s view of Earth in the process. Was that better or worse? Raimy couldn’t decide.

With the blue glow of the planet on his face, Ling continued, “I’ve seen worse than you, though not very often. If you’d been through a proper zero-gee training course, you’d’ve known you were vulnerable, and you’d’ve put a couple of patches on yourself, before we buttoned up your suit. This mission is a rush job. This death on the Moon has a lot of people out of their grooves.”

“Yep,” Raimy agreed. The story had leaked through every barrier set out for it, and while the news services were reporting it so far only as a rumor, the rumor itself was burning brightly. The fact that Geary Notbohm knew why Raimy was here was not surprising in the least. And although it was way too early to be formulating any theories, Raimy’s gut was already telling him that Notbohm had nothing to do with Etsub’s death. Not because he’d protested his innocence (who didn’t?), but because he’d left Raimy alone on his space station, without one of his own crew members to provide guidance and supervision. People with something to hide didn’t generally behave that way. It was thin reasoning—really just an explanation fitted to what his gut was telling him—but nevertheless that was where he was leaning at this too-early moment.

The module was silent for a few seconds, filled only with the sound of breathing and the hum of fans and equipment. Then Ling said, “You’re wasting air. You should turn your suit pack off.”

When Raimy only looked at him helplessly, he said, “The dial on your chest. Here.”

He reached out and manipulated something on Raimy’s suit, and a hissing sound vanished that Raimy hadn’t even realized he was hearing.

“Thanks,” Raimy said, closing his eyes again in an effort to find some kind of equilibrium.

His suit was different from Ling’s. Ling’s was yellow and lightweight, a “launch rescue suit” or “flight suit” meant only to protect him in the event of a capsule depressurization, but Raimy hadn’t been issued one of those. His was highway-cone orange, and vastly bulkier, because it was meant for extended EVA excursions on the Lunar surface. Same type of suit Etsub had been wearing when he died, and the Harvest Moon technicians had had to install a special seat in the capsule to accommodate it. This was not unusual in itself—HMI launch capsules apparently had six different seat types and dozens of possible interior configurations, all swappable with a few days’ notice—but the six other passenger seats were all empty, and that was unusual. Other than the pilot, Raimy had had the flight to himself, which was a rather ridiculous waste of resources. Enterprise City, the Antilympus Project, Harvest Moon, and the Catholic Church were all sharing expenses to make that happen, as they all seemed to agree they wanted this matter solved quickly. Presumably so they could move it into the past and forget about it.


“The Moon is hot, cold, irradiated, and a constant target for micrometeoroids,” the chief technology officer of General Spacesuit had said to Raimy, two days ago in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “You have to carry not only the air and water and power you need, but also communications, thermal management, abrasion and impact resistance, and a goo layer to seal any leaks that do happen.”

“That didn’t help Etsub Beyene,” Raimy had observed.

For security reasons, Raimy had no camera drones with him that day, which was a weird feeling. He could speak freely, without worrying how it looked! On the other hand, he wasn’t getting much audience cred for what he was doing. He’d spoken into an ordinary glasses cam on his way in, announcing where he was and what he was about to do, and then he’d switched the glasses off and slipped them into his shirt pocket. End of transmission.

“No, it didn’t help Beyene,” the CTO had said. Raimy couldn’t remember his name. John Jones? Sam Smith? Something like that; he had it in his notes. The two of them were looking into the open backpack of the suit Raimy was about to be fitted into. CTO made a big deal out of this—that he was personally overseeing the technicians today, that Raimy would want for nothing while he was here. CTO pointed to a bundle of wires and hoses in the top-left corner of the backpack. “His suit failed right here—one of the very few places in the Heavy Rebreather model with no redundancy, no self-sealing, and no autonomous damage-control features. It would be very difficult to engineer redundant features into this particular location, although we will certainly reassess in light of this incident. But it’s awfully suspicious, yeah? These components are tested to eleven times the actual operating pressure, and no failure like this has ever been recorded, in over two thousand hours of cumulative EVA.”

Sardonically, Raimy had asked, “So it’s the position of General Spacesuit that Beyene was murdered?”

To which CTO had smoothly replied, “We haven’t studied the damaged components firsthand yet, but it’s our strong belief that this was a human-mediated failure, rather than a manufacturing or assembly defect. As I said, our quality control processes make that essentially impossible.”

“Essentially impossible,” Raimy mused, with a cop’s skepticism and a lawyer’s ear for evidentiary statements.

CTO declined to retract the comment, saying simply, “Everyone who goes to the Moon is processed through this facility, which is under exclusive contract with Harvest Moon Industries. Every suit bound for the Moon passes through eighteen different quality checks and four different fit checks. A defect like that, we would have caught it. One hundred percent.”

CTO seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying, so Raimy sighed and answered, “All right, when we’re done with my fitting, I want to talk to everyone who ever interacted with Beyene’s suit. I mean everyone.”

CTO nodded. “Some of the people fitting you are . . . it’s some of the same people. Good people, algorithmically vetted and with centuries of collective experience. Please be kind to them, Detective. Every one of them has held dozens of lives in their hands, and this death might as well be one of our own. We don’t have anything to hide.”

That had been a long day, whose only really memorable highlight (aside from being closed up in his own personal moon suit) was speaking with a man named Luke Hopken. Hopken was a longtime GS employee with no criminal record, but in his spare time he was also the number four contender for the Male Hydroponics slot at Antilympus. Now number three.

“It’s terrible, what happened to Etsub,” he’d said, when introduced to Raimy. He was wearing a floral-print polo shirt and a pair of khaki trousers, and looked overdue for a haircut.

Raimy stuck out a spacesuit-gloved hand, which Hopken shook.

“How terrible?” Raimy asked. “How well did you know him?”

“I only met him very briefly when he was here, but of course I watched all of his videos. Studied them, really. He was so far out in front of me. It’s like he was perfect. I rarely saw him make a mistake, no matter how much I wanted him to.”

“Hmm.” Raimy knew the feeling.

It was an awkward moment; Raimy had backed his suit up until the back of it latched onto a gowning rack bolted to the wall. This was a high-bay industrial area, with light streaming in from rows of windows near the ceiling, and the noise of machines all around. Technicians had swiveled his waist connector ring, separating the top and bottom halves of the massive suit, and Raimy was sagging under the weight on his legs. With considerable effort, he wriggled his hands and arms and torso out of the suit’s top half, and stood there with his armored pants falling down around his hips, and nothing but loose-weave, 3D-printed “space underwear” between his private parts and the cool air of the factory.

Ignoring the indignity, he asked, “What exactly do you do around here? Hydroponics?”

“In a way,” Hopken answered. “I design the fluid management systems that distribute heat from the sunny side to the shady side of your suit. I can see you’re struggling under the weight of it, there. It’s heavy because it’s got a whole circulatory system of water-filled tubes between the inner and outer surfaces.”

“Okay,” Raimy said, fishing a paper notebook and a ball-point pen out of the back pocket of his actual pants, sitting on a little table beside the gowning rack. “I’m confused. What does that have to do with hydroponics?”

“Common components,” Hopken said. “Renz Ventures and Harvest Moon have their own proprietary systems for growing plants—in zero gee for Renz and one-sixth gee for HMI—but we make about ninety percent of the fluid management components they both use, and most of those are the same ones in our suits. That means they can be repaired out of a common pool of spare parts, which is very important for any remote installation.”

“Hmm. And you’re part of the quality control process for outgoing suits?”

“Only indirectly. I know, my name is on your list there, but what I do is, I sign off on four of the QC processes. I don’t perform the tests, but I review and initial the results before a suit can leave the premises.”

Raimy made some marks in his notebook.

“So you don’t actually touch the suits on their way through here?”

“Not usually, no. And in this case, definitely not.”

“But you could? You have access?”

Hopken nodded vigorously at that. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m part of the engineering team. I can drop into the line at any point during manufacture or inspection.” Then he stopped, and seemed to think about the implications of what he was saying. But then pressed forward anyway, with, “There’s a lot of video surveillance, but it doesn’t cover every centimeter of the facility. I mean, I’ve got my own camera drones, but like you I’m not allowed to bring them on campus here. Nobody’s allowed to bring recording devices of any kind. If a person wanted to tamper with a suit, there are places in the line where they could do it and not be seen.”

This was very different from the smooth confidence of the CTO, and not a thing most people under suspicion would blab about.

Raimy asked him, “You do realize you’re a suspect, right?”

Hopken shrugged. “That’s inevitable. That’s up to you. I mean, obviously, I’ve moved up in the Mars rankings, but that’s not something I’m happy about. I’ve been with GS for fifteen years, and that suit you’re wearing is kind of my life’s work. Hydroponic gardening is one of my hobbies, and I’m good at it, but spacesuits are what I do. I wouldn’t . . .”

He paused, and Raimy waited until he continued.

“I wouldn’t kill a human being at all, I mean, for anything. And even if I somehow did, I wouldn’t do it that way. Nobody here would. What we do is . . . You . . . I’m sorry, I don’t know your name, but please understand: what we do here is sacred. Even if we never travel in space ourselves, everything that’s going on right now, all that stuff up there”—he gestured upward, toward the metal-trussed ceiling, and the sky beyond it—“starts in places like this, with people like us. Somebody desecrated one of our products, but I don’t possibly see how it could be one of us.”

Hopken sighed, then seemed to busy himself for a moment, looking at the connector valves in the waist ring of Raimy’s suit. It was uncomfortably intimate, and uninvited, so Raimy cleared his throat. Hopken looked up, unembarrassed, and said, “The day he was here, Etsub had two reporters with him, and three traveling companions also being fitted. Are you talking to them?”

“Not the reporters,” Raimy admitted. “Can you ask someone to provide me with their contact information?”

“Sure.”

And although Raimy already knew the answer, he asked, “The reporters were here because camera drones aren’t allowed? Your own included?”

“That’s right. I think it hurts me in the rankings, too, because my livestream feed is dark most of the time, and my most relevant work is invisible. But yes, these two were from a local press organization; I’ve seen them in here before. Maybe hired by the Antilympus Project, but not really part of it. They were all over the place, all day long. All six of them were.”

“Would these reporters have a motive to kill anyone?” Raimy asked, although it was not really a fair question. In a courtroom, it would be objected to as both hearsay and leading the witness, but Hopken seemed to have a lot to say, and if he was guilty then Raimy wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself. If he was innocent, then his perspective would be useful.

“For what, to boost their viewership? I doubt it.”

“You don’t know anything about the organization that sent them?”

“No, but I mean, that doesn’t really make sense. What would they have to gain?”

“Not like you,” Raimy needled.

“No, not like me. I already said, I moved up in the rankings. It doesn’t mean I sabotaged a spacesuit, right? That’s not enough of an incentive. I wouldn’t trade my soul for it.”

“Are you religious?”

“Not particularly, but I believe there’s something. Souls and whatnot, probably. But even if there weren’t, I wouldn’t go around killing people. I just wouldn’t.”

“All right.” Raimy made some more marks in his notebook, not really writing anything of consequence. His real notes were all in his head, slowly assembling themselves like puzzle pieces. His memory for this kind of thing was close to photographic, but he found an old-fashioned paper notebook was a useful prop for signaling his attention to the people he was speaking with.

Hopken went on, “The female hydroponicists, Bridget Tobin and Katla Koskinen . . . I talked to both of them pretty extensively when they were here.”

“But not to Etsub?”

“Not really, no.”

“What about Anming Shui, Etsub’s backup? He was here, right?”

“He was. I didn’t talk to him.”

“Just the women?”

Now Hopken looked slightly embarrassed. “I mean, there was a chance I’d be working alongside one of them. If Etsub and Anming dropped out, and I got my flight status, one of those gals might have been side by side with me, every day for the rest of my life.”

“And you wanted to know . . .”

“What they were like, yes. Whether they were pretty, or nice, or I just couldn’t stand them, or whatever.” He paused, then said, “Is that a crime?”

“No,” Raimy said. “Of course not.”

That was the first thing Hopken had said that sounded even the slightest bit shifty, but Raimy could understand it well enough. The Antilympus candidates were, all of them, hoping to leave behind all of their Earthly attachments and start fresh, with a pool of just ninety-nine other human beings to choose as friends and lovers, rivals and enemies. Until the second batch of colonists arrived, four years later, those would be literally the only people in the whole world. Given that, Hopken’s curiosity was natural enough. He didn’t strike Raimy as much of a womanizer, and perhaps that made the stakes even higher.

“All right,” Raimy said, “so you talked to them. What were your impressions?”

“Both very serious,” Hopken answered. “Very driven. I mean, they were different people, but they both had that . . .”

“Drive?” Raimy suggested.

“Yes. Very driven. But nice enough, both of them. That’s how you move up in the rankings, right? If everybody likes you. And honestly, it’s not like they would stand to benefit from Estub’s death.”

Raimy wasn’t one hundred percent sure that was true. Obviously, emptying a Male Hydroponicist slot wouldn’t magically open up a Female Hydroponicist one. However, Bridget Tobin was apparently a signatory on the recent “gender neutralling” petition, requesting that the roles at Antilympus be divided differently among the sexes, and that nongendered and transgendered persons be allowed to join the competition, so long as they could prove fertility. That didn’t make her special; nearly a hundred candidates (mostly in trailing positions) had signed the thing, but if the Besemans actually listened and acted on it, it could mean (for example) that both hydroponics jobs could go to women, as long as a different job slot were assigned to a person capable of generating spermatozoa.

Raimy wasn’t sure the Besemans were going to budge about this, and if Bridget Tobin were smart, she wouldn’t be, either. The Besemans’ old-fashioned and (if you thought about it) rather privacy-invading plan was to bring fifty natural-born heterosexual males and fifty natural-born heterosexual women to Mars and let them work it out, breeding-wise, to create the first generation of true Martians. They seemed really wedded to the idea, and puzzled by the protests and injunctions people had raised against it. Enterprise City and the Antilympus Project were both headquartered in Suriname, where nobody gave a shit, and Dan Beseman himself had been residing in space for well over a year now. So what did protests or foreign-soil injunctions, or even a petition from the candidates themselves, mean to him? He might well be beyond Earthly coercion. Maybe he’d have a change of heart, or Carol would, or maybe somebody would get to them somehow. Or not. Bridget Tobin should in no way be certain enough about it to commit a murder.

But smart people did stupid things sometimes, and Raimy had seen murders committed on thinner hopes than that. People were endlessly disappointing. Bridget Tobin had been in second place for the Female Hydroponics slot as of last week, so in that sense, she did potentially stand to profit from Etsub’s death.

“What if they could?” Raimy asked.

“If they could . . . benefit?”

“Yes.”

Hopken looked uncomfortable. “I . . . I don’t know. I didn’t get a, like, a murder vibe from them. Would I? I mean, would murders get committed at all, if people gave off a murder vibe?”

“Probably not,” Raimy admitted, although he had certainly gotten some strong murder vibes from suspects after the fact.

Luke Hopken himself was not one of these, at least at this moment. Yes, he had motive. Yes, he had opportunity. Yes, he probably knew the vulnerabilities of a Heavy Rebreather suit as well as any other living person. But he seemed exactly nervous enough and forthcoming enough for a murder suspect who wasn’t guilty and wanted to clear his name. Wanted to clear his employer’s name, too. Nothing he’d said was inconsistent, or vague, or overly specific. Lots of guilty people would try to flood you with a seamless litany of times and locations, accounting for every minute of their day in a way ordinary people never would. Or they just said yeah, I wasn’t there, don’t know what you’re talking about. If Hopken were guilty, then he was a smooth sociopath indeed, and still one giant leap away from achieving his goal. Right now, Raimy couldn’t see it.

And that left Anming Shui, presently resident at St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery, as Raimy’s far-and-away favorite suspect. With Etsub’s death, Anming had moved into first place in the Antilympus rankings, and would be going to Mars. That was worth killing for, though only if the bastard actually thought he could get away with it. Raimy’s mind kept tripping on that point; could anyone possibly expect to get away with such a transparent crime? He’d never met Anming, but from the stats he knew the man was unlikely to be that stupid. So yeah, nothing really made sense yet.

“Are you going to solve this?” Hopken asked, with the kind of quiet outrage usually reserved for a victim’s family and friends.

“I am,” Raimy said. “Yes.”

No criminal was perfect. No crime was perfect. If murder had indeed been committed, then the killer had made mistakes and generated evidence that Raimy was very definitely going to find.

Investigating murders was partly a game of cat and mouse, partly a moral crusade of good versus evil, and partly a matter of assembling puzzle pieces until the picture was actually complete. Part of the reason Raimy had signed up for the police academy, throwing away three years of law school and five years as a prosecuting attorney, was because he’d seen too many goddamn botched investigations. Botched by patrolmen, botched by detectives, botched by evidence technicians who’d been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and wanted nothing more than to crawl back under those covers again. It bothered him, and finally he just couldn’t stand it anymore. Finally, he just had to step in and do the damn thing himself. The work suited him better anyway; and, like being in the military, it was not so much a job as an all-consuming way of life. Once a case was assigned to Raimy, that was his life, and God help the guilty.

Hopken added, “Even if one of them did something to the plumbing in that backpack—even if I did—the QC overpressure checks would have caught it after the pack was sealed. I don’t know. I think whatever happened, happened after the suit left our custody.”


The next day, Raimy caught a private jet from Merritt Island, Florida, to Paramaribo, Suriname—a five-hour flight. Not one of Harvest Moon’s own jets, but a last-minute charter, complete with two personal flight attendants, and no other passengers. His camera drones hovered nervously around him, capturing nothing of importance. After landing, he packed them in their little cases and worked his way through some sort of abbreviated, rich-people customs and immigration where they barely glanced at his passport and seemed to ignore his luggage entirely. For all they knew, it could be full of Cartel bombs and genetically engineered cocaine, but they just waved him right on through. Outside the secure area, he released his drones again. They weren’t remarkable; the airport was teeming with them, mostly flying a polite half meter above the crowd’s tallest heads. As he made his way to the passenger pickup area, he was met by a young, male limousine escort holding up an e-paper sign that said det. raimy vaught in some fancy-ass copperplate font. The man recognized him on sight, which wasn’t difficult, because Raimy was the only bald, Black man dressed in a tan, two-piece Antilympus uniform. With barely a word, the attendant whisked him into a black, double-parked robocar.

From there, things got slower; the city of Paramaribo had roads wholly inadequate to the car and bicycle and truck traffic they carried. Also a lot of motorcycle traffic, which was a welcome novelty for Raimy. He used to ride an old Honda CB650 in his twenties, but then manually piloted, non-gyro-stabilized bikes had been banned on U.S. roads. He did a bit of track racing after that, just for fun, but it was expensive, and getting the bike to and from the track required a trailer and a long drive, so eventually he’d sold off the Honda at a steep loss. The end of that particular era was now five years ago. But Paramaribo was like something out of an old motorcycle magazine’s cartoon section; the riders here were flat-out crazy, weaving their way through much slower traffic, often without protective gear of any kind. Raimy figured they must have a high mortality rate; they were dodging swarms of cranky, horn-honking, non-robotic human drivers. But they all seemed to be in an awful hurry, and willing to endure the risk. It amazed Raimy that an up-and-coming industrial nation like Suriname would put up with such chaos, but he supposed America had, too, in its years of stupid-fast growth.

His own limo seemed to have some sort of override capability that could force other cars to brake or swerve when it cut them off. This was frightening at first, like some kind of jump-scare carnival ride, but once Raimy figured out what was going on, he became sort of annoyed about it. Who did this robot think it was? Who did it think he was, that its mindless algorithms were willing to inconvenience dozens of other vehicles on his behalf? And how long had this kind of thing been going on? Did Harvest Moon pay off the car manufacturers to include this feature? Had they bought off the whole country of Suriname? Or even the whole world? They certainly had the money, and Raimy had never even heard of such a feature, which told him it was not even remotely available to plebes like himself.

So this is first class, he thought. It was certainly a lot easier than fighting your way through lines and traffic and then cramming into some airline’s middle seat. But yeah, during the flight he’d looked up how much it was probably costing HMI to charter a jet for one person, and the answer made him shudder. A five-hour flight, one way, was enough to buy a decent robocar, and he couldn’t help thinking: if he had so much money that ninety thousand dollars could slip through his fingers unnoticed, wouldn’t he, you know, use it to help the poor or something? Of course, that was easy for him to say; his time wasn’t particularly valuable. He wasn’t needed in multiple places, and he often wasn’t needed anywhere at all. And the poor were a bottomless pit that even a trillionaire probably couldn’t do much about. If Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian, the CEO and largest shareholder of Harvest Moon Industries, decided to give away all his money, that would be, what, a hundred and twenty dollars for each person on Earth? Hell, these days that could barely buy you a beat-up old skateboard.

There were, of course, other things money could do for the poor, and truthfully, Killian was already doing a lot of that. Vaccination programs, literacy programs, broadband programs . . .  But as he’d publicly said, probably hundreds of times, his charity bent more toward the long-term future of humanity. To ensuring its long-term survival and, more importantly, “a kind of prosperity we can scarcely dream of right now. The resources of space dwarf those of the Earth, and we don’t have to damage our biosphere to extract them.” Or words to that effect. Raimy did know that “tralphium” or “heavy helium,” pulled from Harvest Moon’s polar ice mines, was already providing cleaner energy than the traditional fusile materials found on Earth. Certainly, it was Killian’s right to spend his money however he wanted, but it could also be argued that everyone was already directly benefitting from his space operations.

As a person who hoped to live the second half of his life on Mars, and who was raising millions of dollars from donors who probably could be helping the poor with that money, Raimy was hardly in a position to criticize. Still, he felt guilty, because this kind of luxury—uncomfortable though it made him—was something he feared he might miss. Once you’d had a taste of the good stuff, did you start to realize how shitty most people’s lives really were, and that you were “most people,” and that you were never going to afford an airline seat that didn’t make your legs go numb?

The limo attendant rode in what was still politely known as the “driver’s seat,” but he didn’t do much there other than fiddle with the climate controls. He kept it cold, and rather than ask him to turn the temperature up, Raimy (riding in back) rolled down his window and inhaled the rich—if muggy—air of Paramaribo. A lot of this traffic was fossil-fueled, so the scents of the nearby jungles and marshland were overlaid by the old-fashioned reek of gasoline and diesel smog. His drones didn’t like the breeze of the open window, though; they eyed him accusingly and settled on various surfaces inside the car.

After twenty minutes or so, the robocar came to a spindly bridge over a wide, blue-brown waterway, and as the pavement carried them up high, Raimy thought, If this car goes off the bridge I’m going to close the window. Before we hit the water, I’m going to jerk my seatbelt until it locks, and then I’m going to hold my breath. If we hit nose-first, it could break the windshield and flood the car. I’m going to wait until the car is fully submerged, and then I’m going to roll my window back down. The window motor runs on DC current; it should still work underwater. I’m going to keep my seatbelt on until the car is fully flooded, and then I’m going to release the latch and swim out. Quickly, before the car has a chance to sink too deep. Then I’m going to swim to the surface, and breathe. Then I’m going to swim to shore.

It only took him a second or so to go through the whole routine in his head. These were diver’s instincts: always know your exit plan. Always. It had saved his life a few times, and in fact this was exactly why he’d quit diving and gone to law school: because if being a Navy diver was that unsafe, then by his extension his best exit plan was to resign from the Navy altogether. The fact that Mars would also be dangerous was something he thought about a lot. But hey, the reward-to-risk ratio was a lot higher there, because he would be one of the first hundred colonists on a brand-new world. Jebediah Springfield or whatever. His children, if he had any, would also be pioneers. And their children after them, et cetera. If he had to pick a single word to describe the feeling, it would be something like destiny. Like everything in his life had been a preparation for his shot at this much profounder thing.

Still, the more immediate, less hypothetical dangers he’d be facing on the Moon were a novelty he’d been thinking about this whole trip. He’d never been one to shrink from danger, but he’d also never seriously thought about the Moon as a place he personally wanted to go. Since it didn’t have all the ingredients for life, it would always be dependent on someplace else. Also, it didn’t have weather or wind or even a sky at all, and these were part of the definition of “world” as far as Raimy was concerned, so what would be the point of going there? But he wasn’t going there to live. He wasn’t even going to visit. His investigation was tentatively scheduled to last five days, from landing to takeoff.

Whenever he thought about this, which was most of the time, he felt a sort of nervous tension coursing through him. Not fear, exactly, but the heightened alertness that preceded a dive. Serious business, Raimy. Pay attention. Space is more dangerous than the ocean. More dangerous than anything you’ve ever done.

All this reflection happened quickly, while he watched the water zooming by underneath the bridge. But then the car was angling downward, and then flattening out again, and the bridge was behind them, and Raimy was away from the city and onto the spaceport island itself.

By agreement with the attendant, the limo took Raimy to the Marriott Cielopuerto, the hotel where Etsub had stayed before lifting off. Once there, although tired, he asked to interview any staff who’d come in contact with Etsub or his belongings. Although Raimy had zero jurisdiction in this foreign land, and spoke zero Dutch and minimal Spanish, he was met with total cooperation, as this hotel had some kind of special partnership with Harvest Moon, and they knew he was coming. It was just a pro forma visit, though, because Etsub didn’t have the spacesuit with him when he was here, and nobody here had a plausible motive for hurting him anyway. Raimy really just wanted to retrace Etsub’s steps, and get a detailed sense of what had transpired in his last few days of life.

Of course, that meant the interviews didn’t tell him much. After an hour and a half, he gave up on them and checked himself into his room, then went ahead and got some dinner at the restaurant. Fortunately, Paramaribo, though on the opposite side of the equator from Florida, was actually just two time zones east, so he didn’t have to deal with any serious jet lag—just the sort of honest tired that came from spending the morning traveling and the afternoon in police interviews.

After dinner he showered, flipped through a little bit of news, and then spent an hour indulging his secret vice for cartoons. Not Japanese anime but actual cartoon cartoons. He liked some older stuff from his childhood—The Simpsons, Rick and Morty, stuff like that—but what he was really into these days was Chimps and Birds, which by any reasonable standard was a children’s show. But it was funny! In some ways it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, and so he watched avidly and laughed freely. He lived in fear that someone at the precinct would eventually catch him at it, and he’d never hear the end of it. Or worse, that his Antilympus sponsors would sniff it out somehow, and never take him seriously again. These risks didn’t keep him away, though. Perhaps he was addicted.

Unfortunately, the only thing on the show’s feed that he hadn’t already seen at least twice was a single twenty-minute episode. That didn’t exactly burn up the evening for him, so when it was done he sighed and indulged his other, lesser vice for behind-the-scenes media gossip. Tonight, he focused for some reason on the Video Reality Games genre, even though he’d never played a VRG, and wouldn’t admit it to anyone even if he had. Which VRG voice actors were pansexual? What did the VRG champions eat? It was pointless drivel, even by the standards of celebrity gossip, but it allowed him to nearly forget that tomorrow afternoon he was going to blast off in an honest-to-God rocket ship.

He went to bed early and slept surprisingly well, but awoke in a cold sweat at 4:15 A.M., with his heart beating tap-tap-tap against the wall of his chest, and that was that. Not fear, exactly, but that heightened state of alertness, back with a vengeance and quite incompatible with sleep. Within moments of waking, he could see his whole day laid out before him: he would shower again, though he didn’t really need to. He would make a cup of coffee with the room’s little machine. He would get a light breakfast (and more coffee) just as soon as the hotel’s restaurant opened, and then he would summon his limousine and head out to the artificial island’s long, finger-shaped Eastern Made Peninsula where all the Harvest Moon launch complexes were located. There, he would interview all the people who’d processed Etsub through launch operations, while they were processing Raimy himself through launch operations. He’d be buttoned up in his spacesuit again—for real this time—and then he’d be taken up in an elevator and walked into a surface-to-low-Earth-orbit capsule (a “SLEO,” as Harvest Moon called them), and strapped into an upward-facing acceleration chair . . . 

And so, yeah. In just a few hours, he was doing this, for real.


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Framed