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1.9
21 November

St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery

South Polar Mineral Territories

Lunar Surface


The walk to “Saint Joe” was interesting but uneventful, and yes, Raimy did do some bouncing, and throw a couple of rocks much farther than he would have thought possible. It was fun. It was also interesting, because they didn’t curve or hook or drop the way they would on Earth, but just flew out of his hand in a perfect parabolic arc. And this didn’t in any way detract from the (ahem!) gravity of the situation up here, because he was just following along behind his escorts, trying to keep up as his ankles got tired of bunny-hopping along.

He went back to bounding foot-to-foot, and then experimented with a rather ridiculous gait that involved tucking his butt in and sneaking his legs way out in front of him, one after the other, like Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. That one worked surprisingly well, so he finished the last third of the hike that way.

They were walking along a dirt road between low hills, in a kind of gray, twilight fairyland of long, deep shadows. Light, dark, light, dark, as if they were walking through one of those old 2D barcodes. The road itself was not too different from the surrounding land, except that it seemed to have been cut into the soil a few centimeters and then crushed flat. A bulldozer and a steamroller, maybe.

“Why is the road necessary?” he asked the two women.

To which Katla answered, “Katla here. Please announce your call sign when beginning a conversation. The road is so we don’t get lost. It’s actually quite easy to get turned around out here; every time you come out, the sun is hovering over a different spot on the horizon. The shadows move; the land almost seems to change shape.”

“Raimy here. Don’t you have GPS? Or something like it?”

“Something like it, yes. Triangulation between Shackleton and the monastery used to be rather inaccurate, but now, with the South Lunar Antenna Park just over the horizon, it’s good enough that Harvest Moon started handing out little handheld navigation units with, they claim, sub-meter accuracy. But it’s one more thing to carry, and we don’t need it, just walking back and forth like this. We have the road.”

“Ah.”

“Tobin here. The road is also for dust management. Fresh moondust is like asbestos, absolutely awful in the lungs, and hard on equipment, too. But if it’s been driven over repeatedly, that tends to smooth out the grains. We do the same thing for plant-growth medium, which is mostly Lunar regolith. Before we bring that stuff inside, it gets rolled in a tumbler for eight hours to make it safe to handle. On Mars you have wind forces doing the same thing, but there’s no wind here. The grains are extremely sharp. I can show you under the microscope, if you like.”

“Sure, maybe,” Raimy said noncommittally. Before anything like that, he was going to use that microscope to examine a hose braid for tool marks. And ask every person in that monastery every question he could think of, until he figured out how and why Etsub died.

Nobody had anything to say after that. A few minutes later, the three of them branched off the main road, down a sort of driveway of similar construction, marked by a painted metal sign that read:


ST. JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO

BENEDICTINE COMMUNITY HOUSES

ALL ARE WELCOME.

From there, it was another several hundred meters, up and over and down a slight incline, before the monastery itself came into view. It was much smaller than Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station, but still larger than Raimy expected. It consisted of three house-sized modules and ten or twelve that were the size of shipping containers.

The first surprise—and it did come as a genuine shock to Raimy—was that Etsub Beyene’s body was lying right out there beside the airlock, wrapped up in reflective Mylar and black nylon cord. Raimy didn’t have to ask what it was, or who. He didn’t have to ask why it was there, either, because obviously there were no facilities inside for storing a corpse, and also because the body wouldn’t decay out here in hard vacuum. It might conceivably freeze if a shadow moved across it for more than a few hours, and in the slanting sunlight it might mummify a little faster, but none of that should be a problem. One of the monks was a medical doctor and had already performed a detailed postmortem examination, so unless Raimy decided a full autopsy was called for, the body was essentially ready for burial or cremation, or whatever. Leaving it out like this was a sensible, if grisly, solution.

Tobin looked away from it as she passed, but Katla Koskinen did a strange little prayer thing, touching two fingers to the lower part of her helmet’s faceplate, and then pointing them at Etsub, as if tapping some invisible surface in the space between them. She muttered something that the noise rejection algorithm didn’t quite pass through, but Raimy thought it might have been “ashes.”

The second surprise happened inside the airlock module itself. Raimy and Katla and Tobin went inside and shut the door behind them, and then sat on benches along the wall for fifteen minutes of pressurization sequence. No one said very much. Even Tobin seemed to have misplaced her exuberance.

Raimy watched as the hard, green cylinder of his flight bag slowly shriveled into the polymer bag it had been in transit. It was dusty, he saw, and so were all three spacesuits—from heels to knees especially, but really all over. It seemed to be stuck to them by static electricity.

There was a glass-doored emergency locker in here, much like the one in the airlock at Transit Point, and with a similar assortment of emergency supplies. Rope, hammer, duct tape, goo suit, spray foam, tool kit, first aid kit. This last item struck him as the least useful, because how were you supposed to administer first aid to someone in a spacesuit?

“Raimy here. What’s the safety protocol inside the airlock?” he asked.

“For you?” Tobin said. “Stay put and don’t touch anything.”

“What about for you?”

“Same thing, mostly, unless there’s a problem. There’s another airlock ’round the back of the complex, so if this one fails, that one’s the backup. Most things have a backup.”

Katla added, “Until Etsub died, there’d never been an emergency here. As you can imagine, it’s a tightly run place. Brother Michael holds regular safety drills, but where to begin? There are so many things that can happen.”

Raimy thought about that for a long time.

Once the module was pressurized, they stepped through into what Katla called “the gowning lock,” where their suits were showered down with jets of soapy water and then jets of clean, and then jets of air to dry them.

Now cleared of visible dust, the women began removing each other’s spacesuits, first taking off the helmet and putting it on a shelf with a dozen other helmets, and then unlatching and pulling off the torso or “coat,” which was then hung on a rack with a dozen other bulky suit torsos. This reduced the two of them to rather skimpy camisoles—the infamous 3D-printed “space underwear”—about which they did not seem self-conscious in the slightest. Their last names were stitched in above the breasts. Tobin then helped Raimy out of his own helmet and coat, and then all three of them were wriggling out of their pants, revealing thin, tight boxer briefs of dark gray print-weave.

The air in here smelled almost exactly like the inside of a shooting range: a hot mixture of sulfur, brass, sweat, and machine oil. The light came from yellow-white electroluminescent fixtures in the walls and ceiling. The floor was a metal grating over smooth plate steel, cold against Raimy’s thin, 3D-printed socks.

The next surprise was that after wriggling out of their spacesuits, Tobin and Katla went right on undressing, pulling off their space underwear and stuffing it in a little chamber by the inner hatch.

Seeing his look, Tobin said, “Oh, be a pervert, why don’t ya. Come on, you’re covered in moondust. T-shirt off. Briefs off. Socks off. Into the laundry lock, all of it. You can pick them up after evening prayers.”

Until that moment, Raimy hadn’t thought of Tobin, or Katla, as anything other than astronauts and Antilympus hopefuls, and of course as suspects he needed to rule out in order to close this case.

But okay, yeah, they were also women. Physically fit, beautiful, and entirely naked.

As a gentleman, he wasn’t about to gawk or ogle their naked bodies, but there just wasn’t a ton of space in here, and once he’d stripped off his own underwear it was nearly impossible to get it into the laundry lock without his gaze sliding once or twice across areas where it didn’t belong. And his brain—his male primate brain, raised on a steady diet of sexualized TV programs and occasional Internet porn—couldn’t help evaluating what it saw.

Katla Koskinen was the shorter of the two, with the top of her head coming to about the height of Raimy’s eyeline. The hair on her head was chestnut brown and cut in a short bob, probably to keep it out of her eyes when she moved around. The rest of her body, though, was hairless and weirdly smooth. Her body was thin and muscled, with something approaching washboard abs, and her small, pink nipples provided little contrast against the skin of her smallish breasts, so that the overall effect was a bit like looking at a plastic action figure. The way she carried herself amidst this mutual nudity was matter-of-fact; she did not appear to give one shit about Raimy’s body or Raimy’s gaze, or her own imperfections on display.

Bridget Tobin was different: bleach-blonde and curvy, compact but with an outer layer of visible softness. Her pubic hair (which he really did try not to look at!) was light brown and lightly groomed, her nipples red and prominent, her buttocks round and tipped upward by the flare of her hips. A spray of freckles decorated her chest and arms and face, and she seemed to animate her body with a kind of energy that some women just had and others just didn’t. Sensual, yeah. She was also unembarrassed at being naked in front of a naked male stranger, but instead of a blank facial expression she wore a faint smirk of amusement. Well, fellah, here we are.

The effect on Raimy was immediate and involuntary: half a boner, right there in the gowning area, not a meter and a half from two naked women. Tobin saw it, too, and caught him looking at her, and her smile became a little warmer and a little more embarrassed. Not for herself, but for him. Sorry about the close quarters.

“We need to shower again,” Katla said flatly. She worked the controls again, and a spray of soapy water rained down on them.

Tobin squawked in amused dismay; the water was chilly, and it had the rapid effect of killing Raimy’s boner and making her own nipples stand up sharply at attention. Raimy tried not to see that, tried harder not to log it in his spank bank, and failed on both counts.

“Oh, that cold always gets me,” she said. “Brr.”

“Scrub your body,” Katla instructed, neither amused nor unamused. “Particularly your hair.”

To which Tobin said, “I think he knows how to take a shower, love.”

“Get on with it,” Katla insisted. “You have fifteen seconds.”

Soon, the soapy water was replaced with clean, which ran for perhaps another twenty seconds before trickling to a stop.

“That was quick,” Raimy observed.

“It’s not to remove your oil and stink,” Tobin said, now huddling her arms across her breasts. “Just the moondust.”

Katla, moving to open the inner hatch, said, “You came in contact with the outside of your spacesuit, which was contaminated. A little bit gets inside the habitat, no matter what we do, but the showers help. We’ll find you a handkerchief; you’re going to notice some discomfort in all your mucous membranes.”

Then she opened the hatch, and stepped through into what looked like a pretty normal dressing room, with two benches running along it and with clothes hooks and rectangular niches along the walls.

“Come on,” Katla said.

Raimy thought it gentlemanly to let Tobin go in front of him, then realized it simply afforded him a better look at her buttocks. Which was not helping. The very last thing he wanted to be was forty years old, single, and lecherous.

Ruefully, he followed Tobin through the hatch and then closed it behind him and dogged it shut. The mechanism was similar to what you’d see on a submarine, or on Transit Point Station for that matter, so there was no point making one of the women reach past him to work it.

Katla and Tobin had towels and space underwear waiting for them in the cubbies. They dried and dressed, and then zipped themselves up in mustard-yellow Harvest Moon coveralls and slippers. For Raimy the process was more involved, as his HMI-issued towel and extra set of underwear, along with his Antilympus uniform, were wadded up in his HMI-issued duffel bag, whose zipper appeared to be jammed. After he’d sat down and fussed with it for a full minute, Tobin came over and peered at it, leaning over Raimy’s naked body in the process.

“You’ve got dust in the teeth,” she said. “Did you drop this or something?”

“No,” Raimy said, but then wondered if, during his bouncing and rock-throwing experiments, he’d let it drag on the ground, or else kicked some loose regolith up onto it.

“Let me get some silicone spray. Wait here.”

This last part appeared to be a joke, as the spray was on a high shelf just a few meters away, and where exactly was he going to go? Unable to get his brain off the sexual track, he watched the slow-motion jiggle of her bosom as she craned upward to grab the spray bottle, then finally gave up and jumped for it. There really was something about the way she moved. Or maybe it was pheromones or something, but he felt an unmistakable attraction. For a goddamn murder suspect.

She came back and leaned over Raimy’s nakedness again, then blasted three good squirts from the spray bottle onto the zipper of Raimy’s bag.

“Try it now,” she said.

Impatiently, Katla said, “Will you two hurry up? Bridget, give him your towel or something. I’m going inside.”

True to her word, she opened up the innermost hatch of the three-chambered airlock module, slipped through it, and closed it behind her. Leaving a naked Raimy alone with a fully dressed Tobin.

He couldn’t help clearing his throat.

“It’s all right,” Tobin said vaguely.

Raimy and Tobin both put their weight into the zipper, and after a couple of good tugs, they got it moving. After a couple more, they got it all the way open. And Tobin was still leaning over him.

For some reason, he cleared his throat again.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it, then, and see you on the other side.”

***

Dressed in his tan Antilympus uniform, Raimy soon entered the monastery proper, through a great vaulted space that looked like the inside of a church. Tobin was there, along with two men in honest-to-God monk robes, and a third one in yellow HMI coveralls. Another monk was busy at the back of the room, going over surfaces with a feather duster that appeared to be made of actual feathers.

“You good?” Tobin asked.

“Fine, thank you.”

She then said, “May I introduce Brother Michael?”

One of the monks reached out for a handshake. He seemed to be about Raimy’s age, though it was difficult to tell for sure, as his blond hair was buzz-cut short enough to blur the edges of his graying temples. There was a physical sturdiness about him that made him look more like a cop or a military man than a religious one.

“Hello, Detective. Welcome to Saint Joe.”

Brother Michael’s rural-Canadian voice might have been a bit jarring, but he spoke softly and mildly.

“Are you in charge here?” Raimy asked.

“I’m the prior, yes. Technically we have an abbot, my boss, but he’s still on Earth. Maybe permanently. So, yes.” He paused and then said, “You’ve had a long trip. Do you need to refresh?”

“No,” Raimy said. “I mean, later. If you’ve got a bunk for me, I guess I’d like to drop my bag off, but my ride is scheduled to leave here in five days. I’d like to get right to work if that’s all right.”

“Better than all right,” Brother Michael agreed. “We’re all very eager for progress on this matter. And in that humble spirit, may I introduce your two chief suspects?” With a low sweep of his left hand, he indicated the monk standing beside him. “This is Andrei Bykhovski, our defector. And this”—he indicated the jumpsuited figure to his right—“is hydroponicist Anming Shui.”

“Hi,” said both men, their voices amiable enough, although neither one offered to shake hands. And right away Raimy was thrown off his game, because the only one of these men who seemed even remotely dangerous was Michael. And what the hell kind of motive could he have?


“I arrive without clothing,” Bykhovski was saying. “They give me this robes until they can figure out where I go. But I am liking it here. Life is short and I am not so good with romance, so I am thinking maybe I stay. Take a vow to become Brother Andrei, if they allow it. Or perhaps I go back to Clementine if demands are met.”

Raimy had been given a private apartment (or “cell”) with surprisingly thick, surprisingly soundproof walls, and he and Bykhovski were seated in chairs. Bykhovski in his monk’s habit, Raimy with his glasses on, recording the interview. Bykhovski seemed collegial, helpful, even eager. He’d watched Etsub die, and it seemed to have had a profound effect on him. Between that and his daring escape from Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot, he had a lot to say.

“What demands are those?”

Bykhovski seemed to weigh the question, as though his life or his future depended on it. He answered carefully, “Orlov Petrochemical is hiring people to work in space, and is paying good . . .  zarplata. Slarry? Salary? I think this is word. But life is hard in the space habitat. You cannot go for walk. You cannot order pizza, or go to downtown and look at people going by. Is difficult. And Orlov does not tell people until they arrive, that they cannot go home. Orlov guarantees not to charge for transportation back to Earth when employment ends, so people think, hey, this is good deal. But if there is wedding or funeral on Earth, or if you just need shore leave, Orlov will charge you for this. More money than you are making. There is no way to get home unless you quit, and then there is no completion bonus, which is most of pay. And Orlov has been saying now, that quitting must even be approved by management. So people are trapped.”

“Indentured servitude?”

Bykhovski shrugged, his face betraying only apology. “I do not know these words, but I think probably you are right. People are working for money they cannot spend, in place they cannot leave. I have made demand for Orlov and Clementine to change this policy. Maybe they will do this, and maybe I will decide to go back there to get my money. Or maybe they kill me for crossing them. We will see. I defected without knowing future, because situation is bad.”

Startled and unsettled by that answer, Raimy asked, “Do you seriously think Orlov Petrochemical would have you killed?”

Bykhovski nodded and, without apparent alarm, said, “Da, I know is possible. Grigory Orlov is his father’s son, yes? Reputation for bad things happening to his enemies. They fall from high places or ingest poison. Cars hit them on corner of street. Bears attack them in the night. Yes, bears! If Orlov is not ordering these deaths, then others do this to try and please him. I make powerful enemy when I come here.”

This was all news to Raimy, who had thought Russian gangsters were mostly a thing of the past, and even then mostly imaginary. As far as he knew, Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot was a small operation, involving a few dozen people at most, but its parent company was a Fortune 500 multinational that delivered fusion power to billions of people. It would never have occurred to Raimy that murder might be a part of their business plan. But yeah, okay, Jesus. Other lawyers and cops were always telling him he wasn’t cynical enough, and at times like this he believed them. Bykhovski seemed credible, and honestly afraid, although he hid it well.

Carefully, without leading the witness, Raimy asked, “Do you think that has any bearing on Etsub Beyene’s death?”

Bykhovski frowned at that, and seemed to think it over for a bitter moment before answering, “Orlov has long reach, but I think he will not do something to this place of religion. Bad for business, I am thinking. This is why I defect here, to monastery. Not to Harvest Moon, yes? Not to Transit Point especially. I think about going to other Horseman, Igbal Renz at ESL1, but how do I get there? They are not customer of Clementine. So I come here. As for Etsub Beyene, I do not think he is on shit list of Grigory Orlov. What does Grigory care if Black man is going . . . I am sorry, may I say Black man? I do not mean offense.”

“You can say whatever you like,” Raimy assured him. You’re the suspect. Have at it.

“Yes, well why does Orlov mind if Black man is going on Danny Beseman’s Mars ship, or in Lawrence Killian’s moonbase, or anywhere he likes? Wherever he goes, Etsub is burning fuel that is purchased from Clementine. Etsub is famous, yes? Etsub tells people that traveling in space is good thing. He is free salesman for Grigory Orlov, not somebody who is wanted to die.”

“Somebody may have wanted him dead, though,” Raimy said. “Why do you think he was outside when you landed?”

Bykhovski looked down at his feet for a moment, and when he looked back up at Raimy, his face was heavy with guilt.

“I am thinking this may be my fault. Before leaving Clementine I am sending secret message to monastery with laser. SOS, and my projected arrival time. Nothing more. I do not know if anyone will hear me, I am just trying things. But maybe Etsub is outside with communication laser, pointing at Clementine for some reason? Or he has left a detector outside? Because he is in communication with someone. He has some . . . side hustle? Is this correct? And someone else has side hustle as well, and so they are talking. Many strange things happen in space these days. Maybe he mistakes me for this person? If he is receiving my message and he is not telling anyone else, then he goes back inside, and he quietly comes back out at the time I say. He does not have information of me. He does not know human being is strapped to cargo lander, in need of rescue. If he thinks this, he would be telling Brother Michael. So he thinks something else is coming on this lander from Clementine. Something he does not want other people to know about.”

“Like what?”

“Who can say? Drugs? Thumb drive full of kompromat? Panties of female admirer? If it is information, it is something they do not dare to transmit even by laser. If it is physical object, then . . . I do not know. I have nothing but speculation. I do not know why Etsub is out there waiting for this lander, unless he thinks he will take something off of it. Something meant for him. But instead there is only me. And so he is confused when he sees me. Confused when he dies. Very sad, to end his life that way.”

“But he was still alive when you landed, and if your story is accurate, he died almost immediately afterward. That’s very suspicious timing. How do you explain that?”

Bykhovski’s guilty expression was tempered now with a kind of consternation, as if Raimy were asking him to explain a rainstorm or a bolt of lightning. “I understand why I am suspect. Yes? I arrive, and Etsub dies. It cannot be coincidence, and so you are thinking I have done something to spacesuit. I would think this also, if I sit where you are sitting. But I am knowing I did not do anything. It is very strange, yes. I am spending my nights thinking about how this could happen. I have only theory, no facts. Do you want theory?”

“Please.”

“Etsub is on top of hill when I see him, next to solar collection tower. Most of Saint Joe is in shadow of this hill, because sun is behind it. This much I see with my own eyes. I descend into this shadow as I am landing. Etsub has climbed himself up into full sunlight, and I am wondering about thermal shock. I am astronaut; I know spacesuit is designed to withstand this, but somehow Etsub’s suit is . . . defective? He sees me land, and maybe he is confused or alarmed by seeing this, and he is wanting to run down hill. So he boosts his oxygen, and because of defect and thermal stress, the hose is breaking. I see him fall, also. I’m thinking he falls because his air is cut off, but maybe he falls first, and this is shaking the hose which is under stress, and then hose is breaking. It could be lot of things.”

Raimy thought that over, and finally said, “So you don’t think he was murdered?”

Bykhovski held up his hands a bit, as if warding off waist-level danger. “Goodness, no. I think General Spacesuit is wanting us to think this, because they do not want to say their suit has failed. Harvest Moon wants us to think this, because otherwise they must admit Moon is not yet safe place for people to live. Enterprise City, too. Same reason. Nobody wants this death to be accident.”

“But couldn’t someone have sabotaged the hose?”

Bykhovski spread his hands. “Who? When? Hose is tested in factory, yes? Before backpack is sealed, and again after backpack is sealed. Who can damage hose inside of backpack? But they do not test this exact combination of rising temperature, rising pressure, and that the backpack is on someone who is running and falling. Suit is smertel’naya lovushka. A trap. Or . . . lemon? Do you say this? We will see if more people are dying from this, or if it is fluke. Mister Vaught, I am sorry you come all this way for nothing, but cause of Etsub’s death is back on Earth, not here.”


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