CisLuna_Hard-boiled Police Procedural_Murder Mystery Read online

  “May I call you Henry?” I asked.

  “Hank, please,” he answered a little too quickly.

  I wondered why he didn’t like Henry.

  “Okay, Hank it is. Call me Roy.”

  We shook hands with our gloves on.

  “You mentioned you wanted to get out of sight as soon as you got here. Let’s collect your things and load them on the golf cart, and I’ll drive you out to the hooch where you will be staying until the rest of your team gets here.”

  He drove the cart over to an airlock and said, “How’s your air holding up?”

  I checked my O2 bottles and they were full since I’d been on the cabin umbilical. As soon as I unplugged, my suit began having a hard time keeping up with the chill. I started looking for buttons to push to warm it up a bit.

  “This ride going to be very long? It’s kind of chilly.”

  “We’re only going half a klick.”

  Easy for him to say. His suit was designed for lunar surface excursions, a truck compared to my sports car.

  “Can you tell me about your operation down here?” I asked between chattering teeth. “It might help me figure out how to flush this guy out, assuming he’s down here.”

  Higgins turned and looked at me chuckling, “You serious?”

  “Yeah, gimme both barrels.”

  “Okay, you asked for it. The Moon’s spin axis is only 1.5° off the vertical from its orbital plane. Contrast that with the Earth’s 23.5° spin axis and it is easy to see why there are numerous craters at the Moon’s poles that are in permanent shadow. Without any atmosphere, water trapped in those craters remains at 25-35 kelvins which is pretty close to absolute zero. Water ice that is trapped here isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Over the years quite a lot of this water ice has accumulated, 600 million tonnes at the lunar north pole and a slightly lesser amount here at the south pole.

  “It takes about 10 km per second of Delta V—you know about Delta V?”

  “Yeah, change in velocity, like a speedometer for rockets.”

  “Close enough. Anyway, it takes 10 km per second for a rocket to get from the Earth’s surface up to LEO and another 3 km per second to get to the Moon. Conversely, it only takes 3 km per second to get from the Moon’s surface up to Lagrange Point 1. That 10 km per second savings in Delta V is why SpaceCorp set up a ‘water works’ at each of the lunar poles.

  “The water works run off nuclear thermal generators to convert water ice into its constituent LOX and LH2 by electrolysis. Of the two, LH2 is more important because while nuclear thermal rockets don’t need oxidizers, they do need copious amounts of propellant or LH2. The dozen space stations at Lagrange Point 1 only need to do a limited number of burns each year to maintain position. But the Mars rocket being constructed at Lagrange Point 2 is anticipated to need 334 thousand tonnes of LH2, including a 32% propellant margin, for a 93-day roundtrip mission with a 33-day outbound leg, a 17-day orbit, and a 43-day return leg. One LH2 propellant shuttle can carry 2,224 tonnes of LH2, requiring 150 runs to fill the Mars rocket’s cavernous hub.”

  He squirmed around to see how I was doing next to him on the golf cart. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. I was beginning to think I was going to be a copsicle by the time we got to the goddamned hooch.

  Higgins rambled on oblivious of my state of frozen torpidity. “Personally, I’ve only gotten occasional glimpses of the Mars rocket. She’s named SpaceCorp Interplanetary Spaceship SIS Pascal Lee after some scientist at SETI—did a lot of Mars work.”

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Couple minutes. Anyway, Pascal Lee’s central hub is 800 meters long, nearly as long as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is tall. There are two spokes mounted amid ships that give her a diameter of 500 meters. She has to rotate at 1.89 rpm to give the crew a full gee at the end of the spokes. We’re all wondering if that kind of rpm is going to give the crew the willies from the Coriolis effect. You don’t really notice the 1.34 rpm on a station, so who knows?”

  “Anyway, Pascal Lee’s supposed to carry four landers, two manned by humans and two manned by AIs. She’ll be looking for life hoping to find something based on DNA, a Second Genesis so to speak. If she can find DNA-based life, there is a promise of incredible riches to be found in genes never before seen in earthbound life. It’s analogous to biologists and chemists going into the Amazon rain forest back before it became the Amazon Desert in order to look for new venoms and weird chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. I read somewhere that used to be a big deal back before genetics replaced chemicals in medical treatments.”

  We finally arrived at the hooch and I secretly prayed they had the heat on. I was so numb I could barely move myself off the golf cart.

  “Helium-3 Team Four is out in the boonies and not expected back for two weeks. You and your team should be good using their quarters. There’s plenty of food and water and O2 inside. You can get out of your suit and clean up from your flight.”

  He shepherded me through an airlock that had air hoses and vacuums to blow all the regolith off our suits and suck it into the vacuum system. Bringing unnecessary regolith indoors is considered very bad etiquette down here, not to mention rough on your lungs after a day or two. Inside the hooch it was delightfully warm and there were noisy air filters going full blast.

  “Those things stay on all the time?” I asked.

  “There are dust sensors that turn them on automatically to keep the dust under control. No matter how good a job you do in the air lock, you always manage to bring some dust inside. They’ll quiet down in a few minutes.”

  “Great, I’d also like you to stick around for a bit so I can fill you in on the details of this sting operation. There’s a lot I didn’t want to share over the laser link.”

  “I was hoping you’d say something like that!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lunar Landing Site—South Pole

  Personnel shuttles landing on the moon are not greeted the way airliners are on Earth. Nobody down here is waiting for a returning loved one or a grandchild coming to stay for the summer. Passengers are just workers down here for a one-month shift. And because the shuttle will not take off again for several days while it’s checked out and fueled for a space flight, there is no one waiting to board.

  My team consisted of Monica, Mak, Lijuan, and Rogers plus two of his biggest and baddest security apes. They knew they’d be keeping their suits on. After checking to be sure everyone had full O2, I ushered them through the external air lock where I had a pair of four-passenger golf carts waiting.

  We made the 500-meter trip to the hooch in about ten minutes. Golf carts aren’t very fast. Still everyone was glad to step into the warmth of the hooch.

  “They call this a hooch?” Mak asked.

  “Yeah, that’s their name for any external structure that’s not dug out of solid rock.”

  Essentially, a hooch was a series of carbon fiber arches built on top of a regolith cement platform. The platform was laced with a network of tubes that carried hot air. You could walk barefoot on the floor and it was pleasantly toasty. The structure was covered over with a two-meter thick layer of regolith sand bags. The sand bags were primarily for radiation protection but they also provided limited ballistic protection from micrometeoroids. Close inspection showed that our hooch had sustained a few such strikes. Inside the hooch was about twenty meters long by ten meters wide and about 5 meters high at the peak. The actual walking space was only about 5 meters wide since walls had been put up to give the sensation of a rectangular structure. The spaces behind the inner and outer walls were used for O2 and H2O storage, air filtration, and waste treatment. About fifty meters away was a minihooch used for plutonium thermoelectric generators. The triple-redundant cable connecting us to it was covered over with a meter of sand bags as a ballistic shield.

  Inside of the hooch were partitioned ‘bedrooms,’ each with two bunkbeds and a chest of drawers for each occupant. We were care
ful not to disturb the chests since they were filled with the belongings of the regular crew that lived here. There was a single shower, commode, and sink. The kitchenette was flanked by a picnic-style table that seated eight. There was a lounge area with a big screen monitor for movies or whatever. It had a big couch and three easy chairs. The couch and chairs didn’t need a lot of padding given the one-sixth gee down here. Finally, there was an exercise area equipped with spring-loaded exercise contraptions presumably to put maximum weight stress on bones. The hooch seemed over-cozy for a team that intended to spend most of its one-month shift in the boonies looking for Helium-3. Hopefully it would be over-cozy for us too. I was hoping to have our stay wrapped up in a few days.

  I added one little gadget missing from all the tech toys found in the hooch—a CO2 detector.

  * * *

  I had a map of the main facility drawn on a marker board. Like all marker boards that were any good, this one connected to my computer plus it allowed me to draw on it with various colored styluses.

  I pulled up a detailed map of the mess area. It was fed by a long corridor that emptied into a ‘mud room.’ Crew working at the water works spent most of their day suited. Hence, when they came in they needed to go through a pair of water and air showers to get the regolith particles off their suits. The air shower also served as a dryer. Regolith particles are a major pain in the ass down here. The damned things got into everything. Air filtration was a huge maintenance headache. On the plus side, it meant our little scam might be believable. Particles ingested into the lungs—a common occurrence—could cause a persistent cough and over time do permanent damage to your lungs.

  Once you were through the mud room and inside the mess hall, you made a right turn to get to the chow line. After your tray was filled, you carried it into the mess hall proper to find a seat and eat your food—all this with your suit on and helmet and gloves off.

  We planned to set up a barricade of tables to funnel incoming surface crew through Monica and Lijuan’s DNA check station. Monica would do the swabbing and testing, Lijuan was mainly there to check IDs. Rogers had his two guys at the far end of the corridor in case somebody decided to cut and run. Mak and Rogers were to keep an eye on anybody making a break for the shuttles. Mak had the extra duty of monitoring flight manifests to see if any names were mysteriously being added at the last minute. I got myself a lunar surface space suit so I wouldn’t stand out, but also so I could roam around outside and give chase to anybody that needed chasing.

  Once the team was on the surface I had arranged to curtail any further inbound shuttle traffic until we were satisfied that our boy was found or simply not here. The shuttle that brought us down was being outfitted for a return trip in a week. We left the shuttle in place, the better to monitor anybody trying to surreptitiously book a seat.

  “Okay, if there are no questions, let’s turn in early. We start this rodeo with the 0600 breakfast meal. Meals are served breakfast, lunch, and supper for three 8-hour shifts. We’re going to work through the full three shifts in order to test every crew member down here.”

  “What if we don’t catch him? What’s the next step?”

  “Lijuan will compare notes with Commander Higgin’s staff to see if we got everybody. If someone decided to skip a meal, we go round them up. If that doesn’t get him, then we do a modified brute force search where we bring every work team into the mess hall one by one. Once inside, we will have everyone get a good look at everyone else and recite what they know of that person—how long they’ve worked with him or her, et cetera.”

  “And the helium teams?”

  “I’ve arranged to have them tested as they come in from the boonies.”

  I looked around the room. Everyone had their game face on—that was good. We all wanted to bag the killer once and for all.

  “Okay, let’s hit the rack. Wakeup is at 0400. We start testing the mess hall staff at 0530 and their first customers at 0600.”

  Monica said, “Cool, we might even get to see a sunrise on the Moon!”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Makeshift Lab Next to the Cafeteria

  To Monica’s great disappointment we did not get to see a sunrise on the Moon. We were at the western end of Cabeus Crater which happens to be in permanent shadow—sorry, Monica. But what it lacked in sunrises, it made up for with gobs of water ice—an ideal spot for a water works.

  The mess hall, however, exceeded all expectations with some of the best coffee I’ve ever had—something about how they had to force feed it through the grounds due to the low gravity. I grabbed the traditional astronaut’s steak and eggs breakfast, low bulk, high density, shipped down from Borucki’s bio-livestock and -poultry generators. I did not want my morning constitutional taking me out of action.

  I hung around the mess hall until the first twenty or so surface workers went through the DNA station. They all took it in stride as Monica swabbed the inside of their mouths with cotton swabs. She signaled me over.

  “‘Sup?” I whispered.

  “This would go faster if I had an assistant to work the machine while I take swabs.”

  “Let me talk to Higgins. Maybe he’s got an off-duty corpsman.”

  An hour later she had a corpsman but no customers. Mess hall staff was busy cleaning up and getting ready for lunch. I went over to the corpsman, “We’re going to need you for three shifts. You up for it?”

  He shrugged, “Sure, why not?”

  “Much obliged.”

  “Mind if I ask what this is all about?”

  “Cancer screening. Certain genomes are susceptible to elements in the regolith. It’s pretty nasty unless we catch it early and pull them out of rotation.”

  I went back over to Monica who was busy with her machine. “I’m gonna go see how Mak is doing with his manifests.”

  “Yeah,” she said not looking up.

  Because of her tone I asked, “You got something?”

  This time she stopped and looked at me, smiling sort of, and said, “Go see Mak. I’ll call you if something comes up.”

  * * *

  Mak was up in flight ops, suited but with his helmet and gloves on the table beside his monitor.

  He had the place to himself. The flight guy that let him in had skipped out for breakfast a half-hour ago since there was no incoming or outgoing traffic scheduled for that day.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Peachy, boss.”

  I noticed he had a cup of coffee and a half-eaten doughnut beside his computer.

  “Talk to me. Whatcha got here?”

  “Just a manifest with thirty names on it. I made a printout so I could see in realtime if somebody new shows up. The way this guy covers his tracks, this might be the only clue I get. I just need to not go crazy for the next twenty-odd hours.”

  “Maybe I could get Rogers to spell you after a bit?”

  “Thanks, but let’s keep the muscle where it will do the most good.”

  I patted his shoulder, “You’re doing noble work.”

  He chuckled, no doubt recalling the last time I’d used that phrase on him.

  “Keep it up, pal. I’m hoping once he gets wind of the scam in the mess hall, he’ll make his move to get off this rock.”

  * * *

  Back at the hooch, the team, including myself and Higgins and a couple of people we had drafted from his crew, had all been at it for 24 hours, taking time out for the occasional potty break and little else. We were beat.

  I looked at Higgins, “This guy is scary smart. He must have gotten wind of what we were up to and gone to ground.”

  “You mean if he’s here at all,” Higgins said.

  I felt myself blush, “Yeah, there is that possibility. If so, then I apologize for the inconvenience we put you through.”

  “No apology needed, Roy. The last thing I want down here is to find one of my people upside down and no blood. The crews on Borucki and Einstein must be scared shitless.”

&n
bsp; “Well, the blond females are. Anyway, I’d like to try one more thing before we pack up and head back to Einstein.”

  “Okay, I’m game.”

  “It’s a kind of brute force search. Rogers’ guys and some of your guys will go room to room trying to find somebody we overlooked from the DNA scan. While they’re doing that, I want to cram everybody into the mess hall that we can, segregated by work group. Everyone will have their helmets off and give everyone in their work group a close inspection and describe all his workmates in terms of name, how long he’s known him, and any other pertinent details he can think of. Lijuan will audit the process to ensure we got each member of the team during the DNA scan. Monica will be on hand to retest anyone who looks suspicious.”

  Higgins wrinkled his brows, “How’s that supposed to find the killer?”

  “The perp is a master of disguises. He can 3D print a face of anyone he has a picture of. What he can’t print is detailed anecdotal information that you can only pick up working with a team.”

  “So you think he may have murdered one of my people and stashed the body somewhere?”

  “I hope not, but yeah, that’s possible.”

  Everybody was tired and the yawns were getting infectious.

  “Why don’t you all turn in? I need to discuss a few possibilities with Rogers and the Commander.”

  It took less than five minutes for everyone to be in their racks.

  “Okay,” I said when everyone had gone, “how much control do you maintain over golf carts or other conveyances that might be used to get to another hideout at another water works?”

  “We don’t control golf carts. There’s about a dozen of them, but they lack the range to go more than a few kilometers before needing to juice up again. They have RFIDs in case somebody needs to grab one. We have some larger vehicles—lunamogs—that carry ten passengers plus a two-man driver team. They can also pull an equipment trailer. They’re used by the helium guys mostly, but we have three more back here as spares.”