1.19
24 November
St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery
South Polar Mineral Territories
Lunar Surface
Raimy knew right away what had happened to him: he’d been blown out the fucking airlock. By Katla. By some kind of shape-memory gizmo jammed into some critical edge of the outer hatch.
He was shocked and terrified and badly disoriented, but his diving instincts kicked in before he’d even hit the ground. He didn’t panic, because panic was death. He didn’t hold his breath, didn’t let the overpressure explode his lungs, but rather let the vacuum of space whoosh the air right out of him. He burped violently as well. It was a lot like ascending from a submarine escape lock: an upward rush through ever-shrinking pressure, your lungs and stomach emptying, your eardrums screaming with pain. Raimy’s eyes wouldn’t focus, and he couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t fucking breathe, but still he didn’t panic.
Crawling feebly, he took a fraction of a moment to collect his bearings, and then he pressed his hands against the ground in a push-up motion that bounced him unsteadily to his feet. Turning, he spotted the dark blur of the exploded airlock against the white blur of the modules around it. He leaned forward and ran, in dreamlike silence, scrabbling for purchase on the dusty soil.
His skin felt curiously dry and slippery against the vacuum around it. He could feel the moisture on his eyes and tongue fizzing away into space, leaving him mummified. The low sun, impossibly hot and impossibly bright, shone like a death ray on his hands and the right side of his face, for what felt like a long time, before he found his way into the cool shade of the module. The shower was still running, silently sputtering out a stream of liquid that evaporated into nothingness halfway to the floor.
Thank God he had memorized the position of the emergency locker, or he might not have recognized it in the blur. Overpressure had blown open and shattered its glass door, but that was fine. That was fine. He groped inside, knowing exactly what he was feeling for: a ring of heavy polymer, with a disc of crinkly plastic film strung across it. A goo suit. For a terrifying moment he couldn’t find it, and he couldn’t find it, and he was starting to buzz and faint and die, and maybe this was it. Maybe rummaging in this locker was the last thing he would ever do.
But then his hand closed on that ring, and with hardly a thought he pulled it out and, with both hands, jammed it firmly down over his head. The film, rolled up inside the ring, unreeled down over his face and neck, until the ring jammed firmly against his collarbones and spine. It didn’t matter which end was up; these things were designed to be used in a hurry.
What happened next was airbag-quick, an explosion far too rapid for human senses to perceive. The ring sprayed out a fine, soaking mist that became a liquid that became an expanding foamy gel, and then a rubbery solid, fiercely hot. The goo easily penetrated clothing, but sealed firmly against human skin, creating a sort of rubber collar beneath the ring—theoretically airtight. Then a separate set of nozzles injected gas—mostly pure oxygen—into the bag of plastic film that contained Raimy’s head.
For Raimy, there was simply a bang and a punching sensation on his chest and face, and then he was magically wearing a baggie-shaped space helmet. Or dive helmet, or escape hood to get you out of a burning building, or whatever. All he knew was that the fucker was hot, and the bubbling goo had stopped just a few millimeters short of covering up his nose and mouth.
And he was alive. He took a breath, and it felt like knives and paint remover, but it worked. He inhaled a lungful of reeking gas, and nothing had ever felt so terrible and wonderful and strange. He exhaled and then breathed again, hearing the rasp and click of the thing’s little regulator, trying to deliver a constant pressure that wouldn’t suffocate him and wouldn’t explode his lungs, seeking that knife edge of survival that might not exist at all. But he could breathe. He’d been exposed to vacuum for something like fifteen seconds, and yet here he was. He was going to live another second, another five seconds, another minute.
Sweet Jesus.
Probably not longer than a minute because he could hear and feel the hiss of air escaping through microchannels in the collar, where it couldn’t quite seal around the fibers of his jacket and undershirt. Because that’s how it was with goo suits: they were very dangerous and worked only in a very approximate sense. Bad medicine; they were what you tried when you were going to die anyway.
And he was probably going to die, and the screaming animal part of his brain had to be wrestled into submission about that, because panic was death.
He looked at the inner hatch, and realized there was no way to open it. Even if he were willing to depressurize the entire monastery, the hatch opened inward, against the air pressure within, and it would take thousands of pounds of force to get it open even a crack.
Shit.
He realized he could see again—not perfectly, but better, and his eyes hurt less, so that was something, but he also realized he had exactly one chance to get out of this alive. And it was in the main airlock, on the exact other side of the monastery complex.
Shit and shit.
He spared a momentary glance at Anming, who was sprawled in the dust, unconscious but possibly not actually dead yet. He had crawled half the distance back to the airlock, and that was all.
No way. Anming Shui might be an innocent man, framed by his girlfriend, but there was no way Raimy was slapping a goo suit on him and carrying him to safety. His own chances were slim to none as it was, and anything that further reduced them was out of the question. The moment seemed to last a long time. Then he took off, running gracelessly in the low gravity, but he seemed to move in slow motion, while his mind raced. Sorry, Anming. Sorry, sorry. I’ll say a prayer for you, I’ll light a candle for you, I’ll name a scholarship after you if I can, sweet Jesus, just get through this alive. Then the moment passed, and he was hopping his way through a ninety-degree turn, and then rounding past the library module and turning again, threading between the library and the spindly-tall tower magnet, and then past the classroom and kitchen and laundry modules, and around the corner again.
He couldn’t hear his feet skidding on the dusty regolith. His breath—a shallow/fast hyperventilating pant—was pretty much the only sound, other than the clicking of the regulator and the hissing away of his meager air supply. Best case, a goo suit had maybe two minutes of fresh air, and then maybe another two minutes of breathing your own filth before the CO2 levels knocked you unconscious. With a bad seal off-gassing like this, he wasn’t sure he could count on even one more breath, so he ran, sweet Jesus he ran, and finally he was at the main airlock.
Which was pressurized, of course, because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone outside right now, so he slapped the red emergency ingress button.
For a long moment, nothing happened, and he knew from his reading that this was because the inner hatch was closing under hydraulic control. Then he was rewarded with an upward blast of silent white gas—the precious atmosphere of the airlock venting irretrievably into space. And then the lights went green and he was undogging the hatch, pressing down and pulling outward with the handle, and then the hatch was opening which was good because he was out of air, exhaling again into hard vacuum, and the bag helmet was sagging and deflating around his head and face. But he was inside and he was closing the hatch and dogging it shut, and the airlock’s emergency logic knew what to do.
Air howled into the chamber, pressing in painfully on his eardrums and flattening the bag helmet firmly against his face, and he was shrink-wrapped for sure.
Now, the thing about a goo suit was that it could just as easily suffocate you as save your life, and so one of its awful design compromises was that you could claw through the bag with your fingers. Yeah, it was that fragile. So Raimy poked a hole through it over his mouth, and then clawed the whole thing away from his face altogether, and then . . .
And then he was safe.
Raimy sat on the bench in the airlock for a long several seconds, contemplating mortality. Anming was certainly dead by now, and Raimy was to blame for that, albeit incidentally. Maybe Raimy could have saved him. Maybe. More to the point, Raimy himself had just come as close to death as it was possible to get. Much closer than he’d ever been before, and he’d had some close calls! The Grim Reaper’s scythe had touched him, for sure. Heck, he still might not survive this; everything hurt, from the hair follicles on the top of his head to the nail beds of his toes. The human body was never designed for explosive decompression, and he might well have a lung embolism or a blood clot or a brain aneurysm, or any of a thousand other decompression injuries. Who knew? His hands were shaking so badly he half-suspected a neurological tremor, and his vision still had not returned to normal. The signs on the airlock wall were written in large print, but Raimy could barely make them out. He might need glasses from now on. He might need a lot of things.
Truthfully he might have sat there for a long time—for hours, for days—but of course the monks came rapping on the inner hatch, calling out, “Hello? Hello? Is this safe to open?” And then opening it anyway.
Raimy could see where they were coming from on this: there they are just standing around doing monk stuff, when suddenly the emergency airlock blows out. And they’re scrambling to look out the windows, trying to figure out what’s going on, and maybe some of them are struggling into their spacesuits, either as a safety precaution or to go outside and assess the damage, and the casualties. But then, barely a minute later, someone is rapid-cycling into the main airlock, and just how could that be? How indeed?
The handle on the inner hatch turned, and the hatch itself swung outward, into the shower room. Hilario Hamblin stood there in his monk’s habit, looking bewildered.
“Raimy? How are you . . . What happened?”
“The goo suit works,” Raimy said. What else could he say?
“Merde,” Hilario said, somehow making a blasphemy of it. It was as if he’d said “I take the name of Jesus H. Fucking Christ deliberately in vain!”
“Anming is dead,” Raimy added.
“Yes, we know. We thought you were, too!”
Raimy pictured it: from the east window of the library, or for that matter, the east window of the cloisters, Anming’s corpse should be clearly visible, along with a mess of debris and scuff marks, and the emergency airlock’s outer hatch, sitting far away. The fact that Raimy’s own corpse wasn’t visible would not have told them much; they’d have no reason to think he wasn’t out there, too—just too close to the building to be visible. Or hung up on something in the balneary, or whatever.
“Happy to disappoint you,” Raimy said.
“What happened?” Hilario said again. “We know there was an explosion, but why? Was it the explosive bolts?”
“Maybe,” Raimy said. “I didn’t see where the device was planted.”
“Device?”
“Yes. Where’s Katla?”
“I don’t know.”
Standing behind Hilario was Brother Hughart, who said, “Raimy, we’ve got to get you to the infirmary.”
“Later,” Raimy said, levering himself up into a standing position. This should have been easy in Lunar gravity, but he felt Earth-heavy.
“You look bad, my friend,” said Hilario as Raimy stepped through the hatch.
“Excuse me,” said Raimy. “I need to get past.”
Practically the whole monastery was standing behind Hughart, and as Raimy brushed past them on his way through to the gowning area, they said things like, “Are you all right?” and “Good lord!” and the ever popular “My goodness!”
Raimy stepped through into the chapel, aware that he was covered in toxic moondust but really beyond caring at this point.
Michael stood there in front of the pews, looking worried, and behind him, in the hatchway to the infirmary, stood Katla, holding a scalpel.
“Sanctuary!” she cried out. “Brother Michael, please, grant me sanctuary!”
“You’re under arrest,” Raimy told her, “for the murders of Etsub Beyene and Anming Shui, and the attempted murder of myself. You have the right to . . .”
Actually, here on the Moon, she probably didn’t. Under maritime law there was virtually unlimited power vested in the captain of a vessel or, by extension, the prior of a Lunar monastery. In that sense, Katla had hardly any rights at all. By agreement, the Church had already ceded Raimy the power to arrest and interrogate, and that power was also, in principle, unlimited. But also easily revoked.
“What’s going on?” Michael demanded, in a voice at once loving and stern.
“She sabotaged the balneary’s outer hatch,” Raimy answered. “Anming didn’t kill anyone; she did. And then she killed Anming to cover her tracks. That’s our killer, right there.”
“He’s crazy,” Katla said to Michael.
Just then, Bridget Tobin appeared in the cloisters hatchway, looking this way and that way, assessing the situation. She was out of breath, and had her glasses on, recording.
“Raimy?” she said.
“I’m alive,” he confirmed, his eyes returning to the scalpel in Katla’s hand.
“If Raimy is mistaken,” Michael asked Katla, “then why have you armed yourself?”
Katla didn’t seem to have an answer to that. She started to say something, but then stopped herself. Started to say something else, and stopped again. Because yeah, what could she say? Honestly.
“I need to take her into custody,” Raimy said.
“How?” Michael asked, with something like amazement.
“I actually still have zip ties in my pocket,” Raimy answered.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Michael.
“Sanctuary!” Katla pleaded. “Michael, please.”
“Oh, I think not,” Michael told her. “And what’s your purpose with that knife, exactly? Are you going to stab your way to safety? You’d have to kill every man here. And then what?”
“And woman,” added Bridget.
In the kitchen hatchway, Kurtis Durm stood, holding what looked like a meat tenderizing hammer.
“Don’t you touch me,” Katla said. Not specifically to Michael or to Raimy, but to everyone here assembled.
“You’re breathing our air,” Michael told her. “You’ve eaten our food and drunk our water. Many gallons of which just bled off into space, by the way, at staggering cost. The nearest place you could hide is, oh, far away. Not here. Whether you’re a murderess or not is for God and a jury to decide, but your arrest is foregone and concluded. A moment’s thought should confirm, you’re in custody already.”
“I can take her,” Raimy said.
“That won’t be necessary.”
For several uncomfortable seconds, nobody said or did anything.
Then Katla sighed loudly, dropped the scalpel, and kicked it out among the pews.
To Raimy, Michael said, “You’re bleeding from the eyes, my friend. You’re pale as a toffee. Will you allow one of us to arrest her for you?”
“No,” Raimy said, stepping between the pews and walking purposefully toward Katla. As purposefully as Lunar gravity allowed, at any rate. “She tried to kill me.”
Reaching her, he grabbed her roughly, spun her around, and pulled her hands together so roughly her feet left the floor. With his other hand he pulled out a zip cuff and slid it over her wrists.
“Police brutality!” she cried out.
“Save it,” Raimy said, jerking the cuff tighter. Then, leaning in close to her ear, he murmured, “If you hadn’t dropped that knife, I’d’ve killed you with it. You give me a reason, I still might.”