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1.16
22 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


The news media—already alive with chatter about Etsub’s death—went bananas when they found out Raimy had solved the crime. To hear them tell it, he was both “a charismatic detective with roots in the U.S. Navy” and “a would-be astronaut with almost childish aspirations to Mars.” He had “cracked” or “untangled” or “blundered into a solution for” something that was either “the crime of the century” or “a fiendish plot to steal one percent of a planet,” or simply “nerdmurder.” He was being “paid a hefty sum” by a “shadowy group of Horsemen’s footmen,” or he was just doing it “for the exposure” in this age of “faux celebrity roughly as convincing as a 3D-printed pizza.” He was from Colorado Springs or San Diego or else he was a transient who moved around a lot. He was a failed lawyer or a failed cop or a Navy washout, or he was “a Renaissance man who’s tried his hand, successfully, at more career paths than a cat has lives.”

He tried not to read it, and when that failed, he tried not to obsess over it. And when that also failed, he simply tried not to spend whole days on it. He was the ninety-first person ever to set foot on the Moon, and he had only another two days at Saint Joe’s before the H.S.F Pony Express returned to pick them all up, students and cops and perps. Whatever the vlogs and tabloids might say, he was no publicity hound. He lacked the tongue for it! And yet, only an idiot would waste an opportunity like this. With the most critical part of the investigation complete, he was technically at liberty to record and post videos of his Lunar adventure, and basically take free advantage of a free trip to the Moon. The same trip had cost Bridget and Katla a hundred million dollars apiece—not out of pocket, but from their Antilympus funds, with the donors’ approval. They’d made their money back immediately once the news got out, and had doubled it once they actually started vlogging from the Moon, so in that sense it was very much a winning strategy. But he was getting his for free.

The publicity didn’t seem to work so well for Raimy, though; in those first two days, while the news was fresh and the iron was hot, he netted barely fifty million in additional donations. This was not even quite enough to move him from third place into second, so basically it meant nothing at all. The kindest interpretation of this (and the one Bridget and Michael favored) was that people had trouble seeing how a murder investigation (even if successful) related to the task of settling a new world. It was a fair point. The somewhat harsher view (espoused by Katla and Andrei and even a few of the monks) was that Raimy was truly shit at vlogging, and it was shocking he’d gotten as far as third place for the uber-competitive Male Administrator slot.

The darkest view, held publicly by many reporters and privately by Raimy himself, was that people simply didn’t want him for the job. Maybe not so much because of his personality (although maybe, yeah), as because he’d never actually administrated anything. Up against CEOs and congressmen and the head of goddamn National Geographic, he’d never really stood a chance. But he wasn’t good for anything else, either; Mars needed mechanics and doctors and hydroponic gardeners. It needed pilots and construction crews and people who could drive a big vehicle over rough terrain. What it didn’t need—what people didn’t want it to need—were cops, lawyers, or military guys, of which Raimy was all three. So yeah, maybe it was simply never meant to be.

That was only in his darker moments, though. The rest of the time he was watching Moon people do their Moon jobs, and learning everything he could, and helping out where he was able. If this was his one and only trip to space, well, it was an incredible experience that was (visibly and audibly) the envy of millions. Certainly, no one at CSPD (not even the Air Force veterans, of whom there were several) could boast of a better vacation. God, could he go back to CSPD after this? Turning over ice-cold corpses with his foot, to see the look of horror on their faces? If Mars wasn’t an option, then yes, that was probably his highest calling. But it occurred to him that he might very well try his hand at something else, and meanwhile, he had the Moon.

Every day there was an elaborate breakfast and an elaborate dinner—different and surprising each time. Lunches, where they occurred at all, were hurried affairs, because everyone was busy during the day, so Raimy learned to really load up at breakfast—enough food to carry him entirely through the day. Which was an adjustment, because he was generally a big fan of big lunches. But here on the Moon, everything was different and required adjusting to, so he just rolled with it.

He and a still-handcuffed Anming even spent a morning in the kitchen with Hilario and Kurtis (or Hamblin and Durm, or H.H. and Dewey), learning how to work the CHON synthesizer, the induction stove, and the weird combo oven that immolated foodstuffs with simultaneous microwaves, radiant infrared, and superheated air, flashing them to baking or broiling or frying temperature. Officially a “Hammerschmidt Combination Oven,” it was colloquially referred to as “the hammer,” and cooking food in it was called “hammering.”

“This thing is expensive like a small airplane,” Hilario explained, “much more than the six appliances it combines. But it saves space, and it saves mass, and so it’s actually way better than shipping six things up here. But for a foodie it does limit options. I miss choosing to air-fry one thing whilst microwaving another.”

It was a bitch to operate, too; never intended for consumer use, it had separate control menus for each heating feature, and no macros or recipe controls to tie it all together. Slow-baking a potato in forty-five minutes was straightforward enough, but flash-hammering one in ten minutes, without exploding or charring it, required a PhD in thermodynamics.

“And yet, we have a lot of people to cook for, and different dishes at every meal. So it has to be fast.”

“You get good at it,” Kurtis said, with the patience of a monk.

The CHON synthesizer was even more complicated, although it did at least allow you to dial up preprogrammed food simulants from a series of menus.

“By itself this stuff is cosa muy pegajosa,” Hilario said of a manufactured protein paste. “Basically glop. But so is miso, or Vegemite, or”—he looked up at Anming—“rice congee, and people eat those things. Today we’re going to put this in chicken nugget molds and then starch the outsides. Tomorrow, maybe blend it into broth, and never let the brothers guess it’s the same ingredient. Cooking well is a tricky skill up here.”

Raimy was nowhere close to mastering the equipment by the end of the breakfast shift, but he at least understood the basic principles. He had no idea if there’d be ovens and printers like this at Antilympus, and anyway he had even less qualification as a chef than he did an administrator. But like any real student of the monastery, he was learning how to live in space.

“I burned the biscuits,” he told his followers in a poorly edited video, with Anming lurking dolefully in the background, “but I printed out some decent glop.”

He spent the afternoon in the workshop, “helping” Brother Purcell repair an electrostatic precipitator from the floor vent of one of the dormitory cells. His contribution consisted mainly of fetching tools and holding a work light, while making sure Anming didn’t get anywhere close to anything he could use as a weapon. But still, Raimy got an idea of how the precipitator was put together, and how it worked.

“The charge pulls air past this plate,” Purcell said. “And the dust sticks to it. But the ozone filter’s bad, and without that, the whole thing’s no bueno, more harm than good. Ozone’s also bad for your lungs.”

Fixing the ozone filter involved putting on paper masks, using compressed air to blast moondust out of a little brick of pumice-like material, and immediately sucking up the dust with a little vacuum hose, to keep it out of the monastery’s atmosphere. The brick was then sprayed down with some sort of anti-static solution from a 3D-printed plastic spray bottle.

“Now we put the filter back in its slot,” Purcell said. “Now we close the housing and screw the grating back on. Now we charge the plates and turn it on, to confirm it’s funcional, which it is. Now we put it back where it came from, and go to the next to-do item on the punch list.”

It wasn’t exactly the most fascinating work, but again, it taught Raimy something important about living and working on an alien planet.

He spent the evening in the library, skimming through Harvest Moon’s maintenance and operator’s manuals for the hab modules and their various subsystems. Verrry dry reading, but it helped him make sense of the equipment all around him, on which his life depended. It was all quite different from the systems onboard a submarine—especially because they were designed so that new plug-and-play hab modules could be snapped into place with minimal fuss. And these were undoubtedly different from the robot-built modules at Antilympus, but maybe not that different, because how many different ways could there be to move air and water and electricity around?

Anming seemed particularly bored here in the library. He tried reading magazines on one of the computers in here, but finally gave up and just sat there, looking accusingly at Raimy. And Raimy did feel somewhat bad for this murderer, because he should have been processed into a jail by now, or (less likely) out on bail after pre-trial hearings. Being dragged around like a parcel was surely humiliating, and it wasn’t Raimy’s job to humiliate anyone. But the alternative was for Raimy himself to sit around bored along with Anming, and he simply wasn’t going to do that, when he had a whole moonbase at his disposal.

The second night Bridget came to his bed, she did so less innocently. They let their hands roam over—and then under—the slippery-stretchy fabric of each other’s space underwear. But only for a while, and only in an exploratory capacity. She then curled up next to him and fell asleep, and when he woke up a few hours later, she was gone. But that was fine. They had another full day here together at the monastery, and then . . . who knew?


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