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1.15
22 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


After explaining the arrest to the knot of onlookers behind him, Raimy asked someone to fetch Brother Michael, and then left Anming temporarily in his care. He then went off to talk to Andrei again.

“What is this thing?” Raimy demanded, holding out the valentine atom in a gray ceramic coffee mug.

“Is coffee cup,” Andrei said dryly, then noticed the valentine atom and stopped. “Mmm.”

Raimy dumped the thing into his palm and demonstrated its transformation: atom to valentine. He then dumped it back in the cup, where it sat for a few seconds before popping back into its original shape, with a clatter like a dropped coin.

“Is shape memory alloy,” Andrei said confidently. “Probably titanium nickel alloy. We say Nitinol in Russian. I do not know American word for this.”

“Explain,” Raimy said. “As though I’ve never heard of it.”

Andrei shrugged. “Is forged in two shapes. Cold shape and hot shape. People use this metal to make eyeglasses that fix themselves if they are bent. Also little medical robots that move without motors, or a hermetic seal between two pipes, very strong. Is pretty old technology. Actually molecules of this metal can have six different structures, so perhaps this kind of object could be six different shapes, but I have not seen this. Usually it is two. This is probably medical wire, with perekhod temperature, uh, change temperature, close to body heat.”

Raimy very carefully pulled the bracket clamp out of his pocket, and held it out in his open palm. “What about this thing? Could it also be memory alloy?”

Andrei furrowed his brow and said, “You thinking this is orudiye ubiystva? Ah . . . murder tool? Weapon? Yes . . . yes, it could be.” He picked it up and seemed to measure its weight again.

“Be careful,” Raimy said.

“You have held this thing all day,” Andrei observed. “It is not switching shape from your body heat. But it could be shape memory alloy, yes, with higher switching temperature.”

“How much higher?”

Andrei shrugged. “Could be anything. How hot is spacesuit backpack in full Lunar sunlight? Could be maybe eighty, ninety degrees centigrade.”

“Can we get it that hot?”

“We have kitchen,” Andrei said, as though it were obvious. Which of course it was.

The kitchen was only two modules over from the library, but Raimy and Andrei took the long way around, through the cloisters and the chapel and the infirmary and the workshop, where they picked up Purcell.

“I can heat it up with a torch,” Purcell offered, once the situation was explained to him.

“I prefer something less destructive,” Raimy said. This was going to be one of the exhibits presented to a jury, and he didn’t want any extraneous scorch marks on it.

They then went back through the chapel again, where Michael and Giancarlo were now keeping watch over Anming.

“What’s going on?” Michael wanted to know.

“I want to heat this thing up on the stove,” Raimy said, holding up the now-familiar clamp bracket. “I have reason to believe it’s going to change shape.”

“Keep him here,” Michael said to Giancarlo, with a nod in Anming’s direction. Then, to Raimy: “Let’s run your plan past H.H. before we start messing with his equipment. Are you thinking that’s some kind of shape memory alloy?”

“Yes,” Raimy said.

“Probably Nitinol,” Andrei added. “Based on weight.”

“I see the logic,” Purcell agreed. And so they all shuffled into the kitchen, where Hilario Hamblin (who had overheard through the open hatchway) said, “How can I help?”

The stove was basically just an induction hotplate that would only activate if a metal pot or pan were placed on it, so Hilario placed the clamp bracket in the center of a frying pan, and turned the heat up to a temperature, suggested by Andrei, of one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius.

“That will not melt or damage,” Andrei explained, “but should exceed backpack temperature.”

They all crowded around, waiting for they knew not what. And they waited. And they waited some more, until, suddenly, the clamp bracket jumped and clanged in the pan, clattering to rest again in a different shape. And right away you could see how this thing had popped the hose and severed the antenna cable, because in its hot configuration it was a tight spiral with a nasty, pointed tip.

“Boom,” Raimy said. This thing had heated up inside Etsub’s backpack until it suddenly coiled into a cutting, puncturing instrument. And then, when he’d fallen into shadow and the backpack started bleeding its gas and heat into the vacuum of space, the clamp bracket had released its death grip and fallen away, its evil task complete.

“You appear to have cracked the case,” Michael said, in a tone that managed to be both admiring and sorrowful.

“A nearly perfect crime,” Raimy said. “I never would have figured it out if he hadn’t brought a sample of the same technology to the goddamn Moon with him. That’s usually what trips people up. They leave their clues, never imagining . . .”

“I am not stupid,” Anming said. Because somehow he was there at the back of the crowd.

“Get him out of here,” Raimy said, to no one in particular. Then, to Hilario: “Let’s turn the heat off.”

Hilario did so, and after a much shorter delay, the clamp bracket clanged and clattered back into its original shape, as though nothing had happened at all.

“Oh my God,” said Bridget, who was somehow also there at the back.

“Where did you get this?” demanded Katla, who was also there.

Everyone was there. Everyone wanted to see.

“Damn,” said Raimy, who had never once had control over this crime scene.

To which Michael said, wearily, “Can I beseech you, all of you, to stop taking the Lord’s name in vain?”


Fifteen minutes later, Michael and Raimy were alone in the chapel, a handcuffed Anming temporarily in the custody of Hilario in the laundry room.

“How certain are you about this?” Michael asked.

“About what?”

The question seemed to surprise Michael, who said, “That you’ve identified the killer in our midst.”

Raimy processed that for a few seconds. It was a completely logical thing for a layman to ask. Superficially, it was the whole point of any criminal investigation, right? But it did kind of miss the point.

“We have a suspect,” he said carefully, “with motive, means, and opportunity. By Etsub’s death, he stood to gain an entire planet. Just him—no one else. He clearly had access to custom Nitinol fabrication services. He was at the GS plant in Florida, where Etsub’s backpack was sitting unsecured, before it was sealed and fitted to its user. We’ve found the murder weapon, and a second piece of physical evidence that ties Anming to it. It’s circumstantial, but unless we find DNA or fingerprints somewhere, it’s what we have, and it’s more than enough for a prosecutor to build an airtight case. Actual guilt or innocence is for a jury to decide—not me—but in procedural terms this one is open and shut.”

But Michael was frowning. “That’s not what I asked.”

“There are always loose ends,” Raimy said, and here his voice sounded a little condescending and a little defensive, even to himself. But damn it, he’d spent eight years lawyering and ten years policing, and he didn’t need some civilian telling him how to do his job. “Some of these we’ll tie up once I get back to Earth. I’ll try to figure out exactly where those metal parts came from, and who placed the order. But there are easy ways to conceal your identity online, and Anming is not stupid, so I’m not expecting to find anything. And some of these ends are going to dangle forever, because we just can’t know everything that happened. And we don’t need to.”

He paused then, looking at Michael, who managed in his monk robes to look both sternly authoritative and utterly naive. Raimy realized that answer was not going to fly, so he tried another:

“You know, people think I’m supposed to be some kind of mind reader, studying the faces of everyone who’s acting weird”—and here he gestured with his hands holding them up around his face and wiggling them slightly—“but everyone acts weird when they’re under suspicion, and even good cops make bad lie detectors. The ones who try to run it that way have low solve rates and low conviction rates, which drove me crazy as a prosecutor. There is no magic to this job; a good detective needs tangible evidence to show who did what to whom, and why. It’s a lot like science: you present your hypothesis, you collect evidence, you prove it beyond reasonable doubt. And still it’s called a theory, not a fact.”

Unimpressed, Michael repeated, “How certain are you?”

“Ninety percent,” Raimy said. “Which is as certain as I ever am about anything.”

The prior’s face softened, then. “All right. I suppose congratulations are in order. And gratitude.”

“Just doing my job,” Raimy said, with transparently false modesty.

Michael side-eyed him a bit, not liking that. But what he said was, “We have no way to confine him, so we’re going to have to figure out sleeping arrangements. You can’t watch him 24/7, and I’m assuming you don’t want to sleep next to him.”

“True,” Raimy said. That concern had been hypothetical up to this point, but there simply wasn’t anywhere to lock up a prisoner. Not here, and not at Shackleton, or the other little bases, either. “And I’m assuming we can’t, you know, stuff him in the bunker and pile weights on top of the hatch?”

“I thought about that,” Michael said. “It’s got a sink and a toilet. But a lot of our plumbing and wiring runs right across the ceiling, unprotected. Even restrained, he could sabotage the whole complex. In retrospect, it’s a design flaw, but who knew?”

“Hmm. Could we maybe maroon him in a separate module, out on the Lunar surface, with no spacesuit?” Raimy had already asked Tracy Greene to run that question up various flagpoles, and none of them had come back with answers at all, much less affirmative ones.

“Even with advance planning,” Michael said, “that would cost a hundred million dollars. We’re going to have to keep him under constant supervision, which means we’ll need to watch him in shifts.”

“At night we are,” Raimy agreed. “I can cover him during the day. Except, you know, when I need bathroom breaks and such.”

“You seem to go to bed early,” Michael observed.

“On the Moon, anyway,” Raimy said. But it wasn’t just on the Moon. He still thought of himself as a night owl, but if he really thought about it, that had mainly been back in the thirties, during the great renaissance of coffeehouse culture, when he was freshly out of the military and trying to figure out who he wanted to be. And in fact, since he’d turned forty, there were more and more nights where he’d lost his steam by 9:00 p.m., if not earlier.

“We can cover for you from, say, 8:00 p.m. to three o’clock in the morning. That should leave you enough time to get six or seven hours of sleep.”

“Sold,” Raimy told him. “But who’s going to watch him?”

“I’ll ask for volunteers,” Michael said, “but I’m guessing Andrei will want to do it. His fear of leaving makes him eager to please. Probably also Brother Purcell, because he’s a firm believer in sleeping twice per night, with a wakeful period in between. He’s into lucid dreaming, too, by the way.”

“Okay,” Raimy said, unsure what to do with that. Then, changing the subject entirely, he said to Michael, “Your secret is safe with me, by the way.”

“Oh? What secret is that?” Michael asked calmly.

Lowering his voice, Raimy said, “You don’t want the men to know you’re gay. Or were, rather.”

Still calm, Michael said, “What gives you that idea? Past homosexuality is not forbidden, by the way. The church has strict codes of conduct, but they do not extend backward in time. Statistically, at least one of us here is bound to have something like that in their past.”

“You and Purcell,” Raimy said. “Though not with each other. You have a . . . person of interest back on Earth, who also keeps the secret.”

“What gives you that idea?” Michael said again, his face mild.

“In Purcell’s case, it’s . . . well, I’m sorry, but it’s the way he moves. I saw it right away.”

“I thought you weren’t a lie detector,” Michael said. “Are you saying you have some infallible gaydar?”

“Not infallible, no.”

Michael stood impassive for a long moment, then sighed. “What gave me away?”

“You really want to know?”

“I do.”

Carefully, Raimy said, “It’s the way you say the word ‘church.’ Like it was a person. Specifically, a . . . beloved mentor, maybe? Once I noticed that, I got an electronic search warrant and stalked your deleted social media profiles.”

“Why?”

“Because you were a suspect.”

“Ah.”

There was a long pause. Then, quietly, Michael said, “Nothing ever happened. I want to be perfectly clear about that.”

“Understood. And none of my business.”

Then, ruefully, Michael said, “That’s extremely flimsy evidence, isn’t it? I never said anything online. I hugged some men in photos, maybe. Until a few seconds ago, all you had was a hypothesis.”

“Correct,” Raimy said.

“You’ve trapped me. To illustrate how your job works.”

“Also correct.”

“Well, consider me illustrated. The police are lucky to have you, Raimy. I expect the Navy was, as well.”


Dinner that night was a subdued affair. That Anming had to be watched every moment was not a problem, because all eyes were on him, and he seemed to feel it keenly. Whether he was a serious threat to anyone’s safety was hard to say; he’d already killed one person, but for a clearly definable reason. Now that he was well and truly caught, it seemed unlikely he had anything to gain by hurting anyone else. Raimy consented to re-cuff him with his hands in front, so he could eat and drink and such. He seemed very sad, and disinclined toward conversation. Nor would he meet the eyes of his classmates, although he looked hard at Raimy a few times.

“What I can’t figure out,” Bridget was saying, “is why that thing didn’t pop off the minute Etsub stepped outside? He went EVA a lot. It must have been a near thing.”

“Maybe it did,” Purcell said. “Maybe multiple times, weakening the hose each time.”

“A little luckier and he might have made it all the way back to Earth, none the wiser he was ever in danger,” Katla agreed.

To which Michael opined, “If it’s true the Lord works in mysterious ways, then the universe by definition cannot be mere clockwork. There’s an uncertainty about things, and it’s there we can look for his handiwork.”

To which Bridget said, “Why would God want him to die at that particular moment? Why would God want him to die at all?”

To which Giancarlo replied, in his thick Italian accent, “Ouch, Bridget. Yes, everyone dies, unpleasantly. It’s unwise to think we know the mind of God, or can know it, but this much has always been true, and likely always will be. It’s hard not to feel victimized.”

Several of the monks had responses to that:

Ovid: “Mathematics shows us the mind of God. The how of creation, at least, if not the why.”

Groppel: “Teilhard de Chardin agreed with you, and wrote a lot about the prevalence of exponential growth in nature and in human affairs. He was actually the first to believe in a Singularity as a heaven of man’s own creation.”

Bear: “No he wasn’t, and no he didn’t.”

Purcell: “Merde. Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon both said empirical evidence is the standard by which all knowledge should be measured. Detectives, both of them, among other things. They would say, until your singularity arrives, it’s not real. Unlike death.”

Groppel: “Bacon’s advice is not relational. Are we machines or men?”

From there, the conversation grew both more esoteric and more overtly Christian, to which Neither Katla nor Bridget nor Raimy had anything to add. Raimy had grown up Baptist, but had stopped going to church the minute his parents stopped making him. He had sometimes attended the chaplain’s services while he was aboard the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter, but that was as much out of boredom as anything else.

However, after another twenty minutes of chatter, Anming effectively ended the discussion—and the meal—by saying, “In my religion, murderers also go to Hell. And liars. And we sometimes say, those who love badly are in Hell already, and have nothing further to fear.” He said nothing more after that, and once the dishes were cleared away and the tables folded back into church pews, he stuck around with Andrei, who had indeed volunteered to watch him. Anming seemed inclined to sit there all the way through “vespers,” which is what the monks called their evening prayers.

Raimy took the opportunity to return to his quarters and call Tracy Greene, to let her know the case had been solved, and how.

“Congratulations,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I knew you would, though. You have a ninety percent solve rate.”

Raimy couldn’t help calculating: as of today, it was actually more like ninety-two and a half. He let it go, though, and simply thanked her, then hung up when it looked like she was going to start asking personal questions. After that, he typed up a little report and emailed it to her, then watched some cartoons, listened to some music and, at some point, drifted off to sleep.


He was a light sleeper, so when his room’s hatch opened later on in the night, he was aware of it, and instantly opened his eyes to a silhouette in the doorway. Female. Wearing only space underwear. She came inside and gently closed the door behind her, and from her smell and the sound of her breathing he could tell it was Bridget.

“What are you—” he started to say in a quiet whisper, but she laid a finger vertically across his lips. Hush. Then she got into bed with him.

He thought for a moment that she was there to seduce him, or reward him, or whatever, but instead she simply snuggled under his arm. And that was better somehow, warmer and more soothing. “I just want to be close,” she said, in a very quiet whisper even he could barely hear.

Her smell was intoxicating. It was funny—right?—how every woman smelled different, and how some of those smells just crawled inside you and set up camp. And she was not a suspect anymore, and he was not on the clock, and so he adjusted his position to make room for her, and she adjusted to settle her shape into his. It was good, and they stayed like that for a long time, until Raimy fell asleep again.

Some hours later she slipped out from under his arm. Slipped out of bed and out of the room, quiet as a feather in vacuum, leaving only her scent behind. Raimy breathed it in deeply, surprised at himself for deriving so much pleasure from so chaste an encounter. And then fell back again into dreamless, virtuous slumber, until his rollup chirped its 3:00 a.m. wakeup call.


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