Back | Next
Contents

1.13
22 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


The backpack of a Heavy Rebreather was normally covered by a layer of tough, polymer-wrapped mesh. Brother Michael had removed this, and also separated the back cover from the backpack itself.

“The outer sheath is held on with Velcro at these four corners,” Michael said, pointing to black Velcro circles on the heavy plastic of the backpack. “It comes off in one piece, and when I first removed it, I did not observe any damage to it, other than normal wear and tear.”

The inspection table had a powerful, illuminated magnifying lens clamped to it on an articulated arm. Raimy used this to study the sheath, once Michael had handed it over to him. He wore a set of black nitrile gloves to avoid contamination, although the sheath had already been touched by the bare fingers of at least three monks—first when they were trying to revive Etsub, and again when they were removing him from the suit. Brothers Michael, Purcell, and Groppel had each completed a General Spacesuit Certified Maintenance Technician course before coming to Luna, and so the three of them had personally inspected the suit a few days ago, sending pictures down to GS for analysis. But they’d been wearing gloves at the time, so the only real risk was that they might have smeared the fingerprints from the previous handling.

However, Raimy’s glasses were police issue, and had preinstalled on them a remarkable app called Fingerprint Finder. There was no need for powders or sprays or ultraviolet light; something called a “deep belief network” was able, somehow, to pick up even the faintest or smudgiest fingerprints from an ordinary video stream. And there were definitely fingerprints, all over the thing! These flashed red, one by one, in Raimy’s vision, and then green as each print was matched to a known suspect.

These days, everyone surrendered up their genomes and biometric data, including fingerprints. It was a condition not only for space travel, but for getting married, getting a job, getting a license to operate motor vehicles in manual mode, etc. Raimy could consult remotely with a number of global databases, but that could take hours and cost many thousands of dollars. Instead, he had preloaded the algorithm with the prints of everyone who might ever have come in contact with the suit. That meant, literally, everyone at GS, Spaceport Paramaribo, Transit Point Station, Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station, and of course, Saint Joe’s. Studying the display now, Raimy found no surprises; the sheath had been handled by Etsub Beyene, Michael Jablonski, Purcell Veloso, Eliaz Groppel, and Daniel Ramirez—a name Raimy didn’t recognize, but which was flagged as belonging to a GS quality control technician.

None of his prime suspects had left any prints. This didn’t mean they were innocent. It didn’t mean that they hadn’t touched the cover of the spacesuit backpack. It only meant they hadn’t left fingerprints. He also didn’t see any signs of sabotage on the sheath itself—no rips or cut marks—but he wouldn’t have expected to. It was only ever Velcroed on.

“What do you see?” Bridget asked.

“I can’t discuss it,” Raimy said.

He repeated the process with the back cover of the backpack, which was made of a rigid gray plastic, about three millimeters thick, and there he did find some tool marks on one side. Putting them under the magnifier, he captured video and still images: a centimeter-wide band of streaks, and a crease or dent in the heavy plastic. A few centimeters away, a similar but larger marking.

“I tried to open the backpack with a screwdriver,” Michael explained. “I couldn’t get enough leverage, so then I used a crowbar. That popped it right open.”

“I can corroborate that,” Bridget said. “I was in here when he did it.”

“Wonderful,” Raimy muttered.

“What?” she asked, sounding as though her feelings were hurt.

“I realize you’re dealing with a very contaminated crime scene,” Michael said sympathetically. “Every witness a suspect, every exhibit tampered. For all you know, Bridget and I killed him together. And yet, someone has to help you. It must be maddening. Perhaps they should have sent an entire team of investigators.”

Raimy had nothing to say to that. Instead, he said, “I’m going to need to have a look at those tools.”

“Of course. Now?”

“Later is fine. Technically I should take them back to Earth with me as bagged exhibits, but I don’t want to endanger your facility by carting off critical equipment. I can make do with pictures; I just want to verify that the tools and markings match.”

“Understood,” Michael said.

Next, they pulled the sheet off the spacesuit itself. It was in two pieces—the pants and the coat—facedown on the table so that the open backpack was exposed. Raimy didn’t have to look very hard to find the burst air hose; it was as thick as his thumb and as long as his outstretched hand, and looked like it had been attacked with a hatchet, or shot, or both. Really, both.

On his glasses, Raimy pulled up the 3D model given him by the CTO of General Spacesuit. Its clean lines overlaid with the jagged ones of the actual hardware, confirming that yes, indeed, the air hose was no longer in factory condition.

“There’s a missing bracket,” Raimy said. He pointed. “It should be here, holding this hose and this cable to this”—he read the part name on his display—“vertical spar.”

“Indeed,” Michael agreed. “I think it’s down at the bottom of the backpack. There. Do you see it?”

“Yes. Right, yes, that’s the right shape. Did you detach it?”

“No, it was like that when we opened the pack. I’m guessing it fell off when the hose blew out.”

“Hmm.”

Looking at the shape of it, Raimy wasn’t clear on how that could have happened, and he didn’t care to speculate just now. Especially he didn’t care to listen to someone else speculate, but he parked that thought for now. His attention fell on the rupture itself. Dong Nguyen had told him to look at the metal wires that formed the hose’s outer braid, to see if they were severed or stretched. It was hard to tell, even under the magnifier, but it kind of looked like the answer was “both.”

“I need a closer look at these braids,” Raimy said, pointing. “Can we get a microscope on this?”

That proved to be harder than it sounded, because the lab’s microscope—a high-end binocular model with lots of knobs and lenses—was configured for tabletop use, and in fact securely bolted to the table. Between its stand and the bottom of the objective lens, the tallest object that would fit was about fifteen centimeters. The spacesuit was rather larger than that, and although the backpack by itself might have been maneuvered into that gap, Michael said it would be several hours’ work to detach the backpack from the actual suit.

“It wasn’t ever meant to come off,” he said, “and we might damage your evidence in the process.”

“We could take the microscope apart,” Bridget suggested. “Look, it screws down to the base, here and here.”

“And here,” Michael said, pointing to the back of it. “But you’re not going to see anything, holding it freehand.”

“Can we clamp it to the sides of the backpack?” Raimy asked.

“I think we very well could,” Michael said, “though we’ll need to fabricate an appropriate fixture.”

This involved dragging Brother Purcell over from the module next door, to take measurements and study geometries. “Yes,” he said, in a voice both cheerful and slightly annoyed. “This can be done. You want it now? Merde. Give me, I think, ninety minutes. Michael, will you assist? You have steady hands.”

“Certainly.”

The two of them hustled off into the workshop, leaving Raimy and Bridget alone with the suit. Raimy reminded himself that a man had died in this thing. He reminded himself that he only had three more days to solve the crime, unless he wanted to wait two weeks for the next scheduled EOLS departure. He reminded himself that the nearest crime lab technician was four hundred thousand kilometers away, and so he was going to have to be really, really careful to get clear images without messing anything up.

“I’m a little out of my depth,” he confessed to Bridget, perhaps unwisely.

“Eh? How so?”

“My victims are usually killed in their homes, or stabbed in a bar fight, or sometimes run over by cars, although that’s getting harder to pull off. If there’s a firearm involved, I send it to ballistics. If there’s a knife or a rock or a samurai sword, we’ve got experts for that. I’m not a spacesuit expert.”

“But you were in the Navy,” she said. “You were, what, a diver?”

“That’s right.”

“So you’ve seen an air hose before.”

“Yes. That’s not really my point.”

“What are you looking for, with the microscope?”

He explained to her about braids and tool marks, and then added, “That’s not something I would normally tell a suspect. This is a very strange investigation.”

“I’ll keep my hands where you can see ’em,” she said, half-jokingly. “But you know I could’ve tampered with this hardware any time before you got here. In the dead of night, with everyone else asleep. Who’d know? There are no locks or security cameras here.”

He sighed. “I’m aware of that, yes.”

“Well, then, shall we continue your investigation? What about that bracket of yours?” The bracket, actually an “upper clamp bracket” according to the plans, was nestled behind tanks and wires, up against the bottom of the backpack.

“I can’t get my hand in there,” Raimy said. He looked at Bridget’s hands, which were slender and long, barely filling out her lab gloves. “Can you reach . . .”

“You want me to touch it?”

“Yes,” he said. “If you can reach.”

She tried, but although she was able to touch the bracket with the tips of her gloves, she couldn’t actually get a grip on it.

“We’re going to have to tilt the suit,” Raimy said.

“Or I could get some tweezers. Or a magnet.”

Raimy thought about that. “A magnet is less likely to scratch it.”

He air-touched the bracket on the AR plans hovering over the suit, and confirmed that it was made of stainless steel. “It should work. What did you have . . .”

Rummaging in a drawer below the lab table, she came up with a sort of telescoping probe, like a pointer or a dental probe, with a little round magnet on the tip. “I saw Michael use this to pick up metal shavings,” she said.

“Okay. Have at it.”

But the probe also wouldn’t grab the bracket. The magnet seemed not to affect it at all.

“I’m not sure stainless steel is magnetic,” Bridget said, still fussing with the thing.

“My refrigerator is stainless,” Raimy said, “and it’s got magnets all over it.”

“So is mine, and magnets won’t stick to it at all. You can try asking Andrei. He’s some sort of metallurgist.”

“It would be better to ask General Spacesuit.”

“Yeah,” Bridget said, “probably.” Then: “Aargh! I give up. This thing’s not working.” Defeated, she set the probe down on the countertop.

So yes, they did end up having to tilt the suit. And shake it. And have Bridget reach her fingers in there again to jiggle the clamp bracket out of its hiding place. Finally, in Lunar slow motion, it tumbled out onto the table. They set the suit back down, and Raimy put the magnifier over the bracket. It was scratched all to hell, which he supposed wasn’t all that surprising if it was wrapped around a braided hose while it exploded. Still, it wasn’t bent, and something in the pattern of scratches didn’t look right; they all formed perfect little synchronous loops. Or so it seemed; he really needed to get it under the microscope for a better look.

“Do you see anything?” Bridget wondered.

“Maybe.”

He picked up the bracket in his gloved hand, and tried to fit it back over the blown-out portion of the hose and antenna cable, where the AR diagram said it should go. It wouldn’t fit, though, so he tried a little lower, on the smooth, intact portions. Still no dice.

Interesting.

“Doesn’t fit?” Bridget said.

“No,” Raimy said. “It doesn’t look like it can fit, without bending it.”

“So bend it,” she said.

“You don’t understand,” he told her. “If it was blown off the hose, it should be bent open already. It isn’t.”

“Oh. Wow. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. I’m going to send a picture to General Spacesuit and see what they can tell me.”

With a few air gestures, he did this.

Then he was out of moves.

“Let’s take a break,” he said. “Until Michael gets back with that part.”

“Sure.”

Taking a break in Lunar gravity was pretty easy; you didn’t even need to sit down. You just stopped what you were doing and stood there, much like you would in a swimming pool.

“So you were also a lawyer?” Bridget asked, filling a long moment of silence.

“Prosecutor, yes. It was a waste of time; I didn’t like it, and I’m still paying off the student loans.”

She twirled her hair around a finger, and then released it.

“Why didn’t you like it?”

He snorted. “I don’t know. Too many plea deals. Too many badly constructed cases, where the city simply couldn’t overcome reasonable doubt. I let five murderers walk who were clearly guilty, along with hundreds of burglars and thieves and child molesters, and finally I just couldn’t take it anymore. Plus I didn’t . . .  It just wasn’t a good fit for me. Of course, some people would say I traded that job for an even uglier one, but I don’t know. As of this month I’ve got a ninety percent conviction rate, which is pretty good for a homicide detective. Makes me feel like the good guys are winning.”

She nodded, thinking that over, and finally asked, “What’s it like to arrest someone?”

He looked her over, trying to decide if there were ulterior motives to that question. Did she fear arrest? But no, she simply looked curious, and maybe a little bored.

She also—it had to be said—looked good. It was getting a little stuffy in here, and she had responded at some point by unzipping her coverall to the top of her shiny-gray space camisole. She’d also unzipped and rolled up her sleeves, and she’d had her trouser bottoms cuffed the whole time. She wore her moon slippers without socks, and while it seemed strangely Victorian to be attracted to a woman’s ankles . . .  Well, there you had it.

“It’s very confrontational,” he told her. “Very in-your-face. They hate your guts—even the ones who go quietly—and you’re touching them and restraining them and controlling their movements. Nobody likes that. And a lot of them don’t go quietly! You have to be ready to fight. Really, you have to be ready to fight to the death, because some of these guys are armed, or just willing to choke you to death the first chance they get. So you have to control them in a way that provides no openings. It’s basically combat, every time.”

“Well, aren’t you a chancer? You seriously like that better than being a lawyer?”

“Yeah. I do. I’m not sure I want to spend the rest of my life on it, but right now, yeah, I’ve never felt more useful. Justice is . . .  Well, you know. Very important. Even if the victim was a dirtbag, they still have families, friends, coworkers. You rip someone out of the world like that, and it’s just very damaging. A conviction lets everyone start to heal.”

He weighed his next words more carefully: “For someone like Etsub, it’s even more dire. If it wasn’t an accident, and if it goes unsolved, it’s going to leave a black mark on, what, four different organizations, and three planets? Plus all the people he’s left behind. I’m sorry, I know he was your friend.”

“He was,” she said wearily. She seemed to have more to say, but the wind had gone out of her. Instead, she nodded glumly, and made one of those faces that said, I have no idea what to do with any of this, so what can you say?

After another long moment, she asked, “How many of them fight you? What percentage?”

“Oh, less than ten percent. But that’s because we show up with overwhelming force, hopefully in public, and hopefully with the element of surprise. Catch them with their pants down, sometimes literally. But about half of them are thinking how they could try it.”

“Huh,” she said. “What’s the scariest thing that ever happened?”

“To me? On the force? I mean, I got stabbed in the leg once. That sucked, especially because I’m pretty sure he was aiming for my femoral artery. If I hadn’t’ve blocked it, it could have been fatal.”

“That’s awful,” she said. “It must have been terrifying.”

“Not as bad as escaping from a submarine,” he said, “but yeah, pretty bad.”

“You did that? Escaped from a submarine? Like, underwater?”

“Yeah, deep,” he said. “Very deep. Once with scuba gear, once with an inflatable escape suit, and once with basically just a plastic hood. That was scary. I also crashed a motorcycle once. On a closed track, but still pretty hairy. Oh, and I had a couple of close calls as a diver. Also deep underwater. Somebody once knocked my helmet loose from its collar, so it flooded. I had to rip it off and grab the spare regulator—which is called an octopus—and breathe with my bare face in freezing black water. Saltwater really burns in your eyes, so I had to close them. I had to climb back into the torpedo tube like that, which is how we got in and out. I suppose that was probably the scariest single incident.”

“Jesus, Raimy.”

“Why, what’s the scariest thing that ever happened to you?”

“Nothing like that. Nothing like any of that. I’m not brave enough to put myself in those kind of situations.”

“Says the astronaut headed for Mars.”

She snorted. “Yeah, I suppose. I mean, it’s scary going EVA in a spacesuit. Especially now.”

She waved in the general direction of Etsub’s suit, as if wishing all her anxieties onto it. Then she reached for her coverall zipper, pulling it down another few centimeters, and fanned herself with her hand. “It’s hot in here. The sun is out, and I don’t think we’re getting quite enough airflow in here.”

“There’s a thermostat,” Raimy said, pointing to a primitive little analog control on the wall. It wasn’t particularly hot in here, but Raimy’s Antilympus uniform seemed to handle a broader range of temperatures than Bridget’s Harvest Moon one.

“We’re not allowed to touch the temperatures,” she said. “Michael’s very fussy about it. But yeah, when he gets back I’ll ask him.”

Then she leaned toward the west hatchway and called out loudly, “Hey Michael! Hurry it up!”

Apparently, she was just clowning; Michael was on the other side of the noisy Life Support module.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” Raimy said.

“Well, I’ll yell louder.”

“Please don’t.”

She pulled her zipper down still further, now past the bottom of her camisole, revealing an inverted triangle of pale, pale skin that exerted a magnetic pull on Raimy’s gaze.

“Don’t go getting ideas,” she said, with what might have been a playful tone.

Raimy surprised himself by answering, “Ma’am, I’ve already seen you naked.”

“So you have,” she agreed. Then: “Tell me something else about you. Not scary, something else.”

“Like what? I grew up vegetarian. Actually, I grew up vegan, but that’s just not realistic for Mars. I had to train myself on printmeat and vat cell cultures.”

“McDonald’s?” she asked.

“Actually, yes. The Ethical Mac was my introduction to animal protein, and I’ve never looked back. As long as it doesn’t come from actual animals.”

“Huh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.”

They chitchatted like that, and time slipped by rather easily, until eventually Michael and Purcell came back with the microscope, now outfitted with a 3D-printed clamping mechanism. This was fitted over the edge of the spacesuit backpack and then screwed into place. Then, after messing with a couple of clip-on LED lamps around the sides of the backpack, Raimy finally got a close look at the wire braids of that hose.

They were . . . 

Well, his initial impression was right; the braids absolutely had been cut through in some places, and had stretched like taffy in other places. Raimy looked at where the clamp bracket was supposed to fit, and concluded that the bracket itself was the cutting instrument. Which didn’t make a ton of sense, because it didn’t have any obvious sharp edges, but he supposed any corner could be a cutting instrument if you put enough force behind it. Force from where, though?

He captured some pictures, for later annotation and inclusion in the case file, which was finally starting to have some real heft to it.

“What do you see?” Purcell asked.

“I see what cut the hose,” Raimy answered, holding up the clamp bracket, “although I don’t see how.”

He let Purcell look through the eyepieces.

“I see what you mean,” Purcell said. “Although it’s a good question where that torque come from.”

“May I see?” Michael asked. So Raimy let him, and then (very much against his best judgment) let Bridget look as well.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “It just pushed right against it, right there, didn’t it. That’s amazing. What could cause something like that?”

“That’s the question,” Raimy agreed. It didn’t look accidental to him; when he did his best to fold the braids back into place, and fit the broken ends of the antenna wire together beside them, there was a perfect little crease along the right side of both hose and cable, right where the top of the clamp bracket would have sat. But there was nothing else around it—nothing that could press or twist or explode, forcing the clamp hard to the left like that.

Raimy looked, and looked again, and looked some more, and got no closer to figuring it out.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I don’t know. I guess the damage must have happened in Florida. I guess we knew that anyway, because of the lack of tool marks on the lip of the backpack. But what are we talking about, here? Someone jammed a crowbar against this thing and pulled really hard, to weaken the hose?”

“Put a crowbar where?” Purcell wanted to know. “Braced against what?”

Raimy shrugged. On the left side, there were a couple of places that might provide the necessary leverage. But the damage was on the right, and that region of the backpack interior was pretty empty. Also, there were no tool marks anywhere along the plastic. Like, zero.

“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t even really have any theories at this point, and it seemed like he ought to. He was on the verge of saying it was time for another break—time to look at other evidence and just let this stuff percolate for a while—when his glasses chimed, and a message icon appeared in his field of view. From CTO@generalspacesuit#com, with a header that said simply, ????

He touched the icon, and the message unfolded into a photograph and a block of text.

***

Hello, Mr. Vaught. I’m a bit confused by the pictures you sent, because this here is our hose clamp bracket.

The attached photo showed a part that was similar to the one in Raimy’s black-gloved hand, but shinier on the outside surface, and lined on the inside with a couple of millimeters of black rubber.

I don’t know where you got the piece you showed us, but it’s sure not one of ours.


Back | Next
Framed